Author and journalist Michael Smith introduces us to a Danish naval officer who was content with very ‘conventional’ inducements for passing on secrets
Trying to find a spy appropriate to the season, I thought it might be a good moment to write about the first agent ever run by MI6. Captain Walter Christmas, a former Danish naval officer who travelled in and out of Germany to collect intelligence on what the German navy was doing. MI6, then known as the foreign section of the Secret Service Bureau, was set up in 1909, amid fears of a German invasion. Its first boss was Mansfield Cumming, who was known only by the initial letter of his surname, C, which is still used by heads of MI6 today as an abbreviation for Chief.
Christmas was designated WK, perhaps because it was mistakenly assumed that his name began with a K, or that using the initials WC would lead to his reports being ridiculed in Whitehill. The first time Christmas met Cumming he stressed how keen he was to spy for MI6 having “always looked upon myself as at least half English”. Cumming concluded in his diary that Christmas “seemed straightforward”.
The Dane was in fact very straightforward indeed. He was willing to spy for what were already the standard inducements of sex and cash and went on to provide Cumming with a regular supply of the Danish navy’s ship-watching reports of German vessels passing through the channels joining the North Sea to the Baltic. As well as reports on new German equipment obtained by visits to the naval dockyards in Kiel, Hamburg and Breman. The 48-year-old insisted that the go-between who collected his intelligence should always be a ‘pretty’ young woman who was to meet him in a hotel in Skagen, the town at the northernmost tip of Denmark. The women concerned were prostitutes procured and paid for the purpose. The close links between what are alleged to be the world’s two oldest professions were to be repeated persistently throughout the Service’s early history. Sex and money often represented far better inducements to spy than Patriotic or moral beliefs.
When a few years later, the Germans got too close to Christmas and Cumming had to have him exfiltrated to London, he was lodged in the notorious Shepherd Market area of Mayfair, where there were plenty of pretty young women, all pursuing the same business as the go-betweens who used to collect his intelligence from the Skagen hotel.
But that was not his last job for MI6, Christmas was a close personal friend of King Constantine. So in an early form of the ‘parallel diplomacy’ practised by MI6 in a number of different situations over the years, most notably at the start of the Northern Ireland peace process, Cumming sent him to Athens, in the hope that he might persuade Constantine that Greece should join the war against Germany. Compton Mackenzie, then the MI6 man in Greece, seemingly unaware that Christmas was operating under the direction of his bosses in London, was furious at this intervention on his patch by “this irresponsible old man of the sea” and stymied the operation.
Frank Stagg, a senior MI6 officer, recalled that what Christmas had to say about Mackenzie on his return to Whitehall Court was “unrepeatable”. Stagg decided to take Christmas out as recompense for Mackenzie’s behaviour. “I took that most lovable man to the Hippodrome where Fay Compton was singing a song in which the last line of each verse was ‘I’ll take a little more off’. Christmas was getting more and more excited and clapping roundly. When at the height of his enthusiasm, I asked him if he knew she was Compton Mackenzie’s sister, he looked tragic and said, ‘I’ll take back everything I said about him. If only I had known he had a sister so lovely I should have made friends with him instead’.”
Christmas was not only the first MI6 agent, he was the first of a long line of officers and agents to venture into spy fiction, a tradition that included Mackenzie himself and many others, most famously John le Carre. Christmas wrote the first spy novel by an MI6 agent ̶ Svend Spejder (Svend the Scout), in which a young boy hunts down German spies in Denmark ̶ in 1911, relatively early in his MI6 career.
Michael Smith’s spy novel, Ritter: No Man Dies Twice is published by Safe House books.
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