Royal Engineers Edmonds was commissioned into the Corps of
Royal Engineers on 22 July 1881. Edmonds spent four years based in
Chatham and a year in Malta studying submarine mining, a matter which the
Royal Navy could not be expected to undertake. Edmonds's intellect was recognised with the nickname
Archimedes. After returning from Malta, Edmonds was posted to Hong Kong with two companies of engineers to garrison the colony after a Russian invasion scare. The 33rd Engineer Company, in which Edmonds served, was one of those chosen. When the orders were received the company commander went sick and his deputy requested to be excused as his wife was pregnant. The two companies reached Hong Kong, one with eight men and the other about thirty; the absentees were either ill, invalid or on attachment and had missed the boat. Edmonds found that rocky outcrops just below the surface in Hong Kong harbour had not been charted and were a danger to shipping, occasionally the cause of serious accidents. Edmonds organised their removal by trailing a rail between two rowing boats and lowering a diver to place an explosive charge on the top. The posting was uneventful; in 1888 Edmonds returned to Chatham after three months' sick leave in Japan and sojourns US and Canada, to join the 38th Mining Company as Assistant Instructor. Apparently Edmonds's main duty was to play golf with the chief instructor in the afternoons. Edmonds was promoted to captain in January 1890 and returned to the RMA Woolwich as an instructor in fortification. During his six years as an instructor Edmonds spent his long vacations abroad learning Russian and other languages.
Staff College In 1895 Edmonds took the entrance exam for the
Staff College, Camberley and passed first again; during the year he married Hilda Margaret Ion (died 1921), daughter of the Rev. Matthew Wood; they had one daughter. Twenty-four candidates were chosen by application and eight men with near misses in the examinations could enter by nomination, one of whom was Douglas Haig. Edmonds felt intellectually superior to his peers and wrote later that only
George Macdonogh was an exception, a man who could also understand some of the more recondite subjects, like the decoding of cyphers. In his Memoirs, Edmonds wrote that he was often paired with Haig because he was good with detail and Haig a generalist. Edmonds passed out in 1899 at the top of his class, one of the most successful and popular students of the era, noted for his conversation which had become even more interesting and appreciated by, amongst others, Douglas Haig,
Aylmer Haldane and
Edmund Allenby. Edmonds wrote that Allenby was a blockhead, which Cyril Falls later called "an error typical of Edmonds's worst side". Edmonds, promoted to major in May 1899, overheard Colonel
George Henderson predict that Haig would become commander in chief. While at the college, Edmonds co-wrote with his brother in law, W. Birkbeck Wood, "The History of the Civil War in the United States 1861–1865" (1905). The book was well received by reviewers who wrote that the book would be appealing to soldiers and to students of history alike. The book was full of statistical information, although the reviewer in the
Times Literary Supplement thought that in this, the authors had gone a little too far. The book gave prominence to novel aspects of the war including the use of cavalry, battles of attrition and the turning of volunteers into disciplined soldiers. The book was in print for thirty years and by 1936 was in its fourth edition and was in use at
West Point.
The Intelligence Division Edmonds was offered a post in the Intelligence Division of the General Staff, commanded by Major-General
John Ardagh in October 1899, ten days after the beginning of the
Second Boer War (1899–1902). Edmonds became head of the Special Duties Section of the
War Office (Section H) which was established soon after the outbreak of the war. Section H censored cable communications, spied on suspected agents, press correspondents and monitored matters of international law. Edmonds has a staff of one officer and a retired police detective with a budget of £200. The section later took on counter-intelligence and secret service work which entailed the dispatch of a small number of officers to South Africa to study topography, communications and Boer troop movements. The temporary Secret Section 13 (A), with a staff of three, kept watch on messages to South Africa and exports of ammunition. The section managed to intercept Dutch correspondence to South Africa but was prevented from accepting the offer by the captain of a rugby team to vandalise the London offices of a pro-Boer agent. In 1901 Ardagh and Edmonds went to South Africa, at the request of the Foreign Office, to advise Lord Kitchener on questions of international law. From 1902–1904 Edmonds worked for
Lord Milner on the establishment of peace. After six years abroad, Edmonds, now a major, returned to England in 1906 and took over MO3, which in 1907 was renamed MO5 and until 1910 concentrated on counter-espionage, intelligence gathering and cryptography. Apart from Edmonds the staff consisted of another major, who spent his time cultivating a parliamentary constituency, where he was elected as a
Conservative MP three years later. Edmonds found that the MO3 files contained matters pertaining to the Boer War, a few items about France and Russia but nothing about Germany, which was to become Edmonds's concern with the diplomatic settlements with France (
Entente Cordiale [1904]) and the
Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Edmonds devised a code called
double Playfair for communications with the Japanese and for British forces engaged in field operations. Edmonds drew up a list of experts in code-breaking and trained junior officers in cypher methods to create a reserve for times of war. Edmonds attempted to establish intelligence gathering by the British as an equivalent of the efforts being made by the French and Germans, who had been spying and counter-spying on each other since before the Franco-Prussian War. Edmonds took the view that in a modern war, old methods would be inadequate and in 1908 gave a lecture on tactical intelligence which compared the tasks of a field officer in a small war to that of their continental equivalents. In a European war, the British Army would need Field officers would find it far harder to get topographical data in Germany during hostilities and would have to rely on information gained during peace. In the
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) the Japanese had the benefit of agents placed in Russia before the war, which contributed to the Japanese victory. Edmonds advocated intelligence operations in Germany before a war but his efforts were hampered by the usual lack of money and War Office inexperience, whose early efforts were embarrassing failures. Edmonds had most success in changing the Security Service, despite his reasons coming from a fantasy. The growing Anglo-German antagonism had led to a fashion for alarmist literature about German spies and invasion scares, several written by
William Le Queux, one of Edmonds's friends. There were some German agents in Britain watching ports and dockyards but no centrally organised system of espionage; Germany was far more interested in France and Russia.
Gustav Steinhauer of German naval intelligence () ran "poorly paid and clumsy agents".
Invasion scares Le Queux wrote
The Invasion of 1910 in 1906, serialised in the
Daily Mail and then published in 17 languages, selling more than a million copies. In 1907
The Morning Post splashed a story purporting that 90,000 German reservists and spies, with arms caches, were at large in Britain. Invasion scares whipped up public anxiety when the Germans accelerated their
dreadnought building plans. The British government set up a sub-committee of the
Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) in 1907 to look into the possibility of a German invasion, which met 16 times from November 1907 to July 1908 and
debunked the invasion scares. The Director of Military Operations, Major-General Sir
Spencer Ewart did have to admit that the counter-intelligence system was inadequate and began a review. In October 1908 a new
Official Secrets Act was drafted to allow arrests and searches without
warrant, the registration of
aliens (foreigners), the use of paid agents in Britain to unmask foreign spies and copying the German system instituted in 1866, in which a police or private detective under an intelligence officer ran spies abroad. Without peacetime preparations, Britain would enter a war "fatally handicapped". Edmonds was suspicious of German intentions because of a widespread assumption that the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War had been helped by its military intelligence effort and the ineptitude of French counter-intelligence. MO5 judged that German army reservists resident in France and the consular service had sent useful information to Germany. MO5 Got hold of a copy of the 1894 edition of "" the German Army Field Manual which required the use of spies by every command. In the 1890s, Edmonds had got to know several German intelligence officers, who had told him that a new department had been established in 1901 for naval intelligence gathering about Britain, the but this was assumed to be part of military intelligence, IIIb. Several German friends told Edmonds that they had been approached by the
German Imperial Admiralty () to report on the movements of warships, observe dockyards, arsenals, aircraft and munitions factories. In 1909 Le Queux published "Spies of the Kaiser" in which London and the east coast were full of German spies disguised as barbers, waiters and tourists. The denunciation of alleged spies increased and the cases were passed on to Edmonds who began to classify German visitors according to their proximity to important buildings and other structures, those who entertained parties of visiting Germans or tradesmen and photographers who lived near dockyards and ports.
Richard Haldane, the
Secretary of State for War (1905–1912), refused to credit the existence of a German spy network and few other members of the government took it seriously. Even
Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the
Chief of the Great German General Staff (1906–1914) claimed that an invasion might be feasible but that supplying a landing force or re-embarking it would be impossible. In February 1909 Edmonds was promoted to brevet
colonel and that year told Captain
Vernon Kell, his deputy during his time in the Far East, that the commander of a German landing in
East Anglia would be better informed than a British general. Haldane was persuaded to set up another CID sub-committee to inquire about foreign espionage, at which Edmonds gave evidence.
Viscount Esher said that Edmonds was but Haldane was more persuaded. The existing intelligence system could not quantify German spying or stop it. The sub-committee recommended that a secret service bureau be established and in August 1909 the new agency was set up within MO5. Edmonds appointed Kell to run the agency. The government also created controls to monitor and limit the freedom of movement of aliens and increased powers under the Official Secrets Act to give more powers to the police against spies. After studying continental powers, the
Metropolitan Police gained more powers of arrest and search. A conviction could be obtained on the evidence of suspicious behaviour and the burden of proof was placed on the accused. Edmonds, who in October 1909 succeeded Brigadier General Aylmer Haldane as a GSO1 at the War Office, was promoted in January 1910 to colonel and left MO5 later that year. He had established a Secret Service section from a ramshackle, under-funded and poorly organised group of temporary, part-time and amateur agents, that resembled a modern intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence organisation. Despite being taken in by sensational tales of mass spying, Edmonds had laid the foundations of MI5 and MI6. ==Return to soldiering==