In 1882 he was chosen to be one of the founding members of the
Special Irish Branch that was founded to work against
Fenians and
anarchists. In the next ten years, Melville embarked on a large series of well-publicized raids against anarchists. He went to
Victoria Station to personally arrest bomber
Théodule Meunier. Working under commercial cover from an unassuming flat in London under the alias persona William Morgan, Melville ran both counterintelligence and foreign intelligence operations, capitalizing on the knowledge and foreign contacts he had accumulated during his years running Special Branch. By 1910 it was clear that the Home Section and the Foreign Section would seek their own identities, and Kell's department, the Security Service separated from Cummings' Secret Intelligence Service. According to the conclusions of author Andrew Cook, his biographer, which are not accepted by all historians, Melville then became the head of British
Secret Service with the code name "M". Still, the service had a small budget and on occasion, Melville had to do the job himself. ==Secret Service Bureau== Melville's own section continued as a separate Special Section of the Secret Service Bureau and he concentrated on looking for German spies. In August 1914 the Bureau eventually identified the
barbershop of Karl Gustav Ernst as the centre of a German
spy ring. ==Death==