The Spy Who Painted the Queen

by Phil Tomaselli

  Appendix 2

  MORE LINKS TO ROYALTY

  WITH DE LÁSZLÓ’S death, MI5 would normally have closed its file on him. It has not been released, despite files on other better-known suspects (W.H. Auden, Jacob Bronowski, J.B. Priestley and George Orwell among them) having been opened in recent years. It’s possible that it has been destroyed as part of MI5’s routine weeding and destruction policy, but another intriguing possibility remains.

  John De László, Philip’s fifth son, had an affair in the late 1940s with the wife of Group Captain Peter Townsend, the Battle of Britain hero and equerry to King George VI. The couple divorced in 1952 and John married her in 1953. The divorce hung over Group Captain Townsend and, in the atmosphere of the time, he was not allowed to remarry within the Church of England. When he and Princess Margaret fell in love and there was talk in the press of them marrying, the matter reached as high as the prime minister, Winston Churchill, then aged 79 and in his final term. The couple, who seem to have had a real and genuine affection for each other, were forced apart by the attitudes prevalent in the upper echelons of society at the time. The princess could not, quite simply, be allowed to get married outside the Church of England, and the Church of England was not going to change its view on remarrying a divorced man.

  A few years ago I mentioned the De László case as part of a talk I was giving. At the end I was approached by a man I had known vaguely for many years who said that the name De László was one he had known well, but that he hadn’t heard it in fifty years. As a young man he had worked as a telephone engineer and was based in south-east England. The new Mrs De László and her husband lived in his area at the end of a country lane and shared a party line with the other houses. This meant that a single line ran up the lane and every house had a telephone connected to it. One bill was issued for the whole line and, of course, only one telephone could be used at a time. According to my friend, this posed a problem for the other line users as Mrs De László spent hours on the phone and would only pay a set percentage of the bill rather than the amount equivalent to her usage. The other line users made repeated complaints to the GPO, who always replied that this was a matter the line users had to sort out between themselves. Eventually, however, the complaints became so persistent that my friend’s boss sent him to examine the line to see if there was any way the De Lászlós’ telephone could be connected separately. On opening the junction box at the end of the lane he was confronted by something that, while in training, he had once been shown and told, ‘You will never see one of these but, if you do, you are to report its presence to your manager and immediately forget that you ever saw it.’ His manager turned pale on being advised of this item, and repeated the advice that, as my friend had signed the Official Secrets Act, he was never to mention it. He hadn’t mentioned it to a soul until we spoke about it over fifty years later. Though the exact nature of ‘it’ was not specified, I think we were both clear that ‘it’ was a tap on the telephone line – and the fact that he had been shown one and recognised it means it was an official one. As far as he knew, the problem with the party line was never resolved.

  Whether it was an MI5 tap, or perhaps one from the police or another agency, we will probably never know – or, indeed, quite why the calls were being listened to. But someone official considered there was a good reason. Though Philip De László had been dead for twenty years, there may be cross references on his MI5 file that will reveal things that, even now, the powers that be do not want us to know.

  Appendix 3

  DID THE FRENCH REPORTS EVEN

  EXIST?

  THERE’S AN INTERESTING question relating to the French secret service reports. Did they, in fact, exist or could they have been fabricated by MI5 itself on the basis of other, even more secret sources?

  The biography of Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, written by Roland Wild and Curtis-Bennett’s son, tells how, concerned that plots were being fomented in Paris by the Russian intelligence service, an attempt was made to access documents being carried by a Russian official travelling from Paris to Russia via London and Scotland. It seems far-fetched: it involved the drugging of the Russian in Edinburgh and the rushing of his bag on an express train to London, where it was opened, the contents photographed and the whole bag (which had to be retied in exactly the same way) rushed back to Scotland before its carrier awoke. However, it’s not utterly impossible. Almost exactly the same story is given in Private and Official, the biography of Sir Ronald Dockray Waterhouse, though in this case it names the head of the Russian intelligence service as Ignatieff. Waterhouse served as an MI5 officer between May 1915 and the end of April 1918 as head of the Military Permit Office in Bedford Square, which issued travel permits to the military zone in France between 1915 and October 1917, a job described as ‘a very responsible position, as in addition to dealing with questions of permits to France for British subjects who are frequently of high rank, he has to maintain very close and cordial relations with the French passport office’. He left the Permit Office in October 1917 to become head of MI5 G3. Included amongst G3’s duties were ‘Special investigations into the cases of suspected persons in diplomatic, financial and political circles’. It’s quite likely, then, that if investigations were being carried out into material passing through the country via the diplomatic bag, he would at least have been aware of it. The biography was written by his widow, Nourah Waterhouse, and in fact describes what appear to be two attempts to access diplomatic material, the other being an attempt to get into the Chinese bag.

  Oddly enough, though it makes no mention of attempting to break into the bag, there’s a file on Ignatieff in TNA, dated 29 November 1917, which describes worries about his contacts with the German secret service. There were actually two Ignatieff brothers: Alexis, the military attaché and Paul, head of the secret service in Paris. Paul had taken over in Paris in 1916 and, the French said, the information he had been providing to them had gone from excellent to bad, then, recently, to dangerous and probably false. The French had him and his agents followed and came to the conclusion that he was working with the new Bolshevik government in Russia and possibly co-operating with the Germans. The officer compiling the report, Major Claude Dansey, a former MI5 man now working for SIS, concluded, ‘in order to guard our own interests we should not neglect the possibility that Ignatieff is willing to assist the Germans’. Given the facilities the British granted the Russians in terms of travel, a Foreign Office official commented, ‘we agree that the matter is one of considerable importance and would be glad to consult the French as to the expediency of allowing these Russian couriers the facilities they have hitherto enjoyed’. Since the Foreign Office had not been told officially about the matter, it specifically requested that Kell ask the director of military intelligence to raise the matter with them. Presumably the break into the bag happened after this.

  The British had long been aware that companies, individuals and German officials had been using neutral countries’ diplomatic bags or post as a means of avoiding the world-wide censorship system. Items of intercepted ordinary mail sometimes made reference to it. A letter from a German lady dated 29 July 1916, intercepted on the high seas, described how she received letters from the USA via the Colombian diplomatic bag between Washington and Berlin and through the Dutch Foreign Ministry. An intercepted telegram between Buenos Aires and Hamburg said the easiest way to get a letter through was via the Argentine legation. Two letters sent from Germany in the US diplomatic bag and posted on to Tonga in the ordinary mail were intercepted by the censor in Samoa and reported to London by the New Zealand government.

  There is some evidence that diplomatic mail was being opened as early as 1915, as three packets addressed to the Swedish legation in Washington had been found to contain enclosures addressed to the German Embassy. A packet stamped by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs opened by the Singapore censor in June 1916 contained a packet from Vienna to the Dutch East Indies. A letter bearing a Peruvian leg
ation seal, and stamped by it, was intercepted on the SS Frederik VIII and, on being opened, was found to contain pro-German propaganda destined for Venezuela. His Majesty’s Minister in Bangkok informed the Foreign Office that he was suspicious that the Dutch Legation Bag was being used to carry official German correspondence to Java. It’s clear that the ordinary censorship was no respecter of the stamps and seals of neutral consulates or embassies, though there is no mention of diplomatic bags, which appear to have been sacrosanct.

  It’s generally assumed that the opening of foreign diplomatic bags by the British secret services began in the 1920s when SIS established their N Section, probably a joint section with MI5, that was reputed to ‘have a team of thirty seamstresses’ who could open and re-sew a diplomatic bag ‘in a fashion calculated to avoid detection’. As a natural sceptic, the current author doubted the validity of some of these stories until a former member of a foreign diplomatic service, who had sealed bags regularly, thought through the process and described how, theoretically, opening one undetected might be done. The method postulated matched, in the most important details, the method allegedly used by MI5 to open Ignatieff’s courier’s bag. It does seem possible that this might have occurred, but it would have involved a great deal of deception, particularly of the Foreign Office, which was notoriously sensitive to such matters and which, through its control of the Secret Service Fund, was to a large part MI5’s paymasters.

  One point militating strongly against the breaking into diplomatic bags is a paragraph in the Special Section report in KV 4/16 which says:

  Under the Defence of the Realm Regulations the only media for the conveyance of uncensored written or printed communications from this country to neutral countries was the Private bags despatched from the various Embassies in London. The Diplomatic objections to any interference with these bags have always been too strong to permit of steps being taken to examine their contents, even when there has been reason to suspect that their immunity was being taken advantage of by enemy agents and it has always been felt that this channel constituted a grave source of danger which it has not been possible to eliminate.

  But they would say that, wouldn’t they?

  Appendix 4

  WHAT BECAME OF THE OTHERS?

  Arpad Horn

  The unfortunate Arpad Horn, following his arrest and questioning, was returned to Donington Hall and placed in solitary confinement, with only one hour’s exercise each morning and evening, for forty-one days. On 29 August he was court-martialled and sentenced to fourteen days’ imprisonment, for which he was transferred to Chelmsford Prison. Here, he complained, he was ‘shut up in a narrow cell and was allowed to spend 1 hour morning and evening in the prison court yard under the supervision of 3 sentries. For exercise there was a space of about 15 x 4 metres where I was placed together with English convicts.’ He wasn’t allowed newspapers, his food was restricted and he was expected to pay for it, he was only allowed to smoke in the exercise yard and his cell was so damp he fell ill from the effects. After his sentence he was transferred to Dyffryn Aled, a POW camp in north Wales surrounded by moors and far from the coast. From here he raised complaints about his treatment via the Swedish legation, which was looking after Austro-Hungarian interests in Britain for the duration of the war. Presumably he was repatriated in 1919.

  Adrienne van Riemsdyk

  Adrienne van Riemsdyk’s only daughter, Marguerite Louise, married a British officer, Major Samuel John Barrington of the Suffolk Regiment, on 24 May 1919. Curiously, one of the witnesses was Colonel Oppenheim, British military attaché to The Hague, who had had extremely close links to the British secret services during the war. Adrienne van Riemsdyk herself died, after a long illness, while visiting her daughter and son-in-law in East Anglia, on 19 October 1919.

  Vernon Kell and MI5

  Despite enormous cuts in MI5’s budget and staff numbers post-war and its relegation to the monitoring of foreign spies and communist agitation in the armed forces (communism generally – industrial relations, terrorism and sedition passed back to Special Branch), Vernon Kell was regarded as a safe pair of hands and steered the organisation through the difficult waters of the 1920s. In part because MI5 was able to expose two communist ‘moles’ within Special Branch, and partly because of the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany, the organisation took on increased responsibilities in the early 1930s, absorbing part of The Branch, as well as a top secret organisation used by SIS to carry out investigations within the UK (a breach of the rule that it should only gather information abroad). The organisation expanded in the late 1930s in anticipation of war with Germany, but for all Kell’s planning, MI5 came close to collapse once again when war broke out, under the sheer volume of enquiries. It had planned a huge round-up of potentially hostile aliens on the outbreak of war, but this had been severely watered down by the Home Office, only to emerge again with the crisis brought on by Dunkirk in 1940. In the resulting chaos, Kell was obliged by Churchill himself to take retirement, with his deputy, Eric Holt Wilson, joining him. Despite threats of mass resignations among the MI5 staff (which didn’t occur), the organisation soldiered on to become, once again, a highly efficient counter-intelligence organisation. Kell became a special constable and died on 27 March 1942.

  Basil Thomson

  Thomson’s star was firmly in the ascendant in 1917. The return to Special Branch of duties connected with industrial disputes (following the dissolution of PMS 2, the Ministry of Munitions intelligence department), meant he had the ear of senior politicians frightened about revolution at home. In 1919 he became Home Office director of intelligence incorporating Special Branch within an organisation for domestic intelligence gathering. His natural right-wing inclinations meant he saw political events in the worst possible light, and it’s safe to say he scare-mongered when reporting on left-wing movements. He exceeded his authority in using his uniformed officers without consulting the commissioner and had to be reminded that, in his police duties, he was a subordinate, and was instructed personally to submit a weekly report on the royal and ministerial protection duties being carried out, as well as all the other activities of the Special Branch officers. He proposed MI5 should be incorporated into one central intelligence organisation headed, naturally, by himself, and Kell was able to resist this only with the backing of the director of military intelligence. In 1921 Lloyd George ‘retired’ him summarily, without an official explanation, though the press speculated it was because of a security failure at Chequers. In 1922 Thomson wrote Queer People about his work in Special Branch, appearing to take the credit for the discovery, as well as the arrest and prosecution, of the spies captured during the war. This did not sit well with MI5.

  On 12 December 1925, Thomson was arrested, along with a young lady, Thelma De Lava, for committing an act of indecency in Hyde Park (it was alleged she was ‘manipulating his person’). Recognised by the sergeant at the police station, he appeared to give a false name (Hugh Thomson rather than Basil Thomson), and was directed to attend Marlborough Street Police Court on 14 December, which he failed to do. Miss De Lava also failed to attend. The commissioner advised the officers to proceed as they would usually. De Lava was traced and charged. She pleaded guilty and was fined £2. At his trial, Thomson argued he had gone to the park to research a new book on solicitation and explained that at the police station he had given his name as Home (pronounced Hume) Thomson, using his middle name. The latter story was accepted, but he was found guilty of the indecency offence and fined £5. He immediately appealed, and at the hearing Thelma De Lava gave evidence against him. Despite attempts to discredit police evidence and the presence of a number of prominent character witnesses, the appeal was dismissed.

  Thomson spent much of the rest of the 1920s and 1930s in France, and continued to write both novels and books about the police and the war. He died on 26 March 1939.

  Robert Nathan

  During 1915 Nathan was gradually shifted to work involving Indian seditionis
t groups. Through the Censorship Department he discovered an Indian seditionist and Italian anarchist plot, hatched in Switzerland and financed in Germany, for (allegedly) the assassination of every one of the heads of the Allied nations, which resulted in details being leaked to the Swiss police and the plot thwarted. In 1916 he went to the USA and helped the US authorities in the smashing of German plots with Dr Chandra Chakravarti to supply weapons to a planned revolt in India, leading to the successful 1917/18 conspiracy trials in San Francisco.

  In 1919 he was a key player in Foreign Office talks with Maxim Litvinov in Scandinavia about the release of British subjects still held in Russia. Though the mission was headed by a Labour MP (Mr O’Grady), Nathan and Lionel Gall (an SIS officer) seem to have done much of the negotiating. He was later proposed to head the British trade mission to Moscow (actually a cover for SIS operations), but ill-health prevented him from taking up the post. He died in 1921.

  Ernest Anson

  Anson remained with G Branch until 31 December 1919. He worked closely with SIS officer Redmond Burton Cafferata in the running of double agents in Switzerland in 1917, with Cafferata running the agents on the ground and Anson co-ordinating things from London. During the 1920s and 1930s he served in the Public Security Department, Ministry of the Interior, Cairo, monitoring Bolshevik activity in Egypt and Palestine. He was awarded the Insignia of Officer of the Order of the Nile, 1938 ‘in recognition of valuable services rendered by him in the employment of the Egyptian Government’.