The Spy Who Painted the Queen

I
ORIGINALLY DISCOVERED
that MI5 had been investigating De László when I stumbled upon a cartoon in one of the MI5 cartoon books (produced for internal consumption only, but which occasionally come on the market) that my good friend Dr Nick Hiley showed me. I owe Nick a considerable debt of gratitude for his assistance, advice and support for this book as for several of my others. Many thanks are also due to Julian Putkowski, who gave me his copy of the other MI5 cartoon book gratis, carried out some splendid research on various members of MI5 staff which he shared with me and found much information on the mysterious Frederic Decseny. Thomas Boghardt, on hearing I intended to mention the Baron von Horst case, kindly sent me a copy of an article he'd written on it, which backed up my own researches and conclusions. Edwin Ruis provided background information on the German intelligence service in Holland. Professor Rick Spence, with whom I've worked on a number of projects, kindly helped me to unpick the relationships between the various banks in the USA and checked the Bureau of Investigation files for me. The Metropolitan Police kindly searched their archives and confirmed they no longer hold any files on de László. Staff at the Foreign Office and the US National Archives and Research Administration (NARA) searched their records for information on Frederic Decseny for me. Staff at the Home Office also searched their records for anything on Desceny and for the missing sub-file 113 in De László's naturalisation file, but were unable to locate anything. Peter Day scoured online newspaper archives for me in search of Desceny. Kim Thomason offered advice on the tying (and possible means of opening) of diplomatic bags. As usual the staff at The National Archives provided their excellent service and assistance, and the staff at North Swindon Library have tracked down various obscure reference books for me. The publishers of
Who's Who
provided me with information on De László's early entries in their book.

I've referred to the Security Service as MI5 throughout the book, though purists will realise that before April 1916 they were known, within the War Office and to the police and other authorities, as MO5g, the counter-espionage section of the larger MO5 which, in its turn, formed part of the Directorate of Special Intelligence at the War Office. The Directorate also dealt with Press Censorship (MO7), Cable Censorship (MO8) and Postal Censorship (MO9) as well as liaison with the foreign secret service (the Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes now called MI6), examination of enemy ciphers, arms traffic and collation of intelligence. Since the name MI5 was assumed in 1916 (when the other MO sections became MI7, MI8 and MI9) the existence of this secret service department has become generally acknowledged and referred to as MI5 by the general public. I've stuck with the common parlance for the ease of the reader. It's also worth noting that, when referring back to themselves after 1916, they used MI5 rather than trying to explain the changes.

T
HE CENTENARY PUBLICATION
of MI5's official history
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5
by Christopher Andrew may have given some people the idea that everything there is to say about the organisation's history has already been said. In fact, it devotes only fifty-six pages to the First World War and, though there are a few other splendid books on their work in that period (and some terrible ones), much remains to be discovered and written.

Though the spies uncovered, arrested, charged and sentenced as a result of MI5's work are pretty well covered in the literature (though I doubt many could name all sixty-five), one little-explored area is the progressive restrictions imposed upon, and eventual internment of, the 226 men of hostile origin or association (other than alien enemies) interned specifically because of MI5's direct action. These were in addition to the thousands of German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish men of military age or considered a security threat, some of whom had lived in Britain for years, who were interned and, in the case of most of the older men, eventually deported. Considering much of MI5's work before August 1914 centred on identifying the potential threat posed by German and Austrian immigrants (including identifying them through illegal use of the 1911 census and the running of agents into their communities), this is a surprising omission, though a lot of hard work is required to find material, much of which appears to have been destroyed after the war. Philip De László, having been born in Hungary and naturalised as British (albeit after the start of the war), comes into the first category, though I doubt he could be considered typical of it. In his case there seems to have been concrete intelligence of hostile acts and hostile intent. His MI5 file, if it survived the organisation's steady weeding of old material, has not been released, but sufficient information remains in files of related government agencies to reconstruct the bones of it.

This is not a nice story. De László comes across as, at least initially, an extremely likeable chap. Raised from poverty on the back of his own talents, a romantic who pursued his wife in the face of all kinds of objections from her posh relatives, a family man, a patriot (though for quite which side may be debated), he seems to have done his best for both sides of his family in the course of an international conflict that slaughtered millions and brought down empires. The standard biographies (one of which he helped write) show him as a confused and decent enough man, his patriotic instincts naturally divided, who made honest mistakes and was condemned for his decent endeavours by vindictive British authorities who were determined to get him to pay for errors it was easy enough to make. This is how he presented himself to the world for twenty years following his success before the Denaturalisation Committee in 1919 (the nearest he came to a trial), and he seems to have been successful. Unfortunately for him, and for his biographers, there was an unexamined and ticking time-bomb lurking in the Home Office and Treasury solicitors' papers at The National Archives (TNA) in Kew. They present the other case – that seen by MI5, Special Branch and the Secret Intelligence Service – that he was a deliberate and cynical agent of an enemy power acting as both a source of important high-level intelligence and a peace propaganda source, spreading ill-will towards Britain's allies and undermining the morale of his important clients among Britain's elite. This is the evidence that will be presented here. Though I have made up my mind on the subject, others may come to a different conclusion, but it is a story that requires telling nonetheless.

There's a contemporary resonance in this case, which illustrates the difficulty the intelligence agencies had, and still have, in pursuing people they suspect of being a danger to security. The evidence presented to the public at the Denaturalisation Committee in 1919 appeared – and indeed was – slight. If anything, it made the authorities look petty and spiteful, though that could be said of other cases, as we shall see. But there was more serious evidence, provided by the French secret service from a secret agent allegedly working at the heart of a German and Austrian intelligence-gathering network based in Switzerland, that never appeared in public. Even if it was examined secretly by the Denaturalisation Committee, it was dismissed without any serious consideration (they took fifteen minutes to clear De László on almost all counts, though the committee that reviewed his internment did treat it more seriously). Without the permission of the French, who would not want such a valuable and sensitive source compromised by exposure in court, MI5, the Police and the Home Office could not use this evidence to prosecute De László and there was no mechanism for secret courts in which he could be tried.

The decision by British judges, a couple of years ago, to release secret American documents relating to Binyam Mohamed's treatment at Guantanamo Bay – and the resulting American threat to downgrade intelligence sharing with the UK – highlighted the delicate relationship between secret services and the information they exchange. The necessity to conceal the origin of secret intelligence has, on occasion, caused similar problems in other terrorist trials. The De László files at The National Archives show this has long been a problem – and that in the case of the prominent society artist, the reluctance of MI5 to reveal its sources worked to his advantage.

F
EBRUARY 1915 WAS
the seventh month of a war that had been supposed by many to have been over by the previous Christmas. In London it was cold, but not unseasonably so. In Flanders the original British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had fought the Retreat from Mons, the Battle of the Marne and the First Battle of Ypres, and was horribly exhausted. Only the influx of fresh troops from the garrisons in the empire, Indian troops and battalions of the part-time Territorial Force had allowed them to hold their portion of the trench line that now snaked between the Belgian coast and the Swiss border. At sea the Royal Navy had had successes at the Battle of the Heligoland Bight in August 1914 when British cruisers and destroyers ambushed a German destroyer patrol, sinking three light cruisers and a destroyer, and at Dogger Bank in January 1915 where they sank the armoured cruiser
Blucher
. They'd also skirmished with German Zeppelins and seaplanes after the Royal Naval Air Service's attempt to bomb the Zeppelin shed at Cuxhaven on Christmas Day. But the Navy too had taken some terrible casualties: three old cruisers,
Aboukir, Crecy
and
Hogue
had been sunk, within a couple of hours by one submarine, with the loss of 1,459 lives, and Rear Admiral Christopher Craddock's South Atlantic Squadron had been effectively destroyed at the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile on 1 November 1914 (subsequently avenged at the Battle of the Falklands on 8 December).

At home, even the casual observer would notice the new recruits for the army training daily in the local parks and would know of their male relatives who had volunteered or were being pressured daily by the White Feather League who gave white feathers, denoting cowardice, to young men not in uniform. The human cost of the war was known; casualty lists in the newspapers named officers and men who were known to be killed, wounded or missing and covered several columns of newsprint every day. The public was perfectly aware of the price being paid by its soldiers and seamen but there was no rationing and, as yet, no blackout.

There had been other casualties that brought the fact that this was a modern, total war, home to civilians. German cruisers had shelled Great Yarmouth in November, fortunately without causing casualties in the town. They then, much more seriously, bombarded Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby on 16 December 1914, killing 137 and wounding 592, most of them civilians. Though there had long been a fear of air raids by the much-vaunted Zeppelin fleet, the first raids had been by German aircraft, dropping bombs into Dover Harbour on 21 December and making an abortive attack on London on Christmas Day. On 19 and 20 January, however, a Zeppelin had crossed the coast near Great Yarmouth and dropped six high explosive and seven incendiary bombs on the town. A sister ship dropped a scattering of small bombs on Norfolk villages and the bulk of its load onto King's Lynn. Four civilians had been killed and sixteen injured. Newspaper correspondents regaled their readers with stories of houses with their doors and windows shattered, of children killed or horribly injured, of miraculous escapes and the composure of the populace under the threat of the airborne menace. If the Germans could carry out these raids with apparent impunity, could they not carry out the threat that had lingered in British minds since Erskine Childers published
The Riddle of the Sands
in 1903, a full-scale invasion of the country backed by a secret army of spies and saboteurs?