He further pointed out that ‘if any poor German had done what rich De László did, there would be little of this slobbery sentiment forthcoming’. He sneered at these supposedly noble motives that had sent money for ‘comforting the enemy’. He attacked the whole process, and the article concluded:
When he was cajoling votes last December, the Prime Minister promised that every interned Hun would be kicked out of the country and no enemies be allowed to enter it again. What value is to be attached to such a promise after this farce? Mr Justice Salter, Lord Hambledon and Judge Radcliffe, sitting in the High Court, in all the dignity of lounge suits, counsel making a pretence of judicial proceedings by wearing their wigs, the jury-box packed with society women, and no evidence taken on oath! I wonder how many British readers who followed the case have realised there was nothing really judicial about the enquiry. The whole thing was a sorry farce and the result is that a man who so offended against the law in the agonising years of war that he was interned, has now been confirmed in his British citizenship. László was anxious to make the best of both worlds. He succoured an Austrian escaped from Donington Hall, and postponed denouncing him to the police, fearing what would be said in Hungary. And he actually delayed becoming a British citizen out of regard for that old reprobate, the late Austrian Emperor, who ennobled him only two years before the war. He defied ‘Dora’ which every decent Britisher had to respect; he attempted to communicate with the enemy through five countries – Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, America; he violated a diplomatic postbag; he sent expressions of sympathy to the enemy. And yet today, after this solemn farce of a pseudo trial, the claim of the State that the continuance of his naturalisation ‘is not conducive to the public good’ is denied; and the man who for our safety was sent to Brixton Prison, is to share with you and me – with every loyal and patriotic subject of the King, the priceless boon of British citizenship. László knows in which country his bread is buttered. If we lost the war he might have found refuge in his native land – where, according to the Attorney General ‘his affections and sympathies are’ – and have renounced the British naturalisation which cost him ‘a severe mental conflict’. But a farcical Court has declared him to be truly British. And now, if he chooses, he can bring an action against me for calling him a traitor! But then the jury box would contain twelve honest men who love their country and honour their King, and who would not be influenced by any considerations of sycophancy and toadyism towards a social upstart, however well placed he might be with those of high estate.
De László’s biography by Rutter claims that he made strenuous attempts to persuade his legal advisers to bring an action against Bottomley who, it has to be said, regardless of any rights or wrongs in this case, was a loathsome specimen who pandered to the most basic instincts of the electorate and was later found guilty of fraud. Wisely, De László said, they persuaded him against it, as it would simply bring the case back to public attention. Of course it could have meant that people such as Basil Thomson, who had seen all the evidence, might have been put on oath and asked about it – and there would have been a jury. Given the result of the previous year’s Pemberton Billing trial, it seems a wise decision.
There were others who wouldn’t let it lie. On 29 July, in the House of Commons, the Liberal MP for East Edinburgh James Hogge asked the home secretary whether the charges against De László at the hearing before the Naturalisation Certificate Revocation Committee were the same that were brought before the committee appointed to deal with cases arising out of Order 14b of the Defence of the Realm Act, presided over by Mr Justice Sankey, or whether other allegations in addition were made by the Crown against Mr De László when his case was considered by Mr Justice Sankey’s Committee. If the latter, would he state what those allegations were and why the case against Mr De László was not presented in the same manner to both committees?
Mr Shortt, the home secretary, replied:
As explained at the conclusion of the de László case by Mr. Justice Salter, the questions with which the Committee over which he presided had to deal were entirely different from those dealt with by the Committee presided over by Mr. Justice Sankey. The case, therefore, against Mr. de László did not assume precisely the same form before the two Committees. The Reports of Mr. Justice Sankey’s Committee on the evidence and proceedings before them were laid before the Committee presided over by Mr. Justice Salter. The findings of Mr. Justice Salter’s Committee as to the revocation of the certificate of naturalisation in no way conflict with the advice as to internment tendered by the Committee presided over by Mr. Justice Sankey.
Mr Hogge pressed his point, asking, ‘If Mr. de László was acquitted by one committee as being practically guiltless, and therefore eligible for British citizenship, why was he interned by the other?’ To which Mr Shortt replied:
Because the two questions are totally different. In the case of internment it is a question whether it is necessary on any ground of suspicion for the safety of the country. You can run no risks. In the other you go into the whole of the facts and thrash them out.
In fact this wasn’t quite an honest and complete answer. Mr Hogge had specifically asked whether other allegations had been made and ‘whether he would state what those allegations were and why the case against Mr. de László was not presented in the same manner to both Committees?’
A memo in the Home Office file discusses the question while preparing the Home Secretary’s answer and notes that it is almost certainly based on the questions asked in the John Bull article about whether vital evidence had been suppressed. Some evidence presented to the first committee had indeed not been presented to the second. Four people who had given evidence the first time had not done so on the second occasion – partly because one was dead and another unavailable, while the attorney general, it was claimed, thought the other two weren’t worth using. But other evidence was not presented to the hearing, or at least to the public part of it. The secret service reports were by ‘general agreement in which the Attorney General agreed’, not used because they ‘could not properly be used’. The reports of the original Sankey Committee, which did discuss the secret service reports in some detail, was put before the second committee ‘who could, if they had thought proper, [have] pursued the matter further’. But the allegations were never put forward to the second committee in public, and the home secretary and the attorney general never mentioned that allegations had been made that De László was a spy.
Did the British Always Get It Right?
MI5 was certainly pleased with itself at the end of the war. The home secretary (without naming the organisation) had told Parliament that the German spy organisation in Britain had been smashed in August 1914 and never recovered. A dozen spies had been caught and executed and many more imprisoned, usually because they were neutrals employed by the Germans and it made more sense to show clemency where neutral governments were involved. A worldwide security organisation based on the restriction of travel visas to suspicious foreigners, run abroad by SIS but coordinated by MI5 in London, made travel by potential foreign agents prohibitive, and an aggressive policy of running double agents abroad, again co-ordinated by MI5, had attacked German espionage in its stations in Holland, Switzerland and the United States. But were the British authorities always right?
Not always, and their pursuit of some suspected agents could be both blinkered and cruel. One such, though his main persecutors were Basil Thomson and Special Branch, was Baron Louis von Horst, a German businessman with extensive interests in the international hop trade, particularly between the USA and Britain. Louis von Horst was born in Germany in 1865, but moved to the USA as a child and was later naturalised there. Together with his brothers he established a company that purchased Californian hops direct from the farmers and sold them to east coast brewers, cutting out the old middle men brokers to the advantage of both sides. They went international and by purchasing hops in this way, and expanding into hop growing thems
elves, the brothers were able to undercut British hop producers with their imports. Louis ran the British side of their business. Though accused of ‘dumping’ and selling inferior hops by the British growers, and subject to a hostile press, the Horst brothers prospered in the years leading up to the First World War. Unfortunately, Louis had a fatal weakness, though he can hardly have foreseen it as such. During a period of great financial and personal trouble following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which had destroyed his hop harvest, he had become close to, and dependent for a short time on, a wealthy, twenty years younger, Irish-American woman journalist named Lilian Scott Troy, who was also a political radical.
Under her influence he too began to mix in radical circles and when, during the 1912 Dock Strike, Lilian overcommitted herself in supporting food kitchens for the relief of strikers’ families, he quite happily paid to provide 100,000 meals. Troy also talked him into supporting the Daily Herald, the new national Labour newspaper, and it was her influence that made him take an interest in both the Suffragette movement and in Irish nationalism. The latter interest was, in part, motivated by the hope of establishing hop farms in Ireland, but it meant meetings with Irish politicians, including Roger Casement, and that some comments he made quite innocently about German shipping visiting Irish ports were later taken wildly out of context.
On the outbreak of war, von Horst was invited by the US consul general to assist those Germans who were still in Britain, some 8,000 of whom, having lost their jobs, were on the verge of destitution. Known as the ‘Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress’, and funded to a large extent by money collected in America by Troy, the committee came under attack from a hostile press and, after one committee meeting, von Horst was arrested and taken to Scotland Yard. Here he was questioned by Thomson and only released on the intervention of assistant police commissioner F.T. Bigham (brother of Charles Clive Bigham). But Thomson had him in his sights, and when he applied for permission to leave the country it was refused on the grounds that he was German; his explanation that he had never sworn an oath to Germany, had voted in US elections and that his German title was a purely honorary one (awarded for sponsorship of a German opera school) was not accepted and he was compelled to register as an enemy alien, which he did on the last day of the deadline.
Special Branch produced a report in which they acknowledged that a Briton who had attached himself to the Suffragette movement, socialism and Irish nationalism ‘might have been ascribed to a restless sympathy to all who believe themselves to be oppressed’ but that, as a German, ‘one can come to no other conclusion but that he is a German agent of a very dangerous type’. Horst was arrested at the end of August 1914 and spent the war in internment before being expelled in 1919, his businesses in Britain having collapsed in the interim.
The truth of the story is that von Horst was enamoured of the much younger Lilian Troy and went out of his way to help and support her. She was absolutely an American and, therefore, pretty much untouchable without rock solid evidence, but the authorities were able to create just enough fog around von Horst’s nationality to allow them to get at her through him. Their relationship was known about (she is referred to as his ‘paramour’), but ignored as a factor. Though it was a Special Branch case, MI5 did, in a report from March 1917, describe him as ‘a most dangerous German agent’.
Even after the war, when von Horst made genuine attempts to restart his hop business in Ireland, he was obstructed at all points by the British authorities.
It’s clear, from this one example, that the British authorities were not infallible and could be vindictive. But was the Internment Committee correct when it agreed to keep De László interned? The short and simple answer has to be yes. The review committee, much as it didn’t like it, said so. Sir John Simon, and through him De László (no doubt through gritted teeth), admitted this during the Denaturalisation Committee. MI5, through Vernon Kell, admitted it was a difficult case (possibly because of his prominent connections – in 1917 it formed a special sub-section, G3 (ii), for investigation into suspected persons in diplomatic, financial and political circles), but was quite satisfied that it had done a good job in getting him detained.
De László the Spy
The Denaturalisation Committee wasn’t something MI5 wanted, nor had its investigations been made with it in mind. In fact, MI5 investigations were made with the intention of preventing espionage, which did not necessarily mean arresting and prosecuting spies or even having them interned. There were a number of cases where potential enemy agents were identified before they travelled to Britain and it was simple enough to refuse them visas to travel – this was probably the most effective means of preventing spying and, in 1915, German agents were already reporting that travel restrictions were making their job harder and they were having difficulty getting into the country. Agents could also be ‘turned’ into working for MI5 while appearing still to work for the enemy. Such ‘double agents’ were given much more prominence in the public eye after the Second World War, when the whole network of carefully controlled XX (Double Cross) agents was gradually revealed. In fact double agents were common in the First World War too. The American agent codenamed COMO has already been mentioned, but there were many others. One was a former Swiss army officer, naturalised as British, who was persuaded by military intelligence in France to contact German intelligence in Switzerland who recruited him as a spy and sent him back to London. Here he gave MI5 ‘considerable valuable information about German methods, identity of their chief agents and so forth and has also worked very satisfactorily in maintaining spy correspondence, under our instructions, with the German Secret Service’. After some deliberation he was allowed to become an MI5 officer once the particular double game he was involved in came to a natural conclusion. Double agents operated in the Far East and Mexico, and there is even some slight evidence that MI5 was involved in faking an explosion at a munitions factory to support the work of a double agent in Britain in 1918. From MI5’s perspective, a dangerous enemy agent had been effectively neutralised. If conclusive evidence had been obtained then De László could have been turned or, as was more usual, passed to Special Branch for arrest and prosecution.
Before the denaturalisation hearing, the authorities carried out, as best they could, an examination of the French Secret Service documents. They were acknowledged as being the most important evidence, but also that it was doubtful how far they could be used. They began with the first note, dated 7 July, noting that:
László has access to splendid political information.
László did not deny all knowledge of ‘Madame G’, but merely said he could not remember who it was.
The Dutch Diplomatic Bag was used by De László.
Of the letter dated 12 July they commented:
By this time the French Secret Service have got hold of De László’s name.
The mechanism of the passing of the secret information is quite correct, viz László has access to Official Circles, he was in touch with a Dutch subject, and the Dutch Subject was in touch with Austria, and very probably by Switzerland, see as to this László’s statement to Scotland Yard.
The letter dated 24 July prompted:
The French Secret Service have found out that the intermediary is known as the ‘ami Hollondaise’.
Of the letter dated 14 June, that had been procured by Thomson’s agent, they were effusive:
This document is addressed to László at his correct address. Let us assume that the superscription is a forgery. The contents of the letter, however, are too strong to be disregarded.
László did wish to recover his nationality.
He had access to Society, Court and Intellectual circles.
He was a vain man; hence his correspondent flatters him.
‘Madame G’ reappears. This is a remarkable coincidence.
Enclosure
The ‘ami Hollondaise’ reappears; again a curious c
oincidence.
The information alleged to have been furnished by László was easily within his power, having regard to his position.
The nationality question crops up again.
The last paragraph is true, but hardly the thing which Laszlo would advertise.
Two further points should be noted.
Madame van Riemsdyk was reported to MI5 by their Rotterdam agent, on August 4th last, as a person known to have acted as intermediary for correspondence with Austria.
The Comte de Soissons, writing to Basil Thomson on September 24th last, says ‘HE IS CERTAINLY UNFRIENDLY TO US, IF NOT DELIBERATELY AND MALICIOUSLY DANGEROUS’. Thomson does not think much of the Comte’s judgment, but this is certainly strong language.
So the authorities felt that the information was internally consistent and matched other information they knew (the use of the bag) that very few others did. It might be argued that MI5 somehow forged the correspondence, but there are letters on the file from Bigham, who worked for SIS, and it would have been remarkably foolish to involve a member of another agency, whose job it was to liaise closely with the French, in an act of forgery. It would also be incredibly risky to plant a story claiming that the king was having doubts about the war. It could be argued that the French wrote the notes as a means of discrediting De László in the eyes of their allies, but what purpose would that serve? A more interesting theory might be that the documents were created by the Austrian secret service and planted on the French in order to cause problems for a man they considered a traitor and renegade. This is plausible apart from the fact that they would be using a double agent who could be better deployed in planting false military or political information that could be used to win the war.
The Spy Who Painted the Queen Page 21
