He ended his letter, ‘I have both valued and enjoyed your friendship in the past, but after your telegram FO No 458 of the 1st July and the tone of your recent messages to me here, I find it difficult to believe that you are still the friend you used to be.’58
Churchill, who had more important priorities, did not answer.
1 RA DW 4628 and RA W 4627, quoted Ziegler, pp. 440–1.
2 Hoyningen-Huene to Berlin, 15 August 1940, GDFP, Series D, Vol. X, B15/B002641–2
3 Michael Bloch suggests that the telegram was about missing luggage, but that would not have justified a telegram to Berlin. John Costello argues that it was sent by MI6 on grounds that ‘a deliberately engineered provocation cabled in the Duke’s name to his host Santo Silva would have furthered Britain’s interests’ as a way of keeping negotiations going and hold off a German invasion whilst Britain prepared, but negotiations had ended. Ten Days, p. 374. The spy writer Nigel West believes ‘the Duke knew exactly what he was doing and was not a dupe.’ Nigel West to the author, 5 November 2020.
4 Duke of Windsor to Lord Lloyd, 12 October 1940, CO 967/122, TNA. $7,000 would be $133K today.
5 Duke of Windsor to Lord Lloyd, 26 August 1940, CHAR 20/9B/180–1, Churchill College Archives. £5,000 would be £286K today.
6 Duke of Windsor to Colonial Office, 24 August 1940, FO 371 24249, TNA.
7 Lord Lloyd to the Duke of Windsor, 27 August 1940, CHAR 20/9A-B/182–5, Churchill College Archives.
8 RA DW 4647, quoted Ziegler, p. 463.
9 $20K is about £380K.
10 Caroline Blackwood, The Last of the Duchess (Macmillan, 1995), p. 144.
11 Adela Rogers St Johns, The Honeycomb (Harper & Row, 1969), p. 533.
12 Lord Lothian to Alec Cadogan, 4 September 1940, Monckton Trustees, Folio 118, Balliol College, and FO 1093/23, TNA.
13 Lord Lothian to Alec Cadogan, 4 September 1940, Monckton Trustees, Folio 118, Balliol College.
14 Duchess of Windsor to Walter Monckton, 16 September 1940, Monckton Trustees, Box 18, Folio 99, Balliol College.
15 Michael Pye, The King Over the Water: The Scandalous Truth About the Windsors’ War Years (Hutchinson, 1981), p. 62.
16 11 September 1940, Courtney Letts de Espil papers, Box 10, Folder 2, Library of Congress.
17 7 October 1940, CHAR 20/9A–B/210, Churchill College Archives.
18 13 October 1940, Monckton Trustees, Box 18, Folio 122, Balliol College.
19 Edward Tamm to Edwin Watson, 13 September 1940, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
20 Memo for Clyde Tolson, 19 October 1940, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
21 Edward Tamm to Edwin Watson, 13 September 1940, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
22 RA GVI 141/35, quoted Ziegler, p. 455, and CHAR 20/31A–B, Churchill College Archives. It was sent to Churchill on 13 January 1941.
23 3 July 1946, Expressen, p. 53, and FBI report, quoted Ziegler, p. 456. The various peace initiatives can be seen in PREM 1/328, TNA.
24 18 October 1940, Wenner-Gren diary, by courtesy of Mark Hollingsworth.
25 25 October 1940, Wenner-Gren diary, by courtesy of Mark Hollingsworth.
26 Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 354.
27 Letter to Hoover, 10 December 1940, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
28 5 December 1940, Adolf Berle diary, Cambridge University Library. Wiseman had headed the British intelligence mission in the United States during the First World War and stayed on as a partner in the American investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
29 5 December 1940, Adolf Berle diary, Cambridge University Library.
30 The full details can be found in Box 1, Folder 22, James D. Mooney papers at Georgetown University.
31 He also had homes in Maine, Palm Beach, Sussex and London.
32 Just under $20 million today.
33 Fulton Oursler Jr, ‘Secret Treason’, American Heritage 42, No. 8 (December 1991).
34 Fulton Oursler Jr, ‘Secret Treason’, American Heritage 42, No. 8 (December 1991). Oursler dictated a seventeen-page account of the episode to his secretary on 26 December 1940, which was later corroborated by Louis Nichols, a senior FBI official.
35 John Colville to Christopher Eastwood, 13 January 1941, CHAR 20/31A, Churchill College Archives. Colville in his diary for 11 January 1941 reported on a meeting with Harry Hopkins, where the American had expressed concerns ‘about HRH’s recent yachting trip with a violently pro-Nazi Swede’, John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 394.
36 Hopkinson to Robinson, 17 January 1940, FO 1093/23, TNA.
37 9 January 1941, report ‘from most secret sources (FBI to Ml5) attached’, CHAR 20/31A–B, Churchill College Archives.
38 Memo, 26 March 1941, CO 23/750, TNA.
39 Sumner Welles to Fletcher Warren, January 1941, State Department files, 800.20211/WG/44 ½, NARA.
40 The Guy Liddell Diaries, Vol. 1, p. 125.
41 Christopher Eastwood to John Martin, 21 January 1941, CHAR 20/31A–B, Churchill College Archives.
42 Wenner-Gren diary, 3 February 1941, courtesy of Mark Hollingsworth.
43 Sumner Welles to Fletcher Warren, January 1941, State Department files, 800.20211/WG/44 1/2, NARA.
44 H. Montgomery Hyde, Secret Intelligence Agent (Constable, 1982), p. 117.
45 29 January 1941, Box 71, Departmental correspondence State Dept, PSF, FDR Library. It is also quoted at Charles Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 380. The State Department had built up large files on Wenner-Gren, which included FBI reports and reports from consular officials in Nassau. The FBI had been tasked with planting an agent on Southern Cross. See memo 18 April 1941 on Wenner-Gren by Harold Hoskins, Box 71, Departmental correspondence State Dept, PSF, FDR Library.
46 The Windsors were lent Sloan’s yacht for a week in April to tour the outer islands.
47 Higham, Mrs Simpson, pp. 361–2.
48 In today’s money almost $2 billion.
49 Alfred Sloan, 8 August 1941, 862.20211/M/19, NARA.
50 Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 362.
51 19 February 1941, LWFD 2/3 Diary, Churchill College Archives. AE is Anthony Eden. Jim Thomas was a Conservative MP, then PPS to the Secretary of State for War.
52 Quoted John Parker, King of Fools (St Martins, 1988), p. 210.
53 Quoted Jim Wilson, Nazi Princess: Hitler, Lord Rothermere and Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe (History Press, 2011), p.115.
54 Valentine Vivian to Kenneth Robinson, 20 March 1941, CHAR 20/31A/6, Churchill College Archives.
55 Christopher Eastwood to Eric Seal, 20 March 1941, CHAR 20/31A/45, Churchill College Archives.
56 Churchill to the Duke, 18 March 1941, FO 954/33A/189, TNA, and CHAR 20/31A, Churchill College Archives.
57 The Duke to Lord Moyne, 19 March 1941, FO 954/33A/189, TNA.
58 The Duke to Churchill, 27 March 1941, FO 954/33A/190, TNA, and CHAR 20/31A/51–2, Churchill College Archives.
CHAPTER 12
Under Surveillance
The Windsors, who required permission to visit the United States, were now lobbying to make another visit. The authorities suspected the trip might involve Wenner-Gren. Churchill advised that the trip ‘would not be in the public interest nor indeed in your own at the present time’ and that Wenner-Gren was ‘according to the reports I have received, regarded as a pro-German international financier, with strong leanings towards appeasement and suspected of being in communication with the enemy.’1
One of the consequences of the Liberty article was that the FBI, under orders from Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, and Franklin Roosevelt, now put the couple under surveillance whenever they were in the United States. On 16 April, agent Percy Foxworth sent a memo to Hoover that ‘this request was predicated upon information which we have had in the past concerning these people’.2 At the same time Roosevelt wanted agents on Southern Cross, because ‘it was easily possible that the Wennergren (sic) yacht might have evidence of suspicious activities on board.�
� He wanted ‘greater energy . . . in covering the activities and connections of Mr Axel Wennergren.’3
On 18 April, the Windsors arrived in Miami and were driven to Palm Beach, where they were staying at the Everglades Club. The ostensible purpose of their visit was to see Sir Edward Peacock, the Canadian financial adviser who had helped negotiate the Abdication Settlement and was now in the United States as head of the British Purchasing Commission, to discuss their financial affairs – but much of their time was spent playing golf and shopping.
It did not go down well with the locals. An intercepted letter was passed to the Colonial Office. ‘What do you think of the very precious Duke and Duchess of Windsor charging up to thirty thousand dollars’ worth of knick knacks during their brief stay in Miami, Florida,’ wrote M.L. Smith of Encino, California to Mrs Begg in Aberdeen. ‘The nerve of them leaving those shop-keepers holding the bag, because dear Edward was unable to take any money out of the Bahamas because of wartime restrictions. Now, these various shopkeepers can only hope that they will be paid when this war is over.’4
The FBI had recruited two informers from the Windsors’ entourage – Alastair ‘Ali’ Mackintosh and William Rhinelander Stewart. Mackintosh was a former equerry to the Royal Family, whom the Duke had known for many years. His first marriage had been to the silent screen star Constance Talmadge, when Rhinelander Stewart, another golfing partner of the Duke, had been best man.
Rhinelander told the FBI that ‘there was current rumour and gossip in Nassau to the effect that when Hitler defeated England, he would then install the Duke of Windsor as the King’ and that the Duke:
was so embittered against what he thought was the raw deal his people had given to her that such a change might be brought about . . . He also stated he was told that at a dinner at the Government House where the Duke and Duchess were piped in, after being seated the Duchess made some remark to a dinner guest and then turned to the piper and made the statement, ‘You can also report that to Downing Street,’ which indicated to everyone present that they thought the piper was some kind of a spy for England. Stewart states that the Duke looks upon Nassau as a sort of Elba for himself and that undoubtedly he does have some personal political aspirations.5
On 2 May, the FBI agent wrote again to Hoover, claiming that Robert Palmer Huntington, the architect and tennis champion, ‘had proof that Goring (sic) and the Duke of Windsor had entered into some sort of an agreement, which in substance was to the effect that, after Germany won the war, Goring, through control of the army, was going to overthrow Hitler and then he would install the Duke of Windsor as the King of England.’6
Another FBI source, whose name is redacted, told Foxworth ‘that her information came from Allen MacIntosh (sic) and, ‘there was no doubt whatever but that the Duchess of Windsor had had an affair with Ribbentrop, and that of course she had an intense hate for the English since they had kicked them out of England.’7
There continued to be numerous reports of the outspoken political views of the Windsors. In April, Robert Brand, the head of the British Food Mission to the United States, relayed to the Foreign Office a conversation that he had had with a recent visitor to the Bahamas, Bob Windmill, ‘who said the Duke had told him, “It was an absolute tragedy if your country came into the war. The only thing to do is to bring it to an end as soon as possible.”’8
In May, a letter was forwarded to Churchill, written by the Wall Street stockbroker Frazier Jelke, who had just spent three months in Nassau and had dined at Government House several times, ‘amazed . . . to be told by each of them personally and separately that they were opposed to America entering the war, as it was too late to do any good.’ The Duke had told him, ‘I have always been a great realist and it is too late for America to save Democracy in Europe. She had better save it in America for herself.’9
Postal censorship had already picked up a similar letter:
I have talked with a man Jelke this afternoon, lately back from the Bahamas. He met Wenner-Gren and dined with him on his yacht several times with the Windsors . . . Jelke had the feeling that W-G probably has some channel of communication with the higher German authorities. The British Government has apparently forbidden the Windsors to frequent his yacht anymore . . . Several nights later the Duchess told Jelke that if the US entered the war, this country would go down in history as the greatest sucker of all times. Jelke had the impression that they both admire Hitler.10
The Windsors had become increasingly concerned about the safety of their French properties and paying the caretaker staff. In April 1941, Churchill personally, through the American ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, arranged for the 55,000 francs in back rent on the Paris property to be paid together with 10,000 francs insurance and 15,000 francs due for the strongroom space they rented at the Banque de France, though the bank was under the control of Hitler.11 According to Charles Higham, ‘Bedaux acted as a go-between in the arrangements, since he was close to Bullitt and Nazi Ambassador Otto Abetz.’12
The British and Americans meanwhile continued to monitor Wenner-Gren’s activities. After the Duke ‘submitted for approval an ambitious proposal for social and agricultural development on the island of Grand Bahamas by Axel Wennergren (sic), which would involve transfer to Wennergren of large tracts of land’, the Foreign Office contacted Washington seeking views, given the site for the US base in the Bahamas had not yet been chosen. The answer was swift and clear: ‘Admiralty and MI5 have been consulted and are not inclined to favour grant to person named on account of his somewhat doubtful political proclivities and strategic position of island.’13
In the summer of 1941, the Windsors expressed a desire to visit the Duke’s ranch in Canada. Delicate negotiations went on to avoid the Duke crossing with his brother, the Duke of Kent, who was due to visit in September, and to arrange a route that avoided Ottawa, where he might have to be entertained by the Governor General, his uncle, Lord Athlone. There was, also, still the concern of encouraging Isolationists at a time when Britain was anxious to bring America into the war.
At the end of September 1941, the couple flew to Miami – Wallis’s eyes bandaged because of her fear of flying – where they inspected 300 RAF cadets training with Pan-American instructors before taking a train to Washington, where there was a reception at the National Press Club and they stayed at the White House. From Washington they continued by train, lent by a friend, the railway magnate Robert Young, through Chicago to the Alberta ranch, where they spent the first week of October.
The Duke had bought the one-storey building during his first visit to Canada in 1919 and paid short visits in the summers of 1923, 1924 and 1927. He was interested in stock breeding and wanted to introduce practices from the Duchy of Cornwall lands. By 1930 he had spent almost $250,000 on it and with the help of W.L. Carlyle, a professor of agriculture, built the finest breeding herd in Canada, but he had not made money and had contemplated selling it several times.
In 1932, the Canadians had gifted him several thousand adjacent acres of Crown land and rights to their mineral resources but, after the Abdication, he realised it would be difficult to return to what was British territory. In 1938, the Duke had sold off the cattle herd but the ranch continued to lose money – $3,000 in 1939 – and attempts to sell it during the early months of the war had come to nothing. At the end of 1940, the American polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth had offered him $40,000, and the Duke was tempted to accept, but then drilling for oil began in the area. It was this interest that had prompted the 1941 visit.
The Windsors returned via Washington, where a lunch for twenty-two had to be cancelled at the last minute, because the Duchess preferred to send out for food and the Duke to eat fruit in his bedroom, and Dorothy Halifax, wife of the British ambassador Lord Halifax, was ‘outraged to be presented with a bill for £7.10 for hire of a lorry to take their luggage to and from station – it did seem a little unnecessary for a 24-hour visit.’14
Against advice,
the couple stayed at the Waldorf Towers in New York, where they took a whole floor. They saw doctors, lawyers and friends, shopped, saw some shows and ate out, but they also made time for public duties. The Duke saw Mayor LaGuardia to discuss urban housing conditions, whilst the Duchess visited a centre for unmarried mothers and babies. They reviewed mobile hospital units of the British-American Ambulance Corps, lunched with the British War Relief Society, inspected relief agencies, housing projects and armaments factories, and played darts with sailors at the British Merchant Seamen’s Club. Everywhere they went, they attracted large crowds, ‘who interfered with traffic, tossed tickertape and shreds of phone books and must inevitably have recalled to the Duke his wild reception here as Prince of Wales.’15
At Baltimore, the couple were met at the little station of Timonium in the Dularey Valley by a crowd of 5,000, including General Warfield, Uncle Harry, the nearest relation on Wallis’s father’s side, and they stayed with him at his 400-acre farmhouse, where Wallis had often stayed as a child. At the official reception, there were crowds of a quarter of a million as they drove with the Mayor in open cars and a police escort from City Hall to the Baltimore Country Club, where 800 people had been invited to meet them. The visit was taking on aspects of a Royal Tour.
They inspected British war relief projects, lunched with the Governor of Maryland and visited two camps of Civilian Conservation Corps. They remained on message in support of the British war effort, but attracted criticism for not returning to the Bahamas, where many properties lived in by Black people had recently been destroyed in a hurricane.
On 14 October, the Duke travelled to Washington to see Lord Halifax, who wrote to Churchill:
His visit seems to have gone off all right, and not attracted too much publicity, and on the whole the Press, with the exception of one or two rags, have behaved all right. I had a long talk to him a few days ago, in which he opened his heart and talked quite freely. He feels pretty bitter about being marooned in the Bahamas, which he says is a foul climate, and where there is nobody except casual American visitors whom he can see anything of as a friend. I must say it certainly sounds pretty grim.16
Traitor King Page 14
