If it can be said that MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service are classic manifestations of, and creatures of, the British Establishment, it is also true that World War II was the catalyst for a change in attitudes to Catholicism.
It was not until September 1939 that MI5 reluctantly began to employ Catholics, the director general, Major-General Sir Vernon Kell, having exercised strict religious discrimination, often asserting that “the pope has the world’s best intelligence agency, and I’m not going to improve it”. With some justification, he observed that the Vatican could make almost instant contact with a source of reliable information, probably a local priest, in virtually any location in the world, however remote.
Whereas the Security Service relied on more than a hundred police chiefs and their Special Branch or equivalent organisations, spread across the empire, the Holy See was perceived to enjoy a truly global reach which filtered down to the smallest villages.
Kell, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, and with his wife the daughter of a Cork landowner, also believed that many Catholics were burdened with a dual loyalty which would not necessarily put the interests of the Crown first. Always risk-averse, Kell relied on families known to him for a supply of officers and administrative staff, and discreetly maintained his policy of religious discrimination against Catholics and Jews.
But he had been unprepared for a further conflict with Germany, and was sacked from his post in June 1940. By then he had relaxed his prejudice somewhat and employed a Catholic solicitor, Dick Butler, who was a partner at the City solicitors Charles Russell & Co, as his personal assistant. Thereafter, when Jasper Harker briefly took over as director general, and was later succeeded by Sir David Petrie, Butler was appointed head of the secretariat, and extended his very considerable influence across the service.
Meanwhile, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) had undermined Whitehall’s reluctance to allow religious minorities into the secret world in 1935 by hiring Commander Kenneth Cohen, reputedly the first Jew to receive a commission in the Royal Navy. SIS’s role, of course, was to exploit foreign contacts to collect information abroad, and the pre-war chief, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, harboured no qualms about employing Catholics, and placed a count of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick Vanden Heuvel, in a key post in Switzerland in an effort to gain the trust of anti-Nazi German Catholics. The genial, cosmopolitan “Fanny” Vanden Heuvel, who had cut his teeth in the intelligence business in France during the Great War, and had enjoyed a successful business career thereafter as a director of Eno’s Fruit Salts, spent most of the war under consular cover in Zürich, recruiting sources with access to opponents of the regime in Berlin.
Another Catholic with strong European aristocratic connections, Count Charles de Salis, was recruited by SIS’s counter-intelligence branch, Section V, as its representative in Lisbon, where he cultivated potential assets within the Axis camp. De Salis would remain in SIS post-war, as would Anthony Coombe-Tennant, who also served in Copenhagen as the SIS station commander. Coombe-Tennant, later posted to The Hague and Baghdad, would resign from SIS in 1961 to take holy orders and join the Benedictine monastery at Downside.
As SIS opted for a more cerebral approach to the task of intelligence collection, eschewing the “bumps in the night” strategy associated with the veterans of Special Operations Executive, the Catholic influence extended, and by the mid 1960s, as the era of the notorious “robber barons” waned, there was a veritable “Catholic mafia” clique of co-religionists who were thought by some of their colleagues to enjoy a rather close association with the Knights of Malta.
By the time the US Central Intelligence Agency had come under the spell of Vernon Walters, and then of Bill Casey and secretary of state General Al Haig, who were all devoutly committed to the Knights of Columbus (prompting some wag to claim that “CIA stands for Catholics in Action”), the acceptance of Catholics within the West’s intelligence community, and their dominance, was unquestioned, and Whitehall’s secret corridors were filled with regular worshippers from Farm Street, Cadogan Street, Cheyne Row and the London Oratory.
Indeed, one of the great historic triumphs of the 20th century, the Soviet collapse and the liberation of Eastern Europe, was widely interpreted as the culmination of a lengthy covert campaign initiated by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US national security adviser during Jimmy Carter’s administration, but largely undertaken by another Catholic, General “Dick” Walters, the former deputy director of Central Intelligence who acted as President Reagan’s ambassador-at-large and collaborated with John Paul II to defeat the Kremlin.
The full details of the CIA’s clandestine support for the Vatican’s subversion in Poland have yet to be fully declassified and released, but those who counted knew exactly who had pulled the strings behind the backdrop of international diplomacy to ensure the Solidarity movement’s success and the restoration of democracy.
Nigel West is the author of Spycraft Secrets Visit nigelwest.com
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