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MI6 spent the present-day equivalent of more than $200m bribing senior Spanish military officers, ship owners and other agents to keep Spain out of the second world war, files released today disclose.

More and more money was delivered, mainly via a Swiss bank account in New York, as Sir Samuel Hoare, Britain’s ambassador in Madrid, warned London that unless it was paid, there was a real and immediate danger of Spain abandoning its neutrality and of Franco joining forces with Nazi Germany.

In June 1940, Hoare was demanding an initial $1m. “I personally urge authority be granted without delay, and that if you have doubts, the prime minister be consulted,” he told the Foreign Office in London. “Yes indeed,” Churchill initialled on a copy of Hoare’s deciphered telegram in red ink.

One file names “Senores Jose Jorro Andreo and Rasado Silva” Torres as recipients of British funds sent, in their case, to the Bank of Portugal in Lisbon.

“It may well be that Spain’s entry in the war will depend on our quick action,” telegraphed Hoare in another urgent plea for MI6 cash to spend on agents. The situation was “cricial”, he insisted: “I cannot spend spare time to explain the position in detail.”

Hoare claimed that British money was responsible for the arrest of people plotting to persuade the Spanish dictator to join the war on Germany’s side. Hoare succeeded in persuading ministers in London. A top secret message from Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, referred to British contact with guerrillas in the event of Spain being invaded by Germany. “Please burn this letter when you have read it,” he told Hoare.

British agents later made contacts in Lisbon with an unnamed Spanish Republican leader and representatives of the Allianza Democratica Española. Churchill’s concerns that British agents were “contacting ‘Reds’ with the object of stirring up a revolution” were allayed by Hugh Dalton, the minister for economic warfare, the files show.

At least $14m, some $200m in today’s value, from MI6′s secret vote was spent on Spanish agents during the second world war, according to the documents. At one point, British ministers persuaded the US to unblock cash for Spanish agents held in banks in New York.

Franco seemed determined throughout the war to remain neutral, though was on close terms with Germany behind the scenes.

Spaniards were not the only beneficiaries of MI6 money approved by FO ministers. “We recently put forward to our ambassador in Baghdad a suggestion for the adoption of large-scale bribery of politicians and other leading personalities in Iraq,” says a file dated January 1941. The file suggests that Britain had to keep up with the Italians and Germans, placing an initial £100,000 at the embassy’s disposal. The document then adds: “We have been trying by hook or by crook to dislodge the Iraqi prime minister” – a reference to the pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gaylani.

The spy who cross-dressed

An MI6 officer was arrested by police in Madrid during the second world war dressed “down to a brassiere, as a woman”, a file disclosed today recalls. Dudley Clarke, masquerading as a Times journalist, said he told Spanish police he was a “novelist and wanted to study the reactions of men to women in the streets”. He later explained that he was taking the “feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought that he would try them on “for a prank”.

An anxious report to C, the head of MI6, in London reported that among the items in his suitcase was a “roll of super fine toilet paper, which particularly excited the police, who are submitting the sheets to chemical tests”.

Communications intercepted by the British revealed that German officials described the case as a “first class espionage incident”.

But Clarke was released, and quickly made for Gibraltar. “Please keep him under strict surveillance and despatch to Middle East by next plane,” C told Gibraltar’s governor. “If he shows signs of mental derangement, he should however be sent home by first ship.”

He did not. Clarke “went on to have a brilliant career in deception”, wrote Keith Jeffrey in his official MI6 history.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/nqiuwjxurXM/mi6-spain-200m-bribes-ww2

MI6 spent the present-day equivalent of more than $200m bribing senior Spanish military officers, ship owners and other agents to keep Spain out of the second world war, files released today disclose.

More and more money was delivered, mainly via a Swiss bank account in New York, as Sir Samuel Hoare, Britain’s ambassador in Madrid, warned London that unless it was paid, there was a real and immediate danger of Spain abandoning its neutrality and of Franco joining forces with Nazi Germany.

In June 1940, Hoare was demanding an initial $1m. “I personally urge authority be granted without delay, and that if you have doubts, the prime minister be consulted,” he told the Foreign Office in London. “Yes indeed,” Churchill initialled on a copy of Hoare’s deciphered telegram in red ink.

One file names “Senores Jose Jorro Andreo and Rasado Silva” Torres as recipients of British funds sent, in their case, to the Bank of Portugal in Lisbon.

“It may well be that Spain’s entry in the war will depend on our quick action,” telegraphed Hoare in another urgent plea for MI6 cash to spend on agents. The situation was “cricial”, he insisted: “I cannot spend spare time to explain the position in detail.”

Hoare claimed that British money was responsible for the arrest of people plotting to persuade the Spanish dictator to join the war on Germany’s side. Hoare succeeded in persuading ministers in London. A top secret message from Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, referred to British contact with guerrillas in the event of Spain being invaded by Germany. “Please burn this letter when you have read it,” he told Hoare.

British agents later made contacts in Lisbon with an unnamed Spanish Republican leader and representatives of the Allianza Democratica Española. Churchill’s concerns that British agents were “contacting ‘Reds’ with the object of stirring up a revolution” were allayed by Hugh Dalton, the minister for economic warfare, the files show.

At least $14m, some $200m in today’s value, from MI6′s secret vote was spent on Spanish agents during the second world war, according to the documents. At one point, British ministers persuaded the US to unblock cash for Spanish agents held in banks in New York.

Franco seemed determined throughout the war to remain neutral, though was on close terms with Germany behind the scenes.

Spaniards were not the only beneficiaries of MI6 money approved by FO ministers. “We recently put forward to our ambassador in Baghdad a suggestion for the adoption of large-scale bribery of politicians and other leading personalities in Iraq,” says a file dated January 1941. The file suggests that Britain had to keep up with the Italians and Germans, placing an initial £100,000 at the embassy’s disposal. The document then adds: “We have been trying by hook or by crook to dislodge the Iraqi prime minister” – a reference to the pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gaylani.

The spy who cross-dressed

An MI6 officer was arrested by police in Madrid during the second world war dressed “down to a brassiere, as a woman”, a file disclosed today recalls. Dudley Clarke, masquerading as a Times journalist, said he told Spanish police he was a “novelist and wanted to study the reactions of men to women in the streets”. He later explained that he was taking the “feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought that he would try them on “for a prank”.

An anxious report to C, the head of MI6, in London reported that among the items in his suitcase was a “roll of super fine toilet paper, which particularly excited the police, who are submitting the sheets to chemical tests”.

Communications intercepted by the British revealed that German officials described the case as a “first class espionage incident”.

But Clarke was released, and quickly made for Gibraltar. “Please keep him under strict surveillance and despatch to Middle East by next plane,” C told Gibraltar’s governor. “If he shows signs of mental derangement, he should however be sent home by first ship.”

He did not. Clarke “went on to have a brilliant career in deception”, wrote Keith Jeffrey in his official MI6 history.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/nqiuwjxurXM/mi6-spain-200m-bribes-ww2

MI6 drew up plans for clandestine operations, including the “liquidation of selected individuals” and “kidnapping of high ranking Communist personalities” as the second world war led to the cold war, secret intelligence files released Thursday at the National Archives reveal.

The prime targets of the secret intelligence service were leading Soviet personalities. A file from 1947 entitled Covert Propaganda, listed “plants” and “fictitious indiscretions” as potential weapons.

The file notes said: “Action could be taken to discredit prominent Communist and other public figures, and to propagate dissension in Communist parties and organisations by (i) dispatch of forged letters through the post, and (ii) the planting of manufactured evidence.”

Referring to the head of MI6, known, as that person still is, as “C” for chief, an intelligence officer told Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary: “C’s organisation should be given a free hand to carry out such special operations as are possible in peacetime in the Soviet Union itself and in Soviet zones of Germany and Austria.”

To the irritation of MI6 and military chiefs, Bevin, like the prime minister, Clement Attlee, was squeamish about what the MI6 papers euphemistically called special purposes and subterranean work.

Responding to the MI6 memo, Bevin wrote: “I have grave objections to this. We are letting loose forces difficult to control … I did not regard it too successful (sic) in the war.”

Ministers later softened their opposition to such MI6 operations in Europe and elsewhere, and “licensed to kill” was not officially abandoned until the mid 1950s.

During the later stages of the second world war, the files show, MI6 drew up a list of key German figures, included senior Gestapo officers, to be assassinated before the planned D-Day Normandy landings, at the request of US officers at the HQ of the allied commander, General Dwight Eisenhower.

Field Marshal Rommel, the “desert fox” who had been defeated in North Africa but who was commanding German troops in northern France, was a candidate for assassination.

However, the plan was dropped before D-Day amid concerns it would lead to what an MI6 officer called “a wave of murderings”. He warned against reprisals against civilians and allied prisoners of war held by the Germans. The officer advised: “It is likely that for every successful assassination, there will be two or three failures, as past records of these attempts show.”

Stewart Menzies, who was C, agreed, as did Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the joint intelligence committee. “Not out of squeamishness”, he said, “as there are several people in this world whom I could kill with my own hands with a feeling of pleasure and without that action in any way spoiling my appetite, but I think that it is the type of bright idea which in the end produces a good deal of trouble and does little good.”

But in June 1944 British agents received reports of a plot to kill Hitler and of his having been spotted in the southern French town of Perpignan disguised and fleeing to north Africa.

Defence chiefs told Winston Churchill they were “unanimous that, from the strictly military point of view, it was almost an advantage that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made, but that on the wider point of view, the sooner he was got rid of the better”.

MI6 believed the Middle East could provide fertile ground for its covert activities. In a file marked oral propaganda, it reported in 1947: “The widespread illiteracy among the people of the Middle East … points to the value of the spoken word as an effective means of propaganda. This kind of propaganda could be put across by the Moslem clergy, both Sunni and Shia, in the Arab countries and in Persia.”

The MI6 noted added: “But they will need to be supplied with the compelling arguments based on a comparison of Communist tenets with Moslem and Christian principles and teaching.”

C wondered whether to assign an officer after the war to the British embassy in Paris to spy on the French. He agreed to do so, the files show, in a letter which he instructed the recipient to burn.

But C wondered what cover his officer should have. After dismissing the labels of cultural attache and commercial secretary, the decision was made to call him “military adviser to the ambassador”.

The man chosen for the task was AJ Ayer, who became well-known as a philosopher. Ayer did not stay long in Paris before he was replaced by MI6 and returned to Britain.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/VT59Vhe3ynY/wartime-mi6-targets-national-archives

MI6 drew up plans for clandestine operations, including the “liquidation of selected individuals” and “kidnapping of high ranking Communist personalities” as the second world war led to the cold war, secret intelligence files released Thursday at the National Archives reveal.

The prime targets of the secret intelligence service were leading Soviet personalities. A file from 1947 entitled Covert Propaganda, listed “plants” and “fictitious indiscretions” as potential weapons.

The file notes said: “Action could be taken to discredit prominent Communist and other public figures, and to propagate dissension in Communist parties and organisations by (i) dispatch of forged letters through the post, and (ii) the planting of manufactured evidence.”

Referring to the head of MI6, known, as that person still is, as “C” for chief, an intelligence officer told Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary: “C’s organisation should be given a free hand to carry out such special operations as are possible in peacetime in the Soviet Union itself and in Soviet zones of Germany and Austria.”

To the irritation of MI6 and military chiefs, Bevin, like the prime minister, Clement Attlee, was squeamish about what the MI6 papers euphemistically called special purposes and subterranean work.

Responding to the MI6 memo, Bevin wrote: “I have grave objections to this. We are letting loose forces difficult to control … I did not regard it too successful (sic) in the war.”

Ministers later softened their opposition to such MI6 operations in Europe and elsewhere, and “licensed to kill” was not officially abandoned until the mid 1950s.

During the later stages of the second world war, the files show, MI6 drew up a list of key German figures, included senior Gestapo officers, to be assassinated before the planned D-Day Normandy landings, at the request of US officers at the HQ of the allied commander, General Dwight Eisenhower.

Field Marshal Rommel, the “desert fox” who had been defeated in North Africa but who was commanding German troops in northern France, was a candidate for assassination.

However, the plan was dropped before D-Day amid concerns it would lead to what an MI6 officer called “a wave of murderings”. He warned against reprisals against civilians and allied prisoners of war held by the Germans. The officer advised: “It is likely that for every successful assassination, there will be two or three failures, as past records of these attempts show.”

Stewart Menzies, who was C, agreed, as did Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the joint intelligence committee. “Not out of squeamishness”, he said, “as there are several people in this world whom I could kill with my own hands with a feeling of pleasure and without that action in any way spoiling my appetite, but I think that it is the type of bright idea which in the end produces a good deal of trouble and does little good.”

But in June 1944 British agents received reports of a plot to kill Hitler and of his having been spotted in the southern French town of Perpignan disguised and fleeing to north Africa.

Defence chiefs told Winston Churchill they were “unanimous that, from the strictly military point of view, it was almost an advantage that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made, but that on the wider point of view, the sooner he was got rid of the better”.

MI6 believed the Middle East could provide fertile ground for its covert activities. In a file marked oral propaganda, it reported in 1947: “The widespread illiteracy among the people of the Middle East … points to the value of the spoken word as an effective means of propaganda. This kind of propaganda could be put across by the Moslem clergy, both Sunni and Shia, in the Arab countries and in Persia.”

The MI6 noted added: “But they will need to be supplied with the compelling arguments based on a comparison of Communist tenets with Moslem and Christian principles and teaching.”

C wondered whether to assign an officer after the war to the British embassy in Paris to spy on the French. He agreed to do so, the files show, in a letter which he instructed the recipient to burn.

But C wondered what cover his officer should have. After dismissing the labels of cultural attache and commercial secretary, the decision was made to call him “military adviser to the ambassador”.

The man chosen for the task was AJ Ayer, who became well-known as a philosopher. Ayer did not stay long in Paris before he was replaced by MI6 and returned to Britain.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/VT59Vhe3ynY/wartime-mi6-targets-national-archives

Doctors‘ leaders and the health secretary are on a collision course over claims the government is using “anti-GP rhetoric” to mask its own failure to effectively reform the NHS.

In a speech on Thursday at the King’s Fund Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, will attack “inaccessible” GPs for leaving the frail and the elderly with no alternative but to fill up hospital accident and emergency waiting rooms. Hunt will call for a new chief inspector of GPs to crack down on poor performers.

Hunt points to “GP surgeries where it is often impossible to get an appointment the next day; same-day appointments but only if you call at 8 o’clock in the morning sharp and are lucky getting through; long waits on the phone to get through, sometimes at premium rates”.

The health secretary will also call for a new Ofsted-style rating system for hospitals, pointing out that the King’s Fund found almost three-quarters – 73% – of NHS professionals do not think that quality of care in the health service is given enough priority. In its first look at the NHS since the Francis report into scandalous levels of poor care at the Stafford hospital, said trust boards “must demonstrate that they give sufficient priority to quality and patient safety”.

However, doctors have hit back – and are producing posters to be placed in surgeries defending the profession, emblazoned with the words: “GPs want to spend more time with you, not red tape” – a dig at the health reforms which have increased their managerial responsibilities.

Michelle Drage, the leader of London’s GPs, wrote on her website: “No doubt you are as sick as us of the anti-GP rhetoric in some of the media. We think it’s time we put the record straight about general practice.”

Drage said the health secretary’s comments were demoralising GPs and causing fear among patients. “GPs are on the edge and we are seeing this when no one appears to be getting a grip on the NHS. Who is running the NHS? Is it the GPs? Is it NHS England? Is it the secretary of state?”

Hunt’s speech will come as GPs gather for their annual conference, which Drage says will be “electric”. She said: “Either [Hunt] does not get [the NHS] or he gets it and does this deliberately. Either way it’s a pretty bad situation out there.”

Hunt has already faced criticism for linking the crisis in hospital AE departments with GPs opting out of out-of-hours care. Mike Farrar, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, the body representing organisations commissioning and providing health services, questioned Hunt’s assertion that Labour was to blame for a public loss of confidence in alternatives to casualty by agreeing a new contracts with family doctors in 2004. Farrar was the person who negotiated the contract with GPs.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health said the health secretary was not “doing GP bashing. We are not proposing to tear up the GP contract. We want to work with the GP community to reduce bureaucracy and get rid of the targets that make it difficult for them to get on and treat patients quickly.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/yqpCv0dkSAU/government-anti-gp-rhetoric-failings

Doctors‘ leaders and the health secretary are on a collision course over claims the government is using “anti-GP rhetoric” to mask its own failure to effectively reform the NHS.

In a speech on Thursday at the King’s Fund Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, will attack “inaccessible” GPs for leaving the frail and the elderly with no alternative but to fill up hospital accident and emergency waiting rooms. Hunt will call for a new chief inspector of GPs to crack down on poor performers.

Hunt points to “GP surgeries where it is often impossible to get an appointment the next day; same-day appointments but only if you call at 8 o’clock in the morning sharp and are lucky getting through; long waits on the phone to get through, sometimes at premium rates”.

The health secretary will also call for a new Ofsted-style rating system for hospitals, pointing out that the King’s Fund found almost three-quarters – 73% – of NHS professionals do not think that quality of care in the health service is given enough priority. In its first look at the NHS since the Francis report into scandalous levels of poor care at the Stafford hospital, said trust boards “must demonstrate that they give sufficient priority to quality and patient safety”.

However, doctors have hit back – and are producing posters to be placed in surgeries defending the profession, emblazoned with the words: “GPs want to spend more time with you, not red tape” – a dig at the health reforms which have increased their managerial responsibilities.

Michelle Drage, the leader of London’s GPs, wrote on her website: “No doubt you are as sick as us of the anti-GP rhetoric in some of the media. We think it’s time we put the record straight about general practice.”

Drage said the health secretary’s comments were demoralising GPs and causing fear among patients. “GPs are on the edge and we are seeing this when no one appears to be getting a grip on the NHS. Who is running the NHS? Is it the GPs? Is it NHS England? Is it the secretary of state?”

Hunt’s speech will come as GPs gather for their annual conference, which Drage says will be “electric”. She said: “Either [Hunt] does not get [the NHS] or he gets it and does this deliberately. Either way it’s a pretty bad situation out there.”

Hunt has already faced criticism for linking the crisis in hospital AE departments with GPs opting out of out-of-hours care. Mike Farrar, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, the body representing organisations commissioning and providing health services, questioned Hunt’s assertion that Labour was to blame for a public loss of confidence in alternatives to casualty by agreeing a new contracts with family doctors in 2004. Farrar was the person who negotiated the contract with GPs.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health said the health secretary was not “doing GP bashing. We are not proposing to tear up the GP contract. We want to work with the GP community to reduce bureaucracy and get rid of the targets that make it difficult for them to get on and treat patients quickly.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/yqpCv0dkSAU/government-anti-gp-rhetoric-failings

A colourful description of how Winston Churchill spent a night drinking with Joseph Stalin in Moscow during a wartime meeting is contained in a letter from Sir Alexander Cadogan, a top official at the Foreign Office, contained in a highly classified document released on Thursday.

He described how at mealtimes between the meetings in August 1942, Churchill “engaged the company in irreverent and irresponsible discourse”.

Cadogan’s account is contained in a letter to Lord Halifax, a former foreign secretary, when he was UK ambassador in Washington in the late 1940s.

“Nothing can be imagined more awful than a Kremlin banquet, but it has to be endured,” wrote Cadogan.

“Unfortunately Winston didn’t suffer it gladly. However, next morning he was determined to fire his last bolt and asked for a private talk, alone with Stalin. This was fixed for 7pm.”

Cadogan said he was himself summoned to Stalin’s room. “There I found Winston and Stalin … sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and innumerable bottles.”

Cadogan continued: “What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.”

Cadogan added that “everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell” as Stalin went on about the benefits of the Soviet system. The party broke up at 3am.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/AonMXsGjyrA/winston-churchill-jospeh-stalin-night-drinking

A colourful description of how Winston Churchill spent a night drinking with Joseph Stalin in Moscow during a wartime meeting is contained in a letter from Sir Alexander Cadogan, a top official at the Foreign Office, contained in a highly classified document released on Thursday.

He described how at mealtimes between the meetings in August 1942, Churchill “engaged the company in irreverent and irresponsible discourse”.

Cadogan’s account is contained in a letter to Lord Halifax, a former foreign secretary, when he was UK ambassador in Washington in the late 1940s.

“Nothing can be imagined more awful than a Kremlin banquet, but it has to be endured,” wrote Cadogan.

“Unfortunately Winston didn’t suffer it gladly. However, next morning he was determined to fire his last bolt and asked for a private talk, alone with Stalin. This was fixed for 7pm.”

Cadogan said he was himself summoned to Stalin’s room. “There I found Winston and Stalin … sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and innumerable bottles.”

Cadogan continued: “What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.”

Cadogan added that “everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell” as Stalin went on about the benefits of the Soviet system. The party broke up at 3am.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/AonMXsGjyrA/winston-churchill-jospeh-stalin-night-drinking

Ministers ordered the bugging of Edward VIII’s telephones in Buckingham Palace and in his Windsor retreat at the height of the 1936 abdication crisis, hitherto secret papers reveal.

The extraordinary move, reflecting a growing and deep distrust between the king and his ministers, is disclosed in a unique cache of intelligence files hidden until now in a basement at the Cabinet Office in the heart of Whitehall.

Among the files is a scribbled note, dated 5 December 1936 and marked “most secret”, from the Home Office to the head of the General Post Office, Sir Thomas Gardiner, referring to an order from the home secretary, Sir John Simon.

It states: “The home secretary asks me to confirm the information conveyed to you orally … that you will arrange for the interception of telephone communications between Fort Belvedere and Buckingham Palace on the one hand and the continent of Europe on the other.”

When not at the palace, Edward stayed at Fort Belvedere, his bolthole in Windsor Great Park. Edward’s mistress, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was staying with friends in the south of France at the time.

The panic in the British establishment provoked by Edward’s affair with Simpson and his apparent belief that he could get away with marrying her and remain king has been widely reported.

What has not been disclosed until now is how the lack of trust in the monarch was such that ministers went to the lengths of recording his personal conversations.

The Queen’s advisers at Buckingham Palace were consulted about the decision to release the file, the Guardian understands.

Deep anxiety in Whitehall and the government’s fear of losing control of the situation led to a close watch of outgoing telegrams. One that was intercepted and blocked was from Neil Forbes Grant, London editor of the Cape Times.

Summoned to see the home secretary, Grant was told there was no truth to his report that the king was about to abdicate and that if the news had reached South Africa and then been telegraphed back to Britain, the reaction might have been “of a most serious character”.

Simon wrote: “I reminded him that in 1815 a false rumour that we had lost the Battle of Waterloo produced a financial crisis and ruined many people. I asked him if he did not realise that his responsibilities as a journalist and an Englishman made the sending of such a message without definite authority as to its truth very improper and reckless.”

Grant insisted he had got his information from “a very highly placed source”, but seemed suitably chastened. According to Simon, the journalist said “this had been a lesson to him and that he would always have this experience in mind in discharging his responsibilities in future”.

Edward abdicated on 10 December 1936, four days after Grant sent his intercepted telegram.

The newly released files, all highly classified, have been gathering dust for decades in a Cabinet Office basement. Lord Wilson, a former cabinet secretary, described how he visited what he called a strongroom beneath his old office where he found “heaps of paper … my eyes swivelled”.

He said he decided to “grasp the nettle” and set up a review to look into the possible release of the papers. It was carried out by Gill Bennett, a former Foreign Office official historian. She said the papers had been treated as “too difficult” to categorise. Officials were “not sure what to do with them”, she said.

Other files among the tranche, which records events up to 1951, reveal how a male MI6 officer was arrested in Madrid wearing women’s clothes, how MI6 paid huge amounts of money to agents to keep Spain out of the second world war, and how MI6 was prepared to “liquidate” selected individuals after the war.

Amid tales of bribery, smuggling, dirty tricks, and intrigue – some of which, missing files suggest, are still being carried out – the papers also include a first-hand account of how Churchill spent a night drinking with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. Sir Alexander Cadogan, top official at the Foreign Office, wrote of being summoned to Stalin’s room. “There I found Winston and Stalin … sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and unnumberable bottles.

“What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.”

” Everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell”, added Cadogan, as Stalin went on about the benefits of the Soviet system. The party broke up at 3am.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/as7NIDFCKbo/ministers-ordered-bugging-king-edward

Ministers ordered the bugging of Edward VIII’s telephones in Buckingham Palace and in his Windsor retreat at the height of the 1936 abdication crisis, hitherto secret papers reveal.

The extraordinary move, reflecting a growing and deep distrust between the king and his ministers, is disclosed in a unique cache of intelligence files hidden until now in a basement at the Cabinet Office in the heart of Whitehall.

Among the files is a scribbled note, dated 5 December 1936 and marked “most secret”, from the Home Office to the head of the General Post Office, Sir Thomas Gardiner, referring to an order from the home secretary, Sir John Simon.

It states: “The home secretary asks me to confirm the information conveyed to you orally … that you will arrange for the interception of telephone communications between Fort Belvedere and Buckingham Palace on the one hand and the continent of Europe on the other.”

When not at the palace, Edward stayed at Fort Belvedere, his bolthole in Windsor Great Park. Edward’s mistress, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was staying with friends in the south of France at the time.

The panic in the British establishment provoked by Edward’s affair with Simpson and his apparent belief that he could get away with marrying her and remain king has been widely reported.

What has not been disclosed until now is how the lack of trust in the monarch was such that ministers went to the lengths of recording his personal conversations.

The Queen’s advisers at Buckingham Palace were consulted about the decision to release the file, the Guardian understands.

Deep anxiety in Whitehall and the government’s fear of losing control of the situation led to a close watch of outgoing telegrams. One that was intercepted and blocked was from Neil Forbes Grant, London editor of the Cape Times.

Summoned to see the home secretary, Grant was told there was no truth to his report that the king was about to abdicate and that if the news had reached South Africa and then been telegraphed back to Britain, the reaction might have been “of a most serious character”.

Simon wrote: “I reminded him that in 1815 a false rumour that we had lost the Battle of Waterloo produced a financial crisis and ruined many people. I asked him if he did not realise that his responsibilities as a journalist and an Englishman made the sending of such a message without definite authority as to its truth very improper and reckless.”

Grant insisted he had got his information from “a very highly placed source”, but seemed suitably chastened. According to Simon, the journalist said “this had been a lesson to him and that he would always have this experience in mind in discharging his responsibilities in future”.

Edward abdicated on 10 December 1936, four days after Grant sent his intercepted telegram.

The newly released files, all highly classified, have been gathering dust for decades in a Cabinet Office basement. Lord Wilson, a former cabinet secretary, described how he visited what he called a strongroom beneath his old office where he found “heaps of paper … my eyes swivelled”.

He said he decided to “grasp the nettle” and set up a review to look into the possible release of the papers. It was carried out by Gill Bennett, a former Foreign Office official historian. She said the papers had been treated as “too difficult” to categorise. Officials were “not sure what to do with them”, she said.

Other files among the tranche, which records events up to 1951, reveal how a male MI6 officer was arrested in Madrid wearing women’s clothes, how MI6 paid huge amounts of money to agents to keep Spain out of the second world war, and how MI6 was prepared to “liquidate” selected individuals after the war.

Amid tales of bribery, smuggling, dirty tricks, and intrigue – some of which, missing files suggest, are still being carried out – the papers also include a first-hand account of how Churchill spent a night drinking with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. Sir Alexander Cadogan, top official at the Foreign Office, wrote of being summoned to Stalin’s room. “There I found Winston and Stalin … sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and unnumberable bottles.

“What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.”

” Everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell”, added Cadogan, as Stalin went on about the benefits of the Soviet system. The party broke up at 3am.

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