Richard Aldrich - The Secret Royals

Also by Richard J. Aldrich & Rory Cormac

The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers

Spying on the World: The Declassified Documents of the Joint Intelligence Committee, 19362013 (with Michael S. Goodman)

Also by Richard J. Aldrich

GCHQ: The Fully Updated Centenary Edition

The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence

Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service

Also by Rory Cormac

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces and the Secret

Pursuit of British Foreign Policy

Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac, 2021

The moral right of Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-912-7

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649- 913-4

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To Libby and Joanne who are just the best!

First section

Elizabeth Is Rainbow Portrait (Wikimedia Commons)

Queen Victoria with her eldest daughter Vicky (Private collection)

George V and Tsar Nicholas II with their heirs (Private collection)

Rasputin (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Fridtjof Nansen (Frum Museum)

The police arrest the would-be assassin George McMahon (Ernest Brooks/Getty Images)

Edward, Wallis with Charles and Fern Bedaux (US National Archives and Records Administration)

The Windsors loose in Florida, 1941 (US National Archives and Records Administration)

Gray Phillips followed Edward with care in the 1940s (Private collection)

Mouse Fielden (Private collection)

The royal family inspect the 6th Airborne Division ( IWM H 38612)

George VI inspects a special forces raiding jeep ( IWM H 19947)

George VI inspects a landing craft (Military Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

Second section

George VI in Montys caravan ( IWM TR 2393)

George VI and Princess Elizabeth (Private collection)

The Treetops Hotel in Kenya (Private collection)

Queen Elizabeth II and Marshall Tito (AFP via Getty Images)

John F. Kennedy, Mountbatten and Lyman Lemnizter (JFK Library)

Queen Elizabeth II with President Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana (Kara University Library)

Queen Elizabeth II and Anthony Blunt (PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

Ian Fleming with Sean Connery (PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

Prince Charles at Cambridge University ( Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)

Prince Charles enjoys pistol practice in West Berlin (INGA SA)

Aftermath of the attempted kidnap of Princess Anne (PA/Alamy Stock Photo)

Queen Elizabeth II with Harold Wilson (Ford Library)

Queen Elizabeth II with the Shah of Iran (PA/Alamy Stock Photo)

Prince Charles eyes Idi Amin (Keystone/Getty Images)

Diana, Princess of Wales (Tim Ockenden/Alamy Stock Photo)

Queen Elizabeth II unveils a plaque to mark the centenary of GCHQ (Niklas Hallen/AFP via Getty Images)

On Her Majestys Secret Service.

Ian Fleming

O N A BALMY summer evening in late July 2012 the worlds most famous intelligence officer arrived at Buckingham Palace in an iconic black cab. Dressed in his trademark tuxedo, he skipped up the central red staircase and, flanked by the royal corgis, entered a gilded room. At a desk in the corner sat Queen Elizabeth II. She kept him waiting; he glanced at the clock and coughed politely.

Good evening, Mr Bond, she said, turning to face him. Good evening, your majesty, he quietly responded.

James Bond followed her as she made her way down the stairs and headed towards a helicopter waiting on the lawn outside. Moments later, Agent 007 and the queen jumped from the helicopter in a dramatic parachute drop down towards the Olympic stadium in east London. The crowd gasped as they vanished from sight, before Elizabeth reappeared, wearing the same pink dress, in the royal box. The sequence formed the highlight of the Olympic Games opening ceremony.

Directed by Danny Boyle and partly filmed in Buckingham Palace, this masterpiece of deception involved the real queen, stunt doubles and cameo roles for three royal corgis, Monty, Holly and Willow. In over fifty years of Bond feature films, the paths of 007 and the royal family have frequently crossed. Prince Charles visited the Bond set at Pinewood Studios in 2019. Photographs showed him inspecting the set and chatting to James Bond himself. More discreetly, producers borrowed some of the most striking interior designs featured in the iconic film Goldfinger from Princess Margarets palace. The early 007 films were known for their conspicuous consumption, high fashion, exotic air travel and the latest designs. Margarets abode fitted right in.

Few realize that these momentary connections are far from fantasy and instead capture a fleeting glance of Britains most secret partnership the British monarchy and their secret services.

Surprisingly, the queen, like her predecessors, is no stranger to the real secret service. Even before her coronation, the young Princess Elizabeth had met two Albanian agents near a hidden MI6 training camp on Malta. Sporting Thompson submachine guns and training on secret transmitters, they were preparing to overthrow the communist government in Tirana. Shortly after ascending the throne in 1952, the queen was discussing a troublesome Middle Eastern leader with officials. She quipped about assassinating him.

The queen knows more state secrets than any living person and, unlike her prime ministers, she keeps them. The queen is a human library of intelligence history. She knew about the British nuclear weapons programme at a remarkably early stage. And she knew more about the Soviet mole, Anthony Blunt, still in her employment as Surveyor of the Queens Pictures, than even the prime minister did. Later, she invited the CIAs head of operations to Buckingham Palace to ask him how my boys were treating him. The senior CIA officer was surprised that Elizabeth knew about his real job at all.