[images and captions added by this website] Monday, December 27, 2004 Mrs Foley's diary solves the mystery of Hess By Michael Smith A BRIEF entry in the diary of the wife of a British spy has led to the discovery of the true story behind one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War - the bizarre 1941 flight to Britain of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess. No single incident in Britain's wartime history has given birth to so many conspiracy theories, all of them centred on an alleged plot by the intelligence services to lure Hess to Britain. Kay Foley kept her diary between 1936 and 1942   They range from suggestions that the man imprisoned by the Allies after the war was not the real Hess, who allegedly died in the 1942 air crash that killed the Duke of Kent, to claims that British psychological warfare experts conned him into coming to Britain so they could use him in an anti-Nazi propaganda campaign. The response from academics has always been disparaging. They regard the conspiracy theories as patent nonsense and, perhaps in response, invariably dismiss any claim of major MI6 involvement in the affair. But the diary has revealed that MI6 was not only heavily involved in the run-up to Hess's flight but even planned "a sting operation" aimed at luring Hess or another prominent German into bogus peace talks with Britain. David Irving comments: THERE is nothing dramatically new in this story which Michael Smith did not learn from reading my 1987 book Rudolf Hess, The Missing Years (Macmillan, London).    It was always known that Haushofer had written a letter to the Duke of Hamilton, addressed initially to a Mrs Wilson in Lisbon (who turned out to be an MI6 agent); the MI6 intercepted the letter and it is in Ministry of Information (letter censorship) archives.    MI6 told Eduard Benes of their plot to lure Hess over. I found that in the papers of Benes' secretary Taborsky in Stanford University.    And we knew that Frank Foley was Hess's chief interlocutor at Mytchett House, southern England,for a year after his arrival in 1941. I published his photo in the book. Most of the transcripts of the recorded conversations have long been released.    Isn't it amazing how an author (Smith) can write an entire article on the subject without mentioning by name the book that contains all these facts, published nearly twenty years ago? The diary belonged to the wife of Frank Foley, the former MI6 head of station in Berlin, who was to become more famous for his work in getting "tens of thousands" of Jews out of Germany. It was Foley, as the leading German expert in MI6, who was in charge of the year-long debriefing of the deputy führer. This much is known from Foreign Office files released to the National Archives some years ago. Hess flew to Britain in a Messerschmitt-110 on May 10, 1941, intent on making contact with the Duke of Hamilton, who he believed would help him mediate a peace deal whereby Britain would join Nazi Germany in a war against the Soviet Union. It was a hopeless mission based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the British establishment. Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, was convinced that it had produced an intelligence windfall for Britain. But Churchill was wrong. The debriefing was a wasted effort. Hess knew astonishingly little and, to make matters worse, Foley swiftly realised he was mad. That is where the role of both MI6 and Foley in the Hess affair begins and ends, according to the files released to the National Archives. But the emergence of Kay Foley's diary, which she had given to one of her nieces, changed all that, sparking off an investigation that has uncovered the truth about Rudolf Hess. Mrs Foley kept the diary for seven years, from January 1936 to December 1942. Not unnaturally for a journal covering such a long period, the entries were all frustratingly brief. Foley was only ever referred to as F (for Frank) and although records of his official activity appeared in the diary, they were vague. For the most part, the diary provided nothing new about Foley and what he did. A few entries added a minor piece of new information. One gave a precise date for a wartime change of job, another details of when and where Foley landed in Britain after the fall of France, adding interesting detail of what he did before returning home. But the most puzzling entries by far concerned a visit to Lisbon that Foley made in early 1941. He flew out of Whitchurch aerodrome near Bristol on Friday, Jan 17, 1941, spending two weeks in Lisbon and arriving back in England on Saturday Feb 1, 1941, when the diary records that Kay received a telegram from F reassuring her that he had arrived safely back in England. The dates were intriguing. Seven months before Hess flew to Britain, in September 1940, one of his close advisers, Albrecht Haushofer, the leading expert on Great Britain in the German Foreign Office [Website note: wrong!] , had written to the Duke of Hamilton at Hess's request, attempting to set up a meeting in Lisbon. The letter, sent via an intermediary, an old family friend of the Haushofers, was intercepted and passed to MI5, who initially suspected Hamilton and the intermediary might be German spies and began an investigation. By November 1940 they had realised this was not the case and spent some months considering whether or not to send Hamilton, a serving RAF officer, to Lisbon to meet Haushofer. The plan was eventually discarded as too dangerous but the letter's very existence has always fuelled the allegation at the heart of the conspiracy theories -- that British intelligence lured Hess to Britain. Conspiracy theories are easily dismissed but if MI6 was aware that someone so close to power had put out feelers to the British establishment, it would be bound to consider meeting them. If the approach was from opposition forces, they would be useful allies. If it came from someone with Hitler's backing, it would have provided invaluable intelligence. The dates for Foley's visit to Lisbon were midway between the letter's interception and Hess's arrival in Britain. They looked right. Only MI6 could say for sure what Foley was doing in Lisbon. The service still refuses to release any of its own files, but it does retain a number of "old boys" as historians to look after them. Their immediate response was that Foley must have gone to Lisbon to look at a potential double-cross operation, a reference to the highly successful system whereby the vast majority of Nazi spies sent to Britain were "turned" by British intelligence to provide false information to the Germans. Although Foley did eventually take over as head of the MI6 Double-Cross section, this did not happen until 15 months later (the diary fixes the date as April 16, 1942). Told this, the MI6 historian went back and checked the files. What he found was the answer to the mystery that has puzzled historians for more than half a century. Much of the MI6 archive on Hess has been destroyed. But in the files there was a single, more recent reference that spoke of MI6 plans for "a sting operation" in response to the Haushofer letter. The MI6 historian also has access to oral histories from former officers and, where they are still alive, the officers themselves. By delving into this "folk memory", he discovered that Foley had flown to Lisbon to see whether it was possible to use a meeting with Haushofer to set up a sting operation. Foley was accompanied by his secretary, Margaret Reid, who was presumably there not just to take notes but also to provide cover -- a middle-aged gentleman and his "niece" spending two weeks away from the austerity of wartime Britain. There is, frustratingly, no information on what Foley and Reid actually did in Lisbon. But the only effective way of checking out the viability of a sting operation would have been to respond to the letter and to arrange to meet either Haushofer or another intermediary in the Portuguese capital. In an account written for Hitler after Hess flew to Britain, Haushofer said: "I did not learn whether the letter reached the addressee. The possibilities of it having being lost en route from Lisbon to England are not small after all." But he could scarcely have admitted having had contacts with the British secret service. After Hess flew to Britain, Haushofer was treated with a great deal of suspicion by the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi party's security service. It interrogated him and placed his flat and office under surveillance. At any event, whatever Foley and Reid did in Lisbon, it took a full two weeks. They arrived back in England with bad news. Foley had decided that the sting was too risky and, understandably, Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6, took the advice of his top expert on Germany, frustrating Hess in his attempts to put out peace feelers to the British aristocracy. As with most of the events that become the subject of conspiracy theories, the truth about Hess has turned out to be much more mundane. Haushofer had always warned Hess that the attempt to go through Hamilton was likely to fail and that it might be necessary to send "a neutral intermediary" to Britain. When it did fail, the deputy führer clearly decided that he could not afford to leave such an important task to someone else and simply came himself.

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