Winston Churchill at canvas.
There are few twentieth century leaders who are more lionized than Winston Churchill. He has come to epitomize everything that is stalwart and excellent about Britain, a sort of Superman of ‘the Greatest Generation’. The truth is something different. I’ve had Winston’s name pop up more than once in my reading about the music business, art world, cult studies and the drug trade. I think the time is right to peel back the Bulldog’s facade– this post is a whirlwind tour of Churchill’s doings that don’t pass the smell test.
Winston Churchill was half-American and his political career was kicked off by American money– Vanderbilt money, to be exact. (Churchills had been politically active for some time, but their fortunes, and therefore influence, were waning before the Vanderbilts came into the picture.) The Vanderbilt family got its start through government contracts supporting the War of 1812, but by the time they had caught the Churchills’ attention they had their fingers in many pies, the most notorious of which was their exploitation of the railways: the Vanderbilts benefited from a sweet deal with the Federal Government which gifted public land as an incentive for railway development– huge tracts of the Continental US were given away in this manner. The Vanderbilts personify crony capitalism and government corruption.
This nouveau riche American family enters the Churchill dynasty via the arranged marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the heiress, to the Duke of Marlborough, Winston’s cousin. Their marriage was orchestrated by Consuelo’s mother Alva Vanderbilt and her lover Oliver Belmont, son of Lord Rothschild’s New York agent. This is how Consuelo’s biographer Amanda Mackenzie Stuart explains Alva Vanderbilt’s motivation for the marriage of her daughter, which was first envisioned on a trip to British India with her husband, lover Belmont, and Consuelo in tow:
The illusionists of the British Raj found a most appreciative audience in Alva, though even she was startled by the size of the Government House guest suite and the ‘ten native servants who were assigned… in beautiful royal liveries of red embroidered in gold to serve us’. What impressed her most, however, was the quasi-imperial role of both Lansdownes [Lord and Lady Lansdowne, Viceroy of India]…
There was no life in the shadows or sunlight by proxy for a Vicereine of India; and just as she had once pictured the Vanderbilts as Medicis, Alva could now visualise her daughter’s future [married to Lady Lansdowne’s nephew, Duke of Marlborough]. From Consuelo & Alva Vanderbilt by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Despite her modern, white-washed image as a feminist icon, Alva Belmont was nothing but a controlling, materialistic, selfish user. How ironic that TIME magazine’s Clare Boothe Luce, the black-ops happy congresswoman, was promoted by a patroness who had day-dreams of British Rajdom…
Alva Belmont, seated second from right, lives her dream of oriental splendor at the opening of her tea house in 1914. Thank you mrmhadams.typepad.com
Alva Vanderbilt would divorce her husband and become Alva Belmont, patroness of Mrs. Pankhurst and Clare Boothe Luce, who I’ve written about in connection to Roald Dahl’s spy work in war-time Washington D.C. The Vanderbilts, and Alva, were never shy about betraying their fellow Americans; the spirit of representative government has never flowed strongly with them.
Winston was young when Consuelo’s doomed marriage took place, but the grasping, twisted quality of his immediate family would mold his psyche. There’s something corrupting about being the ‘poor relations’ of fabulously wealthy people, as Eleanor Roosevelt is testament to, and this corruption didn’t miss Winston.
Perhaps the earliest indication of Winston’s venality was his success in the art world, or I should say, ‘Charles Morin’s’ success in the art world. Winston Churchill, leader of the free world, was an art forger.
In 1921 Churchill exhibited several of his paintings signed with the name ‘Charles Morin’ at the Galerie Druet in Paris. Charles Morin was a reasonably well-known painter who died two years before, in 1919. The art showing in question, where Churchill sold six of his knock-offs, was organized by art critic Charles Montag, who Churchill had met during the Great War. At the time of the forgery, Churchill was already Secretary of State and fishing for more control over Palestine and Mesopotamia too.
Charles Montag is described this way by David Coombs at The Churchill Centre:
Although he is little regarded today, Montag was a friend and regular painting companion of Churchill until his death in 1956. Born in Switzerland in 1880, he must have been as energetic as he was charming, and amazingly well-connected with Impressionist painters, including Monet and Renoir, as well as Post- Impressionists like Bonnard and Matisse. He turned these talents to good account as an exhibition organizer and adviser to art collectors.
Montag was a savvy businessman in the vein of Joe Duveen, Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume: during WWII Montag worked with the Nazis to help them buy French art at bargain-basement prices. When Montag got caught and arrested at the end of the war, Churchill intervened to protect him. Douglas Cooper was responsible for apprehending Montag; Cooper was one of about 350 Allied agents called ‘monuments men’ tasked with tracking down loot. Apart from being a ‘monuments man’, Cooper was a squadron leader for Royal Air Force Intelligence and an independently wealthy Cubist art collector (conflict of interest?!). This is Cooper’s story according to the ‘Monuments Men Foundation‘, an American organization which promotes the Allied role in repatriating art displaced during WWII:
Cooper spent the month of February 1945 in Switzerland as a representative of the MFAA [Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives] and the French Recuperation Commission, interrogating various dealers and collectors who worked with the Nazis, including Theodore Fischer of the Fischer Gallery, who conducted the infamous sale of “degenerate” artworks in 1939. 9 According to John Richardson, Cooper also ordered the arrest of the Swiss dealer Charles Montag, who had been involved in the liquidation of the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, however, he was mysteriously released by higher authority.10 Undeterred, Cooper arrested him again, only to have his authority usurped once more by Winston Churchill, who came to the aid of Montag, his old friend and drawing instructor.11
9. Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 416.
10., 11. Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 35-36.
During WWII, Churchill’s art world criminality became a joke at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, and it caused FDR some discomfort when Winnie’s nature came to light. Of course, die-hard fans of Winston refuse to see Churchill’s actions for what they are, and they often ignore Montag’s dealings with the Nazis entirely. I think that Churchill’s actions, and the company he kept, are windows to his character. It gets worse.
Churchill comes from a line of conspirators. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a founder of the Primrose League, which was the first secret society that British intelligence agent Aleister Crowley joined. The Primrose League was Crowley’s ticket to spy-work, according to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666:
Another positive early influence was Aunt Annie’s, the second wife of his uncle, Jonathan Crowley. In some ways she was his mother-substitute. Annie was well-educated and active in the Primrose League. Named for Disraeli’s [Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister] favorite flower, the League was an auxiliary of the then dominant Conservative Party, which Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, helped found.
The Primrose League may have facilitated Crowley’s introduction to clandestine work. Modeled on the Orange Order, the secretive fraternal hard core of Irish Protestantism, the Primrose League broke ground by admitting women (like Aunt Annie), and acted like the popular front of “Tory Democracy”. It also constituted a kind of secret society within the Conservative Party, an early form of political action committee that, e.g., spied on perceived enemies of Toryism. Despite his associations with the extremes of Left and Right, Crowley maintained that he always was a Tory at heart, and that may have been as true a statement about his political persuasion as he ever made. The Primrose League could have used a young man of such versatility and conviction– e.g., by using young Crowley’s interest in Celtic revivalism and dissident Jacobitism to monitor their adherents.
Through Aunt Annie’s efforts, Crowley claimed, he gained the patronage of two Primrose League luminaries, Charles Thomson Ritchie (later 1st Baron Ritchie) and Robert Gascoyne Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury. Cecil was not only Grand Master of the League, but also reigned as prime minister for most of 1885-1902. Ritchie was Salisbury’s loyal cabinet member and a former Secretary of the Admiralty. In 1895, Ritchie became the new member of Parliament for Croydon, home to Annie and Jonathan Crowley and Crowley Ale’s main brewery. As a well-heeled and active supporter of Ritchie’s campaign, Annie Crowley could command his attention and, through him, solicit the help of Salisbury, who was always looking for young “men of ability.” This supports Aleister’s claim that he entered Cambridge in the autumn of 1895 with the help of Lord Salisbury and was earmarked by him for a career in the Diplomatic Service.
The League was set up to be a type of fifth column in support of the interests of its leaders, and to that end the secret society would promote the careers of its members.
Primrose League Bling: sparkler for ‘outstanding contributions’. Thank you, thehigginsbedfordcollections.blogspot.com
If you’ve read my blog over the last two years, you’ll know that I have contempt for Winston Churchill’s spooky co-conspirator William Stephenson. Stephenson was a Canadian business magnate who got into the intelligence business as a way to attack his German economic competitors and drum up war business. As H. Montgomery Hyde details in The Quiet Canadian:
It was his connection with the Pressed Steel Company that first led Stephenson into the field of secret intelligence. In the course of the business trips which he made to Germany at this period in order to buy steel, he soon discovered that practically the whole of the German steel production had been turned over to the manufacture of armaments and munitions, although Germany had been expressly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles to maintain any armed forces. Unfortunately this state of affairs was not appreciated in Britain… Almost alone among parliamentary back benchers, for he was in the political wilderness during these critical years, Winston Churchill harped unceasingly on what he knew to be going on in the new Reich of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers.
Historian Thomas E. Mahl is much less impressed by Stephenson’s intelligence work, in Desperate Deception:
The Intelligence gathered by Stephenson and others was erroneous, and it led to policies that might have proved disastrous had not the United States come into the war. They reported prior to the war that the German economy was being fully mobilized for war, and in September 1939, that the German economy was strained to its limits– producing at a rate that was unsustainable. This analysis was totally wrong.
The “others” who Mahl refers to are Stephenson’s network of industrial spies– other businessmen like himself. Judging by Stephenson’s business contacts as listed by Hyde, these “others” controlled firms in Canada and the USA as well as firms throughout the British Empire. I don’t find these contacts surprising, given Churchill’s American family connections. What I find particularly gross is how Churchill superimposed this informal network of self-serving businessmen on top of Britain’s intelligence services once he came to power in 1940. According to historian Ron Cynewulf Robbins Britain’s intel pros resented this imposition too:
…Churchill launched Stephenson on his spymaster career by appointing him to head the British Security Co-ordination Service in New York before the United States had entered the Second World War…
It cannot be overlooked that there was mutual antipathy between Sir Stewart Menzies, head of British intelligence, and Stephenson. Churchill gave Stephenson the New York appointment over the objections of Menzies.
Prior to Stephenson’s appointment, Menzies had kept Stephenson’s ‘intelligence’ contributions at arm’s length– Stephenson was allowed to be an uncompensated informer who gave his information to one of Menzies’ subordinates, and this only after pressure was applied by City businessman/MP Ralph Glyn (later Lord Glyn). Prior to Churchill’s war appointments, he didn’t have the pull to get his private spies ‘plugged into’ national defense.[1] However, Churchill used (or was used by!) his industry buddies as early as 1936 to promote their war agenda, as Hyde writes:
Not being in Government, Churchill had no access to official information, so he decided to pursue various private lines of inquiry in order to obtain facts and figures in support of his arguments. Among them, indeed perhaps the most significant, were those provided by Stephenson through access he managed surreptitiously to obtain to the balance sheets of the steel firms of the Ruhr.
To add insult to injury, Stephenson became ‘British Intelligence’ in the USA, representing not only MI-6 (foreign intelligence); but also MI-5 (internal security); the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department and the Political Warfare Executive (which used the Foreign Office as a cover); the British Office of Naval Intelligence; the mysterious Security Executive; Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and finally the ‘dirty tricks’ department, the Special Operations Executive. All of these appointments came under Stephenson’s role as the head of the British Security Coordination in NYC. Stephenson, the businessman, took over Britain’s most sensitive intelligence spheres wholesale.
Stewart and Pamela Menzies in 1932. Thank you, spartacus-educational.com
Of course, once ensconced in New York City, Stephenson would show equal disdain for American government, and collaborate with the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and President Roosevelt to undermine the State Department and sidestep Congress:
Stephenson first arrived in the United States on April 2, 1940 ostensibly on an official mission for the Ministry of Supply. It was on this trip, even before Churchill’s May 10th, 1940 ascension to prime minister that the meeting took place which set the early close working relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and British Intelligence.
This meeting between Stephenson and J. Edgar Hoover had been smoothed over by a mutual friend, the boxer Gene Tunney: “I had known Sir William for several years. He wanted to make… contact with J. Edgar Hoover… [but] he did not want to make an official approach through well-placed English or American friends; he wanted to do so quietly and with no fanfare.”
Mahl explains Stephenson’s orders for stateside espionage with a quote from Ernest Cuneo, who readers will remember from my post on the assassination of Gen. Patton:
The influence of British Security Coordination in America to involved the United States in WWII and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the Ernest Cuneo papers in the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British Intelligence created Donovan’s CIO/OSS. “If the charge against Ellis is true,” wrote Cuneo,”… it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”
“If my buddy Ellis was a spy, that’d mean the CIA was run by Soviets. Can’t happen.”
Following on, Mahl writes:
Not only were the British the primary force in the conception and creation of the COI, which later became the OSS and whose pieces were finally reconstructed into the CIA, but a British officer, Dick Ellis, then ran the organization. This was done in deepest secrecy, because as Winston Churchill’s personal assistant, Major Desmond Morton wrote, “It is of course essential that this fact not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”
Anti-war sentiment was a potent political force in the USA in 1940, and democratic processes would have scuppered FDR’s war plans, had they been allowed to work. It has never been conclusively decided whether Dick Ellis was a Soviet spy, though Richard Trahair’s Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage says that Ellis probably was a Soviet agent, and may have been for 30 years. Personally, I’m not surprised by Ellis, because thanks to the Venona decrypts and books like The Haunted Wood, we know that the OSS was riddled with Soviet agents. Of course, all of this is disastrous news for anybody at the CIA who doesn’t like Russians; if you’re interested in reading more about how Churchill-backed Soviet infiltration has undermined American counterintelligence efforts, check out my post Jesus, Jimmy. I think that this ‘Soviet infiltration’ is best understood as ‘infiltration’ by people who had also backed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.
The final stink wafting around Winston Churchill is a drug and cult related one. Mortimer Planno, the man who converted Bob Marley to Rastafarianism and who became the musician’s manager and political advisor, told journalist Hélène Lee that Winston Churchill had ultimate control over the drug market in Jamaica. Lee writes in The First Rasta:
He [Mortimer Planno] begins by confirming my doubts concerning the ganja trade. In the 1930s, he says, ganja was not yet illegal. The British even advised Guyana, with its big international debt, to plant and repay. But in 1953 Winston Churchill (who had been reelected prime minister in 1951) decided to put an end to the ganja trade. Norman Manley, Planno says, called him into his office and told him, “Morty, you must tell your half-Indian brothers to quit the ganja business.”
Norman Manley is one of the two cousins who ruled Jamaica for decades after the British demurred (the other was Alexander Bustamante); notice that Bob Marley’s handler Planno is on a first-name basis with Manley.
Mortimer Planno, thank you snipview.com.
Of course, it’s possible that Mortimer Planno is lying. However, there is circumstantial evidence which suggests that Planno is telling the truth, because the largest ganja supplier at that time, Leonard Percival Howell, was probably a tool of British intelligence:
First, Bob Marley’s guru Leonard Percival Howell– the first ‘Rasta’– ran a cult from his ganja plantation based on a system of control very similar to the one Crowley pioneered at Cefalù. Like Crowley, Howell exploited single mothers; encouraged drug use amongst his followers; and played to followers’ narcissism by promising them power. What was different about Howell’s system was that instead of promoting sex magic, he focused on Black supremacy: Howell’s target demographic (initially) was in Kingston’s poor Black ghettos, not the idle rich of London. Howell promised his Rastafarian followers that they would be God’s chosen people, that they would rule the world and be better than White people.[2] (If you’re interested in what Howell taught, check out The Promise Key, the ‘bible’ of musician Bob Marley’s guru Leonard P. Howell. This is a book that makes modern proponents of Rastafarianism very nervous.)
Second, Lenoard Howell’s early life is ‘spooky’. Howell came from a military family in Jamaica; he returned home from NYC in 1916 and joined the British West Indian Regiment but never saw combat– no one knows exactly what he did in service nor where he did it. By the end of the war Howell was in New York City just like Aleister Crowley, our ‘Primrose League’ buddy. Readers will remember that during WWI, Crowley carried out his ridiculous ‘pro-German’ and ‘pro-Irish Nationalist’ antics in NYC, which were British intelligence operations designed to undermine support for these groups. (See Secret Agent 666 by Richard Spence.)
No one knows much about what Leonard Percival Howell did for the six years immediately after the war either, besides working for an US Army transport ship based out of NYC. By 1924 Howell had plugged into a group of people who gave him the fundamental ideas of Rastafarianism and by 1932 he’d returned to Jamaica full of religious zeal. (In the mean time Howell’s strict Anglican father, Charles Theophilus Howell, had become Justice of the Peace on behalf of the British in his local district– portends of Jim Morrison?!)
Third, Leonard Howell had contact with at least one Communist agent working out of London (PROFINTERN agent George Padmore), so Howell was in the right crowd to be recruited for British Intelligence.
Finally, Howell’s huge plantation had regular working relationships with local law enforcement and British-backed politicians. Ganja sales funded political violence on the island– politically useful violence– which makes it all the more interesting that Churchill allegedly waited until 1953 to ‘crack down’.
Leonard Percival Howell
Hélène Lee doesn’t explore why in 1953 Churchill would suddenly decide to enforce the 1913 law outlawing ganja; a decision that would ultimately result in the destruction of Leonard Percival Howell’s Rastafarian cult at his Pinnacle Plantation in Jamaica. (More accurately, the plantation still belonged to Albert Chang, because although it’s likely that Howell paid Chang for the land, Chang never transferred the deed.)
What Lee does say is that the 1953/54 crack-down disrupted an international system which had previously been controlled by local Jamaican drug-lords. The crack-down didn’t stop the drug trade, but could very easily have changed who benefited from it: the Jamaican ganja trade in the U.K. continued swiftly, coming to an ugly head in the early Sixties with the Profumo affair– a highly publicised scandal which ended Conservative rule.
It’s a tragedy for Jamaica that the drug trade, and the resulting political violence, wasn’t stopped– and stopped well before 1953. It’s a tragedy for the USA (and the world) that Winston et alia destroyed rule of law at the Federal level. It’s a tragedy for Britain that they lost an empire and almost 400,000 men for Winston’s economic ambitions.
I think this post shows that creatures like Churchill and his patrons don’t care about justice; they don’t care about law; and they don’t care about anyone other than themselves. I look forward to the day when Brits quit referring to Winston as “the great Briton”, and start using a more appropriate epithet, like “that American bastard”, or even better, “that globalist”.
[1] If you’re interested in knowing more about what it was like to be one of Churchill’s spies, I suggest reading my post Great Users of People, where I provide an excerpt from Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, in which Wright reminisces on the sad fate of Klop Ustinov.
[2] British intelligence was interested in exploiting anti-White prejudices, as shown by the report drawn up by George Orwell for Britain’s Information Research Department in 1949, in which he names people he suspects of being communist agents. Orwell made particular note of the “anti-white” prejudices of George Padmore and Paul Robeson, according to Francis Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War, which seethes with hatred for Orwell. George Orwell had strong communist sympathies himself, but became disillusioned with its Russian-side promoters. (George Orwell’s ideological shift may have easily inspired the CIA’s anti-Stalin, then ‘non-communist’, left crusade.)
For Rolling Stones fans, Orwell’s suspected communist agent list included the name of Tom Driberg, a.k.a Lord Bardwell, who was Mick Jagger’s political handler for a time. Next to Driberg’s name, Saunders says Orwell wrote “‘Homosexual’, ‘Commonly thought to be an underground member’, and ‘English Jew’.” Needless to say, Orwell’s list was not a ‘black list’, and many of the people he named went on to enjoy spectacular careers. Their success shouldn’t be surprising considering the CIA’s post-WWII promotion of the ‘non-Communist’ (read: not-Russian-controlled) left.
