Under Surveillance
The Windsors, who required permission to visit the United States, were now lobbying to make another visit. The authorities suspected the trip might involve Wenner-Gren. Churchill advised that the trip ‘would not be in the public interest nor indeed in your own at the present time’ and that Wenner-Gren was ‘according to the reports I have received, regarded as a pro-German international financier, with strong leanings towards appeasement and suspected of being in communication with the enemy.’1
One of the consequences of the Liberty article was that the FBI, under orders from Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, and Franklin Roosevelt, now put the couple under surveillance whenever they were in the United States. On 16 April, agent Percy Foxworth sent a memo to Hoover that ‘this request was predicated upon information which we have had in the past concerning these people’.2 At the same time Roosevelt wanted agents on Southern Cross, because ‘it was easily possible that the Wennergren (sic) yacht might have evidence of suspicious activities on board.’ He wanted ‘greater energy . . . in covering the activities and connections of Mr Axel Wennergren.’3
On 18 April, the Windsors arrived in Miami and were driven to Palm Beach, where they were staying at the Everglades Club. The ostensible purpose of their visit was to see Sir Edward Peacock, the Canadian financial adviser who had helped negotiate the Abdication Settlement and was now in the United States as head of the British Purchasing Commission, to discuss their financial affairs – but much of their time was spent playing golf and shopping.
It did not go down well with the locals. An intercepted letter was passed to the Colonial Office. ‘What do you think of the very precious Duke and Duchess of Windsor charging up to thirty thousand dollars’ worth of knick knacks during their brief stay in Miami, Florida,’ wrote M.L. Smith of Encino, California to Mrs Begg in Aberdeen. ‘The nerve of them leaving those shop-keepers holding the bag, because dear Edward was unable to take any money out of the Bahamas because of wartime restrictions. Now, these various shopkeepers can only hope that they will be paid when this war is over.’4
The FBI had recruited two informers from the Windsors’ entourage – Alastair ‘Ali’ Mackintosh and William Rhinelander Stewart. Mackintosh was a former equerry to the Royal Family, whom the Duke had known for many years. His first marriage had been to the silent screen star Constance Talmadge, when Rhinelander Stewart, another golfing partner of the Duke, had been best man.
Rhinelander told the FBI that ‘there was current rumour and gossip in Nassau to the effect that when Hitler defeated England, he would then install the Duke of Windsor as the King’ and that the Duke:
was so embittered against what he thought was the raw deal his people had given to her that such a change might be brought about . . . He also stated he was told that at a dinner at the Government House where the Duke and Duchess were piped in, after being seated the Duchess made some remark to a dinner guest and then turned to the piper and made the statement, ‘You can also report that to Downing Street,’ which indicated to everyone present that they thought the piper was some kind of a spy for England. Stewart states that the Duke looks upon Nassau as a sort of Elba for himself and that undoubtedly he does have some personal political aspirations.5
On 2 May, the FBI agent wrote again to Hoover, claiming that Robert Palmer Huntington, the architect and tennis champion, ‘had proof that Goring (sic) and the Duke of Windsor had entered into some sort of an agreement, which in substance was to the effect that, after Germany won the war, Goring, through control of the army, was going to overthrow Hitler and then he would install the Duke of Windsor as the King of England.’6
Another FBI source, whose name is redacted, told Foxworth ‘that her information came from Allen MacIntosh (sic) and, ‘there was no doubt whatever but that the Duchess of Windsor had had an affair with Ribbentrop, and that of course she had an intense hate for the English since they had kicked them out of England.’7
There continued to be numerous reports of the outspoken political views of the Windsors. In April, Robert Brand, the head of the British Food Mission to the United States, relayed to the Foreign Office a conversation that he had had with a recent visitor to the Bahamas, Bob Windmill, ‘who said the Duke had told him, “It was an absolute tragedy if your country came into the war. The only thing to do is to bring it to an end as soon as possible.”’8
In May, a letter was forwarded to Churchill, written by the Wall Street stockbroker Frazier Jelke, who had just spent three months in Nassau and had dined at Government House several times, ‘amazed . . . to be told by each of them personally and separately that they were opposed to America entering the war, as it was too late to do any good.’ The Duke had told him, ‘I have always been a great realist and it is too late for America to save Democracy in Europe. She had better save it in America for herself.’9
Postal censorship had already picked up a similar letter:
I have talked with a man Jelke this afternoon, lately back from the Bahamas. He met Wenner-Gren and dined with him on his yacht several times with the Windsors . . . Jelke had the feeling that W-G probably has some channel of communication with the higher German authorities. The British Government has apparently forbidden the Windsors to frequent his yacht anymore . . . Several nights later the Duchess told Jelke that if the US entered the war, this country would go down in history as the greatest sucker of all times. Jelke had the impression that they both admire Hitler.10
The Windsors had become increasingly concerned about the safety of their French properties and paying the caretaker staff. In April 1941, Churchill personally, through the American ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, arranged for the 55,000 francs in back rent on the Paris property to be paid together with 10,000 francs insurance and 15,000 francs due for the strongroom space they rented at the Banque de France, though the bank was under the control of Hitler.11 According to Charles Higham, ‘Bedaux acted as a go-between in the arrangements, since he was close to Bullitt and Nazi Ambassador Otto Abetz.’12
The British and Americans meanwhile continued to monitor Wenner-Gren’s activities. After the Duke ‘submitted for approval an ambitious proposal for social and agricultural development on the island of Grand Bahamas by Axel Wennergren (sic), which would involve transfer to Wennergren of large tracts of land’, the Foreign Office contacted Washington seeking views, given the site for the US base in the Bahamas had not yet been chosen. The answer was swift and clear: ‘Admiralty and MI5 have been consulted and are not inclined to favour grant to person named on account of his somewhat doubtful political proclivities and strategic position of island.’13
In the summer of 1941, the Windsors expressed a desire to visit the Duke’s ranch in Canada. Delicate negotiations went on to avoid the Duke crossing with his brother, the Duke of Kent, who was due to visit in September, and to arrange a route that avoided Ottawa, where he might have to be entertained by the Governor General, his uncle, Lord Athlone. There was, also, still the concern of encouraging Isolationists at a time when Britain was anxious to bring America into the war.
At the end of September 1941, the couple flew to Miami – Wallis’s eyes bandaged because of her fear of flying – where they inspected 300 RAF cadets training with Pan-American instructors before taking a train to Washington, where there was a reception at the National Press Club and they stayed at the White House. From Washington they continued by train, lent by a friend, the railway magnate Robert Young, through Chicago to the Alberta ranch, where they spent the first week of October.
The Duke had bought the one-storey building during his first visit to Canada in 1919 and paid short visits in the summers of 1923, 1924 and 1927. He was interested in stock breeding and wanted to introduce practices from the Duchy of Cornwall lands. By 1930 he had spent almost $250,000 on it and with the help of W.L. Carlyle, a professor of agriculture, built the finest breeding herd in Canada, but he had not made money and had contemplated selling it several times.
In 1932, the Canadians had gifted him several thousand adjacent acres of Crown land and rights to their mineral resources but, after the Abdication, he realised it would be difficult to return to what was British territory. In 1938, the Duke had sold off the cattle herd but the ranch continued to lose money – $3,000 in 1939 – and attempts to sell it during the early months of the war had come to nothing. At the end of 1940, the American polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth had offered him $40,000, and the Duke was tempted to accept, but then drilling for oil began in the area. It was this interest that had prompted the 1941 visit.
The Windsors returned via Washington, where a lunch for twenty-two had to be cancelled at the last minute, because the Duchess preferred to send out for food and the Duke to eat fruit in his bedroom, and Dorothy Halifax, wife of the British ambassador Lord Halifax, was ‘outraged to be presented with a bill for £7.10 for hire of a lorry to take their luggage to and from station – it did seem a little unnecessary for a 24-hour visit.’14
Against advice, the couple stayed at the Waldorf Towers in New York, where they took a whole floor. They saw doctors, lawyers and friends, shopped, saw some shows and ate out, but they also made time for public duties. The Duke saw Mayor LaGuardia to discuss urban housing conditions, whilst the Duchess visited a centre for unmarried mothers and babies. They reviewed mobile hospital units of the British-American Ambulance Corps, lunched with the British War Relief Society, inspected relief agencies, housing projects and armaments factories, and played darts with sailors at the British Merchant Seamen’s Club. Everywhere they went, they attracted large crowds, ‘who interfered with traffic, tossed tickertape and shreds of phone books and must inevitably have recalled to the Duke his wild reception here as Prince of Wales.’15
At Baltimore, the couple were met at the little station of Timonium in the Dularey Valley by a crowd of 5,000, including General Warfield, Uncle Harry, the nearest relation on Wallis’s father’s side, and they stayed with him at his 400-acre farmhouse, where Wallis had often stayed as a child. At the official reception, there were crowds of a quarter of a million as they drove with the Mayor in open cars and a police escort from City Hall to the Baltimore Country Club, where 800 people had been invited to meet them. The visit was taking on aspects of a Royal Tour.
They inspected British war relief projects, lunched with the Governor of Maryland and visited two camps of Civilian Conservation Corps. They remained on message in support of the British war effort, but attracted criticism for not returning to the Bahamas, where many properties lived in by Black people had recently been destroyed in a hurricane.
On 14 October, the Duke travelled to Washington to see Lord Halifax, who wrote to Churchill:
His visit seems to have gone off all right, and not attracted too much publicity, and on the whole the Press, with the exception of one or two rags, have behaved all right. I had a long talk to him a few days ago, in which he opened his heart and talked quite freely. He feels pretty bitter about being marooned in the Bahamas, which he says is a foul climate, and where there is nobody except casual American visitors whom he can see anything of as a friend. I must say it certainly sounds pretty grim.16
The Windsors inspected the automobile plants of Chrysler in Detroit, had tea with Henry Ford – which led to Ford, an Isolationist, being prepared to supply arms to the Allies – and saw James D. Mooney at General Motors.
Meanwhile the FBI were building their file on the couple. At the end of September, they had interviewed the Reverend Dom Odo, a Benedictine monk, about a suspected Gestapo agent, operating under cover of being a priest. Prior to entering the order, Father Odo had been Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg, a cousin of the Duke of Windsor, and ‘related that he knows Queen Mary and her brother, the Earl of Athlone, the present Governor General of Canada, very well.’
Württemberg had come to America in 1940 from Portugal. Fleeing the Nazi regime in 1934, he had settled in Switzerland where, with financial assistance from his aunt Queen Mary, he had set up an organisation called Catholic Help for Refugees to resettle Jews.17
The FBI agent had ‘casually inquired whether Father Odo had seen the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during their recent visit to Washington’, to be told he had not, but that he had previously met the Duchess of Windsor on numerous occasions and ‘that Von Ribbentrop, while in England, sent the then Wallis Simpson seventeen carnations every day. The seventeen supposedly represented the number of times they had slept together.’18
Further evidence was being gathered of the couple’s sympathies. In a naval intelligence report from a recent Washington conference, Major Hayne Boyden, a Marine Corps naval and air attaché seconded to George Messersmith in Cuba, reported to both Adolf Berle and J. Edgar Hoover that the German Legation claimed the Duke:
as no enemy of Germany. (He was) considered to be the only Englishman with whom Hitler would negotiate any peace terms, the logical director of England’s destiny after the war. Hitler well knows that Edward at present cannot work in a manner that would appear to be against his country and he does not urge it (a reliable informant on close terms with a Nazi agent reported). But when the proper moment arrives he will be the only one person capable of directing the destiny of England.19
As a result of the Liberty article, the British authorities recognised that the Windsors needed a press spokesman to steer them clear of controversy. An old friend of theirs, Colin Davidson, was approached, but would do so only if promoted from Major to Lieutenant-General and, eventually, René MacColl, head of press and radio at the British Information Service, was appointed solely for the US part of the visit, with instructions that ‘the Duke must say as little as possible, must hold no press conferences, give no interviews, make no statements.’20
He had pressed the Duke on whether he still advocated a negotiated peace. No, he was told, that was only during the Phoney War ‘before Hitler lost his head’. MacColl felt reassured until the next morning when the Duke approached him. ‘I’ve been thinking about the question about negotiated peace,’ Windsor said. ‘I’ve been talking to the Duchess. I think we’ll play that one by ear.’21
In the end, the visit had been carefully controlled with set speeches and few interviews. When she had been interviewed, Wallis had claimed, ‘I’m afraid people credit me with much more interest in clothes than I really have,’ adding, ‘I care far more about the poor little children of Nassau. It’s them, not clothes, I intend to shop for. I want to buy them all Christmas presents.’22 Her statements were rather contradicted by the numerous packages picked up en route from the designer Mainbocher and from Bergdorf Goodman.
Though some press coverage had been favourable, a running media theme was the extent of the Windsors’ luggage – estimated to be up to seventy-three pieces and often having to be left in hotel corridors – and questions about how they funded their spending, given currency restrictions. On 18 November, Sir Ronald Campbell sent a ‘Personal and Secret’ telegram to the Foreign Office. It was a request from the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to ‘let him know where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor got the dollars which they spent during their visit to this country’, because there had ‘been a certain amount of criticism in the press in regard to the sums spent on clothes etc. in New York.’23
Three weeks later Halifax, in a ‘Most Secret’ telegram to the Foreign Office, reported ‘So far as I can ascertain, the only banking accounts in the United States in the name of the Duke or Duchess of Windsor are two accounts with Chase Bank in the name of the Duchess. One account covers securities to the value of 9,000 dollars, while the other account had a credit balance of 29,931 dollars on 14 June this year as compared with a balance of 1,197 dollars on the same date last year.’24 The question everyone was asking was where this money was coming from.
According to Charles Higham, ‘The surrounding documents are missing from Lord Avon’s files at the Public Record Office in London, but it is clear from this memorandum that the gravest suspicions had yet again been aroused of the Windsors’ improper use of currency against all the restrictions in force at the time. Documents located in the National Archive in Washington, DC indicate that the couple had obtained even more black market currency through Wenner-Gren.’25
A British Press Service Report was blunt: ‘The general impression created was that of a rich and carefree couple, travelling with all the pre-war accoutrement of royalty, and with no thought either of the suffering of their own people or of the fact that the world is at war.’26
On 24 November, in light of the media coverage, a Labour MP, Alexander Sloan, asked a Parliamentary Question drawing attention to ‘the ostentatious display of jewellery and finery at a period when the people of this country are strictly rationed’ and suggesting the couple be ‘recalled since their visit is evidently doing a certain amount of harm and no good.’27
Churchill telegrammed the Duke, expressing regret at the personal attacks.28 The Duke was not happy with the official response. ‘Mr Hall’s lame reply did not silence Sloan, and unless I have from this distance taken an exaggerated view of the importance of this incident, I wonder if it should be left this way?’29
Events were to overtake the criticisms. On 7 December, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America finally came into the war.30 Within a week, Wenner-Gren, long suspected of sheltering U-boats on Hog Island, was on the official US economic blacklist. Shangri-La was closed, the staff cut from thirty to seven, the Bank of the Bahamas, in which the Windsors had an interest, was closed, and the exotic birds sold or given away. A search of the property found none of the supposed landing strips or submarine pens.
America’s entry into the war may have silenced the Windsors’ defeatist sentiments, but fresh controversy was now to follow them.
1 Churchill to the Duke, 17 March 1941, CO 967/125, TNA, and CHAR 20/31A, Churchill College Archives.
2 P.E. Foxworth to Hoover, 16 April 1941, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
3 800.20211/-/51.5, NARA.
4 M.L. Smith to Mrs Begg, 25 April 1941, CO 967/125, TNA.
5 P.E. Foxworth to J. Edgar Hoover, 21 April 1941, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
6 Foxworth to Hoover, 2 May 1941, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
7 Ibid.
8 Robert Brand to Foreign Office, 7 April 1941, FO 1093/23, TNA.
9 Reginald Baxter to Churchill, 27 May 1941 of letter of 17 April, CHAR 20/31A/68–70, Churchill College Archives, and CO 967/125, TNA.
10 Norman Whitehouse to ‘Darling’, 12 April 1941, FO 1093/23, TNA.
11 Michael Pye, p. 63, 70032L, No. X1937/188/503. Charles Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 369, quotes Churchill’s instruction in full. In August the strongroom was broken into by the Germans, but it is unclear if anything of the Windsors was removed. Duke of Windsor to George Allen, 10 August 1941, CO 967/125, TNA. Further details of the property in Paris can be found in the Chief Clerk’s file, FO 366, 1160, TNA.
12 Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (Delacorte, 1983), p. 183.
13 Foreign Office to Washington, 15 May 1941, CO 967/125, TNA.
14 de Courcy, p. 355.
15 New York Times, 23 October 1941.
16 Halifax to Churchill, 19 October 1941, CHAR 20/31B/161–2, Churchill College Archives.
17 His file, ‘Alien Case File for Charles Württemberg’, A4540117, can be found in RG566, National Archives at Kansas City. The Zurich Police had told the State Department that he might be a Nazi agent, but there is no evidence to support that. Lord Halifax was one of his supporters.
18 Memo, 29 September 1941, FBI file HQ 65-31113.
19 Report, 14 October 1941, Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 377. Boyden retired as a Brigadier General.
20 René MacColl, Deadline and Dateline (Oldbourne Press, 1956), p. 122.
21 Pye, p. 155.
22 MacColl, p. 132, quoting Helen Worden in New York World-Telegram.
23 Ronald Campbell to Foreign Office, 18 November 1941, FO 954/33A/206, TNA.
24 Halifax to Foreign Office, 4 December 1941, FO954/33A/207, TNA. The sums today would be $164K, $550K and $21K.
25 Higham, Mrs Simpson, p. 379.
26 24 November 1941, British Press Service Report, 789/1941, NARA.
27 24 November 1941, Hansard, CHAR 31B/174, Churchill College Archives.
28 Churchill to the Duke, 28 November 1941, CHAR 20/45/132, Churchill College Archives.
29 Duke of Windsor to Lord Moyne, 27 November 1941, FO 967/125, TNA.
30 Wenner-Gren had supposedly been on his way in Southern Cross to take the Windsors to Mexico days before war was declared. Washington Times Herald, 31 January 1942, in FBI file 94-8-350-66 and intercepted letter of 8 December 1941. ‘He is going to return to the Bahama Isles and will bring back the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who are thinking of buying a villa and settling down here.’ Report, 16 March 1942, FO 837/858, TNA.