Oh, this isn’t good. Sunday Times of London:
An MI5 [the UK's CIA] officer has been forced to resign after admitting that his wife was a prostitute who took part in a notorious ‘Nazi-style orgy’ with Max Mosley, the Formula One racing chief.
The intelligence officer, who cannot be named for security reasons, left the service last month after it emerged that his wife was one of the five call girls who took part in the sadomasochistic sex session with Mosley.
Exposure of the lurid orgy led to calls for Mosley, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the wartime British fascist leader, to step down from his post as president of the FIA, the governing body of world motor sport. …
Questions will now be asked about why the service’s vetting procedures failed to expose the secret, which could have made the officer vulnerable to blackmail.
Mosley, who is 68 and has been married since 1960, is one of the most powerful men in world sport. His father was a hate figure who led the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. His mother was the society beauty Diana Mitford, a great admirer of Adolf Hitler.
When the story broke, Mosley said he had been told by a source close to the security services that he had been targeted in a covert investigation of his private life ‘by a group specialising in such things for reasons and clients as yet unknown’. …
Seems there’s a five-hour videotape that “Mistress Abi” (the spy’s wife, therein clad in a Luftwaffe uniform) sold to a tabloid.
Remember the great Jessica Mitford, who wrote The American Way of Death and was such a hoot on talk shows in the 70s or so? Max is her nephew, carrying on the family tradition of . . . well . . . carrying on.
Uuuhhh … can you post a link to that 5-hour videotape? I am an aviator and I try to learn all
I can about the Luftwaffe. I haven’t seen that episode on The History Channel.
“by a group specialising in such things”
That cracked me up!
I was drawn to your lovely site by Scruggs et al and have watched this very american story unfold with fascination and, I must admit, a soupcon of Brit superiority.
Welcome to our underbelly.
@Ben (no relation that I’m aware of), the 5 hour version is not publically available (I should imagine it would be like a massive Warhol outtake) but a most amusing precis is floating about on U tube. I think I imagined the Rigsby gels in the background.
When you see concentration camp style pyjamas and Mosley being examined for head lice before counting down in Geman for a thrashing, and then read his denial of any “Nazi” dimension, you’re not a million miles away from his and Scruggs comminality; hubris.
I almost posted about this when it broke. Moseley’s mom was of course Diana Mitford, one of a group of very, um, unusual sisters (there was Jessica who ran away to fight for the left in the Spanish Civil War, ended up in Oakland, CA married to a labor lawyer and member of the CP, then becoming a great muckraking journalist; Nancy Mitford, the novelist and biographer and friend of Evelyn Waugh; Deborah Mitford, the Duchess of Devonshire, who died most recently and was a writer/preservationist; Unity, who ran off to Germany and hung out with Hitler, till she shot herself (wounding) when war broke out in 1939) along with Diana, unrepentant Nazi to her death, married to brownshirt leader Oswald.
I’m not the least surprised to see Max running true to the form of his branch family.
When Diana and Oswald (Max’s parents) were interned during WWII, both sisters Nancy and Jessica wrote their cousin Winston Churchill that the couple were a threat and should remain interred.
There two recent letters collections of the sisters, one of Jessica’s, and one of the whole group, in which I find Diana’s presence particularly poisonous. But the story is amazing and there were some great writers among them. In a large way the middle part of the 20th century played out directly in these people’s lives.
Ben, if you can trust News of the World, here’s their take on youtube, including some of the footage.
Oh, and btw, Lotus, Jessica Mitford would have taken violent exception to the notion that she was carrying on any activity of the Diana branch of the family.
Don’t know if anyone on the list met her when she was in Mississippi in the early 90s, in relation to her last book and speaking at both the medical center in Jackson and in Oxford.
She also came to Mississippi in the early 50s doing civil rights work, agitating to stop an execution in a rape case. She later wrote that she had no idea until much later just what she got herself in for on that trip.
First: HOZANNER, I can finally see my own damn blog again!
Second: RodneyC, welcome to folo. “The Rigsby gels in the background” is an image I won’t soon forget.
Third: NMC, if you haven’t already read Jessica’s Hons and Rebels (it sounds as if you have), you must. And dammit, I’m not accusing Jess of carrying on a la Diana and Oswald (her version was way more respectable), but as you say, MAX is, in spades.
i’ve read Hons and Rebels. I have a signed copy of it.
Oh wow, NMC, speaking of Jessica Mitford . . .