British secret agent "posed as Hess"

British secret agent "posed as Hess"

Exclusive by Cameron Simpson
The Glasgow Herald, Monday 18 August 1997

STARTLING new research claims that the man who committed suicide in Berlin's Spandau prison was not Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess but a British intelligence "double". The research was passed to The Herald yesterday on the 10th anniversary of Hess's death which sparked a police crackdown across Europe on neo-Nazis.

Hess, who was arrested in Scotland when he flew here on a secret mission in 1941, has become a cult figure among neo-Nazi youths in Europe. At least 400 neo-Nazis, including skinheads from Berlin dressed in black, were arrested in Germany at the weekend, while scuffles broke out in Denmark where extremists exploited more liberal freedom of speech laws to rally in the town of Koege.

However, two authors claimed yesterday that the Spandau Hess was a double put up by British intelligence after the real Hess had died. So sensitive are some of the authors' findings for their forthcoming book that their identities will not be revealed until publication date early next year. One is a Scots military historian, while the other is a former British intelligence officer. They leaked their preliminary research to The Herald after one of the paper's assistant news editors, lain Gray, a Hess scholar for the past decade, helped them gain access to the paper's archives.

Their central claim is of a "conspiracy for peace" - a conspiracy that Churchill was aware of and effectively sabotaged. A wide range of characters had roles to play in the affair, including the dukes of Kent and Hamilton, to former Glasgow Lord Provost Patrick Dollan and The Herald's then aviation correspondent Fred Nancarrow.

The key that unlocked their research was a box of documents bought at auction in Bonhams in London last year. The box, along with Hess's Iron Cross, had been the property of the late Daniel McBride, a regular soldier who had been at Floors Farm, near Eaglesham, when Hess was first taken into custody.

The official version of the Hess affair is that be took off from Augsburg for Scotland on a peace mission on May 10, 1941. He came down 12 miles short of his destination, the estate of the Duke of Hamilton at Dungavel. Hess had been under the delusion that the Duke of Hamilton and other members of the British establishment would be willing to discuss peace terms with Germany, and that the common enemy was Stalin's Soviet Union.

The peace proposals were never taken seriously and he was later sentenced at Nuremberg to life imprisonment for war crimes. For 20 years, Hess was the lone inmate at Spandau prison. The prison was torn down after his death to prevent it becoming a neo-Nazi rallying point.

However, numerous investigators have questioned this official version. One theory is that the Rudolf Hess may have been kidnapped by Special Operation Executive agents, taken to a secret location in Scotland, interrogated, and may subsequently have been executed. A doppelganger, or double, may have been planted by SOE in a bid to demoralise and confuse the Nazi leadership.

Dr Hugh Thomas, who looked after Prisoner No.7 in Spandau, has consistently claimed he was not the real Hess. The new research, however, adds a confusing twist to the doppelganger theory. The authors claim that it was indeed the real Hess who landed in Scotland, but he later died and was "replaced" by British intelligence with a doppelganger.

It was essential to maintain the pretence that Hess was still alive, the authors argue, because of fears that should the Nazis suspect he had been ill-treated or even murdered this would have an adverse effect on the treatment meted out to captured British officers.

British intelligence was also aware the Nazi leadership had been thrown into confusion with Hess's defection and was keen to exploit it. It has never been satisfactorily explained, however, who this mysterious "double" was, nor why the fiction had to be maintained.

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