Dirty little secrets of a wartime spy...
Dangerous liaisons of MI5’s Midland-born double agent who had a ‘cesspool mind’
TABLOID tales don’t get any better than the salacious story of Solihull’s smouldering Stella Lonsdale.
She was a spy. She was a nymphomaniac. She was, according to the popular press, a “champagne-loving brunette with a cesspool mind”.
According to MI5, she was “a woman whose loose living would make her an object of shame on any farmyard”.
Throw in, for good measure, the fact Lonsdale’s husband was an international jewel thief.
What you have is a real-life 007 femme fatale: the kind of girl who would bed Bond then try to blow him away. Even the more upmarket, quality newspapers delicately referred to her as a “man charmer”.
Lonsdale, born in Olton in 1913, was Mata Hari with a little more hedonism.
Yet, according to a new book, history has got it wrong about Lonsdale.
Not the morality bit: she was definitely a good time girl.
But she was no mere Nazi agent, according to author David Tremain in his new book, Agent Provocateur for Hitler or Churchill.
Lonsdale was signed up by Hitler’s secret agents, but used her undoubted charms to pass information to Britain and Russia, previously classified documents have revealed.
The British public were first introduced to the then Stella Clive by the Sunday Mirror in 1939.
On July 2, the paper reported: “John Christopher Lonsdale, the Mayfair ‘playboy’ who has just served 18 months’ imprisonment for his part in the Mayfair jewel robbery, is to be married shortly at a London register office.
“His bride, Miss Stella Edith Clive, daughter of the late Mr. Ernest and Mrs. S.M Clive, renewed her friendship with Lonsdale when she visited her former fiancé in Wandsworth Prison.
“He is Mr. Nicholas Sidoroff, of Lancaster-gate, W2, leader of the White Russian set in Paris. Yesterday, at a table in a London restaurant, Miss Clive and Mr. Sidoroff told me the story of the events which led to the chance encounter with Lonsdale in prison.
“‘I was sent to prison last August,’ Mr. Sidoroff said, ‘on a charge under the Immigration Act. Miss Clive and I were in love. Before my sentence, she had stood surety in £50 for my bail. When I was taken to Wandsworth,
I met Stella for the first time. We met there and I referred to him in my letters to Stella. I asked her to write to him to cheer him up and to send him some books. Later, when she visited me, she again met Lonsdale’.”
Sidoroff seemed remarkably at ease with being ditched by his future bride for a cad with a criminal record. But then, Lonsdale admitted to MI5 she’d enjoyed a threesome with both men.
The Mirror report added: “Miss Clive, who has only recently recovered from an illness, told me: ‘I know that we are both going to be happy. We hope to be married soon.
“‘John has made no definite plans as regards future work, but I believe he will be taking up an appointment in the city.’ Although Miss Clive has never sung professionally before, she hopes to sing on the radio shortly. ‘I received an offer last week,’ she said. ‘I hope it will be a success.’ Mr. Sidoroff said that he and Miss Clive were still very good friends. Mr. Lonsdale told me that the marriage would take place this week.”
The showbiz career evidently failed to blossom because when
Germany invaded France, she and British Expeditionary Force soldier Lonsdale were in Nantes.
From there, the tawdry tale becomes tangled. For reasons unknown, her husband was evacuated, but Stella decided to stay in the Nazi occupied country.
That, understandably, raised suspicions of collusion with the enemy.
And it is a fact that when arrested by the Germans in October 1940, she agreed to spy for the Third Reich.
She later admitted it, but was at pains to point out simple self preservation drove her to espionage. She became a spy to save her own skin.
But, Tremain has concluded, Lonsdale was far from the enemy of the Empire that she was painted to be. Far from it.
She forged bonds with resistance groups and, through the double agent, they passed invaluable information to Allies.
She also informed Britain that one of our spies had been captured and his radio was being monitored.
Tremain goes further. He believes the vamp was deliberately given secrets by top brass within the German navy who could see Hitler’s plans would end in tears.
There may be something in that. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr military intelligence service, was executed by the Nazis for high treason in April 1945.
Lonsdale later insisted her Abwehr contact Siegfried Rauch – a spy, codenamed Rene, who shared her bed – was against Hitler and paved the way for her to pass on highly classified information.
Their relationship soured when his squeeze failed to deliver details of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia.
Problem was, we were too suspicious of Lonsdale to take what she said as gospel. We feared the Nazi agent, turned double agent was possibly a triple agent.
Her morals also went against her. An MI5 dossier referred to Lonsdale as “utterly unscrupulous”, “sexfanatical” and with a “cesspool” mind. It also described her as “a liar of such convincingness as I would not have believed existed”.
She was undoubtedly a fantasist. “Everywhere Lonsdale went she was given the runaround, with no one particularly interested in what she had to say,” Tremain writes.
That refusal to listen proved costly. Lonsdale got wind of a daring sea plot. German battleships the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen planned to shake free from the shackles of a Royal Navy blockade by smashing through the Straits of Dover.
We didn’t believe her and, instead, listened to a resistance report that the vessels were no longer sea worthy.
That was a terrible mistake. The Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen would go on to complete many successful missions, while the Gneisenau was destroyed by the RAF shortly after the daring breakout.
From May 1941, Lonsdale alleged she ran messages for the “Pat Line”, a network of Allied soldiers and airmen hidden in enemy territory and run by Belgian Albert-Marie Guérisse.
In the same year, she travelled to Britain, via Spain.
It soon became apparent to our own intelligence service that the journey was organised and orchestrated by the Abwehr.
During an MI5 grilling in the luxurious setting of London’s Waldorf Hotel, Lonsdale gave a garbled, rambling account of her war years that simply didn’t add up.
When arrested by the Germans in October 1940, she agreed to spy for the Third Reich...
A report of that meeting states: “Much of Mrs Lonsdale’s conversation cannot possibly be submitted in a report owing to its indescribably filthy nature.”
She had, she insisted, “pretended to work for the German intelligence service and now wanted to return to France and spy for us”.
British intelligence service was having none of it.
It was the correct decision. “She was too unreliable, too much of a loose cannon,” Tremain admits.
Lonsdale was a dizzy socialite, a pathological liar and promiscuous beyond 1940s belief, spymasters concluded. That was not the stuff British agents were made of.
Lonsdale’s colourful life didn’t
end with the conflict.
In peace time, she began a relationship with a British fascist, then married an alleged French conman.
In 1947, Lonsdale tried to sue the Sunday Express over an article that led readers to the conclusion she’d worked for the Gestapo.
She was forced to drop the case when MI5 let it be known they’d support the paper.
Lonsdale, who died in 1994 aged 81, was a woman who spouted outlandish tales that were often pure fantasy, Tremain concedes. But she did genuinely want to help the Allied war effort. That was Stella Lonsdale, a woman who lay down, closed her eyes and thought of England. Allegedly.