Lord Mountbatten’s ‘lust for young boys’
Secret FBI files reveal claims by society hostess
LORD Mountbatten was ‘a homosexual with a perversion for young boys’, according to secret FBI files.
The US security service began its dossier on the Queen’s cousin because of allegations about his sexuality, according to a biography of the war hero and statesman who was the Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle and mentor to Prince Charles.
The first file was opened in 1944 after society hostess Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies, told the FBI that Lord Mountbatten was considered a person ‘of extremely low morals’.
The FBI file revealed: ‘She stated that Lord Louis Mountbatten was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys. In Lady Decies’s opinion he is unfit to direct any sort of military operations.’
The information was recorded after Lord Mountbatten became Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, and came to light in Andrew Lownie’s research for his biography of Lord Mountbatten and his wife Edwina.
The Lady Decies FBI file was signed by EE Conroy, head of the New York field office, who wrote that she ‘appears to have no special motive in making the above statements’ and ‘apparently’ had been in intimate contact with various members of European royalty.
Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, was assassinated aged 79 by the IRA in 1979.
Rumours have long circulated that he may have been bisexual because of his friendships with a number of homosexuals, including Noel Coward.
Lord Mountbatten’s official biographer Philip Ziegler has previously dismissed the rumours, saying: ‘Sex itself was not a matter of great importance to him… To suggest that such a man was actively homosexual seems to [fly] in the face of the evidence [and] everything we understand about his character.’
Brian Hoey, another Lord Mountbatten biographer, has said that such stories were ‘rubbish… men and boys weren’t his thing at all’.
In his book The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, published today, Mr Lownie reveals how the FBI kept the files over three decades, with American interest peaking around the time of the Suez crisis in 1956.
It is not known if the British Government received the information. Homosexual acts were illegal here until 1967.
Lady Mountbatten, who had several extra-marital affairs, died in 1960.
Mr Lownie said that many of the FBI files, only parts of which have been released in heavily redacted form, remain closed or were destroyed.
He added: ‘The Rumours chapter is 4,000 words in a book of 120,000 and I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions from the evidence presented.’
‘Extremely low morals’