LETTERS Tito, traitors and treachery
From Sir Ian Fraser Sir: Hugh Thomas's thought-provoking profile of Alexander of Yugoslavia (`King's move', 31 July) brings back other memories of the extraordinary behaviour of the British government during those years, 1943-1945.
One of my closest business colleagues in my merchant-banking days at Lazard Brothers in the Seventies was Jasper Rootham who, as a lieutenant-colonel in the Intelligence Corps, had been one of the senior members of the British mission to General Mihailovic, then Commander of the Yugoslav Royal Army and loyal to King Peter, Alexander's father. Rootham, a for- mer Treasury official and a fluent speaker of Russian and Serbo-Croat, told me how, after a couple of years at Mihailovic's head- quarters, he had contracted a bad dose of malaria and had asked to be flown back to base, by then in southern Italy.
There, Rootham's immediate senior was James Klugmann, an Oxford don generally supposed to be a card-carrying communist. On landing, Rootham was directed to Klug- mann's caravan; empty, as Klugmann was apparently lunching in the mess. Rootham found his latest situation report open on Klugmann's desk and 'edited' so as to be almost unrecognisable. He rummaged around in the caravan and found several other reports of his own and his mission col- leagues, similarly 'edited'. The effect of the changes was to present Mihailovic and the Royal Army as German collaborators and to attribute these assessments to the British colonels who commanded the mission. In this form the reports went to London. As a consequence of these reports and of Fitzroy Maclean's assessment of Tito, then skulking on an Adriatic island, Churchill switched his support from Mihailovic to the communists.
Rootham told me that he had attempted to protest to a higher military authority but the doctors ordered him to hospital straight away, and before he left hospital he found that he was posted back to London. After the war, he and his three colleagues tried to appear as witnesses for the defence at Mihailovic's show trial. However, the For- eign Office refused them exit visas. Mihailovic was shot as a traitor.
Rootham wrote a book describing these experiences, but it appears to have come out on the day of the Anglo-French inva- sion of Suez and as a consequence sank without trace. He promised me a copy of the book but, alas, never redeemed this Promise. Crown Prince Alexander ought to be given a copy, if one can be found.
Ian Fraser South Haddon, %agate, Somerset
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