Oh, no he wasn't
Sir: Was Noel Coward really a spy, as John Simpson asserts? (Noel Coward was a spy', 17 December). His evidence is not too good. According to his account Coward was recruited into SIS's Section D, after the war started, at Bletchley Park by Sir Hugh Sin- clair at a time when Guy Burgess was already a member, and Philby 'was soon to join'.
Unfortunately this interesting chronology is not supported by the facts: Sinclair died on 4 November 1939, after a long struggle against cancer, and Philby did not join Sec- tion D until the summer of the following year. Although Bletchley Park's official designation was SIS's war station (a role it adopted after the Munich crisis), SIS was never evacuated there, and the proposition that Sinclair moved his death-bed to Bletchley soon after the outbreak of war to receive Coward (an honour granted to no other potential recruit) must be entirely fanciful. Indeed, it was as likely as the equally absurd claim that the Soviet spy, Oleg Penkovsky, met President Kennedy and Lord Mountbatten.
Certainly Coward had a long connection with Sir Alexander Korda, whose produc- tion company, London Films, provided use- ful commerical cover prewar for various SIS personnel. However, to interpret that tenuous link as proof of Coward's espionage requires a flight of imagination that the Mas- ter himself would have been proud of.
Nigel West
World Intelligence Review, PO Box 2, Goring-on-Thames, Berkshire
Previous page
