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| Prince Edward and "Dickie" Mountbatten |
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were numbers one and two.
Philby was the Third Man.
Gay old Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, was fourth; John Cairncross, fifth.
The question nagging espionage buffs for years has been this:
Was there a sixth major British spy, and if so, whom?
Some pointed the finger at Harold Wilson, who resigned as prime minister under mysterious circumstances in 1976.
The Russians had stuff on Wilson--that's true--but he wasn't their spy.
The Sixth Man may well have been The Battenberg Buggerer: Louis Mountbatten, First Lord of the Admiralty, Earl of Burma--but best known, affectionately, as "Dickie" to his boyfriends.
Mountbatten, a Royal Family insider, was homosexual.
His passion was young guardsmen.
And while his wife, Edwina, enjoyed multiple affairs (including one with Nehru, the first prime minister of India), Dickie ran rampant through the Queen's barracks.
This procilivity was not lost on the KGB's First Directorate (external intelligence), whose job it was to identify and recruit spies.
Homosexuality qualified as criteria for recruitment. Catching a homosexual in the act was grounds for blackmail.
And that's precisely what the KGB did to Mountbatten, whose resentment against the British Establishment, in any case, went all the way back to when he was a kid in 1917 and the British government made Louis and his family change their German last name.
This indignity came after they forced Louis's father to resign as First Sea Lord (the Royal Navy’s top job) because he was a natural-born German.
It has never been a secret that the British Royal Family is German.
Its real name is not Windsor, but Gothe-Saxe-Coburg.
During World War I, the British cabinet felt it unseemly that a family with a German name should rule Britannia while tens of thousands of British lads were being mustard-gassed by Germans in the trenches.
So it compelled the royals to adopt the name Windsor--chosen only because it sounded so quintessentially English.
Overnight, Louis Battenberg became Louis Mountbatten.
Dickie never forgave the Establishment for this slight.
Back to the KGB, which had more than just Dickie's homosexuality in their files.
They also had something on Dickie's favorite cousin, the Duke of Windsor, formerly, King Edward VIII: The de-throned ex-king had secretly collaborated with Hitler during World War II.
Even before the war, Edward was partial to Germany, and liked to point out that one hundred percent Teutonic blood ran through his veins.
Upon becoming King, Edward shared state secrets from his dispatch boxes with the German leadership.
British Intelligence chief Robert Vannistat, whose officers kept a watchful eye on the new king, reported this to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
Baldwin was horrified. Something had to be done.
Baldwin and Vannistat plotted to part King Edward VIII from his throne.
Their ruse?
Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee detested by all, whose on-going but trivial relationship with the King they, through use of the media, elevated into a national catastrophe.
This subterfuge worked, not least because Edward was as thick as two planks and focused the little mental energy he possessed on dressing himself as a dandy.
Edward was jockeyed off the throne and replaced by his unprepared, stammering brother.
Re-titled the Duke of Windsor, the ex-King went into what he truly believed was "temporary" exile on the continent.
He soon realized he'd been duped; that he would never be allowed to return to Britain.
This deeply embittered him.
The Nazis followed these events with great interest.
They tracked the Duke to Madrid, followed him to Lisbon, and cut him a deal: Work secretly for us. Once we occupy Britain, you'll be King again. And Wallis will be Queen.
Wallis, who was really a man (well, I'd like to think so), truly wanted to be Queen. She badgered her husband into accepting this deal like she badgered him about everything.
Now back to Mountbatten.
The KGB threatened to expose his homosexuality and the Duke of Windsor's treachery unless Mountbatten played ball.
Dickie was never a fan of the United States (which he despised as classless), or its "Special Relationship" with Britain.
So it wasn't particularly difficult for him to avoid scandal and agree to spy for the Soviet Union.
When sleaze-ball Anthony Blunt confessed his role to MI5 interrogators in 1964, he likely gave Mountbatten up.
Defying protocol, the Queen would have been informed personally by the Director-General of MI5 to keep the government of the day, including Prime Minister Harold Wilson, out of the loop.
This was an extraordinary arrangement, and out of it was hatched an extraordinary deal: Mountbatten would remain free, unaware that he'd been exposed; the Queen would assist MI5 in supplying Dickie with disinformation for Soviet consumption.
One faction of Britain's security service was livid.
They wanted to see Mountbatten jailed--or bumped off--for his treachery.
Arrest, trial and imprisonment was, of course, out of the question because of the irreparable harm it would do to Britain's Monarchy.
But this faction, more powerful a decade-and-a-half later, finally had their chance.
The plan was brilliant: Blow Mountbatten to kingdom come while he vacationed on his yacht in Ireland--the ultimate blow-job--and blame it on the IRA!
It worked like a gem.
Public and political outrage ensured MI5 a grander budget than ever to fight the IRA, which vehemently denied the hit to no avail.