Further to my BLOG “Irony and Prince William” (June 24)
I referred to how the Prince had been fooled into the nonsensical belief that MI6 Agent Frank Foley, while accredited to the British Embassy in Berlin risked his skin to rescue Jews from the Holocaust.
Foley served in the British Embassy in Berlin from 1919, with the cover job of Passport Control Officer. An estimated 50,000 Russians were in the city at the time, most of them fleeing from the Bolsheviks. But there were also CHEKA, Soviet Secret service agents, there. Foley a Senior MI6 man, created an official liaison with the German police for the exchange of information about communists.
The Berlin police came under Nazi control under Goering and the exchange of information went one way when Foley and Guy Lidell of MI5 spend days transcribing the lists captured by the Nazis when the Nazis came to town. The regular police were helped by Brownshirt Auxiliaries (“B-Special-type thugs) as Foley and Liddell went about their business.
Foley was a devout Catholic, educated at Stoneyhurst College in Lancashire, one of the three most prestigious Catholic schools in England. He then joined a seminary in France but decided not to continue.
He was wounded, serving as a lieutenant in France in 1917.
One profile says that Foley ” came from a relatively poor background for an officer and educated in France, rather than at one of the English public schools that produced most of his fellow officers”
Shades of that Ragged-Schooled Philanthopist, Sir Bob Geldof, alumnus of Blackrock College!
One of Foley’s profiles says he was “appalled by the moral and social depravity of the Nazi regime.”
Foley, like that other devout Catholic MI6 agent Hugh Pollard, enjoyed the protection of his fascist hosts when he served in a British Embassy.
(See also, my Blog “Two Turds of a Feather – Guys Called Pollard” (Dec 7th 2019)
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