‘Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult’ by R.B. Spence
Review: Richard B. Spence, Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House 2008, 300 pages, illustrated, ISBN: 1932595333
by Frater U∴D∴
Note: A slightly abridged German version of this review was first published in Gnostika. Zeitschrift für Symbolsysteme, iss. 61, November 2017, pp. 73-82. This English version has also been reviewed, edited and partially rewritten.
If a work with the lurid title Secret Agent 666 and a correspondingly garishly designed cover is brought to the market, it should hardly come as a surprise if it garners little attention in the reputable, notably the academic world. After all, one is used to seeing a dazzling figure like Aleister Crowley being accompanied by trashy writing and sensationalist exaggerations on yellow press level, as was already the case throughout his lifetime. However, this does not necessarily render dealing with literature on the subject any more palatable. And thus, as expected, ever since the publication of this book (as early as 2008, after all) its critical acclaim has remained within rather manageable limits.
This is, of course, a pity inasmuch as this study by R.B. Spence certainly deserves better. The author is admittedly neither a practicing occultist himself and thus does not pursue any personal occult agenda, nor does he pretend to have delved too deeply into the ideological labyrinths of the occultism of Aleister Crowley and his contemporaries. But what may at first seem to be an unforgivable shortcoming to some readers, proves to be a blessing in disguise when reading on, because an unbiased factual view of the world is indispensable in this particular field.
This study is primarily about the objectifiable intelligence activities, the networks and entanglements of Aleister Crowley and many of his occult (voluntary and involuntary) companions from the end of the 19th century to the end of World War II. Before this book, the author had already demonstrated his fundamental competence in the field several years earlier with his investigative Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House 2002). Here, he describes the life and work of the Russian double agent and “greatest spy of all time” Sidney Reilly, who was born in 1874 under the name Salomon Rosenblum and who is often regarded as the real-world forerunner of James Bond (or at least of the numerous villains in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels), if not the nemesis of the equally fictional Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty. In our context, the only pertinent aspect is that Spence was able to establish excellent contacts with today's Anglo-Saxon intelligence services while writing his first work, which gave him access to numerous generally rather cloaked historical archives not open to every man and his dog – highly essential for any serious researcher.
Admittedly, this already reveals a fundamental problem of all related Crowley research. Although the fact that Aleister Crowley worked for British intelligence services for most of his adult life until shortly before his death is no longer officially disclaimed (though this was patently not always the case), the author was repeatedly confronted with rather strange gaps in the relevant archives. At first, the very existence of Crowley files was politely denied by the British authorities, only to then being reluctantly acknowledged; eventually, some material was made available in part, but other documents were claimed to have been lost: they had, so it was stated, been destroyed without being documented as such, and so on. Clamming up seems a rather charitable way of putting it. This makes the research process itself a veritable thriller which the author manages to convey in a fairly entertaining manner as far as bureaucratic shenanigans go.
As an American, however, Spence did not allow himself to be distracted let alone intimidated by the time-honoured stonewalling of the British services, and so he came up with a few adroit loopholes instead which greatly benefited his efforts. For example, by leveraging the Freedom of Information Act, he managed to obtain U.S. intelligence documents on Aleister Crowley which partially overlapped with the lost (or declared non-existent) British documents due to the intelligence cooperation agreement between the United States and Great Britain in World War I.
Very few researchers within the now quite well-established academic discipline of the study of Hermeticism and Western Esotericism are likely to be familiar with the fact that at the end of the 19th century i.e. at the peak of the Victorian era, there was a publicly known occult organisation that was classified by the security authorities of the time as a most alarming hotbed of political terrorism, separatism and high treason. We are talking about the venerable Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (in the following: GD), active since 1888. This “secret society” of the higher echelons of the Victorian age is as such, of course, familiar to everyone who has investigated European occultism of the turn of the century before last. And it is also widely known, albeit little reflected upon, that under the leadership of the Order’s Superior Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers as well as his original co-founders William Robert Woodman and William Wynn Westcott a lively social life developed in its London headquarters which was not least influenced by some rather prominent Irish freedom fighters. Amongst them were the later Nobel Prize for Literature laureate and future senator of the Republic of Ireland, William Butler Yeats, his permanently inapproachable amour fou Maud Gonne, and her lover William McBride, who was later executed in the course of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, all of whom were at the forefront of this faction. None of these factoids might surprise the pertinently versed reader.
Much less familiar, however, are the other actors, some of whom are mentioned in Aleister Crowley’s monumental “autohagiography”, the Confessions, though by no means all of them and certainly not specifically connecting them to the GD. Specifically, there were the Scottish Jacobites who called themselves “legitimists” and who aimed at overthrowing the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (later renamed to Windsor) and, thus, Queen Victoria herself, by force of arms if necessary and to replace her by the heir to the throne of the Roman Catholic house of Stuart. To them belonged, last but not least, and by no means in a merely marginal role, Mathers himself who soon after the foundation of the order advanced to become the sole ruler of the GD.
Equally under the protection of the GD cover, followers and supporters of the Spanish Carlists exchanged information and conspired to organise some very tangible actions. It was the aim of the radical Catholic, absolutist-monarchist Carlists to depose Isabella II and to enthrone in her place her uncle Carlos María Isidoro of Bourbon or his respectively succeeding pretenders to the Spanish monarchy from his dynastic side line. They were an essential part of the domestic Spanish kulturkampf which extended over more than a century from the Napoleonic occupation right up to the Spanish Civil War of 1938. In the so-called “Carlist Wars” they fought (and did so several times in decidedly bloody military conflicts) against the centralism and liberalism of the Isabelline monarchy in favour of the traditional particularistic special privileges of the individual fiefdoms and regions of Spain. On the English side, they were, just like the Jacobite legitimists, actively supported by Bertram, the fifth Earl of Ashburnham. In 1886 he had revived the legitimist Society of the Order of the White Rose (SOWR) which henceforth served as the official face of legitimism. In addition, the exclusive secret society Legitimist League was active in the Jacobite cause. Ashburnham maintained close contacts to GD members, above all Mathers personally, but probably never formally belonged to the GD himself. However, he was a member of numerous other secret societies and orders including the Knights of Malta. He also acted as Grand Master of the quasi-masonic Order of St. Thomas of Acre. Furthermore, he maintained a private military training camp on his Welsh lands.
Not surprisingly, the British authorities responsible for internal and external security looked upon the GD with increasing concern. Its esoteric public image, interpreted as a mere façade, could not hide the fact that it was a veritable powder keg of divergent and, above all, subversive political elements of quite serious militancy. From today’s vantage point it may seem downright paranoid to regard the stuffy old GD of all institutions as a serious camouflage organisation of seditionist political activists and terrorists. However, as is well known, such paranoia is to this day one of the foundations and the very raison d'être of any security service, especially when it is organised as an intelligence agency and operates largely in secret: secret police, intelligence, counterintelligence, national security, and so on. So, as grossly exaggerated as such an assessment may appear to us in retrospect, it was by no means without its rational foundation as Spence very neatly and convincingly demonstrates.
In the private military camp of Ashburnham, the young Aleister Crowley underwent training as a machine gunner. At this time he was apparently already on duty as an agent of British domestic counterintelligence. He had originally been recruited as a student at Cambridge – a practice that is still common today, with the services preferably picking their qualified personnel at English elite universities.
Spence’s thesis, excellently documented and hardly to be dismissed, at least at the current state of historical research, can be summarised thus: Crowley’s mission was the infiltration and neutralisation of both the legitimists and the Carlists in particular and the GD as a hotbed and stronghold of subversion and terrorism in general. Accordingly, he was deliberately infiltrated into the GD as agent provocateur, a function he was again to perform on multiple other occasions in his long career as a secret agent.
He obviously executed both tasks with bravado. Thus, he ensured that arms deliveries from Ashburnham’s circle to the Spanish Carlists in support of yet another armed insurrection in Catalonia were eventually stopped with French administrative assistance. (Present in Calais harbour when Ashburnham’s yacht was seized, wink wink: Aleister Crowley.)
Almost at the same time, a massive rebellion against the head of the order, Mathers, who was living in Paris, occurred in the GD’s London headquarters. His autocratic style of leadership was no longer suffered by leading order officials (amongst them no other than William Butler Yeats). This conflict focused not least on the extraordinarily rapid rise of Crowley within the order’s hierarchy which was a thorn in the side of many long-standing members. They strongly objected to the distastefully flamboyant, slightly vulgar dandy who disregarded all rules of high society with verve, staged himself as a blatant womanizer, pornographer and drug fiend and gleefully embraced just about any scandal in sight.
In an act of unfathomably poor judgement, Mathers finally sent the young Brother Perdurabo (Crowley’s name in the order) to London as a plenipotentiary deputy to quell the rebellion. Crowley promptly turned the operation into an operetta-style farce by forcibly procuring access to the premises in a tartaned kilt, armed with a dagger and sporting a domino, to organise a show tribunal from which the rebellious bourgeois members turned away in utter disgust. All bridges burned, mission accomplished: the rupture within the organisation was now beyond repair, Mathers accordingly being de facto deposed for good. And so began the disintegration of the GD which was soon to lead merely a shadowy existence until it finally disbanded in the 1920s. Shortly thereafter, Crowley instigated a massive personal rumpus with Mathers by publishing a large part of the latter’s writings which had hitherto been treated as an “arcanum” i.e. a proprietary secret of the order and its (now former) luckless chief, from which his now-antagonist was never to recover – effectively neutralised forever, any prospect of rehabilitation foreclosed.
Spence emphasises the fact that Crowley was never formally enlisted as a vested civil servant with the security authorities. Rather, he was to hold the eminently deniable status of an “agent” throughout his life, as were the vast majority of his contemporary British intelligence actors, responsible for ad hoc operational missions in the field. His legend, as is often the case, largely corresponded to his adopted personal reality and style of living: as a wealthy, garish dandy and bohemian, an intellectual with an undoubtedly broad general education in both the natural sciences and the humanities, multilingual and of outstanding rhetoric, cosmopolitan in his comport and at the same time artistically ambitious as a writer, poet and (in later years) painter, he appeared to the Victorian establishment on the one hand as the epitome of the scandalous enfant terrible: an eccentric and bourgeois bogey of the upper middle class. But at the same time he was politically right-wing-conservative to arch-reactionary-aristocratic, marked by an imperturbable English patriotism which was to inform him deeply until the end of his days despite all the amoral public behaviour he so generously made a show of. In short: a Kiplingesque, Churchill-like “man of the Empire” in all its colonial self-infatuation who firmly believed in the “superiority of the white man” and who was consistently driven by anti-Semitic and racist sentiments, especially towards coloured people.
In keeping with his outstanding intellect, charismatic personality and excellent international connections, his intelligence activities were to cover a wide range of tasks: from political and military espionage and the establishment of both domestic and foreign informant networks to spying on enemy agent cells, sometimes even infiltrating them, acting as a double agent and uncovering hostile sabotage operations. Shortly after the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, he scouted large parts of China, now dominated by the Western powers, on foot and was active in India, Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) and Mexico as well as operating in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Russia and Portugal. Only a few years before his death, the Second World War was already in full swing, he was personally consulted by none other than the head of British Naval Intelligence for whom he had mainly worked during his active time.
In St. Petersburg, at the turn of the century a veritable Mecca of intelligence actors (not least because of the Russian ambitions for greater power and the permanent conflict of the Tsar’s regime with Turkey, Japan, Austria-Hungary, the German Empire and, of course, Britain herself), Crowley was deployed several times, first as a young diplomat in training, later, already in wartime, as the unlikely impresario of the dance troupe Ragged Rag-time Girls. In Mexico, his duty was to observe – and if possible to torpedo – the attempts of the German Imperial intelligence service (Abwehr) to deploy subversive political activities to win the country over to join in the war against the United States. In Berlin, immediately before the National Socialists seized power, he made contact with Communist opposition groups and at the same time spied for good measure on Irish IRA agents who were seeking Soviet support on German territory in their anti-British struggle for the reunification of Ireland.
There is a great deal known about Crowley’s agent activities in New York during the First World War – but mainly about the fact that he worked there for the Kaiser’s foreign propaganda agency and penned correspondingly anti-British articles. The main focus of German propaganda efforts at the time was to prevent the United States from entering the war. In actuality, however, as Spence elaborates in detail with reference to ample American sources, Crowley was acting as a double agent. When the clandestine Imperial German sabotage troops were activated on American soil after the USA had finally entered the war, carrying out bomb attacks on various U.S. armament facilities, it was above all Aleister Crowley who, on behalf of the now officially U.S.-allied British intelligence services, was instrumental in helping the American defence authorities to uncover and neutralise various German sabotage networks: quite obviously the fruit of his infiltration of German Abwehr in New York.
When Crowley finally founded his “Abbey of Thelema” in 1920 in the Sicilian town of Cefalù, which was later to achieve some notoriety, the choice of location was by no means coincidental: situated on a hill almost exactly in the centre of the northern Sicilian coastline, the movements of the Italian navy’s war fleet in the Mediterranean could be well observed from here in all their glory – and of course the intelligence thus gathered was promptly forwarded to the British Admiralty in London. For the British, Italy had long been a serious rival for supremacy in the Mediterranean, a situation that was to escalate decades later with the outbreak of the Second World War and the subsequent Italian-German siege and bombardment of the strategically indispensable colony of Malta (base of the British Mediterranean submarine fleet, among other military assets). Thus here in Sicily, too, the Great Beast was on full course for the intelligence service regardless all his scandalous headline-grabbing occult activities – and it was probably this spook assignment which constituted the true reason why the Mussolini regime finally expelled him from the country.
The list could be continued, for example, to include the excellent contacts Crowley maintained with both the British and the continental European Left and which he made the most of in his agency work, apparently very successfully acting the political chameleon. But this selection should suffice to illustrate that Aleister Crowley’s intelligence activities, though not without breaks and occasional phases of shutdown, were by no means a minor episode but rather equated to a full-time professional job – a career he himself deliberately downplayed in his Confessions and other writings on the subject. Most of his biographers bought into this trivialisation of his intelligence activity. Which, by the way, is anything but implausible: in a country such as Great Britain, where the very existence of a governmental intelligence service was only officially acknowledged by Prime Minister John Major as late as 1992 (almost a full generation after the James Bond franchise had cornered the entertainment industry, unabashedly capitalising on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, as had the spy novels of John le Carré and many others), such seemingly lame hush-up manoeuvres were actually a firmly established tradition and considered a patriotic duty.
However, a strange shortcoming is also noticeable when reading the book: although Spence spreads out Crowley’s activity in Germany, which extended over several visits to the Reich, in great detail, there is nothing in his narrative about The Beast’s meeting with Ernst Thälmann, the chairman of the German Communist Party (KPD) who was later murdered by the Nazis in concentration camp, which the Magus himself tells us about. The pretext for his visit to Berlin on this occasion was an exhibition of his paintings in the Portas Gallery, a fact which also goes unmentioned. What’s more, Spence offers no evidence of any links to Rudolf von Sebottendorf, the former liaison of the burgeoning National Socialist movement with the Ariosophic Teutonic Order (Germanenorden) and the Thule Society (Thule Gesellschaft), as well as gun runner of various right-wing Freikorps units during the time of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, to whom the Nazi party (NSDAP) owed its chief propaganda organ, the daily paper Völkischer Beobachter, like so many other assets in its ideological struggle. Sebottendorf (whom Spence surprisingly never mentions even once) eventually fell out of favour after Hitler’s seizure of power with his book Before Hitler Came (Bevor Hitler kam, 1934) and had to spend the rest of his life as a marginalised small time agent of the Abwehr in Istanbul, until he was fished dead from the Bosporus under mysterious circumstances the day after the European part of the war ended. But as head of the Theosophical Publishing House in Leipzig, where Crowley was well-connected, it seems hardly plausible that their paths should never have crossed. These omissions may seem a bit puzzling, but as a reader one can unfortunately do little more but shrug them off.
However, the army of other occult protagonists presented, all of them contemporaries of Aleister Crowley’s, is downright disturbing. Spence establishes their intelligence connections and activities or, in some cases, merely suspects them, though never unfoundedly. This panorama spans multiple nationalities and the respective intelligence services that go with them. Most readers are probably familiar with Theodor Reuss, who initially worked as an agent for the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, later for the Imperial Abwehr, and spied on the Socialist International in London, among other places. It was Reuss who initiated Aleister Crowley into the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) which was later taken over by the Master Therion. The well-known German occult writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, author of the best-selling novel Mandrake (Alraune) which is still read today, also proved to be an extremely active, internationally operating agent of the Abwehr. Victor Neuburg, Louis Wilkinson, Dennis Wheatley, Eugen Grosche, Gerald Yorke, Ellic Howe, Karl Germer, Somerset Maugham, J.F.C. Fuller, Tom Driberg, George Monti, Dimitri Mitrinovich, Cecil Williamson, Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, A.R. Orage – a list, enough to fill a veritable Who’s Who of contemporary occultists, and yet merely an exemplary excerpt of the sheer overwhelming number of contacts, most all of them intelligence related, that Aleister Crowley cultivated, used, exploited, served or crossed swords with over the years.
In addition, there is an impressive parade of other relevant celebrities who may not have been particularly active in the occult scene or verifiably entrusted with intelligence service activities, but who were invariably highly influential in the societal, cultural or political realm, all of them Crowley contacts and most likely skimmed for intelligence data: Alfred Adler, Erich Ludendorff, Franz von Papen, Ian Fleming, Henry Miller, Fernando Pessoa, Aldous Huxley, even Albert Einstein! Thus, the reader may easily succumb to the temptation to view the entire world of the era described here as one gigantic stage for spies, secret agents, intelligence operatives, saboteurs and Abwehr spooks on a merry never-ending romp.
Nonetheless, Spence cannot and does not want to clarify a decisive question. Looking back on Aleister Crowley and those of his contemporaries, henchmen and contacts who were directly involved in the occult and often set the tone in this field, the reader will inevitably want to know to what extent their respective preoccupation, whether public or hidden, with astrology, Theosophy, alchemy, cabbalism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, ceremonial magic i.e. the entire vast spectrum of hermetic and Eastern secret teachings, is actually authentic and hence to be taken at face value – or to what extent it solely served (perish the thought!) to foster their respective intelligence legends. So were they actually for real? Or was occultism merely instrumentalised by these clandestine players, possibly even manipulated and deliberately falsified by their governmental overlords in pursuit of any which dark political agendas? For if this were indeed the case, the history of Western occultism from the turn of the century to the mid-1900s, i.e. for the entire life span of “Secret Agent 666”, would arguably have to be rewritten from scratch.
Spence is inclined to believe, and we tend to agree with him – albeit perhaps not without a certain touch of disconcerted despair – that, in the case of Aleister Crowley at least, what we are being shown is probably an inseparable melange of a personal, eminently private worldview and its projection as a means of underpinning public legends. After all, Crowley’s lifelong notorious heroin addiction and his experimentation with intoxicating drugs of all flavours were certainly no more based on “official orders” by his handlers than were his sex magic or his diverse occult rituals and visionary revelations, not to mention his often pornographic literary and artistic work. Finally, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that today’s technocratic professionalism and formalisation of intelligence activities as a subset of the civil service was still largely in its infancy in his time. Indeed the individualistic, privatising, often dandified and artistically ambitioned amateur “gentleman spy“ was then, as an established role model in intelligence, still very much the rule and not, as it is today, the absolute (and highly unwelcome) exception.
Unfortunately, despite the most intensive, excellently networked and meticulously conducted research, the sources simply won’t always provide for much more than finger pointing, hints and more or less well-educated speculation. It is to Spence’s credit that he never attempts to whitewash this state of affairs: he neatly distinguishes between facts that are documented and thus often clearly verifiable with detailed references, and mere traces and clues that will only allow for a high probability of interpretation. And finally he scrupulously defines what is pure speculation which again, however, invariably seems entirely plausible and anything but far-fetched. In doing so, he thankfully avoids sensational exaggeration and, without exception, remains as hardnosed and down to earth as possible. More cannot be reasonably expected from a monograph that is dedicated to such a complex and charged topic which, apart from being tightly veiled within its governmental layers of secrecy, disinformation and official classification, is necessarily characterised by innumerable shades of subtlety and contradictions. Very much worth a read!