The Haushofer Intercept – How British Intelligence Managed the Hess Flight

The interval between Albrecht Haushofer’s September 1940 approach to the Duke of Hamilton and Rudolf Hess’s parachute landing at Dungavel on 10 May 1941 runs to nearly eight months. During that period the letter was reviewed inside MI5, an operation was built around it, and the operation was cancelled seven days before Hess arrived. The parliamentary statement made twelve days after the landing does not describe any of that.

The Haushofer Intercept of 1940

Albrecht Haushofer, a German academic with close ties to the Nazi leadership, met Rudolf Hess at Bad Gallspach in Austria on 8 September 1940. They discussed a back-channel to a British peace faction.

Eleven days later, on 19 September, Haushofer wrote to Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton, opening with ‘My Dear Douglo’ and asking whether they might meet somewhere on the outskirts of Europe, suggesting neutral Portugal as the venue. The two men had met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The letter was routed through a third party. The outer envelope was addressed to Mrs Violet Roberts in Lisbon. The inner envelope was marked simply ‘Dr AH’ and contained the message for Hamilton. It did not reach Mrs Roberts. On 2 November 1940, censors at the Ministry of Information in London opened it, copied it and forwarded copies to MI5 and the Foreign Office.

MI5 Delays and Investigation into Hamilton

Through the winter, the intercept was reviewed by Guy Liddell, Director of Counter-Espionage at MI5, and by Major T.A. Robertson, who ran the B1A branch. MI5 identified Haushofer as an expert on the British Empire and opened an investigation into Hamilton to see whether he was a willing participant in anything treasonable.

The investigators found no positive proof of pro-German or anti-British activity on his part.

Hamilton himself was not shown the letter until 26 February 1941. Almost four months had passed since it landed on the censor’s desk. For that entire period, the state possessed knowledge of an attempted German approach to Hamilton that Hamilton did not.

Hamilton and the Proposed Lisbon Trip

On 25 April 1941, Robertson met Hamilton to plan a reply to Haushofer and a possible trip to Lisbon. In a contemporaneous internal note, Robertson described Hamilton as ‘a slow-witted man’ who ‘gets there in the end’ and who could ‘do a very useful job of work’ if ‘properly schooled’. The characterisation is Robertson’s private assessment on a B1A memo.

Hamilton was reluctant. He initially suggested that his brother David go in his place. On 28 April 1941 he wrote to Group Captain Blackford at the Air Ministry, formally agreeing to the mission on two conditions: the British Ambassador in Lisbon was to be fully briefed, and Hamilton required a workable cover story to explain why it had taken him seven months to reply. The operation was routed through B1A, the branch that handled double-cross work.

The Cancellation of the Lisbon Operation

On 3 May 1941, five days later, Blackford wrote to Hamilton cancelling the Lisbon trip. He instructed Hamilton to regard the matter as being in ‘abeyance’. The stated grounds, preserved on the file, were that a ‘watertight excuse’ for the seven-month delay would be very difficult to construct, and that there could be ‘undesirable political consequences’ if the cover failed.

Blackford’s letter is the outcome. The internal argument that produced it is not in the public archive. The minutes of the intelligence committee meetings that led to the cancellation have not been located.

Rudolf Hess Lands at Dungavel

Seven days after the operation was placed in abeyance, on the evening of 10 May 1941, Rudolf Hess flew a Luftwaffe aircraft solo across the North Sea and parachuted into Scotland. He landed near Dungavel House, the Hamilton family’s hunting lodge. He gave a false name, Alfred Horn, was captured by the Home Guard and asked to see the Duke of Hamilton.

A search at Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow turned up a plain, unaddressed envelope in his possession. Inside were visiting cards for Albrecht Haushofer and for his father Karl Haushofer. The physical items connected the pilot back to the intercept file that had just been closed in London.

The next day, 11 May 1941, Major Perfect of Scottish Regional Security signalled Box 500, MI5’s postal address in London, reporting the capture and the visiting cards. In that signal Perfect noted that ‘the Duke of Hamilton is on the suspect list’.

The regional file said one thing; the central file said another. By then, Hamilton had been investigated, cleared, briefed and recruited by central intelligence. On the ground in Scotland, the regional security officer still had him flagged. Why the regional suspect-list entry remained inconsistent with Hamilton’s status in the central files, when the relevant list was issued, or by whom, the public archive does not show.

Parliamentary Accounts of the Hess Incident

Twelve days after the landing, on 22 May 1941, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, made a statement to the House of Commons. He told Members that Hess had arrived giving a false name and asking to see the Duke, that Hamilton was ‘apprised by the authorities’ and had visited the prisoner in hospital, and that it was at that hospital meeting that Hess had revealed his identity for the first time. Sinclair framed the prior connection between the two men as a brief encounter at the 1936 Olympic Games.

Winston Churchill separately declined to make Hess ‘a hero’, describing him as a ‘creature’ and one of the ‘filthiest’ fellows.

Read alongside the internal record, the Commons account omits certain items. It does not mention the intercepted Haushofer letter of September 1940. It does not mention the four-month MI5 review, the B1A recruitment meeting on 25 April, Hamilton’s letter to Blackford on 28 April or the cancellation of the Lisbon operation on 3 May. What survives on the departmental files sits alongside what was said in Parliament. The two accounts share very little material.

The 1942 Libel Suits and State Intervention

Public rumours about Hamilton did not stop with the Sinclair statement. In February 1942, Hamilton sued the London District Committee of the Communist Party over an article in World News and Views which alleged that he had negotiated with Nazi Germany and had known Hess was coming. He also sued the journalist Pierre van Paassen for describing him as a British Fascist.

The Communist Party indicated that it would seek to call Rudolf Hess himself as a witness. That threat was the specific trigger for government concern.

A letter from Herbert Morrison, then Home Secretary, to Sinclair survives on the record. In it, Morrison asks Sinclair to use his influence to have Hamilton drop the libel actions on the ground that Hess could not appear in a public witness box. The letter as preserved is dated 18 June 1941. The date does not fit the sequence: the suits were filed in February 1942, so a request to have them dropped cannot logically have been sent seven months earlier. The document itself is on the record; the timeline around it is not resolved.

Hamilton settled, accepting an apology from the Communist Party. The Sinclair-to-Hamilton correspondence that would show how the settlement was arrived at has not been located.

Source Box

Sources include: MI5 B1A records concerning the intercepted Haushofer approach and Major T.A. Robertson’s 25 April 1941 meeting with the Duke of Hamilton; Hamilton’s 28 April 1941 letter to Group Captain Blackford and Blackford’s 3 May 1941 cancellation letter; Major Perfect’s 11 May 1941 signal to Box 500; House of Commons Hansard records concerning Rudolf Hess and Hamilton, including 22 May 1941; Herbert Morrison’s surviving letter to Sir Archibald Sinclair concerning Hamilton’s libel actions; and Security Service file KV 2/35 concerning Rudolf Hess and the early interrogation material involving Roman Battaglia.