Noel Coward, Not So Famous Spy

Espionage has been called the world's second oldest profession. Its practitioners are familiar in the book of Joshua, Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Roman spies who used carrier pigeons, and notorious figures throughout history — Casanova, the great lover but Venetian spy; Francis Walsingham, spy master to Queen Elizabeth I; Mata Hari, exotic Dutch dancer. Then there are those of the World War II and Cold War periods: Alger Hiss, Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, and George Blake.

During World War II, an unexpected array of diverse individuals of different talents and backgrounds engaged in some form of espionage for the U.S. and its allies. Among them were U.S.-French renowned vedette Josephine Baker; U.S. State Department employee Virginia Hall; biracial Sufi woman Noor Inayat Khan; and Moe Berg, Jewish U.S. Major League Baseball player. One of the most surprising of those recruited for espionage was the then-entertainer of the world, Noel Coward, the exuberant British playwright, actor, composer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and poise.

Coward, though a prolific writer, had never spoken about his activity as a British spy until 1973, when he make his only public statement about his wartime espionage activity, though he had hinted at it in his autobiography, Future Indefinite, 1954. He was a perfect choice for the role: as he remarked, "no one considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I'd pass along." His façade was to appear as a bit of an idiot and a merry playboy. Coward behaved in the manner of his public and theatrical image at all times to keep anyone from suspecting his secret activities.

From WIKI:

“Had the Germans invaded Britain, Coward was scheduled to be arrested and killed, as he was in The Black Book along with other figures such as Virginia Woolf, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, C. P. Snow and H. G. Wells. When this came to light after the war, Coward wrote: “If anyone had told me at that time I was high up on the Nazi blacklist, I should have laughed ... I remember Rebecca West, who was one of the many who shared the honour with me, sent me a telegram which read: ‘My dear – the people we should have been seen dead with’.”

Coward's homosexuality was actually considered a positive qualification for work in the intelligence services.

Until the 1990s, the posh English private schools (which they inexplicably call 'public' schools) permitted an extreme sort of hazing of new young boys that was known as fagging. Boys were pressed into the service of an older student as a sort of house boy, and his 'duties' often ran to providing homosexual services.

As a consequence, a great many the British 'gentlemen' and noblemen had been introduced to homosexual activity as a child. Not only that, they were sent to those same schools by a father who probably had been "fagged" at the same school decades earlier. So homosexuality was rather casually accepted by that crowd.

In fact, in the BBC documentary film Toffs, Queers and Traitors: The Extraordinary Life of Guy Burgess, academic and BBC executive Stewart Purvis states that, "If you look at the Trinity College coffee table book it talks about the fact that in the 1930s homosexuality was thought to be more bonding than football." 'Football' in this case refers to the game of soccer, and Trinity College is one of the vaunted OxBridge universities.

In those circles it was widely believed that the natural (or should that be un-natural?) bonding between homosexual men also imbued in them a sort of common patriotism and love of country. So in their view it was inconceivable that any homosexual OxBridge man would betray his country, and British Intelligence largely dispensed with the vetting process for new operatives who were both gay and educated at Oxford or Cambridge provided the candidate came well recommended by a serving operative, even if that operative was another homosexual OxBridge man.

And this view persisted until the Cambridge Five Spy Ring debacle, which prominently featured Cambridge men who were known homosexuals, and who were recruited into intelligence service despite their known communist tendencies while at university because that shortcoming was considered secondary to the fact that they were gay men from families of repute.

The affair rocked the entire British intelligence community and prejudiced the US's view of the whole British intelligence system for decades to come, in no small part because the British spent years trying to cover up the breech of security at the highest levels.

So to the British intelligence services, the fact of Coward's homosexuality made him all the better qualified for the work of a spy.

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