About three months ago I watched a BBC documentary on Helen Duncan, the famous WWII psychic, titled The Unexplained: The Blitz Witch. Tony Robinson is the host and you can watch it for free on Youtube here:
Helen Duncan was a spirit medium who made two notable predictions about the sinking of British warships HMS Hood in May, 1941 and HMS Barham that November; these predictions ‘came true’. Helen had a well-heeled clientele, which included the head of Scottish Intelligence Brigadier Roy C. Firebrace, who was present for her prediction of the destruction of HMS Hood. (Firebrace was complicit, if not entirely comfortable, in the ‘forced repatriation’ of soldiers after WWII, which resulted in the murder of over two million men by Stalin– in my last post, Curtis Dall was quoted calling these repatriations “Eisenhower’s forced-repatriations“, see Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Great Betrayal.) Apparently, portends of the next life weighed heavily on Firebrace even prior to the Yalta conference.
Helen Duncan and some of her ‘ectoplasmic’ manifestations.
Firebrace visited Helen Duncan because, like many well-connected Brits at the time, he believed her psychic powers could give him useful information. What he heard about HMS Hood startled him, according to Firebrace’s wartime secretary Dr. Mary Austin in Tony Robinson’s Unexplained documentary:
[Tony Robinson reads from a 1959 magazine interview with Brigadier Firebrace] During the War, I was head of intelligence in Scotland and I had the opportunity of attending a séance with Mrs. Duncan in Edinburgh…
[Dr. Austin] Tragedy! HMS Hood is sunk and all the men are sunken… something like that. [Firebrace] couldn’t wait to get back to a telephone to get the Admiralty to tell him what he’d heard, that Hood had gone down. And they said “Rubbish!” No such thing. No, no, no. Wrong.
[Tony Robinson] He got another telephone call back from the Admiralty.
[Dr. Austin] Yes. Not then, but two days later.
[Tony Robinson] And what did they say?
[Dr. Austin] She’s quite right. All was lost.
[Tony Robinson] You don’t think that there was any way that either the Brigadier or Helen Duncan could have known that the Hood was sunk?
[Dr. Austin] No, no. Quite impossible. Quite impossible.
What happened next sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland: MI5 called in a crack team to investigate Helen Duncan which included Ian Fleming. Over two years later, in 1944, Helen was charged with espionage but that charge was quickly changed to ‘pretending to talk to the dead’, which was illegal in Britain because of a 1735 law against witchcraft. The use of this act grabbed headlines in all the wrong ways.
Helen Duncan was the second-to-last British subject to be tried under that anti-witchcraft law. (A 72 year old woman was silenced using the same law shortly afterward.) The choice to use the Witchcraft Act to prosecute Duncan was so weird that Churchill himself wrote this to his secretary:
HOME SECRETARY [Herbert Morrison]
Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was used in a modern Court of Justice.
What was the cost of the trial to the state, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London for a fortnight, and the Recorder [His Lordship Sir Gerald Dodson] kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery…
– From Nina Shandler’s The Strange Case of Hellish Nell
Helen was given a show trial, complete with a famous comic-impersonator prosecutor (the son of a well-known comedian), and a bevy of star witnesses, including the agent provocateur and mystic debunker Harry Price. Rich patrons hired Helen a flashy, theatrical lawyer and prominent supporters of Duncan, including Blitz war-hero Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding and high-ranking Freemason Alfred Dodd, testified on her behalf. (I ask readers to remember that Duncan had high-level masonic supporters.) The Crown got what it wanted in the end: Helen Duncan was convicted and locked away until the end of WWII.
The majority of modern presentations of Helen Duncan’s story focus on 1) questions such as “Was she really psychic?” or 2) outrage over her ‘religious persecution’. These presentations willfully miss the point. Helen Duncan probably was a German spy or at least being used by German spies. What’s shocking about Helen’s story is that she *wasn’t* tried as a spy, but as a witchy fraud. Putting Duncan’s beliefs on trial was hugely dangerous for the British Government because in the 1940s Spiritualism was a politically powerful force with followers in the millions and growing. The Spiritualist movement was largely a middle-class one, making it well-funded, well-educated and *potentially* revolutionary: too many people were like Alfred Conan Doyle– searching for sons who’d died in needless wars.
In answer to Churchill’s question, the Crown took this calculated risk because talking about what Helen was doing in terms of espionage gambled with the safety of ongoing black-ops in Germany.
This post, readers, is about how networks of ‘psychics’ are used by intelligence operations– NOT for actionable intelligence, but to manipulate people who believe in psychics. Helen Duncan was charged with espionage initially because 1) her predictions were demoralizing to military/spook brass and 2) she had a suspicious habit of visiting locations that were sensitive to the planning of upcoming D-Day operations. Helen Duncan looked a lot like an enemy spook, and UK intel should know, because they were running a very similar operation against German military/spook brass at the same time. This is how Richard Crossman, Britain’s Political Warfare Executive during WWII, describes anti-German ‘psychic’ operations:
Crossman even claimed that there was an ‘Astrological Programme’ whose audience inside Germany probably consisted of about forty individuals at most, but which it was believed was popular with senior members of the Nazi Party.33 Its aim was to play on the fact that many senior Nazis were known to have an interest in astrology, feeding them gloomy astrological predictions about their military campaigns.
Sound anything like what Helen Duncan was doing? :)
British intelligence has been involved with the occult for a very long time. Aleister Crowley had been infiltrating and disrupting ‘secret societies’ on behalf of MI5’s predecessors since the late 1890s. Harry Price, the highest-profile hostile Helen Duncan witness, had sown discord in the Spiritualist movement since 1920, when he gave up a seedy career in antiques to become a ‘debunker’ for the Society for Psychical Research, an organization which included Aleister Crowley’s spook boss, Everard Feilding, as one of its luminaries.
Harry Price, a gent who knew something about showmanship.
Why was the British secret service so interested in spiritualists and the occult in general? The best answer to that question I’ve found comes from Richard B. Spence’s book Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Secret Societies like the Masons and religious movements like Spiritualism were “gateways to the British Establishment” and feeder-pools into the intelligence community.
While Freemasonry had become a worldwide organization by the 1890s, with various branches and jurisdictions, the United Grand Lodge of England and Wales (UGLE) remained the largest regular body, and Britain the most Masonic of countries. By 1900, the UGLE boasted almost 3000 lodges with nearly 200,000 brethren.23 That was still a tiny minority out of a general population of some 33 million, but Masonic affiliation had become a virtual union card for admission to the British establishment. Thus, the proportion of Masons in governmental service (including intelligence agencies) was much, much higher than in the population generally.
(Since Helen had prominent Masonic supporters, you can understand how gingerly spooks like Fleming had to treat the Duncan trail, for fear of stepping on important toes AND outing their own unsavory ‘tricks’.)
Spence puts forward a convincing argument that Crowley was a British intelligence agent since his days at Cambridge, and that Crowley worked for William Melville, the original ‘M’. Spence suggests that domestic intelligence pros like Melville were concerned that these occult organizations would provide cover for Irish nationalist, Jacobite (‘Legitimist’) and Papist agitators and other anti-government groups. (Masonic off-shoots did count a number of “regime change” specialists in their top ranks, such as Samuel MacGregor Mathers and Bertram Ashburnahm who, along with others, were busy running arms and fermenting revolutions across Europe in the late Victorian era.)
The Brits’ greatest competitors in using the occult sphere for intelligence work were the German secret services; in fact, the Germans appear to have been more adept:
Reuss’ [Theodor Reuss, German Intel operative] main achievement (with some help from the Austrian industrialist Karl Kellner) was the creation circa 1902 of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the “Order of Oriental Templars.” Second only to the Illuminati, perhaps, the OTO has earned a reputation as a center of conspiratorial skullduggery and even the dubious title of “The World’s Most Dangerous Secret Society.” 31
Outwardly, the OTO seems to have remained rather small and exclusive, though Reuss tirelessly recruited, out of both spiritual zeal and vanity, but also to use the Order as a cover for German intelligence.
It shouldn’t be surprising that German spooks were adept at handling subversive secret societies, seeing as they’d been dealing with organizations like ‘the Illuminati’ since 1776.
Back in Britain spymasters such as Melville, and his counterintelligence counterparts, may have reasoned that British occult movements were an unguarded back door for German spies. The circles that Crowley practiced his ‘magic’ in were so thick with German operatives that at times it was difficult for contemporary onlookers to tell which bunch of spooks, exactly, Crowley worked for!
Not only were influential Brits enamored with the paranormal, but prominent Americans were as well. Abraham Lincoln participated in séances in the White House; Woodrow Wilson consulted psychics; Franklin Delano Roosevelt was ‘read’ by a psychic FBI informer and friend of J. Edgar Hoover; and Ronald Reagan had a few psychic advisors.
What I’d like readers to take home is that influential people all over the world took this occult stuff very seriously. (Some still do!) Intelligence professionals realized that manipulating these beliefs could provide valuable information and counterintelligence protection as well providing vehicles for ‘black ops’ and disinformation of the type I described previously.
All this ‘Hellish Nell’ stuff was a lifetime ago. So why do documentaries like Tony Robinson’s, and books like The Strange Case of Hellish Nell, skirt the intelligence/occult connection? I suggest their skittishness is because such operations are still ongoing.
Here’s a Google Maps image of psychics, and psychic research institutes, which advertise and are located around London’s Whitehall district. (Whitehall Road is between the River Thames and ‘Michael Francois Psychic’.)
Here’s a Google Maps image of practicing psychics’ location around the Capitol area of Washington D.C.
Psychics practicing near Congress.
Each red call out box is a psychic business. There are three on the road between the Capitol building and Dupont Circle, the embassy hot-spot/upper-crust neighborhood.
Here’s a similar map of the psychics plying their trade on Wall Street.
Red dots are publically advertising psychics.
Those two dots are just the psychics advertising through Google, when you actually walk those streets, it’s shocking how many seers/tarot readers work near the exchange. Here’s an October 2011 New York Magazine article documenting the phenomenon.
Millionaires are very concerned about their money,” says the psychic Frank Andrews, offering a breakdown of his new and unexpected clientele. “The billionaires, on the other hand—they come just for fun.” Such is the insecurity of the average Wall Street baron as the market roller-coasters and protesters mass at their door: Bankers are turning to the spirit world for guidance—the clairvoyant reading as an algorithm of last resort.
From later on in the same article:
Rosanna Schaffer-Shaw, a former belly dancer turned tarot-card reader and psychic who goes by “Fahrusha,” sees her Wall Street clients in her Alphabet City apartment. (Concerned with discretion, bankers are perhaps more likely to visit psychics who practice at home than they are to walk past a neon psychic sign and go into a glass-faced storefront.)
Fahrusha has a message for policy-makers in Washington. “If there was a better energy policy,” she says, “if there could be more investment in alternative energy … it would be fabulous. The economy could improve if people would look at green solutions.”
I ask her if that’s her professional psychic analysis or just her opinion.
“You know?” She thinks for a second and shrugs. “It’s so hard to separate the two.”
Gee– Al Gore agrees with Fahrusha! The fates decree that we should throw some more pork at alternative energy… Solyndra, cough cough. Obama’s energy disaster had filed for bankruptcy a few weeks before Fahrusha’s interview. (Good news is that Klain from the Solyndra scandal is now in charge of Ebola!)
My point with these maps is to show that there is definitely a market for the paranormal around major power centers. I’m certainly not the first person to have noticed this, and any “great user of people” would have harnessed that market long ago.
But is there an ongoing effort to protect modern ‘psychic’ operations?
I have not read every book on ‘Hellish Nell’. However, here’s a bit of background on some of the more accessible modern media concerning Helen Duncan.
1) Tony Robinson’s 2008 documentary was produced and directed by Thomas Viner for Channel Four, a British Government entity that was created to expand on the programming offered by the BBC. The BBC was set up with the help of William Stephenson, Churchill’s spymaster in NYC (See The Quiet Canadian by H. Montgomery Hyde) and founding father of what became the CIA. Viner also works for television channels Nat Geo and Discovery. Along with the History Channel, both Nat Geo and Discovery have pretty blatant intel connections, in my opinion. Viner’s documentary on Duncan focuses exclusively on the question of whether Duncan was truly psychic, with a few shout-outs to agent provocateur Harry Price thrown in for good measure.
2) Nina Shandler’s The Strange Case of Hellish Nell was published in 2006. Shandler is a psychologist turned historian, who claims to have been given ‘accidental’ access to British National Archives files on Helen Duncan that should have been secret until 2046 because they contain information vital to the UK’s “national security”. What a mistake! Shandler’s book reads more like a romance novel than an historical investigation and she doesn’t explore British Intelligence forays into the occult, even though Aleister Crowley’s spook antics have been public knowledge since Richard B. Spence’s 2000 article “Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley and British Intelligence in America, 1914-1918″, which appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. Instead, Shandler pays undo attention to cavity searches and wrings her hands about religious persecution.
3) Finally, onto Richard B. Spence himself. Spence is a regular on the History Channel, and a consultant to Washington’s International Spy Museum– a silly tourist trap that gins up anti-Russian feelings and flatters the US ‘intelligence community’. Having said that, Spence’s book Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult does contain interesting factual information and gossip about ‘The Beast’s’ spook-work.
Spence’s book does not contain any mention of Helen Duncan, even though a) the details of her case were highly publicized at the time including the fact that the original charge against her was espionage AND b) Crowley’s ‘handler’ Everard Feilding’s Society for Psychical Research played an important role in the Duncan story. Why, Mr. Spence? If the gossip around Crowley and the Wych-Elm/Charles Walton murders was worth including, why not the more important and well-documented Duncan case?
When I learned about history in school, my teachers were careful to tell me that the source of information is just as important as the information itself. The sources I’ve listed may have reasons to obscure intelligence relations to the occult. In an age where presidents talk to God, the paranormal can be quite useful.
I encourage any lawmakers who consult mediums *and* read anolen.com to know thyselves. If I still have Bulgakov fans reading, we can ask ourselves again: Is the Devil a German?
Aleister Crowley, a magician on and off the stage. Crowley performed at Moscow’s Aquarium Variety Theater in 1913, with the help of UK Intel asset Mikhail Lyiardopoulos, secretary of the Moscow Art Theater. A few years later MAT would become Bulgakov’s employer. Gave me goose-bumps too.
