The Spy Who - The Spy Who Dressed the Queen | The Royal Family's spy links | 4

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

The British Royal Family has long been entwined with the secret services. Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac reveal in their book 'The Secret Royals', how Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II (Codename 2519) were the ultimate handlers; privy to daily intelligence reports, globally well connected, capable of outmanoeuvring their own governments. Host Charlie Higson speaks to Richard and Rory about uncovering this hidden history, why top spies sip tea at Buckingham Palace, and how the next generation of Royals are continuing this intelligence-loving legacy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wandery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad free on Apple Podcasts or the Wandery app. From Wandery, I'm Charlie Higson, spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spy Who Dressed the Queen. The phrase, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, may carry a little more weight than we realise. Often the role of the British royal family is considered ceremonial, and their homes and grounds something of a tourist attraction. But what if there was something more shadowy afoot?

Building on our series about Hardy Amies, the Queen's dressmaker and orchestrator of Nazi assassinations in occupied Belgium, I wanted to explore the two worlds of the British monarchy and their secret services. If you haven't already, be sure to listen to episodes 1-3 of The Spy Who Dressed the Queen to discover how Hardy mastered both vanity and violence. In this episode I'm going to speak to Richard J Aldrich, Professor of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University, and Rory McCormack, Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham.

Both are fellows of the Royal Historical Society. Both have a list of accreditations and achievements to their name that's longer than my arm. And together they've written the book The Secret Royals. Spying and the Crown. From Victoria to Diana. It's a quite eye-opening account of how the intelligence world intermingles with the British royal family to this very day. We do think of the spy world as being dominated by men, but in this domain it's the women who have the power. And it goes all the way back to Elizabeth I.

I'm here with the authors of The Secret Royals, Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana. Richard and Rory, Richard, nice to see you. How are you doing? Great, lovely to be here. And Rory, how are you doing? Very well, thank you. Excellent. Do you work exclusively in the covert world of spies and surveillance? Yes, we began as kind of mainstream historians and actually espionage history is like a refugee camp

for mainstream historians who became bored with mainstream history. Once you start down the espionage track you don't really look back. We should probably start by linking the phrase on her, well now his majesty's secret service with the royals. Culturally recognizable through Bond of course, but why do British spies and the intelligence services operate on this maxim? Partly I think because British spies MI6, they're not civil servants, they're not diplomats, they're crown servants.

And there's this idea that almost they're beyond service to a particular government, a particular party. It's about service to the country and above all, the Queen or the King. One of Britain's most successful spies, Oleg Penkovsky, briefly in Britain on a mission, he's got this list of things he wants and the top thing he wants is to meet the Queen And eventually they kind of twink that this is a thing even in the last 20 years if you're a top British spy you've spent months in some wretched Al Qaeda camp somewhere you come home The way they reward you was tea and cucumber sandwiches with the

Queen or the King. Prince Charles would give you a special award. So the scene at the Olympics of Daniel Craig turning up to visit the Queen is not actually that far-fetched? No, no, absolutely. There's a remarkable amount of real-world interaction between the royal family and spies. And do they get rewarded by the royal family in other ways? Prince Charles, as he then was, used to run almost like a secret awards ceremony every year

from Clarence House, where you'd have the formal and overt knighthoods, and then Prince Charles would run his own clandestine version, where he would invite the great and the good from MI5, MI6, and GCHQ to get their awards. But obviously we never get to hear about who's won one and they have to take those. So it's like a sort of spy of the year. Do they get medals?

Do we know what they're called or is it just too private and secret? It's too secret. Yeah, it's some sort of gong, but it's too secret for us mere mortals to know about. Why is Queen Elizabeth II so crucial in understanding more about this link between the monarchy and the secret services? She was a walking library of state secrets, and I think it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say given that she reigned for so long, she probably knew more state secrets than anybody who has ever walked the earth because

she was the number one reader every week of every single joint intelligence committee weekly assessment. She had regular meetings with the intelligence chiefs. She knew it all. She's number one on the top intelligence report. So you have a highly secret intelligence report might actually get 20 or 30 copies. They're going to the foreign office, the treasury, the Prime Minister, but copy number one goes to the Queen.

It's clear that she was getting really top secret stuff. So typically material produced from GCHQ, stuff from code breaking. When GCHQ had an industrial action in the late 70s, she said, it was wonderful, I had to read less stuff. She's like the sort of inspiration for Judy Dench's M. I mean, she's the ultimate spymaster or spymistress. She spends her childhood, her teenage years, in Buckingham Palace during the war. And this is basically an espionage department store.

Almost everybody there is working for or moonlighting for the Secret Services. So her cousin Margaret Rhodes is working for MI6, coming back every night and sort of sleeping in the next room. The King's private secretary, Tommy Lassles, worked for SOE, cousins worked for MI5. So she's kind of suffused in Secret Service pretty much from the get-go. What's fascinating is that she's not just taking in this stuff, she's also kind of acting on it. It's constitutionally quite tricky.

The Queen was supposed to advise rather than make decisions, but you know with just the rays of an eyebrow, the slight change of tone, you know, do you think that's awfully wise? So she's taking in this information but she's also effectively making policy. And what sort of information is it? It's everything and one of the things that we were trying to get to the bottom of was the Suez crisis in 1956, when obviously Britain and France colluded with Israel to invade Egypt over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. And one of the questions is how much did the Queen know?

And our conclusion from a lot of ferreting around archives was quite a lot because going back to Richard's point about all of her family in the big department store of intelligence, her uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was senior military officer and was in all likelihood feeding her the most sensitive aspects of the collusion. We think that on the balance of probability, she knew what was coming. She probably didn't like it.

She probably raised that eyebrow and uttered her famous catchphrase, are you sure this is wise, Prime Minister? Even on the most sensitive, most contentious, most controversial aspects of British history, she had a front row seat. And if she's not privy to some of the most important pieces of information, then she's not able to do that during her weekly audience with the prime ministers, which isn't just about saying, yes, that's fine, do you want another cup of tea?

It's genuinely exerting that role as a constitutional monarch. One of my favourite examples was the Queen intervening in foreign policy without realising it. So when the Shah is thinking about whether to carry out a coup in his own country, take control in 1953 with the support of MI6 and the CIA, or do a runner, everybody thinks he's going to do a runner, so you've got to persuade the Shah to stay and sort of work with the British and the Americans. And this message comes in to the American ambassador. You've got to persuade the Shah to stay. And the message comes from the Prime

Minister, Anthony Eden and the Queen Elizabeth. The Shah gets this message. The ambassador runs around, gives this message. Actually, the message was garbled. It meant Anthony Eden on the ship, the Queen Elizabeth. But when they discovered their mistake, they covered it up. But although it's a funny story, it shows the power of the Queen, the message, getting a message from the Queen. Stay, work on the coup, don't do a runner. It actually worked. The sh Shah stayed. And when the Shah comes to

visit in the 1970s, so this is someone who every self-respecting terrorist in Europe wants to kill, they all want to get the Shah. And the Shah wants to go to Ascot with the Queen. And the Secret Service is like, well, obviously you're going to go in an armoured car, you're going to go in a tank. But no, the Shah wants to go to Ascot in an open-top carriage, travelling at about five miles an hour. And a big target painted on his forehead. You can see the Queen quite often visibly nervous, just waiting for the grenade or the RPG to land in the carriage.

She also knew the importance of being visible. She used to say, we need to be seen to be believed. You can't be a monarch who locks oneself away, otherwise the power of the monarchy, the existence of the monarchy will dwindle. So she was nervous, but she was brave in constantly pushing herself to do these things. And there are numerous examples. I think the one where she was most nervous was going to she was most nervous was going to Northern Ireland in 1977, was part of the Silver Jubilee Tour. Obviously the Troubles were still very much at their height in those years. And the correspondence on this is really quite eye opening. She thought that she couldn't not go to a particular part of her realm during the Silver Jubilee Tour. And she insisted

on going. And there was one moment in a memoir somewhere, I can't remember exactly which memoir it was, which was as they were sailing away back from Northern Ireland, having survived their three days there. There were genuine risks. Prince Philip kind of rested his hand on her hand and they both breathed an audible sigh of relief getting through that one. But fair play, she didn't have to go and she went. My favourite is the visit to Sudan in the middle of a civil war. And the British ambassador has to sort of get the various warring parties together and say,

look, if you don't stop fighting, she's not coming. And they go, oh, okay, well, we better stop fighting then. And the Foreign Office went on record as saying that the Queen helped end the civil war in Sudan. They mean feats. How did you find out all this information, Adam? Because I'm assuming a lot of this stuff is still classified. The overwhelming majority of it is classified and all of Queen Elizabeth's stuff is classified.

Her father's material is classified. Most of it, but the eighth material is classified. So going down to the National Archives is a pretty thankless task. And you have to keep digging. You have to keep on digging. And one of my favorite stories from the book, it comes about from the 1950s and it should have been in the memoirs of a senior foreign office diplomat called Evelyn Shugborough who was the head of the Middle East section. He published his memoirs, a diary all about Countdown to Suez, but

there's no mention at all of the Queen. And I thought this is a bit strange. So what we did, we went down to the archive at Birmingham and we said, we know this book is published, but can we see the original diary, please? And we went through painstakingly and there, lo and behold, was an entry, which oddly enough didn't make the published version, where Shukbra, the protagonist, said, today I was at Buckingham Palace having tea with the Queen and we were talking about one particular Middle Eastern leader who is not being very friendly to the British. And we were talking about different covert operations to try to undermine the nationalist in the area. And I was most taken

aback when the Queen looked at me and she said, haven't you thought of just slipping something in his coffee? And he said, the cigarette behind his back was burning, so he didn't have time to say, your majesty, this is very much like a time when one of your predecessors, Henry the second, famously said, well, nobody rid me of this troublesome priest and lo and behold, the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered shortly afterwards. So I think that's a nice example of a really interesting and telling interaction between spies and diplomats and the royals which never made the published version of that particular memoir and you have to dig deep across many, many archives and private papers as we did.

Elizabeth I is famous for being surrounded by spies and for using them to hold her reign together. Is that pretty much where the idea of a secret service began? Elizabeth I is thought of as the person who set up the first modern British spy service. She actually had the full panoply of espionage, deception, COVID operations, human spies, but remarkably also her own Bletchley part. So she had one of the finest code breaking services in the world. And this is really how Mary Queen of Scots comes unstuck. Because she's sending messages to her collaborators through elaborate codes. But Elizabeth I's code breaking service, her, Bletchley Park, if you like, is better. And that's what has Mary Queen of Scots Bantle rights. All the elements that we would recognise in a modern Secret Service, modern intelligence community were also present

in the Secret Service of Elizabeth the First. Because there was so many threats and plots going on. It was such a turbulent time. If ever there was a time when there was a desperate need for some intelligence, that was it. And even on the covert operations side of things, Elizabeth was engaged in things that we would recognize today as being quite modern. There was one advisor said to her, we need to use some sort of covert means was the phrase he used.

He spelt it in the ye olde English way, M-E-A-N-E-S. Let's use some covert means to try to undermine the King of Spain. And they were basically waging a covert proxy war in the low countries where Elizabeth was sending mercenaries and money to fighters who were fighting the Catholics in what's now the Netherlands and Belgium. It's classic, what we would now call plausible deniability and Elizabeth is reveling in it half a millennia ago. She actually had three rival spy services operating. This was quite expensive so when we get to the end of her reign, the defeat of the Armada,

because she's a bit of a meanie she sort of just cuts the budget. So she's built this what is effectively a really world class spy service. But it's all wound down and British monarchs use espionage, they use code breaking over the next couple of hundred years. But there isn't really anything organized or substantial before Victoria. Tell me about Queen Victoria. I mean, in some ways, I suppose she was reviving a spy service. Yeah, Queen Victoria was a monarch before the British secret services were formally

existed. They didn't exist until 1909, formally as we know them today. And so Queen Victoria presided, reigned rather, over a vast chasm of the, in the 19th century. But she took what we'd now refer to as intelligence and covert operations and all that secret state crowd. She took it incredibly, incredibly seriously for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it literally kept her alive. You know, information from special branch from undercover police officers protected her from multiple assassination attempts. We think there were at least nine different attempts on her life. It also allowed her to outmaneuver her own government at times because Victoria was the matriarch of royal

families across Europe. She therefore had this web, this network of intelligence everywhere from the Russian courts all the way through to Western Europe. She had relatives feeding her all sorts of tidbits. Her most successful relative spy, if you like, was her eldest daughter, Vicky, who married into the Prussian royal family and was providing all sorts of highly classified, highly sensitive bits of information about Prussian military maneuvers. And on one hand, the British government welcomed this because MI5 didn't exist, MI6 didn't exist and suddenly you have the Queen as an excellent source of intelligence, but also

as an excellent intelligence analyst because she knew all the different maneuverings and machinations of the royal networks across Europe and she could help the prime minister decipher some of this. And there's some lovely images of her sitting at her desk with her prime minister, helping him interpret the latest intelligence about what one of her cousins is doing in some country. So on one level, that was really helpful. On another level, when dynastic and government interests didn't necessarily align, Victoria could use her royal spy service, if you like, to try to outmaneuver her own governments,

which she did on quite a few occasions, much to the government's annoyance. And one example came in 1864, when Germany was fighting Denmark, the British government wanted to get involved to support Denmark, Queen Victoria didn't want them to. And so she turned to her daughter, her fabulous spy inside the German royal household, and she used her intelligence to basically prevent the British government from doing what they wanted to do.

And she single-handedly altered British foreign policy. That wasn't the only time. I think it was 1886 when there was a new foreign secretary who was coming to visit the Queen. And she says to him, if you want anything, don't go to the cabinet. Come to me. Come to Windsor. I've got the best intelligence sources. And if you want anything done, don't bother with Gladstone. Don't bother with the Prime Minister, we'll do it privately.

Almost like a mafia mob boss. And that does therefore give the government a kick up the backside to sort their own intelligence services out. I mean, do you think the monarchy was driving the need for intelligence or was it intelligence that was shaping the monarchy? I think there's a bit of both. I think the monarchy, particularly under Queen Victoria, was pushing hard for more information,

particularly in areas like Russia, where the Queen didn't have quite as good sources as she did in Western Europe. So she was constantly berating her ministers over things like the Crimean War, saying, why don't we know this? What's going on with the Indian mutiny? What's going on? Why am I only being told this now? And so she is driving the need for more intelligence and a much more professional service right

from the mid 19th century. I mean, it's interesting, we've talked about Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Elizabeth I as these centers of power and influence. All women, which is interesting because most people's idea of the spy world is that it's all ruled by men. They are just head and shoulders above the guys, frankly. I mean, put them alongside it with the seventh, George the fifth. They are the supreme practitioners. They weren't just kind of figureheads.

They understood the craft. They understood what it could do, what it couldn't do. Victoria in particular understood when she could manipulate it. And that helped her wield that constitutional power that she has of warning and raising the odd eyebrow. So, Richard, Rory, we've been talking about powerful women. So, I guess we should talk about Diana, Princess of Wales, because I mean it seems very much like the two worlds plus the media came together in 1997 when she was tragically killed in that car crash in Paris. Because of the multiple inquiries, the documents are extraordinary, you know, documents from MI5, MI6, testimony from MI6 chiefs. This is all on the public record. And what's particularly striking is it's the paranoia of Diana, isn't it, that ultimately

leads to her ditching the state security protection, which I mean, we'll never know, but could well have saved her that fateful night. Remember us seeing the documents of British Home Secretaries saying, Princess Diana has insisted she's ditching her bodyguard and I want it in writing that I object to this, this is not my advice. Because they kind of, they sense that something terrible is going to happen. There's no doubt that had she had professional security teams with her in Paris in 1997, those terrible events would not have happened. She was fascinated with the intelligence world, wasn't she? So are you saying that that's sort of half paranoid and half just wanting to know?

She was certainly very anxious about electronic monitoring, and there are some fascinating accounts of her essentially ripping up the carpets and moving the pictures and everything in Kensington Palace in search of the electronic monitoring devices and the great lengths that she went to to try and avoid this kind of surveillance. It was really quite a paradoxical world. She also liked some of it. So sometimes she'd be going to a meeting somewhere and there'd be a lot of charade about keeping it secret and she'd come out and the press would be there. We now know that's because she tipped them off.

There were moments when she liked the press attention and there were moments when she found it a little bit too much one of the questions with Diana was was the state spying on her and Probably not but then the American National Security Agency have Files on Princess Diana and so people say well surely they were they were eavesdropping and bugging But when you start to dig a little bit deeper, you realize that Princess Diana was mixing with all sorts of people that the Americans would have been listening in on. So she wouldn't have necessarily been the target, but she

just happens to be talking to various African leaders or Latin American leaders who the Americans were spying on. It just gets picked up in the noise. And because Buckingham Palace, the top of British society, overlaps with the top of the spy world, she's often using her personal contacts and her friends of friends to spy back on the British state to try and find out what's going on, who's actually monitoring her phone. So quite often there'd be a personal friend and that friend's brother might work for MI6 and she was tasking these people with, if you like, a reverse gaze spying back on the British state to try and find out what was happening. But that whole world. There are spies everywhere. There are spies and conspiracies, you know, almost constantly.

So let's talk about King Charles, currently the head of the royal family. Does he still receive the same briefings as his mother Elizabeth did? He's recipient number one. And not only is he getting the intelligence reports now are not paper, they're electronics. So we've moved into the 21st century with all the gizmos and gadgets that typically surround every Prime Minister and every president. And he's visited the agencies hasn't he? He's done the royal tours and shaken the hands and given the morale boosts. If you're king and you have the right to see all this stuff and you're really interested

in all this stuff, I'm sure he's enjoying some of the access that he gets. He's a huge spy enthusiast. One of my favorite stories is when he's first courting Diana, Princess of Wales, before they kind of got together. I still, the press are just getting wind of this. They've headed off to Balmoral to try and get some private time and the press have followed them up. And of course they're stalking Charles with the long lenses through the heather, hoping to get that precious shot of Charles and Diana having a cuddle. They see Charles on his own, and he's just sat there reading a book. And it's a book on spies and the secret war written by someone called R.V. Jones, Britain's pioneering scientific intelligence chief who was countering things like the V1 and the V2 attacks, doing a lot of electronic

warfare, a lot of radar. So he was reading a book by Q. He was reading a book by Q. It's a very big academic book and the paparazzi were hoping to get a photograph of a snog, but what they got was a photograph of a very studious Charles reading his footnotes. Let's not forget that Charles is no spring chicken himself. He's been around for quite some time and has had his own brush with intelligence and assassination attempts around the investiture in 1968 when he was becoming Prince of Wales, which led to one of the more remarkable stories which we uncovered for the book. So, the whole royal family are going out to Wales for this event.

They're on the royal train. Queen Mother's there, everyone's there, and of course, Charles is obviously anxious because he's going to be the star of the show the next day. When they're about an hour into the journey, the Queen Mother calls him forward and says, terribly sorry, but the danger of assassination is so great that your place is going to be taken tomorrow by a body double. And for about 15 minutes they keep Charles going with this story. But the attempts to attack the investiture were genuine, particularly Welsh nationalists. Quite a lot of them were arrested and they were arrested because they

were arguing over the mode of attack. So some Welsh nationalists wanted to use, believe it or not, dogs with explosives strapped to them. And the people who had animal welfare at heart amongst the Welsh nationalists effectively ratted out their colleagues. The whole sort of conspiracy kind of unraveled. The Soviets were more professional. They also had plans to sabotage one of the railway bridges on the journey from Buckingham Palace up to Wales, which recently came to light. So all these things would have been milling around in Charles's mind. And I'm sure he's had quite a long apprenticeship in becoming king and having access to secret

intelligence. And so do you think it's right that the royals should still have access to all this information? I don't think they should control the information that's collected, but I do think that they have a right to know this material. And I said that I'm no natural royalist, but having written the book, I think if the king is going to exercise his constitutional right to advise and to warn.

He simply can't do that if he doesn't have access to some of the most important bits of information on which the Prime Minister is acting. So yes, I think they should. Not control, but they should have access to what they need to do their job. And what we discovered in the book is clearly they're not just advising, they're engaged in operations, they're making foreign policy, particularly vis-a-vis other leaders. And so if they're doing that they probably need to have intelligence support. Do you think that the monarchy and the Secret Service will continue pretty much as they are at the moment? I do. I think

there's a natural affinity between them, both secretive organizations, both highly mythologized organizations, both organizations which help project British power. There are long standing historical connections between them. There are personal connections between them. And I think intelligence isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's only becoming more important. There's no evidence the monarchy is going anywhere. And as long as those two institutions coexist, I think they will always have a close relationship.

One of the things we found most fascinating was that Prince William spent time interning with all the three secret services. So you know, a week on job experience, he was down at GCHQ in Chatham, he stayed at Charles' house down there. I think it's genuinely important for people from the Three Services to have a member of the Royal Family, kind of in there doing the job. It's better than doing it a week at Gregg's, I suppose. There is a Gregg's inside GCHQ, so maybe you can buy the two.

Prince Albert came to the realization that the prime function of the royal family is to keep itself going. And in your book you say that the British royal family is basically a trade union for all the other royal families around the globe. And a lot of what you've told us is about survival and self-preservation. One of the reasons that Britain's kings and queens have loved intelligence is that it keeps them alive. They're continually subjected to attacks, not only by fixated persons, but also by people trying to kill foreign leaders. The other reason that they love intelligence is because they have this role and the British monarchy are trying to

keep other monarchies in place, sometimes unsuccessfully. We see this particularly at the end of the Second World War when George VI is operating with particularly SOE to try and keep the Danish royal family in power, the Norwegians, the Greeks, and also the Belgians. So again, this is the British royal family, not just being receivers of intelligence, but engaging in operations, covert operations on behalf of all royal families. Are they mutually supportive, secret services in the royal family? It's been a journey, hasn't it? It's gone from Victoria versus the Secret Service and out maneuvering each other and then gradually over 150 years we end up in a

position of this mutual affinity between two Secret Services. Well thank you Richard and Rory for coming to see us and talk to me. I mean it's a wonderful book. Thanks very much for having us. Thank you. I have to say I found that really interesting. The fact that the royal family since the time of Queen Victoria have been a lot more involved with the Secret Services and have known a lot more of what's going on in the world of spies and espionage than I certainly realized before.

And I think that will be quite an eye-opener for a lot of people. This close relationship between the Secret Services and the Royal Family, two institutions that are both quite small, both seen as the establishment, and both obsessed with keeping secrets. Thank you for listening and do join us for our next episode of The Spy Who, hosted by Raza Jafri. Next time we open the file on Dani Lemoore, the spy who ran Mossad's fake hotel. Ethiopian Jews are being persecuted, but Mossad agent Danny has a plan to smuggle them to Israel and safety. Cue Operation Brothers which uses an old

diving resort in Sudan as its base. Hotel staff by day, secret agents by night. The team will navigate formidable dangers to ensure these refugees reach Israel. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. or the Wondery app. From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Dressed the Queen. This episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery, with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. The producers of this episode are Ashley Clevery and Philippa Gearing.

Our senior producer is Rachel Byrne. Our sound designer is Ivor Manley. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson Sink. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcan. The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our senior producer for Wondery is Theodora Leloudis and our senior managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne and Marshall Louis.