The FBI had more than one source apparently and the Times though fit to print this article about it which I include in full. I actually think that Murdoch and his henchmen print this sort of stuff as a sort of mafia warning to those in power of whatever stripe that they can turn on you if needs be and ensure that his and his corporation interests are looked after when needs be.
Lord Mountbatten’s ‘lust for young men’ revealed
Newly released FBI files give grim detail on the private life of Prince Charles’s mentor and his wife — ‘persons of extremely low morals’
Grant Tucker
Sunday August 18 2019, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Rumours have swirled about Lord Mountbatten’s private life since his assassination in an IRA bomb attack 40 years ago
He was the war hero who led allied efforts in southeast Asia, the statesman who was so admired as last viceroy of India that he was invited to be its first governor-general, and the family man who was Prince Philip’s uncle and a valued mentor to Prince Charles.
But recently uncovered FBI files and new interviews paint the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma as a sexually voracious man whose bisexuality became a theme of US intelligence files. The documents came to light during research for a biography of Lord Mountbatten and his wife Edwina by Andrew Lownie, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and president of the Biographers’ Club.
Since the assassination of Mountbatten in an IRA bomb attack 40 years ago, rumours have swirled about his sexuality, fuelled by his comment: “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.”
While Lady Mountbatten’s extramarital affairs are documented and acknowledged by their children, her husband’s private life has rarely been discussed. His official biographer wrote: “To suggest that such a man was actively homosexual seems to be flying not merely in the face of the evidence but also of everything we understand about his character.”
The FBI files cover more than three decades. The first is dated February 1944, soon after Mountbatten became supreme allied commander of southeast Asia. Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies, when interviewed about another matter, had mentioned being an intimate of Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary and their ladies-in-waiting.
“She states that in these circles Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife are considered persons of extremely low morals. She stated that Lord Louis Mountbatten was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys. In Lady Decies’ opinion he is an unfit man to direct any sort of military operations because of this condition. She stated further that his wife Lady Mountbatten was considered equally erratic.”
It was signed EE Conroy, head of the New York field office, who wrote that she “appears to have no special motive in making the above statements” and found her to be of sound mind.
It is not known if the material was passed to the British government. Much of Mountbatten’s FBI file remains closed. Further US intelligence files were added after the war as Mountbatten became Nato commander of allied forces in the Mediterranean, then admiral of the fleet, and later chief of the defence staff.
In Lownie’s book, The Mountbattens: their Lives & Loves, Ron Perks, who was Mountbatten’s driver in Malta in 1948, breaks a silence of more than 70 years to say that one favoured destination, the Red House near Rabat, “was an upmarket gay brothel used by senior naval officers”, which he had not realised at the time. In the UK homosexual acts were illegal until 1967. After that the age of consent for homosexuals was 21 until long after Mountbatten’s death.
Interest in the Mountbattens peaked around the Suez crisis, with FBI files opened in November 1955 and November 1956. Many memos pertaining to his homosexuality have since been redacted or destroyed. One file dated April-July 1956 was destroyed in May 2017, shortly after Lownie requested the records.
It was during the mid-1950s that Edwina came under scrutiny because of her close friendship with Krishna Menon, the Indian defence minister, and numerous men involved with the civil rights movement. At the same time, the FBI sent a report on Lord Mountbatten’s homosexuality to the Department of Justice.
In April 1957 the FBI produced a memo on allegations of an affair between Paul Robeson, the singer, and Edwina, who had several liaisons with black men. She had an on-off relationship with Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson and is said to have given the West Indian singer and pianist a gold bracelet bearing her name and a jewelled penis sheath from Cartier.
Edwina later adopted a new lover, Lieutenant Colonel Harold “Bunny” Phillips, a 6ft 5in officer of the Coldstream Guards, while her husband enjoyed a decades-long relationship with Yola Letellier, the Frenchwoman upon whom Colette based her 1944 novella, Gigi.
Lady Pamela Hicks, the youngest daughter of Lord and Lady Mountbatten, wrote about her mother’s affairs. “The ramifications were messy and complex,” she wrote in a memoir of her childhood. “When my father first heard that she had taken a lover, he was devastated. But eventually, using their reserves of deep mutual affection, my parents managed to negotiate a way through this crisis and found a modus vivendi.”
Indeed it was discomfort with his sexuality that drove Mountbatten’s ambition, according to Lownie: “His sense of inadequacy in his private life found an outlet in his determination for public office.”
The most intriguing of the documents is from May 1968, when a renowned FBI agent by the name of John Grombach discusses “a number of reports pertaining to the alleged homosexuality of Anthony Eden, Earl Mountbatten and [the diplomat] Anthony Nutting”. One of his sources was Lady Judith Listowel, who had been married to “Billy” Hare, the future 5th Earl of Listowel and secretary of state for India.
Not surprisingly for a man of royal birth with film-star looks, Mountbatten cultivated a large group of gay friends, including Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, Ivor Novello and Tom Driberg, who gave him the moniker “Mountbottom”. The book contains an interview with a man who was Mountbatten’s lover throughout the 1970s, an unnamed neighbour then in his twenties.
Francis Wheen, a biographer of Driberg, collected material on Mountbatten but it was destroyed in a shed fire. One of the lost letters had been sent to him by a man who claimed Mountbatten had tried to seduce him when he was 17.
Wheen said: “The young naval rating was lined up to ‘go on a picnic’ with Mountbatten when the great man was visiting (I think) Malta. On the day, the youth was startled to discover that it was à deux.”
In the new book, to be published on Thursday, Anthony Daly, a rent boy to the rich and famous during the 1970s, who had a close relationship with Driberg, claims: “Tom said Mountbatten had something of a fetish for uniforms — handsome young men in military uniforms (with high boots) and beautiful boys in school uniform.”
A fruitful source of young men was the Life Guards, the book suggests. An unnamed former officer claimed Mountbatten had in the mid-1960s set up another young officer in a Belgravia flat.
Lownie also found evidence of a relationship between the young Louis Mountbatten and his private tutor. When he was 13 he spent several weeks in Dorset recovering from whooping cough and was taught by Frederic Lawrence Long, an unmarried man in his thirties, but their relationship lasted long after the summer of 1914.
Their correspondence was intense. In in 1916, Long wrote: “As you know there is only one Dick in the world for me & there never will be anyone before or anywhere near him in my affections. It is hardly necessary for me to add that I would give anything to wipe the floor with you. Goodbye my best beloved & dearest kid.”
Long officiated as a priest at Louis and Edwina’s wedding, but Mountbatten made no reference to him in letters to his family.
In 1980 Pat MacLellan, Mountbatten’s former military assistant, wrote in a letter: “The interesting biography will be the one that is published in 30 or 40 years’ time when the dust has settled.”
Mountbatten once said: “No biography has any value unless it is written with warts and all.”
Lownie said yesterday: “I am a serious historian rather than a tabloid journalist but in a full biography I had to deal with many of the allegations which have repeatedly been raised.”
@GrantTucker