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July 14, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
51:55
Edition 558 - James Parris
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Summer cranks on here in the Northern Hemisphere.
I know it's been, in some parts of the Southern Hemisphere, fairly cold one way or another, but here in the North, it is definitely warm.
But we know that before long, once people start to complain about how hot it is, it's going to flip back again and the seasons will change and it'll be hot in the south and warm in the north.
If you've been affected by some of the problems brought by the weather lately, like floods that we had recently in parts of the United Kingdom, fires in some parts of the world, then my thoughts are definitely with you.
The weather, as it manifests itself, the climate, seem to be manifesting all kinds of things at the moment.
I wish we could just have one of the old-fashioned English summers.
They seem to have gone, but I've mentioned that before, so I won't mention it again.
Now, the guest on this edition of the podcast is an extended version of a conversation you may have heard on my radio show about a topic that is utterly fascinating and not really very well documented before.
Now, James Parris in Shrewsbury, UK, on the Welsh borders, has written a fascinating and very well-researched book about a man who was recruited by the British during World War II to be effectively their astrologer and to try to get inside the mind of Adolf Hitler.
Now, Hitler was said to be sort of interested, but maybe not in these things.
But the story of how the British side came to recruit somebody, not from the UK, to be an astrologer and to supply information to the British and the Americans is a fascinating one.
So we'll get to James Parris in just a moment.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Keep them coming through this summertime.
Keep your guest suggestions coming.
They are gratefully received.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
You can follow the link and send me an email from there.
I think that's all I've got to say for now.
I'm a man of few words this time.
I don't know.
It's hot as I'm recording this.
And I don't know, do you find that when it gets really hot, it affects your trade of thought?
You know, I tend to have a long, cold drink, and then my brain kicks in again.
But at the moment, you know, it's kind of hot.
Even my glasses that I need to wear increasingly these days are steaming up a little.
But I'll spare you that image.
Okay, let's get to James Parris in Shrewsbury now and a conversation based on his book, which is called Astrologer, about an astrologer hired by the British during World War II.
I think World War II, in this regard, is a kind of gift that keeps on giving.
There are no end of stories about people's courage and about the subterfuge, about the ingenuity that was used to try to defeat the enemy, but also to mislead the enemy.
You might remember the stories of how the United Kingdom created a fake platoon almost.
Vehicles, aircraft, even the appearance of accommodation for soldiers, giving the impression that we were going to invade France at the Pas de Calais.
And of course, we didn't.
We were planning for Normandy.
But we successfully misled Hitler into believing that the invasion was going to come where everybody expected it would come at the Pas de Calais.
And that is partly how we won the war.
These things happen all the time, of course.
Secret Service agents, all sorts of tools and methods used.
But never an astrologer.
This is a story that has been buried deep in the annals of World War II.
James Paris has written about the astrologer who was hired by the Brits to try and get into the mind of Hitler and try and help us defeat the enemy.
A cunning plan, very literally.
But was it propaganda?
Was it prediction?
Was it prophecy?
What was it?
It was a very strange combination is what it was.
James Parris in Shrewsbury has written the book, The Astrologer, How British Intelligence Plotted to Read Hitler's Mind.
James, thank you for coming on.
It's nice to be here.
James, let's try to do this in three ways.
And just to say that we're having to do this one on the telephone because digital methods failed.
So there may be a little bit of external noise here, but I can hear what you're saying.
But just to explain to my listener, how did you come across this story?
It is a story that I've never seen or heard of before.
It's just by chance.
I was researching another book which came out a couple of years ago.
History Press brought it out.
They're the same publisher as the astrologer.
It was about the assassination of Edward VIII, the king who abdicated and became Duke of Windsor, or an attempted assassination.
And I was reading around, and I came across a reference to an MI5 officer.
In just one sentence, it said, who handled an astrologer who was working for intelligence.
That's all it said.
It didn't go into more detail.
There wasn't anything to go to give any more information on it.
So then I began to read around.
Found at the National Archives, there's a files in the astrologer.
There are also references to an MI5 files.
There are also references to him in naval intelligence files, military intelligence files, colonial office files.
I put these together and there's the story.
Okay, and how come this story had not been talked about before then?
Is it because it's so bizarre?
Is it, I don't know.
I've seen mentions of him in other places.
This is Louis de Vaux, the astrologer, mentions in other places, but nobody's dug into it.
Why?
I don't know, because it's a very interesting story.
Well, it is.
It's a very unlikely story.
We hadn't named him up to now.
His name was Louis de Vaul.
I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.
So I think the way to do this is probably to break it down into three parts.
Number one, the background of the times, why we would consider doing such a thing, the rise of this man In the 20s and 30s.
Then, how he was recruited, which is a hell of a story in itself.
And then what he actually did and whether he achieved anything.
If we break it down into those three segments, if that works for you, that's how we'll do it.
Okay.
So I think what we have to say before we begin all of this, though, is that we've known that many leaders through history, I think going all the way back to Julius Caesar, you know, is it in our stars or whatever the quote is from Shakespeare, but also people like Ronald Reagan were into astrology, the idea that the fate of the nation, maybe the fate of the battle or conflict lies in the stars.
So, Reagan, yeah.
Can we read into this then, James, that it was Winston Churchill who was into the stars?
There are stories, and they're no more than that, that Churchill consulted astrologers, that he first did it in World War I. He did it off and on in the 20s.
They're only stories.
There's nothing concrete.
There are enough stories to make it plausible.
Okay, so we have a suspicion, we have a feeling.
A suspicion, a feeling.
And what about the man himself then, Louis Duval?
Because, you know, he was a man, from what I read in your book, who had a bit of a showbiz background to him.
He did.
He was very successful.
Not initially.
He was a bit of a drifter initially.
He was born in 1903 in Berlin.
He wasn't German.
He was Hungarian.
His father was Hungarian, a minor nobility.
His mother was Bavarian.
They lived in Berlin because his father had taken up business and he had mining interests.
So De Vaux was educated in Germany.
I mean, to all intents and purposes, he was a German, even though he had Hungarian nationality.
His father died just before the First World War.
Up until then, they'd been quite prosperous.
Fortunes declined during and shortly after the war, which meant Duvol couldn't go to university, wouldn't be able to follow a profession.
Family contacts got him a job in a bank, which didn't suit him at all, didn't suit his temperament or his abilities.
He drifted from there into doing design work of old things for a dress business.
He got into some trouble there.
I think he became too friendly with one of the girls working there.
Then he drifted into the film business.
Once again, he was bored.
Seems to be a common thing in his life.
He began to write.
When he was in the office, he finished a novel.
The novel was immediately successful.
I mean, as Duval himself said, it wasn't great literature, but it had good characters, strong characters, lots of action, lots of interesting scenes it was set in.
He became a successful novelist almost overnight.
From there, he began to write screen, he was a screenwriter for films.
He adapted to the talkies very easily.
So by the 20s, end of the 20s in Germany, he's well known, he's prosperous, and he's married.
And then astrology comes on the scene.
You say that astrology comes on the scene.
I mean, he had an awful lot then if he was getting into screenplays, successful with books.
You know, this guy had a successful path in front of him.
How did astrology appear to him?
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, we see people turning to astrology when their lives are difficult, when they've got problems that they don't seem to be able to resolve.
Wasn't like that for Duvall at all.
He went to a party with his wife, a party given by a friend of his who was a composer.
When they got there, it turned out it was more like an astrological seminar, which, according to his autobiography, Duvaux got annoyed at.
He thought he'd been brought there under false pretences.
So they left.
Him and his wife left the party and talking about it, they said what a load of nonsense it was.
A few months passed, another party, Duval goes to the Dutch community in Berlin.
Every year they had an annual ball.
Duval has friends in the Dutch community.
He has friends everywhere.
He has friends in the Dutch community.
He goes to the ball.
He's introduced to a Baron.
The Baron mentions that he's very interested in astrology.
Duval says he thinks it's an odd nonsense.
The Baron says, let's do a test.
He asks Duval's birthday, which turns out he's an Aquarian.
He consults a notebook that he carries around with him.
He gives Duval this snap character portrait, which impresses Duval.
But he says he's still not happy because he thinks maybe, maybe the Baron's mind-reading, very suspicious character.
The Baron says to him, well, let's do another experiment.
Give me the birthday of somebody that you don't know very much about, and I obviously don't know anything at all about.
Duval goes to his wife and says, give me the birthday of a friend of yours I've never met.
She gives him the birthday.
Duval goes back to the Baron.
The Baron consults his notebook again, gives another character portrait, writes it down, gives it to Duval.
Duval takes it to his wife.
She's completely impressed.
She said, how come the man know all these things?
Duval's captured.
He's beginning to believe in astrology.
But it's one thing, isn't it, as we've seen on the show that I do, with astrologers and psychics and other people who do these sorts of things, it's one thing to give people a character analysis.
And it is.
I agree with you.
It is quite remarkable that sometimes you find particular kinds of people were born on particular dates in my field of broadcasting.
I'm a Gemini.
A lot of broadcasters are Geminis.
Now, maybe that's just a coincidence.
Maybe it's in the stars.
I don't know, but I've always found that interesting.
So he was hooked in by that aspect.
The Baron says to him, do you want me to draw a full horoscope up for you?
So Duval agrees.
And two or three days later, he gives in the horoscope, which says a lot more things about Duval's life, his childhood, his upbringing which also impresses obviously Duval.
But there's one incident and this is really trivial but it does seem to be the clincher.
The Baron tells Duval that in a few days he'll be suffering some pain.
I mean we're all going to suffer some pain in a few days aren't we?
Duval cuts himself shaving twice.
There's blood and there's pain and that really does clinch it for him.
The Baron explains why the combination of, I'm not sure what it was, Mars and Neptune an aspect to his natal chart, you know, the astrological jargon, devolves Hutz, he begins to learn astrology.
How does he do that in the country that he was in in that time?
where did he go to learn?
Well, what's interesting about Germany after we...
It had been defeated.
The old order had gone.
There was massive inflation.
There were attempted coups against the government.
This complete atmosphere of uncertainty.
Astrology becomes more and more popular.
There are lots of astrologers around.
There are lots of astrology books.
De Vaux had some initial lessons from the Baron.
And then, as he says himself, he teaches himself from books.
How does he come to realize that he's sorry to jump in?
How does he come to realize that he's got a bit of a flair for this?
That's it.
I mean, I was interested in astrology when I was younger, and I looked at the technical aspects of it.
And one thing that does become obvious is that intuition and flair plays a big part in it.
It's partly an imaginative exercise.
People might get the wrong idea.
You've got a few facts, you've got bits of information, you've got stuff that you know about planets and houses and signs.
To draw them together in a satisfying picture, you need intuition and creative ability.
These are the things that Duval's got.
He's a novelist.
He's a screenwriter.
He can make a story.
Okay, he can make a story.
Do you think he was sincere in wanting to do this, you know, to help people?
Or do you think he was just using it as a way to develop narratives, you know, to use his creative flair?
I mean, that's interesting.
Devolver's an interesting character.
He's a complex character.
It's sometimes difficult to work out what his motifs are.
And remember, there's also the power aspect of astrology.
I mean, if you can tell someone about their life and convince them that you understand their life, there's some power in that, isn't there?
He gives some examples.
He wrote an autobiography.
He gives some examples of this point in Germany, the advice that he's giving people.
Some small level advice.
Don't take that particular flight.
I think there's going to be a problem with it.
In Duvol's example, the person he's speaking to doesn't take the flight.
The plane crashes.
Everybody dies.
Is that true?
I don't know.
One of the film producers that he's friendly with is making a film.
He's in despair that it's going wrong.
He needs to raise more money.
He's going to give up.
Duval says to him, no, this film's going to be a success.
You're going to be a success.
The film producer pushes on, raises more money, makes the film.
It's a success.
These are the examples that Duval gives of his successes in astrology at this point.
Okay, so he decides to build that into his folio of things that he does.
When does it begin and how does it begin to take over as the main thing that he does?
Hitler comes to power in 1933.
Duvol is a Roman Catholic, but he's got Jewish ancestry.
I think it's his grandparents or his great-grandparents.
Things are getting difficult.
Things are getting difficult for Jewish people in the film industry, which he's completely involved in now.
Lots of people in the film industry are leaving Germany.
They know they can see the way the wind's blowing.
He stays on for a couple of years.
He stays on until 1935.
He's in Austria.
One of his plays is being produced in Vienna.
He gets almost a tap on the shoulder saying it might be best if you don't come back to Germany.
He comes to England where he doesn't know a few people.
And he leaves his wife behind as well.
He lives in such a hurry.
She joins a year or so later.
So now he's in England.
Okay, let's park the story at that point, because this is the point where it starts to get interesting for us in terms of World War II, because he becomes involved with our security services.
And the extraordinary happens, as is documented in the records, but not widely talked about.
a man who is an astrologer in Germany and Austria, becomes involved with our security services in the hope that his astrological abilities help our side to win the war.
James, What happens then?
He's living in a hotel room.
Obviously, he can't get the royalties for his novels from Germany.
He needs money.
He understands astrology.
He's also quite a good networker.
He becomes a professional astrologer.
He builds up quite a clientele.
We don't know who these people are, but we do know that they're influential and they can afford to pay quite a bit of money For astrological advice.
One of the people, one of his clients, is the Romanian ambassador.
Now, the Romanian ambassador is very impressed with astrology.
When he was in Switzerland with his wife and was having treatment, he meets a German-Swiss astrologer called Kraft who gives him some really, really some advice about Romanian politicians and their destiny that nobody could possibly know about.
This impresses the Romanian ambassador.
His name is Tilia.
He's talking to Duval about this.
Both of them now, keen on astrology.
I get the impression that Duval actually believes that this isn't a scam.
This isn't just a money-making racket.
They're talking about the astrologer that Tillia met.
Tillia is convinced that he's Hitler's astrologer.
A few things that Kraft has said make Tillia believe that he's Hitler's astrologer.
War comes.
Tufol tries to become involved.
He tries to join the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
None of them are interested in him.
He says he's not even allowed to dig ditches in Hyde Park, air raid precaution ditches.
Is that because of his partly German roots?
I think his partly German roots.
Partly he's a big figure of land, which is a nice way of putting it.
I don't think he would have thrived in the armed forces.
So in other words, he had a bit too much to say for himself.
That's right.
He's looking for a niche, as he calls it, in his autobiography.
Obviously, I think he's genuinely anti-fascist for good reason.
He wants to play a part in the war.
The only thing that he's got to contribute is astrology.
Tillia convinces him this is the only thing that he's got to contribute.
Tillia says to him, you could talk to intelligence.
You could tell them that there are things you can do with astrology.
You can say to them, you don't have to believe in astrology.
But the point is, Hitler believes in astrology.
You can say to intelligence, I can tell you what advice Hitler's been given by his astrologers.
And it kicks off from there.
Duval sees immediately the potentialities in this.
Tillier says he'll arrange contacts for him.
Tillier's quite close to the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Halifax.
And he knows a lot of other influential people, former ministers, former chancellors.
He kicks the ball off for Duvall.
So, you know, it's a question of not what you know, but who you know.
He was able to get right to the heart of power.
It plays a big part.
If he'd just been some astrologer living in a hotel room in Bayswater, I don't think he would have got anywhere.
But because of this series of contacts, ultimately he's in.
I think we just need to explore for a moment, James, if we can, the interest of Hitler in astrology.
You know, this has been written about.
We know about that.
Hitler seemed to be in two minds about astrology, though, because, of course, later he had a purge on psychics and astrologers and people like that.
But at this stage of the war, or pre-war, Hitler was into the stars.
I think most recent biographers, and especially, you know, probably the best one in English, Ian Kershaw, believes definitely Hitler wasn't a believer in astrology.
Lots of people around wanted to believe that the secret of his success must be the occult.
I mean, Hitler as a politician operated in an unconventional way.
He didn't play diplomacy in the way that, say, the English and the French were used to it.
He had a run of successes, as we know, up until the war.
One of the explanations that people wanted to give for these successes wasn't perhaps their own inability.
There must be some secret behind it.
It must be astrology.
So lots of people believe that he acts on astrological advice.
But I think all the evidence is that he had contempt for astrology and any of those things.
I had read that Hitler was into numerology, the power of numbers.
That is something I had read.
That's a good one as well.
Someone said his lucky number was seven, which is why he used to make his big moves on Sundays, seventh day of the week.
I think he made his big moves on Sundays because he thought Western politicians would be having a long weekend.
Someone else said his lucky number.
And Hitler's supposed to have said, well, I don't.
I'm not suspicious.
I'm not worried about the 13th, but other people are.
So it's good to get them on the wrong footing.
Okay, so you have an enemy in Hitler or a rising potential enemy in Hitler, and you have somebody on this side who might be able to get, literally, as in the title of your book, into Hitler's mind and get an idea of the sorts of advice astrologically that he might be getting.
And, you know, if you can work out what the advice to Hitler might be, you get an insight into what he might be about to do.
So Duvol is introduced to the right people, is he?
He is.
Initially, there's a dinner at the Spanish Embassy.
Not sure who set this up, you know, whether Tillia set it up or whoever set it up.
The Spanish ambassador invites Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and a few other people, and Duval.
At the end of the evening, dinner finished.
Chairs are pulled around.
The ambassador says to Duval, now will you tell Lord Halifax about Hitler's horoscope.
Duval acts surprised.
Oh, I wasn't expecting this.
I haven't got the horoscope with me, but I know enough about it to be able to tell you.
He speaks for an hour about Hitler's horoscope.
He explains from his readings why Hitler did this at that point, why Hitler did that at this point.
It's all written in the stars.
Hanifax seems interesting.
According to Duval in his autobiography, Hanifax asks intelligent questions.
He doesn't dismiss what Duval is saying.
A few days later, the propaganda section at the Foreign Office contacts MI5.
Do you know anything about this man?
We're considering giving him a job.
MI5 do know something about this man because for two years he's been giving them information about other refugees from Germany, some of whom may be Nazi agents.
MI5 obviously takes an interest in people coming from Germany at the end of the 30s, including Devol.
He's partly working for them.
I mean, he's not a full-time agent or anything.
He's just an informant.
Right, so he was already an informer.
That makes it even more interesting.
MI5.
And the interesting thing about that as well is that MI5 had a file on him pre-war, late 1930s, and that was destroyed by German bombs in the Blitz.
Only the second file, the wartime file, survives.
It'd be really, really interesting to have been able to see that first file just to see exactly what Duvall was doing with MI5.
It's referred to occasionally in the second file, earlier contacts, but no detail.
So we don't know how deeply involved he was with MI5, but he certainly was involved.
He was known by them.
So there must have been a meeting where his involvement with the security services with MI5 was given the green light.
Talk to me about that.
How did that happen?
The most interesting initial contact is with naval intelligence.
Duvald is invited to a meeting by the director of naval intelligence, John Godfrey.
He's obviously very impressive because John Godfrey sent a memo to the first Lord of the Admiralty, the political head of the Navy, the first sea lord and some other admirals saying, I've been talking to an astrologer.
What he says is very interesting.
I think he could be useful for intelligence.
He tells Duval's story.
We don't have to believe in astrology, but we know Hitler believes in astrology.
So if we know what Hitler's being told, we're in a good position.
I mean, this, I read the memo, it's incredible.
I mean, it's almost unbelievable that a senior naval officer should be writing a memo saying, let's recruit an astrologer.
And then some of the comments on the bottom of the memo by other naval people, they agree.
I mean, they think it's absolutely bizarre.
But they caveat it and almost get themselves out of being accused of believing in Mumbo Jumbo by saying, you know, even if none of this is true, if we can work out what Hitler is being told, then we don't have to believe in any of it.
We just have to be aware of it.
That's right.
Exactly that.
So, you know, we can ride two horses.
I was thinking the other day about an analogy.
Imagine Rishi Sunak presenting his budget, goes to the cabinet and says, I think this, this, and this and this.
We should do this, this, and this.
And by the way, I've got an astrologer who's telling me it could be a good idea.
I mean, it's equivalent, I think.
The astrologers told me what the inflation rate may be in six months' time.
I mean, it's at that, therefore.
And as you say, they're stepping in and they're backing off.
They're covering themselves at the same time.
What they're really interested in at this point, we're talking about the summer of 1940, you know, the Battle of Britain summer, the retreat from Dunkirk summer.
The next thing that's going to come is the invasion.
Everybody's expecting it.
When's it going to be?
I mean, this is the question.
This is the question that everybody's asking.
So did Louis Duvol have to do anything, as so many people who were recruited to intelligence, they have to do something that proves not only are they trustworthy, but also they're useful.
Did he have to do anything that was almost like a test for them?
No, there's nothing like that.
I mean, in fact, they seem to be bending over backwards to accommodate him, even though in some parts of MI5 there's still lots of suspicion about him.
About this time, the Special Operations Executive is set up SOE, and that mission is to make things difficult for Hitler in Europe, support the resistance, use propaganda, use black propaganda, which means tell as many lies as you need to.
Duvol is taken into that.
The head of operations in SOE, an ex-banker, Charles Sambrough, is very fond of Duvol.
I mean, he seems very impressed with him.
He seems to trust him as well.
There don't seem to be any questions asked.
Can we absolutely trust this man?
So in the way that we would regard it today, Duval was not vetted.
He just seemed to be a personable chap and somebody who might have something that we can use.
Unless there was some vetting mentioned in the file that was destroyed.
But do you vet an informant?
I don't think so.
I mean, you only vet someone who's going to be working directly for you.
In the second file, the one from the wartime one, there's no mention of any vetting of Duval.
It's almost he knows so-and-so, who knows so-and-so knows so-and-so.
So things are okay.
So how was this, James?
How was this arrangement going to work then?
Would Duval write horoscopes?
Would he write reports?
Would he give in-person off-the-record briefings?
How was it set up to work?
He set up what he called a Psychological Research Bureau.
This was financed by SOE, Special Operations Executive.
He was given very luxurious accommodation in the Grosvenor House Hotel.
He was made a captain in the British Army.
A captain.
Okay, so he was given a rank.
He was given a rank.
I mean, there's lots of bizarre things about this as well.
I mean, there's no record that there was actually a Captain Louis Duval, but he was given a rank.
He had a uniform.
He was paid captain's pay.
He was given free accommodation.
Now, in return, there were a number of things they had to do.
There was an MI5 liaison officer with the War Office called Gordon Lennox, Major Gordon Lennox, who Duval also knew from before the war.
Gordon Lennox is another one of these interesting characters.
He comes up intelligence.
He's a major in the Indian Army in the 20s.
He retires in 1930.
He becomes a playwright.
This is how he meets Duval.
So, you know, when Duval comes to England, they're immediate acquaintances.
He's made Duval's hand in MI5.
Everything Duval does to do with military intelligence goes to Lennox.
Lennox passes it off to the War Office, passes it on to the War Office.
At the same time, Duval is doing work for SOE, character studies of German generals, that kind of thing.
He's also making predictions, prophecies of what he thinks might happen.
And this is what we come to.
When's the invasion going to be?
Okay, we'll tell that story in the next segment.
What a fascinating story, though, that the British actually took on board somebody who was an astrologer, had trained as an astrologer, was also a writer of books and screenplays.
So very good at putting together a narrative, but also very good at getting people on his side and making them aware that he is somebody who can be trusted.
He's a nice guy.
And I think some of this, and it's only my thought about this, we'll explore it in the next bit, is about the way that society worked in those times.
You know, these days we have people who are careerists.
There are people who are career soldiers and intelligence people.
In those days, as you heard, you know, we had people who might be a bit of a playwright on the side.
A very different world, and perhaps only in a world like that, plus a world under the pressure of World War II.
How do we defeat the rising tide of Nazism?
You know, perhaps those things came together, the two of them, in the persona of this man, Louis de Vaul, an astrologer who got on the side of the United Kingdom trying to defeat Hitler.
So I made a point, and I don't want to dwell on it too long, that the reason this guy got so far and so deeply embedded was partly to do with the way that society worked in those days.
What do you think of that?
Am I right?
Am I wrong?
I think so.
I think you're completely right.
There's a lot of chamocracy going on in intelligence.
I mean, people are recruited in clubs.
You know, they're the cousin of some.
So this is why you get the Cambridge Five, isn't it?
You know, the Cambridge Five recruited as communist agents at Cambridge in the mid-30s.
They rise in British intelligence, the Foreign Office, completely unsuspected.
I mean, they really do rise to the top.
So the idea being that Louis Duvalle, you know, he's one of us, he's a good egg, he couldn't possibly be a bad guy.
And, you know, he might well be useful at least to the propaganda effort.
Yeah, there are elements in MR5, I mean, who are naturally suspicious.
Somebody there writes in the file, why doesn't he speak Hungarian?
He claims to be Hungarian.
Well, everybody knows why he doesn't speak Hungarian.
He's explained that.
He was brought up and educated in Germany.
That's why he's that kind of thing.
There are suspicions, but yeah, he's generally accepted.
And he wasn't stunningly accurate either.
I think in 1938, that was the year before the war started in 1939, didn't he say that he didn't believe that there would be a war?
Only him.
I think most astrologers thought there's a good way out that DeWaul and other astrologers use.
What they say is astrologically, if Hitler and Mussolini started a war, it would be a disaster for them.
So any reasonable person wouldn't start a war.
That's the kind of cop-out that an astrologer can use.
So they can say, I was right to say there wouldn't be a war, because no sensible person would start a war.
These people started a war.
Either they were ignoring astrological advice.
Well, they're stupid.
Okay.
You know, whatever I say, I'm right.
No, I totally get that.
But then two years later, almost two years later in 1940, he said that the horoscope for Hitler at that time showed he was facing imminent danger and that anything new, any new enterprise that he tried, would be doomed to fail.
That was wrong because, of course, later he swept through Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
You can't be any more wrong.
No, I think about a month later that happened as well.
The other thing is other astrologers are saying the same.
I mean, you could read this two ways.
I mean, is astrology genuine?
Are all astrologers agreeing on what should be happening?
And is Hitler either ignoring his astrologer, according to them, or is he just ignoring it?
Or is he, for us, for our purposes, does he not follow astrology at all?
I mean, you've seen from the book there's a list of the interesting failures of Du Vaugh.
He doesn't see that the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece is coming in 1941.
He doesn't see that Nazi Germany is going to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Not a very good record, is it?
Not a great record, and yet he's being maintained at the rank of captain, paid expenses and a nice salary in the Grosvenor House Hotel.
you know, it's all going very nicely for him by the looks of it.
He must be delivering something.
There's the interesting one about when's the invasion going to be, you know, back to 1940, back to the late summer of 1940.
You know, Britain's raised the Hungarian dad's army.
We're in a desperate state, and the army's escaped from France, left all its heavy equipment behind, so we mostly rifles and machine guns.
The only thing that's protecting Britain is, of course, the Navy as ever, and the RAF, the Battle of Britain.
Duvolves says good time for the invasion would be October the 19th.
He's that precise.
There's a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
The minutes are in the archives.
I mean, this is the second most incredible minute that I've read.
These are the top people in the Army, Navy, and the Air Force.
They say, well, the weather looks good for a German invasion in October.
This, these circumstances seem to make it possible.
And then at the end of the paragraph, and an astrologer also says that this would be a time for a function at time of it.
It's absolutely bizarre, isn't it?
Well, to think that he was getting name-checked there.
You know, clearly there were people who believed, but as you said earlier, there were people in the security service, in MI5SOE, wherever, who had their doubts.
About him as a person, yeah.
Yeah, there are two sets of doubts, aren't there?
There's doubts about astrology generally, and there's also doubts about this man as a person.
They are separate, aren't they?
So look, he was living quite a successful life.
Sorry to jump in, but he was living a nice life in the hotel.
How was he living?
You know what I'm saying?
How was he living the high life?
When he first comes here, as I said, he left his wife behind.
And then he says in his autobiography, he was feeling very lonely.
His wife then comes to England and he packs her off to Chile.
I mean, why he packed her off to Chile, I don't know.
He doesn't say in his autobiography.
And then the stories start about his endless girlfriend's endless affairs.
So yeah, he's living a good life and he's got the money now to do it as well.
But in the meantime, in your book, you say that for reasons that we don't know, he sends his wife off to Chile, South America.
And there is a suspicion that maybe she is passing information back to the Germans because South America is a hotbed of German involvement and involvement with us.
I mean, the two sides were melded down there one way or another.
You know, there was a suspicion that his wife was passing secrets or passing information.
MI6, the MI6 agent in Chile asked him, again, asked MI5 what they know about Duvaul because they said his wife seems to be mixing with Nazis and seems to get lots of letters from Germany.
So yeah, the immediate suspicion is, I suppose what's interesting is what level of information or intelligence has Duvaal got that would be useful to the Nazis?
I'm not really sure about that.
I don't think he's drawn into sort of high-level strategic business.
And there's always the possibility, of course, that she might have been feeding stuff back to him.
There's that, yeah.
And of course, he's not going to mention that.
There's nothing in the files that says Devolve's given us some interesting information from his wife, so can't be sure, but yeah, it's a possibility.
I mean, this is a murky world, isn't it?
Well, it is a murky world, without a...
I mean, everybody is watching one another in the intelligence agencies.
I mean, MI5 doesn't completely trust SOE.
People in SOE don't trust other sections of SOE.
You know, it's an interesting, dodgy world.
So, James, what do you think Duvall himself might have regarded as being his greatest achievement for the Allies?
Well, he's got a problem with his autobiography.
He's got a problem with the Official Secrets Act, hasn't he?
There are only so many things that he can say.
I mean, the only way we know about Duvall's opinion is what he says in his autobiography and a couple of other books that he wrote.
And there's a big limit on what he's allowed to say.
I mean, I think I may have mentioned through to the end of the war when MI5 found that he was writing his autobiography and demanded to see the manuscript.
They weren't happy at all.
I mean, one, they didn't want it revealed that he'd been involved with intelligence at all.
Two, they were worried about some of the things that he was saying about personalities in MI5 and intelligence.
You know, just a bit too much information.
So what he actually says about his wartime activity is very, very thin.
You have to fill in the gaps of what's available in the files and the archives.
So how long did he work in that unit in the Posh Hotel?
How long did he do that for?
He did that until mid-1941 when he came up with a wonderful idea which he called the Orchestra of Hitler's Death.
And the idea now was to completely undermine Hitler and the German population by constantly suggesting Hitler's not a superman, Hitler's going to die, Hitler's going to die this year, Germany's going down into defeat.
And the way he suggested that they should do that was to plant stories all over the world through the colonial office and through embassies, getting local soothsayers to say Hitler's going to die this year.
Okay, so like we said, part of this has been prophecy, but a big part of this is propaganda, too.
We're moving into propaganda.
We're moving into black propaganda now, which, you know, there was white propaganda And there was black propaganda.
I think we're moving into the area of Duval using astrology rather than simply using astrological techniques for, as you say, propaganda purposes.
So, those things that he came up with for local soothsayers to pass on, did they have any basis of fact in them, or was Duvall now working like he did when he was writing books and screenplays?
Was that pure fiction?
To read his paper that he sends to intelligence on the orchestra of Hitler's death is like reading the outline of a film script.
I mean, it's wonderful, it's incredible, it's very imaginative, it's very colourful, and there's a purpose behind it as well.
He knows what he's doing, he knows what he wants to do.
It's like almost, I'm not going to read Hitler's mind, I'm now going to destroy Hitler's mind.
So, from our point of view, then, again, sorry to jump in, it's this telephone line, but from our point of view, a useful man, even if he wasn't the greatest predictor of events in the world, he was very good at being able to use the techniques that he knew to seed mistrust and doubt and fear on the other side.
Exactly that.
I mean, he's sent to America to do this.
I mean, he's so useful at this that he's sent off to America.
He's sent off to America as a civilian, as a Hungarian astrologer who's fled Europe.
And his job in America is to undermine Hitler and convince the American people that they should end neutrality.
They should join in the war.
And he's very successful at what he does there.
He's very popular and respected.
Newspapers call him the modern Mostradamus.
Really?
And the press is very friendly.
In the book, I quote a few of the interviews that he gives, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News.
And they're all over him.
They love what he has to say, and they build him up.
They boost him.
So, as we would say today, he's on a roll.
Was he used throughout the war?
Did he stay in America?
Did he come back to the UK?
What did he do?
When America comes into the war, and ironically, it's not Germany that attacks America, it's Japan.
So Duvol had been building up Hitler as the demon in America, but it's the Japanese who actually draw America in.
He's ordered back to England.
He gets back to London.
He goes to the Grosvenor House Hotel, expecting to go back to his room.
He sees suite, I mean, not room.
All the furniture's been moved out.
He's at a loose end.
He doesn't know what to do.
He speaks to Lennox.
Lennox says he has a few ideas.
Within a few weeks, Duval is working for the Political Warfare Executive, as it was called.
Black propaganda against Germany.
Job of political warfare executive is complete use of propaganda to undermine the Germans.
It's headed by Sefton Delmer, who's a similar character to Duval.
He's a very interesting man.
He's been a journalist.
He seemed to be everywhere the action was.
He was in the Spanish Civil War.
He was on the Polish border when German troops crossed in September 1939.
He was in Paris when German troops were just up the road in 1940.
He's another colourful character.
Him and Duval get on really well.
They're working together on black propaganda.
So Duval starts the war as a predictor or somebody who's seen as a predictor and comes to the end of the war as somebody who's very definitely a propagandist.
So from his point of view, he had a good war.
Yeah, what's interesting is he's doing reverse prediction.
PWE sets up phony German astrological magazines based on astrological magazines that existed in Germany before the war.
They post-date them.
So they bring one out, say, in June 1942.
They date it December 1942, which makes it very easy for Duvaul to put astrological predictions in there about what's happened already.
I think it tells us an awful lot about the way warfare is conducted.
Is it necessary to defeat the Nazis?
I think this is what Duvaule and everyone else would have thought.
It's an astonishing story, and this is not all of it by any manner or means.
Have you had any reaction about the book?
I know that you got it.
It wasn't reviewed, but it was extensively described.
You got a fantastic feature in the mail on Sunday.
So, you know, people are starting to pay attention, aren't they?
It was good.
Yeah, I was really pleased with that.
Yeah, I mean, as you say, it's an interesting story.
It's a bizarre story.
It's a story that's not been told before in this way.
So, yeah, I think there'll be a reaction.
I think so, too.
I think it's a fantastic story.
Sorry we had to struggle with a phone line, James, but I wish you every success with the book.
Remind us the title of the book again.
It's called The Astrologer, How British Intelligence Plotted to Read Hitler's Mind, and published by the History Press.
And written by James Parris in Shrewsbury.
James, thank you very much indeed.
Thanks, Howard.
Nice to talk to you.
And once again, my apologies for the telephone quality of the interview.
I think it was possible to hear every word.
We tried to do it digitally.
I spent about an hour trying to clarify the digital connection, just couldn't do it.
I think there was a problem at his end.
So we did it on the phone in the end.
But I don't think it detracts from what is a great story.
James Paris, the book is called Astrologer, and I wish him well with it.
He's a good man.
Okay, more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
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