Noel Coward was a spy for Britain

Fascinating historical tidbits from this essay by Stephen Koch in the New York Times

The Playboy was a Spy

“Celebrity was wonderful cover,” Noël Coward said near the end of his life. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot ... a merry playboy.”
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Perhaps a lifetime of concealing his own private life gave him a knack for the clandestine. In any case, he said, “I wanted to prove my integrity to myself.”

So he played the fool. “I was the perfect silly ass,” he said. “Nobody ... considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I’d pass along.”

I love this

When war came, Coward was sent to Paris as a figurehead in a propaganda office, where he made it part of his cover to mock intelligence work as childish games carried out by inept duffers. When someone proposed leafleting the enemy with speeches from Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, he recalled, “I wrote in a memorandum that if the policy of His Majesty’s Government was to bore the Germans to death I didn’t think we had enough time.”

I never knew the Duke and Duchess were so pro-Nazi, a fact over looked in the breathless media coverage of the love story of the king who could not continue as king "without the help and support of the woman I love."

By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed — correctly — that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery.