• Sir Ian Fraser  "Tito, traitors and treachery"
• Mr David Turner "Communist in the SOE"
• Lady Maclean of Dunconnel "Tito, Klugmann and SOE"
• Mr Petar Jankovic "Tito, ethnic cleanser"
• Mr Richard Lamb "Churchill’s big mistake"

The Crown Prince of Yugoslavia, Alexander Karageorgevitch was born in Claridge's in 1945, and has moved to Park Lane: a journey which may seem shorter than those taken by some of his fellow Eastern European candidate monarchs. 

In other respects, too, Prince Alexander sees himself as a symbol of unity and continuity: 'Really what other institutions, apart from the monarchy, are there with any credit in Serbia today? The old Communist party? Even if Milosevic is still there, his party is discredited. The opposition parties, though I admire their efforts, have to work together for a government of 
national salvation and get on with the badly needed reforms.' 

'The Church?' I suggested innocently. 

'Of course, the Orthodox Church is of the greatest importance in Serbia but the Church is not a political institution. But I must tell you, the Church has declared itself openly and positively in favour of the monarchy. The Patriarch said so explicitly when I saw him a week or two ago in the monastery of Pec in Kosovo. Not just the Patriarch, but bishops and priests think the same.' 

'Did you find other unexpected support for the monarchy?' 

'Leave aside the considerable growth in monarchical feeling among the politicians and their parties. The Democratic party is more explicitly for the monarchy than it was before the bombing. The Serbian Renewal Movement is also for the monarchy, and the majority of the parties in the alliance with the Democratic party favour the monarchy. In general, the people are 
enthusiastic about the monarchy since it is deep-rooted in the country and provides a break leading into a better future for everyone.' 

'What kind of monarchy will you be offering?' I remembered putting the same naive question to Prince Juan Carlos, as he then was, in January 1975, ten months before his great opportunity came after Franco died in November of that year. 

'There can be no alternative to a constitutional monarchy in which the Crown plays the part of arbiter, umpire, a chairman in reserve.' 

'Do you feel that the establishment of a monarchy in the 21st century would be backward-looking, old-fashioned?' 

'How can you ask that,' demanded Prince Alexander 'when you live in a monarchy where the institution does exactly what I suggest should be done in Yugoslavia in the future? I didn't notice much doubt even in America, about the monarchical principle with all those heads of state whom I saw at King Hussein's funeral in Amman not long ago! Aren't the monarchies of Europe the stable places? Doesn't Japan also offer a very interesting example of how a technologically modern country has a much-loved traditional monarchy of symbolic value and importance? Is that just an accident?' 

'But these old European monarchies were established so long ago.' I said, careful to avoid being drawn into discussion of the monarchies of Jordan and Japan, 'except, of course, for Spain where there was a restoration after nearly 50 years.' 

'Well, in Yugoslavia - and that consists of Serbia and Montenegro - we are looking towards restoration too, even if it's after a little longer: it's 531/2 years since my father was illegally removed by the Communist Yugoslav assembly in November 1945.' 

There was a portrait of the late King Peter II on the wall and I recalled how, at my private school in March 1941, the then very young monarch had seemed for a few days a beacon of liberty in wartime Europe when he had seized power and denounced the agreement with the Germans made by his uncle, the regent, Prince Paul. 

'You know,' the Crown Prince went on, 'my ancestors were very well established in Serbia long before 1941. Black George, the first Karageorge, led the resistance to the Turks in 1804. My great-grandfather King Peter was a clever man who personally translated Mill's essay On Liberty into Serbian. My grandfather, King Alexander, who was murdered in Marseilles, (by a Macedonian acting for the Croats) was intelligent enough to change the name of the kingdom. It had been constituted after the first world war as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. King Alexander thought of the name "Yugoslavia".' 

'Would you say that this popular national origin distinguishes your family from the other royal families elsewhere in the Balkans?' 

'Each situation is different,' Prince Alexander said tactfully, 'and you shouldn't forget that King Michael in Romania and King Simeon in Bulgaria have actually reigned for a time, whereas I have not as yet. King Michael played a heroic part in his country in 1946. But, yes, I suppose there is a difference. Those royal families are, shall we say, not so deeply rooted in the nation as the Karageorgevitches obviously are in Serbia.' 

I told Prince Alexander: 'I have never understood how it was that the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes, who are said to have hated each other from time immemorial, agreed to collaborate in the new kingdom after 1918.' 

'They didn't hate each other in 1918 as they have been encouraged to do now by the subsequent regimes', the Crown Prince replied. 'It was, I am afraid, negative nationalism after the first world war which caused that. That nationalism among the Croats was why our first democracy didn't work in the 1920s, incidentally. But in 1918 the intellectuals and politicians of the various peoples of what became Yugoslavia - the peoples that lay between the old Turkish and Austrian empires - were happy enough to rearrange their politics under the direction of the strongest country, Serbia. There were no referendums, you know,' the Crown Prince added drily. 

'Was your father badly let down by the British, do you think?' 

Prince Alexander regrets the controversial change in policy in 1943 by Churchill to support Tito rather than the royalist General Mihailovic. He is very well informed about the controversies of those old, half-forgotten days: 'Of course, I regret what happened. I know that a monarchy in Yugoslavia after 1945 would have made the country a happier place than it became under Tito. I think that Churchill, and Fitzroy Maclean, come to that, were to a certain extent misled as to what was really happening in the Yugoslav resistance. 

There was a gentleman called James Klugmann in Cairo who was quite a senior Communist. He was the determining influence in your Special Operations Executive for a time, and he was in a position to ensure that only pro-Tito reports were seen. He presented Tito as someone absolutely opposed to any dealings with the Germans. Actually, Tito talked to the Germans when it 
suited him. Read Djilas's book Wartime for confirmation of that. Tito, you know, was quite at home in German. He spoke with a Viennese accent. There are quite a lot of people who think he was an Esterhazy. Perhaps that's why he was so good at music.' 

I didn't think that this was the occasion for another debate about those old controversies of the war, Fitzroy Maclean against Billy Maclean, which at one time, long ago now, seemed to render Serbia part of the Scottish Highlands. I quickly moved back to the present. 

'What was your chief impression of your recent visit?' 

'My wife and I saw the appalling destruction in Kosovo and the total madness. The terrible suffering and pain of both the Kosovo Albanians and the Serbs. There will only be peace and reconciliation without Milosevic and without the terrorist elements of the KLA. Democracy and human rights must be established. There is a saying that there is enough land and bread in Kosovo for everyone. Milosevic is silent now.' 

'Why?' 

'Milosevic knows well that more countries are lost by talking too much than by silence. There have also been stories that he's ill. Serbia's a good place for stories.' 

'What's your next step?' 

'We hope to get an independent media well established. We have had promises of support. Not yet much money.' 

Leaving the Crown Prince's austere but workmanlike rooms, I wondered to whom I was really talking. To a hopeful but doomed representative of an old cause which has no more real possibility of success in modern Serbia than, say, 
the heir of the Stuarts has in modern Britain? 

Or to a man who really has something to offer a country crying out for a revival, in the 21st century, of decency, stability and perhaps ceremonial, such as was one of the 19th century's most successful achievements? 

The second of these possibilities is not just the romantic choice but also the best one. 
_____________________________________________________________ 

Lord Thomas's most recent book is The Slave Trade (1997). 

The Spectator 
14 August 1999 

LETTERS 

Tito, traitors and treachery 

From Sir Ian Faser 

Sir: Hugh Thomas’s thought provoking profile of Alexander of Yugoslavia (‘King’s move’, 31 July) brings back other memories of the extraordinary behaviour of the British government during those years 1943-1945. 

One of my closet business colleagues in my merchant-banking days at Lazard Brothers in the seventies was Jasper Rootham who, as a lieutenant-colonel in the Intelligence Corps, had been one of the senior members of the British mission to General Mihailovic, then Commander of the Yugoslav Royal Army and loyal to King Peter, Alexander’s father. Rootham a former Treasury official and a fluent speaker of Russian and Serbo-Croat, told me how, after a couple of years at Milhailovic’s headquarters, he had contracted a bad dose of malaria and had asked to be flown back to base, by then in Southern Italy. 

There, Rootham’s immediate senior was James Klugmann, an Oxford don generally supposed to be a card-carrying communist. On landing, Rootham was directed to Klugmann’s caravan; empty as Klugmann was apparently lunching in the mess. Rootham found his latest situation report open on Klugmann’s desk and ‘edited’ so as to be almost unrecognisable. He rummaged around in the caravan and found several other reports of his own and his mission colleagues, similarly ‘edited’. The effect of the changes was to present Mihailovic and the Royal Army as German collaborators and to attribute these assessments to the British colonels who commanded the mission. In this form the reports went to London. As a consequence of these reports and of Fitzroy Maclean’s assessment pf Tito, then skulking on an Adriatic island, Churchill switched his support from Mihailovic to the communists. 

Rootham told me that he had attempted to protest to a higher military authority but the doctors ordered him to hospital straight away, and before he left hospital he found that he was posted back to London. After the war, he and his three colleagues tried to appear as witnesses for the defence at Mihailovic’s trial. However, the Foreign Office refused them exit visas. Mihailovic was shot as traitor. 

Rootham wrote a book describing these experiences, but it appears to have come out on the day of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez and as a consequence sank without trace. He promised me a copy of the book but, alas, never redeemed this promise. Crown Prince Alexander ought to be given a copy, if one can be found. 

Ian Fraser 

South Haddon, 
Skillgate, 
Somerset 

LETTERS 

Communist in the SOE 

From Mr David Turner 

Sir: Sir Ian Fraser (Letters, 14 August) is somewhat mistaken when he says that James Klugmann, of the wartime Special Operations Executive, was ‘an Oxford don generally supposed to be a card-carrying communist’. Norman John (‘James’) Klugmann was quite openly a card-carrying member of the Communist party of Great Britain from 1933 until the day he died in 1977. 
He was educated at Gresham’s (where he knew Donald Maclean) and Cambridge (where he was a contemporary of Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross; he also knew Anthony Blunt). In 1935 he gave up postgraduate research to become the secretary of the Communist-led Rassemblement Mondial des Etudiants, a post he held until 1939. Evidence in the Soviet archives proves that during this time Klugmann helped the NKVD to recruit Cairncross. 
Klugmann was conscripted into the Royal Army Service Corps as a private and later transferred to the Intelligence Corps. By 1942 he was a corporal in the Cairo headquarters of SOE; by June 1943 he was a captain; by October 1943 a major; and by June 1944 a lieutenant colonel. During 1945-46 he worked with the United Nations in Yugoslavia.  The precipitous upward curve of Klugmann’s career was partly due to the fact, true to his name, he was a ‘kluger (clever) Mann was fluent in French, German and Serbo-Croat). However, M.R.D. Foot records that the turning point in Klugmann’s progress was when, as an NCO, he took a cup of tea to Brigadier Terence Airy, who recognized him as a fellow Old Boy of Gresham’s. It also helped that Klugmann’s MI5 file had gone up in smoke during an air raid in September 1940. 
The accusation made by Sir Ian Fraser and by Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia (‘King’s Move’, 31 July) that Klugmann tampered with SOE reports to push Britain into supporting Tito instead of the royalist Mihailovic has been around for many years, confirmed by SOE records released into the Public Record Office. However, it seems most unlikely that Klugmann singlehandedly changed British policy. There were others lobbying hard for support to be switched to Tito, most notably Sir William Deakin and the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who can hardly be accused of having been communist moles. Whether his conduct was reprehensible is a moot point given that Mihailovic’s Chetniks are clearly among the political ancestors of today’s Serbian Ethnic cleansers. (SEE NOTE BELOW) 
What Klugmann really deserves to be condemned for is his authorship in 1951 of a mendacious piece of tripe entitled From Trotsky to Tito, in which he denounced his erstwhile hero Tito as an agent of the West: 
At a certain time, and exactly how and when history still has to disclose, the British political and military leadership, on a very high and top-secret level, must have received information… that there were leading elements inside the Partisan forces, inside the Yugoslav Communist party, spies an provocateurs, Gestapo elements, Trotskyites, who could be ‘trusted’ (from the point of view of British imperialism), and could be used to… carry out an Anglo-American imperialist policy. This was the basis of change of British policy from Mihailovic to Tito in the period of 1942-43. It was carried out… with that great measure of cunning and deceit for which British imperialism… has become notorious throughout the world. 
He knew all this to be lies; but, being a dutiful communist functionary, he apparently felt obligated to perjury himself. Legend has it that, long after Moscow and Belgrade had patched up their differences, Klugmann was still haunting second-hand bookshops in order to buy up and destroy copies of his embarrassing opus. 
David Turner 
Oak Lodge, Chestnut Street, 
Borden, Kent 

NOTE: Today's Chetniks have no connection to the Chetniks of World War II; 
the connection is purely by name only. The Ministry of the Interior 
(Ministarstvo Unutrasnjih Poslova) or MUP in Belgrade is the master deceit, 
deception and disinformation. MUP uses for its sordid activities fronts by 
adopting names from the historical past and created a current day version of 
the World War II Chetniks to avoid responsibility being focused on the 
Milosevic regime. The method or dirty game is to transfer liability and 
avoid incrimination. It is very important that the western politician, 
observer and student recognize the tactics of MUP in maintaining the 
Milosevic regime in power. 

In 1997, the budget of MUP was approximately $6 billion, which is a large 
sum in view of sanctions and isolation, interestingly the Yugoslav Army 
budget was only $1 billion in the same year. The funding of MUP during 
sanctions and isolation is also a devious matter. MUP seriously adversely 
affects the rights of many inhabitants, including those born in other parts 
of the former Yugoslavia, refugees, and citizens who had migrated to other 
countries to work or seek asylum. 

Tito, Klugmann and SOE 

>From Lady Maclean of Dunconnel 

Sir: I have only just returned from a long visit to ex-Yugoslavia, so am late in joining in the Mihailovic/Tito controversy, once more revived in your journal by Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia ('King's move', 31 July) and Sir Ian Fraser (Letters, 14 August). 

I had thought that with the release of British and German records this ghost had been laid to rest. But, as it concerns my late husband's reputation, as well as that of Sir William Deakin and many other courageous British liaison officers, including Jasper Rootham, whose evidence formed the basis of the Maclean Report, I feel it is once more necessary to correct the myth that has bedevilled this particular period of Balkan history: 'that Churchill and Fitzroy Maclean were misled as to what was really happening in the Yugoslav Resistance'. 

When, in late July 1943, Winston sent for Fitzroy to give him the mission of finding out more about Tito's Partisans, very little concrete information about them or their leader had reached London from our observers in the field. By the time Fitzroy was dropped by parachute into Tito's headquarters in Bosnia in September 1943, things had moved on. Intercepted German signals, together with the reports of Hudson and Bailey (British liaison officers with Mihailovic), were painting an ever clearer picture of the overall resistance to the Wehrmacht - enormous activity and aggression on the Partisan front, and very little and accommodations on the Chetnik one. So much so that British High Command had already decided to back Tito and to gradually withdraw aid from Mihailovic before they received my husband's report in November, which only confirmed what the intercepted airwaves had already told them. Fitzroy's summing-up of Tito's Communist/Patriot character and the Marxist aims of the national revolution was only of secondary interest to a government whose primary aim was the defeat of Germany. 

In his letter, my much loved but deluded cousin, Ian Fraser, uses Hugh Thomas's rightly cautious interview with Prince Alexander (one hasn't heard much about a restored monarchy in the recent events in Belgrade!) as a peg on which to hang his anti-Tito prejudice, but to suggest that Jasper Rootham's very real contribution to Deakin and Maclean's fact-gathering was invalidated by Klugmann's (the communist mole in SOE) tampering is sheer nonsense. 

His report was made personally to Deakin before he was invalided out to Italy, and by September 1943 the internal rows and questionable security of SOE in Cairo were well known to the Foreign Office. 

Until June 1943, as your correspondent David Turner points out (Letters, 21 August), Klugmann was a lowly corporal in the intelligence corps of SOE, Cairo, but Fitzroy, then in the SAS, had been in Cairo long enough to have grave doubts about SOE security. It was the reason why he insisted that all his signals from Yugoslavia should go directly to General 'Jumbo' Maitland-Wilson's headquarters. It was the reason why Hermione Ranfurly had earlier on crashed a dinner party and told Anthony Eden and other VIPs that SOE, Cairo, was not secure. 

That after all this Klugmann was promoted and ended up in Bari as a lieutenant-colonel only goes to show that SOE always looked after their own. That Klugmann was sent to Italy is indisputable, but I cannot quite understand Ian Fraser's timing of events. 

Churchill could not possibly have been influenced by any Klugmann-doctored reports from Rootham sent from Bari. The headquarters of Balkan sea and air operations and of Fitzroy's mission in Bari were not established until after the decision to back Tito had been made. Tito was not 'skulking on an Adriatic island' in October 1943 but was transported to Vis by two destroyers of the Royal Navy in May 1944 to establish a new HQ after his Drvar base was captured by German paratroop attack. 

The book that Ian Fraser was never sent by Jasper Rootham is called Miss fire and was published by Chatto & Windus in 1946. I know Fitzroy reviewed it and liked it. I suggest that my cousin now visits Taunton Library so that he can do a bit more background reading before blundering again. May I suggest The Embattled Mountain by Sir William Deakin, British Policy Towards Wartime Resistance in South-east Europe by Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg, and the part of Sir Alexander Glen's Footholds Against a Whirlwind which deals particularly sensitively with the Mihailovic issue. 

In view of the horror of the last few months and the unjustified intervention of Nato in the civil war of a sovereign state, which my husband would have condemned, would it not be better to try and find a solution to the appalling mess that the American and our own media-led politicians have left behind rather than ruminate on what might have happened if a weak king, represented by a staff officer with no political experience, had been still further propped up by a British government whose primary concern was to beat the Germans some 55 years ago? 

Veronica Maclean 

Strachur, 
Argyll, Scotland 

4 September 1999 

Letters 

Tito, ethnic cleanser 

From Mr Petar Jankovic 

Sir: David Turner's suggestion that Mihailovic's Chetniks are the political ancestors of today's Serbian ethnic cleansers (Letters, 21 August) is a deformation of history. The Serbs who call themselves Chetniks today have hijacked the name and have nothing to do with General Mihailovic's guerrillas who fought the German occupiers during the second world war. Any ethnic cleansing that took place recently was carried out under the orders of President Milosevic and his government. They are the direct political descendants of Marshal Tito, another communist, who was installed with the help of people like Klugmann and whom General Mihailovic and his Chetniks fought. By the way, an earlier case of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, which took place soon after the end of the war, was orchestrated by Aleksandar Rankovic, Tito's minister of the interior. 

Petar Jankovic 
London SW10

Churchill’s big mistake

From Mr Richard Lamb

Sir: With all respect to Lady Maclean (Letters, 28 August), James Klugmann did ‘doctor’ the reports from British liaison officers with Mihailovic. This occurred in the autumn of 1943 in the SOE office of Cairo, which the communist Klugmann dominated. He handled all reports, editing them and writing policy memorandums from them for the Foreign Office. He delayed decoding reports from Mihailovic’s HQ, giving priority to those to those from Tito’s, and tampered with the reports of sabotage by Mihailovic’s troops.

As a result, when Churchill came to Cairo in December 1943 he was given a completely misleading view of Mihailovic’s activities and a far from rosy one of Tito’s. Accepting the Klugmann version, Churchill sacked Mihailovic despite strong opposition from the US and Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. I went through all the reports from Mihailovic BLO’s in the Public Record Office for my book Churchill as a War Leader (1991). I was helped by a surviving BLO, the late Michael Lees, whose book The Rape of Serbia (1990) is completely authoritative and shows that Mihailovic’s troops were carrying out sabotage with the co-operation of the British officers to a greater extent than Tito’s.

After the war, Churchill said, ‘I thought I could trust Tito…but now I am aware I committed one of the biggest mistakes of the war,’ while Eden stated, ‘My biggest regret of the was abandoning Mihailovic.’

Richard Lamb

Knighton Manor
Broadchalke
Salisbury
Wilts

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