From
the David Irving unpublished memoirs. Written in
Vienna prison, 2006. Posted here Wednesday, March
3, 2010 Winston
Churchill Jr and David Frost gang up on Mr
Irving (extract) IN LONDON, Michael
White staged Rolf Hochhuth's play
Soldiers at the West End's New Theatre in
December 1968; at Kenneth Tynan's invitation
I had privately put a couple of thousand pounds
into its production. This gained me front-row seats
on opening night; as the curtain came down I was
the one who applauded loudly in the darkness and
called for the author. The notices next day were
brilliant, but tailed off after The Sunday
Times's Harold Hobson -- Tynan's
arch-rival -- denounced it; Hobson's daughter was
married to Lord Chandos's son. For two or
three nights attendance figures were good, but then
Prime Minister Harold Wilson denounced the
play in the House of Commons as "anti-British" and
audience figures collapsed. It was an odd phenomenon to
experience from the inside. It was the reverse of
what would have happened in many other countries.
As for the money, of course I never saw it
again. 
THE Churchill family started to kick out, not in
the public arena but in clubland, if I can put it
like that. Randolph and his son Winston, now
twenty-seven, decided that I would have to be
destroyed by whatever means were possible. They
hired lawyers and funded a hitherto unknown writer
to destroy my name. The late Winston Churchill
Jr. boasted of the fact in his excellent
biography of his father Randolph.
Thus it was that a strange
figure entered our lives. Tall, dashing, handsome,
well-spoken, cosmopolitan, and evidently rich,
Carlos Thompson introduced himself to us as
a bon viveur, globetrotter, and would-be
writer. (His real name turns out to have been
Schafter; whether he was Jewish I never asked and
it does not really matter.) He was a swashbuckling
out-of-work actor of Argentine descent, a
heartthrob aged forty-four. He was writing a book,
he explained, about the 1943 Sikorski crash
[the topic of my book Accident.
The Death of General
Sikorski];
he carefully lodged his impressive new
attaché case on the low coffee table between
us and talked for an hour or two, mostly about
himself, if my memory is correct. His fluent and elegant
Argentine-flavoured Spanish and his gaucho
courtesies made a deep impression on Pilar, of
course. He kept asking me leading questions that
seemed oddly phrased; I recall that I explained
Rolf's tempestuous exuberance with the words, "You
must remember, he is a Child of the
Arts." In Thompson's favour were
his good looks and wealth, provided partly by his
wife of ten years. She was Lillie Marie
Peiser, a faded Jewish beauty nine years his
senior; she had fled Poland and enjoyed both
fortune as the ex-wife of Rex Harrison and
fame in her own right as Hollywood actress Lilli
Palmer.
NOW this man Thompson had willingly accepted the
Churchill family's commission to heap slops upon my
name. At the time of his visit in 1969 I did not
know this, and saw no reason to mistrust him; it
was only forty years later, reading the papers of
Marshal of the RAF Sir John Slessor, in the
Public Record Office, that I learned that this
stranger had been put massively in funds by the
Churchill family, by Randolph and young Winston,
with just one intention -- exacting revenge for my
book The
Destruction of Dresden. Thompson was a hired gun.
Money was no object to him. As Der Spiegel
wrote at the time, "Er stieg nur in den teuersten
Hotels ab." [He checked only into the costliest
hotels]. He flew first class to
Johannesburg and Los Angeles and elsewhere,
tracking down leads and clues; and he started work
on a book, The Assassination of Winston
Churchill, which was eventually to be
distributed by a small publisher in Buckinghamshire
who had been in business only since
1966. The book ran into
difficulties even before publication. Somebody
mailed me anonymously a copy; perhaps it was even
the Churchill clique themselves. It contained a
string of seemingly deliberately libels. Thompson
had retraced my steps, and attempted to prove me
wrong. Since I had meticulously tape-recorded most
of my interviews, it was not easy for him. To give
just one example, he had accused me of interviewing
Anthony Quayle, the film actor, in New York
City with a hidden tape-recorder (ironic in the
circumstances, as it would turn out). Quayle had
been the aide to the Governor of Gibraltar at the
time of Sikorski's mysterious death there.
The use of hidden
tape-recorders in the United States is a felony, so
it was a serious charge. In fact, the opening words
on the tape, made during my May 1967 interview with
him, were of myself asking Quayle whether he had
any objection to my interviewing him with a
tape-recorder, which was between us in his hotel
room, to which could be heard replying, that he did
not. Thompson's untruths eventually filled 60 pages
of single spaced typescript, which I sent to my
excellent lawyer Michael Rubinstein and
asked what I should do. It was only years later
that I realised that Thompson had been given the
task of deliberately libelling me, in the hope of
luring me into the High Court. The papers in the
Public Record Office [now Britain's "National
Archives"] seem to make this plain. The
Churchill family had guaranteed to indemnify him
for his costs. In 1969 I instructed
Rubinstein, Nash & Co to issue a writ. If that
was the Churchill clique's plan, it misfired. To
their fury, the book trade panicked and withdrew
Thompson's book from sale. The action proceeded
slowly; after
the setback of the February 1970 defeat in the
PQ.17 libel action
I had to husband every penny to fight the appeal.
With no alternative but to shorten the front-line,
I called off the libel suit against Carlos
Thompson, so that interesting battle was never
fought. As is apparent from the government
documents now released, the real war was boiling up
behind the scenes.
THOMPSON'S wife Lilli Palmer was in the dark about
his real purpose, as was Rolf Hochhuth, who told me
that he too was charmed by the actor's first
approaches. Later Lilli phoned Rolf despairingly to
apologise, warning that whatever her husband's
assurances to the contrary he boded Rolf no good at
all. Carlos had only recently discharged himself
from a Nervenheilanstalt, a mental clinic,
she said. This was the eccentric
character that David Frost now elected to make his
ally. The TV personality had decided to devote his
flagship programme Frost on Friday (and as
things developed Frost on Saturday too) to
destroying me personally. Frost had virtually carte
blanche, as he had co-founded the consortium which
had put together the winning London Weekend
Television (LWT) franchise bid the year
before. Having since then read the
government files, I have little doubt that pressure
was brought to bear on Frost and LWT. For weeks the
British newspapers had been clawing over the
details of the Sikorski crash controversy, their
letter columns filled with indignant and loyal
letters from Churchill's private staff, Sir John
Colville, Sir Ian Jacobs, and Sir
Hastings Ismay. Since October 1968 my book
Accident
was in the bookstores too. Frost's producer telephoned
to ask if I would take part in the Frost on
Friday programme on December 21, 1968 devoted
both to Sikorski's strange death and saturation
bombing, the parallel motifs of Hochhuth's
Soldiers. Ken Tynan would be there too. I
naively suggested they invite Maurice Smith,
the RAF "master bomber" at Dresden, and Sikorski's
Czech pilot, Edward Prchal, the only
survivor of the crash, from California, and I
provided their addresses. "Get on to the Imperial
War Museum," I added, warming to the idea. "Borrow
a Mae West lifejacket, and when the cameras are
live produce it to Prchal and see if even in full
daylight he can put it on, tie all the straps and
inflate it in the seventeen seconds he had while
his plane was taking off and crashing in the
darkness off Gibraltar!" It would have been jolly
good television, agreed the producer, phoning me
back; but they had concluded it would be too costly
to fly Prchal over. Just before I left for the
LWT studio that Friday evening, my publisher
William Kimber rang. "Look, David, about the
book and your advert in The Times," he
pleaded. "Can we agree to bury the hatchet on that?
If either of us is asked about that, let's agree
now that we reply that we have no
comment." I was glad to oblige. Frost
did raise the matter, and I deflected his question
with a non-committal reply.
IN the men's room at the LWT studio I caught sight
of a familiar Eastern European face above the stall
next to mine. It was the Czech pilot, Prchal. This
was the first indication I had that Frost's team
was playing with marked cards. It was an ambush,
and from that moment it rolled like
clockwork. At a cocktail party some
years later his floor manager enlightened me on
some of the Frost Programme's dirty tricks. The
audience was not neutral; it was handpicked, loaded
against one party or other -- and that was not all.
"The loudspeakers around the auditorium are
connected to Frost's table microphone, but not
necessarily to yours. The gain on Frost's
microphone is greater than on his victim's. It is
more sensitive," he explained. When David Frost's
preferred guests come on, illuminated signs direct
the audience: APPLAUSE.
"When you came on, you get the other sign:
SILENCE."
And so on. There was of course no sign of any Mae
West life jacket. Had I been told that Prchal was
coming, I would have brought one in
myself. Wing Commander Maurice
Smith was present, in the front row "ambush" slot.
We exchanged handshakes, as I had always liked him.
At my suggestion, Douglas Martin had also
been brought down from Birmingham, and was further
back in the audience; he was the SOE wireless
operator at Gibraltar, who had been looking out to
sea from high up on the Rock that night in July
1943, and had witnessed the crash, and had seen a
second figure climbing out of the top of the plane
as it settled into the sea. A floor technician brought
in Carlos Thompson ("APPLAUSE"),
carrying the attaché case we had seen in our
drawing room in Maida Vale. It turned out to have
concealed a hidden tape recorder, from which he
played -- to me totally unintelligible -- snatches
of our dialogue; but of course hidden tape
recorders, and this dashing Argentine investigator,
made it look as though something really sinister
had been caught on tape. Frost wore an oafish grin.
It was clear that he had no intention of ambushing
Prchal; going down that route was not the way to
earn an OBE at all. He allowed Prchal to tell his
moving story, and made no attempt to bring in the
witnesses that we had assembled in the audience --
in particular Douglas Martin. At his request, Rolf
Hochhuth was waiting on a direct telephone in his
Swiss home. He was kept holding the line for half
an hour until the intermission, then Frost casually
asked me in his irritating nasal tones to go over
to the phone and reassure Rolf that he would have
his say after the interval. (He never got to speak,
nor did Smith or Martin.) As I communicated Frost's
message in German to Rolf as bidden, an unseen
boom-microphone snaked in overhead so that millions
of English viewers could hear me talking to someone
in that sinister foreign tongue. Frost accused me of lying
when I described my Polish interpreter as fervently
anti-Soviet; he also said that I had lied when I
remarked that Sir Laurence Olivier had been
shown Rolf's "bank safe" document; on a further
matter, whether or not William Kimber, my publisher
had discussed changes he was making to my book, he
also accused me of lying. And Frost had not
finished even then. Frost announced that he was
going to have us all back for Frost on
Saturday, too. I was elated, as I thought I
could come back the next day fully prepared and
even bring that life jacket; but it turned out that
LWT would tape the follow-up immediately. Since it
was clear, when we resumed, what Frost was up to, I
fought back with no holds barred. If I was going to
go down, it would be with all guns blazing -- like
Bismarck. When I got home, I told Pilar -- who had
watched the live Friday broadcast with mounting
dismay -- that she would see on Saturday that I had
put up a good fight against the combined powers of
David Frost and his company LWT. We watched the recorded
broadcast in our little flat that Saturday evening.
The sixteen million viewers thought that they were
watching it live, which was just another of the
deceptions practiced. As the Frost theme music
swelled at the end, and the credits rolled, I
turned to Pilar: "As you see, all guns firing!" But
even as I spoke those words, there was David Frost
was back on the screen: He was now live in the
studios, it was Saturday evening, and he was
wearing a different jacket from the night before to
give the impression that we were still sitting next
to him, and could have interrupted him had we
wished. "Before we finish this
evening's programme," he said in that sneering,
adenoidal voice, glancing across to wgere viewers
assumed I ws sitting at that moment, "I just wanted
to say this. Since
last night's programme, we have been inundated
with messages from all over the United Kingdom,
and I wanted just to mention a few. Sir Laurence
Olivier has phoned us to say that at no time was
he shown any document, as Mr Irving has claimed.
Mr Irving's Polish interpreter, Madame
Lubienska, has denied that she is anti-Soviet.
Mr William Kimber had also phoned us to say that
all the changes that were made to his book were
made with Mr Irving's approval. Frost paused with expert
timing, and his voice took on a grating edge: "Most
of the phone calls that we received last night
however said the same thing about Mr Irving. He is
just repeating the Nazi propaganda lie" --
he drawled, managing to get three syllables out of
that single-syllable word -- "that was first
broadcast by Nazi propaganda minister Dr Joseph
Goebbels a few hours after the plane crashed.
Good night." Then his theme music
returned.
THIS was dirty television. For a few days I quietly
fulminated, then I contacted William Kimber. "I
thought that you and I had a private agreement," I
began, "that we would not wash dirty linen in
public about the circumstances surrounding
publication." "I never contacted Frost in
any way," said Kimber in that airy voice of his. "I
was surprised when he made that statement at the
end of the programme." Never phoned Frost? Who was
lying here? I contacted Madame Lubienska. "Am I
anti-Soviet?" she exclaimed. "I was held in a
Soviet prison camp for years after the war. Judge
for yourself. As for Mr Frost, I never spoke with
him." Sir Laurence Olivier confirmed that he, too,
had made no attempt to contact the television
personality; on the contrary, Frost's secretary had
phoned his, but he had declined any comment.
Frost's closing statements were lies from start to
finish. It was now that the
inequities, inadequacies, of English law became
evident. I contacted my friend Michael
Rubinstein, my attorney, and suggested that
Frost should apologise. "Are you formally
instructing me?" asked Michael, and I said I was.
He obtained a verbatim transcript, from which I
have reproduced the words above. London Weekend
Television was concerned, and rapidly offered some
relief: they would broadcast an agreed retraction,
and Frost himself would withdraw the remarks. I was
not asking for damages, although the steady erosion
being done to my reputation by these devices was
palpable. Weeks passed while
Rubinstein negotiated with the television company's
lawyers on the wording of the apologies. They
reminded him that he had also acted for them in the
past -- a conflict of interest perhaps; he could
continue only as an intermediary. The LWT lawyers
skilfully drew things out, and at the end of three
months withdrew their offer, and left it to me to
decide whether to sue or not. Rubinstein advised against.
Libel verdicts are essentially subjective, he
warned. Frost would be a popular figure in the eyes
of any jury, while I was not. London Weekend
Television did agree to pay the legal costs.
Rubinstein, and his capable assistant, Maxie
Alexander advised me to shut up and move
on. I almost did. Against
Rubinstein's strong advice, I prepared a pamphlet
putting the verbatim transcript of Frost's
broadcast words beside the denials of all those
concerned that they had spoken to him in any way.
First I ran it past Rubinstein. He was horrified;
it would be a clear libel, he advised, malice was
obvious, and I would have no defence. I had my dander up,
however: I was like H. W. Wicks, but unlike
him I would keep my grievance under control. I had
several thousand copies of the pamphlet printed,
and week after week we methodically sent them out
to everybody who we assumed mattered to David Frost
and his production company -- to every television
and radio critic, every producer, and every senior
executive. I do not know what effect this operation
had -- I codenamed it Operation Toast. One
newspaper did dare to pick up the story. The
Daily Express mentioned it in a William Hickey
item; it added that Frost's lawyers had warned them
not even to hint at the content of the leaflet. So
I knew it had hit home. Soon after, Frost vanished
from British television screens for some years.
Perhaps the British public was tired of him. He
crossed the Atlantic, to re-establish himself in
the United States. Years later, having acquired
some of the graces and decencies that go with
statesmanship, he restored himself in the favour of
the British viewing public. The Government awarded
him the Order of the British Empire in 1970 and he
was knighted in 1993, with a personal fortune now
estimated at over two hundred million
pounds.
EARLY in 1969 I asked the
prime minister, Harold Wilson, to reopen the
1943 R.A.F. Court of Inquiry, and Woodrow
Wyatt, MP, tabled a parliamentary Question. The
relevant government files reveal that in February
1969 the Intelligence Co-ordinator provided a
background memorandum for the cabinet secretary Sir
Burke Trend to forward to Wilson. This
concluded that my book had conveyed as clearly as
was possible without risking a libel suit that the
Liberator's pilot, Edward Prchal, had
assisted in the plane's sabotage." He [David
Irving] has clearly done a good deal of
research among people involved in the Gibraltar
arrangements and the Court of Inquiry and among
United States and Polish emigre
archives." In advising the prime
minister to refute the sabotage allegations most
robustly, Sir Burke warned him however to temper
his remarks with caution since, not only were High
Court writs flying, but "the report of the
contemporary R.A.F. court of inquiry contains some
weaknesses which, if it were published, could be
embarrassingly exploited." The 1943 inquiry did not
"exclude the possibility of doubt" on the
possibility of sabotage, explained the cabinet
secretary: The
shadow of doubt is certainly there; and a
skilful counsel could make good use of it.
Irving, in his book Accident,
points to the weaknesses in the report, a copy
of which he has certainly seen and may possess;
and if challenged he might publish it. Anything that the prime
minister might say must therefore be consistent
with what might need to be admitted if the
inquiry's report later came into the public
domain. Meanwhile, as Wilson was
informed, the Intelligence community was limiting
its response to providing "unattributable" and
"discreet" help and "encouragement" to those
anxious to defend the late Sir Winston Churchill,
notably his grandson, Mr Winston Churchill Jr., his
wartime "secret circle," and the "rather enigmatic"
Argentine author Carlos Thompson whom Randolph
Churchill had commissioned to write a
book. It was therefore hoped to
destroy both myself and the playwright Hochhuth
with legal proceedings (only Hochhuth was
eventually sued). "Irving," Harold Wilson was
advised, "has called for a re-opening of the R.A.F.
Court of Inquiry which he (rightly) claims is
permissible under R.A.F. Rules." Sir Burke Trende
warned the prime minister: "It would be most unwise
to agree, not least because of the weaknesses in
the proceedings of the [1943] Court of
Inquiry."*
MANY years later, in October 1981, Carlos Thompson
aka Juan Carlos Mundin Schaffter surfaced again,
acting very oddly. He came to our street door in
Duke Street -- something told me not to allow him
inside -- and warned me to silence about all this,
if I valued my life. He hesitated briefly, then
opened his bag to reveal a revolver, and he
produced a medallion in a leather case which
identified him, he said, as a major in the Mossad.
Who can say now if either was real? I closed the
front door on him at once, perhaps the wisest thing
I have ever done, and I never saw him again. He
died by his own hand in his native Buenos Aires in
1990. He shot himself, perhaps with that very
gun. *
Sir
Burke Trend to Harold Wilson; with attached Memo
by Intelligence Co-ordinator, top secret
[Feb 1969]: 'Irving is a young and
prolific British historian, with known Fascist
leanings. He has published other books on the
war which are critical of British leadership and
tend to show the Germans in a good light.' And:
'There are various grounds for suspecting, but
no real proof, that Hochhuth's and Irving's
activities are part of a long-term Soviet
"disinformation" operation against the West'
(PREM.13/2644). ©
2010 Copyright David Irving / Focal Point
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