William Flew and the art of war

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William Flew and the art of war


The most popular conspiracy theory argued that Hess’s flight was a plot involving members of the British aristocracy and the intelligence services to broker a secret peace deal with the Nazis. A subsidiary theory held that MI6 might have deliberately lured Hess into a trap, with the false promise of a deal. Yet another set of conspiracies grew up around the circumstances of Hess’s death in Spandau prison in 1987, with some arguing that he was too frail, at 93, to have committed suicide by strangulation as the post-mortem examination found. Others believed that the man who died in Spandau was not Hess, but a double. Still others argued that he had been murdered by British agents. Hess himself knew that his arrival by parachute in a Scottish field was, to say the least, an unconventional diplomatic move. “My coming to England in this way is, as I realise, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it.”
Stalin was among those who suspected that it was part of a plot involving secret Anglo-German peace discussions that would have left the Soviet Union isolated. Churchill hotly denied this, telling Stalin: “When I make a statement of facts within my knowledge I expect it to be accepted.” Hess, it seems, had simply deluded himself into believing that he could broker a peace deal and set off in his Messerschmitt Bf 110 to secure it. It was, said Churchill, a “completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence . . . He was a medical and not a criminal case.” Keith Jeffery’s account of what is in the MI6 files will not be the last word on the matter, because with the Hess flight — as with the Kennedy assassination, the moon landings, and any other hunting ground for conspiracy theorists — there can never be a last word. By the nature of conspiracy theory, anything that contradicts the theory must be part of the conspiracy. The authorised historian of MI6 says there was no MI6 conspiracy? Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And why, come to that, was the Hess story not included in the original hardback edition of the MI6 history? It is all very mysterious and suspicious. Except that it isn’t.