Last month we were inundated with 80-year-old images of ‘Victory in Europe’ day. But whose victory were we celebrating? Days after the hollow triumphalism of this VE Day anniversary, we can report for the first time the strange story of how one of the main architects of the postwar Europe that this ‘victory’ spawned was exposed to sexual blackmail by sinister forces with ties to several intelligence agencies.
Peter Rushton reports on his latest archival discoveries.
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John J. McCloy was among the most powerful Americans of the 20th century. In the wartime Roosevelt administration he was perhaps the most influential adviser on policy towards Germany. As the first American High Commissioner for Occupied Germany, he shaped a nascent ‘West German’ state and the structures and constitution he influenced still rule today’s Federal Republic.
For two years before moving to Frankfurt as High Commissioner (where he appointed a Jewish friend from the Kuhn, Loeb banking firm, Benjamin Buttonwieser as Assistant Commissioner), McCloy had been president of the World Bank, the financial behemoth created by the Bretton Woods agreements at the end of 1946.
After McCloy returned from Germany he was from 1953-1970 chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, at the summit of the US foreign policy establishment. Indeed he was referred to by leading economists, political analysts and historians as “Chairman of the Establishment”, and as one of the six “wise men” who developed bipartisan US policy during the Cold War. Through decades of turbulence in US politics, McCloy remained a constant presence, as one of a small group of advisers to every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.
When one of those presidents met an untimely death, McCloy was one of the seven members of the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s assassination – an investigation that remains controversial six decades later. And these were just a few of his public roles: more discreetly, McCloy was a longstanding member of elite clubs such as ‘Nisi Prius’, a regular gathering of senior partners from Wall Street law firms.
Yet from as early as 1942 the British security service MI5 knew that McCloy was subject to (or involved in) sexual blackmail.
During that year a ‘model’ named Joyce Coe (sometimes known as Joyce Coefi or by the nickname ‘Tuffy’) returned to England, having been evacuated to the USA in 1940 with her infant son. Documents and photographs in her luggage discovered by British security officers and reported to MI5 showed that she had earned a living in the USA by posing for pornographic photos and as what amounted to a prostitute.
She had (MI5 reported) “been intimate with several prominent Americans including J.J. McCloy, then Assistant Secretary for War.”
Joyce Coe was the British wife of a German-Jewish refugee art dealer, Dr Heinz Roland (born Heinrich Rosenbaum). The true significance of these documents and photos (and the fact that Joyce had retained evidence that could be used to blackmail McCloy or others) only became evident to MI5 many years later.
It wasn’t until 1955 that MI5 began to take an interest in Heinz Roland, and it was later still (in the 1960s) that they belatedly opened a personal file on him with the designation PF 749778. By then it was clear that Roland had since the 1930s been part of a tightly-knit circle involving Jewish émigrés, communists, and intelligence officers – several of whom were involved at elite levels in the art world.
While starting out as an expert in Dutch and Flemish old masters, Roland and his partners in Roland, Browse & Delbanco became London’s most influential dealers in the postwar world of modern and contemporary art, dominated by fellow Jews. During the mid-1950s he became active with other leading Jewish cultural figures in a KGB front organisation ‘Artists for Peace’, and visited the Soviet Union with his second wife in 1958. Unlike many other Jews in the art world, he avoided overt communist activity, but MI5 surveillance found that as late as June 1960 his name was mentioned among the Communist Party’s Artists’ Group as a possible participant in a ‘brains trust’.
A vast effort was expended by security and intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1960s and 1970s as they struggled to come to terms with the extent of Soviet penetration dating back as far as the 1920s. The full implications of this are still only imperfectly understood in 2025, but it’s now becoming possible for a growing number of scholars to piece together the hidden history of the past century – a history that casts events such as ‘VE Day’ in a very different light.
Together with the long established disciplines of political and diplomatic history, military history, art history, the history of ideas, economic history, and social history, the release of increasing numbers of relevant documents can (when subjected to painstaking analysis by those with expertise in this field) uncover the past seen through a new prism – intelligence history.
At the UK National Archives in Kew, West London, there is now an exhibition celebrating aspects of that intelligence history, but like most press coverage of such subjects it presents a carefully sanitised version. If we are to learn anything from the past century, we need to be honest about both the successes and failures of our intelligence bureaucracy. Due to certain popular historians and broadcasters, the heroic propaganda of earlier generations has been replaced by whimsical self-deprecatory irony. The truth was sometimes heroic, sometimes funny, but more often deadly serious – and it’s time for Britons to grow out of their pantomime versions of our nation’s past.
There are important reasons why we (like MI5) should take a special interest in Heinz Roland and the deployment of his wife Joyce Coe as a porn star and prostitute among the New York and Washington elite of the early Second World War.
Roland was born Heinrich Rosenbaum on New Year’s Eve 1907 in Munich into a wealthy Jewish family, and soon followed his grandfather’s profession of art dealer and art historian, studying in Weimar-era Berlin, Paris and Munich, and obtaining his doctorate at Munich University in 1928. Unlike many German Jewish art dealers who didn’t emigrate until sometimes several years into the national socialist era, Roland moved to London for economic reasons in 1929, and in the autumn of 1930 he went into partnership with a fellow Jewish-German expatriate art dealer, Dr Gustav Delbanco.
In 1932, Heinz Roland was fined by London magistrates for the offence of “indecency with a female” in Hyde Park, a notorious location for male and female prostitution. He married the ‘model’ Joyce Coe that same year.
Beginning on a small scale in their 20s, Roland & Delbanco developed into a prestigious firm of Piccadilly art dealers, eventually expanding postwar with an additional partner, Lillian Browse. Their great breakthrough came in 1942 when Roland spotted an undiscovered triptych by the Flemish master Robert Campin (c.1375-1444). This was bought by a consortium of Jewish ‘refugees’ and sold at vast profit. It’s now known as the ‘Seilern Triptych’ and is exhibited at the Courtauld.
It might seem a long way from the rarefied heights of Renaissance art to the low world of Jewish and communist political blackmail, but MI5 eventually discovered that during the same period when he was building up his art business with Delbanco, Heinz Roland was also part of an especially dangerous circle of communists and fellow travellers linked to the Kremlin’s intelligence service (later known as the KGB).
At numerous interviews during the 1960s and 1970s, MI5 officers focused on a party of friends who spent a weekend together in May 1937 at a holiday cottage in Wales owned by Kim Philby, then a young journalist, who was to become the most famous spy of the century. Kim Philby himself wasn’t present: he was by this time developing his career as a Soviet agent by working as a journalist based at General Franco’s nationalist headquarters in Spain during the Civil War. (In 1935 Heinz Roland had obtained British naturalisation partly thanks to a reference from a fellow art dealer, Kim Philby’s close friend Tomás Harris, a very wealthy Anglo-Spanish half-Jew, whose own espionage career I shall examine in a later article.)
Roland’s wife Joyce wasn’t present either: she had given birth to their son Anthony twelve months earlier and she was unwell, so stayed at home in Hampstead with the baby. (That baby is now in his late 80s and has become the leading collector of documentary films about art and modern literature: his collection is used by galleries, universities and broadcasters worldwide.)
But those who were present at the Philby cottage in Wales that weekend in May 1937 were later of very great interest to MI5. The party was hosted by Philby’s Jewish wife Litzi, who had been pivotal in his recruitment as a secret communist agent in 1934, and her friend Gerda Kalisch, another Austrian Jewess.
Also present were Heinz Roland’s Jewish friends Louis d’Antal and Edward Newmark – d’Antal had previously been Gerda’s lover and Newmark was soon to become her husband. Edward and Gerda Newmark were monitored for years postwar by several intelligence agencies due to their substantial business connections behind the Iron Curtain: they and their circle of friends came to be regarded as important links in the chain enabling MI5 to uncover the full extent of Moscow’s subversion of the West.
Various reports identified d’Antal (despite his wealthy family who were again significant in the art world) as an undercover communist, working with a network of Comintern agents many of whom were fellow Jews, such as the later notorious Otto Katz. He attended this weekend gathering at the Philby cottage with a recently arrived 26 year old Austrian, Friedl Gärtner.
This young woman’s association with the circle around Heinz Roland (and his wife’s involvement just three years later in obtaining blackmail information against leading Americans) rang multiple alarm bells at MI5.
Friedl had married a German Jew and emigrated to Palestine in June 1934, but they divorced within two years. She had come to London in the spring of 1937 to attend her sister Liesel’s wedding at one of London’s high society churches, St Mark’s, North Audley Street, to a wealthy Coldstream Guards veteran, Ian Menzies. The happy couple had met at the London Casino in Soho, where Liesel worked as what was euphemistically known as a “show dancer”. Her performance actually involved standing nude (and stock still) inside a giant sea shell. English obscenity laws in that era dictated that nude performances of this kind were legal, so long as the ‘artistes’ were static: any movement would render the performance pornographic and illegal.
One can imagine that Ian Menzies’ decision to marry a casino ‘show dancer’ of foreign extraction caused some consternation among his family. Ian’s mother Susannah was an heiress who lived in a palatial Mayfair townhouse; his late stepfather Sir George Holford had been a prominent courtier – equerry to King Edward VII, his widow Queen Alexandra, and King George V – and was from a fabulously wealthy family whose London home on Park Lane was eventually demolished to create the Dorchester Hotel.
Perhaps more relevant from an MI5 perspective was that Ian Menzies’ brother Stewart was at this point the deputy chief of Britain’s intelligence service MI6. (From 1939 to 1952, Sir Stewart Menzies was Chief of MI6 – among the most important intelligence officers of the Second World War.)
Less than a month before the Menzies wedding, the bride’s sister Friedl was at this party in the Philbys’ Welsh country cottage, together with a circle of Jews and communists.
Moreover, the following year Friedl herself entered the world of espionage, at first as an undercover agent for the MI5 officer Maxwell Knight, infiltrating pro-German and fascist circles in London, then from 1941 as one of the tiny group of ‘double-cross’ agents who played a significant role in misleading German intelligence about British and Allied intentions.
Unsurprisingly, a great deal of Friedl’s work (both for Knight from 1938-41, and as the ‘double-cross’ agent codenamed ‘Gelatine’ from 1941-45) involved exploiting her physical attractions.
At the end of the war she married an American intelligence officer, Don Calder, and eventually moved to the USA, where her husband had senior intelligence posts at the US State Department. As with numerous other figures in this story, she was interviewed much later in life by MI5, FBI and CIA counter-espionage officers trying to piece together the truth about Soviet penetration of the West, and much of what she told them remains classified.
The mysterious weekend at the Philby cottage in 1937 included two other participants besides those mentioned above (Litzi Philby, her friend Gerda Kalisch, Gerda’s future husband Edward Newmark, art dealer Heinz Roland, fellow art historian and secret communist Louis d’Antal, and the MI6-connected future double-cross agent Friedl Gärtner).
One of these has not been positively identified in any publicly available document. Even in the early 1970s – thirty-five years after the events – MI5 were still trying to work out who this ‘Mr X’ might have been, though some files speculate it was a Jewish businessman or a Middle Eastern diplomat.
The other was certainly well known to MI5 and though they have tried to delete his name from published versions of the documents, I know who it was: another friend of the Philbys, a future intelligence officer and diplomat, Michael Stewart. (He should not be confused with a prominent 1960s Labour politician of the same name.)
There are reasons why the UK authorities even in 2025 try to disguise the importance of Michael Stewart in the Philby saga, and as with the sexual blackmail of John McCloy, these reasons involve the web of personal liaisons between crypto-communists, Jews, and Western diplomats. Yet again, the story also involves the world of art history.
The future Sir Michael Stewart began studying French and German at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Kim Philby and other leading characters in the infamous ‘Cambridge spy ring’, but abandoned these studies to pursue his interests in art at London’s Slade School and the Victoria & Albert Museum. A childhood illness made Stewart deaf in one ear, so when the Second World War began he was rejected for military service and joined the British propaganda and intelligence effort, working for MI6 and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) under diplomatic cover as a press attaché at the British Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal, before transferring to Rome in 1944.
By the time the first stage of the Cambridge spy scandal broke with the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, Michael Stewart had been promoted to a very important role in the secret world as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee Far East, based at Singapore.
And by the time MI5 began to look again at his connection to Philby, Stewart had ascended close to the pinnacle of British diplomacy – first as number two at the British Embassy in Washington from 1964-67, where he and his wife Damaris were among the most glamorous characters on Washington’s political scene; and then as Ambassador to Greece from 1967-71.
MI5 had long known that Stewart was an especially close friend of Kim Philby. During the long summer vacation at the end of their first Cambridge year in 1930, he went on a holiday across Europe with Philby and another friend from Philby’s schooldays, future MI6 officer Tim Milne. What they didn’t know until many years after the event – and which is still disguised in most public versions of official documents – is that Stewart then became the lover of Philby’s first wife and fellow Soviet spy Litzi, the Austrian Jewess who had first recruited Philby to the Kremlin cause.
This affair had already started by the time of the May 1937 weekend party in Wales, and it was a lot more than just a casual fling. It went on for several years, and in the summer of 1939 the Soviet intelligence chief in London reported to Moscow that Litzi had used her affair with Stewart to persuade him to obtain a British intelligence posting for Kim.
This was a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, and Kim Philby was just about to return to London from his posting to Spain, where he had covered the Civil War for The Times from a pro-Franco perspective but was secretly working for Stalin’s intelligence service, reporting to Moscow via Litzi. To facilitate this espionage work she had obtained two French residences – a luxurious Paris flat at 67 Quai d’Orsay, and a rambling country house at Grosrouvre, Seine-et-Oise.
The exact role of Michael Stewart in getting Kim Philby embedded first in Section D of MI6 (which developed into the Special Operations Executive, SOE) and then in his rapid ascent within MI6 – all the while betraying British intelligence to Stalin – is still not known. It seems likely that Stewart was (perhaps unwittingly) one of several avenues exploited to smooth the traitor’s path to the centre of London’s secrets. What we do know is that for much of the war, at his post in Lisbon, Stewart worked closely with Philby who headed the Spanish and Portuguese division of the MI6 counter-espionage section.
When MI5 began to examine Michael Stewart’s affair with Litzi Philby, they were also disturbed by the pre-war connections of his sister Carol and the man she married in 1941 – Francis Graham-Harrison, regarded as one of the best read and sharpest minds of his generation, who worked in Prime Minister Attlee’s private office from 1946-49 before progressing through the Civil Service to become the number two official at the Home Office from 1963-74.
These and others were closely investigated by a team of MI5 sleuths including Peter Wright, who in the 1980s caused an international scandal by exposing some aspects of the investigation in his memoir Spycatcher, which the British government tried and failed to ban. A dossier drawn up by Wright’s MI5 colleagues to brief him for interviews with the art historian and Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt on 30th April and 6th May 1969 was among thousands of pages of once Top Secret documents declassified in January this year, which I read when researching this article and other work that I will publish soon.
How much did Michael Stewart know about Litzi and Kim’s work for Moscow? Evidently this fact was explored at length by MI5 and MI6, and probably (if they were ever allowed to know about it) by their American counterparts in the FBI and CIA. But although we are now starting to learn more about the true story of the Cambridge spy ring, it’s only a handful of experts in intelligence history such as the present author who are equipped to fill in the gaps.
Just what is being hidden in London’s archives, especially about the role of prominent Jews in these subversive activities?
For example, in this instance, what is being hidden about the blackmail material collected against John McCloy. There has been a great deal of speculation in recent years about Russian kompromat – the sexual blackmail of President Donald Trump by Vladimir Putin’s intelligence service and associated ‘oligarchs’.
But if such kompromat was collected against John McCloy and his circle in early 1940s Washington and New York – and the evidence is clear that it was – by whom was it used? Indeed was McCloy the victim of blackmail, or a willing participant in collecting compromising information against other leading members of the New York and Washington financial and political establishment?
We know that the model/prostitute involved was the wife of Heinz Roland, a Jewish art dealer with connections right at the centre of a web of intrigue involving fellow Jews, secret communists, and the British and Soviet intelligence services.
We also know that all three of these interest groups had a record of using sexual blackmail. As I will explain in future articles, Jewish arms dealers and organised crime figures with connections to the Zionist intelligence service quite often used their own wives and mistresses as what amounted to prostitutes, to advance their business interests and obtain secret intelligence. The KGB, its predecessors and successors in Moscow also had a long record of sexual entrapment. And perhaps most relevant of all, there is evidence of the British wartime propaganda and intelligence service BSC (British Security Coordination) using similar methods.
It’s already well-known that Roosevelt’s Republican opponent Wendell Willkie, who ensured that the 1940 presidential election was a contest between two candidates who each favoured the Churchill government’s wartime interests, was a heavy drinker and adulterer whose private conduct would have ended his career had it been made public. A rival Republican, Arthur Vandenberg, rapidly changed from an anti-war to a pro-war stance in 1940: his son and leading aide was a secret homosexual who was later a target for political blackmail.
During the crucial two years between the outbreak of the Second World War and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, both British and Jewish lobby groups worked to support Roosevelt’s secret policy of taking his country towards war with Germany – even though most of the American public had to be won over from an anti-war stance.
John McCloy was among numerous prominent Republicans – theoretically Roosevelt’s political opponents – who were allied to the White House in this secret pro-war policy. In particular he worked with fellow Republican Wall Street lawyer William Donovan in pressing for the creation of a centralised intelligence agency, which under Donovan’s leadership became first the OSS and then the CIA.
McCloy and Donovan were backed by the head of British intelligence in New York and Washington, the Canadian businessman William Stephenson, whose aides included naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming, later world famous as the creator of fictional spy James Bond.
Fleming wrote to Donovan urging him to recruit McCloy as his “chief of staff” in this nascent intelligence organisation. How much did Fleming know about the involvement of the British-born model/prostitute Joyce Coe with McCloy and others in his elite circles? What we now know of this story is already stranger than fiction, but we can be sure there is a great deal more still hidden in the archives.
By the end of the war, McCloy was Roosevelt’s leading expert on Germany, and was having secret discussions with his British counterparts on how to deal with Germany after her defeat.
Unlike his colleague Henry Morgenthau (Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary), McCloy did not believe that Germany should be deindustrialised. On the contrary, he wanted Germany to become economically strong but militarily and politically toothless. Hard-working Germans would be made to finance a postwar world that they were not allowed to influence.
In September 1944 for example, McCloy wrote to the deputy British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Campbell, that if there were to be reparations (as after the previous war) “one must restore and rehabilitate Germany so that she can repay them,” while also recognising the importance of “rendering Germany impotent.”
At this early, pre-Nuremberg, stage, McCloy seemed to agree with the policy initially advanced by the British that “we should not have great state trials, but proceed quickly and with despatch. The English idea, once proffered but then withdrawn, was to give the Army lists to liquidate on mere identification. What has happened to this idea? Besides individuals, what categories should be shot?”
Eventually McCloy and the British acquiesced in the Soviet idea that instead of simply shooting and hanging prominent Germans, it was possible to have Soviet-style show trials at Nuremberg. The idea was that in doing so one could brainwash generations of Germans and other Europeans in truly Orwellian fashion.
Eighty years after VE Day we are perhaps coming to the end of that brainwashed era – the era of European weakness.
May 1945 was no victory for Poland, whose Prime Minister Donald Tusk was eager to grab his share of glory last month, and VE Day was clearly a defeat for Ukraine, whose survival in the shadow of Muscovite oppression has been achieved despite the treachery of 1945’s ‘victors’.
Perhaps we shall never know whether President Trump’s pro-Moscow policies were influenced by sexual blackmail – i.e. what has been termed in Russian, kompromat.
But what we are starting to discover is the secret history of an earlier generation, including that of an American who was arguably a more substantial and significant historical figure than Trump – John J. McCloy.
Today’s UK authorities owe it to our people – including those who lost members of their families in the European civil wars of the 20th century – to be truthful about our secret history.
As George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.“
This essay is based on extensive research, mostly involving documents that were released at the UK National Archives in January 2025. As it relates to an especially controversial American, it is appropriate that the essay is published now in tribute to a very different American – a true European hero of the cause of real history, my old friend and comrade Guillaume Nichols, who died in December 2024 after a long illness which he faced with characteristic courage.
The son of a well-known New York sports journalist, William Nichols renounced his American citizenship and moved to France, where he taught at the Sorbonne, became active in a French nationalist group PNFE, and found his métier as translator and righthand man to the pioneering revisionist scholar, Professor Robert Faurisson.
Guillaume created the online Faurisson Archive which stands as an eternal tribute to him, to the Professor, and to the great intellectual adventure of historical revisionism.
An extended essay about Guillaume’s life and work will appear here soon and in the July 2025 edition of Heritage & Destiny. For legal reasons it is difficult to write at present about Guillaume’s work with the Italian tenor Joe Fallisi, founder of the Robert Faurisson International Prize, but we hope that this complication will be resolved soon.
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