Recruited by MI5: the name's Mussolini. Benito Mussolini

Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 

with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5


Tom Kington in Rome 
The Guardian, Tuesday 13 October 2009 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/13/benito-mussolini-recruited-mi5-italy

Benito Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy 

in the first world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis History 

remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the 

original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country 

with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. 

But a previously unknown area of Il Duce's CV has come to l

ight: his brief career as a British agent.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start 

in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a 

good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was 

not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the 

allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. 

He was also willing to send in the boys to "persuade'' peace 

protesters to stay at home.

Mussolini's payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, 

an MP and MI5's man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British 

intelligence officers in Italy at the time.

Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details 

of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: "Britain's least 

reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary 

Russia's pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 

a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up 

the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week 

today."

Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the 

recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on 

details of the payments for the first time while scouring 

Hoare's papers.

As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d'Italia, 

the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would 

send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, 

a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

"The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing 

the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a 

man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the 

£4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty 

cash," said Martland.

"I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, 

who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the 

money on his mistresses."

After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted 

by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist 

dictorship by the mid-1920s.

His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with 

his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, 

Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over 

Abyssinia.

"There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although 

Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy," said Martland, 

whose research is included in Christopher Andrew's history of 

MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.

The unpopularity of the Hoare-Laval pact in Britain forced Hoare 

to resign. Mussolini, meanwhile, built on his new colonial clout to 

ally with Hitler, entering the second world war in 1940, this time 

to fight against the allies.

Deposed following the allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini 

was killed with his mistress, Clara Petacci, by Italian partisans while 

fleeing Italy in an attempt to reach Switzerland two years later.

Martland said: "Mussolini ended his life hung upside down in Milan, 

but history has not been kind to Hoare either, condemned as an 

appeaser of fascism alongside Neville Chamberlain."

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