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Correspondence from Everard Feilding to Gerald Yorke
[EXTRACT]
[1 May 1929]
Such as I did not hand over to Intelligence, I destroyed after the war.
During the time that I was a Naval censor at the London Press Bureau and afterwards employed on Intelligence work in Egypt, Crowley wrote to me from time to time telling me that he was anxious to do work for the British Intelligence and that meanwhile he was doing his best, by various preposterous performances, to represent himself as disaffected and to get in with German connections. He sent me newspaper accounts, for instance, of his formally proclaiming Irish independence from the steps of the Statue of Liberty. He also asked me to start a defamation campaign against him in the English Press, with the idea that this would confirm his evil reputation in America so far as British allegiance was concerned, While I declined to do this, I sent his letters on to the Intelligence authorities with whom I was personally acquainted, but this branch of work was in no way my job. I did nothing more beyond forwarding to Crowley a test question, which they suggested regarding the identity of a certain personage. Whether it was to raise their knowledge against their own, or because they really wanted to know who this personage was, I did not inquire. Anyway, his answer did not, I understand, prove helpful, and whether for that or other reasons I know not, they declined my direct communication with him.
I can only add that my own personal very strong belief was and is that, whatever vagaries Crowley may have indulged in, which have caused him to be expelled from two countries as widely different as Italy and France, treachery to his country was not one of them.
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