Mussolini Paid by British Secret Service

The Will-Be Italian Duce’s Collaboration with MI5

Oct 26, 2009

The historian Peter Martland maintains that the Italian dictator received £100 a week to support the alliance with UK. The money should have been spent on mistresses.

In the autumn of 1917, the outcome of World War One was uncertain and after the Russian Revolution the conditions were more favorable to the German side. The withdrawal of the Russian Army from the war allowed to the Austrian Empire and the German Reich to concentrate their troops in the western battlefields.

The 24th of October of 1917 the Italian Army received the most important defeat of the war. The Austrian and Germany Armies together attacked and broke the Italian lines in Caporetto, close to the river Isonzo in the eastern side of Italy. From that day for Italians, Caporetto is synonymous with defeat.

Mussolini and the Italian Pacifist Movement

In Martland’s opinion, the Italian pacifist movement was a risk for Great Britain. If Italy had also decided to retire its troops from the war, the conditions could have been favorable for a German victory. In this situation, Sir Samuel Hoare should have approached Mussolini offering him 100 pounds a week, equal to about 8,200 dollars today, to avoid in any manner that Milan workers could block industrial productions. The will-be Duce should have also supported the war with his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia.

Sir Samuel Hoare was at that times a representative of the Conservative party and during the war served the MI5 in Rome. Mussolini was practically unknown outside Italy and banished from the Socialist party for his support of Italian intervention in the war against the Central Empire. The Italian socialist supported, on the contrary, the absolute neutrality of the country.

Mussolini after the break with the socialists initiated the publication of the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. Documents in the Italian Archives prove different financial support to the newspaper, from the Ansaldo Company, the leader in Italy for armaments production, to the French Embassy.

The reason for the financial help, possibly also for British intelligence interests, was the importance of newspapers during these times. A director of a newspaper was surely more powerful than a Party leader. The real link with the people and the public opinion were the newspapers and not the parties.

Mussolini and British Money

The salary details are in historian Christopher Andrew's newly published history of the British intelligence agency MI5, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 to which Martland contributed. For the first time an important intelligence service has decided to publish its authorized history. At the same time, historians know that secret services are not properly a model of virtue in conserving and producing authentic documents.

As different Italian historians assert, the most important thing in this case is not how Mussolini eventually spent the money but that the will-be Duce did not change the newspaper judgment on the war after his payment. Mussolini just continued in the same way as before. The British money was just a surplus, nothing more.

Renzo De Felice, Brenda H. Everett: Interpretations of Fascism, Harvard University Press, 1977

Anthony James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the intellectual origins of fascism, Berkeley University of California press, Los Angeles

The copyright of the article Mussolini Paid by British Secret Service in WW I History is owned by Alessandro Mastrorocco. Permission to republish Mussolini Paid by British Secret Service in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.