Homepage Feature

Benito Mussolini: Fascist, dictator, British spy?

Audio: Play | Download

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3Benito Mussolini may be among history’s most notorious fascist dictators, but evidence suggests he worked for British secret services during World War I. Historian Dr Peter Martland says MI5 records show it paid “Il Duce” about $160 per week, about $7,900 today,to spread pro-war propaganda via his newspaper. To find out how Mussolini spent the money, tune in to the show later today.

• More BBC coverage of this story
• BBC Profile: Benito Mussolini

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: And now some startling news from the world of espionage. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT: Intelligence agencies such as the CIA generally don’t care about the moral fiber of the people they pay to help them out. So the history of the CIA includes involvement with some pretty shady types from Vietnam to Russia to Panama. It’s no different with the British, especially at moments of crisis. Rewind to the year 1917 and World War.

PETER MARTLAND: We can say with great confidence that Britain is losing this war and something has to be done.

GALLAFENT: That’s Peter Martland, a historian at Cambridge University in the UK. He’s using the present tense to you know keep things dramatic. So something has to be done. In particular something to shore up Italian resolve in the war against Germany. Italy remember is a British ally in World War I.

MARTLAND: And what has to be done is to send a British military mission headed by Sir Samuel Hoare.

GALLAFENT: Hold on Dr. Martland. Sir Samuel Hoare is at this time a lawmaker and a senior British intelligence figure. So off goes Sir Samuel Hoare.

MARTLAND: With a hundred British intelligence officers to Italy to put some backbone back into the will to resist. Particularly in Milan which as you know is the industrial heartland of Italy.

GALLAFENT: And indeed the heartland of Italian disillusionment.

MARTLAND: It has been badly affected by the war. There’s hyperinflation, there are food shortages, and there’s a lot of antiwar propaganda.

GALLAFENT: So the question is how to combat that antiwar propaganda. Well with pro-war propaganda. And here’s the big surprise. British military intelligence hired someone who a few years down the line would make history with anti British speeches like this.

BENITO MUSSOLINI: [SPEAKING ITALIAN]

GALLAFENT: That’s Fascist leader Benito Mussolini declaring war on Britain and France in June 1940. And it’s a young Mussolini who was recruited by British intelligence more than 20 years earlier in Milan during World War I. Historian Peter Martland found details of the spy deal in Sir Samuel Hoare’s papers.

MARTLAND: Mussolini is at this point in his career a pro-war socialist journalist with a newspaper that goes out in Milan. And he asked the British for 100 pounds a week to keep that newspaper on the streets.

GALLAFENT: the British paid making Mussolini a kind of real-life socialist and soon-to-be fascist Italian James Bond. I wonder if he took his martinis like this.

JAMES BOND: Agitato, non mesculato.

GALLAFENT: And here’s one other link to that shaken not stirred brand of espionage. Historian Peter Martland says he has quote no evidence to prove it but he suspects that the womanizing Mussolini spends a good deal of his British pay on mistresses. For The World I’m Alex Gallafent.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.