T here have been many biographies written about the Great Beast 666, Aleister Edward Crowley, the bisexual magician and mystic, champion chess player, mountaineer, writer and poet. Some of them have hinted at his possible involvement in the murky world of espionage and intelligence.
      However, this is the first full-length study of the other secret life as a spy of one of the most extraordinary men of the 20th century.
      Richard Spence, a consultant for Washington D.C.’s International Spy Museum and author of a biography of the famous spy Sidney Reilly, believes that Crowley was involved in espionage activities for the British Secret Service from his early days as a student at Cambridge University.
      As a young man Crowley belonged to a right-wing, semi-secret society called the Primrose League that spied on the perceived enemies of the Conservative Party. He also supported the Jacobite cause and was involved in plans for an abortive coup to restore the Bourbon royal dynasty in Spain.
      Spence claims that Crowley was involved in spying missions to the court of the Russian Tsar and may have only joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to investigate the shadowy political activities of its leader, Samuel ‘McGregor’ Mathers.
      In the 1900s Crowley had a homosexual affair with the poet Victor Neuberg. The couple decamped to North Africa to practise sex magic rituals using Dr. John Dee’s Enochian system to summon up demons. While they were staying in Algeria, Crowley and Neuberg were being closely watched by the local French colonial police. They believed the Great Beast was on a secret mission in North Africa to gather information for British Intelligence, using his magical operations as a cover.
      In 1910 Crowley met a German occultist called Karl Theodor Reuss, the head of an occult secret society called the Ordo Templi Orientis or Order of Eastern Templars (OTO). Reuss was a Freemason, an Illuminati and a Rosicrucian who had worked for the Prussian secret police in the 1880s. On their orders he had travelled to London and infiltrated the Socialist League, an extreme left-wing group led by the daughter of Karl Marx.
      When Reuss was exposed, he returned to Germany and, posing as a journalist, visited the Balkans and the Middle East as a spy for German Intelligence. In 1912 Reuss initiated Crowley into the OTO and made him the head of the Order in Britain and later America.
      Around the same time as he joined the OTO, it is alleged that Crowley was using his connection with Reuss to spy on the German government. However, when World War I began in 1914 Crowley was living in the United States. There he posed as an Irish revolutionary to infiltrate pro-German groups and engage in black propaganda on behalf of Britain’s SIS (Secret Intelligence Service or MI6) or the NID (Naval Intelligence Department).
      Crowley’s cover story was assisted by stories planted in British newspapers denouncing him as a pro-German traitor and the police raided his magical temple in London.
      In World War II Crowley allegedly offered his services again to the NID. In the 1930s he became friendly with Maxwell Knight, the assistant director of the Security Service (MI5), Ian Fleming, the assistant-director of Naval Intelligence who later penned the James Bond spy novels, and Dennis Wheatley, the occult thriller writer who served on Winston Churchill’s top-secret planning committee for total warfare.
          When war broke out in 1939, Spence says that Crowley was interviewed by the NID and in his diary he recorded that the meeting went “as satisfactory as could be expected.”
          When a combined NID/SIS sting operation managed to lure the top Nazi Rudolf Hess to Britain on his ill-fated ‘peace mission’ in 1941, Commander Ian Fleming of NID suggested to his superiors that he should be interviewed by Crowley. It is claimed in this book that Crowley did in fact interview Hess several times at a secret MI5 interrogation centre at Ham Common in south London.
      Coincidentally this was not far from where Crowley was living at the time in Kew after leaving Central London to escape the Blitz.
      In writing this book Richard Spence found it difficult to get official confirmation of Crowley’s career as a secret agent and spy. He made enquiries to MI5 and MI6 and was met with denials.
      At first MI5 said they had no files on Crowley until Spence found a reference to the Great Beast in a document from the 1930s in the Public Records Office. When he told MI5 of the discovery they apologised for misleading him and admitted they did once have a file, but it had been destroyed in the 1950s.
      Subsequently Spence found evidence of a second MI5 file dating from 1943 and was told that too had been destroyed “some years ago.” Allegedly, there was also a Scotland Yard file on Crowley and three files exist in the Foreign Office relating to his activities from 1906 to 1919.
      Although the FBI denied having any information, several files mentioning Crowley were disclosed to Spence under the auspices of the US Freedom of Information Act. Also both US Military Intelligence and the Justice Department were aware of Crowley’s status as a British agent in World War I.
      In fact Crowley was investigated and it was noted that his pro-German propaganda work was known to and had been approved by the British government. Crowley, in his role as a British intelligence officer, had also passed information on the activities of Theodor Reuss of the OTO to the deputy attorney general of the State of New York.
      Richard Spence’s book is a well-researched and fascinating account of the clandestine links between occultists and the secret intelligence services of Britain, Europe and the United States.
      Crowley was not the only occult personality of his era to be recruited as a secret agent. However, his long and varied career serving Britain in that role and the extensive links he had with other occultists and the members of secret societies and magical groups makes him totally unique in this respect.
      Secret Agent 666 is highly recommended to anyone seriously interested in the tangled web of connections between the occult, parapolitics and the secret world of espionage. It exposes a shadowy underworld that is generally hidden from the public eye, where political conspiracies, intrigue and occultism are mixed together in an unholy alliance.