Wartime spy who scandalised establishment with her 'nymphomaniac' behaviour

Yet the rollercoaster ride that is the life of Stella Lonsdale, a woman who climbed from humble West Midlands beginnings to enjoy a champagne drenched carnival of candid, at times carnal, adventures with the pampered posh – happened. It really happened.

The daughter of a travelling salesman and born plain Stella Clive, history has depicted her as a Mata Hari figure...with fewer moral scruples.

Stella was dubbed a nymphomaniac by MI5 agents, who suspected her of working for the Nazis. Appalled by the no-nonsense suspect’s own revelations, they described her as “a woman whose loose living would make her an object of shame on any farmyard”.

Now declassified files refer to Stella as “utterly unscrupulous” and add: “Much of Mrs Lonsdale’s conversation cannot possibly be submitted in a report owing to its indescribably filthy nature”.

The popular press were hooked by Stella’s story, their descriptions of the sex-bomb spy ranging from “quite ravishing” to a “champagne-loving brunette with a cesspool mind”.

She died in July, 1994, aged 81, a very rich woman, having spent her post war years with George Pitt-Rivers, an extremely wealthy landowner and former supporter of English fascist leader Oswald Mosley. When he died in 1966, Stella – described in Pitt-Rivers’ will as “my beloved” – received a large slice of the fortune.

It now appears our secret service may have got it wrong about Stella, the espionage bit, anyway.

In his book 'Agent Provocateur for Hitler or Churchill?', author David Tremain claims she was not spying for them, she was spying for us while pretending to spy for them. Both sides incarcerated her under the same suspicion.

Stella was a heroine who lay down and thought of England. The three times married undercover operative is alleged to have done a lot of thinking – and a lot of lying down.

From early adulthood, Stella’s antics flew in the face of codes and conventions.

Born on January 9, 1913, to “commercial traveller” Ernest Clive and wife Stella, she was raised in Olton, Warwickshire, and dreamed of a more glamorous existence. She craved it.

At the age of 21 she raised eyebrows by moving in with financier Paul Christian Bog Holme who was 45.

In the extraordinary world of Miss Lonsdale that would become very small beer.

Three years later, Stella was hanging from the arm of oligarch Nicolas Sidoroff, son of a White Russian prince. They even tied the knot in a Monte Carlo church, but the ceremony was not legally recognised in France or Britain, the marriage declared void.

The British public were first introduced to the then Stella Clive by the Sunday Mirror of July 2, 1939. It informed readers: “John Christopher Lonsdale, the Mayfair playboy who has just served imprisonment for his part in the Mayfair jewel robbery, is to be married shortly at a London Register Office.”

His bride was to be Stella.

Lonsdale, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, had led a louche life and was among a band of four toff robbers – all public schoolboys – who savagely beat a Bond Street jeweller before snatching £13,000 worth of rings. Then aged 24, he was sentenced to 18 months hard labour for the crime.

The Sunday Mirror article added: “Miss Clive renewed her friendship with Lonsdale when she visited her former fiancé in Wandsworth Prison.

“He is Mr Nicholas Sidoroff, leader of the White Russian set in Paris. Yesterday, at a table in a London restaurant, Miss Clive and Mr Sidoroff told me of the events that led to the chance encounter with Lonsdale in prison. ‘I was sent to prison last August,’ Mr Sidoroff said, ‘on a charge under the Immigration Act. Miss Clive and I were in love. When I was taken to prison, I met Lonsdale for the first time. We met there and I referred to him in my letters to Stella. I asked her to write to him to cheer him up and to send him some books. Later when she visited me, she again met Lonsdale’.”

The Stella-Sidoroff-Lonsdale triangle was a curious menage a trois. Stella later told MI5 they’d indulged in threesomes. It was beyond cosy.

She was more conservative in her interview with the Sunday Mirror. “John has made no definite plans as regard future work, but I believe he will be taking up an appointment in the city,” she said.

Stella revealed she was toying with an offer to sing on the radio, although she’d never sang publicly before. The performance didn’t materialise.

Instead, she followed new husband Lonsdale to France where he was serving with the British Expeditionary Force. Oddly, when he was evacuated back to Blighty, Stella, who had found work as a teacher, decided to stay in the Nazi occupied country.

Through whichever lens you view her exploits, Stella’s agreement to spy for the Third Reich, following her arrest in Nantes in October, 1940, has to be treated as fact. She admitted it, but stressed the deal was an act of self-preservation. Stella was looking to save her own skin.

From that truth, the trail forks in two very different directions. Depending on which path you take, Stella either became a double agent, passing invaluable nuggets of information back to Britain, or was simply a traitor.

According to author Tremain, she worked with resistance groups and befriended – even bedded – Nazis in very high places in order to coax secrets from them that were relayed to the Allies.

From May, 1941, she ran messages for the 'Pat Line', a network of Allied soldiers and airmen hidden in enemy territory.

She was, according to Tremain, also used by top brass in the German navy who could see the war would end in tears and wanted Hitler ousted. For example, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr military intelligence service, was executed for high treason against Germany in April, 1945.

Had he given documents to Stella?

She insisted to MI5 that her own contact in the Abwehr intelligence service, Siegfried Rauch, was secretly an anti-Nazi who leaked classified documents.

Rauch not only shared official secrets with Stella, but also her bed.

Their intimate relationship hit the rocks when his lover failed to pass on details of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia.

Tremain insists Stella’s role as an Allied spy was hampered by this country’s own suspicions over her motives. We didn’t believe her and feared the double agent was a triple agent. We decided to “throw a deaf un”.

Her vampish lifestyle didn’t help.

The MI5 documents dub Stella as “sex fanatical” – so is James Bond, and “cesspool” minded. They add: “She is a liar of such convincingness as I would not have believed existed.”

“Everywhere Stella went she was given the runaround, with no one particularly interested in what she had to say,” Tremain states.

In late 1941, Stella slipped back to Britain via Spain and our intelligence service – tipped off the cloak-and-dagger “escape” was actually meticulously organised by the Abwehr, who ensured a safe passage - were waiting.

Her interrogation was a thoroughly English affair, taking place over tea at London’s Waldorf Hotel.

During that interview, Stella maintained she “pretended to work for German intelligence and now wanted to return to France and spy for us”.

It was an offer we steadfastly refused. MI5 concluded she was a dizzy socialite, pathological liar and promiscuous beyond 1940s belief.

Those are not great selling points when applying to be a secret agent.

Tremain agrees: “She was too unreliable, too much of a loose cannon.”

With the war over, Stella’s racy life showed no evidence of slowing down. She squeezed in another marriage, this time to an alleged high-profile French conman, and, in 1947, attempted to sue the Sunday Express for suggesting she’d worked for the Gestapo.

Stella was forced to drop the case when MI5 let it be known they’d support the paper’s defence.

She was a fantasist, Tremain concedes. She had a tendency to peddle outlandish fiction as fact. But she genuinely wanted to help Britain beat Hitler.

Enemy of the Empire or unrecognised heroine? We’ll never know. But her’s was a life with many trysts and turns.

That’s Stella Lonsdale: the spy who loved me…again…and again…and again.