Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | From Dracula's nemesis to prototype foreign spy: "From Dracula's nemesis to prototype foreign spy
National Archives reveal how model for vampire hunter informed on Ottoman empire, and how envoy's valet sold British secrets to Nazis
Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday April 1, 2005
The Guardian
Letters between Britain's secret service and a flamboyant Hungarian professor said to be the model for the vampire-hunter Abraham van Helsing in Bram Stoker's Dracula are among hundreds of documents on British spies disclosed for the first time today.
They include details of how a Middle Eastern arms dealer persuaded the government to part with millions of pounds in the first world war and then honour him with a knighthood.
The papers, released today at the National Archives, also reveal that arguments over the veracity of reports - thrust into the open by the Iraqi weapons dossier - are not a new phenomenon.
One of the secret service's first foreign agents - before MI6 was established - was Arminius Vambery, professor of oriental languages at the Budapest university at the end of the 19th century. Traveller, translator and adventurer, he is said to have introduced Stoker to the Dracula legend during a dinner at London's Beefsteak Club in 1890.
His putative usefulness for the British was that he had the ear of the sultan of Turkey, "your friend in Constantinople", as his controller in London described him.
He provided information about the weakening Ottoman empire and its relations with the Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia at the time of what Keith Hamilton, a Foreign Office historian, yesterday called a "new round in the Great Game, the Anglo-Russian struggle for power in Asia".
The papers include letters to Vambery from his Foreign Office handlers, though none of his replies. One, dated 1893, refers to concern in the Commons about the Turkish treatment of Armenians. "Our humanitarian zealots, like our missionaries, are politically inconvenient, but they are not to be suppressed", Vambery was told.
In 1897, the Foreign Office expressed concern about the sultan's "manoeuvres for the encouragement of Musselman [Muslim] agitation in India and Afghanistan".
Vambery was always after money and most of the Foreign Office's messages to him refer to arrangements for sending him batches of £50, or £120 in bank notes. Eventually he was given a fixed annuity of £140 plus a pension, despite the view of Lord Salisbury, the Conservative foreign secretary, that a lot of what Vambery had to say was "alarmist" and "had done us more harm than good". Gill Bennett, the Foreign Office chief historian, described him yesterday as "a sort of near eastern pimp".
But the Foreign Office entrusted much more money - millions of pounds - to the arms dealer Basil Zaharoff. Zaharoff, who was brought up in Constantinople, wheeled and dealt before buying shares in the Maxim gun company, later bought by the British company Vickers. Papers show that his main supporter in London was Sir Vincent Caillard, a member of the Vickers board.
Zaharoff pestered London for an award, telling Caillard in 1917: "I would like to have the Grand X of the new order [Order of the British Empire]", saying he risked his hide sufficiently to merit it. He added later: "I am like a child who has been promised chocolate".
The papers reveal divided views within the Foreign Office about the worth of reports from the agents of the Secret Service, which was to become MI6. Sir Alexander Cadogan, the FO's permanent secretary, noted in 1939: "I am now in the position where I am exposed to the whole barrage of them. But I cannot ignore that they did warn us of the September crisis [Germany's accession of the Sudetenland in 1938], and they did not give any colour to the ridiculous optimism that prevailed up to the rape of Czechoslovakia".""
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