Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen


Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen was a British diplomat, civil servant and author. He is best remembered as the diplomat whose secrets were stolen by his Kosovar Albanian valet and passed on to Nazi Germany.

Background and education

He was the second son of Reverend Reginald Bridges Knatchbull-Hugessen, son of Sir Edward Knatchbull, 9th Baronet, and his second wife Rachel Mary, daughter of Admiral Sir Alexander Montgomery, 3rd Baronet. Knatchbull-Hugessen was educated at Eton College and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he befriended Anthony Eden and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1907. A year later, he joined the Foreign Office.

Career

He soon obtained the chance of the paid post of an attaché and in October 1909 he went to Constantinople. Returned to England, he served in the contraband department during the First World War and after its end in 1918, when the Foreign Service and the Diplomatic Service merged, Knatchbull-Hugessen became eligible for other postings. Promoted to first secretary, he was attached to the British Delegation at the Versailles Conference in January 1919, for which he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 1920 New Year Honours.
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After a posting in The Hague, followed by Paris, he became counsellor at the country's embassy in Brussels in 1926, an office he held until 1930. In 1931 Knatchbull-Hugessen was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Republics of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia until 1934; he was stationed at Riga, Latvia. Then he transferred to Tehran as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Persia. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 1936 New Year Honours and was sent to China as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. The following year, his car was machine-gunned by a Japanese fighter aircraft, and he was hit. First hospitalised in Shanghai and then invalided home to Britain, he narrowly escaped paralysis.
Having taken over a year to recover from his wound, Knatchbull-Hugessen was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Turkish Republic in 1939. During his time in Ankara, he competed for influence against the German ambassador Franz von Papen. In 1943, Knatchbull-Hugessen was in contact with diplomats from the Hungarian Embassy who wanted to sign an armistice with Britain. On 9 September 1943, on abroad a yacht in the Sea of Marmara that had left Istanbul earlier that day, Knatchbull-Hugessen secretly signed an armistice with an young and passionately Anglophile Hungarian diplomat László Veress under which Hungarian forces would surrender to British and American forces the moment they arrived in Hungary.
From November 1943 to March 1944, his Albanian valet Elyesa Bazna, known as Cicero regularly opened his mail and safe, selling any useful information to German High Command; one of the more damaging spying incidents of World War II.
In 1944, Knatchbull-Hugessen was nominated Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Belgium and additionally Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Luxembourg, retiring three years later in 1947 to his home near Canterbury.

Family

On 16 July 1912, he married Mary Gordon-Gilmour, daughter of Brigadier-General Sir Robert Gilmour, 1st Baronet. They had three children: a son and two daughters.

Works