Noël Coward once hit his fellow dramatist and composer Ivor Novello. On 30 September 1938 they went together to a cinema on the Strand in London to watch newsreels of Neville Chamberlain at the Heston Aerodrome. The prime minister had flown back from Munich that day flourishing a piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler. It would, he promised later that evening, be ‘peace for our time’. War with Germany had seemed inevitable for nearly a month, and Novello burst into tears of relief. Coward lost his temper, and hit him. He was appalled by the agreement and believed the jubilant crowds outside were ‘wildly cheering their own defeat’. Chamberlain, he later said, was one of the only people he ever truly hated.

Think of Noël Coward in 2025, and the character that comes to mind may be one of cigarette holders, hedonistic parties, clipped consonants and a flippant attitude both to life and to politics. All true enough: born into straitened finances and a family hanging onto gentility by its fingernails, he had abandoned formal education in favour of life as a child-actor, and had spent the interwar years conquering the West End and Broadway as playwright, performer and songwriter. But beneath the silk dressing-gown lay a disciplined, even wounded, spirit, with well-tuned political and moral antennae. Fed up with being dismissed as a purveyor of light entertainment, he grew increasingly keen to play a political role in the Second World War, perhaps in atonement for his chequered service in the First, which he had spent either touring regional theatres or in a hospital recovering from a nervous breakdown. Hence his creation of the character that may have been most important to him: Noël Coward the spy.

His espionage career seems to have begun … (But here any account must concede its reliance on ‘seems’, ‘may have’ and ‘perhaps’. Bombed buildings, the Official Secrets Act and Coward’s weird admixture of secrecy and boastfulness combine to make the terrain uncertain. The holes have been partially patched by the recent release of wartime diaries and correspondence.) His espionage career seems to have begun long before the country was at war. British public opinion remained strongly against engagement in another conflict, but Coward was consistently horrified by the government’s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. He was almost a lone voice in the theatrical world and plays espousing anti-Nazi sentiment, seen as going against government policy, were subject to censorship by the Lord Chamberlain. George Bernard Shaw early on expressed admiration for both Hitler and Mussolini and continued to push for a peace negotiation. By contrast Coward, with startling political acuity, was unwavering in his mistrust both of fascists and of Soviets, denouncing Stalin at a time when many in the arts (Shaw included) thought of Russia as a Utopia. Coward knew of what he spoke, having attended one of Mussolini’s rallies in Rome. He had witnessed Jewish friends, such as the director Max Reinhardt and the singer Fritzi Massary, fleeing Austria after the Anschluss and in 1938 he wrote a musical specifically for Massary to ensure her employment in London.

His views glued him to a social group of which Winston Churchill was the central figure. Coward’s relationship with Churchill could be fractious, and the soon-to-be prime minister had little time for the serious political ambitions of a writer the press had nicknamed ‘The Playboy of the West End World’. But there is no doubting Churchill’s admiration for the plays and songs (many of which he knew by heart); put simply, Coward made Churchill laugh, and this would prove a saving grace. He became a fixture in a coterie of politicians who were for a time out of favour given their opposition to appeasement: Anthony Eden, who resigned from government in February 1938; Alfred Duff Cooper, who left the Cabinet in protest after Munich; George Lloyd, president of the British Council; and Sir Robert Vansittart, removed from the Foreign Office for his stance against Germany, who was in fact a vicious Teutophobe, believing fascism endemic to the German character.

It was Vansittart who first employed Coward as a spy. By the summer of 1938 he was serving as ‘Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty’s Government’, a politically meaningless title, and his dire warnings against the Nazis were barely heeded. The Secret Service, focused on the Soviet Union, was run-down and ill-funded. In secret, Vansittart was building a motley private detective agency collecting intelligence, especially on Nazi rearmament, to make the case against appeasement. Chief on his list were wealthy bankers, industrialists and entertainers: the director Alexander Korda became a close collaborator, able to scout for filming locations in politically sensitive countries. Vansittart’s agency either worked with, or may actually have been, the ‘Z Organisation’, a shadowy group intended to replace the Secret Service in the case of invasion. It had been founded in 1936 by Colonel Claude Dansey, an old hand in British espionage.

By early summer 1938 Coward was reporting back to Vansittart, who wrote to him: ‘Your letter told me much in a small compass… in fact it told me all I wanted to know.’ He went later that year to Switzerland, apparently to report to Vansittart as to the influence, if any, of fascist propaganda in the country, which had returned to neutrality after withdrawing from the League of Nations. ‘I snooped around a good deal’, Coward wrote, ‘and flapped my ears… The Nazi propaganda, particularly in Zurich and Basel, is very strong but falling on the stoniest of stony ground.’ Work in the theatre was soon to take Coward to America. ‘I will be in Washington for two weeks in January [1939], so just drop me a line when you have time and give me a few conversational leads.’

It was in the summer of 1939 that Coward travelled to Poland, Russia and Scandinavia, and nobody, including the press, could quite work out why. It is now clear that the tour was undertaken, at least in part, for Vansittart; the Foreign Office opened a file (‘Coward, Noël, Visit to Warsaw’) that no longer survives. His host in Warsaw was Vansittart’s private secretary, and in the Free City of Danzig, the semi-autonomous city state on the coast of the Baltic Sea, he was welcomed by Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner, who was attempting to maintain its international status even as the Nazi-controlled senate was pushing for its return to the Third Reich. While Coward was in Warsaw, Britain extended its defence of Poland to include protection of Danzig’s autonomy. He had been tasked with delivering a letter to Burckhardt, and the two men walked together through the crowded streets, which were thronged with Nazi soldiers milling about in front of buildings draped with swastika banners. ‘The Nazi entourage’, a journalist wrote, was ‘in a fine frenzy’ about the visit.

Vansittart’s intelligence contacts were focused especially on Nazi-Soviet negotiations and in Moscow and Leningrad Coward spent time in the bugged rooms of shabby hotels, aware he was being ‘spied on and followed everywhere’. In Sweden he was asked to carry the diplomatic bag into Oslo, handing the packet of documents to an anonymous Norwegian waiting on a cold station platform. He got back to England on 19 August and went straight into rehearsals for two of his own plays, which were cancelled on 1 September, two days before Chamberlain made an address that will have inspired no tears of relief.

Once the country was at war, Coward never quite avoided a ‘told-you-so’ tone. Most of his anti-appeasement associates were reappointed to government positions and Churchill would become prime minister in 1940. The ‘Z Organisation’ was merged with the Secret Service, of which Claude Dansey became assistant director. To detractors, Coward’s yearning for a high-level war position merely proved his hubris. Now war was upon the country, he all but begged for a senior role in the navy and perhaps in espionage, too, but Churchill’s response was clear: ‘Go and sing to them while the guns are firing – that’s your job.’ And so Coward did, providing entertainment to British and American troops on gruelling tours of the Far East; working on now-legendary films such as Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve; touring the country as an actor; writing the classic comedy Blithe Spirit, whose run would outlast the war; and surviving bombs which fell first on his London flat and then on his reputation, when failure to disclose his foreign currency led to two well-publicised trials at the Old Bailey that cost him a long-expected knighthood.

But he spent the first months of the war in Paris, initially at the request of Sir Campbell Stuart, a newspaper magnate who recruited Coward not, as is often said, to ‘Section D’ at Bletchley Park, but to Department EH, a network working on enemy propaganda that was based at the rather more secret Woburn Abbey, ten miles to the east of Bletchley. Staffed with journalists and broadcasters (the popular crime novelist Valentine Williams was one of Coward’s colleagues), it was investigating propaganda schemes in Europe. Coward was eventually sent, unsalaried, to Paris as Stuart’s representative, working in cooperation with the French Ministry of Information to shunt Allied propaganda into Germany. (The French, too, had sought to utilise theatrical talent, and Coward’s French counterparts, with whom his relationship was uneasy, were the playwrights Jean Giraudoux and André Maurois.) It was an unsatisfying job, mired in bureaucracy and mainly ineffectual, although Coward’s conviviality as host and socialite meant that his Paris flat became a useful source of information for the British government.

From Paris he was sent to America, leading to cries of horror in the press that Noël Coward was fleeing the dangers of the London Blitz, having already made a showy fool of himself in Paris. In fact, Duff Cooper, now Minister of Information, had given the order for Coward to travel to Washington and report back on the public mood. Coward’s celebrity was such that he could obtain an audience at the White House with ease, and he forged a warm relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sent him back to London with messages for Churchill that were delivered in a secret meeting at the Savoy (one yet to be noted by the factory of Churchill Studies). It was on a second trip to America, in the summer of 1940, that Coward was then recruited, by an MI6 agent called Ingram Fraser, to British Security Co-ordination (BSC), the American arm of Special Operations Executive, a vast espionage organisation that Churchill famously said should ‘set Europe ablaze’.

BSC was run by William Stephenson, known today by his rather glamorous and probably mythical code name, ‘Intrepid’. Coward’s diaries detail meeting after meeting with Stephenson, whom he adored; they met four times in the first week of August 1940. A phalanx of eminent figures from the arts was promptly despatched across America by Stephenson, Coward among them, reporting as to where influential figures stood on isolationism versus engagement, or on Roosevelt versus Wendell Willkie, his rival in the forthcoming election. Coward’s reports to Stephenson survive, detailing meetings with prominent newspaper owners and a rather ill-tempered Herbert Hoover. Come 1941, Stephenson had gone so far as to suggest that Coward become Director of Propaganda in Latin America for Special Operations Executive. It was an astonishing job offer. South America was an important source of trade for the Axis Powers, and Stephenson was attempting to intercept a smuggling route between Rome and Brazil. In April 1941 Coward duly flew to Bermuda, where Stephenson had established an office to direct Secret Service agents in the region.

It was in Bermuda that Coward’s formal career as a spy ended. The British arm of Special Operations Executive was having none of it. Its director was Hugh Dalton, the British Minister of Economic Warfare, and he loathed Coward: ‘The man is utterly unsuitable and attracts publicity everywhere. I am told that it will upset [Stephenson] if I say no… I will risk that.’ Dalton closed the whole thing down. A repressed homosexual, he wrote in his diary, ‘of course, [Coward] is a roaring pansy’. Alone on Bermuda, Coward received the news in disbelieving anger, and blamed Churchill for a long time afterwards, although Dalton’s papers reveal that, fearing the prime minister would overrule him, he kept the whole abortive scheme secret. So Coward returned to bomb-damaged London, to go and sing while the guns were firing.

The importance of Coward’s espionage career shouldn’t be overstated, and he was prevented from undertaking the spy role that might have proved the most influential. As Roald Dahl (also in Stephenson’s employ) testified, he had a habit of letting slip that he was working as a spy, hardly the best qualification for espionage, and he proved too famous a figure to move anywhere unnoticed, also an impediment. Attacks by politicians and journalists, who did not know the true nature of his work, became so vicious that he had become a liability; in press conferences he delivered highly politicised messages to the Americans that undid the carefully laid plans of embassies and diplomats.

But the extent and level to which Coward was respected by some of the most prominent figures in Allied espionage are striking: Claude Dansey, Robert Vansittart, and most of all William Stephenson, said to be the most powerful spymaster of the war, and with whom Coward remained friendly. Surprise soon gives way to inevitability. Coward was well-connected, politically engaged and rich enough to fund his own intelligence career. His position in such political circles also becomes explicable considering the group’s theatrical and sexual inclinations. Anthony Eden, in youth, was often compared to a character from a Coward play; Duff Cooper’s pre-war social life was a showbiz whirlwind that encompassed Cole Porter and Fred Astaire. Robert Vansittart was a published playwright who had written dialogue and song lyrics for Hollywood. George Lloyd, whose position at the British Council led to some of Coward’s wartime tours, was, though married, homosexual. The spymaster Claude Dansey had, like Oscar Wilde, been the lover of Alfred Douglas and Robbie Ross. For any homosexual of the time, a life of subterfuge and secrecy was second nature. Noël Coward sits at the centre of the Venn diagram where the worlds of homosexuality, theatre and espionage met. All three required more than a modicum of acting talent, and an ability to read and create character.

Talent Noël Coward had in abundance, and he called the bluff of those who might accuse him of spying by pushing to its absolute limits the notion of hiding in plain sight. He even wrote a comedy sketch about spies called ‘Secret Service’, which was performed in London just before the outbreak of war. A patriotic member of the establishment and a chronicler of the aristocracy, he was born into neither world, and had spied on the inhabitants since adolescence. Espionage, ostensibly the act of an outsider looking in, was also a culmination of belonging, to one country over another. It was a powerful step in his social ascent and an almost moving gesture of acceptance for a homosexual from the wrong side of the tracks. Like many a spy, he was both perfect outsider and perfect insider.

His work did not go unnoticed in Nazi high command. In September 1945 it was reported that a small booklet had been found in the Berlin headquarters of Reich security, a secret list of those who, come the Nazi invasion of Britain, were to be immediately arrested. Among its 2,820 names were Robert Vansittart, Claude Dansey and George Lloyd. Coward, Noël, comes on page 34, a few rows beneath Duff Cooper. The Nazis had believed him to have been in London at an unknown location, and he was wanted specifically by Amtsgruppe VIG1, a department evaluating intelligence material. Questioned by reporters about the booklet, Coward laughed the matter off. Even during the war, after he had only just escaped execution in Paris during the Nazi invasion, he tended to state in print that he had been due to arrive in the French capital on the same day as Hitler, which would have been ‘highly embarrassing for them both’. Also on the Nazis’ hitlist was his friend Rebecca West, who sent him a telegram: ‘My dear – the people we should have been seen dead with.’

Humour, in the interwar years, had been the means by which Coward had dodged the censorship of his era, hiding surprising profundity and great sexual daring beneath the sound of laughter, just as, later, he would hide his true mission beneath the character of the visiting dandy. Watching Mussolini scream red-faced to his Fascist supporters, he had barely suppressed giggles, and with the first explosion of laughter, Il Duce’s frightening, risible display was deflated. Wit was foremost in the armoury of Coward the spy and Coward the playwright, wielded as shield, weapon and disguise. His wartime service was cloak-and-dagger, his wit both dagger and cloak.