The founder of British Secret Service-Sir Vernon Kell

The founder of British Secret Service - Sir Vernon Kell (Part-2)

Vernon Kell and his company

   The Germans made another attempt to throw a spy ring in Britain, but they could make absolutely no headway. Vernon Kell had appealed to the public through the newspapers that it should help to get the German spies arrested by giving full information regarding suspicious characters. Information regarding suspected spies started to poor in. the room of a Norwegian journalist was searched because he was to quiet and kept himself detached from people. The journalist did turn out to be a foreign spy. He was found in possession of invisible ink which has been kept in a bottle labeled as “throat wash”.

   It was Vernon Kell who was responsible for the arrest of Carl Hans Lody, a German spy residing in America. His arrest led to the decisive victory over Germany by the British. In the year 1914 Carl Hans Lody reached Scotland posing to be a tourist in the month of September. He sent a telegram to his Swedish contact which read, ”Hope we will soon defeat the wretched Germans.”

Peter the Great-Emperor of Russia

  Peter the Great-Emperor of Russia (Part-1)

Peter the Great

   Peter the Great was a clever despot. His full name was Peter Alekseyevich Romanov. He had fits of manic-depression in which he would indulge in the worst kinds of brutalities and take delight in them. Typically of his horribly cruel behavior was the way he treated hundreds of men and women who, he alleged, were plotting to overthrow him. They were mercilessly whipped which tore their flesh, their bones were broken on the wheel and then grilled on slow fire. Could the Devil be more ruthless than him?

   Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich’s fourteenth child was Peter (total sixteen, but two of them died in childhood). Nathalie Naryshkina’s was Tsar Alexis’s second wife and Peter was her first child, Peter was merely three years old at the time of the Tsar’s death in 1676. Tsar Alexis was succeeded by his eldest son, Fedor, a boy of 14, from his first wife Maria Miloslavskaya. Fedor was sickly and he died childless at 20. He left a brother, Ivan - a half-blind and mentally deficient boy of 15.

   Immediately after the death of Fedor (April 27, 1682) Peter’s mother succeeded in nominating Peter as his, successor. This was resented by Sophia Alexseyevna Romanov, the eldest of the six daughters of Peter’s father by his first wife. Sophia organized a military revolt which began on March 15 and resulted in the brutal murder of Peter’s maternal uncles and other supporters. She took control of the government in her hands on May 17. On May 26, she announced Ivan the first and Peter the second Tsar and herself became the regent for the duration of the minority of her brothers. She first refused regency, as a comic act on her part, and then accepted it on May 29, 1682. Thus she became Russia’s first woman ruler since the rule of Princess Olga in the tenth century. Sophia was not beautiful by any count. She was madly in love with Prince Vasili Golitsin, one of her father’s advisers, and he became Sophia’s most trusted counselor.

Sir Vernon Kell-The founder of British Secret Service

       Sir Vernon Kell, the founder of British Secret Service (Part-1)

Sir Vernon Kell, the founder of MI-5

Sir Vernon Kell, the man who failed all the attempts of Germany to win the First World War. He was the founder of British Secret Service, MI-5, succeeded in getting all information from the German spy, Carl Hans Lody. This helped to defeat Kaiser’s German Army during the First World War. During his term Sir Vernon Kell displayed a rare kind of skill and insight which helped Britain to get rid of all German spies.

   With the beginning of the 20th century the German dictator Kaiser Wilhelm II started preparations for attacking Britain. In the year 1902 the German spies had begun to infiltrate into Britain. Within seven to eight years, German spied had spread themselves all over England. Every bit of information was being sent to Germany. A counter espionage organization was formed in Britain. It was called MO-5 which was later changed MI-5. Till today this is Britain’s largest espionage organization. Captain Vernon Kell was the founder of this organization. With a rare kind of skill he was able to break the German Spy Wing, which was an event of historical importance.

   Vernon Kell did something very unusual. He attached his own organization to the Special Branch of the Scotland Yard. Patrick Quinn, the Superintendent of the Scotland Yard Special Branch gave his full cooperation to Vernon Kell. This helped a great deal towards the success of MI-5. In 1910 Kaiser Wilhelm II came to Britain to attend the funeral of King Edward VII. His delegation included a Naval Captain, who often visited a barber’s shop on London’s Caledoniam Road. Vernon Kell had long suspected that the shop had something to do with the German spies, as it was run by a German called Carl Gustav Ernst. Vernon Kell thought that a person who had come with the royal delegation could easily get a barber called to his residence for hair cut. To get his suspicions confirmed, Vernon Kell got the officer followed by his own men. Letters addressed to the barber were also opened and read.

A Crazy Despot-Idi Amin

 A Crazy Despot - Idi Amin (Part-3)

Brutality of Idi Amin

A Debauchee:

   Idi Amin has been a debauchee too. His harem was full of women during his Presidency and he sired hundreds of children purposefully. He thought of living behind him a whole tribe known by his name.

   Officially Idi Amin had only four wives. The first, Sarah, known as “Mama Maliam”, was married to him in 1958. The second, Kay, was the daughter of a Protestant priest. The third was Norah and the fourth Medina. He would keep all his children with him in the presidential palace. He misused the Muslim law on divorce on March 26, 1974, when all of a sudden in a public function he divorced his first three wives- Maliam, kay and Norah, by repeating the word “talaq” three times. Idi Amin was so engrossed with his fourth wife, Medina, that he neglected the other three who established illegal relationship with other men. Kay was so full of venom that in order to take revenge upon her husband, she became pregnant by her lover. Idi Amin was so incensed that he put them behind bars and killed their lovers. Maliam and kay escaped and fled from Uganda and Norah was murdered by him. She was dismembered and her breasts were spitted from her body while alive. Then he got her corpse stitched, covered it by a sheet up to neck called her children and told them that their mother was a whore.

The Mysterious Murderer-Jack the Ripper

 The Mysterious Murderer-Jack the Ripper (Part 3)

Mary Kelly

   Jack the Ripper’s last and sixth victim was a 35 years old prostitute, Mary Kelly. Quite a large crowd had assembled at No. 13, Miller’s Court in East London, when Inspector Beck and Detective Walter Drew arrived to investigate. They felt that they had come to slaughter house. It looked as if her body had been cut up as a demonstration of the art of dissection. Pieces of flesh were hanging from picture nails on the walls. She had been disemboweled. Her heart and kidney were placed on a table beside her severed breasts. Her face had been thoroughly mutilated and the nose and ears sliced off. Her throat had been slit open. Inspector Beck wrote afterwards, “ What I saw when I pushed back an old coat and peeped through a broken pane of glass into the sordid little room which Mary Kelly called her home, was too harrowing to be described. It remains with me–and always will remain-as the most gruesome memory of the whole of my police career.” The police deduced that Jack the Ripper must have spent at least two hours in cutting Mary Kelly. It took a team of surgeons six hours to sew the body together.

Idi Amin-A Crazy Despot

    Idi Amin - A Crazy Despot (Part-2)

Idi Amin

Ghastly Murders:

   Simultaneously with the coup, an era of ghastly murders began in Uganda. The first on the list was the Chief of the Army staff, Brig Hussein. He was captured by the troops loyal to Idi Amin and taken to a maximum security Prison where he was clubbed with rifle butts and kicked in the presence of horrified jail warders. The dying officer was then loaded on to an armored military vehicle, driven out the prison and beating with rifle butts was resumed.

   Brig Hussein succumbed to the ghastly treatment meted out to him. His body was decapitated. His head was put on Idi Amin’s table, where he harangued it. Then it was kept in a fridge overnight.

   Idi Amin ordered some of the men he suspected of disloyalty to be thrown behind the bars at Makindye prison. At dusk, a group of army officers would enter the barrack where these people were kept and started beating them mercilessly. Their bellies were gashed with curved knives, and before dawn their corpses were loaded on a military carrier and dumped at various sites. The next morning the prisoners in the adjoining cell were ordered to clean the floor of the barrack with scrubbing brushes and water.  According to an eye-witness “the blood on the floor was a quarter of an inch thick. There were pieces of skill, teeth, brain tissue and dozens of empty shell cases.”

Jack the Ripper- The Mysterious Murderer

Jack the Ripper-The Mysterious Murderer (Part-2)

Newspaper headline about Jack the Ripper

   The third victim was 47 years old Annie Chapman, known to her friends as “Dark Annie”. There was a gap only eight days between the second and third murder. It was 7th September and Annie badly needed four pence to hire a bed for the night. She was seen staggering near 29, Hanbury Street around two in the night. Her body was discovered at dawn as passing people shouted “murder, murder”. Her entrails were hanging at the door of a woman who sold cat’s meat. The murder had been carried out in the usual brutal and vicious manner. Some coins and two brass rings were lying at her feet. The stomach had been opened and the intestines had been lifted from the body and placed on the shoulder of the corpse. Her neck had been nearly severed. The knife used must have been at least five inches long and the Coroner declared, “An unskilled person could not have done this, only someone used to the post-mortem room.” Through a handkerchief was tied to the neck, the blood must have flown freely. This led the Times to wonder as to how the murdered could get away from the scene undetected. It wrote, ”reeking with blood, and yet,.......he must have walked in broad daylight along streets comparatively well frequented, even at that early hour, without his startling appearance attracting attention.” The newspaper thought that the killer must be living in that area and must have gone to his house to remove all traces of his hideous crime. Other journals including Punch vehemently criticized the police and their inability to arrest the murdered. George Bernard Shaw, the eminent write, wrote an angry letter to Star.

   It was certain that the killer was an audacious person. In between the murders, he wrote sarcastic letters to the police ridiculing their inefficiency and working methods. He even threw a challenge to them to catch him if they could. He informed that he was going to kill someone in the near future. The police could neither arrest him nor had any idea regarding his identity. The papers were giving wide publicity to these murders by Jack the Ripper. They also vehemently criticized the tardy manner in which the police was dealing with these gruesome murders. The police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, would not even send his policemen to the site of murder. He would send his police dogs. His Deputy, Sir Robert Anderson, displayed his indifference to these murders by going out to Switzerland for a month’s holiday.