the times | Monday July 27 2020 2GM 7
News
In a story that could have been lifted
straight from a spy novel, a German
scholar who claimed to be learning
Irish was scoping out a possible back-
door route for a Nazi invasion of
Britain.
Ludwig Mühlhausen lived in the tiny
Irish hamlet of Teelin, in Co Donegal,
in 1937, where he identified a potential
secret U-boat base. When he returned
to Germany he broadcast Nazi propa-
ganda in Irish from Berlin into Ireland
during the Second World War before
becoming a decorated SS officer.
Mühlhausen’s secret life is uncovered
in a new BBC Two Northern Ireland
documentary, Nazi sa Ghaeltacht.
Kevin Magee, a journalist, traces the
professor’s footsteps back to Berlin and
reveals that he was fast-tracked
through the ranks of the Nazi regime
because of his unflinching devotion to
Hitler.
Magee first heard the rumours about
as Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn,
Harry’s parents, sought to understand
how Ms Sacoolas was able to claim
diplomatic immunity.
Radd Seiger, speaking for the family,
said: “Having carefully reviewed the
documents disclosed by the foreign sec-
retary, the parents are now satisfied that
the police are absolved of any blame and
could have done no more to ensure that
Ms Sacoolas was brought to justice.
“Our case remains that the police in-
vestigation was effectively stopped in
its tracks abruptly when the Foreign
Office told the police shortly after
Harry died that Ms Sacoolas had diplo-
matic immunity. We say the documents
reveal that the Foreign Office kept the
police in the dark for 14 days about the
uncertainty surrounding Ms Sacoolas’s
claim to immunity.”
The Foreign Office has been ap-
proached for comment.One is a billionaire tech entrepreneur
known for erratic outbursts, the other is
one of the world’s most famous actors.
A feud between the two men could be
settled in a suitably dramatic manner.
Elon Musk, chief executive of the US
electric car maker Tesla, has offered
Johnny Depp, the Hollywood actor, a
chance to sort out their differences in a
cage fight. The call to arms came after
Mr Musk was mentioned in the libel
trial being held in London involving
Depp and Amber Heard, the actress.
Depp, 57, has made a defamation
claim against The Sun, which is owned
by the publisher of The Times, over
claims that the actor was a “wife beater”
during his marriage to Heard, 34.
In court, Depp has alleged that Musk
had an affair with Heard while they
were married. The Pirates of the Carib-
bean star referred to him as “Mollusk”
in texts to a friend.
Mr Musk, 49, who has been married
three times, denies the claims. He said
that Depp and Heard should move on
with their lives.
“I definitely was not having an affair
with Amber while she was married to
Johnny,” he told The New York Times
this weekend. “This is totally false. For
the two of them, I would just re-
commend that they bury the hatchet
and move on.”
The entrepreneur said he hoped that
Depp “recovers from this situation”.
Earlier this month the High Court
was shown an exchange between Depp
and Christian Carino, Lady Gaga’s ex-
fiancé, in which the actor said of Mr
Musk: “I’ll show him things he’s never
seen before like the other side of his
dick when I slice it off.”
Asked by The New York Times what
he made of this, Mr Musk jokingly
replied: “If Johnny wants a cage fight,
just let me know.”
The Tesla boss, who is also the chief
executive of SpaceX, the aerospace
manufacturer, also denied allegations
that he had a threesome with Heard
and Cara Delevingne, the British
model. “We did not have the three-
some,” he said. “I think people think
these things are generally more sala-
cious than they are.”
Mr Musk, the world’s tenth richest
man with a net worth of $67 billion, had
a baby last May with Grimes, 32, the
Canadian pop singer, whose real name
is Claire Boucher. The couple named
Musk challenges Depp to cage fight
Newspapers, the publishers of The Sun,
will sum up its defence today, before
Depp’s lawyers conclude on Tuesday. A
judgment is not expected until Septem-
ber or October.
David Sherborne, Depp’s barrister,
has been hired by Coleen Rooney to
fight claims that she defamed Rebekah
Vardy, The Mail on Sunday reported.
Mrs Vardy, who is married to Jamie
Vardy, the Leicester City striker, claims
that Mrs Rooney, the wife of Wayne
Rooney, the former England football
star, leaked personal information from
her Instagram account to a newspaper.
Mr Sherborne, 50, is also acting for
the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in
their privacy claim against Associated
Newspapers, publishers of The Mail on
Sunday.
Mr Musk is known for his outbursts
on Twitter to his 37 million followers. In
2018 he called a British cave explorer
helping with the rescue of children
trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo
guy”. Last year he said that he had fund-
ing secured for taking Tesla private de-
spite not having spoken with share-
holders or the company board before-
hand.
He told The New York Times that
Twitter “can mess with your mind”. He
said: “It’s good... to take a few breaks
from Twitter and not be on there 24
hours a day. If you’re going down a neg-
ative rabbit hole on Twitter, it can make
you miserable, that’s for sure.”
Mr Musk also remains worried about
the advances of artificial intelligence,
having previously warned that it is
humanity’s “biggest existential threat”,
and that we risk being overtaken by in-
telligent machines.
This stance has provoked ridicule
from some fellow Silicon Valley tech
executives. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief
executive and co-founder of Facebook,
has described Mr Musk’s view of the
future of AI as “hysterical”.
“My assessment about why AI is
overlooked by very smart people is that
very smart people do not think a com-
puter can ever be as smart as they are,”
Mr Musk said. “And this is hubris and
obviously false.”
Mr Musk said that working with AI at
Tesla enabled him to know “that we’re
headed toward a situation where AI is
vastly smarter than humans”.
“I think that time frame is less than
five years from now,” he said. “But that
doesn’t mean that everything goes to
hell in five years. It just means that
things get unstable or weird.”Tom Knowles
Technology Correspondent
Harry Dunn’s parents say
police did nothing wrong
Ali MitibNazi learnt Irish as cover for invasion plot
the Nazi spy when he went to Teelin to
improve his own Irish.
Mühlhausen, a professor of Celtic
studies at Berlin University and a fluent
Irish speaker, spent six weeks in the
area learning Ulster Irish and collect-
ing local stories. Residents had always
been suspicious about his presence so
Magee set about discovering if the
rumours were true.
“The plot reads like a World War Two
thriller, except this story is for real,”
Magee told The Irish Times. “One of the
first things Mühlhausen did in Teelin
after he’d found somewhere to stay was
hang a large picture of Hitler on his
bedroom wall.
“He took photographs everywhere
he went and measured the depth of
Teelin Bay by dropping lead weights
into the tide. Locals later speculated he
had been scouting the place out as a
potential landing site for Nazi U-boats.”
Magee uncovered a file at the Mili-
tary Archives in Dublin, that the Irish
intelligence agencies had compiled onMühlhausen. The files described the
German scholar as an “enthusiastic
Nazi”. One report stated: “He thinks
German culture would be good for us,
and Ireland would be better run by
Germans or British.”
Previously unseen documents were
also uncovered in Berlin, revealing
Mühlhausen’s efforts to shape a Nazi
plan for the invasion of Ireland. At the
end of the war, with the Nazis defeated
and Mühlhausen in a prisoner of war
camp in Naples, he appealed to Presi-
dent Hyde of Ireland in a letter written
in old Irish script.
“There is no evidence Hyde ever
replied to him, and there was certainly
no response I could find,” Magee said.
The film was made for BBC Gaeilge
by Macha Media, with support from
Northern Ireland Screen’s Irish Lan-
guage Broadcast Fund, and was filmed
before coronavirus restrictions were
imposed.
Nazi sa Ghaeltacht was broadcast last
night on BBC Two Northern Ireland.Ali Mitib
Harry Dunn’s parents have dropped
their legal claim against Northampton-
shire police after concluding that the
force was “absolved of any blame” after
their son’s death in August last year.
Mr Dunn, 19, died after his motorbike
was in a collision with a car being driven
by Anne Sacoolas on the wrong side of
the road near RAF Croughton.
In a judicial review hearing at the
High Court in November, his parents
will say that Dominic Raab, the foreign
secretary, “obstructed justice” by allow-
ing Ms Sacoolas, whose husband had
diplomatic immunity, to leave the UK.
The Foreign Office has said that Mr
Raab was “personally made aware of
the case only after Anne Sacoolas had
left the country”, the family says that
that is “utterly inconceivable”.
The police were included in the claimtheir son X Æ A-Xii on his birth certifi-
cate. He said that his partner was “one
of the most unusual people I’ve ever
met”.
Asked how he would manage to
spend time with his child, given his infa-
mously tough work schedule that in-
volves running five companies, Mr
Musk said: “Well, babies are just eating
and pooping machines, you know?
Right now there’s not much I can do.
Grimes has a much bigger role than me.
When the kid gets older, there will be
more of a role for me.”
Mr Musk has five other children —
Griffin and Xavier, who are twins, and
Damian, Saxon and Kai, triplets — with
his ex-wife, Justine Wilson, the Canadi-
an author. The libel trial involving
Heard and Depp will conclude this
week. The legal team of News GroupW m G D h a H wElon Musk with Amber Heard. He denies any affair while she was with Johnny Depp, below with his lawyer David SherborneWILL OLIVER/EPA