When Tom Burns crossed the border from France into Spain, in February 1940, he had been working for the Ministry of Information for just four months. Before that he had been a Catholic publisher. He was thirty-four, handsome, debonair and with Latin looks. He was Chilean born, and his father David Burns was a Scottish banker. His mother Clara was also Chilean born from British stock. He might have been flustered as his companion Denis Cowan, who had recruited him into MoI, had been recalled to London. At Hendaye in south west France they had checked with the British consulate before crossing the border. There an official letter was waiting for Cowan marked ‘urgent’. It instructed Cowan to return to London and for Burns to continue onto Madrid alone.1
Cowan had served as a neutral observer during the civil war implementing the non-intervention policy and was therefore not trusted by the Nationalists, who believed the observers had favoured the Republic. Cowan’s and Burn’s mission to Spain was a reconnaissance trip to set up a propaganda department at the British Embassy in Madrid. The Spanish Ambassador to London, the Duke of Alba, had got wind of the mission and had complained to the Foreign Office about Cowan’s ‘pro-Republican sympathies’.2
So Tom took the grey Humber in which the two men had ‘bowled along’ the roads of France and alone headed south skirting the Pyrenees. The high peaks still had snow on them but he found the valleys were alive with the green shoots of spring. He missed Cowan. They had got on well during the journey. They shared the sense of adventure that the open road instilled and, like the weather, their mood had improved as they moved further south.3
It was a landscape Tom was familiar with. He had walked the Pyrenees as a schoolboy, following in the writer Hilaire Belloc’s footsteps. He had even approached him for advice on crossing the mountains. Shortly after his journey began, he had become lost, but he soon found his way again aided by a priest and some friendly villagers. Motoring south toward Burgos he recalled his time there in 1937, driving an ambulance donated by English Catholics to the Nationalist headquarters during his summer holidays. His companion travellers on that occasion had been Gabriel Herbert, a volunteer nurse, and a mysterious former soldier, whom he thought might be a spy.
Burgos had been the old capital of Castile: ‘… a grave reserved, conservative city, the rising triumphed without difficulty and with scarcely a shot fired.’ The Condesa de Vallellano said, ‘The very stones are Nationalist here.’4
It became Franco’s headquarters, well chosen as it was the birthplace of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador, the legendary 11th century knight and mercenary. The Cid’s remains, and that of his wife Jimena, are in the 11th century cathedral. The diminutive Generalissimo wanted to be Spain’s new El Cid at the head of a holy crusade to liberate Spain from communists, freemasons, and foreigners.
In 1939 Burns found Burgos had lost the ‘sense of urgency’ it had during the civil war and was instead like ‘a woman with nothing to do but confront the chores and tedium of solitary life.’5 Beyond Burgos lay the great plains of Castile which were new to Tom then. It was harvest time when the now famous writer Laurie Lee had walked across this sea of waving, ripening crops before the Civil War broke out:
Green oaks like rocks lay scattered among the cornfields, with peasant’s chest-deep in the wheat. It was the peak of harvest, and figures of extraordinary brilliance were spread across the fields like butterflies, working alone or in clusters, and dressed to the pitch of the light-blue shirts and trousers, and with broad gold hats tied with green and scarlet cloths. Submerged in the wheat, sickles flickered like fish, with rhythmic flashes of blue and silver, and as I passed men straightened and shielded their eyes, silently watching me go, or a hand was raised in salute, showing among its sun-black fingers the glittering sickle like a curved sixth nail.6
The landscape Tom drove across was markedly different to what Laurie Lee had witnessed, and far from that which Don Quixote and Rocinante had plodded through. It was instead a ‘limitless table land’ of brown naked soil destroyed by war and interspersed with trenches and barbed wire and burned out villages. He was grateful to finally see the clear outline of Madrid before him.7 The Spanish capital also showed the gaping wounds of war having been in the front line for three years. Reporting to the Embassy, Tom was told to come back on Monday. But a room was booked for him at the Palace Hotel, which was built in 1912 on the Plaza de las Cortes. It had been one of the largest hospitals during the civil war, and one of the first buildings to be restored.
Tom was tired out by the time he reached the Palace after he had driven for about 300 miles across some of the most war-torn roads in Europe. When he arrived at the hotel: ‘A group of journalists were predictably to be found at the bar but I had no inclination to mix with them …’ All he wanted was his bed.8
On Monday 19 February Tom reported to the Embassy. He soon realised it was understaffed and chaotic. Yet the Assistant Press Attaché Bernard Malley, a former teacher at El Escorial and fellow Catholic, would prove to be a fountain of excellent advice. Known at the Embassy as Don Bernardo Tom soon found that, ‘he gleaned information and exercised influence in areas seldom reached by the career diplomats.’9 He had built up contacts in Spain over many years.
From the start, Alan Hillgarth and Tom got on well together, with the former proving a good guide to the Madrid nightlife. Alan was accomplished at mapping out the numerous espionage groups in the city with all their pitfalls. He was then engaged on building up the British Intelligence gathering network across the Iberian Peninsula. He had already built a good rapport with the Nationalist Naval officers from his days in Majorca, as acknowledged by an NID report to the other British intelligence services that he was: ‘… already on excellent terms with the Spanish naval authorities who both like and trust him.’10 Yet Hillgarth was lucky to have inherited a legacy stretching back to World War I. It was a legacy that helped him with one of the most important contacts he could have, that of Juan March, referred to as ‘The Pirate’.
By the time that World War II had started, Juan March was one of the wealthiest men in Spain. He had started smuggling tobacco, and anything else that might make a profit, from North Africa to Spain. In the first war he had brokered arms deals to both sides. He had been instrumental in transferring the £2,000 needed for the hire of the Dragon Rapide DH 89, which was used to fly Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco. The money was paid into the account of Kleinwort Benson & Sons, a London merchant bank. He also financed the transfer of Franco’s African Army to Spain by air.
He was born in Santa Margarita, Majorca, in 1880 and was the son of a farmer. March had come to know Hillgarth on Majorca probably before the civil war. One story has him interned by the Republicans before the civil war, but Philip Vickers wrote: ‘… he escaped by bribing all his jailers and taking them with him to Paris at his own expense.’11
It is inconceivable that at some point Alan did not hear about, or even meet, Charles Julian Thoroton, former Colonel of the Royal Marines, who had run British Naval Intelligence in Spain during World War I. It was Thoroton who affectionately called March ‘my pirate’ and he secured his services for the Allies with his: ‘smuggling, commercial and maritime empire provided some 40,000 agents to the network.’12
Major Thoroton arrived in Gibraltar in 1913 and was appointed senior naval intelligence officer for the colony on 12 September. The author Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was head of operations in Spain, best remembered for his 1902 novel The Four Feathers. However, Mason was more often inclined to act as a field agent, leaving Thoroton as the director. Late in 1916 Mason sailed around Spain in a steam yacht supplied by Blinker Hall: ‘with a large, mixed house party’ whose ‘careless sightseeing formed an excellent cover under which he made a careful search for German submarine bases.’13
The ‘cover’ cannot have been that good because he was recalled by Hall having become too well known. He was replaced by the then Colonel Charles Thoroton known as ‘Charles the Bold’ by those within NI.14 It was Thoroton who, in May 1915, during a meeting with March, had convinced the wily businessman to support the Allies. He became Thoroton’s most important source. Sir Basil Thomson, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and head of the CID at Scotland Yard, had responsibility for catching spies. When the war broke out, his services were secured for the Admiralty and War Office. He wrote in his diary about the German attempts to turn March over to their side:
He keeps the government quiet by bribing officials and occasionally permitting captures of cargo, but he turned over the services of his staff to watch the coast for German submarines. The Germans offered him money, and he replied they might as well offer him an elephant, and then they tried a decoration, and he said he could buy things to hang on his coat whenever he wanted them. Then they tried a lady from Hamburg, who first would and then would not, though he offered her 30,000 pesetas. This infuriated him. Thoroton had told him she was a spy. He said he did not care what she was. He meant to have her. Thoroton became nervous, but early this month he [March] returned triumphant from Madrid with a scratch across his nose inflicted by the lady, who resented having received only 1,000 pesetas. Now the smuggler [March] is in harness again.15
Thomson thought the ‘lady from Hamburg’ might have been the actress Beatrice von Brunner, whom he had arrested in 1915. It seemed that she had been turned by NI and sent to Gibraltar to infiltrate German spy rings, but they rumbled her and tried to poison her.16
In 1919 Thoroton retired from the Royal Marines after twenty-six years of service. The Spanish government had even sought his retention as he knew more about Spain and had better contacts than their own Secret Service.
Thus he served as a Commissioner to the Federation of British Industry in Madrid for five years. It was a continuation of his wartime work but for commercial and financial purposes, and so was in effect industrial intelligence. In 1923 he retired to his villa Stella Maris, Pedregalejo, Malaga, although he had use of a property in Madrid courtesy of the government. He lived in Spain until the start of the civil war and retained his links with March. He also had a house in England, The Grove at Canford Cliffs, Bournemouth, which remained in his family after his death, before it was later demolished. We know he visited his old friend Marshal Louis Lyautey in Morocco in 1933 who called Thoroton a personal friend and a ‘friend of France’.17 Thoroton probably left Spain for the last time just before or just after the outbreak of the civil war and died in Britain on 17 January 1939. He remains a shadowy figure especially because he destroyed most of his own papers. It was Alan’s work with March which built up his network in his early months as naval attaché in Madrid: ‘… in this Hillgarth was Thoroton’s beneficiary.’18
The enemy Alan Hillgarth faced in Spain in the early months of the war was powerful and well established. Admiral Canaris had in February 1937 started the Abwehr stations in the Iberian Peninsula. He built up a large number of agents and contacts with an intricate communications web. He also created ‘several dummy firms-including Rowak Hisna, Carlos Hinderer & Co and Transmare to serve as blinds to handle financial transactions …’ Transmare was the biggest, with interests in Spanish Morocco and South America. Ladislas Farago wrote: ‘It was managed by Canaris’s sole truly intimate friend in the world, an obscure Russian exile known as Baron Ino, whose real name was Baron Roland Kaulbars.’19
Well in advance of World War II, Canaris had built up the elaborate Kriegsorganisation (War Organisation) or KO Stations. In the end there would be six major KOs abroad in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, and China. The first to be operational was in Madrid housed with the embassy, and in adjacent buildings there were about eighty Abwehr staff, plus OKW Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces High Command) radio intercept teams and a branch of the RSHA, the supreme state security department set up in 1939 to supervise the other security organisations. About half the embassy staff in 1939 was working in intelligence, and towards the end of the war that ratio would increase. They were dependent on good relations with the host country because the KO personnel were ‘built in’ with the diplomatic service. This would later cause great problems but in the early years of the war, the Spanish authorities turned a blind eye to this abuse of the diplomatic code.
There were other smaller KOs in the country in San Sebastian, Barcelona, Seville, and in Spanish Morocco. These worked from the German consulates present in the region. In addition there were Abwehr agents in all the Spanish ports.20 Walter Schellenberg on a mission for the RSHA passed through Madrid in 1940 and visited the Embassy.
Madrid was one of the most strongly developed centres of the German Secret Service. Apart from active espionage and counter-espionage, its military sector included between seventy and a hundred employees who lived and worked in one of the extra-territorial buildings of the German Embassy. There, we had one of our most important short-wave listening posts and decoding stations. There was also a meteorological station with sub-stations in Portugal the Canary Islands, and North and South Africa. This station was of decisive importance to our Luftwaffe and U-boat operations off the Bay of Biscay and in the western Mediterranean area, while the centre at Madrid also supervised the surveillance of the Straits of Gibraltar.21
The Abwehr enjoyed another advantage of being able to work closely with the Spanish Secret Service, the ‘Sirene’ run by General Martinez Campos, an old friend of Canaris.
To make matters worse for Hillgarth he soon found out that SIS were weak in Spain and, against his better judgement, found he had to shoulder this responsibility as well. He believed that the naval attaché should not have: ‘knowledge of the organisation or the sources of SIS or expect to see reports.’22
After his appointment in Madrid he began to recruit agents for this task. He had the help of his skilled assistant Lieutenant-Commander Salvador Augustus Gomez-Beare, known as the ‘Don’. He was born in Gibraltar of Anglo-Spanish parents and could easily pass for Spanish being fluent in the language. He had served in all three branches of the British Armed forces and had suffered injury in the Royal Flying Corps, whilst during the Civil War he had seen action with the Nationalist Army in military intelligence. In 1939 his offer of service to Britain was accepted and he was commissioned into the RNVR. He set to work quickly travelling hundreds of miles across the country on errands. He was at home with all levels of Spanish society from dock workers to the aristocracy. Alan called him ‘invaluable’.23
With financial backing from SIS approved by Sir Stewart Menzies, Alan was able to bribe an officer in the Spanish Secret Service to obtain a list of the key Abwehr agents. Meanwhile, according to Keith Jeffery, he had set up ‘his own counter-intelligence system, code-named “Secolo” targeting German attempts to sabotage British ships in Spanish ports. Some positive work was at last being done.’24
However, as with Thoroton, Hillgarth’s most effective ally would be Juan March. He was fifty-nine when the war broke out. He was now bald, wore thick spectacles, looked frail and walked with a stoop, but he still had a keen mind. Many thought him nothing short of a criminal. Alan wrote that he was: ‘the most unscrupulous and the richest man in Spain besides one of the cleverest.’25
Some accounts cite that Alan was first introduced to March in September 1939 by Sir Maurice Peterson, but this is unlikely to have been his first meeting. He already knew him from Majorca, when Alan had been vice-consul in Palma during the civil war. Their respective homes had only been a few miles apart.26
In their first Madrid meeting March broached the subject to him of buying all the German ships which were interned and laid up in Spanish ports, totalling fifty-nine. He intended to pay the Germans for the ships in pesetas paid into Spanish banks which could not be drawn on until the end of the war. Once he had control of these ships, Britain could use them and Spain could have the money. Alan was taken with the idea, and he sent March off to London under the cover of a business trip to see Godfrey, but with a warning for the admiral not ‘to trust him an inch’.27 Godfrey was impressed by March even though they had to use an interpreter, and wrote in his diary of their meeting on 23 September:
He explained that he ‘had control’ of all Spanish ports except on the north and north west coasts (meaning I suppose from Vigo to San Sebastian) and, believing the future of Spain was bound up with that of Great Britain, he would do all in his power to help us. If we received reports of U-boats taking fuel from a Spanish oiler or in a Spanish port, he asked us not to sabotage the ship or create fires and explosions in the port as we used to do in World War I. Instead would we let him know and he would see that it did not happen again. The same applied to ‘incidents’ in Spanish ports which should be minimised rather than exaggerated. He explained that the port authorities were under his control. He said that Franco would never let the German Army into Spain. He wanted the relations of Spain and England to be friendly and tranquil and would do all he could to achieve this end. We kept in touch and he passed me valuable information which was never incorrect.28
Churchill had wanted to see ‘Senor Marche’ but the meeting did not take place. However he wrote to Godfrey that he felt March: ‘may be able to render the greatest service in bringing about friendly relations with Spain’ and they should not be put off because: ‘he made money by devious means in no way affects his value to us at this present time or his reputation as a Spanish patriot.’29 Of course Churchill was well aware of the service March had already provided for Britain in World War I through his own correspondence with Thoroton who had stayed in touch with him up until his death. Thoroton wrote a three-page letter to Churchill from the Villa Stella Maris in May 1936 about his concerns for Gibraltar. The letter ends with the hope he has, ‘written enough to rouse your interest but not so much as to bore you.’30
From the start of the war, the Germans had planned to resupply U-boats off Cadiz, Vigo, and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and Franco had indicated a willingness to help. In August 1939 they started to put the plan into operation only for Franco to cancel the arrangements by letter on 4 September.31 But only four days later, he changed his mind and allowed it to move ahead. An interned German tanker was to be used in the operation, and supplies were to be provided by Spain, beginning on a dark winter’s night off Cadiz in January 1940. However, no doubt through March’s network, British intelligence was alerted and, in the face of stiff British and French protests, Franco cancelled further activity. Alan reported to Godfrey in February that they had bribed customs officials at Vigo and other ports in order to make it impossible for German submarines to call there. However the fall of France would change that.32
Rather like Thoroton before him, Hillgarth came to trust March and later wrote that he was: ‘a very clever man but a scrupulously honourable one. He always carried out his undertakings and always stood by those who trusted him.’33
While Burns was in Madrid, he helped Hillgarth lobby London for more funds and personnel to extend the propaganda and intelligence operations spreading out from Madrid across the entire Iberian Peninsula. He was back in London in April pressing MoI and the Foreign Office for a larger network of press and information offices across Spain to be directed by the Madrid Embassy.
His experienced friend and colleague Paul Dorchy was sent to Barcelona to open an office. Supplying him with adequate resources proved more difficult, so he encouraged Dorchy to write to MoI. ‘There is an enormous amount to do and people are eager for British propaganda but my hands are tied until someone comes out from Madrid with some sort of credentials …’34 It was not until the MoI and Foreign Office stopped arguing about who was responsible for him that he obtained the funds and staff required.
In March Alan was promoted to acting-captain. He was now working under the code-name ‘Armada’ and never revealed any sign of his involvement with intelligence, through his use of third-party agents. Through the ‘Don’, Gomez-Beare, they had built up a large network of help from dockworkers, customs officials, bar-owners, taxi drivers and shop owners, who would act as their eyes and ears.
On 10 May, hours after the German Blitzkrieg struck the Low Countries and France, Churchill was chosen to replace Chamberlain as prime minister. Three days later he asked the House of Commons for a vote of confidence in the new administration: ‘After reporting the progress which had been made in filling the various offices, I said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” In all our long history no prime minister had ever been able to present to Parliament and the nation a programme at once so short and popular.’35
A month later Alan flew to London with another ambitious plan to offer Churchill which March and himself had cooked up. It was to gain favour with anti-German forces in Spain by bribing high-ranking Spanish officers to pressure Franco in to staying out of the war. Churchill gave his enthusiastic support. Alan had the rare privilege of direct access to the prime minister who trusted his judgement about Spain. He was also glad to have him in Madrid to keep an eye on Hoare, the new ambassador, who he was not entirely comfortable with.
Once again it was March who set up the operation in Spain to make it appear wholly Spanish. It was referred to as the ‘Chivalry of St George’ from England’s patron saint slaying the dragon upon gold guineas that had been used by England to subsidise military allies. March laundered the money through Spanish banks and businesses. A group of Spanish general officers were brought into the fold and they received large payments for promising to discourage Spain’s entry into the war.
The money was drawn secretly from an account with the Swiss Bank Corporation in New York. During the course of the war $13 million in bribes were paid out.36 In 1940 alone, $10 million would be paid out, the same amount as Spain’s exports to Britain that year. At an exchange rate of four dollars to the pound, it was a large amount by the standards of the time.37
However all did not start smoothly as the Foreign Office and Treasury were against the idea fearing the real source was bound to leak out. This delayed the payments for months and undermined the scheme.
On his return to Madrid, Alan faced further crisis with the war situation going from bad to worse. Operation Dynamo had evacuated the BEF from France on 3 June but Britain could now face invasion. At the same time he had to deal with his highly nervous new ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare, who had been a senior Conservative politician and close to Chamberlain. He had served in World War I as an infantry officer on the Western Front and later with intelligence in Italy and Russia and was a diplomat of great experience. Hoare gave Churchill his assessment of Spain’s position on 10 June after Italy entered the war: When I arrived on 1 June I found the whole of Madrid in a state of nervous excitement. It was evident that the Italians and Germans were making a frantic effort to push Spain into the war simultaneously with Italy.38 Two days later, Franco changed the stance of Spain from neutrality to non-belligerency. Hoare quizzed him over this change of status, later recalling: ‘His answer was that, as the war had now come into the Mediterranean, it was necessary for Spain to show its direct interest in what had happened and to be prepared for all emergencies.’ However he added that this did not mean the ‘Spanish Government had departed from their general policy of abstention from the war.’39
The head of the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, was among many who were glad to see the back of Hoare. He told a colleague that there were ‘lots of Germans and Italians in Madrid, and therefore a good chance of S. H. being murdered.’40
Hoare did not waste time in his new post. He requested £500,000 to specifically bribe Foreign Minister Juan Beigbeder, and others. On 27 June he wrote to Churchill about the ‘state of nerves in which Spain and Madrid find themselves after the Germans arrived on the Pyrenees’ but that he was trying his best to appear ‘calm’ in the sea of troubles.41
Alan never took to the opinionated Hoare but was impressed with the way he knuckled down to work. He was also more upbeat about the situation writing to Churchill that ‘Things are going quite well’ and that, ‘Sir Samuel Hoare is doing better than any diplomat I know could do.’42
Ian Fleming, after leaving Bordeaux and making his way via Lisbon to Madrid, was there to assess the situation on the ground in Spain and to report back to Godfrey. He also needed to lay the foundations of a stay-behind sabotage and intelligence gathering operation within the Iberian Peninsula, in case the Germans invaded. He arrived in late June and stayed with the Hillgarths in Madrid. They then went by road to Gibraltar taking Mary along with them to give the outing the cover of a sightseeing trip. Mary was not impressed with Ian as a NI officer, especially when he forgot his wallet at a restaurant.43
Their main aim from the trip was to establish an office in Gibraltar. On the way they met Colonel William Donovan, the United States intelligence chief, who was on a fact-finding visit to Europe. They briefed him on the vital efforts being made to keep Spain neutral. From Gibraltar, Ian went onto Tangier to create a haven there in case the Rock should fall.44