When Burns arrived on his first visit to Madrid in the spring of 1940, one half of Spain was paying the price for being on the wrong side in the civil war, while the other was enjoying the fruits of victory.
The new regime had moved quickly to stamp out all remnants of the Spanish Republic. Political party and trade union activity, except that linked to the pro-Franco Falange, was banned, newspapers were censored, street names changed to honour the victors. Catholicism was established as the official religion of the new regime, with the Church recovering the privileges it had lost when the Republic had separated it from the State in the early 1930s. Masses and pilgrimages were once again an integral part of Spanish culture, and priests and nuns walked the streets in their habits for the first time in years, a symbol as much of rediscovered confidence as of religious orthodoxy. Army officers who had fought for Franco and the Falange formed part of the new social elite, rivalling the returning aristocracy, while the paramilitary civil guard and secret police purged society of lingering ‘subversives’.
From the thousands of Spaniards serving indeterminate prison sentences, some one hundred political dissidents were being shot on average every month in Madrid in the early months of 1940. Small daily notices in the newspapers gave the names of some of those tried by military tribunals for ‘crimes’ committed during the civil war. Other, larger notices paid tribute to those who had died fighting for Franco – martyrs of a heroic crusade against the evils of the red anti-Christ.
The luckier losers had escaped into exile. Those who stayed behind hid or adopted new identities. If you’d fought on the wrong side, living in Madrid in 1940 was to feel humiliated, to fear for one’s own safety, to have no faith in the future other than in the fantasy of watching the combined forces of Russia, Britain and France occupy Spain for the anti-fascist cause. Quixotic dreams.
By contrast, those who had emerged victorious felt seduced by the idea of a New Spain emerging, life being resurrected from the culture of death. Conscripts who had fought for Franco were offered jobs in the emerging bureaucracy with which the new regime surrounded itself. Women were encouraged to start new families and be dutiful housewives. Orphaned children were put up for adoption. The children of the poor, from whatever side, just went on begging.
Burns slept his first night in Madrid in the Palace Hotel, in silk sheets and under warm blankets. Such luxury had only recently been recovered. During the civil war, the Palace had been requisitioned by the militias and communist workers committee, its ample rooms and corridors turned into wards for the wounded and dying. It became one of the largest military hospitals in Madrid. The American journalist Martha Gellhorn visited it as a war correspondent. She later wrote, ‘The clientele was very young then, though pain ages the face, and wore shabby pyjamas, scraps of uniform. In the corridors … piles of used bandages collected on the bare floors. Sleazy cotton blackout curtains hung at the windows … food was scarce, and medicines, especially morphine. I don’t remember sheets and pillow cases, only grey army blankets …’
After Franco’s victory, the hotel was among the first buildings in the capital to be restored to its former splendour. Built as one of Europe’s largest hotels in 1912 during the reign of King Alfonso XIII, its privileged clientele now once again paraded amidst the marble and the gilt fittings. While much of the city and large areas of the country were surviving on the strict diet imposed by ration coupons – pulses, dried cod, bread – the kitchens of the Palace were once again sufficiently well stocked to offer extended tea and cakes in the afternoons and dinner à la carte, as had been the custom before the war.
A copy of ABC, the principal Spanish newspaper, was delivered to Burns’s table. It was filled with reports and photographs of Nazi troop manoeuvres provided by a German-controlled local news agency. The overall impression conveyed was that of the Third Reich on a triumphant march across northern Europe – and of Franco’s Spain getting on with the peace.
Over the next few days Burns would discover that for those victors of the civil war a sort of normality had returned. Dance-halls and bars had begun filling up again. Madrileños took longer over their lunches, found time for their siestas and went to bed later. A municipal decree imposing street silence from midnight to seven in the morning was openly flouted. Thousands turned up to watch bullfights in the Las Ventas ring, the bravery of the emerging young talent from the south, Manolete, enthralling crowds just as Belmonte and Joselito, the two great stars of the 1920s and 1930s, had done in the pre-war years. Large crowds also packed out the Chamartín stadium to watch a re-formed Real Madrid. Of the twenty players who had played for the club during the military uprising in 1936, only four rejoined it in 1940. The others were all new signings. The football pages of the newspaper bubbled with enthusiasm for Jacinto Quincoces, the great Spanish international defender who had spent part of the civil war driving a Red Cross ambulance in the Nationalist zone.
Between the covers of the ABC were the funeral notes of nuns ‘gloriously martyred for God and Spain’, and the latest executed Republican ‘criminal’. Advertisements encouraged men to buy a cream that stiffened the fringe upwards and back in a style called ‘Arriba España’, in honour of Franco’s rallying cry. For women, there were antispot creams and pills to help develop ‘a perfect bust’. The newspaper’s entertainment list included the latest concert by Celia Gamez. She had become the capital’s most popular star with a song that defiantly mocked the communist leader of the civil war, La Pasionaria’s, legendary cry of revolutionary resistance. Instead of No pasarán (They shall not pass) Gamez sang Ya hemos pasao (We have passed) to the rhythm of the popular tango-style chotis music that so enthralled Madrileños of every class.
Cinemas were showing a variety of Hollywood films dubbed into Spanish as well as Spanish films, most of which pre-dated the war. These, like the plays put on in the theatres, were selected for being non-political. There was no shortage of comedy – the Marx Brothers topped the bill – and romantic adventure. Spanish women swooned at the sight of Clark Gable and Errol Flynn, while Spanish men enjoyed the refined beauty of Olivia de Havilland, the sexuality of Ginger Rogers and the coquetry of Shirley Temple.
On the Monday, Burns’s first working day in Madrid, a crisp wind was blowing down from the mountains and the cloudless sky was luminous as he walked the few blocks to the embassy. He was struck by the contrast between the superficial orderliness of street life in the centre of the capital and the devastation he had encountered in his drive across Spain and the outskirts of the city. The buildings of the diplomatic neighbourhood and much of the aristocratic Barrio de Salamanca which straddled the Castellana had survived the civil war largely untouched by the artillery and aerial bombing that had wreaked such devastation on the outskirts. The British embassy building, evacuated at the time, had been hit by a shell during the conflict, but had since been repaired.
Within minutes of arriving at the embassy, Burns took stock of how under-staffed, under-resourced and disorganised it was. And yet he considered himself fortunate, as a fellow Catholic, to have an immediate and personal introduction to the ‘assistant press attaché’, Bernard Malley, the former teacher from El Escorial. Malley looked older than his forty years, with pallid skin and prematurely greying hair. He spoke in the lowered tones of a sacristan and shared similar ecclesiastical mannerisms in his gestures, a tendency to bless the air and raise his eyes heavenwards.
A repressed homosexual, Malley excused his lack of interest in women by alleging that he was a celibate. Burns, who was used to celibates of all kinds, found him well informed in the area that most concerned him professionally: Catholic opinion on the war in Spanish lay and clerical circles and their influence on the Franco regime.
If Burns knew anything about Don Bernardo’s sexual proclivities, he made light of them in later years. Malley’s usefulness as a gatherer of useful intelligence and discreet facilitator proved more important than any personal peccadillo. ‘Don Bernardo [as he was known in the embassy and beyond] was a fervent Catholic but would chuckle over ecclesiastical scandals,’ Burns wrote in his memoirs. ‘He was happier in two-star rather than five-star circles, with captains rather than higher ranks, with parochial clergy rather than bishops. Thus he gleaned information and exercised influence in areas seldom reached by the career diplomats.’
It was thanks to Malley that Burns gained an early insight into the complex politics that lay behind the public façade of pro-Axis unity within the Franco regime, identifying the tensions and self-interest that could be exploited to the greater benefit of the Allied cause. Among Catholics in positions of influence were bishops and lay officials who did not share in the pro-Nazi enthusiasms of Franco’s brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Súñer and the more extremist members of the Falange.
As important in marking out the future activities of the embassy in Madrid was the contact Burns made with the naval attaché, Alan Hillgarth. The former British consul in Mallorca had been posted to Madrid the previous summer on Churchill’s personal instructions. His specific mission was that of countering German intelligence operations. In the spring of 1940, Hillgarth was in the early stages of building up sources within the Spanish military, helping develop from a very low base Britain’s intelligence capability across the Iberian Peninsula.
Burns found Hillgarth a likeable and entertaining tutor in the art of espionage, as well as an excellent guide to Madrid night life. Hillgarth for his part found in Burns – the unexpected emissary from the MoI – someone who seemed to share his understanding of Spanish culture and politics and whose consummate skills as a communicator and networker could prove invaluable for an embassy that was trying to gain confidence and expand its influence.
Burns used his reconnaissance visit to Spain to help Hillgarth press London for more support. A report they drafted together drew attention to the inadequate resources that the embassy’s press department and other sections endured compared to the well-oiled local machinery of the Germans. More staff and more money were needed to develop a propaganda and intelligence operation with the capacity to spread out from Madrid and extend across the Iberian Peninsula, north to Barcelona, west to Lisbon, and south to Gibraltar, with additional consulates and agents across the rest of the country, they argued.
On his return to London in April 1940 Burns continued lobbying hard to get approval from the MoI and the Foreign Office for a network of press and information offices in Spain, North Africa and France, under the direction of the embassy in Madrid. He was particularly instrumental in seeing to it that an experienced colleague and friend, Paul Dorchy, was deployed to Barcelona, which was of growing strategic importance because of the Catalan capital’s position as a Mediterranean port close to the Pyrenees. Getting Dorchy the resources and back-up he needed under his cover post of assistant press attaché proved somewhat laborious as Burns struggled with the bureaucratic inertia of Whitehall. His efforts were helped by a memorandum Burns encouraged Dorchy to write to the MoI and which was copied to senior officials at the Foreign Office.
In it Dorchy hit out at the stinginess and lack of initiative of His Majesty’s Government while drawing attention to the deep economic and social malaise left by the civil war. The memo was circulated in Whitehall on 9 May 1940. The premiership of Neville Chamberlain was drawing to its close, with Chamberlain having to shoulder the blame for the apparent indecisiveness of the Norwegian campaign. Dorchy wrote:
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 … in the meantime we cannot get any rations and the wife is having a rotten time. Still as soon as I ‘exist’ officially, I will be able to draw food (when available). For the moment we are compelled to buy from the ‘black’ market which means that we pay 5/- a pound for mutton, when available 10/- a pound for butter, 9/- for sugar and eat black bread charitably obtained by our porters. With the peseta down at 44 and going down again soon, owing to the fall of the Pound, my Ptas 1,540 a month get me nowhere – to ‘exist’ costs about Ptas 3,000. I presume that it is thought that all assistant press attachés have fabulous incomes of their own, which is unhappily not the case. I hope the Treasury will realise it some day.
Two days at a third rate hotel (the Victoria) when we arrived cost me £6 so we presumably looked for and luckily found a very small furnished flat at £4 a week – and lucky to get it … I am not downhearted, as all the Services people are out here in the same boat, living more or less like paupers – but it does not enhance our prestige. The Germans and Poles seen to dispose of unlimited quantities of Pesetas (no wonder – they print them) but if we are going to put up a Propaganda show at all, the first thing would be to see that our wives do not have to queue up for food with the enemy’s maids – and that is what mine and many others are doing … They are good sports and don’t seem to mind – but I hate it and it certainly seems to back up the Hun propaganda …
Dorchy’s exact status and who should ultimately be responsible for him continued to be the subject of argument between the MoI and the Foreign Office for weeks afterwards until it was agreed that Dorchy be given the additional funds, and staff back-up, to do his job.
On 10 May, hours after Hitler’s forces struck Holland, Belgium and France, Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister. As the historian A. J. P Taylor put it, for months the government had appeared to be moving into war backwards with their eyes tightly closed, with Churchill the one exception, a ‘cuckoo in the nest, restless against inaction … fertile with proposals’. Churchill’s time had finally come. Within days, Dorchy reported that he was installed in his new office, was distributing British propaganda material on a large scale, had made some important local contacts and was therefore in a position to start supplying some ‘valuable information regarding local conditions’.
Burns, meanwhile, busied himself with coordinating cooperation between Kenneth Clark’s MoI’s film division – where John Betjeman and Graham Greene worked – and the BBC to send regular consignments of British newsreel material to Madrid. The MoI reels had their script translated by the Spanish language service at Bush House for, at the time, only a very small minority of Spaniards understood English.
The material chosen was a mixture of trivia, misinformation and a small element of reportage deliberately picked to show the British at their most ordinary and untroubled. A typical consignment prepared for dispatch to Spain and dated 18 April 1940 included items picked for their propaganda value, among them King George inspecting a garrison at Dover Castle – the ‘first monarch visiting this ancient stronghold since Queen Victoria’ – and the legendary English outside right Stanley Matthews, ‘the best hope of England defeating Wales at Wembley’.
From the front line came news and images of French troops ‘getting plenty of practice dealing with mines’, and the Allies ‘rushing to the aid of the Norwegians’. The newsreel concluded that Hitler was ‘accelerating his overthrow by laying his flank open to the joint onslaught of Great Britain’s navies of the sky and sea’. With the exception of the clip of Matthews’s magic on the wing, most of what the MoI was projecting was ‘lies, damned lies’, for the German troops were days away from crossing the Maginot Line, the Norwegian campaign was in difficulties and Hitler was looking more of a threat to the democratic world than he had ever done. But, then, in every war the first casualty is truth.
The main concern for the MoI was one of logistics, not so much gathering the material and shipping it as ensuring that it was made use of at the other end. According to intelligence provided by one of Burns’s Spanish sources, an Anglophile film distributor and concert organiser, Roberto Martín Palleiro, the problem was not with Spaniards themselves but with their government’s authoritarianism and pro-Axis sympathies, as demand for Allied newsreels was high and there was anecdotal evidence that people were getting tired of the propaganda put out by the Germans.
In May 1940, the censorship got worse after Burns had dispatched another deliberately misleading film of French troops holding the Maginot Line, and saving the ‘civilised world from the Nazi invader’. Further images showed German infantry in apparent retreat, leaving a number of their dead along the way. The Spanish authorities now demanded heavier cuts, imposing a process that led to a three-week delay in the films being shown, effectively making them useless as a propaganda tool. To make matters worse, further imports of the newsreels were caught up in a complex bureaucratic web involving the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Commerce and the Cinematography department of the Ministry of the Interior, each of which tried to outdo each other in the administrative checks it imposed on the importer.
On 9 May, Vidal Batet, a local agent for Paramount Films in Madrid, one of the distributors of the British newsreels, sent a report to London via his head office in Paris, complaining of the bias the Spanish authorities were increasingly showing towards the Germans, by favouring material distributed by pro-Axis companies that had operated throughout the Spanish Civil War in the nationalist zones held by Franco forces. Batet suggested that Burns was wasting the government’s time in processing newsreel material that had no chance of ever reaching a Spanish cinema. He wrote: ‘They are hardly suitable for a country which has been declared neutral and which is governed by a totalitarian regime. Commentaries against a certain head of a European state i.e. Hitler cannot be allowed, nor should certain words like “aggressor”, “invader” etc. It is necessary to suppress all speeches containing words or references against (German) people … propaganda has to be very subtle and the commentaries short with non political references, leaving the audience to form its own opinion of the matters shown on the films.’
British propaganda policy was not helped by the fact that the Franco regime was deeply resistant to any British strategy that smacked of intrusion into internal Spanish affairs. The Spanish embassy in London under the Duke of Alba devoted much of its time to identifying and exposing opponents of the Franco regime that were employed by the British state. Its focus was the Spanish department of the MoI where the pro-Francoists had already claimed a significant victory in effectively vetoing its chief Denis Cowan’s visit to Madrid.
After his planned trip to Madrid had been cut short, Cowan had returned to London, conscious that his days in post were numbered, and considering whether he should resign, as the pressure on him mounted. On 8 March 1940 Cowan was working in his office at the MoI when his secretary handed him the latest issue of the Catholic Herald, a mass circulation weekly, that, together with the Tablet, had taken an uncompromising pro-Franco stand during the Spanish Civil War. It ran a lengthy article, based on information provided by the Spanish embassy, accusing the MoI of employing Spaniards who had gone into exile after the Republic had been defeated with the sole aim of mounting an international offensive to have Franco overthrown. Unknown to Cowan, the article was circulated in Whitehall and added to a dossier the Foreign Office was compiling on the tensions that were impacting negatively on Britain’s relations with Spain. The dossier included complaints, emanating from the Spanish embassy in London, that the BBC was using events of the Spanish Civil War for which Franco forces were held culpable, such as the bombing of Gernika, as examples of the cruelty of the modern warfare with which Nazi Germany was now threatening the whole of Europe.
A separate memo from Lord Lloyd at the Foreign Office expressed concern that anti-Franco propaganda filtering through Whitehall risked upsetting his plans to promote the activities of the British Council in Spain. Similar concerns were expressed by the outgoing British ambassador in Madrid, Maurice Peterson. He fired off a furious memo to the MoI, and to Foreign Office, questioning why it appeared that no pro-Franco Spaniards were employed by the department, and suggesting that if Spanish republicans were to be employed at all it should only be as translators.
In the spring of 1940, Cowan was transferred out of the Spanish department, while a short list was secretly drawn up of his possible replacement. At the top of the list featured Burns, who had become increasingly involved in Spanish affairs from his office down the corridor, the hitherto discreetly understated Catholic sector of the MoI’s Religious Affairs Department.
Within days Burns was offered a promotion, but not the one he thought he had been earmarked for. Instead of moving into Cowan’s chair, he was asked to return to Spain, this time to assume the title First Secretary and Press Attaché, with responsibility for Spain, Portugal and Tangier, a cover post for a whole range of diplomatic and covert duties.
The posting came at a critical juncture in the war. The importance of the embassy in Madrid in strategic and operational terms had increased following the German invasion of Belgium and Holland and the subsequent fall of France. It was crucial, as far as Churchill was concerned, to ensure that Franco did not throw in his lot with Hitler and Mussolini, for such a move risked the loss of Gibraltar and the Atlantic and Mediterranean ports to the Axis, with an ensuing dramatic shift in the military balance. The leadership of the project to ensure Spanish neutrality and effectively buy time for the Allies was entrusted to one of Britain’s most experienced and senior politicians, Sir Samuel Hoare, who replaced Sir Maurice Peterson as the new British ambassador in Madrid on 24 May 1940.
Hoare and Churchill’s paths had converged and periodically clashed since they had first met in 1919. As a Conservative MP, Hoare had supported Churchill’s military intervention in Russia against the Bolshevik revolution. Later in the 1920s Hoare served as Secretary of State for Air and Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the two men meeting at Chartwell, both as colleagues and friends, before forming part of the political alliance against the General Strike.
Hoare went on to serve as Secretary of State for India, disagreeing with Churchill over his opposition to self-government. There were further tensions when Hoare as foreign secretary during the late 1930s criticised Churchill’s warnings about Germany’s rearmament as excessively alarmist, alluding in Parliament to the ‘scare-mongers who … delight in increasing crises, if there be crises, in making the crises worse than they would otherwise be’. Hoare later resigned after signing an unpopular agreement with the French whereby Mussolini was allowed to retain his conquests in Abyssinia in return for halting the war. The infamous Hoare/Laval pact earned Hoare a reputation as an appeaser.
He later returned to Neville Chamberlain’s government as Home Secretary, believing along with his prime minister that the pact with Hitler at Munich would guarantee lasting peace. Hoare was among the MPs who most belittled Churchill’s judgement by doubting his claims that Britain was losing air parity with Germany. Five years later, as air minister, he argued that an offensive against Germany should be delayed because more time was needed to build up Britain’s air force capability.
Churchill made Hoare pay for his military miscalculation by excluding him from his first wartime cabinet. Many in the diplomatic corps hoped that would be the end of Hoare’s long involvement in public life. When Hoare was appointed as ambassador to Spain, the news was initially greeted with cruel cynicism by the government’s most senior diplomat. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told Lady Halifax, the wife of the foreign secretary: ‘There is one bright spot – there are lots of Germans and Italians in Madrid and therefore a good chance of S.H. being murdered.’ Cadogan also described Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare’s apparent anxiety to get to Spain as indicating they were ‘rats deserting the ship’.
While the appointment may have implied that Hoare was being ‘exiled’ politically, it suited Churchill’s strategic objectives. Churchill hoped that Hoare’s Anglo-Catholic background, his First World War experience as an intelligence officer and his knowledge of Vatican diplomacy would help his ‘ambassador on special mission’ get to grips with the intricacies of Spanish internal politics. Hoare’s reputation as an appeaser and his proven negotiating skills were, Churchill believed, what made him eminently suitable for his new role. For if Hoare, as British ambassador, couldn’t keep Franco out of the war no one could.
How to energise the British presence not just in Madrid but throughout the Iberian Peninsula and keep Spain from siding with the Axis powers was the subject of a secret meeting Hoare attended with Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s indispensable henchman, at Stornoway House. The Regency building overlooking Green Park was used as a residence and office by Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper baron whom Churchill put in charge of a new Ministry of Aircraft Production. Beaverbrook hosted the meeting, away from the intrigues of the Foreign Office and other service departments.
The Stornoway mini-summit confirmed that Churchill had no sympathy for those on the left who argued that British policy in the foreseeable future should have as its principal focus the restoration of Spanish democracy. He believed that Franco could be treated differently from Hitler and Mussolini, and was determined to keep Spain, guardian of the Mediterranean, free from military occupation by the Axis powers. Within this framework, those gathered at Stornoway laid out the main priorities for Hoare to follow in his first months in office. There was a consensus that the Madrid embassy would have to be upgraded and additional resources invested in the British diplomatic network across the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa if the British were to match the power and influence of the Nazi presence. Hoare believed this could not be achieved without a major reorganisation of the embassy itself, centralising under his control diplomacy, propaganda, special operations and intelligence.
It was undoubtedly fortunate for Hoare that at the time of his appointment as ambassador there was already in the embassy in Madrid the naval attaché, Captain Hillgarth, whom Churchill had befriended and whose expertise in intelligence matters was hugely valued. It was entirely in character that Churchill should now think of Hillgarth as a key element in his strategy for Spain. For when it came to key decisions at moments of crisis, Churchill cut through the bureaucracry of the civil service and, acting on instinct, drew on the counsel of individuals he trusted.
Soon after the Stornoway meeting, Hillgarth was summoned by Churchill and charged with helping keep Spain out of the war with a campaign of bribery and corruption of Spanish generals and officials. Initial funds of $10 million were drawn from a special reserve contingency budget held by the Treasury for special operations and deposited in an account of the Swiss Bank Corporation in New York, arranged by the Treasury. The operation, which Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, helped arrange, involved a crucial third party, the billionaire Mallorcan businessman Juan March, acting as agent and intermediary.
Since helping finance, with British help, Franco’s uprising in 1936, March had consolidated his power base and influence. He helped finance Franco’s campaign throughout the Spanish Civil War, establishing an office in Rome from where he negotiated Italian munitions and planes as well as fuel for the insurgent forces. With the perfect timing that had characterised his emerging years as an entrepreneur, March set up a shipping company called AUCONA in Burgos, the city chosen by Franco as his campaign headquarters, days before the end of the civil war. Monopolising the Spanish import-export business, AUCONA built up his foreign currency reserves in Swiss and British banks while paying Spanish importers and exporters in pesetas. March’s riches and the dubious methods used for achieving them bred resentment. However, he remained untouchable. Too many people in the Franco regime owed him favours, not least members of the Spanish armed forces.
When the Spanish Civil War ended and the Second World War began, March moved quickly to resurrect his links with the British through his old friend Hillgarth. A British intelligence report on March said that he was representing the Spanish government in a ‘quasi-official role’ and described the businessman as a ‘scoundrel’, well disposed to serving the interests of the Allied cause. On 23 September 1939, Hillgarth arranged a meeting in London between March and his chief, Admiral Godfrey, the head of Naval Intelligence.
March told Godfrey that his shipping interests and political contacts gave him unrivalled intelligence coverage of most Spanish ports and said he was committed to helping ensure that the future of Spain was bound up with that of Great Britain. The Spaniard offered not only to buy up German merchant vessels as a way of controlling German-Spanish trade, but also to act as Hillgarth’s ‘eyes and ears’ reporting on U-boats and other Axis naval movements.
As Godfrey later recalled: ‘In return March asked that the British refrain from sabotaging German ships or creating “fires and explosions in our ports” as they had done in World War I … He explained that the port authorities were under his control. He said that Franco would never let the German Army into Spain. He wished the relations of Spain and England to be friendly and tranquil and would do all he could do to achieve this end. We kept in touch and he passed me valuable information that was never incorrect.’
Other contacts March had subsequently with Hillgarth raised the possibility of the businessman acting as an arms broker for the Allies. At the meeting with Godfrey, March had mentioned that he was negotiating a sale of Spanish arms to Yugoslavia. Britain at the time had been asked by Turkey to supply it with arms, an offer it found difficult to meet without dangerously breaking into the reserve it was belatedly building up to deal with the Nazi threat.
As an alternative, March was asked by Hillgarth whether he would help arrange a deal whereby Britain and France would finance the diversion of Spanish arms destined for Yugoslavia to Turkey to bolster the defence of her Thracian border. In preparation for the deal, March’s London agent met with senior officials of the Bank of England to discuss it taking over a loan for £1.8 million to the Spanish government which a private English bank was threatening to call in.
The arms negotiations met resistance from the Foreign Office and the War Office and were eventually dropped. However, another deal was struck. The British loans were rescheduled, the agent got his visa and March was enlisted by the British as an agent of influence in the secret war against Germany. In the autumn of 1940, March was asked by Hillgarth, on Churchill’s behalf, to set up a secret system of money transfers whereby a small but influential group of senior military officers would receive secret payments in return for resisting any moves Franco might make to enter the war. The money was also intended to help fund the development of intelligence on the regime’s dealings with the Germans. ‘The fact that March made his money by devious means in no way affects his value to us at present,’ Sir Alexander Cadogan remarked.
Other matters arising out of the Stornoway meeting required following up on both sides of the Atlantic. Hoare was conscious that there was little sympathy for Franco in the US State Department or in the liberal press of the United States, which was still heavily influenced by the memory of the anti-Franco reporting of the civil war of such high-profile journalists and writers as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Hoare thought it important that Washington be persuaded to accede to a Spanish request for aid, as a way of influencing policy. Not to do so, he feared, would undermine Britain’s own efforts to stop Franco drifting into the arms of the Axis.
Hoare believed the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, would be of help, while Beaverbrook was expected to pursue his good links with Joseph Kennedy, although his term as US Ambassador in London and political ambitions ended abruptly during the Battle of Britain with the publishing of his controversial remarks that ‘Democracy is finished here in England. It may be here (in the US).’ Separately, in May 1940, Menzies, the head of MI6, with Churchill’s support, sent William Stephenson to New York to help boost Anglo-American intelligence cooperation throughout the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, from Buenos Aires to Madrid.
The other item in the pending tray was perhaps the most delicate to handle in administrative terms, for it involved the creation of a key job in the embassy in Madrid that could meet the requirements of the ambassador’s ‘special mission’. The job would involve responsibility throughout the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa for propaganda, developing secret sources and useful intelligence, and reporting directly to the ambassador. Hoare believed that such a job was essential to counter the dominance within the Franco regime of the pro-German sympathisers. Such was the enormity of the challenge he believed his embassy faced that he had begun to think of creating two new jobs instead of one.
‘You cannot imagine what a racket I have had here, alarms and excursion day and night and a depressing feeling of impending catastrophe. There can be no question of making ourselves popular in Spain. The most I can do is play upon the Spanish dislike of another war at a time when they are exhausted after the Civil War …’ Hoare wrote to Beaverbrook three weeks after his arrival in Madrid.
‘Send me a line when you can as to how things are going. Here I am entirely isolated and know little or nothing. Will you also help in two directions? First a talk with Winston about the plans I have for organising the anti-war movement. He and Halifax know about them and I am sending back Commander Furse of the NID [Naval Intelligence Division] to tell them in greater detail about what I am doing. Secondly, will you give me your advice about the press here? At present it is nothing more than a series of German propaganda sheets. The Press Department is in German hands and all the journalists are in German pay. It is impossible for us to get anything into the papers at all and there is a new decree even prohibiting the circulation of typed bulletins. Do you think that it would be possible for someone really big e.g. Roberts [Walter Roberts, a senior Foreign office official] to come out here and advise me as to whether it is practicable to do anything at all or whether I had better give up the job as hopeless? If you do think there is anything in this proposal, I should indeed be grateful if you could fix it with Duff Cooper and send someone out at once. He could do the whole of what I want in a fortnight. As I have no expert to advise me, I am groping in the dark and I terribly want really good advice …’
* * *
Later that night in London, the person whose fate Hoare’s proposal was destined to seal sat and wrote a letter to his loved one. It was nearly midnight, hours after the end of a long day shift at the MoI in Bloomsbury, and minutes away from the night vigil at the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich, where Ann Bowes-Lyon had been working as a volunteer nurse since the outbreak of war. From his blacked-out Chelsea home off the King’s Road, Burns used the light of a candle to write, so tired that he could hardly keep awake as he scribbled his lover’s talk. ‘Darling, don’t be miserable about this job of yours – what a chance it is: you can keep watch over so much more than your ward – everything is easier to communicate in the night, both good and bad: people all over the place are slumping into sleep or despair or loneliness or some sordid sort of luxury and yours is the chance to compensate in some way for all of this. And I shall think of you as awake and vigilant and watching over me as much as over the chaps in the old mortuary … I wish I could be working with you: just to be caring for stricken and miserable people. Darling, your faith will tell you of timelessness and I think sometimes that you can really be near to our Lord in his agony in the garden; you can be awake and alive to all that agony when the apostles slumbered and sleep and say, “Yes” when he asks, “Could you not watch over him with me?” Do you see, darling, how there is all this reality with you even though every securing misery is crowding in! …’
Faith was surely needed. The military hospital where Ann Bowes-Lyon had turned up one bright morning in the summer of 1939, to find long, half-empty wards, and an atmosphere resonant of a Women’s League fête, was now filling up with the wounded and the dying, and forcing new duties and longer hours on those who worked there. None of her letters to Burns from this period survive. But one can only speculate, on the basis of his letters to her, that their intimate correspondence not only reflected the stress of her job, but also served as a reminder that their own worlds were drawing apart, each touched by different experiences, the result of a different calling that seemed to come as much from others as from within.
Ann still felt a need to follow the patriotic example set by the King and Queen Consort Elizabeth, her cousin, who continued to live out their lives with a conscious sense of duty towards the defence of the empire they presided over. It was around this time that the Queen had made the latest of her memorable public statements, a perfect complement to Churchill’s speeches, to help raise morale. Explaining why she was not escaping from London she answered quite matter-of-factly: ‘The children can’t go without me, I can’t leave the King, and of course the King won’t go.’
The King, like every member of the Home Guard, from the plumber to the top civil servant, practised shooting with his revolver and vowed to die fighting, preferably taking at least one German with him. In fact, no one in London could pretend to remain personally unaffected by the war. It was as if a long, dark cloud watched for weeks and months but seemingly settled in the distance was now moving slowly but surely across the Channel. England no longer had reasons to be cheerful. All the country could do, as Churchill urged it to, was prepare for ‘hard and heavy tidings’.
The Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium and split the Allied armies in two by means of the ‘dash to the sea’. In the last week of May, the British Expeditionary Force had been pushed back towards the Channel ports. From his minesweeper, Burns’s friend Mike Richey wrote to his parents: ‘Yes, the war has broken out all right and seems to be more astonishing than the first six months of inactivity. That at any rate was a good idea but this … whatever explanations there may be given I think it is not lack of resistance or inferiority on the allied part that is to blame … My own reading is that the new commander in chief of the German chaps Mr Adolph Hitler has that peculiar quality of commanding personal allegiance that all great militarists from Alexander to Napoleon seem to have had …’
On 3 June, the evacuation from Dunkirk had come to an end. Churchill prepared for a German invasion, as did most of Whitehall and the population at large. Over a million men too old to join the army had by that summer joined the Home Guard. Many of them spent their time harassing innocent fellow citizens for their identity cards as part of the MoI’s ‘know your enemy’ campaign.
For those who worked at the coalface of government these were uncomfortable days. Burns’s friend and colleague at the MoI, Graham Greene, left the department and for the next few months worked as literary editor for the Spectator and returned to writing reviews for this and other magazines, including the Tablet. Whether Greene was sacked or left of his own accord, pre-emptively, remains another unsolved mystery of his life. However, one of his biographers suggests that he may have been advised to do the latter after his cousin Ben, a Quaker and pacifist, was detained on the advice of a controversial MI5 ‘expert’ on counter-subversion named Maxwell Knight. Working from his London flat in Dolphin Square, Knight had placed small advertisements in newspapers to help him recruit a network of impeachable patriots – ‘little ships’ he called them – who he infiltrated into factories and offices. He was an eccentric and an obsessive, with a passion for wild animals as pets and an interest in the occult and bisexuality. Knight had taken credit for planting an agent as a secretary at Woolwich Arsenal and exposing an alleged Soviet cell there in 1938. His focus later turned on alleged Nazi sympathisers.
Fortunately for Greene, Knight was blind to the Soviet Union’s successes in recruiting sympathisers in British universities and seemingly overlooked the fact that Greene himself had, as a student, been a member of the Communist Party. Greene, moreover, had a brother whose fanatical anti-Nazism had led to him being expelled from Germany before the war, and, crucially, a sister who worked for MI6. Within fourteen months of leaving the MoI, Greene himself had been recruited by MI6, and posted to the colonial West African outpost of Sierra Leone, a job that fell under the aegis of MI6’s Iberian section, by then headed by Kim Philby.
Fortunately for Burns, he had succeeded where Evelyn Waugh had failed in getting into the MoI, thanks to convincing influential friends that it was possible to be patriotically pro-Allied and pro-Franco at the same time. Burns believed that every Catholic had an ethical duty to fight Hitler as best he could while never showing himself to have any moral qualms about supporting Franco. To put his conscience at rest, he had drawn from the ‘just war’ Christian medieval theory dating back to the Middle Ages. And yet he could not have imagined the manner in which this Majesty’s Government contrived finally to make the best use of his talents.
One day during the summer of 1940, he received instructions from the Foreign Office that he was to return to Madrid via Lisbon. Burns assumed that this was another temporary assignment to the Madrid embassy, with the added bonus of a couple of days in Portugal, where the British diplomatic and intelligence apparatus was also being strengthened. He was scheduled to have meetings with the new ambassador, Samuel Hoare, and renew contact with the priestly Bernard Malley, and Captain Hillgarth. But he presumed that his visit would be no longer that the previous one, a reconnaissance followed by report back. He scribbled a quick ‘be back soon’ ‘ticket’ to Ann, packed a small suitcase and left the flat knowing that his housekeeper Ethel would keep it tidy while his friend David Jones continued squatting there.
On 14 July he wrote another letter to Ann as his flying boat made its way towards Lisbon. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and he had been in the air since nine that morning. Arrival was half an hour away. ‘It’s like flying in a bungalow this plane with four rooms in it and two lavatories and a kitchen. We had our excitement before starting – we had to get out of the plane and take to a little boat and cruise about because there was an air raid warning. We could just hear the dull thud of the engines, nothing more. We got back in the plane after half an hour. Then I saw two British submarines and one convoy on route but nothing else … now we are sailing across the bay towards Lisbon. I can see the little white houses on the shore and the dusky green of olive trees. I wish you were here little cat …’
Portugal was a haven for refugees, their numbers drawn from all nationalities since the outbreak of war, among them Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and other exiles. Burns spent much of his time on the beach, between briefings at the embassy and meals and drinks with colleagues, making new contacts and catching up with old friends, among them Rosalind Fox, whom he had met during the Spanish Civil War. Fox was a glamorous English divorcee who provided the British with information while maintaining a long and discreet love affair with Franco’s foreign minister General Juan Beigbeder. She lived for a while in some style in the Hotel Palacio in Estoril before opening a nightclub and restaurant called El Galgo which became a favourite haunt of journalists, diplomats and spies.
As Ms Fox later recalled: ‘The Galgo had an unforgettable ambience, a unique oasis of conviviality and intrigue amidst a world at war. But that atmosphere was not of my doing. Credit for that belongs to all those many human beings who passed through its doors, lending to it something of their own spirit – their hopes, their fears, their sorrows, their joys. The Galgo was a phenomenon born out of war and man’s inhumanity to man. It reflected something of that sense of comradeship that simply being human should engender, yet which sadly enough, seems only to be in evidence in times of great trial …’
Burns was alone when, one evening, he visited the Casino in the Hotel Palacio, another rendezvous of choice for the Allies and the Axis diplomats and spies who had turned neutral Portugal into a support base for their activities in the Iberian Peninsula. Dressed impeccably in dinner jacket, he walked through a gauntlet of porters and bell boys, across the thick red carpet to the gaming room. Huge chandeliers on golden painted ropes were suspended above the game tables. Cigar smoke lay thick in the air, dispersed now and then by the scent of Chanel. Glasses clinked, roulette wheels turned. ‘Prenez vos places. Rien ne va plus.’ Burns had never gambled for money in his life. He gambled now, partly for fun, but also out of a sense of duty. He took in the faces, tried to pick up bits of stray conversation, and reported back to the embassy. Four days later the visit to Portugal was cut short on the orders of Hoare. Burns wrote a letter to Ann, postmarked Estoril. ‘Here I am but actually I’m off to Madrid first thing tomorrow and will be knocking about in Spain for about two weeks, I’d meant to be ten days here but Sir Sam simply pines for me so I must go.’