Autumn faded and with it the memory of Gallito’s magical faena in the pouring rain. In the Retiro, Madrid’s central park, the last of the leaves from the few trees that had survived the civil war shrivelled and fell. An icy wind from the Sierras had arrived suddenly, sweeping down the Calle Alcalá and along the Castellana. The harshness of that winter of 1940 – the coldest any Spaniard living then could remember – created new hardships for Madrileños, the divisions, deprivations and destruction wrought by the civil war made worse by the food and fuel shortages created by war in Europe.
Not everyone was badly affected, however. In Madrid, a new, privileged sector had emerged since Franco’s troops had defeated the Republicans, with access to black-market luxury goods, restored or new housing, cars, restaurants and nightclubs. The regime had created a new bureaucracy of former soldiers and members of the Falange. It had also drawn back to the capital the aristocratic families with their maids and chauffeurs and English nannies. And then there was the foreign expatriate community, using their embassies for entertainment when not exploiting to the full whatever Madrid had on offer for those with money to spend.
Social life was concentrated in and around the centre of the capital, on either side of the Castellana, the diplomats’ favourite haunts within walking distance of their embassies. British and the Germans shared the bars and dining rooms of the Ritz and Palace hotels, but there were places where territory was more delineated. No Germans ventured into the Anglo-American Club – a favourite watering hole for some of the harder drinking members of the diplomatic staff. Also out of bounds to the Axis, and accepted as such by the Spanish police, was the hugely popular ‘Embassy’ tea room.
Located just a few blocks from the British embassy, and near the homes of Spaniards of wealth and title, the upmarket Embassy tea room was famous for its cocktails as well as its cakes and sophisticated clientele. Its owner, Margarita Kearney Taylor, was an attractive and impeccably mannered Englishwoman of Irish descent who had had a long-running affair with a Spanish Marques and given birth to a daughter named Consuelo. Closed down during the civil war, the tea room had since been revived, using Spain’s neutrality and the snobbishness of the pro-British Spanish aristocracy to create a newly burgeoning business. Wealthy Spaniards felt pampered and secure there, as did Allied diplomats. As the war progressed, Mrs Taylor’s flat above the tea room provided an additional secret service. It was run by the British embassy as a safe house for Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis and on their way to Lisbon.
The Germans had their own club in the style of a Bavarian beer garden, and their own five-star restaurant, Horcher, in the city’s fashionable Alfonso XII Street. It was set up during the Second World War by Otto Horcher, the owner of one of the most successful restaurants in Hitler’s Berlin, where it was popular with the high-ranking members of the Nazi party and military personnel. Horcher’s key staff had been exempted from the military draft on the orders of the Reichsmarschall himself.
In later years it was claimed that Horcher transferred his main business operation to Madrid when Allied bombing of Berlin became too threatening and in anticipation of Hitler losing the war. In the 1940s the restaurant’s pro-Nazi sympathies were never in doubt, even if they were hidden beneath a veneer of civilised luxury. Its waiters wore tails and its rooms were decorated with dark wooden panelling and thick velvet, and lit by silver candelabra. Horcher became the German embassy’s unofficial canteen. Lazar and the ambassador von Stohrer were among its most frequent guests, with its private dining room also used for visiting high-ranking Nazis with a special interest in Franco’s Spain, such as the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the foreign minister Ribbentrop.
Among the more popular nightspots for male members of the British embassy was Chicote, in the Gran Vía cinema and theatre district. Its owner, Pedro Chicote, had trained as a barman at the Ritz Hotel before setting up on his own in 1931 to cater for the young and rich. When civil war broke out the genial, slightly bumptious Chicote fled the capital and made his way to the Nationalist-controlled northern part of the country. There he set up another bar, making a small fortune serving officers on leave contraband liquor in San Sebastián after the Basque town had been taken by Franco’s forces early in the conflict. Chicotes bar in Madrid, under different management, remained open for most of the conflict, its clientele comprising members of the international brigades, foreign correspondents, and a regular posse of working class prostitutes. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Chicote was back in the Spanish capital, at his bar in Number 12 Gran Vía and very much in charge. The establishment earned a reputation for glamorous single women, seemingly of some social standing. They were despised by anti-Francoists as señoritas putas de derecha, sluttish right-wing ladies. The bar was nevertheless enormously successful in attracting a generation of Spaniards that sought escape from the war and the moral strictures of the Catholic Church. With its long American bar lined with high-backed stools, dimly lit, squat tables and sofas, Chicote offered an intimate and sophisticated drinking den famous for its special gin and red vermouth cocktail, margaritas and mojitos and the attractiveness of the women who happened to be there each night. The atmosphere of a more sombre and austere Madrid that had suffered coups and revolutions, and been subjected to governments of every conceivable political hue, from liberal monarchies to neo-fascist military dictatorship, is captured in Camilo José Cela’s post-war novel The Hive. He describes a city bristling with paradoxes and offering more contrasts and inconsistencies than either London or Paris at the time. The central character, Martín, hears the story of the waking city, its ‘rioting heart’, as he emerges from a night in a brothel. The carts of the garbage men are coming in from the suburbs, emerging from the ‘sad, desolate landscape of the cemetery and passing – after hours on the road, in the cold – at the slow, dejected trot of a gaunt horse or a grey, worried donkey’. There are ‘the voices of the women hawkers as they make their way to set their little fruit stalls and the first distant, indistinct horns of the cars’. There was also the rumble of the trams and the sound of their bells – the main source of transport – for in those days most Madrileños did not have cars. Those who had recovered cars looted during the civil war could hardly run them for lack of petrol. Government officials had access to a special pool of cars with guaranteed fuel supplies, as did foreign diplomats. Taxis ran mainly on ‘gasogene’, with the burner in the boot contributing another layer of grime and dust to vehicles which dated from the early 1930s.
Madrid had always prided itself on being the centre of the Spanish literary world, attracting writers as well as painters to its cafés and restaurants for the informal gatherings over coffee or drinks known as the tertulia. During the civil war, several writers and painters who had supported the Republic had either been killed or forced into exile, their tertulias disbanded. Nevertheless, with the outbreak of the war in Europe other tertulias formed, providing an opportunity for sharing information among trusted friends, under the cover of a convivial and informal drink or meal.
Early on in the winter of 1940 Burns learnt that one of the most interesting and eclectic tertulias had begun to meet regularly in Casa Ciriaco, a popular taverna specialising in Castilian country food and plentiful regional wine. One lunchtime he decided to pay a visit alone. He was ushered to a single table in a corner and sat there rather selfconsciously reading a copy of a week-old London Times, picking at a plate of cured ham and chorizo, and drinking from an earthenware carafe filled with Rioja wine. The only other occupants of the tavern sat at a long table, and, judging by their laughter and fluid conversation, had been there for some time. Looking at them discreetly from behind his newspaper, Burns saw two attractive young women he took to be actresses surrounded by men he recognised as an assortment of painters, bullfighters and writers – the very tertulia he had been looking for. Minutes later, one of their number detached himself from the table, came over to Burns and, in a strong American accent, asked who he was and what he was doing in Madrid, before inviting him to join the others.
The ‘American’ was Edgar Neville, the Spanish film-maker who had lived and worked in the United States before turning out some pro-Franco propaganda films during the civil war. The actresses are thought to have been Conchita Montes and Amparo Rivelles, two of Neville’s favourite female stars during the 1940s. All three worked for Cifesa, the state-sponsored department of cinematography set up by Franco after the civil war.
The rest of the table was made up of an assortment of Spaniards who would remain vivid in Burns’s memory fifty years on. The most loquacious was Antonio Cañabate, the leading bullfight critic of the day, ‘a lank owl-like character, droll, and undomesticated’. Next to him sat the ‘portentous presence’ of Eugenio d’Ors, the Catalan critic, and alongside him the equally imposing Basque painter, Ignacio Zuloaga. Also there that day were Domingo Ortega and Juan Belmonte, two of the great bullfighters in Spanish history.
Ortega, from Toledo, in the region of Old Castile, was then at the height of his powers. Belmonte, from Seville, the capital of Andalusia, Burns had not seen a fight since his first trip to Spain during the early 1930s. Belmonte had by then retired from the ring. He spoke with a stutter and had a picaresque sense of humour. ‘Unless it is per-per-proved to the £W2-£W2-contrary, I assume that you, Bu-Bur-Burns, like aa-aa-all Englishmen are in the Intelligence Service,’ he ventured.
By then the tertulia, after a lunch lasting four hours, had moved to the Lyon d’Or, a Parisian-style fin-de-siècle café opposite the Post Office in the Calle de Alcalá. Intimacies were shared within the circle but went unrecorded. Only Burns felt it his duty to make a mental note of any information he thought he could make use of. During the Second World War there would be many others who drifted in and out of the tertulia Burns came to appreciate as a very special private club, Spanish-style. They included learned Arabists, bull breeders, publishers, antiquarian booksellers, mistresses, and Sebastián Miranda, an eccentric sculptor who, together with Belmonte, was destined to become involved in a decisive chapter in Burns’s life.
‘Those evenings at the Lyon d’Or became a matter of habit; they were convivial but with the austerity that underlines much of Spanish life,’ Burns later recalled.
‘Imperceptibly I was discovering that life, its language and its lore. I had struck a rich vein of the essential Spain – the permanent país – distinct from the polarised passions of the Civil War – which, however, were still far from extinguished.’
And yet it was not from the tertulias that Burns learnt about suffering Spain, but in the poor suburbs and the countryside that he also frequented.
A report he sent to London following a trip he made round Andalusia painted a bleak picture of the dire socio-economic conditions that ordinary Spaniards were enduring beyond the world of privilege and power that was only too apparent in Madrid. It prompted the Foreign Office to conclude that even Nazi Germany might hesitate to take on a country in such a plight. It also informed British policy in encouraging the offer of economic assistance as a carrot for ensuring Franco’s neutrality, backed by an intensified campaign of pro-Allied propaganda.
Burns wrote: All this region is in a very marked contrast to the highly charged political atmosphere of Madrid. In these southern provinces the political machinations of the Government have hardly registered. The obsessing problem is a domestic one: food … The war is only seen in relation to the means of life. I cannot over emphasise the extreme need of the people in this region: it verges on the desperate. Whole villages have been without bread for weeks, large peasant families are living for days on less than one British workman’s supper.’
Burns felt reassured by what he described as the ‘quite markedly friendly’ general attitude towards the Allies that he found among ordinary working-class Spaniards. He felt less sure about the loyalties of the ‘more or less comfortable bourgeois’ who had yet to be convinced that ‘we are not wantonly continuing this war and that a Nazi victory will leave him and his way of life unaffected’.
Given the lack of a developed middle class in Spain, the category applied to the emerging class of state functionaries, mostly drawn from the nationalist so-called Movimiento, or Movement, Franco’s amalgam of the military, the Falange party and the traditionalist right-wing monarchists, the requetés, who had spread out across towns and villages. ‘We must face the fact that with a veering of Spanish opinion away from Germany comes the necessity for more, not less, British propaganda,’ Burns reported. He recommended that additional money be provided from a special contingency fund within the MoI to ensure that the daily British bulletin that was circulating in Madrid and Barcelona would also be distributed in the south of Spain.
Within days Burns was in Tangier, where British diplomatic and intelligence officials and their agents liaised closely with the other Iberian ‘hubs’, Madrid and Lisbon, as well as Gibraltar, a growing network which effectively provided strategic coverage for the western end of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal, as well as the border with France.
Tangier had been a danger spot for the great powers of Europe for decades, because of its strategic location overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar and as a potential bridgehead between Spain and North Africa. In the lead-up to the Second World War, Tangier was nominally ruled by the Sultan of Morocco, while actually being administered by foreign forces, with the French maintaining a predominant influence. In June 1940, Spanish troops marched into the town after convincing the British and the French that it was a temporary but necessary move to ensure Tangier’s security against any attempted takeover by Mussolini.
In Madrid, the Spanish occupation fuelled an outburst of patriotic fervour, drawing parallels with the expansion of the Spanish Empire in Africa under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century.
Tangier was drawn deeper into the war in Europe when the Germans boosted their intelligence and propaganda operations there, forcing the Allies to do likewise. In the winter of 1940, however, there were no British troops available for turning the Spaniards out. Instead, the embassy in Madrid was instructed by the Foreign Office to negotiate an agreement with the Spanish government guaranteeing the protection of British interests with the free entry and departure of British subjects, and the continuing existence of a British newspaper, the Tangier Gazette, and a post office.
Negotiations were coordinated by the embassy’s deputy head of mission, the resourceful and dynamic Arthur Yencken. His close friendship with and professional trust in Burns led Yencken to depend on his colleague’s contacts inside the Spanish regime to facilitate an engagement with the foreign minister Ramón Serrano Súñer on the issue. While negotiations were ongoing, Burns arrived at the British mission in Tangier. ‘Two retired colonels ran the Information Office. They had little to do and seemed to be doing it very well. I left them in peace in the turbulent city,’ recalled Burns in his memoirs.
The two colonels were Toby Ellis and Malcolm Henderson, whose work covered intelligence and propaganda. Burns reported to the Foreign Office: ‘It now appears that the Tangier Gazette is to be allowed to continue publication; its circulation, however, has been forbidden in certain parts of the Spanish and in the entire French zone. This is our sole means of propaganda – the Press-attaché’s industry has increased its quality and scope. It is the best-selling paper in Tangier and will make big inroads in Spain.’
Burns believed that Tangier, for all its enduring international status, was not sufficiently used by the British for what it was – a vital bridgehead not just into Spain but also for pursuing Allied interests in North Africa. He used his report to press the case for the British mission to be expanded, along with an enlargement of the consulate network on the Spanish mainland. ‘I am not satisfied that we are sufficiently equipped in Tangier to maintain contact with the French and to keep check of the constant German effort to drive the Spaniards to further adventures and the occupation of important French possessions … Information and intelligence services are so bound up with each other in Tangier that I cannot but remark on this,’ wrote Burns.
For much of its history, Tangier had retained a certain exotic allure, a city which played to its own rules, offering refuge and excitement, escape and indulgence. At its most tarnished, it was, in the words of its biographer Iain Finlayson, ‘a city of illusory vanities … the anteroom of failure, the casualty ward of desire’. When Burns visited it, he found Charlie’s Bar, a ‘more fruitful source of information’ than the ‘two colonels’. Part-gambling den, part-nightclub, it was presided over by its eponymous owner, a tall, elegant dark-skinned North African who spoke in a somewhat affected upper-class British accent reputedly picked up while studying at Cambridge. There was no shortage of drinks, cigars or women at Charlie’s. Its clientele was almost exclusively expatriate. The British and Americans in particular met there to swap notes, as did the Germans with the collaborationists among the Vichy French.
The smoky, jovial atmosphere around the bar and the piano, along with its darker recesses, provided neutral ground where refugees on their way to Lisbon evaded their pursuers, agents touched base with their handlers and escaped prisoners of war shared their adventures over endless rounds of contraband whisky. It was a place where one could find or lose oneself.
At that time a fictitious version of Charlie’s, based in wartime Casablanca, was being created in a Hollywood studio. The film, Casablanca, starred Humphrey Bogart as the cynical owner of Rick’s Café Américain, who finds himself torn between the love of his life and a rediscovered sense of duty and self-sacrifice. Rick finds resolution in helping Ilsa, his lover (played by Ingrid Bergman), to escape with her husband, a heroic leader of the French Resistance. The film – a beautifully crafted propaganda movie – was rush-released within a year of the Allied landings in North Africa, and went on to become one of the most popular films of all time.
In the winter of 1940–41, it was in Tangier, where the family of Ann Bowes-Lyon happened to own property, that Burns unwittingly found himself playing out a critical scene from his own real-life story of intrigue and romance. With the world he had known in London disintegrating, he had travelled from Europe to Africa as part of the only cause that, apart from his Catholic faith, made any sense to him in the chaotic world – the defeat of Hitler. But in so doing he had crossed an emotional Rubicon.
‘Everything happens here,’ Charlie told Burns the night he drank himself into the ground in Tangier; ‘if you bring your wife I will have to charge you corkage.’ The irony of the quip was not lost on the Madrid embassy’s press attaché. For not only did Burns not have a wife at the time but the prospect of having one had suddenly vanished just a few hours earlier. Before crossing the Strait to Tangier, Burns had spent the morning in Gibraltar, with the military governor and intelligence, signals and defence personnel discussing plans to turn part of the military base into a wireless station from which to broadcast propaganda across into Spain. Another idea advanced at the meeting was boosting local printing facilities so as to enhance the quality and distribution of a locally produced pro-Allied Spanish-language newspaper. Discussions over, Burns was invited to lunch by a local contact to the Rock Hotel, where the restaurant and rooms had been turned into an officers’ mess for the duration of the war. It was there that, during a casual conversation with one of the officers, Burns learnt that Ann Bowes-Lyon was engaged to be married to Francis D’Abreu, a Stonyhurst old boy who was serving as an army doctor.
This was the only news of Ann that had reached Burns in weeks. The last letters he had written to her from Madrid had gone unanswered and those he had received from mutual friends had dropped all mention of her without explanation. While he knew that his departure to Spain had put a strain on their relationship, the correspondence they had maintained after his arrival in Madrid had for a brief period rekindled the relationship with a sense of urgency and longing.
When her letters had suddenly dried up, Burns blamed the Germans and an unpredictable post, while also making himself believe that she had been diverted by the increased workload at the military hospital where she worked as a volunteer nurse. Neither had made any solemn commitment to marriage, but they had parted with mutual trust – or so Burns had imagined. Since arriving in Madrid, he had clung on to the thought of her, despite the fact of their very different circumstances, and he had remained faithful to that thought. Such misplaced loyalty showed how out of touch he had in fact become with Britain and what moved those who remained there.
For at the Royal Herbert Hospital, Ann had been drawn into a world not of spy games, diplomacy, propaganda and expedient neutrality, but one in which men and women fought and were killed in a war they believed was between totalitarianism and democracy, and all she was left with was the wounded, the dying and the dead. It was in such circumstances, not in the romantic candlelit evenings she had spent with Burns at Glebe Place, or the privileged family gatherings at Glamis Castle, that Ann had met and fallen in love with the Jesuit-educated army doctor she had decided to marry.
Burns was emotionally shattered, and he never entirely eradicated the memory of that loss. As he later wrote in his memoirs (in which Ann Bowes-Lyon is never mentioned by name): ‘Any budding affair of the heart had been checked by what seemed a beckoning purpose in my life. Suddenly all of this vanished: no presence, no trust, and no discernible purpose. It would take a long time for this to be changed from a vacuum to a new vision, freed from the bondage and illusion of years.’
Purged of love for a while, Burns returned to Madrid to find his embassy still grappling with the uncertainty of Franco’s intentions. Would he or would he not join the Axis? And how long did Churchill have before he had to confront the nightmare scenario of German troops marching across the Pyrenees, taking Gibraltar and pushing across to North Africa? If there was no easy answer to these questions it was because Franco was a master at playing one belligerent against the other, to his own advantage.
On 23 October 1940 Franco had met Hitler on the French–Spanish border at Hendaye, for their first and only encounter. Neither leader had got what he wanted. Hitler stalled on making any formal promises on Spain’s claims to further territory in North Africa. Franco, for his part, had told Hitler that he would not cede to any foreign power, including Germany’s right of conquest over a sovereign territory (Gibraltar), warned Hitler that England was far from defeated and was likely to fight on with the help of the United States, and made no commitment to dropping Spain’s neutrality. The summit involved the participation at close quarters – apart from Franco and Hitler – of just five people: the German and Spanish foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Serrano Súñer, two translators, Gross and BarÓn de las Torres, and a German foreign ministry official named Paul Schmidt. While the meeting was supposed to be secure and protected from enemy intrusion, it was infiltrated by British intelligence through an individual code-named T.
While the identity of the agent has never been conclusively established, it is likely that he was the translator, Barón de las Torres, otherwise know as Luis Álvarez de Estrada y Luque, a Spanish aristocrat whose Anglophile sympathies led to him providing information to the British about Spanish policy throughout the war. The information the British obtained from the summit was that Franco had resisted entering a formal military pact with Hitler and Mussolini. This released Churchill from any immediate pressure to refocus his military campaign on the Iberian Peninsula at a time when the British had not enough forces to invade the continent, and had been pressed into a war of attrition with Allied air power now seconding the previous weapon of naval blockade. Nevertheless, it left little room for complacency. Hoare remained hugely mistrustful of Serrano Súñer’s pro-Axis sympathies, and believed that the British embassy needed to step up its efforts to counter German influence.
The poverty and hunger which Burns had reported on during his travels reinforced Hoare’s belief that the Allies could use trade in foodstuffs to win over hearts and minds. Equally, Burns’s reports – urging greater use of propaganda and boosting the loose network of agents from Barcelona to Tangier – had convinced the British ambassador that he could neither relax his vigilance nor, as he put it, ‘ignore any straw that showed the direction of the wind’.
On one point Hoare was insistent: any gathering or dissemination of secret intelligence by the British on the Iberian Peninsula should be consistent with his mission of keeping Spain neutral and should be under his control.
From the moment he had taken charge as ambassador in Madrid, Hoare had made every effort to centralise key aspects of the embassy’s operations, holding daily meetings to ensure proper liaison between departments and an uncluttered line of reporting on priority issues. He felt he had every reason to be wary of career intelligence officers whose first loyalty was to their line managers in head office rather than to the interests of British foreign policy, as identified by the ambassador.
Hoare’s experience as an intelligence officer in St Petersburg in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution and his later dealings with the British embassy in Rome during the crisis in Abyssinia had left him with an enduring memory of failed diplomatic missions, whose weakness he blamed on divisive internal departmentalisation. In both missions, the developing international importance of the politics of the host country had meant the grafting on to a relatively small diplomatic staff of a large number of so-called technical experts ‘who owed their primary allegiance to different offices in Whitehall’.
Hoare believed that intelligence officers were potentially isolationist, with a tendency to keep a proprietorial guard over the information they obtained, and with a cavalier attitude to the discipline imposed on civil servants. ‘Important branches of the mission would be ignorant of each other’s programmes, whilst the Chancery, instead of being the nerve centre of a multifarious organisation, would be left stranded on the outskirts of a field almost entirely occupied by the technicians,’ Hoare wrote of his previous missions.
It was in Petrograd in 1918, after he had left Russia, that SIS officers had become embroiled with a group of Latvians in a disastrous plot against the Bolsheviks, involving an attempted assassination of Lenin. The failure of the plot led to hundreds of revenge executions and the dismantling of the British mission, so that the SIS subsequently stood accused of fuelling the Red Terror, and poisoning for years Anglo-Soviet relations.
The memory of the Petrograd debacle confirmed Hoare in his belief that intelligence operations needed to be carefully controlled and that policy was best pursued through diplomacy with military intervention an option of last resort.
His appointment in Spain gave him an opportunity to breathe new life into an embassy that, under the lacklustre Maurice Peterson, had struggled to have any influence on the Catholic, right-wing and militaristic Spain which had emerged victorious from civil war. Hoare wanted to mould an embassy around his leadership which had the capacity to take on and outmanoeuvre its German counterpart, while ensuring that nothing was done that might alienate Franco and tip him into the enemy camp.
His core team was made up of his deputy head of mission, Yencken, the naval attaché Captain Hillgarth, and Burns. Of the three it was Burns’s department that, with Hoare’s encouragement, and thanks to the personal and professional ties developed with Yencken and Hillgarth, was gradually transformed into a powerful and influential nexus straddling diplomacy, propaganda and intelligence.
Burns had arrived in the summer of 1940, protesting his inadequacy and lack of experience to his ambassador and suspecting his job would be short-lived anyway, given what appeared to be the imminent threat of a German invasion. He had found his first meeting with the professional spies in the embassy an unnerving experience. ‘They were at first fish-eyed, aloof and polite to this foreign body thrust into their midst,’ he recalled.
The embassy’s intelligence operations – until Hillgarth, with Hoare’s blessing, took overall charge – was headed up by the MI6 ‘head of station’ (code-numbered 23100), Hamilton-Oakes, with a small staff of assistants. The more experienced spies showed themselves cautiously friendly to Burns no sooner had he arrived, while the young cipher-room girls, high-born, high-spirited and largely unmarried, had no qualms about voting him the most handsome and charming of all embassy bachelors.
Within a year of the fall of France, the Madrid embassy had grown into a formidable centre of Allied diplomatic and covert activity, its network of agents spread across consular posts in the Iberian Peninsula, beyond the Pyrenees in the north, to North Africa in the south. By March 1941, Madrid and Lisbon were two of only four (the others were Stockholm and Berne) MI6 stations remaining in Europe. In Madrid, the secret services’ separate annexe of the embassy was referred to as the ‘attic’ by the attachés. Hamilton-Stokes ran a staff of fourteen under cover of the Passport Control building in the Montesquinza section of the Madrid embassy, running some 168 agents and sub-agents throughout Spain. His staff included the wives of two British diplomats, Joan Bethell, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Vice-Consul of Cartagena, and a nanny. In the spring of 1941, Kenneth Benton, a member of Section V, MI6’s counter-intelligence section, arrived in Madrid after previous postings in Vienna and Riga. Accompanied by his wife of three years, Peggie, he had flown out from England to Lisbon and then driven across the border in a second-hand Buick, alleged to have once belonged to the secretary of Léon Blum, the former French prime minister of the short-lived Popular Front government in France.
Benton’s first night in Madrid’s Ritz Hotel nearly ended in disaster. He had left Lisbon with a pistol in one pocket and a bulb filled with ammonia in the other, to protect him from bandits along the way. With the items still on him, Benton had stepped into the hotel lift. It was crowded with other guests and when one of them pressed against him the bulb blew its stopper. ‘By the time we reached our floor, the people were gasping for breath, but we pretended to be as mystified as they were,’ he later recalled.
The next day Benton went to see Hoare. The ambassador listened attentively as Benton told him about a top-secret plan the Bletchley Park cryptographers, MI5 (B Division) and MI6 (Section V), were developing after successfully decoding German radio traffic, known as ISOS. This was particularly significant, as it meant that British intelligence would soon have the capacity to intercept some of the key messages being transmitted between Berlin and German ‘stations’ on the Iberian Peninsula and in North Africa.
Benton also went on to explain the changing tactics the British secret services were developing in the gathering and planting of intelligence, true and false. In the first year of the war (1940–41), the main aim of MI5 and Section V was to identify and disrupt German attempts to infiltrate spies into the UK. But after the setting-up of the XX Committee in January 1941 to supervise all double-agent work, a further plan got under way to use turned Abwehr agents in a process of strategic deception. ‘That is all extremely interesting,’ Hoare said, after Benton had concluded his monologue. ‘Only mind you don’t fall foul of the Spaniards.’
Meeting Hamilton-Stokes later that day, Benton discovered that exactly the same warning had been issued to the MI6 station chief. It was not that Hoare did not want any secret intelligence or other covert activity to take place while he was in charge; what he wanted was to protect his mission from the development of autonomous fiefdoms which might get out of his control and leave him with the job of picking up the pieces diplomatically.
Hoare came to trust Burns rather more than any of the other spies. The ambassador employed his press attaché as a covert diplomatic tool, using his links with the Franco regime to keep abreast of its intentions and to identify areas for negotiation, providing intelligence that was not obtainable by any other means.
The fact that Burns had never formally been recruited by either MI6 or MI5 as an intelligence officer, but nonetheless ran his own sources, was viewed by his ambassador as an advantage. It gave Burns the operational flexibility to collaborate with both agencies when necessary while maintaining ties with other key departments in the embassy, both gathering and channelling information through the ambassador and directly to the highest levels of government which might otherwise have been lost, overlooked or deliberately ignored. However, from the early stages of the war, a marked tension had began to affect Burns’s relations with some of his colleagues at the MoI and the secret services who questioned his professional competence and political motives, given his reputation as a right-wing Catholic with pro-Franco leanings.
It was while he was serving at the MoI’s headquarters in London in 1939 that Burns decided he would try and make use of some of the contacts he had made during the civil war by engaging their services as agents of the Allied cause. It proved a high-risk strategy at a time when some of the more fanatical Francoists moved in the same social circles as Nazi sympathisers, and were as likely to betray the British as to help them. An early target was the Marqués del Moral, a Spanish aristocrat who, like Burns, had been educated by the Jesuits in England before marrying Gytha Stourton, a member of one of the oldest English Catholic families, whose position in the higher social circles dated from before the Reformation.
During his country’s civil war, Moral had based himself in London running the Francoist propaganda and intelligence organisation in Britain. In a family memoir, Gytha Stourton’s niece, Julia Stonor, describes Moral, or ‘Mos’ as he was affectionately called by his family, as having been a ‘spy, and an important one’.
Stonor, who as a young girl developed a close relationship with her aunt Gytha, tells how Moral became a close friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to London, whom he met in England and Spain, while also maintaining close links with British and Spanish arms traders who brokered deals during the Spanish Civil War.
‘Gytha was horrified by the politics of these men, by Mos’s open friendship with committed admirers and such enthusiastic followers of Hitler. But she was unable to do anything – as an obedient wife, and very Catholic woman she could hardly oppose her husband, let alone her friends so well disposed to the German and Spanish regimes.’ Thus the new Marquesa resigned herself to the role of a ‘pretty, occasionally useful ornament’ to her older and ‘very busily occupied Spanish husband’. When not in London, Moral spent the civil war period travelling frequently between Portugal, Spain and France, issuing safe-conduct passes into Nationalist-held territory to Englishmen considered sympathetic to the Franco cause, including Burns and other members of the fundraising organisation Friends of Nationalist Spain. Once Franco was in power, and the war in Europe had broken out, Moral was approached by Burns, under the official auspices of the Ministry of Information, but with support from the Foreign Office, to work for the Allies.
The idea that Moral should be recruited as an informant on Spanish internal affairs and relations with the Germans was channelled through to a senior contact in the Foreign Office by a right-wing Tory MP, with connections in the Foreign Office and an interest in Anglo-Spanish relations, Sir Nairne Sandeman, in April 1940. Sandeman reminded the contact that Moral had had, as he put in a private letter, ‘considerable dealings of a cooperative nature’ with the Foreign Office during the civil war, and strongly recommended that he be put on the MoI’s payroll.
A file on Moral giving additional details on his life was attached. It focused almost exclusively on Moral’s pro-British credentials. Moral had fought for the British in the Matabele War, the Boer War and the First World War, and had a son, of British nationality, who had recently enlisted in the British Army.
Sandeman died a few days later, but Moral’s recruitment as an agent was actively pursued by Burns, with the support of the MoI and the Foreign Office. The MoI channelled secret payments to Moral via Burns’s department under the broad heading of ‘private propaganda in Spain’.
While Burns appears to have made use of Moral to extend his own contacts with the Franco regime, little additional benefit was drawn from the operation. The first report delivered by Moral, after Burns had been installed in Madrid, was judged ‘practically useless’ by one senior MoI official, Leigh Ashton. In a memo to Roger Makins, one of the top diplomats at the Foreign Office, Ashton wrote: ‘The report contained some very dubious information about Germany which was passed on to DMI (military intelligence) and a certain amount about Spain and Portugal which did not contain anything we did not know already’
Moral had been charging for information, some of which he had already shared with Burns, in effect double-billing the British government at a time when budgets were tight. Discovery of the scam led to the immediate suspension of any further payments to Moral after he had been declared persona non grata in British embassy circles. Burns was lucky to escape with a reprimand.
While the Moral blunder was quietly and quickly forgotten, it was not an isolated incident in the history of British wartime intelligence-gathering in Spain. During the early years of the war, further cases would expose not only the amateurism of some Spanish agents, but the ineptitude of the British spies running them. Early in the autumn of 1940, the British embassy in Madrid sponsored a visit to the UK of Miguel Piernavieja del Pozo as a representative observer of an influential political study group based in Madrid. Pozo was a Falangist who had spied for Franco during the civil war. He had since become a journalist. Pozo arrived in the UK on 29 September 1940. The tour arranged for him by the War Office with the blessing of the Foreign Office and MoI included visits to aerodromes in Scotland, various army units in England and the BBC’s studios in London.
And yet, before the tour got under way, Pozo was approached by Gwylm Williams (GW), a former Welsh police inspector and Welsh nationalist who had been recruited by MI5 as a double agent after he had offered his services to the Germans. GW later informed his handler in MI5 that Pozo – or Pogo as he was code-named by the security services – had given him £3900 stashed in a talcum-powder tin and told him to report on military factories in the west of England, and on the Welsh Nationalist Movement (GW had posed as a Welsh nationalist eager to throw off the English yoke when first contacting the Abwehr in 1939). Pozo had also, so GR alleged, asked for some initial sabotage plans to be drawn up.
‘He is a rather unpleasant type who is obviously on the make.’ Thus did Guy Liddell, the director of MI5 counter-espionage B division, describe Pogo for the first time in a diary entry dated 10 October 1940. Liddell claimed he had only just discovered that Pozo had come to the UK under the auspices of the British Council and on the recommendation of Hoare. The plan, so Liddell had been led to believe, was to have Pozo file pro-Allied news reports as a counterweight to the German propaganda that was flooding the Spanish media, from Berlin. Liddell believed this to be an odd tactic. ‘It seems a curious thing that our authorities should not be really wise to the fact that any member of the Falange, which is in fact a Spanish Nazi Party, must be right in the German camp,’ he wrote.
Whatever the embassy’s motivation, MI5’s B Division needed little persuasion that Pozo was someone they could make use of for their own purposes. The German spy scare had intensified as the Nazi war machine moved across Western Europe. The fear was of the development of a fifth column which, it was believed, had aided the German invasion of France, Belgium, and Holland and was the explanation as to why these countries had fallen so quickly. Emergency laws were brought in suspending the right of habeas corpus and protection against mistreatment of anyone suspected of being an enemy agent. Within MI5 a belief was growing that Nazi Germany was using any trick it could to infiltrate its agents behind lines. The fact that the internment of some 18,000 German, Italians and other enemy ‘aliens’, along with members of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and other figures who were deemed to have their primary loyalty to Germany, within the first year of the draconian new powers being decreed had failed to uncover any major plot, only resulted in efforts being redoubled to catch other agents suspected of still being at large or recently infiltrated under cover of a neutral state.
In October 1940 MI5 installed microphone and telephone taps in Pozo’s London apartment and put him on their official watch list, with officers of D.6, the surveillance unit, tailing him night and day. Despite the blanket coverage, MI5 struggled to come up with anything that suggested serious espionage activity, other than what they suspected were deliberate counter-surveillance measures typical of a trained spy.
An MI5 report accused Pozo of evading his pursuers by ‘boarding moving buses and dodging into doorways’. It also drew on intercepts of his girlfriend’s phone calls suggesting she was not who she claimed to be. ‘According to the person she is speaking to she employs at various times a marked foreign accent, a slightly American accent, a Cockney accent, and a comparatively educated and fluent English accent,’ wrote Liddell. ‘When speaking to Pogo she appears to be a rather elderly woman with a poor command of the language, just as on other occasions she speaks fluently, quickly, and with no accent at all.’
Pozo was drawn into further meetings with GW, who continued to report to the Germans as well as the British, although the Spaniard’s activities became increasingly erratic due in no small part to a heavy drinking habit. Early in November the Daily Express published what it claimed was an interview with Pozo in which he expressed his hope that Germany would win the war. Quite why the Spaniard would willingly want to make such a public confession if he was indeed a fully paid-up German spy was not explained. GW nonetheless reported the matter to the Abwehr in Madrid, saying that it had become too dangerous to work with ‘such a man who tends to give cause for the attention of the authorities and will eventually lead to his deportation if not something worse’.
In his diary Liddell suggests that the incident had come dangerously close to undermining a plan of deliberately letting Pozo continue to operate as an unwitting feeder of false information to the Germans. He also reflects a continuing concern that rival agencies were struggling to control him, not least the Ministry of Information. ‘Pogo has badly blotted his copy-book by getting tight … We have sent over a violent protest to the other side who have replied apologetically. It seems that Pogo has been superimposed on their system by some outside body, probably the Propaganda Ministry.’
Days later the Sunday Graphic published its own very different ‘interview’ with Pozo – a piece of crude Allied propaganda – in which he was quoted as declaring his belief that the war was far from over (contrary to the list of victories claimed in German news reports) and that the morale of the British armed forces and the country at large was very high. Within days, an unidentified agent working for MI6 reported that Pozo had suggested to him the Spanish people were becoming more Anglophile and had written to his unidentified ‘chief in Spain stating his conviction that Great Britain was invincible.
This was suspected by some in MI5 of being an exercise in deception rather than the betrayal of a double agent. But government departments remained divided as to what to do with Pozo. The MoI had growing doubts about his use as a propaganda weapon and thought he should be sent home. MI5 and MI6 wanted to give Pozo more rope with which to hang himself and entrap other agents. The Foreign Office wanted to avoid creating a diplomatic incident, and in effect threatened an administrative paralysis across Whitehall over the case. ‘The case of Pogo is getting rather difficult,’ wrote Liddell on 2 December 1941.
Pozo continued his meetings with GW, some of which took place at the Spanish embassy where the ambassador, the Duke of Alba, still considered the Spaniard a bona fide journalist who had had his papers cleared by Burns, with Hoare’s blessing. In his dealings with GW, Pozo’s alleged demands for information seemed increasingly fanciful. At one meeting he is said to have asked GW to make enquiries about the water purification plant and reservoir at Swansea with a view to introducing a ‘poison’ or else something to blow up the main pipeline.
And yet Pozo remained extraordinarily indiscreet for someone supposed to be an important German spy. A report he allegedly wrote in invisible ink giving details of bomb damage reached Spain and fell straight into the hands of the British embassy. He also arranged to have a meeting with the Duke of Hamilton, an aristocrat of questionable loyalties. The Duke was under MI5 surveillance, even if his reputation as an appeaser of the Germans may have served as a front for his work for other sectors of British intelligence. (It was because he believed in Hamilton’s credentials as a pro-Nazi, high up in the British state, that Rudolf Hess had flown to Scotland to see him.) According to MI5’s ‘Tar’ Robinson, head of the double-cross section, the ‘slow-witted’ Hamilton, while belonging to the peace party, came to believe that the only thing Britain should do was fight to the finish. Hamilton may well have informed on Pozo’s alleged pro-German views.
Towards the end of January 1941, Pozo returned to Spain. The ease with which he was allowed to leave England infuriated some sectors of MI5 who had wanted him interned. But it appears to have represented a calculated risk taken by those within the British secret services who believed they had bigger fish to catch. Instead of bringing in Pozo, MI5 let him swim a little longer with the aim of identifying whatever wider network he was part of, a strategy that was to complicate still further its relationship with the British embassy in Madrid. The spies were in danger of running away with themselves and tying themselves in knots.
It was at the beginning of January 1941, or perhaps even earlier, that Burns became embroiled with a German agent who purported to be in the inner counsels of Serrano Súñer, Franco’s brother-in-law. According to the skeleton account Burns gives of his dealings with Angel Alcázar de Velasco – he gives no precise dates – the Spaniard came to visit him at his suite at Gaylords Hotel with a request for accreditation as the new press attaché at the Spanish embassy in London. Velasco told Burns that Serrano Súñer mistrusted the Anglophile tendencies of Spain’s ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba, and wanted his own man on the spot to assess more accurately British morale and Britain’s capability of continuing the war.
Velasco explained his project with a ‘wealth of colourful personal detail about himself’, most, although not all of which Burns already knew about. The one-time bullfighter had joined the Falange before forming part of an extreme right-wing faction that had fallen out with Franco halfway through the civil war. He had been under sentence of death but had been reprieved. Over several glasses of whisky, he told Burns that he had become the champion masturbator in the military prison. To emphasise this, Velasco suddenly produced a pistol with a silencer and fired at the ceiling above Burns’s head.
‘It seemed to be his way of sealing a bond. Gaylord’s had been the Soviet headquarters in the Civil War and perhaps more than one bullet had lodged in the elegant moulding round the ceiling,’ Burns recalled many years later. ‘Anyway to have a spy easy to tail might lead to others and Velasco’s idea was welcomed by MI5.’
So there was method in the madness – but what method and whose madness? Velasco claimed in his memoirs that the Abwehr suspected the press and information department in the British embassy in Madrid was playing a discreet but important part in British intelligence activities and that he was tasked with infiltrating the department. According to his account, he began his mission by arranging a meeting with Burns’s assistant Bernard Malley.
Over lunch and a series of subsequent meetings, Velasco claimed, Malley became convinced that he was simply an extreme Falangist who felt so betrayed by Franco that he was willing to provide the British with information about the political vulnerabilities of his regime. There is no record anywhere of such meetings taking place although it is probable that Malley may have been involved and that he may have suggested that Velasco meet his boss.
Burns’s version of his own meeting with Velasco suggests that he agreed to it with the approval of his ambassador and aware that the Spaniard was a German spy who would be trailed more easily in London, and perhaps even turned into a double agent. A British intelligence file held on Velasco, which Burns had contributed to, shows that he had pro-Nazi sympathies dating back to the civil war, and may have been recruited as an agent of the Abwehr as early as 1935. By the summer of 1940 Velasco was being groomed for espionage work against the British on the recommendation of Wilhelm Oberbeil, a member of the Hitler Youth the Spaniard had befriended during the 1930s. And Velasco had also been involved in the German plot to ‘kidnap’ the Duke of Windsor before he took up his post in the Bahamas.
Burns nonetheless left the meeting with Velasco convinced that this ‘preposterous character’ could be manipulated to serve British interests.
By the time Alcázar de Velasco arrived in the UK in early 1941, the small community of Spanish journalists and diplomats then living in London was in the process of being heavily infiltrated by British intelligence.
Of growing interest to certain officers of MI5’s counter-espionage B Division was Luis Calvo, the London correspondent of the newspaper ABC. Calvo had started his journalistic career as a trainee with United Press International before joining ABC as a theatre critic in 1926 at the age of twenty-eight. Despite the conservative monarchist leanings of his newspaper, Calvo became involved in liberal Republican circles, and, following the abdication of King Alfonso XIII in 1931, was posted to London as press attaché under the Republican ambassador Ramón Pérez de Ayala. During the civil war, he changed political allegiance and wrote pro-Franco articles for the London Observer and the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación from behind Franco lines. When war broke out in Europe, he returned to London as ABC’s correspondent, having been vetted and cleared by the British embassy in Madrid.
Calvo was by now a fluent English speaker with a good understanding, thanks to his previous posting, of British politics and institutions. He moved effortlessly in diplomatic and Whitehall circles, and was an assiduous reader of British newspapers. Calvo was a hard-working and observant foreign correspondent whose regular articles for ABC during the first months of war had exposed some of the more disarmingly absurd aspects of the ‘phoney war’, before vividly depicting the destruction of the Blitz and the evident refusal of the British people to be bombed into surrender. If, for a while, Calvo managed to escape any censorship by the MoI, it was because Burns saw him as a helpful counterbalance to the pro-German propaganda that was being widely disseminated from Berlin and occupied Europe. Burns’s initial views on Calvo contrasted with those of a close group of friends inside the British intelligence community who, by the middle of 1941, were at the heart of UK-based covert activities against Spaniards whom they accused of pro-Axis sympathies and of association with German spies.
The informal unit was made up of MI5’s B Division officers, the art historian Anthony Blunt and an Anglo-Spanish art dealer called Tomás Harris, and a third, Kim Philby, who had been recruited by MI6’s Section V counter-intelligence section after reporting for The Times during the civil war. As well as meeting socially, between them the three men straddled activities which ranged from intercepting incoming and outgoing mail from the Spanish embassy in London (Blunt), through running double agents and interrogations and liaising with the MoI (Harris) to analysing intercepted German communications (Philby). They worked closely together on identifying targets for their agencies, setting priorities and trying to manipulate British policy against Franco’s Spain.
The three collaborated in pursuing the case of Velasco and tainted by association the Spanish journalists and diplomats who came into contact with him, thus drawing Calvo into the double-cross system overseen by Major John Masterman’s XX Committee and managed by MI5’s Thomas ‘Tar’ Robertson.
On 24 May 1941, MI5 set a trap in which they hoped to ensnare Calvo. They got the double agent Gwylm Williams (GW) to write to Calvo, identifying himself as a friend and contact of Pozo and asking his whereabouts as there had been no communication between the two men for four months. Out of journalistic curiosity, Calvo agreed to meet Williams. By now MI5 had bugged Calvo’s flat and was tapping his phone. The main conversations recorded were those between Calvo and a Russian exile called Natasha Antonovsky, the mistress he shared with a former US consul who was working in London for colonel Donovan’s recently formed US intelligence organisation, the OSS.
The US diplomat, identified only by his surname, Fellner, was regarded as a ‘bit shifty’ by Guy Liddell, the head of MI5’s counter-espionage division, but not half as shifty as Calvo. While Fellner was allowed to get on with his affair, undisturbed, the relationship between the Spanish journalist and the ravishing Natasha was assiduously monitored by MI5, with transcripts of their intercepted telephone conversations included in the incriminating personal file the security service was building up on Calvo. One alleged recording had Calvo mentioning Velasco’s name in terms that suggested a professional arrangement.
Days later Calvo was returning home from work when he discovered Williams waiting in his car outside his flat off Sloane Street. Williams suggested they go for a walk in Hyde Park. According to a report subsequently filed with MI5 under Williams’s name, Calvo agreed to operate a ‘dead letter box’ for any information that might be provided on military factories in Wales and the impact of German bombing raids.
In July, Velasco returned to England after a short visit to Spain. Within Whitehall, there were some, including Lord Swinton, the chairman of Whitehall’s Security Executive, who argued that Velasco should be declared persona non grata and refused entry. But the move was overruled by the Foreign Office on the grounds that it risked reprisals against British embassy personnel in Madrid. By all accounts, Velasco was a Walter Mitty character – an adventurer as well as a fantasist – whom British diplomacy struggled to understand and who willingly played to his own advantage the intrigue and double dealing of spies on both sides. While the bulk of the information he provided to both the Allies and the Axis proved inaccurate, sectors of British intelligence were happy enough to make use of his services to entrap other suspect German agents.
Encouraged by MI5, Williams made renewed contact with Calvo who, in turn, introduced him to Velasco. Williams offered further false information about sabotage plans by Welsh nationalists and the movement of Allied ships and aircraft from Welsh ports and airfields for which he demanded payment of ‘expenses’ of at least £500. Velasco agreed to pay the sum in instalments.
Further meetings between Velasco, Calvo and Williams took place over the summer of 1941. At each, Williams told his Spanish contacts of the latest plans being hatched in the fictitious plot by Welsh nationalists, but kept delaying the supply of the ‘top secret documents’ on British military movements he had promised at their first encounter. Early in September, Velasco abruptly left for Madrid, and was never to return to London. He left behind him a complex web of agents and double agents that permeated out from the higher echelons of the Duke of Alba’s embassy and its associated journalists and across the Spanish expatriate community of exiles.
One of the more active informants run by MI5’s counter-intelligence division was the assistant press attaché, José Brugada, codenamed Peppermint, who in the early stages of the war shared a flat with Calvo. Another agent, codenamed Duck – possibly another unnamed senior diplomat – passed on to his British ‘minders’ copies of telegrams sent by the Duke of Alba, while a third – a female secretary at the Spanish consulate in Newcastle codenamed Tangerine – similarly shared secret documents earmarked for the Spanish ministry of foreign affairs.
It was thanks to Brugada that MI5 was tipped off about the betrayal by an alleged SOE operative of Catalan origin called Fernández Martínez Casabayo. The Catalan offered the Spanish embassy details of British commando raids in Norway and of planned operations on the Iberian peninsula in return for money and diplomatic protection. Casabayo was arrested and was not heard of again for the rest of the war.
The incident contributed little to clarifying the relationship between the British on the one hand, and the Catalans and Basques that formed an influential part of the Republican exiled community in London on the other. While Catalans and Basques together with Galicians helped in the transfer across of the Pyrenees of escaping allied POWs, only a select group of republican exiles were trusted as agents by MI5 and MI6, with the Foreign Office generally wary of letting its diplomacy be dictated to by a clearly defined anti-Francoist agenda. Among the more notorious Catalan agents run by Philby at SIS and subsequently by his friends at MI5 was an industrial chemist called Josep Terradellas, codenamed Lipstick. Terradellas initially provided MI6 with what Philby reported was useful information on German spying activities in Argentina, via Spain. But he was cut loose by British intelligence well before the end of the war, after being judged too indiscreet in his ties with Catalan separatists.
Other public figures involved in wartime Anglo-Spanish relations would have files compiled on them by MI5 as being suspiciously proaxis during the Second World War. They included the Duke of Alba’s deputy José Fernández Villaverde (the later Marquis of Santa Cruz), the military attaché Alfonso Barra, the commercial attaché Mariano Iturde, and the Spanish consuls in Newcastle, Liverpool, and Cardiff.
But of all the names to be chosen as a subject for one of MI5’s potentially incriminating personal files few were to prove as politically sensitive as Tom Burns. From at least the spring of 1941, communications between Burns and the head of the Iberian section at the MoI, Billy McCann, were being copied and passed on to MI5’s B Division in an attempt to build up an incriminating personal file. Alarm bells had been set ringing in April 1941 when Burns recommended that the MoI approve the accreditation of Méndez Domínguez as the London correspondent of the official Spanish news agency EFE. Burns told the MoI he was concerned that the Spanish media carried a disproportionate amount of German-based reports, dominating coverage of the war. Burns blamed the distorted pro-Axis coverage of the war on the overwhelming number of reports being filed from correspondents in Berlin and the limited number of Spanish journalists based in London.
In a telegram of recommendation to the MoI, Burns described Dominguez, a former journalist with ABC and the Catholic El Debate, as ‘more reliable and more trustworthy’ than most of the Spanish journalists he had come across in Madrid, and potentially more manageable than those who had been posted to Berlin. One of the surviving London correspondents was Luis Calvo, who was already being monitored by MI5. The other was Felipe Fernández Armesto, the correspondent for the Catholic Madrid newspaper Ya and the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia whose owner, the Count of Godó, was regarded as being sympathetic to the Allied cause.
Armesto, like Calvo, had supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He was regarded by Burns as more of an Anglophile than Calvo and had earned the trust of the Duke of Alba as well as other British officials, thanks to what was viewed as his well-balanced reporting from the UK.
While some MI5 files suggest that Armesto, who wrote under the pseudonym Augusto Assía, was not above suspicion, others would indicate that he may in fact have been working as an agent for British intelligence. Whatever the true nature of his work, his loyalty to the Allied cause was judged sufficiently special to earn him a King’s Medal at the end of the war, and later an MBE.
While Armesto enjoyed good relations with certain members of British intelligence, the latest journalist to be sent to London by Burns came to be seen in very different terms. Burns believed that Domínguez’s pro-Falangist credentials would ensure that his reports from the UK would be published in Spain. But he also argued with his senior management in London that acceding to his accreditation would benefit the British embassy in Madrid’s relations with the Franco regime. It was a huge miscalculation that played easily into the hands of those who saw most Spanish journalists as simple tools of British appeasement towards Nazi Germany.
Domínguez’s reports were indeed published by the Spanish media, with the blessing of the state censor. However, far from proving sympathetic to the Allied cause, they turned out to be so biased in favour of the Axis powers that Burns was ordered by the MoI to personally reprimand Dominguez and issue him with a veiled warning that he faced detention as a foreign agent if he didn’t alter the tone and content of his copy.
Burns’s latest propaganda blunder provided useful ammunition for those who wanted to discredit him professionally. But his enemies within Whitehall knew that it fell short of being definitive. Far more damaging examples of collaboration with the enemy were needed to undermine the support and loyalties Burns had built up across government departments.
By now a great deal of intelligence coming in and out of Spain, and the decisions about what to do with it, had become the responsibility of Section V, the counter-intelligence branch of MI6, and in particular the head of its Iberian section, Kim Philby. Among the material that landed on Philby’s desk, via Bletchley Park, was ISOS, the intercepted and decrypted coded communications between the Abwehr and its branches and outposts, including those in German missions abroad.
By the middle of 1941, Section V had become an increasingly active arm of British intelligence. It had its own offices in an MI6 building outside London, near St Albans, in Hertfordshire, where ISOS summaries were logged and analysed. It had also set up its own network overseas, with its officers and agents developing their own reporting lines often in parallel with other station sections and with their own independent channel of cipher communication code named XB.
In the early years of the war, the professional liaison in London of the ‘merry band of Iberian specialists’ at the heart of British intelligence was forged by an close-knit social circle which the MI5 officer Tomás Harris hosted at his west London flat in Chesterfield Gardens. It was there that the likes of another MI5 officer Blunt, MI6’s Philby, and Guy Burgess who had been recruited by MI6’s Section D at the outbreak of the war before joining the BBC – a cover for his work for Soviet intelligence – could meet, relax and share their world view over drinks.
Philby at the time was the dominant figure in the circle, personable, self-confident and highly professional, regarded by some of his colleagues as the rising star in British intelligence. He was eminently clubbable without possessing any of the stuffy characteristics of an older generation of British intelligence officers, most of whom had a military background. One of his contemporaries, Walter Bell, who had been recruited into British intelligence during the 1930s before being posted to the US, recalled how he had gone to his first meeting with Philby dressed in pinstripes and bowler hat, only to be greeted by the head of the Iberian section, tieless and with his feet up on the desk. By the desk and piled high were intelligence files Philby claimed had been sat upon by his predecessor and which he was now ensuring got to the people who needed to know.
Bell was only one of dozens of British intelligence officers who would later claim to have been unaware of the traitor concealed by Philby’s affable exterior – or, for that matter, of the duplicity of Blunt and Burgess, who would later be similarly exposed as Soviet agents, with Harris suspected of being one of the paymasters of the so-called Cambridge spies right up to the time of his death in a mysterious car crash in Mallorca in 1964. Others who woke up belatedly to the treacherous deception practised by the Soviet agents included Desmond Bristow, an MI6 officer who worked closely with Philby in the Iberian section in London before he was posted to Spain.
Bristow recalled a conversation he had with Philby while drinking rounds of Irish whiskey at King Harry’s, the pub near where they worked in St Albans. At one point during the evening, Philby asked him what he thought about Franco and his neutrality, implying that he was too pro-German. ‘Kim, I don’t know, but I find it hard to imagine actually coming out and openly supporting either side; Spain is far too unstable to fight. If I was Franco I would stay neutral,’ Bristow told Philby. With the evidence of hindsight, Bristow would later believe that Philby was ‘obviously testing me as a potential partner in his work for the Russians’.
It remains unclear to what extent the merry band of Iberian specialists linked to Philby focused the attention of British intelligence on Spain, in a way that may have defused pressure on the London rezidentura of KGB (NKVD) officers, agents and communist sympathisers which had been the subject of perfunctory purges by MI5 during the 1920s and 1930s. Some evidence had emerged suggesting that Philby at this time was not wholly trusted by his Soviet masters. Within the KGB there were those who simply could not believe that the British Secret Intelligence Services could be run by such fools that no one had noticed that precious information was leaking to Moscow. And yet the fact remained that Philby, Blunt, and Burgess were Soviet agents at the time and felt their duty to the communist ideal paramount.
What is also beyond doubt is that the pursuit of Spaniards suspected of being pro-Nazi agents proceeded more or less unopposed by senior UK officials at the time given the paranoia that many in British intelligence, and MI5 specifically, felt about German penetration of a United Kingdom cut off from continental Europe. It was against this background that Spain and Portugal came to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as the main conduit for Nazi agents.
Philby helped spin the web of conspiracy around the Spanish spy ring in London, and relentlessly pursued it all the way to Madrid. No sooner had Velasco returned to the Spanish capital than a message was sent by Philby directly to Kenneth Benton, the newly arrived Section V officer, ordering him to follow the Spaniard and secure as much intelligence on him as possible.
According to Philby’s message, the intelligence reports for which Velasco was held responsible were still being sent from London to Madrid before being forwarded to Berlin. Philby insisted that only Velasco could provide the answer as to who all his agents were in England and how they were transmitting. Benton was ordered to find out what he could. The subsequent investigation drew on information provided by a drunk who claimed to work for Velasco as a clerk. He told Benton that he hated his employer and offered to provide access to the contents of his safe in return for £2000 – the equivalent in those days of at least £50,000.
Benton was horrified at the idea of paying such a sum to an untested source for what he thought might prove worthless information on a suspect spy who was something of a Walter Mitty character. But Philby secretly wired him the money and insisted he go ahead with the operation. Benton arranged to meet the informant, while Velasco was away on a two-week holiday in Mallorca, on a deserted road at night outside Madrid. Afraid that the clerk might be a stooge for the Spanish secret police or the Germans, Benton waited in his Buick and watched him approach alone before making contact. He then drew an automatic pistol from his pocket and, with his other hand, passed over a package of £1000 in notes in exchange for a large suitcase. Benton said he would only get paid the balance if the contents proved worthwhile. What he found were papers and account books of minimum value in intelligence terms. The account books contained no details of any names of agents or sums paid to them. The papers consisted of cuttings from British and American technical magazines pinned to copies of the reports sent to the Germans and the Japanese. The discovery confirmed Benton in his view that, if Velasco was a spy, he was an amateur.
When Benton later asked Philby why on earth he had agreed to pay such a large sum in the first place, he was told that M16’s Finance Department had also raised their hands in horror at the idea, but had agreed after being persuaded that a ‘single broadside from a battleship would have cost more’. It was, of course, Benton noted many years later, a false comparison since the Admiralty’s budget was infinitely greater than that of MI6 at that time. More crucially, it left unexplained why Philby and his friends remained bent on pursuing a spy (Velasco) of extremely doubtful value to the enemy and encouraging a conspiracy whose only real impact on the war was in provoking tension between the British and Spanish governments. The answer may have lain in the ideological imperative Philby and Harris shared in destabilising the Franco regime, even though there were many other such blind-alley MI5 investigations during the Second World War.
It was a conspiracy that would undoubtedly have been curtailed rather earlier had it not been for the decision of Philby and Harris to order their double agent GW to resume contact with Calvo in October 1941 and feed him false information about the movement of a British convoy on its way to Malta.
A few days later GW provided Calvo with another piece of false information – an alleged copy of the minutes of a meeting of the war cabinet chaired by Churchill on 6 October. GW reported that he saw Calvo translate the minutes into Spanish, and put a copy in an envelope addressed to the deputy head of mission at the Spanish embassy, José Fernández de Villaverde.
Finally, GW provided Calvo with a report on wartime food stocks in the UK, which Velasco had requested in a letter to the journalist which had been intercepted by MI5 a few days earlier. Over the three-week period of contacts with GW, Calvo received $600 in the diplomatic bag which was monitored coming in and out of the Spanish embassy in London by Blunt and his team of ‘night watchmen’ from B Division.
By now Calvo had become a mere pawn in the double-cross system. Under the strategy MI5 used double agents like GW to deceive the enemy about Britain’s capabilities and intentions. There was perhaps no greater supporter of the strategy than MI5’s Dick White, who became executive head of the XX Committee. As White’s biographer Tom Bower has put it, ‘the mechanics of the tradecraft – secret inks, microdots, radio traffic, channelling money to agents in Britain, couriering documents from Britain to Germany and “recruitment” of the double agents excited White’, even if the betrayal of some of his own colleagues would return to haunt him in later years.
A personal file compiled by MI5 on Calvo in October 1941 described him first and foremost as a ‘Spanish patriot’, who at the same time believed the best interests of his country would be served by a German victory. While the file suggested there was sufficient material to justify Calvo’s arrest, a decision was taken to let him run a little longer under surveillance to see what, if any, network might be revived.
Intercepts of telephone conversations Calvo had with the other well-established Spanish London correspondent, La Vanguardias Felipe Fernández Armesto, a month later, in November 1941, showed them at one point mentioning Burns’s presence in London, and referring to meetings the press attaché was planning with his counterpart at the Spanish embassy and with Calvo himself.
For those anxious to portray Burns as a traitor, the conversations provided little useful material. On the contrary, the perception Calvo and Armesto appeared to share of the British press attaché was that he was a man of influence within Whitehall whom they could not depend on to be indiscreet because he liked his job too much.
Days later, Burns, fresh from his meetings with the suspect Spaniards, met Dick Broomham-White, M15 Iberian affairs officer, at the St James’s Club in London. Seemingly unaware of the scale of the double-cross system that the organisation was running, Burns – who was quite open about his contacts with Spanish journalists – tried to win Broomham-White’s support for the propaganda strategy that he was pursuing from the Madrid embassy, refusing to accept that it was fundamentally flawed. He justified the sending of Spanish journalists to London as the only means for getting reports from Britain into the Spanish press. He also argued that the MoI should make greater efforts to ‘bear-lead’ the Spanish foreign correspondents as ‘Nazis have learnt to do in Berlin’ – by feeding them information and exercising greater control on their copy.
Burns had asked for the meeting with Broomham-White in the hope that it might ensure better coordination between the embassy in Madrid and whatever strategy was being pursued by the secret services in London. However, Broomham-White emerged from the meeting convinced that Burns was the problem, not the solution, just as his friend Philby had warned him, even if he stopped well short of damning him as a traitor.
As he reported to Philby: ‘On the basis of the conversation I am reasonably certain Burns is a man with right-wing sympathies who interprets his major responsibilities as keeping in the good books of his opposite numbers in Madrid. I think he is irresponsible and his judgements are superficial. He certainly has no idea of the implications of security work. I do not however, feel that he would consciously do anything which would be harmful to our interests. His indiscretions and mistakes are much more likely to be due to thoughtlessness and an overdose of the “appeasement” outlook.’
Two days later Harris claimed in a report that Burns was closely linked to Calvo and Velasco, and that he had deliberately turned a blind eye to their pro-German activities in order to avoid a major diplomatic row undermining the operations of the British embassy in Madrid. ‘Burns is anxious to keep his position as the spoilt child of the British embassy in Madrid at all costs,’ reported Harris. ‘Burns feels that if any of the Spanish journalists here are molested that reprisals might be taken against him.’
According to Harris, Burns’s fear of reprisals was quite unfounded, as ‘not the slightest importance is attached to Burns by the German embassy or the Spanish government’. In fact, a Spanish police file on Burns, drawn from information provided by the Gestapo, showed that he was suspected of playing a major intelligence role in the Iberian Peninsula, and had been inaccurately identified as head of the MI6 Madrid station. ‘It is suspected that Burns who is the head of English propaganda is in reality the Head of the British Intelligence service in Spain and Portugal. He travels frequently to Lisbon,’ the Spanish secret police stated in a report which landed on Franco’s desk.
Harris’s assertions that neither the Spaniards nor the Germans took Burns seriously was a complete fabrication, designed to suggest that the press attaché could easily be dispensed with without provoking major repercussions. The lie fitted into the conspiratorial web that Harris was weaving with the help of Blunt and Philby to discredit Burns and have him removed from his post.
From within MI6, Philby was anxious to do all he could to ensure that MI5 came to view Burns as a security risk and thus continued to feed false information suggesting that he was aiding and abetting Spanish journalists to circumvent passport controls. He was not short of MI5 officers willing to fuel the conspiracy. One of them was Kemball Johnston, a friend of Philby’s and Blunt’s whom Guy Burgess had recommended to his Russian handler as a possible KGB recruit.
Johnston’s main responsibility was helping oversee the screening and questioning by MI5 of refugees and foreign aliens and drawing up an index file of those suspected of working for the enemy.
Johnston was strongly anti-Franco and anti-Catholic and did all he could to counter anti-Bolshevik propaganda in all neutral countries, claiming that the communist threat was a Nazi exaggeration. He knew that it was not the defence of communism but the suggestion that a good Catholic was, by definition, a bad Englishman that most appealed in some quarters of the British state. Thus did Johnston on 28 December 1941 add this view to the file M15 was developing on Burns: ‘Nobody appears to have realised that Burns is the Burns of Burns & Oates, one of the two most important Catholic publishers in the country – and as such immensely powerful. This is surely the key to Burns’ character, which so far as my information goes, is that of an extremely right-wing militant Catholic’.
In fact, Burns had never hidden his background in Catholic publishing or his family roots. Nevertheless, the Catholic conspiracy theory was picked up by MI5’s Broomham-White and included in a two-page report he drafted three days later, summarising the case against Burns so far.
Broomham-White admitted that there was still no evidence pointing to treason. But he believed there was enough dirt that could be thrown at him to make it to stick. The allegations against him were that Burns’s recommendation of Spanish journalists had been ‘to say the least, misguided’ and been of no service to British intelligence. The note from Johnston on Burns’s Catholic connections, moreover, had thrown ‘an interesting light’ on Burns’s character, making it even more so a target of ‘justifiable suspicion’.
Broomham-White continued: ‘The impression I have formed of him myself and from statements from other sources suggest that he is also a very slippery opportunist. Though I do not think he is actively disloyal, his sympathies are undoubtedly very far to the right, and he has no discretion or sense of security values.’
He concluded that from the point of view of those who had put him under surveillance (i.e. Blunt, Philby, Harris and their allies in the MoI), Burns was a ‘most undesirable person to hold the post of Press Attaché in Madrid’. Furthermore, Broomham-White suggested, if Burns were to be recalled it would have the advantage of having him replaced by a man ‘qualified and prepared to serve the interests of SIS (MI6)’, in other words a candidate more to the liking of Kim Philby, the Soviet mole at the heart of British intelligence who as yet was a long way from being discovered as such by some of his closest colleagues.
And yet, unlike Harris’s earlier report, there was no suggestion that Burns was a minor piece in the intelligence game that could easily be crushed. ‘I think we must assume,’ Broomham-White wrote, ‘that Burns has powerful friends and that any move against him will meet with very strong opposition.’
In the following months a concerted effort was made by Philby and the small cabal of intelligence officers that had come under his influence to enlist the support of some of the most senior government officials behind their campaign to get rid of Burns. At the same time the double-cross entrapment of Spanish journalists entered a new phase. Philby notified the embassy in Madrid that he had no objection from a security and intelligence point of view to having Calvo, the Spanish journalist, return to Britain after spending a few days on leave in Madrid. In fact, Philby and his friends in MI5 had put in place a plan to have Calvo arrested on arrival and charged with espionage.
Prior to Calvo’s return, on 12 January 1942 Broomham-White drafted his latest case report on Burns in consultation with Philby, and submitted it to Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counterespionage. The report unequivocally blamed Burns for sending Spanish journalists with Falangist leanings to the UK and accused him of being complicit in a pro-Axis conspiracy on behalf of the Franco government. While acknowledging there was no proof whatsoever that he was knowingly working for the Germans, it held Burns personally responsible for ‘recommending two German agents, and one suspect and highly undesirable individual’ as suitable representatives of the Spanish press in the UK. It also alleged that Burns’s zeal to have ‘another German agent’ (Calvo) accredited had led him to take action which had been ‘most damaging’ to the work of the security service.
Broomham-White concluded that Burns’s ‘irresponsibility and lack of judgement’ was a sufficient justification on security grounds for MI5 to press for his recall and his banning from holding office in any government department ever again.
Those who had prepared the report on Burns intended to have it copied and sent to the executive head of the XX Committee, Dick White, the head of MI5, Sir David Petrie, and the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan. However, just as the copies of the draft were about to be circulated, Burns chose that moment to remind the Foreign Office and the MoI just what a central plank he had become in British operations in Spain.
Stepping up the propaganda and intelligence activities with which he had been entrusted by his ambassador in Madrid, he made a point of logging for the first time the meetings he had, and making copies to all the departments that he felt needed to know: the Foreign Office, MI6, the Ministry of Information and MI5. There is no record to suggest when and how Burns became aware that his enemies were gunning for him. However, the move by Burns suggests that he was aware that he was treading on potentially dangerous territory, and felt it necessary – to protect himself against anyone who might doubt his motives – to make it clear that he was acting in an official capacity and not as a freelance of dubious loyalties.
On 20 January 1942, Calvo flew back to Madrid ostensibly on leave. Burns wasted little time in resuming contact with him. A few days later he reported to London in detail on a meeting he had had with Calvo in the presence of his editor at ABC, Losada, during which he protested about the pro-Axis nature of coverage on Britain appearing in the Spanish media. According to Burns, Losada promised to maintain a close personal contact with him, told Calvo there and then that he must consider himself entirely free to write objectively about the situation in England and undertook to exercise a censorship of his own over and above the official one, in order to exclude any commentary that smacked of pro-Nazi sentiment.
Burns was not taken in but pretended to both Calvo and Losada that he had been, and left Calvo with the impression that the clouds of suspicion that had been forming around him in London were lifting. In fact, in a subsequent report to his superiors in London, Burns revealed that he had managed to intercept letters to Losada written by Hans Lazar, the German press attaché, suggesting not only the closest friendship between the two men but also that the ABC editor was in the pay of the Germans. He also reported that Calvo had had a meeting with Lazar in the ABC offices.
Back at MI5, those wanting to have Burns’s head dismissed his latest intelligence report as a belated attempt to cover his tracks. Harris stoked the fires of suspicion again by suggesting that a lunch Burns subsequently had in Madrid with Calvo, the press attaché of the Spanish embassy in London, Brugada, and Velasco showed that Burns was continuing to collaborate with pro-German Spaniards.
By now Brugada – code-named Peppermint – was working as a double agent for Harris. Only Harris’s account survives in the MI5 file on Burns. It is based on information provided by another of Harris’s agents, Antonio Pastor, the passionately anti-Franco head of the Spanish department at King’s College London – code-named Peacock. Despite the fact that Pastor was not present at the lunch, Harris claimed that he and the professor had been briefed by Brugada.
Pastor – undoubtedly influenced by his Republican sympathies – painted a picture of a gullible Burns being taken in by the Spaniards and being used to further the interests of the Franco regime. ‘Calvo arranged a number of introductions for Tom Burns and a dinner party for him with Alcázar [Velasco] and Brugada. They regarded Burns as a buffoon and Calvo was trying to put over that he was attempting to come to an arrangement with Losada … an arrangement that his messages [newspaper articles] should not be distorted on their arrival in Madrid … Calvo was telling Burns that Losada was a good fellow and not biased, when Alcázar [Velasco] broke in and said that that all this was nonsense as Losada receives 12,000 pesetas a month from the Germans.’
Harris claimed that Burns himself had made no mention of this conversation and was therefore deliberately covering up the involvement Losada and Calvo may have had with the Germans. And yet MI5’s own file on Burns shows that he had already reported on Losada’s payment by the Germans and Calvo’s meeting with Lazar, not on the basis of information he had received from Velasco but on letters that had been leaked to him well before the lunch with the Spaniards.
Burns trusted Velasco no more than he had done when he first met him and nearly ended up being shot. It was only the erratic Velasco who thought that everyone, including Burns, was taken in by him.
If Burns continued to cultivate Velasco and Calvo it was in order to track their movements while in Spain and infiltrate meetings which he was able to do using his press attaché cover. What he seemed not to have fully realised was the extent to which his reports were being deliberately misinterpreted by key sectors of British intelligence, not as evidence of cooperation by a loyal servant of the Crown but of collaboration by an ‘appeaser’ with the enemy.
On 10 February, Burns reported to London that Calvo had been approached by Enrique Meneses, the owner of an international Spanish-language media group, Prensa Mundial, to be their correspondent in London. Burns himself had earlier been approached to help with the accreditation by the head of the group’s Madrid office, Gregorio Marañón, the son of the famous Spanish doctor, writer and politician whom, as we shall see later, the British embassy in Madrid had been courting as a source of political intelligence since his return from exile in Paris.
Marañón Jr was well to the right of his ‘liberal’ father, having enlisted in the Falange movement as a student and then volunteered to fight for Franco during the civil war. Despite his close links with the Franco regime, Burns considered him pro-Allied, like his father. Burns also believed that the proposal presented an opportunity to make use of Calvo back in London, having him write pro-British reports for publication in South America, as a counterweight to German influence there.
In a letter that was copied subsequently and shared with his enemies in MI5, Burns wrote to the Foreign Division of the MoI, saying that Marañón Jr’s plans envisaged the agency in London extending into a feature and photograph service manned by British staff. He suggested that the agency could serve British intelligence and propaganda interests, particularly in South America.
Burns attached a copy he had obtained of an intelligence report prepared by the Spanish embassy in Paris on Meneses. It showed that Meneses had served as a civil governor in Segovia during the Republic, disappeared during the civil war, and then re-emerged in Paris at the outset of the Second World War where he had become involved in propaganda. He had been paid 100,000 francs by the French government and, shortly before the German occupation, a further £10,000 by the British for a series of articles in favour of the Allied cause. He had since visited Berlin and was thought at the time to be in the pay of the Germans. What the Spaniards did not know – and Burns did – was that Meneses had never left the service of the British and was now in fact being run by the British embassy in Madrid as a double agent.
Early in March 1942, Meneses’ use to Burns was made clear when he came to Madrid and secured a meeting, along with Gregorio Marañón Jr, with Hans Lazar, the aim being to secure information that might be of value to the Allies. Trusting Meneses as an Axis agent, Lazar disclosed the plans the Germans had for using Prensa Mundial as a propaganda tool, infiltrating a Madrid-based South American cultural centre called the Consejo de Hispanidad, and ensuring that Franco’s relations with South America served the interests of Berlin. All of Burns’s reports on Meneses, including his account of the meeting with Lazar, were copied by Harris at MI5 and sent to Philby.
The reports in themselves should have been sufficient to bury once and for all any notion that Burns was working for the Germans, but Harris and Philby saw them as a personal threat. For the reports showed that Burns, their arch enemy in the British embassy in Madrid, was once again encroaching on the double-cross spy game, a field of activity they wanted to control for their own ideological interests.
Towards the end of the month Meneses arrived in Buenos Aires bearing a letter of introduction from Burns to the press attaché in the British embassy. It served no purpose. Days before his arrival, Philby and Harris sent a message to the embassy, denouncing Meneses as a German agent and emphasising the operational necessity of disregarding anything that Burns had to say about him.
By then the original proposal to have Prensa Mundial establish an office in London had served its purpose. Encouraged by the prospect of additional employment, Luis Calvo had flown back to Britain and straight into the trap that British intelligence had set for him. On 12 February, Calvo was arrested by Special Branch police officers on arrival at Whitchurch airport near Bristol. He was taken to Latchmere House – renamed Camp 020 – a secret interrogation centre which British intelligence had set up near Ham Common, on the outskirts of London, on the site of a First World War military hospital once used for the care of officers recovering from shell shock.
The main building and its annexes of portable huts were set in secluded woodland in one of west London’s leafier suburbs. A tall wooden fence around the entire perimeter kept it hidden from prying eyes, while a double barbed-wire fence and a series of security barriers offered further layers of protection and isolation from the outside world. The few residents in the immediate vicinity were vetted regularly while no one could go in or out without a special security pass.
An earlier British precursor of Guantánamo Bay, Camp 020 was a product of its time. It came into being in July 1940, when the Nazi advance across Europe fuelled British government paranoia about Fifth Column activity, and infiltration by enemy agents, and led to the suspension of habeas corpus and the introduction of internment.
Compared with other neutral countries, a relatively high proportion of foreign inmates – over twenty – were Spanish citizens or of Latin American nationality with close connections with Spain. During the time Calvo was detained there, Camp 020 was characterised by its secrecy, security, and lack of accountability to the outside world – with the media, defence lawyers, and the International Red Cross denied access. MI5 justified such containment on the grounds that external scrutiny would risk undermining the development of the XX system. But it meant that the inmates were denied the status or full rights accorded to prisoners of war under the 1929 Geneva Convention. The justification for Calvo’s indefinite detention, as in the case of other inmates, was that there was secret intelligence suggesting he was a threat to national security, not that there was evidence capable of being brought to court. The best his captors could initially claim was that his name had appeared in a diary suggesting a link to Alcazar de Velasco.
With steely eyes, the man MI5 selected to interrogate Calvo, the monocled commander of Camp 020, Lieutenant-Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, seemed physically more like a Gestapo officer than a British soldier.
Stephens had been recruited by MI5 at the outset of the war after serving in the Indian Army and playing a mysterious, clandestine role in Abyssinia. He had travelled extensively and spoke numerous languages, but his experience abroad had simply fuelled an obsessive distrust and disdain of foreigners, with a thinly veiled racist tendency that expressed itself in cultural typecasting. Thus, Frenchmen were untrustworthy – ‘a “good” [sic] Frenchman accepts the German’s money’ – Italians ‘undersized and posturing’ and Spaniards ‘obstinate, immoral and immutable’, according to the notes he took on his prisoners.
Official MI5 historians have made much of the camp’s first and unbreakable rule, that physical violence was not to be used in any circumstances (in fact, it was broken on at least one occasion) – even if it has been pointed out that this was derived not from any sense of morality, but from a purely practical assessment that physical torture risked producing answers to please, and thus lowering the quality of the information. There is no doubt, however, that inmates were subjected to psychological torture of a brutal kind. Recalling his experience many years later, Calvo told friends back in Spain how humiliated and vulnerable he felt, being made within minutes of his forced transfer to the camp – without any formal charges being laid against him – to stand naked as questions were barked at him and insinuations made that he could be sexually abused.
For days he was held incommunicado and threatened with execution. His cell, like those of others, was permanently bugged so as to deny him any privacy. Stephens did not tolerate familiarity or signs of friendship with any of his prisoners – even the offer of a cigarette was proscribed. ‘Figuratively, a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet,’ according to the Stephens code.
In the commandant’s own case study of Calvo, he comes as close as is possible to admitting, but with no sense of remorse or guilt, that the Spaniard was not so much a spy as the victim of entrapment, a mere cog in a complex intelligence wheel serving necessary ends. Calvo was not a professional agent but a journalist who had been ‘pitchforked deeply into espionage’, with the manner of his induction into enemy service suggesting a ‘certain injustice’.
The fact that Calvo had followed the profession of a journalist, not of a spy, and was therefore not trained to withstand interrogation techniques, made things relatively easy for his inquisitors. Stephens took pride in ‘breaking’ Calvo within hours, and having him kept in detention without charge for months, despite acknowledging that the information he provided in the end was ‘considerably more than was known already, but rather less than had been expected’, with the additional intelligence gleaned from him ‘both limited and vague’.
Calvo’s detention sparked an angry protest from the Spanish government led by the Duke of Alba. This was kept from Calvo by his jailers, who instead fuelled his mental breakdown by insisting that he had been forgotten by friends, family and officialdom. It was over a week before anyone from the Spanish embassy was allowed to see him, the first outside visitor since his detention. Calvo had been warned by his jailers that his chances of being freed would be much improved if he pretended he had been well treated. He was then taken blindfolded out of the camp to an ordinary-looking office that MI5 was using as cover.
The visiting Spanish official found Calvo tired and nervous but showing no obvious signs of physical torture. An uncharacteristic security lapse had allowed Calvo to smuggle out on his person a note hastily scribbled in Spanish. Shaking the official by the hand, Calvo transferred the note. In it, he asserted his professional status as a foreign correspondent and declared his innocence of any espionage activities.
The meeting prompted a further protest from the Spanish government and a warning from the Spanish foreign ministry to the British embassy in Madrid that if Calvo was executed by the British, as other alleged German agents had been over the previous year, the Spanish government would arrest those it suspected of being British spies in the embassy in Madrid and would not hesitate to shoot them.
The fate of Calvo was sealed when the British embassy replied, somewhat disingenuously, that Calvo was a Spanish citizen who had spied for the Germans on UK soil, and that therefore there was nothing analogous between his activities and those of any British diplomat in Madrid. By then the Franco regime had long reached the conclusion that Calvo was not worth provoking a diplomatic crisis over and was expendable.
Calvo was abandoned to his fate in Camp 020 for several months – a ‘little grey ghost’, Stephens noted gleefully, during his final period there, when he was accorded the ‘privilege’ of serving as prison librarian. His interrogators could think of nothing better to do with him, given the absence of sufficient evidence to hang him. Calvo was eventually released and repatriated to Spain, after the British embassy in Madrid interceded on his behalf, a gesture of pragmatic diplomacy if not humanity he owed to his contact Burns, if no one else in the British intelligence community.
The Calvo affair showed an MI5 interrogator and his colleagues in the secret and intelligence services at their most ruthless and cynical. What makes the pursuit of alleged German agents linked to the Spanish embassy in London in Second World War Britain all the more extraordinary is that it occurred in parallel with the friendship that had developed between the Duke of Alba and Churchill.
The 17th Duke of Alba and 10th Duke of Berwick, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart was descended on the maternal side from Arabella Churchill, sister of the first Duke of Marlborough, and thus considered himself Churchill’s cousin, a link the British prime minister appeared to have had no problem recognising.
On the contrary, Churchill found Alba a kindred spirit – bon vivant, monarchist first and foremost, and a virulent anti-communist, who had little truck with Nazism. During a lunch held at the Spanish embassy in December 1940, Churchill had told Alba that what he wished for – and what Franco would expect – were the best and friendliest relations between the two nations.
During most of the war, Churchill paid several unpublicised social visits to the richly furnished embassy in Belgrave Square, considering it one of the best kitchens in London. Alba had a fine cellar of vintage French and Spanish wine and employed a French cook who was a magician in the kitchen. Despite rationing there seemed to be no shortage there of pâtés, succulent game, vegetables served with extravagant sauces and desserts made with real cream and eggs, thanks to the black market.
So much did Churchill enjoy his meals with his cousin ‘Jimmy’ that he would often not wait for a formal invitation, but rather telephone and invite himself, a request that was never denied. One day the embassy cook told Alba he would love to have a signed photograph of Churchill. At the next luncheon, Alba approached Churchill with the photograph already framed. ‘Winston, would you mind signing this for my cook? He has such admiration for you,’ Alba asked. Churchill smiled then grunted: ‘Admiration? Well, nothing compared to the admiration I feel for the cooking.’
In another intimate exchange on a visit to the embassy, Churchill confided to Casilda Villaverde, the attractive and well-born wife of the deputy head of mission who was suspected of being a spy by a sector of MI5, that one of the things he most admired about Spanish life was the custom of taking long siestas in the afternoon. The conversation took place at the height of the Blitz. ‘But how do you find time to sleep, Prime Minister?’ asked Casilda. ‘Sometimes it’s just three minutes, sometimes eight … but I switch off and rest,’ replied Churchill.
The Spanish embassy was not short of beautiful women at the time but it was the slim and cultured Casilda who impressed not only Churchill but also one of the most notorious womanisers among his friends. One evening Casilda found herself seated at a West End society dinner next to Duff Cooper, the MoI minister who became Churchill’s liaison officer with the Free French.
Flirting outrageously, Cooper complimented Casilda on her perfect command of English and declared: ‘This can’t be your first time in London.’ Back came the assured reply: ‘Oh, it is, I can assure you it is.’
Cooper was insistent. ‘But where did you learn to speak such perfect English?’ By now he was leaning in to his perceived prey, as was his wont with the women he thought he could seduce. ‘If you really want to know, it was thanks to my English nanny while living in the Plaza de España in Madrid.’ Cooper smiled. ‘Really? I thought you’d learnt it in Oxford. You certainly picked a bad time to come to London.’
The evening ended without a conquest although Cooper and Casilda would settle for an enduring friendship that survived the war and into the years that followed.
Such encounters surrounding the House of Alba in London during the war would have been a mere comedy of manners had they not formed part of a broader stage in Anglo-Spanish relations which embroiled many of the players in a complex plot of diplomatic intrigue and espionage.
Alba, while aware that communications between his embassy and Madrid were being monitored by British intelligence, and that it housed individuals far more pro-Axis than himself, tried for most of the war to keep his relationship with Churchill separate from the complex stratagems of the spies, even if the spies themselves saw him as just another pawn with which they could play.
In early October 1942, MI5’s counter-espionage division went behind Churchill’s back and drew up their latest plan to entice the Spanish embassy into their double-cross game, feeding Alba and his diplomats with false information about an Allied plan for a massive amphibious landing in North Africa.
On 20 October, the head of MI6, Sir Stuart Menzies, contacted Guy Liddell, MI5’s head of counter-espionage, and told him that Churchill was ‘hopping mad’ with his friend the Duke of Alba after being told that the ambassador had sent a report to his government about the Allies’ forthcoming military operations in North Africa. Liddell noted in his diary: ‘Personally, I think it is difficult to blame Alba. People will not realise that however benevolent and pro-British a neutral ambassador may appear, it is his duty to report to his government what he sees, hears, and thinks. The fault lies with those who confide in him. He has an immense circle of friends in all walks of life and probably a great deal of information goes west over the second glass of port.’ The note is revealing for it shows elements of British intelligence concerned less with Alba than with the indiscretions that might have emanated from the English friends he made in London, not least Churchill himself.