The wartime Nazi press attaché in the German embassy in Madrid, Hans Lazar, features as one of the more sinister characters in The Spy Wore Red, the memoirs of Aline Griffith, the American model working for New York designer Hattie Carnegie who turned secret agent for the Allied cause and came to Spain in 1943. With a stylish dress code, good looks and outgoing character, Griffith was recruited by the American OSS, the precursor of the CIA. Her mission was to immerse herself in the more pro-Axis circles of wartime Madrid’s high society.
Griffith first met Lazar while she was dining ‘under cover’ with a Spanish friend at Horcher, the German restaurant in Madrid. The rumour already sweeping diplomatic circles in the early stages of the war was that Lazar had developed the habit of using his monocle to reflect light into the eyes of his victims when he interrogated them, when not using it as a simple magnifying glass to scrutinise secret documents.
Other Allied intelligence suggested that Lazar was not only an important figure in the Nazi world, the éminence grise of the German embassy, but also a man with strange tastes. His bedroom was decorated like a chapel, with two rows of twelve figures of saints and an altar on which he slept.
Lazar’s standing as an important social figure in Madrid and a loyal Nazi was underlined by his choice of companion, the Countess von Furstenberg, a ravishing beauty and friend of the Third Reich who, on the night Griffith saw them together for the first time, was dressed in a long sable cape, a black satin gown and a necklace of gleaming pearls.
Days later Griffith met Lazar again at a party thrown one evening by a German businessman suspected by Allied intelligence of being a Nazi agent at his home near El Escorial. The German’s palatial mansion, tucked away in the Guadarrama Hills, was frequently visited by leading members of the Spanish aristocracy who had returned to Madrid after Franco’s victory in the civil war.
Griffith’s cover was nearly blown that night when she was interrupted secretly photographing a document Lazar had inadvertently left on his dressing table. Luckily for Griffith, her intruder – a fellow guest – was extremely drunk and assumed that the attractive American woman before him was available for sex. According to Griffith, she managed to avoid his advances by slipping a capsule of sodium amobarbital, a ‘truth serum’, into his drink, which incapacitated him while eliciting from him the information that he was acting as a messenger for the Gestapo. When not attending private parties, Griffith spent her evenings at the Ritz and the Palace. One of her favourite dance spots was Pasapoga, a nightclub in the Gran Vía where a big American-style band from Paris played every night except Sundays. The club was managed by an amiable, fun-loving French Jew called Bernard Hinder who had a keen ear for gossip when not serving as a more serious source of secret intelligence for the Allies. At various times during the war, Griffith and Burns would find themselves with different partners on the dance floor at the Pasapoga pretending they didn’t know each other. Madrid was a spy stage and they were merely players.
‘In Madrid, people like me had a busy nightlife,’ Griffith recalled years later, ‘a lot of espionage went on there … in Pasapoga you’d be dancing around, bumping into English agents, German agents. Some of us knew each other but I pretended to be totally unimportant Señorita Griffith, just an American girl having a good time.’ During the day Griffith worked in a secret code room which the OSS had set up in the offices of the US oil mission on Miguel Ángel Street, a few blocks from the American and British embassies. She helped run a small network of Spanish maids, secretaries and cooks, all of them as agents. During the war the OSS came to have several officers in Spain, mainly based in Madrid and Barcelona. They rented hotel rooms and owned several apartments which they used as safe houses for escaping prisoners of war and informants and agents, including those operating north of the Pyrenees and in North Africa. While it increasingly boosted its presence in Spain as the war progressed, the OSS remained an organisation in gestation in Spain, regarded as very much the junior partner by the British.
‘The British had many more people than we did in Madrid. They knew much more than we did,’ Griffith recalled. ‘They had been doing intelligence for much longer than we had. The English were terribly polite and correct but we knew they had a terrible opinion of us … and of course everything we did was new … we thought spying was like being in the movies. The British were more sophisticated.’
Much of what Griffith was tasked with finding out at considerable expense when she was posted to Madrid in late 1943 followed a trail already well trodden by the British. From the moment of his arrival in the late summer of 1940 Burns had realised the formidable challenge posed by his German counterpart. Fate had determined that he and Lazar should track each other’s movements while seemingly avoiding meeting face to face, playing a cat and mouse game in a world of smoke and mirrors, where no one could be fully trusted and nothing was quite what it seemed. Both men used their diplomatic cover to compete for the attention of the Spanish, socialising as much as they could, when not engaged in the more covert art of psychological warfare and the cultivation of discreet informants.
The British embassy’s press office saw as its main official mission that of countering the German triumphalism that manifested itself in the pages of the Spanish media. In addition to circulating its clandestine news bulletins, it invited local journalists, academics and government contacts to showings of morale-boosting British documentaries and feature films. Funded as part of the MoI’s ‘Programme for Film Propaganda’, the films idealised the common struggle that helped forge British national identity, providing an image of stoicism and cheerful resistance. The message to Spanish audiences was that the British were not only determined to win, but that victory over the Axis powers was a foregone conclusion. Films shown included In Which We Serve, an account of the heroic exploits of the captain and crew of a British destroyer in the Mediterranean, and Pimpernel Smith, in which the main character helps refugees evade the Gestapo. Among the documentaries was London Can Take It, which celebrated the spirit of the Blitz – ordinary Londoners getting on with their lives by day while fighting the German bombs by night, ‘the greatest civilians the world has ever known’.
The Madrid sessions of Churchill’s cinematographic propaganda warfare were initially run from within the main British embassy building with seating space for up to 150 people. Within weeks of the hearts and minds operation getting underway, Burns found a very ready response to the embassy’s expanding invitation list, which he put down partly to the quality of the buffet that was laid on. While there was virtually no bread in Madrid in the first year of the war, the British embassy secured ample supplies from Gibraltar. The white rolls – nicknamed Churchills – were sent to Mrs Taylor, the owner of the ‘we-never-close’ tea room Embassy, where they were transformed into sandwiches. For Burns and those who came to watch his shows, those sessions became ‘little oases of optimism in the darkest times of the war’. The press department’s duties included overseeing the safe passage through Spain of British subjects and their loved ones. This was not without some risk, as many right-wing Spaniards had developed strong anti-British feelings as a result of the Spanish civil war, when most British volunteers had fought for the Republic in the International Brigades.
Among those helped by Burns was Henry Buckley, one of the most distinguished of the thousand or so foreign correspondents who had reported on the Spanish Civil War. A journalist with the Daily Telegraph, he wrote with an unrivalled and scrupulous adherence to the truth. Buckley was a devout Catholic and politically conservative but with a radical social instinct that had led him to report on the struggles of the industrial workers and landless peasants in the 1930s without sharing in the anti-communist hysteria of many of his fellow Catholics. Later during the civil war, he came to be horrified by the ideological blindness and intolerance of Spaniards on both sides.
In 1940 Buckley reinforced his credentials as one of the most astute observers of Spanish politics when he published in London his seminal Life and Death of the Spanish Republic, a personal record of one of the most tumultuous periods in European history, from the end of the monarchy to the rise to power of Franco. After the civil war Buckley was posted to Berlin, where he worked until two days before the outbreak of war when, in common with other British nationals, he was ordered to leave by Hitler.
After a brief period in Amsterdam, Buckley worked for a year and half in Lisbon and it was there that he developed close ties with Burns, as a friend and an informant. Despite their political differences over the civil war, Burns trusted Buckley as a fellow Catholic, and considered his experience of Spain invaluable in helping develop British policy towards the Iberian Peninsula. He came to feel very much in Buckley’s debt.
When, halfway through the war, Buckley became a war correspondent attached to British forces in the Mediterranean, Burns personally arranged safe-conduct passes and other documents so that the journalist’s young Catalan wife, María Planas, could travel from her home in Sitges to meet him in southern Spain whenever he was on leave in Gibraltar.
‘I will write to thank Burns for helping you when you went through Madrid for our lovely little holiday in Algeciras,’ wrote Buckley to María on 16 April 1943. ‘It was good of him. He is a very nice fellow indeed.’
Burns’s covert activities included helping the work in Spain of MI9, a branch of the intelligence services tasked with the specific brief of assisting escaped prisoners of war and refugees, both as a way of replenishing the depleted strength of the armed forces, and gleaning information from behind enemy lines. By the end of 1940, MI9 had developed a highly effective Iberian operation headquartered in the British embassies in Madrid and Lisbon, and with satellite bases throughout the consular network, under the direction of Michael Creswell and Donald Darling respectively. Creswell’s codename was Monday while Darling’s was Sunday.
Escapees handled through the embassies in Madrid and Lisbon ranged across a wide variety of nationalities – French, Russians, Dutch, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Czechs, Poles, Austrians and Germans. These included soldiers and deserters from European countries occupied by the Nazis, and Jews escaping from increasing persecution. Secret lines involving local contacts and safe houses were established across France all the way to the Pyrenees. There they would be met and taken across and into Spain by pro-Allied locals – French or Spanish – with a good knowledge of the terrain.
A successful operation involved escapees then finding their way secretly to a British consulate or the embassy in Madrid, from where they were smuggled down to Gibraltar or across the Portuguese border to Lisbon. Because of the proximity of the French border, both Catalonia and the Basque country became particularly important staging posts for Allied special operations.
In both Barcelona and Bilbao, Allied intelligence gathering was facilitated by the long-term presence British shipping and trade interests had in the respective ports. Among the local expatriates recruited by British intelligence early on in the war was Frederick Witty, the son of Arthur Witty, one of the founding players of FC Barcelona, who ran a very successful trading company in the Catalan capital.
In Barcelona one of the most efficient escape runs was coordinated by Paul Dorchy, one of Burns’s appointees at the British consulate. ‘A brash and robust young man who rightly regarded his duties as being adaptable to circumstances rather than what London regarded as proper to a press office’ was how Burns described him. Among the agents who came through on Dorchy’s watch was Mavis Dowden, a young English music teacher who left Mussolini’s Italy for Barcelona at the end of the Spanish Civil War and was recruited by the British after the fall of France. Her task mainly consisted of meeting Polish escapees and helping transfer them to the safe houses that the consulate had rented around the city.
By the spring of 1942 Dowden’s escape network was fully operational and increasingly well organised by her ‘controller’, a British expatriate she code-named Mr Eckys. ‘We now had working for us, two Spanish policemen, several bandits, a school master called Muñoz, and a Belgian priest, a delightful fellow of gargantuan proportions, a schoolboy’s dream of Friar Tuck,’ she later recalled.
The network was eventually infiltrated by the Germans and Dowden was arrested while meeting a contact in a café off the Ramblas. She was imprisoned first in the Jefatura, or police headquarters, and then in the women’s prison, Las Corts, run by nuns, near the site of the present-day FC Barcelona stadium. During her captivity, Dowden was subjected to continuous interrogation by pro-Axis Spanish policemen, while being held in cramped cells. Unlike some of her fellow inmates, however, she was never physically tortured, thanks to early diplomatic intervention on her behalf by the embassy in Madrid.
After more than a year behind bars, Dowden was given conditional liberty and ordered to report weekly to the Military Tribunal next to the statue of Christopher Columbus that overlooks Barcelona’s port.
Life had changed dramatically for Dowden since her arrival at the same spot in 1939, after crossing the Mediterranean from Genoa, carrying her violin and musical sheets. She was later deported and returned to England, where she carried on her work for the British government in political intelligence at Bush House.
Many others were not so fortunate. While the Spanish escape lines remained open throughout the war, many escapees and agents were intercepted by the Germans. In one black week, reported by the embassy in Madrid, four key British agents were captured by the Gestapo. Such was the courage and ingenuity of many of those involved, however, that no sooner had one individual fallen than another was found as a replacement.
POWs who managed to reach Madrid were housed for a period within the confines of the British embassy before being smuggled out by car once the remaining stages of their escape route to Gibraltar had been arranged and secured. The embassy laid on games, books and food. It also provided the POWs with money with which they could supplement their diet with fruit and wine sold on the black market and brought in by trusted Spanish members of staff. Occasionally, one or two of them slipped into the cinema sessions, where they posed as members of staff so that their presence was not leaked to the outside world by any of the other guests. It must have seemed like a holiday camp compared to the rigours of army life and the clandestine existence under German occupation, although their hosts were only too aware how fragile was the political situation beyond the embassy gates.
According to Kenneth Benton, the MI6’s Section V officer in Spain, of more than twenty spies identified directly by the embassy in Madrid during the Second World War, about a third were ‘walk-ins’, individuals who came and pretended to offer their services to the Allies when in fact they were working for the Abwehr.
While serving in the embassy, Burns was personally targeted by several ‘walk-ins’, some drawn by the fact that he was a Catholic, others by his close liaison with other key departments, and his influence on many of the political decisions made by the ambassador.
In his account of his time in Madrid, Benton described how Burns helped MI6’s counter-espionage Section V secure an important asset in the form of a German Jew who volunteered to work for the Allies out of Spain.
‘For most of my time in Madrid I had the services of an excellent agent, a German Jew,’ recalled Benton. ‘He was an educated man, liberal-minded, and he hated the Nazis, so he made an approach to Tom Burns, the Press Attaché, who informed me.’ Benton credits Burns with providing him with the contact that developed into one of the most useful agents the British government had in Spain for the rest of the war and beyond. Benton arranged to meet the prospective agent on a lonely stretch of road outside Madrid, where he could be sure he had not been followed. He was offered a source inside the state security apparatus, the DGS (Dirección General de Seguridad).
The DGS was under Franco’s orders not to close down the activities of the British embassy even though it was the subject of intense surveillance by Spanish agents and the Gestapo. Documents discovered by the Allies at the end of the war show that the Germans kept lists of everyone who went in and out of the British embassy, while Spanish police files in Franco’s own personal archive reveal that Burns was among the diplomats allowed to carry on operating by the Spaniards despite being suspected of spying. Franco benefited from regular information on most of the intelligence operations that were being conducted by the Axis and the Allies against each other on Iberian soil and was content to let them run as long as they did not directly threaten his hold on power. Such a policy appears to have come under pressure in Spanish towns where the influence of pro-Axis Falangists was more prevalent.
In the southern port town of Huelva, for example, William Cluett, the British manager of a British electricity company, Joseph Pool Bueno, an Anglo-Spanish employee of Rio Tinto, and Montagu Brown, the head of the local railway company were expelled for suspected spying activities. The British embassy successfully intervened to secure the release from detention of two other British businessmen. On the whole there was nothing similar in scale to the pursuit of Spaniards suspected of being German spies by MI5 in the UK. Franco’s repression remained focused on what he perceived as the internal enemy of Spaniards who had fought against him.
If Burns enjoyed additional protection in wartime Spain it was because of his Catholic credentials, his anti-Republican stance during the Civil War, and the allies and ‘agents of influence’ he had forged in the higher echelons of the regime.
It was Burns’s faith that appears to have prompted at least one attempt by the German secret service to infiltrate one of their agents into the British embassy, in a case of ecclesiastical espionage redolent of the counter-Reformation.
The agent in question was a German Benedictine monk called Fr Hermann Keller. Born with a hole in the heart, Keller had been barred from military service, prompting him to volunteer instead for espionage work. Keller was recruited as an agent both by the Abwehr and Himmler’s secret service, and tasked with informing on alleged plots involving the Vatican and British and German Catholics. At one point Keller was also sent to Rome to find out who, in May 1940, had betrayed to the Pope advance information on Germany’s impending attack on the Western Front.
Keller continued to work for the Nazis in Paris and from there extended his operations south, attempting to infiltrate the Benedictine monastery in Montserrat, near Barcelona, a traditional refuge for political dissidents high in the granite mountains. The Gestapo had received a tip-off that Friedrich Muckermann, an anti-Nazi Jesuit it was seeking all over occupied Europe, was staying there. He was indeed, but Keller never found him. Undeterred, he travelled to Madrid in search of Muckermann and other pro-Allied German Catholics. There he approached Burns, claiming that he had been in Montserrat on a retreat, and posing as a messenger for the German ‘resistance’.
Burns checked with his Catholic contacts and concluded that Keller was a plant. Since Keller was operating mainly out of Germany and had no plans to go to England, the issue of arrest, internment and trial did not arise. Burns, however, knew how to turn the attempted infiltration into an opportunity and suggested to Keller that he should become a double agent providing information on officers in the German army who might be opposed to Hitler.
Whether Keller adopted a new role as an Allied spy is unclear although, if he did, it proved short-lived. The little that is known of him suggests he suffered a crisis of conscience in Madrid and shortly returned to the simple monastic life.
The Keller incident provides a clear example of Burns being drawn unwittingly into the darker reaches of espionage. Burns had never been trained as a spy. Like others in the war, he had become one by default, initially filling the gaps left by the professionals, and then learnt the trade as he went along as his ambassador loaded an increasing burden of reporting, liaison and analysis on his shoulders. During the early period of his involvement with British interests in Spain, Burns was on a steep learning curve, and mistakes were inevitably made. Among his more eccentric recruits was the poet Roy Campbell with whom he had maintained close links during the civil war. Despite their shared admiration for Franco, it was Burns’s influence on Campbell as a fellow Catholic that in the end deterred the poet from embracing fully the cause of British fascism. Weeks after the outbreak of civil war, Campbell went to London and met Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. They were introduced to each other by the poet and painter Wyndham Lewis in the belief that ‘these two men would be on the same wavelength’. They were not and Campbell refused to join the BUF.
Campbell, however, only belatedly came to view Nazism as alien to his concept of Christianity, lacking its spiritual dimension and humanity. With the end of the civil war, Campbell travelled to Madrid to celebrate Franco’s victory parade on 19 May 1939, in which Spanish troops were joined by Germans and Italians. Days earlier he had written a letter to his mother in which he expressed sympathy for Hitler and a cynical disregard for the plight of the Jews. Campbell wrote: ‘What Catholics realise is that Hitler is a civilised and human adversary, compared to the only alternative, and they suffer cheerfully as they can … What we realise is that the world is going to become either Bolshevik or Fascist, and we know that with one exception the fascist states are eminently Christian, and allow Christians to live whereas bolshevism simply kills and degrades everything – it is against morality – and against every form of religion.’
And yet Campbell’s politics underwent a further shift when Hitler signed his non-aggression pact with Stalin, and later when German troops marched into Poland in open defiance of the pact between the Polish and British governments.
On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Campbell took a train from Toledo to Madrid to try to enlist at the British Consulate, as a soldier in the British Army, the decision prompted, according to his daughter Anna, by fear that he might be thought of as being ‘on Hitler’s side’.
His offer to join up was turned down ostensibly on the grounds of age: Campbell was thirty-eight. The consul chose to ignore Campbell’s fascist sympathies, instead describing as ‘Quixotic’ the fact that a South African living in Spain would want to volunteer for the Allied cause. Initially Campbell was relieved at being able to carry on his life in ‘glorious Spain’ as an expatriate, but as the phoney war gave way to serious hostilities, his conscience stirred and he became frustrated that there was nothing he could do to help the war effort.
He returned to Madrid, this time confident of being enlisted in some shape or form, for news had reached him that among the more influential individuals in the British embassy staff was his friend Burns – publisher turned diplomat with a special mission, whose devotion to the Catholic faith remained unflinching.
Campbell visited the British embassy and was enlisted by Burns as one of his agents. Burns told Campbell to use Toledo as a base for travelling around Spain, reporting regularly on friends and acquaintances and identifying the extent to which their sympathies lay either with the Allies or the Axis powers. Campbell was also asked to make ready to join a clandestine resistance force as and when the Germans decided to occupy Spanish territory. It remains unclear whether the recruitment had the official backing of MI6 or SOE, although by now Burns was trusted as a conduit by colleagues working for both agencies, and Campbell was personally satisfied that he was now working on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It seems likely that Burns was acting with the approval of his ambassador, with secret funds he had secured from the MoI.
According to his daughter, Anna, after the war was over Campbell kept his role secret from his family and it was only after his death that they discovered he had worked for British intelligence at all. In her unpublished memoir of her father, Poetic Justice, Anna suggests that his role in covert operations had a longer lifespan than Burns recalled: ‘Roy rushed off to Madrid to join up at the British Embassy, but since he was over age it was suggested that he should join an intelligence unit in Spain instead. He was terribly disappointed that he could not immediately become a soldier, a life-long ambition that kept getting thwarted. I never knew what he was doing in Intelligence, but he did seem more contented than before. He always refused to talk about his work, except to say he was helping to catch some bandits in the Sierra Nevada.’
Quite what ‘banditry’ Campbell was referring to is unclear. While it suggests he may have seen his role as helping Franco identify the straggling elements of the communist-backed resistance movement, it may also have been a deliberate attempt to divert attention from his somewhat unheroic and brief experience working as one of Burns’s informants.
What is true is that Campbell liked to drink, which he often did to excess. His autobiography contains an elegy to the delights of drinking large quantities of wine from an earthenware botijo, to which he attributed miraculous powers of transformation. ‘This way of drinking brings out the flavour and perfume, both of wine and water, and once one has mastered the art without choking, drinking wine or water out of a glass seems flat and insipid compared to it. The longer, thinner, and more forcible the jet, the more it aerates the bouquet of the wine or the water.’
While in Toledo, when not drinking out of a botijo, Campbell would normally make his way in the evening to a café with a large open terrace in the town’s main square, the Plaza de Zocodover. It was there that, on a hot summer’s evening in 1935, Campbell’s propensity for binge drinking, as well as hospitality, had been experienced by the nascent poet Laurie Lee. At the time Lee had barely turned twenty and was busking his way through Spain with a violin. Identified as an Englishman, he found himself invited to the Campbell table and ended up staying for a week, drinking endless botijos of wine. Lee would later volunteer to fight in the civil war, on the opposite side to Campbell, against Franco. But in the flush of youth, he held Campbell in awe both as a poet and a free spirit. ‘I was young, full of wine, and in love with poetry, and was hearing it now from the poet’s mouth,’ Lee recalled.
Some six years later, Campbell was back in his favourite café (exactly when in 1941 remains unclear), celebrating his appointment as a secret agent. That morning Burns had driven to Toledo in his Wolseley and, during a lengthy lunch at a local taverna with Campbell had confirmed his recruitment. Wine and tapas had flowed as the two friends sealed the engagement. ‘I found him more than eager to have an active part in the war, and that he would be an agent in place seemed a fine idea to both of us,’ Burns recalled.
The two conspirators then devoted the rest of the meal to memories of women and men friends they had once had in common, as well as bullfighters they had come to admire as geniuses, such as Belmonte and Manolete. Burns, like others on wartime service, had developed an ability to drink a great deal while retaining concentration. Campbell had a less self-disciplined attitude towards life generally. After Burns had set off back towards Madrid, Campbell had continued drinking. In the course of the evening, he drew friends and foes to his table, offering to buy them another round. He became paralytically drunk before declaring that the celebration was to mark the start of a new job as a British spy. The next day, when word got back to the embassy, Burns, seemingly under orders from a not-best-pleased ambassador, contacted his friend Campbell and, with regret, informed him that his services were no longer required.
A few weeks later, in early spring 1941, Burns was given permission by his ambassador to visit London on leave, his first break since his posting to Spain. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, he appears to have had some inkling that his pre-Franco leanings and mishandling of certain operations may have stirred his enemies in the intelligence community. Burns saw the trip as a convenient cooling-off period after the Campbell debacle, which he considered a minor incident in the broader context of the work he was doing in Spain. It also offered him the opportunity, on a personal front, to catch up with the news of those he considered his enduring friends.
In March 1941, days before Burns arrived in the UK, the basement dance floor at the Café de Paris, one of his favourite pre-war nightspots, received a direct hit from the Luftwaffe, leaving eighty-four society party-goers dead, among them the bandleader ‘Shake Hips Johnson’ and his entire orchestra. The news shocked Burns, reinforcing his guilt that his posting to Madrid had left him safer than most of the men and women he had mixed with in peacetime, although it was with a sense of relief that he discovered that none of his friends were among the victims.
Among several old girlfriends Burns wanted to look up was the eccentric author Lady Eleanor Smith, whose memoirs, Life’s a Circus, he had edited and published while working at Longman in 1939. They told of how she had been resuscitated by a brandy massage after being born ‘dead’ in 1902 in a small cottage in Birkenhead.
Eleanor was the daughter of the 1st Earl Birkenhead, a tall, olive-skinned lawyer and prominent Conservative politician with a reputation as a brilliant if pugnacious advocate, a hard drinker and a womaniser. As Lord Chancellor he became, with Churchill, a leading figure of the Lloyd George coalition government in the early 1920s. By then he had left an indelible mark on Eleanor, the oldest of his three children. During her childhood he told her macabre fairy tales, took her to boxing matches, advised her to be ‘cheeky before solemn statesmen’, and in her youth encouraged her to bounce up and down on the Lord Chancellor’s woolsack.
Eleanor grew up with a consuming interest in gypsies, circuses and flamenco, passions she owed to reading George Borrows classic account of gypsy life in Spain, The Zincalí, and the gypsy blood she claimed to carry within her from a great-grandmother called Bathsheba. Voluptuous and carefree in her youth, the dark-eyed Eleanor took the hedonistic lifestyle of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s to unparalleled limits. Her escapades on both sides of the Atlantic included an affair with a Chicago gangster called Kid Spider, and turning a pack of Irish wolfhounds on the crowded ballroom of the British embassy in Dublin. In one of her more bizarre exploits, Eleanor spent a night with Zita Jungman, another notorious Bright Young Thing of the 1920s, in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s in London after first moving the wax effigies of the Princes in the Tower from their bed. Zita, together with her sister Teresa, known as ‘Baby’, went on to part-time modelling, hoping to get their portraits in magazines like Tatler and Vogue, and caught the eye of the aspirant photographer Cecil Beaton. Boyfriends caught up in their wild escapades outside the studio recalled them as ideal training for wartime special operations. Zita later described some of her Anglo-Saxon suitors as ‘horrid’ and ‘intensely vulgar’. Eleanor, by contrast, found what she was looking for – half-naked gypsies in the caves of Almería and the red-light district of Barcelona. Los gitanos fed her existentialist fever with rhythmic dance and song that seemed to be drawn from deep within the soul. In Eleanor, four years older than he was, Burns found his own love for Spain taken to an edge of surrealism which he found fascinating, if occasionally disturbing. He also respected her as a writer, although her time as a society reporter and cinema critic on a London newspaper proved short-lived. ‘She was an eternal high-spirited tomboy delighting in the company of gypsies and circus folk,’ Burns recalled. ‘We saw a lot of each other, without the intrusive pangs of sex, to our mutual relief.’
The war came and he saw nothing and heard nothing of Eleanor for over a year. Then, on leave from Spain, he heard from a mutual friend that she was in London, looked her up and took her to dine at the Mirabelle. The couple were deep in conversation over wine and oysters when there was a hush then a stir and a collective turning of heads towards a group of heavy-coated men at the entrance. It was Churchill, in the company of Brendan Bracken, the newspaper magnate turned Minister of Information, and other close aides. With a cigar in one hand, Churchill shuffled over to the couple’s table, smiling broadly. Eleanor’s late father, Lord Birkenhead, a witty, reckless man, ‘naughty but never nasty’, just as his daughter liked to portray herself, had been Churchill’s closest friend until his death, aged fifty-eight, in 1930.
By attending one of Mayfair’s better-known restaurants Churchill was acting with characteristic bravado and indulgence, for these were the very darkest days of the war, a time of bombs and rationing, when Britain was still having to face the enemy ‘alone’, to use a word from one of his more famous broadcasts. The United States had yet to make up its mind even if some of its citizens had defied their government’s official neutrality by volunteering as pilots in the Battle of Britain. Acknowledging Burns’s presence with a smile, Churchill turned to Eleanor and said: ‘Well, at least we have the gypsies on our side.’ The pair, left to themselves, spent the rest of the evening pondering whether he had been referring to the naked boys in Andalusia or the men in uniform in Madrid, or possibly both. After that evening Burns kept in touch with Eleanor but never saw her again. She died before the war was over, of a sudden mysterious illness, but the memory of that evening stuck with him all his life. It seemed to him typical of her starlit life that she had managed to rekindle his spirit just when it seemed at its lowest point.
If, as the novelist Mary Wesley remarked of her own experience of that time, ‘war was erotic’, it was because, with death threatening every street and two million people taking up arms, life needed to be reaffirmed. At the height of the Blitz small private parties, like so many sexual encounters, relieved the tension. While in London, Burns wasted little time in seeking one such party out. It was filled with debutantes, and suitably camouflaged spies. Noël Coward was there, his ostensibly glamorous lifestyle barely covering his morale-boosting work as an agent of His Majesty’s Secret Service. As Burns and the other guests huddled round the piano, Coward was persuaded by his hostess to sing ‘London Pride’, the song of the moment, of which the MoI was making much use to lift morale. It spoke of London’s endurance and defiance, graceful in its pervading sense of freedom and engaging familiarity. This was a city, defined in terms that were familiar to a social class that had read George Bernard Shaw.
Coward’s song romanticised the flower girl Liza and the vegetable marrows, and the fruit piled high in Covent Garden, while similarly exalting the delights of Mayfair’s posher basement nightspots, before the bombs fell.
The song moved Burns more than any other, for it reminded him of times past, of love lost, London personified by the woman he had believed to be the love of his life, the Queen’s cousin, Ann Bowes-Lyon. ‘Coward’s song brought back a violent nostalgia for my beloved and now suffering city’ he recalled later. The shock of hearing of Ann’s engagement to another man had barely dissipated during the previous months, although it reflected wounded pride rather than a real prospect of early reconciliation. ‘I do feel for you about what you say about not being able to get this Ann thing happy in your mind – these things take years and years to burn out,’ David Jones had written to Burns.
‘I can’t say anything consoling,’ wrote Jones, ‘only just that this ’ere vale of tears, or, as you say, fears, is a sod anyway – not a very original conclusion I admit!’
During his posting in Madrid, the memory of Ann would be periodically rekindled by other mutual friends who came across her now and again. Although such contacts became fewer and further apart as the war proceeded, the fact that they took place at all suggested that she herself struggled to put the past behind her. As late as October 1943, she wrote to Michael Richey, knowing full well that he would communicate the fact with his friend Burns. The letter was so emotionally strained and confused that he had concluded that her proposed marriage was no longer on or at least delayed indefinitely. Frank D’Abreu, the man to whom she had become engaged, had been posted to the Middle East as an army doctor, and she was at Glamis Castle recovering from her latest bout of depression after poisoning a finger.
Most of Richey’s correspondence with Ann has not survived, but on 11 October 1943, soon after receiving a letter from her, he wrote to his parents while sailing towards the Falklands on board HMS Carnarvon. His letter expresses admiration for her, in contrast to the disdain he felt for others in her aristocratic social circle.
‘Ann seems to be working very hard. I think some of the fair ladies one sees so much in The Tatler etc would do well to emulate her a bit. Her address is Military Hospital, Shenley, near St. Albans. At least it will be by the time you get this. She was at Glamis recovering from being very ill when she wrote, but was due to go back to hospital in a day or two. Talking of The Tatler few things annoy me more now than to see pictures of young Lord this and that and the other at some nightspot with a bottle of champagne on the table and a Guards uniform on. Some of them are on leave and all that but I always have the impression that a lot of them have been there since September 3rd 1939.’
When Burns arrived in London that spring of 1941, nearly a year had passed since Michael’s older brother Paul, a pilot with the RAF’s Number 1 Squadron, had been drawn into the increasingly violent air battles preceding the fall of France. Between 10 and 19 May 1940, with the squadron confronted by the full might of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg invasion of France and the Low countries, he was shot down twice. He baled out once, and later crash-landed after sustaining a serious bullet wound to the neck. After a long period of rehabilitation during which he served as fighter operations sector commander, in the spring of 1941, Richey was declared fit and posted back to operational flying with 609 squadron at Biggin Hill. He spent the next four months flying a total of fifty-three missions across the Channel.
Knowing of Richey’s heroic exploits, Burns felt deeply humbled by the fact that a letter Paul wrote to him about this time barely mentioned his extraordinary deeds, but was instead a note of gratitude. Paul said he wanted to thanks Burns for the continued use of his sports car and to apologise for only belatedly sorting out the insurance cover.
Burns heard separately that Mike Richey was at sea again after surviving the sinking of his minesweeper the previous November. In the intervening months, while his brother Paul wrote a journal about his own experiences, Mike penned a no less graphic account of his own scrape with death.
He wrote: ‘I remember the disposition of everything, its exact character, as clearly as though the eight or nine months’ work we had done in the ship had been a prelude to its destruction and to the overthrow of the small society that had lived within it. I believe that a clear realization of the look of things just before something happens is quite common. In any case, it has stuck in my mind …’
His account reads like a chronicle of a death foretold, the transformation of a ‘little ship’ from homely fishing vessel to protector of a military convoy, underlying the improvisation and endemic fragility of the Allied war effort. Mike would almost certainly have been killed had he been on watch or sleeping on his bunk below deck at the moment the ship hit a mine. Instead he was sitting on a bench huddled over a small stove, contemplating his shipmates with an almost biblical sense of God’s presence among them.
‘They were no longer a man on watch or a man in his bunk, but they were Peter, Alec, Horace and Tom, with excited, innocent gleams in their eyes, and you felt the unity of the crew which cut across the boundaries of environment, upbringing, and occupation …’
When the mine explodes, Richey describes the ensuing devastation as he struggles to escape through the narrow cabin hatchway. He watches the young cook, ‘whimpering, his face covered with blood and burns’, his lieutenant floating near him, and then the little bows with the boat’s name on them going down. ‘The craft looked gallant enough and pathetic, being sunk like this after what it had done. It was something personal, like seeing a man drown.’
Afterwards, when the survivors, himself included, were taken to hospital, Mike describes how he had limped up and down shouting, before sobbing like a child. Weeks later, he called in an old favour and submitted an early draft of his account to Lewis Ricci at the MoI. It was Ricci, a retired paymaster captain of the Royal Navy, who at the outbreak of war had secured Mike’s recruitment after Burns had convinced him that minesweeping was compatible with his pacifist principles. Ricci read the draft and found it deeply moving but he was no more successful than Burns in having it cleared for publication by the MoI. Senior officials argued against authorisation on the grounds that publication would risk lowering morale.
Burns remained undeterred, however. He was convinced that Mike’s writing would raise awareness not just of the sacrifice of British seamen but also the critical importance of protecting Allied convoys across the Atlantic, a message worth conveying to the American people. He encouraged Mike to hand his draft to their mutual friend the author Barbara Wall, née Lucas, who in turn passed it on to her sister, Sylvia Lucas, a literary agent in New York. The result was that ‘Sunk by a Mine: A Survivor’s Story’ was published on 11 May 1941 in the New York Times Magazine, later winning the Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for literature.
The Richeys were not the only ones from Burns’s group of Catholic friends whom war was in the process of dispersing. A pattern of displacement and separation had set in which would last until well after Hitler had been defeated. A year had passed since Greene had published The Power and the Glory, a venture he owed to his Catholic publishing contacts. Burns had subsequently suggested that Greene write the biography of Father Damien, the Belgian leper colony priest who died from the disease, but this time nothing came of the idea. Instead Burns, on returning to London, discovered that Greene was close to joining MI6 and taking a posting in Sierra Leone after severing his links with the MoI. ‘The MoI asked me to return the other day which gave me an opening for a cheery raspberry,’ Greene wrote to Mary Pritchett in March 1941. While separated by geography and officially working for different departments, Burns and Greene were destined to move in similar intelligence circles in subsequent years. They were both drawn unwittingly into a world of deception and betrayal.
During the Second World War, Sierra Leone came within the orbit of Kim Philby’s Iberian section, just as Madrid, Lisbon and Tangier did, with both Greene and Burns having to become involved in work that troubled their Catholic consciences. In his memoirs, Ways of Escape, Greene tells how he found himself abandoning an interrogation of a young Scandinavian seaman from Buenos Aires suspected of being a German spy. ‘It was a form of dirty work for which I had not been engaged,’ Greene reflected. Similarly, as the war progressed, Burns felt increasingly uncomfortable with the thought that one of the Spanish journalists posted to London, Luis Calvo, had ended up being humiliated at the hands of MI5 interrogators in a London detention camp.
But Burns still counted on as many friends as enemies within the British Establishment. Over at the BBC, Harman Grisewood had leap-frogged from a relatively obscure post in Broadcasting House to a strategically key role as deputy head of the European Division in Bush House at a time when another Catholic, Ivone Kirkpatrick, a senior Foreign Office official, was promoted to the post of Director-General. ‘Two Catholics,’ Kirkpatrick warned Grisewood; ‘some people will make trouble.’
But the expected protest never materialised. Instead Kirkpatrick and Grisewood forged an effective team while maintaining the loyalty and cooperation of other BBC staff. The partnership secured key allies for the policy being pursued by the British embassy in Madrid, an alliance Burns and his friend from debutante days, Grisewood, consolidated over several meetings at the Garrick Club.
Of the original coterie of friends, only the painter and poet David Jones continued to resist, diverting his creative energies away from what smacked of government service. And, unlike the poets Spender and Auden, he did not escape from the war by moving to America. Jones shared Burns’s nostalgia for the life that had existed in London during the 1930s, as did Evelyn Waugh, and the bonds of faith-based friendship that struggled to survive.
Of the impact war had on such bonds, Burns would later write: ‘There was realism in our own consciences, making for an independence of spirit, born of a dependence on God. That was the ultimate lesson of those years, ringing freedom from fear. Such a growth was like that of plants, best brought up in the dark. Call them hyacinth days. We were curiously happy when everything exploded.’
Jones knew that Burns’s relationship with Ann Bowes-Lyon had ended and dissuaded him from trying to win her back. He wrote Burns another letter as he was planning his trip to London. ‘I am sorry, dear Tom, about all this Ann thing. It’s a bloody awful world, and these personal things are so intricate and chancy – and far worse to bear than these old stupid bombs … She appears to have made up her mind about this chap – and that being so – well, one has to take it so.’
Jones encouraged Burns not to cancel coming to London on leave, stressing how much he longed to meet up again and take up where they had left off, old friends bonding again over matters that endure. Jones wrote: ‘As you say, you and I are mates, and I do hope we can scrape through these nasty years and have a nice breather afterwards somehow or other. I don’t feel we shall be changed much, I don’t think anything changes chaps really – jolly tough types, the human species.’
While Burns later alerted the Foreign Office and other government departments that he was coming to London, a letter to Jones detailing the date and time of his arrival never reached him. So Burns arrived at his house in Glebe Place unannounced. Given the bomb damage suffered by the neighbourhood, Burns was relieved to find number 3 still standing. He found Jones where he had last left him, in the sitting room, with Prudence Pelham, the artist’s model and platonic lover.
Pelham’s husband, the RAF pilot Guy Branch, had been killed in action and she was showing the early symptoms of the degenerative disease that would kill her after the war. Virtually bankrupt after unsuccessfully suing the Air Ministry for compensation, she was as delighted to see Burns as Jones was. It felt like a homecoming, however short-lived it turned out to be.
After Pelham had retired to bed, the two old friends stayed up drinking a great deal of whisky and reminiscing about old times. Burns’s dark tabby cat Tim had followed the cleaner, Ethel, to another house. Jones had drawn Tim for posterity, and this image of him now occupied one side of the room, much as he had always done in reality, and they laughed, imagining him twirling his tail before diving off the sofa. It was the surest sign that Burns had begun to put the memory of Ann behind him. But nothing else could really stay the same. The only certainty was that the war would bring more destruction and death before it ended.
The next day Burns loaded his books and various items of furniture into a van and drove to a storage depot further north of the river he judged safer than Chelsea. Jones, for his part, reluctantly agreed to move himself, Prudence and his paintings to an artist’s studio he had been lent in Onslow Square, in South Kensington. He was unconvinced by Burns’s assurance that life would become cheaper and safer. Burns had taken heart from the fact that, in the early months of 1941, the air raids on London had virtually ceased. A tense interlude prevailed without any major German air strikes. Parliament now returned to its traditional home in the House of Commons, and Churchill began using Number 10 Downing Street rather more often than his underground cabinet rooms to conduct government business. But such ‘normality’ proved short-lived. The Luftwaffe resumed its bombing with a vengeance, first on the ports around Britain and then on London, again. There were two heavy raids on the capital on 16 and 17 April, just after Burns had returned to Madrid. There was a third, much heavier raid on 10 May, the anniversary of Churchill becoming prime minister, during which a bomb hit the depot in which Burns had recently stored his books and other possessions, destroying everything.