Dawn was breaking over the Atlantic Ocean off the south-west coast of Spain and the fishermen were hauling in their nets about a kilometre out to sea on the morning of 30 April 1943. As the sun rose over the white sand dunes, one of the fishermen spotted a yellow object floating in the calm turquoise waters. He rowed closer and discovered a Mae West keeping afloat the body of a dead man. The corpse was dressed in British military uniform and had a briefcase attached to its belt. Only years later would the fisherman, twenty-three-year-old José Antonio Rey, discover that he had become an unintentional witness to one of the most audacious acts of deception to be carried out in wartime Spain, in an episode that would gain notoriety as The Man Who Never Was.
Months earlier, as 1942 drew to a close, the highly secretive interservice XX Committee, under the chairmanship of the MI5 officer John Masterman, had begun to put in place its latest plans to deceive the enemy. Its basic mission was to fully occupy German and Italian forces in Western Europe and the Mediterranean and thus discourage their transfer to the Russian front. As part of the deception strategy, two British military intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu from Naval intelligence and Charles Cholmondeley, another MI5 officer (both members of the XX Committee) developed a plan to feed the Germans false information about a major Allied landing in southern Europe following the successful Operation Torch in North Africa. The aim: to divert German troops towards Greece and Sardinia and away from Sicily, the area selected for the commencement of a major Allied offensive.
Code-named Operation Mincemeat, the plan was put together in Room 14 (NI D12), a top-secret office run by Naval Intelligence from a basement in Whitehall. It involved a team of a dozen carefully vetted individuals, including secretaries, tasked with handling coded messages and, most famously, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. As a member of the XX Committee, Montagu had access to the ‘most secret sources’, the information drawn from Ultra, the British system for intercepting and breaking of high-grade German code and cipher signals. He was thus able to plan his operation according to the analysis of the intercepted communications on military dispositions that the Germans in Madrid and Lisbon had with Berlin. These reached him from the communications centre at Bletchley Park.
Patricia Davies was one of those who worked on Mincemeat. ‘A colonel in the marines got me into the Admiralty. Most of the people in Naval Intelligence were recommended by somebody in the armed forces because that meant you came from the right kind of family. Everything was incredibly hush hush. “Don’t you dare mention anything to anybody”, we were warned. I was put in a section that received the traffic from Bletchley … the intercepts used to come by teleprinter every day, into the little office of the building we called the Citadel.’
The plan involved creating the false identity of a Royal Marine officer, Major William Martin, and enlisting him in an equally fictitious mission, as the courier of top-secret letters detailing the Allied plans from Sir Archibald Nye, the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the War Office, to General Sir Harold Alexander, the British commander in North Africa under Eisenhower. An accident whereby the aircraft carrying Major Martin crashed into the sea, but near enough to a coastline that would guarantee his body and the documents being discovered by the Germans, completed the basic elements of the ingenious plan.
To make the plot credible, weeks were spent creating Major Martin’s identity, making it as plausible as possible: family background, career record, love letters from a girlfriend, nights out at the theatre, intimate dinners in the West End, bank statements all documented and with the participation of an array of invented characters. Patricia Davies played her part in the deception. ‘Ewen (Montagu) handed me the big brown envelope that was to go on the body and got me to forge the address from Nye to Alexander … the love letters and the photograph of the girl friend were provided by girls from MI5 … I remember being rather annoyed not be asked to do that as well.’
In its final stages the deception took on a macabre tone as the planners put out discreet enquiries to trusted service medical officers and waited to hear that a suitable body had been found. Over sherry at the Junior Carlton club, one of the country’s top pathologists, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, advised Montagu that the corpse of a man who had either drowned or recently died from any but a few ‘natural causes’ could be used. So the quest intensified.
Montagu wrote later: ‘There we were in 1942, surrounded all too often by bodies, but no one that we could take. We felt like the Ancient Mariner – bodies, bodies, everywhere, nor any one to take! We felt like Pirandello – Six officers in search of a corpse.’ Eventually a suitable body was found, of a man who had died of pneumonia and had liquid in his lungs. His identity was kept secret, although Montagu told members of his team that he was a down-and-out, originally from Wales, who had spent the last days of his life sleeping rough on the streets of wartime London.
Sir Bernard inspected the body and judged that if a post-mortem were made by someone who believed that death was due to drowning, there was little likelihood that the difference between the liquid in the lungs of a body that had started to decompose and the seawater would be noticed. ‘You have nothing to fear from a Spanish post-mortem,’ Sir Bernard told Montagu; ‘to detect that this young man had not died after an aircraft had been lost at sea would need a pathologist of my experience – and there aren’t any in Spain.’
The body was kept in cold storage in a London mortuary, before being dressed up in a Marine officer’s uniform and given Major Martin’s identity papers, together with a briefcase filled with the fictitious documents. The major was then packed with dry ice into a metal container and driven north to Holy Loch in a 30-cwt Ford van. At the wheel was a racing driver who was on special duty at the War Office. He and Montagu took turns to drive through the night, accompanied by Charles Cholmondeley. Once in Scottish waters, the container was taken out by boat to the submarine HMS Seraph, whose crew had been told that it contained a secret weather reporting device bound for waters near Gibraltar.
Eleven days later, at 4.30 a.m., the submarine surfaced in the Gulf of Cadiz, some 1600 yards from the mouth of the River Odiel and the nearby port of Huelva. The local currents and German presence had been meticulously studied over the preceding weeks by a small intelligence unit headed by Captain Gómez-Beare, the assistant naval attaché at the British embassy in Madrid.
The Gibraltar-born Lieutenant Commander Gómez-Beare had worked in military intelligence for Franco’s army during the civil war before being recruited for covert wartime duties by Naval Intelligence. With his dark looks and southern accent, Gómez-Beare was one of a small number of embassy staff who could infiltrate the local population without drawing attention to themselves.
Like his commander Captain Hillgarth, he had developed close ties with key sources in the Spanish navy and was familiar with the coastline, its ports, their personnel and the local weather. Huelva had been identified as a hub of German intelligence, with the Abwehr and Gestapo controlled from the German consulate and a Nazi agent monitoring Allied shipping from a house near the estuary. Gómez-Beare reported on close collaboration between the consulate and the Spanish naval authorities. It was considered that as soon as Martin’s body was washed ashore the Abwehr would be alerted and given access to the planted documents.
It was still dark when the Royal Navy submarine went about its secret business that spring day in 1943. The new moon had just set and the ebb tide was on the turn. The submarine was trimmed down until the calm sea just lapped its hull. It was then that the mysterious container was raised aloft and unbolted by members of the crew who had been made privy to the secret of its contents by Captain Bill Jewell for the first time only minutes before.
In silence, the seamen raised the body, wrapped in a blanket, and slipped it into the water, commending its soul as they did so even as their captain prayed secretly for its safe delivery into Nazi hands. In preparing for this final stage, the planners of Mincemeat had taken into account the lessons learnt from an incident that had occurred in Spanish waters some eight months earlier. In September 1942 the secrecy surrounding the build-up to the North African landings had nearly been compromised when an Allied Catalina crashed near Algeciras, killing all those on board. Among the victims was an officer who was carrying a letter about Operation Torch to the governor of Gibraltar, Noel Mason-Macfarlane. The officer’s body was washed ashore where it was discovered by a Spanish naval coastguard. Within hours the letter had been handed over to the British, but not before it had first been seen by the Germans and dismissed as a fake.
Two aspects of the Catalina crash inspired the planners of Operation Mincemeat. First, no debris or equipment from the aircraft – similar to the one that had now ‘crashed’ off the coast of Huelva – had been washed ashore. It had thus been decided that there was no need to float a dinghy along with Major Martin to complete the deception. It was also assumed that the Germans, having cause to regret the ease with which they had been taken by surprise by the North African landings, would not again easily dismiss strategic Allied documents if and when they came into their possession.
Martin’s body was discovered off the beach of El Portil, near Huelva. After it had been brought ashore by the fishermen, it was handed over to the local police, and eventually to the British consul, but only after a local German agent had taken copies of the documents and sent them back to Berlin via the German embassy in Madrid. The British vice-consul in Huelva, Francis Haseldan, was the only local British agent to be briefed on the operation. In Madrid, only a small group at the British embassy were party to the final stages of Mincemeat, their contribution as critical to its success as the accuracy of the intelligence they had helped provide. The naval attaché, Captain Hillgarth, became involved in a series of separate, carefully orchestrated exchanges with the Admiralty in London, which he shared with his contacts in the Spanish navy, designed to give the impression that the documents were of the utmost importance and needed to be retrieved as quickly as possible. Hillgarth and his superiors in Naval Intelligence accurately predicted that such exchanges would be leaked to the Germans and fuel their belief that the documents were genuine.
As part of the operation, Hillgarth decided to enlist the support of Burns. The press attaché had made some enemies in British intelligence, but Hillgarth was not one of them. The two cooperated on the basis of mutual trust. Burns was asked by Hillgarth to contribute to the deception by telling anyone who enquired about the fictitious ‘Major Martin’ that he was someone he vaguely recalled having dealings with as an agent of the British government in Burgos during the civil war. Questioned by his Spanish friends, Burns would claim to have forgotten the details.
Gómez-Beare, Hillgarth and Burns were among the unsung heroes of Mincemeat. A fourth was Eduardo Contioso, a young Spanish doctor who was involved in the post-mortem of ‘Major Martin’. He had his suspicions about the real cause of death but refused to divulge to the Germans what he believed had really happened.
Undoubtedly the biggest ‘hero’ of all was ‘Major Martin’, not an officer at all but an anonymous civilian who died in mysterious circumstances before being transported to Spain. It is there that ‘Major Martin’ lies buried, in Huelva’s main cemetery; a bunch of flowers was dutifully laid on his tombstone on Remembrance Day for years after the end of the war by a member of the local Anglo-Spanish community.
In 1996, a British town planning officer and amateur historian called Roger Morgan claimed that the body used by British intelligence in Operation Mincemeat was that of a homeless alcoholic Welshman named Glyndwr Michael who had died after ingesting rat poison. The discovery, subsequently supported by documentation filed at the National Archive in Kew, fuelled continuing conspiracy theories on the internet, but the tombstone nonetheless now also bears the name of Glyndwr Michael. The rest, as they say, is history. On 1 July 1943 Allied troops landed in Sicily. The Italians appealed in vain for German help, but they were otherwise occupied in Greece and Sardima.
The fall of Mussolini, just over three weeks later, on 25 July 1943, led to a two-day news blackout in Spain, as Franco tried to defuse the threat it posed to his own future. Franco wept as he recounted the events in Rome to his cabinet, but in public and in a meeting he had soon afterwards with the US ambassador Hayes he appeared self-assured, insisting there was no similarity between the collapse of fascism in Italy and the situation in Spain. While Italy had fought against the Allies, Spain had not. And yet, as Hayes pointed out to Franco, the Spanish regime continued to send out too many mixed messages which raised doubts about the genuineness of its neutrality. The Spanish media remained heavily censored and biased against the Allies, with many officials, including civilian and military governors, and members of Franco’s own cabinet, openly pro-Axis. Hayes also complained about the continuing presence in Russia of Spain’s pro-German Blue Division regiment of volunteers which he regarded less as an anti-communist crusade than as a military alliance against an ally.
If such protests barely dented Franco’s complacency it was because there was no suggestion that it would all lead to a move by the Allies to have him removed from power. On the contrary, the central plank of the policy being pursued by both the British and American embassies in Madrid was to maintain low-level interference as far as a change in regime was concerned. To both London and Washington, the strategic Allied interest still lay in a neutral Spain and the avoidance of any pro-Axis military intervention south of the Pyrenees that might threaten supply lines to North Africa and the Mediterranean.
In May 1943, following a secret meeting with a member of the Spanish royal family, Alfonso de Orleans, the British ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare had alerted London to the ongoing activities of those who favoured a restoration of a monarchy in Spain in favour of Prince Juan, then living in exile in Lausanne, Switzerland. The plotters had set themselves a target of toppling Franco within four months and yet seemed to lack any convincing plan for how to go about it.
On 24 May, Hoare received a letter from the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. It warned that there remained the danger of ‘German counter-moves, involving strong pressure from the Spaniards’, although the prospect of the Germans taking any effective action if the British invoked the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance and obtained facilities in the Azores was unlikely given the strain on Germany’s resources and military commitments.
Despite accepting that the strategic risks of alienating Franco’s Spain were no longer as great as they had been, Eden nevertheless remained adamant that British interests were best served by not rocking the boat. Thus he emphasised the need not to stray from the ‘guiding principle’ of non-intervention in internal Spanish affairs: ‘I am … convinced that we should not become in any way connected with arrangements to bring Don Juan to Spain from Switzerland,’ Eden wrote. ‘This is a matter which we must leave to the Spaniards themselves, and we must not lay ourselves open to any subsequent accusations of having aided or abetted his return.’ On 27 July 1943 Hoare wrote to Eden with an early analysis of what he thought might be the likely reaction in Spain to Mussolini’s fall. He remained sceptical that the Spanish left’s joyful reaction to the news would translate into effective action to topple Franco. As Hoare reported: ‘If they attempt any movement against the Franco regime, they will be easily suppressed by the Army and the immense force of police that dominate Spanish life … So long as the Spanish Army is against them, the Leftists are committing suicide if, elated by Italian events, they at this moment attempt a coup.’
As for the monarchists, despite the support of some generals, ‘very few of them have any political sense and, hitherto, Franco’s opposition has been sufficient to block any movement in Don Juan’s favour,’ commented Hoare. As he prepared for his next meeting with Franco, the ambassador planned to press for unambiguous Spanish neutrality, while holding back from issuing any ultimatum on which he knew the Allies would not deliver.
Hoare went on to tell Eden: ‘I feel that it is necessary to disabuse him [Franco] of the idea that Falangism and the Allies can jog along happily and indefinitely together, but that in making this clear, I must avoid the danger of appearing to dictate a particular form of government.’
Two days later his US counterpart Carlton Hayes emerged from his meeting with Franco in the Pardo Palace, a former royal hunting lodge outside Madrid, feeling, as he later put it, that ‘I had cast a good bit of bread on the water, and wondering how much, if any, might return.’ Within a week Burns and the US embassy press attaché were summoned to the office of a sympathetic source they shared inside the Falange party and told that Franco had ordered that the Spanish press, radio and newsreels were to adopt an impartial stance, one at least that did not discriminate in the coverage of the war against the Allies.
While Hayes’s account of his meeting with Franco and its aftermath suggests that he alone was responsible for the conciliatory attitude adopted by the Spanish regime, the apparent ‘concession’ made by Franco had been carefully planned to ensure that his own interests were well served, with more than a little help from within the Allied camp.
Hayes’s ‘summit’ with Franco had been preceded by a more discreet meeting in London between Tom Burns and Rafael Nadal, an exiled Spanish academic whose broadcasts for the BBC’s Spanish service had become an important propaganda vehicle. This visit was the latest in a series of short work-related trips Burns had made to the UK since being posted to Madrid.
Towards the end of July 1942 Burns invited Nadal to lunch at the Garrick, the private gentleman’s club near Covent Garden which had been founded in the nineteenth century. Burns had developed his network of literary, political and secret intelligence friends among the club’s membership since being elected weeks before the outbreak of war in 1939, with the support of the actor Robert Speaight and the influential publisher Rupert Hart-Davies. Among the Garrick members who had already achieved certain stardom in the film world was the actor Leslie Howard, who was destined to play his most dramatic and final role in wartime Spain.
The club’s Shakespearian motto, ‘All the World’s a Stage’, was well suited to the tragi-comedies and intrigues that had traditionally been played out within its walls. While Garrick rules prohibited work-related business being conducted in any of its rooms, the club’s ruling committee was packed with individuals already involved in some way or another in the war effort, while the club’s reputation for discretion in a convivial atmosphere meant that its members could and did use it as a perfect location for the discussion of sensitive matters of state.
Burns had enticed the poverty-stricken Nadal with the promise of a relaxed and nourishing lunch, during which they would have the opportunity to catch up on news of mutual friends in Madrid. Nadal was late. He found Burns standing impatiently in the entrance hall at the foot of the winding staircase, by a bronze bust of the Victorian actor Henry Irving. Burns, Nadal later recalled, seemed irritated at having been kept waiting and suggested they go straight into the main dining area – known somewhat misleadingly as the ‘coffee room’, given the relative luxury of its decor and fare in rationed wartime London. Sacrificed was the traditional pre-lunch cocktail or two and the informal banter members and their guests usually enjoyed in the upstairs long bar. Only when the two took their seats at one of the round dining tables did Burns seem to relax and Nadal begin to feel more comfortable with his host.
Burns ordered wine and talked about the informal literary meetings, or tertulias, and the bullfights he had recently been to in Madrid; Nadal recalled the experience of living and working in a London that awaited the assault of the Luftwaffe. First it was the firebombs, now it was the flying bombs. Burns confessed to missing his London friends but not the bombs. The claret they shared seemed better than any wine he had recently had in Spain. Nadal looked around the ‘coffee room’ and was surprised, amidst the studied elegance of the silverware and antique wooden furniture, by the poor taste of the cheap prints that somewhat incongruously lined the walls.
Only later would he be told that, since the outbreak of war, more than two hundred of the Garrick’s most valuable pictures had been removed outside London. Some of the windows had been blown out despite the regulation tape criss-crossing the glass. The bombing had led to a drop in attendance in the evenings, and the occasional loss of electricity and gas, leaving the club cold and dark for extended periods. But the committee was proud of the club’s wartime record: not a day had passed without luncheon being served. For Nadal, the Garrick certainly made a change from the place at which he usually ate, the canteen at the BBC’s wartime location in Evesham.
Over cheese and port, conversation drifted inevitably towards Spanish politics. Knowing of Burns’s right-wing sympathies, Nadal couldn’t help recalling that one of his best friends, the poet Federico García Lorca, had been among thousands executed by fascist thugs early in the civil war. Burns in turn remembered the writers executed on both sides, and that the left had shot priests and raped nuns. He then moved the conversation to another delicate subject – the political position of the British embassy in Madrid and of the Allies in Spain in general as they tried to defeat Hitler. Franco, he asserted, deserved the support of the Allies so long as Spain remained neutral. Nadal’s response was that the Allies had a moral imperative to help restore democracy to Spain as soon as possible.
It was only over coffee that Burns confronted Nadal about the broadcasts he had been making for the BBC. He admitted that they were incisive and well produced and heard by thousands inside and outside Spain. However, the Spanish embassy in London and senior government officials in Madrid had complained that the broadcasts were biased against the Franco regime, and ‘subversive’. Burns suggested that Nadal would better serve the interests of the BBC, the British government and of Spain generally if he adjusted the tone and content of his programmes in a way that would widen their appeal to both sides of the political divide in Spain. Nadal recalled the moment: ‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Then I said, “On no account, Tom. For this operation you’ve got to find someone else. Don’t you realise that to try and embrace the Falange and others who support Franco would be to betray in one act all those who rest their hopes in Great Britain?”’
Nadal had a depressing sense of déja vu. It seemed to him that Burns’s line of argument was the one long used by British Conservative MPs and their Catholic allies. It dated back to 1936, in fact, when the British government had refused to intervene against Franco’s military uprising in the outset of the civil war. And yet Nadal sensed that the policy of non-intervention was also being influenced by longer-term strategic planning, in London and Washington, about the Spain that would best serve Western interests once Nazism had been defeated and the Soviet Union had begun to claim her share of the spoils of victory.
‘I still think that you could and should do what I am suggesting. Perhaps at a later stage you will understand why I am right,’ Burns told Nadal. Their lunch was at an end. There was no raising of voices. No sudden walkouts. This was the Garrick, after all, and Nadal had lived in London long enough to know how to play by club rules. ‘We parted without any apparent tension, although with a better understanding of where we each stood,’ he recalled.
It was nearly eight years since Nadal had first arrived in London. He had been studying at the French University of Poitiers and thought the time had come to learn English. Among his letters of introduction to various British academics of a left-wing disposition was one from the communist Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and another from Lorca himself. He was soon studying English at University College London while working as a part-time Spanish teacher.
Nadal’s circle of friends included the Spanish ambassador representing the Republican government, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, and two Anglo-Spaniards, Tomás Harris and his younger sister Enriqueta. At that time Tomás, yet to be recruited by MI5, was an art dealer, specialising in El Greco and Goya and selling paintings to raise funds for anti-Franco forces. He worked at a gallery in Mayfair which his Jewish father, Lionel, had set up after marrying a woman from Seville. Enriqueta was doing a postgraduate course at the Courtauld Institute where Anthony Blunt was a lecturer. It was Enriqueta who introduced Blunt and Tomás to each other.
Early in the summer of 1936, Nadal was appointed assistant lecturer in the Spanish department at King’s College London, a post he assumed belatedly after being caught up, while on holiday in Spain, in the early stages of the civil war. Nadal considered himself a loyal supporter of the Spanish Republic, having spent his early youth as a militant member of the Spanish Socialist Party. But weeks into the war he chose exile rather than military conscription and returned to London. In exile, Nadal’s politics became passionately anti-Franco, all the more so when news reached him of the summary execution near Granada of his close friend Lorca after the poet had been arrested by nationalist forces. Within weeks Nadal expressed his disdain for Franco by embarking on an English translation of a book of Lorca verses in cooperation with Stephen Spender. The literary left was beginning to speak out in support of the Spanish Republic.
The outbreak of the Second World War provoked the closure of the Spanish department at King’s College and left Nadal temporarily reduced to scraping a living from giving private classes. His luck turned when, in the final weeks of the phoney war, he met Billy McCann, the head of the Iberian section of the MoI, at a party at the Harris household. Thanks to McCann, he was offered a job at the BBC. But for occasional contributions on Latin American culture, Nadal had no broadcasting experience. He was also ideologically poles apart from Douglas Woodruff, the unashamedly pro-Franco editor of the Catholic weekly the Tablet, whose reflections on the war were being broadcast twice a week on the BBC’s Spanish service. Nevertheless Nadal managed to convince McCann that, if given an opportunity, he would be able to serve the interests of both the British government and the Spanish people better by offering a commentary that was bolder in projecting the war as a fight against freedom and fascism. British propaganda aimed at Spain, Nadal argued, had to be fine-tuned so that the majority of Spaniards would be left in no doubt that their lives would be better and happier if the Nazis were defeated.
Nadal was appointed assistant producer of programmes. He was told by McCann that this gave him responsibility for the content of Allied propaganda broadcast to Spain by the BBC, but under the supervision of John Marks, a writer and journalist who had been recruited into government service on the recommendation of Burns and others in the British embassy. Both men were required to report regularly to McCann at the MoI.
What Nadal was not aware of was the extent to which he was being drawn into an unresolved power struggle, involving government departments, over who should be in control of propaganda and what the nature of this propaganda should be. Lack of agreement between and within the Foreign Office and the MoI as to what the government’s relationship with the BBC should be only added to the tension already created by the divergent ideologies and political views of some of their employees.
McCann’s own appointment had been made against the background of continuing disagreement within the British government over how policy should be conducted towards wartime Spain. As described in an earlier chapter, the previous incumbent at the head of the Spanish department, Denis Cowan, had been shifted sideways after the Spanish embassy had used its contacts in the Catholic media in Britain to criticise him for employing Spaniards known for their strong opposition to Franco. The same shake-up had resulted in Tom Burns being posted to Madrid.
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Nadal’s appointment by a board comprising senior officials from the MoI, the Foreign Office and the BBC was the result of an uneasy truce in the hostilities that had been raging between government and the BBC over policy towards Spain. It involved a compromise whereby concerns about Nadal’s politics and lack of journalistic experience were temporarily set aside on the condition that his broadcasts were made subject to careful monitoring and effective vetting by the government. Nadal himself was reminded by one of his interviewers, Ivone Kirkpatrick, the controller of the BBC’s European Services, that British policy towards Spain had as its only end that of maintaining its neutrality. ‘It is not that we want Spain to enter the war on our side, it is however our aim to ensure by all possible means that she doesn’t join the enemy,’ Kirkpatrick told Nadal.
Days later, on 17 November 1940, Nadal, under the nom de guerre (agreed to by the BBC) of Antonio Torres, began a series of broadcasts in Spanish called La Voz de Londres, the voice from London, from a studio in Evesham. One of his first commentaries was a morale-boosting broadcast as London suffered heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe. While Nazi propaganda across Europe, not least Spain, predicted that Londoners would be brought to their knees, Nadal spoke of the heroism of the Blitz, describing Londoners as a bastion of democratic resistance against the forces of fascism. Other programmes were delivered in a lighter tone, with Nadal mocking the inflated rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini’s speeches.
Writing from Madrid, Burns pressed Nadal to continue broadcasting anything that might counter the depressing sight of Spaniards clutching their radios and listening to the Germans triumphantly proclaiming their latest ‘victory’.
In the spring of 1941, Nadal, in a moment of almost Chaplinesque brilliance, responded by getting his studio engineer to record the notes of an out-of-tune flute over the military trumpet blast that preceded the official Nazi propaganda broadcasts, fading the flute in with increasing volume as the broadcast progressed.
Days later word reached Burns from one of his Republican informants that in a Madrid suburb the German ambassador’s car had been surrounded by a group of Spanish urchins mocking him by pretending to play tunelessly on flutes. Thanks to Nadal, it seemed that the BBC had briefly struck a chord with Madrid’s hungry and dispossessed, a sign, perhaps, of the growing popularity of his broadcasts in some working-class neighbourhoods of the Spanish capital.
The honeymoon period between Nadal and his detractors proved relatively short-lived once La Voz de Londres began to focus more directly on emphasising the pro-Axis sympathies of the Franco regime. From the autumn of 1941 the British embassy in Madrid began to warn the Foreign Office that its diplomatic strategy in Spain was being put at risk by Nadal’s broadcasts. This was strongly refuted by Nadal who claimed that the popularity of his programmes among Spanish listeners was increasing daily.
By now Nadal had friends in MI5 – Tomás Harris – and another ally in the MoI, the deputy head of the Spanish department, Enriqueta Harris. Under the influence of her former tutor Blunt, Enriqueta had learnt to keep her political cards close to her chest at the heart of government. She joined the MoI after her brother Tomás joined MI5, the year Blunt was recruited by British intelligence, in 1940. The precise ideological allegiance of the Harris siblings when war broke out is unclear beyond the fact that they both hated Franco, his ministers and everything they stood for, and secretly regarded anyone who thought differently as fascists. Blunt was already a committed communist and had been recruited by an agent of the Russian secret service when he joined MI5.
In her days at the MoI, Enriqueta Harris was careful not to appear as anything other than a loyal patriot. Only towards the end of her life, reduced by old age and illness to spending long hours in the darkened sitting room of her house in Earl’s Court, did she allow her guard to drop when visited by the author. She seemed angry at having been discovered by the son of a wartime colleague she utterly despised after maintaining a relatively low profile for so long in retirement. She remained extremely defensive when asked about the circumstances of her recruitment into the MoI but what little she was prepared to let slip at least hinted at the intriguing possibility that she too may have been working for the Soviets.
‘I try and forget all that … but why don’t you think of the Spanish Civil War, and think what that meant … I was in London. Most of my friends were anti-Franco because they were on the side of the people,’ she said.
She declared herself absolutely against the strategy the British government had adopted of not supporting the anti-Franco opposition. Despite being brought up as a young girl in the Jewish faith she admitted to being ‘anti-religion’ and feeling, as Philby did, that Catholics had been given too great a role in influencing British policy towards Spain. ‘There were a lot of Catholics in British government service. I thought there were too many,’ she told me. ‘It seemed to me as somebody who was supposed to be doing propaganda that I had no scope at all because we weren’t allowed to do propaganda against Franco,’ she added.
She acknowledged she had had dealings with all three known Cambridge spies – Burgess, Blunt and Philby – but her refusal to discuss them in any detail and what she did say seemed deliberately misleading. She described Blunt simply as a ‘very polite and good lecturer’, Guy Burgess as a ‘bad joke’, and Philby as someone she didn’t like very much. ‘He drank too much and at one point started sucking up to Franco.’ This last remark I took as deliberately deceptive as it referred to the time when Philby had been working as a pro-Franco foreign correspondent as a cover for his work for the Soviets. She also denied that, as some writers on intelligence have suggested, her brother Tomás was a Russian spy. Only afterwards did I realise that I hadn’t even asked her about her brother when she decided, unprompted, to mention his name alongside those of the Cambridge three.
By then it was plain that Enriqueta didn’t wish to say anything more. She ended with these words: ‘I don’t like remembering and anyway I don’t know if what I tell you is lies or not, you see. You will have to check it out.’ Months later she was dead, carrying her truths and her lies to the grave.
In January 1942 the tensions over the BBC’s Spanish coverage stirred internally when the journalist John Marks was encouraged by an unidentified source in government – almost certainly Burns – to write to the MoI questioning Nadal’s political objectivity and professionalism.
Until that point, Marks had won Nadal’s affection as a friend and colleague. The Spanish academic looked at the journalist-turned-BBC-producer as a somewhat archetypal ex-public school boy and Cambridge graduate, with a certain hedonistic lifestyle that seemed to consciously defy the stifling bureaucracy of the careerists in the BBC and the insularity of many British government officials.
A chain smoker, with a permanent smear of nicotine round his nostrils, Marks drank heavily and was a serial womaniser. He was also immensely educated in Spanish culture, having developed a passion for its poetry, its music and its bullfighting while travelling round Andalusia as a freelance writer, a trait which the hugely educated, aesthete Nadal much admired.
But whatever feelings Nadal may have felt for the Englishman-turned-Hispanist quickly changed to a deep sense of betrayal when he heard the knives were out and he suspected Marks of sharpening them. Nadal tendered his resignation. Kirkpatrick refused it, declaring Marks’s criticism to be unjustified. It proved to be a hollow victory for the BBC as it struggled to assert its independence in wartime. As for Nadal, he had merely achieved a stay of execution. Marks left for Madrid as the London Times correspondent where he developed a close friendship and political alliance inside the British embassy with Burns and his two assistants, Walters and Stordy, for the rest of the war.
Nadal was convinced by now that the pressure he had first come under at the Garrick Club lunch was the product of a diplomatic chess game with the Franco regime in which BBC employees had become expendable pawns.
During the summer of 1943, the new Spanish foreign minister, General Jordana, made clear to both Burns and his American counterpart that he expected Nadal’s programmes to be reined in as a diplomatic response to his government’s decision to ease the restriction on the importation of pro-Allied films and the placing of other British and US news material in the Spanish media.
A Spanish government decree in January 1943 prohibiting the showing in cinemas of raw unedited newsreel footage produced by the official German news agencies and the American studio Fox, and an announcement of their replacement instead by a new national state-run newsreel called the No Do, was seen by the British embassy in Madrid as an opportunity to establish a more level playing field in propaganda terms.
By contrast, at the MoI in London the creation of the No Do was viewed with some scepticism, not least by Enriqueta Harris, who saw it simply as a cynical manoeuvre by the Franco regime to create a propaganda vehicle for its own internal political purposes. The first No Do appeared to vindicate such fears. It showed no clips of the war whatsoever. Instead it presented Franco as the omnipresent head of state – Caudillo and Generalíssimo – handing out diplomas to new staff officers, and visiting emblematic locations of his victory in the civil war such as the ruins of Toledo’s Alcázar and the Valley of the Fallen.
Alongside such triumphalism, the No Do portrayed a Spain radiating peace, good cheer and Christian devotion at Christmas time and over the New Year. No reference was made to the daily executions and mass imprisonment of political dissidents, and the continuing economic hardships experienced by the majority of the population. The text accompanying the news items commented: ‘One of the most interesting and succulent decorations in shop windows at Christmas time consists of traditional poultry hanging there, waiting for the pot – but the true spirit reflected in people’s hearts during the festivities is that of the Child Jesus. We all feel a little childish and fancy free on beholding the small painted clay figures …’
Despite the blatant Francoist propaganda, Burns urged patience and understanding in London, pleading with the MoI not to desist from sending him more British newsreel footage. On 8 January 1943, he wrote to his head of section at the MoI, McCann, thus: ‘I can quite well see how it might appear all together too Falangist, and worse than that. But I think it is important to realise that for all its defects the No Do represents a big step forward in our direction. By merely existing it pushes off screen the UFA and LUCE [Nazi] newsreels which have virtually dominated the screen up to till now.’ As an aside, Burns said that the Spanish decision to include inserts from British movietone news rather than Fox was a welcome development. ‘Fox, as you know, has virtually had to confine itself to bathing girls, dress parades and pastoral scenes, and was useless from our propaganda point of view.’
Such optimism generated by Spanish action proved premature. Film footage was sent belatedly from London, and the Spanish authorities were even slower in using any of it. In the following weeks, Burns struggled to secure the ‘balance’ he had been promised by the senior Spanish government officials in charge of the No Do. While the volume of blatantly pro-Axis war footage was reduced, there was no immediate marked increase in war footage showing the military advances being made by the Allies. Burns’s official instructions from the Spanish were that anything sent from London should be confined to non-war scenes, and exclude any footage of German prisoners of war. As a result an early edition of the No Do had only one newsreel item devoted to the UK: a scene of horse schooling at the Police College in Imbert Court.
Beyond the embassy in Madrid, in Whitehall, the patience of Burns’s enemies began to wear thin. Burns’s candid admission to McCann in February 1943 that the Germans might have discovered a covert operation he had been running to buy up and destroy German newsreel before it reached Spanish hands gave ammunition to those who questioned his political judgement and professionalism. In a curt telegram from the MoI to the ambassador he was ordered to abandon the operation forthwith. ‘The press attaché in Spain should know clearly that he should not purchase any film material of enemy origin except on specific instructions from ministry headquarters.’ After Burns’s clandestine newsreel buying enterprise was stopped, Enriqueta Harris pressed her case at the MoI that it should refuse to accept any Spanish No Do shots of Franco on the basis that it was Falangist propaganda. From Tetuán, the British consul, R. G. Moneypenny, wrote to the department in a similarly combative tone. No Do films, he insisted, ‘Under the guise of a national Spanish and neutral enterprise are becoming an effective medium for pro-Axis propaganda.’
Within weeks, however, the British and US embassies were reporting to their head offices a marked improvement in the dissemination in the Spanish media of Allied propaganda following the unopposed success of Operation Torch. As the US ambassador Hayes later recalled, ‘There was considerable contemporaneous improvement in the attitude of the Spanish press and the Falange censorship towards us. Two outstanding Spanish publicists, Manuel Aznar and Manuel Halcón, were seemingly unhampered in conducting a strongly pro-Allied campaign. Leading dailies like Ya and Madrid in the capital were now giving good publicity … this was a noticeable change … an increase in news and photographs from United Nations sources; improvement in headlines; and a decrease in volume and less favourable presentation of Axis news.’
In London and Washington, sceptics viewed such developments as a cynical exercise by the Franco regime to save itself now that the tide of war appeared to be turning against the Axis powers. But they were unable to come up with a convincing and coherent alternative. Information gathered by the British embassy in Madrid from various key Spanish political sources outside the regime in late July 1943 suggested ‘a growing discontent’, according to the British ambassador Hoare, but one that still seemed unable to translate itself into a unified strategy or detailed plan of action.
On the subject of Franco’s opponents, Hoare wrote to Eden: ‘I fear … that they all equally seem to show that there is no precise or effective plan for getting rid of it [the regime]. It is this want of a plan and of a leader that is the real strength of Franco’s position. It gives him the chance of once again digging himself in and of exploiting the general fear of war, foreign and civil.’
Hoare’s memorandum was largely based on information supplied to him by Burns, evidence that the press attaché’s role in influencing British policy towards Spain had been reasserted. Burns in turn was encouraged by the strong support he counted on within the US embassy. Over that summer of 1943, the importance the US government attached to not allowing anything to undermine its conciliatory attitude towards Franco was underlined in exchanges between Ambassador Hayes, President Roosevelt and Robert E. Sherwood, the chief of the overseas Office of War Information.
Hayes reported that, thanks to his representations, Spanish newspapers as a whole were publishing more news from the Allies than from the Axis. ‘I am glad,’ replied Roosevelt, ‘that our position in the press is so much better.’ Meanwhile, Sherwood had separately signed a propaganda directive for Spain stressing that the US ‘does not propose to interfere in the internal affairs of Spain’ and that this was the ‘best reply to enemy propaganda to the effect that an Allied victory would bring Bolshevism to Spain and curtail Spain’s independence’.
On 20 October 1943, Hoare returned to the subject of Nadal. The ambassador wrote to Churchill accusing the BBC’s Spanish programming of undermining British policy towards Spain. Hoare threatened to resign unless it ceased. On 2 November, the new Minister of Information at the MoI, Brendan Bracken, wrote to Churchill confirming that Nadal had been suspended from his post as chief presenter of the BBC’s La Voz de Londres.
Six months passed before Nadal was reinstated, in April 1944, after agreeing not to make any further direct or indirect criticism of the Spanish government. By then the direction of the war had turned in favour of the Allies and it was longer a question of if but when Hitler would finally be defeated.
Nadal was convinced that the self-censorship he had agreed to would prove short-lived and was reasonably content to bide his time. Along with other Spanish exiles, he hoped that British policy towards Spain might still shift in favour of paving the way for a post-war democratic government. Instead Churchill delivered a speech on 24 May 1944 in the House of Commons in which he thanked Franco for helping the Allied cause by keeping Spain out of the war, and argued that the continuation of this policy during Operation Torch had made full amends for earlier Spanish assistance to Germany.
Churchill went on: ‘As I am here today speaking kindly words about Spain, let me add that I hope she will be a strong influence for the peace of the Mediterranean after the war. Internal political problems in Spain are a matter for the Spaniards themselves. It is not for us – that is the Government – to meddle in them.’
Churchill’s speech came as a terrible shock to Spanish Republican exiles and monarchists who had looked to the Allies to help liberate their country from the Franco regime after Hitler and Mussolini had been defeated. By contrast, the Madrid media painted it as an endorsement of Franco’s foreign policy and of his regime. Among many ordinary Spaniards who had lived through the trauma of the civil war there was a genuine sense of relief that they had been saved from another war, as well as the political turmoil and revolution they feared might follow an Allied victory.
Less than a month later, on 17 June 1944, Rafael Nadal was having lunch with Enriqueta Harris in the basement of the BBC’s Bush House in the Strand when a loud explosion shook the building, covering them in plaster and dust as they sought cover beneath a table. A flying bomb had destroyed a post office on the ground floor, just a few metres from where they were. Both Nadal and Harris were unhurt, but the bomb injured dozens of civilians, some of them fatally. It was a stark reminder that the war had yet to run its course.
The next day Nadal sat at his desk and typed out his latest La Voz de Londres in which he declared his hope that an Allied victory would in time lead to the restoration of democratic government throughout Europe. Without mentioning any particular countries, he laid out a vision of a future international order involving ordinary citizens of every nationality and race recovering their human rights, not least the right to vote for a government of their choice. The commentary was written but then left unrecorded, being judged to be veiled interference in Spanish political affairs by the BBC’s censors at the MoI. Nadal resigned that same evening and never again worked for the BBC in a time of war.