The ship sailed to Marseilles via Barcelona where it picked up more refugees, the week before Christmas 1936, the first winter of the civil war.
It was sunny but with a blustery north wind. Mabel spent much of the journey on deck, wrapped in a heavy coat and blanket to protect her from the cold, being looked after by Francis Warrington-Strong, the handsome young naval officer who had helped save her brother’s life. The sight of the displaced Spanish families filled Warrington-Strong with a huge sense of sympathy for their plight. But it was Mabel who stirred his emotions most, a young untainted Spanish beauty who seemed to have retained a sense of grace, poise and humour, despite the horrors she had lived through in Madrid.
For her part the eighteen-year-old Mabel found Warrington-Strong a refreshing contrast to the men she had left behind on Spanish soil. He struck her as calm and considerate, and with a fresh, engaging face that seemed as yet unmarked by the experience of killing another human being. On the final night of the passage, Mabel and Francis spent some time together romantically gazing out at the moonlit Mediterranean. They shared their fears that the war in Spain seemed a prelude to a wider European conflict, one in which his ship would be militarily engaged and no longer commissioned for a humanitarian role. Each was resigned to the likelihood of never seeing the other again once the passage was over. In memory of those precious moments they shared together, Warrington-Strong gave Mabel two keepsakes she had inspired – one a piece of poetry, the other a photograph.
The poem, mourning a lost innocence, seemed to foretell with a sense of anguish the fate he thought awaited him once the European war had started in earnest.
Steadfastly he gazed,
Down at the bottomless abyss.
To think that life should end like this!
His mind felt cold and dazed …
Under the wintry moon
A lonely night not far on high,
And murmured to the velvet sky,
‘Too soon –Too soon –Too soon
The photograph showed him as Mabel had met him, smiling and relaxed, in his white naval jacket with his arms crossed. It was dedicated to her: ‘In memory of a trip which was made so much more pleasant for us by the cheery and delightful company of a certain refugee’.
Two months later, Mabel and her father were at sea again, in a setting that could not have been more different. In February 1937, they boarded the Cap Arcona, the luxury German ocean liner, at Boulogne on its journey from Hamburg to South America. Marañón had spent much of the intervening period since leaving Alicante installing his family at the Hôtel d’Iéna in Paris while establishing professional contacts with local French academics and authors. Politically Marañón kept in contact with a wide circle of friends among fellow exiles and the Spanish diplomatic community in Paris. In London and Oxford he corresponded regularly with the Duke of Alba and separately with the liberal writer and former minister of the Republic, Salvador de Madariaga, who became an increasingly vocal critic of Franco. While in Paris, Marañón’s own Republicanism had given way to a belief that a Franco victory would bring the stability and order he now saw as more important for Spain than any renewed attempt at parliamentary democracy. While he reached out to those he considered reasonable men on both sides of the Spanish political divide, he felt most perturbed by the communist influence on the Republicans and blamed his exile on the intolerable position he had been placed in by Spain’s increasingly radicalised Popular Front government.
While his wife and daughters searched for more permanent accommodation, Marañón wasted little time in making contact with Franco’s representative in Paris, Quiñones de León, and interceding on behalf of his son’s wish to return to Spain and fight as a soldier with the nationalists. Marañón subsequently found himself becoming increasingly depressed by the news from Spain at a time when Franco’s victory seemed far from assured – the relentless violence, the apparent breakdown of law and order, the summary executions by both sides of individuals whose only crime was to be judged politically different.
He found it difficult to concentrate on his work as a doctor, and struggled with his writing. Marañón heeded the advice of friends and fellow doctors and agreed to accept an invitation to go on a lecture tour of South America with his fare and that of his daughter Mabel – enlisted as companion and secretary – paid for by the governments of Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil.
In that early spring of 1937, the Cap Arcona steamed down to Lisbon before making its two-week crossing to the South American mainland, via Cape Verde and Madeira. Marañón had plenty of time to prepare his lectures while Mabel read, took the sun and generally enjoyed herself in the company of similar aged South Americans and Germans between the elaborate dinners and other entertainment laid on for passengers. One evening Mabel dressed up as a gypsy and danced flamenco; on another, she took on the role of fairy princess in the fancy dress ball that followed the traditional rituals as the ship crossed the Equator.
Marañón was spared the company of destitute fellow exiles and found his civil war neurosis improving as he shared the dinner table with a group of rich Argentinian estancieros and German entrepreneurs, among them an amiable businessman named Oscar Schindler who would later become famous for his part in saving hundreds of Jews from the Nazi death camps.
Marañón’s visit to South America proved both cathartic and a huge personal success. He filled lecture halls and theatres as he spoke emotionally about the Spain that was tearing itself apart. He engaged his audience’s sympathy as a true patriot of essentially liberal values, who was suffering the pain of exile because of his refusal to sign formally up to any political dogma. ‘I have always been at the service of my country, whether the omens were good or bad. I am now once again at the service of my country, above all else and whatever the consequences might be,’ he said in one lecture entitled ‘I am a Spaniard’.
In another, entitled the ‘Dictatorship of Ideas’, he lamented the advent of ideologues that justified intolerance and brutality as a means to an end: ‘I never tire of saying that the core of all the ills that afflict this world, or at least this world which is seen from America as an uprising of madmen is the simple fact that men fight each other over ideas rather than conducting themselves as civilized beings.’
Marañón’s lectures won him plaudits from the local media, nowhere more so than in Buenos Aires, where the Argentinian commentators noted that he had drawn bigger crowds than the Prince of Wales had on a recent visit to the city. For the eighteen-year-old Mabel, South America was one long holiday, riding along the beach of Uruguay’s Punta del Este and across the huge estates of Argentina, on an endless string of horses supplied by the sons and daughters of government ministers and landowners.
Father and daughter enjoyed the return passage on the Cap Arcona. Marañón had recovered from his depression. Mabel played ping-pong with a new group of Argentinian friends, and attended a masked ball. She felt excited to be on a ship which was universally considered one of the most beautiful of the time, the most impressive commercial liner to be built since the Titanic. Only on 1 May, in mid-Atlantic, did the Cap Arcona show its true colours with a well-drilled exhibition of Nazi loyalty. The Marañóns emerged from their cabin to find the main decks covered in swastika flags, and officers and crew in military uniform parading with Nazi salutes and Heil Hitlers as a tribute to the Third Reich.
As most of the passengers raised their arms in salute, Marañón put his round his daughter’s and held it there, a discreet act of defiance for which the captain of the ship apparently bore him no ill will. The captain chose to observe what he took simply to be a gesture of the love between father and daughter. Three days later he hosted a dinner in honour of Mabel’s nineteenth birthday, a full-course menu with champagne and cake. Mabel sat on his right in the seat of honour. Later that night, as father and daughter made their way back to their respective cabins, Mabel asked her father if he was concerned that she had not met anyone yet she wanted to marry. She had two suitors at the time – a friend of her brother’s who had enlisted in Franco’s army, and a young doctor she had met in Buenos Aires. While flattered by their attentions, she felt unmoved by either of them. ‘The only thing that matters,’ Marañón advised her, ‘is marrying someone you are in love with.’ To Mabel, her father was still the most romantic man she had ever known.
On 11 May the ship docked at Southampton and the Marañóns made their way back to Paris by train. Marañón spent the next three years pursuing his calling as doctor, essayist and historian – writing a book on the mysticism of El Greco and an essay on Don Juan – in which he developed the thesis, based on clinical studies of some of his own patients, that the legendary Lothario was a repressed homosexual.
In 1938, Mabel was encouraged by her father to make her first visit to Britain in order to perfect her English and experience something of English life.
Over that summer, she stayed with a family in Norwich where she gave Spanish lessons in Blyth secondary school while improving her knowledge of British culture with occasional visits to Cambridge. A surviving photograph album from that period shows Mabel posing with some Spanish friends outside King’s College, punting along the College Backs – the most famous stretch of the River Cam – and dressed in academic gown and at Number 15 King’s Parade, presumably a student flat but long since converted into commercial premises.
For all her academic regalia, Mabel’s involvement with the university city was essentially that of a tourist. At the time, though, she dreamed of staying in the UK and becoming a Cambridge undergraduate. She claimed in later years that an unnamed academic who had interviewed her was a communist and biased against her because she had ended up supporting Franco in the Civil War.
There is no mention of her failed application in the diary she kept at the time. Instead her notes show her generally content, growing in confidence with her first paid job in a foreign land. As one entry put it, ‘I like England and I like English men. Most of them seem to have manners.’
In 1939, she returned to Paris, and resumed her studies at the Sorbonne. She was now fluent in French as well as English. During a family summer holiday in the South of France she met a young French girl of Jewish descent called Nelly Hess, the daughter of a Parisian textile manufacturer. By the end of the summer, Mabel and Nelly had become the best of friends. They exchanged addresses and delivered on their mutual promise to continue to see each other in Paris, which they did regularly for the next two years. The memory of Nelly’s sudden disappearance in the summer of 1941 would haunt Mabel for the rest of her life.
In early June of that year, as the German army advanced on Paris, Mabel and Nelly were travelling back from the cinema on the Métro when they were confronted by a group of French youths. One of them pointed at Nelly before leading the others in a verbal outpouring of anti-Semitic abuse. The train pulled into the Champs-Elysées station, the nearest stop to where the girls lived. The girls waited till the doors were about to close again, and then rushed out, leaving the boys inside the carriage, gesticulating with their fingers as the train moved on.
Shaken by the experience, the pair walked in silence, arm in arm, to Nelly’s house where they embraced and promised to see each other in the morning. The next day Mabel telephoned Nelly’s house but there was no answer. When she later visited the house, she found it empty and was told by a neighbour that she and her family had left Paris.
Mabel assumed that Nelly’s was one of the richer French Jewish families that had chosen to emigrate across the Atlantic, either to the US or South America. They were lucky to escape when they did. In July 1942 the Germans rounded up 13,000 Jews in the Paris region, most of whom subsequently perished in concentration camps. As the years passed after the war, with no word from Nelly, so Mabel came to believe that her friend had perhaps not survived the Holocaust. She had not been able to do anything to help her. The memory weighed heavily on her conscience.
* * *
Mabel was not in Paris when the Germans marched in on 14 June 1940. She and her middle sister Belén had been sent south by her parents, by train to the border, and then across to San Sebastián to visit Marañón’s eldest daughter Carmen who was living there with her husband, three young children, and a German Fräulein.
On the night of 13 July her father heard on the radio that the Germans had reached the outskirts of the capital and were in in the Bois de Boulogne. The next morning Marañón rose early, ordered his wife Lolita to stay in the family apartment, and, with his medical colleague Teofilo Hernando, walked across the streets of Paris in search of the invaders. The city centre had an eerie, abandoned feel about it, many of its shops and cafés closed, its public transport temporarily suspended. More than half of Paris’s population of five million had fled south. Marañón and Hernando were caught by a French photographer in the Place d’Etoile, as they stood on an empty pavement, at the very moment that the first of the German motorcycles with sidecars snaked into the boulevards, followed by the tanks and in turn by German troops, goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysées.
Within days of the Nazi occupation, Marañón witnessed the revival of Parisian life as sectors of the local population settled into a pattern of collaboration. He took notes of what he saw. ‘People are beginning to make contact with the soldiers; some women speak to them … two or three are laughing, and there are also men talking to the Germans, in German,’ he wrote in one diary entry.
Marañón also described the experience of lunching in their local restaurant just after it had reopened for business. ‘The owner is eating, alone, in shirt sleeves. We join him, and as we eat together he blames everything that has happened on the politicians and the lack of discipline among his fellow countrymen. When he serves us some food, he adds: “I hate Hitler, of course; but there is something in him which reminds me of Napoleon and Alexander the Great.”’
While shocked by the suddenness of the French capitulation, Marañón found himself initially impressed by the discipline of the Germans, believing for a while that they had brought the kind of order he felt Europe so desperately needed. Such was the ‘normality’ that he sent word to Mabel that she and her sister should return without delay and resume their studies while he continued to write essays, letters and books. ‘The years I lived in Paris during the war,’ Marañón later told his official biographer, ‘were fundamental ones; because I was allowed to work without social obligations, because I was forced to live modestly and because I had the time to get to know myself better …’
A wish to find out more about Spain’s most famous Parisian exile lay behind the summons Marañón received one day to dine with the most senior Nazi counter-intelligence officer in occupied France, Hans Keiffer, at his residence, a large turn-of-the-century town house from which the owners, a Jewish family, had been forcefully evicted.
The unexpected invitation was made in a telephone call one evening while Marañón was working in his study in the family apartment he had rented in the rue George Ville. He would later tell his family that his first thought was that the Germans were planning to arrest him – perhaps because he and his family had befriended Jews prior to the occupation. But if Keiffer wanted Marañón arrested he would simply have sent troops to his home. Suspecting that other motives lay behind the invitation, or simply as an insurance policy, Marañón almost certainly would have thought of contacting his friend, Franco’s wartime ambassador in Paris José Félix de Lequerica, and asking his advice.
Lequerica, under instructions from Franco, had cultivated ties with the collaborationist French right, and with the Germans, while defending Spain’s neutrality and resisting Nazi demands for the handing over of Jews who had crossed the border south into Spain. Lequerica, nevertheless, would in all likelihood have convinced Marañón that it was his patriotic duty to accept the invitation from Keiffer as a sign of respect for the Axis while using the meeting as an opportunity to remind the Germans that Franco had no wish to be dragged into the war. Marañón shared the view that the alternative to neutrality was seeing Spain plunge into another civil war, this time with the prospect of the Allies fighting alongside the communists south of the Pyrenees.
In the thin and unconvincing account Marañón’s official biographer gives of the Spaniard’s meeting, the high-ranking Nazi official is not named, and there is no reference to the fact that his host was by then already responsible for the execution of dozens of resistance fighters and the persecution of the Jews. Nor was any political subject raised. Instead, Marañón claimed he had spent the evening discussing art before being personally driven home by Keiffer. No separate testimony survives of what was said by the two men, though the very fact that Marañón was left alone by the Germans during his remaining stay in Paris would suggest that his freedom was not considered a threat to their interests.
As for Mabel, she appears, initially at least, and in common with several of her non-Jewish French and Spanish girlfriends, to have developed a similarly ambiguous attitude towards the German occupation.
It was only long after the war was over that Mabel recalled her visits to the Paris Opéra and the Comédie-Française when German soldiers were present. She remembered feeling distracted by the smell of leather from their boots mixing with the perfume of the women in the audience. The memory returned as clearly as that of Nelly’s ‘disappearance’ and a separate incident in which a French boyfriend of hers was slapped and then arrested after accidentally pushing into a German officer as he came out of the Métro.
The only German she befriended for a brief period was a Luftwaffe pilot, who had survived the Battle of Britain; he spoke perfect English and French and seemed courteous and trustworthy, at least until the night she agreed to a double date with her friend Chiquita, the daughter of the Argentinian consul César Oliveira, who was a fanatical supporter of Franco and the Spanish Falange party. One night Chiquita persuaded Mabel to join her for drinks in her flat while her parents were away. She arrived to find her alone with her German friend and a fellow pilot.
Within minutes the four of them were laughing and joking. Records were sorted and they paired off, dancing the tango. Then, halfway through the evening, Chiquita announced suddenly that she was going for a walk with her partner, leaving Mabel with her pilot.
Within minutes he had placed cushions on the floor, lit some candles and opened the third bottle of champagne of the evening. To Mabel, what had seemed romantic at first now became a little unnerving. While she thought she liked the German, she had no intention of making love with him. So it was that she told the pilot that she was engaged to be married to a high-ranking officer in the Spanish army who might visit Paris within days. The German immediately stood up, apologised and offered to take Mabel back to her parents’ apartment. It was the last night they ever saw each other.
Mabel Marañón never was engaged to a high-ranking officer in the Spanish army but to someone who had served as a subaltern in Franco’s army along with her brother Gregorio during the civil war. His name was Clemente Peláez, one of the young founders of the Falange party who had become a stockbroker in Spain. The day Mabel met Tom Burns for the first time, the loyal, well-mannered if somewhat dour Peláez was still officially her fiancé. She wore a bracelet he had given her.
But whatever loyalty she felt she owed him evaporated in the presence of the attractive and charming Englishman who, despite his pipe and dog and heavily accented Spanish, had a charisma almost equal to that of the father she venerated.
It was as if Captain Warrington-Strong had sent his elder brother or best friend to rekindle the romance of that moonlight crossing from Alicante to Marseilles. But just as important was the fact that Burns had come to Marañón’s beloved Toledo on the recommendation of friends the two men appeared to share. If Mabel was looking for a father substitute, Burns was the closest she had come to finding one.
It was one of these friends, the bullfighter Belmonte, who, in the runup to Christmas 1943, took it upon himself to invite Burns down to his ranch in Andalusia while Mabel was still holidaying there, a willing go-between for two individuals of whom he was enormously fond. On 4 December Burns, once again accompanied by his dog Juerga and the eccentric sculptor Sebastián Miranda – now temporarily engaged as an unofficial chaperone – set off from Madrid in an old Ford borrowed from the US embassy (Burns’s Wolseley was undergoing repairs) and made the journey south in icy conditions.
Spain was settling into another cold winter, and the car had no heating. It was a bumpy journey, much of it along a badly paved road Burns was familiar with from earlier professional assignments. But with Miranda there were always surprises. The unexpected came after Burns narrowly missed crashing into a flock of turkeys as he motored through an isolated village. The birds were being driven across the road by an peasant woman with a stick. Miranda told Burns to stop the car, haggled with the old woman and bought two of her turkeys. The two companions journeyed on, each feeling a little warmer thanks to the turkey each had between his legs.
Belmonte’s ranch was typical of the region, low-built and whitewashed, and decorated inside with tiles, rugs and hides. Nearby stables were filled with thoroughbreds and cross-breed Andalusian and Arab horses, and there was a small bullring where Belmonte and other friends would practise their bullfighting skills with some of the younger calves. Beyond, hundreds of fighting bulls and cows grazed on grassland which stretched for miles across one of the most underpopulated areas of Western Europe.
The bullfighter was hugely fond of Mabel, who had become a close friend of his only daughter, Yola. He thought the young Marañón girl refreshingly different from most of the somewhat snobbish upper-class Madrileñas – cosmopolitan, a fearless horse-rider, and with a genuine soul, or duende, when it came to flamenco dancing. That Christmas, Belmonte dedicated to her a signed photograph of himself on his favourite mare, and dressed in the traditional Andalusian country clothes – the traje corto.
Belmonte was similarly taken by Burns, whom he considered the most eccentric Englishman he had ever met – and he hadn’t met all that many ingleses. From the moment Burns had first infiltrated his dining club, or tertulia, in Madrid, Belmonte had taken to this maverick spy who seemed to genuinely love Spain and its culture, not least bullfighting.
Belmonte took a mischievous delight in acting the go-between for his two friends. He proved the ideal host for the developing love-match, providing good company, and matching his other guest, the flamboyant Sebastián Miranda, with an apparently inexhaustible flow of picaresque anecdote at the end of a long day out of doors.
Belmonte’s stuttering good humour came accompanied by plentiful wine, tapas, and barbecues. But he also showed himself capable of being unobtrusive as circumstances demanded.
Burns had brought with him a book of Lorca poems, Poet in New York, which he had smuggled in from the UK, and which he gave Mabel in private. The edition had been published in Mexico because the poems were banned in Spain at the time. Burns had himself been given it by Rafael Nadal, the exiled Spanish academic whose BBC programmes he had had censored. The two men had maintained a friendship despite their political disagreements over Franco, largely through a shared respect for Lorca, whose execution by the nationalists Burns had come to view as inexcusable.
His gift of the Lorca poems to Mabel was an acknowledgement of Lorca’s friendship with her father during the 1920s and early 1930s when he had been an occasional visitor to the Cigarral de Menores in Toledo.
While at Belmonte’s ranch Burns and Mabel spent most days going on long walks or riding together, watching the cowhands in the distance moving in and out of the bulls, and marvelling at the space and peace that surrounded them. It was hard to believe that a war was still being fought and there were long moments when they were able to forget it.
When the time came for Burns to return to Madrid, Mabel chose to follow soon afterwards. Just after Christmas, they met up secretly for the first time, stole out of the city and spent the day in the peace and quiet of the old university quarter of Alcalá de Henares, before dining at the Mesón de Fuencarral, an old tavern on the outskirts of the capital which the British embassy considered off limits to the Germans. Much of what each had lived went unsaid, and yet they both felt a new dimension was beginning to take form, one built on the common ground of shared secrets, faith and love. His memory of the moment he and Mabel decided to marry would remain the clearest and most profoundly heartfelt of encounters with any woman in his life. ‘It was there that what we must have been groping towards in the past few weeks came clearly into sight. Now we were looking not so much at each other as in the same direction. We were going to be married …’ he later recalled.
Three days later, at a private embassy function celebrating New Year’s Day 1944, Burns approached his ambassador and asked permission to marry a Spaniard. Burns had learnt enough about the character of Sir Samuel Hoare, the inner workings of the British government and the sensitivity of relations with Franco’s Spain not to expect an immediate reply. Moreover, it was not immediately obvious whose interests would be best served by the Burns/Marañón marriage, planned for April 1944.
Earlier that spring the US government had decided to step up pressure on Franco, warning him, through its embassy in Madrid, that Spain faced an embargo on petroleum imports unless it suspended exporting wolfram to Germany. The ensuing discussion between the Allies and Franco over the various points at issue – not just wolfram, but the continuing presence of German spies in Spain, a hostile German consul general in Tangier, continuing acts of sabotage, and enduring pro-Axis propaganda in the local media – would probably have been negotiated discreetly had it not been for Germany calling in payment of the debt Franco owed Hitler for his assistance during the civil war.
The 100,000 Marks made it possible for the Nazis to come into the market and purchase wolfram in competition with the Allies. It fuelled a speculative market of international intrigue and double-dealing over a commodity that in 1939, in the words of Ambassador Hoare, had been as ‘worthless as dust’.
In a secret memorandum to his foreign secretary Eden outlining the extraordinary story of wolfram trading in wartime Spain, Hoare described the frenzied pre-emptive Allied buying and German demand for the mineral thus: ‘Throughout the period there was the wildest possible gambling in the commodity. The South Sea Bubble could not compare with what happened over the Peninsula. Fortunes were made in a night, desperate crimes were committed in making them, smuggling became rife, and the huge sums given for this once worthless rock were one of the principal causes in the rise in the cost of living.’ The ambassador’s sense of humour, not notable at the best of times, wore decisively thin when dealing with Americans, many of whom he regarded as cowboys, unschooled in the delicate art of diplomacy and the game of intelligence.
Nevertheless, Hoare was wise enough to recognise that, with the tide of war showing signs of turning in the Allies’ favour, public opinion in Britain as well as the US was likely to turn against a fascist government remaining in southern Europe. ‘It is well, therefore, to reconsider our position from time to time, and to adjust our policy to the general course of the war and the actual facts of the Spanish situation,’ he wrote to London on 11 December 1943.
Four weeks later Hoare sent Eden an intelligence assessment based on a series of conversations Burns had had with Marañón since meeting him in Toledo. Burns had been provided by his prospective father-in-law with a useful insight into the current state of internal Spanish politics, not least the continuing divisions of the anti-Franco opposition. ‘Spain, however much she may need it, is not ready for a change of regime,’ Marañón told Burns. The monarchists, among whom Marañón had several close friends, had spent the past weeks and months plotting a restoration, only to see the efforts come to nought, through their inability to forge a ‘really unified, representative and responsible centre’.
Other exiles had proved themselves incapable of unifying except in extremist groups that risked being dominated by the communists. As for Franco, he remained in power more by default than genius, so Marañón believed. Despite his support of the Nationalists in the civil war, Marañón was scathing in his criticism of the Generalísimo who he thought history might come to judge as one of the ‘most guilty rulers of Spain’, out of ‘sheer stupidity and from idolatry of self and a few false political ideas’.
And yet, critically, Marañón, in his meeting with Burns, argued for cautious and consensual rather than unilateral diplomacy. ‘The fatal thing would be to let the country suffer as a consequence of such pressure [i.e. an embargo] and to allow him [Franco] to appear symbolically as the victim of the whole people.’
Less surprisingly, Marañón described Hoare’s mission as a ‘triumphant success’, for taking the long-term view and maintaining contact with ‘so many sides of Spanish life’. It was a strategy, he suggested, that should be used as a model, for dealing with the acute internal complexities of other countries. ‘The [British] Ambassador has achieved an almost mythical status which of course held its dangers but implied the highest responsibilities for Spain herself,’ Marañón told Burns.
By presenting his ambassador with his report, Burns was in effect gambling his own reputation on Marañón’s credibility with the British government. He was playing for high stakes, in his pursuit of professional recognition on the one hand and the heart of Mabel on the other. Hoare’s covering letter suggested that he had won his ambassador over and that a process was under way to convince London of the diplomatic benefits that might be gained from a Burns/Marañón marriage – one that openly linked His Majesty’s Government with a Spaniard who was popular and likely to play an important role in the future of his country, with or without Franco.
The higher echelons of the British government took less than a month to decide that the Burns/Marañón union, far from harming British interests, would actually help promote them. Fearing a German diplomatic pre-emptive strike to disrupt the wedding, the Foreign Office sent its official message of approval in cipher. Days later Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s propaganda chief, sent Burns a personal letter of congratulations in the diplomatic bag.
The wedding took place on 29 April 1944. The church chosen for the religious ceremony was San Jerónimo the Royal, an impressive piece of architecture, built in brilliant white stone, its neo-gothic exterior resembling a fairy castle, so called because of the royal connections with the restored former monastery near the Prado museum. It was here that King Alfonso XIII had married his English bride Victoria Eugenia on 31 May 1906 before both survived an assassination attempt. The Burns/Marañón wedding proved only marginally less ambitious in its conception. No expense, diplomacy or publicity was spared in making the event the best-organised and best-attended nuptials in wartime Spain, as well as the most eclectic. The invitation list ranged from orphans of Republicans killed in the civil war (the messenger boys employed by Burns’s section) and former exiles to members of the royal family and five-star generals of the Franco regime, among them General Aranda, one of the officers bribed by the British. Other guests included English nannies, Spanish countesses, and most of the Allied diplomatic corps, along with doctors, politicians, poets, painters and spies, each of whom had contributed in some way or another to bringing excitement and colour to wartime Madrid.
The atmosphere was captured in the notebook of a journalist: ‘the whole of Madrid appears to have been waiting for hours for this wedding … a mass of well-known faces mixed in with thousands of ordinary people, who are there out of sheer curiosity, waiting for the couple to arrive … there are faces from the days of the Monarchy, from the days of the Republic, from the days of the Civil War, from the present and the future … those who have survived on one side or the other are here, many out of friendship and affection towards Marañón who so skilfully has managed with the wedding of his daughter to give a show of unity, a word that is much overused these days, but of which there is scarce evidence …’
The best man was Belmonte, the bullfighter. Hours earlier he had attended the funeral of the wife of Domingo Ortega, a bullfighter turned bull rancher like himself. Belmonte had spent most of his professional life risking death. The marriage made him feel as he did after a good faena and a decent kill, happy to be alive, among friends.
Burns was impeccably dressed in a morning coat made by his tailor in Jermyn Street, Mayfair, and flanked by embassy colleagues on the one side and Mabel’s male relations on the other. Most distinctive among them was the British military attaché, Brigadier Torr, looking the archetypical Colonel Blimp, and Mabel’s brother Gregorio, his black hair smoothed back with Brylcreem, and sporting a thin black moustache, as was the fashion among young Falangist veterans of the civil war.
Like the military, the Church was similarly equally represented. Two priests had been called in for the occasion – the octogenarian Marañón family chaplain, the pious, unassuming Monsignor Monreal from Toledo Cathedral, and one of the embassy’s more eccentric secret agents, the bumptious rector of the English College in Valladolid, Monsignor Henson.
Mabel, whom Belmonte considered one of the most beautiful women in Madrid, emerged from the British embassy’s Rolls-Royce looking very much a fairy-tale Spanish princess – radiant in a flowing lace dress especially designed and sewn by the private seamstress her mother shared with Queen Victoria Eugenia. The dress was covered in damask and crimson velvet.
She was led up the long stairway and the aisle not by her beloved father but by the British ambassador, an arrangement she and Marañón had reluctantly agreed to, for the sake of diplomacy. Burns followed with Marañón’s wife Lolita, and after them came the father of the bride with the wife of the ambassador, Lady Maud.
As the procession slowly made its way towards the high altar, Hoare at one point turned towards Mabel and whispered half-jokingly that he believed his Protestant Anglo-Saxon parents were turning in their grave at the sight of him holding the hand of a Spanish Catholic bride. Mabel, her face hidden beneath a veil, replied that, actually, it was her Cuban-born grandmother who was turning in her grave at the sight of a Spanish lady with a Protestant British ambassador.
The riposte confirmed Hoare’s opinion that the new Mrs Burns was a woman of character who would need careful coaching by his wife, Lady Maud. Mabel found Hoare’s comment typical of a man she considered as personifying the worst characteristics of the colonial mentality: snobbish, mean and inherently racist.
Unaware of the barbed exchange, Burns met his young bride at the altar and, raising her veil, marvelled at her beauty and smiled with undisguised satisfaction at an event her parents and the embassy had stage-managed to perfection. In the preceding days he had persuaded a high-ranking official in the Franco government that the wedding served its interests as much as it did his Majesty’s Government, as a demonstration of Anglo-Spanish friendship in its broadest political and social sense.
Tom Burns and Mabel Marañón were married according to the old Spanish Catholic custom bajo vela, or under the veil. A large lace cloth was draped over Mabel’s and Burns’s heads, symbolically representing the union of the couple in one flesh.
The reception was held in the church’s ample cloisters. Wartime Madrid’s most famous bar owner, Pedro Chicote, marshalled an army of white-jacketed waiters for the distribution of cocktails and canapés of a variety that some of the guests had only dreamed of. Mrs Taylor, the British agent who ran the Embassy tea room, looked on with pride as bride and groom cut a towering three-layered cake she had personally created. It was made of fresh Toledo marzipan and Scottish fruit cake and topped with Spanish and British flags in a sugary embrace.
The wedding was one of the leading items in the official No Do newsreels that showed in Spanish cinemas, with the British mission in Madrid given more air time than at any stage in the war. The final preparations for the ceremony coincided with the Allies and Franco pulling back from the brink of diplomatic rupture. Spain cut its wolfram exports to Germany and the Allies lifted their oil embargo. Much to the anger of Berlin, the nuptials became popularly known in the streets of wartime Madrid as the Boda de Gasolina, or the Petrol Wedding.
Since June 1940, Burns had struggled to convince Spain to reverse its disproportionate use of German propaganda in favour of British news. He may not have ended the war but, thanks to his wedding, he had won an important battle.
The next morning, with a copy of the 16mm film of their marriage ceremony donated as a gift by Franco’s official documentary maker safely stashed in his bedroom, Burns and Mabel embarked on their honeymoon. They drove to Toledo, for a few days ‘solitude and peace’ in the Cigarral de Los Menores. From there the couple journeyed south, stopping overnight at a small hotel that British intelligence had commandeered as a safe house near Bailén, beyond the mountain chain that separates Castile from Andalusia. They then continued down towards Gibraltar where they stayed at the Rock Hotel and had lunch as the guests of the governor. German agents still loitered on the Spanish side of the border, but the threat of sabotage had evaporated and talk of an imminent German invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and full-scale offensive on the British colony had long ago ceased.
From Gibraltar the newly-weds motored along the Costa del Sol. Estepona, Marbella and Torremolinos, names that in the second half of the twentieth century would become synonymous with mass tourism, were still small fishing villages. Burns and Mabel found empty beaches all to themselves to play and make love in. In Torremolinos, they stopped off for a drink at a small hotel. It had a good view of maritime traffic and at night they could see the lights of Málaga twinkling in the distance. Its manager, the embassy’s local eyes and ears, was on a retainer.
They then journeyed inland towards the Sierra Nevada. The valleys were being replanted with olive trees, and the higher ground with pines, and the roads damaged by the civil war repaved.
In Granada, they booked into a small hotel near the Alhambra and marvelled at this enduring tribute to the architecture of Moorish Spain as they strolled around its perfumed gardens and fountains. Later they walked down to the gypsy quarter where they bought lace, drank a lot of wine and watched an impromptu flamenco, unaware that their honeymoon was about to end abruptly.
They returned to their hotel by moonlight to find an urgent telegram from the embassy. It informed Burns that his friend and colleague, the deputy head of mission Arthur Yencken, and the assistant air attaché Squadron Leader Caldwell, had been killed in an air crash in the mountains of Aragón, on their way to Barcelona. Their plane had crashed into wooded terrain in poor conditions. That night Burns and Mabel drove back to Madrid to attend Yencken’s funeral.
It was a solemn affair, with Yencken, as acting head of mission during Ambassador Hoare’s temporary absence in London, being accorded full honours by the Spanish government and the Foreign Office. Even if sabotage was suspected by some within the British embassy, London seemed happy enough to exploit the propaganda value of the funeral without turning the cause of Yencken’s death into a major diplomatic incident.
As the most senior and longest serving member of the Madrid embassy, Burns found himself among those leading the cortège. He was accompanied by key Spanish government figures, several in military uniform, alongside an equally impressive array of foreign diplomats, led by the American ambassador Carlton Hayes and an emissary of the first post-Mussolini Italian government.
The cortège walked slowly along Madrid’s main avenue – the same one down which Himmler had paraded in 1941 – the Union Jack draped over the coffin, the black mahogany funeral carriage flanked by detachments of the Spanish army, navy and air force in the slow march usually reserved for Christs, Virgins, Saints and the Generalísimo.
Hoare had spent the last months of his mission in Spain, between June and December 1944, regularly protesting about the prevarication shown by the Franco regime in shutting down the Axis spy networks, and the continuing presence of enemy agents in North Africa and Spain. According to Hoare, the Spanish police adopted ‘every kind of subterfuge’ for evading the expulsion orders decreed by their government. Agents altered their passports, had their expulsion orders revoked or conveniently disappeared. Those who were forced out of Tangier were allowed to settle on the Spanish mainland. Hoare calculated that within two months of the Allied–Spanish oil deal being signed, 201 out 220 suspected agents were still circulating freely in Spain, although the figure had fallen to 68 by Christmas 1944.
And yet the diplomatic protests emanating from the British embassy belied the fact that German intelligence was by this stage in turmoil. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who had been head of the Abwehr since at least 1936, had been ‘retired from his post’, his professionalism and political loyalty and that of several of his officers questioned by some of Hitler’s closest advisers. Canaris was later executed after being implicated in a plot to overthrow the Führer.
On 18 February 1944, Hitler decreed the setting-up of a unified German intelligence service which merged the overseas Abwehr with the domestic security organisation, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), under the control of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The decision pushed the baby out with the bath water. ‘SD officers with the haziest notions of military intelligence procedures and techniques took over positions where networks of agents, painstakingly built up over years, were “burnt” in weeks. As the intelligence war reached its climax ahead of the Normandy landings, the Abwehr was literarily hors de combat,’ wrote Canaris’s biographer Richard Bassett.
In fact German intelligence had already been severely weakened by the cracking of the cipher used in communications between Berlin and the various Abwehr outstations. This had allowed British intelligence to develop successful counter-espionage and deception operations through the extended use of double agents, an achievement which Franco seemed only too aware of. Faced with Hoare’s protests, the cunning old fox feigned surprise that the ambassador should be worrying at all about agents, most of whom, in his view, were ‘shirkers from the war and double crossers’ of no political importance.
In Madrid, M16 officers had spent much of the war encoding and decoding the decrypted Abwehr wireless traffic, the so-called ISOS material (an abbreviation of ‘Intelligence Service, Oliver Strachey’ – name of the the officer at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park responsible for German intelligence material). After the landings in North Africa, more time was devoted to investigating the links between the Abwehr in Madrid and their agents in Britain. The running of double agents helped British intelligence in Spain to identify their case handlers and other figures linked to German espionage, including their Spanish ‘cut-outs’ or go-betweens. It also, crucially, allowed the Allied chiefs of staff to continue to deceive Hitler about their planned operations in a way that had a decisive impact on the outcome of the war.
By the autumn of 1944, a Spaniard called Juan Pujol, code-named Garbo, had already earned himself a place in the history books as one of the most successful double agents run from Abwehr Madrid. Three years earlier, Pujol had made his first contact with the British through the embassy in Madrid, using his wife as a go-between. At first the British were unconvinced by the latest ‘walk-in’. Pujol claimed to be committed to the Allied cause but his personal history was full of contradictions and impossible to verify. He also claimed to have been born into a liberal middle-class family in Barcelona in 1908. At the outbreak of the civil war he had enlisted in the Republican army but had ended up fighting for the Nationalists during Franco’s last major offensive, the Battle of the Ebro. Pujol would later tell his handlers that he had become as alienated by the communism of one set of Spaniards as by the fascism of others. He saw the future of humanity as resting in the hands of the Allies – or so he told the British.
The conversion to the cause of democracy of a man lacking any ideological coherence defied belief, raising doubts about where his true loyalties lay, but Pujol’s credentials were no more dubious than those of numerous other agents recruited by the British during the war, not least the legendary Agent Zigzag, the convict Eddie Chapman who worked as part of the double-cross system run by MI5.
Like all double agents, Pujol was a mercenary who cleverly made himself indispensable to both sides. It was only after a year, during which Pujol touted his services among a plethora of British, US and German diplomats, attachés and intelligence personnel in Madrid and Lisbon, that he was recruited by MI5 and based in the UK. By then Pujol had persuaded the sceptics on the Allied side of his potential usefulness because of the quality of the intelligence he obtained from the Germans as a result of providing them with fabricated information they trusted.
Few cases in the history of British intelligence during the Second World War can equal the Garbo case in terms of its duplicity, deception and betrayal. It was through Garbo that British intelligence managed to recruit a network of bogus sub-agents, each of whom played his part in a complex operation of counter-espionage, both feeding false information and identifying names and addresses of suspect German spies and their agents.
By the time the Allies prepared to make the final preparations for the North African landing, Garbo was regarded as a prime asset by sectors of British intelligence, and by the Nazis. So highly rated was Garbo that all his material was given priority status, with every military report transmitted to Madrid from his network immediately retransmitted to Berlin. While Garbo helped in deceiving the Germans about Operation Torch, his main contribution to the Allied victory was in the false information he fed to the Germans in the weeks leading up to the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944.
Garbo’s subsequent role proved more controversial. He and his sub-agents were instructed to feed the Germans false intelligence about the physical damage, or lack of it, wrought by the V1 and V2 bombs. The guided rockets aimed at heavily populated parts of Britain’s cities were Hitler’s last, desperate throw of the dice. With them he sought to dent Allied complacency that the war was won, by serving notice of Germany’s enduring military potential. Early reports by the Garbo network suggested, however, that some of the rockets were missing their targets, and persuaded the German launchers to modify their range. While the aim of the deception was to ensure that the bombs gradually landed in harmless places, this was not always the case, because some of the bombs still went astray, hitting civilian areas. The result was arguments between Whitehall and borough councils, and protests by politicians wanting to protect their constituencies from the diverted bombing. Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, was among the cabinet ministers particularly concerned about possible unnecessary loss of life.
Throughout this period of the late summer and early autumn 1944, increasingly elaborate ruses were conjured up by Garbo’s handler, Tomás Harris, in order to maintain his credibility with the Germans. At one point, Harris had Pujol arrested on suspicion of spying as a way of reinforcing the idea that the information he was providing Berlin was genuine. Such was Garbo’s perceived value to both sides that he was recommended for both an MBE and an Iron Cross.
Within Whitehall, Pujol became the subject of a struggle between MI6 and MI5, both of whom wanted to control him, with each agency accusing the other of inadequately sharing information. The extent to which several members of the British embassy in Madrid and Lisbon may have been involved in initial contacts with Pujol is difficult to judge, given that the intelligence services were selective when declassifying official paperwork dealing with Garbo’s activities.
What is known is that it was only after Pujol had applied for accreditation as a journalist from the press office in the British embassy in Madrid – as an initial cover for his work for the Germans in London – that British intelligence began to take him seriously as an agent worth having on side. As for ambassador Hoare, at the very least he seems to have played the part of an unwitting pawn in a complex conspiracy of deception, his diplomatic protests about the lingering threat of German espionage a helpful diversion in allowing Garbo to succeed.
There is evidence, too, that the running of the Garbo network involved other key departments without their full knowledge or approval. In order to explain to his German controllers how he had managed to obtain key pieces of intelligence, Pujol claimed at different stages to be working for the BBC, and to have an ‘unconscious source’ within the Ministry of Information’s Spanish section, a pretence that risked fuelling interdepartmental distrust within Whitehall just when the British embassy was trying to pursue a coherent policy on Spain that would outlive the end of the war.
Undoubtedly, however, it was the success of the Garbo operation in tearing apart German intelligence that ensured the ascendancy within Whitehall of those most closely involved. They included Harris, Garbo’s case officer, and his friend Philby, the head of MI6 Section V, who had oversight and overall management of all the communications between Garbo and the Germans.
Against this background it is perhaps not surprising that one English Catholic who straddled the world of diplomacy, propaganda and espionage began to feel the first pangs of vulnerability.