On 3 August 1944, the increasingly pro-Allied Spanish foreign minister Jordana died of a sudden heart attack and was replaced by José Félix Lequerica, Franco’s retiring ambassador to German-occupied France.
It was at this point that Burns re-entered the power play of wartime Madrid, thanks to the close friendship the Basque-born Lequerica had developed in Paris with Burns’s father-in-law, Gregorio Marañón, during his exile in France. Following his appointment and before any formal meetings had been arranged with either the British or US embassy at any senior ambassadorial level, Lequerica, an affable bachelor who enjoyed good food and fine wines, received a secret message inviting him to dine at the Madrid flat Burns had moved into with his new bride.
The newly married Señores de Burns had coalesced effortlessly into a much-in-demand cosmopolitan partnership on the Madrid social circuit – good-looking, energetic, and intelligent. Burns showed himself to be very much in love with his young bride, a skilful and passionate dancer like himself, who could as easily dance a flamenco as a tango or fox-trot, with a physicality that had rarely been shown by the English debutantes of his youth, and the Queen’s cousin he had mistakenly believed to be the love of his life. Daily, the self-confidence Mabel had developed while growing up under her eminent father’s tutelage and those of his intellectual and powerful friends transformed into a new maturity, capable of handling the duties required of a diplomat’s wife while retaining character and independence. She attended Lady Maud’s tea parties, and occasionally participated in the knitting circle, but always made clear that she preferred coffee and wine and that she had other pressing duties to attend to.
With Mabel as his wife, Burns became more organised, and his contact book even more extensive. Together they turned their newly rented apartment in the picturesque Calle del Prado – one of Madrid’s better preserved old neighbourhoods – into a venue of choice for embassy colleagues, anglophile Spaniards, and those in the regime whose allegiance to the Axis cause was diminishing with each military encounter won by the Allies. From early spring onwards, the flat’s decorative roof terrace became the scene for extended sobremesas– the after-meal discussions that formed such a key part of Spanish culture.
The speed with which the new foreign minister, Lequerica, accepted an invitation to the Burns household that last summer of the war reflected in part the growing influence of the British embassy as Nazi fortunes waned. It reaffirmed the special nature of the Marañón name, priceless in helping gain access to high-level sources within the Franco regime. And it reflected a certain pragmatism on Franco’s part. Two months after the Normandy landings, Franco realised it was time to engage more positively with those likely to emerge victorious.
That evening Mabel played her part to perfection, first overseeing the cooking and serving of dinner by her newly hired domestic staff, and then drawing away the bulk of the guests so that Lequerica – fresh from a recent meeting with the German High Command – was given the chance, as Burns would later put it, to ‘expand and let his indiscretions roll’ in private conversation. On 22 August, as Allied forces closed in on Paris, the indiscretions drawn from Lequerica at his dinner chez Burns informed a three-page memorandum from Hoare to the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed assessment of the new minister’s appointment and its implications for Allied relations with Spain.
‘If history were conclusive, we should be forced to conclude that he [Lequerica] is nothing better than a Falange agent who has in the last four years shown himself to be a flatterer of General Franco and a friend of the Germans,’ reported Hoare. And yet, the ambassador continued, such a judgement risked being proved over-simplistic, for friends and foes alike regarded the minister as an ‘unabashed opportunist’ who was willing to back whichever side looked like winning. ‘Being a businessman from Bilbao, the Liverpool of Spain, he is not likely to keep his money in any bankrupt concern,’ quipped Hoare.
Hoare had been persuaded by the Foreign Office to delay his planned departure from Madrid until the end of the year and oversee certain changes of personnel within his embassy. Among the new recruits to Burns’s department sent by the Ministry of Information, with the blessing of the intelligence services, was Peter Laing, an Old Etonian and Grenadier Guards officer who had been invalided out of overseas military service before being assigned to royal protection duties at Windsor Castle. Laing had a reputation within his regiment as an eccentric prone to indiscipline, raising the possibility that his appointment may have been part of a deliberate ploy by Burns’s enemies within MI5 to disrupt the press department’s activities and undermine its chief’s position. In fact, Laing was befriended by Mabel in a mildly flirtatious way and kept on a relatively tight professional reign by his chief, Burns, who thought him too young for an embassy wartime post but nevertheless possessing some experience that made him useful to the specific mission in Spain.
Apart from his military training and a short spell as an interpreter at General de Gaulle’s Free French headquarters in London, the twenty-two-year-old Laing’s main qualification for the job as assistant press attaché in the Madrid embassy was that he had unique and unpublicised access to useful Spanish sources in the Franco government thanks to his romantic entanglement midway through the war with Cayetana, the young daughter and only child of Franco’s ambassador to the UK, the Duke of Alba, while both were living in London.
In early 1943, Laing was introduced to the eighteen-year-old Cayetana by Chiquita Carcaño, one of the beautiful, fashion-conscious twin daughters of the Argentinian ambassador in the UK he had befriended while studying at the Sorbonne. Cayetana Alba, the Duchess of Montoro, was descended from a noble Spanish blood line, that of Álvarez de Toledo, dating back to the feudal wars of the fourteenth century, her ancestry subsequently interwoven with a history of conquest and aristocratic interbreeding. Her artistic and outgoing personality derived inspiration from the 13th Duchess of Alba, the patron and alleged lover of the eighteenth-century painter Francisco Goya. ‘She [the Duchess of Alba] was without question one of the most beautiful women in Spain,’ wrote Goya to his friend Zapater of his muse, ‘tall, slender, and flashing dark eyes and a fine-boned face.’
Of Cayetana at first sight, Laing would later write: ‘She was absolutely divine – piggy eyes, a little plump, but sweet, and terribly attractive.’
Days after their first meeting in the Argentinian embassy, Laing was invited to Albury Park, the Victorian mansion in Surrey which the Duchess of Northumberland had rented to her friends the Albas as a weekend retreat during the war years. Set in more than 150 acres originally laid out by John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century diarist and horticulturalist, Albury would have seemed quite ordinary to the Albas whose palaces and estates in Spain included the magnificent neoclassical Palacio de Liria, in Madrid, where Cayetana was born amid Flemish tapestries, pillars of Siena marble and walls covered in Titians, Goyas and Rembrandts. Nevertheless, it was at Albury that the Duke of Alba hosted weekend lunches for some of Churchill’s top officials and ministers while his daughter entertained her own friends. Laing’s platonic infatuation with Tana, as she was more familiarly known, blossomed one sultry summer afternoon as he watched her languishing by the swimming pool, her true feeling tantatisingly obscured by dark glasses as she chewed on a reed.
At times Tana’s demeanour suggested a melancholic side. She once confessed that she had never got over the loss of her mother to tuberculosis – the same disease that killed the 13th Duchess – when she was only eight years old. Two years after her mother’s death, Tana was forced to escape from Madrid with her father at the outbreak of the civil war, first to Paris, then to London, when her father was appointed Franco’s chief representative before becoming ambassador in March 1939.
Circumstances had forced Tana to mature rather quicker than most girls of her age while leading a relatively sheltered life. Her studies were overseen by an Austrian Fräulein and her outings from the embassy, chaperoned by trusted diplomatic wives and ladies-in-waiting, included sitting for a portrait by the licentious Augustus John. While Alba’s trust in his daughter’s virtue was not misplaced on this occasion, having her pose for John was not without its risks. The artist had a weakness for attractive young women and is thought to have seduced another Spanish woman – a bride-to-be whose portrait Alba commissioned as a wedding present for her diplomat husband.
Only occasionally did Tana’s indiscretions earn her a mention in the local gossip columns, behaviour more characteristic of her later years. One memorable occasion was the night she attended a dinner at the Dorchester Hotel as the guest of Lady Emerald Cunard, the celebrated Anglo-American London society hostess. Early on in the evening, Emerald discovered that one of the waiters was a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, and somewhat flippantly urged Tana to ‘say something to him in Spanish’. When Tana did so, the waiter replied in Catalan. There was a pause before Tana announced in English to the assembled guests, ‘He’s a Red Catalan! He’s probably gong to poison us all!’ At which point the table erupted with laughter.
In matters of love, the young duchess had yet to find a suitable man to marry. While in wartime London Tana was rumoured to have maintained a formal and platonic relationship with a young air force officer who served as an aide to Prince Juan. But there was another side to her that craved the escapades and follies of youth, and which Laing tried to appeal to by accompanying her to some of London’s more sophisticated nightspots, such as the 400 Club in Leicester Square.
Although his feelings for her appear not to have been reciprocated beyond a flirtatious friendship, to Tana and her girlfriends Laing cut a fine figure. An impeccably mannered and dashing young English officer, it was not long before he had secured an introduction to the Duke of Alba and, through him, to any number of influential aristocratic and military contacts in Madrid.
When Laing arrived in Madrid the war was reaching its final stages. In that summer of 1944, the British and American embassies felt it secure enough to move the bulk of their operations to the seaside town of San Sebastián, near the Spanish–French border, away from the heat of Madrid and closer to the German retreat from southern France. At the time, there was growing concern in London and Washington about the unstable political situation north of the Pyrenees, with the German retreat prompting violent revenge on collaborators and also leading to divisions in the Resistance, between those who were communist and those who were not. The Americans and the British were anxious to counter Soviet influence. Burns was assigned to work on a propaganda operation in southern France alongside Michael Creswell, a member of MI9, the unit set up earlier in the war by British intelligence to help run the escape lines of POWs and refugees.
Creswell helped Burns across the border, putting him in touch with a French Resistance group which had good contacts in the local media and cinema. On the way to his first meeting, Burns was stopped on the road by an armed band of maquisards. One of them spoke to him in an impeccable Oxbridge accent. He turned out to be a British soldier who had been cut off behind enemy lines during the German advance at the beginning of the war and joined up with the Resistance, preferring to fight alongside them than return to regimental duties. He asked Burns to send a message back to his father that he was alive and well and would soon be emerging from the clandestinity in which he had been submerged for most of the war.
Now that the war seemed to be drawing to an end, the soldier felt it was safe to break cover and asked Burns to make telegraphic contact on his behalf with his father in England. Burns had no problem with that, or with his next encounter with the French – in the person of a local doctor and Resistance leader who invited him home for lunch. On arrival, Burns was led by his host to the end of a long garden where he watched him dig out a large glass jar containing a duck preserved in aspic, which he then shared, with a bottle of wine. ‘These were days of great joy,’ he later recalled.
Burns was followed days later into France by the British and American ambassadors in a small Allied convoy which crossed the border from Spain into French territory through Hendaye and St Jean de Luz and then on towards Biarritz.
‘The road was lined with cheering crowds of French people – men, women, and children, peasants and townspeople, priests and nuns, wounded veterans and “resistance” youths,’ wrote the American ambassador Hayes. ‘Heaps of flowers were tossed into our path and through the car windows, and when we were halted by the press of people, babies were handed in to be kissed.’ When the convoy reached Biarritz, the streets were festooned with British and American, and occasionally Russian, flags.
After the ambassadors had withdrawn back across the border, Burns got to work enlisting the support of trusted members of the Resistance. Initial attempts to bribe a local newspaper, La Résistance Républicaine, and to influence the production and mass distribution of special liberation issues – with editorial content suggested by the British – ran into difficulties because of an acute paper shortage, and political differences within its seven-member editorial committee, which included one monarchist and a communist.
Burns had more success in distributing propaganda material sent by the MoI. Large quantities of British press photographs, posters, illustrated reviews and other publicity material were circulated in Bayonne, Biarritz, St Jean de Luz and Hendaye. British newsreels were, meanwhile, shown in local cinemas, from Bordeaux to Pau, including a documentary entitled Tunisian Victory from the North African campaign. ‘It has gone a long way to reassure the French population that His Majesty’s Government was interested in keeping them informed and in countering the subtle effects of German propaganda over the four years [of war],’ Creswell reported to the embassy.
Other congratulatory notes credited Burns with a skilful propaganda coup in difficult circumstances, raising morale at a time when the last stages of the war threatened to drain the mission in Madrid of any sense of moral purpose.
Within weeks of his return, across the border, to San Sebastián, his wife gave premature birth to their first child. Mabel had suffered a miscarriage during the first weeks of their marriage, so that the successful delivery of a seemingly healthy baby was initially a source of huge joy. While undecided on his Christian name, Burns and Mabel immediately nicknamed the boy El Inglesito, the Little Englishman, in tribute to the Allied cause. Then, only days old, the baby developed respiratory problems and died.
Overwhelmed with grief, the couple placed their child in a small white coffin and took him to the local cemetery where he was laid to rest in the marble mausoleum belonging to Mabel’s Basque cousins.
The many letters of condolence included one from Burns’s embassy colleague John Walters, who was deeply affected on a personal level – it reminded him of the loss of a dear family member, deepening an alcohol addiction that had been developing through the war. ‘This is the most appalling news,’ wrote Walters. ‘I am so horrified and so sorry for you and for Mabel that the only way I can express a small part of my deep sympathy is to let you know, honestly, that in all my experience of the tragedies of life there have only been two occasions when I have felt the shock of sudden sorrow so acutely …’
On 25 October 1944 Burns wrote to Harman Grisewood at the BBC to alert him to the news: ‘… I’m writing just to let you know that we had a sad thing: a baby boy came a month before his time and wasn’t quite strong enough and died after 48 hours: there was a strong shock of loss and yet he was God-given, God-taken in such a swoop as to leave more significance than sorrow and Mabel is building up again in a most wonderful way …’
A few weeks later Burns wrote to David Jones telling him how he had managed to bear the pain of loss around El Inglesito’s death thanks to the deepening love he and Mabel found in each other.
After a period on compassionate leave, Burns returned to his embassy duties, only to find the relations he had built up with the Franco regime under threat. Within days of his return to London, the retiring ambassador Hoare delivered a strong critique of the Franco regime in a talk to his Chelsea constituents and then followed this up, on October 16th 1944, with a similarly scathing memorandum to the Foreign Office. Hoare condemned Franco’s Spain as fascist and collaborationist, and, while ruling out direct intervention, suggested that the Allies should use whatever methods were available to bring about his downfall. The statement represented a dramatic personal U-turn for Hoare, effectively throwing to the four winds the cautious crisis-averse diplomacy he himself had imposed on his embassy since 1940.
Burns felt betrayed, and came as close as he could to openly criticising his former chief in a letter he wrote to the Foreign Office. In it Burns argued that the speech risked hurting Spanish national pride and thus boosting support for Franco, although his main concern was that it had badly let down those who had assisted the Allied cause from within the regime. He told Hoare: ‘The effect [of your speech] has been frankly bad among many of our friends … these never had an advocate in their own press, nor were they specially protected by the police, but they felt that they had an understanding friend in you who would wave them a cordial goodbye from London and let it be known there that they were not so bad as propaganda painted them.’
Much had changed since that first encounter between Burns and Hoare in the late summer of 1940 when the two men had buried whatever prejudices – formed by faith and background – might have otherwise separated them in pursuit of what seemed then a straightforward common cause. During the four years of the war, Burns had developed his passionate interest in Spanish affairs in a way that, to his enemies in Whitehall, confirmed him as an unreconstructed pro-Francoist Catholic. Those who wished to tarnish his reputation further insinuated that he had become an enemy agent. By 1944 Burns’s beliefs remained unshaken, however misplaced they may have seemed to others.
By contrast Hoare, with one eye on his political future, had in the final year of the war desperately tried to shake off the curse of appeaser that had hung around his neck since Abyssinia, adopting towards the end of his posting an uncompromising attitude towards Franco’s Spain just at the time when it appeared to be positioning itself to serve the West as a strategically important ally in post-war Europe.
In truth, Hoare had struggled from the outset of his posting to like a country whose politics and culture he instinctively regarded as alien. His accommodation with the Spanish Catholic Church was the fruit of diplomatic opportunism and only in part based on his theological sympathy, as a member of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Anglican Church, with the sacrificial nature of the priesthood, and the sacramental aspect of the Mass. But contrary to what the German embassy propaganda mischievously rumoured, Hoare had never converted to Rome, nor did he have any intention of doing so. That would have been a betrayal of his Englishness. Hoare’s attitude to the Spanish as a whole was essentially colonialist, regarding them simply as pawns of British interests, while increasingly resentful of the rival influence of the United States. In the end Hoare grew tired of Spain and its idiosyncrasies to the point of being hugely relieved at getting rid of them, with his attitude towards the people, their army and their rulers not unlike that once expressed by Wellington in the aftermath of the Peninsular War. Both men looked upon the Spaniards, as they did the Indians, as a lesser race.
With the Foreign Office in no apparent hurry to send a new ambassador, the British embassy in Madrid was left temporarily under the management of Jim Bowker as chargé d’affaires, with Burns the most senior and longest-serving member of staff as his deputy.
The day after Hoare had made his outspoken criticism of the Franco regime in London, Burns met one of his contacts, Gabriel Arias Salgado, Spain’s undersecretary of state for education.
Arias Salgado was not only directly related to Franco but also one of his most trusted ministers at this time. At the meeting, Burns was greeted with a well-calculated counter-blast. The minister told him that it was absurd for Hoare to have complained about the activities in Spain of German intelligence when he knew only too well that British intelligence had been as active in the country throughout the war, if not more so, in defiance of Spain’s neutral status, while at the same time protected by it.
Not only this, Arias Salgado told Burns, but all the proof had fallen into Franco’s hands, including twenty-six transmitters of British origin seized by Spanish police, and a police report denouncing Burns himself as perhaps the biggest spy of them all, and the dictator had chosen to turn a blind eye.
As for the future, Arias Salgado reminded Burns, Spain should be allowed to choose her own post-war development without foreign intervention. If there was a future for Anglo-Spanish relations, Franco’s minister suggested it was in a common Christian heritage capable of resisting the spread of Bolshevism in Europe.
With Arias Salgado ‘rattling off with nervous intensity’, Burns had thought it prudent to listen patiently before offering a measured reply. It was time, he suggested to the minister as delicately as he could, for the Spanish government to recognise that there were ‘moral issues’ at stake in the war that were important for the future of the whole world.
Moreover, while Britain respected ‘technical neutrality’ and, indeed, had asked for nothing more from Spain, London was no longer in the mood to accept ‘moral neutrality’.
Asked by Arias Salgado what he meant by this, Burns replied: ‘I have never seen a word of blame addressed to Germany in the Spanish press in four years, no criticism of the Nazi threat to Europe or of the barbarities committed by the Nazis.’
Franco’s government in the last weeks of the Second World War appeared to be a regime in denial, not just in its refusal to accept any guilt over collaboration with the Axis powers from the outset of the civil war to the final days of the Second World War, but, crucially, in its inability to accept and project through the national media the true nature of Nazism as it had manifested itself in the concentration camps.
The situation presented the press section in the British embassy in Madrid with a fresh challenge in propaganda terms. Its response was to suggest that Spanish journalists should be included in a media visit the combined Allied command was organising to the concentration camp at Dachau. The move drew Burns into renewed conflict with his enemies in British intelligence, for one of the journalists he proposed for the visit, Carlos Sentis, had been placed on a list of suspects by Kim Philby’s friends in MI5 because of his pro-Franco leanings.
According to British intelligence files, during the civil war, Sentís had worked as a spy for Franco in Paris, using his cover as a journalist to report secretly on pro-Republican Spanish refugees, among them the fugitive former Spanish correspondent in Berlin, Eugenio Xammar, with whom he shared a flat for a while. Sentís later flew to London and covered the aftermath of the abdication crisis, before publishing a sympathetic if light-hearted book about the British and their democratic institutions. He opened his preface with the comment that he considered journalism to be a great sport in peacetime and espionage in wartime, a statement which even his close friends considered to be crassly indiscreet.
When Franco assumed power, Sentís joined the government administration as a member of the staff of the Falangist minister without portfolio, Rafael Sánchez Mazas. He also pursued his career as a freelance journalist, with his main articles published in the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia, whose Catalan owner, the Count of Godó, was regarded by the British as pro-Allied.
With the outbreak of War in Europe, Sentis initiated a discreet relationship with the British embassy in Madrid where he was regarded as a useful source and supporter of the Allied cause despite his links with media outlets of more dubious ideological credentials. They included Radio Mundial, a Madrid-based radio station that broadcast relatively balanced reports on the progress of the war to Latin America and yet was suspected by British intelligence of being financed by the Germans.
It was in the autumn of 1942 that Burns first unequivocally championed Sentís as a useful agent of Allied propaganda, recommending in a letter to the head of the Spanish section at the MoI, Billy McCann, that he be allowed to be posted as the new London correspondent of the Spanish news agency EFE. ‘He [Sentís] has been pretty coy in his relations with me but is, I am convinced, very well disposed and certainly would not play the double game,’ Burns wrote.
At the time he made the request Burns appears to have been unaware of the protracted secret campaign his enemies in MI5 and MI6 were conducting to have him sacked because of his pro-Franco views and his record of recommending Spanish journalists suspected of being German agents. Burns had survived thanks to the trust invested in him by his ambassador, and the support he enjoyed within the Foreign Office and from other members of the intelligence community. But he now faced additional accusations of furthering the cause of the enemy.
McCann contacted Tomás Harris at MI5 to tell him what he knew about Sentís. He had just read Sentis’s book, La Europa que he visto morir (The Europe that I Have Seen Dying), and concluded that it contained ‘no gibes at England of any kind’. McCann went on, ‘Personally I know Carlos Sentís very well: he is a Catalan, and in my opinion, well disposed towards us.’ He recalled that he got to know Sentís when they were both living in the Palace Hotel during the first year of the war. ‘He was friendly and, when I was having trouble with the Gestapo, he offered to help me if I got into any real difficulties.’
McCann had met Sentís again on a more recent visit to Madrid. Sentís was now married and living in a ‘very expensive way’ in a luxurious apartment the Duke of Alba had built near the Palacio de Liria. He asked McCann to use his influence to allow Radio Mundial material into Latin America, arguing that it would help Allied interests by keeping German material out of the local press.
McCann had told Sentís to contact Burns despite lingering doubts over the true loyalties of both men. ‘My own personal opinion of Carlos Sentís is that he is a pleasant and gifted young man, who finds the Fascist way of life alien to his own idea of life. At the same time, he has a taste for high living and a great love of money, and if the Germans were paying him enough I am convinced that he would work for them even if he knew it was against his real feelings,’ McCann wrote on 7 October 1942. With the Sentís case the subject of ongoing correspondence between the MoI and the secret services, Burns faced intense lobbying by the Franco regime. In December that year he was visited by Gregorio Marañón, the young Falangist son of the doctor and his future brother-in-law, a close friend of Sentís who had also been recruited into the state apparatus.
Marañón showed Burns a telegram sent to Franco’s Director General of Press by José Brugada, the assistant press attaché in the Spanish embassy in London. It reported that Sentís would be declared persona non grata as a correspondent in the UK. ‘This communication from Brugada was shown to me in confidence and naturally you will not let him know that I have seen it,’ Burns subsequently wrote to McCann. Neither Burns nor the young Marañón, it seemed, realised that Brugada had been recruited by a section of MI5 as a double agent, code-named Peppermint.
Burns told McCann that Marañón had told him he could not imagine a person better suited to report on British affairs than Sentís, ‘judging from his earlier record and his well-known [pro-Allied] sympathies’. It was a view with which Burns concurred. However, as Burns told Marañón, it was perhaps ‘quite natural’ that in general London was not enthusiastic about giving a positive answer after its experiences with Luis Calvo, Alcázar de Velasco and other Spanish journalists suspected of being German agents. The Spanish regime, moreover, had not helped matters, Burns told Marañón, by continuing to censor heavily the reports sent by the one remaining London-based journalist, Felipe Fernández Armesto, who wrote under the pseudonym Augusto Assia.
Days later Sentís’s accreditation request was officially blocked by MI5. The case file on Sentis had been updated by MI5’s Iberian desk officer Dick Broomham-White with information provided by Tomás Harris and Kim Philby. Their ‘sources’ had taken the view that Sentís was ‘untrustworthy’, ‘arriviste’ and a ‘snake’.
Broomham-White urged the intelligence services not to place any reliance on any recommendations from Burns given the precedent set by the Calvo affair. And yet Broomham-White’s file makes clear that his section was opposed to Sentís’s arrival in the UK not because they had any evidence that he might be a German spy but on the basis that his professional journalism might undermine the double-cross game the secret services were conducting through the Spanish embassy in London.
‘At present the main Spanish source of information to the [Spanish] Embassy is under our control and has been used for passing over deception material. It would be most unfortunate from our point of view if a new Spanish press correspondent arrived in this country who had access to the Fleet Street gossip and provided an independent source which might supply information contradicting that which we were trying to put across through our controlled channel,’ wrote Broomham-White. He thus assumed that MI5’s double-cross system had priority status over anybody else’s handling of agents, however important the latter was in diplomatic and propaganda terms. It was a view shared by several of his MI5 colleagues and those who straddled the influential XX Committee, but which was disputed by other members of the intelligence community, and within government departments such as the Foreign Office and the MoI.
It would take another three and half years before Burns got positive vindication of the accreditation of Sentís, with his enemies in MI5 no longer able to sustain a convincing case against him. In May 1945 Burns successfully arranged to have Sentís imbedded with US troops in Germany after first flying him to London and being accredited there as a journalist. He and his colleague Fernández Armesto subsequently covered the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg trials for the two leading Spanish newspapers ABC and La Vanguardia. The scenes witnessed at Dachau proved particularly poignant for a Spanish readership, as details emerged of the brutality with which the Nazis treated the prisoners, one-third of whom were Jews, in addition to an estimated three thousand Catholic nuns, priests and bishops, some of whom were subsequently beatified by the Pope.
By the autumn of 1944, the Allies had been advancing rapidly across Europe, overrunning towns and villages with minimum resistance, watched by a civilian population that had spent most of the war believing in Hitler’s invincibility. The reports filed by Sentís and Fernández Armesto conveyed some of the horror while making clear that Hitler’s Germany had been resolutely defeated.
And yet even at this late stage in the war the British embassy in Madrid found itself immersed in fresh controversy from an unexpected quarter. It was around this time, in early May 1945, that Burns heard the news that the wayward – some thought him degenerate – thirty-year-old oldest son of Leo Amery, a close friend of Samuel Hoare, had had his brief career as a Nazi propagandist cut short by his capture by Italian partisans at the end of the war.
John Amery was interned in northern Italy before being brought back to the UK, under arrest, by Leonard Burt, a Scotland Yard detective on secondment to MI5. Four months later, in early September, his brother Julian, later a prominent Conservative MP, arrived in Madrid in a desperate attempt to save John from the gallows.
John, or ‘Jack’ as he was known to family and friends, had told his defence lawyers that while in Spain during the civil war he had been granted Spanish citizenship. The legal advice he received was that such an admission, if supported by evidence, would make it difficult if not impossible for the British government to proceed with a case of treason against him in a British court.
The Amery case was further complicated by the unpublicised involvement of Hoare. In March 1942, while serving as ambassador in Madrid, Hoare had received a letter from Leo Amery expressing his gratitude for the ‘parcel of warm things’ that Lady Maud had sent Jack. The letter also thanked Hoare for the contacts he had provided Jack in unoccupied France.
The close friendship which bound Samuel and Maud Hoare to Leo and Florence Amery (John’s parents) dated back to the early part of the century when the heads of each family made their way, thanks to privileged upbringings and a common political allegiance to the Conservative Party, effortlessly into the higher echelons of power. Samuel Hoare was ten years younger than Leo Amery, but both had long mixed in similar social circles, having been educated at the exclusive boy’s school Harrow, as Churchill had also been. Later, both Hoare and Amery served in Andrew Bonar Law’s government, then in that of Stanley Baldwin (another Old Harrovian), Hoare as Secretary of State for Air, Amery as First Lord of the Admiralty and subsequently as Colonial Secretary. When the Conservatives joined the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, Hoare became Secretary of State for India while Amery pursued an active political career, as an MP, a director of several companies and a member of the Empire Industries Association.
When Hoare was later forced to resign over his apparent ‘sellout’ to Mussolini over Abyssinia and another clash with Churchill following their disagreement over the India Act, Amery was again at his side.
After the outbreak of war, it was Hoare (the appeaser) who became exiled from Churchill’s cabinet, while Amery returned as Secretary of State for India. Amery was disappointed not to form part of Churchill’s war cabinet, but made the most of the position he was offered, while maintaining his close personal ties with Hoare once his friend had been posted as ambassador to Madrid.
By then both Jack and his young brother Julian had become embroiled in the politics of Spain. Of the two, Julian had the more high-profile involvement in the civil war, on Franco’s side. Julian was a first-year Oxford undergraduate when, in 1937, a year after the outbreak of war in Spain, he met Franco’s representative in London, the Duke of Alba, and arrangements were made for him to go to Spain as an observer attached to Nationalist forces.
Once across the Spanish border, Julian travelled extensively, visiting a military hospital in San Sebastián and the Nationalist headquarters in Burgos. From there he joined the international press corps on the Aragón Front, with Franco’s troops poised to cut Barcelona off from Republican-held Valencia, a defining moment of the war. In Huesca, Julian came across ‘apocalyptic horror’: a cemetery which had been desecrated by Republicans, with some of the skeletons rearranged round a card table, a bottle of wine in one hand, a glass in the other. Other skeletons had been entwined, as if dancing in a grotesque embrace of death.
Joining the Nationalist advance near Lérida, and coming under bombardment from Republican artillery, Julian shared cover in a shell hole with Peter Kemp, another of the few Englishmen who had volunteered to fight for Franco. Julian then drove south to Seville, before returning to England via Gibraltar. Once back in Britain, Julian found himself very much in demand from Conservatives and Catholics in universities, publishing and the media as a public speaker, his pro-Franco utterances fuelling the propaganda war against the left.
He returned to Burgos as an accredited correspondent with the Daily Express, reaching Madrid just a few hours after the city was ‘liberated’ by Franco’s advance troops, continuing to write articles broadly sympathetic to the Nationalist cause. Jack was also in Spain during the civil war, although the precise nature of his activity became a subject of dispute. According to Julian, his brother joined the Spanish Foreign Legion in mid-March 1937, although entries in his passport showed him departing from Lisbon and arriving in Genoa at that time. He later suggested to his father that he may have been involved in running German guns to Spain, and had spent some time in secret on Spanish soil.
When Hoare was appointed ambassador to Spain in 1940, Jack was living in Portugal, desperately short of money and under pressure from his father to report for service for King and Country, while secretly suspected by MI5 of being involved in diamond smuggling. Within two years, it was Jack’s collaboration with Nazi Germany which was becoming of growing covert interest to British intelligence.
The contents of the diplomatic bag from the British embassy in Madrid, secretly intercepted by MI5, showed that both Hoare and his wife had agreed to act as conduits for clothes, money and letters sent by Leo to his oldest son. Jack was by then living in France, actively broadcasting on behalf of Nazi Germany even as his health deteriorated from alcoholism and TB.
‘I wonder if I might trouble you to put a stamp on the enclosed letter and have it dropped into a letterbox in France,’ Leo had written to Hoare. A father’s protective love for the prodigal son meant that Leo had yet to come to terms with the perception in the corridors of power in Whitehall that Jack was an enemy of the state. Similarly, Hoare appears to have been in denial about the security implications of his actions and those of his wife in deliberately choosing not to use the legal channels open to them for communicating with their son, via the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The suggestion Hoare made in a letter to Leo that Jack might be useful as a semi-official agent of the British embassy in unoccupied France defied credibility given Jack’s record of collaboration with Vichy. Hoare’s misuse of diplomatic privilege in a gesture of solidarity with an old political chum was at best a serious misjudgement, at worst a conspiracy of betrayal of the Allied cause.
One person who openly admitted many years later to have been with Jack in Burgos was Burns. It was in 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, and Burns, together with Gabriel Herbert, had driven to the Nationalist headquarters with an ambulance donated by English Catholics. Burns described how one evening he found himself in a room reserved for the foreign press, ‘glued to the radio, in the company of John [Jack] Amery and a tall blond man with a Nazi buttonhole badge’, listening to the latest BBC bulletins about the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Burns recalled the ensuing conversation thus: ‘“We’ll squash those dwarfs flat,” said the Nazi at one point. I glared at him and retorted that in that case he would eventually be squashed flat himself and the swastika banished from the earth. John Amery, the only witness to this clash, was silent, withdrawn.’
Burns described Amery as a ‘romantic figure who had taken up the Nationalist cause, leading him into later and deeper involvement with the Axis as a propagandist in Italy’. He was, in Burns’s view, ‘misguided but never malevolent and certainly not guilty of any bloody act’.
It was on such sympathies in the British embassy in Madrid, together with the friends in the Franco regime he had made during the civil war, that Julian Amery counted when he came to Spain to plead on his brother’s behalf.
While Hoare had left Spain in January, the Amerys depended on at least two allies among those who had served under him. One was Burns, the other his most recent recruit, Laing, the young ex-Grenadier guardsman turned spy.
How much Burns knew of Hoare’s contacts with the Amerys is uncertain. However, given his close working relationship with his ambassador, it is at least possible that Burns did know and felt comfortable about not reporting it to London. Burns not only had enormous respect for Julian’s pro-Nationalist stance during the civil war, he also shared common friends in SOE, which Julian had joined after the outbreak of war.
Now that Julian had ‘gallantly’ come to Madrid to try and save his brother, Burns was willing to give him all the support he could muster. He had no doubt – for that is what he had been told by his own sources in the Franco regime – that Jack had indeed been granted Spanish nationality, as he had informed his lawyers, and that any trial for treason in a British court was a miscarriage of justice.
Nonetheless, the Foreign Office regarded the Amery case as one of great sensitivity and insisted that Julian’s trip to Madrid be handled with maximum discretion. So, rather than booking him into the Ritz or the Palace where the embassy had reserved rooms, Burns arranged for him to stay in the flat of his deputy, Laing. Laing and Julian knew each other from Oxford and had mixed in similar social circles in London. But the accommodation served an added operational purpose which was to keep Julian’s visit carefully monitored. Laing’s flat was a block away from the embassy and even nearer to a separate building used by British intelligence. It was the best ‘safe’ house the embassy could offer.
Laing and Burns were more than happy to facilitate his access to senior figures in the Spanish regime in the hope that they might help to save Jack’s life. Soon after Julian’s arrival, they succeeded in getting Ernesto Giménez Caballero, the regime’s main ideologue, to arrange a meeting with Franco, with Laing providing his car and chauffeur. Laing forgot to tell the chauffeur to remove the Union Jack before he set off, so that the visit took on an official note, much to the embarrassment of the Foreign Office.
London was furious and Burns was instructed to give Laing an official reprimand. What Julian was unaware of was that the entire visit was being secretly tracked by a sector of British intelligence with a very different agenda from that of Julian’s official chaperones – one that was uncompromisingly anti-Francoist and that wished Jack Amery to stand trial and subsequently to be be found guilty.
This sector was heavily influenced by Philby. By the spring of 1944, Philby, highly regarded by his colleagues and moving fast up the promotion ladder, had been moved from the Iberian section to a new department within SIS with responsibility for setting up anti-Russian networks in Eastern Europe. But he kept a watching brief on Spain, using the influence he enjoyed across Whitehall to counter the British embassy’s attempt to engage with leading members of the Franco regime and dissident Nazis.
It is almost certain that Philby would have strongly approved of, if not had a more direct role in, the decision to have the resident SOE officer in Madrid, Squadron Leader Park, join the embassy team officially assigned to accompany Julian Amery while in Spain. Unknown to Amery, Park’s mission was to pass as much politically incriminating evidence as he could back to SIS and MI5 to be used in court against Jack. Thus the MI5 officer in charge of Jack Amery’s case made much of the fact that his brother not only met with fascist ideologues such as Giménez Caballero but also General Muñoz Grandes, the man who had been in charge of the Spanish Blue Division that had fought alongside the Germans on the Russian front.
Julian pushed on regardless, obtaining sworn affidavits from people who had known Jack during the civil war, a document purporting to show that he had indeed enlisted on 17 March in the Spanish Foreign Legion, and a separate witness statement, supported by Burns, from Serrano Súñer, Franco’s former foreign minister, confirming Jack’s Spanish citizenship. A defence lawyer in the Spanish embassy regarded the statement as ‘conclusive evidence according to Spanish law’.
But such efforts were to no avail. MI5 came up with their own document listing Jack as a passenger on board a Dutch merchant ship sailing from Lisbon to Genoa during a ten-day period in March 1937. MI5 claimed that the ship’s log showed Jack to be the only passenger on board, and that the vessel was at sea on the day of his ‘enlistment’ in the Spanish Foreign Legion. Days later, Major Henry Pakenham, an MI6 officer in Madrid, filed a report to MI5 accusing Julian, and by implication those helping him in his investigation in Spain, of being involved in a conspiracy to manufacture evidence and documents.
In the end the fate of Jack Amery was sealed by the machinations of Spanish politics and the intrigue of international diplomacy. The shifting post-war power balance in the Franco regime, and pressure exercised by sectors of the Foreign Office, resulted in the Spanish Ministry of the Interior and the Spanish embassy in London refusing to back the defence’s claim. Franco realised that ditching Amery was perhaps a price worth paying in order to maintain some sort of relationship with the generally antagonistic post-war Labour government. Within Whitehall there were those who did not relish the idea of a protracted trial airing in public the dirty linen of Amery’s contacts with the Nazis, and the potentially even more embarrassing tensions and contradictions of British policy towards wartime Spain.
On 28 November 1945 Jack Amery pleaded guilty, having convinced himself and his family that he would be spared the death penalty. In fact being found guilty of treason carried an automatic death penalty in those days. His barrister advised him to plead not guilty and the trial judge went to great lengths to ensure he knew the consequences of ignoring the advice. It has been argued that Amery was dying of TB and wanted to spare his parents the embarrassment of a trial. He never appealed the death sentence, nor did he ask for the sentence to be commuted. He was hanged at Wandsworth prison, three weeks later, on 19 December after the Home Secretary resisted a last-ditch campaign for clemency from family, friends and lawyers, based on a claim of insanity. One member of Jack’s family, his uncle-in-law, Hamar Greenwood, made a personal appeal to Clement Attlee based on the apparent inhumanity of executing someone for his opinions rather than his actions. That was also rejected. Jack Amery was condemned on his record of broadcasting Nazi propaganda on a regular basis and also of trying to raise battalions among British POW’s to fight the Soviets.
In the end those closest to Jack, led by his father Leo, remain convinced that he had been a victim of political necessity. Having seen the wider conservative establishment saved the embarrassment of a trial, a Labour government was in the mood to teach it a severe lesson, that no one is above the law. Samuel Hoare was nevertheless undoubtedly lucky to have escaped from the whole Amery debacle without having to answer in public for his collaboration. So, too, were Burns and Laing.
On 8 May, VE Day, there were no euphoric mass street gatherings in Madrid, as occurred in other European and American cities. Days earlier, the news of Hitler’s suicide had prompted an outpouring of sympathy among certain elements of the Falange and Spanish military. Spaniards in blue shirts and military uniform had turned up at the German embassy in Madrid and its consulates around the country to sign the book of condolence.
‘It was a bleak day. It wasn’t really sunny … I felt the atmosphere was funereal, and terribly distressing … It was an oppressive feeling to be surrounded by people who seemed not to be pleased with the fact that we had won,’ Helen Rolfe, a secretary at the British embassy, recalled.
VE Day caught the Anglo-Spanish Enriqueta Harris, deputy head of the MoI’s Iberian section, on a short work-related visit to Madrid. She had long come to the conclusion that the British embassy was dominated by pro-Franco Catholics led by Burns. She chose, however, to delay the confrontation she had planned to have with Burns, electing instead to accept his invitation to the embassy’s modest ceremony to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The victory party took the form of a gathering, organised by the chargé d’affaires, Jim Bowker, and Burns in the main embassy building, of all the British and local staff and small numbers from the expatriate community. They included a large group of English nannies who had spent the last four years looking after the children of Spanish aristocrats. Cakes and sandwiches were laid on at Mrs Taylor’s Embassy Bar and bottles of sherry by Ann Williams, one of the embassy secretaries from a family in the wine trade who had married a member of the Domecq sherry family.
Harris later recalled: ‘Part of me was furious that I was in Madrid on VE Day. I felt it unfortunate to be caught there with so many people not really caring about the fact we had won. But we celebrated in the embassy … singing “God Save the King”. It was very emotional in its own way … Afterwards I rushed out to the local florist who managed to come up with some red, white and blue flowers – just like I imagined the colour of the bunting back in the UK. I took them like a flag to my Spanish aunt. Do you know what she did with them? She put each colour in a different vase. She didn’t have a clue what they meant …’
In the Marañón household the celebrations for the end of the war were overshadowed by a particular piece of news that filled Mabel and her father with horror. Four days before Hitler’s suicide, and four days before the unconditional surrender of Germany, a squadron of RAF Typhoons had attacked and sunk the Cap Arcona, the ship on which they had sailed to South America and back during the civil war. The luxury liner, converted to military use during the war, was in the Baltic transporting both hundreds of SS guards and officers and several thousand prisoners released from concentration camps. While German trawlers rescued most of the SS, only 350 of the 4500 or so prisoners survived.
Following the German surrender, however, Burns received a message from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Franco had broken off diplomatic ties with Germany. However belated and absurd the gesture may have seemed, he took it as a signal that the Allies could now step up their demands for the internment or expulsion from Spain of all Germans suspected of having links with the Nazi regime, a process that had got under way earlier in the year, and the seizing of any related assets by the Spanish state on behalf of the victorious Allies.
A dossier prepared by the OSS’s counter-intelligence section X-2, with the cooperation of the British, detailed the extent of ‘German penetration of Spain, illegal currency transfers, smuggled works of art, and plans by French collaborators, pro-Nazi individuals, and covert organisations to use Spain as a post-war hideout – as well as integration of German technicians into the Spanish military’, reported one of its operatives. X-2 identified nearly fifty Spanish firms suspected of being used by Germany for espionage purposes, some three thousand agents in Spain and more than four hundred members of ‘enemy clandestine services’.
Before VE Day was over, Burns was taken by a group of officials from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the German embassy to officially ‘liberate’ it from Nazi occupation. The Nazis had vacated the building in an operation staggered over a number of months, the exodus seemingly completed just hours before Burns arrived. Missing were works of art, and documents which had been removed or destroyed. The only remaining pieces of furniture were some chairs, office desks and filing cabinets, all of which were empty. In one of them Burns found a Mauser pistol and a large number of Iron Crosses, many of them apparently intended for the Spanish volunteers who had fought for the Blue Division on the eastern front. Burns pocketed them all, then climbed on to the roof and hoisted the Union Jack.