One day during the final autumn of the war the British embassy in Madrid’s long serving military attaché, the blimpish Brigadier Torr, burst into Burns’s office and declared: ‘Congratulations, Tom, you are a “Call-me-God” in the embassy honours list.’ Days earlier, on 19 October, the retiring ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, had written to Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, recommending that Burns be awarded ‘some honour’ for wartime services but without specifying whether it should be a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) or the lower grade Order of the British Empire (OBE), as had been periodically awarded to other chiefs of branches within the embassy.
‘He [Burns] has done most remarkable work in Spain, from almost nothing to something very big,’ Hoare wrote. ‘In addition to this, he has made himself one of the most popular personalities of Spain.’
Hoare’s valedictory book of memoirs published after the war paid special tribute to Burns’s press and information department. ‘Under his vigorous direction, an insignificant section of the Embassy had developed into a great and imposing organisation.’
And yet Burns’s enemies returned to haunt him during his final months in Madrid, and many years would pass before he was honoured with any medal for services to his country.
One of his more influential detractors surfaced weeks after Torr’s premature announcement, when Burns returned to London on what was to prove his final stretch of leave, granted on compassionate grounds following the death of his baby son.
The new offensive against Burns’s reputation was launched by Sir Kenneth Grubb, one of the senior officials at the Ministry of Information. Grubb was a former evangelical lay missionary whose fundamentalist Protestantism put him at odds with Burns. The theological divide fuelled a mutual animosity from the moment each was recruited to the MoI at the outbreak of the war, although a formal confrontation was deferred until the war was coming to its conclusion.
During the war years, Burns grew in his view of Grubb as a fastidious puritan and bureaucrat with a patronising Anglo-Saxon attitude on matters related to the Spanish-speaking world. Grubb, for his part, despised Burns as an insubordinate loose cannon – a ‘foreigner’ who had been allowed by the embassy to get above himself and had ‘gone native’ in Spain, defying the MoI’s attempts to control him.
Burns spent the war years happily making use of whatever propaganda material and funds that were supplied to him by the MoI while considering his line of duty lay with his ambassador, the Foreign Office and Churchill via his effective intelligence chief in Madrid, the naval attaché Captain Hillgarth, and others with whom he had a mutual trust on intelligence matters.
Only with Hoare’s withdrawal from Madrid did Grubb sense an opportunity to punish Burns for his perceived insubordination. To distract him from his real intention, Grubb invited Burns to lunch at the Travellers Club in London for what he claimed would be a routine update briefing on policy matters. It was only at coffee that Grubb turned suddenly and remarked, with what Burns took for a smirk, that he had blocked Hoare’s attempts to have him decorated for his wartime work. ‘By the way, I’m sorry I had to knock you off the embassy honours list; I thought too many RCs [Roman Catholics] were getting gongs,’ Grubb said.
While Burns would later recall the incident as evidence of enduring religious bigotry within the British state, the action against him was taken against the background, days earlier, of a final concerted attempt by Burns’s enemies in the intelligence community to paint him as a traitor.
Encouraged by Philby and Tomás Harris, and drawing on a report written by Anthony Blunt on his monitoring of suspect Spaniards, MI5’s head of counter intelligence, Captain Guy Liddell, wrote a scathing denunciation of Burns in a secret memorandum to Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of Britain’s wartime Joint Intelligence Committe, and Whitehall’s spy supremo. Blunt claimed that while Burns had been on leave in London the press attaché had failed to report his suspicions that six Spanish journalists who were being repatriated from Berlin to Spain via London might have been working as German agents. No evidence was provided to substantiate the claim, but the mere allegation made on hearsay by an unidentified source was sufficient for Liddell to vigorously pursue the case against Burns.
Liddell wrote on 17 July 1945: ‘This might of course be considered a minor sin of omission but as you know we have long felt some concern about the activities of Burns who, during the course of the last four years, has pressed for the admission of undesirable Spanish journalists to the UK, on the doubtful grounds that they were going to do so much for Anglo-Spanish relations. In fact three or four of these people whose cases he sponsored have subsequently turned out to be German agents. In fact they were almost notoriously so in Spain before they started. Burns has moreover explicitly stated his view that he is not interested in security and was not concerned to know that the Spanish correspondents whom he was recommending as suitable to work in this country were in fact German agents. I do not know whether there is anything to be done about this but to say the least it does seem that Burns has been singularly ill-chosen for the job.’
Cavendish-Bentinck spent a week looking into the allegations and consulting others in government about Burns. The prejudice felt in some quarters against a spy who had never quite fitted into the Establishment because of his faith and background was deeply rooted, as was evident in the profile that was made of him. ‘He is an Anglo-Chilean, aged 39, but we do not know whether he is first or second generation born abroad – at any rate his English is at times of a rather foreign nature,’ noted Cavendish-Bentinck in his report on Burns. The comment contained a glaring falsehood. Burns, though born in Chile, had been brought up and raised in England, and his accent was pure public school, without a trace of ‘foreignness’.
The intelligence chief did admit nevertheless to finding no evidence supporting the suggestion that Burns was sponsoring the activities of the Germans. All Cavendish-Bentinck unearthed was an administrative blunder earlier on in the war for which Burns was not held directly responsible: the apparent loss of some low-grade correspondence between the MoI and the embassy. ‘In 1940 there was some minor hanky-panky regarding misuse of the [diplomatic] bag in which however the Ministry of Information themselves were as much responsible as Burns,’ he noted. The ‘hanky-panky’ had occurred while Burns was still working at the MoI headquarters in Senate House, prior to his posting to Madrid. It had involved the smuggling of propaganda material, paid for by a slush fund approved by his superiors. There may also have been a reference to the unfortunate incident, reported in an earlier chapter, in which Burns, with backing from the Foreign Office, arranged for the pro-Francoist agent, the Marques del Moral, to be paid for information while working in Madrid, only to discover that the agent had been double-billing the British government.
Cavendish-Bentinck reported that any such misdemeanours had apparently been compensated for by the high-level intelligence Burns had secured through his unrivalled penetration of the Franco regime. ‘Such reports from Burns which have been forwarded by the Ambassador to this Office have generally met with approval,’ he wrote.
Critically, however, Cavendish-Bentinck went on to warn that the vendetta a sector of MI5 was pursuing threatened to be counterproductive, as it risked compromising Spaniards and their handlers who were involved in the double-cross game. He concluded, ‘If any action were to be taken [against Burns] it would be necessary to reveal the sources of our information and, as Burns does not appear to have committed many gross crimes in the past I doubt whether any action is desirable in the present case.’
The report saved Burns from any disciplinary action against him. With hindsight it was ironic, nonetheless, that the latest attack on him was prompted by information provided by Blunt, a traitor who, as was subsequently discovered, had spent his time with MI5 during the Second World War sharing all the secret intelligence he handled with Moscow.
If Blunt and his friends were allowed to operate for a while unsuspected and unrestrained it was because Russia was still considered a wartime ally and the political climate in Britain on matters Spanish was turning in their favour. By the summer of 1945 the change in the public mood was reflected in a headline carried in the Daily Herald on the eve of the first post-war General Election: ‘A Vote for Churchill is a Vote for Franco’ reflected the certainty that the majority of British voters saw Franco’s Spain as the last bastion of fascism in Europe. And the suspicion that Churchill’s policy of non-intervention to keep Spain neutral in the war was also responsible for keeping the dictator in power.
By now the whispering campaign against Burns had surfaced with a vengeance in Tribune, the socialist newspaper which, at the end of the war included members of the British Communist as well as the Labour Party on its editorial board. ‘Spaniards must be really puzzled over the British outlook. This democracy of ours, which is swinging so hard to the Left, is still presented in Madrid by a Press attaché who is an outstanding friend of the Franco regime and married into the inner ranks,’ commented the newspaper’s diarist.
The new Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had no wish to commit Britain to another military intervention in Europe once the war with Germany was over and opted for symbolic political gestures against the Franco regime rather than any substantive change of policy towards Spain. In a gesture of solidarity with the left, he ordered that any further honours that may have been recommended for the embassy in Madrid be quickly withdrawn, particularly from those most directly associated with the policy of appeasement towards Franco.
Burns was not surprised by the news of his honours snub, which he was told by Whitehall friends had as much to do with politics as with his faith and was no reflection on his professional competence. He was nonetheless furious that it had come from his old enemy, the Protestant Grubb, in an unholy alliance with those who had always opposed him, for ideological reasons, over Spain. The anti-Franco camp in the UK had been reinforced by an opportunistic U-turn by Hoare, and the signing by the Duke of Alba of a manifesto calling for the return of the monarchy.
The political shift against the Franco regime left Hoare’s successor as ambassador Sir Victor Mallet ostensibly with little room to manoeuvre when he arrived in Madrid in July 1945, just as the Labour Party was being propelled to power in Britain. Compared to his previous posting in neutral Sweden, where he had been given a reasonably free hand to deal with local problems as they arose, Mallet found that Spain was ‘politically gunpowder’. As he later recalled, it soon became only too evident from instructions received from London that official relations with the Franco regime had to be restrained and personal cordiality eschewed.
And yet Franco’s determination to stay in power had more coherence than the Labour government’s plans for removing him, as the newly arrived ambassador was only too quick to notice. In his first statement to the House of Commons, Ernest Bevin said that it was up to the Spanish to decide their future. The British government would adopt a ‘favourable view’ if steps were taken by the Spanish people to change the regime, but His Majesty’s Government would not itself do anything which would risk provoking another civil war – in other words the overarching policy towards Spain remained passive and non-interventionist, just as it had been under the Conservatives.
Mallet felt frustrated and unconvinced. He wrote: ‘A series of suggestions kept reaching me from London that various discredited left wing exiles from the War now living in London like Negrín, or like Giral in Mexico should be encouraged to form a provisional government which would be recognised by the great powers. What this recognition could possibly do to help was by no means clear because Franco was still obviously in full command of the country, his power resting on the three pillars of Army, the Church and Big Business, with the support of the Falange which, however, was becoming rather an embarrassment.’
In a clear strategy aimed at defusing the enmity of the victorious democracies, Franco had appointed a conservative Christian Democrat, Alberto Martín Artajo, as his new foreign minister. His task was to cultivate the image of Franco as an authoritarian Catholic leader, increasingly distanced from the Falange – as opposed to that of the fascist dictator, which is how the Marxist left saw him – and to accelerate the process of denazification the Allies had demanded.
Martín Artajo was a lawyer with interests in Catholic publishing whom Burns had known and maintained cordial relations with since before the war. On his appointment to government he agreed to a series of secret meetings with Burns, outside the official diplomatic protocol, knowing that he would get a sympathetic hearing and that his views would be reported back to London.
It was from these meetings that Mallet drew his intelligence on the political direction of the regime, and tried to influence the Foreign Office, much to the chagrin of those like the Soviet ambassador in London, Feodor Gousev, who wished, like his boss Stalin, to have the Allies break off relations with Franco and offer support to ‘democratic forces’.
Gousev was convinced that Franco was trying to consolidate his position and ‘throwing dust in the eyes of the Allies’ by announcing that he intended to hold elections at some point in the future.
Undoubtedly the Burns/Martín Artajo nexus was used by Franco to help him buy time, resisting foreign pressure for immediate democratic change following the collapse of the Axis powers. And yet British policy of continuing non-intervention appears, nevertheless, to have based itself on an accurate reading of Spain’s internal political situation at the end of the war.
Franco’s own police reports may have talked up the threat of the left being heartened by the defeat of the Axis, anti-Falangist sentiments may have stirred in Catholic and military circles and some former followers of the regime, including the Duke of Alba, may have dreamt that the restoration of the monarchy was imminent, but the fact remained that the opposition to Franco inside Spain’s border and within the Spanish exiled community lacked a powerful unifying organisation, still less a common ideology, ranging as it did from anarchists on the left to virulently anti-communist aristocrats on the right.
In early August 1945, the British ambassador Mallet wrote to the Foreign Office from his summer residence in San Sebastián describing the ‘war weariness’ that he felt gripped the majority of Spaniards and warning the Allies against supporting or provoking a military uprising, not least because the army remained largely supportive of Franco. In the last stages of the war, the US military had refused to bow to increasing pressure both from domestic American opinion and the anti-Franco resistance fighters that straddled the French-Spanish border to push on into Spain when Allied troops liberated south-east France.
Mallet attached to his dispatch an eight-page memorandum he had received from Burns soon after he had taken up his ambassadorial posting in Madrid, based on the secret conversations Burns had had with Martín Artajo, the minister nicknamed the ‘pious elephant’ because of his Catholicism and heavy build.
Burns had told Martín Artajo how struck he had been on his recent visit to London by what seemed a unanimity and depth of feeling against General Franco among new members of Parliament.
Martín Artajo, however, had little trouble in persuading Burns of his sincerity in arguing that British public opinion was gravely misinformed about Spanish politics. Far from being an unpopular tyrant, Franco counted on the support of the ‘great mass of the Spanish people’ who had suffered from the ‘reds’ during the Spanish Civil War and were enormously grateful to El Caudillo not only for saving their country from anarchy but also keeping it out of the Second World War.
But Martín Artajo was much too astute a lawyer to think that an experienced observer of the Spanish scene such as Burns would easily ignore the aspirations of many Spaniards for some kind of democratic opening capable of freeing Spain from its international isolation.
Thus he gave Burns to understand that given time, Franco would be prepared to pave the way for a peaceful transfer of power to the ‘most responsible’ political elements in Spain, which, in their shared view, were found not on the left but towards the centre, including like-minded Christian democrats and supporters of Don Juan, the Bourbon prince in exile. The future of Spain lay in patience, not revolution in other words. It was a message Burns had no qualms about transmitting to his new ambassador.
On August 6 1945 he wrote: ‘A violent or provocative act or gesture from the outside just now … might well plunge Spaniards once more into one of the reckless metaphysical moods to which they are so prone, making them defiant of measurable standards and ultimately destructive of themselves and of all understanding … any idea that there can be a swift and radical change of the present regime into something more representative without bloodshed and violence on a large scale must be rejected …’
In the final weeks of 1945 Burns tried to get his father-in-law Gregorio Marañón named ambassador in London. The idea was conjured up with the help of his friend Martín Artajo but was blocked by Franco. Before the year was out, another contact of Burns’s, the former foreign minister Serrano Súñer, had written to his brother-in-law Franco suggesting he name Marañón a minister in a government of national unity which would also include other intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset and the Catalan politician Francesco Cambó. This, too, Franco vetoed.
According to Franco’s biographer Paul Preston, Franco distrusted Marañón as ‘someone who would be loyal to higher ideals than the survival in power of Franco’. In their continuing exchanges, Burns and Martín Artajo had concurred that Marañón was among the few intellectuals who could lay claim to the respect of the majority of Spaniards. His political background was that of a founder and onetime liberal supporter of the Republic whose anti-communism had led him, in the end, to back Franco in the civil war, in the hope that, once it was over, he would oversee the establishment of a political system to which most Spaniards could feel they belonged.
But while Franco had agreed, under pressure from his advisers, to allow Marañón back from exile in 1942 – as a way of contributing to a sense of normality – he thought the idea of bringing Marañón into government a step too far and too soon in the direction of democracy. In fact, it would take another thirty-two years for the Spanish people to vote for the kind of regime they wanted in free and democratic elections and by then Marañón and many of his generation were long dead.
In Spain the end of the Second World War brought a reckoning of sorts. Burns’s final weeks there saw him helping his British and American colleagues draw up a priority list for the urgent repatriation of 257 German officials and agents considered a security and political risk. It proved a protracted and inconclusive affair, with just over a hundred repatriated by the end of 1946, seventy being given the right to remain in Spain and the rest unaccounted for, having changed their names before starting new lives in South America. Such was the case of Reinhardt Spitzy, private secretary to Hitler’s foreign minister Ribbentrop, who escaped to Argentina in 1947, along with countless other Nazis.
Those repatriated to Germany included Wilhelm Leissner (alias Gustav Lenz), who had served as the head of German military espionage in Spain for most of the war. His assistant, Kurt Meyer-Döhner, the naval attaché, got a job working for the Spanish Admiralty. Similarly the police attaché and Gestapo representative Walter Eugene Mosig fled from an internment camp before returning to a discreet post with the Spanish General Directorate of Security.
Other Nazis gave up the spying game and became successful businessmen in post-war Spain, setting up residences and hotels along the country’s southern coast in anticipation of what became one of Europe’s fastest growing tourist economies from the late 1950s onwards. Among them was Johannes Bernhardt, one of the chief organisers of German military and economic aid to Spain and a personal friend of Franco. Also granted residence in Spain after a short period in a detention camp in Caldas del Rey were two brothers, Adolfo and Luis Clauss, who were working for German intelligence in Huelva at the time of Operation Mincemeat. They returned to the south of Spain and developed a successful family business in construction while becoming substantial landowners on the border with Portugal.
But the most elaborate escape from prosecution involved the Nazi with whom Burns had competed personally in his battle for the hearts and minds of wartime Spaniards. On 6 February 1946, coincidentally the same day that Burns’s return to the UK was officially noted by the Spanish authorities, the German embassy’s press attaché, spy and propaganda chief Hans Lazar eluded an order for his arrest.
A week later, Lazar reappeared in the form of a letter to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that he had been recovering in a hospital in Madrid after an operation for acute appendicitis. An enclosed photograph showed the once impeccably dressed Lazar, naked from the waist upwards, looking drawn and emaciated, as if he were dying of some terminal disease.
The photograph, cynically mirroring the image of a concentration camp survivor, was almost certainly fabricated – black propaganda of the kind Lazar was a master at creating. With it came a plea from Lazar that he be granted Spanish nationality, or at worst repatriated to his ‘native’ Austria rather than Germany. ‘The only case that can be held against me is that during a particular period of time I served as a member of the German embassy,’ Lazar wrote disingenuously.
Lazar was never arrested. Instead, Franco showed a leniency towards him, and to other Nazis, that he denied to thousands of Spaniards who were either executed or condemned to long prison sentences under his regime. Lazar was allowed to disappear quietly and without trace for several years until his case had ceased to be of interest to the Allies. Eight years passed before Lazar remerged as a freelance journalist and commentator in West Germany. In an article published in a Hamburg newspaper just before Christmas 1953, Lazar lashed out at the evils of communism and portrayed Franco as a bastion of Western Christian values.
By then the Cold War was under way, following the East/West crisis of the Berlin blockade, and London and Washington had long ceased to view pursuing ex-Nazis as a priority. Meanwhile, the majority of those who had played important roles in the British embassy in wartime Madrid had long moved on to pastures new anyway. From the comfort of his Chelsea home, the ennobled British ambassador to wartime Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare – Lord Templewood – wrote his memoirs, entitled Ambassador on Special Mission, which aimed to justify his policy towards Franco’s Spain and why, in the end, he had turned against it. In the words of Sir Victor Mallet, his successor, Hoare’s reminiscences were written in a generally ‘spiteful and exaggerated tone with the main object of redounding in his own glory’. For a brief spell Hoare was engaged in an unseemly row with his American counterpart Carlton Hayes, who, in his own memoirs, accused Hoare of imperial arrogance and of failing to understand the true nature of Spain as some of his subordinates, including Burns, had.
Hoare served out the twilight of his political years as an opposition peer, his dreams of leading the Conservative Party shattered by Labour’s post-war electoral success and feeling increasingly embittered by the decline of the British Empire and America’s emergence as the dominant Western power. He tried to remain active in the post-war parliament, helping get the 1948 Criminal Justice Bill through, opposing capital punishment, and becoming chairman of the Magistrates’ Association and the anti-slavery movement. He was also appointed president of the Lawn Tennis Association and became a regular fixture at the annual Wimbledon tournament.
Hoare’s trusted adviser on intelligence matters, Captain Hillgarth, spent his retirement pursuing investments in Spain with his old friend Juan March while maintaining his contacts with MI6. Hillgarth converted to Catholicism, and chose Burns as his godfather for reception into the Catholic Church. Out of Burns’s team, John Walters returned to journalism, while John Stordy joined the BBC and subsequently the UN. Peter Laing stayed on in the Madrid embassy before turning to freelance writing on Spanish affairs and investing in Spanish real estate.
Among the service chiefs of Hoare’s embassy, the military attaché Brigadier Torr became a farmer, and his assistant, Alan Lubbock, a Hampshire squire as Lord Lieutenant of the county. Hamilton Stokes, the MI6 station chief in Madrid, was briefly put in charge of Iberian affairs in London, receiving and distributing reports from Spain, Portugal and West Africa. Suffering from bad eyesight, made worse by the neon lighting in MI6’s ageing offices in Ryder Street, he retired in 1945 to become secretary of the Dublin Yacht Club. He was replaced as Iberian station chief under cover of Second Secretary, British Embassy, Chancery division, by Desmond Bristow, who had also served in the embassy in wartime Madrid. In 1947, Bristow replaced the new head of MI6’s Madrid station, David Thomson, who had been forced to resign after one of his agents had been caught in possession of Spanish War Office papers. With the cover of Second Secretary, Bristow kept track of Nazis, communist agents and the internal machinations of Franco’s regime. Within a year of his arrival, the British embassy found itself having to increase its reporting on the state of prisoners held in Spanish jails, an issue of concern to Labour backbench MPs.
The task of attending political trials and visiting prisons was given to the longest surviving member of the Madrid embassy staff, Bernard Malley, who had worked as assistant press attaché to Burns throughout the war and had subsequently been confirmed on a permanent contract as a locally employed counsellor. With his staunch Catholic views and pro-Franco contacts, the former seminarian continued to play a useful role as a well-placed informant on Spanish internal affairs, although the British remained diplomatically ineffectual in moderating Franco’s appalling human rights record.
Burns, like Malley, came to benefit from the fact that the Cold War shifted the focus of attention of the British foreign policy and of the security and intelligence services away from fascism towards communism, putting pressure on the Soviet moles who had infiltrated the British state from the late 1930s. Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, two intelligence officers who had spent much of the war trying to get Burns sacked for alleged disloyalty to the Allied cause, were belatedly exposed as Soviet spies.
Philby completed his defection by escaping to Moscow in 1963, having betrayed a network of British agents in Eastern Europe, and leaving behind a trail of disillusioned colleagues – senior intelligence officers in MI6 and MI5 – who had looked up to him as a man of impeccable professionalism and loyalty to the Crown, beyond suspicion. The Americans, with the evidence of hindsight, blamed the Philby affair on a very English old boy network’s instinct to protect its own. It was, however, a network to which not everyone belonged.
Those who had venerated Philby throughout the Second World War and beyond included Richard Broomham-White, MI5’s wartime Iberian desk officer who was part of the conspiracy to get Burns sacked from his Madrid posting. As a post-war Conservative Member of Parliament, Broomham-White stood up in the House of Commons prior to his friend Philby’s final exposé as a Soviet agent and insisted that he was innocent, a statement that caused him severe embarrassment and subsequent public discredit. Enriqueta Harris left the Ministry of Information and returned to the art world she had once inhabited with Anthony Blunt. In the post-war years she was employed in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute which had been incorporated into the University of London. She also earned a reputation as a leading authority on Spanish masters like El Greco and Diego Velazquez, and was honoured by the post-Franco Spanish state. She received the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos in 1989, and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabel La Catolica. She died in April 2006.
Tomás Harris, the MI5 officer who had tried, together with his sister, so consistently to have Burns sacked from the Ministry of Information, was killed in a mysterious car crash in Mallorca in 1964, a year after Philby absconded to Moscow, and a few months before Blunt, by then firmly ensconced in his post-war role as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, confessed to being a Soviet spy in return for immunity from prosecution.
The doubts as to whether Tomás Harris was a Soviet agent were never dispelled. Harris’s former colleague Bristow subsequently credited him for his work as a case officer of Juan Pujol, Garbo, who in turn was brought back from post-war anonymity and self-exile in South America and honoured by MI5 as one of the most successful double-cross operators of the entire war.
In his own memoirs, published in defiance of attempts by MI6 to suppress them, Bristow wrote that Harris had been in an ‘ideal situation’ to further Soviet infiltration, not just as a case officer for allegedly the most successful wartime deception agent in the world, but having also acted as a nexus for a group of friends that included Philby, Blunt, Burgess and Maclean – the four Cambridge KGB ‘spies’ – and some of the top figures of MI5 and MI6.
Bristow alleged that after the war Harris and Blunt, together with Pujol ran a fake paintings scam out of Latin America until it was cut short by a Venezuelan art expert. It was also alleged that Harris had been the Cambridge four’s paymaster, and that some of the fakes Blunt authenticated after the war helped raise money for the Spanish Communist Party. The greatest mystery of all continued to surround the circumstances of Harris’s death, with the claim that he was drunk and hit a tree questioned in the aftermath of the crash by his wife who was with him at the time. Subsequently investigators familiar with the road, and who did not consider the site of the accident a blackspot, resurrected the idea that the car might have been tampered with and that Harris had been the victim of an assassination, although no evidence has even been produced substantiating such a claim.
At the same time the absence of any conclusive proof that there was an accident has fuelled the theory that Harris was killed in anticipation that he would eventually have been hauled in for questioning in London over the Philby case and revealed an even greater degree of penetration of Western intelligence by the Soviets than has hitherto been discovered to be the case. The mystery remains unresolved.
After leaving the Madrid embassy, Burns ostensibly went back to his prewar profession as a publisher. A letter from his old friend Douglas Jerrold suggested he take charge of Burns & Oates, the firm founded by his great-uncle, and consolidate it as a leading Catholic books and media enterprise. ‘Oblique suggestions from SIS (MI6) that I might wish for some permanent employment with them would now be discouraged with safety for the future,’ Burns wrote mischievously in his memoirs.
In fact some of the friends Burns made before and during the war served as spies in the Cold War and he himself maintained a secret informal relationship with the British and US intelligence services after returning to public life as a publisher, a cover for overseas travel and the securing of a variety of sources of information.
His contacts with dissident Christian groups resisting the repression of religious liberty under Eastern European communism and his extensive international network of influential Catholic friends in government and opposition provided him with intelligence from Warsaw to Belfast and across Asia, Africa and the Americas with particularly privileged information on the inside machinations of the Vatican under a succession of Popes, which he would pass on to trusted contacts in MI6, the Foreign Office and the CIA.
Meanwhile, the personal file his enemies in MI5 had built up against him during the war was quietly shelved with the advent of the Cold War, as Franco came to be seen as a strategic partner of American interests – just as the informal network of anti-Catholic conspirators involved in the double-cross system within the organisation was quietly disbanded.
Only one entry in March 1948, two years after Burns returned to Britain from his Spanish posting, served as a reminder that some of the anti-Franco agents Tomás Harris had put in place remained active in the early post-war years. A source code-named Poodle, run by Harris and Blunt’s old section B1 inside the Spanish embassy, reported that Burns was by then ‘collaborating fully’ with the Spanish chargé d’affaires in London, the Marques de Santa Cruz, in ‘defending the Franco regime from attacks on it in this country’.
Soon after the new Spanish diplomat had returned to London after a visit to Spain, Burns submitted to him the draft of a letter he suggested might be sent to The Times in reply to criticism by a spokesman for the Labour Party. ‘Santa Cruz reported to Madrid that Burns’s open championship of the regime would have an important effect on public opinion here in view of his high standing,’ reported the MI5 agent code-named Poodle.
In the years following the end of the war, Franco survived in power, despite attempts to isolate him internationally, ranging from Spain’s initial exclusion from the post-war UN to the temporary withdrawal of British and American ambassadors from Madrid, a measure Washington reversed in 1950 when it authorised military and financial aid to Spain so as to bring it within the anti-Soviet bloc. The resumption of full diplomatic ties with Britain coincided with the return to power of a Conservative government, so that Franco had little difficulty in persuading the Foreign Office to accept the nomination as the new Spanish ambassador to London of Miguel Primo de Rivera, a brother of the founder of the Falange, José Antonio, and a stalwart of the regime.
The subsequent appointment of Santa Cruz – who as José Villaverde had served as deputy head of mission in London under the Duke of Alba – as ambassador in 1958 came as the memory of Franco’s services to the Allies was fading and opposition to his authoritarian rule was growing. However, Santa Cruz and his vivacious wife Casilda became the consummate diplomatic couple, making it their mission to assure a wide circle of friends that democracy would eventually return to Spain with the monarchy. Among regular guests at the embassy were Salvador de Madariaga, the Oxford-based academic who had shunned his homeland since the civil war, the ageing exiled former Republican prime minister Negrín and a variety of influential Labour and Conservative MPs including the Tory minister R.A. ‘Rab’ Butler and future prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
While the post-war Labour Party had been in power, Burns’s sphere of influence had focused on Conservative MPs and their associated networks that extended across the civil service, the Garrick Club and, within it, a convivial dining table known as the Old Burgundians, which counted The Times editor Bill Casey, the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, the writer Arthur Ransome and the poet T. S. Eliot among its regular attendees. His enduring post-war friendships in the world of intelligence included Walter Bell, who after serving in Washington in the UK–US liaison committee under William Stephenson went on to work as a spy in various Cold War postings, including Cairo and Nairobi. Burns also maintained close links with a number of MI6 officers, including Peter Lunn, son of the Catholic polemicist Arnold Lunn, whose expertise in tapping Soviet communications was made much use of in post-war Vienna and subsequently East Berlin.
The return of a Conservative government in 1951 saw Burns playing an increasingly influential role in bolstering Anglo-Spanish relations with the help of his wife Mabel, their London home an informal gathering place for an assortment of Spaniards living in London, well-connected members of the British political establishment and foreign service and priests and theologians.
Eight months after Anthony Eden, the new Conservative foreign secretary, declared he was looking forward to improved relations with Franco’s Spain, on 2 May 1952 Burns gave a keynote lecture at the Ateneo, the prestigious literary club in Madrid. The invitation had the official blessing of the authorities as well as the patronage of Burns’s father-in-law Gregorio Marañón. No Englishman had been afforded such an honour by the Spaniards for years. Burns spoke on English Catholicism, a subject tailor-made for his audience and to appease the authorities, as well as one genuinely close to his heart.
He began by noting that, in contrast to Spaniards, the English were generally by nature reserved when it came to religious matters, as if slightly embarrassed by them. He went on to identify a growing and increasing confident Catholic population, comprising traditional English families, Irish immigrants and converts who had managed to free the ‘true faith’ from its social and political segregation before concluding thus: ‘Every thinking Englishman today faces a world debate between Christianity and Atheism, and increasingly, as he looks for authentic religion amidst all the confusions, all the darkness, he finds it in the Catholic community … which threatens no one, lest he be the devil.’
Burns’s contacts extended, crucially, to Rome and across the Atlantic, for it was the Vatican and the US administration that led post-war international re-engagement with the Franco’s Spain, culminating in its admission to the UN in December 1955.
Key players involved in discreet negotiations during this period included Spaniards Burns had befriended during his time in the embassy in Madrid. Prominent among them was the Christian Democrat lawyer Joaquin Ruiz-Giménez, who was dispatched as Spain’s ambassador to the Holy See to secure the Pope’s recognition of the Franco regime as a Catholic nation state.
In the US, another of Burns’s friends from Madrid days, the former Spanish foreign minister José Félix Lequerica, coordinated a pro-Spanish lobby. For his part Burns used his regular trips to America under his guise of a publisher to help encourage the restoration of full US diplomatic relations with Spain through a network of staunchly anti-communist and powerful American Catholics, who ranged from the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, to the CIA’s Archie Roosevelt.
The grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Archibald had risen through the ranks of the American intelligence services during the war. In 1953, the year Franco signed a historic pact with the US, Roosevelt was posted to Madrid as the CIA station chief. During his three years there he was a regular visitor to the Cigarral de Los Menores, the country retreat outside Toledo where Burns had first met the daughter of its owner, his future bride Mabel Marañón, in 1943.
‘Dr Marañón was a true sage – a great medical doctor, historian, philosopher, and a wonderful human being,’ Roosevelt later wrote. He went on to recount how knowledgeable Marañón had shown himself to be about Spain’s Mozarabic culture, a theme the CIA man warmed to, regarding himself as somewhat of a specialist in dealings with Muslims.
While Burns travelled frequently across the Atlantic, mentally Mabel never left Spain. It was not just that she returned to the country frequently, taking her children on holidays, and keeping in touch with her parents and their influential social network. She became, in effect, an honorary Spanish ambassadress, founding cultural associations such as the Anglo-Spanish Society with one of the post-war British ambassadors to Spain, Jock Balfour, and charities such as the Spanish Welfare Fund, which helped channel money from Franco’s Spain into the growing postwar immigrant community, work for which she was honoured by the Spanish state with the Grand Cross of Isabel la Católica.
It was during these post-war years that Mabel met Franco and brought to his attention the plight of elderly Spaniards who wanted to return home from exile, young single mothers, and children who needed Spanish-language classes. There were still hundreds of political prisoners and periodic executions still took place in Spain, but Mabel refrained from commenting on the country’s internal affairs.
Instead she focused on getting a sympathetic response from the dictator to her request for money for her charities when she pointed out that the majority of Spanish immigrants in the UK at the time were from his native Galicia. So moved was Franco by Mabel’s special pleading that, at one point in their conversation, he burst into tears. ‘Mis pobres Gallegas’ (my poor Galician women) he wailed, for Franco was himself of Galician stock. Behind his tears, Franco had also spotted a political opportunity to counter-balance the opposition to his regime by the old republican exiled community that had established itself in London during the Spanish Civil War. In the post-war years the house – and later the flat – that Mabel shared with her husband in the English capital would leave its doors open as an informal meeting place for a politically wide cross-section of Spaniards. Discussions about Spanish culture or alternatives to Franco’s dictatorial regime would take place over a coffee or a glass of wine or an extended dinner of Spanish food.
But Mabel’s charities, which she helped run when not working for the BBC’s Spanish language service, became the beneficiaries of Spanish public and private funding with Franco’s blessing, part of it channelled through the Foundation set up in 1955 in memory of Juan March, the banker who had helped bankroll the Spanish Civil War in the first place and later worked as a British agent.
While using the Marañón name to maintain his own contacts in Spain, on his return to Britain Burns wasted little time in getting back in touch with the world with which he had been familiar as a bachelor. Burns stayed close to the Richey brothers, Harman Grisewood, and his best friend David Jones, who in 1955 was awarded a CBE. When the Queen asked Jones what he did, he answered simply, ‘I paint pictures and your mother has quite a collection of them.’ He might have added, ‘and Anthony Blunt looks after them’, which he did at the time, as Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.
While gaining some recognition for his undoubted talent as a poet and artist, work which Burns helped promote, Jones never rid himself of a life-long depression which took hold of him in the trenches in the Great War. Jones spent his last years as a semi-recluse in a nursing home in the outskirts of London. Burns would visit him regularly at weekends, and paid a moving tribute to him in his memoirs. ‘I doubt if any other mortal soul has been such a counsellor, such a kind comrade,’ wrote Burns eighteen years after Jones’s death in 1974.
Among Burns’s female friends and one-time lovers, Ann Bowes-Lyon settled into her marriage with Dr Frank D’Abreu, became a devoted Catholic, and helped run charities. The fund-raising events and the Stonyhurst old-boy network meant that the Burnses and the D’Abreus met socially from time to time. The affair between Tom Burns and Ann Bowes-Lyon was never resumed, although Ann secretly kept his prewar letters until she died in 1999.
For her part, Mabel Marañón found her new post-war life in London as Mrs Tom Burns difficult only when having to suffer some of the old friendships her husband had forged in a different era.
‘Back early (11 o’clock) to hotel where just as I was in bed I was telephoned by Burns who came up with his bride, swarthy, squat, Japanese appearance. He says he can arrange a holiday in Spain for me,’ Evelyn Waugh noted in his London diary on 21 February 1946.
Mabel, whom most other men considered a beauty, did not keep a diary at this time, but her dislike for Waugh was mutual. She found him physically repugnant, snobbish and rude to the point of cruelty. It was soon after that first encounter that she and her husband invited Waugh for dinner at their first post-war London home in Victoria Square. The author spent part of the evening mocking Mabel for bringing a Spanish maid over from Franco’s Spain to serve at table wearing white gloves and also complained about the smell of garlic given off by the chorizo stored next to the guest room. Mabel felt it a terrible abuse of her hospitality.
But worse was to come in the conflict between the most brilliant English novelist of his generation and the self-assured youngest daughter of one of twentieth-century Spain’s most eminent men of science and letters. Despite the earlier fiasco, Mabel was reluctantly persuaded weeks later by her husband to lend Waugh their home for a party he wanted to give in honour of Clare Booth Luce. The glamorous wife of the proprietor of Time-Life was an ardent Catholic convert and Waugh thought the Burns’s residence an ideal place to gather together a good sampling of London’s Catholic intelligentsia. ‘There was a fine mixture of writers and hacks with a sprinkling of selected clergy; the house was awash with champagne; Dr Hyde, so to call the better side of Evelyn, was at his kindliest and most amusing,’ Burns later recalled.
And yet Burns was as upset as Mabel by the appearance at their door the following evening of Robert Speaight, the Catholic actor and author. He had turned up a day late because of a misleading invitation Waugh had deliberately sent him.
Some years later Burns had transferred his young family of one daughter and two sons from their elegant Georgian house in Victoria Square to a flat in a Victorian mansion block opposite Westminster Cathedral. No sooner had he moved in than he received a postcard from Waugh. ‘I am sorry that you have come down in the world,’ Waugh snarled. Burns thought it best not to show the postcard to Mabel.
While Mabel never reconciled herself with Waugh’s acerbic wit and brash manner – both of which she found offensive – Burns continued to value him as a literary and social asset, suffering as best he could his idiosyncrasies, over occasional meals together and correspondence, and seeking some advantage in return.
In the summer of 1946, Burns helped arrange for Waugh’s first postwar visit to Spain. At the time Waugh was basking in the fame of his bestseller Brideshead Revisited. He was ‘alternately absorbed in writing and high living, with hard drinking, to the neglect of his wife and family’, Burns later recalled. As he would later reflect in his memoirs, Waugh had acquired a persona with a constant scowling glare alternating with an expression of ineffable boredom. ‘These masks cracked occasionally with a smile which seemed to me a grotesque grimace,’ Burns wrote. And yet Burns considered Waugh’s acceptance of an invitation to attend an international congress in Madrid in honour of the fifteenth-century Spanish Dominican Francisco de Victoria something of a diplomatic coup, at a time when the wartime allied powers appeared determined to exclude Franco’s Spain from the United Nations.
The congress was ultimately postponed but Waugh and his companion, his old friend from Oxford days, the Tablet editor Douglas Woodruff, spent two weeks touring emblemic cities of Franco’s Spain – Valladolid, Burgos and Salamanca – and laying a wreath at the Peninsular War memorial in Vitoria. Despite periodic organisational setbacks, the two companions were treated to endless banquets and vins d’honneur by the lay and ecclesiastical Spanish authorities and, in the British ambassador Victor Mallet’s absence, by his wife Peggy, whom Waugh knew from an earlier trip abroad.
Two years later, in the summer of 1948, Waugh repaid Burns the favour of his free holiday in Spain by editing a book by the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton. ‘Tom Burns gave me enthralling task of cutting the redundancies and solecisms of Tom Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. This took a week and resulted in what should be a fine thin volume. I gave dinner to Mia, the Pakenhams and Burns. Bill £26. But lavish,’ Waugh wrote in his dairy.
Merton’s book, with Waugh’s amendments, was published in Britain as Elected Silence, a title chosen by Burns in consultation with Waugh. This time Waugh did not question his publisher’s judgement as he had done with the earlier Waugh in Abyssinia.
Burns later wrote to Waugh on the subject of their mutual friend Graham Greene’s new novel, The Heart of the Matter. The central character is called Scobie, a Catholic expatriate policeman living in West Africa. Scobie’s marriage is in crisis, and he falls in love with another woman. When his wife discovers the affair, Scobie pretends he still loves her and, to maintain the pretence, takes Holy Communion with her. Believing that his adultery has placed him in a state of mortal sin, he commits suicide, offering his damnation as a sacrifice for the two women in his life. Whatever its literary merits, as a fellow Catholic Burns believed that Greene had produced a ‘sham spiritual dilemma’ with ‘a caricature conventional Catholic couple’. He told Waugh: ‘He [Greene] almost turns things upside down and hates the sinners whilst he loves the sin. G. G. is becoming a sort of smart Alec of Jansenism.’
Waugh’s subsequent review published in the Tablet was no less visceral. ‘To me the idea of willing my own damnation for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a mad blasphemy …’ he wrote in a review that provoked a lengthy debate in the letters column of the magazine but which ultimately left his friendship with Burns and Greene unaffected.
Greene had officially left MI6 in 1944 in mysterious circumstances. Just as Burns had facilitated Greene’s original recruitment into government service with the MoI in the immediate aftermath of war, so he played a part in helping the author reintegrate into civilian life. Burns arranged for Greene to be offered a job at the publishers Eyre & Spottiswoode. These were days before the advent of the big conglomerates, when publishing was still a cottage industry run by a close social circle of well-known public figures.
Greene was a member of one such coterie, their meetings at the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden recalled by Burns: ‘Graham seemed to have a spotlight on him, although his companions were by no means shadowy figures and I recall them with affection … there was Douglas Jerrold, the chairman of the company and a tall, saturnine figure … all of a right-wing piece … in contrast was his close colleague Sir Charles Petrie; an owlish, round and bearded baronet, a learned historian but as much as home in the Lamb and Flag as in the Carlton Club.’ Frank Morley made up the trio, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar who had ‘adopted England as his own and had settled near its heart, in Buckinghamshire’.
While Burns’s relations with Waugh cooled in later years, his friendship with Greene intensified as publisher and author found common ground in their engagement with the more liberal Catholic theology emerging from the Second Vatican Council and their more discreet and enduring contacts with the murky world of espionage. Burns’s friendship with Greene was made easier by the fact that he was much admired by Mabel, who found him thoughtful, kind and attractive, in striking contrast to her feelings for Waugh.
When Burns took over as the editor of the Tablet in 1967 from the more conservative Douglas Woodruff, he stepped up his correspondence and informal meetings with Greene, at which conversation would range freely over matters of politics, theology and love. In 1976 Burns persuaded Greene to become a Trustee of the Tablet Trust, along with several of the great and good of the post-war British Catholic establishment led by the Duke of Norfolk and the one-time head of the civil service, Sir John Hunt. Burns came to rely on Greene’s voluntary contributions to raise the Tablet’s profile at minimal cost, most notably the submission by the author of episodes of what became the novel Monsignor Quixote.
A regular visitor to his flat in Antibes, Burns was in correspondence with Greene right up to the final week of the author’s life, in June 1991, when he himself had already been diagnosed with cancer – two Catholics struggling to come to terms with their mortality, raging against the night, with their faith in God facing its ultimate test and with the frustration and pain of old age and incurable illness.
Two years younger than Greene, my father died four and a half years later, on 8 December 1995, the iconic Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception, having suffered from the same fatal blood condition as his good friend.
More than four decades had passed since the author of this book was conceived. Mabel Marañón, my mother, and my father, Tom, were then staying in their new Madrid flat on the sixth floor of a building on the Avenida Castellana also occupied by her parents and her two sisters. On 27 January 1953, Mabel gave birth in the Spanish capital to Jimmy, her fourth surviving child, the first to be born in Spain since the premature death towards the end of the Second World War of El Inglesito. My parents saw my coming into this world as a symbol of a new beginning in Anglo-Spanish relations. Thirty years later, on his retirement from publishing in 1983, Tom Burns was awarded the OBE in recognition of services to Queen and Country.