The main source for this chapter is Tom Burns, The Use of Memory (London: Sheed & Ward, 1993)
p. 1 very English, very respectable, and very traditional: Sir Samuel Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission (London: Collins, 1946), p. 9.
p. 2 There is no country: Ibid., p.102.
p. 2 a new generation of young intellectuals: Author’s conversations with various English Catholics, including Barbara Lucas and Michael Walsh. Also Bernard Wall, Headlong into Change (London: Harvill, 1969), p. 61, and Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity (London, SCM Press, 2005), pp. 280–81, ibid., p. 279.
p. 4 Thank you very much: David Burns’s letters from the front are from Burns Family Archive (BFA).
p. 5 Stonyhurst considered itself unique: For the most comprehensive history of the school, from its early beginnings to the late twentieth century, see T. E. Muir, Stonyhurst College (London: James & James, 1992).
p. 5 loyalty to the British state: Francis Irwin, Stonyhurst War Record (Stonyhurst, 1927), p. xxxiv. Also contains account of David Burns’s death in action, pp. 18–20.
p. 5 John was infused with an adventurous and polemical spirit: I have drawn from correspondence between John and Fr D’Arcy from BFA. Also H. J. A. Sire, Father Martin D’Arcy (Leominster, 1997), p. 48.
p. 6 Burns and the much older Gwen: Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (ed.), Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks (London: Tate Publishing in association with The National Library of Wales, 2004), pp. 162, 164; Susan Chitty, Gwen John (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981), p. 189.
p. 8 On the rare occasion that G. K. was neither on a ritual drinking binge with Belloc: On the relationship between the two, see A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), pp. 99–100.
p. 9 the most innovative if controversial of Burns’s early stable of authors: Fiona McCarthy, Eric Gill (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 150.
p. 9 near his friend Harman Grisewood: Grisewood papers, Georgetown University (GEO). For other private jokes and references in Vile Bodies, see Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh (London, Minerva, 1995), p. 209.
p. 9 a BBC news editor he held responsible: D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People, (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 134.
p. 10 one time fanatics of the party-going scene: Taylor, Bright Young People, p. 166.
p. 10 the girl that claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary urging her to a life of chastity: Sire, D’Arcy, p. 79.
p. 10 ‘suffered the attention of sea gulls’: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 22.
p. 11 had filled me with foreboding: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 22.
p. 12 conflict between Burns and Oldmeadow: Michael Walsh, Tablet (London: The Tablet Publishing Company, 1990), pp. 37–8.
p. 12 royalties going to the Oxford Jesuit college: Sire, D’Arcy, p. 82.
p. 13 ‘savagery comitted by communist regimes: Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 206.
p. 13 ‘rather curved ’: For Greene’s politics at this time see W. J. West, The Quest for Graham Greene (London: Phoenix, 1988), pp. 58, 59, also Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man Within (London, Minerva, 1995), pp. 89, 140, and Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 1 (London, Penguin, 1990), p. 161.
p. 14 It was from Barbara and it was a cry for help: Author’s interview with Barbara Lucas. For Belmonte character and bullfighting, see Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Classic Vintage, 2007), Fiesta, the Sun Also Rises (London: Arrow, 1982) and A. L. Kennedy, On Bullfighting (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 1999), pp. 68–79, also bullfighter’s memoirs in Manuel Chaves Nogales, Juan Belmonte, matador de toros (Madrid: Alianza, 1969).
p. 15 George Steer, the South African-born correspondent: Nicholas Rankin, Telegram from Guernica (London: Faber & Faber, 2003).
p. 16 Burns signed up Waugh: Sykes, Waugh, pp. 227, 231 and 234 (for influence of Belloc).
p. 17 the main army conspirators: Luis Bolín, Spain: The Vital Years (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967); Mariano Sánchez Soler, Los Banqueros de Franco (Madrid: Oberon, 2005); by same author, Ricos por la guerra de España (Madrid: Raices, 2007); J. I. Luca de Tena, Mis Amigos Muertos (Barcelona: Planeta, 1971); for Pollard’s intelligence links, see documents HS 9/1200–5, NA; Diana Pollard’s memoirs were recorded by the Imperial War Museum, London.
p. 19 On a scale almost Chinese: Martin Gilbert, Churchill (London: Pimlico, 2000), pp. 58–60.
p. 20 ‘Blood, blood, blood ’: Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 87.
p. 20 Hillgarth, the Naval Intelligence officer: David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (London: Abacus, 1997), pp. 236–7; Hillgarth’s novel based in Bolivia is called The Black Mountain.
p. 20 Very sure of himself, writes shockers: Waugh, Diaries, 1 July 1927; for account of Son Torella, I have drawn from Mary Hillgarth, ‘A Private Life’ (privately printed memoirs) (BFA).
p. 24 There’s something obscene: Quoted in Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (London: Fount/HarperCollins, 1996), p. 25.
p. 25 When the left-wing Popular Front won: For Campbell’s experience of the ‘terror’ in Toledo, and other details of his life, I am indebted to his biographers Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond (London: HarperCollins, 2002), and Peter Alexander, Roy Campbell (Oxford University Press, 1982), as well as Campbell’s own memoirs, Light on a Dark Horse (London: Penguin, 1971), and Anna Campbell Lyle’s memoir of her father, Poetic Justice (BFA).
p. 26 more for my sympathies: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 74.
p. 26 The Catholic weekly the Tablet: Buchanan, Civil War, p. 179.
p. 26 Campbell followed Burns’s instructions: Alexander, Roy Campbell, p. 172.
p. 27 the young Cambridge graduate: For Peter Kemp’s own account of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, see his memoir, Mine Were of Trouble (London: Cassell, 1957). Further insights are provided by Priscilla Scott-Ellis, who met Kemp while working as a nurse on the Nationalist side. See her diary, The Changes of Death (Norwich: Michael Russell, 1995), and a more critical account of her activities in Paul Preston, Doves of War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002).
p. 27 propaganda efforts: A detailed examination of media coverage of the Spanish Civil War is provided by Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die (London: Constable & Robinson, 2008).
p. 28 survey of British writers: Buchanan, Civil War, p. 159.
p. 28 Burns’s takeover of the Tablet: Detailed in Walsh, Tablet. Graham Greene’s collected journalism for the magazine is examined in Ian Thomson’s edited Articles of Faith (Oxford: Signal Books, 2006).
p. 28 Greene contrasted the political rantings of the 1930s: the Spectator article is quoted in Shelden, Greene, p. 225.
p. 29 For this account of the propaganda war waged over Gernika, I have drawn from Rankin, Telegram from Guernica. See also Preston, We Saw Spain Die.
p. 29 More recently Basque investigators: author’s interview with Basque journalist and author Iñigo Gurruchaga.
p. 31 A broader attack on the claims made: A copy of the Jesuit George Burns’s (brother of Tom) letter defending Nationalist propaganda is in the Basque National Archive (BNA), Fundación Sabino Arana.
p. 33 joined Longman, Green & Co.: Hastings, Waugh, p. 315.
p. 35 Beverley Nichols entertained leaders of the Hitler Youth to lunch at the Garrick Club: Taylor, Bright Young People, p. 245.
p. 38 ‘To those men who watched the creeping disorder’: Gabriel Herbert papers.
p. 38 ‘To a people tired of injustice’: Gabriel Herbert papers
p. 40 Philby continued to use his journalism as a cover for espionage: Preston, We Saw Spain Die,
p. 165; Kim Philby, My Silent War (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 1–6
p. 46 Mass and Communion: Waugh, Diaries, p. 439.
p. 46 Churchill was not taken seriously: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 83.
p. 46 Yes, I heard Chamberlain’s grand little speech: David Jones (ed.), Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones in His Letters (London: Faber & Faber, 1980), p. 88.
p. 46 I am deeply impressed by it: Ibid., p. 92.
p. 47 pull strings for me: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 171.
p. 47 The new Pope was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli: Two essential books of reference on the controversial Pius XII are John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope (London: Penguin: 2000) and Gerard Noel’s Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler (London: Continuum, 2008).
p. 48 This is the first chance of writing: Grisewood papers, GEO.
p. 53 ‘Darling, here I am alone: Burns/BL letters.
p. 54 thrush-like beauty: Hugo Vickers, Elizabeth, The Queen Mother (London: Arrow Books, 2005), p. 52.
p. 55 My darling Ann: All letters from Tom Burns to Ann Bowes-Lyon are from BFA.
p. 55 I keep thinking of you: Ibid.
p. 56 Darling little heart: Ibid.
p. 56 Richey was looking for a job: Information based on author’s interview with Richey (24/8/2005) and Richey papers at GEO.
p. 57 Burns moved into the Ministry of Information: No government records appear to have survived detailing the precise sequence of events that led to Burns’s recruitment although it is possible to deduce from Burns’s memoir, The Use of Memory, the kind of networking that may have influenced matters. Grisewood was by then a rising star in the BBC and increasingly involved in wartime propaganda. Lord Howard of Penrith was another of Burns’s male friends from the 1920s, the first of to achieve a peerage. Francis Howard had just inherited the title following the death of his father Esme, a senior figure in the diplomatic service and former ambassador to Washington.
p. 57 the future poet laureate: See Bevis Hillier’s condensed biography of the poet (London: John Murray, 2006) and Channel 4’s The Real John Betjeman (text in Channel 4’s portrait gallery). Recalling their first encounter in the 1920s, Burns in Use of Memory described Betjeman as the ‘first Protestant I’ve ever met’. They were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, Billy Clonmore, a former Anglican priest who had converted to Catholicism. Betjeman spent only slightly more time at the MoI HQ than Burns before being posted to Dublin as press attaché – his job involved him advocating Ireland’s alliance with Britain against Germany and reporting on the activities of the IRA. ‘The boy who had been teased as a “German spy” had grown up to be a British spy’ (Channel 4, Real Lives).
p. 58 Most of us indulged in an unscrupulous and crazy scramble: Sir Kenneth Grubb, The Crypts of Power (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971), p. 107.
p. 59 if English life had run as it did in the books of adventure: Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 50.
p. 59 too tall, too handsome, too well-born: Ibid., p. vii.
p. 59 history of the Jesuits: According to Waugh’s biographer, Selina Hastings, the author decided not to write the book after he returned from his trip to Mexico in October 1938. The decision was welcomed by Waugh’s agent A. D. Peters who felt that Burns’s proposal ‘could not from any angle be regarded as commercial’. See Hastings, Waugh, p. 380.
p. 60 I shall be delighted to do such a preface: Belloc papers, Burns Library, Boston College (BC).
p. 60 Burns enlisted the help of his friend and political ally Douglas Jerrold:‘I am sure this would be invaluable both from the Catholic and national point of view,’ Jerrold wrote of the ‘pamphlet’ he commissioned Belloc to write. Ibid.
p. 60 browbeaten, by people who talk of a large and powerful Catholic body: Quoted by Wilson, Belloc, p. 365. Belloc’s anti-German pronouncements contrast with his more controversial statements on the Jewish race. A more recent biography by Joseph Pearce, Old Thunderer: A Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: HarperCollins, 2002), was criticised for ‘skating’ over the question of Belloc’s anti-Semitism, which the reviewer, Hywel Williams, describes as the ‘central disfiguring fact of his oeuvre‘ (Guardian, 17/8/2002). Critics accuse Belloc of fuelling anti-Semitism among some fellow Catholics through his writings, blaming Jewish elements for the influence they had in promoting the forces of materialism. But in The Catholic and the War, published in 1940, Belloc condemned Nazi anti-Semitism. p. 60 Before the war … violent polemics were carried out by literary men: Wall, Headlong into Change, p. 169.
p. 61 D’Arcy began to broadcast frequently: For the Jesuit’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War see Sire, D’Arcy, pp. 88–9 and p. 121.
p. 61 Waugh wrote to Basil Dufferin: see Sykes, Waugh, p. 26. On the suspicions agencies like MI5 might have of Waugh’s political reliability, Sykes comments: ‘He [Waugh] was to show that he was not reliable in the sense of being politically subservient in all things. In the sense of not being prone to treason, he was politically wholly reliable’, ibid., pp. 269–70.
p. 61 His social contacts during the 1930s extended to families like the Mitfords: The emotional attraction Waugh felt for Diana Mitford (he dedicated his 1929 novel Vile Bodies to her) has been well documented by his biographers. See Hastings, Waugh, pp. 217–18. For Oswald Moseley’s close relationship with the Nazis, and his attempts – aided by Diana and her sister Unity – to support Hitler’s regime see Stephen Dorill, Black Shirt (London: Viking: 2006). Dorill suggests that a member of Mosley’s early circle of friends was a rebellious and polemic Oxford contemporary of Evelyn Waugh’s, Peter Rodd, who the author used as a model for Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags.
The diaries of Guy Liddell, the deputy MI5 chief during the Second World War, and other recently declassified MI5 files show that British intelligence had been tracking the personal involvement of Diana and Unity with the Nazi regime through the 1930s. Unity shot herself in Munich at the outbreak of the war and lived out the rest of her short life as an invalid. Diana became Mosley’s mistress before marrying him in 1936 in Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin drawing room. Apart from the witnesses, Goebbels and Hitler were the only guests. Both Diana and her husband were interned by the British until November 1943, when they were placed under house arrest for the remainder of the war.
p. 62 Burns, thanks to his friends in the Foreign Office: The most influential of these was Eric Drummond, the 16th Earl of Perth. A descendant of one of the oldest Scottish clans and a staunch Catholic, Drummond developed a close personal and professional relationship with Burns during the 1930s when he served as British ambassador to Rome. With the outbreak of the Second World War Drummond was appointed by the Foreign Office as Director General designate of the MoI and subsequently the department’s chief adviser on foreign publicity. Drummond’s son, the (Benedictine) Downside-educated John, a contemporary of Burns, served in the intelligence corps in France and was sent, when Burns was at the MoI, to the US to lobby for its involvement in the war.
p. 62 Evelyn turned up at the Ministry of Information: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 64.
p. 62 George Orwell, 1984 (London: Penguin, 1959). For the topography of 1984, see D.
J. Taylor, Orwell, A Life (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 388.
p. 63 Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent (London: Vintage, 2001).
p. 63 Mike on leave: Barbara Lucas, personal diary and interview with the author.
p. 65 Franco’s triumphant state entry: A detailed description is given in Paul Preston, Franco (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 329–30.
p. 66 It is clear that if friendship and understanding: Quoted by Michael E. Williams in St Alban’s College, Valladolid (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1986), p. 217.
p. 67 Pope Pius XI’s letter against Nazism: Ibid., p. 217. For an example of how the forthright anti-fascist encyclical was contrasted by Catholics with Pacelli’s later failure to publicly condemn Nazism, see Charles R. Gallagher, Vatican Secret Diplomacy (London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 91.
p. 67 The appointment of such a priest: Williams, St Alban’s, p. 217.
p. 68 Until England breaks definitely: Ibid., p. 218.
p. 68 Cowan was a former member: For account of Chetwode commission, see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London: 1977), p. 854. For documentation on Cowan controversy, see Foreign Office files FO 371–245526 at NA.
p. 70 He was excellent company: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 85.
p. 71 the contrast and the change: From Hilaire Belloc’s Many Cities (London: Constable, 1920), quoted in Jimmy Burns, A Literary Companion to Spain (London: John Murray, 1994), p. 3.
p. 71 Whereas uniforms had been everywhere: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 86.
p. 71 the yellow land, the red land: From José Ortega y Gasset, Viajes y Países (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957), quoted in Burns, Literary Companion to Spain, p. 5.
p. 71 The long road from Burgos to Madrid: For a photographic and anecdotal record of the suffering and destruction suffered by the Spanish capital and its inhabitants during the long siege of the Spanish Civil War, see Carmen and Laura Gutierrez Rueda, El Hambre en el Madrid de la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Ediciones La Liberia, 2003).
p. 72 A group of journalists: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 86.
p. 74 The clientele was very young then: Martha Gellhorn, The View from the Ground (London: Granta Books, 1989), p. 337.
p. 74 A copy of ABC: For source material on this period, editions of the newspaper during the Second World War were researched at the Local Newspaper Library of the Madrid City Council, Hemeroteca Municipal del Ayuntamiento de Madrid.
p. 76 Don Bernardo … was a fervent Catholic: Burns, The Use of Memory, p. 87.
p. 77 Burns found Hillgarth a likeable and entertaining tutor: For the background to Hillgarth’s appointment as naval attaché in Madrid, see British Admiralty files at NA. In August 1939, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Geoffrey Cooke, wrote a memo supporting Hillgarth’s posting on the following grounds: politically, Hillgarth would help exploit the Anglophile tendency in the Spanish navy against the influence of German and Italian naval attachés. Hillgarth had an advantage in that nearly all the principal units of the Spanish navy were equipped with British materiel and had been built in the partly British-owned naval shipyard of El Ferrol. Hillgarth had built up his contacts with senior pro-Franco naval officers while serving as Consul in Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War.
According to a Foreign Office report circulated to the British secret services on 22 July 1939, ‘Hillgarth is already on excellent terms with the Spanish naval authorities who both like and trust him.’ ADM 116/4167 NA.
Churchill considered Hillgarth not only his personal ‘eyes and ears’ on intelligence on Spain, but as a key player on pursuing a measure of leniency towards Franco’s Spain, relaxing the British navy’s stringent blockade to allow for some trade with the Iberian Peninsula as a quid pro quo for Spanish and Portuguese neutrality. Churchill’s decision to delegate authority over policy to the British embassy in Madrid was taken on 29 September 1940. CHAR 20/13 Churchill Archives (CA). See also Richard Wigg, Churchill and Spain (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press: 2008), pp. 4–6, 11–12 and 14–15.
p. 78 Burns continued lobbying: FO 371–24526 NA.
p. 78 There is an enormous amount: Ibid.
p. 79 A cuckoo in the nest, restless against inaction: A. J. P. Taylor, English History: 1914–1945 (London: Penguin 1981), p. 568.
p. 79 Dorchy reported that he was installed: FO 371–24526 NA.
p. 79 A typical consignment prepared for dispatch: Ministry of Information files NA.
p. 80 According to intelligence provided by one of Burns’s Spanish sources: Ibid.
p. 81 A local agent for Paramount films: Ibid.
p. 81 Cowan was working in his office at the MoI: FO-24526 NA. The Duke of Alba’s influence on his cousin and friend Churchill while serving as Spanish ambassador in Madrid is detailed in Wigg, Churchill and Spain. At a lunch in December 1940 – the first of many between the two – Churchill reassured Alba that what he wished for was ‘the best and most friendly relations with Spain’.
p. 82 A separate memo from Lord Lloyd: FO-24526 NA.
p. 82 Hoare and Churchill’s paths had converged and periodically clashed See Gilbert, Churchill, p. 544.
p. 83 he argued that an offensive against Germany should be delayed: Ibid., p. 626.
p. 84 There is one bright spot: Quoted by Preston, Franco, p. 356. I am indebted to Dr Peter Martland of Cambridge University for pointing out that Cadogan also separately described Sir Samuel and Lady Maud’s anxiety to get to Spain as indicating they were ‘rats deserting the ship’.
p. 84 The Stornoway mini-summit: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 13, also Templewood papers XII-17, Cambridge University Library (CUL).
p. 83 bribery and corruption of Spanish generals: See Denis Smyth’s essay ‘Les Chevaliers de Saint-George’ from the series Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, 162 (Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), pp. 29–54. Also Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, p. 237 – ‘at least $2m went to General Antonio Aranda Mata’ who was seen as a potential coup leader capable of toppling Franco if the Allies thought it necessary. Stafford questions whether the funds accomplished anything more than the corruption of the generals involved, ‘enriching those who would have argued the neutrality case anyway’ and who never seriously threatened Franco.
Hoare was also involved in the bribery operation, using ‘special funds’ of £500,000 to ensure that a ‘safe means of approach’ could be secured to the then foreign minister Colonel Beigbeder. Templewood papers XII-17, CUL, and FO 371–24508 NA.
p. 85 March set up a shipping company called AUCONA: For a broad account of March’s involvement in the financing of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, see Sánchez Soler, Ricos por la guerra de España. For Hillgarth’s relationship with March and the importance of the relationship to British intelligence see Patrick Beesley, Very Special Admiral: The Life of J. H. Godfrey (London: Hamish Hamilton 1980). Godfrey, the head of Naval Intelligence, wrote that his running of an ‘A1 source’ (March) was one of the reasons Hillgarth was a ‘super-Attaché’. Another was that he was the uniquely coordinating authority for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Special Operations Executive (SOE) and NID (Naval Intelligence Division).
March’s link to the arms trade is detailed in previously secret British government documents now available to researchers. ADM 1/9809 NA.
p. 88 You cannot imagine what a racket I have had here: Templewood papers XII-17, CUL.
p. 89 you can keep watch over so much more: Burns/BL.
p. 90 The children can’t go without me: Vickers, Elizabeth, p. 199.
p. 90 Yes, the war has broken out: Richey papers, GEO.
p. 91 Ben, a Quaker and pacifist: see West, Quest for Graham Greene, pp. 100–101. For Maxwell Knight’s idiosyncrasies see Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 26. Some previously secret MI5 files on Knight were released for research in 2004 (NA) although no further light is shed on the Greene affair.
p. 91 Greene himself had been recruited by MI6: See Richard Greene’s introduction to Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (London: Little Brown, 2007) in which Greene’s relationship with Philby is described as ‘warm’. The author officially left MI6 in 1944 although he continued to have an informal relationship with the agency for many years afterwards. Despite Philby’s treachery, Greene agreed to write a foreword to the Cambridge spy’s memoirs, describing them as a ‘dignified statement of beliefs’.
p. 92 It’s like flying in a bungalow: Burns/BL.
p. 93 The Galgo had an unforgettable ambience: Rosalind Powell Fox, The Grass and the Asphalt (Cadiz: J. S. Hartland, 1997), p. 240.
p. 93 Here I am but actually I am off to Madrid: Burns/BL.
p. 94 The new ambassador’s distrust of foreign parts:‘Final Turn’, paper on Sir Samuel Hoare’s time in Spain delivered at Cambridge University by Vivek Viswanathan; Keith Neilson, ‘Joy Rides?’ British Intelligence and Propaganda in Russia, 1914–17 (The Historical Journal, Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 885–906. For further information I am indebted to Cambridge University’s Dr Peter Martland and his extensive research of the Templewood papers.
p. 95 not knowing where to lay my head: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 13.
p. 95 real and urgent war work: Ibid., p. 16.
p. 96 Spanish aristocrats who were regular guests: Author’s interview with Peter Laming and unpublished personal memoir by the British diplomat. BFA.
p. 97 The German embassy had been built up: The scale of Nazi involvement in wartime Spain was confirmed in documents obtained by the Allies and only declassified in recent years. These documents, held at the NA, have provided an interesting source of information, particularly for a new generation of Spanish investigators. See Carlos Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi: (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2005) and Ivan Ramilla, Epaña y los Enigmas Nazi (Madrid: Espejo de Tinta, 2006).
p. 98 The suggestion he had Jewish ancestry: In his memoirs Hoare describes Lazar as a ‘very sinister eastern Jew’. It was also rumoured that Lazar had become a morphine addict as a result of an injury suffered in the First World War, although his reputation among Spaniards and the Allies was as a key and energetic figure in the German embassy.
One Spanish official recalled Lazar as ‘quite unlike anyone else in the Franco era … well dressed, and self-consciously well-mannered like those operatic Viennese figures created by Straus or Lehar … those of us who dealt with him, came to the conclusion that we were dealing with someone very important … his ambition had no limit.’ During the Spanish Civil War, Lazar developed his propaganda skills working as a correspondent for the pro-Nazi German broadcaster Transocean, before formally entering the German Foreign Service at the outbreak of the Second World War. From the German embassy in Madrid, Lazar masterminded his ‘Grand Plan’ to have Franco’s Spain move closer to Hitler’s Germany, and disrupt Allied propaganda and covert activities. The plan included funding distribution of pro-Nazi parish newsletters, publishing pro-Nazi military action magazines and bribing Spanish journalists and their Spanish government controllers from a slush fund rather greater than that managed by his British counterpart. See ‘Los espias Nazis que salvo Franco’, El País, 26/01/2003.
p. 98 Hoare’s predecessor, Maurice Peterson: For his period as ambassador in Spain, see his memoirs, Both Sides of the Curtain (London: Drummond, 1950). David Eccles, who served under Peterson and Hoare recalled: ‘Why was Peterson doomed to failure in Madrid? He couldn’t like the Spaniards, not one of them. That was an obstacle no brains, no subtlety could overcome.’ See Eccles, By Safe Hands (London: Bodley Head, 1983), p. 266.
p. 99 It may well be that things may go badly in Spain: Templewood papers XIII (1940–45). See also another letter to Halifax in Ambassador on Special Mission (p. 29) in which Hoare foresees the necessity of spending ‘large sums [of money] upon propaganda and the development of trade with Spain’.
p. 99 Britain’s official policy of non-intervention had turned Spain into an intelligence backwater: The lack of reliable information, apart from the secret intelligence provided by Hillgarth in Mallorca, and the often ideologically subjective reports of British journalists (see Preston, Doves of War), was belatedly raised as a subject of concern at the Foreign Office when war was declared in 1939. ‘I quite agree as to the vital necessity that our intelligence [on Spain] should in these anxious times be of first-class quality’ FO-371/231171. See also Nigel West, MI6, and Service Operations 1909–45 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983).
p. 100 Yencken was tough laconic, witty, and sometimes rather wild: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 89.
p. 101 Things are moving so quickly: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 101 Barcelona and other Spanish ports: New York Times, May 1940.
p. 101 living in a besieged city: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 30.
p. 102 someone really big: Templewood papers XIII. Letter to Duff Cooper reproduced in Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission.
p. 102 I protested my inadequacy: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 87.
p. 104 many talents and many tensions: Ibid., p. 88.
p. 104 good food and real beer: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 236.
p. 104 I am in shirt sleeves after a sweltering day: TB to BL letters (BFA).
p. 106 She looked jolly nice: Jones to TB, Dai Greatcoat, p. 98.
p. 106 secret Foreign Office project: Wall was appointed to work on Italian affairs under the Foreign Office, in the research department based at Balliol College, Oxford, and directed by Dr Arnold Toynbee and Sir Alfred Zimmerman. Author’s interview with Wall’s widow, Barbara Lucas. See also Wall, Headlong into Change, p. 107.
p. 106 dined with Douglas Woodruff: For an account of Woodruffs pro-Franco sympathies see Mary Craig’s introduction to Woodruff at Random (London: The Universe, 1978), pp. 19–20. Also Woodruffs correspondence with Franco’s ambassador to London, the Duke of Alba, in Woodruff papers, GEO.
p. 107 another cell of good living: Quoted in McCarthy, Eric Gill, p. 290.
p. 108 You are objecting to him: Graham Greene to Richey, quoted in Richard Greene (ed.), A Life in Letters, p. 104.
p. 109 looks like a young lion: Jones to TB, Dai Greatcoat, p. 98. Also author’s interview with Michael Richey.
p. 109 I bet it is bloody hot: Jones to TB, ibid., p. 99.
p. 109 what most concerned Burns in those early days: BFA.
p. 110 Burns made strenuous efforts to get in touch: Waugh, Diaries, p. 470. Earlier Waugh had referred in his diary to TB living in a ‘land of wild make-believe, where the only problem is to decide what sort of government shall be set up in Germany, immediately, bloodlessly’, ibid., p. 461.
p. 110 Went to M of I: Ibid., p. 471.
p. 110 empty-headed utopianism of the ‘Phoney War’: Sykes, Waugh, p. 281.
p. 111 They were full of tales of the interesting jobs all my friends are getting: Waugh, Diaries, p. 473.
p. 111 News of the bombing: ‘The Tablet offices in Paternoster Row were burned out but, like the more famous Windmill Theatre, they could boast we “we never close”’ Craig, Woodruff, p. 19.
p. 111 Graham was saved by his infidelity: Quoted in Tablet, 17 June 2005.
p. 112 an absurdly hilarious time: Greene, A Life in Letters, p. 106.
p. 112 Hell, bugger them all: TB/Jones correspondence, BFA.
p. 113 We get raid warnings a good bit: Jones to TB, Dai Greatcoat, and p. 105.
p. 113 curious compound of ordinary private life in the old haunts: BFA.
p. 114 I think you ought to do whatever you bloody well feel: Ibid.
p. 115 Muñoz Rojas had no hesitation: Author’s interview with José Antonio Muñoz Rojas. For additional information on Pedro Gamero, author’s conversations with his daughter Concha Gamero and her husband Robert Graham. There are no surviving papers about Gamero’s secret dealings with TB. It is thought likely that Gamero destroyed them before his death.
p. 116 Each afternoon Burns and his team prepared and printed: Author’s interview with José Luis García who was employed by TB as a messenger.
p. 117 I could not help reflecting that this luckless: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 93.
p. 118 According to Williams, in St Albans College, p. 219, Henson was generally happy to engage in clandestine work on behalf of the embassy. Only once did he resist a request from TB on security grounds. Early on in the Second World War TB approached Henson on behalf of Lord Phillimore’s pressure group, the Friends of Spain, for help in providing names of contacts. Henson turned the request down on the grounds that putting his contacts into the hands of the group would risk leakage and make them ‘marked men’. ‘The Friends of Spain might well devote their efforts to changing the attitude towards the New Spain of certain sections of our English Press.’
TB’s relations with the previously named right-wing Friends of Nationalist Spain endured throughout the Spanish Civil War and into the first months of the Second World War. However, once recruited by the British government, TB appears to have heeded Henson’s advice – shared by the Catholic hierarchy in England – and kept the Friends at arm’s length from his projects in Spain, while making use of them for propaganda purposes in the UK.
p. 118 Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson: For some of the details of the Nazi kidnap plot I am indebted to the substantial research done on the Windsor affair by Michael Bloch, author of Operation Willi (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984). I owe thanks, too, to Patrick Buckley for sharing his researches into certain lesser known aspects of this extraordinary story.
In his study of Hoare’s relationship with Churchill in the handling of British policy towards Spain, Richard Wigg argues that the Windsor episode forged an uncharacteristic close collaboration between the ambassador and his prime minister. See Wigg, Churchill and Spain, p. 14.
The full story has yet to be written, however, given that the British state still controls and restricts the public release of many documents related to members of the royal family p. 119 travel to neighbouring Portugal: The Duke was reported to have told the Spanish foreign minister that he would only return to England if his wife was recognised as a member of the royal family and if he were appointed to a military or civilian position of influence. The Duke had also reportedly expressed himself in strong terms against Churchill and against the war. The Spanish foreign minister suspected that the Duke was going to Portugal in order to replenish his supply of money.
The subject of the Duchess’s status had become an obsession for the Duke. See J. Bryan III and Charles J. V. Murphy, The Windsor Story (London: Granada, 1979), p. 528. p. 119 The ‘over-elegant’ Eccles: Burns, Use of Memory, pp. 118, 134. Eccles went on to become a Conservative MP from 1943 to 1960 and in Conservative governments served as Minister of Education. He and TB kept in touch in the post-war years, with Eccles supporting TB’s publishing ventures.
p. 120 Marcus Cheke, the somewhat aloof and aristocratic student: Ibid., p. 98.
p. 120 watch him at breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Eccles, By Safe Hands, p. 128.
p. 120 niece of Hilaire Belloc: For the sections covering Portugal, I have drawn on information provided by contacts and friends I made while working as the Financial Times’s Lisbon correspondent during the late 1970s, including conversations with the late Susan Lowndes, her son Paulo Lowndes Marques, and her daughter Ana Vicente, the author of a family history, Arcadia (Lisbon: Gotica, 2006). I am also indebted to the late Josie Shercliff, who aged gracefully as The Times’s wartime and post-war Portuguese expert.
p. 121 He was the sort of self made person: Quoted in Bloch, Operation Willi, p. 134. In an interview with the Guardian published on 15 January 1983 Eccles described his wartime role as that of an ‘apostle of bribery’, with one of his tasks that of ‘buying’ unnamed ‘eminent neutrals’.
p. 122 Sir Walter Monckton: Churchill was by now fully informed by the embassies in Madrid and Lisbon about the plot to ‘kidnap’ the Windsors. The Nazi SD counterespionage chief Schellenberg mistakenly thought Monckton (which German intelligence reports had misspelt as ‘Monckstone’) was a cover name for a ‘member of the personal police of the reigning King by the name of Camerone’. See Anthony Cave Brown’s biography of Churchill’s SIS (MI6) chief Sir Stewart Menzies, The Secret Servant (London: Michael Joseph, 1988), p. 680.
Monckton was highly regarded by his peers in the MoI. At the end of 1941 he took charge of British propaganda activities in the Middle East in Cairo. See Grubb, Crypts of Power.
p. 122 Many sharp and unfiendly ears: Letter quoted in full by Bloch in Operation Willi, p. 174.
p. 123 German ciphers were being read: According to Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, code-breakers at Bletchley Park broke the main Luftwaffe operational key on 22 May 1940. Within a year, the code-breakers made their first significant breakthrough into German’s naval Enigma so that by August 1941 every signal to or from U-boats was being read by the Allies.
p. 124 Darling Ann, I can’t tell you: TB letters to BL (BFA).
p. 125 haunt of spies: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 70. A transcription error in TB’s memoirs sets the encounter in 1943, although TB’s own recollection subsequently made clear that the meeting coincided with a time when the Duke of Windsor was ‘on his way, through a minefield of enemy intrigue in Spain and Portugal’.
p. 126 The Duke drew me off to a sofa: Ibid., p. 70.
p. 127 a country ‘whose beauty and history’: Bloch, Operation Willi, p. 180.
p. 127 Willi wollte nicht: Ibid., p. 181.
p. 127 Sam (Hoare) seemed very glad to see me: TB letters to BL (BFA).
p. 129 I kick myself and have to tell: Ibid.
p. 129 American public opinion far from enthusiastic: The reluctance of the US to enter the war has been well documented. See, for example, Taylor, English History, pp.60–63.
p. 129 That the US embassy in first years of the war was smaller than the British: In his memoirs, Carlton Hayes, the US ambassador, recalled that on his arrival in Madrid in December 1941, the ‘British embassy was considerably larger than ours, and names ‘the half British and half-Chilean’ TB as among the ‘capable (British) officers with whom we were in especially close contact’. See Carlton Hayes, Wartime Mission in Spain (New York: Macmillan, 1945). See also Hayes, The United States & Spain (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1951), for a critical view of the generally pro-Republic sentiment in the US during the Spanish Civil War, and a sympathetic view of Francos role in the Second World War. The bad blood that affected the relations between Hayes and his British counterpart, Hoare, in Spain is reflected in each ambassador’s memoirs. See Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, and Foreign Office documents in which Hayes is described by Hoare as a ‘very heavy footed professor from Colombia University who, so far as I know, has had no previous experience of public life’, FO 954/27 NA.
Hayes also proved unpopular with elements of the US’s nascent intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According to senior CIA historian Donald P. Steury, ‘the OSS mission in Madrid had as a principal function of “economic intelligence” when it was set up in April 1942, despite being very considerably hampered until shortly after VE Day by an ambassador and diplomatic staff hostile to OSS activities’. See Steury, The OSS and Project Safehaven (Washington, DC: Studies in Intelligence, 2000).
p. 130 D’Arcy had helped him gain a foothold: For D’Arcy’s ‘extravagant success in the higher reaches of US Catholic society’ see Sire, D’Arcy, p. 117.
p. 130 The poet seemed totally at home: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 73.
p. 131 Tom, I think my mission in Spain is finished: Ibid., p. 91.
p. 131 and preventing the passage of German troops through to Gibraltar: Ibid., p. 91.
p. 132 I have the honour to transmit an interesting memorandum: FO 371/28384 NA.
p. 132 My informant said: Ibid.
p. 133 sensationalist in the past: Ibid.
p. 133 the self styled Reichsführer SS: Preston, Franco, p. 392. Also the newspaper ABC issues covering the three-days’ visit (HEM).
p. 135 You should have been recommended for the VC: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 102.
p. 137 Horcher became the German embassy’s unofficial canteen: On arriving in Madrid, the US wartime ambassador Carlton Hayes noted the extensive nature of Nazi social and cultural penetration in the city, within walking distance of the Allied embassies. ‘Just beyond the Franciscan Church of San Fermin de los Navarros was a big (German) social club; across the street, the headquarters of the local Gestapo; and directly opposite our embassy (at that time occupying an entire block along the Catellana), a Nazi Kulturinstitut with swastikas rampant.’ Hayes would soon discover that Madrid was dotted with dozens of other ‘annexes’ to the German embassy, in addition to the Italian fascist institutes or ‘annexes’. Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 25.
p. 138 Chicote, had trained as a barman at the Ritz Hotel: At 12 Gran Via, the bar/nightclub had its heyday in the 1940s although it continued to attract the glamorous and famous in the post-war years. Hemingway said of the place: ‘The most attractive girls in the city went to Chicote and it was the place from which you could begin a good night out; well, everyone has begun some good night outs from there. It was like a club. It was without doubt the best bar in Spain, and I think one of the best in the world.’ Quoted by Elizabeth Nash in Madrid (Oxford: Signal Books, 2001), who goes on to remark: ‘The clientele during the war was comprised of the international brigades, the foreign correspondents, and a regular church of young women who engaged in prostitution’, p. 178.
p. 138 sad, desolate landscape of the cemetery: Quoted in Burns, A Literary Companion to Spain, p. 33.
p. 140 Those evenings at the Lyon d’Or: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 95.
p. 141 All this region is in a very marked contrast: FO 371/26890 NA.
p. 143 Two retired colonels: A thinly veiled reference to the SIS (MI6) station in Tangier where Toby Ellis, a former Indian Army oculist, operated under press attaché cover in the British Consulate-General, alongside Malcolm Henderson, Neil Whitelaw and Paddy Turnbull, three other intelligence officers unnamed by TB. See Nigel West, MI6 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983).
p. 143 It now appears that the Tangier Gazette: FO 371/26890, p. 95.
p. 143 I am not satisfied: FO 371/26890 NA.
p. 143 a city of illusory vanities: Iain Finlayson, City of the Dream (Canada: HarperCollins, 1992).
p. 146 infiltrated by British intelligence: The extensive nature of agent T’s work on behalf of the British is contained in a three-page British intelligence report which has been previously overlooked by researchers. It is among the records of the Special Operations Executive transferred to the National Archives in Kew in recent years. HS 6/927 NA. An attached note suggests that he was ‘run’ by Hillgarth and SOE, and paid a regular fee for services that were focused on disrupting the political machinations of the pro-German members of the Franco regime.
Notes on the Hendaye summit taken by Barón de las Torres were published in the Spanish press in 1989 (ABC, ‘La Guerra Mundial’). In his critical biography of Franco, Paul Preston argues that the notes – detailing how the Spanish dictator resisted Hitler – were ‘redolent of the post-1945 propaganda exercise’ aimed at downplaying Francoist Spain’s pro-Axis leanings in the Second World War. And yet the British appear to have taken some comfort from penetrating ‘the inevitable veil of official secrecy’ surrounding the summit and concluding that the talks had not gone well. As the British ambassador subsequently put it, ‘Franco, not wishing to fight, and never wishing to burn his boats, returned to Madrid without any African trophies, but also without any definite commitment to enter the war’. See Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, pp. 94–5. On the eclectic nature of agents run by SOE, the historian M. R. D. Foot has noted that they included several nationalities, including ‘several score Spaniards’ with a social range that reached from head of state (the regent of Siam) to exiled Russian grandees and dukes through ‘the whole range of the upper and lower European and east Asiatic bourgeoisie to railwaymen, telephonists, clerks, labourers, peasants, prostitutes and coolies’. See Foot, SOE: 1940–1946 (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 78.
p. 147 Hoare had made every effort to centralise key aspects of the embassy’s operations: For Hoare’s own account of the lessons he had learnt and how he organised the Madrid embassy, see Ambassador on Special Mission, pp.130–31. Also D. Heath, SIS & British Foreign Policy during the Great War (University of Cambridge paper, July 2002). The tension that existed between Hoare and senior SIS (MI6) officers is commented on by West, MI6, p. 109.
p. 149 They were at first fish-eyed, aloof and polite: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 131.
p. 149 The embassy’s intelligence operations: West, MI6, p. 134.
p. 150 By the time we reached our floor: Kenneth Benton, The ISOS Years (Journal of Contemporary History, July 1995). Benton’s memoir of his time in Madrid appeared discreetly in an academic journal after an original text had been censored by SIS (MI6) with the names of officers, secretaries, informants and agents excised at the request of the Security Section of the Service. Curiously, the version that was published contained TB’s name although it was never shown to him, nor permission asked. TB died four months after its publication. The article was drawn to the attention of the author by an MI6 officer during the research for this book.
p. 151 a spy, and an important one: Julia Camoys Stonor, Sherman’s Wife (London: Desert Hearts, 2006), p. 71.
p. 151 Gytha was horrified by the politics of these men: Ibid., p. 70.
p. 152 considerable dealings of a cooperative nature: The Moral affair is detailed in Foreign Office and Ministry of Information documents; see FO 371/23171 NA.
During the Spanish Civil Sir Nairne Sandeman, a Member of Parliament, was a leading figure in the Scottish branch of the pro-Franco Friends of Nationalist Spain. In the spring of 1938, Sandeman held a fundraising meeting in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall which was disrupted by anti-fascist protestors and resulted in mayhem. Scotsman, 20/11/2008. Sandeman died in 1940, weeks after Sandeman’s letter recommending Moral’s recruitment as an agent.
p. 153 Miguel Piernavieja del Pozo: For the origins of Pozo’s recruitment and details of his subsequent activities and those of other alleged Spanish spies in the UK I am indebted to research undertaken by Javier Juarez. See his Madrid, Londres, Berlin (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2005), and Eduardo Martín de Pozuelo and Iñaki Ellakuria, La Guerra Ignorada (Barcelona: Debate, 2008). I have also examined MI5 files on the subject. KV2/468 NA.
p. 153 He is a rather unpleasant type: Nigel West (ed.), The Guy Liddell Diaries, vol. 1, 1939–1942 (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 103.
p. 155 When speaking to Pogo: Ibid., p. 108.
p. 155 Pogo has badly blotted his copy-book: Ibid., p. 110.
p. 156 The case of Pogo is getting rather difficult: Ibid., p. 114.
p. 156 the ‘slow-witted’ Hamilton: Dorril, Black Shirt, p. 523.
p. 157 wealth of colourful personal detail: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 97.
p. 157 It seemed to be his way of sealing a bond: Ibid.
p. 157 Velasco claimed in his memoirs: see Juarez, Madrid Londres, Berlin, p. 47. Also Angel Alcázar de Velasco, Memorias de un agente secreto (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1979).
p. 158 the Spaniard was a German spy: The British agent code-named T warned his handlers on 18 January 1941 that Velasco was a German agent. The information somehow found its way to the Russians. See SOE document HS 6/927.
p. 158 Velasco arrived in the UK: He arrived to take up his post as press secretary at the Spanish embassy armed with a letter of introduction to senior British newspapermen provided by the British embassy in Madrid. It described Velasco thus: ‘He is a well known and distinguished Spaniard, having made himself a reputation both as scholar in university life and a fighter in the civil war … He is held in esteem and confidence by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the other members of the Spanish government. A keen Falangist but one of the many Spaniards who believe that Spanish falangism should never imitate German nazism or Italian fascism.’ Templewood papers XIII.
p. 159 Calvo had started his journalistic career: Biographical details on Calvo are based on information compiled in an MI5 file (KV2/713 NA) and additional personal information obtained by the author.
p. 159 A hard-working and observant foreign correspondent: Calvo’s reporting for ABC from London during 1940 ranges from detailed if dispassionate accounts of ordinary citizens enduring the Blitz to more light-hearted swipes at what A. J. P. Taylor called ‘the authorities’ misplaced lack of confidence in the British people’ (see Taylor, English History, p. 599). In a front-page piece published in ABC on 31 July 1940, for example, Calvo focused on the Minister of Information Duff Cooper’s use of investigators to probe public opinion (dismissed by those investigated, including Calvo, as ‘Cooper’s snoopers’). Only occasionally does Calvo display a crude political bias, as when he hits out at sectors of the British media for criticising Franco four days earlier (ABC, 27/7/1940). On most days, the space devoted to ABCs Calvo reports from London was notably less generous than that enjoyed by the more blatantly pro-Nazi Berlin correspondent.
p. 159 The informal unit was made up of MI5’s B Division officers: A variety of sources suggest that Blunt was recruited by MI5 in June 1940 by the newly promoted head of the counterespionage B Division, Guy Liddell, after serving the War Office in military intelligence. The spy writer Chapman Pincher, whose main source was the disaffected MI5 officer Peter Wright, claimed that Blunt was recommended by his friend Tomás Harris, who actually joined the security service subsequently. See Chapman Pincher, Too Secret Too Long (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), p. 389.
B Division was involved in the double-cross system, ‘turning’ enemy agents, and running agents of its own, as well as surveillance teams. It was where Ultra – the information gathered by the Bletchley code-breakers – was delivered and analysed. Blunt worked for B6, MI5’s surveillance section, before he found a ‘niche monitoring foreign diplomatic missions’, in particular the Spanish embassy. See Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 249–51 and p. 273.
Harris was a member of a group of Cambridge graduates that included Blunt, Philby and Guy Burgess. It was on Burgess’s recommendation that Harris was introduced into the shadowy world of British intelligence, at the SOE training school at Brickendonbury Hall. He was later brought into MI5’s Iberian section by Liddell. ‘Harris’s sociability, wealth, generosity and gourmet tastes made his London home an unofficial club-cum-mess for intelligence officers’ including Burgess, Blunt and Philby See Mark Seaman’s introduction to Garbo: The Spy Who Saved D-Day (London: Public Record Office, 2000), p. 19.
In his memoirs, Philby credited Harris for helping his recruitment by SIS (MI6)’s Iberian section. See Philby, My Silent War, p. 35 His passage into the heart of British espionage was also smoothed by Burgess who recommended Philby’s recruitment in 1939 to Marjorie Maxse, the chief-of-staff of SIS’s Section D training school for propaganda, sabotage and subversion. See Bower, The Perfect English Spy, p. 52.
p. 160 The US diplomat, identified only by his surname: West (ed.), Liddell Diaries, pp. 186–7.
p. 160 Velasco returned to England: In The Use of Memory, Burns describes Velasco as a potential Walter Mitty character, a somewhat deranged fantasist who purported to be ‘in the counsels’ of the Spanish foreign minister at the time, Serrano Súñer, and to have been recruited with the task of assessing British morale and the British capability for continuing the war. Burns anticipated that influential sectors of British intelligence would take Velasco seriously enough as a spy and seems to have gone along with their designs. ‘To have a spy easy to tail might lead to others and de Velasco’s idea was welcomed by MI5,’ wrote Burns (p. 97). It is clear from Guy Liddell’s Diaries that Velasco was being watched by MI5 from the moment he first landed in the UK and that subsequently MI5 presented a strong case for him to be declared persona non grata, banning him from re-entering the UK. However, once Velasco had returned to the UK, he was allowed to effectively ‘run’ in order to entrap other agents. See West (ed.), Liddell Diaries, p. 162.
p. 161 Williams made renewed contact: KV2/7 13 NA.
p. 161 Further meetings between Velasco, Calvo and Williams: The story of Velasco’s alleged activities in wartime Britain is a good example of the morass into which intelligence history can fall. An official history of MI5 completed in 1946, but only made publicly available in 1999, paints a mixed if somewhat contradictory picture of Velasco. On the one hand it portrays Velasco as somewhat ineffectual spy – the source of intelligence reports sent by the Japanese minister in Madrid to Tokyo – ‘much of it invented while some of it based on the reports of another member of the Spanish embassy [in London] who was in fact a double agent controlled by us [MI5]’. On the other hand the official historian subsequently states categorically that MI5’s counter-espionage B.1.G. section (Iberia and South America) under Lt Col. Broomham-White had discovered that the Germans had recruited ‘at least five journalists and a press attaché for espionage purposes through Alcázar’. John Curry, The Security Service 1908–1945 (London: Public Record Office, 1999), p. 275.
p. 162 Other public figures: KV2/713 NA. As one wartime MI5 officer has written: ‘MI5 had no executive function and if they wanted a prosecution they got the police to do it; but prosecution (in those days) came very low down in their priorities; they wanted to watch, wait, and draw in as many others as possible into their view. It was only when their targets became a useless burden that they considered going for an arrest.’ Walter Bell’s private correspondence (BFA).
p. 162 But of all the name to be chosen: Details of the surveillance carried out on Burns, and the secret information circulated about him, are contained in MI5 files KV 2/2823 and KV 2/2824 NA.
p. 164 a close-knit social circle: Bower, The Perfect English Spy, p. 47.
p. 164 One of his contemporaries, Walter Bell: Recruited by British intelligence in the late 1930s, Bell served initially as an MI5 officer and later joined SIS (MI6). During the Second World War he was in Washington, liaising with the FBI and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under Colonel William J. Donovan and William Stephenson. He was awarded the Order of Merit by the US government ‘for exceptionally meritorious achievement aiding US in prosecution of the war in Europe between December 1941 and May 1945’. Personal documents (BFA) and author’s interview with Bell’s widow, Tatti Bell, 9/4/2004.
p. 165 Bristow recalled a conversation: Desmond Bristow, A Game of Moles (London: 1993), p. 26.
p. 165 the London rezidentura of the KGB (NKVD) officers: The regularity with which British spies recruited by Russian intelligence saw their Russian ‘controllers’ during this time is not clear. As Anthony Boyle points out in The Climate of Treason (London: 1979), p. 202, the early months of the war ‘was not the most auspicious season for Nazi or Soviet agents, however well hidden, to go about their business’. The official MI5 history reveals that, towards the end of 1939, John King, a Foreign Office cipher clerk, was convicted of working for the Soviets and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude.
During the summer of 1940 Churchill urged his cabinet that ‘very considerable numbers’ of British communists as well as fascists should be put in protective or preventive internment, including the leaders. ‘It was hardly surprising that Philby, Burgess, Blunt … had little option but to lie low’, ibid., p. 202.
On the other hand Blunt’s biographer states that ‘there is no doubt’ he was passing MI5 documents to the Russian before June 1941, when Hitler broke the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. On 12 July 1941, two and half weeks after the invasion, the Soviet Union signed a Mutual Assistance Treaty with Britain. At Churchill’s behest, the British intelligence services suspended intercepting Soviet intelligence and monitoring Soviet radio signals. See Carter, Anthony Blunt, pp. 274–6. What remained constant during this period was British intelligence’s, and in particular MI5’s, paranoia about German penetration of a Britain cut off from mainland Europe. Philby and his friends had little difficulty in persuading their masters of the necessity of focusing on Spain and Portugal as the main conduit for such agents.
p. 166 Benton, the newly arrived Section V officer: Benton, The ISOS Years, p. 388.
p. 167 When Benton later asked Philby: Ibid.
p. 167 GW provided Calvo: KV2/713 NA.
p. 168 A personal file compiled by MI5: Ibid.
p. 168 Intercepts of telephone conversations: KV2/2823 NA.
p. 168 Days later, Burns: Ibid.
p. 169 As he reported to Philby: Ibid.
p. 169 Burns is anxious to keep his position: Ibid.
p. 169 not the slightest importance: Ibid.
p. 169 It is suspected: Hand-written police report filed undated but numbered 54. Discovered by the author in Franco’s Archive in Madrid.
p. 170 One of them was Kemball Johnston: Carter, Anthony Blunt, p. 290. Also West, MI5, p. 30.
p. 171 Broomham-White admitted: KV2/2823 NA.
p. 172 drafted his latest case report: Ibid.
p. 173 Harris stoked the fires: Ibid.
p. 174 If Burns continued to cultivate: The tracking of Velasco and Calvo’s movements in Spain was consistent with the orders received by MI6 (SIS) counter-intelligence officers (Section V) based in the Madrid embassy. One of them, Kenneth Benton, recalled the importance his chief, Felix Cowgill, attached to catching German spies although the identification and apprehension of spies in the UK was the task of MI5. ‘What Cowgill wanted was to identify spies before they came to Britain and pass the names and details to MI5 for action. His first objective was to assemble all information about the German intelligence services and how they operated abroad.’ See Benton, The ISOS Years, p. 372.
p. 174 Burns reported to London: KV2/2823 NA.
p. 175 Burns wrote to the Foreign Division: Ibid.
p. 176 Calvo was arrested: KV2/712 and KV2/713 NA.
p. 176 Camp 020 – a secret interrogation centre: Some five hundred suspected enemy spies (twenty-five of them Spanish nationals) from dozens of countries passed through the camp. See introduction by Oliver Hoare and MI5 documents in Camp 020 (London: Public Record Office, 2000).
p. 177 Official MI5 historians: The security service has in recent years publicised the phrase ‘Violence is taboo’ which ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens wrote in his in-house history, before adding, ‘For not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standards of information’ (see MI5’s website www.MI5.gov.uk).
In his introduction for interrogators Stephens wrote, ‘Never strike a man. In the first place it is an act of cowardice. In the second place, it is not intelligent. A prisoner will lie to avoid further punishment and everything he says thereafter will be based on false premise.’
Other contemporary records released by MI5 show that on one occasion in September 1940 Stephens expelled a War Office interrogator from the camp for hitting a prisoner, the German double agent code-named Tate (Wulf Schmidt).
For a further defence of MI5’s Second World War record, see Ben Macintyre, ‘The Truth that Tin Eye Saw’ (The Times, 10/2/2006) in which he concedes that Stephens ‘did not eschew torture out of mercy … his motives were strictly practical’.
p. 177 psychological torture of a most brutal kind: The calculated use of intimidation to ‘break’ Calvo using ‘evidence’ drawn from a fraudulent diary is described by Philby in his memoir, My Silent War, p. 49. For Calvo’s own views on his captivity, information provided to the author by Carlos Sentis.
p. 179 Calvo was eventually released: Calvo was among several Spanish detainees who were repatriated on 22 August 1945 via Gibraltar. KV2/714 NA.
p. 180 the best and friendliest relations: See Wigg, Churchill and Spain, pp. 6–7
p. 180 Churchill paid several unpublicised social visits: Anecdotal information provided to the author by Casilda Villaverde, Marquesa de Santa Cruz.
p. 180 But how do you find time: Ibid.
p. 180 One evening Casilda found herself: Ibid.
p. 181 Such encounters: See also Jane and Burt Boyar, Hitler Stopped by Franco (Marbella House, 2001), p. 181: Alba was not there on a mission to promote Spanish trade; the (Spanish) Embassy was intended to make friends and to influence them politically, so when luncheon was finished and he offered Churchill a cigar and cognac they would have labels the Prime Minister would recognise and enjoy before he had even tasted them’.
p. 181 Alba, while aware that communications: Spanish government document cited in Juarez, Madrid, Londres, Berlin, p. 71.
p. 181 Personally, I think it is difficult: West (ed.), The Guy Liddell Diaries, vol. 2, 1942–1945 (London: Routledge, 2005).
p. 183 Griffith first met Lazar: Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), pp. 110–11.
p. 183 an important figure in the Nazi world: Lazar arrived in Spain in September 1938 as a representative of Transocean, the Nazi Party’s overseas propaganda agency. A year later he had been appointed press attaché at the German embassy in Madrid, with a reported monthly budget of 200,000 pesetas. During the Second World War his attempts to influence the media in Spain proved more successful than those to used by the Spanish official news agency EFE as a tool of Nazi propaganda in Latin America. EFE had pro-Allied journalists working for it, including its director Vicente Gallego. See Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 122–3.
p. 183 His bedroom was decorated: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 54.
p. 184 Griffith’s cover was nearly blown: Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red, pp. 144–5.
p. 184 people like me had a busy nightlife: Author’s interview with Aline, Countess of Romanones.
p. 185 The British had many more people: Ibid.
p. 185 From the moment of his arrival: The challenge facing the British embassy in countering Nazi influence in Spain was laid out in a nine-page memorandum to Ambassador Hoare in June 1940 by Captain Hillgarth urging a ‘drastic re-organisation’ of the embassy. Hillgarth wrote: ‘Our press department is inefficient, not entirely through its own fault. Germans have bought (Spanish) editors and journalists … WE are much too inclined to accept every rebuff … WE make no attempt really to counteract German lies …’ What was needed, Churchill’s friend and adviser insisted, was to present the Spanish government with a ‘decided policy, not a vague and hesitant one … the only thing the Spaniard respects is power, though he prefers it politely expressed’, Templewood papers XIII.
p. 185 ‘Programme for Film Propaganda’: James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939–45 (I. B. Tauris, 1999). As Glen Newey has commented, ‘films of this sort blurred generic boundaries between documentary and fiction – as, indeed, does propaganda itself, New Statesman, 12 July 1999.
p. 186 The white rolls – nicknamed Churchills: Author interview with Gómez-Beare.
p. 186 Buckley was a devout Catholic: According to his son, Patrick, Buckley temporarily lost his Catholic faith during the Spanish Civil War, regaining it during the Second World War. Patrick Buckley, interview with the author. Henry Buckley’s journalism in Spain is examined in Preston, We Saw Spain Die, pp. 341–50. See Henry Buckley’s book, Life and Death of the Spanish Republic (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1940).
p. 187 I will write to thank Burns: Letter from Buckley to his wife Maria Planas, Buckley Family Archive.
p. 187 MI9 had developed a highly effective Spanish operation: Author interview with Colin Creswell. See also Airey Neave, MI9 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969) and M. R. D. Foot and J. M. Langley, MI9: Escape and Evasion (London: Bodley Head, 1979). Juan Carlos Jimenez de Aberasturi had focused on the Basque involvement in the so-called Comet Line of escape and evasion of POWs. See his El Camino de la Libertad (Bilbao Ayuntamiento de Hernani, 2006). For Catalan escape routes, including US involvement bases on declassified US documents, see Martín de Pozuelo and Ellakuria, La Guerra Ignorada, pp. 169–87.
p. 188 one of the founding players of FC Barcelona: Author interview with Frederick Witty. See also Jimmy Burns, Barca: A People’s Passion (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), pp. 131–2.
p. 188 We now had working for us: Mavis Bacca Dowden, A Tale of Spain, personal memoir, p. 48.
p. 189 twenty spies identified directly by the embassy: Benton, The ISOS Years.
p. 190 For most of my time in Madrid: Ibid.
p. 191 If Burns enjoyed additional protection: Franco knew who the spies were in the British and German embassies and let them ‘run’ as long as they did nothing that threatened his regime. It was a game he watched from the ringside. Problems came when pro-Axis elements in the Falangist party pursued the British. This happened in Huelva where the Germans had a big influence. William Cluett, manager of a British electricity company, and Joseph Pool Bueno, an Anglo-Spanish employee of Rio Tinto, were expelled from Spain for suspected spying activities. The British ambassador Samuel Hoare personally intervened on behalf of two others. Alexander Millan, an Anglo-Spanish shipping agent, was released from detention. However, Montagu. W. Brown, the head of a railway company, was also expelled. See Jesus Ramiro Copeiro del Vilar, Huelva en la Segunda Guerra Mundial (Huelva: Imprenta Jimenez, 1996).
p. 191 The agent in question was a Benedictine monk: Based on research carried out by the Jesuit historian Fr Robert Graham BFA. During the Second World War several priests were drawn into espionage activities by the Allies and the Axis powers. Several ended up in concentration camps where they subsequently died.
Among those suspected by the Nazis of working for the Allies was an Austrian Marianist priest called Jakob Gapp who had been teaching in the Basque port of Lequeitio and in Cadiz after arriving in Spain in May 1939. In September 1941 Gapp moved to Valencia where he took the first steps in applying for a visa to Britain at the consulate. He visited the consulate several times, sharing information on the state of politics and the Church in Germany and collected copies of the pro-Churchill English Catholic weekly the Tablet.
The distribution of the Tablet in Spain had been organised by TB from the British embassy in Madrid. Although no record survives of Fr Gapp meeting TB before, he was suspected of being recruited as an agent by the British.
The Tablet provided Gapp with the text of the anti-Fascist Bishop of Calahorra on the dangers of Nazism and the persecution of Catholics in Germany and the Netherlands which the priest passed on to others. The Tablet, of which TB was one of the owner-directors, was also said to contain coded messages to pro-British factions and resistance groups.
Gapp was arrested by the Gestapo on the French-Spanish border at Hendaye after being persuaded to cross the Pyrenees for a meeting by a Nazi agent posing as Jewish refugee seeking conversion to the Catholic faith. At least three German intelligence services were well aware of the Tablets importance as a pro-Allied propaganda vehicle. Gapp was interrogated about his links with the magazine, having been kept under surveillance by the Gestapo since the Anschluss, when he had first spoken out against Nazism.
Gapp was taken to Berlin, found guilty of treason by the notorious Nazi Judge Roland Freisler and beheaded on 13 August 1943. Information provided for the author by John Cummings and Paul Burns. See also Gapp’s entry in Cumming’s revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints (Collegeville: Burns & Oates, 1998), pp. 115–19.
p. 192 on the same wavelength: Anna Campbell Lyle, quoted by Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond, p. 199.
p. 193 What Catholics realise: Ibid.
p. 193 on Hitler’s side: Ibid.
p. 193 Campbell visited the British embassy: Campbell’s biographer Peter Alexander suggests that Burns hired the poet as an agent on his own initiative to ‘act as a gatherer of background information on the mood of Spain’. Alexander adds: ‘It is difficult to see what other information he can have expected, for Campbell had no access to men of influence in the country’.
p. 194 Campbell kept his role secret: Such was the claim made by Anna Campbell Lyle, Poetic Justice, p. 170. In fact, Roy Campbell, according to other accounts, seems to have been a most indiscreet agent. On 3 October 1941, Campbell wrote to his mother telling her that he had been on ‘His Majesty’s service’ since 3 September 1939 and often on ‘very dangerous work. The letter is quoted by one of Campbell’s biographers, Peter Alexander, in Roy Campbell, p. 186. p. 194 This way of drinking: Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse, quoted by Jimmy Burns in Spain: A Literary Companion, p. 199.
p. 195 I found him more than eager: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 105. According to Campbell’s biographer Peter Alexander the approach made by TB delighted Campbell, giving him a feeling of direct participation in the war, allowing him to ‘hold up his head’ when writing home to South Africa, where several of his brothers had signed up as soon as war had been declared. See Alexander, Campbell, p. 185. ‘His method of gathering information was original: he would settle into a bar, have a few drinks, and tell a few jokes and tall stories at which he excelled. In this way he would soon collect a circle of acquaintances, for whom he would buy drinks while his money or credit lasted. When the evening had progressed to the stage where they were all lifelong friends, he would lower his voice and quieten the rowdy circle before sharing with them a great secret, which they were to keep under their hats: he was a British spy …’
p. 196 the eccentric author: Eleanor Smith, Life’s a Circus (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1939).
p. 197 An eternal high-spirited tomboy: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 56.
p. 197 naughty but never nasty: Time magazine, 5 February 1940.
p. 198 at least we have the gypsies on our side: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 57.
p. 198 war was erotic: For an account of Mary Wesley’s experience of wartime see Patrick Marnham, Wild Mary (London: Vintage, 2007).
p. 199 Coward’s song: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 116.
p. 199 I do feel for you: David Jones’s letters to TB, National Library of Wales (NLW), David Jones papers.
p. 200 Ann seems to be working very hard: Michael Richey’s letters to his family, Richey papers, GEO.
p. 200 Paul, a pilot with the RAF: Paul Richey’s heroic exploits are vividly captured in a personal record, Fighter Pilot (London: Cassell, 2001) and its sequel, co-written by Norman Franks, Fighter Pilot’s Summer (London: Grub Street, 2004).
p. 200 I remember the disposition of everything: New York Times, 11 May 1941.
p. 202 The MoI asked me to return: Graham Greene to Mary Pritchett, letter published in Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, p. 107.
p. 202 a form of dirty work: Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 118.
p. 203 Two Catholics: Harman Grisewood papers, GEO.
p. 203 realism in our own consciences: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 166.
p. 203 all this Ann thing: David Jones’s letters to TB, NLW.
p. 207 I am installed at present: Say Family Archive.
p. 208 Poor Peter: Ibid.
p. 208 It seemed unreal: Ibid.
p. 209 Source says that Burns is madly in love: MI5 file KV 2/2823 NA. The tracking of TB’s personal relationships by his detractors in British intelligence extended to male friends. The suggestion was that some of them were homosexual, as if such proclivities were a treasonable offence. An MI5 officer in Wales and the police Special Branch were tasked with finding out what they could about Jim Ede, who had been communicating with TB over the case of a Bulgarian refugee who had asked the British embassy in Madrid to arrange for his brother’s safe conduct out of Spain.
‘We are rather interested in Tom Burns’ friends, as some of them have turned out to be decidedly queer,’ reported a member of MI5’s Iberian section.
The investigation threw up nothing suspicious about Ede such as possible links with pro-Axis Welsh nationalists. ‘So far as political leanings are concerned, Mr Ede has none … there is not the slightest reason to doubt that he is completely loyal to this country (Britain).’ Ede was ‘discovered’ by the police to be a ‘painter by profession’ and a former secretary of the Tate Gallery. Ibid.
Not mentioned was the fact that Ede was a well-known and popular figure in London’s artistic circles, a long-term friend and benefactor, together with TB, of the fellow Welsh painter and poet David Jones. See various references in the self-portrait of Jones in his letters, Dai Greatcoat.
p. 210 M 12 confirmed: Ibid.
p. 211 Although Stordy is a strong Roman Catholic: Ibid. MI5 appears to have overlooked the fact that TB and Stordy had known each other since school days. They had both been educated by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College.
p. 213 Each in his own way: Author’s interview with José Luis García.
p. 214 In his report: KV 2/2823 NA.
p. 215 A mild form of wishful thinking: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 98. The position of the pretender to the throne, Don Juan, was somewhat ambiguous until the final stages of the war when he and his supporters openly called for a democratic front to force Franco to give up power. The prince supported Franco during the civil war and, after his father King Alfonso XIII died in February 1941, praised the political and social values of the ‘the Crusade’, the Nationalists’ term for the civil war. (See E. Vegas, Memorias Politicas 1938–42 (Madrid: Acras, 1995), p. 242.) Then, in an interview with the Journal de Genève on 11 November 1942, he declared that ‘my supreme ambition is to be King of a Spain in which all Spaniards, finally reconciled, might live together’. During 1943, Franco received two separate letters, one from a group of eight senior army officers, the other from a group of conservative politicians led by the Spanish ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba, urging him to agree to the restoration of a ‘Catholic and traditional’ monarchy, freed from any ‘foreign influence’, in other words turning its back on constitutional and liberal principles to the point of absolutism. See a book written by TB’s eldest son, Tom Burns Marañón, La Monarquia necesaria (Barcelona: Planeta, 2005), pp. 105–7. Also Wigg, Churchill and Spain, pp. 29–33.
p. 216 In Spain, the Knights of St George: See Denis Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy of Survival: British Policy and Franco’s Spain, 1940–41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 222–5. Also David Messenger, Against the Grain: Special Operations Executive in Spain, 1941–45 (Intelligence & National Security, vol. 20, no. 1 (March 2005)), pp. 173–90, and Mark Seaman (ed.), Special Operations Executive: New Instrument of War (Routledge, 2006), p. 65.
p. 216 arrangements for Press Section: FO 371 26834 NA.
p. 217 merchants bankers: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 88.
p. 217 Guy Fawkes College: See Boyle, The Climate of Treason, p. 205.
p. 217 There had been very short visits: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 115.
p. 218 twin-tracked policy: For background, see Messenger, Against the Grain, and Seaman, Special Operations Executive. Ambassador Hoare insisted on keeping a tight control both on SOE’s operations in Gibraltar and in Spain. PREM 3 405/6, 4/21/2A, 3 405/6 NA.
p. 218 quiet Peninsula: For Ambassador Hoare’s summary of the case for non-military intervention in Spain, see Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 122.
p. 219 Father D’Arcy flew: Sire, D’Arcy, p. 121.
p. 219 lower echelons of British intelligence: Charles R. Gallagher, Vatican Secret Diplomacy (London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 5 and 142, who quotes the philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin on his time serving in the British embassy in Washington during the Second World War. Berlin provided Churchill with a weekly summary of American opinion which was said to be the prime minister’s favourite reading. According to Berlin, the British wanted to harness the power of the American Catholic political bloc, because American Catholics were ‘better organised’ than any other religious body in the US. Hurley liaised with, among others, Robert Wilberforce, chief religious propagandist for the British Information Services – the US arm of the MoI – and, through him, with MI6.
For its part, the US State Department, anxious to win over the Catholics in America, most of whom had Irish, Italian or German roots and were ‘hardly sympathetic’ to Britain, to Roosevelt’s pro-war policy, fed him with anti-Axis propaganda material. ‘The very basis of our faith is challenged by the orgies of extermination that are going on among the Jews of Europe.’ Quoted by Michael Walsh in ‘Bishop’s Private War’, Tablet, 20 December 2008.
p. 220 The British have a large organisation: Hayes, Wartime Mission in Spain, p. 74.
p. 221 I doubted whether anyone: Philby, My Silent War, p. 56.
p. 221 Beevor was posted to Portugal: The father of historian Antony Beevor described his recruitment thus in his overview of SOE wartime operations: ‘I had no previous knowledge of secret activities, but had the advantage of legal training and practice, which at least develops discretion, analytical thinking and care in the use of words.’ He had three weeks’ training which included ‘studying the chances of the Iberian Peninsula being invaded by the Germans’ and being exposed to ‘some of the latest techniques in demolitions and small arms’. Beevor had some involvement in Spain where the ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare ‘was opposed to any secret activity which might provoke Franco to join the Axis’ although not opposed to ‘secret activities of which he knew and approved’. He was tasked with liaising closely with Captain Hillgarth and two Madrid-based SOE officers who handled the movement of special operations personnel going into or coming out of Gibraltar through Spain. In Portugal, his operations were infiltrated by the Portuguese secret police, as were those of MI6. See J. G. Beevor, SOE (London: Bodley Head, 1981), pp. 30–43. See also Neville Wylie, ‘Special Operations’ (Journal of Contemporary History vol. 56, no. 3, 2001), pp. 441–56.
Beevor’s account is generally positive, suggesting that, despite challenging operational conditions, he succeeded in carving out a niche for SOE in Portugal and went some way to insuring Britain against a German invasion of Portugal. In the end he was let down by a combination of bad luck, the indiscretions of some of his agents and the Foreign Office’s inability to show a united front in his defence against expulsion. Wyle nevertheless concludes that Beevor’s unmasking in early 1942 was ‘the worst incident of its kind to afflict SOE stations in neutral Europe’, while judging the Foreign Office’s reluctance to authorise SOE operations to have been in Britain’s best interests.
p. 222 the German was snatched by an SOE team: author’s correspondence with Anthony Beevor.
p. 222 a British diplomatic bag: CO 967/68 NA.
p. 223 It is difficult to write nice things: Philby, My Silent War, p. 57.
p. 223 prescription for propaganda: For an insider’s account of US policy towards Spain during this period, see John Emmet Hughes, Report from Spain (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1947).
p. 224 The Spain that I had come into: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 106.
p. 224 Plans for an Allied occupation: Smyth, Diplomacy, pp. 232–7.
p. 224 Thunderbird november eight two am: Hughes, Report, p. 263.
p. 225 an attitude of unconcern: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 177.
p. 225 Hayes rung Jordana: ‘The ambassador (Hayes) was received by a Foreign Minister (Jordana) in bathrobe, pajamas, and a state of fear-worn nerves.’ Franco could not be immediately reached because he was on a hunting trip so that for another half-hour Jordana ‘pattered in his slippers up and down the floor, struggling with his worst fears of imminent disaster’. Finally the ambassador allowed Jordana to see Roosevelt’s message. ‘Poor Jordana smiled happily, sank bank in his chair, and sighed with relief, “Ah! Spain is not involved.”’ Hughes, Report, p. 264.
In his published diaries, Jordana records simply that he went to see Franco in the country palace of El Pardo, outside Madrid, spent until four in the morning with the Generalísimo before returning to his office and ‘giving orders’. A footnote by the sympathetic editor of the diary, Jordana’s diplomat son Rafael, clarifies that the minister talked as a fellow soldier to the country’s senior generals and impressed upon them the need to ‘remain calm. Francisco Gomez-Jordana Souza, Milicia y Diplomacia (Burgos: Dossoles, 2002).
p. 226 The role of the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris: According to documents in the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich cited by a recent Canaris biographer, the landings had been accurately predicted by the Abwehr. Indeed, it would have been surprising if the agency’s station in Algeciras had failed to note the build-up of Allied vessels. However, the intelligence was overruled by Ribbentrop who relied on information provided by the rival Foreign Ministry Intelligence Department inside the German embassy in Madrid. The view from the embassy, presumably based on disinformation provided by the Allies, was that the Allied landing would not take place before the end of 1943. Richard Bassett, Hitler’s Spy Chief (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 247–8.
Bassett makes an interesting case that British intelligence, through the MI6’s Sir Stewart Menzies, was trying as early as December 1940 to exploit the possibilities raised by Canaris’s growing opposition to Hitler. Separately, the Catholic writer John Cummings, a relation of whom worked closely with the German admiral, suggests that from 1938 onwards Canaris protected the ‘respectable’ – non-Communist – German resistance at the highest possible level. According to Cummings, the German spy chief was party to efforts at the Vatican from 1939 to obtain approval for an alternative German regime and ‘later played a dangerous double game by negotiating with the British’. Correspondence with the author. See also Cummings, Butler’s Lives, p. 118.
The view formed by the well-informed British military attaché in wartime Madrid, Brigadier Wyndham Torr, was that Canaris was a ‘loyal German, opposed to Hitler and to his tyranny and methods of conducting the war, which he was convinced, from the outset, would result in German’s ultimate defeat’.
In a revealing letter to Samuel Hoare, years after the war was over, Torr suggested that Canaris was used as a pawn by the British. ‘We tapped C. [Canaris] without his knowing it and he never knowingly or willingly, worked for us directly, but often did so, knowingly indirectly, in order to further his beliefs.’ A more severe judgement has been made by one of Hitler’s best recent biographers, Ian Kershaw, who labels Canaris a ‘professional obfuscator’. Quoted by Tony Barber, ‘The Enemy Within’, Financial Times Magazine, 16 April 2005.
p. 226 Well, here we are: Gilbert, Churchill, p. 733.
p. 227 long road to tread: Ibid., p. 734.
p. 228 all eyes and ears: Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 95.
p. 229 Only years later: Detailed research of Operation Mincemeat, including interviews with some of the unwitting participants, and discovery of relevant documents, was carried out by local historian Jesus Ramirez Copeiro. British government documents include WO 106/5921, WO 208/3163. For the insider’s classic account see Ewen Montagu, The Man Who Never Was (London: Evans, 1953). Mincemeat, wrote intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper in his introduction to Montagu’s Beyond Top Secret (London: Peter Davies, 1977), was the ‘most spectacular single episode in the history of deception’.
p. 229 the highly secretive interservice XX Committee: Sir John Masterman’s internal memorandum written in 1945 and first published as The Double Cross System (London: Yale University Press, 1992) described the basic idea of the deception policy during 1943 up to the beginning of the winter as ‘containing the maximum enemy forces in Western Europe and the Mediterranean area and thus discourage their transfer to the Russian front’, p. 133.
p. 230 carefully vetted individuals: Membership of the committee included representatives from the War Office, Naval Intelligence Division (NID), Air Ministry Intelligence, MI6 and MI5 which provided the chairman and the secretary. Masterman, The Double Cross System, p. 62.
p. 230 most secret sources: The Director of Naval Intelligence, John Godfrey, had acceded to a demand from Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, that the whole work of deciphering should be put under the control of MI6. Wireless signals, having been intercepted at various special receiving stations, were sent by teleprinter to Bletchley Park where they were deciphered and distributed on a very restricted ‘need to know basis’ to named persons. The ‘product’ was known as ‘Special Intelligence’ and deciphered messages or documents about the subject were marked ‘Most Secret U’, the letter U standing for Ultra. Later, when the Americans pointed out that the word ‘most’ could mean ‘almost’, this was altered to ‘Top Secret U’. Montagu, Beyond Top Secret, p. 32.
p. 230 Major Martin’s identity: The status of an officer in the Royal Marines allowed NID to exercise control over the communications involved in Mincemeat, although Martin wore a battledress ‘as no normal uniform could be made to fit exactly’. The difficulty of obtaining underclothes, owing to the system of coupon rationing, was overcome by a gift of thick underwear from the wardrobe of the late Warden of New College, Oxford. Ibid., p. 137.
p. 230 A colonel in the marines: Author’s interview with Patricia Davies.
p. 230 Detailing the Allied plans: The fictitious document included a cover letter from Admiral Mountbatten to Admiral Cunningham, the naval chief in the Mediterranean, to explain why Major Martin was travelling. The main deception letter was intended to give the impression that Sicily was not the next target of the Allies and that there were two other operations being mounted in the Mediterranean, indicating that landings were likely in Greece and Sardinia. Masterman, The Double Cross System, p. 138.
p. 230 Ewan [Montagu] handed me the big brown envelope: author’s interview with Patricia Davies.
p. 231 There we were in 1942: Montagu, The Man Who Never Was, p. 25.
p. 232 The Gibraltar-born Lieutenant Commander Gómez-Beare: Information provided to the author by Gómez-Beare family.
p. 233 a local German agent: One of the most active Second World War spies in Huelva was Adolph Clauss, son of the German consul. He was briefly detained on behalf of the Allies by the Spanish at the end of the war but was subsequently released. Information provided to the author by the Clauss family. See also Ramilla, España y los Enigmas Nazis, p. 149, and Copeiro del Vilar, Huelva, pp. 307, 424.
p. 234 The two cooperated on the basis of mutual trust: Burns, Use of Memory, p.114
p. 234 a young Spanish doctor: Eduardo Fernández Contioso conducted the autopsy together with his father, Eduardo Fernández del Torno. The young Eduardo had only just returned to Huelva from his honeymoon. Information provided to the author by the Contioso family.
p. 234 Franco wept: Preston, Franco, p. 404.
p. 235 Hayes pointed out: Ibid.
p. 235 secret meeting with a member of the Spanish royal family: FO 954/27 NA.
p. 235 German counter-moves: Ibid.
p. 236 On 27 July 1943 Hoare wrote to Eden: FO 371/34788 NA.
p. 236 reaction in Spain to Mussolini’s fall: Ibid.
p. 236 I had cast a good bit of bread: Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 163.
p. 237 lunch at the Garrick: The Garrick Club has its roots ‘deep in the need of actors, artists, and writers for a venue, a private place, for informal exchanges of view’, writes its biographer Richard Hough, in The Ace of Clubs (London: André Deutsch, 1986). Since its first informal meeting of actors and nobles in 1831 the Garrick – named after the great eighteenth-century English actor David Garrick – had taken pride in the conviviality, intellectual calibre and informed gossip of its membership, which set it apart from the stuffiness, insularity and occasional prejudice of the other London gentlemen’s clubs.
TB was proposed for membership by the actor and author Robert Speaight, part of his network of artistic friends who used to gather in his Chelsea house during the 1930s. Speaight was well connected with friends and relatives extending across government service. TB’s candidacy was seconded by Rupert Hart-Davis, the influential and successful publisher, and approved by a committee chaired by the Catholic peer and Law Lord Lord Russell of Kilowen, and Daniel Macmillan, another leading publisher and brother of the Tory politician and future prime minister Harold Macmillan.
p. 237 Burns had enticed the poverty-stricken Nadal: Rafael Martinez Nadal, Antonio Torres y la Politica Española del Foreign Office (Madrid: Casariego, 1989), p. 97.
p. 239 I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: Ibid., p. 98. Despite Nadal’s shock and anger, the academic agreed to further meetings with Burns. They included lunch at Martinez, the popular Spanish restaurant in Swallow Street, off Piccadilly Circus, where TB urged Nadal to focus his broadcasts on what he claimed was a turning tide in the war, and the Allied fightback. Ibid., p. 124.
p. 240 Nadal’s circle of friends: Ibid., pp. 22–3.
p. 240 Enriqueta who introduced Blunt and Tomás to each other: Author’s interview with Enriqueta Harris. See also Carter, Anthony Blunt, p. 94.
p. 240 an English translation of a book of Lorca verses: Published as Poems of Federico García Lorca (London: The Dolphin Press, 1939).
p. 242 It is not that we want Spain: Quoted in Nadal, Antonio Torres, p. 36.
p. 242 the notes of an out-of-tune flute: Ibid., pp. 50–51.
p. 243 I try and forget all that: Author’s interview with Enriqueta Harris.
p. 244 the journalist John Marks was encouraged: The Cambridge-educated Marks was the BBC’s Spanish programme organiser until January 1942, after which he was posted to Madrid as the Times correspondent. Throughout the war Marks maintained close links with the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information, who valued this fluent Spanish speaker as an astute observer of the local political scene. Marks was both fond of and knowledgeable about Spanish culture, enjoying eating, drinking, women and bulls. During the war Marks became a close friend of TB, and served him as an informal ‘agent’.
p. 245 During the summer of 1943: FO371/34766, FO 371/34764, FO/34765 NA; Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 149; Preston, Franco, p. 495. The pressures on Nadal built up throughout 1943, partly due to TB’s personal intervention. See Nadal, Antonio Torres, p. 142. TB’s enemies in MI5 saw his insistence on Nadal’s eventual dismissal as one of the crowning episodes of Samuel Hoare’s ‘appeasement policy’. See MI5 file, KV 2/2823.
p. 245 a new national state-run newsreel called No Do: For a critical Spanish analysis of how Francoist propaganda focused on conveying a sense of political, social and cultural normality, see Pedro Montoliu, Madrid en la Posguerra (Madrid: Silex, 2005), pp. 284–9. For a UK perspective on how Spanish wartime propaganda was viewed within the Spanish film division at the Ministry of Information, see MoI files INF 1/572/; INF 1/574; INF 1/594; INF 1/596 NA.
p. 246 One of the most interesting: Ibid.
p. 246 Fox, as you know: Ibid.
p. 247 The press attaché in Spain: Ibid.
p. 247 Under the guise of a national Spanish and neutral enterprise: Ibid.
p. 247 There was considerable contemporaneous: Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 149.
p. 248 a growing discontent: FO 954/27 NA.
p. 248 information supplied to him by Burns: The names of the informants listed by Hoare included Cardinal Pedro Segura, the Cardinal Archbishop of Seville, who maintained close relations with TB’s assistant Bernard Malley. Other ‘agents’ of influence mentioned were General Manuel Matallana (an anti-communist Spanish Civil War officer who had fought for the Republic against Franco, before surrendering his troops), the writer José Martínez Ruiz Azorín and Gregorio Marañón, the prominent doctor and man of letters and TB’s future father-in-law.
p. 248 ‘I am glad’, replied Roosevelt: Quoted in Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 163.
p. 249 Hoare returned to the subject of Nadal: FO 954/27 NA.
p. 249 Churchill delivered a speech: For the speech and the criticism it sparked see Wigg, Churchill and Spain, pp. 151–2. Also Preston, Franco, p. 513: ‘Churchill’s speech was a hostage to fortune from which Franco was to squeeze the last ounce of benefit both domestically and internationally.’
p. 251 a letter from Sir Malcolm Robertson: Ronald Howard, In Search of my Father (London: William Kimber, 1981).
p. 251 the Americans had been expanding their presence: The possibility of a German occupation of Spain was viewed as a major strategic danger by the Allies, particularly in the months following the North African campaign of 1942 when supply lines were stretched. OSS agents began to arrive in Lisbon and Madrid in April 1942 under State Department cover. In the Spanish capital, the counter-intelligence section X-2 worked out of the offices of the US oil mission. Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998), pp. 168–9. See also Martín de Pozuelo and Ellakuria, La Guerra Ignorada, pp. 31–2. The US propaganda push, along similar lines to the British, is described in Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 76.
p. 252 At the time Starkie was a Catholic professor: In the weeks preceding the outbreak of war, Starkie was visited in Dublin by Churchill’s closest friend, the newspaper magnate and future Minister of Information Brendan Bracken. While in the Irish capital, Bracken stayed under an assumed name at the Jury’s Hotel and had secret conversations with Starkie. See Charles Edward Lysaght, Brendan Bracken (London: Allen Lane, 1979). The contact was presumably not unconnected to the Anglophile professor’s recruitment to government service. Bracken may also have been sounding out Starkie’s views on Irish attitudes towards the imminent war with Germany.
p. 252 For how could official Spain: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 102.
p. 252 Walter wanted to do anything to help the Allied cause: Author’s interview with Alma Starkie.
p. 252 The horses belonged to the Spanish army: Ibid.
p. 252 The poor people of Madrid: Ibid.
p. 253 The Starkies allowed their own large flat: Ibid. Starkie was part of a large Madrid-based organisation that the Allies used to help smuggle POWs and some 30,000 Jews through Spain and Portugal. The daughter of a Spanish doctor, who worked for the British and helped in the escape route, has written an account of this operation. See Patricia Martínez de Vicente, Embassy y La Inteligencia de Mambru (Velecio, 2003) and interview in The Times, 3/12/2003.
p. 254 the crew crouched or suspended: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 103.
p. 255 Ought we to tell him: Howard, In Search of My Father.
p. 256 It proved, indeed, to be a gala affair: Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 97.
p. 256 Brendan Bracken, the MoI chief, and Anthony Eden: Howard, In Search of My Father.
p. 256 Mr Leslie Howard is going to Spain: FO NA.
p. 257 It is very important just now: Ibid.
p. 257 He was very polite: Author’s interview with Olive Stock.
p. 257 One of those he was scheduled: In El Vuelo de Ibis (Madrid: Facta, 2009) the Spanish author José Rey Ximénez claims he was told the ‘full story’ of Howard’s visit to Madrid when he interviewed Conchita Montenegro. Once dubbed the Spanish Greta Garbo because of her seductive sensuality, Montenegro, a one-time lover of the Spanish Hollywood director Edgar Neville, allegedly also had an affair with Howard whom she met, as a young actress, while filming Never the Twain Shall Meet in 1931. Montenegro later married Ricardo Giménez-Arnau, who was in charge of foreign relations for the Falange party.
Rey Ximénez claimed that Howard was sent to Madrid with a ‘special message for Franco’ which he delivered personally. ‘Thanks to Howard, at least in theory, Spain was persuaded to stay out of the war,’ the Spanish author alleged. Guardian, 6/10/2008.
p. 258 he was keen to briefly rekindle an old flame in Montenegro: Burns family archive
p. 258 one of several German agents that tracked Howard: The information about Gloria von Furstenberg was provided to the author during an interview with Aline Griffith, Countess of Romanones.
Such was Howard’s reputation as a philanderer that his visit to Spain fuelled Madrid gossip about his alleged ‘affairs’. Another German aristocratic agent he allegedly got involved with was the ravishing Colombian-born Countess Mechtild von Podewils. Rey Ximénez, El Vuelo del Ibis.
p. 258 the pure white shoulderless tube of a dress: Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red, p. 234.
p. 259 this charming English export: Howard, In Search of My Father.
p. 260 Long-term membership of the Garrick Club: Howard was elected to the Garrick along with James Makepeace Thackeray, the grandson of the great nineteenth-century novelist W. M. Thackeray, in 1933. It was a controversial year for the club, with the Committee exercising its right of veto on a range of new applicants. Of the many portraits and sculptures of famous actors that adorn the club today, Howard’s hangs in one of the club’s most convivial locations – the members’ bar. Hough, The Ace of Clubs, pp. 42 and 144.
p. 260 the most unashamedly patriotic and propagandist: On the importance of representations of nationhood and heroism in Second World War films, see review of The Death of Colonel Blimp by Sarah Knight in Journal of Film Studies (Institute of Film & TV Studies, University of Nottingham, Issue 6, 2006). For the collaboration between the government and the British film industry in propaganda, see also Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939–45.
p. 261 There were no consequences: Gilbert, Churchill, p. 747.
p. 261 We have been rather anxious: Ibid., p. 747.
p. 262 it was not the prime minister but Howard: British intelligence’s suspicions about Kuno Weltzien, the German agent thought responsible for providing the information that led to the shooting down of Leslie Howard’s plane, are in an MI5 KV2 file. NA.
p. 262 the manifest: Details collated by Howard’s son, Ronald.
p. 263 It is just possible: Ibid.
p. 263 Stow died: Author’s interview with Geoffrey’s son, Michael Stow.
p. 263 The Herrenvolk are not hard to recognise: Quoted by Ronald Howard.
p. 263 to some he apologised: Ibid.
p. 264 After the wild nightmare: Letter from Howard to TB from Burns Family Archive.
p. 265 Burns sent a message to the MOI: INF file 1/572 NA.
p. 265 how best to limit the sale of Spanish wolfram: See Wigg, Churchill and Spain pp. 121–7.
p. 265 I enjoyed meeting Marañón: FO 370 NA.
p. 266 intellectually, one of the best minds: FO 954/27 NA.
p. 266 Marañón became disillusioned: For a detailed analysis of how developments in the Civil War impacted on Marañón, see ‘La Guerra de Marañón’, research paper by Antonio Lopez Vega (Madrid: Fundación Marañón, 2006). On the restrictions Marañón initially found on returning from exile, see the elliptical account – written when Franco was still in power – of his first authorised biographer, Marino Gomez-Santos, Vida de Marañón (Madrid: I. B. Tauris, 1971), p. 382.
p. 266 one of the public men mainly responsible for King Alfonso’s downfall: FO 954/27 NA.
p. 267 Marañón is back: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 107.
p. 269 empty apart for her presence: Ibid., p. 108.
p. 269 Mabel’s early memories: Based on Mabel Burns’s conversations with the author.
p. 271 If I am not out of here in one hour: Ibid.
p. 273 Mabel found Warrington-Strong: Author’s conversations with Mabel Burns.
p. 274 Steadfastly he gazed: BFA.
p. 275 contact with Franco’s representative: Gomez-Santos, Vida de Marañón, p. 350.
p. 275 Mabel dressed up as a gypsy: Source material held in BFA.
p. 275 amiable businessman named Oscar Schindler: Ibid.
p. 276 I have always been at the service of my country: Gregorio Marañón, Obras Completas, vol. 2 (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1966), pp. 353–5.
p. 276 I never tire of saying: Ibid., pp. 351–2.
p. 276 well-drilled exhibition of Nazi loyalty: BFA. The Cap Arcona was built and conceived in the mid-1920s for service between North America and Argentina, a route ‘every bit as prestigious as the better remembered North American run’ (quoted in www.garemaritime.com). She sunk on 3 May 1945 in the Baltic Sea, four days after Hitler’s suicide and four days before Germany’s unconditional surrender after being attacked by the RAF. British pilots were targeting fleeing Nazis who were believed to be on their way to Norway. The ship was transporting thousands of inmates from the Neuengamme concentration camp along with their SS guards. About five thousand of those on board perished, of which the majority were prisoners. For a detailed account see Benjamin Jacobs and Eugene Pool, The 100 Years Secret (Connecticut, US: The Lyons Press, 2002).
p. 277 The only thing that matters: Author’s conversations with Mabel Burns.
p. 277 She dreamed of becoming a Cambridge undergraduate: Ibid. Mabel Burns left no record of which college she applied to. In subsequent correspondence with the author, her suggestion of anti-Franco bias in the university has been questioned by one Cambridge historian, Dr Peter Martland: ‘In 1938, there were certainly communists like Maurice Dobb (the Marxian economics lecturer) but the place still reeked of the old Tory right.’
p. 278 I like England and I like English men: Mabel Burns’s diary, BFA.
p. 278 As the years passed: Extensive enquiries made by the author failed to shed light on Nelly Hess’s fate.
p. 279 People are beginning to make contact with the soldiers: Paris diary entries quoted in Gomez-Santos, Vida de Marañón, p. 374.
p. 280 The years I lived in Paris: Ibid., p. 375.
p. 280 the summons Maranon received one day: Ibid., p. 375. Marañón refers, without identifying him by name, to a ‘German governor, a well-known Gestapo chief. Hans Josef Keiffer was the Nazi counter-intelligence chief in Paris at the time. His seemingly civilised treatment of Marañón was deceptive, the behaviour of a ruthless senior Gestapo officer who used his charm to befriend his victims and extract information. British agents held at the Paris Gestapo headquarters in Avenue Foch were ‘fed and nurtured and generally encouraged to feel “at home”’, writes Sarah Helm in A Life in Secrets (London: Abacus, 2007), p. 331. Kieffer’s employees, with his approval, took charge of torture at a Gestapo detention centre in the Place des Etas-Unis, and subsequent executions. When the war ended, Kieffer tried to exonerate himself by claiming he never ‘knew’ about the torture of those he had befriended – but he was directly implicated in the execution of British soldiers and hanged for crimes against humanity at Wuppertal. Ibid. See also war crimes case file WO 235 NA.
p. 281 It was only long after the war: Author’s conversations with Mabel Burns.
p. 281 The only German she befriended: Ibid. p. 282 His name was Clemente Pelaez: Ibid. While Mabel was not short of suitors among the young Francoist civil war veterans her brother Gregorio had fought alongside, it was Pelaez who most persistently courted her.
p. 283 Miranda told Burns to stop the car: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 109.
p. 283 dressed in the traditional Andalusian country clothes: Burns family archive.
p. 284 We were going to be married: Ibid., p. 109.
p. 285 there was the wildest possible gambling in this commodity: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 285 It is well, therefore, to reconsider our position: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission,
p. 248. The ambassador’s policy towards Spain remained pragmatic. Hoare considered the absence of an effective opposition to the Franco regime alongside his perception that Franco could not be trusted as an ally. He argued against a total economic embargo because of the risk of social upheaval and the ensuing ‘general confusion’ being exploited by the Nazis. Policy, he concluded, should remain focused on non-intervention and countering any non-neutral pro-Axis acts by the regime.
p. 286 Spain, however much she may need it, is not ready: FO 954/27 NA.
p. 287 the whole of Madrid: Unidentified journalist’s diary, BFA.
p. 289 her face hidden beneath a veil: Author’s conversations with Mabel Burns.
p. 291 shutting down the spy networks: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 268.
p. 292 SD officers with the haziest notions: Bassett, Hitler’s Spy Chief, p. 282.
p. 293 the links between the Abwehr in Madrid and their agents in Britain: Benton, The ISOS Years, p. 407. According to its chief architect, ‘the basic idea of the deception policy during 1943 and up to the beginning of the winter was to contain the maximum enemy forces in Western Europe and the Mediterranean area and thus discourage their transfer to the Russian front’, Masterman, The Double Cross System, p. 133.
p. 293 a Spaniard called Juan Pujol: As one of its more objective chroniclers warns readers, a ‘miasma of falsehood, deception and deceit’ surrounds the case of Juan Pujol, alias Garbo. Mark Seaman’s introduction to MI5’s official summary prepared by Pujol’s case officer Tomás Harris (London: Public Record Office, 2000), p. 2. The summary conflicts on several points with Pujol’s own memoirs written decades earlier: Juan Pujol and Nigel West, Garbo (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). Other material relevant to the Garbo case is MI5 files KV2 series numbers 39, 40, 42, 63, 64, 66 and 69. NA. A recent biographer concludes that Pujol may have initially entered the spy game for purely mercenary reasons – he approached the Germans first. His subsequent activities suggest he was motivated by a mixture of idealism, adventurousness and opportunism but contributed to the defeat of Nazism although the full facts of his story are likely for ever to remain a mystery. Javier Juarez, Juan Pujol el espia que derroto a Hitler (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2004), p. 413.
p. 294 a network of bogus sub-agents: Pujol and his handler Harris expanded a network across the UK military and government machinery from the RAF to the BBC. Agents’ included a drunken RAF officer in Glasgow, an anti-Communist War Office linguist and a Gibraltarian waiter whom Garbo claimed had been working for him for some time and was ‘one hundred per cent loyal to the German cause’. KV2/41 NA.
According to one UK intelligence estimate, by the end of the war Garbo had registered at least fourteen ‘agents’ and eleven official ‘contacts’, all notional. Benton, The ISOS Years, p. 375.
p. 294 deceiving Germans about Operation Torch: As part of the deception, Pujol removed one of his ‘agents’ from Liverpool before the Germans could deploy him, and reported on Allied convoys after the landings had taken place. KV2/41 NA.
p. 294 main contribution to the Allied victory: Pujol’s role in the success of Operation Overlord was widely celebrated on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day in June 2004. Garbo was described as the Allies’ ‘top double agent’ by the BBC which also acknowledged that the story surrounding the Spaniard was ‘almost beyond belief (press pack issued by BBC, 14/5/2004). The deception included the fictitious First US Army Group (FUSAG), the ‘existence’ of which led the Germans to hold back seven of their divisions in the Pas de Calais, pointlessly, for two weeks after D-Day.
p. 294 the V1 and V2 bombs: For an account of the damage wrought by the bombs and the mishandled information provided to the public by the government, see Maureen Waller, London, 1945 (London: John Murray, 2005).
p. 295 arrested on suspicion: Juarez, Juan Pujol, pp. 349–50.
p. 295 struggle between MI6 and MI5: The rivalry within Whitehall over who should control Pujol and in what way appears to have been most marked in the early stages. It has been noted by official historians of British intelligence in the Second World War – see Michael Howard, British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 4 (London: HMSO, 1990), p. 16, and F. H. Himsley and C. A. G. Simkins, p. 113, both cited by Mark Seaman in his introduction to the Harris ‘summary’.
The most fluid intelligence cooperation on the Garbo case appears to have passed through the personal friendship between Harris at MI5 and Kim Philby at MI6. As far as our department was concerned, Philby made all the major decisions (on Garbo)’, Desmond Bristow of MI6’s Section V’s Iberian section told the spy catcher Peter Wright. See Bristow, A Game of Moles, p. 264.
p. 295 the Ministry of Informations Spanish section: One of the notional ‘agents’ Pujol claimed as a friend was given the code symbol J (3). The alleged ‘high-ranking official’ was never named. However, Harris claims that a careful examination of the information provided by J (3) and a check on the movements of Billy McCann, the head of the section, while in Spain, would have led the Germans to the conclusion that J (3) and McCann were one and the same. Harris describes the character as ‘certainly the most important of all Garbo’s contacts’. J (3) was represented as increasingly indiscreet, with Pujol telling his German handler that he had first befriended him while working as a part-time employee at the MoI. Harris claimed that McCann was told ‘in confidence’ about Garbo’s deception although there is no separate verification of this. Pujol also created a fictitious agent at the MoI, primarily with the aim of using him as a source of deception material. The ‘agent’ was an unnamed employee at the MoI in charge of censorship. KV2/41 NA.
p. 297 José Félix Lequerica: Elsewhere described as ‘intensely ambitious, quite unprincipled, and a highly skilled operator in high places’. His mother was from the Urquijo family, one of the Spanish banking dynasties, aiding his status as one of the prominent members of the Basque financial and industrial establishment which had helped finance Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Wigg, Churchill and Spain, p. 160.
p. 298 expand and let his indiscretions roll: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 112. The Lequerica dinner was also noted in a private guest book diary Mabel Burns kept during her and TB’s stay in Calle del Prado. BFA.
p. 298 If history were conclusive: FO 954/127 NA.
p. 299 an eccentric prone to indiscipline: Laing was reprimanded for dressing up in full regimental regalia on one of his wartime outings to a London nightclub. Regimental notes seen by the author.
p. 299 Laing was introduced to the eighteen-year-old Cayetana: Author’s interview with Peter Laing.
p. 300 one of the most beautiful women in Spain: Quoted in essay on Goya by John F. Moffitt in Journal of Art History, vol. 50, issue 3 (1981), pp. 119–35. Robert Hughes, in Goya (London: Harvill Press, 2003), questions whether the painter became Alba’s lover. He suggests instead as more likely that the duchess represented for Goya an erotic ‘type’ who stirred his fantasies of ‘dark maja-hood and lithe proletarian sex’.
p. 300 Of Cayetana at first sight: Unpublished memoirs of Peter Laing and his interview with the author.
p. 300 her outings from the embassy: Among her regular chaperones was Casilda Villaverde, the Marquesa de Santa Cruz, the young wife of her father’s deputy in the Spanish embassy in Madrid. Author’s interview with Casilda Santa Cruz.
p. 301 He’s a Red Catalan!: Peter Laing diary note.
p. 302 Burns was assigned to work on a propaganda operation: FO 371/41886 NA and Templewood papers XIII.
p. 302 An armed guard of maquisards: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 302 days of great joy: Burns, Use of Memory, p.115.
p. 302 The road was lined with cheering crowds: Hayes, Wartime Mission in Spain, p. 257.
p. 304 This is the most appalling news: BFA.
p. 304 I’m writing just to let you know: Grisewood papers, GEO.
p. 305 The effect [of your speech] has been frankly bad: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 305 an uncompromising attitude towards Franco’s Spain: For a sympathetic account of Hoare’s belated attempt to force a U-turn in Churchill’s benevolent attitude towards Franco, which the ambassador himself had backed for most of the war, see Wigg, Churchill and Spain.
p. 307 Sentis had worked as Franco spy in Paris: Personal information collated by MI5. KV2/2823 NA.
p. 308 He [Sentis] has been pretty coy with me: Ibid.
p. 308 no gibes at England of any kind: Ibid.
p. 309 Marañón showed Burns a telegram: Ibid.
p. 309 This communication from Brugada: Ibid.
p. 310 main [Spanish] source of information to the [Spanish] embassy is under our control: Ibid.
p. 310 Burns got positive vindication: Author’s interview with Carlos Sentís. Details of the trip to Dachau were noted by MI5. KV2/2824 NA.
p. 311 The reports filed by Sentis:‘The horrors of the Dachau concentration camp’, La Vanguardia, 15/5/1945. ‘Witness of the end of the War’, La Vanguardia, 29/11/1945. The journalist’s style – cynical and verging on the flippant at times – and anti-communist views during and after the Spanish Civil War have drawn criticism in recent years from the Catalan left. Writing in El País (14/1/2006 ‘Franquistas en Barcelona’) Jordi Gracia questions Sentis’s professed Anglophilia and describes Spain’s political neutrality, which Sentis supported, as ‘false because it had its political heart with the Axis powers’. See Francesc Vilanova I Vila Abadal, La Barcelona franquista i l’Europa totalitaria (Barcelona: Empuries, 2005). Nevertheless, Sentis’s articles have survived the test of time as unique eyewitness accounts in the Spanish language of one of the great human horrors of the twentieth century. Sentis arguably did for Spanish readers what the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby did with his broadcasts for the British, providing an ‘unforgettable, definitive statement about human atrocity’ (see Jonathan Dimbleby, Richard Dimbleby (London: Coronet, 1977), p. 180).
p. 311 John Amery was interned in northern Italy: David Faber, Speaking for England (Pocket Books, 2007), pp. 478–80.
p. 311 he had been granted Spanish citizenship: Ibid.
p. 311 parcel of warm things: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 312 apocalyptic horror: Julian Amery, Approach March: A Venture in Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 89.
p. 314 I wonder if I might trouble you: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 314 We’ll squash those dwarfs flats: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 81.
p. 315 Laing and Burns: Author’s interview with Peter Laing.
p. 316 the resident SOE offcer in Madrid: Faber, Speaking for England, p. 493.
p. 317 conspiracy to manufacture evidence: Ibid., p. 497.
p. 318 It was a bleak day: Author’s interview with Helen Rolfe. She was married to a British intelligence officer. Her sister was an SOE agent who was captured and executed by the Germans.
p. 318 Part of me was furious: Author’s interview with Enriqueta Harris.
p. 319 A dossier prepared by the OSS’s: Donald P. Steury, The OSS and Project Safehaven (CIA Government Library), p. 8.
p. 321 ‘ Call-me-God: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 117. Brigadier Wyndham Torr, together with the naval attaché Captain Hillgarth – whom Hoare had recommended earlier for a CMG – maintained key informants at the highest level of the Spanish military. They complemented much of the political intelligence gathered on the civilian members of the Franco regime (including the Falange) and the Catholic Church by TB and his team, most notably Bernard Malley. When the former Grenadier officer Peter Laing became an assistant press attaché in Madrid, he worked closely with Torr and TB.
p. 321 He [Burns] has done most remarkable work: Templewood papers XIII: 7.
p. 322 a former evangelical lay missionary: Prior to the Second World War, ‘Grubb had spent a good deal of his early life in Latin America, mostly in Brazil, where as a missionary he had lived for several years in the backwaters of the Amazon, working among the Indians’, Sir Robert Marett, Through the Back Door (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1969), p. 5. TB claimed that it was in Latin America that Grubb developed an ‘evangelical zeal’ and ‘hatred of Rome’.
p. 322 Grubb, for his part, despised Burns: In his autobiography, Grubb criticises TB’s wartime mission without naming him, recalling Madrid as the ‘the only case I can remember of a violent clash of interests’ between the Ministry of Information and the ambassador over the duties of the press attaché. Grubb, The Crypts of Power, p. 110.
p. 322 I am sorry I had to knock you off: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 117.
p. 323 This might of course be considered a minor sin: KV2/2824 NA.
p. 323 He is an Anglo-Chilean: Ibid.
p. 324 information provided by Blunt: According to his biographer, the great mass of British secret intelligence Blunt passed on to the Soviets dates from 1942, although there is no doubt he was giving documents to his controller Anatoli Gorsky in the months before June 1941, when Hitler broke the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. See Carter, Anthony Blunt, p. 274.
p. 325 Spaniards must be really puzzled: A cutting of the Tribune diary piece is to be found in MI5’s personal file on TB – KV2/2824 NA.
p. 325 The new Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin: See Preston, Franco, p. 542.
p. 325 he ordered that any further honours: Author interview with Peter Laing.
p. 326 politically gunpowder: Author’s copy of unpublished memoirs of Sir Victor Mallet – courtesy of Mallet family.
p. 326 A series of suggestions kept reaching me: Ibid.
p. 327 outside the offcial diplomatic protocol: Burns, Use of Memory, pp. 112–13.
p. 327 Gousev, who wished, like his boss Stalin, to have the Allies break off relations: Preston, Franco, p. 542.
p. 327 Mallet wrote to the Foreign Office: FO 371/46835? NA.
p. 328 A violent or provocative act: Ibid.
p. 329 someone who would be loyal to higher ideals: Preston, Franco, p. 544.
p. 329 German officials and agents considered a security and political risk: Copies of list in Spanish Foreign Ministry archive (AMAE) R/2160/3.
p. 329 Those repatriated: The post-war fate of Leissner (alias Lenz), Meyer-Doyer and Mosig are noted in Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi, pp. 169 and 311. Also in archive files (AMAE) R/5651/29 and (AMAE) R/5651/17.
p. 330 German military and economic aid: Bernhardt oversaw the running of Sofindus, a consortium that straddled mining and shipping interests, using ‘front companies’ ostensibly managed by Spaniards. See Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi, pp. 147–9, 185–8.
p. 330 short period in a detention camp in Caldas del Rey: During the final stages of researching this book, the author discovered a surviving member of the Clauss family – Klaus Clauss, grandson of Ludwig, living in Huelva. Growing up and working in post-war Spain, Klaus had earned a reputation for his hedonistic lifestyle, throwing lavish parties for his business partners and clients either in town or out in La Luz, a large country estate his family brought from the Pérez de Guzmán, an old established Andalusian family.
There was never a shortage of women and drink in Klaus’s wild fiestas. But in 2006 he was in retirement, suffering from throat cancer. He was living in a large semi-colonial town house, obscured from the outside world by tropical trees and a perimeter gate and wall. Klaus agreed to speak through his lawyer and interpreter in a dimly lit room decorated with antiques. He described his wartime childhood in Huelva as being a relatively happy and uneventful one until the day the local authorities, under pressure, detained his grandfather, father and uncle. He attended a local school and had German and Spanish friends, although German was spoken at home. He claimed to have been unaware at the time of the wartime activities of the elders in his family. He described them as ‘loyal Germans’ – his father was a veteran of the First World War – who he remembered had spent much of their time listening to Nazi broadcasts on the radio
p. 330 Lazar eluded an order for his arrest: Lazar’s personal file at the Spanish Foreign Ministry archives contains photographs and letters surrounding his ‘escape’. Separately, the Franco archive contains the copy of an undated and previously undiscovered letter from Lazar to the Generalísimo pleading for Spanish residence. In it, Lazar argues that his reputation as a ‘notorious anti-communist’ means that he would be ‘sacrificed’ by the Soviets were he to be repatriated to his native Austria. He also claims that his wife is too ill to leave Spain (Franco archive document 618/19). British information on Lazar is recorded in FO 371/60439.
p. 331 Lazar lashed out at the evils of communism: Hamburger Anzeiger, 10/12/1953
p. 331 the Cold War was under way: In 1946 a report was placed before the UN Security Council estimating that between 2000 and 3000 Nazi officials, agents and war criminals were living in Spain in addition to tens of thousands of ex-members of the Vichy government (mentioned by Preston, Franco, p. 550). This may have been an inflated figure, and several of the more prominent Nazis subsequently left for South America. Allied pressure on Franco’s Spain neutralised the feared attempt of a resurgent Nazi state in southern Europe (see Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi, p. 313).
In 1947 the UN body CROWCASS (Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects) drew up a list of more than 60,000 names of individuals worldwide wanted for war crimes committed between September 1939 and May 1945. Over the next fifty years an estimated 6500 were caught. Many of the more notorious criminals were in Allied custody for a while but were released for lack of evidence and uncertainty over their true identities. In recent years evidence of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union’s complicity in allowing some Nazis to escape justice has emerged. CIA documents reveal that some 118 German scientists helped develop the US space programme, while in the UK Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government favoured East Europeans, among them former Nazis, over non-whites and Jews in its immigration policy. British intelligence recruited many as agents and sent them into the Eastern Bloc, where some also worked for the Russians, a subject dealt with by David Cesarani in his book Justice Delayed (London: Phoenix, 2001) and John Le Carré, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (London: Coronet Books, 2005). See also ‘The Nazi most wanted list’ in The Week, 14/2/2009.
p. 331 spiteful and exaggerated tone: Victor Mallet memoirs.
p. 332 Bristow kept track of Nazis, communist agents: Bristow, A Game of Moles, p. 196. In retirement, Bristow owned up to a long-standing friendship with a Spaniard who had a house in Antequera, near Málaga, but only partly identifying him as ‘José Muñoz’. He was José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, one of TB’s wartime contacts. Several wartime agents of influence in Spain were maintained during the Cold War period by the British. (Author’s interview with Munoz Rojas.)
p. 322 political trials and visiting prisons: Bristow found that, despite the ‘apparent viciousness’of some court sentences, the general atmosphere within Francoist prisons was ‘very informal’. He dismissed the outraged reporting in the US and British media as the product of left-wing propaganda. Ibid., pp. 196–7.
While several historians have focused on the repressive power of the Francoist state, a detailed examination of court documents shows that prosecutors relied on Franco’s grassroots support at local level to identify and provide evidence against, and convict, Republicans. Peter Anderson, In the Interests of Justice? (CUP: Contemporary European History, 2009), 18: pp. 25–44.
p. 333 Those who had venerated Philby: In The Climate of Treason Boyle describes the ‘ever loyal’ Broomham-White as one of Philby’s friends and advocates, ‘perhaps the most ardent believer of the traitor’s innocence’. When the Soviets announced on 30 July 1963 that they had not only granted Philby’s request for political asylum, but had also conferred on him the privileges of Russian citizenship, Broomham-White went into decline and died five months later.
p. 334 Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures: On 15 November 1979, Margaret Thatcher announced that in 1964 Blunt had admitted to being a Russian spy in return for immunity from persecution. He died on 26 March 1983 and his ashes were scattered on Martinsell Hill overlooking the town of Marlborough where he had walked as schoolboy. Carter, Anthony Blunt, p. 497.
p. 334 The doubts as to whether or not Tomás Harris was a Soviet agent: In an interview with the author, Enriqueta Harris defended her reputation as a wartime employee of the Ministry of Information and an art historian. She insisted her brother had never betrayed his country.
p. 334 post-war anonymity and self-exile: At the end of the war, Pujol was paid a gratuity of £15,000 by MI5 to ‘help him on his way’. He was later located in Venezuela by the spy writer Rupert Allason (Nigel West) and persuaded to make a ‘sentimental’ return to London. There he met some of his former MI5 colleagues and was granted an audience at Buckingham Palace with the Duke of Edinburgh. He receded into relative obscurity as several books on his life appeared. He died in 1988. Seaman, Introduction to The Spy Who Saved D-Day, p. 29.
p. 334 ‘ ideal situation’ to further Soviet infiltration: Bristow, A Game of Moles, p. 274.
p. 334 fake paintings scam: Ibid., p. 275.
p. 335 The greatest mystery of all: While the police report into the crash suggested an accident, the suspicion that the car was tampered with and that the Russians were involved endured. Spy writer Chapman Pincher suggested that several MI5 officers were convinced that Harris was murdered by the Russians. The theory revolved round Blunt’s arrest three months later and the anticipation that Harris was about to be brought in for questioning by British intelligence. See Pincher, Too Secret Too Long, p. 390. Also one of Pincher’s alleged sources MI5’s Peter Wright and his book Spy Catcher (London: Viking, 1987), p. 260. Pincher claimed that Harris’s wife, Hilda, who survived the crash, could not understand why the car crashed because her husband was ‘not driving fast and no other car was involved’. But the MI6 Madrid officer, Desmond Bristow, who was at the scene the day after the crash, reported that Hilda had told him that Harris was ‘driving like hell’ after consuming a ‘couple of drinks’, had got into an argument with his wife, and then lost control of the car after crossing a humpback bridge (Bristow, p. 279).
More than forty years after the crash, Harris’s sister Enriqueta carried whatever doubts she may have had to the grave. In her final interview she told the author that her brother had been ‘driving too fast and hit a tree’. The Mallorcan authorities believed that because they ‘exhibited the case as if warning people of the dangers of speeding’.
p. 335 Oblique suggestions from SIS (MI6): Burns, Use of Memory, p. 116.
p. 335 A source code-named Poodle: KV 2/2824.
p. 337 Every thinking Englishman: TB’s lecture to the Ateneo is in the Burns Family Archive.
p. 338 Dr Marañón was a true sage: Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing, Little, Brown, 1988), p. 414. According to Roosevelt’s wife Lucky, the American spy maintained close personal ties with TB during his subsequent posting in London in the early 1960s, during which the political sex scandal known as the Profumo affair fuelled CIA concerns about Soviet-inspired honeytraps. Roosevelt was tasked by his director, John McCone, with filing detailed daily reports on the case. In his memoirs, he wrote: ‘McCone was a man who took his Catholic religion very seriously indeed, and I am sure he must have been shocked by some of the spicy items I served him.’ Ibid., p. 470.
p. 339 Franco burst into tears: The anecdote was shared by Mabel with her family and subsequently related by her son, the author and journalist Tom Burns Marañón, during his eulogy at her remembrance service in London in September 2008.
p. 340 swarthy, squat, Japanese appearance: Waugh, Diaries, p. 643.
p. 341 Mabel felt it a terrible abuse of her hospitality: Mabel Burns in conversation with the author.
p. 341 Dr Hyde, so to call the better side of Evelyn: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 65.
p. 341 I am sorry that you have come down in the world: Ibid., p. 65.
p. 342 These masks cracked: Ibid., p. 65.
p. 342 Tom Burns gave me enthralling task: Waugh, Diaries, p. 700.
p. 343 He [Greene] almost turns things upside down: Copy of letter from TB to Waugh in Burns Family Archive.
p. 343 the idea of willing my own damnation: Quoted in Hastings, Evelyn Waugh, p. 546.
p. 343 Graham seemed to have a spotlight on him: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 58.