by Jimmy Burns
The idea that such a world of intrigue might be worth exploring was initially shared with and accepted by my then agent, Caroline Dawnay at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, and by my then editor at Bloomsbury, Mike Jones. Both subsequently moved to new organisations, but their generosity of spirit was such that they did all they could to ensure that the project remained on track.
My researches into the correspondence between my father and some of his friends and a widening list of useful contacts within the retired intelligence community in the United States was hugely assisted by Nicholas Scheetz at Georgetown University. The staff and residents of John J. Burns Library and Fr Philip Kiley at St Mary’s in Boston College provided further assistance in tracing relevant material.
During an extended sabbatical in the US, Jackie Quillen generously provided hospitality in Georgetown, Washington DC, as did my nephews James and Peter Parker, and their respective wives Kristen and Susie, in Boston and New York. In Massachusetts Nigel and Katherine Adam provided additional company and accommodation. Special thanks for an informative lunch, exchange of emails, and a book, go to a long-term friend of my Spanish family, Mrs Archibald Roosevelt.
The curator of the CIA’s Historical Intelligence Collection, Hayden B. Peake, offered some useful insights into Kim Philby one evening at the Special Forces Club, while Katherine Gresham helped me order and make sense of the private papers of her uncle-in-law, the late intelligence officer Walter Bell, as did his widow Tatti, since deceased. There were others who helped on both sides of the Atlantic who asked not be identified and I have respected that.
In the UK, some of the experts in the field came to my rescue on the frustrating occasions I hit a brick wall of official secrecy and Whitehall bureaucracy. I was particularly fortunate in counting on the guidance of Whitehall expert Professor Peter Hennessy, of Professor Keith Jeffery, official historian of MI6, and, in even greater measure, of Professor Christopher Andrew and Dr Peter Martland, official historians of MI5.
Thanks to Chris and Peter I was able not only to draw on their insights, but also to engage in a fruitful exchange of information with their inspired and hardworking postgraduate students and fellows at Cambridge University, of whom I would like to make special mention of Calder Walton, Owen Ryan, and Tony Craig.
On certain aspects of signals intelligence and special operations, thanks go to my helper at GCHQ and to Duncan Stuart and Professor Michael Foot, who provided me with relevant documents and other useful information. Antony Beevor generously pitched in with some useful additional insights and clarifications in the later stages of research.
In Spain and Germany, José de Pascual Antonio Luca de Tena proved a diligent researcher, and Ana Momplet a good insurance against losing meanings in translation. In the Basque country, Juan Carlos Jiménez de Aberasturi encouraged me to look at escape routes and hidden connections.
In Portugal, the Municipality of Cascais, Ana Vicente and Michael Stowe were as always both welcoming and supportive, as were the descendants of Roy Campbell, led by Frances Cavero.
Others who have helped along the way include Professor Paul Preston, Professor Hugh Thomas, Professor Luis Suárez, Dr Collado Seidel (in Germany and Spain), Javier Juárez, Pablo Kessler, Antonio Lopera, Victor and Philip Mallet, Mary Uzzell Edwards, Magdalene Goffin, Jonathan Stordy, the late Peter Laing, the late Marquesa de Santa Cruz, the Countess of Romanones, Mary Keen, Bernard Dru, Mary Walsh, Septimus Waugh, Ian Thomson, Tessa Frank, Michael Walsh, Philip Vickers, Alma Starkie, Alan Hunt, Carlos Sentís, José Luis García Fernández, Patricia Martínez Vicente, Tristan Hillgarth, Dolores Jaraquemada, Pepe Maestre, the Haynes and Gómez-Beare families, Rafael Gómez Jordana – father and son, Philip Wright OBE, Frank Porral, Julia Stonor, Patrick Buckley, Julia Holland, Hallam and John Murray, Jaime Carvajal de Urquijo, Piru Urquijo, Michael Richey, Denis McShane, Iñaki Goiogana, Vincent O’Doherty, Sir Raymond Carr, Pat Davies, José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, Paul Burns, John Cumming, Juan Fernández Armesto, Felipe Fernández Armesto, Rafa Gandarios, Iñigo Gurruchaga, Jaime Salas, Colin Cresswell, the late Barbara Wall, Olive Stirling, Helen Oliver, Begoña Cortina, Tom Catan, Mark Mulligan, Leslie Crawford, Isa Gutiérrez de la Cámara.
Thanks too to the library staff at the Financial Times – Peter Cheek, Bhavna Patel, and Neil McDonald, and those who showed me where to look at the National Archives in Kew, the London Library, the Fundación Francisco Franco, the Hemeroteca Municipal del Ayuntamiento de Madrid, the Museo de Historia de Madrid, the library of Municipal History in Madrid, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Archivo de Nacionalismo Vasco – Fundación Sabino Arana, Cambridge University Library, the British embassy in Madrid, and the Garrick Club.
My former editor Lionel Barber and colleagues at the FT, not least George Parker, Alex Barker, and Jim Pickard, gave me time, and space, and much necessary humour in the early stages of researching this book, before I left the newspaper. Special thanks to Ben Fenton and Fred Studermann who provided advice, translation, and logistical support, as did Richard Norton-Taylor and Alan Travis of the Guardian.
Early drafts took shape thanks to meticulous reading by Robert Graham, Peter Martland, Hugh Thomas, my brother Tom Burns, and Anton D’Abreu.
My brother David Burns and sister Lady Parker showed their support by allowing me – the youngest of the family – to draw on the family archive, and raised no objections to the project.
Thanks to Annabel Merullo and Tom Williams at PFD and Bill Swainson and Anna Simpson at Bloomsbury the project came to life again. And the biggest, biggest thanks of all go to Kidge, Julia, and Miriam who endured the book from gestation to birth.
London/Madrid, May 2009
1
Catholic Roots
When his Majesty’s ambassador to Madrid Sir Samuel Hoare first saw Tom Burns striding purposefully towards him across the room, we do not know what he thought but we can surmise that he wondered whether Burns was suited to the competing demands for delicate diplomacy, propaganda, and secret intelligence in the Spain of the Second World War. Prior to taking up residence in the Spanish capital, Hoare had been an MI6 station chief in pre-Revolutionary Russia and a senior diplomat in Rome before going on to serve as Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Privy Seal, Home Secretary, Secretary of State for India and Secretary of State for Air.
Forty years of public service had given Hoare an instinctive wariness of outsiders. With his dark hair, suave looks and impeccable manners, the wartime embassy’s latest recruit appeared to Hoare to be someone playing the role of an Englishman without actually being one. His name, his light green-grey eyes, and fair skin suggested Celtic blood, but he also had a Latin swagger about him. The fact that Burns had been born in Chile and was a fervent Catholic further fuelled his suspicion.
Hoare, at sixty years old, was nearly twice Burns’s age. Unmistakably Anglo-Saxon in appearance and from a staunchly Anglican background, he was cut from quite a different cloth. In his own memoirs, Hoare described himself as ‘very English, very respectable, and very traditional’. According to the experts in the College of Arms, there were few families with a longer all-English descent than the Hoares. The ambassador was also well read in British military and colonial history. When addressing the challenge facing his special wartime mission – that of stopping the Germans from marching into neutral Spain – Hoare was fond of quoting a memorandum from one of his heroes, the Duke of Wellington, to Viscount Castlereagh in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. ‘There is no country in Europe in the affairs of which foreigners can interfere with so little advantage as Spain. There is no country in which foreigners are more disliked, and even despised, and whose manners and habits are so little congenial with those of other nations in Europe.’
Be that as it may, Sir Samuel Hoare’s responsibility was to keep Franco’s Spain neutral, and yet this passionate English Catholic was the man he had been sent to run his press office and win the propaganda war.
Tom Burns was born in the Chilea
n seaside resort of Viña del Mar in 1906, the seventh child of David Burns, a Scotsman who had gone to South America from his home in Brechin to seek a livelihood as a bank manager. His mother, Clara Swinburne, while descended from English North Country stock as well as of Basque blood, was Chilean-born and bred. The Burnses left for London after a devastating earthquake nearly killed the baby of the family before destroying the family home. My father was only six months old when the roof collapsed over him, leaving his nanny partly buried under the rubble and himself miraculously alive with his only injury a cut lip. A permanent scar left an enduring reminder of survival in the midst of disaster. Tom Burns was a cradle Catholic, owing his early spiritual nourishment to his mother, Clara.
In fact her influence in the family was so great that on her arrival in England it drew her husband away from his Scottish Presbyterianism and towards induction into a Catholic Church that was undergoing a revival across Europe, and nowhere more than in Britain. By the early twentieth century, the influence of Cardinal Newman in drawing Anglicans closer to Rome, and the literary cache of Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, brought in their wake a new generation of young intellectuals who saw in their religion the only valid alternative to chaos.
Burns’s father was austere and dedicated to his life in the City at a time when a banker was trusted as a counsellor by his customers. He was also enormously appreciative of books. He had returned from Chile with a huge library: Conrad, Dickens, Henry James, George Eliot, as well as the French classics bound in handsome editions. He was fond of making Shakespeare his main point of reference during his rare intrusions into family life. Hearing his daughters arguing in the playroom, he would murmur to himself, ‘Her voice was ever sweet, gentle and low – an excellent thing in a woman.’ Keats would occasionally come to the rescue, as when he once trod in a dog mess on the front porch and lamented, ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet’. Such eccentricities would mark his youngest son, turning him into something of a maverick in later life. And yet it was the mother’s deeply ingrained religion that prevailed. Like his three older brothers, Burns was educated by the Jesuits. ‘Give me a boy at seven, and he is mine for life,’ goes the old Jesuit saying. At seven Burns was sent to Wimbledon College, a Jesuit school in west London, where he began to be formally instructed in the basics of Catholic dogma as laid down in the Catechism.
Burns found himself absorbing the mysteries of a faith that had at its core the doctrine of the Real Presence. He munched on his first Communion wafer, and sipped at the chalice, fully believing that this was the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, as recited by the priest, and that the words were part of the same kind of mystification as that experienced by the apostles at the Last Supper.
Burns’s second year of Catholic schooling coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. It was a time, he would later recall, that brought him closer to his father, as the only son left at home. They played a lot of chess and pored over a large map of the Western Front, moving little flags as the fortunes of war fluctuated. Only later would the personal agonies behind such symbols touch the Burns household with brutal suddenness.
Burns, his parents, four sisters (he was followed now by Alice, two years younger) and two brothers (a third, George, was studying for the priesthood) were on holiday by the sea in Felixstowe, Suffolk, on 4 August 1914, when the life as he and his siblings had enjoyed it together – treasure hunts in the garden, tea dances, tennis parties – died. The front page of the Daily Mirror on that day was wholly taken up with a photograph of the Kaiser with his waxed moustache and wearing the helmet of the Death’s Head Hussars. By that afternoon British soldiers were already digging trenches in the garden which overlooked the sea. Burns’s two older brothers – Charles and David – enlisted in the army, while his oldest sister Dorothy left her convent school and volunteered as a nurse in a military hospital.
Charles survived, invalided out after being injured, and returned to his medical studies, but David, an officer in the Black Watch, was killed in Flanders during the third Battle of Ypres, on 1 October, 1 day short of his twentieth birthday and six weeks before the Armistice of 1918.
The Burnses were enthusiastic letter writers from an early age. During the last weeks of his life, David wrote regularly to his youngest sister, Alice, who was a nine-year-old schoolgirl at the time, writing letters home that barely hinted at the horrors of the sodden trenches and the killing fields beyond. In early September 1918, he wrote with darkening humour: ‘Thank you very much for your interesting letter and the drawing of me in a gas mask. I will do my best to gratify your desires for a Hun helmet but at present I’m afraid the nearest I’ve been to the wily Bosche is when he comes over and bombs us like he did last night.’
Burns (then aged twelve) was with his sister Alice and their mother when the telegram bearing the news of David’s death arrived. After opening it, Clara sat stunned in the hall, with the paper in her hands, silenced by shock, and waiting for her husband to return from his job in the City. She told her children to restrain their tears and to mourn silently. ‘There was no more plotting of little flags on the map,’ recalled Burns many years later. ‘Our war was over. Quite soon it was for everyone and they went mad with joy so that an awful irony was added to our empty world.’
Days later a Roman Catholic chaplain wrote to say that David had taken Holy Communion a few days before being first wounded in the leg and then shot in the head by a German machine-gunner. His regimental commander commended him for his skills as a runner and his bravery in the line of fire. Then David’s adjutant, Tim Milroy, returned from the front and married Burns’s second sister Clarita. Later Tim introduced his younger brother Bill to Alice, and they too eventually married. Burns’s faith in God was rekindled, and he would long treasure, with a mixture of worship and trepidation, the enduring memory of his beloved and heroic brother, an awkward role model of selfless sacrifice in the line of duty, cut off in the flower of youth.
Burns was fourteen when, two years after the end of the Great War, he went to Stonyhurst College, a leading Catholic boarding school in the north of England also run by Jesuits. Stonyhurst considered itself unique, with a history of its early founders beginning in exile during the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics, the first boys drawn from recusant homes near Blackburn, Lancashire. While firm in its Catholicism, it was a school that also drew its identity from its loyalty to the British state. Thus, near a centuries-old room full of original portraits dedicated to the Stuart royal lineage the Reformation had interrupted, was a memorial to more than a thousand old boys who had died for King and Country, six of them decorated with the Victoria Cross.
Burns’s best school friend Henry John, a son of the painter Augustus, was a soldier of sorts, but not in any traditional sense. John was infused with an adventurous and polemical spirit that flourished in the spirit of enquiry that some Jesuits teachers encouraged among their students, most notably a sage called Fr Martin D’Arcy. Under his tutelage the two boys developed a fondness for theology and a belief that in their faith lay the key to confronting the materialism of the prevailing culture. They chose to become militant evangelisers.
With the encouragement of their teachers, Burns and John spent their holiday time at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. There, mounted on soap boxes, the young crusaders expounded various ‘truths’ of their Catholic doctrine amidst much heckling from the largely agnostic crowd.
With the end of schooldays came a sense of a bigger world and an even greater longing to be part of a universal Church capable of transforming the experience of it. John was persuaded by his Jesuit mentors to further his religious studies in Rome as a step towards joining the order himself. He was about to make his final vows when Burns suggested they take a journey together, away from the rigours of life near the Vatican. By boat, train and camel, the two friends travelled to Libya and Tunisia in search of the troglodytes who lived below ground level, and of the Ouled Nail, belly dancers of
legendary sensuality. They discovered remnants of the troglodytes in countless caves dug into the sides of vast craters near Togourt, and shades and phrases of St Augustine amidst the stones of Carthage.
For the two friends, the journey proved to be the parting of the ways. John returned to England where he embarked on the final stages of his training for the priesthood. Despite securing the necessary academic qualifications, Burns decided against applying for Oxford or Cambridge, believing that it would mean a financial strain on his parents and a postponement of a more challenging world beyond British shores that he was anxious to discover.
Thus, with ‘an open mind and a small purse’, he decided to pursue his studies in France, and one day in 1924 caught a train to Paris to seek out the vibrant intellectual life of French Catholicism that was then flourishing on the Left Bank. He had just turned eighteen. In Paris, Burns rented a room in a ‘sleazy hotel’ in Montparnasse before immersing himself in the writings of French Catholic philosophers who boldly proclaimed the dawn of a new era of social and spiritual transformation. They ranged from the neo-fascism of Charles Maurras’s Action Française to the neo-Thomist theology of Jacques Maritain, politically on the left if still opposed to its agnosticism, and proclaiming instead the imminence and immediacy of God in all things.
It was in Paris that Burns dabbled in the bohemianism of the Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare & Company, the meeting place for aspirant American writers, and shared a mutual if platonic infatuation with Gwen John, sister of Augustus, mistress of Rodin and lesbian lover of Maritain’s sister-in-law. Burns and the much older Gwen – his best friend’s aunt – spent much of their time maintaining their tense relationship in intimate conversations, when not writing letters to each other about their common faith.