Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  It was while Burns was repairing the initially dysfunctional Wall union that news reached them of war in Abyssinia. The Italians had nursed a grievance against Ethiopia since their ignominious defeat there in 1896 by Emperor Memelik II, an alleged descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. After a phoney war lasting several months comprising military skirmishes over waterholes and other disputed territories, and impotent diplomatic protests, Italian troops attacked in force in October 1935. With the fortieth anniversary of the earlier humiliation approaching, Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, had set his sights on a new Roman Empire in eastern Africa, joining Ethiopia with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.

  One witness to the Italian attack was George Steer, the South African-born correspondent for The Times. In an article for the Spectator Steer described Ethiopia as the ‘last African Empire to be invaded by a white Power, when feeling against the colour bar is rising all over Africa’. He warned that the subjugation of Ethiopia risked lighting a fire ‘throughout the African bush’. In his articles Steer painted a stark contrast between the poorly equipped but brave Ethiopians (they fought mainly with rifles, swords and spears) struggling against the brute, well-equipped force of a fascist military machine, using any means it thought necessary to achieve victory, including the deliberate bombing of civilians to demoralise the enemy.

  Such a perception was not shared by the network of Catholics that Burns had gathered around him. Burns’s first meeting with Waugh had taken place just after the writer had returned from his first visit to Abyssinia where he had reported on Haile Selassie’s coronation for The Times. Waugh’s accreditation with The Times, to file on spec, had been partly facilitated by Burns’s close associate Douglas Woodruff after his approaches to several other newspapers has been turned down. It was the experience of that first trip to Abyssinia that helped forge Waugh’s friendship with Burns and led to their first joint publishing venture.

  Returning from his latest journey to Spain, Burns got back in touch with Waugh. The novelist was at the time actively courting Laura Herbert while anxiously awaiting news of his petition to Rome for annulment from his first wife, Evelyn. The process was proving tortuously slow, and threw him into bouts of depression. The emotional quagmire which drew in the two friends still revolved round their shared involvement with the Herbert sisters. While Waugh was focused on marrying Laura, Burns had befriended Laura’s more extrovert and garrulous sister, Gabriel.

  It was against this background that Burns, then building up his list at Longman, seized on a commercial and political opportunity, and commissioned Waugh to write a book on the Abyssinian war which he felt was guaranteed to sell well and give the Catholic perspective on an Italian venture that appalled much of the British nation.

  Mussolini’s invasion had fuelled considerable media interest in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and writers like Waugh, with a developing literary reputation and knowledge of the region, were at a premium. Burns signed up Waugh as part of a triangular deal with the Daily Mail, negotiated for the novelist by his sharp-witted agent Augustus Peters, under which Waugh would have his expenses covered and receive an equally generous payment for a series of dispatches from Abyssinia.

  The journey produced the second of Waugh’s non-fiction books on Abyssinia, Waugh in Abyssinia. Burns had decided on the title, thinking the pun on the author’s name was clever, punchy and, most important, marketable. Waugh had wanted to call it A Disappointing War. So he told his friend and biographer Christopher Sykes: ‘Tom [Burns] as a professional publisher knew that a title that suggested disappointment would unquestionably result in disappointing sales.’ Waugh, strongly encouraged by his publisher, portrayed his experience of Abyssinia as a clash between civilisations, with the Italians representing the cause of socio-economic progress, and the locals, barbarism. Sykes saw in the book the influence of the Old Catholic lay patriarch Hilaire Belloc, who saw in Mussolini, like Napoleon, the personification of benevolent power and greatness.

  When the book was published at the end of 1936, the British public and Europeans in general were taking sides once again – this time over Spain. While the context was one of a civil war, the arguments revolved around similar issues, with the British and French governments signing up to a policy of non-intervention, and Italy, Germany and Russia getting militarily involved on opposing sides. Catholics once again tried to influence the agenda, this time portraying General Franco as the force of Christian civilisation intervening to stop Spain sliding into the grasp of atheistic communism.

  In the early hours of 11 July 1936, a light passenger aircraft took off from an airfield in Croydon as part of a covert operation that was to unravel into the start of the bloodiest civil war in modern history. On board the Dragon Rapide were Luis Bolín, the London correspondent for the right-wing monarchist Spanish newspaper ABC, and two glamorous nineteen-year-old English girls, Diana Pollard and her friend Dorothy Watson, posing as tourists on a flight to the Canary Islands.

  Bolín was just one of several players in an elaborate conspiracy to draw into a military uprising General Francisco Franco, at the time military commander of the Canary Islands. To ensure his joining in the coup against Spain’s civilian government, the main army conspirators and their civilian allies arranged for a small plane to fly from England, pick up Franco and then take him to Spanish Morocco where the rebel forces were gathered.

  Money for the operation was put up by Juan March, a Spanish millionaire from Mallorca who had made his fortune in tobacco smuggling and arms deals during the First World War. March was a close friend of Franco. He had also established ties with British intelligence through Alan Hillgarth, the British consul in Palma, Mallorca’s capital. It was March who helped transfer the necessary funds for the hire of the Dragon Rapide – £2000 – into an account held in the Fenchurch Street branch of Kleinwort Benson & Sons, a merchant bank in the heart of the City of London.

  The plane was hired by Bolín with the backing of several London-based Spaniards led by the monarchist unofficial London ambassador of the nationalist forces, the Duke of Alba, and a group of English Catholics, led by Douglas Jerrold, a right-wing Tory and publisher. While there is no evidence to suggest that Burns was directly involved in the plot, it is reasonable to assume that he was aware of it through his close friendship with Jerrold and chose to maintain its secrecy.

  It was Jerrold who introduced Bolín to Hugh Pollard, a retired army officer and fellow Catholic, who was put in charge of organising the logistics of the operation, including the recruitment of an RAF pilot turned mercenary, Captain William Begg.

  Of all the plotters it was Pollard who was the most intriguing; he was, according to one of his friends, ‘one of those romantic Englishmen who specialise in other people’s revolutions’. Educated at Westminster School and with a degree in engineering from London University, Pollard – whose favourite hobbies were hunting and shooting – enlisted as a trooper in the Northumberland Hussars.

  Before volunteering his services to the British Army in the First World War, Pollard used his riding and shooting skills in the Mexican Revolution, helping organise the escape of the toppled dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1911. He subsequently took part in the pro-Spanish uprising in Morocco of 1913 which deposed the Sultan Abdul Aziz and placed Mulay Hafid on the throne. In North Africa, Pollard and March had a common bond, for it was thanks to the subsequent Spanish colonial presence in Morocco that the Spanish entrepreneur had added to his riches, developing a tobacco monopoly. Pollard’s duties after the First World War included at one point working as a police staff adviser in Dublin Castle, where suspect Irish republicans were interrogated. After this, his career turns somewhat nebulous, almost certainly because he became embroiled in British intelligence. In 1940, the security service MI5 began to investigate Pollard as a suspected member of the British Union of Fascists and Nazi sympathiser, only to discover that he had been enlisted as an MI6 agent after serving, under cover as a journalist, in military intelligence an
d government propaganda operations. Fluent in several languages, he was also the author of several military books, most notably an expert’s manual on small arms commissioned by the War Office.

  Pollard was thus almost certainly a spy. Once he had been briefed on the Franco plot, he decided to give it his full support, convinced that he was serving the cause of the Roman Catholic faith. He agreed to volunteer his daughter Diana and her friend as cover. The two debutantes carried operational orders aboard the Dragon Rapide between the covers of Vogue magazine. Six days later, at 5 p.m. on 17 July, the first of a series of coordinated military risings took place in Morocco. The Spanish Civil War had begun.

  The gathering storm of German territorial expansion and militarism during the 1930s, and the apparent slowness in British rearmament in the face of the threat, were the subject of passionate denunciation inside and outside Parliament by Winston Churchill. And yet when the Spanish Civil War broke out Churchill agreed with foreign secretary Anthony Eden that it was essential for Britain to maintain her neutrality in the struggle. Their shared principal motive was a strategic one and based solely in what they believed best served British interests: the wish to avoid the Spanish conflict becoming the principal battleground for a general European war.

  It was just over thirty years since Churchill had last had any real interest in Spanish matters. In 1895 he had gone to Cuba in a semi-official capacity as a military observer, reporting as well for the Daily Graphic. Cuba at the time was one of the last remaining colonies of the Spanish Empire, and was in the throes of a rebellion by the islanders. He was shocked by the corruption of the colonial administration – ‘on a scale almost Chinese’ – but impressed by the professionalism and bravery of the Spanish troops and their commander General Valdez whose campaign he accompanied. The Spanish military for its part honoured Churchill – a Sandhurst-trained cavalry officer – with a medal for courage in the field.

  In his dispatches, Churchill showed some understanding of the Cuban rebels’ cause but he was shocked by their military tactics which he described as that of ‘incendiarists and brigands – burning canefields, shooting from behind hedges, firing into sleeping camps, destroying property, wrecking trains, and throwing dynamite’. These, Churchill, concluded, were ‘perfectly legitimate in war, no doubt, but they are not acts on which States are founded’. He would think on the lessons of Cuba when later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he encouraged the formation of Special Operations Executive (SOE) with its orders to set Europe ablaze.

  Perhaps there was a reason for Churchill to have forgotten Spain over the intervening years when his interests had ranged from military planning in the First World War to Home Rule in Ireland. And yet the Spanish Civil War prompted memories of Cuba, the nearest the old warrior had come to seeing Spaniards at war. From the outset Churchill was careful not to criticise the military uprising. By contrast, he showed little sympathy for the Republican government, which he regarded as revolutionary in character and tainted by its record of violent industrial and agrarian militancy and anticlericalism.

  On being presented to the newly appointed republican ambassador to London, Pablo de Azcárate, in October 1936, Churchill turned red with anger, muttered ‘Blood, blood, blood’, and refused the Spaniard’s outstretched hand. The perception was fuelled by the partisan reports about the summary executions of Franco sympathisers which reached him from within the Foreign Office, influential English Catholics, and, most particularly, Hillgarth, the Naval Intelligence officer serving as British consul in Mallorca who was to remain a trusted contact on matters Spanish for over a decade.

  The son of a Harley Street surgeon, Hillgarth had entered naval college as a young boy, before serving and getting wounded as a Royal Navy midshipman during the Dardanelles campaign of the First World War, when Churchill had served as First Lord of the Admiralty. During the 1920s Hillgarth became a military adviser to the Spanish Foreign Legion during its confrontation in Morocco with the uprising of the Rif’s tribes. Among the Legion’s officers and one of its founders was a young major named Francisco Franco.

  Returning to London, Hillgarth became part of a social network that drew together the upper classes and emerging literary figures and in 1929 married Mary Gardner. ‘A young man called Alan Hillgarth, very sure of himself, writes shockers, ex-sailor’, Evelyn Waugh had noted in his diary two years earlier.

  Hillgarth had planned to spend an extended honeymoon sailing round the world in a converted Dutch schooner, but the romantic idea collapsed along with the stock market. Less rich than they had been brought up to be, the Hillgarths sailed from England to Palma, Mallorca, and there sold the boat.

  The proceeds from that eventually helped them purchase Son Torella, a run-down but palatial residence and estate whose widowed absentee owner – a member of the Spanish nobility – had left for the mainland to become a nun. When the Hillgarths settled there in 1932, the house was half occupied by cows, donkeys and mules. Contraband tobacco was stored in the galleries and the olive press had been stripped of its hydraulic equipment. It took two years to make the house habitable with the help of local master masons, Mary Hillgarth’s private income and a fortunate lottery ticket in which the Hillgarths had ‘gone halves’ with a friendly Austrian barman called Joe.

  Windows were glazed, bookcases carved and installed, the rooms retiled and repainted and filled with a mixture of local antique wooden furniture and portraits of the Gardner family. Apart from the attentive restoration of the house, Mary Hillgarth took special care in creating a garden that was a piece of England grafted on to the Mediterranean. The house had long-established cypresses, palms and lotus trees, planted by the previous owners to provide shelter and shade from the Mediterranean storms and hot summers. Mary planted herbaceous borders, and a thousand irises – Dutch Wedgewoods and Yellow Queens.

  Son Torella was already something of an idyll when Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine visited it in the late autumn of 1935. It was a restful place – bursting with scents and colours – which contrasted with the dark shadow of German military expansion that threatened mainland Europe, and the frustration Churchill felt at having his political peers ignore his warnings. Churchill’s hopes of being brought back into government after an extended period on the backbenches had been dashed when he was left out of Stanley Baldwin’s cabinet despite an overwhelming election victory for the Conservatives to which he had contributed. Bruised and verging on despair, Churchill dealt with the resurgent ‘black dog’ of depression by taking a long working and painting holiday.

  Hillgarth was by then serving as the British honorary vice-consul in Mallorca. Initially the job had mainly consisted of getting drunken British seamen out of Spanish jails, but Hillgarth had soon manoeuvred it into a ‘cover’ posting, whereby he doubled up as a spy. He adeptly exploited his position to make influential friends among the local community, and gain useful political and military intelligence on an island that was not without strategic importance as a naval base in the Mediterranean. When Churchill came to visit him he played the perfect host, letting him paint and laying on large quantities of food and drink between discussions about worrying developments on the international front and the increasingly volatile state of Spanish politics.

  Hillgarth’s most immediate concern was less the threat of a war with Italy than the increasing disgruntlement many of his friends in Mallorca felt about the revolutionary politics of the Spanish left. In the traditionally deeply conservative and right-wing island, one of his key informants was the local businessman Juan March. The plot which was to involve March in financing Franco’s involvement in the military uprising was only months away.

  Years later, Tom Burns – by then a long-term friend of Captain Hillgarth – would reflect on the 1930s, not without a sense of guilt pricking his conscience over the sins of omission he had unwittingly contributed to: supporting Mussolini in Abyssinia with the pact formulated by the then foreign secretary Samuel Hoare, his future ambassad
or in Madrid; waking up belatedly to the real evil of Hitler; and passively acquiescing in the fiction of non-intervention in Spain. ‘The rise of the dictatorships was reported in a muted and distorted fashion: an ugly development, better kept out of sight. Official compliance with broken treaties, near criminal efforts to satisfy Nazi expansionism, by offering to hand over territories that were not ours – such was the coin of our diplomacy. Rearmament, thought Mr Baldwin, would be electorally dangerous – a prospect which was apparently more alarming to him than any belligerent threat from abroad.’

  By contrast, Burns reflected, only Winston Churchill had spoken out against government policy and apathy at ‘every possible opportunity’, ceaselessly exposing Britain’s military vulnerability and Nazi Germany’s growing power. And yet, despite Churchill’s formidable eloquence, he was not taken seriously. It was not just Parliament that ignored him. As Burns admitted: ‘I remember thinking that he was aggravating great dangers in the very act of denouncing them. The prospect of peace receded with each new barrage of insults and accusations hurled against Hitler. Mine was a very widely shared view among many of my friends. We read Mein Kampf, published here in 1931, with incredulity; we distrusted the outpouring of the Left Book Club and were as ignorant of German concentration camps and the persecution of the Jews as of the Gulag Archipelago and the enslavement and “liquidation” of millions of political dissenters in the Soviet Union. Partly because the protagonists of protest against these horrors were, to me, suspect witnesses, partly because my life and work were at full stretch, I did not become involved in these matters.’