by Jimmy Burns
Philby was released without charge and went back to London where he was debriefed by his Soviet controllers and relieved of further involvement in the assassination plot. He was told to focus on securing further intelligence on Franco and his forces. Having obtained a further letter of accreditation from the London General Press, a news and syndication agency, Philby was subsequently hired by The Times and returned to Spain as its correspondent in June 1937.
He reported from Salamanca where Franco had established his first military headquarters in the local bishop’s palace. He also spent some time in Burgos where, by the autumn of 1937, foreign journalists accredited to Franco’s army were spending more of their time, using it as a base to report on the nationalist advance across the Basque country. Whereas his colleagues were genuine war correspondents, Philby continued to use his journalism as a cover for espionage. He had been recruited as an agent of the Soviet intelligence service in 1934, a year after leaving Cambridge a convinced communist.
In the run-up to the Spanish Civil War, Philby had been encouraged by his Soviet controller to join the Anglo-German Fellowship to cover up his communist background, including his post-Cambridge involvement with the socialist movement in Vienna where he had married a communist student, Litzi Friedman. It was not until January 1963 that Philby’s cover was officially blown after the Soviet Union announced it had granted him political asylum in Moscow. The full story of who among Philby’s acquaintances suspected his true identity in the preceding thirty years is unlikely ever to be fully revealed. Philby carried many of his secrets to the grave, knowing many people who had as much, if not more, to lose from the revelation of the truth as he did.
Nevertheless there is little doubt that during the 1930s Philby swam in similar waters to Catholic laymen during his stint at the Anglo-German Fellowship, and later when filing pro-Franco copy from behind Nationalist lines, and did so without revealing the true nature of his political sympathies or secret assignments. The fact that in Salamanca, and later in Burgos, Philby had an attractive, socially well-heeled and amusing mistress he could bed whenever he felt like relieving the stress of war was a source of envy for the bulk of his mainly womanless fellow hacks.
But for the visiting ‘aid volunteer’ Burns, the discovery that the mistress in question was in town while Philby was temporarily absent was a cause of some personal celebration. For Philby’s lover, the Canadian-born Lady Lindsay Hogg, was not unknown to Burns. In fact, she was an old friend from pre-war days in Chelsea and Bloomsbury.
Burns had met Lady Lindsay Hogg during the early 1930s when the then Frances ‘Bunny’ Noble was a young, effervescent star of the London stage. After her marriage to Sir Anthony Lindsay Hogg, Burns temporarily lost track of Bunny, only to rediscover her once she had extended her social network to Spanish aristocrats and other Francoist sympathisers, friendships she had sought to repay by sharing passionately in their cause. The Spanish Civil War lover of the man destined to be exposed as one of the most famous spies of the twentieth century was a thirty-five-year-old divorcee when Burns shared a flirtatiously nostalgic meal with her in Philby’s temporary absence, the food selected in the full mutual knowledge of its aphrodisiacal properties. ‘“Bunny” was good company,’ Burns recalled years later. ‘I can see her now laughing at my shock at the effect of lemon juice on fresh clams, wriggling and raising their periscopes in apparent surprise.’
It was in Burgos that Franco’s chief liaison officer with the foreign press, Merry del Val, offered Burns a tour of Gernika as part of the extended propaganda battle fought in print and on the wireless following the Basque town’s bombing. The two had been contemporaries at Stonyhurst, when Del Val’s father was Spanish ambassador in London. Del Val appears to have harboured few doubts that Burns, by now a director of the rabidly pro-Franco Tablet, would be receptive to whatever propaganda was laid before him.
‘Pablo (Merry del Val) took us to Gernika and patiently explained that the extensive destruction of the main streets had been the work of the retreating Reds. Dynamite, not bombs of the German Condor Legion, was responsible. It was not convincing propaganda and has since been abandoned,’ Burns admitted many years later. At the time, though, he chose to keep whatever doubts he had to himself, believing that breaking Catholic ranks on Gernika would threaten Britain’s and Franco’s best interests – that of maintaining the British policy of non-intervention, however breached it was in practice by its other European signatories, namely Germany and Italy. After Gernika, Burns spent a few more days wining and dining Bunny Noble while Kim Philby continued to be professionally occupied getting as near as he could to the battle front behind Nationalist lines, not without raising some suspicions among his own colleagues.
Some of Philby’s English-speaking colleagues, among them Sam Pope Brewer of the New York Times and Karl Robson of the Daily Telegraph, noticed Philby’s tendency to ask more probing questions than other journalists at press briefings, wanting details such as names, numbers and troops strengths. Whenever he returned to base, Philby was as hard-drinking as the rest of his colleagues, but when not with Bunny usually drank alone, maintaining a certain personal aloofness.
The Spanish minders had no problem with Philby. Convinced as they were of his pro-Nationalist credentials, they were happy to offer him any detail they thought might underline Franco’s tactical nous and his military superiority. Pope Brewer and Robson later claimed that they suspected Philby was not who he claimed to be, even if neither of them guessed that he was a Soviet spy. Robson, who shared a room with Philby at one point, used to listen to him painting a doomsday scenario of China and Russia dominating the world. Robson thought Philby’s anti-communism exaggerated but claimed to have been too preoccupied with the war to give it much thought. Robson was in a car in front of Philby’s when, on New Year’s Eve 1937, he and a group of journalists left Zaragoza by convoy to cover Franco’s bold counterattack to relieve a besieged garrison near the town of Teruel. Philby travelled in the back seat of a two-door saloon, accompanied by an Englishman, Dick Sheepshanks of Reuters, and two Americans, Ed Neil of Associated Press and Bradish Johnson, a freelance photographer who was on assignment for Newsweek.
On the way to Teruel the journalists stopped off at a small village called Caude. It was mid-morning with sub-zero temperatures. Soldiers huddled round improvised fires. Robson walked a few yards and sought shelter with a group huddled by the side of the barn to protect themselves from the wind. Suddenly there was a violent explosion, knocking two nearby Spanish press officers to the ground. Through a thick pale of smoke, Robson could see that the car Philby had been travelling in was on fire. He then saw Philby staggering across the road towards him, blood dripping down his face and on to his clothes, screaming as he pointed to the car, ‘They’re in there!’
Robson described what he saw next: ‘Sickeningly I saw three figures, with grotesquely blackened faces, lolling motionless in their seats … When the door was opened, Johnson tumbled out dead. Sheepshanks, who had been sitting next to Johnson, was breathing in quick, deep snores, his temple torn open, and consciousness gone for ever … Neil was sprawled in the back …’
Robson put Philby’s survival down to incredible luck. However, neither Robson nor the soldiers he was sheltering with, still less the two press officers who were blown off their feet, were in a position to see exactly what happened. Of the four journalists hit by the blast, one, Johnson, had died instantly, Sheepshanks died later that evening without regaining consciousness and Neil died of gangrene two days later. Only Philby survived to tell the tale. He had emerged largely untouched except for cuts on his forehead and wrist, telling Robson and others who were first on the scene that his car had been hit by shrapnel as they were entering the village. By his own account, Philby, who was sitting in the back seat, managed to ‘jump out’.
After being treated in a local field hospital, Philby went back to Tarragona where he was joined by Bunny Noble. He met her in a restaurant, his head heavily bandag
ed but neatly, cleanly rolled and stacked like a Sikh turban. Otherwise, Philby was dressed in a fur-lined military coat lent to him by a Spanish officer, as if he had emerged heroically from the trenches, his apparent serenity masking a deeper inner tension. He asked for a drink as soon as he sat down at table. ‘His hands were shaking,’ Bunny later recalled, ‘but his mind was absolutely clear.’
So clear that on that day, the day Neil died, Philby filed a story to The Times, reporting dispassionately on the death of his travelling companions and his own extraordinary escape. It was published alongside a photograph of Philby, with his head bandaged, looking more like a man in fancy-dress than an injured hero. In subsequent years conflicting accounts developed as to what really happened that cold day in December 1937. One version had it that the car had been hit by a Russian-made shell, and that the reason Philby omitted this detail from his report was that he could not bring himself to tell the world that a country he had secretly sworn allegiance to had not only killed three journalists, but also nearly killed him.
What is known about Philby is that in his years as a spy he displayed utter ruthlessness in betraying British agents in the field, and was also a master at covering his tracks. Philby’s own version of what happened that winter in Spain leaves more questions than answers that, with detailed forensic investigation, might have got at the truth that was lost in the fog of war.
Philby emerged from the incident with his reputation as a loyal journalist enhanced in the eyes of Franco, who promptly honoured him with the Cross of Military Merit for bravery in the line of duty. Similar medals were awarded posthumously to the journalists who had been killed after their corpses had been returned for immediate burial to their own countries – Sheepshanks’s to the UK, Neil’s and Johnson’s to the United States. Philby recovered, spending more time with his mistress in Zaragoza, and later in France. Then, feeling confident enough to resume his cover as a Times journalist, he returned to Burgos. There he continued to report on Franco’s military planning and political manoeuvrings, including the institutionalisation of the Generalísimos rule on 30 January 1938 with the formation of Franco’s first cabinet.
The Spanish Civil War was now entering its third year. By then, some left-wing intellectuals who, like Philby, had studied at Cambridge, had been killed fighting against Franco. They included the poets John Cornford and Julian Bell and the writer David Haden-Guest. Philby showed no regret or sense of grieving. Instead he enthusiastically went on to report for The Times on the ‘liberation’ of Barcelona by Franco’s troops. The city that George Orwell had witnessed in a state of euphoric revolution in the first months of the civil war in 1936 now greeted Franco with a mixture of hysterical abandon and disbelief. As one of his biographers later put it, it was in this moment of disaster for the international left that Philby celebrated the fact that his Spanish cover story had acquired perfection.
By then the civil war had secretly defined Philby politically, as it had done, in quite different ways, those English Catholics he so resented, not least Tom Burns, whose influential role as a publisher was by now well known to journalists on The Times. While in Burgos, Philby and Burns had separately made the acquaintance of a German officer named Ulrich von der Osten, or Don Julio, as Franco’s soldiers called him.
According to Philby, the German spent much time in Burgos entertaining him, with the hope of recruiting Bunny Noble to the Nazi cause, preferably in bed. Philby later boasted that he thought he had deceived the German into believing he had done him a good turn by suggesting he could have Noble for one night, an offer she indignantly turned down.
Philby made much of von der Osten, inflating his importance as a member of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. The two men would make a habit of meeting in the Convento de Las Esclavas, a convent which had been converted into a logistics depot and media centre. Philby, who was by this time passing his secrets to the KGB, would later claim it was in Burgos that he had first managed to infiltrate German intelligence, a boast he used to get himself recruited by the British secret services for similar anti-Nazi work after the beginning of the Second World War.
3
Ministry of Information
‘Mass and Communion. After breakfast the Prime Minister broadcast the war had begun.’ Thus Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary at the beginning of September 1939 when news came through that German troops had crossed the Polish border. Much as the cause of Franco had stirred British Catholics into taking sides during the Spanish Civil War, the menace of Hitler had largely been neglected. ‘Despite his impressive evidence and formidable eloquence, Churchill was not taken seriously – Parliament ignored him,’ recalled Burns. ‘I remember thinking that he was aggravating 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 view widely shared among many of my friends.’
Even after the Munich crisis, many of them still hoped that a peace pact with Hitler was possible. The painter and poet David Jones – an integral figure in the coterie of friends that Burns had formed around him – wrote to Harman Grisewood at the BBC, following Chamberlain’s first encounter with Hitler. ‘Yes, I heard Chamberlain’s grand little speech on his first return. I did like that more than I can say. He is simply the real goods, there is no doubt about that – the only bright spot. But, Lord, what a weight the poor man has to carry, and hardly any bugger to give him proper support.’ Hitler stirred more complex emotions. In April 1939, Jones was staying at the Fort Hotel, Sidmouth when he wrote again to Grisewood thus, after reading a full edition of Mein Kampf. ‘I am deeply impressed by it, it is amazingly interesting in all kinds of ways – but pretty terrifying too. God, he’s nearly right – but this hate thing mars the whole thing, I feel. I mean it just misses getting over the frontier into the saint thing – he won’t stand any nonsense or illusions or talk – but, having got so far, the conception of the world in terms of race-struggle (that’s what it boils down to) will hardly do. But I do like a lot of what he says – only I must admit he sees the world as just going on for ever in this steel grip. Compared with his opponents he is grand, but compared with the saints he is bloody.’
Burns sought inspiration and hope from developments at the Vatican. On 10 February 1939, the ultramontane Pope Pius XI died. Within minutes Burns received a telephone call from Grisewood, with an urgent request that he accompany him immediately to Rome to help facilitate the BBC’s coverage of the funeral. ‘You’ll be able to pull strings for me – I know nobody there. The BBC will pay all expenses,’ Grisewood told Burns, who was more than happy to assist.
Burns had a key contact in the Vatican, a raffish prince, William Rospilgliosi, of Italo-American parentage, who ran the Italian state radio network. Thanks to the contact, the BBC was given unparalleled access to the funeral ceremony inside St Peter’s, and provided with the equipment it needed.
Grisewood went on to organise the BBC’s coverage of the election of the new Pope by the College of Cardinals in just three ballots and the subsequent crowning of Pius XII on 12 March, the eve of Hitler’s march into Prague. The new Pope was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, a brilliant young Vatican lawyer who had played a major part in the drafting of the Code of Canon Law, a legal instrument which helped transform papal primacy and infallibility into an unprecedented principle of papal power.
In the early 1930s, Pacelli, by then promoted to Cardinal Secretary of State, the most important post under the Pope, negotiated a concordat with Hitler under which the Vatican secured certain privileges and protection for German Catholics in return for their withdrawal from politics. Pacelli proclaimed the Reich Concordat an unparalleled triumph for the Holy See, a total recognition of the Church’s law by the German state. But Hitler interpreted it differently, seeing in it the Vatican’s blessing of his policies, not least his increasingly virulent anti-Semitism.
Nevertheless when Pacelli was elected as Pope, many British Catholics saw him a
s a man capable of providing moral authority in the midst of the turmoil of European politics, strong enough to see off the threat of communism and to contain the ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini. Pacelli’s coronation marked much more than the advent of a skilful mediator: it symbolised the Vatican’s potential as a universal power.
Three days earlier, Burns had written to Grisewood in a state of spiritual and emotional euphoria. ‘This is the first chance of writing to you or anyone. I’ve thought a lot about Rome these days and imagined you are at various times and places. Ann read me your letter and I saw and felt with you in St Peter before the conclave. I wonder if this is the time – what I think we both feel (and hope) – that this Pope really can be and do a great thing – something in a different order from others – as if he were a Gregory. Never before have I had such a personal devotion to a Pope, a personal trust as in leader and not just this supremely important ecclesiastic but really Christ’s vicar … People are just longing for a spiritual leadership and he has all of them waiting for him and him only. It is positively momentous – This Papacy …’
Ann was Ann Bowes-Lyon, a member of the Royal family, with whom Burns had embarked on a passionate if doomed affair. The precise circumstances and timing of their first meeting remain obscure, with both parties taking a deliberate decision to keep their relationship protected from public scrutiny in later years.