Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  From the thousands of Spaniards serving indeterminate prison sentences, some one hundred political dissidents were being shot on average every month in Madrid in the early months of 1940. Small daily notices in the newspapers gave the names of some of those tried by military tribunals for ‘crimes’ committed during the civil war. Other, larger notices paid tribute to those who had died fighting for Franco – martyrs of a heroic crusade against the evils of the red anti-Christ.

  The luckier losers had escaped into exile. Those who stayed behind hid or adopted new identities. If you’d fought on the wrong side, living in Madrid in 1940 was to feel humiliated, to fear for one’s own safety, to have no faith in the future other than in the fantasy of watching the combined forces of Russia, Britain and France occupy Spain for the anti-fascist cause. Quixotic dreams.

  By contrast, those who had emerged victorious felt seduced by the idea of a New Spain emerging, life being resurrected from the culture of death. Conscripts who had fought for Franco were offered jobs in the emerging bureaucracy with which the new regime surrounded itself. Women were encouraged to start new families and be dutiful housewives. Orphaned children were put up for adoption. The children of the poor, from whatever side, just went on begging.

  Burns slept his first night in Madrid in the Palace Hotel, in silk sheets and under warm blankets. Such luxury had only recently been recovered. During the civil war, the Palace had been requisitioned by the militias and communist workers committee, its ample rooms and corridors turned into wards for the wounded and dying. It became one of the largest military hospitals in Madrid. The American journalist Martha Gellhorn visited it as a war correspondent. She later wrote, ‘The clientele was very young then, though pain ages the face, and wore shabby pyjamas, scraps of uniform. In the corridors … piles of used bandages collected on the bare floors. Sleazy cotton blackout curtains hung at the windows … food was scarce, and medicines, especially morphine. I don’t remember sheets and pillow cases, only grey army blankets …’

  After Franco’s victory, the hotel was among the first buildings in the capital to be restored to its former splendour. Built as one of Europe’s largest hotels in 1912 during the reign of King Alfonso XIII, its privileged clientele now once again paraded amidst the marble and the gilt fittings. While much of the city and large areas of the country were surviving on the strict diet imposed by ration coupons – pulses, dried cod, bread – the kitchens of the Palace were once again sufficiently well stocked to offer extended tea and cakes in the afternoons and dinner à la carte, as had been the custom before the war.

  A copy of ABC, the principal Spanish newspaper, was delivered to Burns’s table. It was filled with reports and photographs of Nazi troop manoeuvres provided by a German-controlled local news agency. The overall impression conveyed was that of the Third Reich on a triumphant march across northern Europe – and of Franco’s Spain getting on with the peace.

  Over the next few days Burns would discover that for those victors of the civil war a sort of normality had returned. Dance-halls and bars had begun filling up again. Madrileños took longer over their lunches, found time for their siestas and went to bed later. A municipal decree imposing street silence from midnight to seven in the morning was openly flouted. Thousands turned up to watch bullfights in the Las Ventas ring, the bravery of the emerging young talent from the south, Manolete, enthralling crowds just as Belmonte and Joselito, the two great stars of the 1920s and 1930s, had done in the pre-war years. Large crowds also packed out the Chamartín stadium to watch a re-formed Real Madrid. Of the twenty players who had played for the club during the military uprising in 1936, only four rejoined it in 1940. The others were all new signings. The football pages of the newspaper bubbled with enthusiasm for Jacinto Quincoces, the great Spanish international defender who had spent part of the civil war driving a Red Cross ambulance in the Nationalist zone.

  Between the covers of the ABC were the funeral notes of nuns ‘gloriously martyred for God and Spain’, and the latest executed Republican ‘criminal’. Advertisements encouraged men to buy a cream that stiffened the fringe upwards and back in a style called ‘Arriba España’, in honour of Franco’s rallying cry. For women, there were antispot creams and pills to help develop ‘a perfect bust’. The newspaper’s entertainment list included the latest concert by Celia Gamez. She had become the capital’s most popular star with a song that defiantly mocked the communist leader of the civil war, La Pasionaria’s, legendary cry of revolutionary resistance. Instead of No pasarán (They shall not pass) Gamez sang Ya hemos pasao (We have passed) to the rhythm of the popular tango-style chotis music that so enthralled Madrileños of every class.

  Cinemas were showing a variety of Hollywood films dubbed into Spanish as well as Spanish films, most of which pre-dated the war. These, like the plays put on in the theatres, were selected for being non-political. There was no shortage of comedy – the Marx Brothers topped the bill – and romantic adventure. Spanish women swooned at the sight of Clark Gable and Errol Flynn, while Spanish men enjoyed the refined beauty of Olivia de Havilland, the sexuality of Ginger Rogers and the coquetry of Shirley Temple.

  On the Monday, Burns’s first working day in Madrid, a crisp wind was blowing down from the mountains and the cloudless sky was luminous as he walked the few blocks to the embassy. He was struck by the contrast between the superficial orderliness of street life in the centre of the capital and the devastation he had encountered in his drive across Spain and the outskirts of the city. The buildings of the diplomatic neighbourhood and much of the aristocratic Barrio de Salamanca which straddled the Castellana had survived the civil war largely untouched by the artillery and aerial bombing that had wreaked such devastation on the outskirts. The British embassy building, evacuated at the time, had been hit by a shell during the conflict, but had since been repaired.

  Within minutes of arriving at the embassy, Burns took stock of how under-staffed, under-resourced and disorganised it was. And yet he considered himself fortunate, as a fellow Catholic, to have an immediate and personal introduction to the ‘assistant press attaché’, Bernard Malley, the former teacher from El Escorial. Malley looked older than his forty years, with pallid skin and prematurely greying hair. He spoke in the lowered tones of a sacristan and shared similar ecclesiastical mannerisms in his gestures, a tendency to bless the air and raise his eyes heavenwards.

  A repressed homosexual, Malley excused his lack of interest in women by alleging that he was a celibate. Burns, who was used to celibates of all kinds, found him well informed in the area that most concerned him professionally: Catholic opinion on the war in Spanish lay and clerical circles and their influence on the Franco regime.

  If Burns knew anything about Don Bernardo’s sexual proclivities, he made light of them in later years. Malley’s usefulness as a gatherer of useful intelligence and discreet facilitator proved more important than any personal peccadillo. ‘Don Bernardo [as he was known in the embassy and beyond] was a fervent Catholic but would chuckle over ecclesiastical scandals,’ Burns wrote in his memoirs. ‘He was happier in two-star rather than five-star circles, with captains rather than higher ranks, with parochial clergy rather than bishops. Thus he gleaned information and exercised influence in areas seldom reached by the career diplomats.’

  It was thanks to Malley that Burns gained an early insight into the complex politics that lay behind the public façade of pro-Axis unity within the Franco regime, identifying the tensions and self-interest that could be exploited to the greater benefit of the Allied cause. Among Catholics in positions of influence were bishops and lay officials who did not share in the pro-Nazi enthusiasms of Franco’s brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Súñer and the more extremist members of the Falange.

  As important in marking out the future activities of the embassy in Madrid was the contact Burns made with the naval attaché, Alan Hillgarth. The former British consul in Mallorca had been posted to Madrid the previous summer on Churchill’s personal instruct
ions. His specific mission was that of countering German intelligence operations. In the spring of 1940, Hillgarth was in the early stages of building up sources within the Spanish military, helping develop from a very low base Britain’s intelligence capability across the Iberian Peninsula.

  Burns found Hillgarth a likeable and entertaining tutor in the art of espionage, as well as an excellent guide to Madrid night life. Hillgarth for his part found in Burns – the unexpected emissary from the MoI – someone who seemed to share his understanding of Spanish culture and politics and whose consummate skills as a communicator and networker could prove invaluable for an embassy that was trying to gain confidence and expand its influence.

  Burns used his reconnaissance visit to Spain to help Hillgarth press London for more support. A report they drafted together drew attention to the inadequate resources that the embassy’s press department and other sections endured compared to the well-oiled local machinery of the Germans. More staff and more money were needed to develop a propaganda and intelligence operation with the capacity to spread out from Madrid and extend across the Iberian Peninsula, north to Barcelona, west to Lisbon, and south to Gibraltar, with additional consulates and agents across the rest of the country, they argued.

  On his return to London in April 1940 Burns continued lobbying hard to get approval from the MoI and the Foreign Office for a network of press and information offices in Spain, North Africa and France, under the direction of the embassy in Madrid. He was particularly instrumental in seeing to it that an experienced colleague and friend, Paul Dorchy, was deployed to Barcelona, which was of growing strategic importance because of the Catalan capital’s position as a Mediterranean port close to the Pyrenees. Getting Dorchy the resources and back-up he needed under his cover post of assistant press attaché proved somewhat laborious as Burns struggled with the bureaucratic inertia of Whitehall. His efforts were helped by a memorandum Burns encouraged Dorchy to write to the MoI and which was copied to senior officials at the Foreign Office.

  In it Dorchy hit out at the stinginess and lack of initiative of His Majesty’s Government while drawing attention to the deep economic and social malaise left by the civil war. The memo was circulated in Whitehall on 9 May 1940. The premiership of Neville Chamberlain was drawing to its close, with Chamberlain having to shoulder the blame for the apparent indecisiveness of the Norwegian campaign. Dorchy wrote:

  There is an enormous amount to do and people are eager for British propaganda but my hands are tied until someone comes out from Madrid with some sort of credentials … in the meantime we cannot get any rations and the wife is having a rotten time. Still as soon as I ‘exist’ officially, I will be able to draw food (when available). For the moment we are compelled to buy from the ‘black’ market which means that we pay 5/- a pound for mutton, when available 10/- a pound for butter, 9/- for sugar and eat black bread charitably obtained by our porters. With the peseta down at 44 and going down again soon, owing to the fall of the Pound, my Ptas 1,540 a month get me nowhere – to ‘exist’ costs about Ptas 3,000. I presume that it is thought that all assistant press attachés have fabulous incomes of their own, which is unhappily not the case. I hope the Treasury will realise it some day.

  Two days at a third rate hotel (the Victoria) when we arrived cost me £6 so we presumably looked for and luckily found a very small furnished flat at £4 a week – and lucky to get it … I am not downhearted, as all the Services people are out here in the same boat, living more or less like paupers – but it does not enhance our prestige. The Germans and Poles seen to dispose of unlimited quantities of Pesetas (no wonder – they print them) but if we are going to put up a Propaganda show at all, the first thing would be to see that our wives do not have to queue up for food with the enemy’s maids – and that is what mine and many others are doing … They are good sports and don’t seem to mind – but I hate it and it certainly seems to back up the Hun propaganda …

  Dorchy’s exact status and who should ultimately be responsible for him continued to be the subject of argument between the MoI and the Foreign Office for weeks afterwards until it was agreed that Dorchy be given the additional funds, and staff back-up, to do his job.

  On 10 May, hours after Hitler’s forces struck Holland, Belgium and France, Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister. As the historian A. J. P Taylor put it, for months the government had appeared to be moving into war backwards with their eyes tightly closed, with Churchill the one exception, a ‘cuckoo in the nest, restless against inaction … fertile with proposals’. Churchill’s time had finally come. Within days, Dorchy reported that he was installed in his new office, was distributing British propaganda material on a large scale, had made some important local contacts and was therefore in a position to start supplying some ‘valuable information regarding local conditions’.

  Burns, meanwhile, busied himself with coordinating cooperation between Kenneth Clark’s MoI’s film division – where John Betjeman and Graham Greene worked – and the BBC to send regular consignments of British newsreel material to Madrid. The MoI reels had their script translated by the Spanish language service at Bush House for, at the time, only a very small minority of Spaniards understood English.

  The material chosen was a mixture of trivia, misinformation and a small element of reportage deliberately picked to show the British at their most ordinary and untroubled. A typical consignment prepared for dispatch to Spain and dated 18 April 1940 included items picked for their propaganda value, among them King George inspecting a garrison at Dover Castle – the ‘first monarch visiting this ancient stronghold since Queen Victoria’ – and the legendary English outside right Stanley Matthews, ‘the best hope of England defeating Wales at Wembley’.

  From the front line came news and images of French troops ‘getting plenty of practice dealing with mines’, and the Allies ‘rushing to the aid of the Norwegians’. The newsreel concluded that Hitler was ‘accelerating his overthrow by laying his flank open to the joint onslaught of Great Britain’s navies of the sky and sea’. With the exception of the clip of Matthews’s magic on the wing, most of what the MoI was projecting was ‘lies, damned lies’, for the German troops were days away from crossing the Maginot Line, the Norwegian campaign was in difficulties and Hitler was looking more of a threat to the democratic world than he had ever done. But, then, in every war the first casualty is truth.

  The main concern for the MoI was one of logistics, not so much gathering the material and shipping it as ensuring that it was made use of at the other end. According to intelligence provided by one of Burns’s Spanish sources, an Anglophile film distributor and concert organiser, Roberto Martín Palleiro, the problem was not with Spaniards themselves but with their government’s authoritarianism and pro-Axis sympathies, as demand for Allied newsreels was high and there was anecdotal evidence that people were getting tired of the propaganda put out by the Germans.

  In May 1940, the censorship got worse after Burns had dispatched another deliberately misleading film of French troops holding the Maginot Line, and saving the ‘civilised world from the Nazi invader’. Further images showed German infantry in apparent retreat, leaving a number of their dead along the way. The Spanish authorities now demanded heavier cuts, imposing a process that led to a three-week delay in the films being shown, effectively making them useless as a propaganda tool. To make matters worse, further imports of the newsreels were caught up in a complex bureaucratic web involving the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Commerce and the Cinematography department of the Ministry of the Interior, each of which tried to outdo each other in the administrative checks it imposed on the importer.

  On 9 May, Vidal Batet, a local agent for Paramount Films in Madrid, one of the distributors of the British newsreels, sent a report to London via his head office in Paris, complaining of the bias the Spanish authorities were increasingly showing towards the Germans, by favouring material distributed by pro-Axis companies that had operated throughout the Spanis
h Civil War in the nationalist zones held by Franco forces. Batet suggested that Burns was wasting the government’s time in processing newsreel material that had no chance of ever reaching a Spanish cinema. He wrote: ‘They are hardly suitable for a country which has been declared neutral and which is governed by a totalitarian regime. Commentaries against a certain head of a European state i.e. Hitler cannot be allowed, nor should certain words like “aggressor”, “invader” etc. It is necessary to suppress all speeches containing words or references against (German) people … propaganda has to be very subtle and the commentaries short with non political references, leaving the audience to form its own opinion of the matters shown on the films.’

  British propaganda policy was not helped by the fact that the Franco regime was deeply resistant to any British strategy that smacked of intrusion into internal Spanish affairs. The Spanish embassy in London under the Duke of Alba devoted much of its time to identifying and exposing opponents of the Franco regime that were employed by the British state. Its focus was the Spanish department of the MoI where the pro-Francoists had already claimed a significant victory in effectively vetoing its chief Denis Cowan’s visit to Madrid.