by Jimmy Burns
Ann still felt a need to follow the patriotic example set by the King and Queen Consort Elizabeth, her cousin, who continued to live out their lives with a conscious sense of duty towards the defence of the empire they presided over. It was around this time that the Queen had made the latest of her memorable public statements, a perfect complement to Churchill’s speeches, to help raise morale. Explaining why she was not escaping from London she answered quite matter-of-factly: ‘The children can’t go without me, I can’t leave the King, and of course the King won’t go.’
The King, like every member of the Home Guard, from the plumber to the top civil servant, practised shooting with his revolver and vowed to die fighting, preferably taking at least one German with him. In fact, no one in London could pretend to remain personally unaffected by the war. It was as if a long, dark cloud watched for weeks and months but seemingly settled in the distance was now moving slowly but surely across the Channel. England no longer had reasons to be cheerful. All the country could do, as Churchill urged it to, was prepare for ‘hard and heavy tidings’.
The Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium and split the Allied armies in two by means of the ‘dash to the sea’. In the last week of May, the British Expeditionary Force had been pushed back towards the Channel ports. From his minesweeper, Burns’s friend Mike Richey wrote to his parents: ‘Yes, the war has broken out all right and seems to be more astonishing than the first six months of inactivity. That at any rate was a good idea but this … whatever explanations there may be given I think it is not lack of resistance or inferiority on the allied part that is to blame … My own reading is that the new commander in chief of the German chaps Mr Adolph Hitler has that peculiar quality of commanding personal allegiance that all great militarists from Alexander to Napoleon seem to have had …’
On 3 June, the evacuation from Dunkirk had come to an end. Churchill prepared for a German invasion, as did most of Whitehall and the population at large. Over a million men too old to join the army had by that summer joined the Home Guard. Many of them spent their time harassing innocent fellow citizens for their identity cards as part of the MoI’s ‘know your enemy’ campaign.
For those who worked at the coalface of government these were uncomfortable days. Burns’s friend and colleague at the MoI, Graham Greene, left the department and for the next few months worked as literary editor for the Spectator and returned to writing reviews for this and other magazines, including the Tablet. Whether Greene was sacked or left of his own accord, pre-emptively, remains another unsolved mystery of his life. However, one of his biographers suggests that he may have been advised to do the latter after his cousin Ben, a Quaker and pacifist, was detained on the advice of a controversial MI5 ‘expert’ on counter-subversion named Maxwell Knight. Working from his London flat in Dolphin Square, Knight had placed small advertisements in newspapers to help him recruit a network of impeachable patriots – ‘little ships’ he called them – who he infiltrated into factories and offices. He was an eccentric and an obsessive, with a passion for wild animals as pets and an interest in the occult and bisexuality. Knight had taken credit for planting an agent as a secretary at Woolwich Arsenal and exposing an alleged Soviet cell there in 1938. His focus later turned on alleged Nazi sympathisers.
Fortunately for Greene, Knight was blind to the Soviet Union’s successes in recruiting sympathisers in British universities and seemingly overlooked the fact that Greene himself had, as a student, been a member of the Communist Party. Greene, moreover, had a brother whose fanatical anti-Nazism had led to him being expelled from Germany before the war, and, crucially, a sister who worked for MI6. Within fourteen months of leaving the MoI, Greene himself had been recruited by MI6, and posted to the colonial West African outpost of Sierra Leone, a job that fell under the aegis of MI6’s Iberian section, by then headed by Kim Philby.
Fortunately for Burns, he had succeeded where Evelyn Waugh had failed in getting into the MoI, thanks to convincing influential friends that it was possible to be patriotically pro-Allied and pro-Franco at the same time. Burns believed that every Catholic had an ethical duty to fight Hitler as best he could while never showing himself to have any moral qualms about supporting Franco. To put his conscience at rest, he had drawn from the ‘just war’ Christian medieval theory dating back to the Middle Ages. And yet he could not have imagined the manner in which this Majesty’s Government contrived finally to make the best use of his talents.
One day during the summer of 1940, he received instructions from the Foreign Office that he was to return to Madrid via Lisbon. Burns assumed that this was another temporary assignment to the Madrid embassy, with the added bonus of a couple of days in Portugal, where the British diplomatic and intelligence apparatus was also being strengthened. He was scheduled to have meetings with the new ambassador, Samuel Hoare, and renew contact with the priestly Bernard Malley, and Captain Hillgarth. But he presumed that his visit would be no longer that the previous one, a reconnaissance followed by report back. He scribbled a quick ‘be back soon’ ‘ticket’ to Ann, packed a small suitcase and left the flat knowing that his housekeeper Ethel would keep it tidy while his friend David Jones continued squatting there.
On 14 July he wrote another letter to Ann as his flying boat made its way towards Lisbon. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and he had been in the air since nine that morning. Arrival was half an hour away. ‘It’s like flying in a bungalow this plane with four rooms in it and two lavatories and a kitchen. We had our excitement before starting – we had to get out of the plane and take to a little boat and cruise about because there was an air raid warning. We could just hear the dull thud of the engines, nothing more. We got back in the plane after half an hour. Then I saw two British submarines and one convoy on route but nothing else … now we are sailing across the bay towards Lisbon. I can see the little white houses on the shore and the dusky green of olive trees. I wish you were here little cat …’
Portugal was a haven for refugees, their numbers drawn from all nationalities since the outbreak of war, among them Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and other exiles. Burns spent much of his time on the beach, between briefings at the embassy and meals and drinks with colleagues, making new contacts and catching up with old friends, among them Rosalind Fox, whom he had met during the Spanish Civil War. Fox was a glamorous English divorcee who provided the British with information while maintaining a long and discreet love affair with Franco’s foreign minister General Juan Beigbeder. She lived for a while in some style in the Hotel Palacio in Estoril before opening a nightclub and restaurant called El Galgo which became a favourite haunt of journalists, diplomats and spies.
As Ms Fox later recalled: ‘The Galgo had an unforgettable ambience, a unique oasis of conviviality and intrigue amidst a world at war. But that atmosphere was not of my doing. Credit for that belongs to all those many human beings who passed through its doors, lending to it something of their own spirit – their hopes, their fears, their sorrows, their joys. The Galgo was a phenomenon born out of war and man’s inhumanity to man. It reflected something of that sense of comradeship that simply being human should engender, yet which sadly enough, seems only to be in evidence in times of great trial …’
Burns was alone when, one evening, he visited the Casino in the Hotel Palacio, another rendezvous of choice for the Allies and the Axis diplomats and spies who had turned neutral Portugal into a support base for their activities in the Iberian Peninsula. Dressed impeccably in dinner jacket, he walked through a gauntlet of porters and bell boys, across the thick red carpet to the gaming room. Huge chandeliers on golden painted ropes were suspended above the game tables. Cigar smoke lay thick in the air, dispersed now and then by the scent of Chanel. Glasses clinked, roulette wheels turned. ‘Prenez vos places. Rien ne va plus.’ Burns had never gambled for money in his life. He gambled now, partly for fun, but also out of a sense of duty. He took in the faces, tried to pick up bits of stray conversation, and reported back
to the embassy. Four days later the visit to Portugal was cut short on the orders of Hoare. Burns wrote a letter to Ann, postmarked Estoril. ‘Here I am but actually I’m off to Madrid first thing tomorrow and will be knocking about in Spain for about two weeks, I’d meant to be ten days here but Sir Sam simply pines for me so I must go.’
5
Embassy on Special Mission
It was the stiffness in Sir Samuel Hoare – dressed in a dull charcoal suit and severity stamped on his face – that reminded Burns of the least likeable aspects of his own late banker father David, the puritan Scotsman who had only converted to the Catholic faith with the approach of death. Burns believed the Whitehall gossip that the real reason Churchill had left Hoare out of his cabinet and encouraged his posting abroad was that he could not bear the thought of having to cope with someone so abstemious and fastidious at close quarters for the rest of the war. Hoare, so Churchill had once joked, was descended from a line of maiden aunts. The new ambassador’s distrust of foreign parts and his belief in their endemic political instability had been engendered by his early experience as MI6’s station chief in Tsarist Russia’s St Petersburg during the First World War before heading the British Military Mission to Italy. On the other hand Hoare’s unwavering belief in the integrity and enduring political, economic and cultural superiority of the British Empire had been engendered by a record in the higher echelons of public office spanning three decades. He had served Britain as Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Privy Seal, Home Secretary, Secretary of State for India and Secretary of State for Air.
Then, after nine years of virtually uninterrupted ministerial office, Hoare had lost his place in government just as his country was embarking on a defining chapter in world history. He was shocked by the sudden severance from the trappings of high office. From one day to the next he lost his official telephones, ‘red boxes’ of sensitive documents, office, car and staff. Hoare wandered disconsolately from his house in Chelsea to the Carlton Club and from the Carlton Club to the House of Commons, ‘not knowing where to lay my head and wondering how I should occupy my time and energies’. For a short period, his old friend Beaverbrook took pity on him and suffered his advice at the new Ministry of Aircraft Production.
But what happened next came close to humiliation for a man who regarded himself as one of the most experienced politicians of his generation. Faced with the reality of his exclusion from the cabinet and the looming prospect of an extended exile to the backbenches, Hoare wanted Churchill to make him Viceroy of India. He wrote to Chamberlain asking him to force the new prime minister to do this. Lord Halifax vetoed it, saying that Hoare was not up to it. Instead Halifax asked Hoare to go to Spain as an emissary and tasked initially only with the implementation of an Anglo-Spanish trade and economic assistance treaty signed the previous March. Halifax told Hoare that his mission to Spain would take only a few weeks. The politically disgraced and physically fading Chamberlain – for whom Hoare retained enormous respect – tried to warm him against going, on the grounds that he could expect little of Franco’s Spain other than it falling into German hands.
Another of his trusted allies advised him that it was precisely such a prospect that made his mission both urgent and necessary. The Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Tom Phillips, warned of the crucial importance of ensuring that the Atlantic ports of the Iberian Peninsula and north-west Africa did not fall into enemy hands, if the Royal Navy was to pursue with any chance of success its ongoing battle with German U-boats. It was equally critical to stop the Germans using Spain as a platform for attacking and taking Gibraltar, a key naval base for Allied Mediterranean and eastern communications.
Thus did Phillips soothe Hoare’s wounded ego, restoring his faith in his own importance, and dispelling any notion he harboured that he was being put out to grass. The mission, in Hoare’s eyes, was no longer a ‘pretext for breaking the fall of an ex-minister, or for finding a job for an old friend’. It was instead ‘real and urgent war work of great strategic urgency in which the chiefs of staff and the fighting services were vitally concerned’.
Hoare and his wife Lady Maud – a matronly figure from a staunchly Conservative background (she was the youngest daughter of the Tory grandee Frederick Lygon, 6th Earl of Beauchamp) – set off for his new post via Lisbon, arriving in Madrid on 2 June. For all his foreign experience, Hoare seems to have been ill prepared for what awaited him in the Spanish capital. He was shocked to discover that the Foreign Office, unlike the Indian Civil Service, did not provide its higher officials with fully-appointed houses and a large complement of domestic staff for their missions abroad. He sent urgent word to the Secretary of the Office of Works, Sir Patrick Duff, to remedy the situation. Duff saw to it that a cargo of china, cutlery and linen was collected from noble establishments around London and shipped out immediately to Madrid via the port of Valencia.
Far from being warmly greeted by their host country, the Hoares faced angry anti-British demonstrators outside the embassy, shouting in Spanish, ‘Gibraltar must be Spanish.’ With no official residence to go to, the Hoares booked into the Ritz Hotel. Like the Palace, which it faced on the other side of the wide Paseo del Prado, the hotel had only recently been restored after being used as a military hospital during the civil war. It had a palatial entrance of wrought-iron gates, topped with gold paint, and was surrounded by manicured gardens. Its rooms were filled with antique Spanish and French furniture, including priceless velvet curtains, tapestries, chandeliers and silverware.
The Hoares had chosen the Ritz on the recommendation of the Spanish ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba. The Duke’s sister, the Duchess of Santoña, was among a group of Spanish aristocrats who were regular guests at the hotel, taking suites there while waiting for their palatial houses to be restored to their pre-civil war splendour. Doña Sol, as the duchess was popularly known, made a point of sitting at the same table in the hall by the bar that her family had had before the war. The table was sacrosanct. Every day before luncheon at 1.30 she sat at the same table sipping her dry Martini, in the presence of other members of the aristocracy.
Hoare was struck less by the Ritz’s aristocratic inhabitants than by its intrigue, not least the presence of so many Germans. From the moment he and Lady Maud booked into the hotel, he suspected he was being watched and followed, and his telephone tapped. The Hoares found it oppressive and immediately started looking for an alternative residence. House-hunting was not easy, for few good houses had survived the civil war intact and the ambassador had to count on the services of his military attaché, Brigadier William Wyndham Torr, to exploit his contacts among the Spanish senior officer class in his search for a suitable abode.
A large house was eventually secured off the Castellana, within walking distance of the embassy building in Fernando el Santo Street. That Hoare chose to live next to the residence of Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, the German ambassador, was a deliberate act of defiance, symbolic of his determination not to be seen to be intimidated by the Nazi presence in Spain.
Hoare’s first days in Madrid were marked by a growing realisation of the importance of his mission. When he had set off from England, Spain was seemingly isolated from the rest of war-torn Europe, but the Nazi military offensive had intensified the nearer he got to Madrid. While he was en route, Dunkirk was evacuated. Then, while he was in Lisbon, Norway followed by Belgium had fallen to the Germans. Almost simultaneously with his arrival in Madrid, France had finally capitulated, allowing German troops to reach the Franco-Spanish border at the Pyrenees and radically altering the whole strategic balance of Western Europe.
It was not just the Atlantic ports of the Iberian Peninsula that were potentially in jeopardy from Hitler’s advance. Following Mussolini’s entry into the war, the whole of the Mediterranean, and, by extension, the maintenance of access to the Suez Canal and beyond, was under threat. The British could no longer rely on the French fleet with its bases at Marseilles, Bizerta and Casablan
ca. Instead they faced the nightmare scenario of Hitler pushing through Spain, taking Gibraltar and taking over North Africa so as to dominate continents and seas.
To Hoare, it became evident that, in addition to official German organisations and ‘front companies’, there were German sympathisers in every department of the Spanish government, with some Nazis enjoying a major influence over the media, and how the war was reported. The German embassy had been built up into a powerful hub of diplomatic, military, commercial, and covert activity, its reach extending as far as South America. The Abwehr ran a European and American network of agents from its Madrid base, while the Gestapo had established close ties with the Spanish secret police, delivering training and equipment and moving its informers backwards and forwards across the Portuguese and French borders in pursuit of Allied targets.
Among the most formidable and sinister players at the German embassy was Hans Lazar, who, under his cover of press attaché, controlled an impressive secret propaganda and intelligence organisation. Lazar’s background was as mysterious as much of the work he carried out. The suggestion that he had Jewish ancestry was almost certainly a piece of misinformation mischievously circulated by the British embassy; that he had been born in Turkey and had moved with the Armenian diaspora into Eastern Europe before spending his time between Vienna and Berlin after becoming a supporter of Hitler during the Anschluss, was less in doubt.
A stylish dresser with a trim moustache and swept-back hair, Lazar was indistinguishable from the other well-groomed and cocky young men who dominated key areas of public life in the Spanish capital; only a monocle (when he wore it) gave him a sinister air. Lazar moved with ease in Madrid’s social circles, and added daily to his array of contacts. At an early stage in the war he was rumoured to have more than four hundred agents reporting to him, making his department bigger than any other in the embassy.