by Jimmy Burns
By comparison, what the British had up and running in Madrid fell well short of what Hoare felt necessary to carry out his mission with any hope of success. The embassy had only been re-established, under Franco’s new authority in Madrid, the previous October, after moving from its temporary civil war lodgings in San Sebastián. Hoare’s predecessor, Maurice Peterson, had found the small complex housing the residence and the chancery in a state of abandonment, with only preliminary restoration work funded by the British Office of Works.
On 12 May 1940, Peterson received a letter from the Foreign Office bluntly informing him that his posting was at an end. The charge laid against him when he returned to London was that he had grown unpopular with Spaniards, and that he was not ‘comfortable’ in Madrid.
Hoare arrived in Madrid and was shocked to find just how right the sceptics in Whitehall had been in thinking that the ineffectual Peterson’s ‘slow-motion machine of a peace time embassy’ was totally ill-equipped to deal with the developing strategic imperatives of securing Spanish neutrality. So fragile did Hoare believe the situation to be that he arranged for an emergency aircraft to be on standby to evacuate him and the embassy staff in the event of an Axis takeover. ‘It may well be that things may go badly in Spain and that we may have to leave at very short notice and in very difficult circumstances,’ he wrote in late May 1940. ‘We have to face the facts in the world today and we must not exclude the possibility of a coup organised by German gunmen.’
The embassy struck Hoare at first sight as the most ‘horrible building’ he had ever been required to work in, its facilities cramped, its staff struggling to remain operational despite the additional funding that Burns and Hillgarth had obtained for their operations. At the time the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, had established a relatively small but self-contained office in Madrid in the same grounds as the chancery but in a separate outbuilding. By the end of 1940, British propaganda and intelligence operations within the embassy were seeing unprecedented levels of activity. It had not always been thus.
During the Spanish Civil War, the handful of British diplomatic and consular officials out in the field struggled to provide the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office, while trying to protect UK lives and interests amidst the chaos of the conflict. The bulk of their reports had helped forge the British policy of non-intervention in Spain, turning the country – in the eyes of the professional British spies – into an intelligence backwater. While Abwehr and Soviet NKVD agents swarmed all over Spain, MI6’s intelligence gathering was reduced to occasional reporting by its accredited representative, Colonel Edward de Renzy Martin, a veteran of the Great War who had been posted to Spain after serving as Inspector of the Albanian Gendarmerie. When the British embassy was re-established in Madrid in early 1940, Renzy Martin was replaced as ‘head of station’ by Hamilton-Stokes.
MI6’s new local chief tried to maintain his own separate channel of communication to London under the so-called CX system. This consisted in a two- to three-digit prefix on SIS telegrams which identified their recipient to the Foreign Office clerks. ‘CX’ indicated a personal message to the chief of MI6, while CXG indicated the sharing of information within the organisation. While the system was justified in terms of protecting sources and operations, it also conspired against accountability and effective administration. In Madrid, as elsewhere, there was a tendency built up over the years to keep the distribution of MI6 information to a restricted ‘need to know’ basis although the agency itself drew on sources from other areas.
When Hoare arrived in Spain, MI6 was drafting plans to reinforce its operations in Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar and Tangier. In June 1940, MI6 had lost touch with its agents in occupied Europe, forcing the organisation to build up its stations in the neutral countries of Spain and Portugal as well as Switzerland. Until then much of the information coming out of Madrid had been collated as a result of individual initiative rather than in response to any grand strategy. The embassy’s two pivotal operatives, Hillgarth and assistant press attaché Malley, had established their own lines of reporting to London and were responsible for the bulk of intelligence on Spain that reached the Foreign Office and Churchill.
Both men were fortunate in having an experienced deputy head of mission, Arthur Yencken, to hold the fort during the change of ambassadors. An Anglicised Australian who had won a Military Cross during the First World War, Yencken had done some useful intelligence work during his previous posting in Berlin. Drawing on contacts he developed in the German metallurgical industry, Yencken had sent some intuitive reports about Hitler’s rearmament programme which eventually found their way into Churchill’s hands, thanks to a high-level source he had in the Foreign Office.
As Burns remembered him, Yencken was ‘tough, laconic, witty and sometimes rather wild’, popular on the Madrid diplomatic circuit and as skilled an operator in obtaining intelligence from local sources as he had been in Germany. In Burns, Yencken identified from the outset a friend and useful colleague, a ‘semi-Brit’ who could similarly integrate effortlessly into the local landscape because he had managed to resist being drawn into the pompous insularity and phobias that pervaded the British Foreign Service. ‘One of your many jobs here will be to keep Sam [Hoare] from doing a bunk,’ Yencken told Burns soon after they met.
Notwithstanding the professional talent that existed within the British embassy, Hoare spent his first few weeks in Spain feeling almost overwhelmed by the situation he found himself in. He became paranoid about the German presence in the country, which he believed was paving the way for a full-sale Nazi occupation. ‘Things are moving so quickly that by the end of three months there may be no more Mission in Madrid,’ he wrote to the Treasury in June 1940.
Just how dire the situation seemed to observers beyond the embassy was summed up in a report published around this period in the New York Times. According to its correspondent, compared to the small team of less than a dozen staff employed in the British embassy, there were some two hundred Germans operating in Madrid under diplomatic cover. The report went on: ‘Barcelona and other Spanish ports are said to be swarming with German and Italian agents, awaiting Mussolini’s signal for the war in the Mediterranean to begin.’
The highly charged political atmosphere Hoare encountered fuelled deepening concern about the survival of his mission. A week into his post he confessed in a private letter to Chamberlain that he found himself ‘in the midst of every sort of difficulty with little or no daylight’ to guide him through it. He compared living in Madrid to living in a besieged city, ‘a shortage of almost everything, prices terribly high. And a heavy atmosphere of impending crisis on all sides.’
Hoare saw armed guards wherever he went, and felt unsure whether they were there to guard or to intimidate him. He became so nervous about his personal safety that he insisted on being shadowed on his daily walk to the embassy by a stalwart Scotland Yard detective he had arranged to have smuggled in from London. And yet Hoare felt a need to redeem himself in Madrid and set about overhauling and shaping the embassy to meet the needs of the mission with which he had been entrusted – that of preventing Franco from entering the war on behalf of the Axis powers.
Taking on the Germans in the propaganda war and winning over Spanish public opinion was placed at the top of Hoare’s agenda. On 7 June he wrote personally to Duff Cooper, the newly appointment Minister of Information, asking for his support in developing the operational capacity of the press section. Hoare also wrote to Beaverbrook, asking for his help in ensuring that ‘someone really big’ – he had suggested the head of the Foreign Office’s Western European Department, Walter Roberts – be posted to Madrid as soon as possible to help advise him.
That Hoare was sent not Roberts or anyone of his rank or status within the upper echelons of the civil service, but Tom Burns, a Catholic publisher and relatively recent recruit of the Ministry of Information, partly reflected the ambassador’s unpopularity and the resentment he still generated in Brit
ish political circles.
Those within the Foreign Office who joked about Hoare being murdered by Germans or Italians saw him as a cowardly appeaser and were unconvinced of Spain’s developing strategic importance. They were damned if they were going to help Hoare out in his time of need, and wanted to thwart his plans if they could. There were also those in the Ministry of Information who had no difficulty in offering Burns up as a sacrificial lamb. Coming as he had done from outside the civil service and largely through the recommendation of his Catholic network, Burns had made enemies among his own colleagues. Religious bigotry, politics and envy all conspired against him, and in particular the fact that he had backed Franco.
Burns’s own record of his first meeting with Hoare on a hot July day in 1940 suggests that neither man expected to survive long in Madrid. ‘I protested my inadequacy and lack of experience, but all objections were brushed aside. Perhaps he [Hoare] thought that job would be too short-lived anyway,’ he later recalled. Fate and circumstances had thrown these opposites together into a coordinated effort that was to survive, for better or for worse, for most of the war. And yet the job Hoare offered Burns suggested there was method in the ambassador’s madness. ‘What you make of the job is largely up to you,’ Hoare told Burns; ‘all I insist is that that you report directly to me.’
Thus, having initially asked for a senior Whitehall mandarin to come and hold his hand, and seen the request turned down, Hoare felt he had no option but to make do with what he’d been sent and to try to turn the appointment to his advantage. The ambassador calculated that Burns’s relative inexperience would make him more manageable, easier to fit into the grand design he had for the embassy and for British policy towards Spain generally. The fact that no single department would, under Hoare’s design, be able to claim ownership over Burns meant that his appointment could be turned into a pivotal post, straddling civilian and military departments and diplomacy and intelligence – in effect, the ambassador’s eyes and ears.
Given their differences in background and character, both men faced a formidable challenge in ensuring an effective professional relationship between them. What separated them was rooted in geography, blood, faith and history. Hoare seemed ill at ease in Spanish society. Burns believed his ambassador’s alienation stemmed from an indelible insularity reinforced by puritan convictions. And yet these personal failings, thought Burns, were largely overcome by Hoare’s own dynamism. ‘He was,’ Burns would later comment on his ambassador, ‘absorbed in his station and its duties, restlessly determined to advance or initiate whatever might help in his mission.’
Burns’s own advancement under Hoare’s tutelage was largely thanks to the fact that he found the official policy the ambassador pursued for much of the war entirely in accord with his personal opinions. The urgent necessity of bolstering Britain’s presence in Spain was, after all, the proposal Burns had reported back to the Ministry of Information and his friends in the Foreign Office when he had completed his earlier visit to Spain in February 1940. Moreover, he hoped for and worked towards Spanish neutrality with a passion that perhaps Hoare lacked. Ever since his friend Douglas Jerrold had helped plot Franco’s uprising, Burns had argued, contrary to the view held by many fellow British men and women, that the Spanish Civil War was not by design a rehearsal for the Second World War, thus linking Franco ineluctably with the Axis, but was a phenomenon specifically of Spanish political history. It was not that Burns ignored the Axis support for Franco. He saw this as an undeniable fact, just as he regarded as an undeniable fact the support given to the Republican government by the Soviets and worldwide communism. But he had no doubt that if these ‘giants’ had been off the scene, the ‘fatal clash in Spain’ would still have come about.
Now Burns saw in the mission dedicated to preserving Spain’s neutrality the answer to the question posed by his friend Mike Richey during that night of shared whisky and revelations on the eve of the Second World War. What, in all conscience, could those who could not bring themselves to kill but who wanted to do their bit for the war do? Burns had signed up to his ambassador’s ‘special mission’.
And that was how, scarcely a week after his arrival from Lisbon, Burns found he was staying on in Madrid, keenly aware that he was joining, as he put it, an embassy of ‘many talents and many tensions that over time came to be transformed into a closely-knit unit family’. This time he didn’t stay at the Palace Hotel, but for some weeks took up residence in the no less luxurious if smaller and more discreet Gaylord’s Hotel, which was operating under the name Hotel Buen Retiro. One of Franco’s first decrees on coming to power was that hotels and other such establishments should have Spanish names but Gaylord’s was what its customers continued to call it, immortalised as it was thanks to the pen of Ernest Hemingway.
During the civil war, communist officers and Soviet spies had stayed at Gaylord’s, displacing the bourgeoisie with the same disdain they had shown for the previous occupants of churches, convents and palaces. It was there that Robert Jordan, the young American volunteer in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, had ended up during his three-day leave from the front, because there you could get ‘good food and real beer and could find out what was going on in the war’, thanks to Karkov, the Russian KGB colonel. Jordan had at first felt bad about being there – it seemed too luxurious and the food too good at a time when most of the city was starving – but Jordan corrupted very easily, or so he thought. He felt he owed himself some decent food after taking on the dangers that living at war in Spain brought along.
It was in the room once slept in by an NKVD officer that Burns found himself one night when, towards the end of July 1940, he sat and wrote his first long Spanish ‘ticket’ to Ann Bowes-Lyon. He imagined her on night duty in the military hospital at Woolwich, listening to the groans and cries of the wounded and the dying, trying to distinguish between the pain and the nightmares. ‘I am in shirt sleeves after a sweltering day,’ he wrote to her. How inadequate, by comparison, seemed his existence, but what else was he supposed to write that was not invention? ‘Nothing is emptier than a hotel when you’re alone,’ he continued. ‘Even the furniture is dead and gone and the room seems to soak up one’s life like blotting paper so that one has to get out every now and then to survive it all.’
Writing that seemed a corruption of the language: ‘survival’ in a hotel room without a shot being fired or a bomb dropped? He had to explain as best he could that his peace, Spain’s peace, was deceptive. So he wrote on, telling her that Madrid that summer was an all day burning sun and dust – ‘not a heavy humid heat, but dry hard bright heat and a gentle warm tender sort of night’. He went on: ‘People creep along the shade of walls from house to house in the midday and sit for hours in the evening round their little tables on the pavement … It is all peaceful as far as you can see, you would not guess the intrigue and threat behind it all …’
And then he told Ann what he had been dreading having to tell her – that he wasn’t coming back to London, to her, not for a while at least, because of the ‘special mission’ he had been recruited for. This meant that for the first time since they had met they faced the prospect of a prolonged period of involuntary separation. He tried to think of a way of reassuring her. It was duty not betrayal but he thought it best to deflect the issue. He turned instead to the cat language, a frivolous code but one they had learnt to share. ‘Sam Hoare seems – miao – to think he is a much better sort of cat than I am. Any way he has asked me most insistently if I would stay here and cope with things for a month …’ Hoare had in fact given Burns no time limit but had insisted that the job should be open-ended, and include assignments in Lisbon, Gibraltar and North Africa. Like the rest of the embassy, Burns was secretly warned by his ambassador that he might have to flee Madrid if Franco joined the war on Hitler’s side. The ‘month’ Burns had mentioned to Ann was a white lie conjured up to reduce the blow of a less predictable separation. What followed reflected a sense of calling, on Burns�
�s side, and the need to overcome any vestiges of self-doubt: ‘Do see darling a bit and help us by being all right as I shall try to be … How I am plunked down with much too big a job for my furry head and having to work like fury … if only one can keep this heavenly place from the main flood of war, that will indeed be worth all one’s sweat and life.’
He ended, as he always did whenever he wrote to her, wishing God’s blessing on her ‘dreamt heart’, and wishing ‘her safe and well, and his enduring love’. He sketched her as a white cat looking at him, similarly transformed into a black cat, sitting in a building marked British embassy. ‘Oh dearie, he is grand!’ the white cat mocked. And, yes, there was a sense that Burns had found something he could be proud of telling her, that he had finally got somewhere special before her, that he had found his own Glamis Castle, one whose bridge was not drawn up on him even if walking into it risked losing her.
Burns placed the letter in the diplomatic bag for urgent dispatch to London, acutely aware of the distance that separated him from England now that he was flying the flag in a foreign land. ‘She looked jolly nice … in her tight fitting tailored blue coat and black tie and white collar,’ David Jones wrote to Burns after a visit by Ann. ‘She seemed all right and pretty cheerful, but of course sad that you were going to be longer away than you thought.’
It was the summer of 1940. London, like Madrid, was experiencing a heatwave. Jones, the artist, struggled to remain above the fray, as nearly everyone else got dragged into it. Jones continued to live rent-free in the basement of Burns’s Chelsea house, his meals dutifully cooked by Ethel, the housekeeper. Her wages were still paid out of Burns’s London account, as was much of Jones’s general unkeep, thanks to an informal arrangement the painter had reached with his friend at the outbreak of war. Such generosity sprang from a sense of enduring loyalty and protectiveness Burns felt towards the neurotic artist.