by Jimmy Burns
In 1940 Gamero had taken temporary lodgings at Gaylord’s Hotel, waiting to move to more permanent accommodation after being transferred to the capital from the south. Burns booked into the same hotel and discreetly made plans to meet Gamero unofficially. He used as a go-between someone he knew from his publishing days, the minister’s brother-in-law José Antonio Muñoz Rojas. Another Andalusian Francoist, Muñoz Rojas had spent the civil war teaching in Cambridge, developing close ties with the English Catholic network in academic, publishing and government circles.
Knowing of Burns’s own pro-Franco stance during the civil war, Muñoz Rojas had no hesitation in recommending him to Gamero as a secret point of contact at a time when official diplomatic encounters between Ambassador Hoare and senior figures in the Spanish government remained strained and unproductive.
Burns for his part looked on Gamero as a radical idealist deeply committed to his Catholic faith, who, beneath his pro-German exterior, was alienated by what he saw as the godless nature of the Nazi vision and was prepared to offer discreet support to British efforts to keep Spain out of the war. During Burns’s posting in Madrid, Gamero not only became a close friend but also a useful source, keeping him informed of the inner machinations of the Franco regime as it struggled with its internal divisions as well as the contacts the Falange had with the Germans.
In developing his mission in Spain under cover of press attaché, Burns drew on his intuition and charm as well as a slush fund provided, with Churchill’s approval, by London to win over further ‘agents of influence’ to the Allied cause. While he never had as much money as his counterpart Hans Lazar with which to bribe Spanish officials, Burns used the funds he was given selectively and generally to good effect.
Burns was helped by the sheer simplicity of the system of censorship that the Falange had imposed. Nothing could be published without the permission of high-ranking officers of the party, among them Gamero and Serrano Súñer. While there is no evidence that Burns bribed Gamero personally, he did channel secret funds to some of his more junior officials in exchange for information on the inner workings of Spanish government policy and support for British propaganda operations.
That Spaniards generally at the time took a somewhat cynical view of their highly censored media, ensuring that Spanish newspapers were often not only unreadable but also unread, was of some comfort to Burns. It certainly put a premium on a bulletin his department, under his management, began to publish, with material drawn from a special wireless service provided by the MoI.
Each afternoon Burns and his team prepared and printed off thousands of copies of the bulletin before having it distributed across Madrid and in several Spanish towns by a clandestine army of locally recruited messenger boys, most of whom were orphans of the civil war or the sons and nephews of Republican soldiers who were in prison or awaiting execution.
Remembering those days long after the end of the Second World War, Burns recalled the tragic juxtaposition he witnessed on a daily basis between the continuous queues of young volunteers shuffling through the porter’s lodge to his office, and the lorryloads of political prisoners who daily passed the embassy on their way to some detention camp with ‘cheerful shouts, clenched fists and cries of Viva Inglaterra’. While the British embassy helped find employment and housing for the children of the Spanish Civil War, it generally adopted a policy of scrupulous non-intervention towards older Spaniards thrown into jail – many of whom were subsequently executed – with the exception of those who had some connections with British government service.
In his old age a certain sense of guilt nagged at Burns’s conscience on this issue, so that he wrote in his memoirs: ‘I could not help reflecting that this luckless mass of men would quickly stifle their vivas if they knew what British policy was: to keep Spain neutral by doing nothing to disturb Franco’s hold in the country and when possible to aid it economically. To prevent the Germans marching through to attack Gibraltar was our major objective.’
Over the weeks and months that followed, local staff employed by Burns were periodically verbally abused in the streets by fascists. Embassy secretaries were detained by the police and questioned about the precise nature of their duties. Some of the messenger boys were beaten up by plain-clothes fascist thugs and their bulletins set on fire. Under pressure from Lazar and some of his more pro-Nazi allies within the Spanish government, a note was delivered from the Falange headquarters to the British embassy accusing its press department of spreading ‘Red propaganda’. But the bulletin continued to be widely distributed, with Burns’s allies within the Franco regime blocking any attempt to suppress it officially despite an ongoing campaign of intimidation. The messenger boys bravely continued to carry Allied propaganda through the neighbourhoods of Madrid and across Spain throughout the war.
Nowhere was the embassy’s propaganda strategy better served than in Valladolid, where the Rector of the English Catholic College of St Alban’s, Fr Henson, remained as committed to the Franco cause as he had been during the Spanish Civil War while working for the British. On his rare visits to Madrid, Henson insisted on eating his lunch punctually at one o’clock, not later, like the Spaniards, and seemed to glory in the English accent of his spoken Spanish. He also discarded his purple cassock for a clerical coat that might have come out of a Trollope novel. Burns excused Henson his eccentricities, as the camouflage of a good agent, and liked to think of him as the reincarnation of the Jesuit spies who during the Reformation ended up being martyred rather than succumb to the enemy.
From the outset of the war, Henson became increasingly engaged in propaganda and intelligence work, reporting on German sympathisers and recommending Spaniards who could be relied on to help the Allied cause. In one report to the embassy, Henson gave the name of a shopkeeper who was prepared to bribe local officials for the necessary import permits to bring in and distribute wireless receivers from England. The project was organised by Burns through the MoI, with the support of Grisewood at the BBC. It proved less challenging for Burns than having to help deal, soon after his arrival in Madrid, with a Nazi conspiracy to have the Windsors – the former Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson – detained in Spain pending the former monarch’s restoration to the British throne.
With the German advance across northern Europe, the Windsors had retreated from their self-imposed exile in Paris, first to the Château de la Croë on Cap d’Antibes before making their way south across the Pyrenees. On 23 June 1940 they arrived in Madrid, and booked into the Ritz Hotel. There they were met by Hoare, against the background of mounting German propaganda in the Spanish press claiming that Churchill wished to arrest the Duke as soon as he returned to England.
Hoare tried his best to reassure the Windsors, and suggested that the sooner they returned to England the better as this would help stem the campaign of Nazi misinformation.
Intelligence had reached the British embassy that the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had persuaded his Spanish counterpart Beigbeder to invite the Duke to remain in Spain for as long as he wished as a guest of the Franco government.
The Windsors did not immediately take up the offer of residence in the Palace of the Moorish Kings in the Andalusian town of Ronda, but chose instead to extend their stay in Madrid, where they were entertained separately by the Franco regime and the British embassy while becoming the subject of intense diplomatic wrangling behind the scenes.
Seemingly encouraged by the Foreign Office, Hoare ensured that he saw as much as he could of the Windsors, making them feel appreciated with regular invitations to the embassy. The cocktail party given in their honour was the biggest held since Hoare had taken over as ambassador. It subsequently fell to Burns to ensure that a tight rein be kept on the Windsors’ dealings with the local press, so that no statements were forthcoming that could be interpreted as critical of the Allies. He was also asked to keep an eye on the Duke’s contacts with the Franco regime during the short time they were expected to remain in Spain.
Much to Burns’s relief, the Spanish government raised no objections to the Windsors’ decision on 2 July 1940 to leave Madrid and travel to neighbouring Portugal, to await there a more positive response from London to their request that they be allowed to return to the UK. Over the next month, the Windsors played for time, hoping for positive news from London, while letting it be known that they had not ruled out, as an alternative, returning to Spain, seemingly unaware that the Germans were behind the original ‘invitation’ to take up residence there. While in Portugal they stayed in a large villa near Cascais, along the coast from Lisbon, belonging to Ricardo Espirito Santo, a rich and powerful local banker, in an atmosphere of intensifying diplomatic intrigue.
Early in the morning of 4 July a telegram arrived via the British embassy for the Duke from Churchill advising him that he had been appointed Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Bahamas. It was delivered personally to the Duke by David Eccles, an experienced diplomat who had become a key figure in the Lisbon embassy.
Sent to the Iberian Peninsula in the first year of the war by the newly created Ministry of Economic Warfare, Eccles had spent a period in Madrid using the British control over navicert shipping licences – and thus Spanish imports – to secure a trade deal with the Franco regime with which to counter German commercial interests. His colleague Burns would later recall that the ‘over-elegant’ Eccles created a formidable working unit in the ‘Economic Section’ with Hugh Ellis-Rees from the Treasury.
In Lisbon, Eccles’s rank of economic counsellor provided adequate cover for a post that straddled trade, politics and secret intelligence. With his responsibilities extending across the Iberian Peninsula, Eccles liaised closely with Marcus Cheke, the somewhat aloof and aristocratic student of Portuguese history who served as press attaché in the Lisbon embassy under Burns. All three were drawn operationally into the saga of the Windsors.
July saw Lisbon becoming increasingly immersed in a feverish atmosphere of spying and propaganda activity, with a renewed attempt by the Germans to have the Duke detained in Spain. Eccles was among those entrusted with keeping socially close to the Duke. He resolved to ‘watch him at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; with a critical eye’. For his part, the press attaché Cheke, instructed by Burns, used his contacts with local Anglophile politicians and newspaper proprietors to counter Axis misinformation, ensuring that the Duke’s access to the media was, as it had been in Madrid, largely controlled by the Allies and heavily restricted.
As a result, it was not just the Portuguese media that found its coverage of the visit being censored. The English language weekly Anglo-Portuguese News, which the MoI funded both as a tool of British propaganda and a source of local intelligence, remained strikingly uninformative in print about the Duke and Duchess as if they didn’t exist. The newspaper was edited by Susan Lowndes Marques, an English Catholic and niece of Hilaire Belloc whom Burns had befriended before the war. She was married to an English-educated and similarly staunchly pro-Allied Portuguese banker, whom Burns had helped contribute to a collection of articles published by Burns & Oates entitled Neutral War Aims, with an introduction by Christopher Hollis.
Such contacts ensured that the Anglo-Portuguese News became a key instrument in the Allied strategy aimed at denying the Windsors any official significance that could be exploited by the Germans. Meanwhile, discreet British contacts with senior officials of the Franco regime helped Churchill anticipate German moves, in Lisbon as much as in Madrid.
On 23 July Nicolás Franco, brother of the dictator and Spain’s ambassador in Lisbon, told Eccles that the pressure was building from Berlin for the Duke of Windsor to return to Spain and remain there, pending a decision by Hitler on how to use him after a successful invasion of Britain. Of Nicolás Franco’s usefulness to the Allied cause Eccles would later recall: ‘He was the sort of self-made person who always seemed to be saying, “Look at me! I’m an ambassador!”, and would illustrate the fact by repeating all kinds of things he had got to know recently. We relied upon him for much of our political information. Not only was he indiscreet, but we always felt he was on our side.’ It was partly thanks to the ambassador that the British had advance warning of the arrival in Lisbon three days later of the latest Spanish ‘emissary’ sent with the specific mission of trying to draw the Duke into German hands. Angel Alcázar de Velasco was a fanatical member of the Spanish Falange, who was thought to have taken part in the fatal shooting of Lieutenant Jose Castillo Seria, a socialist paramilitary policeman on 12 July 1936 in the days leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. At the time, the only information the British had on Velasco was that he was a former bullfighter who had retrained as a journalist and had high-level contacts within the Franco regime.
The British embassy also knew the identity of the Nazi figure operationally behind the plot, Walter Schellenberg, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the German foreign counter-intelligence organisation, who was thought to have arrived separately in Lisbon on the same day as Velasco, accompanied by Paul Winzer, the Gestapo’s chief in Madrid. The task Schellenberg had set himself appears to have been twofold: to fuel the sense of insecurity surrounding the Windsors, and to ensure that, once they had taken fright, their flight would not be impeded at the frontier. However, unknown to Schellenberg, one of the key contacts used by the Germans in the Portuguese secret police to pursue their interests was a double agent working for the British. The German plot had begun to unravel before Velasco had even met the Duke.
The meeting took place on 28 July in the villa the Windsors had been staying in since their arrival in Portugal. The location was a wooded promontory called Boca do Inferno, the Jaws of Hell. The Duke was handed a letter signed by Miguel Primo de Rivera, brother of the founder of the Falange, reviving the old canard that the Windsors faced the threat of extra-territorial terrorism by the British while remaining in Portugal, and that they similarly risked assassination by the British secret services in the Bahamas. As an alternative, the Duke’s alleged friends in Madrid offered the Windsors safe haven on Spanish soil. In the event of Franco entering the war in support of Hitler, the Duke would be given the option of remaining in the country as a ‘prisoner of honour’.
Velasco left for Spain later that night without an immediate answer. By then the British government had reacted to the alarming intelligence it was receiving from Madrid and Lisbon and set in motion an exercise designed to stop the Windsors tilting towards the enemy. On the same day as Velasco’s departure from Lisbon to Madrid, 28 July 1940, there flew into Lisbon from London a British government official as senior and influential in his country’s wartime affairs as Schellenberg was in Germany’s.
The latest high-ranking ‘emissary’ involved in the Windsor case was Sir Walter Monckton, a brilliant and charming barrister who as Edward VIII’s lawyer had been involved in the delicate negotiations over the abdication, and was trusted by the Windors. Since the outbreak of war Monckton had been put in charge of a wide range of sensitive operations as Deputy Director of the MoI, including the interrogation of suspect German agents and overseeing the conduct of British government propaganda.
Once in Lisbon, Monckton delivered a letter to the Duke signed by Churchill. It began by reassuring the Duke that the Bahamas appointment would provide him and the Duchess with a ‘suitable sphere of activity and public service during this terrible time when the whole world is lapped in danger and confusion’. The appointment, insisted Churchill, reflected his sincere desire to do all in his power to serve the Duke’s interests and consider his wishes.
The letter then went on to warn the Duke to be on his guard against loose gossip and fiendish plots. ‘Many sharp and unfriendly ears will be pricked up to catch any suggestion that your Royal Highness takes a view about the war, or about the Germans, or about Hitlerism, which is different from that adopted by the British nation and parliament,’ Churchill warned.
According to the prime minister, since the Duke’s arrival in Lisbo
n ‘conversations have been reported by telegraph through various channels which might have been used to your Royal Highnesses’ disadvantage’. Various historians have speculated on the nature of the sources informing Churchill’s comment. While it has been claimed that some German ciphers were being read by the Allies at the time, such intercept capability had not yet extended to the cipher code operated by the Abwehr in top-secret German communications between the Iberian Peninsula and Berlin. The first such Abwehr Enigma was not broken by British intelligence until late 1941, well over a year after the Windsors had left Portugal.
It is almost certain, however, that information had reached Churchill through various human intelligence channels developed by the British embassies in Madrid and Lisbon, in addition to secretly coded transmitted communications involving the Spanish and Portuguese governments and diplomats which were intercepted by the Allies as well as the Axis from the beginning of the Second World War. What also seems likely is that by the time Churchill wrote his letter, those feeding information to London about the Duke’s state of mind and political inclinations included Burns, who had discreetly travelled to Lisbon from Madrid by train, anticipating the arrival of Monckton, in the Portuguese capital by several days.
Burns revealed his presence in Lisbon at this time in a letter he wrote to Ann Bowes-Lyon. It was in the last week of July that Ann found herself on a break from her ward duty at the Royal Herbert Hospital, opening the latest in a long line of love letters from her persistent suitor. It had been sent in a diplomatic bag, and brought to her by messenger from a secret postal dispatch box in Whitehall.
That it was from Burns came as no surprise. What puzzled her was that it showed that he was back in Lisbon, so soon after she had last heard from him from Madrid, taking up his post there. The letter gave little away. It ran to just a few lines, acknowledging receipt of her letter to him, and saying that he planned to be there for a week, and would write soon at greater length. Given the delicate nature of his assignment, Burns had exercised professional self-discipline while telling no lies.