Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Two days later Burns wrote the promised follow-up. He was staying in a top-floor flat used by the embassy in the Alfama district, Lisbon’s old fishermen’s quarter below the city’s famous Castle. Though he did not let Ann know of this detail, the flat was one of several ‘safe houses’ owned or rented by the British in Lisbon and used for secret missions.

  Burns had begun writing his letter in the morning and completed it later that afternoon, after attending mass, in time to catch the next day’s diplomatic bag run out of the Lisbon embassy. After the moral rectitude of Franco’s Spain, and the post-civil war squalor Burns had glimpsed among poorer Madrileños, Lisbon struck him as not just picturesque but refreshingly liberating – a similar feeling to that experienced by Monckton, who had noted the contrast to the depression of the London blackouts. The Portuguese capital was smaller than Madrid and seemingly less developed. But to Burns it seemed a city at ease with itself, less troubled by war (or the threat of foreign invasion for that matter) and enjoying more openly the trading and cultural benefits of neutrality, in an atmosphere both exuberant and sensual, an ‘incongruous outpost of prosperity in stricken Europe’.

  The near ecstatic rambling goes on for a page before Burns spares a thought for what life must have been like at that time for Ann, with what we now know as the Battle of Britain underway and the wounded and dying beginning to crowd her ward. A sense of guilt nags at him again and he feels a need to reassure her that this is not a holiday for him, so dropping for the first time in his correspondence with her a veiled hint of the secret nature of his assignment.

  ‘Darling Ann, I can’t tell you much of my stuff here but just know that I am very well and very busy and just longing for this exile to end and come back and be near you. Of course I wonder each day how things really are with you and everyone – and your dead watchfulness at night keep me safe. I hope it will be impossible for a black cat to be bad at night, prowling because he will think you at your work. Poor darling I suppose the long month of night duty is about over now. Perhaps by the time this arrives you’ll have your rest.’

  Here the letter stops as Burns leaves to look for a mass. His Portuguese landlady had told him that there were masses aplenty because the priests and monks were saying mass all day in Lisbon. Burns had not imagined a country more Catholic than Franco’s Spain, until discovering Salazar’s Portugal. He felt truly at home.

  ‘This is a really a happy town,’ he continued writing. ‘To walk through the poorest part is to go through a vast nursery where children and grown ups aren’t separated but squat about on the sun-warm stones and chatter and sew and play games. They are much milder than the Spaniards, there is no hard fierceness, little swagger, and they are very pious.’

  The letter ends without giving any hint as to what Burns is really up to in Lisbon. His ‘ticket of love’, as if written by a euphoric tourist, had finally resolved itself into an exercise in deception. Burns’s official appointment as First Secretary had given him responsibility over the press office in the embassy in Lisbon, a similar cover, as in Madrid, for a broad operational remit that took him into areas he was unable to reveal even to the woman he considered then to be the love of his life. It showed that by this stage Burns was operating as a spy as well as a propagandist. His memoirs provide a tantalising clue as to what he might have been doing. He recalls that while he was in Lisbon he met the Duke of Windsor on a return visit to the Casino in Estoril, a ‘haunt of spies and many shady characters at the time’. Burns was playing at one of the roulette tables when a voice behind said, ‘Dix mille sur le noir.’ It was the unmistakeable voice of the Duke.

  The two men had last met in New York in 1937 when Burns was working as a publisher and the Duke was checking some proofs. At the time Burns shared, along with many of his generation and Catholic upbringing, a huge regret that the King perceived as a ‘moderniser’ had been forced to abdicate the throne because of love. The Duke had thanked him for the way the Tablet, under Burns’s chairmanship, had showed sympathy for his human predicament. But the war had forced a change in Burns’s perception of the Duke. He had become an issue of concern for the British government and potentially detrimental to Allied interests.

  The former publisher was in Portugal among the ‘watchers’, making sure, just as Churchill wished, that the Duke did not allow himself to be irreversibly tricked and trapped by the Nazis. Far from it being a chance meeting, Burns had gone to the Casino knowing that the Duke would see him and renew an old acquaintance.

  ‘The Duke drew me off to a sofa as if I was an old friend and told me of his last audience with the Pope. “We talked about Communism all the time. He was against it,” the Duke recalled. The thundering banality of this comment has obscured my memory from anything else he said, but he seemed to be glad to be holding a different conversation from what might be expected from his glitzy friends across the room.’ There are no surviving records of the meeting so one can only speculate as to what hidden motives lay behind it. It is doubtful whether it was purely accidental or that what was said was as inconsequential as Burns makes out in his self-censored memoirs.

  Brief as the encounter seems to have been, the Duke appears to have deliberately sought out Burns as someone who might lend him a sympathetic ear and rescue him from the minefield of enemy intrigue he had stepped into.

  Another possibility is that Burns had taken the initiative to seek out the Duke, as part of a covert diplomatic operation which was stamped with Churchill’s personal authority. For Churchill had separately reminded the Duke of his rank of serving major general in the British Army, and of the dangers of disobeying military orders, a veiled threat of court martial.

  The Duke and Duchess did not cross the border that summer of 1940. The Spanish invitation was snubbed as sure as the German plot to ‘kidnap’ the Windsors collapsed. Monckton stayed on in Lisbon overseeing the Windsors’ departure on 1 August aboard the cruise ship Excalibur. Two days before they sailed, the Duke, with the Duchess beside him, bade farewell and thanks to the Portuguese in a press conference held in the British embassy.

  For three weeks any detailed mention of the Windsors had been carefully exorcised from the pages of the Portuguese press and no foreign journalist had been allowed near them. A rare exception was Josie Shercliff, a Times correspondent living in Estoril – one of the Windsors’ favourite haunts – who served as a wartime agent and was encouraged by the British embassy to help keep an eye on their movements.

  Now the British judged that the time had come to turn the Windsors into a vehicle of propaganda. The Duke’s statements, like the journalists who were invited (all were vetted by the embassy beforehand), were carefully controlled to convey a simple message of gentlemanly good manners and patriotic duty. Portugal, the Duke told his audience, was a country ‘whose beauty and history’ he had admired ever since visiting it for the first time in 1931 as Prince of Wales. He now graciously accepted his appointment as Governor of the Bahamas, ‘one of the few parts of the British Empire which I have never visited’, alluding to the offer Churchill had urged upon him and which in the end he knew he couldn’t refuse.

  A week had gone by since the Duke had met Burns in the Estoril Casino. As he watched the press conference taking place, Burns could have been forgiven for believing that this was a job well done. One day earlier the Germans had accepted they had lost the battle to get the Duke, or Willi as they had code-named him. ‘Willi wollte nicht‘ – Willi won’t play, the Gestapo’s Schellenberg wrote in his log.

  Burns returned to Madrid to find his ambassador no longer worried about the Windsors but trying to deal with a crisis nearer to his patch: a fresh German push to try to force a breach in Anglo-Spanish diplomatic relations and draw Spain into the war. Hoare had intelligence that German agents provocateurs were behind the latest anti-British demonstrations and the intimidation of British subjects. Escaped Allied prisoners of war were being arrested and thrown into prison or special detention camps by Spanish police workin
g under the influence of German agents. Meanwhile, Hans Lazar, taking advantage of Burns’s absence in Lisbon, had installed some rabidly pro-German editorials in the Spanish media, and news coverage suggesting that a weakened Britain was facing a seemingly invincible Nazi war machine.

  On his first evening back in Madrid, Burns attended a reception at the British embassy to which senior members of the Spanish government he counted among his sources were invited. ‘Sam [Hoare] seemed very glad to see me. He happened to be having a huge cocktail party that night and asked me to go,’ Burns wrote to Ann. ‘It was a huge affair and lasted from 8 to 11 and was a bit queer as all the Spanish government chaps who are supposed to be our enemies, having said they would not come, at the last minute came. I left a proud cat as I was told to cope with Serrano Súñer and in the end it was jolly as could be and we were punching each other’s stomachs …’

  On a weekend that August 1940, Burns drove in his Humber to the city of Ávila where he wrote another enthusiastic letter to Ann. ‘How you would have loved it! It is one more of those places that I vow you shall see with me one day my darling Ann. It is a walled town – a big sandy grey bastion on a hill. It is St Teresa’s town, and John of the Cross was often there. It couldn’t have changed much since: nothing could alter that stone house or straighten the twisted narrow street or take away the smells of horse and fruit and soup. All the houses have “patios” – with courtyards filled with flowers and make shadows or else when everyone is dark the flowers catch starlight and moonlight from the square opening to the sky – Darling can you guess how much you are wanted when I creep out and see such things on my own?’

  A postscript suggests that a letter from Ann that had crossed in the post had been written in a somewhat different tone. ‘Not nice to hear that Rosie is rampaging,’ Burns wrote back. Rosie was the word he had coined long ago to describe the bouts of depression which periodically afflicted his friend David ‘Dai’ Jones.

  ‘We must just hang on and hope … Lovely to hear of you having drinks with Mike [Richey] and Dai and all. You poor darling – if only you had a little more of that and so rested yourself. I do agree with what you say about how it isn’t possible to contemplate the war but only to get on with one’s job: that’s what I try and do – but one thing is specially awful for me: the Spanish press is always full of the wildest German claims about wholesale destruction and what not and of course I suddenly feel sick with misery and doubt about my darling’s safety …’

  By the middle of August in Britain the Blitz was still raging, with fleets of bombers protected by fighters hitting civilian, industrial and military targets across the country. The Spanish media reported in triumphalist terms on the first raids being carried out on London. One night in his room at Gaylords Burns woke covered in sweat, poured himself a neat whisky and walked over to his hotel window. Apart from the night watchman on the corner, the streets were empty, the whole city humid and hushed and bathed in the light of a tranquil full moon. He could only think of Ann so he wrote: ‘… I kick myself and have to tell myself that it is here where I must fight, and lie, and plot that I can do my job and that there where you can tend wounds you can do yours and we can stick at it and work at it in such different ways. I do love you Ann right across this unspeakable thing. I come to realise more and more that you are all that I want and need in human womanhood and dearest Ann, sweet heart I trust you to be strong and good and well till I come back – as surely I will just as soon as I can …’ What Burns didn’t mention was that he had just been told by his ambassador that British interests in Spain were facing a critical period during which there was no question of him taking leave. He knew that he would not be returning to London for several months. What he did not know at the time was that he had written the last letter of his that Ann would keep. If there was further correspondence between them it is impossible to tell, as none survives, but it suggests, as later emerged, that their love affair had reached a critical fork in the road.

  Riven with guilt that his posting might be viewed, from a London perspective, as a holiday under the sun, Burns felt spurred to explore uncharted and potentially dangerous aspects of his embassy job by the knowledge of the war increasingly threatening the lives of those he felt closest to in Britain. He began to expand the scope of his assignment into areas for which he had no special training and where he risked treading on jealously protected fiefdoms.

  Among the secret contacts he began to make few proved as fruitful from the outset as the one he established with his American counterparts. Officially, the British and US embassies in Madrid had maintained a discreet if dysfunctional relationship with each other since the two governments had recognised the Franco government in March 1939.

  At a time when American public opinion was far from enthusiastic about the prospect of being drawn into another European war, the US government was also slow in waking up to the potential strategic importance of Spain in such a conflict. That the US embassy in Madrid in the first years of the war was smaller than the British also reflected the fact that Washington doubted if there was any real justification for fearing, as the British government did, that Spain would join the Axis.

  Samuel Hoare neither really liked the Americans not seriously tried to understand them. In contrast, Burns had used visits to the United States as a young man between the wars to forge long-term friendships and gain privileged access to important areas of American intellectual and government life. During the 1930s Burns’s schoolteacher, the Jesuit Fr D’Arcy, had helped him gain a foothold in the US Catholic network whose field of activity ranged from Harvard, the Jesuit universities of Fordham in New York and Georgetown in Washington DC to the State Department, the FBI and the fledgling OSS, the wartime predecessor of the CIA. In Harvard, Burns had been the guest of T. S Eliot, at the time a professor at the university. ‘The poet seemed totally at home there in a way that could not be said of him in London where he was an exotic despite his complete disguise as a traditional British publisher,’ Burns recalled. He might have said the same about himself. What he liked about America was its racial mix, its openness and its youthful optimism. Burns called it his ‘New-found land’. In America, Burns broadened his friendships to encompass characters as diverse as the poet Thomas Merton, the FBI officer Matt Murray, the intelligence officer Archie Roosevelt, the grand Washington dame Mrs William Corcoran Eustis and Ann Fremantle, the English peer’s daughter whose brownstone off New York’s 6th Avenue became a haven for writers such as Waugh and Auden.

  In attempting to bridge the gap between the British and US embassies in wartime Madrid, Burns was encouraged by his friend and colleague Captain Hillgarth. Hillgarth was aware that Churchill had embarked on a private correspondence with President Roosevelt while at the Admiralty and that this personal approach had become another vital channel for Anglo-American relations with the objective of securing US military support.

  Within weeks of his arrival in Spain Burns had established a close relationship with several members of the American embassy staff. They included Earl Crain, a young, energetic and outgoing second secretary who used his diplomatic cover to build up a ‘press and propaganda section’ with a brief as wide as that developed by the British. The fact that Crain was nicknamed ‘Tom’ by his American colleagues was a light-hearted reference to his operational twinning with Burns. The two men had been posted to Spain at around the same time. Burns’s privileged status on the American embassy’s books as a friend and colleague became further enhanced when Carlton Hayes, another Catholic, was appointed ambassador. Hayes was a new arrival on the diplomatic scene, recruited from Colombia University where he was a professor, specialising in sixteenth-century Spanish history. An admirer of Isabella, the Catholic Queen who was behind the reconquest of Spain from the Moors and Columbus’s voyage of discovery and colonisation, he saw Franco as personifying the Christian values that had dominated large parts of the globe during Spain’s golden age of empire. Hayes saw Franco as a phenomenon specifica
lly of Spanish political history, whose sense of national pride would make him resist any attempt by Hitler to absorb Spain into the Third Reich.

  The extent to which similar views, shared by Burns, contrasted with Hoare’s paranoia about Franco’s pro-Nazi sympathies surfaced for the first time when Serrano Súñer became foreign minister in October 1940.

  ‘Tom, I think my mission in Spain is finished,’ Hoare told Burns soon after the appointment. Burns replied that, in his view, the mission had only just begun. The appointment to such a post of such an influential member of the regime meant a ‘wonderful opportunity to review and renew Anglo-Spanish relations’, he told Hoare. There was no doubting that Serrano Súñer was a passionate National Catholic, an eloquent rabble-rouser and a flamboyant womaniser, not unlike his predecessor and rival General Beigbeder; he was also avowedly pro-German. But Burns had formed a nuanced opinion of Serrano Súñer as a result of his personal dealings with him and the intelligence gleaned from his other sources in the Falange.

  Burns believed him to be too much of a patriot to allow himself to be used simply as the tool of another country. ‘If any man in the Spanish government at that time was a major influence in keeping Spain out of the war and preventing the passage of German troops through to Gibraltar that man was Serrano Súñer,’ Burns wrote.

  Burns’s initiative in establishing a personal channel of communication with the US embassy soon after his arrival allowed him to gain intelligence information from the Americans at a time when the British were over-reliant on their own resources. On 7 September 1940, a telegram with an attached two-page intelligence report was sent by Hoare to the foreign secretary Viscount Halifax: ‘I have the honour to transmit an interesting memorandum prepared by Mr T. F. Burns, acting press attaché at this Embassy, of a conversation he had with an American friend of his, who has just returned from Berlin.’