by Jimmy Burns
The report was founded on access to the highest level of the German command structure, as well as on a personal observation of how the war was being experienced by ordinary Germans. According to the report, Hitler believed that the war had entered a critical juncture. With the Soviet Union threatening Germany’s eastern borders, and Mussolini reluctant to invade Greece, Berlin believed that the war stood to be won or lost in the Battle of Britain.
The source reported that British air raids on Germany had damaged the docks in Hamburg, but that the Krupp armament factory in Essen and other targets such as railway junctions had escaped practically unscathed, with the German air force making effective use of camouflage and decoy fires to deceive Allied aerial photography. While the civilian population was showing signs of ‘tiredness and nervousness’, and workers had been forced to carry on at the assembly lines ‘at bayonet point’, most people remained firmly behind the goal of a German victory.
The intelligence obtained by Burns suggested that the German air raids which had so far taken place on England were simply a prelude to the main offensive on an unprecedented scale. The informant provided Burns with two other areas of intelligence: that the Germans had put on hold any plans to invade Spain and that the persecution of the Jews was increasing.
‘My informant said that he could see that we in England did not lay nearly enough stress on the absolute inhuman brutality of the Nazi regime and were in danger of letting the war be seen as an ordinary combat of arms – or else were too vague when we talked of a conflict of ideas. The regime was and should be constantly shown to be diabolic,’ reported Burns.
According to a weary note subsequently drafted by Walter Roberts, the head of the Foreign Office’s Western European Department, Burns’s informant was in a position to ‘supply useful information’ although he had been ‘sensationalist in the past’. ‘There have even been suggestions that he is under German influence and used by the Germans to plant information.’
On 6 September the codeword ‘Cromwell’ was sent to all armed forces in the United Kingdom, alerting them to ‘immediate action’. It was a false alarm, as Hitler had not even set a date for the invasion. Instead, the real activity, Burns’s source had predicted with greater accuracy, was the launching of Germany’s entire bomber strength against Britain.
An early draft of Burns’s first intelligence report before it was put into code and transmitted to London shows the comment ‘I wonder’ scribbled alongside his source’s claim that the threat of a German invasion of Spain had receded. The scribbler – Hoare – disagreed with Burns’s own analysis that Franco’s patriotism was of a nature that would resist any attempt by Hitler to absorb Spain into his empire. There was certainly ample evidence to justify the ambassador’s scepticism, even if Burns’s judgement has ultimately stood the test of time.
Spanish gestures of solidarity with the Axis powers continued through the summer and early autumn, with German influence seemingly reaching a new, particularly threatening stage on 16 October with the appointment of Serrano Súñer as foreign minister.
Four days later Heinrich Himmler, the self-styled Reichsführer SS, began a three-day visit to Spain and was accorded the honours of a visiting head of state. Burns’s Gamero was among the senior Falange officials who accompanied Himmler throughout most of his stay. Sitting in an open-air Mercedes-Benz, and flanked by Moorish lancers – Franco’s guard of honour – Himmler was driven along the Castellana which was draped in swastika flags and lined with members of the Falange giving the fascist salute and crowds shouting ‘Viva!’
His arrival was on a Sunday, a day normally devoted to masses, football and bullfighting. That day Real Madrid supporters poured into the Chamartín stadium to watch their team beat Deportivo Español 4–1. Himmler was blessed by the monks as he visited the El Escorial monastery. Later that afternoon, he sat in the presidential box of Las Ventas bullring watching three of Spain’s most popular bullfighters. It was a dull, overcast day but the bullring was packed and the audience filled with a sense of collective anticipation. The first fighter, Gallito (the Little Cock), stepped out into the ring to huge applause. As he confronted the bull with some deft swirls of his cape, it began raining. With fighter and bull soon slipping and sliding, the corrida took on the aspect of a surreal ballet. The crowd loved it as Gallito maintained his composure and imposed himself with a faena of effortless skill, and a summary kill that earned him the prize of an ear. The other fighters, Marcial Lalanda and Pepe Luis Vázquez, fought and killed their bulls with similar success, drawing standing ovations. But when the third bull had been dispatched, the arena had turned into a mudbath.
With the rain now a downpour and people beginning to leave the ring, it was decided to suspend the rest of the fight. The three matadors made their way to the presidential box to shake Himmler’s hand. It was at that moment, as the band struck up the first notes of the German national anthem, and the crowd of thousands stood and applauded and saluted, that a member of the Gestapo noticed two men who had stayed in their seats.
The two were Burns and one his embassy colleagues, the ambassador’s private secretary Gerry Young. A fanatical enthusiast of the bullfight, but ever watchful of the enemy, Burns had installed himself and his colleague in the cheapest seats, to better blend in with the crowds. He had calculated that the German national anthem would inevitably be played, but at the end of a normal corrida of six bulls, and had therefore planned to leave before the last bull. He had not counted on the rain.
When the band struck up ‘Deutschland über Alles’, a mixture of principle and sheer bravado prompted Burns and Young to stay where they were, action that provoked murmurs of disapproval which soon developed into angry roars of protestation from the Spaniards surrounding them. Within seconds they found themselves being unceremoniously hustled out by two plain-clothed members of the Gestapo. It was only as they stumbled down some steps and out of one of the entrances that Burns spotted a group of Spanish Civil Guards talking to their officer. ‘I am under Spanish jurisdiction,’ shouted Burns as he broke free from his Nazi captors and joined the Spaniards, identifying himself and Young as British diplomats. He was aware that his friend Gamero was almost certainly in the ring as well, but knew that to mention his name would risk exposing a key source.
Just a few yards away the recently killed bull was being hung and quartered by a butcher and his assistants. The mules that had dragged the creature from the arena stood nearby, their coats drenched, their bells silent. In the ensuing conversation, Burns offered the Spanish officer a cigar, explained that Britain acknowledged Spanish – but not German – sovereignty over the bullring, and apologised for any inconvenience caused. Minutes later, the Gestapo officers withdrew from the scene having been persuaded by the Spanish officer that he and his men would take charge. This they did, once the Germans were out of sight, by issuing Burns and Young with a formal reprimand, before taking their money and telling them they were free to go back to their embassy.
That evening word of the incident spread around Madrid’s diplomatic circle and Burns was summoned urgently to the ambassador’s residence. Hoare was furious. ‘Totally irresponsible, Tom, you have come dangerously close to endangering my mission,’ he protested before letting the matter rest.
Years later the South African poet Roy Campbell told Burns he had been at the same bullfight on the other side of the ring and had watched the whole incident without knowing who or what was involved. ‘You should have been recommended for the VC,’ Campbell growled over his beer.
7
Spy Games
Autumn faded and with it the memory of Gallito’s magical faena in the pouring rain. In the Retiro, Madrid’s central park, the last of the leaves from the few trees that had survived the civil war shrivelled and fell. An icy wind from the Sierras had arrived suddenly, sweeping down the Calle Alcalá and along the Castellana. The harshness of that winter of 1940 – the coldest any Spaniard living then could remember – created new hards
hips for Madrileños, the divisions, deprivations and destruction wrought by the civil war made worse by the food and fuel shortages created by war in Europe.
Not everyone was badly affected, however. In Madrid, a new, privileged sector had emerged since Franco’s troops had defeated the Republicans, with access to black-market luxury goods, restored or new housing, cars, restaurants and nightclubs. The regime had created a new bureaucracy of former soldiers and members of the Falange. It had also drawn back to the capital the aristocratic families with their maids and chauffeurs and English nannies. And then there was the foreign expatriate community, using their embassies for entertainment when not exploiting to the full whatever Madrid had on offer for those with money to spend.
Social life was concentrated in and around the centre of the capital, on either side of the Castellana, the diplomats’ favourite haunts within walking distance of their embassies. British and the Germans shared the bars and dining rooms of the Ritz and Palace hotels, but there were places where territory was more delineated. No Germans ventured into the Anglo-American Club – a favourite watering hole for some of the harder drinking members of the diplomatic staff. Also out of bounds to the Axis, and accepted as such by the Spanish police, was the hugely popular ‘Embassy’ tea room.
Located just a few blocks from the British embassy, and near the homes of Spaniards of wealth and title, the upmarket Embassy tea room was famous for its cocktails as well as its cakes and sophisticated clientele. Its owner, Margarita Kearney Taylor, was an attractive and impeccably mannered Englishwoman of Irish descent who had had a long-running affair with a Spanish Marques and given birth to a daughter named Consuelo. Closed down during the civil war, the tea room had since been revived, using Spain’s neutrality and the snobbishness of the pro-British Spanish aristocracy to create a newly burgeoning business. Wealthy Spaniards felt pampered and secure there, as did Allied diplomats. As the war progressed, Mrs Taylor’s flat above the tea room provided an additional secret service. It was run by the British embassy as a safe house for Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis and on their way to Lisbon.
The Germans had their own club in the style of a Bavarian beer garden, and their own five-star restaurant, Horcher, in the city’s fashionable Alfonso XII Street. It was set up during the Second World War by Otto Horcher, the owner of one of the most successful restaurants in Hitler’s Berlin, where it was popular with the high-ranking members of the Nazi party and military personnel. Horcher’s key staff had been exempted from the military draft on the orders of the Reichsmarschall himself.
In later years it was claimed that Horcher transferred his main business operation to Madrid when Allied bombing of Berlin became too threatening and in anticipation of Hitler losing the war. In the 1940s the restaurant’s pro-Nazi sympathies were never in doubt, even if they were hidden beneath a veneer of civilised luxury. Its waiters wore tails and its rooms were decorated with dark wooden panelling and thick velvet, and lit by silver candelabra. Horcher became the German embassy’s unofficial canteen. Lazar and the ambassador von Stohrer were among its most frequent guests, with its private dining room also used for visiting high-ranking Nazis with a special interest in Franco’s Spain, such as the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the foreign minister Ribbentrop.
Among the more popular nightspots for male members of the British embassy was Chicote, in the Gran Vía cinema and theatre district. Its owner, Pedro Chicote, had trained as a barman at the Ritz Hotel before setting up on his own in 1931 to cater for the young and rich. When civil war broke out the genial, slightly bumptious Chicote fled the capital and made his way to the Nationalist-controlled northern part of the country. There he set up another bar, making a small fortune serving officers on leave contraband liquor in San Sebastián after the Basque town had been taken by Franco’s forces early in the conflict. Chicotes bar in Madrid, under different management, remained open for most of the conflict, its clientele comprising members of the international brigades, foreign correspondents, and a regular posse of working class prostitutes. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Chicote was back in the Spanish capital, at his bar in Number 12 Gran Vía and very much in charge. The establishment earned a reputation for glamorous single women, seemingly of some social standing. They were despised by anti-Francoists as señoritas putas de derecha, sluttish right-wing ladies. The bar was nevertheless enormously successful in attracting a generation of Spaniards that sought escape from the war and the moral strictures of the Catholic Church. With its long American bar lined with high-backed stools, dimly lit, squat tables and sofas, Chicote offered an intimate and sophisticated drinking den famous for its special gin and red vermouth cocktail, margaritas and mojitos and the attractiveness of the women who happened to be there each night. The atmosphere of a more sombre and austere Madrid that had suffered coups and revolutions, and been subjected to governments of every conceivable political hue, from liberal monarchies to neo-fascist military dictatorship, is captured in Camilo José Cela’s post-war novel The Hive. He describes a city bristling with paradoxes and offering more contrasts and inconsistencies than either London or Paris at the time. The central character, Martín, hears the story of the waking city, its ‘rioting heart’, as he emerges from a night in a brothel. The carts of the garbage men are coming in from the suburbs, emerging from the ‘sad, desolate landscape of the cemetery and passing – after hours on the road, in the cold – at the slow, dejected trot of a gaunt horse or a grey, worried donkey’. There are ‘the voices of the women hawkers as they make their way to set their little fruit stalls and the first distant, indistinct horns of the cars’. There was also the rumble of the trams and the sound of their bells – the main source of transport – for in those days most Madrileños did not have cars. Those who had recovered cars looted during the civil war could hardly run them for lack of petrol. Government officials had access to a special pool of cars with guaranteed fuel supplies, as did foreign diplomats. Taxis ran mainly on ‘gasogene’, with the burner in the boot contributing another layer of grime and dust to vehicles which dated from the early 1930s.
Madrid had always prided itself on being the centre of the Spanish literary world, attracting writers as well as painters to its cafés and restaurants for the informal gatherings over coffee or drinks known as the tertulia. During the civil war, several writers and painters who had supported the Republic had either been killed or forced into exile, their tertulias disbanded. Nevertheless, with the outbreak of the war in Europe other tertulias formed, providing an opportunity for sharing information among trusted friends, under the cover of a convivial and informal drink or meal.
Early on in the winter of 1940 Burns learnt that one of the most interesting and eclectic tertulias had begun to meet regularly in Casa Ciriaco, a popular taverna specialising in Castilian country food and plentiful regional wine. One lunchtime he decided to pay a visit alone. He was ushered to a single table in a corner and sat there rather selfconsciously reading a copy of a week-old London Times, picking at a plate of cured ham and chorizo, and drinking from an earthenware carafe filled with Rioja wine. The only other occupants of the tavern sat at a long table, and, judging by their laughter and fluid conversation, had been there for some time. Looking at them discreetly from behind his newspaper, Burns saw two attractive young women he took to be actresses surrounded by men he recognised as an assortment of painters, bullfighters and writers – the very tertulia he had been looking for. Minutes later, one of their number detached himself from the table, came over to Burns and, in a strong American accent, asked who he was and what he was doing in Madrid, before inviting him to join the others.
The ‘American’ was Edgar Neville, the Spanish film-maker who had lived and worked in the United States before turning out some pro-Franco propaganda films during the civil war. The actresses are thought to have been Conchita Montes and Amparo Rivelles, two of Neville’s favourite female stars during the 1940s. All three worked for Cifesa, the state-sponso
red department of cinematography set up by Franco after the civil war.
The rest of the table was made up of an assortment of Spaniards who would remain vivid in Burns’s memory fifty years on. The most loquacious was Antonio Cañabate, the leading bullfight critic of the day, ‘a lank owl-like character, droll, and undomesticated’. Next to him sat the ‘portentous presence’ of Eugenio d’Ors, the Catalan critic, and alongside him the equally imposing Basque painter, Ignacio Zuloaga. Also there that day were Domingo Ortega and Juan Belmonte, two of the great bullfighters in Spanish history.
Ortega, from Toledo, in the region of Old Castile, was then at the height of his powers. Belmonte, from Seville, the capital of Andalusia, Burns had not seen a fight since his first trip to Spain during the early 1930s. Belmonte had by then retired from the ring. He spoke with a stutter and had a picaresque sense of humour. ‘Unless it is per-per-proved to the £W2-£W2-contrary, I assume that you, Bu-Bur-Burns, like aa-aa-all Englishmen are in the Intelligence Service,’ he ventured.
By then the tertulia, after a lunch lasting four hours, had moved to the Lyon d’Or, a Parisian-style fin-de-siècle café opposite the Post Office in the Calle de Alcalá. Intimacies were shared within the circle but went unrecorded. Only Burns felt it his duty to make a mental note of any information he thought he could make use of. During the Second World War there would be many others who drifted in and out of the tertulia Burns came to appreciate as a very special private club, Spanish-style. They included learned Arabists, bull breeders, publishers, antiquarian booksellers, mistresses, and Sebastián Miranda, an eccentric sculptor who, together with Belmonte, was destined to become involved in a decisive chapter in Burns’s life.