by Jimmy Burns
‘Those evenings at the Lyon d’Or became a matter of habit; they were convivial but with the austerity that underlines much of Spanish life,’ Burns later recalled.
‘Imperceptibly I was discovering that life, its language and its lore. I had struck a rich vein of the essential Spain – the permanent país – distinct from the polarised passions of the Civil War – which, however, were still far from extinguished.’
And yet it was not from the tertulias that Burns learnt about suffering Spain, but in the poor suburbs and the countryside that he also frequented.
A report he sent to London following a trip he made round Andalusia painted a bleak picture of the dire socio-economic conditions that ordinary Spaniards were enduring beyond the world of privilege and power that was only too apparent in Madrid. It prompted the Foreign Office to conclude that even Nazi Germany might hesitate to take on a country in such a plight. It also informed British policy in encouraging the offer of economic assistance as a carrot for ensuring Franco’s neutrality, backed by an intensified campaign of pro-Allied propaganda.
Burns wrote: All this region is in a very marked contrast to the highly charged political atmosphere of Madrid. In these southern provinces the political machinations of the Government have hardly registered. The obsessing problem is a domestic one: food … The war is only seen in relation to the means of life. I cannot over emphasise the extreme need of the people in this region: it verges on the desperate. Whole villages have been without bread for weeks, large peasant families are living for days on less than one British workman’s supper.’
Burns felt reassured by what he described as the ‘quite markedly friendly’ general attitude towards the Allies that he found among ordinary working-class Spaniards. He felt less sure about the loyalties of the ‘more or less comfortable bourgeois’ who had yet to be convinced that ‘we are not wantonly continuing this war and that a Nazi victory will leave him and his way of life unaffected’.
Given the lack of a developed middle class in Spain, the category applied to the emerging class of state functionaries, mostly drawn from the nationalist so-called Movimiento, or Movement, Franco’s amalgam of the military, the Falange party and the traditionalist right-wing monarchists, the requetés, who had spread out across towns and villages. ‘We must face the fact that with a veering of Spanish opinion away from Germany comes the necessity for more, not less, British propaganda,’ Burns reported. He recommended that additional money be provided from a special contingency fund within the MoI to ensure that the daily British bulletin that was circulating in Madrid and Barcelona would also be distributed in the south of Spain.
Within days Burns was in Tangier, where British diplomatic and intelligence officials and their agents liaised closely with the other Iberian ‘hubs’, Madrid and Lisbon, as well as Gibraltar, a growing network which effectively provided strategic coverage for the western end of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal, as well as the border with France.
Tangier had been a danger spot for the great powers of Europe for decades, because of its strategic location overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar and as a potential bridgehead between Spain and North Africa. In the lead-up to the Second World War, Tangier was nominally ruled by the Sultan of Morocco, while actually being administered by foreign forces, with the French maintaining a predominant influence. In June 1940, Spanish troops marched into the town after convincing the British and the French that it was a temporary but necessary move to ensure Tangier’s security against any attempted takeover by Mussolini.
In Madrid, the Spanish occupation fuelled an outburst of patriotic fervour, drawing parallels with the expansion of the Spanish Empire in Africa under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century.
Tangier was drawn deeper into the war in Europe when the Germans boosted their intelligence and propaganda operations there, forcing the Allies to do likewise. In the winter of 1940, however, there were no British troops available for turning the Spaniards out. Instead, the embassy in Madrid was instructed by the Foreign Office to negotiate an agreement with the Spanish government guaranteeing the protection of British interests with the free entry and departure of British subjects, and the continuing existence of a British newspaper, the Tangier Gazette, and a post office.
Negotiations were coordinated by the embassy’s deputy head of mission, the resourceful and dynamic Arthur Yencken. His close friendship with and professional trust in Burns led Yencken to depend on his colleague’s contacts inside the Spanish regime to facilitate an engagement with the foreign minister Ramón Serrano Súñer on the issue. While negotiations were ongoing, Burns arrived at the British mission in Tangier. ‘Two retired colonels ran the Information Office. They had little to do and seemed to be doing it very well. I left them in peace in the turbulent city,’ recalled Burns in his memoirs.
The two colonels were Toby Ellis and Malcolm Henderson, whose work covered intelligence and propaganda. Burns reported to the Foreign Office: ‘It now appears that the Tangier Gazette is to be allowed to continue publication; its circulation, however, has been forbidden in certain parts of the Spanish and in the entire French zone. This is our sole means of propaganda – the Press-attaché’s industry has increased its quality and scope. It is the best-selling paper in Tangier and will make big inroads in Spain.’
Burns believed that Tangier, for all its enduring international status, was not sufficiently used by the British for what it was – a vital bridgehead not just into Spain but also for pursuing Allied interests in North Africa. He used his report to press the case for the British mission to be expanded, along with an enlargement of the consulate network on the Spanish mainland. ‘I am not satisfied that we are sufficiently equipped in Tangier to maintain contact with the French and to keep check of the constant German effort to drive the Spaniards to further adventures and the occupation of important French possessions … Information and intelligence services are so bound up with each other in Tangier that I cannot but remark on this,’ wrote Burns.
For much of its history, Tangier had retained a certain exotic allure, a city which played to its own rules, offering refuge and excitement, escape and indulgence. At its most tarnished, it was, in the words of its biographer Iain Finlayson, ‘a city of illusory vanities … the anteroom of failure, the casualty ward of desire’. When Burns visited it, he found Charlie’s Bar, a ‘more fruitful source of information’ than the ‘two colonels’. Part-gambling den, part-nightclub, it was presided over by its eponymous owner, a tall, elegant dark-skinned North African who spoke in a somewhat affected upper-class British accent reputedly picked up while studying at Cambridge. There was no shortage of drinks, cigars or women at Charlie’s. Its clientele was almost exclusively expatriate. The British and Americans in particular met there to swap notes, as did the Germans with the collaborationists among the Vichy French.
The smoky, jovial atmosphere around the bar and the piano, along with its darker recesses, provided neutral ground where refugees on their way to Lisbon evaded their pursuers, agents touched base with their handlers and escaped prisoners of war shared their adventures over endless rounds of contraband whisky. It was a place where one could find or lose oneself.
At that time a fictitious version of Charlie’s, based in wartime Casablanca, was being created in a Hollywood studio. The film, Casablanca, starred Humphrey Bogart as the cynical owner of Rick’s Café Américain, who finds himself torn between the love of his life and a rediscovered sense of duty and self-sacrifice. Rick finds resolution in helping Ilsa, his lover (played by Ingrid Bergman), to escape with her husband, a heroic leader of the French Resistance. The film – a beautifully crafted propaganda movie – was rush-released within a year of the Allied landings in North Africa, and went on to become one of the most popular films of all time.
In the winter of 1940–41, it was in Tangier, where the family of Ann Bowes-Lyon happened to own property, that Burns unwittingly found himself playing out a critical
scene from his own real-life story of intrigue and romance. With the world he had known in London disintegrating, he had travelled from Europe to Africa as part of the only cause that, apart from his Catholic faith, made any sense to him in the chaotic world – the defeat of Hitler. But in so doing he had crossed an emotional Rubicon.
‘Everything happens here,’ Charlie told Burns the night he drank himself into the ground in Tangier; ‘if you bring your wife I will have to charge you corkage.’ The irony of the quip was not lost on the Madrid embassy’s press attaché. For not only did Burns not have a wife at the time but the prospect of having one had suddenly vanished just a few hours earlier. Before crossing the Strait to Tangier, Burns had spent the morning in Gibraltar, with the military governor and intelligence, signals and defence personnel discussing plans to turn part of the military base into a wireless station from which to broadcast propaganda across into Spain. Another idea advanced at the meeting was boosting local printing facilities so as to enhance the quality and distribution of a locally produced pro-Allied Spanish-language newspaper. Discussions over, Burns was invited to lunch by a local contact to the Rock Hotel, where the restaurant and rooms had been turned into an officers’ mess for the duration of the war. It was there that, during a casual conversation with one of the officers, Burns learnt that Ann Bowes-Lyon was engaged to be married to Francis D’Abreu, a Stonyhurst old boy who was serving as an army doctor.
This was the only news of Ann that had reached Burns in weeks. The last letters he had written to her from Madrid had gone unanswered and those he had received from mutual friends had dropped all mention of her without explanation. While he knew that his departure to Spain had put a strain on their relationship, the correspondence they had maintained after his arrival in Madrid had for a brief period rekindled the relationship with a sense of urgency and longing.
When her letters had suddenly dried up, Burns blamed the Germans and an unpredictable post, while also making himself believe that she had been diverted by the increased workload at the military hospital where she worked as a volunteer nurse. Neither had made any solemn commitment to marriage, but they had parted with mutual trust – or so Burns had imagined. Since arriving in Madrid, he had clung on to the thought of her, despite the fact of their very different circumstances, and he had remained faithful to that thought. Such misplaced loyalty showed how out of touch he had in fact become with Britain and what moved those who remained there.
For at the Royal Herbert Hospital, Ann had been drawn into a world not of spy games, diplomacy, propaganda and expedient neutrality, but one in which men and women fought and were killed in a war they believed was between totalitarianism and democracy, and all she was left with was the wounded, the dying and the dead. It was in such circumstances, not in the romantic candlelit evenings she had spent with Burns at Glebe Place, or the privileged family gatherings at Glamis Castle, that Ann had met and fallen in love with the Jesuit-educated army doctor she had decided to marry.
Burns was emotionally shattered, and he never entirely eradicated the memory of that loss. As he later wrote in his memoirs (in which Ann Bowes-Lyon is never mentioned by name): ‘Any budding affair of the heart had been checked by what seemed a beckoning purpose in my life. Suddenly all of this vanished: no presence, no trust, and no discernible purpose. It would take a long time for this to be changed from a vacuum to a new vision, freed from the bondage and illusion of years.’
Purged of love for a while, Burns returned to Madrid to find his embassy still grappling with the uncertainty of Franco’s intentions. Would he or would he not join the Axis? And how long did Churchill have before he had to confront the nightmare scenario of German troops marching across the Pyrenees, taking Gibraltar and pushing across to North Africa? If there was no easy answer to these questions it was because Franco was a master at playing one belligerent against the other, to his own advantage.
On 23 October 1940 Franco had met Hitler on the French–Spanish border at Hendaye, for their first and only encounter. Neither leader had got what he wanted. Hitler stalled on making any formal promises on Spain’s claims to further territory in North Africa. Franco, for his part, had told Hitler that he would not cede to any foreign power, including Germany’s right of conquest over a sovereign territory (Gibraltar), warned Hitler that England was far from defeated and was likely to fight on with the help of the United States, and made no commitment to dropping Spain’s neutrality. The summit involved the participation at close quarters – apart from Franco and Hitler – of just five people: the German and Spanish foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Serrano Súñer, two translators, Gross and BarÓn de las Torres, and a German foreign ministry official named Paul Schmidt. While the meeting was supposed to be secure and protected from enemy intrusion, it was infiltrated by British intelligence through an individual code-named T.
While the identity of the agent has never been conclusively established, it is likely that he was the translator, Barón de las Torres, otherwise know as Luis Álvarez de Estrada y Luque, a Spanish aristocrat whose Anglophile sympathies led to him providing information to the British about Spanish policy throughout the war. The information the British obtained from the summit was that Franco had resisted entering a formal military pact with Hitler and Mussolini. This released Churchill from any immediate pressure to refocus his military campaign on the Iberian Peninsula at a time when the British had not enough forces to invade the continent, and had been pressed into a war of attrition with Allied air power now seconding the previous weapon of naval blockade. Nevertheless, it left little room for complacency. Hoare remained hugely mistrustful of Serrano Súñer’s pro-Axis sympathies, and believed that the British embassy needed to step up its efforts to counter German influence.
The poverty and hunger which Burns had reported on during his travels reinforced Hoare’s belief that the Allies could use trade in foodstuffs to win over hearts and minds. Equally, Burns’s reports – urging greater use of propaganda and boosting the loose network of agents from Barcelona to Tangier – had convinced the British ambassador that he could neither relax his vigilance nor, as he put it, ‘ignore any straw that showed the direction of the wind’.
On one point Hoare was insistent: any gathering or dissemination of secret intelligence by the British on the Iberian Peninsula should be consistent with his mission of keeping Spain neutral and should be under his control.
From the moment he had taken charge as ambassador in Madrid, Hoare had made every effort to centralise key aspects of the embassy’s operations, holding daily meetings to ensure proper liaison between departments and an uncluttered line of reporting on priority issues. He felt he had every reason to be wary of career intelligence officers whose first loyalty was to their line managers in head office rather than to the interests of British foreign policy, as identified by the ambassador.
Hoare’s experience as an intelligence officer in St Petersburg in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution and his later dealings with the British embassy in Rome during the crisis in Abyssinia had left him with an enduring memory of failed diplomatic missions, whose weakness he blamed on divisive internal departmentalisation. In both missions, the developing international importance of the politics of the host country had meant the grafting on to a relatively small diplomatic staff of a large number of so-called technical experts ‘who owed their primary allegiance to different offices in Whitehall’.
Hoare believed that intelligence officers were potentially isolationist, with a tendency to keep a proprietorial guard over the information they obtained, and with a cavalier attitude to the discipline imposed on civil servants. ‘Important branches of the mission would be ignorant of each other’s programmes, whilst the Chancery, instead of being the nerve centre of a multifarious organisation, would be left stranded on the outskirts of a field almost entirely occupied by the technicians,’ Hoare wrote of his previous missions.
It was in Petrograd in 1918, after he had left Russia, that SIS officers had
become embroiled with a group of Latvians in a disastrous plot against the Bolsheviks, involving an attempted assassination of Lenin. The failure of the plot led to hundreds of revenge executions and the dismantling of the British mission, so that the SIS subsequently stood accused of fuelling the Red Terror, and poisoning for years Anglo-Soviet relations.
The memory of the Petrograd debacle confirmed Hoare in his belief that intelligence operations needed to be carefully controlled and that policy was best pursued through diplomacy with military intervention an option of last resort.
His appointment in Spain gave him an opportunity to breathe new life into an embassy that, under the lacklustre Maurice Peterson, had struggled to have any influence on the Catholic, right-wing and militaristic Spain which had emerged victorious from civil war. Hoare wanted to mould an embassy around his leadership which had the capacity to take on and outmanoeuvre its German counterpart, while ensuring that nothing was done that might alienate Franco and tip him into the enemy camp.
His core team was made up of his deputy head of mission, Yencken, the naval attaché Captain Hillgarth, and Burns. Of the three it was Burns’s department that, with Hoare’s encouragement, and thanks to the personal and professional ties developed with Yencken and Hillgarth, was gradually transformed into a powerful and influential nexus straddling diplomacy, propaganda and intelligence.
Burns had arrived in the summer of 1940, protesting his inadequacy and lack of experience to his ambassador and suspecting his job would be short-lived anyway, given what appeared to be the imminent threat of a German invasion. He had found his first meeting with the professional spies in the embassy an unnerving experience. ‘They were at first fish-eyed, aloof and polite to this foreign body thrust into their midst,’ he recalled.
The embassy’s intelligence operations – until Hillgarth, with Hoare’s blessing, took overall charge – was headed up by the MI6 ‘head of station’ (code-numbered 23100), Hamilton-Oakes, with a small staff of assistants. The more experienced spies showed themselves cautiously friendly to Burns no sooner had he arrived, while the young cipher-room girls, high-born, high-spirited and largely unmarried, had no qualms about voting him the most handsome and charming of all embassy bachelors.