Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Within a year of the fall of France, the Madrid embassy had grown into a formidable centre of Allied diplomatic and covert activity, its network of agents spread across consular posts in the Iberian Peninsula, beyond the Pyrenees in the north, to North Africa in the south. By March 1941, Madrid and Lisbon were two of only four (the others were Stockholm and Berne) MI6 stations remaining in Europe. In Madrid, the secret services’ separate annexe of the embassy was referred to as the ‘attic’ by the attachés. Hamilton-Stokes ran a staff of fourteen under cover of the Passport Control building in the Montesquinza section of the Madrid embassy, running some 168 agents and sub-agents throughout Spain. His staff included the wives of two British diplomats, Joan Bethell, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Vice-Consul of Cartagena, and a nanny. In the spring of 1941, Kenneth Benton, a member of Section V, MI6’s counter-intelligence section, arrived in Madrid after previous postings in Vienna and Riga. Accompanied by his wife of three years, Peggie, he had flown out from England to Lisbon and then driven across the border in a second-hand Buick, alleged to have once belonged to the secretary of Léon Blum, the former French prime minister of the short-lived Popular Front government in France.

  Benton’s first night in Madrid’s Ritz Hotel nearly ended in disaster. He had left Lisbon with a pistol in one pocket and a bulb filled with ammonia in the other, to protect him from bandits along the way. With the items still on him, Benton had stepped into the hotel lift. It was crowded with other guests and when one of them pressed against him the bulb blew its stopper. ‘By the time we reached our floor, the people were gasping for breath, but we pretended to be as mystified as they were,’ he later recalled.

  The next day Benton went to see Hoare. The ambassador listened attentively as Benton told him about a top-secret plan the Bletchley Park cryptographers, MI5 (B Division) and MI6 (Section V), were developing after successfully decoding German radio traffic, known as ISOS. This was particularly significant, as it meant that British intelligence would soon have the capacity to intercept some of the key messages being transmitted between Berlin and German ‘stations’ on the Iberian Peninsula and in North Africa.

  Benton also went on to explain the changing tactics the British secret services were developing in the gathering and planting of intelligence, true and false. In the first year of the war (1940–41), the main aim of MI5 and Section V was to identify and disrupt German attempts to infiltrate spies into the UK. But after the setting-up of the XX Committee in January 1941 to supervise all double-agent work, a further plan got under way to use turned Abwehr agents in a process of strategic deception. ‘That is all extremely interesting,’ Hoare said, after Benton had concluded his monologue. ‘Only mind you don’t fall foul of the Spaniards.’

  Meeting Hamilton-Stokes later that day, Benton discovered that exactly the same warning had been issued to the MI6 station chief. It was not that Hoare did not want any secret intelligence or other covert activity to take place while he was in charge; what he wanted was to protect his mission from the development of autonomous fiefdoms which might get out of his control and leave him with the job of picking up the pieces diplomatically.

  Hoare came to trust Burns rather more than any of the other spies. The ambassador employed his press attaché as a covert diplomatic tool, using his links with the Franco regime to keep abreast of its intentions and to identify areas for negotiation, providing intelligence that was not obtainable by any other means.

  The fact that Burns had never formally been recruited by either MI6 or MI5 as an intelligence officer, but nonetheless ran his own sources, was viewed by his ambassador as an advantage. It gave Burns the operational flexibility to collaborate with both agencies when necessary while maintaining ties with other key departments in the embassy, both gathering and channelling information through the ambassador and directly to the highest levels of government which might otherwise have been lost, overlooked or deliberately ignored. However, from the early stages of the war, a marked tension had began to affect Burns’s relations with some of his colleagues at the MoI and the secret services who questioned his professional competence and political motives, given his reputation as a right-wing Catholic with pro-Franco leanings.

  It was while he was serving at the MoI’s headquarters in London in 1939 that Burns decided he would try and make use of some of the contacts he had made during the civil war by engaging their services as agents of the Allied cause. It proved a high-risk strategy at a time when some of the more fanatical Francoists moved in the same social circles as Nazi sympathisers, and were as likely to betray the British as to help them. An early target was the Marqués del Moral, a Spanish aristocrat who, like Burns, had been educated by the Jesuits in England before marrying Gytha Stourton, a member of one of the oldest English Catholic families, whose position in the higher social circles dated from before the Reformation.

  During his country’s civil war, Moral had based himself in London running the Francoist propaganda and intelligence organisation in Britain. In a family memoir, Gytha Stourton’s niece, Julia Stonor, describes Moral, or ‘Mos’ as he was affectionately called by his family, as having been a ‘spy, and an important one’.

  Stonor, who as a young girl developed a close relationship with her aunt Gytha, tells how Moral became a close friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to London, whom he met in England and Spain, while also maintaining close links with British and Spanish arms traders who brokered deals during the Spanish Civil War.

  ‘Gytha was horrified by the politics of these men, by Mos’s open friendship with committed admirers and such enthusiastic followers of Hitler. But she was unable to do anything – as an obedient wife, and very Catholic woman she could hardly oppose her husband, let alone her friends so well disposed to the German and Spanish regimes.’ Thus the new Marquesa resigned herself to the role of a ‘pretty, occasionally useful ornament’ to her older and ‘very busily occupied Spanish husband’. When not in London, Moral spent the civil war period travelling frequently between Portugal, Spain and France, issuing safe-conduct passes into Nationalist-held territory to Englishmen considered sympathetic to the Franco cause, including Burns and other members of the fundraising organisation Friends of Nationalist Spain. Once Franco was in power, and the war in Europe had broken out, Moral was approached by Burns, under the official auspices of the Ministry of Information, but with support from the Foreign Office, to work for the Allies.

  The idea that Moral should be recruited as an informant on Spanish internal affairs and relations with the Germans was channelled through to a senior contact in the Foreign Office by a right-wing Tory MP, with connections in the Foreign Office and an interest in Anglo-Spanish relations, Sir Nairne Sandeman, in April 1940. Sandeman reminded the contact that Moral had had, as he put in a private letter, ‘considerable dealings of a cooperative nature’ with the Foreign Office during the civil war, and strongly recommended that he be put on the MoI’s payroll.

  A file on Moral giving additional details on his life was attached. It focused almost exclusively on Moral’s pro-British credentials. Moral had fought for the British in the Matabele War, the Boer War and the First World War, and had a son, of British nationality, who had recently enlisted in the British Army.

  Sandeman died a few days later, but Moral’s recruitment as an agent was actively pursued by Burns, with the support of the MoI and the Foreign Office. The MoI channelled secret payments to Moral via Burns’s department under the broad heading of ‘private propaganda in Spain’.

  While Burns appears to have made use of Moral to extend his own contacts with the Franco regime, little additional benefit was drawn from the operation. The first report delivered by Moral, after Burns had been installed in Madrid, was judged ‘practically useless’ by one senior MoI official, Leigh Ashton. In a memo to Roger Makins, one of the top diplomats at the Foreign Office, Ashton wrote: ‘The report contained some very dubious information about Germany which was passed on to DMI (military int
elligence) and a certain amount about Spain and Portugal which did not contain anything we did not know already’

  Moral had been charging for information, some of which he had already shared with Burns, in effect double-billing the British government at a time when budgets were tight. Discovery of the scam led to the immediate suspension of any further payments to Moral after he had been declared persona non grata in British embassy circles. Burns was lucky to escape with a reprimand.

  While the Moral blunder was quietly and quickly forgotten, it was not an isolated incident in the history of British wartime intelligence-gathering in Spain. During the early years of the war, further cases would expose not only the amateurism of some Spanish agents, but the ineptitude of the British spies running them. Early in the autumn of 1940, the British embassy in Madrid sponsored a visit to the UK of Miguel Piernavieja del Pozo as a representative observer of an influential political study group based in Madrid. Pozo was a Falangist who had spied for Franco during the civil war. He had since become a journalist. Pozo arrived in the UK on 29 September 1940. The tour arranged for him by the War Office with the blessing of the Foreign Office and MoI included visits to aerodromes in Scotland, various army units in England and the BBC’s studios in London.

  And yet, before the tour got under way, Pozo was approached by Gwylm Williams (GW), a former Welsh police inspector and Welsh nationalist who had been recruited by MI5 as a double agent after he had offered his services to the Germans. GW later informed his handler in MI5 that Pozo – or Pogo as he was code-named by the security services – had given him £3900 stashed in a talcum-powder tin and told him to report on military factories in the west of England, and on the Welsh Nationalist Movement (GW had posed as a Welsh nationalist eager to throw off the English yoke when first contacting the Abwehr in 1939). Pozo had also, so GR alleged, asked for some initial sabotage plans to be drawn up.

  ‘He is a rather unpleasant type who is obviously on the make.’ Thus did Guy Liddell, the director of MI5 counter-espionage B division, describe Pogo for the first time in a diary entry dated 10 October 1940. Liddell claimed he had only just discovered that Pozo had come to the UK under the auspices of the British Council and on the recommendation of Hoare. The plan, so Liddell had been led to believe, was to have Pozo file pro-Allied news reports as a counterweight to the German propaganda that was flooding the Spanish media, from Berlin. Liddell believed this to be an odd tactic. ‘It seems a curious thing that our authorities should not be really wise to the fact that any member of the Falange, which is in fact a Spanish Nazi Party, must be right in the German camp,’ he wrote.

  Whatever the embassy’s motivation, MI5’s B Division needed little persuasion that Pozo was someone they could make use of for their own purposes. The German spy scare had intensified as the Nazi war machine moved across Western Europe. The fear was of the development of a fifth column which, it was believed, had aided the German invasion of France, Belgium, and Holland and was the explanation as to why these countries had fallen so quickly. Emergency laws were brought in suspending the right of habeas corpus and protection against mistreatment of anyone suspected of being an enemy agent. Within MI5 a belief was growing that Nazi Germany was using any trick it could to infiltrate its agents behind lines. The fact that the internment of some 18,000 German, Italians and other enemy ‘aliens’, along with members of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and other figures who were deemed to have their primary loyalty to Germany, within the first year of the draconian new powers being decreed had failed to uncover any major plot, only resulted in efforts being redoubled to catch other agents suspected of still being at large or recently infiltrated under cover of a neutral state.

  In October 1940 MI5 installed microphone and telephone taps in Pozo’s London apartment and put him on their official watch list, with officers of D.6, the surveillance unit, tailing him night and day. Despite the blanket coverage, MI5 struggled to come up with anything that suggested serious espionage activity, other than what they suspected were deliberate counter-surveillance measures typical of a trained spy.

  An MI5 report accused Pozo of evading his pursuers by ‘boarding moving buses and dodging into doorways’. It also drew on intercepts of his girlfriend’s phone calls suggesting she was not who she claimed to be. ‘According to the person she is speaking to she employs at various times a marked foreign accent, a slightly American accent, a Cockney accent, and a comparatively educated and fluent English accent,’ wrote Liddell. ‘When speaking to Pogo she appears to be a rather elderly woman with a poor command of the language, just as on other occasions she speaks fluently, quickly, and with no accent at all.’

  Pozo was drawn into further meetings with GW, who continued to report to the Germans as well as the British, although the Spaniard’s activities became increasingly erratic due in no small part to a heavy drinking habit. Early in November the Daily Express published what it claimed was an interview with Pozo in which he expressed his hope that Germany would win the war. Quite why the Spaniard would willingly want to make such a public confession if he was indeed a fully paid-up German spy was not explained. GW nonetheless reported the matter to the Abwehr in Madrid, saying that it had become too dangerous to work with ‘such a man who tends to give cause for the attention of the authorities and will eventually lead to his deportation if not something worse’.

  In his diary Liddell suggests that the incident had come dangerously close to undermining a plan of deliberately letting Pozo continue to operate as an unwitting feeder of false information to the Germans. He also reflects a continuing concern that rival agencies were struggling to control him, not least the Ministry of Information. ‘Pogo has badly blotted his copy-book by getting tight … We have sent over a violent protest to the other side who have replied apologetically. It seems that Pogo has been superimposed on their system by some outside body, probably the Propaganda Ministry.’

  Days later the Sunday Graphic published its own very different ‘interview’ with Pozo – a piece of crude Allied propaganda – in which he was quoted as declaring his belief that the war was far from over (contrary to the list of victories claimed in German news reports) and that the morale of the British armed forces and the country at large was very high. Within days, an unidentified agent working for MI6 reported that Pozo had suggested to him the Spanish people were becoming more Anglophile and had written to his unidentified ‘chief in Spain stating his conviction that Great Britain was invincible.

  This was suspected by some in MI5 of being an exercise in deception rather than the betrayal of a double agent. But government departments remained divided as to what to do with Pozo. The MoI had growing doubts about his use as a propaganda weapon and thought he should be sent home. MI5 and MI6 wanted to give Pozo more rope with which to hang himself and entrap other agents. The Foreign Office wanted to avoid creating a diplomatic incident, and in effect threatened an administrative paralysis across Whitehall over the case. ‘The case of Pogo is getting rather difficult,’ wrote Liddell on 2 December 1941.

  Pozo continued his meetings with GW, some of which took place at the Spanish embassy where the ambassador, the Duke of Alba, still considered the Spaniard a bona fide journalist who had had his papers cleared by Burns, with Hoare’s blessing. In his dealings with GW, Pozo’s alleged demands for information seemed increasingly fanciful. At one meeting he is said to have asked GW to make enquiries about the water purification plant and reservoir at Swansea with a view to introducing a ‘poison’ or else something to blow up the main pipeline.

  And yet Pozo remained extraordinarily indiscreet for someone supposed to be an important German spy. A report he allegedly wrote in invisible ink giving details of bomb damage reached Spain and fell straight into the hands of the British embassy. He also arranged to have a meeting with the Duke of Hamilton, an aristocrat of questionable loyalties. The Duke was under MI5 surveillance, even if his reputation as an appeaser of the Germans may have served as a front for his work for other
sectors of British intelligence. (It was because he believed in Hamilton’s credentials as a pro-Nazi, high up in the British state, that Rudolf Hess had flown to Scotland to see him.) According to MI5’s ‘Tar’ Robinson, head of the double-cross section, the ‘slow-witted’ Hamilton, while belonging to the peace party, came to believe that the only thing Britain should do was fight to the finish. Hamilton may well have informed on Pozo’s alleged pro-German views.

  Towards the end of January 1941, Pozo returned to Spain. The ease with which he was allowed to leave England infuriated some sectors of MI5 who had wanted him interned. But it appears to have represented a calculated risk taken by those within the British secret services who believed they had bigger fish to catch. Instead of bringing in Pozo, MI5 let him swim a little longer with the aim of identifying whatever wider network he was part of, a strategy that was to complicate still further its relationship with the British embassy in Madrid. The spies were in danger of running away with themselves and tying themselves in knots.

  It was at the beginning of January 1941, or perhaps even earlier, that Burns became embroiled with a German agent who purported to be in the inner counsels of Serrano Súñer, Franco’s brother-in-law. According to the skeleton account Burns gives of his dealings with Angel Alcázar de Velasco – he gives no precise dates – the Spaniard came to visit him at his suite at Gaylords Hotel with a request for accreditation as the new press attaché at the Spanish embassy in London. Velasco told Burns that Serrano Súñer mistrusted the Anglophile tendencies of Spain’s ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba, and wanted his own man on the spot to assess more accurately British morale and Britain’s capability of continuing the war.