by Jimmy Burns
Velasco explained his project with a ‘wealth of colourful personal detail about himself’, most, although not all of which Burns already knew about. The one-time bullfighter had joined the Falange before forming part of an extreme right-wing faction that had fallen out with Franco halfway through the civil war. He had been under sentence of death but had been reprieved. Over several glasses of whisky, he told Burns that he had become the champion masturbator in the military prison. To emphasise this, Velasco suddenly produced a pistol with a silencer and fired at the ceiling above Burns’s head.
‘It seemed to be his way of sealing a bond. Gaylord’s had been the Soviet headquarters in the Civil War and perhaps more than one bullet had lodged in the elegant moulding round the ceiling,’ Burns recalled many years later. ‘Anyway to have a spy easy to tail might lead to others and Velasco’s idea was welcomed by MI5.’
So there was method in the madness – but what method and whose madness? Velasco claimed in his memoirs that the Abwehr suspected the press and information department in the British embassy in Madrid was playing a discreet but important part in British intelligence activities and that he was tasked with infiltrating the department. According to his account, he began his mission by arranging a meeting with Burns’s assistant Bernard Malley.
Over lunch and a series of subsequent meetings, Velasco claimed, Malley became convinced that he was simply an extreme Falangist who felt so betrayed by Franco that he was willing to provide the British with information about the political vulnerabilities of his regime. There is no record anywhere of such meetings taking place although it is probable that Malley may have been involved and that he may have suggested that Velasco meet his boss.
Burns’s version of his own meeting with Velasco suggests that he agreed to it with the approval of his ambassador and aware that the Spaniard was a German spy who would be trailed more easily in London, and perhaps even turned into a double agent. A British intelligence file held on Velasco, which Burns had contributed to, shows that he had pro-Nazi sympathies dating back to the civil war, and may have been recruited as an agent of the Abwehr as early as 1935. By the summer of 1940 Velasco was being groomed for espionage work against the British on the recommendation of Wilhelm Oberbeil, a member of the Hitler Youth the Spaniard had befriended during the 1930s. And Velasco had also been involved in the German plot to ‘kidnap’ the Duke of Windsor before he took up his post in the Bahamas.
Burns nonetheless left the meeting with Velasco convinced that this ‘preposterous character’ could be manipulated to serve British interests.
By the time Alcázar de Velasco arrived in the UK in early 1941, the small community of Spanish journalists and diplomats then living in London was in the process of being heavily infiltrated by British intelligence.
Of growing interest to certain officers of MI5’s counter-espionage B Division was Luis Calvo, the London correspondent of the newspaper ABC. Calvo had started his journalistic career as a trainee with United Press International before joining ABC as a theatre critic in 1926 at the age of twenty-eight. Despite the conservative monarchist leanings of his newspaper, Calvo became involved in liberal Republican circles, and, following the abdication of King Alfonso XIII in 1931, was posted to London as press attaché under the Republican ambassador Ramón Pérez de Ayala. During the civil war, he changed political allegiance and wrote pro-Franco articles for the London Observer and the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación from behind Franco lines. When war broke out in Europe, he returned to London as ABC’s correspondent, having been vetted and cleared by the British embassy in Madrid.
Calvo was by now a fluent English speaker with a good understanding, thanks to his previous posting, of British politics and institutions. He moved effortlessly in diplomatic and Whitehall circles, and was an assiduous reader of British newspapers. Calvo was a hard-working and observant foreign correspondent whose regular articles for ABC during the first months of war had exposed some of the more disarmingly absurd aspects of the ‘phoney war’, before vividly depicting the destruction of the Blitz and the evident refusal of the British people to be bombed into surrender. If, for a while, Calvo managed to escape any censorship by the MoI, it was because Burns saw him as a helpful counterbalance to the pro-German propaganda that was being widely disseminated from Berlin and occupied Europe. Burns’s initial views on Calvo contrasted with those of a close group of friends inside the British intelligence community who, by the middle of 1941, were at the heart of UK-based covert activities against Spaniards whom they accused of pro-Axis sympathies and of association with German spies.
The informal unit was made up of MI5’s B Division officers, the art historian Anthony Blunt and an Anglo-Spanish art dealer called Tomás Harris, and a third, Kim Philby, who had been recruited by MI6’s Section V counter-intelligence section after reporting for The Times during the civil war. As well as meeting socially, between them the three men straddled activities which ranged from intercepting incoming and outgoing mail from the Spanish embassy in London (Blunt), through running double agents and interrogations and liaising with the MoI (Harris) to analysing intercepted German communications (Philby). They worked closely together on identifying targets for their agencies, setting priorities and trying to manipulate British policy against Franco’s Spain.
The three collaborated in pursuing the case of Velasco and tainted by association the Spanish journalists and diplomats who came into contact with him, thus drawing Calvo into the double-cross system overseen by Major John Masterman’s XX Committee and managed by MI5’s Thomas ‘Tar’ Robertson.
On 24 May 1941, MI5 set a trap in which they hoped to ensnare Calvo. They got the double agent Gwylm Williams (GW) to write to Calvo, identifying himself as a friend and contact of Pozo and asking his whereabouts as there had been no communication between the two men for four months. Out of journalistic curiosity, Calvo agreed to meet Williams. By now MI5 had bugged Calvo’s flat and was tapping his phone. The main conversations recorded were those between Calvo and a Russian exile called Natasha Antonovsky, the mistress he shared with a former US consul who was working in London for colonel Donovan’s recently formed US intelligence organisation, the OSS.
The US diplomat, identified only by his surname, Fellner, was regarded as a ‘bit shifty’ by Guy Liddell, the head of MI5’s counter-espionage division, but not half as shifty as Calvo. While Fellner was allowed to get on with his affair, undisturbed, the relationship between the Spanish journalist and the ravishing Natasha was assiduously monitored by MI5, with transcripts of their intercepted telephone conversations included in the incriminating personal file the security service was building up on Calvo. One alleged recording had Calvo mentioning Velasco’s name in terms that suggested a professional arrangement.
Days later Calvo was returning home from work when he discovered Williams waiting in his car outside his flat off Sloane Street. Williams suggested they go for a walk in Hyde Park. According to a report subsequently filed with MI5 under Williams’s name, Calvo agreed to operate a ‘dead letter box’ for any information that might be provided on military factories in Wales and the impact of German bombing raids.
In July, Velasco returned to England after a short visit to Spain. Within Whitehall, there were some, including Lord Swinton, the chairman of Whitehall’s Security Executive, who argued that Velasco should be declared persona non grata and refused entry. But the move was overruled by the Foreign Office on the grounds that it risked reprisals against British embassy personnel in Madrid. By all accounts, Velasco was a Walter Mitty character – an adventurer as well as a fantasist – whom British diplomacy struggled to understand and who willingly played to his own advantage the intrigue and double dealing of spies on both sides. While the bulk of the information he provided to both the Allies and the Axis proved inaccurate, sectors of British intelligence were happy enough to make use of his services to entrap other suspect German agents.
Encouraged by MI5, Williams made renewed contact with
Calvo who, in turn, introduced him to Velasco. Williams offered further false information about sabotage plans by Welsh nationalists and the movement of Allied ships and aircraft from Welsh ports and airfields for which he demanded payment of ‘expenses’ of at least £500. Velasco agreed to pay the sum in instalments.
Further meetings between Velasco, Calvo and Williams took place over the summer of 1941. At each, Williams told his Spanish contacts of the latest plans being hatched in the fictitious plot by Welsh nationalists, but kept delaying the supply of the ‘top secret documents’ on British military movements he had promised at their first encounter. Early in September, Velasco abruptly left for Madrid, and was never to return to London. He left behind him a complex web of agents and double agents that permeated out from the higher echelons of the Duke of Alba’s embassy and its associated journalists and across the Spanish expatriate community of exiles.
One of the more active informants run by MI5’s counter-intelligence division was the assistant press attaché, José Brugada, codenamed Peppermint, who in the early stages of the war shared a flat with Calvo. Another agent, codenamed Duck – possibly another unnamed senior diplomat – passed on to his British ‘minders’ copies of telegrams sent by the Duke of Alba, while a third – a female secretary at the Spanish consulate in Newcastle codenamed Tangerine – similarly shared secret documents earmarked for the Spanish ministry of foreign affairs.
It was thanks to Brugada that MI5 was tipped off about the betrayal by an alleged SOE operative of Catalan origin called Fernández Martínez Casabayo. The Catalan offered the Spanish embassy details of British commando raids in Norway and of planned operations on the Iberian peninsula in return for money and diplomatic protection. Casabayo was arrested and was not heard of again for the rest of the war.
The incident contributed little to clarifying the relationship between the British on the one hand, and the Catalans and Basques that formed an influential part of the Republican exiled community in London on the other. While Catalans and Basques together with Galicians helped in the transfer across of the Pyrenees of escaping allied POWs, only a select group of republican exiles were trusted as agents by MI5 and MI6, with the Foreign Office generally wary of letting its diplomacy be dictated to by a clearly defined anti-Francoist agenda. Among the more notorious Catalan agents run by Philby at SIS and subsequently by his friends at MI5 was an industrial chemist called Josep Terradellas, codenamed Lipstick. Terradellas initially provided MI6 with what Philby reported was useful information on German spying activities in Argentina, via Spain. But he was cut loose by British intelligence well before the end of the war, after being judged too indiscreet in his ties with Catalan separatists.
Other public figures involved in wartime Anglo-Spanish relations would have files compiled on them by MI5 as being suspiciously proaxis during the Second World War. They included the Duke of Alba’s deputy José Fernández Villaverde (the later Marquis of Santa Cruz), the military attaché Alfonso Barra, the commercial attaché Mariano Iturde, and the Spanish consuls in Newcastle, Liverpool, and Cardiff.
But of all the names to be chosen as a subject for one of MI5’s potentially incriminating personal files few were to prove as politically sensitive as Tom Burns. From at least the spring of 1941, communications between Burns and the head of the Iberian section at the MoI, Billy McCann, were being copied and passed on to MI5’s B Division in an attempt to build up an incriminating personal file. Alarm bells had been set ringing in April 1941 when Burns recommended that the MoI approve the accreditation of Méndez Domínguez as the London correspondent of the official Spanish news agency EFE. Burns told the MoI he was concerned that the Spanish media carried a disproportionate amount of German-based reports, dominating coverage of the war. Burns blamed the distorted pro-Axis coverage of the war on the overwhelming number of reports being filed from correspondents in Berlin and the limited number of Spanish journalists based in London.
In a telegram of recommendation to the MoI, Burns described Dominguez, a former journalist with ABC and the Catholic El Debate, as ‘more reliable and more trustworthy’ than most of the Spanish journalists he had come across in Madrid, and potentially more manageable than those who had been posted to Berlin. One of the surviving London correspondents was Luis Calvo, who was already being monitored by MI5. The other was Felipe Fernández Armesto, the correspondent for the Catholic Madrid newspaper Ya and the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia whose owner, the Count of Godó, was regarded as being sympathetic to the Allied cause.
Armesto, like Calvo, had supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He was regarded by Burns as more of an Anglophile than Calvo and had earned the trust of the Duke of Alba as well as other British officials, thanks to what was viewed as his well-balanced reporting from the UK.
While some MI5 files suggest that Armesto, who wrote under the pseudonym Augusto Assía, was not above suspicion, others would indicate that he may in fact have been working as an agent for British intelligence. Whatever the true nature of his work, his loyalty to the Allied cause was judged sufficiently special to earn him a King’s Medal at the end of the war, and later an MBE.
While Armesto enjoyed good relations with certain members of British intelligence, the latest journalist to be sent to London by Burns came to be seen in very different terms. Burns believed that Domínguez’s pro-Falangist credentials would ensure that his reports from the UK would be published in Spain. But he also argued with his senior management in London that acceding to his accreditation would benefit the British embassy in Madrid’s relations with the Franco regime. It was a huge miscalculation that played easily into the hands of those who saw most Spanish journalists as simple tools of British appeasement towards Nazi Germany.
Domínguez’s reports were indeed published by the Spanish media, with the blessing of the state censor. However, far from proving sympathetic to the Allied cause, they turned out to be so biased in favour of the Axis powers that Burns was ordered by the MoI to personally reprimand Dominguez and issue him with a veiled warning that he faced detention as a foreign agent if he didn’t alter the tone and content of his copy.
Burns’s latest propaganda blunder provided useful ammunition for those who wanted to discredit him professionally. But his enemies within Whitehall knew that it fell short of being definitive. Far more damaging examples of collaboration with the enemy were needed to undermine the support and loyalties Burns had built up across government departments.
By now a great deal of intelligence coming in and out of Spain, and the decisions about what to do with it, had become the responsibility of Section V, the counter-intelligence branch of MI6, and in particular the head of its Iberian section, Kim Philby. Among the material that landed on Philby’s desk, via Bletchley Park, was ISOS, the intercepted and decrypted coded communications between the Abwehr and its branches and outposts, including those in German missions abroad.
By the middle of 1941, Section V had become an increasingly active arm of British intelligence. It had its own offices in an MI6 building outside London, near St Albans, in Hertfordshire, where ISOS summaries were logged and analysed. It had also set up its own network overseas, with its officers and agents developing their own reporting lines often in parallel with other station sections and with their own independent channel of cipher communication code named XB.
In the early years of the war, the professional liaison in London of the ‘merry band of Iberian specialists’ at the heart of British intelligence was forged by an close-knit social circle which the MI5 officer Tomás Harris hosted at his west London flat in Chesterfield Gardens. It was there that the likes of another MI5 officer Blunt, MI6’s Philby, and Guy Burgess who had been recruited by MI6’s Section D at the outbreak of the war before joining the BBC – a cover for his work for Soviet intelligence – could meet, relax and share their world view over drinks.
Philby at the time was the dominant figure in the circle, personable, self-confident and highly professional, regarded
by some of his colleagues as the rising star in British intelligence. He was eminently clubbable without possessing any of the stuffy characteristics of an older generation of British intelligence officers, most of whom had a military background. One of his contemporaries, Walter Bell, who had been recruited into British intelligence during the 1930s before being posted to the US, recalled how he had gone to his first meeting with Philby dressed in pinstripes and bowler hat, only to be greeted by the head of the Iberian section, tieless and with his feet up on the desk. By the desk and piled high were intelligence files Philby claimed had been sat upon by his predecessor and which he was now ensuring got to the people who needed to know.
Bell was only one of dozens of British intelligence officers who would later claim to have been unaware of the traitor concealed by Philby’s affable exterior – or, for that matter, of the duplicity of Blunt and Burgess, who would later be similarly exposed as Soviet agents, with Harris suspected of being one of the paymasters of the so-called Cambridge spies right up to the time of his death in a mysterious car crash in Mallorca in 1964. Others who woke up belatedly to the treacherous deception practised by the Soviet agents included Desmond Bristow, an MI6 officer who worked closely with Philby in the Iberian section in London before he was posted to Spain.
Bristow recalled a conversation he had with Philby while drinking rounds of Irish whiskey at King Harry’s, the pub near where they worked in St Albans. At one point during the evening, Philby asked him what he thought about Franco and his neutrality, implying that he was too pro-German. ‘Kim, I don’t know, but I find it hard to imagine actually coming out and openly supporting either side; Spain is far too unstable to fight. If I was Franco I would stay neutral,’ Bristow told Philby. With the evidence of hindsight, Bristow would later believe that Philby was ‘obviously testing me as a potential partner in his work for the Russians’.