Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  It remains unclear to what extent the merry band of Iberian specialists linked to Philby focused the attention of British intelligence on Spain, in a way that may have defused pressure on the London rezidentura of KGB (NKVD) officers, agents and communist sympathisers which had been the subject of perfunctory purges by MI5 during the 1920s and 1930s. Some evidence had emerged suggesting that Philby at this time was not wholly trusted by his Soviet masters. Within the KGB there were those who simply could not believe that the British Secret Intelligence Services could be run by such fools that no one had noticed that precious information was leaking to Moscow. And yet the fact remained that Philby, Blunt, and Burgess were Soviet agents at the time and felt their duty to the communist ideal paramount.

  What is also beyond doubt is that the pursuit of Spaniards suspected of being pro-Nazi agents proceeded more or less unopposed by senior UK officials at the time given the paranoia that many in British intelligence, and MI5 specifically, felt about German penetration of a United Kingdom cut off from continental Europe. It was against this background that Spain and Portugal came to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as the main conduit for Nazi agents.

  Philby helped spin the web of conspiracy around the Spanish spy ring in London, and relentlessly pursued it all the way to Madrid. No sooner had Velasco returned to the Spanish capital than a message was sent by Philby directly to Kenneth Benton, the newly arrived Section V officer, ordering him to follow the Spaniard and secure as much intelligence on him as possible.

  According to Philby’s message, the intelligence reports for which Velasco was held responsible were still being sent from London to Madrid before being forwarded to Berlin. Philby insisted that only Velasco could provide the answer as to who all his agents were in England and how they were transmitting. Benton was ordered to find out what he could. The subsequent investigation drew on information provided by a drunk who claimed to work for Velasco as a clerk. He told Benton that he hated his employer and offered to provide access to the contents of his safe in return for £2000 – the equivalent in those days of at least £50,000.

  Benton was horrified at the idea of paying such a sum to an untested source for what he thought might prove worthless information on a suspect spy who was something of a Walter Mitty character. But Philby secretly wired him the money and insisted he go ahead with the operation. Benton arranged to meet the informant, while Velasco was away on a two-week holiday in Mallorca, on a deserted road at night outside Madrid. Afraid that the clerk might be a stooge for the Spanish secret police or the Germans, Benton waited in his Buick and watched him approach alone before making contact. He then drew an automatic pistol from his pocket and, with his other hand, passed over a package of £1000 in notes in exchange for a large suitcase. Benton said he would only get paid the balance if the contents proved worthwhile. What he found were papers and account books of minimum value in intelligence terms. The account books contained no details of any names of agents or sums paid to them. The papers consisted of cuttings from British and American technical magazines pinned to copies of the reports sent to the Germans and the Japanese. The discovery confirmed Benton in his view that, if Velasco was a spy, he was an amateur.

  When Benton later asked Philby why on earth he had agreed to pay such a large sum in the first place, he was told that M16’s Finance Department had also raised their hands in horror at the idea, but had agreed after being persuaded that a ‘single broadside from a battleship would have cost more’. It was, of course, Benton noted many years later, a false comparison since the Admiralty’s budget was infinitely greater than that of MI6 at that time. More crucially, it left unexplained why Philby and his friends remained bent on pursuing a spy (Velasco) of extremely doubtful value to the enemy and encouraging a conspiracy whose only real impact on the war was in provoking tension between the British and Spanish governments. The answer may have lain in the ideological imperative Philby and Harris shared in destabilising the Franco regime, even though there were many other such blind-alley MI5 investigations during the Second World War.

  It was a conspiracy that would undoubtedly have been curtailed rather earlier had it not been for the decision of Philby and Harris to order their double agent GW to resume contact with Calvo in October 1941 and feed him false information about the movement of a British convoy on its way to Malta.

  A few days later GW provided Calvo with another piece of false information – an alleged copy of the minutes of a meeting of the war cabinet chaired by Churchill on 6 October. GW reported that he saw Calvo translate the minutes into Spanish, and put a copy in an envelope addressed to the deputy head of mission at the Spanish embassy, José Fernández de Villaverde.

  Finally, GW provided Calvo with a report on wartime food stocks in the UK, which Velasco had requested in a letter to the journalist which had been intercepted by MI5 a few days earlier. Over the three-week period of contacts with GW, Calvo received $600 in the diplomatic bag which was monitored coming in and out of the Spanish embassy in London by Blunt and his team of ‘night watchmen’ from B Division.

  By now Calvo had become a mere pawn in the double-cross system. Under the strategy MI5 used double agents like GW to deceive the enemy about Britain’s capabilities and intentions. There was perhaps no greater supporter of the strategy than MI5’s Dick White, who became executive head of the XX Committee. As White’s biographer Tom Bower has put it, ‘the mechanics of the tradecraft – secret inks, microdots, radio traffic, channelling money to agents in Britain, couriering documents from Britain to Germany and “recruitment” of the double agents excited White’, even if the betrayal of some of his own colleagues would return to haunt him in later years.

  A personal file compiled by MI5 on Calvo in October 1941 described him first and foremost as a ‘Spanish patriot’, who at the same time believed the best interests of his country would be served by a German victory. While the file suggested there was sufficient material to justify Calvo’s arrest, a decision was taken to let him run a little longer under surveillance to see what, if any, network might be revived.

  Intercepts of telephone conversations Calvo had with the other well-established Spanish London correspondent, La Vanguardias Felipe Fernández Armesto, a month later, in November 1941, showed them at one point mentioning Burns’s presence in London, and referring to meetings the press attaché was planning with his counterpart at the Spanish embassy and with Calvo himself.

  For those anxious to portray Burns as a traitor, the conversations provided little useful material. On the contrary, the perception Calvo and Armesto appeared to share of the British press attaché was that he was a man of influence within Whitehall whom they could not depend on to be indiscreet because he liked his job too much.

  Days later, Burns, fresh from his meetings with the suspect Spaniards, met Dick Broomham-White, M15 Iberian affairs officer, at the St James’s Club in London. Seemingly unaware of the scale of the double-cross system that the organisation was running, Burns – who was quite open about his contacts with Spanish journalists – tried to win Broomham-White’s support for the propaganda strategy that he was pursuing from the Madrid embassy, refusing to accept that it was fundamentally flawed. He justified the sending of Spanish journalists to London as the only means for getting reports from Britain into the Spanish press. He also argued that the MoI should make greater efforts to ‘bear-lead’ the Spanish foreign correspondents as ‘Nazis have learnt to do in Berlin’ – by feeding them information and exercising greater control on their copy.

  Burns had asked for the meeting with Broomham-White in the hope that it might ensure better coordination between the embassy in Madrid and whatever strategy was being pursued by the secret services in London. However, Broomham-White emerged from the meeting convinced that Burns was the problem, not the solution, just as his friend Philby had warned him, even if he stopped well short of damning him as a traitor.

  As he reported to Philby: ‘On the basis of the conversation I am reasonably certai
n Burns is a man with right-wing sympathies who interprets his major responsibilities as keeping in the good books of his opposite numbers in Madrid. I think he is irresponsible and his judgements are superficial. He certainly has no idea of the implications of security work. I do not however, feel that he would consciously do anything which would be harmful to our interests. His indiscretions and mistakes are much more likely to be due to thoughtlessness and an overdose of the “appeasement” outlook.’

  Two days later Harris claimed in a report that Burns was closely linked to Calvo and Velasco, and that he had deliberately turned a blind eye to their pro-German activities in order to avoid a major diplomatic row undermining the operations of the British embassy in Madrid. ‘Burns is anxious to keep his position as the spoilt child of the British embassy in Madrid at all costs,’ reported Harris. ‘Burns feels that if any of the Spanish journalists here are molested that reprisals might be taken against him.’

  According to Harris, Burns’s fear of reprisals was quite unfounded, as ‘not the slightest importance is attached to Burns by the German embassy or the Spanish government’. In fact, a Spanish police file on Burns, drawn from information provided by the Gestapo, showed that he was suspected of playing a major intelligence role in the Iberian Peninsula, and had been inaccurately identified as head of the MI6 Madrid station. ‘It is suspected that Burns who is the head of English propaganda is in reality the Head of the British Intelligence service in Spain and Portugal. He travels frequently to Lisbon,’ the Spanish secret police stated in a report which landed on Franco’s desk.

  Harris’s assertions that neither the Spaniards nor the Germans took Burns seriously was a complete fabrication, designed to suggest that the press attaché could easily be dispensed with without provoking major repercussions. The lie fitted into the conspiratorial web that Harris was weaving with the help of Blunt and Philby to discredit Burns and have him removed from his post.

  From within MI6, Philby was anxious to do all he could to ensure that MI5 came to view Burns as a security risk and thus continued to feed false information suggesting that he was aiding and abetting Spanish journalists to circumvent passport controls. He was not short of MI5 officers willing to fuel the conspiracy. One of them was Kemball Johnston, a friend of Philby’s and Blunt’s whom Guy Burgess had recommended to his Russian handler as a possible KGB recruit.

  Johnston’s main responsibility was helping oversee the screening and questioning by MI5 of refugees and foreign aliens and drawing up an index file of those suspected of working for the enemy.

  Johnston was strongly anti-Franco and anti-Catholic and did all he could to counter anti-Bolshevik propaganda in all neutral countries, claiming that the communist threat was a Nazi exaggeration. He knew that it was not the defence of communism but the suggestion that a good Catholic was, by definition, a bad Englishman that most appealed in some quarters of the British state. Thus did Johnston on 28 December 1941 add this view to the file M15 was developing on Burns: ‘Nobody appears to have realised that Burns is the Burns of Burns & Oates, one of the two most important Catholic publishers in the country – and as such immensely powerful. This is surely the key to Burns’ character, which so far as my information goes, is that of an extremely right-wing militant Catholic’.

  In fact, Burns had never hidden his background in Catholic publishing or his family roots. Nevertheless, the Catholic conspiracy theory was picked up by MI5’s Broomham-White and included in a two-page report he drafted three days later, summarising the case against Burns so far.

  Broomham-White admitted that there was still no evidence pointing to treason. But he believed there was enough dirt that could be thrown at him to make it to stick. The allegations against him were that Burns’s recommendation of Spanish journalists had been ‘to say the least, misguided’ and been of no service to British intelligence. The note from Johnston on Burns’s Catholic connections, moreover, had thrown ‘an interesting light’ on Burns’s character, making it even more so a target of ‘justifiable suspicion’.

  Broomham-White continued: ‘The impression I have formed of him myself and from statements from other sources suggest that he is also a very slippery opportunist. Though I do not think he is actively disloyal, his sympathies are undoubtedly very far to the right, and he has no discretion or sense of security values.’

  He concluded that from the point of view of those who had put him under surveillance (i.e. Blunt, Philby, Harris and their allies in the MoI), Burns was a ‘most undesirable person to hold the post of Press Attaché in Madrid’. Furthermore, Broomham-White suggested, if Burns were to be recalled it would have the advantage of having him replaced by a man ‘qualified and prepared to serve the interests of SIS (MI6)’, in other words a candidate more to the liking of Kim Philby, the Soviet mole at the heart of British intelligence who as yet was a long way from being discovered as such by some of his closest colleagues.

  And yet, unlike Harris’s earlier report, there was no suggestion that Burns was a minor piece in the intelligence game that could easily be crushed. ‘I think we must assume,’ Broomham-White wrote, ‘that Burns has powerful friends and that any move against him will meet with very strong opposition.’

  In the following months a concerted effort was made by Philby and the small cabal of intelligence officers that had come under his influence to enlist the support of some of the most senior government officials behind their campaign to get rid of Burns. At the same time the double-cross entrapment of Spanish journalists entered a new phase. Philby notified the embassy in Madrid that he had no objection from a security and intelligence point of view to having Calvo, the Spanish journalist, return to Britain after spending a few days on leave in Madrid. In fact, Philby and his friends in MI5 had put in place a plan to have Calvo arrested on arrival and charged with espionage.

  Prior to Calvo’s return, on 12 January 1942 Broomham-White drafted his latest case report on Burns in consultation with Philby, and submitted it to Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counterespionage. The report unequivocally blamed Burns for sending Spanish journalists with Falangist leanings to the UK and accused him of being complicit in a pro-Axis conspiracy on behalf of the Franco government. While acknowledging there was no proof whatsoever that he was knowingly working for the Germans, it held Burns personally responsible for ‘recommending two German agents, and one suspect and highly undesirable individual’ as suitable representatives of the Spanish press in the UK. It also alleged that Burns’s zeal to have ‘another German agent’ (Calvo) accredited had led him to take action which had been ‘most damaging’ to the work of the security service.

  Broomham-White concluded that Burns’s ‘irresponsibility and lack of judgement’ was a sufficient justification on security grounds for MI5 to press for his recall and his banning from holding office in any government department ever again.

  Those who had prepared the report on Burns intended to have it copied and sent to the executive head of the XX Committee, Dick White, the head of MI5, Sir David Petrie, and the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan. However, just as the copies of the draft were about to be circulated, Burns chose that moment to remind the Foreign Office and the MoI just what a central plank he had become in British operations in Spain.

  Stepping up the propaganda and intelligence activities with which he had been entrusted by his ambassador in Madrid, he made a point of logging for the first time the meetings he had, and making copies to all the departments that he felt needed to know: the Foreign Office, MI6, the Ministry of Information and MI5. There is no record to suggest when and how Burns became aware that his enemies were gunning for him. However, the move by Burns suggests that he was aware that he was treading on potentially dangerous territory, and felt it necessary – to protect himself against anyone who might doubt his motives – to make it clear that he was acting in an official capacity and not as a freelance of dubious loyalties.

  On 20 January 1942, Calvo flew back to Madrid o
stensibly on leave. Burns wasted little time in resuming contact with him. A few days later he reported to London in detail on a meeting he had had with Calvo in the presence of his editor at ABC, Losada, during which he protested about the pro-Axis nature of coverage on Britain appearing in the Spanish media. According to Burns, Losada promised to maintain a close personal contact with him, told Calvo there and then that he must consider himself entirely free to write objectively about the situation in England and undertook to exercise a censorship of his own over and above the official one, in order to exclude any commentary that smacked of pro-Nazi sentiment.

  Burns was not taken in but pretended to both Calvo and Losada that he had been, and left Calvo with the impression that the clouds of suspicion that had been forming around him in London were lifting. In fact, in a subsequent report to his superiors in London, Burns revealed that he had managed to intercept letters to Losada written by Hans Lazar, the German press attaché, suggesting not only the closest friendship between the two men but also that the ABC editor was in the pay of the Germans. He also reported that Calvo had had a meeting with Lazar in the ABC offices.

  Back at MI5, those wanting to have Burns’s head dismissed his latest intelligence report as a belated attempt to cover his tracks. Harris stoked the fires of suspicion again by suggesting that a lunch Burns subsequently had in Madrid with Calvo, the press attaché of the Spanish embassy in London, Brugada, and Velasco showed that Burns was continuing to collaborate with pro-German Spaniards.

  By now Brugada – code-named Peppermint – was working as a double agent for Harris. Only Harris’s account survives in the MI5 file on Burns. It is based on information provided by another of Harris’s agents, Antonio Pastor, the passionately anti-Franco head of the Spanish department at King’s College London – code-named Peacock. Despite the fact that Pastor was not present at the lunch, Harris claimed that he and the professor had been briefed by Brugada.