by Jimmy Burns
Pastor – undoubtedly influenced by his Republican sympathies – painted a picture of a gullible Burns being taken in by the Spaniards and being used to further the interests of the Franco regime. ‘Calvo arranged a number of introductions for Tom Burns and a dinner party for him with Alcázar [Velasco] and Brugada. They regarded Burns as a buffoon and Calvo was trying to put over that he was attempting to come to an arrangement with Losada … an arrangement that his messages [newspaper articles] should not be distorted on their arrival in Madrid … Calvo was telling Burns that Losada was a good fellow and not biased, when Alcázar [Velasco] broke in and said that that all this was nonsense as Losada receives 12,000 pesetas a month from the Germans.’
Harris claimed that Burns himself had made no mention of this conversation and was therefore deliberately covering up the involvement Losada and Calvo may have had with the Germans. And yet MI5’s own file on Burns shows that he had already reported on Losada’s payment by the Germans and Calvo’s meeting with Lazar, not on the basis of information he had received from Velasco but on letters that had been leaked to him well before the lunch with the Spaniards.
Burns trusted Velasco no more than he had done when he first met him and nearly ended up being shot. It was only the erratic Velasco who thought that everyone, including Burns, was taken in by him.
If Burns continued to cultivate Velasco and Calvo it was in order to track their movements while in Spain and infiltrate meetings which he was able to do using his press attaché cover. What he seemed not to have fully realised was the extent to which his reports were being deliberately misinterpreted by key sectors of British intelligence, not as evidence of cooperation by a loyal servant of the Crown but of collaboration by an ‘appeaser’ with the enemy.
On 10 February, Burns reported to London that Calvo had been approached by Enrique Meneses, the owner of an international Spanish-language media group, Prensa Mundial, to be their correspondent in London. Burns himself had earlier been approached to help with the accreditation by the head of the group’s Madrid office, Gregorio Marañón, the son of the famous Spanish doctor, writer and politician whom, as we shall see later, the British embassy in Madrid had been courting as a source of political intelligence since his return from exile in Paris.
Marañón Jr was well to the right of his ‘liberal’ father, having enlisted in the Falange movement as a student and then volunteered to fight for Franco during the civil war. Despite his close links with the Franco regime, Burns considered him pro-Allied, like his father. Burns also believed that the proposal presented an opportunity to make use of Calvo back in London, having him write pro-British reports for publication in South America, as a counterweight to German influence there.
In a letter that was copied subsequently and shared with his enemies in MI5, Burns wrote to the Foreign Division of the MoI, saying that Marañón Jr’s plans envisaged the agency in London extending into a feature and photograph service manned by British staff. He suggested that the agency could serve British intelligence and propaganda interests, particularly in South America.
Burns attached a copy he had obtained of an intelligence report prepared by the Spanish embassy in Paris on Meneses. It showed that Meneses had served as a civil governor in Segovia during the Republic, disappeared during the civil war, and then re-emerged in Paris at the outset of the Second World War where he had become involved in propaganda. He had been paid 100,000 francs by the French government and, shortly before the German occupation, a further £10,000 by the British for a series of articles in favour of the Allied cause. He had since visited Berlin and was thought at the time to be in the pay of the Germans. What the Spaniards did not know – and Burns did – was that Meneses had never left the service of the British and was now in fact being run by the British embassy in Madrid as a double agent.
Early in March 1942, Meneses’ use to Burns was made clear when he came to Madrid and secured a meeting, along with Gregorio Marañón Jr, with Hans Lazar, the aim being to secure information that might be of value to the Allies. Trusting Meneses as an Axis agent, Lazar disclosed the plans the Germans had for using Prensa Mundial as a propaganda tool, infiltrating a Madrid-based South American cultural centre called the Consejo de Hispanidad, and ensuring that Franco’s relations with South America served the interests of Berlin. All of Burns’s reports on Meneses, including his account of the meeting with Lazar, were copied by Harris at MI5 and sent to Philby.
The reports in themselves should have been sufficient to bury once and for all any notion that Burns was working for the Germans, but Harris and Philby saw them as a personal threat. For the reports showed that Burns, their arch enemy in the British embassy in Madrid, was once again encroaching on the double-cross spy game, a field of activity they wanted to control for their own ideological interests.
Towards the end of the month Meneses arrived in Buenos Aires bearing a letter of introduction from Burns to the press attaché in the British embassy. It served no purpose. Days before his arrival, Philby and Harris sent a message to the embassy, denouncing Meneses as a German agent and emphasising the operational necessity of disregarding anything that Burns had to say about him.
By then the original proposal to have Prensa Mundial establish an office in London had served its purpose. Encouraged by the prospect of additional employment, Luis Calvo had flown back to Britain and straight into the trap that British intelligence had set for him. On 12 February, Calvo was arrested by Special Branch police officers on arrival at Whitchurch airport near Bristol. He was taken to Latchmere House – renamed Camp 020 – a secret interrogation centre which British intelligence had set up near Ham Common, on the outskirts of London, on the site of a First World War military hospital once used for the care of officers recovering from shell shock.
The main building and its annexes of portable huts were set in secluded woodland in one of west London’s leafier suburbs. A tall wooden fence around the entire perimeter kept it hidden from prying eyes, while a double barbed-wire fence and a series of security barriers offered further layers of protection and isolation from the outside world. The few residents in the immediate vicinity were vetted regularly while no one could go in or out without a special security pass.
An earlier British precursor of Guantánamo Bay, Camp 020 was a product of its time. It came into being in July 1940, when the Nazi advance across Europe fuelled British government paranoia about Fifth Column activity, and infiltration by enemy agents, and led to the suspension of habeas corpus and the introduction of internment.
Compared with other neutral countries, a relatively high proportion of foreign inmates – over twenty – were Spanish citizens or of Latin American nationality with close connections with Spain. During the time Calvo was detained there, Camp 020 was characterised by its secrecy, security, and lack of accountability to the outside world – with the media, defence lawyers, and the International Red Cross denied access. MI5 justified such containment on the grounds that external scrutiny would risk undermining the development of the XX system. But it meant that the inmates were denied the status or full rights accorded to prisoners of war under the 1929 Geneva Convention. The justification for Calvo’s indefinite detention, as in the case of other inmates, was that there was secret intelligence suggesting he was a threat to national security, not that there was evidence capable of being brought to court. The best his captors could initially claim was that his name had appeared in a diary suggesting a link to Alcazar de Velasco.
With steely eyes, the man MI5 selected to interrogate Calvo, the monocled commander of Camp 020, Lieutenant-Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, seemed physically more like a Gestapo officer than a British soldier.
Stephens had been recruited by MI5 at the outset of the war after serving in the Indian Army and playing a mysterious, clandestine role in Abyssinia. He had travelled extensively and spoke numerous languages, but his experience abroad had simply fuelled an obsessive distrust and disdain of foreigners, with a thinly veil
ed racist tendency that expressed itself in cultural typecasting. Thus, Frenchmen were untrustworthy – ‘a “good” [sic] Frenchman accepts the German’s money’ – Italians ‘undersized and posturing’ and Spaniards ‘obstinate, immoral and immutable’, according to the notes he took on his prisoners.
Official MI5 historians have made much of the camp’s first and unbreakable rule, that physical violence was not to be used in any circumstances (in fact, it was broken on at least one occasion) – even if it has been pointed out that this was derived not from any sense of morality, but from a purely practical assessment that physical torture risked producing answers to please, and thus lowering the quality of the information. There is no doubt, however, that inmates were subjected to psychological torture of a brutal kind. Recalling his experience many years later, Calvo told friends back in Spain how humiliated and vulnerable he felt, being made within minutes of his forced transfer to the camp – without any formal charges being laid against him – to stand naked as questions were barked at him and insinuations made that he could be sexually abused.
For days he was held incommunicado and threatened with execution. His cell, like those of others, was permanently bugged so as to deny him any privacy. Stephens did not tolerate familiarity or signs of friendship with any of his prisoners – even the offer of a cigarette was proscribed. ‘Figuratively, a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet,’ according to the Stephens code.
In the commandant’s own case study of Calvo, he comes as close as is possible to admitting, but with no sense of remorse or guilt, that the Spaniard was not so much a spy as the victim of entrapment, a mere cog in a complex intelligence wheel serving necessary ends. Calvo was not a professional agent but a journalist who had been ‘pitchforked deeply into espionage’, with the manner of his induction into enemy service suggesting a ‘certain injustice’.
The fact that Calvo had followed the profession of a journalist, not of a spy, and was therefore not trained to withstand interrogation techniques, made things relatively easy for his inquisitors. Stephens took pride in ‘breaking’ Calvo within hours, and having him kept in detention without charge for months, despite acknowledging that the information he provided in the end was ‘considerably more than was known already, but rather less than had been expected’, with the additional intelligence gleaned from him ‘both limited and vague’.
Calvo’s detention sparked an angry protest from the Spanish government led by the Duke of Alba. This was kept from Calvo by his jailers, who instead fuelled his mental breakdown by insisting that he had been forgotten by friends, family and officialdom. It was over a week before anyone from the Spanish embassy was allowed to see him, the first outside visitor since his detention. Calvo had been warned by his jailers that his chances of being freed would be much improved if he pretended he had been well treated. He was then taken blindfolded out of the camp to an ordinary-looking office that MI5 was using as cover.
The visiting Spanish official found Calvo tired and nervous but showing no obvious signs of physical torture. An uncharacteristic security lapse had allowed Calvo to smuggle out on his person a note hastily scribbled in Spanish. Shaking the official by the hand, Calvo transferred the note. In it, he asserted his professional status as a foreign correspondent and declared his innocence of any espionage activities.
The meeting prompted a further protest from the Spanish government and a warning from the Spanish foreign ministry to the British embassy in Madrid that if Calvo was executed by the British, as other alleged German agents had been over the previous year, the Spanish government would arrest those it suspected of being British spies in the embassy in Madrid and would not hesitate to shoot them.
The fate of Calvo was sealed when the British embassy replied, somewhat disingenuously, that Calvo was a Spanish citizen who had spied for the Germans on UK soil, and that therefore there was nothing analogous between his activities and those of any British diplomat in Madrid. By then the Franco regime had long reached the conclusion that Calvo was not worth provoking a diplomatic crisis over and was expendable.
Calvo was abandoned to his fate in Camp 020 for several months – a ‘little grey ghost’, Stephens noted gleefully, during his final period there, when he was accorded the ‘privilege’ of serving as prison librarian. His interrogators could think of nothing better to do with him, given the absence of sufficient evidence to hang him. Calvo was eventually released and repatriated to Spain, after the British embassy in Madrid interceded on his behalf, a gesture of pragmatic diplomacy if not humanity he owed to his contact Burns, if no one else in the British intelligence community.
The Calvo affair showed an MI5 interrogator and his colleagues in the secret and intelligence services at their most ruthless and cynical. What makes the pursuit of alleged German agents linked to the Spanish embassy in London in Second World War Britain all the more extraordinary is that it occurred in parallel with the friendship that had developed between the Duke of Alba and Churchill.
The 17th Duke of Alba and 10th Duke of Berwick, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart was descended on the maternal side from Arabella Churchill, sister of the first Duke of Marlborough, and thus considered himself Churchill’s cousin, a link the British prime minister appeared to have had no problem recognising.
On the contrary, Churchill found Alba a kindred spirit – bon vivant, monarchist first and foremost, and a virulent anti-communist, who had little truck with Nazism. During a lunch held at the Spanish embassy in December 1940, Churchill had told Alba that what he wished for – and what Franco would expect – were the best and friendliest relations between the two nations.
During most of the war, Churchill paid several unpublicised social visits to the richly furnished embassy in Belgrave Square, considering it one of the best kitchens in London. Alba had a fine cellar of vintage French and Spanish wine and employed a French cook who was a magician in the kitchen. Despite rationing there seemed to be no shortage there of pâtés, succulent game, vegetables served with extravagant sauces and desserts made with real cream and eggs, thanks to the black market.
So much did Churchill enjoy his meals with his cousin ‘Jimmy’ that he would often not wait for a formal invitation, but rather telephone and invite himself, a request that was never denied. One day the embassy cook told Alba he would love to have a signed photograph of Churchill. At the next luncheon, Alba approached Churchill with the photograph already framed. ‘Winston, would you mind signing this for my cook? He has such admiration for you,’ Alba asked. Churchill smiled then grunted: ‘Admiration? Well, nothing compared to the admiration I feel for the cooking.’
In another intimate exchange on a visit to the embassy, Churchill confided to Casilda Villaverde, the attractive and well-born wife of the deputy head of mission who was suspected of being a spy by a sector of MI5, that one of the things he most admired about Spanish life was the custom of taking long siestas in the afternoon. The conversation took place at the height of the Blitz. ‘But how do you find time to sleep, Prime Minister?’ asked Casilda. ‘Sometimes it’s just three minutes, sometimes eight … but I switch off and rest,’ replied Churchill.
The Spanish embassy was not short of beautiful women at the time but it was the slim and cultured Casilda who impressed not only Churchill but also one of the most notorious womanisers among his friends. One evening Casilda found herself seated at a West End society dinner next to Duff Cooper, the MoI minister who became Churchill’s liaison officer with the Free French.
Flirting outrageously, Cooper complimented Casilda on her perfect command of English and declared: ‘This can’t be your first time in London.’ Back came the assured reply: ‘Oh, it is, I can assure you it is.’
Cooper was insistent. ‘But where did you learn to speak such perfect English?’ By now he was leaning in to his perceived prey, as was his wont with the women he thought he could seduce. ‘If you really want to know, it was thanks to my English nanny while living in the Plaza de España in Madrid.’ Co
oper smiled. ‘Really? I thought you’d learnt it in Oxford. You certainly picked a bad time to come to London.’
The evening ended without a conquest although Cooper and Casilda would settle for an enduring friendship that survived the war and into the years that followed.
Such encounters surrounding the House of Alba in London during the war would have been a mere comedy of manners had they not formed part of a broader stage in Anglo-Spanish relations which embroiled many of the players in a complex plot of diplomatic intrigue and espionage.
Alba, while aware that communications between his embassy and Madrid were being monitored by British intelligence, and that it housed individuals far more pro-Axis than himself, tried for most of the war to keep his relationship with Churchill separate from the complex stratagems of the spies, even if the spies themselves saw him as just another pawn with which they could play.
In early October 1942, MI5’s counter-espionage division went behind Churchill’s back and drew up their latest plan to entice the Spanish embassy into their double-cross game, feeding Alba and his diplomats with false information about an Allied plan for a massive amphibious landing in North Africa.
On 20 October, the head of MI6, Sir Stuart Menzies, contacted Guy Liddell, MI5’s head of counter-espionage, and told him that Churchill was ‘hopping mad’ with his friend the Duke of Alba after being told that the ambassador had sent a report to his government about the Allies’ forthcoming military operations in North Africa. Liddell noted in his diary: ‘Personally, I think it is difficult to blame Alba. People will not realise that however benevolent and pro-British a neutral ambassador may appear, it is his duty to report to his government what he sees, hears, and thinks. The fault lies with those who confide in him. He has an immense circle of friends in all walks of life and probably a great deal of information goes west over the second glass of port.’ The note is revealing for it shows elements of British intelligence concerned less with Alba than with the indiscretions that might have emanated from the English friends he made in London, not least Churchill himself.