Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  8

  Hyacinth Days

  The wartime Nazi press attaché in the German embassy in Madrid, Hans Lazar, features as one of the more sinister characters in The Spy Wore Red, the memoirs of Aline Griffith, the American model working for New York designer Hattie Carnegie who turned secret agent for the Allied cause and came to Spain in 1943. With a stylish dress code, good looks and outgoing character, Griffith was recruited by the American OSS, the precursor of the CIA. Her mission was to immerse herself in the more pro-Axis circles of wartime Madrid’s high society.

  Griffith first met Lazar while she was dining ‘under cover’ with a Spanish friend at Horcher, the German restaurant in Madrid. The rumour already sweeping diplomatic circles in the early stages of the war was that Lazar had developed the habit of using his monocle to reflect light into the eyes of his victims when he interrogated them, when not using it as a simple magnifying glass to scrutinise secret documents.

  Other Allied intelligence suggested that Lazar was not only an important figure in the Nazi world, the éminence grise of the German embassy, but also a man with strange tastes. His bedroom was decorated like a chapel, with two rows of twelve figures of saints and an altar on which he slept.

  Lazar’s standing as an important social figure in Madrid and a loyal Nazi was underlined by his choice of companion, the Countess von Furstenberg, a ravishing beauty and friend of the Third Reich who, on the night Griffith saw them together for the first time, was dressed in a long sable cape, a black satin gown and a necklace of gleaming pearls.

  Days later Griffith met Lazar again at a party thrown one evening by a German businessman suspected by Allied intelligence of being a Nazi agent at his home near El Escorial. The German’s palatial mansion, tucked away in the Guadarrama Hills, was frequently visited by leading members of the Spanish aristocracy who had returned to Madrid after Franco’s victory in the civil war.

  Griffith’s cover was nearly blown that night when she was interrupted secretly photographing a document Lazar had inadvertently left on his dressing table. Luckily for Griffith, her intruder – a fellow guest – was extremely drunk and assumed that the attractive American woman before him was available for sex. According to Griffith, she managed to avoid his advances by slipping a capsule of sodium amobarbital, a ‘truth serum’, into his drink, which incapacitated him while eliciting from him the information that he was acting as a messenger for the Gestapo. When not attending private parties, Griffith spent her evenings at the Ritz and the Palace. One of her favourite dance spots was Pasapoga, a nightclub in the Gran Vía where a big American-style band from Paris played every night except Sundays. The club was managed by an amiable, fun-loving French Jew called Bernard Hinder who had a keen ear for gossip when not serving as a more serious source of secret intelligence for the Allies. At various times during the war, Griffith and Burns would find themselves with different partners on the dance floor at the Pasapoga pretending they didn’t know each other. Madrid was a spy stage and they were merely players.

  ‘In Madrid, people like me had a busy nightlife,’ Griffith recalled years later, ‘a lot of espionage went on there … in Pasapoga you’d be dancing around, bumping into English agents, German agents. Some of us knew each other but I pretended to be totally unimportant Señorita Griffith, just an American girl having a good time.’ During the day Griffith worked in a secret code room which the OSS had set up in the offices of the US oil mission on Miguel Ángel Street, a few blocks from the American and British embassies. She helped run a small network of Spanish maids, secretaries and cooks, all of them as agents. During the war the OSS came to have several officers in Spain, mainly based in Madrid and Barcelona. They rented hotel rooms and owned several apartments which they used as safe houses for escaping prisoners of war and informants and agents, including those operating north of the Pyrenees and in North Africa. While it increasingly boosted its presence in Spain as the war progressed, the OSS remained an organisation in gestation in Spain, regarded as very much the junior partner by the British.

  ‘The British had many more people than we did in Madrid. They knew much more than we did,’ Griffith recalled. ‘They had been doing intelligence for much longer than we had. The English were terribly polite and correct but we knew they had a terrible opinion of us … and of course everything we did was new … we thought spying was like being in the movies. The British were more sophisticated.’

  Much of what Griffith was tasked with finding out at considerable expense when she was posted to Madrid in late 1943 followed a trail already well trodden by the British. From the moment of his arrival in the late summer of 1940 Burns had realised the formidable challenge posed by his German counterpart. Fate had determined that he and Lazar should track each other’s movements while seemingly avoiding meeting face to face, playing a cat and mouse game in a world of smoke and mirrors, where no one could be fully trusted and nothing was quite what it seemed. Both men used their diplomatic cover to compete for the attention of the Spanish, socialising as much as they could, when not engaged in the more covert art of psychological warfare and the cultivation of discreet informants.

  The British embassy’s press office saw as its main official mission that of countering the German triumphalism that manifested itself in the pages of the Spanish media. In addition to circulating its clandestine news bulletins, it invited local journalists, academics and government contacts to showings of morale-boosting British documentaries and feature films. Funded as part of the MoI’s ‘Programme for Film Propaganda’, the films idealised the common struggle that helped forge British national identity, providing an image of stoicism and cheerful resistance. The message to Spanish audiences was that the British were not only determined to win, but that victory over the Axis powers was a foregone conclusion. Films shown included In Which We Serve, an account of the heroic exploits of the captain and crew of a British destroyer in the Mediterranean, and Pimpernel Smith, in which the main character helps refugees evade the Gestapo. Among the documentaries was London Can Take It, which celebrated the spirit of the Blitz – ordinary Londoners getting on with their lives by day while fighting the German bombs by night, ‘the greatest civilians the world has ever known’.

  The Madrid sessions of Churchill’s cinematographic propaganda warfare were initially run from within the main British embassy building with seating space for up to 150 people. Within weeks of the hearts and minds operation getting underway, Burns found a very ready response to the embassy’s expanding invitation list, which he put down partly to the quality of the buffet that was laid on. While there was virtually no bread in Madrid in the first year of the war, the British embassy secured ample supplies from Gibraltar. The white rolls – nicknamed Churchills – were sent to Mrs Taylor, the owner of the ‘we-never-close’ tea room Embassy, where they were transformed into sandwiches. For Burns and those who came to watch his shows, those sessions became ‘little oases of optimism in the darkest times of the war’. The press department’s duties included overseeing the safe passage through Spain of British subjects and their loved ones. This was not without some risk, as many right-wing Spaniards had developed strong anti-British feelings as a result of the Spanish civil war, when most British volunteers had fought for the Republic in the International Brigades.

  Among those helped by Burns was Henry Buckley, one of the most distinguished of the thousand or so foreign correspondents who had reported on the Spanish Civil War. A journalist with the Daily Telegraph, he wrote with an unrivalled and scrupulous adherence to the truth. Buckley was a devout Catholic and politically conservative but with a radical social instinct that had led him to report on the struggles of the industrial workers and landless peasants in the 1930s without sharing in the anti-communist hysteria of many of his fellow Catholics. Later during the civil war, he came to be horrified by the ideological blindness and intolerance of Spaniards on both sides.

  In 1940 Buckley reinforced his credentials as one of the most astute observers
of Spanish politics when he published in London his seminal Life and Death of the Spanish Republic, a personal record of one of the most tumultuous periods in European history, from the end of the monarchy to the rise to power of Franco. After the civil war Buckley was posted to Berlin, where he worked until two days before the outbreak of war when, in common with other British nationals, he was ordered to leave by Hitler.

  After a brief period in Amsterdam, Buckley worked for a year and half in Lisbon and it was there that he developed close ties with Burns, as a friend and an informant. Despite their political differences over the civil war, Burns trusted Buckley as a fellow Catholic, and considered his experience of Spain invaluable in helping develop British policy towards the Iberian Peninsula. He came to feel very much in Buckley’s debt.

  When, halfway through the war, Buckley became a war correspondent attached to British forces in the Mediterranean, Burns personally arranged safe-conduct passes and other documents so that the journalist’s young Catalan wife, María Planas, could travel from her home in Sitges to meet him in southern Spain whenever he was on leave in Gibraltar.

  ‘I will write to thank Burns for helping you when you went through Madrid for our lovely little holiday in Algeciras,’ wrote Buckley to María on 16 April 1943. ‘It was good of him. He is a very nice fellow indeed.’

  Burns’s covert activities included helping the work in Spain of MI9, a branch of the intelligence services tasked with the specific brief of assisting escaped prisoners of war and refugees, both as a way of replenishing the depleted strength of the armed forces, and gleaning information from behind enemy lines. By the end of 1940, MI9 had developed a highly effective Iberian operation headquartered in the British embassies in Madrid and Lisbon, and with satellite bases throughout the consular network, under the direction of Michael Creswell and Donald Darling respectively. Creswell’s codename was Monday while Darling’s was Sunday.

  Escapees handled through the embassies in Madrid and Lisbon ranged across a wide variety of nationalities – French, Russians, Dutch, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Czechs, Poles, Austrians and Germans. These included soldiers and deserters from European countries occupied by the Nazis, and Jews escaping from increasing persecution. Secret lines involving local contacts and safe houses were established across France all the way to the Pyrenees. There they would be met and taken across and into Spain by pro-Allied locals – French or Spanish – with a good knowledge of the terrain.

  A successful operation involved escapees then finding their way secretly to a British consulate or the embassy in Madrid, from where they were smuggled down to Gibraltar or across the Portuguese border to Lisbon. Because of the proximity of the French border, both Catalonia and the Basque country became particularly important staging posts for Allied special operations.

  In both Barcelona and Bilbao, Allied intelligence gathering was facilitated by the long-term presence British shipping and trade interests had in the respective ports. Among the local expatriates recruited by British intelligence early on in the war was Frederick Witty, the son of Arthur Witty, one of the founding players of FC Barcelona, who ran a very successful trading company in the Catalan capital.

  In Barcelona one of the most efficient escape runs was coordinated by Paul Dorchy, one of Burns’s appointees at the British consulate. ‘A brash and robust young man who rightly regarded his duties as being adaptable to circumstances rather than what London regarded as proper to a press office’ was how Burns described him. Among the agents who came through on Dorchy’s watch was Mavis Dowden, a young English music teacher who left Mussolini’s Italy for Barcelona at the end of the Spanish Civil War and was recruited by the British after the fall of France. Her task mainly consisted of meeting Polish escapees and helping transfer them to the safe houses that the consulate had rented around the city.

  By the spring of 1942 Dowden’s escape network was fully operational and increasingly well organised by her ‘controller’, a British expatriate she code-named Mr Eckys. ‘We now had working for us, two Spanish policemen, several bandits, a school master called Muñoz, and a Belgian priest, a delightful fellow of gargantuan proportions, a schoolboy’s dream of Friar Tuck,’ she later recalled.

  The network was eventually infiltrated by the Germans and Dowden was arrested while meeting a contact in a café off the Ramblas. She was imprisoned first in the Jefatura, or police headquarters, and then in the women’s prison, Las Corts, run by nuns, near the site of the present-day FC Barcelona stadium. During her captivity, Dowden was subjected to continuous interrogation by pro-Axis Spanish policemen, while being held in cramped cells. Unlike some of her fellow inmates, however, she was never physically tortured, thanks to early diplomatic intervention on her behalf by the embassy in Madrid.

  After more than a year behind bars, Dowden was given conditional liberty and ordered to report weekly to the Military Tribunal next to the statue of Christopher Columbus that overlooks Barcelona’s port.

  Life had changed dramatically for Dowden since her arrival at the same spot in 1939, after crossing the Mediterranean from Genoa, carrying her violin and musical sheets. She was later deported and returned to England, where she carried on her work for the British government in political intelligence at Bush House.

  Many others were not so fortunate. While the Spanish escape lines remained open throughout the war, many escapees and agents were intercepted by the Germans. In one black week, reported by the embassy in Madrid, four key British agents were captured by the Gestapo. Such was the courage and ingenuity of many of those involved, however, that no sooner had one individual fallen than another was found as a replacement.

  POWs who managed to reach Madrid were housed for a period within the confines of the British embassy before being smuggled out by car once the remaining stages of their escape route to Gibraltar had been arranged and secured. The embassy laid on games, books and food. It also provided the POWs with money with which they could supplement their diet with fruit and wine sold on the black market and brought in by trusted Spanish members of staff. Occasionally, one or two of them slipped into the cinema sessions, where they posed as members of staff so that their presence was not leaked to the outside world by any of the other guests. It must have seemed like a holiday camp compared to the rigours of army life and the clandestine existence under German occupation, although their hosts were only too aware how fragile was the political situation beyond the embassy gates.

  According to Kenneth Benton, the MI6’s Section V officer in Spain, of more than twenty spies identified directly by the embassy in Madrid during the Second World War, about a third were ‘walk-ins’, individuals who came and pretended to offer their services to the Allies when in fact they were working for the Abwehr.

  While serving in the embassy, Burns was personally targeted by several ‘walk-ins’, some drawn by the fact that he was a Catholic, others by his close liaison with other key departments, and his influence on many of the political decisions made by the ambassador.

  In his account of his time in Madrid, Benton described how Burns helped MI6’s counter-espionage Section V secure an important asset in the form of a German Jew who volunteered to work for the Allies out of Spain.

  ‘For most of my time in Madrid I had the services of an excellent agent, a German Jew,’ recalled Benton. ‘He was an educated man, liberal-minded, and he hated the Nazis, so he made an approach to Tom Burns, the Press Attaché, who informed me.’ Benton credits Burns with providing him with the contact that developed into one of the most useful agents the British government had in Spain for the rest of the war and beyond. Benton arranged to meet the prospective agent on a lonely stretch of road outside Madrid, where he could be sure he had not been followed. He was offered a source inside the state security apparatus, the DGS (Dirección General de Seguridad).

  The DGS was under Franco’s orders not to close down the activities of the British embassy even though it was the subject of intense surveillance by Spanish agents and the
Gestapo. Documents discovered by the Allies at the end of the war show that the Germans kept lists of everyone who went in and out of the British embassy, while Spanish police files in Franco’s own personal archive reveal that Burns was among the diplomats allowed to carry on operating by the Spaniards despite being suspected of spying. Franco benefited from regular information on most of the intelligence operations that were being conducted by the Axis and the Allies against each other on Iberian soil and was content to let them run as long as they did not directly threaten his hold on power. Such a policy appears to have come under pressure in Spanish towns where the influence of pro-Axis Falangists was more prevalent.

  In the southern port town of Huelva, for example, William Cluett, the British manager of a British electricity company, Joseph Pool Bueno, an Anglo-Spanish employee of Rio Tinto, and Montagu Brown, the head of the local railway company were expelled for suspected spying activities. The British embassy successfully intervened to secure the release from detention of two other British businessmen. On the whole there was nothing similar in scale to the pursuit of Spaniards suspected of being German spies by MI5 in the UK. Franco’s repression remained focused on what he perceived as the internal enemy of Spaniards who had fought against him.

  If Burns enjoyed additional protection in wartime Spain it was because of his Catholic credentials, his anti-Republican stance during the Civil War, and the allies and ‘agents of influence’ he had forged in the higher echelons of the regime.

  It was Burns’s faith that appears to have prompted at least one attempt by the German secret service to infiltrate one of their agents into the British embassy, in a case of ecclesiastical espionage redolent of the counter-Reformation.