by Jimmy Burns
The agent in question was a German Benedictine monk called Fr Hermann Keller. Born with a hole in the heart, Keller had been barred from military service, prompting him to volunteer instead for espionage work. Keller was recruited as an agent both by the Abwehr and Himmler’s secret service, and tasked with informing on alleged plots involving the Vatican and British and German Catholics. At one point Keller was also sent to Rome to find out who, in May 1940, had betrayed to the Pope advance information on Germany’s impending attack on the Western Front.
Keller continued to work for the Nazis in Paris and from there extended his operations south, attempting to infiltrate the Benedictine monastery in Montserrat, near Barcelona, a traditional refuge for political dissidents high in the granite mountains. The Gestapo had received a tip-off that Friedrich Muckermann, an anti-Nazi Jesuit it was seeking all over occupied Europe, was staying there. He was indeed, but Keller never found him. Undeterred, he travelled to Madrid in search of Muckermann and other pro-Allied German Catholics. There he approached Burns, claiming that he had been in Montserrat on a retreat, and posing as a messenger for the German ‘resistance’.
Burns checked with his Catholic contacts and concluded that Keller was a plant. Since Keller was operating mainly out of Germany and had no plans to go to England, the issue of arrest, internment and trial did not arise. Burns, however, knew how to turn the attempted infiltration into an opportunity and suggested to Keller that he should become a double agent providing information on officers in the German army who might be opposed to Hitler.
Whether Keller adopted a new role as an Allied spy is unclear although, if he did, it proved short-lived. The little that is known of him suggests he suffered a crisis of conscience in Madrid and shortly returned to the simple monastic life.
The Keller incident provides a clear example of Burns being drawn unwittingly into the darker reaches of espionage. Burns had never been trained as a spy. Like others in the war, he had become one by default, initially filling the gaps left by the professionals, and then learnt the trade as he went along as his ambassador loaded an increasing burden of reporting, liaison and analysis on his shoulders. During the early period of his involvement with British interests in Spain, Burns was on a steep learning curve, and mistakes were inevitably made. Among his more eccentric recruits was the poet Roy Campbell with whom he had maintained close links during the civil war. Despite their shared admiration for Franco, it was Burns’s influence on Campbell as a fellow Catholic that in the end deterred the poet from embracing fully the cause of British fascism. Weeks after the outbreak of civil war, Campbell went to London and met Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. They were introduced to each other by the poet and painter Wyndham Lewis in the belief that ‘these two men would be on the same wavelength’. They were not and Campbell refused to join the BUF.
Campbell, however, only belatedly came to view Nazism as alien to his concept of Christianity, lacking its spiritual dimension and humanity. With the end of the civil war, Campbell travelled to Madrid to celebrate Franco’s victory parade on 19 May 1939, in which Spanish troops were joined by Germans and Italians. Days earlier he had written a letter to his mother in which he expressed sympathy for Hitler and a cynical disregard for the plight of the Jews. Campbell wrote: ‘What Catholics realise is that Hitler is a civilised and human adversary, compared to the only alternative, and they suffer cheerfully as they can … What we realise is that the world is going to become either Bolshevik or Fascist, and we know that with one exception the fascist states are eminently Christian, and allow Christians to live whereas bolshevism simply kills and degrades everything – it is against morality – and against every form of religion.’
And yet Campbell’s politics underwent a further shift when Hitler signed his non-aggression pact with Stalin, and later when German troops marched into Poland in open defiance of the pact between the Polish and British governments.
On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Campbell took a train from Toledo to Madrid to try to enlist at the British Consulate, as a soldier in the British Army, the decision prompted, according to his daughter Anna, by fear that he might be thought of as being ‘on Hitler’s side’.
His offer to join up was turned down ostensibly on the grounds of age: Campbell was thirty-eight. The consul chose to ignore Campbell’s fascist sympathies, instead describing as ‘Quixotic’ the fact that a South African living in Spain would want to volunteer for the Allied cause. Initially Campbell was relieved at being able to carry on his life in ‘glorious Spain’ as an expatriate, but as the phoney war gave way to serious hostilities, his conscience stirred and he became frustrated that there was nothing he could do to help the war effort.
He returned to Madrid, this time confident of being enlisted in some shape or form, for news had reached him that among the more influential individuals in the British embassy staff was his friend Burns – publisher turned diplomat with a special mission, whose devotion to the Catholic faith remained unflinching.
Campbell visited the British embassy and was enlisted by Burns as one of his agents. Burns told Campbell to use Toledo as a base for travelling around Spain, reporting regularly on friends and acquaintances and identifying the extent to which their sympathies lay either with the Allies or the Axis powers. Campbell was also asked to make ready to join a clandestine resistance force as and when the Germans decided to occupy Spanish territory. It remains unclear whether the recruitment had the official backing of MI6 or SOE, although by now Burns was trusted as a conduit by colleagues working for both agencies, and Campbell was personally satisfied that he was now working on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It seems likely that Burns was acting with the approval of his ambassador, with secret funds he had secured from the MoI.
According to his daughter, Anna, after the war was over Campbell kept his role secret from his family and it was only after his death that they discovered he had worked for British intelligence at all. In her unpublished memoir of her father, Poetic Justice, Anna suggests that his role in covert operations had a longer lifespan than Burns recalled: ‘Roy rushed off to Madrid to join up at the British Embassy, but since he was over age it was suggested that he should join an intelligence unit in Spain instead. He was terribly disappointed that he could not immediately become a soldier, a life-long ambition that kept getting thwarted. I never knew what he was doing in Intelligence, but he did seem more contented than before. He always refused to talk about his work, except to say he was helping to catch some bandits in the Sierra Nevada.’
Quite what ‘banditry’ Campbell was referring to is unclear. While it suggests he may have seen his role as helping Franco identify the straggling elements of the communist-backed resistance movement, it may also have been a deliberate attempt to divert attention from his somewhat unheroic and brief experience working as one of Burns’s informants.
What is true is that Campbell liked to drink, which he often did to excess. His autobiography contains an elegy to the delights of drinking large quantities of wine from an earthenware botijo, to which he attributed miraculous powers of transformation. ‘This way of drinking brings out the flavour and perfume, both of wine and water, and once one has mastered the art without choking, drinking wine or water out of a glass seems flat and insipid compared to it. The longer, thinner, and more forcible the jet, the more it aerates the bouquet of the wine or the water.’
While in Toledo, when not drinking out of a botijo, Campbell would normally make his way in the evening to a café with a large open terrace in the town’s main square, the Plaza de Zocodover. It was there that, on a hot summer’s evening in 1935, Campbell’s propensity for binge drinking, as well as hospitality, had been experienced by the nascent poet Laurie Lee. At the time Lee had barely turned twenty and was busking his way through Spain with a violin. Identified as an Englishman, he found himself invited to the Campbell table and ended up staying for a week, drinking endless botijos of win
e. Lee would later volunteer to fight in the civil war, on the opposite side to Campbell, against Franco. But in the flush of youth, he held Campbell in awe both as a poet and a free spirit. ‘I was young, full of wine, and in love with poetry, and was hearing it now from the poet’s mouth,’ Lee recalled.
Some six years later, Campbell was back in his favourite café (exactly when in 1941 remains unclear), celebrating his appointment as a secret agent. That morning Burns had driven to Toledo in his Wolseley and, during a lengthy lunch at a local taverna with Campbell had confirmed his recruitment. Wine and tapas had flowed as the two friends sealed the engagement. ‘I found him more than eager to have an active part in the war, and that he would be an agent in place seemed a fine idea to both of us,’ Burns recalled.
The two conspirators then devoted the rest of the meal to memories of women and men friends they had once had in common, as well as bullfighters they had come to admire as geniuses, such as Belmonte and Manolete. Burns, like others on wartime service, had developed an ability to drink a great deal while retaining concentration. Campbell had a less self-disciplined attitude towards life generally. After Burns had set off back towards Madrid, Campbell had continued drinking. In the course of the evening, he drew friends and foes to his table, offering to buy them another round. He became paralytically drunk before declaring that the celebration was to mark the start of a new job as a British spy. The next day, when word got back to the embassy, Burns, seemingly under orders from a not-best-pleased ambassador, contacted his friend Campbell and, with regret, informed him that his services were no longer required.
A few weeks later, in early spring 1941, Burns was given permission by his ambassador to visit London on leave, his first break since his posting to Spain. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, he appears to have had some inkling that his pre-Franco leanings and mishandling of certain operations may have stirred his enemies in the intelligence community. Burns saw the trip as a convenient cooling-off period after the Campbell debacle, which he considered a minor incident in the broader context of the work he was doing in Spain. It also offered him the opportunity, on a personal front, to catch up with the news of those he considered his enduring friends.
In March 1941, days before Burns arrived in the UK, the basement dance floor at the Café de Paris, one of his favourite pre-war nightspots, received a direct hit from the Luftwaffe, leaving eighty-four society party-goers dead, among them the bandleader ‘Shake Hips Johnson’ and his entire orchestra. The news shocked Burns, reinforcing his guilt that his posting to Madrid had left him safer than most of the men and women he had mixed with in peacetime, although it was with a sense of relief that he discovered that none of his friends were among the victims.
Among several old girlfriends Burns wanted to look up was the eccentric author Lady Eleanor Smith, whose memoirs, Life’s a Circus, he had edited and published while working at Longman in 1939. They told of how she had been resuscitated by a brandy massage after being born ‘dead’ in 1902 in a small cottage in Birkenhead.
Eleanor was the daughter of the 1st Earl Birkenhead, a tall, olive-skinned lawyer and prominent Conservative politician with a reputation as a brilliant if pugnacious advocate, a hard drinker and a womaniser. As Lord Chancellor he became, with Churchill, a leading figure of the Lloyd George coalition government in the early 1920s. By then he had left an indelible mark on Eleanor, the oldest of his three children. During her childhood he told her macabre fairy tales, took her to boxing matches, advised her to be ‘cheeky before solemn statesmen’, and in her youth encouraged her to bounce up and down on the Lord Chancellor’s woolsack.
Eleanor grew up with a consuming interest in gypsies, circuses and flamenco, passions she owed to reading George Borrows classic account of gypsy life in Spain, The Zincalí, and the gypsy blood she claimed to carry within her from a great-grandmother called Bathsheba. Voluptuous and carefree in her youth, the dark-eyed Eleanor took the hedonistic lifestyle of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s to unparalleled limits. Her escapades on both sides of the Atlantic included an affair with a Chicago gangster called Kid Spider, and turning a pack of Irish wolfhounds on the crowded ballroom of the British embassy in Dublin. In one of her more bizarre exploits, Eleanor spent a night with Zita Jungman, another notorious Bright Young Thing of the 1920s, in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s in London after first moving the wax effigies of the Princes in the Tower from their bed. Zita, together with her sister Teresa, known as ‘Baby’, went on to part-time modelling, hoping to get their portraits in magazines like Tatler and Vogue, and caught the eye of the aspirant photographer Cecil Beaton. Boyfriends caught up in their wild escapades outside the studio recalled them as ideal training for wartime special operations. Zita later described some of her Anglo-Saxon suitors as ‘horrid’ and ‘intensely vulgar’. Eleanor, by contrast, found what she was looking for – half-naked gypsies in the caves of Almería and the red-light district of Barcelona. Los gitanos fed her existentialist fever with rhythmic dance and song that seemed to be drawn from deep within the soul. In Eleanor, four years older than he was, Burns found his own love for Spain taken to an edge of surrealism which he found fascinating, if occasionally disturbing. He also respected her as a writer, although her time as a society reporter and cinema critic on a London newspaper proved short-lived. ‘She was an eternal high-spirited tomboy delighting in the company of gypsies and circus folk,’ Burns recalled. ‘We saw a lot of each other, without the intrusive pangs of sex, to our mutual relief.’
The war came and he saw nothing and heard nothing of Eleanor for over a year. Then, on leave from Spain, he heard from a mutual friend that she was in London, looked her up and took her to dine at the Mirabelle. The couple were deep in conversation over wine and oysters when there was a hush then a stir and a collective turning of heads towards a group of heavy-coated men at the entrance. It was Churchill, in the company of Brendan Bracken, the newspaper magnate turned Minister of Information, and other close aides. With a cigar in one hand, Churchill shuffled over to the couple’s table, smiling broadly. Eleanor’s late father, Lord Birkenhead, a witty, reckless man, ‘naughty but never nasty’, just as his daughter liked to portray herself, had been Churchill’s closest friend until his death, aged fifty-eight, in 1930.
By attending one of Mayfair’s better-known restaurants Churchill was acting with characteristic bravado and indulgence, for these were the very darkest days of the war, a time of bombs and rationing, when Britain was still having to face the enemy ‘alone’, to use a word from one of his more famous broadcasts. The United States had yet to make up its mind even if some of its citizens had defied their government’s official neutrality by volunteering as pilots in the Battle of Britain. Acknowledging Burns’s presence with a smile, Churchill turned to Eleanor and said: ‘Well, at least we have the gypsies on our side.’ The pair, left to themselves, spent the rest of the evening pondering whether he had been referring to the naked boys in Andalusia or the men in uniform in Madrid, or possibly both. After that evening Burns kept in touch with Eleanor but never saw her again. She died before the war was over, of a sudden mysterious illness, but the memory of that evening stuck with him all his life. It seemed to him typical of her starlit life that she had managed to rekindle his spirit just when it seemed at its lowest point.
If, as the novelist Mary Wesley remarked of her own experience of that time, ‘war was erotic’, it was because, with death threatening every street and two million people taking up arms, life needed to be reaffirmed. At the height of the Blitz small private parties, like so many sexual encounters, relieved the tension. While in London, Burns wasted little time in seeking one such party out. It was filled with debutantes, and suitably camouflaged spies. Noël Coward was there, his ostensibly glamorous lifestyle barely covering his morale-boosting work as an agent of His Majesty’s Secret Service. As Burns and the other guests huddled round the piano, Coward was persuaded by his hostess to sing ‘London Pride’, the song of the moment
, of which the MoI was making much use to lift morale. It spoke of London’s endurance and defiance, graceful in its pervading sense of freedom and engaging familiarity. This was a city, defined in terms that were familiar to a social class that had read George Bernard Shaw.
Coward’s song romanticised the flower girl Liza and the vegetable marrows, and the fruit piled high in Covent Garden, while similarly exalting the delights of Mayfair’s posher basement nightspots, before the bombs fell.
The song moved Burns more than any other, for it reminded him of times past, of love lost, London personified by the woman he had believed to be the love of his life, the Queen’s cousin, Ann Bowes-Lyon. ‘Coward’s song brought back a violent nostalgia for my beloved and now suffering city’ he recalled later. The shock of hearing of Ann’s engagement to another man had barely dissipated during the previous months, although it reflected wounded pride rather than a real prospect of early reconciliation. ‘I do feel for you about what you say about not being able to get this Ann thing happy in your mind – these things take years and years to burn out,’ David Jones had written to Burns.
‘I can’t say anything consoling,’ wrote Jones, ‘only just that this ’ere vale of tears, or, as you say, fears, is a sod anyway – not a very original conclusion I admit!’
During his posting in Madrid, the memory of Ann would be periodically rekindled by other mutual friends who came across her now and again. Although such contacts became fewer and further apart as the war proceeded, the fact that they took place at all suggested that she herself struggled to put the past behind her. As late as October 1943, she wrote to Michael Richey, knowing full well that he would communicate the fact with his friend Burns. The letter was so emotionally strained and confused that he had concluded that her proposed marriage was no longer on or at least delayed indefinitely. Frank D’Abreu, the man to whom she had become engaged, had been posted to the Middle East as an army doctor, and she was at Glamis Castle recovering from her latest bout of depression after poisoning a finger.