Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Among Burns’s young Spanish girlfriends few attracted as much attention as Conchita Olivares. The vivacious aristocratic socialite and fluent English speaker regularly attended parties at the British embassy, where she was often to be seen in intimate conversation with Burns.

  At least, that is what one of M15’s agents, José Brugada, the assistant press attaché at the Spanish embassy in London, code-named Peacock, claimed on the basis of a visit to Madrid in July 1943. ‘Source says that Burns is madly in love with Conchita Olivares,’ the agent’s handler, Broomham-White, subsequently reported to Philby and Harris.

  The agent had drawn attention to the well-known fact that Olivares was the daughter of the ‘anti-British’ Spanish consul general in London and the sister-in-law of the Marqués of Murrieta, suspected by elements within MI5 and MI6 of being actively pro-Axis.

  Broomham-White went on to report: ‘The source says girl, who is constantly in touch with the Germans and Italians, trails Burns round in her wake to all the Madrid parties, and that he is the laughing stock of the town. Source’s own view is that Burns, who he likes personally, is bringing a lot of discredit to the British name, and should be recalled at once.’

  For all her family connections, there was no collaborative evidence or information to substantiate the idea that Burns was betraying state secrets to Olivares. On the contrary, Burns made no attempt to hide his short-lived affair with Olivares from his ambassador, and was happy to pass on to his most trusting colleagues in the embassy the small bits of intelligence he gleaned from her on pro-Axis Spaniards and the Germans.

  The personal file MI5 kept on Burns contains two entries on the alleged ‘German agent’ Olivares, after which the subject is dropped, presumably because of a lack of any further incriminating facts on what, anyway, proved a relatively short-lived mutual passion.

  Burns’s enemies in British intelligence nevertheless believed they had detected a human weakness in their target, and around this time tasked one of their female agents working in the British embassy to seduce Burns and build a case against him as a potential traitor.

  What was fed back by the small-time Mata Hari, identified only as M 12, but probably his personal assistant Olive Stock, suggested that a traitor he was not.

  While M 12 confirmed that Burns had ‘right wing political sympathies’, he was not, in her view, ‘an extreme fascist’. Her report went on: ‘Burns interprets his duties as being chiefly to keep as far as possible in the good books of the Spanish authorities … the reason, or one of the reasons for this is … the fact that Burns is “half-Spanish” and finds himself perhaps more in sympathy with the Spaniards than others of his purely English colleagues.’

  M 12 thought it ‘quite possible’ that Burns was too easily influenced by the over-enthusiasm of some of his Spanish friends and thus might interpret ‘what may be a warm interest in his work and information as evidence of genuine friendship’. Nevertheless she had concluded that ‘Burns is fairly shrewd and better informed about Spain – or at least Franco’s Spain – than many of his other compatriots’.

  If MI5 had hoped to find evidence that agent M 12 had successfully drawn Burns into a honey trap, they were surely disappointed. As her handler reported: ‘M 12’s opinions … were arrived at quite coldly and do not seem to be biased by any friendship which may exist between her and Burns … M 12 cannot remember any indiscretions – or evidence of a tendency towards indiscretions – made by Burns …’

  M 12’s own views, based on a considered assessment of the target, were largely sympathetic towards Burns, identifying him as a man prepared to think outside the box of government bureaucracy and be guided by his instincts and specialist knowledge.

  ‘M 12 thinks that Burns may quite easily have given the impression of being a difficult man from the FO [Foreign Office] point of view in so far as he may think that our propaganda in Spain is not suited entirely to the needs of Spain at the moment and may give it a twist to suit what he thinks to be the best line of attack,’ her report concluded: ‘Further that he may think that our Foreign Office is not as well informed as to the Spanish situation as he is himself’.

  It was clearly not what those who had commissioned the report wanted to hear. It confirmed Burns as a dynamic entity within the British embassy, and, in effect, at the sharp end of Anglo-Spanish relations.

  By 1942, Burns’s ‘press office’ had mushroomed into the British embassy’s biggest section with its own separate building and more than 120 British and local permanent and part-time employees. Burns’s team of assistant press attachés had been boosted to include John Walters and John Stordy, fellow Catholics trained in intelligence and propaganda with specialist knowledge in Spanish affairs.

  Walters came from a prestigious newspaper family that owned a majority shareholding in The Times. Before being recruited by Burns, with his ambassador’s approval, Walters had been working in the intelligence corps in Gibraltar. Stordy had previously worked in the Spanish department of the MoI in London and was relocated to Madrid with the backing of MI5’s Harris, MI6’s Philby and his former boss Billy McCann on the assumption that he would act as a further informant on Burns.

  ‘Although Stordy is a strong Roman Catholic and has a leaning towards the Right, he is very moderate in his views on Spanish Affairs. McCann describes him as unbiased loyal and a fine character and adds that he is not a protégé of Burns,’ Harris reassured Philby on Stordy’s appointment in January 1942.

  They had overlooked the fact that Stordy had as an adolescent been at the Jesuit Stonyhurst College with Burns, and that the old schoolboy ties had endured. As the war developed, Stordy, along with Walters, came to consider Burns a good colleague and confidante. Stordy counted on Burns’s help to extradite him from a short-lived marriage, with Burns providing a witness statement, as a fellow Catholic, that suggested the union should be declared null and void in the eyes of the Church. Walters, a heavy drinker, came to increasingly rely on Burns to protect him from those within the embassy that thought his alcoholism was a liability.

  The location of the embassy’s press section was equidistant between the passport/visa building used as cover by a section of the intelligence services, and the main chancery building which housed the ambassador, several attachés and the special annexe for POWs and refugees.

  Viewed from the street, the press section’s three-storey stone building in Orfila Street had little to distinguish it from the other turn-of-the-century Parisian-style buildings of the neighbourhood. Access to the ground floor was through an unassuming garage door behind which was a store room filled with paper and magazines and next to it a library and reading room. The printing works were in a windowless annexe which gave on to an inner courtyard. A staircase wound up to the first floor where there was a reception area and behind it two large interconnected living rooms leading to a corridor of small offices and a back room filled with radio transmitters, communications equipment and a film projector.

  The two main rooms were transformed into a cinema at least once a week, with seating for more than three hundred, a gathering place for the firmly pro-Allied local community, and those sitting on the fence waiting to see which side in the hostilities would prevail – although, as the war progressed, the invitation list drew increasingly on the firmly converted.

  An invitation list surviving from early 1944 shows the degree of support on which the British counted for their well-oiled propaganda machinery. In addition to senior US and other Allied diplomats, guests ranged from leading representatives of the Spanish nobility, such as the Marqueses de Quintanar and Miraflores, to sources the British had developed within the Franco regime such as Pedro Gamero and the dictator’s interpreter, Barón de las Torres. Others included the film maker Edgar Neville, the painter Zuloaga and the leading newspaper columnist Manuel Aznar, grandfather of a future prime minister of Spain, José María Aznar.

  In a separate room Burns’s assistant Bernard Malley ran an additional enterprise assiste
d by qualified medical staff as part of the UK’s hearts and minds campaign: an unofficial emergency health service free at the point of delivery. For, stored in a refrigerated back room of His Majesty’s Government’s press section, was a stock of imported medicines which were financed by another secret British government slush fund and smuggled in through the diplomatic bag.

  Other core staff employed under Burns’s management included shorthand typists, cipher clerks, radio transmitters and a resident priest who liaised with senior figures of the Catholic Church.

  The third floor, officially part of the British mission, acted as cover for the operations of local representatives of the French Resistance, who worked closely with the escape routes the embassy organised. The majority of non-administrative staff in the building was made up of Spaniards working eight-hour shifts on the printing machines that day and night churned out pro-Allied information, much of it thinly veiled propaganda drawn from the BBC, the Ministry of Information and the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Burns’s network of messengers, couriers and general dogsbodies included a group of some thirty Spanish boys aged between eleven and fifteen. The boys were summoned by a system of internal bells linked to the main embassy and paid five pesetas a day. Underage and underpaid, they nevertheless felt themselves lucky to have survived the civil war, privileged to be serving the Allied cause not least because it provided them with regular meals.

  José Luis García was among those employed as a messenger by Burns at the time. An only child, he was eight years old when, on 31 July 1939, days after Franco’s victory, his father and uncle – both Republican sympathisers – were taken out of a detention centre and executed by firing squad for alleged subversion. Three years later, he was told by his widowed mother that she could no longer afford to support him and that he would have to find work and not go on begging in the street. Franco had introduced a new law on anti-social behaviour, whereby child beggars were forcefully taken from the streets and placed in boarding schools run by nuns and female volunteers of the Falange movement.

  Widows of Republican prisoners shunned such institutions, believing that their only purpose was to brainwash a new generation of destitute working-class Spaniards into allegiance to the fascist regime. José Luis was encouraged by his mother to seek work she believed was more in keeping with his late father’s ideals.

  The boy worked principally for the British embassy’s press department, helping distribute the bulletin or running personal errands for Burns, including walking his dog, which provided additional cover whenever he thought he was being followed by the police.

  ‘Each in our own way, we were all playing spy games … I may not have been conscious of it at the time but I know that the people I worked with would not have been true to their mission if they hadn’t also been involved in intelligence. They had the contacts and a lot of information …’ recalled José Luis many years later.

  ‘What I did feel was that the Germans were all over the place and that there were members of the Spanish police that acted as if they were under the direct orders of the Gestapo … They were constantly harassing anyone employed by the embassy … I remember they arrested and interrogated for two days Paquita Fernández, the massagist of the ambassador’s wife … They also beat up one of my mates while he was delivering a package.’

  Burns was among the embassy staff that used Republicans who, young and old, had survived the civil war as a source of intelligence in working-class districts of Madrid and other towns. It was a high-risk strategy for the Spaniards involved, for there was little support from the embassy if they fell into police hands. Among the Republicans who returned from exile in France after the Spanish Civil War, and with whom Burns is thought to have had some secret contacts, was the socialist painter and writer Francisco Mateos. According to a report filed by Burns, a Spaniard answering to that name and profession was arrested and tortured by Spanish police after being observed on several occasions meeting the British press attaché. Weeks later, Mateos wrote to Burns, telling him he had been freed after denying that he had supplied the British embassy with information on Republicans who had been shot but signing a statement that he had been commissioned to write some anti-fascist propaganda. He said he was anxious to resume his work as an agent.

  In his report, Burns raised the suspicion that Mateos had been released with the purpose of feeding him with false information. The MI5 file in which the report is included contains no further information. Francisco Mateos survived the Second World War and died in 1976. The details of what further covert contacts he may have had with the British remain unclear.

  While dozens of Spaniards like Mateos were used as agents by both the British and the Americans during the Second World War, the encouragement of political opposition to the Franco regime was restricted under the terms of an official policy of non-intervention in internal Spanish politics.

  Only with one sector of Spanish politics did the British embassy pursue serious covert discussions about a possible alternative regime to Franco’s. Throughout the war Burns was among the few members of the embassy staff authorised by the ambassador to maintain contacts with exiled non-communist political figures in Lisbon such as José María Gil Robles and Pedro Sainz Rodríguez who favoured the restoration of a constitutional monarchy.

  Burns used his visits to Lisbon to gain intelligence on the political manoeuvrings of Spanish exiles. He discussed possible Allied support for a negotiated transition to constitutional rule in Spain but remained unconvinced that the opposition to Franco was sufficiently united to offer a stable political alternative.

  As Burns saw it, part of the problem lay in the political ambiguity of the so-called monarchists who had strongly backed Franco in the civil war only then to profess themselves democratic constitutionalists. British intelligence reports from Rome drew attention to the close friendship the exiled King Alfonso XIII had developed with Mussolini. The democratic credentials of the monarchists had been further undermined as a result of a lunch a close aide to Prince Juan had had in Madrid with Hans Lazar. At the meeting, the German press attaché had been reassured that the monarchist camp supported the Axis.

  ‘A mild form of wishful thinking conspiracy was kindled occasionally by lengthy luncheons but I learnt to expect nothing by way of action,’ Burns wrote later. ‘The court of Juan Alonso, pretender to the [Spanish] throne in remote Estoril, had an Oriental immobility about it.’

  It was a year since Hillgarth had been personally entrusted by Churchill to use a British intelligence slush fund of $10 million to dissuade a group of senior Spanish army officers – referred to by the British as the ‘Knights of St George’ (because of the image of St George on the face of the British gold sovereign) – from siding with the Axis powers and entering the war on Hitler’s side.

  US intelligence documents declassified in recent years have suggested that the more influential ‘Knights’ included General Antonío Aranda, the Captain-General of the Valencia region, General Luis Orgaz, commander-in-chief of Spanish Morocco, and General Alfredo Kindelán, commander of the Balearic Islands, and that monies intended to suborn them and other generals were deposited in a New York bank account. The plot nearly fell apart in 1941 when the US Treasury suspected that Juan March – the Spanish entrepreneur who had helped finance Franco’s uprising in the Spanish Civil War and acted with some of his generals as a conduit for the British – was using the money to support Hitler, although this suspicion subsequently dissipated.

  In May 1941, General Juan Vigón, Franco’s chief of staff during the civil war, warned the Spanish head of state that he would face a mass resignation by his military ministers if he did not curtail the power of his brother-in-law Serrano Súñer. Franco reacted by carrying out a cabinet reshuffle which left Serrano Súñer in post but ostensibly strengthened the hand of the generals against the pro-Axis Falange party. The outcome of the crisis was viewed by one of Churchill’s most senior ministers as evidence that Hillgarth’s plan had borne
fruit. ‘In Spain, the Knights of St George have charged: it is thanks to them that certain recent changes have been brought about,’ enthused Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare. His enthusiasm, based on supposition rather than firm evidence of a link between the cabinet crisis and covert bribes, proved premature.

  In July 1940 Dalton had taken charge of the fledgling SOE, an organisation devoted to sabotage, subversion and black propaganda. In what became knows as the SOE’s founding mission statement, or ‘high command’, Dalton had declared: ‘We have got to organise movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Feín movement in Ireland, to the Chinese guerrillas now operating in Japan, to the Spanish irregulars who played a notable part in Wellington’s campaign.’

  SOE officers based in Madrid prepared excitedly for the worst-case scenario – a German occupation of the Iberian Peninsula – and proposed to Burns that his department provide extra cover for some additional operatives. The Foreign Office separately sent the embassy secret instructions specifically aimed at protecting the department Burns was in charge of.

  Under the heading ‘arrangements for Press Section Staff in the event of German Invasion of Portugal and Spain’, it recommended that the Barcelona and Lisbon staff be reassigned to the Portuguese colonies, initially leaving Burns behind in charge of a ‘compact unit’ together with Bernard Malley for the purpose of ‘advice, information, and liaison’ prior to a full-scale occupation. ‘If Spain enters war against us and relations severed suggest Malley invaluable in London. Burns should go to London or South America’, the telegram recommended.

  Under the contingency plans drawn up by SOE, Burns agreed to help recruit additional agents, and – rather than agree to a redeployment outside Spain as suggested by the Foreign Office – volunteered to go underground in Spain. ‘The “merchants bankers” [SOE] suggested that I lie low in a monastery for a spell. I do not think they had any contact with any religious community, or with much else for that matter,’ Burns wrote in his memoirs.