Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  The comment reflected the growing scepticism with which Burns came to regard the usefulness of such proposed ‘gung-ho’ special operations in Spain. That scepticism had its roots in the summer of 1940, when Burns was being transferred from the Ministry of Information in London to the British embassy in Madrid. At the time, the as yet undiscovered Soviet agent Guy Burgess was working in Section D (for Destruction), a branch of the War Office, as a propaganda expert.

  In July 1940, Burgess had already recruited to his section his friend Kim Philby. That Burgess, with Philby’s blessing, went on to draft a scheme for a training centre called ‘Guy Fawkes College’ was not without irony. The two communists had named their scheme after a fanatical Catholic whose conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament – against the wishes of many of his Catholic peers – had been foiled by Sir Francis Walsingham, the British state’s first spymaster.

  Later that summer Section D was disbanded and some of its operations transferred to Dalton’s SOE, although the influence of Burgess and Philby within the political and intelligence establishment would continue for a good while yet. One of Dalton’s first acts was to appoint Colonel Colin Gubbins as Director of Training and Operations.

  Burns met Gubbins while on a visit to London. In a rare reference to his links with the world of espionage and special operations, Burns writes: ‘There had been very short visits to London … the third was spent in more colourful company: with various Intelligence officers and the SOE where Colonel Gubbins reigned. He took me to dinner with Guy Burgess whom I disliked on sight. “Set Europe ablaze!” had been Churchill’s call to SOE. I scented contingency plans to apply this injunction to Spain if necessary and argued against it forcibly, knowing more than they did of the desert that it would create.’

  Burns feared that unleashing the SOE on the Spanish would reignite the revolutionary agitation he had opposed during the civil war and which he regarded as a source of division and brutality.

  Plans for a twin-tracked policy of propaganda and subversion within SOE continued to be put forward for Spain and Portugal. A strategic directive from the Chiefs of Staffs (COS) in November 1940 included preparing for guerrilla warfare and the destruction of communications on the Iberian Peninsula. A case was also made by SOE’s headquarters in Baker Street for an expansion of ‘irregular political activities’, encouraging the SOE’s stations in neutral Europe to cultivate contacts across the political spectrum, from government officials to clandestine members of the opposition who might offer an alternative government system.

  Under some pressure from London, Hoare allowed SOE to open a base in Spain in February 1941, but on the condition that its operations were vetted by the naval attaché Hillgarth, who in turn liaised closely on the issue with other trusted members of the embassy staff, with a direct line to the ambassador, notably Burns. While SOE trained bands of Republican volunteers in Scotland, and established some discreet contacts in Spain, it was kept on a tight rein, and had little involvement with Hillgarth’s bribery of Franco’s generals, which was designed to keep out Germans rather than to provoke an internal anti-Franco coup.

  When Burns, Hillgarth and Hoare were recalled to London for consultation in the summer of 1941, all three argued strongly in their meetings across Whitehall and with MPs against any British military intervention in Spain, because they believed Britain’s war effort was better served by a ‘quiet Peninsula’.

  While Burns was in London he also touched touch base with his old department at the MoI on an issue that troubled him as much as it did many people, including Churchill – the continuing refusal of the American government to declare war.

  Burns believed that US support both in terms of economic aid to the country and military involvement against the German army elsewhere in Europe and Africa would help bring Spanish public opinion firmly behind the Allied cause, convincing them that a German victory was no longer possible.

  In September 1941, at Burns’s request and with the backing of the MoI, Father D’Arcy flew to the United States. He was to use a series of lectures, interviews with local media and discreet meetings to generate support for US intervention among the Catholic community in which the majority of Italian and Irish immigrants remained largely against the war. D’Arcy’s presence in the US coincided with the growing involvement in anti-Nazi propaganda of Joseph Hurley, an influential American bishop who had previously worked in secret diplomacy at the Vatican. During the war, Hurley worked independently of the Vatican bureaucracy and other American bishops, developing secret ties with the Roosevelt administration, the US office of War Information, and what his biographer described as ‘the lower echelons of British intelligence’ in a pro-Allied propaganda campaign.

  The following spring, weeks after Roosevelt had declared war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, ill health forced Alexander Weddell, the American ambassador in Madrid, to resign. The move was greeted with relief by Burns, who had to come believe that no good was to be gained by the ambassador’s conflicting relationship with the Spanish authorities, and that a more tactful approach to dealing with the idiosyncrasies of local politics was needed to ensure neutrality.

  Weddell’s succession by Carlton Hayes seemed heaven-sent to Burns, who had managed in a remarkably short time to manoeuvre himself into a key position of influence with some of his American colleagues. A professor of modern European history at Columbia University, New York, Hayes had been pulled out of academic life and thrown into his new job with a clear objective in mind. Both the US State Department and the White House hoped that Hayes’s knowledge of Spanish history, Catholicism and sympathy for the Franco cause would help him navigate better the tortuous politics of wartime Spain, and guarantee its neutrality as the Allies prepared a new offensive against Hitler.

  On 1 June 1942 Hayes wrote to fellow Catholic General William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, Roosevelt’s special envoy on Spain and founding head of the OSS, sharing his conviction that, although the Spanish government was still outwardly pro-Axis, the Spanish masses felt first and foremost Spanish and were more anti-German than anti-American. The case Hayes put for a steadily intensifying and expanding barrage of propaganda as a key weapon to be used against Nazi influence in Spain was influenced by the example set by the British embassy and the arguments put forward by one of its members of staff in particular: ‘The British have a large organisation which is doing splendid work, but its director, Mr T. F. Burns, frankly admits that Spaniards will pay more attention to Americans than to the British and that the British work does not touch certain basic matters which American propaganda can and should deal with, such as American war preparedness and production, American scientific developments, American films, attitude of American Catholic prelates and intellectuals towards Nazism, the relations of the United States to Latin America (and vice versa) and the grim determination of America to win the war and to help impose a just peace …’

  In the following weeks, Hayes was granted the financial resources to develop the US presence in Madrid in a way that mirrored the British, increasing its diplomatic staff, building up a new propaganda unit and developing its intelligence-gathering capability.

  British intelligence for its part came up with an ingenious plan aimed principally at breeding distrust between Franco and the Germans while disrupting the operations of the Abwehr. Kim Philby, by then head of the Iberian section of MI6’s Section V, delivered to the British embassy in Madrid a dossier alleging that the Germans were developing a secret submarine-tracking system across the Strait of Gibraltar.

  The information on so-called Operation Bodden, according to Philby, was based on the breaking by the British of German intelligence ciphers covering communications between Berlin and Abwehr stations in the Gibraltar area. It was in no small measure due to Philby’s access and use of these decrypts that the Soviet spy managed to win the trust of the head of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies.

  In his memoirs Philby claims that by the middle of 1942 he had consid
ered and then discarded the possibility of engaging SOE agents in sabotage operations against the Germans on Spanish soil. Somewhat disingenuously, he suggests that the decision was his only, when in fact it was taken under pressure from others in Whitehall who did not share his ideological belief in fuelling revolutionary turmoil in Franco’s ‘fascist state’. He wrote: ‘I doubted whether anyone on our side would welcome a James-Bond-like free-for-all in Spain, where the authorities would have been against us. On reflection, it seemed that the diplomatic approach would be the best.’

  Information about Bodden was shared within the British embassy in Madrid and a decision taken to bring it to the attention of the Spanish authorities in the form of a formal diplomatic protest. However, the position of those like Burns who argued against anything that might risk a subversive ‘free-for-all’ by British special forces had been strengthened by two badly bungled SOE operations which provoked embarrassing diplomatic fallout.

  The first involved Jack Beevor, SOE’s main representative in Portugal, where President Salazar was regarded by the British as a more reliably pro-Allied head of state than Franco. At the outset of war, Beevor was working as a junior partner at the London law firm Slaughter & May when he and several other members of staff were recruited by SOE and other intelligence departments. (Another of the firm’s partners, Harry Sporborg, served as assistant to the SOE chief Gubbins, while a third, George Vickers, became Director General of the Foreign Office’s Economic Intelligence Division.)

  Beevor was posted to Portugal under cover of assistant military attaché with the brief of coordinating clandestine resistance to the Germans, and, if needs be, to the Salazar government, using sabotage and helping the general intelligence-gathering effort in neighbouring Spain. By the end of 1941 Beevor believed he had succeeded, against the odds, in putting together a network of agents, and in countering German influence by working closely with Captain Hillgarth, the intelligence supremo in Madrid, and his Spanish business ally Juan March. Beevor followed Hillgarth’s lead in deploying the ‘cavalry of St George’ – in other words, bribing certain officials in the Salazar regime to support the Allies and neutralise German influence.

  One of Beevor’s more notable successes was in organising the kidnap of a senior Abwehr officer, using a female MI6 agent to draw him into a honey trap. The agent was told by Beevor to arrange an assignation on a secluded beach outside Lisbon. When he arrived for the meeting, the German was snatched by an SOE team, and flown back to England before his embassy had time to alert the authorities that he had gone missing. In early 1942, however, SOE’s operations in Portugal were severely disrupted when the Portuguese secret police infiltrated and exposed Beevor’s underground networks which included members of the local Communist Party.

  Within days, a British diplomatic bag sent from Gibraltar exploded in the port of Tangier, killing a number of Moroccans and Spaniards as well as a British consular employee. The news provoked instant recriminations between the various British intelligence and military departments that operated in wartime Gibraltar, competing for control under the nominal leadership of the colonial governor.

  A subsequent internal British government enquiry revealed that limpet mines which SOE had planned to use in an operation against the Germans had detonated prematurely after being assembled and packed on the Rock and transported by ferry across the Strait. Fearing that Franco would react by expelling British embassy and consular staff, and that other intelligence activities might be compromised, MI6 and MI5, as well as the Foreign Office, moved quickly to distance themselves from any involvement in the incident, and blamed it on SOE’s professional incompetence, as well as political naivety. The row forced SOE’s chief in Gibraltar, Peter Quennell, to resign and reinforced Ambassador’s Hoare’s demands to have all SOE military operations in Spain and Portugal effectively closed down.

  Philby’s subsequent caution about the use of special operations in Spain was part of a general reining in of SOE’s operations across neutral countries in the aftermath of the Lisbon and Tangier incidents. Thereafter, Allied intelligence in Spain and Portugal was forced to rely on the decryption of the German Enigma cipher by the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, with propaganda, deception and diplomacy – overt as well as secret – as the favoured non-military tools in combating the enemy.

  For what remained of the war, and during its aftermath, Philby barely managed to hide his dislike for Hoare, a man whose innate conservatism was at odds ideologically with the spy’s communism and who had a tendency to rely on the counsel of Catholics sympathetic to the Franco cause in the Spanish Civil War. ‘It is difficult to write nice things about Sir Samuel,’ he wrote, but he conceded that, over Operation Bodden, ‘he rose to the occasion magnificently’ by confronting Franco directly and in effect accusing him of complicity with German covert operations. Hoare, once briefed by MI6, dressed his senior members of staff in full uniform, and took them as a team to see Franco and issue a strongly worded complaint.

  At the end of September 1942 Hoare and his US counterpart, Hayes, were secretly notified that the Allies planned an invasion of French North Africa. Burns was among a small group of Allied staff in Madrid with whom the news was subsequently shared on a ‘need to know basis’. Those in charge of propaganda work came together in a carefully coordinated plan to ensure that Franco and others in the regime did not react to the Allied operation by allowing the Germans to mount a counter-offensive south of the Pyrenees.

  By now Burns had a new American colleague and fellow Catholic with whom he could collaborate on diplomatic and covert activities. Emmet Hughes had been sent as a replacement for Tom Crain, who had suffered a nervous breakdown due to overwork and had returned to the US. Under the cover of press attaché, Hughes worked for the OSS and the Office of War Information, which was broadly modelled on Britain’s Ministry of Information.

  At the diplomatic level Burns and Hughes made a formidable team, combining to reassure their sources in the highest echelons of the Franco regime – both military and civilian – that Spanish sovereignty was not in jeopardy. They also offered an additional carrot in the form of increasing economic assistance.

  As for the ‘prescription for propaganda’, as Hughes described it, this involved the Allies wielding a big stick. The main priority was to emphasise to the Spanish people and their rulers the swift Allied conversion of war potential into war might, thanks to increasing US involvement alongside the British, thus countering any notion that a German victory was either possible or preferable.

  Two months earlier, continuing tension within the Franco regime between the Falange party and the military had led to the replacement of Serrano Súñer as foreign minister by General Count Francisco Gómez Jordana. Jordana had served as Franco’s foreign minister between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the Second World War before being sacked because he was deemed to be insufficiently sympathetic towards the Axis cause.

  Jordana’s return to government generated positive signals from the British and American embassies. In his memoirs, Burns recalled his own sense of expectation thus: ‘The Spain that I had come into was being transformed, power was passing to the new technocrats, and Falangism was on the way out, its fiery foreign minister, Serrano Súñer, had been replaced by the cautious and courteous General Jordana. General Franco remained aloof, enigmatic, in total control.’

  Such optimism proved premature. With his well-honed tactic of playing one opposing force against the other so as to ensure his own survival, Franco also sacked the pro-Allied army chief General Iglesias Varela, and replaced him with the pro-German General Carlos Asensio Cabanillas. The latest government reshuffle meant that neither Britain nor the US could be sure that Franco would not mobilise the 15,000-strong garrison in Spanish Morocco to reinforce French Resistance or acquiesce in a German attack on Gibraltar.

  Plans for an Allied occupation of the Spanish Canary Islands were revived in London and Washington. From Madrid, Ambassado
r Hoare, with the support of Hayes, strongly argued against such a move. He warned that an attack on the islands would risk embroiling the Allies in a war with Spain and wipe out any chance of keeping the Spanish as a buffer between the Germans in France and the Allied Anglo-American expeditionary force in North Africa. The Combined Chiefs of Staff were persuaded to put the plan on ice.

  Instead, on Saturday 7 November 1942, both embassies received a coded cable confirming that the first great offensive of the united Allied forces, on the success of which depended the fate of the entire war, was going ahead: Thunderbird november eight two am Spanish time.

  Detailed instructions on how ambassadors should proceed, with only a small group of senior trusted officials in the know, were encrypted with a secret British code, deemed safer than any of the American ones. The US ambassador Hayes approached Jordana first with a personal message from President Roosevelt. Hoare, meanwhile, consulted with his deputy head of mission Yencken and Burns and sent a similar message of reassurance from Churchill.

  In the preceding hours, Hoare, on the advice of his officials, had spent much of that Saturday adopting ‘an attitude of unconcern’. He stayed away from the embassy, maintained communications silence with London and avoided any meetings with Spanish officials. Instead he engaged in the Spanish aristocracy’s favourite weekend pastime which Franco had adopted since taking power. Hoare drove out that afternoon and joined a partridge shooting party in Millas, a large estate outside Madrid owned by Luis Quintanilla, the son of the prime minister during the time of the monarchy, Count Romanones.

  A few hours later, at two o’clock on Sunday morning, Hayes rang Jordana (Franco himself was on a hunting trip outside Madrid and could not be reached immediately) and reassured him that Spanish sovereignty would not be threatened by the Allied military action that was getting under way. Jordana, whose main concern was to avoid a German occupation of Spain, used his rank to persuade some of the more pro-Axis Spanish generals to remain calm and not mobilise their troops.