by Jimmy Burns
In 1996, a British town planning officer and amateur historian called Roger Morgan claimed that the body used by British intelligence in Operation Mincemeat was that of a homeless alcoholic Welshman named Glyndwr Michael who had died after ingesting rat poison. The discovery, subsequently supported by documentation filed at the National Archive in Kew, fuelled continuing conspiracy theories on the internet, but the tombstone nonetheless now also bears the name of Glyndwr Michael. The rest, as they say, is history. On 1 July 1943 Allied troops landed in Sicily. The Italians appealed in vain for German help, but they were otherwise occupied in Greece and Sardima.
The fall of Mussolini, just over three weeks later, on 25 July 1943, led to a two-day news blackout in Spain, as Franco tried to defuse the threat it posed to his own future. Franco wept as he recounted the events in Rome to his cabinet, but in public and in a meeting he had soon afterwards with the US ambassador Hayes he appeared self-assured, insisting there was no similarity between the collapse of fascism in Italy and the situation in Spain. While Italy had fought against the Allies, Spain had not. And yet, as Hayes pointed out to Franco, the Spanish regime continued to send out too many mixed messages which raised doubts about the genuineness of its neutrality. The Spanish media remained heavily censored and biased against the Allies, with many officials, including civilian and military governors, and members of Franco’s own cabinet, openly pro-Axis. Hayes also complained about the continuing presence in Russia of Spain’s pro-German Blue Division regiment of volunteers which he regarded less as an anti-communist crusade than as a military alliance against an ally.
If such protests barely dented Franco’s complacency it was because there was no suggestion that it would all lead to a move by the Allies to have him removed from power. On the contrary, the central plank of the policy being pursued by both the British and American embassies in Madrid was to maintain low-level interference as far as a change in regime was concerned. To both London and Washington, the strategic Allied interest still lay in a neutral Spain and the avoidance of any pro-Axis military intervention south of the Pyrenees that might threaten supply lines to North Africa and the Mediterranean.
In May 1943, following a secret meeting with a member of the Spanish royal family, Alfonso de Orleans, the British ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare had alerted London to the ongoing activities of those who favoured a restoration of a monarchy in Spain in favour of Prince Juan, then living in exile in Lausanne, Switzerland. The plotters had set themselves a target of toppling Franco within four months and yet seemed to lack any convincing plan for how to go about it.
On 24 May, Hoare received a letter from the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. It warned that there remained the danger of ‘German counter-moves, involving strong pressure from the Spaniards’, although the prospect of the Germans taking any effective action if the British invoked the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance and obtained facilities in the Azores was unlikely given the strain on Germany’s resources and military commitments.
Despite accepting that the strategic risks of alienating Franco’s Spain were no longer as great as they had been, Eden nevertheless remained adamant that British interests were best served by not rocking the boat. Thus he emphasised the need not to stray from the ‘guiding principle’ of non-intervention in internal Spanish affairs: ‘I am … convinced that we should not become in any way connected with arrangements to bring Don Juan to Spain from Switzerland,’ Eden wrote. ‘This is a matter which we must leave to the Spaniards themselves, and we must not lay ourselves open to any subsequent accusations of having aided or abetted his return.’ On 27 July 1943 Hoare wrote to Eden with an early analysis of what he thought might be the likely reaction in Spain to Mussolini’s fall. He remained sceptical that the Spanish left’s joyful reaction to the news would translate into effective action to topple Franco. As Hoare reported: ‘If they attempt any movement against the Franco regime, they will be easily suppressed by the Army and the immense force of police that dominate Spanish life … So long as the Spanish Army is against them, the Leftists are committing suicide if, elated by Italian events, they at this moment attempt a coup.’
As for the monarchists, despite the support of some generals, ‘very few of them have any political sense and, hitherto, Franco’s opposition has been sufficient to block any movement in Don Juan’s favour,’ commented Hoare. As he prepared for his next meeting with Franco, the ambassador planned to press for unambiguous Spanish neutrality, while holding back from issuing any ultimatum on which he knew the Allies would not deliver.
Hoare went on to tell Eden: ‘I feel that it is necessary to disabuse him [Franco] of the idea that Falangism and the Allies can jog along happily and indefinitely together, but that in making this clear, I must avoid the danger of appearing to dictate a particular form of government.’
Two days later his US counterpart Carlton Hayes emerged from his meeting with Franco in the Pardo Palace, a former royal hunting lodge outside Madrid, feeling, as he later put it, that ‘I had cast a good bit of bread on the water, and wondering how much, if any, might return.’ Within a week Burns and the US embassy press attaché were summoned to the office of a sympathetic source they shared inside the Falange party and told that Franco had ordered that the Spanish press, radio and newsreels were to adopt an impartial stance, one at least that did not discriminate in the coverage of the war against the Allies.
While Hayes’s account of his meeting with Franco and its aftermath suggests that he alone was responsible for the conciliatory attitude adopted by the Spanish regime, the apparent ‘concession’ made by Franco had been carefully planned to ensure that his own interests were well served, with more than a little help from within the Allied camp.
Hayes’s ‘summit’ with Franco had been preceded by a more discreet meeting in London between Tom Burns and Rafael Nadal, an exiled Spanish academic whose broadcasts for the BBC’s Spanish service had become an important propaganda vehicle. This visit was the latest in a series of short work-related trips Burns had made to the UK since being posted to Madrid.
Towards the end of July 1942 Burns invited Nadal to lunch at the Garrick, the private gentleman’s club near Covent Garden which had been founded in the nineteenth century. Burns had developed his network of literary, political and secret intelligence friends among the club’s membership since being elected weeks before the outbreak of war in 1939, with the support of the actor Robert Speaight and the influential publisher Rupert Hart-Davies. Among the Garrick members who had already achieved certain stardom in the film world was the actor Leslie Howard, who was destined to play his most dramatic and final role in wartime Spain.
The club’s Shakespearian motto, ‘All the World’s a Stage’, was well suited to the tragi-comedies and intrigues that had traditionally been played out within its walls. While Garrick rules prohibited work-related business being conducted in any of its rooms, the club’s ruling committee was packed with individuals already involved in some way or another in the war effort, while the club’s reputation for discretion in a convivial atmosphere meant that its members could and did use it as a perfect location for the discussion of sensitive matters of state.
Burns had enticed the poverty-stricken Nadal with the promise of a relaxed and nourishing lunch, during which they would have the opportunity to catch up on news of mutual friends in Madrid. Nadal was late. He found Burns standing impatiently in the entrance hall at the foot of the winding staircase, by a bronze bust of the Victorian actor Henry Irving. Burns, Nadal later recalled, seemed irritated at having been kept waiting and suggested they go straight into the main dining area – known somewhat misleadingly as the ‘coffee room’, given the relative luxury of its decor and fare in rationed wartime London. Sacrificed was the traditional pre-lunch cocktail or two and the informal banter members and their guests usually enjoyed in the upstairs long bar. Only when the two took their seats at one of the round dining tables did Burns seem to relax and Nadal begin to feel more comfortable with his host.<
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Burns ordered wine and talked about the informal literary meetings, or tertulias, and the bullfights he had recently been to in Madrid; Nadal recalled the experience of living and working in a London that awaited the assault of the Luftwaffe. First it was the firebombs, now it was the flying bombs. Burns confessed to missing his London friends but not the bombs. The claret they shared seemed better than any wine he had recently had in Spain. Nadal looked around the ‘coffee room’ and was surprised, amidst the studied elegance of the silverware and antique wooden furniture, by the poor taste of the cheap prints that somewhat incongruously lined the walls.
Only later would he be told that, since the outbreak of war, more than two hundred of the Garrick’s most valuable pictures had been removed outside London. Some of the windows had been blown out despite the regulation tape criss-crossing the glass. The bombing had led to a drop in attendance in the evenings, and the occasional loss of electricity and gas, leaving the club cold and dark for extended periods. But the committee was proud of the club’s wartime record: not a day had passed without luncheon being served. For Nadal, the Garrick certainly made a change from the place at which he usually ate, the canteen at the BBC’s wartime location in Evesham.
Over cheese and port, conversation drifted inevitably towards Spanish politics. Knowing of Burns’s right-wing sympathies, Nadal couldn’t help recalling that one of his best friends, the poet Federico García Lorca, had been among thousands executed by fascist thugs early in the civil war. Burns in turn remembered the writers executed on both sides, and that the left had shot priests and raped nuns. He then moved the conversation to another delicate subject – the political position of the British embassy in Madrid and of the Allies in Spain in general as they tried to defeat Hitler. Franco, he asserted, deserved the support of the Allies so long as Spain remained neutral. Nadal’s response was that the Allies had a moral imperative to help restore democracy to Spain as soon as possible.
It was only over coffee that Burns confronted Nadal about the broadcasts he had been making for the BBC. He admitted that they were incisive and well produced and heard by thousands inside and outside Spain. However, the Spanish embassy in London and senior government officials in Madrid had complained that the broadcasts were biased against the Franco regime, and ‘subversive’. Burns suggested that Nadal would better serve the interests of the BBC, the British government and of Spain generally if he adjusted the tone and content of his programmes in a way that would widen their appeal to both sides of the political divide in Spain. Nadal recalled the moment: ‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Then I said, “On no account, Tom. For this operation you’ve got to find someone else. Don’t you realise that to try and embrace the Falange and others who support Franco would be to betray in one act all those who rest their hopes in Great Britain?”’
Nadal had a depressing sense of déja vu. It seemed to him that Burns’s line of argument was the one long used by British Conservative MPs and their Catholic allies. It dated back to 1936, in fact, when the British government had refused to intervene against Franco’s military uprising in the outset of the civil war. And yet Nadal sensed that the policy of non-intervention was also being influenced by longer-term strategic planning, in London and Washington, about the Spain that would best serve Western interests once Nazism had been defeated and the Soviet Union had begun to claim her share of the spoils of victory.
‘I still think that you could and should do what I am suggesting. Perhaps at a later stage you will understand why I am right,’ Burns told Nadal. Their lunch was at an end. There was no raising of voices. No sudden walkouts. This was the Garrick, after all, and Nadal had lived in London long enough to know how to play by club rules. ‘We parted without any apparent tension, although with a better understanding of where we each stood,’ he recalled.
It was nearly eight years since Nadal had first arrived in London. He had been studying at the French University of Poitiers and thought the time had come to learn English. Among his letters of introduction to various British academics of a left-wing disposition was one from the communist Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and another from Lorca himself. He was soon studying English at University College London while working as a part-time Spanish teacher.
Nadal’s circle of friends included the Spanish ambassador representing the Republican government, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, and two Anglo-Spaniards, Tomás Harris and his younger sister Enriqueta. At that time Tomás, yet to be recruited by MI5, was an art dealer, specialising in El Greco and Goya and selling paintings to raise funds for anti-Franco forces. He worked at a gallery in Mayfair which his Jewish father, Lionel, had set up after marrying a woman from Seville. Enriqueta was doing a postgraduate course at the Courtauld Institute where Anthony Blunt was a lecturer. It was Enriqueta who introduced Blunt and Tomás to each other.
Early in the summer of 1936, Nadal was appointed assistant lecturer in the Spanish department at King’s College London, a post he assumed belatedly after being caught up, while on holiday in Spain, in the early stages of the civil war. Nadal considered himself a loyal supporter of the Spanish Republic, having spent his early youth as a militant member of the Spanish Socialist Party. But weeks into the war he chose exile rather than military conscription and returned to London. In exile, Nadal’s politics became passionately anti-Franco, all the more so when news reached him of the summary execution near Granada of his close friend Lorca after the poet had been arrested by nationalist forces. Within weeks Nadal expressed his disdain for Franco by embarking on an English translation of a book of Lorca verses in cooperation with Stephen Spender. The literary left was beginning to speak out in support of the Spanish Republic.
The outbreak of the Second World War provoked the closure of the Spanish department at King’s College and left Nadal temporarily reduced to scraping a living from giving private classes. His luck turned when, in the final weeks of the phoney war, he met Billy McCann, the head of the Iberian section of the MoI, at a party at the Harris household. Thanks to McCann, he was offered a job at the BBC. But for occasional contributions on Latin American culture, Nadal had no broadcasting experience. He was also ideologically poles apart from Douglas Woodruff, the unashamedly pro-Franco editor of the Catholic weekly the Tablet, whose reflections on the war were being broadcast twice a week on the BBC’s Spanish service. Nevertheless Nadal managed to convince McCann that, if given an opportunity, he would be able to serve the interests of both the British government and the Spanish people better by offering a commentary that was bolder in projecting the war as a fight against freedom and fascism. British propaganda aimed at Spain, Nadal argued, had to be fine-tuned so that the majority of Spaniards would be left in no doubt that their lives would be better and happier if the Nazis were defeated.
Nadal was appointed assistant producer of programmes. He was told by McCann that this gave him responsibility for the content of Allied propaganda broadcast to Spain by the BBC, but under the supervision of John Marks, a writer and journalist who had been recruited into government service on the recommendation of Burns and others in the British embassy. Both men were required to report regularly to McCann at the MoI.
What Nadal was not aware of was the extent to which he was being drawn into an unresolved power struggle, involving government departments, over who should be in control of propaganda and what the nature of this propaganda should be. Lack of agreement between and within the Foreign Office and the MoI as to what the government’s relationship with the BBC should be only added to the tension already created by the divergent ideologies and political views of some of their employees.
McCann’s own appointment had been made against the background of continuing disagreement within the British government over how policy should be conducted towards wartime Spain. As described in an earlier chapter, the previous incumbent at the head of the Spanish department, Denis Cowan, had been shifted sideways after the Spanish embassy had used its contacts in the Catholic media in Britain to c
riticise him for employing Spaniards known for their strong opposition to Franco. The same shake-up had resulted in Tom Burns being posted to Madrid.
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Nadal’s appointment by a board comprising senior officials from the MoI, the Foreign Office and the BBC was the result of an uneasy truce in the hostilities that had been raging between government and the BBC over policy towards Spain. It involved a compromise whereby concerns about Nadal’s politics and lack of journalistic experience were temporarily set aside on the condition that his broadcasts were made subject to careful monitoring and effective vetting by the government. Nadal himself was reminded by one of his interviewers, Ivone Kirkpatrick, the controller of the BBC’s European Services, that British policy towards Spain had as its only end that of maintaining its neutrality. ‘It is not that we want Spain to enter the war on our side, it is however our aim to ensure by all possible means that she doesn’t join the enemy,’ Kirkpatrick told Nadal.
Days later, on 17 November 1940, Nadal, under the nom de guerre (agreed to by the BBC) of Antonio Torres, began a series of broadcasts in Spanish called La Voz de Londres, the voice from London, from a studio in Evesham. One of his first commentaries was a morale-boosting broadcast as London suffered heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe. While Nazi propaganda across Europe, not least Spain, predicted that Londoners would be brought to their knees, Nadal spoke of the heroism of the Blitz, describing Londoners as a bastion of democratic resistance against the forces of fascism. Other programmes were delivered in a lighter tone, with Nadal mocking the inflated rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini’s speeches.
Writing from Madrid, Burns pressed Nadal to continue broadcasting anything that might counter the depressing sight of Spaniards clutching their radios and listening to the Germans triumphantly proclaiming their latest ‘victory’.
In the spring of 1941, Nadal, in a moment of almost Chaplinesque brilliance, responded by getting his studio engineer to record the notes of an out-of-tune flute over the military trumpet blast that preceded the official Nazi propaganda broadcasts, fading the flute in with increasing volume as the broadcast progressed.