by Jimmy Burns
Days later word reached Burns from one of his Republican informants that in a Madrid suburb the German ambassador’s car had been surrounded by a group of Spanish urchins mocking him by pretending to play tunelessly on flutes. Thanks to Nadal, it seemed that the BBC had briefly struck a chord with Madrid’s hungry and dispossessed, a sign, perhaps, of the growing popularity of his broadcasts in some working-class neighbourhoods of the Spanish capital.
The honeymoon period between Nadal and his detractors proved relatively short-lived once La Voz de Londres began to focus more directly on emphasising the pro-Axis sympathies of the Franco regime. From the autumn of 1941 the British embassy in Madrid began to warn the Foreign Office that its diplomatic strategy in Spain was being put at risk by Nadal’s broadcasts. This was strongly refuted by Nadal who claimed that the popularity of his programmes among Spanish listeners was increasing daily.
By now Nadal had friends in MI5 – Tomás Harris – and another ally in the MoI, the deputy head of the Spanish department, Enriqueta Harris. Under the influence of her former tutor Blunt, Enriqueta had learnt to keep her political cards close to her chest at the heart of government. She joined the MoI after her brother Tomás joined MI5, the year Blunt was recruited by British intelligence, in 1940. The precise ideological allegiance of the Harris siblings when war broke out is unclear beyond the fact that they both hated Franco, his ministers and everything they stood for, and secretly regarded anyone who thought differently as fascists. Blunt was already a committed communist and had been recruited by an agent of the Russian secret service when he joined MI5.
In her days at the MoI, Enriqueta Harris was careful not to appear as anything other than a loyal patriot. Only towards the end of her life, reduced by old age and illness to spending long hours in the darkened sitting room of her house in Earl’s Court, did she allow her guard to drop when visited by the author. She seemed angry at having been discovered by the son of a wartime colleague she utterly despised after maintaining a relatively low profile for so long in retirement. She remained extremely defensive when asked about the circumstances of her recruitment into the MoI but what little she was prepared to let slip at least hinted at the intriguing possibility that she too may have been working for the Soviets.
‘I try and forget all that … but why don’t you think of the Spanish Civil War, and think what that meant … I was in London. Most of my friends were anti-Franco because they were on the side of the people,’ she said.
She declared herself absolutely against the strategy the British government had adopted of not supporting the anti-Franco opposition. Despite being brought up as a young girl in the Jewish faith she admitted to being ‘anti-religion’ and feeling, as Philby did, that Catholics had been given too great a role in influencing British policy towards Spain. ‘There were a lot of Catholics in British government service. I thought there were too many,’ she told me. ‘It seemed to me as somebody who was supposed to be doing propaganda that I had no scope at all because we weren’t allowed to do propaganda against Franco,’ she added.
She acknowledged she had had dealings with all three known Cambridge spies – Burgess, Blunt and Philby – but her refusal to discuss them in any detail and what she did say seemed deliberately misleading. She described Blunt simply as a ‘very polite and good lecturer’, Guy Burgess as a ‘bad joke’, and Philby as someone she didn’t like very much. ‘He drank too much and at one point started sucking up to Franco.’ This last remark I took as deliberately deceptive as it referred to the time when Philby had been working as a pro-Franco foreign correspondent as a cover for his work for the Soviets. She also denied that, as some writers on intelligence have suggested, her brother Tomás was a Russian spy. Only afterwards did I realise that I hadn’t even asked her about her brother when she decided, unprompted, to mention his name alongside those of the Cambridge three.
By then it was plain that Enriqueta didn’t wish to say anything more. She ended with these words: ‘I don’t like remembering and anyway I don’t know if what I tell you is lies or not, you see. You will have to check it out.’ Months later she was dead, carrying her truths and her lies to the grave.
In January 1942 the tensions over the BBC’s Spanish coverage stirred internally when the journalist John Marks was encouraged by an unidentified source in government – almost certainly Burns – to write to the MoI questioning Nadal’s political objectivity and professionalism.
Until that point, Marks had won Nadal’s affection as a friend and colleague. The Spanish academic looked at the journalist-turned-BBC-producer as a somewhat archetypal ex-public school boy and Cambridge graduate, with a certain hedonistic lifestyle that seemed to consciously defy the stifling bureaucracy of the careerists in the BBC and the insularity of many British government officials.
A chain smoker, with a permanent smear of nicotine round his nostrils, Marks drank heavily and was a serial womaniser. He was also immensely educated in Spanish culture, having developed a passion for its poetry, its music and its bullfighting while travelling round Andalusia as a freelance writer, a trait which the hugely educated, aesthete Nadal much admired.
But whatever feelings Nadal may have felt for the Englishman-turned-Hispanist quickly changed to a deep sense of betrayal when he heard the knives were out and he suspected Marks of sharpening them. Nadal tendered his resignation. Kirkpatrick refused it, declaring Marks’s criticism to be unjustified. It proved to be a hollow victory for the BBC as it struggled to assert its independence in wartime. As for Nadal, he had merely achieved a stay of execution. Marks left for Madrid as the London Times correspondent where he developed a close friendship and political alliance inside the British embassy with Burns and his two assistants, Walters and Stordy, for the rest of the war.
Nadal was convinced by now that the pressure he had first come under at the Garrick Club lunch was the product of a diplomatic chess game with the Franco regime in which BBC employees had become expendable pawns.
During the summer of 1943, the new Spanish foreign minister, General Jordana, made clear to both Burns and his American counterpart that he expected Nadal’s programmes to be reined in as a diplomatic response to his government’s decision to ease the restriction on the importation of pro-Allied films and the placing of other British and US news material in the Spanish media.
A Spanish government decree in January 1943 prohibiting the showing in cinemas of raw unedited newsreel footage produced by the official German news agencies and the American studio Fox, and an announcement of their replacement instead by a new national state-run newsreel called the No Do, was seen by the British embassy in Madrid as an opportunity to establish a more level playing field in propaganda terms.
By contrast, at the MoI in London the creation of the No Do was viewed with some scepticism, not least by Enriqueta Harris, who saw it simply as a cynical manoeuvre by the Franco regime to create a propaganda vehicle for its own internal political purposes. The first No Do appeared to vindicate such fears. It showed no clips of the war whatsoever. Instead it presented Franco as the omnipresent head of state – Caudillo and Generalíssimo – handing out diplomas to new staff officers, and visiting emblematic locations of his victory in the civil war such as the ruins of Toledo’s Alcázar and the Valley of the Fallen.
Alongside such triumphalism, the No Do portrayed a Spain radiating peace, good cheer and Christian devotion at Christmas time and over the New Year. No reference was made to the daily executions and mass imprisonment of political dissidents, and the continuing economic hardships experienced by the majority of the population. The text accompanying the news items commented: ‘One of the most interesting and succulent decorations in shop windows at Christmas time consists of traditional poultry hanging there, waiting for the pot – but the true spirit reflected in people’s hearts during the festivities is that of the Child Jesus. We all feel a little childish and fancy free on beholding the small painted clay figures …’
Despite the blatant Francoist
propaganda, Burns urged patience and understanding in London, pleading with the MoI not to desist from sending him more British newsreel footage. On 8 January 1943, he wrote to his head of section at the MoI, McCann, thus: ‘I can quite well see how it might appear all together too Falangist, and worse than that. But I think it is important to realise that for all its defects the No Do represents a big step forward in our direction. By merely existing it pushes off screen the UFA and LUCE [Nazi] newsreels which have virtually dominated the screen up to till now.’ As an aside, Burns said that the Spanish decision to include inserts from British movietone news rather than Fox was a welcome development. ‘Fox, as you know, has virtually had to confine itself to bathing girls, dress parades and pastoral scenes, and was useless from our propaganda point of view.’
Such optimism generated by Spanish action proved premature. Film footage was sent belatedly from London, and the Spanish authorities were even slower in using any of it. In the following weeks, Burns struggled to secure the ‘balance’ he had been promised by the senior Spanish government officials in charge of the No Do. While the volume of blatantly pro-Axis war footage was reduced, there was no immediate marked increase in war footage showing the military advances being made by the Allies. Burns’s official instructions from the Spanish were that anything sent from London should be confined to non-war scenes, and exclude any footage of German prisoners of war. As a result an early edition of the No Do had only one newsreel item devoted to the UK: a scene of horse schooling at the Police College in Imbert Court.
Beyond the embassy in Madrid, in Whitehall, the patience of Burns’s enemies began to wear thin. Burns’s candid admission to McCann in February 1943 that the Germans might have discovered a covert operation he had been running to buy up and destroy German newsreel before it reached Spanish hands gave ammunition to those who questioned his political judgement and professionalism. In a curt telegram from the MoI to the ambassador he was ordered to abandon the operation forthwith. ‘The press attaché in Spain should know clearly that he should not purchase any film material of enemy origin except on specific instructions from ministry headquarters.’ After Burns’s clandestine newsreel buying enterprise was stopped, Enriqueta Harris pressed her case at the MoI that it should refuse to accept any Spanish No Do shots of Franco on the basis that it was Falangist propaganda. From Tetuán, the British consul, R. G. Moneypenny, wrote to the department in a similarly combative tone. No Do films, he insisted, ‘Under the guise of a national Spanish and neutral enterprise are becoming an effective medium for pro-Axis propaganda.’
Within weeks, however, the British and US embassies were reporting to their head offices a marked improvement in the dissemination in the Spanish media of Allied propaganda following the unopposed success of Operation Torch. As the US ambassador Hayes later recalled, ‘There was considerable contemporaneous improvement in the attitude of the Spanish press and the Falange censorship towards us. Two outstanding Spanish publicists, Manuel Aznar and Manuel Halcón, were seemingly unhampered in conducting a strongly pro-Allied campaign. Leading dailies like Ya and Madrid in the capital were now giving good publicity … this was a noticeable change … an increase in news and photographs from United Nations sources; improvement in headlines; and a decrease in volume and less favourable presentation of Axis news.’
In London and Washington, sceptics viewed such developments as a cynical exercise by the Franco regime to save itself now that the tide of war appeared to be turning against the Axis powers. But they were unable to come up with a convincing and coherent alternative. Information gathered by the British embassy in Madrid from various key Spanish political sources outside the regime in late July 1943 suggested ‘a growing discontent’, according to the British ambassador Hoare, but one that still seemed unable to translate itself into a unified strategy or detailed plan of action.
On the subject of Franco’s opponents, Hoare wrote to Eden: ‘I fear … that they all equally seem to show that there is no precise or effective plan for getting rid of it [the regime]. It is this want of a plan and of a leader that is the real strength of Franco’s position. It gives him the chance of once again digging himself in and of exploiting the general fear of war, foreign and civil.’
Hoare’s memorandum was largely based on information supplied to him by Burns, evidence that the press attaché’s role in influencing British policy towards Spain had been reasserted. Burns in turn was encouraged by the strong support he counted on within the US embassy. Over that summer of 1943, the importance the US government attached to not allowing anything to undermine its conciliatory attitude towards Franco was underlined in exchanges between Ambassador Hayes, President Roosevelt and Robert E. Sherwood, the chief of the overseas Office of War Information.
Hayes reported that, thanks to his representations, Spanish newspapers as a whole were publishing more news from the Allies than from the Axis. ‘I am glad,’ replied Roosevelt, ‘that our position in the press is so much better.’ Meanwhile, Sherwood had separately signed a propaganda directive for Spain stressing that the US ‘does not propose to interfere in the internal affairs of Spain’ and that this was the ‘best reply to enemy propaganda to the effect that an Allied victory would bring Bolshevism to Spain and curtail Spain’s independence’.
On 20 October 1943, Hoare returned to the subject of Nadal. The ambassador wrote to Churchill accusing the BBC’s Spanish programming of undermining British policy towards Spain. Hoare threatened to resign unless it ceased. On 2 November, the new Minister of Information at the MoI, Brendan Bracken, wrote to Churchill confirming that Nadal had been suspended from his post as chief presenter of the BBC’s La Voz de Londres.
Six months passed before Nadal was reinstated, in April 1944, after agreeing not to make any further direct or indirect criticism of the Spanish government. By then the direction of the war had turned in favour of the Allies and it was longer a question of if but when Hitler would finally be defeated.
Nadal was convinced that the self-censorship he had agreed to would prove short-lived and was reasonably content to bide his time. Along with other Spanish exiles, he hoped that British policy towards Spain might still shift in favour of paving the way for a post-war democratic government. Instead Churchill delivered a speech on 24 May 1944 in the House of Commons in which he thanked Franco for helping the Allied cause by keeping Spain out of the war, and argued that the continuation of this policy during Operation Torch had made full amends for earlier Spanish assistance to Germany.
Churchill went on: ‘As I am here today speaking kindly words about Spain, let me add that I hope she will be a strong influence for the peace of the Mediterranean after the war. Internal political problems in Spain are a matter for the Spaniards themselves. It is not for us – that is the Government – to meddle in them.’
Churchill’s speech came as a terrible shock to Spanish Republican exiles and monarchists who had looked to the Allies to help liberate their country from the Franco regime after Hitler and Mussolini had been defeated. By contrast, the Madrid media painted it as an endorsement of Franco’s foreign policy and of his regime. Among many ordinary Spaniards who had lived through the trauma of the civil war there was a genuine sense of relief that they had been saved from another war, as well as the political turmoil and revolution they feared might follow an Allied victory.
Less than a month later, on 17 June 1944, Rafael Nadal was having lunch with Enriqueta Harris in the basement of the BBC’s Bush House in the Strand when a loud explosion shook the building, covering them in plaster and dust as they sought cover beneath a table. A flying bomb had destroyed a post office on the ground floor, just a few metres from where they were. Both Nadal and Harris were unhurt, but the bomb injured dozens of civilians, some of them fatally. It was a stark reminder that the war had yet to run its course.
The next day Nadal sat at his desk and typed out his latest La Voz de Londres in which he declared his hope that an Allied victory would in time lead to the restoration o
f democratic government throughout Europe. Without mentioning any particular countries, he laid out a vision of a future international order involving ordinary citizens of every nationality and race recovering their human rights, not least the right to vote for a government of their choice. The commentary was written but then left unrecorded, being judged to be veiled interference in Spanish political affairs by the BBC’s censors at the MoI. Nadal resigned that same evening and never again worked for the BBC in a time of war.
11
To Love in Madrid
In January 1943 the British actor Leslie Howard, best remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, received a letter from Sir Malcolm Robertson, MP, chairman of the British Council, exploring the idea of a lecture tour in Portugal and Spain to coincide with the Spanish release of the film.
The threat of a German occupation of Spain had resurfaced as a major strategic challenge to the Allies in the months after the North African campaign had got under way in 1942, with supply lines stretched across North Africa.
Behind the Robertson proposal lay a secret plan prepared by the British and US embassies in Madrid to consolidate their influence on the Franco regime following the military success of Operation Torch. The plan was to use Howard as a propaganda tool, and to have him ingratiate himself with Franco by establishing ties with the Spanish film industry which the dictator was keen on developing as popular entertainment.
Over the preceding months the Americans had been expanding their presence in Spain using front companies as cover for the OSS and leasing a separate building for the Casa Americana. This was a thinly disguised propaganda department directly copied from an idea established by the British embassy’s press department and the British Council, with dozens of expatriate and local employees involved in the showing and distribution of pro-Allied films and news bulletins, as well as the financing of helpful agents of influence.