Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Burns almost certainly consulted with his US friends prior to having the British Council make its approach to Howard, who recent polls were showing to be the most popular actor in the Iberian Peninsula. Cover for Burns’s involvement was provided by Walter Starkie, the head of the British Council in Madrid, who volunteered to officially host the proposed Howard visit.

  Starkie had been posted to Spain in the summer of 1940, after being plucked by government from relative obscurity because of his influential contacts and knowledge of the country and its people.

  At the time Starkie was a Catholic professor at Trinity College, Dublin, who had spent his holidays before the war travelling round Spain, writing two books about living with gypsies and earning his keep with his fiddle. A self-taught expert on Irish jigs and flamenco, Starkie also hugely enjoyed Spanish food, wine and bulls. His camouflage as an eccentric expatriate was completed by marriage to an Argentine amateur opera singer of Italian descent.

  Years later in his memoirs Burns credited Lord Lloyd, the then head of the British Council, with Starkie’s ‘imaginative appointment’ to Spain. ‘For how could official Spain ever say that Starkie was persona non grata? He knew more about the country, its literature and folklore than most Spaniards, politics had never concerned him and he could hardly be suspected of being a British agent,’ wrote Burns.

  Starkie was a British agent, his eccentric public persona belying a background of discreet service to His Majesty’s Government as an Anglo-Irishman who strongly identified with the Allied cause and equally strongly opposed his native Ireland’s neutrality in the war on the grounds that he considered it part of the British Empire. ‘Walter wanted to do anything to help the Allied cause, in contrast to the neutrality adopted by the Irish government,’ recalled his daughter Alma years later.

  Alma was thirteen when she arrived in Madrid with her parents. Term time was spent in a Catholic girls’ boarding school back in Ireland. Holidays were spent riding in the Retiro in Madrid with her best friend, Mary, the daughter of the American ambassador Carlton Hayes. ‘The horses belonged to the Spanish army. They had all the best horses,’ remembered Alma.

  Her Buenos Aires-born mother, Italia Augusta, dropped her first name soon after Starkie’s appointment in Madrid. She thought it a price worth paying to avoid being branded an agent of Mussolini and to be allowed access to the exclusive club of British expatriate women.

  As a result, during the war years, when not drinking tea or playing bridge, Augusta helped organise knitting groups at which the wives of diplomats and their elegant friends from the Spanish aristocracy made clothes for the poor children of Madrid out of the sacks with which food was transported to the embassy. The ‘knitting circle’ was presided over by the impeccably correct Lady Maud and regularly addressed with morale boosting speeches by her husband, the ambassador Sir Samuel. It was a joint act they had finessed while campaigning for the Conservative Party back in pre-war London. In their mutual dependence, the childless Hoares came across as a business partnership as much as a marriage. They certainly lived in more style than many of the people of wartime Madrid.

  As Alma Starkie recalled, ‘The poor people of Madrid were in a bad state in those days,’ said Alma. ‘I remember the Council doctor having to attend a young woman who had fainted out in the street. He pronounced her dead from malnutrition.’

  While the ladies drank tea and knitted rough jerseys for the cold winter, their husbands plotted and intrigued. Some wives and girlfriends volunteered to visit the refugee internment centre in Miranda del Ebro. A few took on the more dangerous task of providing cover for those who had eluded arrest. The Starkies allowed their own large flat at number 24 Calle del Prado – in the old quarter, dating back to the Spanish empire – to be used by the embassy as a safe house for escaping prisoners of war and Jewish refugees.

  In his official and covert activities, Starkie found a friend and trusted colleague in Burns. Both men mixed in similar social circles of bullfighters and artists, and looked to each other’s foreignness to rescue them on occasions from the stuffy insularity of some of their diplomatic colleagues, not least the ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare, who barely tolerated the ‘Irishman’ Starkie, despite his declared anti-(Irish) republicanism.

  While both shared a love of adventure, Starkie and Burns were physically striking contrasts. The Anglo-Irishman, short – with a height roughly equalling his girth – and with a huge bald head; the Anglo-Chilean with Scottish and Basque blood, tall and lean, with a healthy crop of dark hair swept back from his forehead, whose semblance, as the war wore on, seemed to transform into a disarming cross between Noël Coward and Leslie Howard, as if he had absorbed the mannerisms of the Allied propaganda stars through a process of osmosis.

  Inevitably Starkie and Burns came to be dubbed Sancho Panza and Don Quixote by their Spanish friends. One of their more outrageous adventures together revolved around a trip they made to Gibraltar, at the invitation of Captain ‘Hooky’ Holland, Commander of the Ark Royal. While Burns touched base with local intelligence contacts, Starkie played a concert of Irish jigs in the great hangar below deck of the Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, ‘the crew crouched or suspended among the overhanging girders giving thunderous applause’. After a night of music and heavy drinking, ‘Hooky’ accepted Starkie’s invitation to accompany him and Burns, strictly incognito, to a flamenco party he had organised the next day in Madrid. It was held in Starkie’s flat which was lit with candles for the occasion. Music and dance was provided by a band of wild gypsies Starkie had befriended on his wanderings through the country. Much wine and whisky flowed. In the early hours, the inebriated Starkie struggled to his feet and proposed a toast, revealing his guest’s identity for the first time. ‘To my honoured guest Captain Holland of the Ark Royal!’ Starkie declared merrily, lifting his glass.

  It had an instant, sobering effect on Burns. ‘It was a horrifying and dangerous breach of security. I devoutly hoped that our naval attaché would not come to hear of it, still less his German counterpart,’ Burns recalled. Luckily the incident was not reported by either side. ‘Hooky’ returned safely to Gibraltar, while Sancho Panza and Quixote got back to the Leslie Howard project.

  The initial approach to the actor had met with a firm but polite refusal. While delighted that his films were well known in the Iberian Peninsula, Howard claimed he knew very little about the land or its people, had far less lecturing skills than other actors, and, anyway, had yet to finish The Lamp Still Burns, a morale-boosting film he was helping to produce in the UK. Undeterred, Burns enlisted the support of key Whitehall figures, among them Jack Beddington, the head of the Film Division at the MoI who had been helping the British embassy – with mixed results – to get British films distributed in Spain.

  Beddington put Howard’s obstinacy partly down to lingering depression. His lover, Violette Cunnington, had died suddenly a few weeks earlier having contracted a mysterious skin infection. Beddington believed that the one thing that was driving Howard on was his enduring love of film. He also knew that his agent, Arthur Chenhalls, was looking to expand the commercial success of his client by exploiting the fledgling Spanish-language cinema audience. Beddington visited them both at Denham Studios. He was initially greeted with caution. When he asked Howard how soon he expected to finish his latest film, the actor turned to his director Maurice Elvey and said, not entirely tongue in cheek: ‘Ought we to tell him – isn’t he a spy from the MoI?’

  Beddington kept a cool head and marked time before broaching the subject of the Iberian trip in terms he hoped Howard and his agent would find hard to refuse. He explained that the actor’s role would be that of an ambassador for the film industry, and that behind the trip was the potential to tap exciting new opportunities across Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Howard remained publicly non-committal, while privately sharing with Chenhalls his fear that he might present too easy a target for extreme fascists if he went to Franco’s Spain.

  Such a
pprehension was not unjustified given that Howard was Jewish and there was a high-profile presence of Nazis in Spain who had the support of the regime. In fact there was evidence of the sort of political passions that Howard might stir a few days later in Madrid when, on 12 February, the US embassy sponsored a gala showing of Gone with the Wind at one of the principal theatres in Madrid. The event was preceded by a warning from the pro-German sectors of the Spanish media that the film showed life at its most decadent and was ‘immoral’. During a subsequent demonstration, Falangist youths threw nails and shouted pro-German slogans at those attending.

  Nevertheless the US ambassador Hayes was encouraged by the huge support the film generated among other Spaniards. They included the Bishop of Madrid who occupied a front seat and stayed, seemingly enthralled, for the full four hours the showing lasted, along with the Spanish foreign minister Jordana, his family and hundreds of others in the audience.

  Even more significant and surprising was the reaction to the film when it was later shown to Franco in the private cinema he had built himself in the Pardo Palace. The Generalísimo was enormously impressed with the film’s depiction of the suffering and survival of war and encouraged its subsequent distribution across Spain in defiance of Nazi advice that it was US propaganda and therefore should be banned along with the book on which the film was based, as had occurred in Germany.

  ‘It proved, indeed, to be a gala affair, and one of our best bits of propaganda,’ Carlton Hayes later recalled.

  Days after the film’s successful showing in Madrid, Howard was subjected to further pressure from senior British government figures. Brendan Bracken, the MoI chief, and Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, were among the ministers who personally contacted the actor. In response, Howard told Eden that, while he was happy to go to Lisbon, he was not prepared to cross the border. He had no desire to meet leading Falangists at official functions, which he thought unavoidable, and was worried that such meetings might upset the Russians.

  Such sensitivity towards Moscow was curious. It suggests that Howard or his agent, or both, may have had some contact with one or other of the Soviet agents who had manoeuvred themselves into departments dealing with Spain, including Philby.

  However, there were other elements in Whitehall, among them some of the Foreign Office’s top officials, that were unconvinced by Howard’s excuses. ‘Mr Leslie Howard is going to Spain to lecture on Shakespeare acting and film making. I feel that Mr Howard is exaggerating the damage which his visit may cause to his relations with the Russians …’ stated a Foreign Office memorandum of 16 April 1943. ‘I agree that Mr Howard is making heavy weather of this … the Russians understand our Spanish policy perfectly well, and are not going to hold it up against Mr Leslie Howard that he helped to forward anti-German propaganda in Spain,’ wrote Walter Roberts, the head of the Foreign Office’s European section, a day later.

  The Foreign Office had by then received a secret telegram from the Madrid embassy confirming that arrangements for Howard’s visit were advanced and arguing strongly that to suspend them would prove hugely damaging in diplomatic and propaganda terms. Anthony Eden wrote to Howard: ‘It is very important just now to fly the British flag in Spain and to give encouragement to our many friends there … on the whole I think it would be best to avoid Spanish internal politics as a subject of conversation, and to concentrate on explaining the British war effort … I do not think either that you need fear that your journey will be misinterpreted by the Russians, who take a realistic view of Spanish affairs and of the importance of Spanish neutrality.’

  A week later Howard and Arthur Chenhalls were on their way to Lisbon in an Ibis DC3. The two men stayed there ten days. Between receptions and lectures on Shakespeare and the British and American film industries, Howard spent much of his time in his shorts dictating notes to an young expatriate English secretary at his beachside hotel.

  The warm sun and the casino at Estoril reminded him of California. Photographs taken at the time invariably show Howard in the company of young, attractive women. His grief for Violette had given way to the old philandering ways which had troubled his marriage during his Hollywood years. Howard found that the young secretaries at the British embassy and the pretty young daughters of the local Anglophile Portuguese were easily seduced by his charm and good looks and he felt invigorated in their presence.

  ‘He was very polite and simpatico, among the most interesting individuals I met in the whole war. Everyone fell in love with him,’ recalled Olive Stock, a member of the embassy staff who was appointed to help organise Howard’s accommodation and schedule before being transferred to the Madrid embassy as Burns’s assistant.

  On 8 May, Howard and Chenhalls travelled to Madrid on the overnight Lusitania Express, to be greeted at Atocha station by Starkie in the midst of an early summer heat wave. Howard was furious when Starkie began almost immediately going through a packed list of planned engagements. They ranged from meetings with Spanish actors and attendance at embassy cocktail parties to numerous speaking engagements and intimate meetings with a select group of local artists and bullfighters. One of those he was scheduled to meet was the Hollywood Spanish actress Conchita Montenegro, with whom Howard had co-starred in the film Never the Twain Shall Meet in 1931, when she had just turned nineteen and he was thirty-seven years old. It was rumoured at that time that they had had a passionate affair. Both had aged well in the intervening twelve years, and they made a striking couple in wartime Madrid – she a beautiful, mature thirty-something-year-old, he a well-preserved and attractive forty-six. Montenegro was by now engaged to – and would marry within the year – Ricardo Giménez-Arnau, one of Burns’s contacts in the Falange where he was head of the right-wing party’s international affairs department. Her reunion with Howard appears to have prompted a light-hearted flirtation and nothing more serious. Prior to her death in April 2007, Montenegro gave an interview in which she alleged that she had helped secure a private meeting between Howard and Franco during which the actor passed on a secret message from Churchill that was critical in ensuring that Spain kept out of the war, although the evidence for this is largely circumstantial, and Burns, who would have known about it, left no record of it, either verbal or oral.

  What is known with more certainty is that, once in Madrid, Howard insisted that his official schedule be cut back drastically so as to spare him the requirement of meeting too many representatives of a Spanish government. By contrast, he was keen to briefly rekindle an old flame in Montenegro, and got his opportunity when Burns sat him next to her at an intimate lunch party he arranged for the actor at a friendly restaurant the British embassy used for discreet encounters on the outskirts of Madrid. While Howard was in the Spanish capital, Burns allowed him three days free of any speaking engagements, a concession which is thought to have paved the way for the actor’s fateful amorous encounter with a beautician who worked in the Ritz where he was staying. She was one of several German agents who tracked Howard throughout his stay in the Iberian Peninsula. Among the others was Gloria von Furstenberg, the glamorous Mexican wife of a German count, to whom Howard was introduced by the Spanish actor Luis Escobar. In her memoirs the OSS agent Aline Griffith described von Furstenberg as the best-dressed woman she had ever seen – ‘the pure white shoulderless tube of a dress was embroidered with tiny blue stars mixed with geometric patterns that suggested … little swastikas’. Griffith believed that, while Howard may have been warned about von Furstenberg, he was so struck by her beauty that he spent much of the evening telling her about his future travel plans, including the fact that he was flying back to London via Lisbon within a week. The information is thought to have been subsequently passed on to the German embassy in Madrid.

  Against this background of intrigue, Madrid remained submerged in a relentless war of propaganda between the Allies and the Axis. The British and US embassies were trying to maximise the publicity around the Allied military advance across North Africa and the massive bombing
s of German factories. For its part the German embassy was spreading rumours of an imminent Allied invasion of Spanish sovereign territory.

  To the British embassy, Howard’s presence in Madrid represented an exciting new phase in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of Spaniards. In the words of his son Rodney, ‘this charming English export epitomised for many Spaniards the best and most admirable of British qualities’. But it was precisely such usefulness to the Allied cause and his record of anti-Nazism that made him a target for the Germans as a suspect enemy agent.

  Among the subjects discussed by Howard and Arthur Chenhalls in their talks with representatives of the Spanish film industry was a plan for an Anglo-Spanish production of the life of Christopher Columbus, a project which hugely appealed to Franco. The figure of the explorer and ‘discoverer’ of the Americas was being resurrected by Franco’s government as a symbol of Spanish imperial greatness and of universal Christianity extending on both sides of the Atlantic. Columbus as a Christian hero went down well with the Catholics who were driving American and British policy on Spain.

  But while Howard owed his stardom to America, his visit to Madrid was controlled by the British. Social events organised for him included a flamenco evening at the British Council to which Franco’s ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba, was invited along with other Anglophile members of the aristocracy and artists and writers who had survived the civil war.

  Accompanied by John Marks of The Times, Burns also took Howard to a bullfight before introducing him to some of Madrid’s nightspots, in exchange for which he was expected to deliver on some of the programme that had been originally devised. The most successful events in propaganda terms were a lunch and press conference with foreign and Spanish journalists, and a lecture Howard gave on Hamlet, filled with thinly veiled allusions to the courage and nobility of the Allies in the face of the forces of darkness as represented by Nazism. The lecture was well received by a carefully selected audience of academics, dramatists and art critics, and its printed version – translated into Spanish – was distributed with the daily embassy bulletin across Madrid.