Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Howard then went to ground, disappearing to his room in the Ritz and not surfacing again for twenty-four hours. His schedule was hastily rearranged, again. Two further official engagements were cancelled, much to Hoare’s chagrin. However, Burns suffered Howard’s idiosyncrasies more readily that his ambassador, seeing in the maverick actor a kindred spirit with whom he had much in common. Long-term membership of the Garrick Club – where they had met on several occasions informally before the war – a fondness for women and a mixed foreign ancestry all helped fuel a genuine friendship.

  Tragically, Burns failed to instil an element of self-discipline and caution into Howard’s reckless lifestyle. When Howard re-emerged at the Ritz he did so arm in arm with the hotel beautician. The next day she was with Howard when he took the train back to Lisbon, helping him give the slip to the embassy ‘minder’, a junior official the ambassador had insisted keep a close watch on him. The lovers shared a compartment while Chenhalls slept alone along the corridor.

  Howard and the beautician separated on arriving in Lisbon, leaving the seemingly insatiable Howard to pick up where he had left off last time, sharing a romantic dinner with one of his female friends from the British embassy, in a seaside restaurant near the fishing village of Cascais.

  Later that week Howard gave a short speech of introduction to The First of the Few before it was run for the first time in Portugal at a private showing organised by the British Council. It turned out to be Howard’s final public act of adherence to the Allied cause.

  The First of the Few is probably one of the most unashamedly patriotic and propagandist of all the films that Howard acted in, a tribute to the RAF and a rallying call for continued heroism and perseverance. It was exactly the sort of line the MoI hoped to encourage.

  On 1 June 1943, the day after the screening, the Ibis DC3 in which Howard was flying back to England was attacked over the Bay of Biscay by the Luftwaffe. It was the first commercial airliner to be shot down on the Lisbon–UK route in the Second World War. All on board, including Howard, were killed.

  In the aftermath of the crash, British intelligence circulated rumours that the Germans had actually intended to kill Winston Churchill, mistakenly thinking he was on the plane. It was a theory that Churchill himself resolutely stuck to, along with others who were with Howard during his visit to Portugal and Spain.

  Churchill was at the time in North Africa, at a military aerodrome in the desert outside Algiers briefing an American squadron that was about to bomb the island of Pantelleria, halfway between Tunisia and Sicily. A picturesque volcanic island, its capture was regarded as crucial to the Allied success in invading Sicily in 1943 because it allowed planes to be based in range of the larger island. Pantelleria was heavily bombarded in the days before the landing of the main Allied attack, and the garrison finally surrendered as the landing troops were approaching. Churchill had flown there, after talks with Roosevelt in Washington, by flying boat, first to Newfoundland and then to Gibraltar, a journey of seventeen hours during which the aircraft was struck by lightning. ‘There were no consequences, which, after all, is what is important on these journeys,’ Churchill commented later.

  On 28 May Churchill had flown the three-hour trip from Gibraltar to Algiers in a specially converted Lancaster bomber. On 4 June he flew back to Gibraltar on the same plane. Because the weather was bad, he decided to continue his journey to England later that day in the Lancaster rather than the flying boat as was originally intended. Churchill was back in London by the morning of 5 June. ‘We have been rather anxious about you since they got Leslie Howard,’ his daughter Diana wrote.

  It was only partly due to a British secret service disinformation campaign that the Germans were kept guessing about Churchill’s real flight plans, and believed that he might at one stage, during his visit to North Africa, divert at short notice and take a commercial flight from Lisbon.

  As a result German agents were put on alert at Lisbon airport on 1 June. By then the passenger list of the Ibis DC3 flight to England had been changed at least once before Howard and Arthur Chenhalls were observed walking across the tarmac surrounded by other passengers to board the plane. Cigar-smoking, bald, portly and wearing a heavy coat, Chenhalls bore some physical similarity to Churchill but not one that stood up to close scrutiny.

  The morning of departure was bright and sunny and both Howard and Chenhalls had lingered to say goodbye to Portuguese friends and embassy staff and to allow the local media to take photographs. It seems improbable that by the time the two men reached the aircraft their identity had not been established beyond doubt. Indeed, the fact that a German news agency first announced the crash, naming Howard and Chenhalls among the victims, suggests that, when the plane was shot down, it was not the prime minister but Howard who was the target of the Luftwaffe, and that British intelligence attempted to cover up the real reason for his death – the suspicion that he was not just a propagandist but also a spy. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole Leslie Howard affair is the possibility that, by June 1943, the breaking of German codes meant that a small exclusive sector of British intelligence may have known in advance of German plans to attack the aircraft, and that the information may have been deliberately suppressed so as not to compromise the Enigma breakthrough at Bletchley Park.

  What is beyond doubt is that the manifest of the fourteen passengers originally booked on that fateful flight included at least two other individuals believed by the Germans to have had some involvement with British intelligence – Tyrrel Shervington, the Shell manager in Lisbon, and Wilfred Barthold Israel of the Jewish Refugee Mission.

  It is also true that the young son of a British diplomat based in Washington, Major Frederick Partridge OBE, and his nanny were removed from the passenger list to make way for Howard and Chenhalls, and that a third passenger, a Catholic priest from the local English College, disembarked at the last minute, making the passenger list an unlucky thirteen.

  The priest, Fr Holmes, withdrew from the flight after being told by an airport employee that he had received an unidentified telephone message requiring that he urgently call either the British embassy or the Papal Nunciature. When he did so he could find no trace of anyone making such a call. The providence and motive of the telephone call that had drawn the priest away from the flight was to remain a mystery. Although Fr Holmes may have had a premonition and made the call an excuse for missing the flight, he never suggested it. ‘It is just possible that the supernatural element has obscured the fact that the unknown caller may, indeed, have had a hot line to someone who really knew what was going to happen,’ Geoffrey Stow, the assistant air attaché in Lisbon at the time, wrote later.

  Stow died without ever clarifying what he meant, even to his close family. If someone did deliberately warn Fr Holmes off the plane, the motive remains equally unclear since Fr Holmes had no known hidden agenda.

  With the passing of the years and evidence emerging of the British government’s involvement in Howard’s mission, what seems far less in doubt is that the Germans would have had a perfectly valid reason for considering Howard an Allied propaganda tool, if not a paid-up agent of British intelligence. It was this theory that weighed heavily on the conscience of those who had encouraged him to go to Spain in the first place, and who did little to protect him from the prying eyes of German agents.

  Only days after the crash did British embassy staff discover that Howard had devoted part of his final days in Lisbon to writing letters while relaxing on his balcony in the seaside Hotel Atlantico in Estoril.

  To his long-suffering wife Ruth he wrote a light-hearted if prescient account of the Germans he would occasionally stumble across in the hotel: ‘The Herrenvolk are not hard to recognise and whenever they see us approaching they drop their voices and stare icily’. It suggested that Howard remained reconciled to hanging on to married life despite his serial infidelity, and that he was aware he was being pursued by the Nazis.

  A seemingly perfect gent
leman to the end, Howard also wrote several thank-you notes to his hosts in Madrid. As his son Ronald later explained, ‘to some he apologised for turning up late and others for not turning up at all’. They were token apologies in the main, perhaps made with one eye on maintaining his popularity and keeping open the prospect of making money in the Spanish film industry in the future. He took particular care with the letter he wrote to Burns. In it, Howard makes clear his belief that he owed him special thanks for his friendship and support during a tempestuous Iberian journey and an apology for his behaviour.

  Dear Tom,

  After the wild nightmare which in retrospect my Madrid trip seems to have been, I just want to let you know how grateful I am for all you did to get what I hope will have proved successful results. There may have been occasions when I seemed far from grateful, but you will, I know, take that in good part. It was very hot, I was not feeling very well, and the nights were very short. I quite realise that all the visits you arranged to the bull-fight and the film studios were a necessary contribution towards the result for which we are all striving. It may please you to hear that in the view of the Spaniards to whom I spoke to you are one of the aces among the English. Naturally I was most interested in the film situation, which I think merits a good deal of attention, and I do think I might come back one day in this connection. If there ever is such a project, and you are still there, I shall be in touch with you very quickly. If you ever want to reach me in England, Denham Studios, where I have my office, always finds me.

  Au revoir, and many thanks and give my love to all the people I really like.

  The letter was written on 29 May 1943. It reached Burns in Madrid two days later. By then news was filtering through to the embassy that a commercial airliner believed to be transporting a group of British civilians, including the actor Leslie Howard, had been shot down by enemy aircraft off the coast of Galicia, in northern Spain. There were seventeen people on board, including four crewmen. There were no survivors. Nor were any remains of the aircraft ever found.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Burns sent a message to the MoI reporting that distribution problems had forced him to suspend the sending of copies of Spanish newsreels with the exception of one piece which he felt was useful in propaganda terms. It was a clip of Howard visiting a Spanish film studio, days before his doomed flight from Lisbon. By then the British and American embassies were reporting that matters in Spain were improving after the embassies had successfully contained the diplomatic fallout from the successful implementation of Operation Torch.

  Rumours of a German invasion persisted, however, and the autumn of 1943 witnessed the beginning of the ‘last major crisis’ the British embassy in Madrid had to deal with as the Allies quarrelled over how best to limit the sale of Spanish wolfram to Germany. Delivery of the metal was vital to the German steel industry, which produced tanks and guns, and made possible the continuation of the war. Nevertheless, the ensuing period leading up to the final Allied victory would also see the betrayals and deceptions of wartime Madrid reach a resolution in diplomatic as well as personal terms for one of its key members of staff. For it saw the unfolding of, arguably, Burns’s greatest propaganda coup, his love affair with a Spanish woman of not inconsiderable beauty, charm and influence. On 10 October 1943 Burns received an invitation to visit her father, Gregorio Marañón. A doctor, writer and consummate political networker, Marañón was a man of considerable public standing who had been cultivated by the British. Early that summer, Marañón had been the key guest at a dinner hosted by the British Council’s Starkie for a team of British doctors and academics on a Foreign Office-sponsored visit to Spain.

  Marañón was subsequently described by one of the English doctors thus: ‘I enjoyed meeting Marañón very much, although he speaks very little English, and his conversational Spanish was rather too much for me. He is a literateure, interested in art and politics as well as medicine. He had, and still has a great reputation as a physician, the true basis of which I was unable to assess. Indeed I do not recall discussing any medical subject with him at all. I am inclined to think that the diversity of his interests argues a certain superficiality, and that his success has depended more upon his personality than anything else.’

  A less grudging assessment of Marañón was sent to the Foreign Office around this time by Ambassador Hoare. In his secret dispatch to London, Hoare described Marañón as ‘intellectually, one of the best minds in Spain’. Marañón featured on a named list of four ‘representative Spaniards’ Hoare regarded as ‘important contacts’, along with the Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid, Pedro Segura, the writer José Martínez Ruiz Azorín and General Matallana, a senior army officer who had fought against Franco during the civil war.

  Marañón made a name for himself in his country’s politics in the 1920s, after taking a stand against the authoritarian rule of General Primo de Rivera and earning a prison sentence for his pains. He was later one of a group of leading liberal intellectuals who forced the abdication of King Alfonso XIII and helped bring about the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931. It proved a short-lived engagement with left-wing politics.

  Marañón became disillusioned with the political radicalisation of the Republic, and within a year of the outbreak of civil war had led his family into exile in Paris. Although he had been threatened by extreme elements on both sides of the political spectrum, Marañón’s sympathies increasingly shifted in favour of a Franco victory, which he saw as necessary to restore a sense of political stability and national unity prior to what he hoped would be the restoration of a constitutional monarchy. Marañón returned to Spain in October 1942.

  He was allowed to resume his medical practice in Madrid on the condition that he did not immediately assume his pre-war position as a physician in one of Madrid’s major hospitals and kept out of politics. He complied by not publicly criticising the regime, while maintaining discreet political contacts with those, like himself, who mistakenly believed and hoped that Franco would pave the way for a democratic monarchy once the war was over, or even sooner.

  The intelligence gathered by the British embassy on Marañón suggested there was still a potential conspirator beneath the skin of the popular doctor: ‘Although one of the public men mainly responsible for King Alfonso’s downfall, he is now an advocate for Don Juan. He spoke more bitterly than ever of Franco and the Falange and also criticised the Church leaders for not having adopted a more independent attitude.

  He declared that a close friend of his who had recently been Minister at the Vatican had told him that the Pope was growing exercised over the want of independence in the Church,’ reported Hoare.

  The privileged access to Marañón that Burns enjoyed came about thanks to his membership of the literary and artistic clubs that began to re-form after their disintegration during the civil war. Through the tertulias Burns won the trust of some of Marañón’s closest friends, among them the sculptor Sebastián Miranda. It was Miranda who secured Burns an invitation to the sixteenth-century convent near Toledo that Marañón had converted into his country retreat and which at the time he generally reserved for close family, trusted friends or individuals brought along on their recommendation. ‘Marañón is back and you must meet him,’ Miranda announced to Burns one day with a characteristic sense of drama.

  The invitation was for Sunday sobremesa, literally translated as ‘on the table’ but meaning the extended period over coffee, brandy, anis and cigars, during which Spaniards – and Spanish men in particular – engaged in relaxed conversation on politics, art or bulls.

  Burns and Miranda duly set off for Toledo in one of the embassy cars, Burns’s dog Juerga sitting on the sculptor’s lap in the front seat. The journey took them through working-class suburbs and towns around Madrid that had seen some of the worst fighting during the capital’s prolonged siege. The ruins of houses destroyed by artillery, the windows and walls shattered by machine-gun fire and the spreading shanty towns along th
e way served as a reminder as to why many Spaniards had no desire to go through another war.

  As they approached Toledo, Burns found his progress blocked at a level crossing by a long, stationary goods train that seemed in no hurry to move. Miranda jumped out, walked over to the train driver and indicated the Union Jack on the bonnet of Burns’s car. It was, Miranda insisted, the emblem of the British ambassador and he was in the car, late for a very important meeting with Toledo’s military governor. Within seconds the train was moving again, allowing the two men to proceed, laughing, on their way. The route to Marañón’s cigarral took Burns and Miranda across the Roman bridge of San Martín and up a hill on the other side of the wide and fast-flowing Tagus. A large wooden gate with a wall made of rough tiles on either side marked the entrance to the narrow, unpaved lane that wound its way down to the house, with its magnificent view of the old imperial city perched over the valley.

  Burns drove the final metres to Marañón’s house with a growing sense of anticipation, through an avenue of young cypress trees bordering wild rosemary bushes and olive groves, the extraordinary peace and isolation of the doctor’s country retreat fuelling a belief that he had been brought to a temple of wisdom across a biblical landscape. Don Gregorio, as Miranda introduced him, was waiting with his wife Lolita, son Gregorio, son-in-law Alejandro, three daughters, Carmen, Belén and Mabel, and two grandchildren – a chieftain among his most intimate tribe.