Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  On 11 May the ship docked at Southampton and the Marañóns made their way back to Paris by train. Marañón spent the next three years pursuing his calling as doctor, essayist and historian – writing a book on the mysticism of El Greco and an essay on Don Juan – in which he developed the thesis, based on clinical studies of some of his own patients, that the legendary Lothario was a repressed homosexual.

  In 1938, Mabel was encouraged by her father to make her first visit to Britain in order to perfect her English and experience something of English life.

  Over that summer, she stayed with a family in Norwich where she gave Spanish lessons in Blyth secondary school while improving her knowledge of British culture with occasional visits to Cambridge. A surviving photograph album from that period shows Mabel posing with some Spanish friends outside King’s College, punting along the College Backs – the most famous stretch of the River Cam – and dressed in academic gown and at Number 15 King’s Parade, presumably a student flat but long since converted into commercial premises.

  For all her academic regalia, Mabel’s involvement with the university city was essentially that of a tourist. At the time, though, she dreamed of staying in the UK and becoming a Cambridge undergraduate. She claimed in later years that an unnamed academic who had interviewed her was a communist and biased against her because she had ended up supporting Franco in the Civil War.

  There is no mention of her failed application in the diary she kept at the time. Instead her notes show her generally content, growing in confidence with her first paid job in a foreign land. As one entry put it, ‘I like England and I like English men. Most of them seem to have manners.’

  In 1939, she returned to Paris, and resumed her studies at the Sorbonne. She was now fluent in French as well as English. During a family summer holiday in the South of France she met a young French girl of Jewish descent called Nelly Hess, the daughter of a Parisian textile manufacturer. By the end of the summer, Mabel and Nelly had become the best of friends. They exchanged addresses and delivered on their mutual promise to continue to see each other in Paris, which they did regularly for the next two years. The memory of Nelly’s sudden disappearance in the summer of 1941 would haunt Mabel for the rest of her life.

  In early June of that year, as the German army advanced on Paris, Mabel and Nelly were travelling back from the cinema on the Métro when they were confronted by a group of French youths. One of them pointed at Nelly before leading the others in a verbal outpouring of anti-Semitic abuse. The train pulled into the Champs-Elysées station, the nearest stop to where the girls lived. The girls waited till the doors were about to close again, and then rushed out, leaving the boys inside the carriage, gesticulating with their fingers as the train moved on.

  Shaken by the experience, the pair walked in silence, arm in arm, to Nelly’s house where they embraced and promised to see each other in the morning. The next day Mabel telephoned Nelly’s house but there was no answer. When she later visited the house, she found it empty and was told by a neighbour that she and her family had left Paris.

  Mabel assumed that Nelly’s was one of the richer French Jewish families that had chosen to emigrate across the Atlantic, either to the US or South America. They were lucky to escape when they did. In July 1942 the Germans rounded up 13,000 Jews in the Paris region, most of whom subsequently perished in concentration camps. As the years passed after the war, with no word from Nelly, so Mabel came to believe that her friend had perhaps not survived the Holocaust. She had not been able to do anything to help her. The memory weighed heavily on her conscience.

  * * *

  Mabel was not in Paris when the Germans marched in on 14 June 1940. She and her middle sister Belén had been sent south by her parents, by train to the border, and then across to San Sebastián to visit Marañón’s eldest daughter Carmen who was living there with her husband, three young children, and a German Fräulein.

  On the night of 13 July her father heard on the radio that the Germans had reached the outskirts of the capital and were in in the Bois de Boulogne. The next morning Marañón rose early, ordered his wife Lolita to stay in the family apartment, and, with his medical colleague Teofilo Hernando, walked across the streets of Paris in search of the invaders. The city centre had an eerie, abandoned feel about it, many of its shops and cafés closed, its public transport temporarily suspended. More than half of Paris’s population of five million had fled south. Marañón and Hernando were caught by a French photographer in the Place d’Etoile, as they stood on an empty pavement, at the very moment that the first of the German motorcycles with sidecars snaked into the boulevards, followed by the tanks and in turn by German troops, goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysées.

  Within days of the Nazi occupation, Marañón witnessed the revival of Parisian life as sectors of the local population settled into a pattern of collaboration. He took notes of what he saw. ‘People are beginning to make contact with the soldiers; some women speak to them … two or three are laughing, and there are also men talking to the Germans, in German,’ he wrote in one diary entry.

  Marañón also described the experience of lunching in their local restaurant just after it had reopened for business. ‘The owner is eating, alone, in shirt sleeves. We join him, and as we eat together he blames everything that has happened on the politicians and the lack of discipline among his fellow countrymen. When he serves us some food, he adds: “I hate Hitler, of course; but there is something in him which reminds me of Napoleon and Alexander the Great.”’

  While shocked by the suddenness of the French capitulation, Marañón found himself initially impressed by the discipline of the Germans, believing for a while that they had brought the kind of order he felt Europe so desperately needed. Such was the ‘normality’ that he sent word to Mabel that she and her sister should return without delay and resume their studies while he continued to write essays, letters and books. ‘The years I lived in Paris during the war,’ Marañón later told his official biographer, ‘were fundamental ones; because I was allowed to work without social obligations, because I was forced to live modestly and because I had the time to get to know myself better …’

  A wish to find out more about Spain’s most famous Parisian exile lay behind the summons Marañón received one day to dine with the most senior Nazi counter-intelligence officer in occupied France, Hans Keiffer, at his residence, a large turn-of-the-century town house from which the owners, a Jewish family, had been forcefully evicted.

  The unexpected invitation was made in a telephone call one evening while Marañón was working in his study in the family apartment he had rented in the rue George Ville. He would later tell his family that his first thought was that the Germans were planning to arrest him – perhaps because he and his family had befriended Jews prior to the occupation. But if Keiffer wanted Marañón arrested he would simply have sent troops to his home. Suspecting that other motives lay behind the invitation, or simply as an insurance policy, Marañón almost certainly would have thought of contacting his friend, Franco’s wartime ambassador in Paris José Félix de Lequerica, and asking his advice.

  Lequerica, under instructions from Franco, had cultivated ties with the collaborationist French right, and with the Germans, while defending Spain’s neutrality and resisting Nazi demands for the handing over of Jews who had crossed the border south into Spain. Lequerica, nevertheless, would in all likelihood have convinced Marañón that it was his patriotic duty to accept the invitation from Keiffer as a sign of respect for the Axis while using the meeting as an opportunity to remind the Germans that Franco had no wish to be dragged into the war. Marañón shared the view that the alternative to neutrality was seeing Spain plunge into another civil war, this time with the prospect of the Allies fighting alongside the communists south of the Pyrenees.

  In the thin and unconvincing account Marañón’s official biographer gives of the Spaniard’s meeting, the high-ranking Nazi official is not named, and there is no reference to t
he fact that his host was by then already responsible for the execution of dozens of resistance fighters and the persecution of the Jews. Nor was any political subject raised. Instead, Marañón claimed he had spent the evening discussing art before being personally driven home by Keiffer. No separate testimony survives of what was said by the two men, though the very fact that Marañón was left alone by the Germans during his remaining stay in Paris would suggest that his freedom was not considered a threat to their interests.

  As for Mabel, she appears, initially at least, and in common with several of her non-Jewish French and Spanish girlfriends, to have developed a similarly ambiguous attitude towards the German occupation.

  It was only long after the war was over that Mabel recalled her visits to the Paris Opéra and the Comédie-Française when German soldiers were present. She remembered feeling distracted by the smell of leather from their boots mixing with the perfume of the women in the audience. The memory returned as clearly as that of Nelly’s ‘disappearance’ and a separate incident in which a French boyfriend of hers was slapped and then arrested after accidentally pushing into a German officer as he came out of the Métro.

  The only German she befriended for a brief period was a Luftwaffe pilot, who had survived the Battle of Britain; he spoke perfect English and French and seemed courteous and trustworthy, at least until the night she agreed to a double date with her friend Chiquita, the daughter of the Argentinian consul César Oliveira, who was a fanatical supporter of Franco and the Spanish Falange party. One night Chiquita persuaded Mabel to join her for drinks in her flat while her parents were away. She arrived to find her alone with her German friend and a fellow pilot.

  Within minutes the four of them were laughing and joking. Records were sorted and they paired off, dancing the tango. Then, halfway through the evening, Chiquita announced suddenly that she was going for a walk with her partner, leaving Mabel with her pilot.

  Within minutes he had placed cushions on the floor, lit some candles and opened the third bottle of champagne of the evening. To Mabel, what had seemed romantic at first now became a little unnerving. While she thought she liked the German, she had no intention of making love with him. So it was that she told the pilot that she was engaged to be married to a high-ranking officer in the Spanish army who might visit Paris within days. The German immediately stood up, apologised and offered to take Mabel back to her parents’ apartment. It was the last night they ever saw each other.

  Mabel Marañón never was engaged to a high-ranking officer in the Spanish army but to someone who had served as a subaltern in Franco’s army along with her brother Gregorio during the civil war. His name was Clemente Peláez, one of the young founders of the Falange party who had become a stockbroker in Spain. The day Mabel met Tom Burns for the first time, the loyal, well-mannered if somewhat dour Peláez was still officially her fiancé. She wore a bracelet he had given her.

  But whatever loyalty she felt she owed him evaporated in the presence of the attractive and charming Englishman who, despite his pipe and dog and heavily accented Spanish, had a charisma almost equal to that of the father she venerated.

  It was as if Captain Warrington-Strong had sent his elder brother or best friend to rekindle the romance of that moonlight crossing from Alicante to Marseilles. But just as important was the fact that Burns had come to Marañón’s beloved Toledo on the recommendation of friends the two men appeared to share. If Mabel was looking for a father substitute, Burns was the closest she had come to finding one.

  It was one of these friends, the bullfighter Belmonte, who, in the runup to Christmas 1943, took it upon himself to invite Burns down to his ranch in Andalusia while Mabel was still holidaying there, a willing go-between for two individuals of whom he was enormously fond. On 4 December Burns, once again accompanied by his dog Juerga and the eccentric sculptor Sebastián Miranda – now temporarily engaged as an unofficial chaperone – set off from Madrid in an old Ford borrowed from the US embassy (Burns’s Wolseley was undergoing repairs) and made the journey south in icy conditions.

  Spain was settling into another cold winter, and the car had no heating. It was a bumpy journey, much of it along a badly paved road Burns was familiar with from earlier professional assignments. But with Miranda there were always surprises. The unexpected came after Burns narrowly missed crashing into a flock of turkeys as he motored through an isolated village. The birds were being driven across the road by an peasant woman with a stick. Miranda told Burns to stop the car, haggled with the old woman and bought two of her turkeys. The two companions journeyed on, each feeling a little warmer thanks to the turkey each had between his legs.

  Belmonte’s ranch was typical of the region, low-built and whitewashed, and decorated inside with tiles, rugs and hides. Nearby stables were filled with thoroughbreds and cross-breed Andalusian and Arab horses, and there was a small bullring where Belmonte and other friends would practise their bullfighting skills with some of the younger calves. Beyond, hundreds of fighting bulls and cows grazed on grassland which stretched for miles across one of the most underpopulated areas of Western Europe.

  The bullfighter was hugely fond of Mabel, who had become a close friend of his only daughter, Yola. He thought the young Marañón girl refreshingly different from most of the somewhat snobbish upper-class Madrileñas – cosmopolitan, a fearless horse-rider, and with a genuine soul, or duende, when it came to flamenco dancing. That Christmas, Belmonte dedicated to her a signed photograph of himself on his favourite mare, and dressed in the traditional Andalusian country clothes – the traje corto.

  Belmonte was similarly taken by Burns, whom he considered the most eccentric Englishman he had ever met – and he hadn’t met all that many ingleses. From the moment Burns had first infiltrated his dining club, or tertulia, in Madrid, Belmonte had taken to this maverick spy who seemed to genuinely love Spain and its culture, not least bullfighting.

  Belmonte took a mischievous delight in acting the go-between for his two friends. He proved the ideal host for the developing love-match, providing good company, and matching his other guest, the flamboyant Sebastián Miranda, with an apparently inexhaustible flow of picaresque anecdote at the end of a long day out of doors.

  Belmonte’s stuttering good humour came accompanied by plentiful wine, tapas, and barbecues. But he also showed himself capable of being unobtrusive as circumstances demanded.

  Burns had brought with him a book of Lorca poems, Poet in New York, which he had smuggled in from the UK, and which he gave Mabel in private. The edition had been published in Mexico because the poems were banned in Spain at the time. Burns had himself been given it by Rafael Nadal, the exiled Spanish academic whose BBC programmes he had had censored. The two men had maintained a friendship despite their political disagreements over Franco, largely through a shared respect for Lorca, whose execution by the nationalists Burns had come to view as inexcusable.

  His gift of the Lorca poems to Mabel was an acknowledgement of Lorca’s friendship with her father during the 1920s and early 1930s when he had been an occasional visitor to the Cigarral de Menores in Toledo.

  While at Belmonte’s ranch Burns and Mabel spent most days going on long walks or riding together, watching the cowhands in the distance moving in and out of the bulls, and marvelling at the space and peace that surrounded them. It was hard to believe that a war was still being fought and there were long moments when they were able to forget it.

  When the time came for Burns to return to Madrid, Mabel chose to follow soon afterwards. Just after Christmas, they met up secretly for the first time, stole out of the city and spent the day in the peace and quiet of the old university quarter of Alcalá de Henares, before dining at the Mesón de Fuencarral, an old tavern on the outskirts of the capital which the British embassy considered off limits to the Germans. Much of what each had lived went unsaid, and yet they both felt a new dimension was beginning to take form, one built on the common ground of shared secrets, faith and love. His mem
ory of the moment he and Mabel decided to marry would remain the clearest and most profoundly heartfelt of encounters with any woman in his life. ‘It was there that what we must have been groping towards in the past few weeks came clearly into sight. Now we were looking not so much at each other as in the same direction. We were going to be married …’ he later recalled.

  Three days later, at a private embassy function celebrating New Year’s Day 1944, Burns approached his ambassador and asked permission to marry a Spaniard. Burns had learnt enough about the character of Sir Samuel Hoare, the inner workings of the British government and the sensitivity of relations with Franco’s Spain not to expect an immediate reply. Moreover, it was not immediately obvious whose interests would be best served by the Burns/Marañón marriage, planned for April 1944.

  Earlier that spring the US government had decided to step up pressure on Franco, warning him, through its embassy in Madrid, that Spain faced an embargo on petroleum imports unless it suspended exporting wolfram to Germany. The ensuing discussion between the Allies and Franco over the various points at issue – not just wolfram, but the continuing presence of German spies in Spain, a hostile German consul general in Tangier, continuing acts of sabotage, and enduring pro-Axis propaganda in the local media – would probably have been negotiated discreetly had it not been for Germany calling in payment of the debt Franco owed Hitler for his assistance during the civil war.