by Jimmy Burns
The 100,000 Marks made it possible for the Nazis to come into the market and purchase wolfram in competition with the Allies. It fuelled a speculative market of international intrigue and double-dealing over a commodity that in 1939, in the words of Ambassador Hoare, had been as ‘worthless as dust’.
In a secret memorandum to his foreign secretary Eden outlining the extraordinary story of wolfram trading in wartime Spain, Hoare described the frenzied pre-emptive Allied buying and German demand for the mineral thus: ‘Throughout the period there was the wildest possible gambling in the commodity. The South Sea Bubble could not compare with what happened over the Peninsula. Fortunes were made in a night, desperate crimes were committed in making them, smuggling became rife, and the huge sums given for this once worthless rock were one of the principal causes in the rise in the cost of living.’ The ambassador’s sense of humour, not notable at the best of times, wore decisively thin when dealing with Americans, many of whom he regarded as cowboys, unschooled in the delicate art of diplomacy and the game of intelligence.
Nevertheless, Hoare was wise enough to recognise that, with the tide of war showing signs of turning in the Allies’ favour, public opinion in Britain as well as the US was likely to turn against a fascist government remaining in southern Europe. ‘It is well, therefore, to reconsider our position from time to time, and to adjust our policy to the general course of the war and the actual facts of the Spanish situation,’ he wrote to London on 11 December 1943.
Four weeks later Hoare sent Eden an intelligence assessment based on a series of conversations Burns had had with Marañón since meeting him in Toledo. Burns had been provided by his prospective father-in-law with a useful insight into the current state of internal Spanish politics, not least the continuing divisions of the anti-Franco opposition. ‘Spain, however much she may need it, is not ready for a change of regime,’ Marañón told Burns. The monarchists, among whom Marañón had several close friends, had spent the past weeks and months plotting a restoration, only to see the efforts come to nought, through their inability to forge a ‘really unified, representative and responsible centre’.
Other exiles had proved themselves incapable of unifying except in extremist groups that risked being dominated by the communists. As for Franco, he remained in power more by default than genius, so Marañón believed. Despite his support of the Nationalists in the civil war, Marañón was scathing in his criticism of the Generalísimo who he thought history might come to judge as one of the ‘most guilty rulers of Spain’, out of ‘sheer stupidity and from idolatry of self and a few false political ideas’.
And yet, critically, Marañón, in his meeting with Burns, argued for cautious and consensual rather than unilateral diplomacy. ‘The fatal thing would be to let the country suffer as a consequence of such pressure [i.e. an embargo] and to allow him [Franco] to appear symbolically as the victim of the whole people.’
Less surprisingly, Marañón described Hoare’s mission as a ‘triumphant success’, for taking the long-term view and maintaining contact with ‘so many sides of Spanish life’. It was a strategy, he suggested, that should be used as a model, for dealing with the acute internal complexities of other countries. ‘The [British] Ambassador has achieved an almost mythical status which of course held its dangers but implied the highest responsibilities for Spain herself,’ Marañón told Burns.
By presenting his ambassador with his report, Burns was in effect gambling his own reputation on Marañón’s credibility with the British government. He was playing for high stakes, in his pursuit of professional recognition on the one hand and the heart of Mabel on the other. Hoare’s covering letter suggested that he had won his ambassador over and that a process was under way to convince London of the diplomatic benefits that might be gained from a Burns/Marañón marriage – one that openly linked His Majesty’s Government with a Spaniard who was popular and likely to play an important role in the future of his country, with or without Franco.
The higher echelons of the British government took less than a month to decide that the Burns/Marañón union, far from harming British interests, would actually help promote them. Fearing a German diplomatic pre-emptive strike to disrupt the wedding, the Foreign Office sent its official message of approval in cipher. Days later Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s propaganda chief, sent Burns a personal letter of congratulations in the diplomatic bag.
The wedding took place on 29 April 1944. The church chosen for the religious ceremony was San Jerónimo the Royal, an impressive piece of architecture, built in brilliant white stone, its neo-gothic exterior resembling a fairy castle, so called because of the royal connections with the restored former monastery near the Prado museum. It was here that King Alfonso XIII had married his English bride Victoria Eugenia on 31 May 1906 before both survived an assassination attempt. The Burns/Marañón wedding proved only marginally less ambitious in its conception. No expense, diplomacy or publicity was spared in making the event the best-organised and best-attended nuptials in wartime Spain, as well as the most eclectic. The invitation list ranged from orphans of Republicans killed in the civil war (the messenger boys employed by Burns’s section) and former exiles to members of the royal family and five-star generals of the Franco regime, among them General Aranda, one of the officers bribed by the British. Other guests included English nannies, Spanish countesses, and most of the Allied diplomatic corps, along with doctors, politicians, poets, painters and spies, each of whom had contributed in some way or another to bringing excitement and colour to wartime Madrid.
The atmosphere was captured in the notebook of a journalist: ‘the whole of Madrid appears to have been waiting for hours for this wedding … a mass of well-known faces mixed in with thousands of ordinary people, who are there out of sheer curiosity, waiting for the couple to arrive … there are faces from the days of the Monarchy, from the days of the Republic, from the days of the Civil War, from the present and the future … those who have survived on one side or the other are here, many out of friendship and affection towards Marañón who so skilfully has managed with the wedding of his daughter to give a show of unity, a word that is much overused these days, but of which there is scarce evidence …’
The best man was Belmonte, the bullfighter. Hours earlier he had attended the funeral of the wife of Domingo Ortega, a bullfighter turned bull rancher like himself. Belmonte had spent most of his professional life risking death. The marriage made him feel as he did after a good faena and a decent kill, happy to be alive, among friends.
Burns was impeccably dressed in a morning coat made by his tailor in Jermyn Street, Mayfair, and flanked by embassy colleagues on the one side and Mabel’s male relations on the other. Most distinctive among them was the British military attaché, Brigadier Torr, looking the archetypical Colonel Blimp, and Mabel’s brother Gregorio, his black hair smoothed back with Brylcreem, and sporting a thin black moustache, as was the fashion among young Falangist veterans of the civil war.
Like the military, the Church was similarly equally represented. Two priests had been called in for the occasion – the octogenarian Marañón family chaplain, the pious, unassuming Monsignor Monreal from Toledo Cathedral, and one of the embassy’s more eccentric secret agents, the bumptious rector of the English College in Valladolid, Monsignor Henson.
Mabel, whom Belmonte considered one of the most beautiful women in Madrid, emerged from the British embassy’s Rolls-Royce looking very much a fairy-tale Spanish princess – radiant in a flowing lace dress especially designed and sewn by the private seamstress her mother shared with Queen Victoria Eugenia. The dress was covered in damask and crimson velvet.
She was led up the long stairway and the aisle not by her beloved father but by the British ambassador, an arrangement she and Marañón had reluctantly agreed to, for the sake of diplomacy. Burns followed with Marañón’s wife Lolita, and after them came the father of the bride with the wife of the ambassador, Lady Maud.
As the procession sl
owly made its way towards the high altar, Hoare at one point turned towards Mabel and whispered half-jokingly that he believed his Protestant Anglo-Saxon parents were turning in their grave at the sight of him holding the hand of a Spanish Catholic bride. Mabel, her face hidden beneath a veil, replied that, actually, it was her Cuban-born grandmother who was turning in her grave at the sight of a Spanish lady with a Protestant British ambassador.
The riposte confirmed Hoare’s opinion that the new Mrs Burns was a woman of character who would need careful coaching by his wife, Lady Maud. Mabel found Hoare’s comment typical of a man she considered as personifying the worst characteristics of the colonial mentality: snobbish, mean and inherently racist.
Unaware of the barbed exchange, Burns met his young bride at the altar and, raising her veil, marvelled at her beauty and smiled with undisguised satisfaction at an event her parents and the embassy had stage-managed to perfection. In the preceding days he had persuaded a high-ranking official in the Franco government that the wedding served its interests as much as it did his Majesty’s Government, as a demonstration of Anglo-Spanish friendship in its broadest political and social sense.
Tom Burns and Mabel Marañón were married according to the old Spanish Catholic custom bajo vela, or under the veil. A large lace cloth was draped over Mabel’s and Burns’s heads, symbolically representing the union of the couple in one flesh.
The reception was held in the church’s ample cloisters. Wartime Madrid’s most famous bar owner, Pedro Chicote, marshalled an army of white-jacketed waiters for the distribution of cocktails and canapés of a variety that some of the guests had only dreamed of. Mrs Taylor, the British agent who ran the Embassy tea room, looked on with pride as bride and groom cut a towering three-layered cake she had personally created. It was made of fresh Toledo marzipan and Scottish fruit cake and topped with Spanish and British flags in a sugary embrace.
The wedding was one of the leading items in the official No Do newsreels that showed in Spanish cinemas, with the British mission in Madrid given more air time than at any stage in the war. The final preparations for the ceremony coincided with the Allies and Franco pulling back from the brink of diplomatic rupture. Spain cut its wolfram exports to Germany and the Allies lifted their oil embargo. Much to the anger of Berlin, the nuptials became popularly known in the streets of wartime Madrid as the Boda de Gasolina, or the Petrol Wedding.
Since June 1940, Burns had struggled to convince Spain to reverse its disproportionate use of German propaganda in favour of British news. He may not have ended the war but, thanks to his wedding, he had won an important battle.
The next morning, with a copy of the 16mm film of their marriage ceremony donated as a gift by Franco’s official documentary maker safely stashed in his bedroom, Burns and Mabel embarked on their honeymoon. They drove to Toledo, for a few days ‘solitude and peace’ in the Cigarral de Los Menores. From there the couple journeyed south, stopping overnight at a small hotel that British intelligence had commandeered as a safe house near Bailén, beyond the mountain chain that separates Castile from Andalusia. They then continued down towards Gibraltar where they stayed at the Rock Hotel and had lunch as the guests of the governor. German agents still loitered on the Spanish side of the border, but the threat of sabotage had evaporated and talk of an imminent German invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and full-scale offensive on the British colony had long ago ceased.
From Gibraltar the newly-weds motored along the Costa del Sol. Estepona, Marbella and Torremolinos, names that in the second half of the twentieth century would become synonymous with mass tourism, were still small fishing villages. Burns and Mabel found empty beaches all to themselves to play and make love in. In Torremolinos, they stopped off for a drink at a small hotel. It had a good view of maritime traffic and at night they could see the lights of Málaga twinkling in the distance. Its manager, the embassy’s local eyes and ears, was on a retainer.
They then journeyed inland towards the Sierra Nevada. The valleys were being replanted with olive trees, and the higher ground with pines, and the roads damaged by the civil war repaved.
In Granada, they booked into a small hotel near the Alhambra and marvelled at this enduring tribute to the architecture of Moorish Spain as they strolled around its perfumed gardens and fountains. Later they walked down to the gypsy quarter where they bought lace, drank a lot of wine and watched an impromptu flamenco, unaware that their honeymoon was about to end abruptly.
They returned to their hotel by moonlight to find an urgent telegram from the embassy. It informed Burns that his friend and colleague, the deputy head of mission Arthur Yencken, and the assistant air attaché Squadron Leader Caldwell, had been killed in an air crash in the mountains of Aragón, on their way to Barcelona. Their plane had crashed into wooded terrain in poor conditions. That night Burns and Mabel drove back to Madrid to attend Yencken’s funeral.
It was a solemn affair, with Yencken, as acting head of mission during Ambassador Hoare’s temporary absence in London, being accorded full honours by the Spanish government and the Foreign Office. Even if sabotage was suspected by some within the British embassy, London seemed happy enough to exploit the propaganda value of the funeral without turning the cause of Yencken’s death into a major diplomatic incident.
As the most senior and longest serving member of the Madrid embassy, Burns found himself among those leading the cortège. He was accompanied by key Spanish government figures, several in military uniform, alongside an equally impressive array of foreign diplomats, led by the American ambassador Carlton Hayes and an emissary of the first post-Mussolini Italian government.
The cortège walked slowly along Madrid’s main avenue – the same one down which Himmler had paraded in 1941 – the Union Jack draped over the coffin, the black mahogany funeral carriage flanked by detachments of the Spanish army, navy and air force in the slow march usually reserved for Christs, Virgins, Saints and the Generalísimo.
Hoare had spent the last months of his mission in Spain, between June and December 1944, regularly protesting about the prevarication shown by the Franco regime in shutting down the Axis spy networks, and the continuing presence of enemy agents in North Africa and Spain. According to Hoare, the Spanish police adopted ‘every kind of subterfuge’ for evading the expulsion orders decreed by their government. Agents altered their passports, had their expulsion orders revoked or conveniently disappeared. Those who were forced out of Tangier were allowed to settle on the Spanish mainland. Hoare calculated that within two months of the Allied–Spanish oil deal being signed, 201 out 220 suspected agents were still circulating freely in Spain, although the figure had fallen to 68 by Christmas 1944.
And yet the diplomatic protests emanating from the British embassy belied the fact that German intelligence was by this stage in turmoil. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who had been head of the Abwehr since at least 1936, had been ‘retired from his post’, his professionalism and political loyalty and that of several of his officers questioned by some of Hitler’s closest advisers. Canaris was later executed after being implicated in a plot to overthrow the Führer.
On 18 February 1944, Hitler decreed the setting-up of a unified German intelligence service which merged the overseas Abwehr with the domestic security organisation, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), under the control of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The decision pushed the baby out with the bath water. ‘SD officers with the haziest notions of military intelligence procedures and techniques took over positions where networks of agents, painstakingly built up over years, were “burnt” in weeks. As the intelligence war reached its climax ahead of the Normandy landings, the Abwehr was literarily hors de combat,’ wrote Canaris’s biographer Richard Bassett.
In fact German intelligence had already been severely weakened by the cracking of the cipher used in communications between Berlin and the various Abwehr outstations. This had allowed British intelligence to develop successful counter-espionage and deception operations t
hrough the extended use of double agents, an achievement which Franco seemed only too aware of. Faced with Hoare’s protests, the cunning old fox feigned surprise that the ambassador should be worrying at all about agents, most of whom, in his view, were ‘shirkers from the war and double crossers’ of no political importance.
In Madrid, M16 officers had spent much of the war encoding and decoding the decrypted Abwehr wireless traffic, the so-called ISOS material (an abbreviation of ‘Intelligence Service, Oliver Strachey’ – name of the the officer at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park responsible for German intelligence material). After the landings in North Africa, more time was devoted to investigating the links between the Abwehr in Madrid and their agents in Britain. The running of double agents helped British intelligence in Spain to identify their case handlers and other figures linked to German espionage, including their Spanish ‘cut-outs’ or go-betweens. It also, crucially, allowed the Allied chiefs of staff to continue to deceive Hitler about their planned operations in a way that had a decisive impact on the outcome of the war.
By the autumn of 1944, a Spaniard called Juan Pujol, code-named Garbo, had already earned himself a place in the history books as one of the most successful double agents run from Abwehr Madrid. Three years earlier, Pujol had made his first contact with the British through the embassy in Madrid, using his wife as a go-between. At first the British were unconvinced by the latest ‘walk-in’. Pujol claimed to be committed to the Allied cause but his personal history was full of contradictions and impossible to verify. He also claimed to have been born into a liberal middle-class family in Barcelona in 1908. At the outbreak of the civil war he had enlisted in the Republican army but had ended up fighting for the Nationalists during Franco’s last major offensive, the Battle of the Ebro. Pujol would later tell his handlers that he had become as alienated by the communism of one set of Spaniards as by the fascism of others. He saw the future of humanity as resting in the hands of the Allies – or so he told the British.