Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  The conversion to the cause of democracy of a man lacking any ideological coherence defied belief, raising doubts about where his true loyalties lay, but Pujol’s credentials were no more dubious than those of numerous other agents recruited by the British during the war, not least the legendary Agent Zigzag, the convict Eddie Chapman who worked as part of the double-cross system run by MI5.

  Like all double agents, Pujol was a mercenary who cleverly made himself indispensable to both sides. It was only after a year, during which Pujol touted his services among a plethora of British, US and German diplomats, attachés and intelligence personnel in Madrid and Lisbon, that he was recruited by MI5 and based in the UK. By then Pujol had persuaded the sceptics on the Allied side of his potential usefulness because of the quality of the intelligence he obtained from the Germans as a result of providing them with fabricated information they trusted.

  Few cases in the history of British intelligence during the Second World War can equal the Garbo case in terms of its duplicity, deception and betrayal. It was through Garbo that British intelligence managed to recruit a network of bogus sub-agents, each of whom played his part in a complex operation of counter-espionage, both feeding false information and identifying names and addresses of suspect German spies and their agents.

  By the time the Allies prepared to make the final preparations for the North African landing, Garbo was regarded as a prime asset by sectors of British intelligence, and by the Nazis. So highly rated was Garbo that all his material was given priority status, with every military report transmitted to Madrid from his network immediately retransmitted to Berlin. While Garbo helped in deceiving the Germans about Operation Torch, his main contribution to the Allied victory was in the false information he fed to the Germans in the weeks leading up to the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944.

  Garbo’s subsequent role proved more controversial. He and his sub-agents were instructed to feed the Germans false intelligence about the physical damage, or lack of it, wrought by the V1 and V2 bombs. The guided rockets aimed at heavily populated parts of Britain’s cities were Hitler’s last, desperate throw of the dice. With them he sought to dent Allied complacency that the war was won, by serving notice of Germany’s enduring military potential. Early reports by the Garbo network suggested, however, that some of the rockets were missing their targets, and persuaded the German launchers to modify their range. While the aim of the deception was to ensure that the bombs gradually landed in harmless places, this was not always the case, because some of the bombs still went astray, hitting civilian areas. The result was arguments between Whitehall and borough councils, and protests by politicians wanting to protect their constituencies from the diverted bombing. Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, was among the cabinet ministers particularly concerned about possible unnecessary loss of life.

  Throughout this period of the late summer and early autumn 1944, increasingly elaborate ruses were conjured up by Garbo’s handler, Tomás Harris, in order to maintain his credibility with the Germans. At one point, Harris had Pujol arrested on suspicion of spying as a way of reinforcing the idea that the information he was providing Berlin was genuine. Such was Garbo’s perceived value to both sides that he was recommended for both an MBE and an Iron Cross.

  Within Whitehall, Pujol became the subject of a struggle between MI6 and MI5, both of whom wanted to control him, with each agency accusing the other of inadequately sharing information. The extent to which several members of the British embassy in Madrid and Lisbon may have been involved in initial contacts with Pujol is difficult to judge, given that the intelligence services were selective when declassifying official paperwork dealing with Garbo’s activities.

  What is known is that it was only after Pujol had applied for accreditation as a journalist from the press office in the British embassy in Madrid – as an initial cover for his work for the Germans in London – that British intelligence began to take him seriously as an agent worth having on side. As for ambassador Hoare, at the very least he seems to have played the part of an unwitting pawn in a complex conspiracy of deception, his diplomatic protests about the lingering threat of German espionage a helpful diversion in allowing Garbo to succeed.

  There is evidence, too, that the running of the Garbo network involved other key departments without their full knowledge or approval. In order to explain to his German controllers how he had managed to obtain key pieces of intelligence, Pujol claimed at different stages to be working for the BBC, and to have an ‘unconscious source’ within the Ministry of Information’s Spanish section, a pretence that risked fuelling interdepartmental distrust within Whitehall just when the British embassy was trying to pursue a coherent policy on Spain that would outlive the end of the war.

  Undoubtedly, however, it was the success of the Garbo operation in tearing apart German intelligence that ensured the ascendancy within Whitehall of those most closely involved. They included Harris, Garbo’s case officer, and his friend Philby, the head of MI6 Section V, who had oversight and overall management of all the communications between Garbo and the Germans.

  Against this background it is perhaps not surprising that one English Catholic who straddled the world of diplomacy, propaganda and espionage began to feel the first pangs of vulnerability.

  13

  Liberation

  On 3 August 1944, the increasingly pro-Allied Spanish foreign minister Jordana died of a sudden heart attack and was replaced by José Félix Lequerica, Franco’s retiring ambassador to German-occupied France.

  It was at this point that Burns re-entered the power play of wartime Madrid, thanks to the close friendship the Basque-born Lequerica had developed in Paris with Burns’s father-in-law, Gregorio Marañón, during his exile in France. Following his appointment and before any formal meetings had been arranged with either the British or US embassy at any senior ambassadorial level, Lequerica, an affable bachelor who enjoyed good food and fine wines, received a secret message inviting him to dine at the Madrid flat Burns had moved into with his new bride.

  The newly married Señores de Burns had coalesced effortlessly into a much-in-demand cosmopolitan partnership on the Madrid social circuit – good-looking, energetic, and intelligent. Burns showed himself to be very much in love with his young bride, a skilful and passionate dancer like himself, who could as easily dance a flamenco as a tango or fox-trot, with a physicality that had rarely been shown by the English debutantes of his youth, and the Queen’s cousin he had mistakenly believed to be the love of his life. Daily, the self-confidence Mabel had developed while growing up under her eminent father’s tutelage and those of his intellectual and powerful friends transformed into a new maturity, capable of handling the duties required of a diplomat’s wife while retaining character and independence. She attended Lady Maud’s tea parties, and occasionally participated in the knitting circle, but always made clear that she preferred coffee and wine and that she had other pressing duties to attend to.

  With Mabel as his wife, Burns became more organised, and his contact book even more extensive. Together they turned their newly rented apartment in the picturesque Calle del Prado – one of Madrid’s better preserved old neighbourhoods – into a venue of choice for embassy colleagues, anglophile Spaniards, and those in the regime whose allegiance to the Axis cause was diminishing with each military encounter won by the Allies. From early spring onwards, the flat’s decorative roof terrace became the scene for extended sobremesas– the after-meal discussions that formed such a key part of Spanish culture.

  The speed with which the new foreign minister, Lequerica, accepted an invitation to the Burns household that last summer of the war reflected in part the growing influence of the British embassy as Nazi fortunes waned. It reaffirmed the special nature of the Marañón name, priceless in helping gain access to high-level sources within the Franco regime. And it reflected a certain pragmatism on Franco’s part. Two months after the Normandy landings, Franco realised it was time to engage more pos
itively with those likely to emerge victorious.

  That evening Mabel played her part to perfection, first overseeing the cooking and serving of dinner by her newly hired domestic staff, and then drawing away the bulk of the guests so that Lequerica – fresh from a recent meeting with the German High Command – was given the chance, as Burns would later put it, to ‘expand and let his indiscretions roll’ in private conversation. On 22 August, as Allied forces closed in on Paris, the indiscretions drawn from Lequerica at his dinner chez Burns informed a three-page memorandum from Hoare to the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed assessment of the new minister’s appointment and its implications for Allied relations with Spain.

  ‘If history were conclusive, we should be forced to conclude that he [Lequerica] is nothing better than a Falange agent who has in the last four years shown himself to be a flatterer of General Franco and a friend of the Germans,’ reported Hoare. And yet, the ambassador continued, such a judgement risked being proved over-simplistic, for friends and foes alike regarded the minister as an ‘unabashed opportunist’ who was willing to back whichever side looked like winning. ‘Being a businessman from Bilbao, the Liverpool of Spain, he is not likely to keep his money in any bankrupt concern,’ quipped Hoare.

  Hoare had been persuaded by the Foreign Office to delay his planned departure from Madrid until the end of the year and oversee certain changes of personnel within his embassy. Among the new recruits to Burns’s department sent by the Ministry of Information, with the blessing of the intelligence services, was Peter Laing, an Old Etonian and Grenadier Guards officer who had been invalided out of overseas military service before being assigned to royal protection duties at Windsor Castle. Laing had a reputation within his regiment as an eccentric prone to indiscipline, raising the possibility that his appointment may have been part of a deliberate ploy by Burns’s enemies within MI5 to disrupt the press department’s activities and undermine its chief’s position. In fact, Laing was befriended by Mabel in a mildly flirtatious way and kept on a relatively tight professional reign by his chief, Burns, who thought him too young for an embassy wartime post but nevertheless possessing some experience that made him useful to the specific mission in Spain.

  Apart from his military training and a short spell as an interpreter at General de Gaulle’s Free French headquarters in London, the twenty-two-year-old Laing’s main qualification for the job as assistant press attaché in the Madrid embassy was that he had unique and unpublicised access to useful Spanish sources in the Franco government thanks to his romantic entanglement midway through the war with Cayetana, the young daughter and only child of Franco’s ambassador to the UK, the Duke of Alba, while both were living in London.

  In early 1943, Laing was introduced to the eighteen-year-old Cayetana by Chiquita Carcaño, one of the beautiful, fashion-conscious twin daughters of the Argentinian ambassador in the UK he had befriended while studying at the Sorbonne. Cayetana Alba, the Duchess of Montoro, was descended from a noble Spanish blood line, that of Álvarez de Toledo, dating back to the feudal wars of the fourteenth century, her ancestry subsequently interwoven with a history of conquest and aristocratic interbreeding. Her artistic and outgoing personality derived inspiration from the 13th Duchess of Alba, the patron and alleged lover of the eighteenth-century painter Francisco Goya. ‘She [the Duchess of Alba] was without question one of the most beautiful women in Spain,’ wrote Goya to his friend Zapater of his muse, ‘tall, slender, and flashing dark eyes and a fine-boned face.’

  Of Cayetana at first sight, Laing would later write: ‘She was absolutely divine – piggy eyes, a little plump, but sweet, and terribly attractive.’

  Days after their first meeting in the Argentinian embassy, Laing was invited to Albury Park, the Victorian mansion in Surrey which the Duchess of Northumberland had rented to her friends the Albas as a weekend retreat during the war years. Set in more than 150 acres originally laid out by John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century diarist and horticulturalist, Albury would have seemed quite ordinary to the Albas whose palaces and estates in Spain included the magnificent neoclassical Palacio de Liria, in Madrid, where Cayetana was born amid Flemish tapestries, pillars of Siena marble and walls covered in Titians, Goyas and Rembrandts. Nevertheless, it was at Albury that the Duke of Alba hosted weekend lunches for some of Churchill’s top officials and ministers while his daughter entertained her own friends. Laing’s platonic infatuation with Tana, as she was more familiarly known, blossomed one sultry summer afternoon as he watched her languishing by the swimming pool, her true feeling tantatisingly obscured by dark glasses as she chewed on a reed.

  At times Tana’s demeanour suggested a melancholic side. She once confessed that she had never got over the loss of her mother to tuberculosis – the same disease that killed the 13th Duchess – when she was only eight years old. Two years after her mother’s death, Tana was forced to escape from Madrid with her father at the outbreak of the civil war, first to Paris, then to London, when her father was appointed Franco’s chief representative before becoming ambassador in March 1939.

  Circumstances had forced Tana to mature rather quicker than most girls of her age while leading a relatively sheltered life. Her studies were overseen by an Austrian Fräulein and her outings from the embassy, chaperoned by trusted diplomatic wives and ladies-in-waiting, included sitting for a portrait by the licentious Augustus John. While Alba’s trust in his daughter’s virtue was not misplaced on this occasion, having her pose for John was not without its risks. The artist had a weakness for attractive young women and is thought to have seduced another Spanish woman – a bride-to-be whose portrait Alba commissioned as a wedding present for her diplomat husband.

  Only occasionally did Tana’s indiscretions earn her a mention in the local gossip columns, behaviour more characteristic of her later years. One memorable occasion was the night she attended a dinner at the Dorchester Hotel as the guest of Lady Emerald Cunard, the celebrated Anglo-American London society hostess. Early on in the evening, Emerald discovered that one of the waiters was a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, and somewhat flippantly urged Tana to ‘say something to him in Spanish’. When Tana did so, the waiter replied in Catalan. There was a pause before Tana announced in English to the assembled guests, ‘He’s a Red Catalan! He’s probably gong to poison us all!’ At which point the table erupted with laughter.

  In matters of love, the young duchess had yet to find a suitable man to marry. While in wartime London Tana was rumoured to have maintained a formal and platonic relationship with a young air force officer who served as an aide to Prince Juan. But there was another side to her that craved the escapades and follies of youth, and which Laing tried to appeal to by accompanying her to some of London’s more sophisticated nightspots, such as the 400 Club in Leicester Square.

  Although his feelings for her appear not to have been reciprocated beyond a flirtatious friendship, to Tana and her girlfriends Laing cut a fine figure. An impeccably mannered and dashing young English officer, it was not long before he had secured an introduction to the Duke of Alba and, through him, to any number of influential aristocratic and military contacts in Madrid.

  When Laing arrived in Madrid the war was reaching its final stages. In that summer of 1944, the British and American embassies felt it secure enough to move the bulk of their operations to the seaside town of San Sebastián, near the Spanish–French border, away from the heat of Madrid and closer to the German retreat from southern France. At the time, there was growing concern in London and Washington about the unstable political situation north of the Pyrenees, with the German retreat prompting violent revenge on collaborators and also leading to divisions in the Resistance, between those who were communist and those who were not. The Americans and the British were anxious to counter Soviet influence. Burns was assigned to work on a propaganda operation in southern France alongside Michael Creswell, a member of MI9, the unit set up earlier in the war by British intelligence to help run the
escape lines of POWs and refugees.

  Creswell helped Burns across the border, putting him in touch with a French Resistance group which had good contacts in the local media and cinema. On the way to his first meeting, Burns was stopped on the road by an armed band of maquisards. One of them spoke to him in an impeccable Oxbridge accent. He turned out to be a British soldier who had been cut off behind enemy lines during the German advance at the beginning of the war and joined up with the Resistance, preferring to fight alongside them than return to regimental duties. He asked Burns to send a message back to his father that he was alive and well and would soon be emerging from the clandestinity in which he had been submerged for most of the war.

  Now that the war seemed to be drawing to an end, the soldier felt it was safe to break cover and asked Burns to make telegraphic contact on his behalf with his father in England. Burns had no problem with that, or with his next encounter with the French – in the person of a local doctor and Resistance leader who invited him home for lunch. On arrival, Burns was led by his host to the end of a long garden where he watched him dig out a large glass jar containing a duck preserved in aspic, which he then shared, with a bottle of wine. ‘These were days of great joy,’ he later recalled.

  Burns was followed days later into France by the British and American ambassadors in a small Allied convoy which crossed the border from Spain into French territory through Hendaye and St Jean de Luz and then on towards Biarritz.