Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  ‘The road was lined with cheering crowds of French people – men, women, and children, peasants and townspeople, priests and nuns, wounded veterans and “resistance” youths,’ wrote the American ambassador Hayes. ‘Heaps of flowers were tossed into our path and through the car windows, and when we were halted by the press of people, babies were handed in to be kissed.’ When the convoy reached Biarritz, the streets were festooned with British and American, and occasionally Russian, flags.

  After the ambassadors had withdrawn back across the border, Burns got to work enlisting the support of trusted members of the Resistance. Initial attempts to bribe a local newspaper, La Résistance Républicaine, and to influence the production and mass distribution of special liberation issues – with editorial content suggested by the British – ran into difficulties because of an acute paper shortage, and political differences within its seven-member editorial committee, which included one monarchist and a communist.

  Burns had more success in distributing propaganda material sent by the MoI. Large quantities of British press photographs, posters, illustrated reviews and other publicity material were circulated in Bayonne, Biarritz, St Jean de Luz and Hendaye. British newsreels were, meanwhile, shown in local cinemas, from Bordeaux to Pau, including a documentary entitled Tunisian Victory from the North African campaign. ‘It has gone a long way to reassure the French population that His Majesty’s Government was interested in keeping them informed and in countering the subtle effects of German propaganda over the four years [of war],’ Creswell reported to the embassy.

  Other congratulatory notes credited Burns with a skilful propaganda coup in difficult circumstances, raising morale at a time when the last stages of the war threatened to drain the mission in Madrid of any sense of moral purpose.

  Within weeks of his return, across the border, to San Sebastián, his wife gave premature birth to their first child. Mabel had suffered a miscarriage during the first weeks of their marriage, so that the successful delivery of a seemingly healthy baby was initially a source of huge joy. While undecided on his Christian name, Burns and Mabel immediately nicknamed the boy El Inglesito, the Little Englishman, in tribute to the Allied cause. Then, only days old, the baby developed respiratory problems and died.

  Overwhelmed with grief, the couple placed their child in a small white coffin and took him to the local cemetery where he was laid to rest in the marble mausoleum belonging to Mabel’s Basque cousins.

  The many letters of condolence included one from Burns’s embassy colleague John Walters, who was deeply affected on a personal level – it reminded him of the loss of a dear family member, deepening an alcohol addiction that had been developing through the war. ‘This is the most appalling news,’ wrote Walters. ‘I am so horrified and so sorry for you and for Mabel that the only way I can express a small part of my deep sympathy is to let you know, honestly, that in all my experience of the tragedies of life there have only been two occasions when I have felt the shock of sudden sorrow so acutely …’

  On 25 October 1944 Burns wrote to Harman Grisewood at the BBC to alert him to the news: ‘… I’m writing just to let you know that we had a sad thing: a baby boy came a month before his time and wasn’t quite strong enough and died after 48 hours: there was a strong shock of loss and yet he was God-given, God-taken in such a swoop as to leave more significance than sorrow and Mabel is building up again in a most wonderful way …’

  A few weeks later Burns wrote to David Jones telling him how he had managed to bear the pain of loss around El Inglesito’s death thanks to the deepening love he and Mabel found in each other.

  After a period on compassionate leave, Burns returned to his embassy duties, only to find the relations he had built up with the Franco regime under threat. Within days of his return to London, the retiring ambassador Hoare delivered a strong critique of the Franco regime in a talk to his Chelsea constituents and then followed this up, on October 16th 1944, with a similarly scathing memorandum to the Foreign Office. Hoare condemned Franco’s Spain as fascist and collaborationist, and, while ruling out direct intervention, suggested that the Allies should use whatever methods were available to bring about his downfall. The statement represented a dramatic personal U-turn for Hoare, effectively throwing to the four winds the cautious crisis-averse diplomacy he himself had imposed on his embassy since 1940.

  Burns felt betrayed, and came as close as he could to openly criticising his former chief in a letter he wrote to the Foreign Office. In it Burns argued that the speech risked hurting Spanish national pride and thus boosting support for Franco, although his main concern was that it had badly let down those who had assisted the Allied cause from within the regime. He told Hoare: ‘The effect [of your speech] has been frankly bad among many of our friends … these never had an advocate in their own press, nor were they specially protected by the police, but they felt that they had an understanding friend in you who would wave them a cordial goodbye from London and let it be known there that they were not so bad as propaganda painted them.’

  Much had changed since that first encounter between Burns and Hoare in the late summer of 1940 when the two men had buried whatever prejudices – formed by faith and background – might have otherwise separated them in pursuit of what seemed then a straightforward common cause. During the four years of the war, Burns had developed his passionate interest in Spanish affairs in a way that, to his enemies in Whitehall, confirmed him as an unreconstructed pro-Francoist Catholic. Those who wished to tarnish his reputation further insinuated that he had become an enemy agent. By 1944 Burns’s beliefs remained unshaken, however misplaced they may have seemed to others.

  By contrast Hoare, with one eye on his political future, had in the final year of the war desperately tried to shake off the curse of appeaser that had hung around his neck since Abyssinia, adopting towards the end of his posting an uncompromising attitude towards Franco’s Spain just at the time when it appeared to be positioning itself to serve the West as a strategically important ally in post-war Europe.

  In truth, Hoare had struggled from the outset of his posting to like a country whose politics and culture he instinctively regarded as alien. His accommodation with the Spanish Catholic Church was the fruit of diplomatic opportunism and only in part based on his theological sympathy, as a member of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Anglican Church, with the sacrificial nature of the priesthood, and the sacramental aspect of the Mass. But contrary to what the German embassy propaganda mischievously rumoured, Hoare had never converted to Rome, nor did he have any intention of doing so. That would have been a betrayal of his Englishness. Hoare’s attitude to the Spanish as a whole was essentially colonialist, regarding them simply as pawns of British interests, while increasingly resentful of the rival influence of the United States. In the end Hoare grew tired of Spain and its idiosyncrasies to the point of being hugely relieved at getting rid of them, with his attitude towards the people, their army and their rulers not unlike that once expressed by Wellington in the aftermath of the Peninsular War. Both men looked upon the Spaniards, as they did the Indians, as a lesser race.

  With the Foreign Office in no apparent hurry to send a new ambassador, the British embassy in Madrid was left temporarily under the management of Jim Bowker as chargé d’affaires, with Burns the most senior and longest-serving member of staff as his deputy.

  The day after Hoare had made his outspoken criticism of the Franco regime in London, Burns met one of his contacts, Gabriel Arias Salgado, Spain’s undersecretary of state for education.

  Arias Salgado was not only directly related to Franco but also one of his most trusted ministers at this time. At the meeting, Burns was greeted with a well-calculated counter-blast. The minister told him that it was absurd for Hoare to have complained about the activities in Spain of German intelligence when he knew only too well that British intelligence had been as active in the country throughout the war, if not more so, in defiance of Spain’s neutral status, while at
the same time protected by it.

  Not only this, Arias Salgado told Burns, but all the proof had fallen into Franco’s hands, including twenty-six transmitters of British origin seized by Spanish police, and a police report denouncing Burns himself as perhaps the biggest spy of them all, and the dictator had chosen to turn a blind eye.

  As for the future, Arias Salgado reminded Burns, Spain should be allowed to choose her own post-war development without foreign intervention. If there was a future for Anglo-Spanish relations, Franco’s minister suggested it was in a common Christian heritage capable of resisting the spread of Bolshevism in Europe.

  With Arias Salgado ‘rattling off with nervous intensity’, Burns had thought it prudent to listen patiently before offering a measured reply. It was time, he suggested to the minister as delicately as he could, for the Spanish government to recognise that there were ‘moral issues’ at stake in the war that were important for the future of the whole world.

  Moreover, while Britain respected ‘technical neutrality’ and, indeed, had asked for nothing more from Spain, London was no longer in the mood to accept ‘moral neutrality’.

  Asked by Arias Salgado what he meant by this, Burns replied: ‘I have never seen a word of blame addressed to Germany in the Spanish press in four years, no criticism of the Nazi threat to Europe or of the barbarities committed by the Nazis.’

  Franco’s government in the last weeks of the Second World War appeared to be a regime in denial, not just in its refusal to accept any guilt over collaboration with the Axis powers from the outset of the civil war to the final days of the Second World War, but, crucially, in its inability to accept and project through the national media the true nature of Nazism as it had manifested itself in the concentration camps.

  The situation presented the press section in the British embassy in Madrid with a fresh challenge in propaganda terms. Its response was to suggest that Spanish journalists should be included in a media visit the combined Allied command was organising to the concentration camp at Dachau. The move drew Burns into renewed conflict with his enemies in British intelligence, for one of the journalists he proposed for the visit, Carlos Sentis, had been placed on a list of suspects by Kim Philby’s friends in MI5 because of his pro-Franco leanings.

  According to British intelligence files, during the civil war, Sentís had worked as a spy for Franco in Paris, using his cover as a journalist to report secretly on pro-Republican Spanish refugees, among them the fugitive former Spanish correspondent in Berlin, Eugenio Xammar, with whom he shared a flat for a while. Sentís later flew to London and covered the aftermath of the abdication crisis, before publishing a sympathetic if light-hearted book about the British and their democratic institutions. He opened his preface with the comment that he considered journalism to be a great sport in peacetime and espionage in wartime, a statement which even his close friends considered to be crassly indiscreet.

  When Franco assumed power, Sentís joined the government administration as a member of the staff of the Falangist minister without portfolio, Rafael Sánchez Mazas. He also pursued his career as a freelance journalist, with his main articles published in the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia, whose Catalan owner, the Count of Godó, was regarded by the British as pro-Allied.

  With the outbreak of War in Europe, Sentis initiated a discreet relationship with the British embassy in Madrid where he was regarded as a useful source and supporter of the Allied cause despite his links with media outlets of more dubious ideological credentials. They included Radio Mundial, a Madrid-based radio station that broadcast relatively balanced reports on the progress of the war to Latin America and yet was suspected by British intelligence of being financed by the Germans.

  It was in the autumn of 1942 that Burns first unequivocally championed Sentís as a useful agent of Allied propaganda, recommending in a letter to the head of the Spanish section at the MoI, Billy McCann, that he be allowed to be posted as the new London correspondent of the Spanish news agency EFE. ‘He [Sentís] has been pretty coy in his relations with me but is, I am convinced, very well disposed and certainly would not play the double game,’ Burns wrote.

  At the time he made the request Burns appears to have been unaware of the protracted secret campaign his enemies in MI5 and MI6 were conducting to have him sacked because of his pro-Franco views and his record of recommending Spanish journalists suspected of being German agents. Burns had survived thanks to the trust invested in him by his ambassador, and the support he enjoyed within the Foreign Office and from other members of the intelligence community. But he now faced additional accusations of furthering the cause of the enemy.

  McCann contacted Tomás Harris at MI5 to tell him what he knew about Sentís. He had just read Sentis’s book, La Europa que he visto morir (The Europe that I Have Seen Dying), and concluded that it contained ‘no gibes at England of any kind’. McCann went on, ‘Personally I know Carlos Sentís very well: he is a Catalan, and in my opinion, well disposed towards us.’ He recalled that he got to know Sentís when they were both living in the Palace Hotel during the first year of the war. ‘He was friendly and, when I was having trouble with the Gestapo, he offered to help me if I got into any real difficulties.’

  McCann had met Sentís again on a more recent visit to Madrid. Sentís was now married and living in a ‘very expensive way’ in a luxurious apartment the Duke of Alba had built near the Palacio de Liria. He asked McCann to use his influence to allow Radio Mundial material into Latin America, arguing that it would help Allied interests by keeping German material out of the local press.

  McCann had told Sentís to contact Burns despite lingering doubts over the true loyalties of both men. ‘My own personal opinion of Carlos Sentís is that he is a pleasant and gifted young man, who finds the Fascist way of life alien to his own idea of life. At the same time, he has a taste for high living and a great love of money, and if the Germans were paying him enough I am convinced that he would work for them even if he knew it was against his real feelings,’ McCann wrote on 7 October 1942. With the Sentís case the subject of ongoing correspondence between the MoI and the secret services, Burns faced intense lobbying by the Franco regime. In December that year he was visited by Gregorio Marañón, the young Falangist son of the doctor and his future brother-in-law, a close friend of Sentís who had also been recruited into the state apparatus.

  Marañón showed Burns a telegram sent to Franco’s Director General of Press by José Brugada, the assistant press attaché in the Spanish embassy in London. It reported that Sentís would be declared persona non grata as a correspondent in the UK. ‘This communication from Brugada was shown to me in confidence and naturally you will not let him know that I have seen it,’ Burns subsequently wrote to McCann. Neither Burns nor the young Marañón, it seemed, realised that Brugada had been recruited by a section of MI5 as a double agent, code-named Peppermint.

  Burns told McCann that Marañón had told him he could not imagine a person better suited to report on British affairs than Sentís, ‘judging from his earlier record and his well-known [pro-Allied] sympathies’. It was a view with which Burns concurred. However, as Burns told Marañón, it was perhaps ‘quite natural’ that in general London was not enthusiastic about giving a positive answer after its experiences with Luis Calvo, Alcázar de Velasco and other Spanish journalists suspected of being German agents. The Spanish regime, moreover, had not helped matters, Burns told Marañón, by continuing to censor heavily the reports sent by the one remaining London-based journalist, Felipe Fernández Armesto, who wrote under the pseudonym Augusto Assia.

  Days later Sentís’s accreditation request was officially blocked by MI5. The case file on Sentis had been updated by MI5’s Iberian desk officer Dick Broomham-White with information provided by Tomás Harris and Kim Philby. Their ‘sources’ had taken the view that Sentís was ‘untrustworthy’, ‘arriviste’ and a ‘snake’.

  Broomham-White urged the intelligence services not to place any reliance on any
recommendations from Burns given the precedent set by the Calvo affair. And yet Broomham-White’s file makes clear that his section was opposed to Sentís’s arrival in the UK not because they had any evidence that he might be a German spy but on the basis that his professional journalism might undermine the double-cross game the secret services were conducting through the Spanish embassy in London.

  ‘At present the main Spanish source of information to the [Spanish] Embassy is under our control and has been used for passing over deception material. It would be most unfortunate from our point of view if a new Spanish press correspondent arrived in this country who had access to the Fleet Street gossip and provided an independent source which might supply information contradicting that which we were trying to put across through our controlled channel,’ wrote Broomham-White. He thus assumed that MI5’s double-cross system had priority status over anybody else’s handling of agents, however important the latter was in diplomatic and propaganda terms. It was a view shared by several of his MI5 colleagues and those who straddled the influential XX Committee, but which was disputed by other members of the intelligence community, and within government departments such as the Foreign Office and the MoI.

  It would take another three and half years before Burns got positive vindication of the accreditation of Sentís, with his enemies in MI5 no longer able to sustain a convincing case against him. In May 1945 Burns successfully arranged to have Sentís imbedded with US troops in Germany after first flying him to London and being accredited there as a journalist. He and his colleague Fernández Armesto subsequently covered the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg trials for the two leading Spanish newspapers ABC and La Vanguardia. The scenes witnessed at Dachau proved particularly poignant for a Spanish readership, as details emerged of the brutality with which the Nazis treated the prisoners, one-third of whom were Jews, in addition to an estimated three thousand Catholic nuns, priests and bishops, some of whom were subsequently beatified by the Pope.