Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Following the German surrender, however, Burns received a message from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Franco had broken off diplomatic ties with Germany. However belated and absurd the gesture may have seemed, he took it as a signal that the Allies could now step up their demands for the internment or expulsion from Spain of all Germans suspected of having links with the Nazi regime, a process that had got under way earlier in the year, and the seizing of any related assets by the Spanish state on behalf of the victorious Allies.

  A dossier prepared by the OSS’s counter-intelligence section X-2, with the cooperation of the British, detailed the extent of ‘German penetration of Spain, illegal currency transfers, smuggled works of art, and plans by French collaborators, pro-Nazi individuals, and covert organisations to use Spain as a post-war hideout – as well as integration of German technicians into the Spanish military’, reported one of its operatives. X-2 identified nearly fifty Spanish firms suspected of being used by Germany for espionage purposes, some three thousand agents in Spain and more than four hundred members of ‘enemy clandestine services’.

  Before VE Day was over, Burns was taken by a group of officials from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the German embassy to officially ‘liberate’ it from Nazi occupation. The Nazis had vacated the building in an operation staggered over a number of months, the exodus seemingly completed just hours before Burns arrived. Missing were works of art, and documents which had been removed or destroyed. The only remaining pieces of furniture were some chairs, office desks and filing cabinets, all of which were empty. In one of them Burns found a Mauser pistol and a large number of Iron Crosses, many of them apparently intended for the Spanish volunteers who had fought for the Blue Division on the eastern front. Burns pocketed them all, then climbed on to the roof and hoisted the Union Jack.

  14

  Aftermath

  One day during the final autumn of the war the British embassy in Madrid’s long serving military attaché, the blimpish Brigadier Torr, burst into Burns’s office and declared: ‘Congratulations, Tom, you are a “Call-me-God” in the embassy honours list.’ Days earlier, on 19 October, the retiring ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, had written to Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, recommending that Burns be awarded ‘some honour’ for wartime services but without specifying whether it should be a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) or the lower grade Order of the British Empire (OBE), as had been periodically awarded to other chiefs of branches within the embassy.

  ‘He [Burns] has done most remarkable work in Spain, from almost nothing to something very big,’ Hoare wrote. ‘In addition to this, he has made himself one of the most popular personalities of Spain.’

  Hoare’s valedictory book of memoirs published after the war paid special tribute to Burns’s press and information department. ‘Under his vigorous direction, an insignificant section of the Embassy had developed into a great and imposing organisation.’

  And yet Burns’s enemies returned to haunt him during his final months in Madrid, and many years would pass before he was honoured with any medal for services to his country.

  One of his more influential detractors surfaced weeks after Torr’s premature announcement, when Burns returned to London on what was to prove his final stretch of leave, granted on compassionate grounds following the death of his baby son.

  The new offensive against Burns’s reputation was launched by Sir Kenneth Grubb, one of the senior officials at the Ministry of Information. Grubb was a former evangelical lay missionary whose fundamentalist Protestantism put him at odds with Burns. The theological divide fuelled a mutual animosity from the moment each was recruited to the MoI at the outbreak of the war, although a formal confrontation was deferred until the war was coming to its conclusion.

  During the war years, Burns grew in his view of Grubb as a fastidious puritan and bureaucrat with a patronising Anglo-Saxon attitude on matters related to the Spanish-speaking world. Grubb, for his part, despised Burns as an insubordinate loose cannon – a ‘foreigner’ who had been allowed by the embassy to get above himself and had ‘gone native’ in Spain, defying the MoI’s attempts to control him.

  Burns spent the war years happily making use of whatever propaganda material and funds that were supplied to him by the MoI while considering his line of duty lay with his ambassador, the Foreign Office and Churchill via his effective intelligence chief in Madrid, the naval attaché Captain Hillgarth, and others with whom he had a mutual trust on intelligence matters.

  Only with Hoare’s withdrawal from Madrid did Grubb sense an opportunity to punish Burns for his perceived insubordination. To distract him from his real intention, Grubb invited Burns to lunch at the Travellers Club in London for what he claimed would be a routine update briefing on policy matters. It was only at coffee that Grubb turned suddenly and remarked, with what Burns took for a smirk, that he had blocked Hoare’s attempts to have him decorated for his wartime work. ‘By the way, I’m sorry I had to knock you off the embassy honours list; I thought too many RCs [Roman Catholics] were getting gongs,’ Grubb said.

  While Burns would later recall the incident as evidence of enduring religious bigotry within the British state, the action against him was taken against the background, days earlier, of a final concerted attempt by Burns’s enemies in the intelligence community to paint him as a traitor.

  Encouraged by Philby and Tomás Harris, and drawing on a report written by Anthony Blunt on his monitoring of suspect Spaniards, MI5’s head of counter intelligence, Captain Guy Liddell, wrote a scathing denunciation of Burns in a secret memorandum to Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of Britain’s wartime Joint Intelligence Committe, and Whitehall’s spy supremo. Blunt claimed that while Burns had been on leave in London the press attaché had failed to report his suspicions that six Spanish journalists who were being repatriated from Berlin to Spain via London might have been working as German agents. No evidence was provided to substantiate the claim, but the mere allegation made on hearsay by an unidentified source was sufficient for Liddell to vigorously pursue the case against Burns.

  Liddell wrote on 17 July 1945: ‘This might of course be considered a minor sin of omission but as you know we have long felt some concern about the activities of Burns who, during the course of the last four years, has pressed for the admission of undesirable Spanish journalists to the UK, on the doubtful grounds that they were going to do so much for Anglo-Spanish relations. In fact three or four of these people whose cases he sponsored have subsequently turned out to be German agents. In fact they were almost notoriously so in Spain before they started. Burns has moreover explicitly stated his view that he is not interested in security and was not concerned to know that the Spanish correspondents whom he was recommending as suitable to work in this country were in fact German agents. I do not know whether there is anything to be done about this but to say the least it does seem that Burns has been singularly ill-chosen for the job.’

  Cavendish-Bentinck spent a week looking into the allegations and consulting others in government about Burns. The prejudice felt in some quarters against a spy who had never quite fitted into the Establishment because of his faith and background was deeply rooted, as was evident in the profile that was made of him. ‘He is an Anglo-Chilean, aged 39, but we do not know whether he is first or second generation born abroad – at any rate his English is at times of a rather foreign nature,’ noted Cavendish-Bentinck in his report on Burns. The comment contained a glaring falsehood. Burns, though born in Chile, had been brought up and raised in England, and his accent was pure public school, without a trace of ‘foreignness’.

  The intelligence chief did admit nevertheless to finding no evidence supporting the suggestion that Burns was sponsoring the activities of the Germans. All Cavendish-Bentinck unearthed was an administrative blunder earlier on in the war for which Burns was not held directly responsible: the apparent loss of some low-grade correspondence between
the MoI and the embassy. ‘In 1940 there was some minor hanky-panky regarding misuse of the [diplomatic] bag in which however the Ministry of Information themselves were as much responsible as Burns,’ he noted. The ‘hanky-panky’ had occurred while Burns was still working at the MoI headquarters in Senate House, prior to his posting to Madrid. It had involved the smuggling of propaganda material, paid for by a slush fund approved by his superiors. There may also have been a reference to the unfortunate incident, reported in an earlier chapter, in which Burns, with backing from the Foreign Office, arranged for the pro-Francoist agent, the Marques del Moral, to be paid for information while working in Madrid, only to discover that the agent had been double-billing the British government.

  Cavendish-Bentinck reported that any such misdemeanours had apparently been compensated for by the high-level intelligence Burns had secured through his unrivalled penetration of the Franco regime. ‘Such reports from Burns which have been forwarded by the Ambassador to this Office have generally met with approval,’ he wrote.

  Critically, however, Cavendish-Bentinck went on to warn that the vendetta a sector of MI5 was pursuing threatened to be counterproductive, as it risked compromising Spaniards and their handlers who were involved in the double-cross game. He concluded, ‘If any action were to be taken [against Burns] it would be necessary to reveal the sources of our information and, as Burns does not appear to have committed many gross crimes in the past I doubt whether any action is desirable in the present case.’

  The report saved Burns from any disciplinary action against him. With hindsight it was ironic, nonetheless, that the latest attack on him was prompted by information provided by Blunt, a traitor who, as was subsequently discovered, had spent his time with MI5 during the Second World War sharing all the secret intelligence he handled with Moscow.

  If Blunt and his friends were allowed to operate for a while unsuspected and unrestrained it was because Russia was still considered a wartime ally and the political climate in Britain on matters Spanish was turning in their favour. By the summer of 1945 the change in the public mood was reflected in a headline carried in the Daily Herald on the eve of the first post-war General Election: ‘A Vote for Churchill is a Vote for Franco’ reflected the certainty that the majority of British voters saw Franco’s Spain as the last bastion of fascism in Europe. And the suspicion that Churchill’s policy of non-intervention to keep Spain neutral in the war was also responsible for keeping the dictator in power.

  By now the whispering campaign against Burns had surfaced with a vengeance in Tribune, the socialist newspaper which, at the end of the war included members of the British Communist as well as the Labour Party on its editorial board. ‘Spaniards must be really puzzled over the British outlook. This democracy of ours, which is swinging so hard to the Left, is still presented in Madrid by a Press attaché who is an outstanding friend of the Franco regime and married into the inner ranks,’ commented the newspaper’s diarist.

  The new Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had no wish to commit Britain to another military intervention in Europe once the war with Germany was over and opted for symbolic political gestures against the Franco regime rather than any substantive change of policy towards Spain. In a gesture of solidarity with the left, he ordered that any further honours that may have been recommended for the embassy in Madrid be quickly withdrawn, particularly from those most directly associated with the policy of appeasement towards Franco.

  Burns was not surprised by the news of his honours snub, which he was told by Whitehall friends had as much to do with politics as with his faith and was no reflection on his professional competence. He was nonetheless furious that it had come from his old enemy, the Protestant Grubb, in an unholy alliance with those who had always opposed him, for ideological reasons, over Spain. The anti-Franco camp in the UK had been reinforced by an opportunistic U-turn by Hoare, and the signing by the Duke of Alba of a manifesto calling for the return of the monarchy.

  The political shift against the Franco regime left Hoare’s successor as ambassador Sir Victor Mallet ostensibly with little room to manoeuvre when he arrived in Madrid in July 1945, just as the Labour Party was being propelled to power in Britain. Compared to his previous posting in neutral Sweden, where he had been given a reasonably free hand to deal with local problems as they arose, Mallet found that Spain was ‘politically gunpowder’. As he later recalled, it soon became only too evident from instructions received from London that official relations with the Franco regime had to be restrained and personal cordiality eschewed.

  And yet Franco’s determination to stay in power had more coherence than the Labour government’s plans for removing him, as the newly arrived ambassador was only too quick to notice. In his first statement to the House of Commons, Ernest Bevin said that it was up to the Spanish to decide their future. The British government would adopt a ‘favourable view’ if steps were taken by the Spanish people to change the regime, but His Majesty’s Government would not itself do anything which would risk provoking another civil war – in other words the overarching policy towards Spain remained passive and non-interventionist, just as it had been under the Conservatives.

  Mallet felt frustrated and unconvinced. He wrote: ‘A series of suggestions kept reaching me from London that various discredited left wing exiles from the War now living in London like Negrín, or like Giral in Mexico should be encouraged to form a provisional government which would be recognised by the great powers. What this recognition could possibly do to help was by no means clear because Franco was still obviously in full command of the country, his power resting on the three pillars of Army, the Church and Big Business, with the support of the Falange which, however, was becoming rather an embarrassment.’

  In a clear strategy aimed at defusing the enmity of the victorious democracies, Franco had appointed a conservative Christian Democrat, Alberto Martín Artajo, as his new foreign minister. His task was to cultivate the image of Franco as an authoritarian Catholic leader, increasingly distanced from the Falange – as opposed to that of the fascist dictator, which is how the Marxist left saw him – and to accelerate the process of denazification the Allies had demanded.

  Martín Artajo was a lawyer with interests in Catholic publishing whom Burns had known and maintained cordial relations with since before the war. On his appointment to government he agreed to a series of secret meetings with Burns, outside the official diplomatic protocol, knowing that he would get a sympathetic hearing and that his views would be reported back to London.

  It was from these meetings that Mallet drew his intelligence on the political direction of the regime, and tried to influence the Foreign Office, much to the chagrin of those like the Soviet ambassador in London, Feodor Gousev, who wished, like his boss Stalin, to have the Allies break off relations with Franco and offer support to ‘democratic forces’.

  Gousev was convinced that Franco was trying to consolidate his position and ‘throwing dust in the eyes of the Allies’ by announcing that he intended to hold elections at some point in the future.

  Undoubtedly the Burns/Martín Artajo nexus was used by Franco to help him buy time, resisting foreign pressure for immediate democratic change following the collapse of the Axis powers. And yet British policy of continuing non-intervention appears, nevertheless, to have based itself on an accurate reading of Spain’s internal political situation at the end of the war.

  Franco’s own police reports may have talked up the threat of the left being heartened by the defeat of the Axis, anti-Falangist sentiments may have stirred in Catholic and military circles and some former followers of the regime, including the Duke of Alba, may have dreamt that the restoration of the monarchy was imminent, but the fact remained that the opposition to Franco inside Spain’s border and within the Spanish exiled community lacked a powerful unifying organisation, still less a common ideology, ranging as it did from anarchists on the left to virulently anti-communist aristocrats on the right.

 
; In early August 1945, the British ambassador Mallet wrote to the Foreign Office from his summer residence in San Sebastián describing the ‘war weariness’ that he felt gripped the majority of Spaniards and warning the Allies against supporting or provoking a military uprising, not least because the army remained largely supportive of Franco. In the last stages of the war, the US military had refused to bow to increasing pressure both from domestic American opinion and the anti-Franco resistance fighters that straddled the French-Spanish border to push on into Spain when Allied troops liberated south-east France.

  Mallet attached to his dispatch an eight-page memorandum he had received from Burns soon after he had taken up his ambassadorial posting in Madrid, based on the secret conversations Burns had had with Martín Artajo, the minister nicknamed the ‘pious elephant’ because of his Catholicism and heavy build.

  Burns had told Martín Artajo how struck he had been on his recent visit to London by what seemed a unanimity and depth of feeling against General Franco among new members of Parliament.

  Martín Artajo, however, had little trouble in persuading Burns of his sincerity in arguing that British public opinion was gravely misinformed about Spanish politics. Far from being an unpopular tyrant, Franco counted on the support of the ‘great mass of the Spanish people’ who had suffered from the ‘reds’ during the Spanish Civil War and were enormously grateful to El Caudillo not only for saving their country from anarchy but also keeping it out of the Second World War.

  But Martín Artajo was much too astute a lawyer to think that an experienced observer of the Spanish scene such as Burns would easily ignore the aspirations of many Spaniards for some kind of democratic opening capable of freeing Spain from its international isolation.