by Jimmy Burns
Thus he gave Burns to understand that given time, Franco would be prepared to pave the way for a peaceful transfer of power to the ‘most responsible’ political elements in Spain, which, in their shared view, were found not on the left but towards the centre, including like-minded Christian democrats and supporters of Don Juan, the Bourbon prince in exile. The future of Spain lay in patience, not revolution in other words. It was a message Burns had no qualms about transmitting to his new ambassador.
On August 6 1945 he wrote: ‘A violent or provocative act or gesture from the outside just now … might well plunge Spaniards once more into one of the reckless metaphysical moods to which they are so prone, making them defiant of measurable standards and ultimately destructive of themselves and of all understanding … any idea that there can be a swift and radical change of the present regime into something more representative without bloodshed and violence on a large scale must be rejected …’
In the final weeks of 1945 Burns tried to get his father-in-law Gregorio Marañón named ambassador in London. The idea was conjured up with the help of his friend Martín Artajo but was blocked by Franco. Before the year was out, another contact of Burns’s, the former foreign minister Serrano Súñer, had written to his brother-in-law Franco suggesting he name Marañón a minister in a government of national unity which would also include other intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset and the Catalan politician Francesco Cambó. This, too, Franco vetoed.
According to Franco’s biographer Paul Preston, Franco distrusted Marañón as ‘someone who would be loyal to higher ideals than the survival in power of Franco’. In their continuing exchanges, Burns and Martín Artajo had concurred that Marañón was among the few intellectuals who could lay claim to the respect of the majority of Spaniards. His political background was that of a founder and onetime liberal supporter of the Republic whose anti-communism had led him, in the end, to back Franco in the civil war, in the hope that, once it was over, he would oversee the establishment of a political system to which most Spaniards could feel they belonged.
But while Franco had agreed, under pressure from his advisers, to allow Marañón back from exile in 1942 – as a way of contributing to a sense of normality – he thought the idea of bringing Marañón into government a step too far and too soon in the direction of democracy. In fact, it would take another thirty-two years for the Spanish people to vote for the kind of regime they wanted in free and democratic elections and by then Marañón and many of his generation were long dead.
In Spain the end of the Second World War brought a reckoning of sorts. Burns’s final weeks there saw him helping his British and American colleagues draw up a priority list for the urgent repatriation of 257 German officials and agents considered a security and political risk. It proved a protracted and inconclusive affair, with just over a hundred repatriated by the end of 1946, seventy being given the right to remain in Spain and the rest unaccounted for, having changed their names before starting new lives in South America. Such was the case of Reinhardt Spitzy, private secretary to Hitler’s foreign minister Ribbentrop, who escaped to Argentina in 1947, along with countless other Nazis.
Those repatriated to Germany included Wilhelm Leissner (alias Gustav Lenz), who had served as the head of German military espionage in Spain for most of the war. His assistant, Kurt Meyer-Döhner, the naval attaché, got a job working for the Spanish Admiralty. Similarly the police attaché and Gestapo representative Walter Eugene Mosig fled from an internment camp before returning to a discreet post with the Spanish General Directorate of Security.
Other Nazis gave up the spying game and became successful businessmen in post-war Spain, setting up residences and hotels along the country’s southern coast in anticipation of what became one of Europe’s fastest growing tourist economies from the late 1950s onwards. Among them was Johannes Bernhardt, one of the chief organisers of German military and economic aid to Spain and a personal friend of Franco. Also granted residence in Spain after a short period in a detention camp in Caldas del Rey were two brothers, Adolfo and Luis Clauss, who were working for German intelligence in Huelva at the time of Operation Mincemeat. They returned to the south of Spain and developed a successful family business in construction while becoming substantial landowners on the border with Portugal.
But the most elaborate escape from prosecution involved the Nazi with whom Burns had competed personally in his battle for the hearts and minds of wartime Spaniards. On 6 February 1946, coincidentally the same day that Burns’s return to the UK was officially noted by the Spanish authorities, the German embassy’s press attaché, spy and propaganda chief Hans Lazar eluded an order for his arrest.
A week later, Lazar reappeared in the form of a letter to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that he had been recovering in a hospital in Madrid after an operation for acute appendicitis. An enclosed photograph showed the once impeccably dressed Lazar, naked from the waist upwards, looking drawn and emaciated, as if he were dying of some terminal disease.
The photograph, cynically mirroring the image of a concentration camp survivor, was almost certainly fabricated – black propaganda of the kind Lazar was a master at creating. With it came a plea from Lazar that he be granted Spanish nationality, or at worst repatriated to his ‘native’ Austria rather than Germany. ‘The only case that can be held against me is that during a particular period of time I served as a member of the German embassy,’ Lazar wrote disingenuously.
Lazar was never arrested. Instead, Franco showed a leniency towards him, and to other Nazis, that he denied to thousands of Spaniards who were either executed or condemned to long prison sentences under his regime. Lazar was allowed to disappear quietly and without trace for several years until his case had ceased to be of interest to the Allies. Eight years passed before Lazar remerged as a freelance journalist and commentator in West Germany. In an article published in a Hamburg newspaper just before Christmas 1953, Lazar lashed out at the evils of communism and portrayed Franco as a bastion of Western Christian values.
By then the Cold War was under way, following the East/West crisis of the Berlin blockade, and London and Washington had long ceased to view pursuing ex-Nazis as a priority. Meanwhile, the majority of those who had played important roles in the British embassy in wartime Madrid had long moved on to pastures new anyway. From the comfort of his Chelsea home, the ennobled British ambassador to wartime Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare – Lord Templewood – wrote his memoirs, entitled Ambassador on Special Mission, which aimed to justify his policy towards Franco’s Spain and why, in the end, he had turned against it. In the words of Sir Victor Mallet, his successor, Hoare’s reminiscences were written in a generally ‘spiteful and exaggerated tone with the main object of redounding in his own glory’. For a brief spell Hoare was engaged in an unseemly row with his American counterpart Carlton Hayes, who, in his own memoirs, accused Hoare of imperial arrogance and of failing to understand the true nature of Spain as some of his subordinates, including Burns, had.
Hoare served out the twilight of his political years as an opposition peer, his dreams of leading the Conservative Party shattered by Labour’s post-war electoral success and feeling increasingly embittered by the decline of the British Empire and America’s emergence as the dominant Western power. He tried to remain active in the post-war parliament, helping get the 1948 Criminal Justice Bill through, opposing capital punishment, and becoming chairman of the Magistrates’ Association and the anti-slavery movement. He was also appointed president of the Lawn Tennis Association and became a regular fixture at the annual Wimbledon tournament.
Hoare’s trusted adviser on intelligence matters, Captain Hillgarth, spent his retirement pursuing investments in Spain with his old friend Juan March while maintaining his contacts with MI6. Hillgarth converted to Catholicism, and chose Burns as his godfather for reception into the Catholic Church. Out of Burns’s team, John Walters returned to journalism, while John Stordy joined the BBC and subsequently the
UN. Peter Laing stayed on in the Madrid embassy before turning to freelance writing on Spanish affairs and investing in Spanish real estate.
Among the service chiefs of Hoare’s embassy, the military attaché Brigadier Torr became a farmer, and his assistant, Alan Lubbock, a Hampshire squire as Lord Lieutenant of the county. Hamilton Stokes, the MI6 station chief in Madrid, was briefly put in charge of Iberian affairs in London, receiving and distributing reports from Spain, Portugal and West Africa. Suffering from bad eyesight, made worse by the neon lighting in MI6’s ageing offices in Ryder Street, he retired in 1945 to become secretary of the Dublin Yacht Club. He was replaced as Iberian station chief under cover of Second Secretary, British Embassy, Chancery division, by Desmond Bristow, who had also served in the embassy in wartime Madrid. In 1947, Bristow replaced the new head of MI6’s Madrid station, David Thomson, who had been forced to resign after one of his agents had been caught in possession of Spanish War Office papers. With the cover of Second Secretary, Bristow kept track of Nazis, communist agents and the internal machinations of Franco’s regime. Within a year of his arrival, the British embassy found itself having to increase its reporting on the state of prisoners held in Spanish jails, an issue of concern to Labour backbench MPs.
The task of attending political trials and visiting prisons was given to the longest surviving member of the Madrid embassy staff, Bernard Malley, who had worked as assistant press attaché to Burns throughout the war and had subsequently been confirmed on a permanent contract as a locally employed counsellor. With his staunch Catholic views and pro-Franco contacts, the former seminarian continued to play a useful role as a well-placed informant on Spanish internal affairs, although the British remained diplomatically ineffectual in moderating Franco’s appalling human rights record.
Burns, like Malley, came to benefit from the fact that the Cold War shifted the focus of attention of the British foreign policy and of the security and intelligence services away from fascism towards communism, putting pressure on the Soviet moles who had infiltrated the British state from the late 1930s. Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, two intelligence officers who had spent much of the war trying to get Burns sacked for alleged disloyalty to the Allied cause, were belatedly exposed as Soviet spies.
Philby completed his defection by escaping to Moscow in 1963, having betrayed a network of British agents in Eastern Europe, and leaving behind a trail of disillusioned colleagues – senior intelligence officers in MI6 and MI5 – who had looked up to him as a man of impeccable professionalism and loyalty to the Crown, beyond suspicion. The Americans, with the evidence of hindsight, blamed the Philby affair on a very English old boy network’s instinct to protect its own. It was, however, a network to which not everyone belonged.
Those who had venerated Philby throughout the Second World War and beyond included Richard Broomham-White, MI5’s wartime Iberian desk officer who was part of the conspiracy to get Burns sacked from his Madrid posting. As a post-war Conservative Member of Parliament, Broomham-White stood up in the House of Commons prior to his friend Philby’s final exposé as a Soviet agent and insisted that he was innocent, a statement that caused him severe embarrassment and subsequent public discredit. Enriqueta Harris left the Ministry of Information and returned to the art world she had once inhabited with Anthony Blunt. In the post-war years she was employed in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute which had been incorporated into the University of London. She also earned a reputation as a leading authority on Spanish masters like El Greco and Diego Velazquez, and was honoured by the post-Franco Spanish state. She received the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos in 1989, and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabel La Catolica. She died in April 2006.
Tomás Harris, the MI5 officer who had tried, together with his sister, so consistently to have Burns sacked from the Ministry of Information, was killed in a mysterious car crash in Mallorca in 1964, a year after Philby absconded to Moscow, and a few months before Blunt, by then firmly ensconced in his post-war role as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, confessed to being a Soviet spy in return for immunity from prosecution.
The doubts as to whether Tomás Harris was a Soviet agent were never dispelled. Harris’s former colleague Bristow subsequently credited him for his work as a case officer of Juan Pujol, Garbo, who in turn was brought back from post-war anonymity and self-exile in South America and honoured by MI5 as one of the most successful double-cross operators of the entire war.
In his own memoirs, published in defiance of attempts by MI6 to suppress them, Bristow wrote that Harris had been in an ‘ideal situation’ to further Soviet infiltration, not just as a case officer for allegedly the most successful wartime deception agent in the world, but having also acted as a nexus for a group of friends that included Philby, Blunt, Burgess and Maclean – the four Cambridge KGB ‘spies’ – and some of the top figures of MI5 and MI6.
Bristow alleged that after the war Harris and Blunt, together with Pujol ran a fake paintings scam out of Latin America until it was cut short by a Venezuelan art expert. It was also alleged that Harris had been the Cambridge four’s paymaster, and that some of the fakes Blunt authenticated after the war helped raise money for the Spanish Communist Party. The greatest mystery of all continued to surround the circumstances of Harris’s death, with the claim that he was drunk and hit a tree questioned in the aftermath of the crash by his wife who was with him at the time. Subsequently investigators familiar with the road, and who did not consider the site of the accident a blackspot, resurrected the idea that the car might have been tampered with and that Harris had been the victim of an assassination, although no evidence has even been produced substantiating such a claim.
At the same time the absence of any conclusive proof that there was an accident has fuelled the theory that Harris was killed in anticipation that he would eventually have been hauled in for questioning in London over the Philby case and revealed an even greater degree of penetration of Western intelligence by the Soviets than has hitherto been discovered to be the case. The mystery remains unresolved.
After leaving the Madrid embassy, Burns ostensibly went back to his prewar profession as a publisher. A letter from his old friend Douglas Jerrold suggested he take charge of Burns & Oates, the firm founded by his great-uncle, and consolidate it as a leading Catholic books and media enterprise. ‘Oblique suggestions from SIS (MI6) that I might wish for some permanent employment with them would now be discouraged with safety for the future,’ Burns wrote mischievously in his memoirs.
In fact some of the friends Burns made before and during the war served as spies in the Cold War and he himself maintained a secret informal relationship with the British and US intelligence services after returning to public life as a publisher, a cover for overseas travel and the securing of a variety of sources of information.
His contacts with dissident Christian groups resisting the repression of religious liberty under Eastern European communism and his extensive international network of influential Catholic friends in government and opposition provided him with intelligence from Warsaw to Belfast and across Asia, Africa and the Americas with particularly privileged information on the inside machinations of the Vatican under a succession of Popes, which he would pass on to trusted contacts in MI6, the Foreign Office and the CIA.
Meanwhile, the personal file his enemies in MI5 had built up against him during the war was quietly shelved with the advent of the Cold War, as Franco came to be seen as a strategic partner of American interests – just as the informal network of anti-Catholic conspirators involved in the double-cross system within the organisation was quietly disbanded.
Only one entry in March 1948, two years after Burns returned to Britain from his Spanish posting, served as a reminder that some of the anti-Franco agents Tomás Harris had put in place remained active in the early post-war years. A source code-named Poodle, run by Harris and Blunt’s old sect
ion B1 inside the Spanish embassy, reported that Burns was by then ‘collaborating fully’ with the Spanish chargé d’affaires in London, the Marques de Santa Cruz, in ‘defending the Franco regime from attacks on it in this country’.
Soon after the new Spanish diplomat had returned to London after a visit to Spain, Burns submitted to him the draft of a letter he suggested might be sent to The Times in reply to criticism by a spokesman for the Labour Party. ‘Santa Cruz reported to Madrid that Burns’s open championship of the regime would have an important effect on public opinion here in view of his high standing,’ reported the MI5 agent code-named Poodle.
In the years following the end of the war, Franco survived in power, despite attempts to isolate him internationally, ranging from Spain’s initial exclusion from the post-war UN to the temporary withdrawal of British and American ambassadors from Madrid, a measure Washington reversed in 1950 when it authorised military and financial aid to Spain so as to bring it within the anti-Soviet bloc. The resumption of full diplomatic ties with Britain coincided with the return to power of a Conservative government, so that Franco had little difficulty in persuading the Foreign Office to accept the nomination as the new Spanish ambassador to London of Miguel Primo de Rivera, a brother of the founder of the Falange, José Antonio, and a stalwart of the regime.
The subsequent appointment of Santa Cruz – who as José Villaverde had served as deputy head of mission in London under the Duke of Alba – as ambassador in 1958 came as the memory of Franco’s services to the Allies was fading and opposition to his authoritarian rule was growing. However, Santa Cruz and his vivacious wife Casilda became the consummate diplomatic couple, making it their mission to assure a wide circle of friends that democracy would eventually return to Spain with the monarchy. Among regular guests at the embassy were Salvador de Madariaga, the Oxford-based academic who had shunned his homeland since the civil war, the ageing exiled former Republican prime minister Negrín and a variety of influential Labour and Conservative MPs including the Tory minister R.A. ‘Rab’ Butler and future prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home.