Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  According to a Foreign Office report circulated to the British secret services on 22 July 1939, ‘Hillgarth is already on excellent terms with the Spanish naval authorities who both like and trust him.’ ADM 116/4167 NA.

  Churchill considered Hillgarth not only his personal ‘eyes and ears’ on intelligence on Spain, but as a key player on pursuing a measure of leniency towards Franco’s Spain, relaxing the British navy’s stringent blockade to allow for some trade with the Iberian Peninsula as a quid pro quo for Spanish and Portuguese neutrality. Churchill’s decision to delegate authority over policy to the British embassy in Madrid was taken on 29 September 1940. CHAR 20/13 Churchill Archives (CA). See also Richard Wigg, Churchill and Spain (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press: 2008), pp. 4–6, 11–12 and 14–15.

  p. 78 Burns continued lobbying: FO 371–24526 NA.

  p. 78 There is an enormous amount: Ibid.

  p. 79 A cuckoo in the nest, restless against inaction: A. J. P. Taylor, English History: 1914–1945 (London: Penguin 1981), p. 568.

  p. 79 Dorchy reported that he was installed: FO 371–24526 NA.

  p. 79 A typical consignment prepared for dispatch: Ministry of Information files NA.

  p. 80 According to intelligence provided by one of Burns’s Spanish sources: Ibid.

  p. 81 A local agent for Paramount films: Ibid.

  p. 81 Cowan was working in his office at the MoI: FO-24526 NA. The Duke of Alba’s influence on his cousin and friend Churchill while serving as Spanish ambassador in Madrid is detailed in Wigg, Churchill and Spain. At a lunch in December 1940 – the first of many between the two – Churchill reassured Alba that what he wished for was ‘the best and most friendly relations with Spain’.

  p. 82 A separate memo from Lord Lloyd: FO-24526 NA.

  p. 82 Hoare and Churchill’s paths had converged and periodically clashed See Gilbert, Churchill, p. 544.

  p. 83 he argued that an offensive against Germany should be delayed: Ibid., p. 626.

  p. 84 There is one bright spot: Quoted by Preston, Franco, p. 356. I am indebted to Dr Peter Martland of Cambridge University for pointing out that Cadogan also separately described Sir Samuel and Lady Maud’s anxiety to get to Spain as indicating they were ‘rats deserting the ship’.

  p. 84 The Stornoway mini-summit: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 13, also Templewood papers XII-17, Cambridge University Library (CUL).

  p. 83 bribery and corruption of Spanish generals: See Denis Smyth’s essay ‘Les Chevaliers de Saint-George’ from the series Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, 162 (Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), pp. 29–54. Also Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, p. 237 – ‘at least $2m went to General Antonio Aranda Mata’ who was seen as a potential coup leader capable of toppling Franco if the Allies thought it necessary. Stafford questions whether the funds accomplished anything more than the corruption of the generals involved, ‘enriching those who would have argued the neutrality case anyway’ and who never seriously threatened Franco.

  Hoare was also involved in the bribery operation, using ‘special funds’ of £500,000 to ensure that a ‘safe means of approach’ could be secured to the then foreign minister Colonel Beigbeder. Templewood papers XII-17, CUL, and FO 371–24508 NA.

  p. 85 March set up a shipping company called AUCONA: For a broad account of March’s involvement in the financing of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, see Sánchez Soler, Ricos por la guerra de España. For Hillgarth’s relationship with March and the importance of the relationship to British intelligence see Patrick Beesley, Very Special Admiral: The Life of J. H. Godfrey (London: Hamish Hamilton 1980). Godfrey, the head of Naval Intelligence, wrote that his running of an ‘A1 source’ (March) was one of the reasons Hillgarth was a ‘super-Attaché’. Another was that he was the uniquely coordinating authority for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Special Operations Executive (SOE) and NID (Naval Intelligence Division).

  March’s link to the arms trade is detailed in previously secret British government documents now available to researchers. ADM 1/9809 NA.

  p. 88 You cannot imagine what a racket I have had here: Templewood papers XII-17, CUL.

  p. 89 you can keep watch over so much more: Burns/BL.

  p. 90 The children can’t go without me: Vickers, Elizabeth, p. 199.

  p. 90 Yes, the war has broken out: Richey papers, GEO.

  p. 91 Ben, a Quaker and pacifist: see West, Quest for Graham Greene, pp. 100–101. For Maxwell Knight’s idiosyncrasies see Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 26. Some previously secret MI5 files on Knight were released for research in 2004 (NA) although no further light is shed on the Greene affair.

  p. 91 Greene himself had been recruited by MI6: See Richard Greene’s introduction to Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (London: Little Brown, 2007) in which Greene’s relationship with Philby is described as ‘warm’. The author officially left MI6 in 1944 although he continued to have an informal relationship with the agency for many years afterwards. Despite Philby’s treachery, Greene agreed to write a foreword to the Cambridge spy’s memoirs, describing them as a ‘dignified statement of beliefs’.

  p. 92 It’s like flying in a bungalow: Burns/BL.

  p. 93 The Galgo had an unforgettable ambience: Rosalind Powell Fox, The Grass and the Asphalt (Cadiz: J. S. Hartland, 1997), p. 240.

  p. 93 Here I am but actually I am off to Madrid: Burns/BL.

  5. Embassy on Special Mission

  p. 94 The new ambassador’s distrust of foreign parts:‘Final Turn’, paper on Sir Samuel Hoare’s time in Spain delivered at Cambridge University by Vivek Viswanathan; Keith Neilson, ‘Joy Rides?’ British Intelligence and Propaganda in Russia, 1914–17 (The Historical Journal, Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 885–906. For further information I am indebted to Cambridge University’s Dr Peter Martland and his extensive research of the Templewood papers.

  p. 95 not knowing where to lay my head: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 13.

  p. 95 real and urgent war work: Ibid., p. 16.

  p. 96 Spanish aristocrats who were regular guests: Author’s interview with Peter Laming and unpublished personal memoir by the British diplomat. BFA.

  p. 97 The German embassy had been built up: The scale of Nazi involvement in wartime Spain was confirmed in documents obtained by the Allies and only declassified in recent years. These documents, held at the NA, have provided an interesting source of information, particularly for a new generation of Spanish investigators. See Carlos Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi: (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2005) and Ivan Ramilla, Epaña y los Enigmas Nazi (Madrid: Espejo de Tinta, 2006).

  p. 98 The suggestion he had Jewish ancestry: In his memoirs Hoare describes Lazar as a ‘very sinister eastern Jew’. It was also rumoured that Lazar had become a morphine addict as a result of an injury suffered in the First World War, although his reputation among Spaniards and the Allies was as a key and energetic figure in the German embassy.

  One Spanish official recalled Lazar as ‘quite unlike anyone else in the Franco era … well dressed, and self-consciously well-mannered like those operatic Viennese figures created by Straus or Lehar … those of us who dealt with him, came to the conclusion that we were dealing with someone very important … his ambition had no limit.’ During the Spanish Civil War, Lazar developed his propaganda skills working as a correspondent for the pro-Nazi German broadcaster Transocean, before formally entering the German Foreign Service at the outbreak of the Second World War. From the German embassy in Madrid, Lazar masterminded his ‘Grand Plan’ to have Franco’s Spain move closer to Hitler’s Germany, and disrupt Allied propaganda and covert activities. The plan included funding distribution of pro-Nazi parish newsletters, publishing pro-Nazi military action magazines and bribing Spanish journalists and their Spanish government controllers from a slush fund rather greater than that managed by his British counterpart. See ‘Los espias Nazis que salvo Franco’, El País, 26/01/2003.<
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  p. 98 Hoare’s predecessor, Maurice Peterson: For his period as ambassador in Spain, see his memoirs, Both Sides of the Curtain (London: Drummond, 1950). David Eccles, who served under Peterson and Hoare recalled: ‘Why was Peterson doomed to failure in Madrid? He couldn’t like the Spaniards, not one of them. That was an obstacle no brains, no subtlety could overcome.’ See Eccles, By Safe Hands (London: Bodley Head, 1983), p. 266.

  p. 99 It may well be that things may go badly in Spain: Templewood papers XIII (1940–45). See also another letter to Halifax in Ambassador on Special Mission (p. 29) in which Hoare foresees the necessity of spending ‘large sums [of money] upon propaganda and the development of trade with Spain’.

  p. 99 Britain’s official policy of non-intervention had turned Spain into an intelligence backwater: The lack of reliable information, apart from the secret intelligence provided by Hillgarth in Mallorca, and the often ideologically subjective reports of British journalists (see Preston, Doves of War), was belatedly raised as a subject of concern at the Foreign Office when war was declared in 1939. ‘I quite agree as to the vital necessity that our intelligence [on Spain] should in these anxious times be of first-class quality’ FO-371/231171. See also Nigel West, MI6, and Service Operations 1909–45 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983).

  p. 100 Yencken was tough laconic, witty, and sometimes rather wild: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 89.

  p. 101 Things are moving so quickly: Templewood papers XIII.

  p. 101 Barcelona and other Spanish ports: New York Times, May 1940.

  p. 101 living in a besieged city: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 30.

  p. 102 someone really big: Templewood papers XIII. Letter to Duff Cooper reproduced in Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission.

  p. 102 I protested my inadequacy: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 87.

  p. 104 many talents and many tensions: Ibid., p. 88.

  p. 104 good food and real beer: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 236.

  p. 104 I am in shirt sleeves after a sweltering day: TB to BL letters (BFA).

  p. 106 She looked jolly nice: Jones to TB, Dai Greatcoat, p. 98.

  p. 106 secret Foreign Office project: Wall was appointed to work on Italian affairs under the Foreign Office, in the research department based at Balliol College, Oxford, and directed by Dr Arnold Toynbee and Sir Alfred Zimmerman. Author’s interview with Wall’s widow, Barbara Lucas. See also Wall, Headlong into Change, p. 107.

  p. 106 dined with Douglas Woodruff: For an account of Woodruffs pro-Franco sympathies see Mary Craig’s introduction to Woodruff at Random (London: The Universe, 1978), pp. 19–20. Also Woodruffs correspondence with Franco’s ambassador to London, the Duke of Alba, in Woodruff papers, GEO.

  p. 107 another cell of good living: Quoted in McCarthy, Eric Gill, p. 290.

  p. 108 You are objecting to him: Graham Greene to Richey, quoted in Richard Greene (ed.), A Life in Letters, p. 104.

  p. 109 looks like a young lion: Jones to TB, Dai Greatcoat, p. 98. Also author’s interview with Michael Richey.

  p. 109 I bet it is bloody hot: Jones to TB, ibid., p. 99.

  p. 109 what most concerned Burns in those early days: BFA.

  p. 110 Burns made strenuous efforts to get in touch: Waugh, Diaries, p. 470. Earlier Waugh had referred in his diary to TB living in a ‘land of wild make-believe, where the only problem is to decide what sort of government shall be set up in Germany, immediately, bloodlessly’, ibid., p. 461.

  p. 110 Went to M of I: Ibid., p. 471.

  p. 110 empty-headed utopianism of the ‘Phoney War’: Sykes, Waugh, p. 281.

  p. 111 They were full of tales of the interesting jobs all my friends are getting: Waugh, Diaries, p. 473.

  p. 111 News of the bombing: ‘The Tablet offices in Paternoster Row were burned out but, like the more famous Windmill Theatre, they could boast we “we never close”’ Craig, Woodruff, p. 19.

  p. 111 Graham was saved by his infidelity: Quoted in Tablet, 17 June 2005.

  p. 112 an absurdly hilarious time: Greene, A Life in Letters, p. 106.

  p. 112 Hell, bugger them all: TB/Jones correspondence, BFA.

  p. 113 We get raid warnings a good bit: Jones to TB, Dai Greatcoat, and p. 105.

  p. 113 curious compound of ordinary private life in the old haunts: BFA.

  p. 114 I think you ought to do whatever you bloody well feel: Ibid.

  6. Of Princes, Priests and Bulls

  p. 115 Muñoz Rojas had no hesitation: Author’s interview with José Antonio Muñoz Rojas. For additional information on Pedro Gamero, author’s conversations with his daughter Concha Gamero and her husband Robert Graham. There are no surviving papers about Gamero’s secret dealings with TB. It is thought likely that Gamero destroyed them before his death.

  p. 116 Each afternoon Burns and his team prepared and printed: Author’s interview with José Luis García who was employed by TB as a messenger.

  p. 117 I could not help reflecting that this luckless: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 93.

  p. 118 According to Williams, in St Albans College, p. 219, Henson was generally happy to engage in clandestine work on behalf of the embassy. Only once did he resist a request from TB on security grounds. Early on in the Second World War TB approached Henson on behalf of Lord Phillimore’s pressure group, the Friends of Spain, for help in providing names of contacts. Henson turned the request down on the grounds that putting his contacts into the hands of the group would risk leakage and make them ‘marked men’. ‘The Friends of Spain might well devote their efforts to changing the attitude towards the New Spain of certain sections of our English Press.’

  TB’s relations with the previously named right-wing Friends of Nationalist Spain endured throughout the Spanish Civil War and into the first months of the Second World War. However, once recruited by the British government, TB appears to have heeded Henson’s advice – shared by the Catholic hierarchy in England – and kept the Friends at arm’s length from his projects in Spain, while making use of them for propaganda purposes in the UK.

  p. 118 Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson: For some of the details of the Nazi kidnap plot I am indebted to the substantial research done on the Windsor affair by Michael Bloch, author of Operation Willi (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984). I owe thanks, too, to Patrick Buckley for sharing his researches into certain lesser known aspects of this extraordinary story.

  In his study of Hoare’s relationship with Churchill in the handling of British policy towards Spain, Richard Wigg argues that the Windsor episode forged an uncharacteristic close collaboration between the ambassador and his prime minister. See Wigg, Churchill and Spain, p. 14.

  The full story has yet to be written, however, given that the British state still controls and restricts the public release of many documents related to members of the royal family p. 119 travel to neighbouring Portugal: The Duke was reported to have told the Spanish foreign minister that he would only return to England if his wife was recognised as a member of the royal family and if he were appointed to a military or civilian position of influence. The Duke had also reportedly expressed himself in strong terms against Churchill and against the war. The Spanish foreign minister suspected that the Duke was going to Portugal in order to replenish his supply of money.

  The subject of the Duchess’s status had become an obsession for the Duke. See J. Bryan III and Charles J. V. Murphy, The Windsor Story (London: Granada, 1979), p. 528. p. 119 The ‘over-elegant’ Eccles: Burns, Use of Memory, pp. 118, 134. Eccles went on to become a Conservative MP from 1943 to 1960 and in Conservative governments served as Minister of Education. He and TB kept in touch in the post-war years, with Eccles supporting TB’s publishing ventures.

  p. 120 Marcus Cheke, the somewhat aloof and aristocratic student: Ibid., p. 98.

  p. 120 watch him at breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Eccles, By Safe Hands, p. 128.

  p. 120 niece of Hilaire Belloc: For the sections covering Portugal, I have drawn on
information provided by contacts and friends I made while working as the Financial Times’s Lisbon correspondent during the late 1970s, including conversations with the late Susan Lowndes, her son Paulo Lowndes Marques, and her daughter Ana Vicente, the author of a family history, Arcadia (Lisbon: Gotica, 2006). I am also indebted to the late Josie Shercliff, who aged gracefully as The Times’s wartime and post-war Portuguese expert.

  p. 121 He was the sort of self made person: Quoted in Bloch, Operation Willi, p. 134. In an interview with the Guardian published on 15 January 1983 Eccles described his wartime role as that of an ‘apostle of bribery’, with one of his tasks that of ‘buying’ unnamed ‘eminent neutrals’.

  p. 122 Sir Walter Monckton: Churchill was by now fully informed by the embassies in Madrid and Lisbon about the plot to ‘kidnap’ the Windsors. The Nazi SD counterespionage chief Schellenberg mistakenly thought Monckton (which German intelligence reports had misspelt as ‘Monckstone’) was a cover name for a ‘member of the personal police of the reigning King by the name of Camerone’. See Anthony Cave Brown’s biography of Churchill’s SIS (MI6) chief Sir Stewart Menzies, The Secret Servant (London: Michael Joseph, 1988), p. 680.

  Monckton was highly regarded by his peers in the MoI. At the end of 1941 he took charge of British propaganda activities in the Middle East in Cairo. See Grubb, Crypts of Power.

  p. 122 Many sharp and unfiendly ears: Letter quoted in full by Bloch in Operation Willi, p. 174.

  p. 123 German ciphers were being read: According to Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, code-breakers at Bletchley Park broke the main Luftwaffe operational key on 22 May 1940. Within a year, the code-breakers made their first significant breakthrough into German’s naval Enigma so that by August 1941 every signal to or from U-boats was being read by the Allies.