by Jimmy Burns
p. 124 Darling Ann, I can’t tell you: TB letters to BL (BFA).
p. 125 haunt of spies: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 70. A transcription error in TB’s memoirs sets the encounter in 1943, although TB’s own recollection subsequently made clear that the meeting coincided with a time when the Duke of Windsor was ‘on his way, through a minefield of enemy intrigue in Spain and Portugal’.
p. 126 The Duke drew me off to a sofa: Ibid., p. 70.
p. 127 a country ‘whose beauty and history’: Bloch, Operation Willi, p. 180.
p. 127 Willi wollte nicht: Ibid., p. 181.
p. 127 Sam (Hoare) seemed very glad to see me: TB letters to BL (BFA).
p. 129 I kick myself and have to tell: Ibid.
p. 129 American public opinion far from enthusiastic: The reluctance of the US to enter the war has been well documented. See, for example, Taylor, English History, pp.60–63.
p. 129 That the US embassy in first years of the war was smaller than the British: In his memoirs, Carlton Hayes, the US ambassador, recalled that on his arrival in Madrid in December 1941, the ‘British embassy was considerably larger than ours, and names ‘the half British and half-Chilean’ TB as among the ‘capable (British) officers with whom we were in especially close contact’. See Carlton Hayes, Wartime Mission in Spain (New York: Macmillan, 1945). See also Hayes, The United States & Spain (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1951), for a critical view of the generally pro-Republic sentiment in the US during the Spanish Civil War, and a sympathetic view of Francos role in the Second World War. The bad blood that affected the relations between Hayes and his British counterpart, Hoare, in Spain is reflected in each ambassador’s memoirs. See Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, and Foreign Office documents in which Hayes is described by Hoare as a ‘very heavy footed professor from Colombia University who, so far as I know, has had no previous experience of public life’, FO 954/27 NA.
Hayes also proved unpopular with elements of the US’s nascent intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According to senior CIA historian Donald P. Steury, ‘the OSS mission in Madrid had as a principal function of “economic intelligence” when it was set up in April 1942, despite being very considerably hampered until shortly after VE Day by an ambassador and diplomatic staff hostile to OSS activities’. See Steury, The OSS and Project Safehaven (Washington, DC: Studies in Intelligence, 2000).
p. 130 D’Arcy had helped him gain a foothold: For D’Arcy’s ‘extravagant success in the higher reaches of US Catholic society’ see Sire, D’Arcy, p. 117.
p. 130 The poet seemed totally at home: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 73.
p. 131 Tom, I think my mission in Spain is finished: Ibid., p. 91.
p. 131 and preventing the passage of German troops through to Gibraltar: Ibid., p. 91.
p. 132 I have the honour to transmit an interesting memorandum: FO 371/28384 NA.
p. 132 My informant said: Ibid.
p. 133 sensationalist in the past: Ibid.
p. 133 the self styled Reichsführer SS: Preston, Franco, p. 392. Also the newspaper ABC issues covering the three-days’ visit (HEM).
p. 135 You should have been recommended for the VC: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 102.
7. Spy Games
p. 137 Horcher became the German embassy’s unofficial canteen: On arriving in Madrid, the US wartime ambassador Carlton Hayes noted the extensive nature of Nazi social and cultural penetration in the city, within walking distance of the Allied embassies. ‘Just beyond the Franciscan Church of San Fermin de los Navarros was a big (German) social club; across the street, the headquarters of the local Gestapo; and directly opposite our embassy (at that time occupying an entire block along the Catellana), a Nazi Kulturinstitut with swastikas rampant.’ Hayes would soon discover that Madrid was dotted with dozens of other ‘annexes’ to the German embassy, in addition to the Italian fascist institutes or ‘annexes’. Hayes, Wartime Mission, p. 25.
p. 138 Chicote, had trained as a barman at the Ritz Hotel: At 12 Gran Via, the bar/nightclub had its heyday in the 1940s although it continued to attract the glamorous and famous in the post-war years. Hemingway said of the place: ‘The most attractive girls in the city went to Chicote and it was the place from which you could begin a good night out; well, everyone has begun some good night outs from there. It was like a club. It was without doubt the best bar in Spain, and I think one of the best in the world.’ Quoted by Elizabeth Nash in Madrid (Oxford: Signal Books, 2001), who goes on to remark: ‘The clientele during the war was comprised of the international brigades, the foreign correspondents, and a regular church of young women who engaged in prostitution’, p. 178.
p. 138 sad, desolate landscape of the cemetery: Quoted in Burns, A Literary Companion to Spain, p. 33.
p. 140 Those evenings at the Lyon d’Or: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 95.
p. 141 All this region is in a very marked contrast: FO 371/26890 NA.
p. 143 Two retired colonels: A thinly veiled reference to the SIS (MI6) station in Tangier where Toby Ellis, a former Indian Army oculist, operated under press attaché cover in the British Consulate-General, alongside Malcolm Henderson, Neil Whitelaw and Paddy Turnbull, three other intelligence officers unnamed by TB. See Nigel West, MI6 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983).
p. 143 It now appears that the Tangier Gazette: FO 371/26890, p. 95.
p. 143 I am not satisfied: FO 371/26890 NA.
p. 143 a city of illusory vanities: Iain Finlayson, City of the Dream (Canada: HarperCollins, 1992).
p. 146 infiltrated by British intelligence: The extensive nature of agent T’s work on behalf of the British is contained in a three-page British intelligence report which has been previously overlooked by researchers. It is among the records of the Special Operations Executive transferred to the National Archives in Kew in recent years. HS 6/927 NA. An attached note suggests that he was ‘run’ by Hillgarth and SOE, and paid a regular fee for services that were focused on disrupting the political machinations of the pro-German members of the Franco regime.
Notes on the Hendaye summit taken by Barón de las Torres were published in the Spanish press in 1989 (ABC, ‘La Guerra Mundial’). In his critical biography of Franco, Paul Preston argues that the notes – detailing how the Spanish dictator resisted Hitler – were ‘redolent of the post-1945 propaganda exercise’ aimed at downplaying Francoist Spain’s pro-Axis leanings in the Second World War. And yet the British appear to have taken some comfort from penetrating ‘the inevitable veil of official secrecy’ surrounding the summit and concluding that the talks had not gone well. As the British ambassador subsequently put it, ‘Franco, not wishing to fight, and never wishing to burn his boats, returned to Madrid without any African trophies, but also without any definite commitment to enter the war’. See Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, pp. 94–5. On the eclectic nature of agents run by SOE, the historian M. R. D. Foot has noted that they included several nationalities, including ‘several score Spaniards’ with a social range that reached from head of state (the regent of Siam) to exiled Russian grandees and dukes through ‘the whole range of the upper and lower European and east Asiatic bourgeoisie to railwaymen, telephonists, clerks, labourers, peasants, prostitutes and coolies’. See Foot, SOE: 1940–1946 (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 78.
p. 147 Hoare had made every effort to centralise key aspects of the embassy’s operations: For Hoare’s own account of the lessons he had learnt and how he organised the Madrid embassy, see Ambassador on Special Mission, pp.130–31. Also D. Heath, SIS & British Foreign Policy during the Great War (University of Cambridge paper, July 2002). The tension that existed between Hoare and senior SIS (MI6) officers is commented on by West, MI6, p. 109.
p. 149 They were at first fish-eyed, aloof and polite: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 131.
p. 149 The embassy’s intelligence operations: West, MI6, p. 134.
p. 150 By the time we reached our floor: Kenneth Benton, The ISOS Years (Journal of Contemporary History, July 1995). Benton’
s memoir of his time in Madrid appeared discreetly in an academic journal after an original text had been censored by SIS (MI6) with the names of officers, secretaries, informants and agents excised at the request of the Security Section of the Service. Curiously, the version that was published contained TB’s name although it was never shown to him, nor permission asked. TB died four months after its publication. The article was drawn to the attention of the author by an MI6 officer during the research for this book.
p. 151 a spy, and an important one: Julia Camoys Stonor, Sherman’s Wife (London: Desert Hearts, 2006), p. 71.
p. 151 Gytha was horrified by the politics of these men: Ibid., p. 70.
p. 152 considerable dealings of a cooperative nature: The Moral affair is detailed in Foreign Office and Ministry of Information documents; see FO 371/23171 NA.
During the Spanish Civil Sir Nairne Sandeman, a Member of Parliament, was a leading figure in the Scottish branch of the pro-Franco Friends of Nationalist Spain. In the spring of 1938, Sandeman held a fundraising meeting in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall which was disrupted by anti-fascist protestors and resulted in mayhem. Scotsman, 20/11/2008. Sandeman died in 1940, weeks after Sandeman’s letter recommending Moral’s recruitment as an agent.
p. 153 Miguel Piernavieja del Pozo: For the origins of Pozo’s recruitment and details of his subsequent activities and those of other alleged Spanish spies in the UK I am indebted to research undertaken by Javier Juarez. See his Madrid, Londres, Berlin (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2005), and Eduardo Martín de Pozuelo and Iñaki Ellakuria, La Guerra Ignorada (Barcelona: Debate, 2008). I have also examined MI5 files on the subject. KV2/468 NA.
p. 153 He is a rather unpleasant type: Nigel West (ed.), The Guy Liddell Diaries, vol. 1, 1939–1942 (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 103.
p. 155 When speaking to Pogo: Ibid., p. 108.
p. 155 Pogo has badly blotted his copy-book: Ibid., p. 110.
p. 156 The case of Pogo is getting rather difficult: Ibid., p. 114.
p. 156 the ‘slow-witted’ Hamilton: Dorril, Black Shirt, p. 523.
p. 157 wealth of colourful personal detail: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 97.
p. 157 It seemed to be his way of sealing a bond: Ibid.
p. 157 Velasco claimed in his memoirs: see Juarez, Madrid Londres, Berlin, p. 47. Also Angel Alcázar de Velasco, Memorias de un agente secreto (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1979).
p. 158 the Spaniard was a German spy: The British agent code-named T warned his handlers on 18 January 1941 that Velasco was a German agent. The information somehow found its way to the Russians. See SOE document HS 6/927.
p. 158 Velasco arrived in the UK: He arrived to take up his post as press secretary at the Spanish embassy armed with a letter of introduction to senior British newspapermen provided by the British embassy in Madrid. It described Velasco thus: ‘He is a well known and distinguished Spaniard, having made himself a reputation both as scholar in university life and a fighter in the civil war … He is held in esteem and confidence by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the other members of the Spanish government. A keen Falangist but one of the many Spaniards who believe that Spanish falangism should never imitate German nazism or Italian fascism.’ Templewood papers XIII.
p. 159 Calvo had started his journalistic career: Biographical details on Calvo are based on information compiled in an MI5 file (KV2/713 NA) and additional personal information obtained by the author.
p. 159 A hard-working and observant foreign correspondent: Calvo’s reporting for ABC from London during 1940 ranges from detailed if dispassionate accounts of ordinary citizens enduring the Blitz to more light-hearted swipes at what A. J. P. Taylor called ‘the authorities’ misplaced lack of confidence in the British people’ (see Taylor, English History, p. 599). In a front-page piece published in ABC on 31 July 1940, for example, Calvo focused on the Minister of Information Duff Cooper’s use of investigators to probe public opinion (dismissed by those investigated, including Calvo, as ‘Cooper’s snoopers’). Only occasionally does Calvo display a crude political bias, as when he hits out at sectors of the British media for criticising Franco four days earlier (ABC, 27/7/1940). On most days, the space devoted to ABCs Calvo reports from London was notably less generous than that enjoyed by the more blatantly pro-Nazi Berlin correspondent.
p. 159 The informal unit was made up of MI5’s B Division officers: A variety of sources suggest that Blunt was recruited by MI5 in June 1940 by the newly promoted head of the counterespionage B Division, Guy Liddell, after serving the War Office in military intelligence. The spy writer Chapman Pincher, whose main source was the disaffected MI5 officer Peter Wright, claimed that Blunt was recommended by his friend Tomás Harris, who actually joined the security service subsequently. See Chapman Pincher, Too Secret Too Long (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), p. 389.
B Division was involved in the double-cross system, ‘turning’ enemy agents, and running agents of its own, as well as surveillance teams. It was where Ultra – the information gathered by the Bletchley code-breakers – was delivered and analysed. Blunt worked for B6, MI5’s surveillance section, before he found a ‘niche monitoring foreign diplomatic missions’, in particular the Spanish embassy. See Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 249–51 and p. 273.
Harris was a member of a group of Cambridge graduates that included Blunt, Philby and Guy Burgess. It was on Burgess’s recommendation that Harris was introduced into the shadowy world of British intelligence, at the SOE training school at Brickendonbury Hall. He was later brought into MI5’s Iberian section by Liddell. ‘Harris’s sociability, wealth, generosity and gourmet tastes made his London home an unofficial club-cum-mess for intelligence officers’ including Burgess, Blunt and Philby See Mark Seaman’s introduction to Garbo: The Spy Who Saved D-Day (London: Public Record Office, 2000), p. 19.
In his memoirs, Philby credited Harris for helping his recruitment by SIS (MI6)’s Iberian section. See Philby, My Silent War, p. 35 His passage into the heart of British espionage was also smoothed by Burgess who recommended Philby’s recruitment in 1939 to Marjorie Maxse, the chief-of-staff of SIS’s Section D training school for propaganda, sabotage and subversion. See Bower, The Perfect English Spy, p. 52.
p. 160 The US diplomat, identified only by his surname: West (ed.), Liddell Diaries, pp. 186–7.
p. 160 Velasco returned to England: In The Use of Memory, Burns describes Velasco as a potential Walter Mitty character, a somewhat deranged fantasist who purported to be ‘in the counsels’ of the Spanish foreign minister at the time, Serrano Súñer, and to have been recruited with the task of assessing British morale and the British capability for continuing the war. Burns anticipated that influential sectors of British intelligence would take Velasco seriously enough as a spy and seems to have gone along with their designs. ‘To have a spy easy to tail might lead to others and de Velasco’s idea was welcomed by MI5,’ wrote Burns (p. 97). It is clear from Guy Liddell’s Diaries that Velasco was being watched by MI5 from the moment he first landed in the UK and that subsequently MI5 presented a strong case for him to be declared persona non grata, banning him from re-entering the UK. However, once Velasco had returned to the UK, he was allowed to effectively ‘run’ in order to entrap other agents. See West (ed.), Liddell Diaries, p. 162.
p. 161 Williams made renewed contact: KV2/7 13 NA.
p. 161 Further meetings between Velasco, Calvo and Williams: The story of Velasco’s alleged activities in wartime Britain is a good example of the morass into which intelligence history can fall. An official history of MI5 completed in 1946, but only made publicly available in 1999, paints a mixed if somewhat contradictory picture of Velasco. On the one hand it portrays Velasco as somewhat ineffectual spy – the source of intelligence reports sent by the Japanese minister in Madrid to Tokyo – ‘much of it invented while some of it based on the reports of another member of the Spanish embassy [in London] who was in fact a double agent controlled by us [MI5]’. On the oth
er hand the official historian subsequently states categorically that MI5’s counter-espionage B.1.G. section (Iberia and South America) under Lt Col. Broomham-White had discovered that the Germans had recruited ‘at least five journalists and a press attaché for espionage purposes through Alcázar’. John Curry, The Security Service 1908–1945 (London: Public Record Office, 1999), p. 275.
p. 162 Other public figures: KV2/713 NA. As one wartime MI5 officer has written: ‘MI5 had no executive function and if they wanted a prosecution they got the police to do it; but prosecution (in those days) came very low down in their priorities; they wanted to watch, wait, and draw in as many others as possible into their view. It was only when their targets became a useless burden that they considered going for an arrest.’ Walter Bell’s private correspondence (BFA).
p. 162 But of all the name to be chosen: Details of the surveillance carried out on Burns, and the secret information circulated about him, are contained in MI5 files KV 2/2823 and KV 2/2824 NA.
p. 164 a close-knit social circle: Bower, The Perfect English Spy, p. 47.
p. 164 One of his contemporaries, Walter Bell: Recruited by British intelligence in the late 1930s, Bell served initially as an MI5 officer and later joined SIS (MI6). During the Second World War he was in Washington, liaising with the FBI and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under Colonel William J. Donovan and William Stephenson. He was awarded the Order of Merit by the US government ‘for exceptionally meritorious achievement aiding US in prosecution of the war in Europe between December 1941 and May 1945’. Personal documents (BFA) and author’s interview with Bell’s widow, Tatti Bell, 9/4/2004.
p. 165 Bristow recalled a conversation: Desmond Bristow, A Game of Moles (London: 1993), p. 26.
p. 165 the London rezidentura of the KGB (NKVD) officers: The regularity with which British spies recruited by Russian intelligence saw their Russian ‘controllers’ during this time is not clear. As Anthony Boyle points out in The Climate of Treason (London: 1979), p. 202, the early months of the war ‘was not the most auspicious season for Nazi or Soviet agents, however well hidden, to go about their business’. The official MI5 history reveals that, towards the end of 1939, John King, a Foreign Office cipher clerk, was convicted of working for the Soviets and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude.