by Jimmy Burns
During the summer of 1940 Churchill urged his cabinet that ‘very considerable numbers’ of British communists as well as fascists should be put in protective or preventive internment, including the leaders. ‘It was hardly surprising that Philby, Burgess, Blunt … had little option but to lie low’, ibid., p. 202.
On the other hand Blunt’s biographer states that ‘there is no doubt’ he was passing MI5 documents to the Russian before June 1941, when Hitler broke the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. On 12 July 1941, two and half weeks after the invasion, the Soviet Union signed a Mutual Assistance Treaty with Britain. At Churchill’s behest, the British intelligence services suspended intercepting Soviet intelligence and monitoring Soviet radio signals. See Carter, Anthony Blunt, pp. 274–6. What remained constant during this period was British intelligence’s, and in particular MI5’s, paranoia about German penetration of a Britain cut off from mainland Europe. Philby and his friends had little difficulty in persuading their masters of the necessity of focusing on Spain and Portugal as the main conduit for such agents.
p. 166 Benton, the newly arrived Section V officer: Benton, The ISOS Years, p. 388.
p. 167 When Benton later asked Philby: Ibid.
p. 167 GW provided Calvo: KV2/713 NA.
p. 168 A personal file compiled by MI5: Ibid.
p. 168 Intercepts of telephone conversations: KV2/2823 NA.
p. 168 Days later, Burns: Ibid.
p. 169 As he reported to Philby: Ibid.
p. 169 Burns is anxious to keep his position: Ibid.
p. 169 not the slightest importance: Ibid.
p. 169 It is suspected: Hand-written police report filed undated but numbered 54. Discovered by the author in Franco’s Archive in Madrid.
p. 170 One of them was Kemball Johnston: Carter, Anthony Blunt, p. 290. Also West, MI5, p. 30.
p. 171 Broomham-White admitted: KV2/2823 NA.
p. 172 drafted his latest case report: Ibid.
p. 173 Harris stoked the fires: Ibid.
p. 174 If Burns continued to cultivate: The tracking of Velasco and Calvo’s movements in Spain was consistent with the orders received by MI6 (SIS) counter-intelligence officers (Section V) based in the Madrid embassy. One of them, Kenneth Benton, recalled the importance his chief, Felix Cowgill, attached to catching German spies although the identification and apprehension of spies in the UK was the task of MI5. ‘What Cowgill wanted was to identify spies before they came to Britain and pass the names and details to MI5 for action. His first objective was to assemble all information about the German intelligence services and how they operated abroad.’ See Benton, The ISOS Years, p. 372.
p. 174 Burns reported to London: KV2/2823 NA.
p. 175 Burns wrote to the Foreign Division: Ibid.
p. 176 Calvo was arrested: KV2/712 and KV2/713 NA.
p. 176 Camp 020 – a secret interrogation centre: Some five hundred suspected enemy spies (twenty-five of them Spanish nationals) from dozens of countries passed through the camp. See introduction by Oliver Hoare and MI5 documents in Camp 020 (London: Public Record Office, 2000).
p. 177 Official MI5 historians: The security service has in recent years publicised the phrase ‘Violence is taboo’ which ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens wrote in his in-house history, before adding, ‘For not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standards of information’ (see MI5’s website www.MI5.gov.uk).
In his introduction for interrogators Stephens wrote, ‘Never strike a man. In the first place it is an act of cowardice. In the second place, it is not intelligent. A prisoner will lie to avoid further punishment and everything he says thereafter will be based on false premise.’
Other contemporary records released by MI5 show that on one occasion in September 1940 Stephens expelled a War Office interrogator from the camp for hitting a prisoner, the German double agent code-named Tate (Wulf Schmidt).
For a further defence of MI5’s Second World War record, see Ben Macintyre, ‘The Truth that Tin Eye Saw’ (The Times, 10/2/2006) in which he concedes that Stephens ‘did not eschew torture out of mercy … his motives were strictly practical’.
p. 177 psychological torture of a most brutal kind: The calculated use of intimidation to ‘break’ Calvo using ‘evidence’ drawn from a fraudulent diary is described by Philby in his memoir, My Silent War, p. 49. For Calvo’s own views on his captivity, information provided to the author by Carlos Sentis.
p. 179 Calvo was eventually released: Calvo was among several Spanish detainees who were repatriated on 22 August 1945 via Gibraltar. KV2/714 NA.
p. 180 the best and friendliest relations: See Wigg, Churchill and Spain, pp. 6–7
p. 180 Churchill paid several unpublicised social visits: Anecdotal information provided to the author by Casilda Villaverde, Marquesa de Santa Cruz.
p. 180 But how do you find time: Ibid.
p. 180 One evening Casilda found herself: Ibid.
p. 181 Such encounters: See also Jane and Burt Boyar, Hitler Stopped by Franco (Marbella House, 2001), p. 181: Alba was not there on a mission to promote Spanish trade; the (Spanish) Embassy was intended to make friends and to influence them politically, so when luncheon was finished and he offered Churchill a cigar and cognac they would have labels the Prime Minister would recognise and enjoy before he had even tasted them’.
p. 181 Alba, while aware that communications: Spanish government document cited in Juarez, Madrid, Londres, Berlin, p. 71.
p. 181 Personally, I think it is difficult: West (ed.), The Guy Liddell Diaries, vol. 2, 1942–1945 (London: Routledge, 2005).
8: Hyacinth Days
p. 183 Griffith first met Lazar: Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), pp. 110–11.
p. 183 an important figure in the Nazi world: Lazar arrived in Spain in September 1938 as a representative of Transocean, the Nazi Party’s overseas propaganda agency. A year later he had been appointed press attaché at the German embassy in Madrid, with a reported monthly budget of 200,000 pesetas. During the Second World War his attempts to influence the media in Spain proved more successful than those to used by the Spanish official news agency EFE as a tool of Nazi propaganda in Latin America. EFE had pro-Allied journalists working for it, including its director Vicente Gallego. See Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 122–3.
p. 183 His bedroom was decorated: Hoare, Ambassador on Special Mission, p. 54.
p. 184 Griffith’s cover was nearly blown: Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red, pp. 144–5.
p. 184 people like me had a busy nightlife: Author’s interview with Aline, Countess of Romanones.
p. 185 The British had many more people: Ibid.
p. 185 From the moment of his arrival: The challenge facing the British embassy in countering Nazi influence in Spain was laid out in a nine-page memorandum to Ambassador Hoare in June 1940 by Captain Hillgarth urging a ‘drastic re-organisation’ of the embassy. Hillgarth wrote: ‘Our press department is inefficient, not entirely through its own fault. Germans have bought (Spanish) editors and journalists … WE are much too inclined to accept every rebuff … WE make no attempt really to counteract German lies …’ What was needed, Churchill’s friend and adviser insisted, was to present the Spanish government with a ‘decided policy, not a vague and hesitant one … the only thing the Spaniard respects is power, though he prefers it politely expressed’, Templewood papers XIII.
p. 185 ‘Programme for Film Propaganda’: James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939–45 (I. B. Tauris, 1999). As Glen Newey has commented, ‘films of this sort blurred generic boundaries between documentary and fiction – as, indeed, does propaganda itself, New Statesman, 12 July 1999.
p. 186 The white rolls – nicknamed Churchills: Author interview with Gómez-Beare.
p. 186 Buckley was a devout Catholic: According to his son, Patrick, Buckley temporarily
lost his Catholic faith during the Spanish Civil War, regaining it during the Second World War. Patrick Buckley, interview with the author. Henry Buckley’s journalism in Spain is examined in Preston, We Saw Spain Die, pp. 341–50. See Henry Buckley’s book, Life and Death of the Spanish Republic (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1940).
p. 187 I will write to thank Burns: Letter from Buckley to his wife Maria Planas, Buckley Family Archive.
p. 187 MI9 had developed a highly effective Spanish operation: Author interview with Colin Creswell. See also Airey Neave, MI9 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969) and M. R. D. Foot and J. M. Langley, MI9: Escape and Evasion (London: Bodley Head, 1979). Juan Carlos Jimenez de Aberasturi had focused on the Basque involvement in the so-called Comet Line of escape and evasion of POWs. See his El Camino de la Libertad (Bilbao Ayuntamiento de Hernani, 2006). For Catalan escape routes, including US involvement bases on declassified US documents, see Martín de Pozuelo and Ellakuria, La Guerra Ignorada, pp. 169–87.
p. 188 one of the founding players of FC Barcelona: Author interview with Frederick Witty. See also Jimmy Burns, Barca: A People’s Passion (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), pp. 131–2.
p. 188 We now had working for us: Mavis Bacca Dowden, A Tale of Spain, personal memoir, p. 48.
p. 189 twenty spies identified directly by the embassy: Benton, The ISOS Years.
p. 190 For most of my time in Madrid: Ibid.
p. 191 If Burns enjoyed additional protection: Franco knew who the spies were in the British and German embassies and let them ‘run’ as long as they did nothing that threatened his regime. It was a game he watched from the ringside. Problems came when pro-Axis elements in the Falangist party pursued the British. This happened in Huelva where the Germans had a big influence. William Cluett, manager of a British electricity company, and Joseph Pool Bueno, an Anglo-Spanish employee of Rio Tinto, were expelled from Spain for suspected spying activities. The British ambassador Samuel Hoare personally intervened on behalf of two others. Alexander Millan, an Anglo-Spanish shipping agent, was released from detention. However, Montagu. W. Brown, the head of a railway company, was also expelled. See Jesus Ramiro Copeiro del Vilar, Huelva en la Segunda Guerra Mundial (Huelva: Imprenta Jimenez, 1996).
p. 191 The agent in question was a Benedictine monk: Based on research carried out by the Jesuit historian Fr Robert Graham BFA. During the Second World War several priests were drawn into espionage activities by the Allies and the Axis powers. Several ended up in concentration camps where they subsequently died.
Among those suspected by the Nazis of working for the Allies was an Austrian Marianist priest called Jakob Gapp who had been teaching in the Basque port of Lequeitio and in Cadiz after arriving in Spain in May 1939. In September 1941 Gapp moved to Valencia where he took the first steps in applying for a visa to Britain at the consulate. He visited the consulate several times, sharing information on the state of politics and the Church in Germany and collected copies of the pro-Churchill English Catholic weekly the Tablet.
The distribution of the Tablet in Spain had been organised by TB from the British embassy in Madrid. Although no record survives of Fr Gapp meeting TB before, he was suspected of being recruited as an agent by the British.
The Tablet provided Gapp with the text of the anti-Fascist Bishop of Calahorra on the dangers of Nazism and the persecution of Catholics in Germany and the Netherlands which the priest passed on to others. The Tablet, of which TB was one of the owner-directors, was also said to contain coded messages to pro-British factions and resistance groups.
Gapp was arrested by the Gestapo on the French-Spanish border at Hendaye after being persuaded to cross the Pyrenees for a meeting by a Nazi agent posing as Jewish refugee seeking conversion to the Catholic faith. At least three German intelligence services were well aware of the Tablets importance as a pro-Allied propaganda vehicle. Gapp was interrogated about his links with the magazine, having been kept under surveillance by the Gestapo since the Anschluss, when he had first spoken out against Nazism.
Gapp was taken to Berlin, found guilty of treason by the notorious Nazi Judge Roland Freisler and beheaded on 13 August 1943. Information provided for the author by John Cummings and Paul Burns. See also Gapp’s entry in Cumming’s revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints (Collegeville: Burns & Oates, 1998), pp. 115–19.
p. 192 on the same wavelength: Anna Campbell Lyle, quoted by Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond, p. 199.
p. 193 What Catholics realise: Ibid.
p. 193 on Hitler’s side: Ibid.
p. 193 Campbell visited the British embassy: Campbell’s biographer Peter Alexander suggests that Burns hired the poet as an agent on his own initiative to ‘act as a gatherer of background information on the mood of Spain’. Alexander adds: ‘It is difficult to see what other information he can have expected, for Campbell had no access to men of influence in the country’.
p. 194 Campbell kept his role secret: Such was the claim made by Anna Campbell Lyle, Poetic Justice, p. 170. In fact, Roy Campbell, according to other accounts, seems to have been a most indiscreet agent. On 3 October 1941, Campbell wrote to his mother telling her that he had been on ‘His Majesty’s service’ since 3 September 1939 and often on ‘very dangerous work. The letter is quoted by one of Campbell’s biographers, Peter Alexander, in Roy Campbell, p. 186. p. 194 This way of drinking: Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse, quoted by Jimmy Burns in Spain: A Literary Companion, p. 199.
p. 195 I found him more than eager: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 105. According to Campbell’s biographer Peter Alexander the approach made by TB delighted Campbell, giving him a feeling of direct participation in the war, allowing him to ‘hold up his head’ when writing home to South Africa, where several of his brothers had signed up as soon as war had been declared. See Alexander, Campbell, p. 185. ‘His method of gathering information was original: he would settle into a bar, have a few drinks, and tell a few jokes and tall stories at which he excelled. In this way he would soon collect a circle of acquaintances, for whom he would buy drinks while his money or credit lasted. When the evening had progressed to the stage where they were all lifelong friends, he would lower his voice and quieten the rowdy circle before sharing with them a great secret, which they were to keep under their hats: he was a British spy …’
p. 196 the eccentric author: Eleanor Smith, Life’s a Circus (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1939).
p. 197 An eternal high-spirited tomboy: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 56.
p. 197 naughty but never nasty: Time magazine, 5 February 1940.
p. 198 at least we have the gypsies on our side: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 57.
p. 198 war was erotic: For an account of Mary Wesley’s experience of wartime see Patrick Marnham, Wild Mary (London: Vintage, 2007).
p. 199 Coward’s song: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 116.
p. 199 I do feel for you: David Jones’s letters to TB, National Library of Wales (NLW), David Jones papers.
p. 200 Ann seems to be working very hard: Michael Richey’s letters to his family, Richey papers, GEO.
p. 200 Paul, a pilot with the RAF: Paul Richey’s heroic exploits are vividly captured in a personal record, Fighter Pilot (London: Cassell, 2001) and its sequel, co-written by Norman Franks, Fighter Pilot’s Summer (London: Grub Street, 2004).
p. 200 I remember the disposition of everything: New York Times, 11 May 1941.
p. 202 The MoI asked me to return: Graham Greene to Mary Pritchett, letter published in Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, p. 107.
p. 202 a form of dirty work: Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 118.
p. 203 Two Catholics: Harman Grisewood papers, GEO.
p. 203 realism in our own consciences: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 166.
p. 203 all this Ann thing: David Jones’s letters to TB, NLW.
9: Black Arts
p. 207 I am installed at present: Say Family Archive.
p. 208 Poor Peter: Ibid.
p. 208 It seemed unreal: Ibid.
p. 209 Source says th
at Burns is madly in love: MI5 file KV 2/2823 NA. The tracking of TB’s personal relationships by his detractors in British intelligence extended to male friends. The suggestion was that some of them were homosexual, as if such proclivities were a treasonable offence. An MI5 officer in Wales and the police Special Branch were tasked with finding out what they could about Jim Ede, who had been communicating with TB over the case of a Bulgarian refugee who had asked the British embassy in Madrid to arrange for his brother’s safe conduct out of Spain.
‘We are rather interested in Tom Burns’ friends, as some of them have turned out to be decidedly queer,’ reported a member of MI5’s Iberian section.
The investigation threw up nothing suspicious about Ede such as possible links with pro-Axis Welsh nationalists. ‘So far as political leanings are concerned, Mr Ede has none … there is not the slightest reason to doubt that he is completely loyal to this country (Britain).’ Ede was ‘discovered’ by the police to be a ‘painter by profession’ and a former secretary of the Tate Gallery. Ibid.
Not mentioned was the fact that Ede was a well-known and popular figure in London’s artistic circles, a long-term friend and benefactor, together with TB, of the fellow Welsh painter and poet David Jones. See various references in the self-portrait of Jones in his letters, Dai Greatcoat.
p. 210 M 12 confirmed: Ibid.
p. 211 Although Stordy is a strong Roman Catholic: Ibid. MI5 appears to have overlooked the fact that TB and Stordy had known each other since school days. They had both been educated by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College.
p. 213 Each in his own way: Author’s interview with José Luis García.
p. 214 In his report: KV 2/2823 NA.
p. 215 A mild form of wishful thinking: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 98. The position of the pretender to the throne, Don Juan, was somewhat ambiguous until the final stages of the war when he and his supporters openly called for a democratic front to force Franco to give up power. The prince supported Franco during the civil war and, after his father King Alfonso XIII died in February 1941, praised the political and social values of the ‘the Crusade’, the Nationalists’ term for the civil war. (See E. Vegas, Memorias Politicas 1938–42 (Madrid: Acras, 1995), p. 242.) Then, in an interview with the Journal de Genève on 11 November 1942, he declared that ‘my supreme ambition is to be King of a Spain in which all Spaniards, finally reconciled, might live together’. During 1943, Franco received two separate letters, one from a group of eight senior army officers, the other from a group of conservative politicians led by the Spanish ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba, urging him to agree to the restoration of a ‘Catholic and traditional’ monarchy, freed from any ‘foreign influence’, in other words turning its back on constitutional and liberal principles to the point of absolutism. See a book written by TB’s eldest son, Tom Burns Marañón, La Monarquia necesaria (Barcelona: Planeta, 2005), pp. 105–7. Also Wigg, Churchill and Spain, pp. 29–33.