by Jimmy Burns
p. 298 expand and let his indiscretions roll: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 112. The Lequerica dinner was also noted in a private guest book diary Mabel Burns kept during her and TB’s stay in Calle del Prado. BFA.
p. 298 If history were conclusive: FO 954/127 NA.
p. 299 an eccentric prone to indiscipline: Laing was reprimanded for dressing up in full regimental regalia on one of his wartime outings to a London nightclub. Regimental notes seen by the author.
p. 299 Laing was introduced to the eighteen-year-old Cayetana: Author’s interview with Peter Laing.
p. 300 one of the most beautiful women in Spain: Quoted in essay on Goya by John F. Moffitt in Journal of Art History, vol. 50, issue 3 (1981), pp. 119–35. Robert Hughes, in Goya (London: Harvill Press, 2003), questions whether the painter became Alba’s lover. He suggests instead as more likely that the duchess represented for Goya an erotic ‘type’ who stirred his fantasies of ‘dark maja-hood and lithe proletarian sex’.
p. 300 Of Cayetana at first sight: Unpublished memoirs of Peter Laing and his interview with the author.
p. 300 her outings from the embassy: Among her regular chaperones was Casilda Villaverde, the Marquesa de Santa Cruz, the young wife of her father’s deputy in the Spanish embassy in Madrid. Author’s interview with Casilda Santa Cruz.
p. 301 He’s a Red Catalan!: Peter Laing diary note.
p. 302 Burns was assigned to work on a propaganda operation: FO 371/41886 NA and Templewood papers XIII.
p. 302 An armed guard of maquisards: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 302 days of great joy: Burns, Use of Memory, p.115.
p. 302 The road was lined with cheering crowds: Hayes, Wartime Mission in Spain, p. 257.
p. 304 This is the most appalling news: BFA.
p. 304 I’m writing just to let you know: Grisewood papers, GEO.
p. 305 The effect [of your speech] has been frankly bad: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 305 an uncompromising attitude towards Franco’s Spain: For a sympathetic account of Hoare’s belated attempt to force a U-turn in Churchill’s benevolent attitude towards Franco, which the ambassador himself had backed for most of the war, see Wigg, Churchill and Spain.
p. 307 Sentis had worked as Franco spy in Paris: Personal information collated by MI5. KV2/2823 NA.
p. 308 He [Sentis] has been pretty coy with me: Ibid.
p. 308 no gibes at England of any kind: Ibid.
p. 309 Marañón showed Burns a telegram: Ibid.
p. 309 This communication from Brugada: Ibid.
p. 310 main [Spanish] source of information to the [Spanish] embassy is under our control: Ibid.
p. 310 Burns got positive vindication: Author’s interview with Carlos Sentís. Details of the trip to Dachau were noted by MI5. KV2/2824 NA.
p. 311 The reports filed by Sentis:‘The horrors of the Dachau concentration camp’, La Vanguardia, 15/5/1945. ‘Witness of the end of the War’, La Vanguardia, 29/11/1945. The journalist’s style – cynical and verging on the flippant at times – and anti-communist views during and after the Spanish Civil War have drawn criticism in recent years from the Catalan left. Writing in El País (14/1/2006 ‘Franquistas en Barcelona’) Jordi Gracia questions Sentis’s professed Anglophilia and describes Spain’s political neutrality, which Sentis supported, as ‘false because it had its political heart with the Axis powers’. See Francesc Vilanova I Vila Abadal, La Barcelona franquista i l’Europa totalitaria (Barcelona: Empuries, 2005). Nevertheless, Sentis’s articles have survived the test of time as unique eyewitness accounts in the Spanish language of one of the great human horrors of the twentieth century. Sentis arguably did for Spanish readers what the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby did with his broadcasts for the British, providing an ‘unforgettable, definitive statement about human atrocity’ (see Jonathan Dimbleby, Richard Dimbleby (London: Coronet, 1977), p. 180).
p. 311 John Amery was interned in northern Italy: David Faber, Speaking for England (Pocket Books, 2007), pp. 478–80.
p. 311 he had been granted Spanish citizenship: Ibid.
p. 311 parcel of warm things: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 312 apocalyptic horror: Julian Amery, Approach March: A Venture in Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 89.
p. 314 I wonder if I might trouble you: Templewood papers XIII.
p. 314 We’ll squash those dwarfs flats: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 81.
p. 315 Laing and Burns: Author’s interview with Peter Laing.
p. 316 the resident SOE offcer in Madrid: Faber, Speaking for England, p. 493.
p. 317 conspiracy to manufacture evidence: Ibid., p. 497.
p. 318 It was a bleak day: Author’s interview with Helen Rolfe. She was married to a British intelligence officer. Her sister was an SOE agent who was captured and executed by the Germans.
p. 318 Part of me was furious: Author’s interview with Enriqueta Harris.
p. 319 A dossier prepared by the OSS’s: Donald P. Steury, The OSS and Project Safehaven (CIA Government Library), p. 8.
Aftermath
p. 321 ‘ Call-me-God: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 117. Brigadier Wyndham Torr, together with the naval attaché Captain Hillgarth – whom Hoare had recommended earlier for a CMG – maintained key informants at the highest level of the Spanish military. They complemented much of the political intelligence gathered on the civilian members of the Franco regime (including the Falange) and the Catholic Church by TB and his team, most notably Bernard Malley. When the former Grenadier officer Peter Laing became an assistant press attaché in Madrid, he worked closely with Torr and TB.
p. 321 He [Burns] has done most remarkable work: Templewood papers XIII: 7.
p. 322 a former evangelical lay missionary: Prior to the Second World War, ‘Grubb had spent a good deal of his early life in Latin America, mostly in Brazil, where as a missionary he had lived for several years in the backwaters of the Amazon, working among the Indians’, Sir Robert Marett, Through the Back Door (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1969), p. 5. TB claimed that it was in Latin America that Grubb developed an ‘evangelical zeal’ and ‘hatred of Rome’.
p. 322 Grubb, for his part, despised Burns: In his autobiography, Grubb criticises TB’s wartime mission without naming him, recalling Madrid as the ‘the only case I can remember of a violent clash of interests’ between the Ministry of Information and the ambassador over the duties of the press attaché. Grubb, The Crypts of Power, p. 110.
p. 322 I am sorry I had to knock you off: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 117.
p. 323 This might of course be considered a minor sin: KV2/2824 NA.
p. 323 He is an Anglo-Chilean: Ibid.
p. 324 information provided by Blunt: According to his biographer, the great mass of British secret intelligence Blunt passed on to the Soviets dates from 1942, although there is no doubt he was giving documents to his controller Anatoli Gorsky in the months before June 1941, when Hitler broke the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. See Carter, Anthony Blunt, p. 274.
p. 325 Spaniards must be really puzzled: A cutting of the Tribune diary piece is to be found in MI5’s personal file on TB – KV2/2824 NA.
p. 325 The new Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin: See Preston, Franco, p. 542.
p. 325 he ordered that any further honours: Author interview with Peter Laing.
p. 326 politically gunpowder: Author’s copy of unpublished memoirs of Sir Victor Mallet – courtesy of Mallet family.
p. 326 A series of suggestions kept reaching me: Ibid.
p. 327 outside the offcial diplomatic protocol: Burns, Use of Memory, pp. 112–13.
p. 327 Gousev, who wished, like his boss Stalin, to have the Allies break off relations: Preston, Franco, p. 542.
p. 327 Mallet wrote to the Foreign Office: FO 371/46835? NA.
p. 328 A violent or provocative act: Ibid.
p. 329 someone who would be loyal to higher ideals: Preston, Franco, p. 544.
p. 329 German officials and agents consi
dered a security and political risk: Copies of list in Spanish Foreign Ministry archive (AMAE) R/2160/3.
p. 329 Those repatriated: The post-war fate of Leissner (alias Lenz), Meyer-Doyer and Mosig are noted in Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi, pp. 169 and 311. Also in archive files (AMAE) R/5651/29 and (AMAE) R/5651/17.
p. 330 German military and economic aid: Bernhardt oversaw the running of Sofindus, a consortium that straddled mining and shipping interests, using ‘front companies’ ostensibly managed by Spaniards. See Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi, pp. 147–9, 185–8.
p. 330 short period in a detention camp in Caldas del Rey: During the final stages of researching this book, the author discovered a surviving member of the Clauss family – Klaus Clauss, grandson of Ludwig, living in Huelva. Growing up and working in post-war Spain, Klaus had earned a reputation for his hedonistic lifestyle, throwing lavish parties for his business partners and clients either in town or out in La Luz, a large country estate his family brought from the Pérez de Guzmán, an old established Andalusian family.
There was never a shortage of women and drink in Klaus’s wild fiestas. But in 2006 he was in retirement, suffering from throat cancer. He was living in a large semi-colonial town house, obscured from the outside world by tropical trees and a perimeter gate and wall. Klaus agreed to speak through his lawyer and interpreter in a dimly lit room decorated with antiques. He described his wartime childhood in Huelva as being a relatively happy and uneventful one until the day the local authorities, under pressure, detained his grandfather, father and uncle. He attended a local school and had German and Spanish friends, although German was spoken at home. He claimed to have been unaware at the time of the wartime activities of the elders in his family. He described them as ‘loyal Germans’ – his father was a veteran of the First World War – who he remembered had spent much of their time listening to Nazi broadcasts on the radio
p. 330 Lazar eluded an order for his arrest: Lazar’s personal file at the Spanish Foreign Ministry archives contains photographs and letters surrounding his ‘escape’. Separately, the Franco archive contains the copy of an undated and previously undiscovered letter from Lazar to the Generalísimo pleading for Spanish residence. In it, Lazar argues that his reputation as a ‘notorious anti-communist’ means that he would be ‘sacrificed’ by the Soviets were he to be repatriated to his native Austria. He also claims that his wife is too ill to leave Spain (Franco archive document 618/19). British information on Lazar is recorded in FO 371/60439.
p. 331 Lazar lashed out at the evils of communism: Hamburger Anzeiger, 10/12/1953
p. 331 the Cold War was under way: In 1946 a report was placed before the UN Security Council estimating that between 2000 and 3000 Nazi officials, agents and war criminals were living in Spain in addition to tens of thousands of ex-members of the Vichy government (mentioned by Preston, Franco, p. 550). This may have been an inflated figure, and several of the more prominent Nazis subsequently left for South America. Allied pressure on Franco’s Spain neutralised the feared attempt of a resurgent Nazi state in southern Europe (see Collado Seidel, España: Refugio Nazi, p. 313).
In 1947 the UN body CROWCASS (Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects) drew up a list of more than 60,000 names of individuals worldwide wanted for war crimes committed between September 1939 and May 1945. Over the next fifty years an estimated 6500 were caught. Many of the more notorious criminals were in Allied custody for a while but were released for lack of evidence and uncertainty over their true identities. In recent years evidence of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union’s complicity in allowing some Nazis to escape justice has emerged. CIA documents reveal that some 118 German scientists helped develop the US space programme, while in the UK Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government favoured East Europeans, among them former Nazis, over non-whites and Jews in its immigration policy. British intelligence recruited many as agents and sent them into the Eastern Bloc, where some also worked for the Russians, a subject dealt with by David Cesarani in his book Justice Delayed (London: Phoenix, 2001) and John Le Carré, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (London: Coronet Books, 2005). See also ‘The Nazi most wanted list’ in The Week, 14/2/2009.
p. 331 spiteful and exaggerated tone: Victor Mallet memoirs.
p. 332 Bristow kept track of Nazis, communist agents: Bristow, A Game of Moles, p. 196. In retirement, Bristow owned up to a long-standing friendship with a Spaniard who had a house in Antequera, near Málaga, but only partly identifying him as ‘José Muñoz’. He was José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, one of TB’s wartime contacts. Several wartime agents of influence in Spain were maintained during the Cold War period by the British. (Author’s interview with Munoz Rojas.)
p. 322 political trials and visiting prisons: Bristow found that, despite the ‘apparent viciousness’of some court sentences, the general atmosphere within Francoist prisons was ‘very informal’. He dismissed the outraged reporting in the US and British media as the product of left-wing propaganda. Ibid., pp. 196–7.
While several historians have focused on the repressive power of the Francoist state, a detailed examination of court documents shows that prosecutors relied on Franco’s grassroots support at local level to identify and provide evidence against, and convict, Republicans. Peter Anderson, In the Interests of Justice? (CUP: Contemporary European History, 2009), 18: pp. 25–44.
p. 333 Those who had venerated Philby: In The Climate of Treason Boyle describes the ‘ever loyal’ Broomham-White as one of Philby’s friends and advocates, ‘perhaps the most ardent believer of the traitor’s innocence’. When the Soviets announced on 30 July 1963 that they had not only granted Philby’s request for political asylum, but had also conferred on him the privileges of Russian citizenship, Broomham-White went into decline and died five months later.
p. 334 Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures: On 15 November 1979, Margaret Thatcher announced that in 1964 Blunt had admitted to being a Russian spy in return for immunity from persecution. He died on 26 March 1983 and his ashes were scattered on Martinsell Hill overlooking the town of Marlborough where he had walked as schoolboy. Carter, Anthony Blunt, p. 497.
p. 334 The doubts as to whether or not Tomás Harris was a Soviet agent: In an interview with the author, Enriqueta Harris defended her reputation as a wartime employee of the Ministry of Information and an art historian. She insisted her brother had never betrayed his country.
p. 334 post-war anonymity and self-exile: At the end of the war, Pujol was paid a gratuity of £15,000 by MI5 to ‘help him on his way’. He was later located in Venezuela by the spy writer Rupert Allason (Nigel West) and persuaded to make a ‘sentimental’ return to London. There he met some of his former MI5 colleagues and was granted an audience at Buckingham Palace with the Duke of Edinburgh. He receded into relative obscurity as several books on his life appeared. He died in 1988. Seaman, Introduction to The Spy Who Saved D-Day, p. 29.
p. 334 ‘ ideal situation’ to further Soviet infiltration: Bristow, A Game of Moles, p. 274.
p. 334 fake paintings scam: Ibid., p. 275.
p. 335 The greatest mystery of all: While the police report into the crash suggested an accident, the suspicion that the car was tampered with and that the Russians were involved endured. Spy writer Chapman Pincher suggested that several MI5 officers were convinced that Harris was murdered by the Russians. The theory revolved round Blunt’s arrest three months later and the anticipation that Harris was about to be brought in for questioning by British intelligence. See Pincher, Too Secret Too Long, p. 390. Also one of Pincher’s alleged sources MI5’s Peter Wright and his book Spy Catcher (London: Viking, 1987), p. 260. Pincher claimed that Harris’s wife, Hilda, who survived the crash, could not understand why the car crashed because her husband was ‘not driving fast and no other car was involved’. But the MI6 Madrid officer, Desmond Bristow, who was at the scene the day after the crash, reported that Hilda had told him that Harris was ‘driving like hell’ after consumi
ng a ‘couple of drinks’, had got into an argument with his wife, and then lost control of the car after crossing a humpback bridge (Bristow, p. 279).
More than forty years after the crash, Harris’s sister Enriqueta carried whatever doubts she may have had to the grave. In her final interview she told the author that her brother had been ‘driving too fast and hit a tree’. The Mallorcan authorities believed that because they ‘exhibited the case as if warning people of the dangers of speeding’.
p. 335 Oblique suggestions from SIS (MI6): Burns, Use of Memory, p. 116.
p. 335 A source code-named Poodle: KV 2/2824.
p. 337 Every thinking Englishman: TB’s lecture to the Ateneo is in the Burns Family Archive.
p. 338 Dr Marañón was a true sage: Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing, Little, Brown, 1988), p. 414. According to Roosevelt’s wife Lucky, the American spy maintained close personal ties with TB during his subsequent posting in London in the early 1960s, during which the political sex scandal known as the Profumo affair fuelled CIA concerns about Soviet-inspired honeytraps. Roosevelt was tasked by his director, John McCone, with filing detailed daily reports on the case. In his memoirs, he wrote: ‘McCone was a man who took his Catholic religion very seriously indeed, and I am sure he must have been shocked by some of the spicy items I served him.’ Ibid., p. 470.
p. 339 Franco burst into tears: The anecdote was shared by Mabel with her family and subsequently related by her son, the author and journalist Tom Burns Marañón, during his eulogy at her remembrance service in London in September 2008.
p. 340 swarthy, squat, Japanese appearance: Waugh, Diaries, p. 643.
p. 341 Mabel felt it a terrible abuse of her hospitality: Mabel Burns in conversation with the author.
p. 341 Dr Hyde, so to call the better side of Evelyn: Burns, Use of Memory, p. 65.
p. 341 I am sorry that you have come down in the world: Ibid., p. 65.