The Tablet editor who was a spy of genius
John Hinton enjoys a passionate biography of the author's father – a spy in wartime Spain

6 November 2009

Papa Spy
By Jimmy Burns
Bloomsbury, £18.99

Papa Spy is an exciting story with a strong Catholic angle, enjoyably complex because it is set in the world of wartime espionage. Its subject, Tom Burns, was a publisher in the Thirties who signed up early works by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but who made his own mark in the cauldron of Anglo-Spanish relations during the early years of the Franco regime. He later became editor of the Catholic weekly the Tablet until his retirement.

This unofficial biography is by way of a salute by his son Jimmy Burns, a former Financial Times writer, who as a youngster discovered a German pistol and miniature spy camera in his father's London study - a discovery which ignited a fascination with his secretive double life as a diplomat in the operations of both British Catholicism and the British Secret Service in the crenellated buildings and alliances of Madrid during the Second World War.

He shouldered a difficult assignment because Papa, very much a professional operator, left very few clues, taking most of his secrets to the grave. Indeed, the author has had a long five-year trail to follow, interviewing survivors of the period and digging deep into government and university archives in Britain, Spain and America.

A committed Catholic, Tom Burns was taught at Stonyhurst College by the influential priest Fr D'Arcy. An incurable romantic, he had film-star looks and had a long love affair with Ann Bowes-Lyon, a poet whose cousin married the future George VI, as well as a series of other liaisons. Eventually he married the youngest daughter of one of Spain's leading public intellectuals, Gregorio Marañón, a convert to Franco's side from Republicanism. Their 1944 wedding was a high-society occasion.

It may seem controversial now, but like many in the British Catholic establishment in the Thirties Burns saw Fascism in its Italian and Spanish forms as a bulwark of religious values against Communist materialism and atheism. Godless Nazism attracted him less, but at that time he favoured appeasement and supported the Nazi-backed coalition of Church, army and upper class that overthrew Spain's fledgling elected Republican government in the civil war of 1936-1939 which left a million dead.

Britain's much-criticised non-intervention in that conflict - despite the thousands of volunteers who joined the Republican fight from England, the Commonwealth and America - amounted, in practice, to covert support of Franco. And when the Second World War began, only five months after Franco became dictator, the pragmatic strategy for Britain was to befriend the dictatorship. Churchill's aim: to head off an alliance with Germany that would have led to the capture of Gibraltar and the rest of the Mediterranean.

To this end, and despite the anti-Catholic bias of the British establishment, Burns was courted by Churchill's senior officials because of his communications skills and extensive contacts. He agreed to join the Ministry of Information, a propaganda wing of the secret services, and was sent to Madrid as press attaché to the British embassy, where the ambassador was the formidable Protestant Sir Samuel Hoare. Helping spin the same web was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who worked in Naval Intelligence.

Given the massive Nazi presence in the peninsula, the British strategy in Spain called for a mixture of shrewd traditional diplomacy on the one hand and charm, social networking, bribery, corruption and outright spying on the other. The former was supplied by Sir Samuel, the latter largely by Burns, who appears to have relished the ever-present danger of being involved in plots and counter-plots. Spanish police thought he was clearly head of MI6 in Madrid, others that he was simply a "slippery character". Without these efforts would Franco's Spain ever have let itself be governed by Hitler?

There were good reasons for Hitler not to saddle himself with Franco, whose demands and equivocations exasperated him. Still, the key fact is that Spain remained neutral. Among the British triumphs Burns had a hand in were the preparations for the Allied invasion of North Africa, done in such a way that the Axis didn't learn about it in advance and so that the response of well-bribed senior Spanish soldiers and officials was muted.

The author discovered his father was involved in some of the most colourful episodes of the war - entrapping German agents, the thwarting of a Nazi attempt to kidnap the Duke of Windsor and the recruitment of several unusual British agents, including the Hollywood romantic actor Leslie Howard.

Burns himself skated on thin ice and some of his worst enemies were at home in London. The notorious Soviet agents Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby both had key official responsibilities in relation to Spain. Professionally as well as ideologically opposed to Franco and to British policy, they saw Burns as a Fascist sympathiser and did all they could to get rid of him.

This thread of the book perhaps becomes too complex because Burns made some serious errors of judgment but also because his son is so absorbed in the intricacies of double-crossing that the reader can get lost.

Put simply, in the notes accompanying the book, he says: "My father was a controversial character - his virulent anti-Communism and unorthodox methods of operation made him enemies among some of his own colleagues and he narrowly escaped a plot to destroy his reputation hatched by senior intelligence officers."

There is a vivid spy story at the heart of this book and also some rich social history of the changing pre-war alliances within the British Catholic community. Burns acquired the Tablet in 1936 after a long campaign with friends including Waugh, accusing its then owner, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bourne, of adopting an editorial line he regarded as "sectarian and puritanical, pompous and parochial".

His friendship with Waugh faded as the great humorist began to scowl more often than smile. But, as a regular visitor to his flat in Antibes, he remained in close touch with Greene: Catholic friends together, no doubt reliving wartime and other memories before cancer took them both in the Nineties.

One's only quibble with the book is with some elementary proof-reading errors in what is clearly a labour of love written with both passion and precision.