Tinker, tailor, writer, spy

Burns père, like many of his faith, was appalled by the brutal treatment of Catholics, especially the clergy, under the Spanish Republic from its inception in 1931. Not surprisingly, he supported Franco and the Nationalist rebels during the country’s civil war (1936-1939). It is a position not popular today, nor was it then with Democrats or, for that matter, admirers of the Soviet Union; but neither was it strictly the province of the vile. The author shows how, for Burns and many others, Catholicism offered an alternative to what they viewed as the dehumanizing forces that were dissolving civilization, specifically, industrialization, including mechanized war; materialism; and communism. Moreover, many British Catholics, including Burns and Evelyn Waugh, identified the persecution of Catholics under Communism and Spain’s Republic with the persecution of “Popish Recusants’’ in Britain during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, a conceit that supplied history’s cachet to this foreign affair.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the question of diplomatic relations with Spain arose in Whitehall. Shattered and impoverished by the civil war, Spain declared itself neutral - though its general tilt was toward the Axis powers. The undesirable and possibly lethal post of British ambassador to Spain fell to an abstemious, fastidious Sir Samuel Hoare, formerly a very big bug, now out of favor with Winston Churchill. Burns was soon assigned to Hoare as a press attaché, which turned out to be fortunate indeed. Burns’s pro-Franco record did much to reassure the Spanish government that Britain would not plot against the regime. As for Burns himself, his goal was to prevent Spain from joining the Axis, for had it, it would have meant the loss to the Allies of Gibraltar as well as important Mediterranean and Atlantic ports. In furthering this end, Burns found himself having as much trouble combating the British Secret Service and its anti-Franco propaganda, as he did courting the Spanish and countering the machinations of Nazi agents.

Burns was alive to what most of those in the British Foreign Office weren’t: that the ultra-Catholic Franco had a real distaste for the paganism that was an element of Nazism, and, as a fervent nationalist, he objected to Hitler gaining influence in Spain. As it happened, Spain, though clearly unsympathetic to the Allies, neither allowed Hitler’s troops to take Gibraltar, nor stood in the way of the Allied forces’ invasion of French North Africa.

Intrigue in Madrid was unceasing, convoluted, and everywhere. Burns spent his time recruiting agents, securing and passing on secret information, formulating propaganda, and frustrating German stratagems. Among the dastardly schemes that he was instrumental in foiling was the German attempt to elicit pro-Axis statements from the visiting, quasi-fascist duke of Windsor and to detain him in Spain with an eye to restoring him to the British throne as a friend to the Third Reich. Here, and throughout the book, the author is masterly in making comprehensible the welter of intrigue and the milieu in which it flourished, and in laying out diplomatic and propagandistic maneuvers, vexed allegiances, provisional associations, and downright treachery. Thanks to recently opened MI5 archives, the author is able to show that all the time his father was promoting the interests of the Allies, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, Soviet spies ensconced in the British Secret Service, were conspiring to brand him an enemy agent.

Roald Dahl, Norwegian born, British subject, was a tall, handsome, banged up former RAF pilot when he showed up in Washington in the spring of 1942. He was also a British spy and is the central figure of Jennet Conant’s uncomfortably illuminating “The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington’’ (Simon and Schuster, paperback, $16). Sent to Washington as a diplomat by the British Security Coordination, Dahl’s mission was to collect information, spread rumors, and ingratiate himself with influential Americans in order to boost support for the British war effort and to marginalize isolationists who hoped to restrict the United States’ military involvement to the Pacific theater.

And it was in Washington that the writing career of the author of “James and the Giant Peach’’ began. Dahl’s first effort, “Shot Down Over Libya,’’ appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and was a highly embellished account of the crash landing of his fighter plane that ended his flying days. Dahl followed it up with more - and increasingly fictional - accounts of wartime derring-do.

Possessed of wit and charm, Dahl practiced the art of persuasion enthusiastically at cocktail parties in the homes of the great and in any number of beds, including that of isolationist Clare Booth Luce. This is a terrific book, buzzing with insider gossip and spycraft, but also detailing the ferocious struggle for hegemony between two ostensible allies, the United States and Britain. It is a real contribution to history, exposing what Conant calls, “one of the most controversial, and probably one of the most successful, covert action campaigns in the annals of espionage.’’

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.