British spy Tom Burns succeeds in keeping Spain’s dictator Franco out of WW2, but can’t save the life of Leslie Howard
Rating:3 stars
Reviewed by Gabrielle Pantera
“In the case of Papa Spy, I got two significant breaks,” says author Jimmy Burns. “The first was when I discovered hundreds of letters written by my father and secretly kept in a battered old suitcase by a cousin of the Queen, Ann Bowes-Lyon. The second was a phone call from a contact in the British security services offering me two big classified files on my father’s wartime spying activities. These showed how Soviet agents who’d infiltrated British intelligence, like Kim Philby, conducted a secret campaign against my father.”
Papa Spy is about Tom Burns, known as a rising star of British publishing, who led a secret life. Some of Burns’ friends were G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, the artist Eric Gill and the poet David Jones. When war was declared in 1939, Burns joined the Ministry of Information, also known as the propaganda wing of the secret service before it became MI5.
Burns says that as a child he had suspected his father was involved in something, a suspicion that grew the day he discovered a spy camera and a WW2 army pistol hidden in his desk. “When he died in 1995, I was left with too many questions unanswered about the friends he’d made, the women he’d loved, and what he had really got up during that part of history so crucial to his generation and our freedom, WW2,” says Burns. “I’ve won newspaper awards in the UK as an investigative journalist, but this investigation has proved my biggest challenge so far.”
“The first priority was to trace survivors of WW2 who were linked to the story and talk to them before they died from illness or old age,” says Burns. “Sadly it is a generation that’s fast departing from this world.” Burns was lucky, finding key witnesses to the story, from an American model who worked for the US intelligence agencies to a secretary in the British embassy who had tried to draw his father into a honeytrap. Burns also tracked down a suspect Soviet spy who had worked for the British, and an orphan from the Spanish Civil War who had worked for his father as a secret messenger.
Burns did a lot of work researching correspondence involving some of his father’s friends, letters he discovered at Georgetown University and at Boston College. However, the jackpot was a trove of love letters kept by the beautiful Ann Bowes-Lyon, cousin of the then Queen. Burns’ father and Bowes-Lyon had a passionate love affair before and during WW2.
Papa Spy unlocks a fascinating history of WW2 and Spain. Burns love affairs and are intriguing. Papa Spy will appeal to readers who enjoy history.
Burns was born in Madrid.
Papa Spy: Love, Faith, and Betrayal in Wartime Spain Jimmy Burns. Hardcover, 416 pages, Publisher: Walker & Company (December 22, 2009). Language: English, ISBN: 9780802717962 $26.00
