In June 1943 the film star Leslie Howard was mysteriously killed when his plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe on a return flight from Spain. This was an unprovoked attack on a commercial airliner, and there seemed to be no motive for it. British intelligence circulated rumours that the Germans had hoped to kill Churchill, whom they mistakenly thought was travelling on the plane. In fact, it now seems that the Germans’ target was Leslie Howard himself. He was returning from a celebrity tour of Spain, following the success of Gone with the Wind, in which he starred as Ashley Wilkes. Howard had been sent to Spain as part of a propaganda campaign to win Spanish support for the British. The man who arranged the tour was the press attaché at the British Embassy in Madrid, Tom Burns.
Tom Burns, the subject of this book, was the father of Jimmy Burns. Burns senior kept very quiet about what he did in the war, and it has taken Jimmy five years to research the story. A devout Roman Catholic, Tom Burns worked before the war as editor of the Catholic Tablet, and he was both friend and publisher of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. He had an intense relationship with Anne Bowes-Lyon, a posh and passionate Catholic poet who was a cousin of the Queen Mother. In 1940 Burns was sent to Madrid by the Ministry of Information. Working under the British ambassador Samuel Hoare, his brief was to keep Spain neutral and prevent it from joining the war on the side of Hitler by supporting General Franco.
Franco was a pro-Nazi dictator, but Tom Burns had no pangs of conscience about supporting the regime.
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