Page "Leslie Howard (actor)" Paragraph 29

While ostensibly on " entertainer goodwill " tours at the behest of the British Council, Howard's intelligence-gathering activities had attracted German interest.

The chance to demoralise Britain with the loss of one of its most outspokenly patriotic figures may have motivated the Luftwaffe attack.

Ronald Howard was convinced the order to shoot down Howard's airliner came directly from Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany, who had been ridiculed in one of Howard's films and who believed Howard to be the most dangerous British propagandist.

The British Film Yearbook for 1945 described his work as " one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda ".

A 2008 book by Spanish writer José Rey Ximena claims that Howard was on a top-secret mission for Churchill to dissuade Francisco Franco, Spain's authoritarian dictator and head of state, from joining the Axis powers.

Via an old girlfriend, Conchita Montenegro, Howard had contacts with Ricardo Giménez-Arnau, a young diplomat in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Further circumstantial background evidence is revealed in Jimmy Burns's 2009 biography of his father, spymaster Tom Burns.

According to author William Stevenson in A Man called Intrepid, his biography of Sir William Samuel Stephenson ( no relation ), the senior representative of British Intelligence for the western hemisphere during the Second World War, Stephenson postulated that the Germans knew about Howard's mission and ordered the aircraft shot down.

Stephenson further claimed that Churchill knew in advance of the German intention to shoot down the aircraft, but decided to allow it to proceed to protect the fact that the British had broken the German Enigma code.