We Saw Spain Die (31 page)

General Franco is becoming more and more intolerant towards war correspondents with his armies. He turned them all away when the attack on Malaga began. The men he then turned away had been with him for months and had written the most pronounced pro-Franco articles. No war correspondent with him could have been more satisfactory to him than Knickerbocker who was convinced of his early and inevitable victory when I saw him frequently five months ago. He returned
to America three months ago and has now been ordered back. I have seen him twice in Saint-Jean-de-Luz at my home. He was waiting for a permit to cross the border and to rejoin the army. He has just been informed that he ‘cannot continue his journey to Spain’. I can only interpret this denial to mean that there must be something in the present situation that General Franco does not care to have blazoned to the world. I find Knickerbocker completely flabbergasted by the changed situation.
⁸⁸

Despite the prohibition on his proceeding into Spain, a week later the intrepid Knickerbocker sneaked over the frontier. He was caught and imprisoned in San Sebastián for thirty-six hours. His release was secured only after a considerable fuss was made by his friend and fellow newspaperman Randolph Churchill. Knickerbocker was then expelled from Spain. Believing that his experience had been the consequence of a denunciation by Captain Aguilera, Knickerbocker took his revenge in a devastating fashion. He simply published, in the
Washington Times
on 10 May 1937, an account of what sort of society the military rebels planned to establish in Spain, which he based on Aguilera’s anti-Semitic, misogynistic, anti-democratic opinions and, in particular, his claim that: ‘We are going to shoot 50,000 in Madrid. And no matter where Azaña and Largo Caballero (the Premier) and all that crowd try to escape, we’ll catch them and kill every last man, if it takes years of tracking them throughout the world.’ Knickerbocker’s article was quoted extensively in the US Congress by Jerry J. O’Connell of Montana on 11 May 1937. It may be presumed to have been a significant propaganda blow against the Francoists, coming as it did shortly after the bombing of Guernica.

Asking a hypothetical question about the kind of society that Franco would establish if he won the war, Knickerbocker answered using the words of Gonzalo Aguilera, rendered as a mythical Major Sánchez. Aguilera was quoted as saying:

It is a race war, not merely a class war. You don’t understand because you don’t realize that there are two races in Spain – a
slave race and a ruler race. Those reds, from President Azaña to the anarchists, are all slaves. It is our duty to put them back into their places – yes, put chains on them again, if you like. Modern sewer systems caused this war. Certainly – because unimpeded natural selection would have killed off most of the ‘red’ vermin. The example of Azaña is a typical case. He might have been carried off by infantile paralysis, but he was saved from it by these cursed sewers. We’ve got to do away with sewers.

Aguilera had apparently been melancholy for days when he had heard about the success of F. D. Roosevelt in the presidential election, commenting: ‘What you can’t grasp is that any stupid Democrats, so called, lend themselves blindly to the ends of “red” revolution. All you Democrats are just handmaidens of bolshevism. Hitler is the only one who knows a “red” when he sees one.’ His most commonly used expression was ‘take ’em out and shoot ’em!’ He believed that trade unions should be abolished and membership of them made punishable by death. He advocated for industrial workers the paternal direction of the factory owners and for peasants a benevolent serfdom. His beliefs on the pernicious effects of education had also been expounded to Knickerbocker: ‘We must destroy this spawn of “red” schools which the so-called republic installed to teach the slaves to revolt. It is sufficient for the masses to know just enough reading to understand orders. We must restore the authority of the Church. Slaves need it to teach them to behave.’ He had repeated to Knickerbocker views about women roughly similar to those to which he had treated Whitaker: ‘It is damnable that women should vote. Nobody should vote – least of all women.’ The Jews, he believed, were ‘an international pest’. Liberty was ‘a delusion employed by the “reds” to fool the so-called democrats. In our state, people are going to have the liberty to keep their mouths shut.’
⁸⁹
It can have come as little surprise when one year later, the rebels again refused Knickerbocker permission to cover their drive to the Mediterranean.
⁹⁰

A correspondent who was ostensibly a rebel sympathizer was Harold A. R. Philby, nicknamed ‘Kim’ after the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s tale about a spy. Like Knickerbocker, he would inflict damage on the rebels
but in a very different way. He was welcomed with open arms in the Nationalist zone because he was the correspondent of
The Times
and, even more so, because of recommendations from the German Embassy in London. Ostensibly, he repaid this faith by producing pro-rebel articles that delighted his hosts, but he was actually a Russian spy. He had been recruited in London in the summer of 1934 by an NKVD talent scout, Edith Suschitzky, who was the wife of Dr Alex Tudor Hart (who would later serve in the International Brigade medical services in Spain) and a friend of Philby’s Austrian wife, Litzi Friedman. Philby had then been paternalistically groomed by his ‘control’ or case officer, Arnold Deutsch, who was under the orders of the NKVD station chief in London, Alexander Orlov, a man who would later play a crucial role in the Spanish Civil War. Since Philby was known to have left-wing sympathies, in order to get him recruited into the Foreign Office or the security services, his past was buried by working for a small magazine called
Review of Reviews,
where he painstakingly built up an image of someone without political convictions, albeit vaguely liberal.
⁹¹

From there, Philby was able to get a job with the
Anglo-Russian Trade Gazette,
a journal run by British financiers who had business interests in pre-revolutionary Russia and assumed by Moscow to be linked to British Intelligence. Since there was no chance of its backers getting their money back from the Russians, the
Gazette
was failing and the owners decided to turn it into an Anglo-German publication with backing from the Third Reich. Philby was installed as editor and also joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, an organization of pro-Nazi financiers, members of parliament and figures from high society – mocked by Churchill as the ‘Heil Hitler Brigade’. This not only gave Kim credibility, but also allowed him to report to Moscow on the extent of British support for Hitler. Orlov, whose cover had been blown, left London and was replaced by the Hungarian-born Theodore Mally. Because Philby had never adopted a fully pro-Nazi line, he was about to be sacked by the German Ministry of Propaganda when he was told by his Russian controllers that he was being sent to the rebel zone in Spain under the cover of being a freelance pro-Nazi journalist: ‘I was told that my trip was very important to gather information but what was even more important was to gain a reputation and establish myself
as journalist to obtain a more important job.’ It was hoped that not only would he be able to gather information for the Russians about German and Italian military and political contributions to Franco’s war effort, but also thereby to become attractive to British Intelligence as a potential informant.
⁹²

Philby’s cover was that he would be a freelance, to which end, he had secured accreditation from the London
Evening Standard
and a German magazine called
Geopolitics.
Through the German Embassy, he was put in contact with Franco’s diplomatic agent in Cavendish Square, the Duque de Alba, who provided him with letters of recommendation, one of which was to Pablo Merry del Val who, at the time, was in charge of the censorship at Talavera de la Reina. Philby later recalled:

My immediate assignment was to get first-hand information on all aspects of the Fascist war effort. The arrangement was that I should transmit the bulk of my information by hand to Soviet contacts in France or, more occasionally, in England. But for urgent communications, I had been provided with a code and a number of cover-addresses outside Spain. Before I left England, instructions in the use of the code were committed to a tiny piece of a substance resembling rice-paper, which I habitually kept in the ticket-pocket of my trousers.

However, in fact, it was also intended that Philby might find a way to insinuate himself into Franco’s headquarters. In order to facilitate an assassination attempt on the Caudillo, he was to report on anything to do with security routines, and personnel as well as any gaps therein. He left London on 3 February 1937 en route for Seville. At first he reported to his Russian contacts on the military situation, armaments deliveries, troop movements and the location of airfields. The information was then passed on to the Republicans.
⁹³

Although his cover held, in April 1937, he had nearly ended up in front of a firing squad in Córdoba, where he had gone after seeing a poster advertising a bullfight. He had been unable to resist the chance of combining a visit to the bullring with a trip to the front to the east of the city. Unfortunately, he had been misadvised about the need for a
special pass to enter what was a restricted military area. He was arrested in the middle of the night by Civil Guards and taken to their headquarters. His luggage was minutely searched and he was questioned. He was worried that, when his clothing was searched, his secret codes would be found. When asked to turn out his pockets, he resourcefully spun his wallet across the table and, while his three interrogators scrambled after it, he managed to screw into a ball and swallow the code sheet.
⁹⁴

He returned to London in May 1937. After debriefing him, his controllers decided that he was completely unsuitable for ‘a wet job’ and recommended that he be relieved of the task of participating in any assassination plot against Franco. Instead, he was instructed to get hired as the correspondent of a major newspaper in order to get closer to British Intelligence. With help from his father, the immensely influential Arabist, Harold St John Bridger Philby, Kim got hired by
The Times
on 24 May to replace James Holburn, who had been covering the Basque campaign. He actually reached Spain in the last week of June 1937 after first revisiting the German Embassy. Once in Spain, he got considerable mileage out of his connection with Joaquim von Ribbentrop. Dazzled by such references, Bolín thought that Philby was ‘a decent chap who inspired confidence in his reports because he was so objective’, and, along with Merry del Val, considered him to be ‘a gentleman’. On New Year’s Eve 1937, during the battle of Teruel, he was a passenger in a car with three other correspondents eating lunch when it was hit by Republican artillery fire. The twenty-three-year-old Bradish Johnson of
Newsweek,
who had been in Spain for only three weeks, was killed instantly. Richard Sheepshanks, the star reporter of Reuters, was badly wounded, as was Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press. They were taken to hospital in Zaragoza, where they both died. The only one to survive was Philby, who suffered a minor head wound.
⁹⁵
It was a tribute to his status as much to his minor head wound that, on 2 March 1938, he was decorated by Franco himself with the Red Cross of Military Merit. He recalled later: ‘My wounding in Spain helped my work, both journalism and intelligence, no end – all sorts of doors opened for me.’ After being honoured by the Caudillo, Philby reported on the rebel advances from Teruel to the sea
and then on the battle of the Ebro. He was one of the first correspondents to enter Barcelona with the occupying forces – all of which he found deeply painful – ‘the worst time of my life’.
⁹⁶
Nevertheless, far more than the correspondents who tried to cheat the censorship by taking reports out to France, it may be supposed that he did the Francoist war effort some damage.

Had Philby’s real purpose been discovered, the warmth of Bolín’s welcome might well have embarrassed him. In fact, Bolín’s time as head of the rebel press service soon came to an end. After the removal of Millán Astray, and the conversion in January 1937 of the Oficina de Prensa y Propaganda into the Delegación para Prensa y Propaganda, under Vicente Gay, Bolín had been left in charge of the press. He survived too the removal of Vicente Gay and his replacement by Manuel Arias Paz. However, Bolín’s days overseeing the work of the correspondents were numbered after his bungled efforts to deny the bombing of Guernica.
⁹⁷
The furore over the bombing had coincided with Arthur Koestler’s release from prison with the attendant publicity about his arrest and Bolín’s part in it.

Alarmed by the damage being done to the Nationalist cause, the Marqués del Moral, Frederick Ramón Bertodano y Wilson, the Anglo-Spanish co-ordinator of pro-Franco propaganda in London, hastened to Salamanca to warn Franco. Bertodano, like other Nationalist sympathizers, believed the story about Basque dynamiters, but was distressed by the damage being done to the Nationalists by reports about the bombing. He begged Franco to consent to an enquiry to allow the ‘truth’ to come out. Naturally, the Generalísimo refused and promised only to renew previous statements in other forms. However, the Marqués del Moral, together with another of Franco’s British propagandists, Arthur Loveday, had a meeting with Manuel Arias Paz, shortly after his appointment as Delegado de Prensa y Propaganda, and convinced him that Bolín was provoking the hostility of otherwise favourable British correspondents. It seems likely that the pressure of all three led to Franco removing Bolín, who was replaced immediately after on 18 May by Pablo Merry del Val, who was promoted from head of press on the Madrid front to head of relations with the foreign press in Salamanca and Burgos. Thereafter, the treatment of correspondents was somewhat
improved, even to the extent of Franco himself receiving a group of them on 15 July 1937 to tell them how much freer censorship was in his Spain than in the Republican zone. Bolín was appointed
‘enviado especial de la Delegación en Inglaterra, Paises Escandinavos y Estados Unidos’,
a post which involved him lobbying politicians and the media. In February 1938, he was named Jefe del Servicio Nacional de Turismo, which arranged sight-seeing tours of the rebel zone.
⁹⁸