As we saw in Chapter 1, by the summer of 1940 Gibraltar was facing four enemies. Nazi Germany controlled western Europe from the Arctic to the Basque country, with its submarines ranging the Atlantic; Fascist Italy straddled the central Mediterranean; Vichy France dominated the Maghreb. And Falangist Spain, to which Gibraltar was soldered by geography, threatened the peninsula from north, west and south.

On 13 June 1940, three days after Italy joined the war on Germany’s side, Spain changed its status from ‘Neutrality’ to ‘Non-Belligerency’. The term did not exist in international law but, ominously, it was the same one that Italy had used at the start of the war. Did it mean ‘Pre-Belligerency’? David Eccles of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, sent to Portugal by the Bank of England to help prop up the escudo, obtained a private clarification from Franco’s older brother, Nicolás, the Spanish ambassador in Lisbon, to the effect that ‘they meant nothing more by non-belligerent than they had previously meant by neutral, the new phrase was used to please the Axis and the extreme Falangistas who were looking for an excuse to throw over the government. General Franco was as firmly determined as ever not to have a shot fired on Spanish soil.’

In Eccles’s discussion with Nicolás Franco there was ‘some skating round the Rock of Gibraltar’. The Rock was clearly a site of key strategic interest to the British and the Axis, and Spain’s leaning towards Nazi Germany was worrying for the Fortress. The Falangist newspaper Arriba España for some time had been baying for Gibraltar’s return to Spain, and saying that the democracies should not be surprised ‘by the ardent sympathy with which Spain follows today the victories of the Axis Powers’.

On 14 June 1940, twelve hundred Spanish Moroccan troops, led by Spanish marines, occupied the international zone of Tangier, just across the Strait of Gibraltar; ‘provisionally’, it was said, ‘to maintain neutrality’. Spain might have been tempted to seize some of French Morocco as well, but on 17 June the French cunningly checked that move by asking Spain (rather than Switzerland, as expected) to mediate the Franco-German armistice. Any Spanish land grab in French Morocco now would only dishonour Franco: holding the coats disbarred him from picking their pockets.

*

As the pieces moved on the international chessboard, the new British Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Spain was trying to find his feet. Sixty-year-old Sir Samuel Hoare arrived in Spain on 1 June 1940 with his wife, Maud, and was now staying at the Ritz Hotel next to the Prado Museum in central Madrid. The Spanish capital was swarming with police, soldiers, Falangists and German agents; the atmosphere was strongly anti-British; all the telephones were tapped. The new ambassador felt genuinely frightened, although he had a Scotland Yard detective as bodyguard and carried an automatic pistol with him day and night.

Hoare had lost his job as Secretary of State for Air with the fall of the Chamberlain government on 10 May, and had not been re-appointed to Cabinet rank by the new prime minister. But on 17 May, Winston Churchill picked Hoare as ambassador to Madrid, sending the man nicknamed ‘Slimy Sam’ to soft-soap the dictator. Sir Alec Cadogan, the head of the Foreign Office bureaucracy, loathed Samuel Hoare for a ‘dirty little dog [who] has got the wind up’ and likened him to a rat ‘leaving the ship’. In his diary for 20 May 1940 Cadogan saw only one bright spot in Hoare’s appointment – ‘there were lots of Germans and Italians in Madrid and therefore a good chance of S.H. being murdered’.

In June 1940, three Beaverbrook journalists, Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, under the pseudonym ‘Cato’, wrote a best-selling polemic called Guilty Men, which set out to name and shame a dozen key appeasers of the 1930s. (This pamphlet, though influential, distorted history by not acknowledging Labour’s pacifism and solely blaming the Conservatives of the ‘National’ Government for the failure to rearm.) Among the ‘guilty men’ was Sir Samuel Hoare, still tarnished by the 1935 Hoare–Laval Pact.

Hoare (later Viscount Templewood) had to vindicate himself in print. He called his 1946 memoir of his four and a half years in Spain Ambassador on Special Mission. That mission – ‘the most difficult task of my whole career’, he said – was, essentially, to keep Spain neutral and out of the war. As Hoare said to Eden a year later, the job was ‘buying time – local time for the fortification of Gibraltar and world time for British recovery after the French collapse’.

In his introduction to Ambassador on Special Mission, Hoare sketches his banking family as ‘English’, ‘traditional’, ‘respectable’ and ‘reputable’. He describes himself as ‘alert both in body and mind’, ‘very sensitive, perhaps over sensitive to his environment’, ‘cautious and unaggressive’ and ‘usually ready to accept a compromise’. These comments point towards the flaws others saw in this fussy Anglo-Catholic monarchist. David Eccles of MEW, for example, himself a smoothly confident man educated at Winchester and Oxford, described Sir Samuel on first meeting as the sort of ‘well-connected and superbly intelligent man’ who ‘had a duty to tell inferior mortals what to do. His contempt for the lower classes was matched by his admiration for authority.’ Eccles deplored ‘his vanity, his jealousy, his fits of nerves’, and considered Sir Samuel’s ‘bouts of physical and moral cowardice’ pitiable in ‘a potentially great man’. Later, as Eccles got to know and admire Hoare’s subtle gamesmanship in dealing with the Spanish regime, he saw that Hoare’s attacks of panic were just tics, like his habit of saying things three times, ‘Yes, yes, yes’, or the way he kept pulling his handkerchief out of his sleeve and stuffing it back in again. There may have been other layers to the ambassador’s personality. In his 2015 book Closet Queens, Michael Bloch suggests that Hoare was a celibate homosexual.

Educated at Harrow and Oxford, an elegant ice-skater and tango dancer as well as a good shot, Sir Samuel Hoare had been in politics for thirty years as the MP for Chelsea, with a sheaf of major posts in different British governments: Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Minister for Air (four times), Secretary of State for India, and Lord Privy Seal (‘maid-of-all-works for the PM’) in the Neville Chamberlain War Cabinet. Hoare also understood the secret world. In the First World War, he had been an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service in Russia and Italy and was therefore not overly respectful of ‘spooks’.

The SIS man in Madrid, a former RN lieutenant commander called Leonard Hamilton-Stokes, now posing as one of the embassy’s first secretaries, had been based in Gibraltar during the Spanish Civil War. In truth he was fairly useless, providing scant information on what the Germans and Italians had been up to. The head of the secret intelligence service, ‘C’, Admiral Sinclair, was appalled to hear from the Air Ministry in November 1938 that SIS had supplied no technical and tactical information about the new guns, bombs, fuses, shells, etc. being used in Spain. Hamilton-Stokes was now secretly plotting with the left-wing opposition to Franco; Hoare put a stop to it because it contradicted his policy of constructive engagement with Franco’s regime.

More congenial to Hoare, and far better informed, was the naval attaché in Madrid, forty-one-year-old Captain Alan Hillgarth RN. Born Hugh Evans, in the 1920s he had changed his name to give himself a nom de plume for the adventure books and thrillers he longed to write. A Spanish-speaker who had quested for treasure in Bolivia and who actually liked Spaniards, Alan Hillgarth had been vice consul and consul in Majorca during the Spanish Civil War. There he came to the attention of Rear Admiral John Godfrey of HMS Repulse, who rose to become the Director of Naval Intelligence in January 1939. Godfrey handpicked Hillgarth to be the naval attaché in Madrid.

Hillgarth shrewdly chose to live in Spain rather than in Paris like his predecessors. If British Naval Intelligence merely relied on the Flag Officer Gibraltar or on visits by RN ships to acquire information, then they were looking at Spain through the wrong end of the telescope. ‘Contacts through Gibraltar are purely local,’ Hillgarth wrote in an excellent memo on his role, ‘and naval visits, besides being infrequent, are usually not to the chief naval bases. There is neither intimacy, nor continuity.’

Though Alan Hillgarth visited Gibraltar regularly, he never stationed himself there. But Gibraltar was a lifeline to the outside world from Franco’s Madrid. At least once a week, a British Embassy car with diplomatic plates shuttled between the Rock and the Spanish capital, bringing food and drink as well as files and correspondence in the ‘diplomatic bag’. And Hillgarth owed much of his success in Spain to a native Gibraltarian. His ‘invaluable’ right-hand man, the assistant naval attaché, was forty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Commander Salvador Gomez-Beare.

Born in Gibraltar and a member of the Calpe Rowing Club presided over by the Marqués de Marzales, ‘Don’ Gomez was a veteran of the First World War. Like a true Gibraltarian, he joined the Dorsetshire Regiment because its cap-badge incorporated the Gibraltar Castle and Key symbol, and after two years’ service, he signed up as an airman in the Royal Flying Corps. In 1926 Salvador Gomez married Yvonne O’Sullivan-Beare and thereafter changed his surname to Gomez-Beare. He worked for Franco’s intelligence service during the Spanish Civil War, like the Marquesa de Povar, thus gaining contacts right through Franco’s Spanish armed forces. In August 1939, Alan Hillgarth got him an emergency commission in the Special Branch of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and said he would hire him as his assistant naval attaché, so long as he shaved off his Royal Flying Corps handlebar moustache.

Don Gomez-Beare turned out to be the perfect Gibraltarian for the job of agregado naval adjunto. Impeccable in uniform, courteous and humorous, he was English to the English, Spanish to the Spanish, resourceful and energetic in finding information, chatting people up, running agents and carrying out clandestine missions. ‘His loyalty and discretion are unequalled,’ wrote Hillgarth, ‘and the Spaniards, especially the Spanish Navy, love him.’

Hillgarth was pleased when Hoare arrived in Spain: ‘Now we had a chance,’ he wrote. The previous ambassador was Sir Maurice Peterson, a bad-tempered man who had rubbed Franco up the wrong way and kept everything in sealed compartments, but ‘dapper Sir Samuel Hoare … treated his staff as a team.’ Himself an excellent collaborator, Hillgarth was soon on top of security and secret intelligence in the Madrid embassy. It helped that he had a direct line to Winston Churchill, whom he had known personally before the war. Crucially, he was also a friend of the millionaire Mallorcan Juan March, who had helped bankroll Franco’s rebellion.

Barely had Sir Samuel Hoare arrived in Madrid than Hillgarth had him involved in the scheme with Juan March to try and ensure that Spain stayed neutral by bribing key figures in the Franco regime with British money. Hillgarth later told an American officer that this idea had originally come from ‘C’, the head of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies, who also knew March. At Churchill’s insistence, Hillgarth was also reporting to ‘C’, under the code-name ‘Armada’.

Hoare’s first enciphered secret message on the ‘Spanish Neutrality Scheme’, dated 4 June 1940, requested that ‘up to £500,000’ should be sent to a bank in Lisbon. Three weeks later, the sum required had risen to US$10 million, placed in a New York bank for the credit of Banque Suisse in Geneva. This money was to be used to organise a counter-force to those Spaniards like General Yagüe and Ramón Serrano Suñer who wanted to push Franco’s Spain into the war on the Axis side. None of the influential Spaniards ‘sweetened’ by Juan March’s secret bank accounts knew that the money they were given came indirectly from the Bank of England, who transferred it to March. Top of the list of recipients was the Caudillo’s brother Nicolás Franco ($2 million), then the Minister of War, General José Enrique Varela ($2 million), General Antonio Aranda ($2 million), Colonel Valentín Galarza of the Falange ($1 million) and General Alfredo Kindelán in Majorca ($500,000). Money also went to Generals Queipo de Llano in Sevilla, Orgaz in Catalonia and Asensio in Morocco. By May 1941, the amount expended by the British government in the first instalments had risen to an eye-watering £3,478,000 or US$14 million, leaving Anthony Eden ‘rather aghast’.

*

Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, the German ambassador to Spain, was the foreign diplomat Franco most regularly saw. Stohrer was far from a Nazi in his private beliefs, having helped Jewish people when he was in Cairo (although in late 1941, he also wrote a memorandum proposing that the German Reich woo Islam). He despised his boss, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and was being spied on by Kriminalcommissar Paul Winzer, the Gestapo man in Madrid, who was working for Heinrich Himmler.

Joseph Goebbels also had his agent inside the German Embassy. The man who was actually orchestrating Nazi propaganda through the Spanish newspapers was Hans Lazar, a smoothly sinister Turkish Jew who claimed to be an Armenian from Vienna. ‘The Germans pay heavy weekly subsidies to the Spanish press for lying in their favour,’ wrote David Eccles. ‘Taking it all round,’ remarked Adolf Hitler on 5 September 1942, ‘the Spanish press is the best in the world!’

Spain was the most pro-Axis of all the neutral countries: German submarines were provisioned and U-boat crews changed in Spanish ports, German reconnaissance planes flew in Spanish markings and were repaired by Spanish mechanics, and a radio station beam transmitter at La Coruña was at the service of the Luftwaffe. The Spanish Foreign Ministry – headed from August 1939 to October 1940 by the German-speaking Colonel Juan Beigbeder Atienza – passed most of the intelligence gleaned from its missions abroad straight to the German Embassy in Madrid. Information from José Félix de Lequerica, the ‘neutral’ Spanish ambassador to France, was particularly valuable to German political and military intelligence during the negotiations for the Franco-German armistice in June 1940. Lequerica also ensured that Lluís Companys, the ex-president of autonomous Catalunya, was sent back from his French exile to be shot by the Francoists in Barcelona.

*

In June 1940, Franco sent the Chief of the Spanish General Staff, General Juan Vigón, to congratulate Hitler personally on his military victories, carrying a glozing letter from Franco which had a sting in its tail. Although the country was entirely in sympathy with Germany, it said, Spain was not at that moment able to join the war against France and Britain. Hitler treated the proud Vigón like a centurion from some distant satrapy, keeping him waiting six days before he accorded him a mere forty-five minutes on 16 June at the Chateau Lausprelle in Acoz, Belgium. Yet when they did finally meet, with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in attendance, the conversation was friendly enough. Vigón said that Spain was worried by the United States coming into the war, and Hitler replied that ‘if any attempts were made by enemy powers to land in Portugal or Morocco, all Germany’s forces would be at Spain’s side’.

After the Führer said he wished to destroy the dominance of France and England, their talk turned to the Strait of Gibraltar. Hitler said he was pleased by the Spanish occupation of Tangier and approved of the idea of reincorporating Gibraltar into Spain. When Vigón said that Spain also wanted all of Morocco under her protectorate, Ribbentrop stepped in to suggest that if only Hitler, Mussolini and Franco could get together then ‘a solution satisfactory to all parties would certainly be found’.

*

Ambassador Plenipotentiary Sir Samuel Hoare had his first private meeting with Generalísimo Franco on 22 June 1940, the same day France signed its humiliating armistice at Compiègne. Going to see Franco was more like visiting an oriental despot than a western general, Hoare thought, as he travelled through the ruined suburbs of Madrid, the wrecked university city with its stumps of walls, past begging children, and across the dried-up Manzanares river, to reach a squalid village where Moorish guards let him into the Pardo Palace, the hunting box of kings since Carlos III.

Franco received him in a spacious library, seated by a writing desk that held signed photographs of Hitler and Mussolini, with only an interpreter present. Hoare thought Franco a cold fish, but what struck him most about the Generalísimo was the impossibility of penetrating ‘the cotton-wool entanglements of his amazing complacency’. In General Franco’s mind, Spain was neither half-starving nor war-wrecked, and needed absolutely nothing from the British Empire. ‘Why don’t you end the war now?’ Franco asked the British ambassador. ‘You can never win it. All that will happen if the war is allowed to continue, will be the destruction of European civilisation.’

*

The following day, Sir Samuel Hoare received some awkward guests. The exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had fled their home in the south of France to escape Axis troops, arrived at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid. At first, the plan was to sweep them off to Lisbon and a flying boat straight back to England, but that had to be postponed because the ex-king’s younger brother, Prince George, the Duke of Kent, was on an official visit to neutral Portugal to celebrate the eight hundred years of Portugal’s existence and the three hundred years of its independence from Spain. In this crucial visit to Britain’s oldest ally (the first Anglo-Portuguese treaties date from 1373 and 1386), the Duke of Kent’s more glamorous sibling could not be allowed to overshadow him.

The Windsors stayed nine days in Madrid and Hoare reported to London that the German Embassy rumour mill was in overdrive, claiming the duke ‘had come to make a British peace negotiation … [and] make trouble against the British’. Samuel Hoare thought ‘the only possible course was to take [the Duke of Windsor] as much as I could under my wing and to make it as clear as I could to the whole world that he was in friendly relations with all of us and merely stopping in Madrid on his way to England.’ Hoare kept the duke away from journalists, and Hoare’s wife, Lady Maud, organised the largest cocktail party in many a year for le tout Madrid at which the duke uttered patriotic banalities. In private, however, the aggrieved ex-king was treacherously indiscreet. ‘He is pretty fifth column,’ the MEW official David Eccles confided to his wife. Stohrer reported to Ribbentrop: ‘Windsor has expressed himself … in strong terms against Churchill and against this war.’

When he was Prince of Wales, the trenches in France had horrified the young royal; he wanted no more ‘Great Wars’. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had visited Germany and met Hitler in October 1937; the Nazis thought of him as politically pro-German (ancestrally, of course, he was German, from Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, and he was a fluent German-speaker, top of his class at Dartmouth). In the Nazis’ slightly outdated view of how the British establishment worked, with monarchy and aristocracy still ruling supreme, the duke was seen as a powerful trump card to play in the future when Britain would be conquered and ‘the Churchill clique’ removed: the Third Reich would then restore the Duke of Windsor as King Edward VIII, possibly with that other Hitler enthusiast, David Lloyd George, as the British Pétain. From this notion sprang a bizarre plan by Ribbentrop and Hitler to kidnap the duke and duchess or otherwise induce them to remain in neutral Spain so they would be to hand if and when required. The vain and petulant duke himself, busy squabbling with Churchill about the latter’s insufficiently attractive job offer of the governorship of the Bahamas, constantly fussing about his clothes, servants and possessions left behind in France, may have been semi-oblivious to all these Nazi plottings.

One of the Duke’s Spanish aristocrat cronies, Javier ‘Tiger’ Bermejillo, who had known him in England as the Prince of Wales, reported on the royal guest to the Spanish Foreign Minister Juan Beigbeder on 25 June 1940, intelligence duly passed on to Franco and, one may safely assume, also to the Germans.

More damningly, Bermejillo reported the Duke of Windsor as saying ‘that if England were bombed effectively that could bring peace. He seemed to want this to happen …’

The Luftwaffe’s first daylight bombing raids on Britain began in early July.

*

The irresponsible ex-king was still in Madrid on 30 June 1940 when the small, white-haired German intelligence chief, Wilhelm Canaris, also slipped into the city. Admiral Canaris was a great admirer of General Franco, whom he had known since October 1936, and kept his personally dedicated photograph on the wall of his office in the Abwehr HQ in Berlin. First, the little admiral talked to his old friend Colonel Juan Beigbeder and his acolyte General Juan Vigón. Beigbeder later reported to Franco that Canaris was not at all optimistic about the German attack on England: a sea landing would not be easy. The Abwehr chief thought Spain should stay neutral and do nothing to extend the conflict, and he said that Germany had not actually been pleased by Italy’s entrance into the war. Vigón and Canaris wondered if the presence of German troops on the Spanish frontier might prompt the British to invade Portugal.

The Wehrmacht, storming through southwest France, had reached their finishing line, the river Bidasoa between France and Spain, on Thursday 27 June. Baron von Stohrer, the German ambassador, and General José López Pinto, Captain-General of Spain’s VI Military Region, Burgos, with all his staff and a Spanish military band, were there to greet the German soldiers at the Franco-Spanish border. At the formal lunch in Biarritz, López Pinto toasted, ‘¡Viva Hitler!’ ‘As to gossip here,’ Sir Samuel Hoare wrote to Winston Churchill, ‘you can imagine the state of nerves in which Spain and Madrid find themselves after the German arrival on the Pyrenees.’

When Spanish newspapers proudly announced a Wehrmacht parade through San Sebastián, the capital of Guipuzcoa, on the following Sunday, 30 June, plus visits by German military detachments to Spain’s northern garrisons, Hoare acted. Fearing Hitler’s old techniques of fraternisation and infiltration would lead to the occupation of the whole country, he went to see Juan Beigbeder, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, to try and quash the move.

Colonel Beigbeder (whose surname was originally Breton) is an attractive and quixotic character in Hoare’s book, a dark, thin Arabist with a pencil moustache who slept in a velvet-backed royal four-poster covered in purple damask shot with silver. He and Hoare were both dandies. Beigbeder lived in three rooms on the ground floor of the Palacio Viana where his study was lined from floor to ceiling with glass-fronted bookcases holding a fine collection of eighteenth-century bindings. Beigbeder adored Morocco and had piles of Arab clothes in amazing stuffs and colours that he made his guests try on before admiring themselves in the long glass in his bedroom. He kept an illuminated Koran on his desk and would occasionally chant from it in Arabic. ‘Somos todos moros,’ ‘We are all Moors,’ he once confessed to Sir Samuel.

You can see Morocco from Gibraltar and southern Spain. Arabic-speaking Moors had occupied Spain for eight hundred years (almost twice as long as the Romans were in Britain). Iberians had been in Morocco for centuries too, since the Portuguese conquered Ceuta in 1415 and the Spanish took Melilla in 1497. Beigbeder and Franco were both africanistas; the colonel had successfully recruited seventy thousand Moroccan soldiers for the Generalísimo’s cause. Hoare learned from Beigbeder how deeply Morocco mattered to military nationalists in Spain. The great Spanish empire that once girdled the world had shrunk to a strip of North Africa conceded by the French in 1912, and they were determined to expand again. ‘Morocco is Spanish earth,’ said Franco once, ‘because it has been acquired at the highest price and paid for with the dearest coin – Spanish blood.’

Hoare was pleased to discover that Beigbeder was not like the Falangist minister Ramón Serrano Suñer, who considered ‘the democracies were decadent, corrupt and vicious and that totalitarianism was the new dispensation revealed to save the world’. Although Beigbeder spoke German, had been an attaché in Berlin, admired the German army, and was regularly talking to the German ambassador and flirting with his wife, he was not enamoured of German brutality. The violent fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation had given him some pause for thought. Beigbeder did not know much about the UK, but he had read enough history to know about the inhabitants’ bloody-minded stubbornness. ‘The British bull has not yet come into the arena,’ Beigbeder said to Hoare. ‘Will it fight? And if so, how will it fight? No one can say that it is dead until the corrida is over.’

Sir Samuel pointed out the grave dangers of allowing Hitler’s ‘invincible’ troops across the Spanish frontier. People everywhere would think that Spain was no longer neutral. Should the official German military parade in San Sebastián go ahead, Hoare’s diplomatic mission would end and he would return to England forthwith.

Beigbeder passed on this warning to ‘mi Caudillo’ Franco with his usual signing-off – ‘Respect and Loyalty’ – and Franco acted. The parades did not happen; fraternising General López Pinto was relieved of his post, and General Juan Yagüe Blanco, ‘the Butcher of Badajoz’, Göring’s acolyte who had authorised the Luftwaffe use of the La Coruña radio station, was dismissed as head of the air force.

‘An Allied success had been achieved,’ wrote Hoare in his memoirs. But he added that ‘no Allied success in Spain was ever complete … Whilst the organised parades were forbidden, the fullest latitude was given to smaller parties of Germans to cross the frontier in uniform and to travel to and fro at their will in northern Spain.’

Some of these incursions may have been even larger than Hoare knew. Since 1938, the Spanish Foreign Minister Juan Beigbeder had supported an English mistress, Mrs Rosalinda Powell Fox, who was then living in a rented villa on Mount Igeldo in San Sebastián, overlooking the curving sandy bay known as La Concha. In her intriguing if not wholly accurate memoir, the patriotic Mrs Fox claims that during her siesta one sunny afternoon in late June 1940, her son Jonny, picking wild strawberries up the hill, spotted a long motorised column of German troops. The Foxes warned Beigbeder in Madrid by telephone: German ‘guns, tanks and heavily armed personnel with fixed bayonets’ were heading southwest past San Sebastián towards Vitoria. ‘No bands were playing. No flags were flying. It was certainly no parade.’ She says her lover Beigbeder later told her what he did after her call:

I immediately telephoned the local Army Commander and asked what the hell was going on … He thought the order had been given in Madrid to let them in! By whom? I didn’t give any such order. I have made it plain that as Foreign Minister I will not permit any warring soldiers of either side to set foot in Spain. We are neutral!

Further confirmation of the incursions came from a British spy. Major Hugh Pollard of SIS, working behind Sir Samuel Hoare’s back with the Madrid military attache, Brigadier Wyndham Torr, sent a British officer from Portugal into northern Spain, posing as a summer tourist recuperating on the Basque coast. He was Captain Peter Kemp, an English adventurer who had served with the Carlist requetés on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War, and later been recruited into MI(R), a War Office cell which, together with the Electra House propaganda unit and Section D (for ‘Destruction’) of SIS, later morphed into SOE, the Special Operations Executive. Wearing a Francoist medal as proof of his bona fides, Peter Kemp arrived in San Sebastián on or around 8 July 1940, his brief to keep an eye on any German cross-border activity.

The appearance of the Panzers on the northern border alarmed Franco as much as it frightened Beigbeder – ‘we have a monster on our frontier.’ The German Blitzkrieg through France had made a deep impression on Franco and he knew that if those tanks were to roll on south, supported by Stukas, the Spanish armed forces were in no state to resist.

How could the Spanish deal with the hulking bully at the door? Coquettishly. They flattered and appeased, they squirmed and flirted, and they made promises they never intended to keep.

*

In early July 1940, Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr met General Franco again. Gibraltar loomed over their talks. The German suggested that if Portugal joined the war on the British side, or if Britain invaded Portugal, German troops should be allowed to cross Spanish territory in order to attack them. Of course, he added, they could also be helpful in retaking Gibraltar.

Franco said that the honour of recapturing Gibraltar must be reserved for the Spanish army. What he needed from Nazi Germany was heavy artillery, naval big guns which could be mounted on railways, and aircraft, especially dive-bombers. Canaris took note of Franco’s large shopping list for operations against the Rock.

On 17 July, in a grandiose speech to the Falange on the fourth anniversary of the foundation of his ‘national movement’, Franco laid public claim to Gibraltar. He boasted that ‘two million warriors’ were ready to revive Spain’s glorious imperial past. ‘It is necessary to make a nation, to forge an empire,’ he shouted. ‘To do that, our first task must be to strengthen the unity of Spain.’ He said his duty and mission was ‘command of Gibraltar and African expansion’.

The next day’s huge Francoist victory parade along Madrid’s Via Castellana required the attendance of the entire diplomatic corps, waiting in the hot sun for the tubby dictator to arrive. An anti-British claque in the crowd shouting ‘¡Gibraltar español!’ drove Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare to leave the ceremony ostentatiously.

But the victory parade was the open-air theatre of politics. Other things were going on quietly behind the scenes. While declaiming publicly, Franco was under intense private pressure. His regime was economically vulnerable, ruling a ravaged country full of hungry people.

The subhead of a story in the New York Times on 20 July 1940 about increased US exports of oil to Spain – ‘Fear Expressed in Washington Diplomatic Circles That It May Be Going to Hitler’ – disturbed the Franco regime. The British press picked up the story and some UK newspapers began shouting for a more stringent blockade of this new back door into Germany. Only oil tankers flying the Spanish flag were now allowed to obtain navicerts from the British, and it was a struggle for Beigbeder to find cargo ships to deliver enough oil and petrol for CAMPSA, the state oil company, to keep the economy going. In San Demetrio London, a propaganda film about the British merchant navy set in late 1940, a character remarks that ‘a cargo of petrol is worth all the tea in China’. Fuel was so scarce in Spain that some of the Spanish fishing fleet could make more money by selling their petrol quota to private motorists than by using it to help feed their compatriots.

Nevertheless, on 24 July 1940, only six days after his blustered threats against Gibraltar, Franco shamelessly signed a three-way commercial War Trade Agreement with Britain and Portugal that gained him one hundred thousand tons of wheat for his starving country, access to Portuguese colonial products (castor oil seeds, coffee, copra, groundnut oil, maize and sisal) paid for out of the sterling proceeds of Spain’s exports to the UK, and up to £750,000 credit facilities if required. Naturally, this deal was not bruited in Franco’s propaganda press. His hábil prudencia (crafty caution) was serving him well.