The Vengeance of Rome

She minimises her part in all that. Even in prison she was my guardian angel. Kolya was powerless to help me. He told me so. And if Kolya was able to get me released in 1937, why couldn’t he get me out earlier? Why, as Mrs C suggests, was it up to the SS? After all, the Spanish conflict began in 1936. By the time I arrived in Barcelona, the war was as good as won. Germany and Italy had thrown their weight behind Franco. True, Major Nye was the intelligence officer attached to the government authorities, but he could not have helped me if she hadn’t told me where to find him.

When it was clear Franco had overwhelmed the government forces, Major Nye sent me and a dozen others who had served under Johnny Banks on to Lisbon and from Lisbon home to London. By then the others knew I wasn’t American but believed me to be a German anti-Nazi and covered for me. I had actually seen Santucci and his Italians machine-gunning Republicans as they waded ashore in Majorca, thinking they had found at least some brief relief from their demoralising defeats. Whatever my sympathies, this massacre of defeated, tired soldiers disgusted and horrified me. At various times in Palma I had been threatened with hanging, both as a Spanish traitor and as a Russian spy, but I could easily prove the accusations false. Major Pujol had vouched for me all he could without getting court-martialled himself. He even colluded with Major Nye when the time came to get me to England. He took many risks and died, I learned recently, impoverished in Madrid, a minor civil servant.

I know nothing much worse than civil war, which is usually conducted with the worst ferocity. Yet for all the Spanish bloodshed and cruelty, I never witnessed anything as bad as the horrors of Ukraine, nor was Franco, in victory, as vengeful as Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. Say what you will about the General, he remained a devout supporter of the Opus Dei all his life and was in turn thoroughly supported by that godly society, whose part in the Spanish revolution has never been properly acknowledged.

I hold no brief for Catholics or their leaders, but while Mussolini and Hitler sought rapprochement with the Pope to further their own political ends, Franco received genuine blessing for his efforts. America, too, remained a great friend to Spain throughout the War and long afterwards. The Generalissimo was permanently grateful for that. He believed it stupid to persecute Jews just for being Jews. He felt the same about Negroes. The last letter I ever received from Mr Mix, after he wrote from Washington many years later, made it clear how he owed his life to Franco’s pro-Americanism. Only when the Nationalists discovered Mix was an American, and not a Moroccan, did they spare his life. He, of course, continued to work in Europe until the early fifties, when he was recalled to the home bureau’ and became some kind of civil rights expert at CIA headquarters. I heard this from Major Nye. I never did understand why Mr Mix stopped writing to me. I am not, I hope, one to exploit a relationship, but that man owed me something. Americans have short attention spans. No doubt he forgot. US intelligence people are inclined to abstractions at the best of times. They are not people to remember favours.