We Saw Spain Die (32 page)

The brutality with which the Nationalists went about ‘managing’ the news of Guernica was illustrated by the treatment received by the first reporter to arrive after the rebels had occupied the town. This was the Frenchman Georges Berniard, of
La Petite Gironde,
who had previously been with the rebel forces at San Sebastián, Oviedo and Toledo. Now, on 29 April, however, he had flown from Biarritz to Bilbao, received permits from the Basque Republican authorities and then driven to Guernica without realizing that it was now in rebel hands. He was immediately detained at gunpoint, accused of espionage. When an officer asked who Berniard and his guide were, their captors replied: ‘They are communists who claim to be journalists.’ He was saved by the intervention of an Italian correspondent, Sandro Sandri, who vouched for him and thus gave him the time in which to swallow some incriminating letters. He was then handed over to Captain Aguilera, who accepted that he was probably not a spy, but accused him of contravening a rebel decree condemning to death any foreign journalist who, having once covered the Francoist side, was found in the company of the Republican forces. Berniard was taken to Vitoria, where he was told that he was to be shot at dawn. His chauffeur was shot, as were two Basque journalists who had been with him that morning in Bilbao but, tired of waiting for him to get the necessary permits, had impatiently set off to Guernica on their own. After thirty-six hours under arrest, Berniard was told by Aguilera that he would be freed on condition that he wrote an article thanking Generals Franco, Mola and Solchaga for their clemency. This he duly did when he returned to France. The fact that Malet-Dauban was still in solitary confinement under sentence of death may well have influenced Berniard and indeed other journalists to go along with the rebel line. That seems to have been the case of Georges Botto, Malet-Dauban’s replacement as Havas correspondent. Under Aguilera’s
guidance, he wrote a story that sustained the rebel line that Guernica had not been bombed but burned by the Basques themselves.
⁹⁹

The appointment of Merry del Val improved the day-to-day treatment of correspondents only as long as they did not ask awkward questions or try to send out embarrassing information. The German bombing of Guernica came into this category. Despite the removal of Bolín, the cover-up of Guernica would go on for many years and, in the short term, continued to involve all those in the press apparatus including Aguilera. This meant the close supervision of ‘untrustworthy’ journalists who tried to get near the ruins of the town and the expulsion of those who wrote unwelcome reports. It also extended to giving strong guidance to sympathetic journalists as to how their articles should be written.
¹⁰⁰

After the excitement of the Basque campaign, Aguilera was transferred from Mola’s general staff to the Delegación del Estado para Prensa y Propaganda.
¹⁰¹
It made little difference to his readiness to be directly involved at the front. He took part in the subsequent assault on Santander, again accompanying the Navarrese Brigades. He actually entered the defeated city two hours before any other Nationalist forces, accompanied by the correspondent of
The Times,
Kim Philby. He drove through thousands of Republican militiamen, still armed but utterly paralysed and dejected by the rapidity of their defeat.
¹⁰²
Shortly after, Virginia Cowles found herself in the recently captured city. Captain Aguilera offered to drive her to León, where she would be nearer Franco’s headquarters as he continued with his attack on Asturias. He had a pale yellow Mercedes on the back seat of which he kept two large rifles and ‘a chauffeur who drove so badly he was usually encouraged to sleep’. Wearing cavalry boots and spurs, a cap from which a blue tassel swung, he drove as if riding a racehorse. Since the roads were clogged by refugees and Italian troops, he would drive along cursing at other traffic. He occasionally complained: ‘You never see any pretty girls. Any girl who hasn’t got a face like a boot can get a ride in an Italian truck.’ He gave little sign of being on his best behaviour for a foreign correspondent. If anything, the brutality of his speech was inflamed by the presence of Miss Cowles, an attractive woman who looked a little like Lauren Bacall. On stopping to ask the way and asking someone who
turned out to be German, he said: ‘Nice chaps, the Germans, but a bit too serious; they never seem to have any women around, but I suppose they didn’t come for that. If they kill enough Reds, we can forgive them anything.’
¹⁰³
‘Blast the Reds!’ he said to Virginia Cowles, ‘Why did they have to put ideas into people’s heads? Everyone knows that people are fools and much better off told what to do than trying to run themselves. Hell is too good for the Reds. I’d like to impale every one and see them wriggling on poles like butterflies…’ The Captain paused to see what impression his speech had made, but she said nothing, which seemed to anger him. ‘There’s only one thing I hate worse than a Red,’ he blazed. ‘What’s that?’ ‘A sob-sister!’
¹⁰⁴

In the wake of the embarrassment over Guernica, ever stronger guidance was given to sympathetic journalists as to how their articles should be written. Virginia Cowles reached Nationalist Spain just before the entry of the Italians into Santander on 26 August 1937. She found the atmosphere in Salamanca reeking of paranoia. She wrote later:

I found it dangerous to make contradictions. One woman, the wife of an official in the Foreign Office, asked me how I dared walk along the streets of Madrid. She had heard there was so much sniping from the windows that bodies were piled up by the curbs and left to rot in the gutters. When I denied this her tone became hostile, and I later learned she had denounced me as suspect. Another man asked if I had seen the Reds feeding prisoners to the animals in the Zoo. I told him the Zoo had been empty for months, and his manner froze. Still another, Pablo Merry del Val, the head of the Foreign Press, admired a gold bracelet I was wearing: ‘I don’t imagine you took that to Madrid with you,’ he said, smiling. When I replied I had bought it in Madrid he was greatly affronted and from then on bowed coldly from a distance.
¹⁰⁵

On a trip to Asturias accompanied by Aguilera, she got on the wrong side of him, provoking his wrath by suggesting that the Republicans had blown up a bridge not out of wanton destructiveness but to hold up the Nationalists. He took his revenge by leaving her sitting alone in a car for
several hours. In turn, she refused to greet a senior officer. Apoplectic with rage, he said: ‘You have insulted the Nationalist cause. You will hear more of this later.’ After a report from Aguilera, Merry del Val refused her the necessary permits for her to leave Spain. Other journalists told her that there was a warrant out for her arrest. She managed to get to Burgos with the help of the Duque de Montellano, whom she knew, and then on to San Sebastián thanks to another friend, the Conde Churruca. There, by a subterfuge, the First Secretary of the British Embassy, Geoffrey ‘Tommy’ Thompson, managed to spirit her across the border into France.
¹⁰⁶
As Cowles’ case revealed, the treatment meted out to correspondents by Bolín and Aguilera was a far cry from the efforts of Arturo Barea, Ilsa Kulcsar and Constancia de la Mora to facilitate the news-gathering of reporters in the Republican zone.

When the Francoists arrived in Barcelona, the foreign press was transported in a fleet of limousines. However, they were allowed to go nowhere unless accompanied by supervising officers. Cedric Salter, of the
Daily Mail,
had remained in the Catalan capital when the rest of the correspondents assigned to the Republic had been evacuated, confident that the right-wing and pro-fascist stance of his paper would protect him. Although he was treated contemptuously by the newly arrived conquerors, he was saved from major discomfort by a cable sent by the
Daily Mail
to Franco’s headquarters in Burgos. He was called for interrogation by Manuel Lambarri, who had by now been promoted to Colonel. Lambarri was outraged to read in the newspaper’s defence of its correspondent that he had reported the war ‘absolutely objectively’, something he regarded as deeply shocking. However, because Lambarri was under instructions to do nothing to displease the
Daily Mail,
Salter was to be sent to Burgos for a final decision on his fate. Once there, he was told by the urbane press chief, Pablo Merry del Val, that he could not work in Spain as a correspondent. There was, it seemed, a danger that he might repeat the sin of objectivity.
¹⁰⁷

I
n the summer of 1938, Mikhail Koltsov, one of Russia’s most successful writers and journalists, was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. It was a reward for a distinguished career which included an active, and indeed daring, role during the Spanish Civil War. His chronicles from Spain, published daily in
Pravda,
from 9 August 1936 to 6 November 1937, had been devoured avidly by the Russian public. During the spring and summer of 1938, his vivid diary of his Spanish exploits was serialized to enormous acclaim. He was at the apogee of his popularity. In the autumn of the same year, one evening at the Bolshoi, Stalin invited him to his box and told him how much he was enjoying the Spanish diary. The dictator then invited Koltsov to give a lecture to present the History of the Bolshevik Party, which he himself had edited. It was a notable token of official favour. Two days before the lecture, yet another honour came Koltsov’s way – he was made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. In the late afternoon of 12 December, a beaming Koltsov fulfilled his promise to Stalin and gave a warmly received lecture at the Writers’ Union about Stalin’s book. Late that night, shortly after he arrived at his
Pravda
office, agents of the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Security) arrived and took him away. After interrogation and torture over a period of nearly fourteen months, Koltsov was shot. To this day, the precise reasons for the fall from grace of such a celebrity remain a mystery.

Born in Kiev in 1898, the son of a Jewish artisan, Mikhail Efimovich Friedland Koltsov was to attain immense popularity in Soviet Russia. As a young man, he had left the Ukraine to study for a degree in medicine at the University of St Petersburg, but the outbreak of the Russian Revolution had seen him swept into politics. He took part in the
Russian Civil War, producing political propaganda for the Red Army’s Okna Yug ROSTA, an information bulletin on the southern front. He joined the Communist Party in 1918 with a letter of recommendation signed by both Trotsky and the old Bolshevik Anatoly Lunacharsky, and participated in the repression of the sailors’ revolt at Kronstadt in March 1921. Thereafter he became a prominent journalist. He was also an aviator who had taken part in long-distance flights, the most celebrated of which had opened up the route Moscow-Ankara-Teheran-Kabul. In 1931, he published the book
Khochu letat’
(I want to fly). He was an important pioneer in the nascent Soviet aircraft industry, participating in the fund-raising for construction of the gigantic aircraft ‘Maxim Gorki’. He wrote colourfully realistic articles about his flying exploits, about his experiences as a taxi-driver and about his long journeys through Asia and Europe.
¹
He believed that a journalist should see, feel and participate in everything he wrote about. From an early stage, his journalistic and literary work was larded with accounts of his own intrepid adventures. A tendency to self-publicity would accompany him throughout his career and may well have contributed to his ultimate fate.

Koltsov’s political activities in the 1920s also contained the seeds of subsequent problems. He was a member of the left Opposition and the protégé of Lev Sosnovsky, an old Bolshevik, a close associate of Karl Radek and himself a gifted journalist. He joined the staff of
Pravda
in 1922 at the invitation of Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulianova, one of the paper’s senior editors. In 1923, to Stalin’s annoyance, he had published a photo-montage ‘A Day in the Life of Trotsky’ in the magazine
Ogonyok.
After the deportation in 1927 of Leon Trotsky, Sosnovsky courageously bore the banner of his friend, an example not followed by Koltsov. When Sosnovsky was arrested in 1928, Koltsov quickly dissociated himself from his erstwhile mentor, which earned him a public slapping in the foyer of the Bolshoi Theatre from Sosnovsky’s mistress, Olga.
²
Koltsov participated in Stalin’s fiftieth-birthday celebrations in 1929 with a panegyric comparing him to Lenin.
³
Having reneged on his past, Koltsov quickly acquired considerable celebrity in the world of the Soviet press. He became editor of a host of journals –
Ogonyok
(1928–39),
Krokodil
(1934–38),
Chudak
(1928–30),
Za rubezhom
(1932–38),
among others. He became acquainted with the top brass of the NKVD. Sofia Prokofieva, a colleague at
Ogonyok,
introduced him to her husband Georgi Prokofiev, deputy to the chief of the NKVD, Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda. He also knew Yagoda’s successor, the vicious Nikolai Yezhov, by dint of attending the literary salon run by his wife Yevgenia. He rose to be head of the powerful Soviet magazine and newspaper association, making him one of the most influential men in Soviet cultural policy of the 1930s. Moreover, as chairman of the foreign committee of the Soviet Writers’ Union, he held a key function in propagating the policies of the Popular Front.
⁴
Trotsky never forgave his conversion to Stalinism but Koltsov would never be free of the taint of Trotskyism.

Despite his growing pre-eminence in the literary world, Koltsov always retained a thirst for action. At the funeral of the great poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky who had died on 14 April 1930, Koltsov volunteered to drive the hearse. It had been announced that Mayakovsky had committed suicide over a failed love affair. Certainly, he was demoralized and disillusioned by the drift of Soviet politics, but it was whispered by some that he had been murdered by the security services because of his increasingly individualistic writings. A huge crowd gathered to pay homage, walking behind the cortège as it drew away from the Writers’ Union. However, Koltsov drove too fast, and lost the crowd. It is to be assumed that this was as a result of the impetuousness of the one-time taxi-driver rather than an official ploy to diminish the size of the popular homage to Mayakovsky and thus limit the negative publicity of his untimely death.
⁵