We Saw Spain Die (67 page)

I
wrote this book for many reasons. My interest in the correspondents who covered the Spanish Civil War was first awakened over 35 years ago by my friend and mentor, Herbert Southworth, to whom this book is dedicated. Over the years, as I read their memoirs and articles, I became intrigued by the way in which the correspondents were changed by their Spanish experiences. This led me to examine, when available material permitted, their lives before and after Spain. I was able to do this in much more detail for some rather than others. Inevitably, this left several lesser characters in the book about whom my curiosity was left unsatisfied. Nevertheless, publication of the first edition provoked responses from readers that have helped to fill in some of the gaps. What follows is a compilation of new material that has come my way about Nigel Tangye, Gerda Grepp, Elizabeth Deeble, Kitty Bowler and Tom Wintringham, and Ilsa Barea. In each case, with the possible exception of Gerda Grepp, the complexities of political commitment in the Spanish Civil War for any committed reporter are exposed even further both in terms of personal emotional entanglements and of involvement, deliberate or inadvertent, with the security services of the major international powers.

In the first edition, I quoted some of the laughably absurd opinions expressed in 1938 by the right-wing aviation journalist Nigel Tangye. However, thanks to my friend Gerald Howson, I now think that it is open to question whether these statements reflected Tangye’s real views. In the London Library’s copy of his book,
Red, White and Spain,
can be read the following inscription, dated March 1975 and signed by the author:

This book was written by the author as cover to his assignment by MI5 as a secret agent in the Spanish War. Information was primarily required on the tactics and equipment of the German Condor Legion who were using the conflict to test modern weapons and tactics. Technical photographs were obtained and actually sent back to England at the author’s request through the Diplomatic bag of the German ambassador via Berlin. Thus interception by Spanish police or German confrontation was avoided – but at a risk.

In fact, further research revealed that Tangye did indeed work for MI5, albeit in the press department of which he was later briefly director.
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Questions remain as to why someone who worked for the British internal security services and who was not an operational agent should have been active in Spain. On the other hand, the fact that he arrived in Spain armed with references from the Embassy of the Third Reich in London and other German contacts, echoed the experience of Kim Philby. Tangye, like Philby who was using the cover of philo-Nazism to the benefit of Soviet Intelligence services, was one of the few foreign correspondents in the rebel zone given privileges by Luís Bolín similar to those enjoyed by representatives of the Axis press.

Another correspondent who appears relatively briefly in the book is the Norwegian Gerda Grepp. Material about her was sparse, although I found her moving love letters to Louis Fischer among his papers. Her love affair with him seemed of a piece with her brief passage through the Republican press office in Valencia, recorded in the memoirs of Kate Mangan. The letters and her broken-hearted reaction to the plight of the refugees fleeing from Málaga suggested someone whose attachment to the Republic had deep emotional roots. Inevitably, I was left with a desire to learn more about her.

Accordingly, I was delighted to be contacted by two Norwegian authors, Jo Stein Moen and Rolf Saether, who are preparing a book on Norway and the Spanish Civil War. From them, I learned that Gerda
was the daughter of a famous radical Labour Party leader, Kyrre Grepp. She had married an Italian emigrant at the age of 18 and lived with him in Lugano for a number of years. They had three children, but one died at an early age. Eventually she left her husband and tried to make a living as a journalist back in Norway. She belonged to the left wing of the Norwegian Labour Party, but was a strongly independent internationalist with an impressive network, including the Soviet feminist and politician Alexandra Kollontai. She was already dying of tuberculosis when she arrived in Spain in October 1936, the first ever Norwegian female war reporter. She met and fell in love with Louis Fischer a few days after her arrival and he remained the object of her passion for the rest of her short life. After the Republican debacle in Màlaga, she went to Bilbao and covered the last months of the Basque resistance to Franco’s troops. She was the only Norwegian journalist who covered three fronts: Madrid, Màlaga and the Basque campaign. Despite her fervent anti-fascist views, she remained remarkably objective. Her somewhat pessimistic reports openly criticized the failures and lack of organization of Republican forces. On her return to Norway, she was invited to write a biography of Kollontai, but she was already too sick to accept. She died a few weeks after the German invasion of Norway in the spring of 1940.

Elizabeth Deeble was another interesting female correspondent about whom my curiosity remained unsatisfied. Like her friend Kitty Bowler, much of her work for the
Manchester Guardian
was not credited – printed simply with the heading ‘from our correspondent’. In the chapter on the correspondents in Valencia and Barcelona, I quoted the lengthy letter from Elizabeth to Kitty. Its description of her work with the press services of the Catalan Generalitat was not only highly informative but also entirely accurate. Her activities as liaison with visiting dignitaries and journalists are mentioned in two memoirs. Prince Hubertus Friedrich of Loewenstein was a German Catholic with Czech nationality who, at the behest of Otto Katz, visited Spain in the spring of 1937. While in Catalonia, amongst other things, he inspected air-raid
shelters. He wrote later of his reception by Jaume Miravitlles and ‘his voluntary assistant, Miss Elizabeth Deeble, an American woman from an old Maryland family’. She entertained him throughout the Catalan part of his visit, accompanying him on a tour of Barcelona, including the Gothic cathedral and the Palace of Pedralbes, and of part of the Costa Brava. Back in Barcelona, she took him to inspect residences, schools and kindergartens for refugee children.
²
The American Communist journalist Anna Louise Strong arrived in Valencia just before Christmas 1936. With the government having decamped there just seven weeks earlier, it was nearly impossible for her to find anywhere to stay. She was rescued by Kitty Bowler and Elizabeth Deeble, who let her bunk down in their hotel room. She referred to Elizabeth as ‘an American women who has lived in Spain ten years (“Not interested in politics, you know, but I dearly love the Spanish people, so of course I’ve got to hate that beast of a Franco who is worse than Alfonso and Primo de Rivera combined.”)’
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These brief references to Elizabeth Deeble were filled out for me thanks to Phyll Smith, a librarian from Lincolnshire who, along with Hugh Purcell, is one of the two great experts on Tom Wintringham and Kitty Bowler. Phyll very kindly sent me a report by the FBI Washington Field Office, dated 8 December 1946, which made it possible to learn a little about Deeble’s career before and after her Spanish experiences. Deeble was mentioned peripherally, her name having come up during the surveillance of the Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. This particular report was concerned with Americans who had an interest in Spain and therefore might be considered as possible Communists. One of the FBI’s informants was Abel Plenn, who had worked with the US Office of War Information in Spain from 1944 to 1946. Plenn was in contact with both Jaume Miravitlles and Elizabeth Deeble, whom he had known previously in the OWI. She was now working in a responsible position in its successor, the Office of International Information and Culture within the State Department. Although she was not suspect, the report gave some background information. Its comment that she had first visited England, France and Spain in the years 1912 to 1914 suggested that she was in her forties at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. She had lived in Spain from 1926 to 1937. For some years
from 1930, she ran a tourist business based in Barcelona. Then she had moved to Mallorca where she became editor and business manager the
Mallorca Sun,
an English language newspaper in Barcelona. During the Spanish conflict, she wrote for the
Washington Post
as well as the
Manchester Guardian.
Back in the United States, she worked in the Office of Censorship from April 1942 to April 1944 when she transferred to the Office of War Information.
⁴

It was also a comment from Phyll Smith that led me to look again at a couple of passing references to Kitty Bowler in a book by Graham Greene’s brother, Herbert.
⁵
A cryptic account of his activities as a secret agent in Spain (in which it is not revealed for whom he was working) included references to meeting Kitty Bowler in the Hotel Inglés in Valencia. His few comments about Kitty were later used against her by the leaders of the British Communists as part of their efforts to make Tom Wintringham abandon his relationship with her. The inadvertently damning remarks referred to his gratitude for her ‘shepherding me round Valencia at night. From her I learnt more about the disposition of forces on both sides than from anyone else. She had visited most fronts and had once spent several nights in what she described as the “cooler” as a suspected spy. She was still in Spain the last time I left in August and for all I know she is there now.’ As he was leaving Valencia for Madrid with a group of English ecclesiastical dignitaries, ‘Kitty Bowler flourished my toothbrush which I had left on the hall table’. Although there is no reason to doubt that Greene had indeed left his toothbrush where he said, the comment was apparently later cited as an indication of Kitty’s allegedly loose morals. On Greene’s return to Valencia, he encountered her again: ‘I was not surprised to see Kitty Bowler as eager as ever in her hunt for news’.

Thanks also to Phyll Smith, I learned that Kitty Bowler and Kate Mangan lived together in London after Kitty returned from the United States, where she had gone after being expelled from Spain. Tom and Kitty were unable to live together after he returned to England. With his serious wounds, he needed the support of his family, for whom Kitty
was an abomination, and convalesced with his brother John and sister Meg. John wrote a brief memoir of his brother, describing how he collected a clearly shattered Tom on his arrival in England, a description which makes it clear that Tom almost certainly could not have travelled alone and led to Phyll speculating that he was perhaps accompanied by Kate Mangan.

Phyll has also made the plausible and fascinating suggestion that Hemingway’s
The Fifth Column
was at least partially based on Tom and Kitty. Tom reviewed the play when it was produced in London by Michael Powell.
⁶
His motive for this unusual, and probably unique, excursion into theatre reviewing was to refute accusations from the British Communist Party that he was an infatuated dupe in Spain, that Kitty had been a spy, that he was irresponsible and a frivolous journalist. Much of the language both in the review and in the play itself could be read as a direct reference to the slurs made about Kitty in Spain by the CPGB and André Marty – ‘adventuress’, ‘time wasting journalist’. Phyll also speculated that Michael Powell decided to do
The Fifth Column
as his next project after his film
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,
with its many passing references to Tom in the Home Guard, precisely because he thought it was also loosely based on Tom.

With regard to Ilsa Barea, a comment from Boris Volodarsky, the historian of the Soviet Intelligence services in Spain, prompted me to think that I should have written more about her. Boris reminded me that Ilsa’s first husband Leopold Kulcsar (also known as ‘Poldi’), was an NKVD agent, and that Ilsa had also been accused of being a Russian agent. Given that Ilsa was virtually expelled from Spain having been accused of being a Trotskyist, it seems highly unlikely that she was working for Soviet security services. Indeed, her Comintern file accused her of being a Trotskyist spy with links to the Gestapo.
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Nevertheless, ‘Víctor Alba’ (the pseudonym of Pere Pagès i Elies), a Catalan ex-Trotskyist who became a vehement anti-Communist, claimed that Ilse Kolsar (sic) was the director of a secret women’s prison in Barcelona.
⁸
This was absurd but the virulent accusations
from the Austrian leftist Katia Landau merit more serious examination. Katia Landau had known both Ilsa and her husband Leopold Kulcsar in Vienna. Her accusations derived from the fact that Leopold played a role in the case of her husband, one of the most prominent foreign anti-Stalinist Communists arrested and ‘disappeared’ after the crisis of May 1937.

The Landau case was part of the aftermath of the complex events of May 1937 in which the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and the anti-Stalinist quasi-Trotskyist POUM were repressed. Republicans, socialists and Communists believed that the advocacy of revolutionary militias by the CNT and the POUM was undermining the war effort. In an appalling episode following the events of May 1937, the leader of the POUM, Andreu Nin, was kidnapped on 16 June in Barcelona by Russian agents. He was taken to a house in Alcalá de Henares, where he was interrogated and brutally tortured. When he refused to ‘confess’ to being a Nazi agent, he was murdered. Clumsy Communist propaganda claiming that Nin had been taken to Germany by a Nazi rescue squad was unable to stifle ongoing speculation that his death was the work of the NKVD.

A number of foreign Trotskyists linked to the POUM also disappeared, including the Austrian Kurt Landau, the German Erwin Wolf and the Russian Marc Rhein, son of the leading Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch. Landau, a one-time collaborator of Trotsky had a long history of anti-Stalinist militancy in Austria, Germany, France and Spain. Using the pseudonym ‘Wolf Bertram’, he was secretary of the
Der Funke
(the Star) international Communist opposition group. In Spain, where he worked closely with Nin, he had launched virulent polemics against the militarization of the militias and their incorporation into the ‘Peoples’ Army’. He had outraged the Soviets with his pamphlet
Spain 1936, Germany 1918,
published in December 1936. In it, he had compared the crushing of the revolutionary workers of Germany by the Freikorps in 1918 to Stalinist hostility to the CNT and the POUM in Spain. In consequence, he had been the object of a smear campaign by the Soviets who accused him of being ‘the leader of a band of terrorists’ and the liaison agent between the Gestapo and the POUM.
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