[image error] On July 18th, 1936, a short, balding, barrel-chested man in a grey suit, carrying a Spanish diplomatic passport in the name of José Antonio de Sagroniz, boarded a private seven-seater de Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft that had been chartered for the substantial sum of £2000 ($156,000 today), anonymously deposited into a special account in Kleinwort’s Bank in London, then flown under conditions of greatest secrecy from Croydon Aerodrome in England to the Canary Islands. The pilot, Cecil Bebb, a sometime British military intelligence officer, had been instructed to make sure of the identity of his passenger by giving him the bottom half of a playing card and asking the passenger to supply the top half, which would have been peculiar orders if the passenger were an ordinary diplomat, and this were a routine charter flight.

In reality, however, Bebb’s passenger was Francisco Franco Bahamonde, at forty-four the youngest general in the Spanish Army and former commander of the fearsome Army of Africa during the ill-fated Rif rebellion against Spanish and French rule in Morocco. A vocal critic of his country’s five month old Socialist government, he had been sequestered on the Canary Islands as military commandant after being dismissed from his post as military Chief of Staff. And he was on his way from exile in the Canaries, almost a thousand miles by sea from Spain, to rejoin his old troops in Spanish Morocco and lead them to the mainland as part of a carefully plotted military coup against Spain’s democratically elected regime.

This story, with which the prologue to my new book, Hotel Florida, begins, is almost too good to be true. In its expanded version it involves clandestine meetings, money laundering, even a pair of blondes being used as camouflage. In my telling I pared some of these details away (this is just the introduction, after all); but the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere they evoke nonetheless permeates parts of my narrative. There are smuggled papers and disappearances and midnight visits by the secret police; but although I hope these elements make Hotel Florida readable, I haven’t added them just to manufacture suspense. In fact they’re integral to the story itself, because in the Spanish Civil War the shadow line between truth and falsehood often became faint indeed. Your friend could be your enemy. Honesty could get you killed. And one of the things Hotel Florida is about is the way its protagonists navigated their way through that perilous new landscape.

I’ve just received the edited manuscript, on which my editor, Jonathan Galassi, has lavished the kind of fine-grained attention that is supposed to be (lamentably) obsolete in today’s publishing world; and I’m now creeping through it responding to his queries. I’m also starting the painstaking process of clearing permissions for quotations and photographs; tidying my (voluminous) notes on documentation, of which more in a separate post; assembling helpful additional matter, such as a glossary of Civil War acronyms (to remind readers of what UGT, CEDA, POUM, and other abbreviations stand for), a map, and so on. All of which goes some way to explaining why, although the manuscript is now complete, the book will most likely not make an appearance until early in 2014. In the meantime, though, I’ll continue to post short snippets on this blog. Stay tuned. For now, here’s the ending of the prologue, which follows a three-and-a-half-page summary of the events leading up to the military coup that touched off the war:

The stage was now set for a carefully orchestrated military uprising, first in the colonial outposts of Melilla, Ceuta, and Tetuán in Spanish Morocco, then in garrisons around the Spanish mainland. The plotters apparently envisioned a quick military takeover: not a prolonged civil war that would last nearly three years; cost five hundred thousand lives; destroy villages, towns, and substantial parts of cities; put thousands of citizens in political prisons for decades; lay waste to the country’s economy; and leave scars in the national psyche that still cannot be spoken of more than seventy years later. But they did intend – unilaterally, by force -- to overthrow their country’s legally elected government and replace it with one of their devising.
So when the hired Dragon Rapide safely crossed into Spanish colonial airspace, Francisco Franco opened his suitcase and changed from his gray business suit into a khaki uniform, winding around his waist the red-and-gold tasseled sash of a general in the Spanish Army. Shortly thereafter, the plane touched down on the tarmac at Tetuán, where rebel troops had already stormed and secured the airfield, and Franco proceeded by motorcade between lines of saluting Moorish soldiers to the office of the High Commissioner. Soon all the world would hear his proclamation:

Once more the Army, reunited with the other forces of the nation, has found itself obliged to respond to the wishes of the great majority of Spaniards who, with infinite bitterness, have seen disappear that which unites us in a common ideal: SPAIN. At stake is the need to restore the empire of ORDER within the REPUBLIC…[and] the principle of AUTHORITY, forgotten in these past years….
To execute these tasks rapidly
I order and command:
Article 1. Martial law is declared in the whole territory and all armed forces in consequence are militarized….

Ten days later an American newspaperman, Jay Allen, who had happened to be in Gibraltar when the uprising began, managed to get to Tetuán and interview Franco in the High Commissioner’s mansion. “There can be no compromise, no truce,” the general told Allen then. “I shall advance. I shall take the capital. I will save Spain from marxism at whatever cost.”

“That means,” Allen asked, for clarification, “that you will have to shoot half Spain?”

Franco smiled. “I said whatever the cost.”

The Spanish Civil War had begun.