The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  In the winter of 1943 the OSS recruited Mannes for its Secret Intelligence Branch, first using her to organize files, later to read intercepted mail. Eventually she was groomed for undercover work, the training taking place in a New York apartment and involving basic spycraft of picking locks, taking secret photographs, breaking codes, and piecing together bits of paper removed from trash. She considered herself so poor at the work that she expected to be dismissed by the OSS; instead she was sent to the agency’s Lisbon station. Her cover as a secret agent, ironed out with The New Yorker magazine and reasonably plausible given her time with Vogue, was that she would write regular “letters” for the magazine from Portugal and Spain, with her payment coming from OSS funds.

  In early June 1944 Mannes left New York on a Clipper flight. Aboard on his way to a posting in Moscow was George Kennan, who provided her—so she later noted—with more information about the current state of affairs in Portugal than had come from her OSS briefings. Her Lisbon mission was vague: along with other correspondents she was to linger in hotels, airports, cafés, and local dives, there gathering whatever information she could about the Germans. Tall, blonde, and glamorous, she hardly faded into her surroundings; nor did she seem, at least to male admirers, believable as a writer for an important American magazine. “What are you doing over here, a beautiful woman like you, alone?” she would be asked, and reply, “Didn’t you know, I am an international spy!” Sometimes the candid gambit worked, but at other times more was required to get sources to open up to her. She asked her Lisbon superior about how far she should go in dealing with amorous and aggressive types. “As far as you need,” was the unhelpful answer. By her own account, she performed dutifully in this vein, yet on the whole she felt she collected little useful information despite all-out efforts.

  With Allied forces moving across Europe, the OSS had less need for operatives on the Iberian peninsula, and after four months abroad Mannes returned to New York. In a final report to the agency she made a point of urging that conspicuous females no longer be sent to Latin countries as secret agents. If her spy work was of admittedly limited value, her New Yorker cover was at least productive, resulting in five published letters—two each from Lisbon and Madrid, one from Barcelona.

  The initial Marya Mannes “Letter from Lisbon,” cabled to New York on June 25, reported that while the concept of neutrality was familiar and understandable, actually seeing it at work in Portugal was unnerving. Germans sitting beside her in restaurants gave her a sense that a filmlike partition had dropped between them: “They are an exhibit marked ‘Enemy. Do not touch.’” Unsettling too was the sight of Nazi posters on walls and German publications in newsstands beside stacks of Collier’s, Time, and Life; so was hearing radio broadcasts coming from Berlin and Vichy as well as from the BBC in London. But however extraordinary life there might feel, Lisbon, and Portugal as a whole, had clearly benefited from neutrality. Portuguese men were alive and at home. Lisbon was clean and strikingly attractive. Luxury items filled the shops. New buildings were going up everywhere. There was rationing, but it was hardly noticeable by foreigners—most of whom, with the refugees now largely absent, were members of the diplomatic corps.

  How diplomats went about their work and play in the aftermath of D-Day became the subject of Mannes’s second Lisbon letter. Although the city had less wartime importance, the diplomatic community was still large. There were roughly a hundred people in the American mission, several hundred in the British, and several hundred more in various friendly missions—which meant, as Mannes wrote, that a diplomat in Lisbon never need fear of dining alone.

  This was comforting since Lisbon diplomats, like diplomats everywhere, preferred their own company. Their association with the local Portuguese was usually limited to a few aristocrats and important families. Many of the top-rank diplomats lived in grand style outside the city on country estates, yet wherever they resided they had access to plentiful low-paid household help for entertaining, which was incessant. The elderly minister from Switzerland, Henri Martin, stood out by giving picnics rather than the usual evening dinners. Sundays were his days, and his invitations were sent out in French verse, with replies expected in kind. Guests met at his home at noon for cocktails, then were taken by cars to a beach, where they went swimming while a long wooden table was set with place cards. After a lengthy and elegant champagne lunch, everyone usually took a nap before they were driven home in time to dress for dinner. “In Lisbon,” said Mannes of the diplomats, “everyone eats too much and pays for it with either increased girth or ‘Lisbon stomach,’ an exhausting ailment.”

  American and British diplomats, Mannes noted, were known for their hospitality. The Spanish ambassador, Franco’s brother Nicolás, rarely entertained, but at parties given by others he was a lively guest. The German diplomats had by this time largely vanished from Lisbon social life, as had the Vichy French, and the Japanese had never sought to take part. (If Japan’s diplomats kept to themselves, its secret agents were a familiar presence in the Estoril casino. When a new American secret agent was introduced to the casino, a colleague pointed to the Japanese milling about in the gambling room and said, “Again, watch those fellows. Here in Lisbon they receive information about troop departures from seaports on our West and East coasts, which is relayed to Tokyo and Berlin. The Japanese have an excellent worldwide espionage network. They’re contacting agents here in the casino, picking up messages, including dates and hours transmitted by the numbers played at the roulette table—right under our noses.”) Since Italy’s change of sides, the chargé d’affaires of its legation and his wife had become regulars at all Allied evenings. The embassies and legations were also filled with low-level, unattached young men and women, and they were more likely to seek out such Lisbon nightclubs as Nina’s and Galgo’s or the Wonder Bar of the Estoril casino. On weekends they might even join the ordinary Portuguese at country fairs, bullfights, and at the beaches.

  As for official work at most ministries in Lisbon, Mannes reported that it was conducted within a narrow slice of time. Typically diplomats did no business before eleven in the morning, or between one and four in the afternoon, or after six in the evening. The British, a bit more industrious, began the workday at ten. The Americans, in the face of a wall of diplomatic disapproval, held to a scarcely imaginable nine-to-six schedule, with two hours off for lunch.

  Mannes’s account of Lisbon diplomatic life flowed over into a promised article for Vogue on the city’s fashions, her last journalistic effort before returning to New York. While the fashion industry in Paris carried on under German rule, she observed that in Lisbon smartly dressed women—a large number of whom were in or associated with the diplomatic corps—“have every stitch they wear made to order,” which meant they were far better turned out than the French. Lisbon abounded in superb fabrics, silks especially, and swarms of able dressmakers followed photos in British and French magazines to turn out charming clothes.

  With shoes, in Lisbon the ready-made variety were easily found, but for little more money they could be hand made in any color and leather. For women the standard style was a sling-pump mounted on Portuguese cork wedges of different heights—the cork a necessity for maneuvering the city’s steep and cobbled streets. Accessories in Lisbon, Mannes found, were not outstanding but of good quality. Gold jewelry, on the other hand, was “something to lust for.” Portugal seemed to be overflowing with gold, and skilled craftsmen could work it into highly original designs. Even the country’s “junk jewellery” could be ravishing.

  Beyond securing fine attire, the main concern of fashionable women in Lisbon was how to avoid getting fat on local meals, which could feature five courses. Exercise was seldom undertaken, with few inclined to walk and even fewer to use the many beaches for swimming. Anyone who had lived in Lisbon long enough, Mannes concluded, knew the reason: “the will to act dies a slow and painless death, thanks to a climate that seems to breed passivity. It doesn’t matter … and tomorro
w … are the two most popular phrases in Portugal.”

  *

  In writing about the constant round of diplomatic social activity in Lisbon, Marya Mannes caustically observed that it often seemed “unpardonably trivial at a time when most of the world is at war. In many respects it is a life as remote from reality as it is from illusion.” Colm O’Donovan tried to distinguish firmly between the real and the illusory, at least in reports he sent to Dublin from his diplomatic post in Lisbon, where he had come in the winter of 1941–1942 as the chargé d’affaires of a newly established Irish legation after earlier assignments in Belgium, Germany, and the Vatican. (The columnist in the Irish Times who in October 1941 wrote—as quoted in the epigraph to the opening chapter—that Lisbon must be the most fascinating place in the world, had gone on to remark: “I have often wondered, by the way, why Mr. de Valera has not established an Irish Diplomatic Mission of some sort in Portugal, and I can imagine no more interesting job—except possibly my own—than that of an envoy to the Portuguese capital.”) At his post in Lisbon, O’Donovan pursued routine ministerial duties—keeping an eye on the trade flow between Ireland and Portugal, attending to the needs of Irish nationals, and defending Irish neutrality against a backdrop of British and American hostility. He was in no sense a secret agent, but he had been given a secondary mission of informing the Irish government about how Salazar’s New State truly functioned.

  In Ireland at the time, notably in Catholic, conservative, and intellectual circles but also in the popular press, Salazar was receiving high marks. In addition to steering Portugal’s neutrality, he had brought financial order and stability, and his vision of a rural and religious nation seemed all of a piece with Eamon de Valera’s conception of the Irish state. The Irish view of Portugal generally derived from secondhand information, and in proposing a legation in Lisbon de Valera had told Salazar that “the Irish Government has watched with sympathy and admiration the great work of reconstruction which you have carried out in Portugal and, naturally, it wishes to observe it more closely.” Colm O’Donovan and his colleagues in the Lisbon ministry were to do the observing.

  Their dispatches back to Dublin did not question Salazar’s political skills, nor did they say much about the repressive nature of a regime underpinned by the military and the secret police. But they made an unequivocal case against the New State as a political template for democratic Ireland. O’Donovan quickly grasped that in Portugal “decisions on all matters, even of no special importance are made at the top,” and that there existed a vast administrative gap between that elevated point and the next level. Other diplomats told him that Salazar’s task of governing was impossible because of a lack of good subordinates and the overall backwardness of the country. A Portuguese religious figure added that the Irish “had nothing to learn here, that there was no country in the world where there was so much poverty.” O’Donovan came to conclude for himself that massive poverty was the country’s endemic problem, and that the New State was unable or unwilling to address it.

  In a wartime situation he was astonished to find that Portugal had not immediately begun rationing essential food items. The government, so he was told, believed the country could produce enough food, oversee its equitable distribution, and prevent smuggling to hungry Spain. But the system that was set up was clearly inadequate, with a black market flourishing and all foodstuffs available at a price. In September 1943 O’Donovan informed Dublin that “there have been many arrests and punishments of firms found to have been hoarding but these measures, though popular, do not tackle the root of the problem, which lies in the failure of the Government to introduce an effective system of rationing.” When rationing was finally established, it covered only the purchase of bread, with other items added as the war went on.

  In a report in February 1945 O’Donovan contrasted the meager bread ration of poor workers with the well-fed life of the prosperous. In the same year the secretary of the Irish legation, Patrick J. O’Byrne, wrote Dublin that despite the fact that potatoes were in short supply, “it seems phenomenal how … large sacks of them come to light from no one knows where to be sold under the noses of the authorities in the city of Lisbon itself at fancy prices.” In a subsequent letter the secretary added that the entire food distribution system was “a long-standing joke with the public.”

  Social unrest was inevitable, and the Lisbon legation alerted Dublin to various protests—an acute embarrassment for a regime obsessed with keeping order. In January 1944 O’Donovan reported a 20 percent pay increase given to civil servants, the military, and local officials with the intent, so he believed, of warding off more dissent caused by inflation and the black market. The pay concessions, he wrote, “were wrung from the government virtually at the point of a pistol, the twice repeated rioting and strikes of the past twelve months and open revolt among the troops in the Azores having forced them to take action.” But the boost in earnings could scarcely keep up with higher prices, and he predicted further unrest.

  At bottom, the problem was the way the New State functioned. “The war is of course the great alibi of the authorities in regard to everything that is amiss,” O’Donovan noted, “but I think it cannot be doubted that a very large part of the difficulties arises from the system.” In making their way through it, ordinary citizens resorted to systematic bribery, which in turn resulted in endless prosecutions of businessmen and civil servants but did nothing to stop corruption. The only well-functioning unit of the government, in O’Donovan’s sour view, was the propaganda office, which managed to plant in the media a continuing stream of favorable accounts of the regime.

  “I leave Portugal with a definite opinion that the present regime will not last,” O’Donovan said when he returned to Dublin in February 1945. Although his prediction was more than two decades wide of the mark for Salazar’s government, his observations in Lisbon had cast the dictator in a new light. The “sympathy and admiration” that de Valera had expressed to Salazar did not cease in Dublin; Portugal was still admired for its fervent Catholicism and anti-communism. But the Irish government’s view of the Salazar era now included reports from the field of poverty, corruption, inefficiency, and unrest.

  7

  Celebrité de Passage

  Lisbon always had its current celebrité de passage. They came out of the wings, took their bow and passed on again, like the characters in some charity revue.

  —Polly Peabody, Occupied Territory

  Faced with a wartime Lisbon that produced more rumor than news, Hugh Muir fell back on interviewing notable figures passing through the city. There were many possibilities. America’s Wendell Willkie, on his way home after visiting England, turned out to be an ideal subject, both congenial and talkative. Britain’s Clement Attlee, on the other hand, was glacial in his reserve, and after a half-hour conversation had managed to say nothing. Dorothy Thompson, America’s top-paid woman columnist, was good copy but as interested in interviewing Muir about British war attitudes as he was her. H. G. Wells was not copy of any sort since he could be interviewed only through his literary agency, at so much per word. Gracie Fields was returning from singing for the troops in England when she chatted at length with Muir while having her shoes shined. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were at first unnoticed when they slipped into Lisbon, then for days afterward dominated the attention of the press.

  When Noël Coward came in from New York in June 1940 he confided to Muir his irritation with those complaining about his absence from his native England, insisting that all his time away he had been on official war-related jobs. However hard that might have been to swallow for someone with a reputation as a sophisticated entertainer, it was in fact true, though Coward could not fully reveal to Muir or anyone else what he was up to. He recalled in his memoirs of being cornered once by a reporter for London’s Daily Express whose assignment, as he informed Coward, was to find out “just exactly what war work you are engaged in.” Rather than brush him off, Coward solemnly explaine
d that, though he was not at liberty to go into it, he could assure him it was routine activity lacking in mystery. He would be grateful if the reporter would take his word for this and just regard him as an ordinary Englishman rather than a show-business celebrity. The resulting story for the newspaper was so misleading that the British censored it, leaving Coward for once in his life on the side of suppression of information.

  The misadventure with the reporter took place in Paris. Even before the war broke out Coward had been recruited to join a group of businessmen and celebrities traveling in Europe to gauge local opinion, the effects of Nazi propaganda, and whatever else seemed worth reporting back to London. With the war he was given a new job of setting up in Paris a propaganda bureau that would operate in conjunction with France’s Commissariat d’Information, which was also drawing on the services of such literary figures as André Maurois and Jean Giraudoux. On September 5, 1939, two days after England declared war on Germany, Coward was flown to Paris to start looking for an office. Soon he found a place as well as a flat to live in, then waited out the limbo of the phony war. He dutifully went to the office each morning and did what work there was to do, yet even when the real war got under way he felt he was accomplishing little that mattered, and even this he was unable to communicate to friends and family back home.