The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  During the secret negotiations over the Azores, Kennan and W. Walton Butterworth, who was directing American economic warfare activities on the Iberian peninsula under the aegis of the government-operated United States Commercial Company, were both kept informed of developments by the British embassy. They in turn informed Secretary of State Cordell Hull, but their messages brought no response, leaving Kennan and Butterworth to assume that the government on some other level was consulting with the British. Then, three days before the British landings in the islands were to begin in October 1943, the State Department told Kennan to assure Salazar that the United States would respect Portuguese sovereignty in all its overseas possessions, but only to do so if directly asked by the prime minister. Since the matter had not come up with the Portuguese, Kennan did nothing.

  When on the day of the landings another message came telling him to give the assurances without waiting to be asked, Kennan sped to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to arrange a meeting with Salazar, and learned he was out of town and would return only for serious reason. Kennan hinted at the reason by recalling a similar important situation when he and Bert Fish had asked to arouse President Carmona in the middle of the night to tell him of the North African landings. The hint was strong enough that Salazar, contacted by telegraph, agreed to return and meet Kennan at his private quarters at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  On the appointed date, only minutes before leaving for the meeting, Kennan received a coded message now telling him not to give assurances but providing no explanation. What was he to do? He had brought Salazar back from a journey on a weekend and now had nothing to tell him. In what he recalled as “black despair,” he went to the dictator’s modest residence and vaguely confessed to some last-minute change of instructions. Was it possible, though, they might use the time to generally discuss the neglected matter of Portuguese-American relations? A puzzled Salazar agreed, and a wide-ranging discussion followed. When Kennan reported to Washington on the conversation there was, once again, no response, and he wondered if assurances were being withheld because, somewhere in the vast chain of government, plans were afoot to seize some piece of Portuguese territory.

  After the presence of British troops in the Azores finally came to light, Germany responded with what Kennan called a “menacing diplomatic note,” and in subsequent weeks Portugal held its breath in expectation of attack. Time magazine maintained that with the agreement “Portugal was a neutral no longer; she was a participant.” She had “half-stepped into World War II.” Lisbon had become, the magazine also noted, the destination of the moment for war correspondents. Civil-defense exercises took place throughout the city; anti-aircraft guns were stationed in Eduardo VII park; windows were taped; air-raid wardens watched skies from rooftops; some families moved to the countryside for safety. Trying to calm the storm, the newspaper Diário de Lisboa told readers, “the present moment is not for panic but for precaution against the repercussion of events.” At the American embassy in Madrid, the Azores accord seemed a rerun of the crisis that had followed Operation Torch in North Africa. In the event of a German move on Portugal through Spain, all consulates in Spain were told to be ready to destroy confidential material and make plans to rush personnel by automobile to Gibraltar or Lisbon. (The embassy’s concern, as it turned out, was unfounded. The Spanish foreign minister told the German ambassador that Spain remained loyal to its neighbor while Franco informed the Portuguese ambassador in Madrid that Portugal’s back door would be “guarded by Spain.”)

  Roosevelt and Churchill had engaged in correspondence about a military response should Portugal be attacked. Roosevelt wrote that “we must expect Germany to launch concentrated air and submarine attacks upon Portugal as retaliation and in order to impress neutral nations.” He considered putting into Portugal a defensive force that included an infantry division, anti-aircraft battalions, fighter-plane and anti-submarine squadrons, and various support troops. Churchill cautioned that Portugal would resist having Allied ground forces in the country—and that sending them might only increase the probability of a German attack. He also thought a German air attack on Lisbon and Porto unlikely. “By so doing,” Churchill wrote, “they would blot out a valuable listening post and enable us to base air squadrons in Portugal… . They would also lose their vital wolfram.” Nonetheless he added that if asked by the Portuguese, Britain was ready to send a hundred anti-aircraft guns and two daytime and one nighttime fighter squadrons to defend the two cities.

  German retaliation turned out to be nothing more than diplomatic demands. Portugal should remain otherwise neutral by agreeing not to carry Allied supplies on Portuguese vessels going to the islands, by continuing trade relations with the Axis, and by refusing the United States the same use of the Azores as the British. The latter proved another thorny issue for Kennan when he was instructed by order of President Roosevelt to seek an interview with Salazar to request American military facilities on the Azores far greater than those Britain had been granted under the alliance. What the request amounted to, as Kennan grimly saw it, was “a virtual takeover of the islands by our armed forces for the duration of the war and the ruination of the culture and traditional mode of life of the inhabitants.”

  He knew Salazar would not agree. The prime minister had already fulfilled what he understood the Anglo-Portuguese alliance demanded of him, and in so doing had stretched Portuguese neutrality to the limit. Kennan also thought he now grasped why he had not been allowed to give Salazar assurances that the United States would guarantee Portuguese sovereignty in its possessions. Salazar would now believe, Kennan assumed, that America was telling him to allow full use of the Azores or they would be seized. In that case his response might be to turn the coin of the alliance and remind the British that he had honored it, now it was their turn to do so by protecting him from the Americans. Or he might, as Kennan noted, “have picked up his hat and gone back to the University of Coimbra … and said, ‘If I have brought my country to a place where it is necessary to negotiate under the threat of violence, I am not the man to handle its affairs. Somebody else will have to do it.’” He would surely not, in any case, agree to American demands under what was plainly a threat. Kennan felt he had no choice but to challenge the presidential order.

  There followed a standoff between Lisbon and Washington that resulted in Kennan being recalled home. After a painfully useless meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson and a roomful of top military brass—none of whom, the Lisbon chargé d’affaires concluded, knew nearly as much about Portugal as he did—Kennan found himself (after he had been closely vetted by Harry Hopkins, president Roosevelt’s chief adviser) in a one-on-one meeting with the president. Roosevelt heard him out and said to return to the White House the following day to get a personal letter to present to Salazar. And then, added the president, “you just go ahead and do the best you can.” Although elated by Roosevelt’s confidence in him, Kennan still brought up his meeting at the War Department where those present seemed to have a different course in mind. As Kennan recorded his response, the president—“with a debonair wave of his cigarette holder”—said, “Oh, don’t worry about all those people over there.”

  In his letter to Salazar, Roosevelt appealed for American use of the Azores on the grounds of shortening the war and saving British and American lives—and, in a chatty personal aside, recalled that as undersecretary of the navy in World War I he had visited bases in the Azores used by the Allies. After the war, when American forces had withdrawn, the president said he had “personally inspected everything, and the relationship at that time between Portugal and the United States was on a basis of mutual confidence and great friendship.” The implication was that Portugal could expect the same total and efficient withdrawal from the islands once the current conflict ended.

  In reply, Salazar observed that Portugal’s situation was different now due to “well-known circumstances” of, presumably, his country’s World War II neutrality. He had been “
able to satisfy the desires of England” for use of the Azores bases because of the alliance. And “those concessions,” he added in diplomatic-speak but with clear meaning, would also go “some distance towards meeting the requirements which we know exist on the part of the United States.” The Azores agreement, in other words, was with the British; America’s appeal for use of the bases as Britain’s ally, and hence friends to friends of Portugal, would be allowed only under the umbrella of British authority. As the Lisbon ministry later set out the situation for Washington, Salazar was permitting “our immediate use of existing British facilities provided external appearance of adherence to existing British agreement is maintained.” When an American naval air squadron began operating from an island airfield in 1944, the crews would maintain that appearance by wearing insignia of both Britain and the United States.

  *

  Full details of the Azores pact were yet to be worked out when in late 1943 a new American minister was appointed in Lisbon. A former ambassador to Peru, R. Henry Norweb was a career diplomat whom George Kennan liked and was pleased to serve under, but he stepped aside to let Norweb finish the arrangements. (While in Peru, Norweb had negotiated rights to military bases, leading the German press to announce about his present appointment that a “famous American base stealer” had been posted to Portugal.) After Kennan returned to the United States for reassignment, Norweb—with the rank of ambassador after the American legation was designated an embassy in June 1944—quickly recognized what dealing with the Portuguese was like. “We must remember,” he wrote Secretary of State Hull, “that even if we can once overcome the qualms of principle in Dr. Salazar’s mind we will still have to face the usual Portuguese proclivity for horse trading over details.” (Kennan’s version of the same view: “Salazar was a cautious man. All Portuguese are. They are the damnedest traders in the world. They can think of more reservations and little details.”)

  The fondness for bargaining over minutiae was again evident when the United States sought to build and operate a new air base on Santa Monica Island in the Azores. Norweb handled the trying talks in Lisbon that, without British involvement and the possibility of appeal to the alliance, inched along until Salazar finally consented in November 1944, some five months after the Normandy landings.

  10

  War without Guns

  For here too men were at war. A war without guns. A war of speculations, betrayals and secrets.

  —Frederic Prokosch, The Conspirators

  Portugal came through the struggle over military use of the Azores with the Union Jack ever more visible in its buttonhole yet its neutrality otherwise intact. But a second and more severe test, this involving Allied and Axis demands for one of the country’s few abundant natural resources, was already in the making. Well before either defining challenge to its status, however, the country knew war by other means in the form of intense hearts-and-minds competition waged by the belligerents’ propaganda machines. While all European neutrals were targets of propaganda, Portugal’s strategic assets—Atlantic location, open port, overseas possessions—made it an especially contested battleground.

  At the war’s start Germany held the stronger hand. Following the Spanish Civil War its firms had penetrated Portuguese commercial and investment areas while the government exploited Salazar’s fear of communism, a two-pronged approach that reminded British Ambassador Walford Selby of Nazi tactics in Austria, his previous posting before Lisbon. When the war began Germany also had in place Joseph Goebbels’s well-oiled propaganda apparatus. “Nazi Germany believes propaganda is as powerful as Panzer divisions,” Hugh Muir wrote of the Reich’s Portuguese ambition, “and in Portugal Hitler’s propaganda machine is geared to give its maximum output.”

  Britain quickly formed a parallel organization, the Foreign Publicity Directorate (FPD) within the Ministry of Information, and set to work utilizing its strength of broad Anglophile feeling among the Portuguese people, usually calculated over the course of the war at some 80 percent of the population. In the long run, success for the British in the word war was largely a matter of holding the allegiance it already had. In practice this first meant assuring the Portuguese that Britain would survive the shooting war; later, that the outcome would be total Allied victory rather than a compromised peace; finally, that Britain would hold a leadership position in the postwar world.

  Yet for both warring parties Portugal proved a troublesome propaganda market. Salazar’s rigid interpretation of neutrality required equal treatment of the Axis and the Allies, Russia excepted, and his regime censored anything that seemed to tilt the balance, or that it simply found displeasing. The New State from the beginning had tightly controlled what its citizens could read and hear through a system of prior censorship set up to scrutinize books, magazines, and newspapers as part of a national—as an official decree had it—“labor of reconstruction and moral cleansing.” A highly generous interpretation was that the dictator believed a nation with at least half its population illiterate needed protection against opposition voices promoting confusion and disorder. The society would be brought along with patient, fatherly care to see what was best for it. Savvy consumers, at any event, soon learned that Portugal’s constrained media were at any moment a fair measure of the government’s thinking.

  In Antonio Tabucchi’s brilliant short novel Pereira Declares, set in Lisbon in 1938, an aging journalist named Pereira—overweight, a widower, a University of Coimbra graduate and literary minded—is the culture editor of a minor newspaper called Lisboa, where he mostly writes advance obituaries and excerpts work from French writers but still must contend with censorship. When he translates for the paper a nineteenth-century story by Alphonse Daudet that ends with the phrase “Vive la France!”, an acquaintance reminds him the government might not allow it to appear: “… there’s the state censorship and every day, before your paper appears, the proofs are examined by the censors, and if there’s something they don’t like don’t you worry it won’t be printed, they leave blank spaces… .”

  As it happens, the government censor allows the Daudet story to appear, but Pereira’s boss, the paper’s editor-in-chief, lectures him on the need for care in the future. Since the story concerns the Franco-Prussian War, it might give offense to Germany, which the editor points out is Portugal’s ally. Pereira objects that the country has no alliance with Germany, but the editor insists it has “strong sympathies, we think along the same lines as Germany does.” When Pereira falls back on the fact that the censor passed the story, the editor cynically instructs him on the role of self-censorship:

  The censors are a bunch of illiterate boobies … the chief censor is an intelligent man, a friend of mine, but he cannot personally read the proofs of every newspaper in Portugal, the others are just officials, common-or-garden policemen paid not to let through subversive words such as socialism or communism, they could scarcely be expected to understand a story by Daudet ending with the words “Vive la France!,” it is we who must be vigilant, we who must be cautious, we journalists who are versed in history and culture, we have to keep a watchful eye on ourselves.

  The censorship of Pereira’s prewar period intensified in the neutrality of wartime, with the added concern now of giving no offense to the belligerents as well as the government. Space allotted to military accounts in Portuguese publications was finely calibrated to give the Allies and Axis equal space. Certain loaded words—“rout” to describe a battle result—were removed. Newspaper advertisements about shortwave broadcasts coming from London, Berlin, and the United States were restricted to identical size. When the journalists Reynolds and Eleanor Packard reached Lisbon on the exchange train from Italy, they were briefly able to transmit uncensored news dispatches until, as they later wrote, “the corrugated-iron shutters were dropped… . We had lunch with the chief censor and asked him about the change in censorship, and he replied: ‘You sent your best material, didn’t you? Now we have to placate the Axis. Remember, we are trying to
be neutral.’”

  William L. Shirer and Edward R. Murrow broke off their leisurely reunion in Estoril long enough to put together a radio broadcast from Lisbon, schedule it with CBS in New York, and submit their script to Portuguese censors. By telephone a censor politely told them he had translated two of the ten pages; he thought it possible he could finish the rest by the following week, after which the broadcast could take place. Murrow and Shirer argued their case until nearly airtime before concluding the censor would not speed up his pace.

  In early 1940 the British embassy in Lisbon believed the Portuguese chief censor was so dazzled by Nazi combat success that he even restricted references to the Anglo-Portuguese alliance and what it required of both nations. At year’s end, W. E. Lucas, the Lisbon correspondent of the London Times—and during 1940 listed on the masthead of the Anglo-Portuguese News as its director and proprietor—was given forty-eight hours to leave the country after authorities objected to uncensored stories he had written for the New York newspaper PM (and described in this book’s opening chapter). Hauled before the secret police, Lucas defended his work, but a report found that “without the slightest regard for the country whose hospitality he benefits from, he did not hesitate to twist or make up facts, writing not just nonsense but also untruths which clash with national pride and which falsify Portugal’s international stance.” Although he apologized to the head of the secret police and the propaganda chief, Lucas’s stay in Portugal was only slightly extended, and he left the country in early January 1941. Soon thereafter the government dispelled an Italian journalist, thereby rebalancing its treatment of Allied and Axis newsmen.

  While newspapers and other media coming into Portugal from abroad were dutifully inspected, the effort was inconsistent because of divided attitudes within the secret police and the Salazar government. There was also inherent difficulty in the censors’ guessing in advance what might offend the warring nations. One response was to assume anything might, so when newsreels of war events were shown in theaters, a notice on the screen asked for no expressions of sympathy for any of the belligerents. Pro-Allied audiences circumvented the prohibition by stamping their boots on the floor when Hitler appeared, having coughing fits when it was Mussolini, and shouting out “Viva Benfica!”, the name of a Lisbon football club, for Churchill.