I tried to penetrate it, to climb over or round it, all without success. Weeks into our love affair, I tried another tack. “Whom do you admire?” I asked.
“What makes you ask?”
“You can tell a lot about a man from whom he admires. Statesmen? Sportsmen? Seamen? Businessmen? Gamblers? Writers? Gigolos?”
He gave the question some thought, nursing his umpteenth gin, rubbing the rim of the glass with a forefinger until it produced a soft moan. “I admire rock climbers,” he finally said.
“That’s certainly creative. And why rock climbers?”
“Once they start scaling the face of a cliff, I’m t-told there is no turning back, no way out except up. If you get weak-kneed, if your arms or your n-nerve give out, you have no choice, you must keep on climbing.”
“Is that how you see life in general?”
He appeared startled by my question, almost as if he had caught a glimpse of a side of himself he hadn’t remarked before. “Now that you mention it, I suppose it is.”
By December of 1937, the war that was said to be laying waste to the Iberian peninsula had become rather abstract to me. I had never heard a rifle fired in the hope of killing or maiming a fellow human being, so I was incapable of summoning an image of trenches filled with soldiers shooting down ranks of attacking soldiers. Try as I might, I was unable to see the war through English’s eyes. To give him his due, he attempted to educate me. He recounted dreadful episodes of mayhem committed on both the Nationalist and the Republican sides. I remember one tale about the wife of a Communist leader who was raped by every member of the firing squad before being executed. We actually got into a quarrel over it—I argued that English had no way of knowing if the story was a true account of an atrocity or propaganda. He retorted that his source was unimpeachable, but of course he refused to identify him.
English had the habit of fortifying himself with gin before attending the daily briefing given by the general staff’s press attaché on the hotel’s fourth floor, and he took everything that was said there with a grain of salt. He played pelota twice a week with the chief of military censorship, Pablo del Val, in the hope of getting a scoop. The only thing he got for his trouble was muscle cramps. He managed occasional field trips when the Nationalists removed the leash on which journalists were kept, but he and his colleagues were escorted everywhere by a team of Franco’s press officers and were permitted to interview only preselected Nationalist soldiers or officers. English traded war stories with various of his Fourth Estate friends at the table reserved for foreign correspondents in the hotel’s basement bar. I was often present but I had difficulty following the conversation, laced as it was with military jargon and references to unfamiliar geography. I did gather, as Ernie Sheepshanks of Reuters put it, that the handwriting was on the wall: Nobody covering Franco’s H.Q. thought the Republicans could triumph, let alone cling to the territory they held. One of Mussolini’s own sons, Bruno, commanded an Italian bomber squadron—I’d been introduced to him at a cocktail party marking the first anniversary of the arrival of Franco’s Moorish army in Spain. I remember his saying much the same thing, although his gloating tone of voice was repugnant.
Days before what turned out to be one of the coldest Christmases in memory, the Grand Hotel was abuzz with excitement. To everyone’s astonishment, the Republicans—goaded on by their Soviet advisors, so it was presumed—had captured the provincial capital of Teruel. English pointed it out to me on the map. It was inland on the Mediterranean side of the peninsula, circled in red by one of the German or Italian aviators who had bombed it. There was a heated debate at the correspondents’ table about the merits of the Republican campaign. The consensus was that a quick propaganda victory might boost flagging morale but would not translate into a strategic advantage. Robson of The Daily Telegraph had actually been to Teruel when the Nationalists first took it. As foreign journalists were refused permission to visit the Teruel front, a good deal of the local color in English’s notices came from Robson: Teruel was a bleak, walled town with Siberian winters; soldiers fed broken furniture into fires to melt snow for drinking water; both sides could expect more casualties from frostbite than bullets; whoever held La Muela, the hill dominating the town, could expect to win the battle. English’s dispatches were so detailed, he actually received a telegram from the Times foreign editor, Ralph Deakin, complimenting him. Another regular at the correspondents’ table, the Associated Press’s Ed Neil, claimed to have a source on the Nationalist’s general staff who reported that Franco, unwilling to allow the Republicans even an insignificant triumph, had massed an enormous army on the Teruel front. It was Neil who kept us informed of the Nationalist counterattack. After softening up (what a revolting expression) the Republicans with the heaviest artillery barrage of the war, the Nationalist soldiers stormed the Republican positions. Fighting raged in the center of the town around the churches of Santiago and Santa Teresa. Dinamiteros braved heavy fire to blow up Republican T-26 tanks dug in around the bullring in a suburb. With Teruel safely back in Nationalist hands, Franco’s press people finally laid on a junket to the front.
Teruel. Even now, long after the fact, the word makes my blood run cold, not because of the battle, of which I know little more than what was reported in the headlines. No, my blood runs cold because I was personally acquainted with five casualties of the Teruel campaign. The abstract civil war became sickeningly real.
Here is English’s account of the junket to Teruel at the very end of December, which I heard a dozen times if I heard it once. I can honestly say that until we went our separate ways, some two years after we’d met, talking about the trip—to me, to other correspondents, to visiting members of a Parliamentary commission, once to a German embassy officer who had been playing die Wacht am Rhein on the bar’s upright piano—seemed to be the only way English could make it through the day. Or the night that followed.
English shared an automobile with four regulars from the Grand Hotel’s basement bar: the Daily Telegraph’s Robson, Reuters’ Sheepshanks, the AP’s overweight and forever dieting Ed Neil, and the very young and very amusing Newsweek photographer Bradish Johnson. The five of them set off in a snow blizzard so blinding they managed to stay on the road only by following the taillights of the press officer’s car, which in turn followed the taillights of an army supply truck. English was wearing the coat of an Arab prince his father had given him; it was bright green on the outside with a red fox fur lining. Icy winds swept the wastelands of Aragon around Teruel as the journalists passed through villages acrawl with soldiers heading for the front and civilians fleeing the battle. The group stopped for lunch at the canteen of a makeshift landing field that used a stretch of roadway as runway. From the toilet window English could make out soldiers chipping ice off the wings of Fiat fighter planes. In the village of Caudé, north and west of Teruel, English persuaded Franco’s press chaperone to let him interview a wounded officer limping toward the rear. Passing a water well, English chanced to look into it and saw that it was filled with dead bodies—whether civilians or military he could not make out as they were covered with snow. The brief conversation he was able to have with the wounded officer was drowned out by an artillery battery a hundred yards away shelling Republican lines.
Once past Caudé, English—who was driving—pulled up next to a snowbank and went off to relieve himself near a dead horse with its frozen legs thrust into the sky. His description of trying to open the buttons on the fly front of his trousers while wearing mittens still brings tears to my eyes. In the end he took off one mitten and undid the buttons and quickly pulled the mitten back on for fear his fingers would become frostbitten in the subzero temperature. Returning to the two-door automobile, English found he had lost his place in front. Bradish was pouring rum into tin cups. “Come on in out of the cold,” he called. English walked around to the passenger side. Sheepshanks pulled his seat forward and English squeezed onto the rear seat next to Ed Neil. There apparently was a
spirited discussion under way about whether the winters in Aragon were colder than a witch’s tit, but as nobody could claim firsthand experience with witches’ tits, the question was left hanging. Bradish gunned the motor to activate the small heating unit. Before he could throw the automobile into gear a giant hand lifted the vehicle into the air and then dropped it back onto the ground. English never heard the explosion of the Republican shell that landed (so he was later told) next to the bonnet. He remembered only an ear-piercing silence, then soft groans. Soldiers pried open the car doors, which were shredded with shrapnel holes. Bradish Johnson, his face blackened, fell out headfirst onto the road, lifeless. Poor Sheepshanks, sitting next to Johnson, was gasping for oxygen and suffocating because he couldn’t get enough. His head was torn open; what English took for brain matter was seeping out. The soldiers pulled Robson and English onto the road and then wrestled Ed Neil out from the rear seat. His left leg was torn to the bone with metal splinters. English, who was bleeding from a gash in his scalp, pressed a mitten to his own wound to stop the flow of blood. He bent over Neil, whose lips formed words. He finally managed to whisper, “Do me a favor, keep an eye on my typewriter, will you?”
A military ambulance took the five journalists to a dressing station at Santa Eulalia. Robson and Bradish Johnson were pronounced DOA. Sheepshanks never regained consciousness. The surgeons did their level best to save Neil’s leg, after which they did their level best to save Neil when gangrene set in. He died late in the evening of the following day. As for English, once the doctors stitched up the wound and bandaged his head, he was, medically speaking, fit as the proverbial fiddle. I, of course, knew nothing of all this until, on the first day of 1938, which chanced to be English’s twenty-sixth birthday, he turned up in the hotel dining room, a bandage around his head, dried blood on his jacket. “I b-b-badly need a b-b-bloody drink,” he said.
His hands trembled so violently he had to use both of them to maneuver the brandy glass to his lips.
It must have been close to midnight before he ceased trembling entirely. Lying next to him in bed, our hips touching, I could sense him asserting control over his body. When he was still, I whispered in his ear, “Your strengths are evident. Your weaknesses aren’t.”
“I don’t p-permit myself weaknesses.”
I thought about that for the time it took to smoke half a cigarette. Finally I said, “Surely that is your weakness.”
“Ahhh. I see your p-point, Frances.”
English, of course, was an overnight sensation. Photographs of him appeared first in the local Spanish papers, then the story of the Times correspondent who had cheated death while those around him were killed spread to England and Continental Europe. In the hotel bar, utter strangers would come over and shake his hand. Looking back, I can see that this newfound fame may have contributed to our drift apart. Up to the Teruel business, I was the celebrity in the couple. Brits or Canadians would occasionally recognize me from one of my films—usually The Water Gipsies or Dark Red Roses—and ask for an autograph. Now when Brits or Canadians—or Frenchies or Italians or Germans or Dutch, for that matter—accosted English, he would quickly introduce me: “You will surely recognize Frances Doble,” he would say, and more often than not I was favored with a polite smile or a perfunctory nod before the individual turned back to English, who clearly occupied center stage. Oh, please don’t jump to the conclusion that I was jealous. I honestly don’t believe I am capable of jealousy. I suppose it’s simply that my ego required a certain amount of nourishment and, like most actresses flirting with middle age, it made me uncomfortable when I didn’t get it.
English and I got into more spats than usual over ridiculously minor matters such as who had first suggested this or that restaurant, why he always came to my room (after Teruel, the German pilots were getting up at the same hour as the Italian pilots, and in any case we were so tired we never heard them stirring in the corridor), and why I was never invited down to his. All of these small increments of a disintegrating relationship came to a head when English’s pelota partner, the chief of military censorship Pablo del Val, telephoned one Saturday morning not long after English’s return from Teruel. (Talk about being taken for granted, he rang my room and without so much as a buenos dias demanded to speak to English.) As English held the telephone away from his ear, I caught the conversation. “Philby, I’m coming round to get you at six tonight.” “But we aren’t supposed to be playing pelota until Tuesday,” English remarked sleepily. Del Val’s hysterical laughter crackled over the telephone line. “It has nothing to do with pelota, which in any case you are miserable at. Generalissimo Franco is going to decorate you for your heroic actions on the battlefield in the struggle against Godless Communism.”
English and I had a spat over whether I should accompany him, he insisting, me desisting, but I gave in if only to shake the hand of the great leader whom I expected would restore the monarchy to Spain. That evening we found del Val waiting impatiently in the hotel’s elliptical driveway, his black Mercedes-Benz motorcar at the head of an imposing convoy of vehicles filled with journalists. He was a bit flustered to see me on English’s arm, but I ducked into the backseat before he could utter a word. Shaking his head grumpily, del Val took his place next to the driver. We had a police escort all the way to the palace in Burgos that Franco used as a home and a headquarters. We wound up practically running through a series of enormous rooms filled with army and air force officers sitting like schoolchildren at small desks, and a grand ballroom with artists on a scaffolding restoring frescoes on the ceiling, until we arrived at an antechamber where rough-looking men in identical shiny black suits searched English, and a female wearing a badge that identified her as a sanitary officer searched me. (She didn’t shilly-shally, in full view of all the men, about patting down my breasts.) We were ushered into a windowless round room with military maps tacked to the walls. A gaggle of journalists crowded in behind us. Three men in uniform were leaning over a map spread across a large table. I realized the short one was Generalissimo Franco in the flesh. Del Val coughed into his cuff. Franco looked up, unsure of what was expected of him. A young officer with the gold braid of an aide-de-camp approached and whispered in his ear. “Pensé que iba a venire mañana,” Franco said in a loud voice. Del Val said, “Hoy en dia, excelencia.” Franco shrugged. “Vamos a harcerlo.” The young officer handed Franco a small wooden box. He opened it and removed what turned out to be the Red Cross of Military Merit. The Generalissimo made his way across the room to English, stood on tiptoes and, with some difficulty, succeeded in pinning the medal onto the breast pocket of his corduroy jacket. Flashbulbs exploded. Franco mumbled his way through a short speech, which I didn’t catch a word of. English thanked the Generalissimo in English. Del Val translated it phrase by phrase into Spanish. Franco nodded and reached to pump English’s hand. Flashbulbs popped again. English started to introduce me—“Please meet my friend, the Canadian film actress Frances—” But Franco had already turned back to the map on the table.
There was an impromptu bash at the Grand Hotel basement bar the next night. Correspondents from a dozen or so countries clustered around English, each waving his copy of a local or regional newspaper with a photograph of English, a decidedly sheepish grin on his face, being decorated by El Caudillo splashed across the front page. Bill Carney of The New York Times asked English for his impressions of Franco. “Tell the truth, the whole thing was over in the b-bat of an eye,” he replied. “Didn’t have a chance to form an impression.” Randy Churchill clapped English on the back. “Well done, old boy. You’re bound to get a raise from your masters at the British Secret Intelligence Service—they will be elated to have one of their operatives seen shaking Franco’s hand. Doors will open that have heretofore remained shut. Nationalist generals will usher you into their map rooms and point out the disposition of their troops. By Jove, any intelligence service in the world would consider this a major coup.”
English laughed off t
he suggestion that he was employed by the SIS. “I don’t work for any intelligence service, much less the B-Brits. So none of them can claim a coup.”
“If you swallow that,” Randy told Carney with a knowing wink, “I have some prime fen for sale in County Galway that will be of interest to you.”
Long about midnight I tugged at English’s elbow. “Don’t be too awfully long,” I told him. “I’m fagged out.”
“Shouldn’t think I shall be coming by tonight,” he said. “Bit b-bushed myself.”
“You could always come round simply to sleep.”
He managed one of his delicious smiles, the kind that can thaw out the iciest grudge when you first experience it. “I’ll take a rain check,” he said.
I am afraid irritation got the better of me. I snapped, “Tough luck, English—I haven’t been reduced to giving rain checks to my bed.”
7: BIARRITZ, APRIL 1938
Where Alexander Orlov, Cryptonym the Swede, Discovers That the Englishman Is Armed
I have heard it bandied about that, as a matter of tradecraft, the reasonably professional British Secret Intelligence Service, along with their American cousins, the embarrassingly amateurish Office of Strategic Service, use safe houses or safe apartments or safe hotel rooms for clandestine meetings, while we Russians are thought to favor public places on the theory that the more public the place, the easier it is to go unnoticed in the crowd. You will be amused to learn that tradecraft has nothing to do with these preferences. In my experience, which consists of two decades of clandestine activities, the British and the Americans rent safe houses because money is burning a hole in their trouser pockets. Our NKVD, hostage to its proletarian roots, counts kopeks. A Russian controller, which happens to be my current job description, would leap at the chance to debrief his agents under a roof, if only to keep out of the rain. For shit’s sake don’t quote me, but the problem is Moscow Centre. The problem is the fuckers on the fifth floor of the Lubyanka who pore over our expense notes like chimpanzees hunting for lice in the hair of their offspring—these budget commissars refuse to authorize the rental of safe houses or safe apartments or safe hotel rooms when, without spending a ruble, we are, so they argue, perfectly able to meet agents outdoors. In parks, in cafés, at motorbus or train stations and the like. The one time I rented a room in Paris to debrief a secretary to the chef de cabinet in the office of French prime minister Daladier (she had flatly refused to meet me at the Gare de Lyon), the Soviet Embassy’s code clerk wound up being rousted from his bed at two in the morning to deal with a blistering telegram (tagged Priority Immediate, which meant it had to be deciphered the moment it came in) addressed to me. The son of a bitch of a code clerk passed it on, pasted in strips across a blank page in his steel-covered message book, with a graceless smirk. “To the attention of Alexander Orlov,” the plain text memorandum began. “The 5000 French francs you squandered on a room at the Hotel Meurice last month, along with the 100 franc gratuity to the concierge, have been deducted from your wages. Be so kind as to follow Centre guidelines to the letter. We direct your attention to Standard Agent Operating Procedure Rule 7 subparagraph Kh: Meetings with undercover agents are to be conducted in public Areas.”
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