by Preston Paul
Wild rumours flew around Valencia about the disappearance of Robles. Some said that he had been arrested on espionage charges and shot within the Soviet Embassy. Of all the reasons given for his subsequent death, the most widely believed was that, in a café conversation, he had carelessly let slip a piece of sensitive military information which he could have known only by dint of his privileged access to coded telegrams. This is what Ayala believed and Louis Fischer also heard the same rumours. In fact, Fischer’s unique combination of access to both the Russian hierarchy in Spain and to the highest levels of the Spanish Government gives considerable credence to his comments on the case – written after he had broken all ties with Communism. He wrote:
He was not shot by the government, and I do not know whether he was shot, but he vanished about that time without leaving a trace. People affirmed that he had been smuggled out of Spain against his will and taken by boat to Russia. Whispers said he had talked too much and revealed military secrets in Madrid cafés. If that could have been proved it might have warranted turning him over to the Spanish government for trial, but not ‘taking him for a ride’.18
Louis Fischer was not in the habit of repeating rumours just for the sake of filling pages. He had strict journalistic ethics as well as high-level contacts. His contacts spoke to him uninhibitedly because they trusted him never to reveal more than they were comfortable with. Accordingly, this passage takes on considerable significance. His assertion that the Spanish Government was not involved carries some weight. He was a close friend of various ministers, including Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who at the time was both Foreign Minister and Chief Commissar for War. If Fischer’s elimination of the Republican Government as a suspect is accepted, the hint that Robles was killed by the Russians is doubly significant. Taken with the suspicion that, to get the position that he occupied, Robles had to have close connections with the Russian security services, it might well explain why, at this relatively early stage, they had no compunction in eliminating him. In other words, they regarded him as one of their own and not merely a Spanish employee. Enquiries about Robles directed by the present author to a hitherto helpful member of Gorev’s staff, who was a GRU interpreter during the Civil War and knew about the case, were met with a brusque refusal to comment.
What would make the Robles case notorious was the interest taken in it by John Dos Passos. He arrived in Spain on 8 April 1937, on a trip that he later described as ‘so typical of the blundering of well-intentioned American liberals trying to make themselves useful in the world’. Since the outbreak of the war, he had been working with ‘various friends’ to find ways of persuading the Roosevelt administration to lift the embargo which prevented the Spanish Republic buying arms. It having been decided that a documentary about the Civil War would help get public opinion behind the campaign, he was now en route to Madrid where he intended to link up with Ernest Hemingway and the Dutch director Joris Ivens to make the film The Spanish Earth. Dos Passos intended Pepe Robles to be his first port of call: ‘I knew that with his knowledge and taste he would be the most useful man in Spain for the purposes of our documentary film.’ On reaching Valencia, he headed for the press office in the Calle Campaneros. On a nearby street corner, Dos Passos was introduced by the American journalist Griffin Barry to Kate Mangan, who remembered him as ‘yellow, small and bespectacled’.19
When he got to the press office, and began asking for Robles, Dos Passos recalled much later:‘faces took on a strange embarrassment. Behind the embarrassment was fear. No one would tell me where he could be found. When at last I found his wife she told me. He had been arrested by some secret section or other and was being held for trial.’ Márgara asked him to try to find out what had happened to her husband by using his influence as an internationally celebrated novelist who was identified with the Republic’s cause. He began to make enquiries in an effort to discover what Robles had been accused of. If Robles had been arrested by Grigulevich’s Brigada Especial or by some other section of the secret police, whether Russian or Spanish, none of the functionaries that he visited would have known anything. Nevertheless, Dos Passos regarded their ignorance as only feigned and thus as deeply sinister: ‘again the run-around, the look of fear, fear for their own lives, in the faces of republican officials’. Grasping around for a story with which to fob him off, ‘the general impression that the higher-ups in Valencia tried to give was that if Robles were dead he had been kidnapped and shot by anarchist “uncontrollables”’.20
Not long after the arrest of Robles, at some point in January, his family had been evicted from their flat, which was unlikely to have been a coincidence. In an overcrowded Valencia, Robles had a decent apartment only because of his military rank and position in the Ministry of War. To pay the rent on the sleazy apartment to which they had to move, ‘Coco’ Robles had taken the job in the press office. Márgara told Dos Passos that the last time that she saw her husband was ‘in the hands of a Communist group of secret police in Valencia’ in late January 1937.21 Thereafter, Robles was transferred from the prison on the banks of the Turia to Madrid where, presumably, he was executed. On 9 April, the day after Dos Passos reached Valencia, Coco was told that his father was dead. His informant was his immediate boss in the press and propaganda office, Liston Oak, the man responsible for the daily English-language news release. The gloomy, self-obsessed Oak was a member of the American Communist Party, but was developing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist POUM.22 Those who worked in the press with ‘Coco’ were appalled by the news about his father. At the time, the most vocal in expressing her outrage was the outspoken American Milly Bennet. An English colleague, Kate Mangan, tried later in her memoirs to explain what had happened to Robles: ‘he had been engaged in rather hush-hush work. What happened remained a mystery; it was inexplicable but it leaked out despite efforts to hush it up on the part of our communist friends.’23
Ironically, ‘one of our communist friends’ who not only did not hush the case up but was instrumental in giving it notoriety was that bundle of introspective misery and political contradictions, Liston Oak. His involvement in the Robles case and in the subsequent estrangement between Dos Passos and Hemingway was considerable. It derived in the first instance from his contact with Coco Robles and subsequently with Dos Passos. When Dos Passos went to the press office on 9 April and Coco Robles told him what Oak had said about the death of his father, they both chose to believe that this was merely a rumour. In fact, Coco, his sister and mother would go on believing for quite some time thereafter that José Robles was alive. On 20 April, Coco wrote to Henry Lancaster, saying: ‘From my father there is no definite news. Some even say that he is free and at one of the Madrid fronts. I am not inclined to believe this. The whole affair continues to be surrounded with great mystery. We do not know what to think or expect next.’ Then, in late April or early May, Maurice Coindreau heard from Márgara that ‘for over a month she has not heard from her husband, that she thinks he is still in Madrid although she cannot understand why he doesn’t communicate with her’. Coindreau was godfather to Robles’ daughter Margarita (Miggie) and was also Dos Passos’ French translator. As late as 17 July, Coco wrote to Professor Lancaster saying that there was still no news of his father.24
Meanwhile, on 9 April, Dos Passos was deeply affected by finding Márgara exhausted, her face drawn, living in a sordid and grimy apartment block, and by her desperate request that he try to find out what had happened to José. As a distinguished foreign visitor, Dos Passos was staying at the Hotel Colón, which had been renamed the Casa de Cultura and reserved for displaced and/or visiting intellectuals, artists and writers. Locally, it was known as the Casa de los Sabios (the house of the wise men), although Kate Mangan regarded it as ‘a kind of zoo for intellectuals’.25 When he was back in America, Dos Passos wrote about going back to his room and brooding on what Márgara had told him:
It’s quiet at night in the Casa de los Sabios. Lying in bed it’s hard not to think of what one had hea
rd during the day of the lives caught in a tangle, the prisoners huddled in stuffy rooms waiting to be questioned, the woman with her children barely able to pay for the cheap airless apartment while she waits for her husband. It’s nothing they have told her, he was just taken away for questioning, certain little matters to be cleared up, wartime, no need for alarm. But the days have gone by, months, no news. The standing in line at the police station, the calling up of influential friends, the slow-growing terror tearing the woman to pieces.
He went on to imagine what had happened to his friend:
And the man stepping out to be court-martialed by his own side. The conversational tone of the proceedings. A joke or a smile that lets the blood flow easy again, but the gradual freezing recognition of the hundred ways a man may be guilty, the remark you dropped in a café that somebody wrote down, the letter you wrote last year, the sentence you scribbled on a scratchpad, the fact that your cousin is in the ranks of the enemy, and the strange sound your own words make in your ears when they are quoted in the indictment. They shove a cigarette in your hand and you walk out into the courtyard to face six men you have never seen before. They take aim. They wait for the order. They fire.26
Those words were written months after. For now, Dos Passos was still uncertain of his friend’s fate but he feared the worst. Playing on his celebrity, he had been to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked to see the minister himself. His subsequent writings make it apparent that, although he had turned up without an appointment, he was mortified to be told that the minister could not see him until the following day. Julio Álvarez del Vayo, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and ultimate head of the press and propaganda machinery, was in fact an incredibly busy man. The government was in the throes of considerable internal upheaval. The Republic was fighting for its life, its forces exhausted after the battles of Jarama and Guadalajara, and facing a massive assault on the Basque Country. Del Vayo was the Commissar for War as well as Foreign Minister. In the latter capacity, he had to deal with the Republic’s most difficult problem, the non-intervention policy of the British and French Governments that deprived it of the possibility of buying arms with which to defend itself. Inevitably, he did not just drop everything to see Dos Passos. Nevertheless, despite his myriad occupations, Álvarez del Vayo managed to make time to see him on the following day. Regarding Robles, he ‘professed ignorance and chagrin’. This might have been expected and was almost certainly the truth. Nevertheless, he promised to try to find out what had happened.27 Although Dos Passos would never forgive Álvarez del Vayo for what he considered to be his snub and his duplicity, there is no reason whatsoever why the Minister of Foreign Affairs would know anything about the fate of a functionary working in the Ministry of War with the representative of the Russian GRU.
Thereafter, Dos Passos went to Madrid to work on the film Spanish Earth and, if possible, pursue his investigations into the fate of Robles. To do that, he had two advantages: his celebrity as an internationally acclaimed novelist; and a prior acquaintance with the head of Republican counter-espionage (Comisario General de Investigación y Vigilancia), Pepe Quintanilla. He knew Pepe through his brother Luis, a famous Republican artist and one of his oldest and closest friends in Spain. Pepe and Luis were also good friends of Hemingway, who was going to be intensely displeased by Dos Passos’ efforts to find out what had happened to Robles. There may have been some tension between them over the direction to be taken in Spanish Earth. Hemingway was more comfortable concentrating on the military achievements of the Republic, whereas Dos Passos was happier showing the suffering of ordinary people and the hopes raised by social revolution. Nevertheless, this was not a bone of contention. It is more likely that Dos Passos was becoming uncomfortable and suspicious about the growing influence of the Communists within the Republic as they endeavoured to impose order. In contrast, Hemingway regarded their activities as a crucial contribution to mounting an effective war effort.
When Dos Passos reached the Hotel Florida in Madrid, everything he did and said seemed to provoke Hemingway’s scorn. He had failed to bring any food with him. There was also a certain friction deriving from the fact that Dos Passos and his wife Katy were close friends of Hemingway’s wife Pauline. Dos Passos could not conceal his discomfort at the fact that Ernest was conducting a highly visible affair with Martha Gellhorn.28 In his thinly fictionalized account, Dos Passos wrote of Martha: ‘It becomes immediately clear that she doesn’t like Jay [Dos Passos] any better than he likes her.’29 Their mutual friend, Josephine Herbst, would be a privileged observer of the breakdown of the relationship between Hemingway and Dos Passos. She noted in her diary that Hemingway often made derogatory remarks about Dos Passos’ wife Katy, irritated because she was such a good friend of Pauline. His annoyance was also reflected in complaints that Dos Passos had ‘no guts’ and ‘no balls’.30
Trying to explain the friction between the two, Josie Herbst wrote later that Hemingway was determined to be ‘the war writer of his age’ and that he ‘seemed to be naively embracing on the simpler levels the current ideologies at the very moment when Dos Passos was urgently questioning them’. Perhaps too, as he posed ever more as the wise combat veteran, he resented the fact that Dos Passos knew how little combat he had actually seen. Or maybe he was just annoyed that Dos Passos did not share his visceral enjoyment of the war. Josie noted that there was ‘a kind of splurging magnificence about Hemingway at the Florida, a crackling generosity whose underside was a kind of miserliness. He was stingy with his feelings to anyone who broke his code, even brutal, but it is only fair to say that Hemingway was never anything but faithful to the code he set up for himself.’ However, it was not just that Dos Passos was anything but ostentatiously macho. Rather, the key issue was Hemingway’s annoyance about his friend’s insistent enquiries about Robles. Josie could feel the irritation growing between them: ‘Hemingway was worried because Dos was conspicuously making inquiries and might get everybody into trouble if he persisted. “After all”, he warned, “this is a war”’, whereas Dos Passos refused to believe that his friend could be a traitor.31
In Dos Passos’ fictional version, he gives a flavour of their disagreements over Robles. George Elbert Warner (the character based on Hemingway) asked the hero (Jay Pignatelli) why he was looking worried, saying: ‘If it’s your professor bloke’s disappearance, think nothing of it…People disappear every day.’ As soon as Sidney Franklin (‘Cookie’ in the novel) left the room, Warner screamed in Jay’s ear: ‘Don’t put your mouth to this Echevarría [Robles] business…not even before Cookie. Cookie’s the rightest guy in the world, but he might get potted one night. The Fifth Column is everywhere. Just suppose your professor took a powder and joined the other side.’ When Jay protested that Echevarria/Robles was of unimpeachable loyalty, Warner’s girlfriend, Hilda Glendower (Martha Gellhorn), allegedly chipped in, ‘like a blast of cold air’, saying: ‘Your enquiries have already caused us embarrassment.’32
Apart from Century’s Ebb, the most commonly used source for the disagreements between Dos and Hemingway over Robles is the fragment of memoir by Josephine Herbst, ‘The Starched Blue Sky of Spain’, although her unpublished diary contains important additional information. Josie Herbst had arrived in Valencia about a week before Dos Passos. She had come to Spain not as a fully accredited correspondent of any newspaper. Rather, her biographer, Elinor Langer, considered that, as a lifelong leftist, Josie just wanted to be able to experience the revolutionary events there. According to Stephen Koch, she was a trusted Comintern operative and ‘was sent to Spain to help monitor and control the American literary celebrities in Madrid’. To this end, he claimed, she had been invited by ‘the Republic’s propaganda office’ to make radio broadcasts. It is highly unlikely that she had the sinister function attributed to her by Koch. Indeed, her personal notes reveal not the slightest interest in the political stances of anyone that she wrote about. However, she certainly made at least one broadcast ‘from a cellar deep undergr
ound in Madrid’. It is true that she had set off for Spain rather precipitately, failing to get a newspaper assignment, and had secured only the vaguest expressions of interest from magazine editors who would be glad to consider articles from a ‘human interest’ or ‘women’s angle’. However, she seems to have written to Otto Katz, whom she had met briefly in Paris years before, to let him know about her trip and to ask his advice about getting into Spain. His wife, Ilsa, replied briefly, offering to help Josie should she encounter any difficulties.33
Thus, despite her lack of newspaper credentials, but because of her still current, albeit now forgotten, celebrity as a writer, she was supplied with a letter of introduction to Álvarez del Vayo from the Republican press agency in Paris, Otto Katz’s Agence Espagne. If indeed he received her in Valencia, Álvarez del Vayo must quickly have passed her on to the press bureau. There, she was given anything but the privileged treatment that might have been expected if she was really an important Comintern agent on a mission personally backed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In fact, she was kept hanging around as befitted someone with no proper journalistic credentials. She complained: ‘I had been assured at the press bureau that I would get to go places, but for days I was suspended, wondering. Where?’34
In the published memoir of her Spanish experience, she claims that it was told in strict confidence by someone in Valencia that Robles had been shot as a spy. She does not say who told her. Koch has claimed that the ‘authority’ in question was Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who had allegedly received Herbst for a lengthy conversation when she delivered her letter of introduction from the Agence Espagne, although there is no evidence for this. In fact, Josephine Herbst does not say that she was told by anyone in authority. However, in a letter to Bruce Bliven of the New Republic, she wrote: ‘My informant was not an “American Communist sympathizer” but a Spaniard and a responsible person [added by hand] and I was told that he had worked in the Ministry of War and documents had been found in his possession proving or appearing to prove that he had direct connection with Franco’s side.’ This would rule out Liston Oak, whom she would have met when she visited the press office to arrange transport to Madrid. On the other hand, it would rule in Constancia de la Mora, whom she almost certainly saw as well. Her informant, whoever it was, told her that she must swear to keep the secret just as he had been sworn to secrecy by someone ‘higher up’. This in itself eliminates Álvarez del Vayo, since the only person ‘higher up’ than the Foreign Minister was the prime minister, Francisco Largo Caballero, and it is inconceivable that that highly moral anti-Communist would be involved in covering up an apparent assassination by the Russians. The reason for all this secrecy was, she was told, that the authorities ‘were beginning to be worried about Dos Passos’s zeal, and fearing that he might turn against their cause if he discovered the truth, hoped to keep him from finding out anything about it while he was in Spain’. This makes it much more likely that her information originated in the press office. On the other hand, it does not explain why telling Josie increased the possibility of keeping the news from Dos Passos.35