We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  The drama surrounding the Robles case was now intensified one more time by Liston Oak. He visited Dos Passos one night in his Barcelona hotel claiming to be on the run from the security services after having been denounced as a Trotskyist. It is more than probable that Oak had become uncomfortable about the possible consequences of his lurch away from the American Communist Party and towards the anti-Stalinists of the POUM. This was surely related to his constant complaints about his health. However, this is some distance from Koch’s assertion that ‘Liston was also sick spiritually. There was a pestilence of fear and loathing in the depths of his soul.’52 Liston Oak may have been ‘sick with fear’, but he was starkly dramatizing the circumstances of his leisurely separation from the Republican press service when he said that he had escaped by the skin of his teeth after discovering that he been reported to be politically unreliable. What actually happened is that he had gone to Barcelona, and made contact with Andreu Nin, the POUM leader. In late April, he had written an article mentioning his meeting with Nin and sympathizing with the POUM standpoint that the war could not be won if the revolution was crushed. The article was written before the events of May 1937 and the disappearance of Nin, but would be published in London only afterwards, in mid-May. George Orwell read it in hospital three weeks later and found it ‘very good and well balanced’.53 Having worked in the English-language section of the Republic’s press office, Oak cannot have failed to realize that the publication of the article would be considered a subversive act, given the POUM’s opposition to the government’s policy of prioritizing the war effort over the revolution.

  However, it is possible that, once in Barcelona, the already timorous Oak may have been startled into an outright funk by a chance meeting with a Russian agent whom he had known in New York as George Mink. His real name was Mink Djhordis and he was born in Lithuania. He was said to be closely related to Solomon Abramovich Lozovksy, the head of the Profintern, the Soviet international of trade unions. According to testimony given to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was a serving officer of Soviet military intelligence. Despite Mink being a taxi-driver in Philadelphia, and utterly ignorant of matters nautical, Lozovsky had used his influence to raise him to an important position in the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union. He was arrested in Copenhagen in 1935 and jailed for eighteen months after police discovered espionage paraphernalia in his room. He was also linked to political assassinations in Germany and Spain. It has been suggested that he was one of the murderers of the Soviet defector, Ignace Reiss, in Switzerland.54 Mink did not know of Oak’s drift towards anti-Stalinist communism, invited him to have a drink and informed him that the Communists planned to move against the POUM and the anarchists in Barcelona within a couple of days. Oak, already jumpy, went into panic mode, assuming that he would be among those pursued.55

  On the basis of Oak’s panic-stricken pleas, Dos Passos sheltered him in his hotel room and then took him out of Spain as his ‘private secretary’. In Century’s Ebb, Dos Passos portrays Oak as ‘Don Carp’, suggesting both his endless whingeing and the fact that there was something fishy about him. In that version, he wrote: ‘I thought that Carp was a down-the-line dyed-in-the-wool Party member, but it turned out the poor guy had associated with some splinter in Wisconsin.’56 Back in Valencia, wrote Kate Mangan,

  it seeped through that Liston was consorting with the POUM a great deal in Barcelona. He left shortly before the May rising in that town, in haste, we heard, with the police on his track. It was much later that we heard from America that he had been conducting virulent written and spoken propaganda against the Spanish Republic and the war, and that he used his position ‘employed in a responsible post by the Government’ to lend authority to his statements.

  This may be a reference to information received from Kitty Bowler who, on 22 June, wrote to Tom Wintringham that news of ‘the Liston affair’ had reached a left-wing friend in New York.57

  The fact that Oak had written a pro-POUMist article, in the wartime circumstances, would certainly have rendered unlikely his continued employment at the Valencia press office. It might even have attracted the attention of the secret police. However, Koch’s suggestion that Oak feared that the NKVD would use its ‘elite squad for foreign assassinations, the Bureau of Special Tasks’ to hunt him relentlessly to the ends of the earth is belied by the fact that, when he returned to the USA, Oak continued to publish numerous pro-anarchist and pro-POUM articles fiercely critical of Communist policy. Oak’s criticism of Stalin was even quoted, less than favourably, by Trotsky himself in an article entitled ‘Stalinism and Bolshevism’, written on 28 August 1937. Elsewhere, in an article entitled ‘Their Morals and Ours’, Trotsky wrote: ‘Liston Oak until recently enjoyed such confidence from the Comintern that it entrusted him with conducting the English propaganda for Republican Spain. This did not, naturally, hinder him, once he had relinquished his post, from likewise relinquishing the Marxist alphabet.’58 Most remarkably, for a man terrified of Russian hit-men in general and George Mink in particular, he wrote in one of his subsequent articles: ‘I met George Mink, American Communist, who boasted about his part in organizing the Spanish GPU and offered me a job – to put the finger on “untrustworthy” comrades entering Spain to fight against fascism, such as the members of the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the American Socialist Party.’59

  Once over the Spanish frontier, Oak and Dos Passos continued on to the United States. While Dos Passos and his wife waited for the boat train in Paris, Hemingway came to the station to see them off. Their pleasure at this unexpected privilege was soon chilled when they saw that ‘his face was a thundercloud’. Hemingway asked him what he planned to do about the Robles issue. Dos Passos replied: ‘I’ll tell the truth as I see it. Right now I’ve got to straighten out my ideas. You people are trying to believe it is one isolated instance. It isn’t.’ When Hemingway tried to point out the circumstances of the war, Dos Passos asked: ‘What’s the point of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?’ A furious Hemingway growled: ‘Civil liberties shit. Are you with us or are you against us?’ When Dos Passos shrugged, Hemingway raised his fist as if to hit him and threatened: ‘These people know how to turn you into a back number. I’ve seen them do it. What they did once they can do again.’ Katy replied: ‘Why, Ernest, I never heard anything so despicably opportunistic in my life.’ If it was not quite the end of a great friendship, it was the beginning of the end.60

  When Dos Passos finally reached New York, he met Maurice Coindreau and told him what he thought had happened to their friend. Coindreau wrote to Henry Lancaster, Robles’ head of department at Johns Hopkins:

  The news he gave me are most distressing and absolutely true since he himself was in Valencia and Madrid and got his information on the spot. José Robles was shot sometime in the Winter. The last time that Márgara saw him was in January, in jail. (Therefore, no matter how much denial the government send, they just shamelessly lie). He told her that he was going to be transferred to Madrid. She never heard from him since. Dos Passos could not find out whether he was shot in Valencia or in Madrid, whether he was tried or simply executed.

  Astonishingly, the letter ended with the request:

  will you be kind enough to mention to no one that the news were brought by Dos Passos. He has many connections with the Communist Party and he might get in trouble if they knew that he has revealed what the Spanish government has done to an American professor who had never in his life taken any interest in politics neither on one side or the other.61

  It looks as if Hemingway’s contemptuous warning had had an effect.

  In the spring and summer of 1937, Márgara was devastated and very ill. When she finally accepted that José was dead, she wrote to Esther Crooks, a friend from Baltimore: ‘I feel so crushed and so sad that I am hardly alive. I have been left pathetically incomplete, incapable of doing anything’. To her grief was added worry over their finan
cial situation and the need to get a death certificate in order to collect on José’s life insurance. She wrote to Miss Crooks about her situation: ‘so far, since the Government hasn’t intervened, everything is still wrapped in mystery. No one can justify what happened and no one wants to admit a mistake. The internal situation is so complicated, so volatile and so complex that until this is all over, it’s going to be difficult to get anything’.62

  Strangely, despite the execution of José Robles, his family remained loyal to the Republic and stayed in Spain when it would have been relatively easy for them to return to the United States. In letters to Esther Crooks and Henry Lancaster, Márgara made it clear that she did not blame the Republic. To Miss Crooks, she wrote: ‘It is still so incomprehensible for us that at times I think that I am going to awake from this nightmare. We still don’t know anything concrete about what happened other than the fact of his death and that the government had nothing to do with it. Personal hatred or a fatal mistake appears to be the only explanation. And he had worked so hard and with such enthusiasm for the cause’. She wrote in similar terms to Henry Lancaster: ‘Nothing makes sense to us. His loyalty to the Government was absolute. He gave everything and risked everything with such generosity in order to help what we consider such a just cause that the only explanation is a fatal error or an act of personal revenge’. Coco continued to work in the press office in Valencia and Miggie worked in a photographic laboratory of the Ministry of Propaganda. And once Márgara recovered her strength, she also began to work in the press office.63

  Not long after Dos Passos left Spain, the press office received a visit from Elliott Paul, the American novelist who had just completed his book on the repression in Ibiza. Constancia de la Mora assigned Coco Robles to accompany him on a trip to Madrid. The middle-aged novelist and the boy became good friends on the journey. During one of their late-night discussions about literature, Elliott Paul mentioned Dos Passos and said: ‘I don’t know what has come over Dos Passos. I saw him in Paris and he won’t even take an interest in Spain anymore – says he doesn’t care. He is full of some story about a friend of his being shot as a spy, some college professor from Johns Hopkins.’ With great sadness, but also notable firmness, Coco replied: ‘I hope that will not make Mr Dos Passos lose his interest in the fight against fascism in Spain. The man he spoke of was my father.’64

  Coco moved with the rest of the press office personnel when the capital was transferred from Valencia to Barcelona in November 1937. He had often tried to volunteer for the Republican army, lying about his age in order to do so. In 1938, he would eventually be successful. He joined a guerrilla unit, was captured on his first mission and spent many years in a Francoist prison. His sister Miggie joined the Communist Youth Movement, the Juventudes Unificadas Socialistas, and took part in morale-boosting visits to International Brigade units at the battle-front and a propaganda tour of the United States. After the government moved from Valencia to Barcelona, Márgara Villegas also continued to work in the press office with Coco and Constancia de la Mora. The Robles family became friendly not just with Constancia but also with Julio Álvarez del Vayo, despite Dos Passos’ persistent belief that he had knowingly lied about the fate of José Robles. Márgara regularly used to take tea with Luisi, the Swiss wife of Álvarez del Vayo, and Maria Mikhailova Fiedelman, the estranged Russian wife of Juan Negrín.

  It has been suggested by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón that Álvarez del Vayo’s solicitude for the family was born of guilt. However, it is perfectly possible that he genuinely did not know what had happened to Robles, particularly if he had been arrested, imprisoned and executed by a Russian-run special section – all the more so if this was the unit led by Grigulevich. It is, of course, equally possible that he felt sympathy for the family precisely because he had been unable to do anything to prevent the murder of Robles, which does not mean necessarily that he was complicit therein. It has also been suggested that the actions of both Coco and Miggie were born of a desire somehow to show by their loyalty to the Republic that their father was innocent. It may be so, but other interpretations are possible. Márgara’s letters to Esther Crooks and Henry Lancaster make it clear that the family was convinced that what had happened to José Robles had absolutely nothing to do with Constancia de la Mora or Julio Álvarez del Vayo. There is every possibility that they may even have feared that there had been good reasons for the action taken against Robles. In this regard, Constancia wrote: ‘What John Dos Passos could not forgive, the man’s wife and two children understood.’ Kate Mangan, who worked with Coco, recalled him as ‘crushed and wretched, so ashamed he never spoke of it’. Josie Herbst wrote in 1939: ‘Several months after Robles had been shot I saw his son in Valencia on my way out of Spain. He was in Rubio’s propaganda and censorship bureau and to my knowledge believed or said he believed in the proof of his father’s guilt.’ The family’s collective commitment to the Republic remained undiminished, which would have been utterly inexplicable if they had harboured resentment against Álvarez del Vayo and other senior Republican politicians.65

  Ironically, when the United States entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, Josie Herbst was given a job in Washington at the Office of the Coordinator of Information, a semi-independent intelligence and propaganda agency run by Colonel William J. Donovan. Her job was the preparation of radio scripts for propaganda broadcasts to Germany. However, she soon crossed the radar of the House Committee on un-American Activities, which was looking into the issue of the fitness of those serving the war effort. Many anti-fascists were being criticized for their support of the Spanish Republic and she was suddenly removed from her job on 21 May 1942. The circumstances remain mysterious. She was under investigation by the FBI, as were most people who, like her, had access to confidential information. A substantial report was compiled on the basis of a number of contradictory comments from various sources, including a particularly virulent one from Josie’s friend, the novelist Katherine Anne Porter. In the event, it would appear that Porter’s fabricated testimony was not the problem. Indeed, the final FBI report cleared Josephine Herbst of un-Americanism. It would appear that she had been sacked on the instructions of Bill Donovan because of her earlier sympathies for the Soviet Union and her support for the Spanish Republic. Her colleagues protested against the ‘peremptory methods’ and the undemocratic way in which she was refused the opportunity to defend herself.66 Such things happened in a democracy in wartime, a fact forgotten by those outraged by the treatment of Liston Oak, whose betrayal of the Spanish Republic far outweighed anything done by Josie Herbst.

  Dos Passos remained in touch with Márgara Villegas and tried to do what he could for the family, especially in relation to getting José Robles’ life insurance paid out. He seems to have brooded on the issue and it was clearly one of the things that inclined him ever further to the right. He was initially cautious in what he wrote about the Robles case, as was to be expected in the light of his admonition to Maurice Coindreau to keep his name out of any public discussion of it. However, he did write an article entitled ‘Farewell to Europe’, in which he depicted the Communists in Spain crushing individual and local freedoms with a ‘tremendously efficient and ruthless machine for power’. It was published in July 1937 in the magazine Common Sense. It provoked intensely critical responses from several of his friends. The next six months saw Dos Passos’ anti-Communism become more explicit. In December 1937, he published another article in Common Sense entitled ‘The Communist Party and the War Spirit: A Letter to a Friend Who is Probably a Party Member’. In it, he went beyond a generally fierce anti-Soviet line to make direct criticisms of the Spanish Republican Government. Speaking of the Communist Party’s ‘will to rule’ and ‘blind intolerance’, he went on to claim that it had ‘as it gained power, set itself to eliminating physically or otherwise all the men with possibilities of leadership who were not willing to put themselves under its orders’.67

  Over the next year, perennially short o
f money, he decided to collect together some previously published plus some more recent pieces on Spain. The ensuing book, Journey Between Wars, included material in which both Robles and Márgara Villegas appeared anonymously as ‘the man stepping out to be court-martialled by his own side’ and ‘the woman’ waiting for her husband. It also provided an account of the fiesta at the XV Brigade in which he did not mention his conversation there with Hemingway but did describe the Soviet-trained General ‘Walter’, the Pole Karol Swierczewski – who would later be portrayed as Goltz in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.68 The most ferocious outrage was expressed by Hemingway who sent a cable from a transatlantic liner:

  When you decide to rat for money while better guys than you still fighting there’s a war on you can always peddle it somewhere but in case you’re incorporating your adventures in a book please check up and find Walter is a Pole not a Russian stop Meantime would appreciate small down payment on any your borrowings celebrate success trilogy regards hem.

  The telegram was followed by a long letter, in which, after apologizing for the ‘snotty’ tone of the cable, he expressed his outrage at details in the book and in Dos Passos’ articles which had effectively accused the Spanish Republican Government under Juan Negrín of being Russian puppets:

  The only trouble about this, Dos, is that Walter is a Pole. Just as Lucacz was a Hungarian, Petrov a Bulgarian, Hans a German, Copic a Yugo-Slav and so on. I’m sorry, Dos, but you didn’t meet any Russian generals. The only reason I can see for your attacking, for money, the side that you were always supposed to be on is an unsuppressable desire to tell the truth. Then why not tell the truth? The thing is that you don’t find out the truth in ten days or three weeks and this hasn’t been a communist run war for a long time.69