By 1959, the base renovations were virtually complete and 20,000 American troops had moved in.
In December of that year, as a symbol of the two countries’ new partnership, President Eisenhower visited Madrid. It was the first visit to Franco by any Western head of state since he took power.
Eager to advertise his new alliance with the United States, Franco ordered Spain to welcome the president with open arms.
When Eisenhower’s plane landed at Torrejón, the president smiled, walked down the steps, and greeted Franco with a firm handshake. Traditionally, greeting a Latin leader requires an abrazo, or formal embrace. But the U.S. government had decided that Franco, a dictator, would receive only a handshake, and Eisenhower hewed to the policy. But the visit went exceptionally well. A crowd of 500,000 Spaniards crammed the president’s motorcade route into Madrid, lining the sidewalks fifteen and twenty deep, waving flags and cheering “Ike! Ike!” as church bells pealed a welcome. (Of course, they cheered the president’s nickname in Spanish—“Eekay! Eekay!”—much to Eisenhower’s amusement.) In deference to the president’s grueling travel schedule, Franco arranged for dinner to be served at 8:45 p.m., unusually early for Spain. At dinner, the two generals offered warm toasts to each other’s countries, commenting on the shared history and goals of the United States and Spain. When they parted the next day, the president and the generalissimo exchanged not one but two abrazos. Franco, rejected by most of the world, had been embraced by the world’s greatest power.
Buoyed by American money and the stamp of American approval that encouraged foreign investors to move in, Spain slowly began to climb out of poverty. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Franco, now in his late sixties, allowed a handful of forward-thinking ministers in his cabinet to modernize the economy. They slashed the budget, devalued the peseta, and opened the country to foreign goods. At the same time, the standard of living in Western Europe surged. Europeans had money to burn, and suddenly foreign money and tourists began flowing into Spain. Construction gear and cranes popped up all over the country, and modern dams and skyscrapers stretched into the sky.
Between 1960 and 1965, the gross national product of Spain climbed by an astonishing 65 percent.
During that same time, 36 million tourists spent $3.5 billion in Spain, $1.1 billion in 1965 alone.
That same year Spain hit another milestone: the per capita income reached $500 a year, meaning that the United Nations no longer classified Spain as a “developing country.” The Spain that Ambassador Duke saw in 1966 was a far cry from the broken, impoverished country he had seen in 1951 with Stanton Griffis. But the country remained a land of deep contrasts, at once utterly modern and shockingly primitive. The Spanish magazine ¡Hola! , somewhat akin to Life magazine in the United States, provides an insightful glance into Spanish society at the time. The issues in early 1966 offered endless fluff and photos covering the comings and goings of the rich and famous: royal weddings, debutante balls, and Jackie Kennedy’s ski trips with John-John and Caroline. Photos showed women wearing the latest fashions and hairstyles, sandwiched between full-color ads for TVs, dishwashers, and Johnnie Walker Red Label.
This modern, high-fashion Spain was a world away from the hard-scrabble desert of Palomares, where indoor plumbing was still a luxury. The modern beach resort of Marbella, with its high-rise hotels, manicured golf courses, and glassy apartment buildings, was just a couple hundred miles down the coast from Palomares. Yet it seemed like another planet. It was hard to imagine the tomato farmers of Palomares lounging by the pool, sipping iced cocktails, and flipping through ¡Hola! for news of Mia Farrow’s daring new haircut.
So great was the divide between these two Spains that ¡Hola! never mentioned the Palomares incident. Angier Biddle Duke, however, fit perfectly into its pages, appearing in two articles in early 1966. One showed him and Robin gazing at a painting as they inaugurated a new American cultural center in Madrid. The other included a two-page photo spread of a hunting trip with the ambassador, various government ministers, and Generalissimo Franco himself. Duke posed with a shotgun, sharing a drink with Franco around the bonfire. He looked perfectly at home amid wealth and power. And that was a good thing for him. The ambassador would need every bit of his charm and connections in early 1966; the accident in Palomares would ruffle a lot of feathers, and Angie would have to smooth them.
In the days immediately following the accident, the main concern of the Spanish government — and of Duke — was keeping a lid on the press. The Spanish government wanted the word “nuclear” kept out of the news entirely, lest the public learn about nuclear overflights, radioactivity, or possible contamination. The accident was an unfortunate plane crash, no more. But the international press had quickly gotten wind of the accident, and reporters were already sniffing around. Both the U.S. and Spanish governments agreed to tell them as little as possible in the hope they would go away.
On the day of the accident, at 9:45 p.m. in Madrid, the U.S. Information Service, the Department of Defense, and the State Department released a joint statement about the accident to UPI, the Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, and Stars and Stripes. It read, in its entirety: A B-52 bomber from the 68th Bomb Wing, Seymour Johnson AFB, N.C. and a KC-135 tanker from the 910th air refueling squadron, Bergstrom AFB, Texas, crashed today southwest of Cartagena, Spain, during scheduled air operations. There are reports of some survivors. An Air Force accident investigation team has been dispatched to the scene. Additional details will be made available as the investigation progresses.
Over the next couple of days, Duke kept an eye on the papers as the story bubbled through the international press. The embassy sent a steady stream of reports back to Washington. On the days following the accident, short, straightforward stories ran in British and American newspapers. A few papers speculated that the planes might have been carrying nuclear weapons. At the same time, the Spanish press ran newspaper, television, and radio stories without any critical comment, treating the accident as simply an unusual news event.
By Wednesday, January 19, two days after the accident, the story seemed to be fizzling out, much to the relief of Spanish and American officials. On that day and the next, Duke sat down to discuss the situation with his key contact in the Spanish Foreign Ministry, Ángel Sagáz, who ran the North American section. At the meetings, Sagáz seemed calm but concerned about repercussions if the Spanish public discovered that nuclear-armed American bombers regularly flew over Spain. “Sagáz also mentioned, without great stress, that sensational stories about missing bombs and radiation could excite Spanish public,” Duke reported in a cable to the secretary of state.
At one point during the meetings, the Americans asked to issue a statement of gratitude for Spain’s help in the search-and-rescue effort. Sagáz and other Spanish officials shot the idea down. The story was already dying in the press, they said, and they certainly didn’t want it resurrected. Duke pushed the point: if, by some chance, the story rekindled, it would be good to have a statement ready. Sagáz agreed, and Duke drafted a seven-paragraph statement providing some basic details of the crash and thanking Spanish officials for their help.
Although the meeting went well, hints of trouble emerged. Some lower-level Foreign Office officials expressed surprise that these risky refueling operations were taking place over land. Around the same time, Spanish Vice President Agustín Muñoz Grandes met with U.S. Air Force General Stanley Donovan, head of the Joint U.S. Military Group and Ambassador’s Duke’s chief military contact, to suggest that the refuelings take place over water, rather than Spanish territory. Muñoz Grandes also posed an uncomfortable question: Did the United States have any nuclear devices stored on Spanish territory? Although the U.S. military had stored nuclear weapons in Spain since 1958, its policy was strict and unyielding: never tell anyone exactly where the weapons were. “The subject was still very touchy,” said the former embassy staffer Joseph Smith. “It doesn’t surprise me that Muñoz Grandes didn’t know — or didn
’t know for certain.” General Donovan was a blunt, plainspoken man who emulated Curtis LeMay, in both his cigar-chomping demeanor and his direct speech. “He was not dumb,” said Smith. “I can’t believe that Donovan would have told him anything.”
Despite these diplomatic bumps, Duke told Washington that tension remained low and both sides were cooperating. Military and government officials in Madrid felt good about the situation. On January 19, a secret cable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington rang with optimism: “American Embassy officials report Spanish Foreign Office is of the opinion that coverage has reached its peak and will now decline,” it read. “Queries from American news bureaus in Madrid have diminished appreciably.”
The optimism would not last. A young reporter named Andró del Amo was about to upset Ambassador Duke’s delicately balanced diplomacy. The previous evening, del Amo, a twenty-five-year-old UPI reporter, had left for Palomares with Leo White, a London Daily Mirror reporter, to investigate the scene firsthand.
They drove all night, arriving at the dirt road into Palomares about 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 19. As they headed into town, they saw some wreckage — what looked like airplane engines — lying on a hillside. They stopped the car, took some photos, and continued on. In the center of town, they saw some guardias civiles on patrol, but nobody gave the two reporters a second glance. Del Amo asked a villager where he could find the Americans and was directed toward the camp in the dry riverbed. The most complete account of what happened next is recorded in Tad Szulc’s book The Bombs of Palomares:
Driving up the road, del Amo suddenly slammed on his brakes. As he said later, he became “very excited” by what he saw. Long lines of American airmen in fatigues or bright yellow coveralls were moving through the fields, beating the bushes, tomato vines, and clumps of vegetation with long sticks and canes. They were doing it with extreme thoroughness, del Amo thought, as they slowly advanced almost shoulder to shoulder. Other airmen, closer to the road, were checking the ground with portable instruments del Amo and White assumed to be Geiger counters.
The two men continued on to the camp and saw a frenzy of activity. The tail section of the B-52 still sat in the riverbed, with the blue Air Force buses that had carried the airmen from Morón and Torrejón scattered around it. American officers, airmen, and guardias civiles buzzed around the camp. In the center of activity stood General Wilson in his blue greatcoat, issuing orders and receiving reports. The two reporters asked some questions but received little information. But del Amo had enough for an initial report. He drove to Vera to call in his first story to Madrid. After lunch, the two reporters returned to the riverbed camp to track down the Sixteenth Air Force’s information director, Colonel Barnett Young, who told them that the airmen in the fields were simply looking for wreckage. When the reporters asked if the planes had carried nuclear weapons, Young “exploded with anger,” according to del Amo, shouting, “This is not a place for scandal stories or outrageous hypotheses!” Young warned the reporters to stop nosing around.
As the two reporters headed back toward the village, a young Air Police trooper flagged down their car. Readying themselves for another confrontation, the reporters were struck instead by a bolt of luck. Looking desperate, the airman asked if either of the men spoke Spanish. Del Amo replied that he did. “Great,” the air policeman said. “There’s a fellow in that bean field, and I’ve got to get him out of there.” Del Amo said he would be happy to translate.
The two reporters trudged into the bean field, and Del Amo translated the airman’s message, telling the farmer that he had to leave the field because of dangerous radioactivity. On the way back to the car, del Amo asked the airman if the Air Force was worried about the bombs. Their conversation, recorded in The Bombs of Palomares, would break the Palomares story wide open:
“How do you know about the bombs?” the airman asked, suddenly suspicious.
“Hell,” del Amo told him, “I’ve just come back from the camp.” The air policeman was reassured. “Well, they found three of them very shortly after the crash, but they’re worried because they haven’t found the other one,” he said. They reached the car, and he pointed to the sites where the three bombs had been found. “One was in the river bed where the camp now is,” he explained. “The second bomb was near that white house over there, you see? And the third one way over in those hills in front of you. Now they’re all worried about the fourth bomb.” Del Amo sped back to Vera. He called the Madrid bureau and told it about the four bombs, radioactivity, and a missing nuclear weapon — everything the governments wanted to keep covered up.
That evening, in Madrid, Duke got wind of del Amo’s dispatch. At 9:46 p.m., he sent a terse cable to Washington: “Have just learned local UPI correspondent filed story today on B-52/KC-135 accident to effect three atom bombs recovered from wreckage but one still missing and that hundreds of US troops combing countryside with Geiger counters.” He added, “Foregoing may lead to escalation of media treatment and rapid change in present circumstances.” The following morning, January 20, 1966, The New York Times ran the UPI story on page one. The headline read, “U.S. Said to Hunt Lost Atom Device.” The article began: United States Air Force men today were reported searching the Spanish countryside for an atomic device that was understood to be missing after the collision of a B-52 nuclear bomber and a jet tanker Monday during a refueling mission.
United States officials in Madrid and here in Southeastern Spain refused to confirm or deny that a nuclear bomb was carried by the B-52, which crashed into the KC-135 jet tanker near here.
But they gave every sign they were looking for one. Hundreds of American servicemen were searching the crash scene, some of them armed with Geiger counters. Palomares is a village a little more than a mile inland on Spain’s southeastern coast, about 95 miles east of Granada.
When asked what the Geiger counters were being used for, Col. Barnett Young, chief information officer for the 16th Air Force at Torrejón Air Force base, near Madrid, asked in return, “what do you normally use Geiger counters for?”
The article, which went on to describe the massive search under way near Palomares, made no splash in Spain on January 20. Exercising its iron grip on the press, the Spanish government allowed no major foreign newspapers into the country that day. When Foreign Minister Fernando Castiella summoned Duke to a meeting that evening, they spent most of the time discussing the long-contested territory of Gibraltar and barely mentioned Palomares.
But the storm had only been delayed. The following day, the UPI article landed on Franco’s desk, sent by the Spanish Embassy in Washington. The generalissimo was not pleased.
Shortly after noon on January 21, the Spanish foreign minister called Duke to report that Franco had read the UPI article and was extremely concerned. Ángel Sagáz, the director of North American affairs, was on his way to the U.S. Embassy to discuss the situation.
Sagáz arrived at the embassy agitated and upset. Franco fired people at will, and Sagáz undoubtedly felt the gun sights turning in his direction. This was a crisis. He gave Duke an earful: Who were these “United States officials” mentioned in the article? And what were these other reports, citing “Spanish inhabitants of the accident area” who had complained about nuclear overflights? If this turned into a radiation scare, it could wreck the tourism industry. He thought that the United States and Spain had been working together to contain the press, but since that obviously wasn’t the case, the Spanish government might take matters into its own hands. Maybe it would convene its own press conference, to at least spin the story in Spain’s favor.
Duke, the man who could calm kings, responded. He understood why Sagáz was upset. This was a delicate situation of great concern to both governments. Both needed to remain calm and work together. He had no idea who the “United States officials” were — certainly, neither he nor anyone under his control had spoken to the UPI reporter, but he would get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, U.S. Air Force General S
tanley Donovan, Duke’s chief military contact, was visiting Palomares and expected to return at any moment. When Donovan got back, they would get an up-to-date situation report and then decide what to do next. Everything would be fine if they stuck together. Sagáz calmed down and agreed to wait for further reports from the scene.
After the meeting, Duke got to work. Donovan gave him the rundown on Palomares: the fourth bomb was still missing, but the Air Force was following every lead; experts had identified several small radioactive areas, which were now closed off and awaiting remediation; the Air Force was buying affected plants and livestock; medical teams were examining people in the area who might have been exposed. The residents of the area seemed a bit fearful, but there was no mass panic.
Spanish medical teams, nuclear experts, and civil authorities were on the scene and cooperating. The situation seemed under control. However, a growing crowd of international press was swarming the area, including UPI, Paris Match, CBS-TV, and some British media.
Duke next called the UPI bureau chief, Harry Stathos, to give him a piece of his mind. He refuted the “United States officials” quoted in the article and asked where he had found that information.
The shaken Stathos started to backpedal. He said he had gotten the information thirdhand and apologized for filing the story without double-checking with the embassy.
It was about 7:30 in the evening on January 21, the Friday after the accident. Duke called Sagáz with a summary and offered to send an embassy officer with a full report, which Sagáz quickly accepted. The officer who briefed Sagáz reported that he listened intently, especially to the story of the UPI bureau chief. It seemed that Sagáz wanted that part of the story particularly clear to report to his superiors. The embassy assured Sagáz that it was open to any Spanish suggestions on how to handle the situation but believed they should continue working together closely. Sagáz agreed. The crisis of the day was over.
The Day We Lost the H-Bomb Page 9