4.
On the morning of the accident, the one person most concerned with Spanish-American relations sat at lunch in Madrid, stoically fulfilling one of his more mundane job requirements. Being an American ambassador had its moments. Sometimes the nights were filled with glitz and glamour: dining at elegant tables, sipping champagne, conversing with kings. Other days swelled with political intrigue: wheeling and dealing, carving treaties, molding history alongside statesmen. But much of the time, the job sagged under the weight of duty. Today the ambassador was spending the afternoon at a luncheon for the American Management Association in Madrid: sitting in a banquet hall, steeling himself for a dismal lunch, and discussing President Johnson's recent efforts to reduce the United States' dollar outflow. That was where Angier Biddle Duke, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, was trapped on January 17, 1966. Then something caught his eye.
Duke sat with five other men at the head table, on a dais at the front of the banquet hall. As he listened to a speech by the Spanish industry minister, he saw someone familiar standing in the wings. Duke glanced over, then looked back to the speaker. Then he did a double take. Joseph Smith, a young Foreign Service officer from the embassy, stood on the side of the stage, trying desperately to get his boss's attention. Duke quickly excused himself and joined Smith in the wings. The two men went somewhere quiet to talk. Smith, the manager of the embassy's political-military affairs, said he had received a call at 11:05 a.m. informing him that two American military planes had crashed; there were several survivors and one plane had carried unarmed nuclear weapons.
The ambassador listened to the news. He asked Smith a couple of questions, then decided to head back to the embassy. The two men slipped out of the hall and climbed into the ambassador's limousine. After a block or two, Duke changed his mind, redirecting the driver to the Spanish Foreign Ministry.
Ten minutes later Duke and Smith went inside the ministry and spoke to an usher. Duke asked to speak with Ángel Sagáz, the director of North American affairs, but Sagáz was out of the office. So was his deputy, the foreign minister himself, and almost everyone else, as far as they could tell. Many were attending a funeral for a colleague's mother; the rest were eating lunch.
The two Americans finally made contact with an undersecretary for foreign affairs, a man Smith regarded as “not particularly friendly” and “not terribly fond of Americans.” It was not ideal, but Duke had to make some diplomatic contact with the Spanish government. So the ambassador, doing his best to be charming, told the dour undersecretary everything he knew about the crash. The undersecretary seemed very serious and quite concerned. He asked the Americans a lot of questions, most of which they couldn't answer. After a short discussion, the ambassador said he needed to return to the embassy to gather more information. He promised to keep the Spanish government informed.
If America had to choose someone to deliver bad news to a grumpy foreign official, Angier Biddle Duke was the perfect man for the job. “Angie,” as everyone called the ambassador, was charming and urbane, with flawless manners, a voice smooth as velvet, and a way of easing uncomfortable situations. He never lost his temper. “Even,” said his wife, “when people were behaving badly.”
Duke had been born and bred into gentility, with a family tree reaching and branching through a century of American aristocracy. His grandfather Benjamin Duke helped found the American Tobacco Company, a Duke family business that dominated the cigarette industry until it was trust-busted in 1911. Grandfather Duke also helped found Duke University. On the other side of the family, Angie could list ancestors such as Nicholas Biddle, the first editor of Lewis and Clark's journals, and Brigadier General Anthony Drexel Biddle, Jr., deputy chief of staff to Eisenhower during World War II.
As ambassador to Spain in 1966, Angie was in his early fifties but still tall and trim from regular exercise. He had a long, aristocratic face and combed his thinning hair straight back from his high forehead. He dressed elegantly, in finely tailored clothes. Angie evoked an earlier age, a time when people dressed up to fly on planes, wore hats and gloves in public, and wrote notes on personalized stationery. He was, above all, civilized.
Yet for all his connections, Angie's upbringing had left him insecure. His mother, Cornelia Drexel Biddle, had married his father, Angier Buchanan Duke, when she was only sixteen. The marriage had failed, and the two had divorced when Angie was six years old. Angie's father had died two years later but had disinherited his two sons, cutting them off from his share of the Duke tobacco fortune. Angie's mother was so furious that she changed her sons' names to incorporate her own: Angie, christened Angier Buchanan Duke, Jr., became Angier Biddle Duke. Despite the disinheritance, Angie inherited enough from his grandfather that he never actually had to work for a living. But as an adult he invested poorly and was never quite as rich as everyone thought. Joseph Smith recalled that Duke never had any cash on hand to pay for restaurants and lodging. Smith would also receive letters from luxury hotels around Spain, saying that the ambassador's checks had bounced.
For a role model, Angie turned to his uncle Tony Biddle, a globetrotting diplomat. As a teenager, he regularly visited Uncle Tony in Oslo, once attending a hunting party in Austria that his uncle hosted for the king of Spain. The visit with the royal family made a strong impression on him, especially the evening conversations about Central Europe and the rise of Hitler. Angie, dazzled by the dignitaries, the serious talk, and the importance of it all, began to contemplate a career in diplomacy. He attended Yale, studying Spanish and history on a “prediplomatic” track. But after two and a half years, he dropped out, married the first of his four wives, and never went back to school. He regretted the decision for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he remained painfully embarrassed that he had never earned a college degree.
After Yale, Angie floundered. He spent his twenties traveling the world, working briefly at a sports magazine, and toying with business. He divorced his first wife and married his second. Eventually, World War II gave him some direction. He enlisted in the Army before Pearl Harbor, then attended Officer Candidate School, becoming a second lieutenant in January 1942. It was a proud moment for the flighty young man with no college degree: for the first time in his life, he had actually accomplished something. He served much of his tour in the Washington war room of Secretary of War Henry Stimson. There, as the lowest-ranking officer, Angie read incoming cables and updated battle maps with colored pushpins. Sometimes he stood at the maps with a pointer as generals discussed battle plans. He remained in the Army for five years, retiring with the rank of major.
After the war Angie drifted again until fate pushed him back toward foreign affairs. In 1948, he was conducting an auction at a golf tournament. In the audience that day was an investment banker named Stanton Griffis. Griffis was impressed by the young man's poise and, speaking with him afterward, discovered Angie's interest in diplomacy. Griffis had served as ambassador to Poland and was expecting another appointment if Harry Truman got elected. Griffis knew that any embassy posting would involve a heavy load of socializing, and, as a widower in his sixties, he wasn't up to the task. Angie and his young wife, however, would be perfect. Angie lit up at the proposition, but with no college degree, he wasn't qualified to take the Foreign Service exam. Griffis pulled some strings, Angie took the exam, and in 1949, Angier Biddle Duke began his diplomatic career as special assistant to Stanton Griffis, the new ambassador to Argentina. When Griffis was appointed to Spain in 1951, after the United States had resumed diplomatic relations with the country, he took Angie with him. The following year, President Truman named Angier Biddle Duke ambassador to El Salvador. Only thirty-six years old, he was the youngest U.S. ambassador in history.
Ambassador Duke poured his abundant energy into the new job. He desperately wanted to make his mark on foreign policy and worked hard to understand key issues and participate in important decisions. But, to his continued dismay, most of his colleagues considered him more adept at parties than policy. The American press called Angie a “tobacco-rich playboy,” and one colleague described him as an “amiable lightweight.” Yet he was much loved in the countries he served. One Salvadoran reporter wrote, “He has dedicated more sewers, slaughterhouses, and clinics than half a dozen politicians.” When Eisenhower, a Republican, won the 1952 election, Angie hoped to remain at his post in El Salvador, but the political winds blew him out of his beloved government job. He plugged away on international refugee issues for the next eight years, then worked on the John F. Kennedy campaign. When Kennedy won the 1960 election, Duke expected another posting, hopefully as ambassador to Spain. Instead, the new president called him in late December and asked him to serve as his director of protocol.
Angie balked at the offer. He wanted to shape foreign policy, not arrange table settings like some glorified Emily Post. But Kennedy, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, convinced him that the job was critical to the administration's foreign policy goals, and Angie finally accepted. Soon he and his third wife—a Spanish aristocrat he had met while stationed in Spain—were up to their ears in diplomatic minutiae. Duke ensured that the rooms of one foreign dignitary were stocked with his favorite brand of soda crackers; that another had an informative visit to the Tennessee Valley Authority. He sent birthday greetings from the president and answered queries on the correct way to display the American flag. He introduced new ambassadors to Kennedy and arranged the seatings and menus for state dinners. He attended about a dozen cocktail parties a week, a half-dozen dinners, and two or three luncheons. With his elegance and boundless energy, Duke excelled at the job. In 1964, The New Yorker ran a long, flattering profile of Duke. At one point, it caught him in a moment of despondency. “I'm lost,” he told the magazine. “I'm lost and of no importance.” Then, after a moment, he brightened. “But there are compensations,” he said. “It's satisfying to be as close as I've been to the sources of world power.”
After President Kennedy was killed, President Johnson kept Angie on as director of protocol. But Duke craved something more substantive. In early 1965, Johnson gave Angie his dream job: ambassador to Spain. Duke's third wife, the Spanish aristocrat, had died in a plane crash in 1961, and he had remarried for a fourth and final time the following year. So in 1965, he, his wife, Robin, and their children from previous marriages packed up and moved to Madrid.
Ironically, once he got to Spain, Angie felt marooned. For years, he had stood at the side of the president. Maybe he had just been an observer, but he had been at the center of the Washington whirl, meeting kings, chatting with Jackie Kennedy, watching history being made. Now he was stuck in the backwaters of Europe. “When I got there, I found that I was moving from the center of the action into the countryside,” he said years later. “Fankly, to move to a dictatorship after the hurly burly of the White House years, in many ways was disappointing.”
Nonetheless, Duke, patriotic and dedicated, threw himself into his new job with characteristic vigor. Spain had changed enormously since Duke's last posting in the early 1950s. But the embassy's main policy goals had changed very little. As ambassador, Duke had to maintain the solid working relationship between the U.S. and Spanish governments. There was only one reason the United States cared at all about its relationship with Spain: the military bases. In 1966, the U.S. and Spanish governments jointly held four major military bases in Spain. The Air Force operated three bases: Torrejón, near Madrid; Morón, outside Seville; and Zaragosa in northeastern Spain. The Navy ran a Polaris submarine base on the southern coast at Rota, near Cádiz. Connecting these four bases, cutting across the center of Spain, stretched a 485-mile-long pipeline that supplied the bases with petroleum. The American military presence also peppered the rest of Spain. The Air Force ran a small air base at San Pablo and a fighter base at Reus, about ninety miles southwest of Barcelona. The Navy stored oil at a supply center in northwestern Spain and kept oil and ammunition in a depot at Cartagena. The U.S. military also operated seven radar sites across the country.
George Landau, who worked at the embassy with Duke and became the State Department's director for Spanish and Portuguese affairs in 1966, called the Spanish bases the “crown jewels” of America's foreign military bases. Strategically located at the entrance to the Mediterranean, they were a key component of the military's nuclear deterrent strategy. The Sixteenth Air Force, headquartered at Torrejón, oversaw the bases in Spain (and Morocco until 1963) and was the largest SAC force overseas. SAC stocked the Spanish bases with tanker planes and medium-range bombers, critical for both its strip alert and airborne alert programs. The bases also offered numerous amenities: servicemen could live there on the cheap, the sky beamed blue and clear almost every day, and the Spanish government—at least in the early days—rarely hassled the Americans about anything. “The Pentagon was absolutely enamored with Spain,” said Landau. “They thought it was the wherewithal for everything.”
The base agreement that existed in 1966 would expire in just two years, and American officials were starting to negotiate terms for a new agreement. The American military had a good thing going in Spain and wanted the situation to remain as it was. But the Spanish government had grander goals. “Spain wanted to be a part of Europe, a world power,” said the embassy staffer Joseph Smith. “The original base agreement made it clear that Spain was a junior partner. They wanted the United States to acknowledge Spain as something bigger…. They wanted to change from a purely military relationship to one that involved politics on the highest level.” The U.S. Embassy in Spain had a finite number of diplomatic chits; diplomats had to spend and save them wisely, always with an eye toward the upcoming base renegotiations. The bases, according to Landau, were not the embassy's top concern, they were the only concern. If not for the bases, the United States would have never reached out to Spain's military dictator, General Francisco Franco, at a time when Western Europe still regarded him with scorn.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco, chief of state, president of the Council of Ministers, and caudillo of Spain by the grace of God, didn't look the part of an iron-fisted terror. He was short and tubby, his soft face dominated by wide brown eyes with long eyelashes that gave him a decidedly feminine appearance. When he spoke, words tumbled out in a high-pitched squeak. Angie Duke described him as “the most uncharismatic dictator you ever saw in your life.” Franco had “a white face, mottled, jowled, fishy eyes, a very limp handshake, a big pot belly. Yet at the same time, he had quite an impressive personality. He had enormous reserves of power inside of him.”
Franco had led the right wing Nationalists to victory during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. Both sides had committed horrendous atrocities against civilians, and Franco emerged from that bloody conflict with a reputation for coldhearted brutality. During the war, Franco ordered the slaughter of anyone who opposed him or posed a threat: schoolteachers, trade unionists, prisoners, wounded troops. He refused to hear any appeals for clemency.
Franco idolized Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and his side received massive military assistance from them during the war. But when World War II began just six months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, he had little to offer his friends. The civil war had devastated Spain. Most of the country's industry lay in ruins. About half a million Spaniards had been killed or had died of disease and malnutrition. Another half million had fled the country, and those who remained faced widespread poverty and hunger. Spain was a broken country, and Franco was in no position to support the Axis powers when World War II broke out. Throughout the war, Spain remained officially neutral.
The Allies worked hard to maintain Spain's neutrality. Britain knew of Franco's infatuation with Hitler and Mussolini—the British ambassador reported that Franco kept signed photos of the two dictators on his desk. But the British also knew that they couldn't afford to lose Gibraltar, the tiny British stronghold jutting off southern Spain that served as their gateway to the Mediterranean. They, along with the United States and other allies, sent Spain petroleum, cotton, food, and other materials under the condition that the country remain neutral. Franco eagerly accepted the goods while keeping his eye on the changing winds of the war. Once the United States entered the fray and the tide began to turn against the Axis powers, Franco started to hedge his bets. “Henceforth,” said one historian, “his energies were to be devoted almost impartially to working both sides of the street while keeping Spain untouched by war.”
Meanwhile, Franco continued his brutal behavior within Spain. Between 1939 and 1945, the Franco government executed thousands of political opponents; one study says the death toll may have reached 28,000. The government imprisoned hundreds of thousands more and sentenced them to hard labor. Franco, threatened by ethnic groups like the Basques and Catalans, banned the Basque and Catalan languages, folk music, and traditional dance. The government muzzled the press and stifled all political opposition. Only Catholics were allowed to build churches and practice their religion openly.
Franco's internal policies, and his waffling during the war, disgusted the Allies. After the war, the victors paid him back. The fledgling United Nations excluded Spain from membership. Then, at its second meeting, the UN. General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending that all members recall their ambassadors from Madrid. On March 4, 1946, the United States, France, and Great Britain signed a Tripartite Declaration to the Spanish people, warning that they would not gain full relations with the three countries as long as Franco remained in power. In 1949, when NATO was formed, Spain was kept out. Finally, and perhaps most devastating, the Allies excluded Spain from the Marshall Plan, the massive aid program that helped rebuild Europe after the war.
Spain crawled forward in virtual isolation for several years, its only foreign relations with the dictatorships of Portugal and Argentina. The country lagged behind the rest of Europe, its economy and industry struggling, its people—for the most part—desperately poor. But Franco, dictator for life, knew he could wait out any storm. Historians tell a famous anecdote about the dictator's legendary patience. As the story goes, Franco kept two boxes on his desk. One was labeled “Problems That Time Will Solve;” the other, “Problems That Time Has Solved.” Franco's career involved shifting papers from the first box to the second.
And indeed, time—and the advent of the Cold War—did solve the problem of Spain's isolation. In the late 1940s, as the situation between the United States and the USSR grew increasingly tense, “more weight was given to the help Spain might furnish in the next war than to any hindrance she had offered in the last,” according to the historian Arthur Whitaker. Franco had long been a virulent anti-Communist, and in the new world of nuclear deterrence, Spain's strategic location looked increasingly useful. Furthermore, the idea of giving aid to Spain now seemed more acceptable: American Catholics were lobbying their congressmen to give economic aid to the starving country. Franco encouraged the warming Spanish-American relations. In July 1947, he told a reporter that the United States could obtain the use of Spanish bases if it tried hard enough. The Pentagon pushed for bases, and President Truman didn't put up much resistance. “I don't like Franco and I never will,” he said. “But I won't let my personal feelings override the convictions of you military men.” In late 1950, Congress appropriated $62.5 million in aid for Spain. In 1951, Stanton Griffis—with Angie Duke in tow—arrived in Spain to fill the long-vacant post of ambassador. That summer, American military officials started talking to Franco about military bases in Spain as Great Britain watched in annoyance. “The strategic advantages which might accrue from associating Spain with western defense,” said the British foreign secretary in the summer of 1951, “would be outweighed by the political damage which such an association might inflict.” American military officials waved such protests aside. They wanted those bases.
On September 26, 1953, the United States signed three agreements with Spain that together became known as the Pact of Madrid. The United States would give Spain military aid—$226 million in the first year alone—in exchange for the use of three existing air bases at Morón, Torrejón, and Zaragosa. The United States would expand and update the bases, as well as build a new Navy base at Rota and other facilities. The United States and Spain would operate the bases jointly, but the Americans would run the show. The pact would remain in effect for ten years—until 1963—and then could be extended in five-year increments. Because the pact was an executive agreement, not a treaty, it did not require congressional approval. Military necessity had trumped the ideals of freedom and democracy. A New York Times editorial called the deal “a bitter pill.” “Let us hope,” it said, “that the medicine will not do more harm than good.”
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 Stanley 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.
But the larger crisis was not. The Spanish government would not be soothed as easily as Sagáz. The next morning, General Donovan met with Spanish Vice President Muñoz Grandes to give him the latest news from Palomares. Muñoz Grandes did not appear upset, but he responded with a demand: nuclear flights over Spanish territory must be stopped until further notice.
The demand did not appear to originate from Muñoz Grandes. A military man, he had always been cooperative and friendly toward the Americans, “the only friend we really had,” according to George Landau. Most likely the ban had come from the civilian side of the Spanish government, or maybe Franco himself. And it probably had little to do with Spain's concern for its people; the government might simply have been arming itself with a bargaining chip for the 1968 base renegotiations.
Muñoz Grandes's decree meant little for the Chrome Dome route over Spain. Though some reports claimed that SAC dropped the route, U.S. Embassy staffers say the flights continued but started refueling over water. But the decree also had another implication: no more nuclear logistics flights either. The United States couldn't fly nuclear bombs over Spain just to get them somewhere else, such as to storage depots in Germany, for instance. Most viewed these curbs as simply an inconvenience: planes could be rerouted over oceans or other countries. But others saw clouds gathering on the horizon. What if other European countries—Britain, France, Germany—fearing a Palomares accident of their own, started asking questions? What if they demanded that the United States remove nuclear bombs from their bases, nuclear subs from their waters, nuclear-armed planes from their skies? If Spain's decision caused a domino effect, the United States' nuclear strategy could be curtailed. Everything in Spain had to be patched up as quickly as possible. Over the next few months, Ambassador Duke constantly received a question from Defense: When can we get the overflights reinstated?
Duke foresaw other troubles ahead, and not just from the Spanish government. The story had broken open, and hordes of international journalists were massing on Spain's southern shore. Despite Duke's best efforts, Palomares was swelling into an international news event. He braced himself for a long struggle, concluding his January 22 dispatch to Washington with a warning and a plea:
Believe we must be prepared for continued and possibly increased media treatment of accident until fourth bomb located and removed. If much more time elapses without success in search, we may be faced with practical necessity admitting officially one bomb still missing. This in turn carries obvious dangers including potentially triggering off further GOS [government of Spain] official statements possibly including public reference to Spanish demand that refueling and/or overflights nuclear-armed aircraft be stopped. It therefore clearly of utmost urgency that no effort be spared locate fourth bomb with minimum delay. Urge all necessary US resources be provided for search.