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Flying blind

This article is more than 15 years old
David Mathieson
Captain Cecil Bebb flew General Franco to Morocco 70 years ago, and unleashed a conflict that left a million people dead.

At 07.15 on a bright summer morning just over 70 years ago a small Dragon Rapid aircraft took off from Croydon airport in South of London. Flying for pleasure or for commerce was still in its infancy: it was less than 10 years since Charles Lindbergh had landed at the same Croydon airfield after completing the first ever flight across the Atlantic. The pilot that July day, Captain Cecil Bebb, carried with him a navigator, a friend, Major Hugh Pollard, and two young blond women.

According to the flight log, the plane was bound for the Canary Islands. To the outside world Bebb's flight looked like an excursion by some rich, posh people on a joy ride. In fact, the real object of the flight was to collect General Franco from the Canaries and take him to Tetuán in Morocco, then a Spanish colony, where Spain's African Army was garrisoned. As the plane touched down on Spanish soil the country was gripped by political instability. The socialist government elected a few months before was struggling to withstand mounting pressure from all sides and on July 18 1936 some army generals declared a coup.

Franco was already known for his hostility to the republic. He had been posted to the Canary Islands months before by the government in Madrid precisely because they recognised him as a danger and wanted him out of the way. Had a Spanish plane flown to the Islands the authorities would immediately have been suspicious but the British flight went unnoticed. Bebb and Franco arrived on July 19 and the General immediately set about organising the Moroccan troops to participate in the uprising.

The generals assumed that the coup would be quick and remove the socialist government within a matter of days if not hours. They were dumbfounded when the people that had actually elected the government began to resist their plan and instead the country descended into a bloody three year civil war.

It has subsequently been revealed that British security services may have been complicit in Franco's flight. Bebb's companion, Major Pollard, was in reality an experienced agent of the British secret services, MI6. Pollard organised the flight over a lunch at the restaurant Simpsons in the Strand with a journalist Luis Bolín. Bolín was the London correspondent of the ferociously rightwing, catholic ABC newspaper and later became Franco's press chief.

As an example of unintended consequences is similar to the plot of the German General staff in 1917 when they provided a little-known communist called Lenin with a sealed train to take him from his exile in Switzerland through Germany to the Baltic coast. The Germans hoped that Lenin would agitate against the social democratic government of Kerensky and further weaken Russia's resolve to stay in the First World War. In the short-term the plan was a splendid success: within the year Lenin had seized government and Trotsky signed a peace treaty. The longer-term consequence, of course, was a brutal dictatorship, which continued to threaten Germany for the rest of the 20th century.

The French government made a similar miscalculation with the ayatollah Khomeni. During his exile in Paris in the 1970s the cleric was given free run to record tapes for the faithful Iran and agitate from a distance for the revolution of 1979. The French assessment that anything would be an improvement on the American backed Shah.

Exactly how much the British government knew or cared about the activities of the secret services in aiding Franco is questionable. Officially the British were concerned simply to keep out of the Spanish conflict. As the Spanish civil war took hold over the summer of 1936 the famously indolent prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, seemed worried only about two things: the scandalous behaviour of the King, who was having an affair with an American divorcee, and enjoying a lengthy summer holiday to recover his health. When the foreign secretary, Eden, tried to talk to Baldwin about the situation in Spain he noted that the prime minister "listened for a while and then his attention began to wander". Eden was astonished and recalled "it was another example of Baldwin´s reluctance to face unpleasant realities."

The Spanish civil was a catastrophe for Spain and the overture to World War II. Bebb´s flight was a causal link in a conflict that lead to the death of a million people followed by a 40 year dictatorship. A joy ride it was not.