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
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
So great was the divide between these two Spains that
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
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, Angel Sagaz, who ran the North American section. At the meetings, Sagaz seemed calm but concerned about repercussions if the Spanish public discovered that nuclear-armed American bombers regularly flew over Spain. “Sagaz 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. Sagaz 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. Sagaz 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 Agustin Munoz 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. Munoz 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 Munoz 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 Andro 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
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
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 Moron and Torrejon 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
