defense agreement, at least not in its present form.
“Now, with its economy and its political ties in Europe both steadily expanding, the Spanish Government is said to be tiring of its ‘equal but separate role,’” reported the
The base negotiations got under way in late 1967, and Duke placed himself in the thick of them.
Finally, he had a chance to shape U.S. foreign policy. He had been lobbying hard for a water desalinization plant for Palomares, a goodwill gift from America to soothe the psychological pain of the accident. If he could announce the gift as soon as possible, preferably before the two-year anniversary of the accident, it would improve the atmosphere for the base negotiations. The American diplomats had to remember, said Duke, that “The accident brought home to the Spanish, in a most dramatic way, that the American military presence in Spain was not without serious risks.” On January 6, 1968, Duke was dining at the embassy in Madrid when President Johnson called.
Johnson handed Duke some surprising news: he wanted Angie to leave his post as ambassador and return to Washington. Johnson faced a tough reelection battle, and he wanted Angie at his side as his director of protocol. Dismayed, Duke saw his policy-making ambitions vanishing in a puff of presidential whimsy. He protested: he couldn’t leave now. He was in the middle of touchy base negotiations with the Spanish, which wouldn’t wrap up until September. But Johnson insisted; he needed Angie back in Washington before then.
Duke was bitterly disappointed. But if the president needed him, he had to obey. For the next few months, he sped around Spain, tying up loose ends and making farewell calls. On March 31, 1968, Duke and his family climbed onto a military airplane in Madrid and flew to the United States. They arrived in Washington exhausted. They checked into the Watergate Hotel, ordered room service, and turned on the television. President Johnson would be speaking at 8 p.m., and Duke, with his wife and children, gathered to watch the broadcast. President Johnson appeared on the screen and told the nation that he would not seek reelection.
Duke sat stunned in front of the television. He had been yanked away from Spain for nothing. Soon after, Duke was sworn in as director of protocol, a job that now seemed more frivolous than ever.
The president did not attend the ceremony, sending Lady Bird instead. “He must have known,” said Duke, “how disappointed I was.”
During his famous swim, Duke predicted a bright future for the gritty beaches of Costa Bomba.
Time eventually proved him right. Today, the once barren coast is crammed with beachfront condominiums and beet-faced British tourists. The Garrucha waterfront, once a working wharf packed with fishing boats, now sports a tony marina and a stylish promenade lined with palm trees.
Two miles inland from Palomares sits a luxury golf resort called Desert Springs, its emerald links flanked by dramatic sculptures of rearing horses. The resort looks as if it had been carved out of Tucson, airlifted across the Atlantic, and plunked down in the Spanish desert. Closer to Palomares, Playa de Quitapellejos, the former site of Camp Wilson, remains much the same. The sand is rough and rocky, scattered with black slag. But there have been some changes. Two miles south, on what used to be a barren beach, is a thriving nudist colony.
In Palomares itself, there are few remnants of the dusty farming village that grabbed the world’s attention in 1966. Palomares is now a modern, prosperous town, thanks to industrial agriculture and tourism. Modern greenhouses blanket the fields, and produce-processing centers the size of airplane hangars squat on the outskirts of town. The village square boasts a community center resembling a suburban library. The modern building faces a wide tiled plaza and new three-story condos, built for vacationing Europeans. The skyline of Palomares — the town now has a skyline — bristles with cranes lifting steel beams. The only memorial to the accident is a small street near the central plaza marked with a sign reading “Calle de 17 de enero de 1966”—January 17, 1966, Street.
Manolo and Dolores Gonzalez still live in Palomares, in a small but comfortable apartment in the center of town. (They also own a gracious hacienda on the outskirts.) Like the rest of the town, Manolo and Dolores have prospered. Instead of a Citroen pickup truck, Manolo now drives a luxury-model silver Mercedes. As upbeat and enthusiastic as ever, Manolo says the town is no worse off from the accident. There is an endless supply of British tourists, with their bottomless, deep-seated craving for the Spanish sun. Plutonium or no plutonium, the building boom was inevitable.
As the town sprawls outward, however, the echoes of the past are making themselves heard. In 1966, during the initial cleanup, the Spanish and American governments created a program to monitor the air and soil of Palomares, as well as the health of its people. They named the program
“Project Indalo” and put Emilio Iranzo, the JEN scientist, in charge. (The name “Indalo” comes from a petroglyph found in nearby caves, showing a stick figure of a man holding an arc over his head. Indalo is an omnipresent tourist symbol for Almeria, visible on place mats, key chains, and shot glasses throughout the area.) From the beginning, the U.S. government has funded part of the program, though it refuses to say publicly how much it has contributed.
In 1966, JEN set up air monitors in and around the town and has regularly checked the contamination levels since then. It has also tested chickens, rabbits, tomatoes, and other crops. Every year, about 150 residents of Palomares travel to Madrid — all expenses paid — for complete physical examinations, including urine testing for plutonium. So far, at least 1,029 people have received more than 4,000 medical and dosimetric examinations. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, these tests show that about 5 percent of the people studied carry plutonium in their bodies. However, say the authorities, the increased plutonium causes no health risk. This is proven, they say, by the fact that the residents of Palomares have shown no increase in illnesses or deaths that might be caused by plutonium ingestion.
Unfortunately, neither CIEMAT — the successor to JEN — nor the DOE has made these medical results public. Villagers who visit Madrid for screenings are given detailed printouts listing their weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol but are never told anything about the plutonium that may or may not be in their bodies. Only one small study examining the villagers’ long-term cancer rates has been published. It found that the cancer rates in Palomares were no higher than those in another Spanish town with a similar population.
Nevertheless, the accident continues to haunt the village. In the late 1970s, a large irrigation pool was built next to the area where bomb number two fell and cracked open. This area, which also served as the staging ground for loading the contaminated soil into barrels, remains the most contaminated zone. The heavy digging for the pool resuspended some of the buried plutonium, spiking contamination levels. Iranzo, who still ran the program at the time, insists that the levels, even at their highest, remained safe for the villagers.
In 2002, because of development encroaching on this same area, CIEMAT purchased about twenty-three acres of contaminated land in order to restrict use. It forbade farmers to plant in the area and eventually enclosed it with a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. (“
Between November 21, 2006, and February 22, 2007, CIEMAT technicians swept 71 million square feet of land — the equivalent of 660 soccer fields — in and around Palomares with radiation meters, collecting 63,000 measurements. The preliminary results, released in the summer of 2007, surprised the scientists. The plutonium contamination was higher and more widespread than they had suspected, and several areas they had considered clean were contaminated with americium, a product of plutonium disintegration. In April 2008, CIEMAT announced another surprise: the discovery of two trenches, about ten yards long and thirty yards wide, containing radioactive debris.
Little information on the trenches is available, though they appear to contain many “small radioactive metal objects” left by the Americans. Though the U.S. and Spanish governments had long known of the trenches’ existence, they had not known their exact location.
The scientists insist that the radiation levels, though higher than expected, are still safe for residents.
But as a result of the 2007 findings, they widened the “contaminated” zone from 107,000 square yards to almost 360,000. They have also restricted construction in and the sale of produce from the most contaminated areas. They have not yet established a plan for remediation.
The townspeople, who stand to gain or lose much from land use restrictions, are not happy with the increased attention. Manolo and Dolores Gonzalez consider the new rules ridiculous. Manolo is not worried about the plutonium; after the accident, he says, he took a piece of the melted wreckage and used it for a paperweight, and he is healthy as a horse. “Everybody is healthy, no one is sick. The death rate in Palomares is below the national average,” said Manolo. Everyone just needs to be
