We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  The publication of the serialized book alerted the FBI to the presence of Orlov in the USA and provoked J. Edgar Hoover to initiate an investigation. In consequence, Fischer was questioned by FBI investigators on 19 May 1953 about Orlov’s role in Spain. When it was Orlov’s turn to be interrogated by the FBI, he attempted to divert attention from his own crimes by pointing the fingers at others. He claimed that Fischer had once been a Soviet intelligence agent. However, it has been pointed out that ‘the NKVD records contain no evidence that Fischer was ever anything more than a Communist sympathizer’ and that the FBI, despite its extremely thorough investigation of Orlov, chose to take no action against Fischer. Accordingly, it appears that Orlov was falsely accusing Fischer by way of revenge for, and to cast doubt on, allegations in his book Men and Politics about the activities of the Russian security services in Spain. Within Stalin’s Russia, Fischer, far from being considered agent material, was regarded as a Trotskyist sympathizer.122

  Fischer returned to Russia in 1956 and wrote a book about his experiences called Russia Revisited. He wrote biographies of Stalin, Gandhi and Lenin. The latter, The Life and Death of Lenin, won the National Book Award in 1964.123 In December 1958, he was appointed a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1961, he became a lecturer at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he taught Soviet–American relations and Soviet foreign politics. In October 1967, he wrote a letter in favour of British entry into the European Economic Community.124

  Throughout this period, he had numerous love affairs. His correspondence contains dozens of pages of love letters from unidentified women. In 1957, ‘Dede’ wrote to him: ‘what manner of a Man sees three women in as many hours? Who would allow such a thing? Well, I just want to be the last.’125 The letter was from Deirdre Randall and her wish would eventually come true. The relationship with Deirdre was one of the most enduring in his life. Although forty years Louis’ junior, Deirdre was deeply in love with him but tolerated his infidelities. About ten years after Louis first began to see Deirdre, another of his last relationships was especially tempestuous and involved Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. At the time, Svetlana, aged forty-two, was an attractive woman with auburn hair, deep blue eyes and a seductive smile. Thirty years her senior, Louis Fischer was rather weather-beaten but still active and as alert as ever. Her years in the Kremlin, despite her problems with her father, had left her spoiled, petulant and arrogant. Having made a fortune from the sale of her book of memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend, she rented a house in Princeton in New Jersey. There in 1968 she met and fell in love with the Russian-speaking Fischer. Since she was not the only woman in his life at the time, she felt intense jealousy.126

  Svetlana’s suspicions fell inevitably on the beautiful Deirdre Randall, who had become Fischer’s research assistant, certainly spent lengthy periods in his house and was effectively living with him. Svetlana was enraged after she found some of Deirdre’s things in his house. On that occasion, she seems to have thrown Deirdre’s clothes around. On another, Deirdre left Louis a note after Svetlana had telephoned while he was out:

  First she hung up, then curiosity got the best of her, and she asked who this was and I said, ‘Deirdre. How are you?’ and she said (and she talks with the elaborate sinisterness of people in Eisenstein movies, at least to me) ‘and what are you doing there’ and I said ‘working of course’ and she very sweetly, ‘and are you wearing your beautiful nightgown?’ and I said ‘Of course not, most of the time I was in the bed naked’. Sorry I blew my top but she grabs me. I don’t think she would have apologised, nor let me use her ironing board to iron the clothes she wrinkled. I think she’s absolutely crackers and that one of us is going to end up with an ikon buried in her heart. My mommy told me not to fool around with married men. If you get home at a reasonable hour, better call her. I really feel awful. I hate being bullied and I hate most of all being afraid and she’s so crude I feel that I know what it was like to talk to Stalin.127

  Svetlana’s temper tantrums were the talk of Princeton’s small academic community. One day, in the autumn of 1968, she arrived at Louis’ house and banged furiously at the door. Inside with Deirdre Randall, Fischer ignored Svetlana as she ranted for over an hour, demanding that he return her presents to him. They amounted to a travel clock and two decorative candles. As her fury mounted, she tried to break in by smashing the windows at the side of the door. When the police arrived, they found her hysterical with blood pouring from her hands. It was the end of their relationship.128

  The relationship with Deirdre, in contrast, was more lasting. Despite the difference in their ages, she could be critical, commenting to his son George on Louis’ ‘horrible hard, tough, thick-skulled frightening ego’. That perhaps made her more attractive to him, as did the fact that, while she adored him, she was something of a free-spirited child of the 1960s and did not pressure him with ambitions of monogamy. In one of her early letters to him, she wrote: ‘I touch your hand. You are so vital. You’ve made me come alive. You are the sun. I feel you here. I am warm.’129 With the encouragement of Deirdre, he continued to work, producing two important works on Soviet foreign policy. Russia’s Road from Peace to War: Soviet Foreign Relations, 1917–1941 was published in 1969, shortly before his death. He died on 15 January 1970, but Deirdre continued to work on the final preparation of the manuscript of the other, The Road to Yalta: Soviet Foreign Relations, 1941–1945, which appeared two years later.130

  8

  The Sentimental Adventurer: George Steer and the Quest for Lost Causes

  In early 1938, Martha Gellhorn wrote to her friend and mentor, Eleanor Roosevelt:

  You must read a book by a man named Steer: it is called the Tree of Gernika. It is about the fight of the Basques – he’s the London Times man – and no better book has come out of the war and he says well all the things I have tried to say to you the times I saw you, after Spain. It is beautifully written and true, and few books are like that, and fewer still that deal with war. Please get it.1

  Martha Gellhorn’s judgement has more than stood the test of time. Steer was the correspondent of The Times whose account of the bombing of Guernica perhaps had more political impact than any single article written by any correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. The Labour Member of Parliament for Derby, Philip Noel-Baker, wrote to Steer about his reporting:

  Your telegrams from Bilbao have been of incalculable value to me, and your messages to the Times have been simply brilliant. I think no article in modern times has made so deep an impression throughout the whole country as your dispatch about the bombing of Guernica. I wish you could have heard the comments made by your Member of Parliament, Arthur Salter. I have quoted the dispatch at length in at least ten big meetings throughout the country, and it everywhere makes a tremendous impression.2

  To a world which has witnessed the slaughter unleashed by Hitler and Stalin, to say nothing of the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars, the Spanish Civil War might well seem small beer. After Dresden and Hiroshima, the destruction of Guernica could appear to be no more than a second-rate piece of thuggery. Yet, for all that, the bombing of the sleepy Basque market town on 26 April 1937 has probably provoked more savage polemic than any single act of war since, and much of that polemic has revolved around Steer’s article. This is partly because what happened at Guernica was perceived as the first time that aerial bombardment wiped out an undefended civilian target in Europe. In fact, the bombing of innocent civilians was a well-established practice in the colonies of the Western powers and had most recently and most thoroughly been carried out by the Italians in Abyssinia. Even in Spain, the bombing of Guernica had been preceded by the destruction of nearby Durango by German bombers at the end of March 1937. As the special envoy of The Times with the Republican forces in Bilbao, George Steer, who had witnessed the horrors of bombing in Abyssinia, described what was done at Durango as ‘the most terrible bombardm
ent of a civil population in the history of the world up to March 31st 1937’.3 However, with the aid of Picasso’s searing painting, it is Guernica that is now remembered as the place where the new and horrific modern warfare came of age.

  It has been claimed increasingly of late that, but for Picasso, Guernica would have soon been forgotten as a regrettable but unavoidable act of war. That this is to miss much of the real drama of Guernica was one of the central points made by the most important book to be published on the atrocity, and indeed one of the most important books published on any aspect of the Spanish Civil War: La destrucción de Guernica, by the late Herbert Rutledge Southworth. Dr Southworth’s painstaking and gripping study of the myth of Guernica and the web of lies that was constructed around it shows that the survival of the controversy owes as much to the work of George Steer as to Picasso.

  Who was George Lowther Steer? As his biographer, Nick Rankin, discovered when trying to answer the question: ‘Almost nothing remains of his personal letters and papers. His widow destroyed much in the 1940s before remaking her life; his parents’ executors destroyed the rest in the 1950s.’4 His life has to be reconstructed from his articles and books, from some scattered memories of people who saw him in Abyssinia, Spain or the fronts that he covered in the Second World War until his death at the end of 1944, and from his correspondence with his friend Philip Noel-Baker. What is clear from the surviving material is that Steer saw his journalism as a vehicle both to expose and thus to combat the horrors of fascism.5 His father-in-law, Sir Sidney Barton, commented in the preface to one of Steer’s books, Sealed and Delivered, that he had been ‘at the front in the Second World War ever since this began in fact with the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 1 October 1935’.6

  This diminutive but brave, flame-haired reporter was born in East London, South Africa, in 1909, the son of Bernard Steer, managing editor of the important local newspaper, the Daily Dispatch. He was educated in England, as a scholar of Winchester College and then at Oxford University. At Christ Church, he secured a double first in Classical Greats (Mods in 1930 and Greats in 1932). He returned briefly to South Africa, working as the crime and baseball reporter for the Cape Town Cape Argus until 1933. He then came back to England to a job on the Yorkshire Post, working in the paper’s London office in Fleet Street. From 1933 to 1935, he edited the ‘London Letter’ from the Fleet Street office, which was a mixture of stories, gossip, curiosities and theatre and other reviews sent to Yorkshire. He spent some time freelancing for the Yorkshire Post in the Saarland during the electoral campaign for the January 1935 referendum which saw its incorporation into Nazi Germany. Convinced that Italy was planning to invade Ethiopia, and tired of the snow in the Saarland – ‘sun on yellow grass seemed better’ – he returned to London and laid siege to The Times, which eventually hired him as a special correspondent to cover the coming Italo–Ethiopian war.7

  After having his tonsils out and his teeth filled, he left London in June 1935, equipped with a gift from his colleagues at the Yorkshire Post, a topee bedecked with the colours of Winchester College. After a hazardous two-week journey, via Djibouti in French Somaliland, he arrived in Addis Ababa. He stayed at the Hotel Imperial, ‘a wooden, balconied structure that looked as though it had been transplanted whole from the Yukon’, where guests were expected to bring their own house-boy to clean their rooms. With typical commitment, Steer immediately began to learn the local language, Amharic. At the Imperial, he was eventually joined by a band of correspondents, among whom were several who were also to be in Spain, in particular the Australian Noel Monks, the Irishman O’Dowd Gallagher, the American Hubert R. Knickerbocker and the American-born Englishman Sir Percival Phillips. As Monks and Gallagher checked in, they were greeted by Steer, remembered by Monks as ‘a short, slight man with an impish face’. The Abyssinian capital was both dusty and backward and the telegraph system particularly primitive. The censorship was crude, the cable clerks incompetent and, to save money, the correspondents invented bizarre abbreviations. Given the scarcity of news and the brevity of official communiqués, it was not surprising that others just invented their stories. Steer recalled: ‘We dashed frantically about in cars between the Legations, the Foreign Ministry, the Palace and the radio, scratching together from the barren rockeries of Ethiopia a few frail seeds from which we hoped would flower exotically a story.’ In early October 1935, when the Italians were about to invade, and Haile Selassie signed, but did not issue, an order for general mobilization, Hubert R. Knickerbocker produced an especially colourful account, with signals being sent by flaming beacons on the hills and beating drums in every village. In recognition of his inspiration, his fellow correspondents presented him with a small toy drum.8 Knickerbocker would later write an equally invented account of the entry into Madrid of the military rebels some two and a half years before it actually happened.

  Regarding cables from Europe and America, a messenger boy would bring a sheaf of messages to the first correspondent he met in the lobby of the Imperial. The result was that, on occasion, they were all able to read their rivals’ messages and indeed to indulge in practical jokes. O’Dowd Gallagher claimed to have played a particularly effective one on Steer. He fabricated a cable purporting to be from John Jacob Astor, Lord Astor of Hever, the proprietor of The Times: STEER TIMES ADDIS ABABA WE NATION PROUD YOUR WORK STOP CARRY ON IN NAME YOUR KING AND COUNTRY – ASTOR. He claimed that such was the stir created by the cable that Steer was invited to interview the Emperor Haile Selassie, who gave him an unprecedentedly long interview. The story is surely apocryphal, since Steer had spoken to the Emperor for ninety minutes shortly after his own arrival and long before Gallagher appeared. By then, Haile Selassie insisted on questions being submitted in writing and seeing journalists for only a few minutes.9

  It is certainly the case that, with or without Gallagher’s mischief, Steer’s sympathy with the Ethiopians led to him establishing a close personal relationship with the Emperor and being given access to his general staff throughout the war. Before the Italians invaded, he warned Monks and Gallagher: ‘There’s going to be a massacre unless the League of Nations get off their bottoms and stop Mussolini. These people are still living in the spear age. That’s all they’ve got – spears.’ Steer’s support for such underdogs was reflected in Caesar in Abyssinia, which set out

  to show what was the strength and spirit of the Ethiopian armies sent against a European Great Power. My conclusions are that they had no artillery, no aviation, a pathetic proportion of automatic weapons and modern rifles, and ammunition sufficient for two days’ modern battle. I have seen a child nation, ruled by a man who was both noble and intelligent, done brutally to death almost before it had begun to breathe.10

  Moreover, as the jacket of his book proclaimed: ‘The first to arrive and the last to leave, Steer was the only correspondent who saw the campaign from beginning to end.’ His descriptions of Italian atrocities made his reputation as an intrepid war correspondent. They also ensured that, after the victorious forces of the Duce occupied the Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936, he would be expelled from Abyssinia merely eight days later, when Steer was accused of ‘anti-Italian propaganda and espionage’ on behalf of British Intelligence, and a warrant was prepared for his arrest on charges of transporting gas masks to Ethiopian troops and assisting in blowing up a road. ‘It is not surprising’, he told his newspaper, ‘that the Italians did not succeed in finding evidence to support these charges.’ The accusation derived from the fact that there had been a cargo of gas masks carried by a lorry on which he had made the perilous journey from Addis Ababa to the Emperor’s northern headquarters at Dessye, just before it was occupied by the Italians.11 On the other hand, hints of Steer’s connections with the intelligence services would emerge from time to time.

  Steer’s nomination as special correspondent in Ethiopia had earned him the jealousy of Evelyn Waugh, who had reported for The Times five years earlier for the coronation of Haile Selassie, but came in August 19
35 as representative of the pro-fascist Daily Mail. The relationship was not helped when, at their first brief encounter at a railway station, Steer failed to recognize the great novelist, taking him for just another journalist. Waugh was not exactly suited to the daily discomforts of being a war correspondent. Once, to steal a march on his colleagues, he had sent one of his despatches in Latin, a gesture which had not been well received back in London. Unlike many of his fellows, Waugh was fiercely pro-Italian, or as he described it, ‘slappers with the wops’, that is to say, on bottom-slapping terms with the Italians. He wrote to Diana Cooper: ‘I have got to hate the ethiopians more each day goodness they are lousy & i hope the organmen gas them to buggery’. Waugh was as deficient in typing skills as in the milk of human kindness.

  By his own account, Waugh was drunk much of the time in Addis Ababa and, on one occasion, he and his friend Patrick Balfour locked Steer in his room so that he would be unable to catch an important train. Bored, Waugh bought ‘a very lowspirited baboon’ which masturbated all day, and then, in the evenings, took it to the local nightclub, where it molested the whores. Steer would occasionally indulge in adolescent levity to make the time pass during interminable press conferences, and in the sterile meetings of the Foreign Press Association of which he was permanent secretary and Evelyn Waugh the minute-taker. However, he never reached the heights attained by Waugh. Indeed, Steer spent most of his time travelling all over Abyssinia and getting to know the country and its people. In October 1935, perhaps to escape Waugh, Steer moved out of the Hotel Imperial where he had been incarcerated in his room. It did him little good. Waugh and Balfour locked him in his new house and gave the key to the madame of a local bordello. Waugh’s practical joke was not the only misfortune suffered by Steer in Ras Mulugeta Bet, as his home was named. At the beginning of May 1936, it was gutted during the looting that preceded the arrival of the Italians and he had been taken in by the family of the British Minister, Sir Sidney Barton. Waugh himself never actually made it to the front, which did not distress him overmuch since he did not take his reporting seriously. He claimed that the heaviest fighting he saw was among the journalists. Steer, he wrote, ‘a very gay South African dwarf – is never without a black eye. Some say it is the altitude more than the bottle.’12