The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History

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.