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

Ironically, once he got to Spain, Angie felt marooned. For years, he had stood at the side of the president. Maybe he had just been an observer, but he had been at the center of the Washington whirl, meeting kings, chatting with Jackie Kennedy, watching history being made. Now he was stuck in the backwaters of Europe. “When I got there, I found that I was moving from the center of the action into the countryside,” he said years later. “Fankly, to move to a dictatorship after the hurly burly of the White House years, in many ways was disappointing.” Nonetheless, Duke, patriotic and dedicated, threw himself into his new job with characteristic vigor.

Spain had changed enormously since Duke's last posting in the early 1950s. But the embassy's main policy goals had changed very little. As ambassador, Duke had to maintain the solid working relationship between the U.S. and Spanish governments. There was only one reason the United States cared at all about its relationship with Spain: the military bases. In 1966, the U.S. and Spanish governments jointly held four major military bases in Spain. The Air Force operated three bases: Torrejón, near Madrid; Morón, outside Seville; and Zaragosa in northeastern Spain. The Navy ran a Polaris submarine base on the southern coast at Rota, near Cádiz. Connecting these four bases, cutting across the center of Spain, stretched a 485-mile-long pipeline that supplied the bases with petroleum. The American military presence also peppered the rest of Spain. The Air Force ran a small air base at San Pablo and a fighter base at Reus, about ninety miles southwest of Barcelona.

The Navy stored oil at a supply center in northwestern Spain and kept oil and ammunition in a depot at Cartagena. The U.S. military also operated seven radar sites across the country.

George Landau, who worked at the embassy with Duke and became the State Department's director for Spanish and Portuguese affairs in 1966, called the Spanish bases the “crown jewels” of America's foreign military bases. Strategically located at the entrance to the Mediterranean, they were a key component of the military's nuclear deterrent strategy. The Sixteenth Air Force, headquartered at Torrejón, oversaw the bases in Spain (and Morocco until 1963) and was the largest SAC force overseas. SAC stocked the Spanish bases with tanker planes and medium-range bombers, critical for both its strip alert and airborne alert programs. The bases also offered numerous amenities: servicemen could live there on the cheap, the sky beamed blue and clear almost every day, and the Spanish government — at least in the early days — rarely hassled the Americans about anything. “The Pentagon was absolutely enamored with Spain,” said Landau. “They thought it was the wherewithal for everything.”

The base agreement that existed in 1966 would expire in just two years, and American officials were starting to negotiate terms for a new agreement. The American military had a good thing going in Spain and wanted the situation to remain as it was. But the Spanish government had grander goals.

“Spain wanted to be a part of Europe, a world power,” said the embassy staffer Joseph Smith. “The original base agreement made it clear that Spain was a junior partner. They wanted the United States to acknowledge Spain as something bigger…. They wanted to change from a purely military relationship to one that involved politics on the highest level.” The U.S. Embassy in Spain had a finite number of diplomatic chits; diplomats had to spend and save them wisely, always with an eye toward the upcoming base renegotiations. The bases, according to Landau, were not the embassy's top concern, they were the only concern. If not for the bases, the United States would have never reached out to Spain's military dictator, General Francisco Franco, at a time when Western Europe still regarded him with scorn.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco, chief of state, president of the Council of Ministers, and caudillo of Spain by the grace of God, didn't look the part of an iron-fisted terror. He was short and tubby, his soft face dominated by wide brown eyes with long eyelashes that gave him a decidedly feminine appearance. When he spoke, words tumbled out in a high-pitched squeak. Angie Duke described him as “the most uncharismatic dictator you ever saw in your life.” Franco had “a white face, mottled, jowled, fishy eyes, a very limp handshake, a big pot belly. Yet at the same time, he had quite an impressive personality. He had enormous reserves of power inside of him.” Franco had led the right wing Nationalists to victory during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939.