Burnett Bolloten - The Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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THE GRAND CAMOUFLAGE

THE COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

BY

BURNETT BOLLOTEN

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TO GLADYS

WHOSE UNREMITTING LABOURS

AND SELF-SACRIFICE MADE

THIS BOOK POSSIBLE

THIS volume is the product of many years of incessant and exhaustive research. To those persons who expected an earlier completion I should like to offer a few words of explanation. More than twenty years ago I set to work to reconstruct from limited materials and a limited knowledge of the subject, acquired as a United Press correspondent in Spain, some of the principal political events of the Spanish Civil War and Revolution; but no sooner had I begun than I realized that the information at my disposal was not in keeping with the complexity and magnitude of the subject, so I undertook the work of investigation on a scale commensurate with the need. From that time on more than one hundred thousand newspapers and periodicals, approximately two thousand five hundred books and pamphlets, and hundreds of unpublished documents were consulted. This massive documentation was not available in any one institution or in any one country, but had to be secured, sometimes under difficult circumstances, from a dozen different countries: from Spain, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Mexico, as well as from half a dozen other Latin American republics, where thousands of Spaniards took refuge after the Civil War. In the course of many years of unremitting research and inquiry considerably more than twenty thousand letters were written and received, and a very large number of interviews were obtained from persons who had played a role in the Civil War and Revolution. Often enough many years went by before a particular publication could be located or a particular fact could be verified to my satisfaction.

I therefore fed that I am entitled to the indulgence of those friends and acquaintances who looked forward year after year, seemingly in vain, to the publication of this volume. I can hardly be criticized for not being able to estimate how long it would take to complete; for there was no gauge by which I could measure the length of time required to collect the necessary materials, comb and recomb sources of information for fresh evidence in a thousand different places, read and reread, digest and assimilate, sift and combine this vast store of materials.

Only an infinitesimal portion of the documentation amassed since I first started collecting materials at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War could be pressed into the compass of a readable volume, and the same is true of the testimony furnished by individuals with whom I was in personal or written communication for many years. But this does not imply that their information did not serve a most useful purpose, and I should like them to know that it broadened and deepened my knowledge and made it possible for me to check the reliability of materials actually incorporated.

In preparing this volume I have allowed myself to be guided solely by a desire to reveal the truth. I have endeavoured by the most diligent research, by the most conscientious selection of materials, and, what was still more exacting, by a rigorous control of my own emotions and convictions, to maintain the highest possible standards of scrupulosity and objectivity, and regret that in so doing I have had to ignore the political susceptibilities of friends and acquaintances who provided me so generously with personal testimony and documentary material. Had I acted otherwise, I should have been guilty of conduct unworthy of an historian; for, in the words of Cervantes, historians should be exact, truthful, and impartial, and should not allow themselves either through self-interest, fear, rancour, or sympathy to deviate from the path of truth.

Because of the highly controversial nature of the subject dealt with in this volume, because memories are short, and because there is a tendency to falsify and distort even the most elementary fact connected with the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, I have been forced to substantiate almost every important point in my exposition. Hence the footnotes. The reader, of course, is not compelled to go through them all, but were he to ignore them entirely he would miss much valuable and fascinating material, which for stylistic reasons could not be embodied in the text.

And now I should like to express my gratitude to all those persons, institutions, publishers, and journals listed alphabetically on pp. 3379, which have greatly assisted or at least facilitated the preparation of this volume. Considerations of space do not permit a detailed account of the manner in which each made a contribution, such as furnishing me with, testimony, searching for or collecting, giving, loaning, or micro-filming materials, helping me to make valuable contacts, authorizing me (when permission was necessary) to quote from, publications, giving me the benefit of their knowledge and experience, and rendering many other services for which I am sincerely grateful. None of them, however, bears the slightest responsibility for any conclusions expressed or implied in this volume .

But more than to anyone else I owe special gratitude to my former wife, Gladys Bolloten. Her devoted assistance, encouragement, sympathy, enthusiasm, good judgment, suggestions, and hard work for nearly fifteen years helped to make this book what it is.

BURNETT BOLLOTEN

Santa Clara, California, 1960

All data used in the preparation of this volume can be found in newspapers, periodicals, books, pamphlets, documents, and clippings held by one or more of the following United States and European libraries unless otherwise stated in the bibliography. {1}

Biblioteca Universitaria de Barcelona, Barcelona.

Bibliothque Nationale , Paris.

British Museum Newspaper library, London.

Harvard College library, Cambridge, Mass.

Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid, Madrid.

The Hoover Institute and library on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, Calif. (See Burnett and Gladys Bolloten Collection on the Spanish Civil War, especially microfilm section, and Vols. 110 of The Grand Camouflage materials .)