Fighting for relevance: Economic intelligence and special operations executive in Spain, 1943–1945
This article examines the work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Spain during the latter part of the Second World War. Unlike SOE's broad mandate to sow dissent and disarray in occupied countries, in Spain agents were forbidden from any involvement in direct action and sabotage. Diplomatic concerns, namely the maintenance of Spanish neutrality in the war, overrode all other strategic issues in Iberia. SOE agents and leaders in Madrid, therefore, attempted to create a different role for themselves. Drawing on files released in the Public Record Office in 1998, the article highlights SOE's limited success in the effort to establish for itself a part in the Allied strategic and diplomatic campaign against German wolfram smuggling. Success proved fleeting, however, and SOE's ultimate failure, in the face of hostility from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), to prove its usefulness beyond the wolfram campaign, would lead to its withdrawal from Spain. The story of the SOE in Spain represents, on a small scale, the failure of the organization to find a niche in the British intelligence community after the Second World War.
Economic Relations between Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain 1936-1945
This is the first comprehensive study of the economic relationship between Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain between the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Second World War. It demonstrates how, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi regime helped General Franco to victory, but at the same time tried to turn Spain into an economic colony. Despite the involved techniques employed by the Nazis to control German trade with Spain - and determined efforts to influence the Spanish mining industry - the Germans were never able to intimidate Franco into completely surrendering control of his national assets. The German situation was weakened in September 1939, when the war against Britain and France effectively cut Spain off from the Third Reich. Based on documents in German and Spanish as well as British and American archives, this book makes a significant contribution not only to our understanding of Spanish history, but also of international relations in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Oldest Ally: Britain and the Portuguese Connection, 1936-1941
Origins of non-intervention in Spain non-intervention diplomacy countering the Axis in Portugal the military dimension origins of colonial appeasement Portugal's African colonies and appeasement the connection and pre-war diplomacy countering the Axis in war-time Portugal the Atlantic dimension the Far Eastern context.