Eighty one years ago this week Spain’s General Francisco Franco launched what he thought would be a lightening coup to overthrow the elected Republican Government. He was not fully trusted by the Government, who had posted him to the Canary Islands where he might do the State no harm. But Britain’s Secret Service, which had been given free access in Berlin to files on Communists and Socialists by the by the Nazis in 1933, knew who its friends were. So, posing as holidaying aviators they landed in the Canaries and whisked the traitorous mutineer off to Spanish Morocco, from which he launched a murder campaign which took three years to install him as tyrant of all Spain. The key spook, Hugh Pollard, who flew Franco, .was no loose cannon, doing his own thing, for he served as MI6’s man in the British Embassy In Madrid when the city finally fell to Franco.
Pollard had form. He was a key misinformation officer in Dublin in. 1920, but not a roaring success. Following the Kilmichael ambush in County Cork in November 1920 he faked photos of the site, which Dublimers, nearly two hundred miles away recognised as their own Vico Road by Killiney Bay.
A more ambitious stunt also came unstuck. Crown Forces found the office where Dáil Eireann’s IRISH BULLETIN was printed, together wit its mailing list an printing equipment. So a counterfeit issue was printed but deliberately made false assertions and suggestions in order to discredit the paper. The fake copies were mailed from one Dublin location, whereas, for security reasons the genuine articles had been sent from many, scattered around the country to evade detection. In addition, the real Irish Bulletin was printed on a spare machine and mailed. in the normal way without missing an issue. Pollard was bitterly anti-Irish. His racism was not mixed with anti-Catholicism, for he was himself a Catholic. He was a firearms nerd and wrote about them. A close collaborator of his was an officer named Darling, equally, if not more vociferously anti-Irish.
Darling baca me Lord Provost of Edinburgh and a Tory MP. A great nephew of his became a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Ironically, the IRISH BULLETIN was closely connected with Erskine Childers, one of whose uncles, or great uncles, had been Chancellor of the ExcHEQUER.
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