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Dealers in rare stones and currencies, dealers in information and flesh, dockside prostitutes doing a sideline in espionage, peasants illicitly shipping tungsten over the border — there was something for everyone, and at the summit of it all stood the privately frugal and monkish ‘Dean of Dictators,’ Dr António de Oliveira Salazar.
At the outbreak of war Salazar had only two objectives: to keep himself in power and to preserve the sovereign and territorial integrity of Portugal and her empire, and as far as he was concerned neutrality was essential to both. There was the small complication of an Anglo-Portuguese alliance that had lasted for over 500 years, but with Britain unable to guarantee Portugal’s safety and keen to keep the Iberian peninsula out of the war, Salazar was free to sell Portugal’s vital supplies of tungsten to either the Nazis or the Allies, with a more or less complete indifference as to which side won, so long as it left him and his regime intact.
It would be nice to be fair to Salazar —his country helpless to defend itself, Franco poised on his doorstep, the Allies eyeing the Azores, memories of Portugal’s miserable record in the first world war, the northern cities in range of German bombers — but as Forster said in defence of his A Passage to India, there are better things to be than ‘fair’.
It is certainly true that Salazar succeeded in all the strategic objectives he set himself, but a wartime trade surplus of $45 million and some 95 tons — over $100 million-worth — of looted Nazi gold in its banks tell their own unarguable story of the lengths that this most austerely cerebral of right-wing, communist-hating, Catholic dictators was prepared to go in defence of his Estado Novo.
The British Foreign Office reckoned that he was part peasant and part aloof scholastic, and the description would pretty well seem to fit the facts. Lochery claims that Salazar’s wartime record is still ‘misrepresented, misinterpreted or simply misunderstood’ — and yet all one can say at the end of a book that makes out the best possible case for him is long may it remain so.
This was an ugly regime, and Lochery’s Lisbon, under Salazar and his secret police, an ugly city. It is not just a city of shadows, as the title suggests, but of the shadows of shadows. It is a city obsessed with fears that never materialise, with kidnaps that never happen and plots that come to nothing; a city of Allied and Axis spies and their informers, feeding on false information in an endless and largely futile cycle of bribery, blackmail, rumour and counter-rumour: a city, in short, so morally bankrupt that even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor do not seem out of place. If Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund had had any sense they would have got themselves on the first plane back to Casablanca.
Because you read about book review
Also by David Crane
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