More on bribery

A reader writes:

Bribery has been used very effectively in the past to keep potential enemies tame. In World War 2 there was a British-American scheme to buy off General Franco's military advisers to keep Spain neutral, according to this New York Times book review of Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets:

And the research is at its most impressive when Stafford reconstructs a byzantine British-American scheme to bribe the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and his military command to keep Spain out of the war. That scheme involved $10 million, an infamous international financier, the United States Treasury and Churchill's man in Madrid. And it seems to have worked.

It only cost $10 million, which even in 1940s money seems like a bargain to eliminate Spain from the War.

I hadn't heard that before and I can't confirm it elsewhere yet.

Certainly Franco's lack of enthusiasm for the Axis cause, despite German and Italian aid to the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, was strategically important.

After the Americans and the British landed in northwest Africa in November 1942, the U.S. was scared that Franco would let the German army move through Spain and fall on the green American troops from the rear. (The OSS gave the two-fisted physical anthropologist Carleton Coon the mission, in that eventuality, of becoming the "Lawrence of Morocco:" he was to disappear into the Atlas mountains and organize the wild Berber tribes that he had long studied into a guerilla resistance.) Fortunately, Franco ungratefully kept the Germans at arm's length.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer