Emilio Grandío Seoane, A Balancing Act: British Intelligence in Spain During the Second World War Brighton, Portland, Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2017. 182 pp

Emilio Grandío Seoane of the university of Santiago de Compostela has studied the Civil War and Second World War era in Galicia for numerous years, the fruits of which are here, in his first book published in English.Grandio places intelligence activity in Spain within the framework of broader British and Allied policy towards Spain since the Civil War, stressing how British anti-Communism, Spain's strategic supply of wolfram for war economies, and overall control of the Atlantic shipping lanes shaped British responses there, including on the intelligence front.The status of Gibraltar, too, was of particular concern for the British Government.The result is a study that nicely combines an assessment of overall British policy toward the Franco regime with the details of its effort through intelligence agencies to work with the regime of General Francisco Franco and forestall Nazi inroads into Spain.The British, first and foremost, always accepted Franco as the legitimate ruler of Spain, and the best option of many poor ones.Certainly a fear of the left, and of Communism especially, led Britain to want Franco to emerge from the Civil War as a stabilizing force.The immediate impact of this direction once the Second World War began, however, was an extensive and well developed espionage network in place for Nazi Germany and almost nothing in place on the part of the British.Thus when German trade in wolfram and other goods took off, German submarines were re-supplied in Spain, and Nazis established extensive spy stations along Spain's Atlantic coast to monitor Allied shipping, the British had to play catch up.This was the task given to Naval Attaché Alan Hillgarth, appointed in 1939 to organize the entirely of Britain's espionage work in Spain.Hillgarth used all the resources available to him to develop British intelligence in Spain, not only the Secret intelligence Service (SiS), but also those of the newly created Special operations Executive (SoE), designed to provoke and coordinate sabotage through active resistance to Nazi occupations on continental Europe.While outright sabotage was not permissible in a state that was either neutral or non-belligerent throughout the war, networks with Communist and other anti-Francoist resisters were developed by SoE agents in the chance that they could be mobilized if a German occupation or invasion of iberia occurred.As those chances lessened into 1942, the British largely abandoned further development of such contacts, a point reinforced by Ambassador Samuel Hoare

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