Cecil Bebb

Captain Charles William Henry "Cecil" Bebb (27 September 1905 – 2002) was a commercial pilot and later airline executive, notable for flying General Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in 1936, a journey which was to trigger the onset of the Spanish Civil War.

At 07.15 on the morning of 11 July 1936, Captain Bebb took off from Croydon Airport, London, in a Dragon Rapide aircraft, with a navigator, his friend Major Hugh Pollard, and two female companions.

The flight log records that the aircraft was bound for the Canary Islands. The purpose of Bebb's flight was to collect General Franco from the Canaries and fly him to Tetuán in Spanish Morocco, at that time a Spanish colony, where the Spanish African Army was garrisoned.

Franco was recognized by the government in Madrid as a danger to the Second Spanish Republic and had been sent to the Canaries in order to keep him away from political intrigue. Had a Spanish plane flown to the islands, the authorities would likely have been alerted, but the British aircraft attracted little or no attention. Bebb and Franco arrived in Tetuán on 19 July and the general quickly set about organising Moroccan troops to participate in the coming coup.

It is possible that British security services may have been complicit in Bebb's flight. Certainly his companion Pollard had previously been an intelligence agent. The flight itself was planned over lunch at Simpson's in the Strand, where Douglas Francis Jerrold, the conservative Roman Catholic editor of the English Review, met with the journalist Luis Bolín, London correspondent of the ABC Newspaper and later Franco's senior press advisor. Jerrold then persuaded Pollard to join the enterprise, and Pollard in turn recruited Bebb as pilot, with daughter Diana Pollard and a friend as passengers to pose as tourists.

...
Wikipedia