SPAIN: In Business

Just after sunset one night last week, a flight of U.S. Air Force B-47 jet bombers streaked across the purple Guadarrama Mountains and slid onto Western Europe's longest runway, the new 13,400-ft. strip of the U.S. Strategic Air Commands Torrejon Air Base, 13 miles northeast of Madrid. Looking down on the serried ranks of bombers on the once-empty apron, a U.S. control-tower operator crowed: "Man, are we ever in business!"

After four years of construction, U.S. bases in Spain are 80% completed. The network: three full-fledged SAC bases (at Torrejon, Zaragoza, Moron), completing a chain that stretches 1,200 miles from England to Morocco; a supply base at San Pablo, near Seville; a big sea and air base at Rota, commanding the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar; a 485-mile underground fuel pipeline linking the bases. Total cost of the bases when completed: $340 million.

In return for the right to establish its bases on Spain's strategic soil, the U.S. has so far given Franco $650 million in military assistance and defense support, another $264 million in economic aid that has helped build dams, factories, highways and housing. Critics have objected that the U.S. has thus bolstered Franco's position over the Spanish people. Franco retorts that Spain is the most staunchly anti-Communist of all the U.S.'s allies, has asked U.S. military experts to make a special study of Spain's "increased vulnerability" on the ground that U.S. bases have made his country a "frontline" target of Soviet long-range missiles. Spain is the only nation in Western Europe now receiving direct grants of economic aid from the U.S. But Franco argues that Spain received no help under the Marshall Plan, is asking for enough additional money to help raise the Spanish economy to the level of the rest of Western Europe.