Stealth in a Mercedes

It was straight Hollywood foreign intrigue: the night scene at Lisbon airport, passengers to Rio de Janeiro fretting at Flight 289's unexplained two-hour delay. A black Mercedes-Benz slips onto the runway. A man scuttles out, clambers into the airliner. Forty-five minutes later, 20 plainclothes policemen dissolve into the darkness, and the great silver plane roars off into the Atlantic midnight.

The scene was a little overdramatic, but then, dictators must take no chances. The man whisked out of Portugal to asylum in Brazil was Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's biggest problem--Humberto Delgado, a balding Portuguese general-turned-politician, who had spent the past three months in petulant, self-imposed exile in Brazil's Lisbon embassy. Running for the ceremonial office of President last year against a candidate backed by Salazar, in a land where the press is not free and Salazar's men count the votes, Delgado polled almost one-fourth of the votes, and he rallied the biggest electoral crowds in years. After the elections, Delgado lost his job as director of civil aviation. In January, fearing he was about to be arrested, he fled to the Brazilian embassy. Though Salazar contemptuously let it be known that Delgado was in no danger, Delgado would not leave without a written safe-conduct pass. Last week's complicated ritual at the airport resulted from a compromise worked out by a Brazilian newspaperman so that neither Delgado nor Salazar need give way on prideful procedure points. With Delgado gone, Salazar, the gentle-seeming but tough ex-professor of economics who rules Portugal, could look forward to his 70th birthday this week with a feeling that after 31 years in power, Portugal, like it or not, was still in his hands.

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