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 António de Oliveira Salazar's biggest problem—Humberto...