Foreign News: Automatic Sentence

In outwitting a dictator to get one’s husband out of his clutches, the first rule is to keep quiet until success is complete. Last week U. S. Airman Harold (“Whitey”) Dahl, who was captured by the Rightists while fighting for the Leftists, sentenced to death and then reprieved (TIME, Oct. 18, et ante), had every reason to wish that his wife had not burbled, “I used on General Franco all the sob technique I learned in my years on the stage.” In appealing by letter to Franco to save Whitey, Mrs. Dahl enclosed a picture of her handsome self in a low-cut evening dress, afterward claimed to have received a reply in which the General wrote “your obedient servant kisses your foot.”

To General Franco, who is a married man, this may have proved embarrassing. At any rate while Edith Dahl has worked up in a few weeks from a Riviera night club to one in Paris, Whitey has remained in custody at Salamanca. Last week the General’s headquarters announced that Airman Dahl’s reprieve was not a pardon, as had been thought, carries with it an “automatic sentence to life imprisonment.”