MODERN AGE FALL 2016 various Chinese, Spanish and other relief campaigns: charity as a vehicle for political action."3 With the onset of civil war in Spain in August 1936, Münzenberg's next great cause was born. He was at the center of an international campaign for a nonintervention pact to be signed by all the major players in international politics. Of course this campaign was very much in keeping with Münzenberg's previous enterprises. As Koestler's biographer Michael Scammell points out, "[Münzenberg's] Moscow patrons had done a masterly job of concealing their real intentions until now and were poised to intervene behind the smokescreen of the pact."4 What the defenders of socialism needed at that moment was information about the nature and extent of German and Italian support of Franco. Koestler offered his services. He had a Hungarian passport and a press card from a German-language Hungarian newspaper called Pester Lloyd. Though an excellent cover (Pester Lloyd was a "conservative paper in a semi-fascist country friendly to Franco"), the paper was also unlikely to have the resources to send its own correspondent.5 So Münzenberg's deputy Otto Katz contacted a foreign editor (and Party member) of the London-based News Chronicle to see if he would be interested in publishing Koestler's reportage from Spain. Koestler spent a little more than a month in Spain in the fall of 1936 and posted a number of stories for the News Chronicle. Katz then started a Spanish Republican press agency in Paris and asked Koestler to return to report from the southern front of the war in Málaga. Arriving there at the end of January 1937, Koestler was promptly arrested on February 9. He would spend the next three months in Franco's prisons, much of them in solitary confinement, wondering if and when his execu48 moder nagejour nal .comhttp://www.modernagejournal.com