Lester Ziffren, who died November 12 at 101, was the stalwart United Press reporter who, in 1936, used a cipher to fool censors to break the news of the Spanish Civil War to the world.

As Madrid bureau chief for United Press, which became United Press International in 1958, Ziffren had reported on plenty of political unrest in the months leading up to the July 17, 1936, uprising in which Spanish Army troops in Melilla, Morocco, revolted, touching off the revolution that would bring Francesco Franco to power. Approached by an aristocratic source with news of the uprising, Ziffren realized that his report would be censored. After wangling a phone line to the London headquarters of the UP, he filed a story beginning, “MOTHERS EVERLASTINGLY LINGERING ILLNESS LIKELY LARYNGITIS AUNT FLORA OUGHT RETURN EVEN IF GOES NORTH LATER EQUALLY GOOD IF ONLY NIGHT…” Censors did not detect what the first letters of the words spelled out: “Melilla — Foreign Legion …” News flashed around the world.

Ziffren spent a few more months in Madrid as the government fled to Valencia and Franco’s troops closed in. Informed that Franco would punish him for reporting on intelligence failures, Ziffren decamped for Hollywood. There, he married the daughter of a Hollywood agent and got a job as a writer of the 20th Century Fox’s Charlie Chan series. Ziffren seemed to have a knack for landing someplace interesting, always on his feet. In Hollywood, his next-door neighbor was the author Thomas Mann; Ziffren helped out the author of “The Magic Mountain” by babysitting for his dog.

A native of Rock Island, Ill., Ziffren got his start in journalism by covering a local golf tournament for the Rock Island Argus. After graduating from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1927, he got a job with the UP and within a year was reporting from Brazil. He later claimed to have covered “seven or eight revolutions in South America.” In 1931, he filed a report of an elderly woman he found living in the Brazilian jungle who claimed to be the last survivor of a group of citizens who left America in protest when slavery was abolished.

The UP assigned him to head its Madrid bureau in 1934. Politics were rife in the Spanish capital, and Ziffren’s four employees included a Marxist, a Trotskyite, a republican, and a monarchist. Ziffren became entranced with bullfighting and amassed a large collection of tauromachy, as devotees call the spectacle. He drank manzanilla with Hemingway. The two corresponded for years. In addition to his duties for the UP, Ziffren had a nightly radio broadcast, “Spain Day by Day.”

After he fled Madrid in 1936, Ziffren made his way to Los Angeles, where he was became engaged to Edythe Wurtzel. Through Wurtzel’s uncle, Ziffren found a job writing for 20th Century Fox. His credits drew on his reporting assignments include “Charlie Chan in Panama” and “Charlie Chain in Rio.”

During World War II, Ziffren was recruited by the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Claude Bowers — Bowers was Ambassador to Spain in the 1930s — to work in Santiago as the embassy public relations officer. He returned to America after the war and took over his late father-in-law’s Hollywood agency, whose clients included the directors John Ford and Merian Cooper, most famous for “King Kong.” But he disliked being an agent. “He thought it was like being in the slave business,” Ziffren’s daughter, Didi, said. In 1951, he returned to the state department and had diplomatic postings in Colombia and Chile. He then joined the Kennecott Copper Corp., a large Chilean mining company, as director of public relations, and moved to New York in the early 1960s.

Ziffren retired in 1971, but kept up his interest in South America and helped found the North American-Chilean Chamber of Commerce. In recent years, he entertained friends and family with stories of his wilder exploits. He once interviewed Leon Trotsky in Mexico, but Trotsky forbade him from using the material; he once hitched a ride aboard the Prince of Wales’s train on a visit to Brazil and upstaged royalty by disembarking first. A letter to his parents written during the bleak days of when Madrid was under daily bombardment by Franco’s forces in 1936 included a characteristic flourish: “Couldn’t walk on this story for anything, otherwise why be a newspaperman?”

Lester Ziffren

Born April 30, 1906, in Rock Island, Ill.; died November 12 in New York City; survived by his daughter, Davis “Didi” Hunter, and a sister, Ruth Ziffren Learner.