General Franco Made Me A Terrorist. The Christie File: part 2, 1964-1967

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

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The CNT in the Spanish Revolution (Vol. 2), by José Peirats Valls (edited by Chris Ealham).

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GENERAL FRANCO

MADE ME A ‘TERRORIST’ The Christie File:

Part 21, ,1964–1967 The Christie File: part (The interesting years abroad of a west of Scotland ‘baby-boomer’) STUART CHRISTIE

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

by Stuart Christie April 2003 PO Box 35, Hastings East Sussex, TN34 2UX e-mail: admin@christiebooks.com Copyright © Stuart Christie, 2003 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Christie, Stuart, 1946 — General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’ : the Christie File Vol. 2 : 1964-67 by Stuart Christie 1. Christie, Stuart, 1946- 2. Anarchists - Scotland - Spain Biography 3. Anarchism - Spain - History - 20th century I. Title 335.8’3’092 ISBN 1 873976 19 4

If you find mistakes in this publication, please remember that they are there for a purpose. We publish something for everyone, and some people are always looking for mistakes!

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for ‘B’ the next link in the chain

I would like to thank the following friends for checking the typescript for content: Octavio Alberola Surinach, Luis Andrés Edo, Marcelino Boticario, Juan Busquets Verges, Germinal García, Salvador Gurucharri, Ariane Gransac Sadori, Nardo Imbernón, Alain Pecunia, Paul Sharkey, Antonio Tellez Solá; and Mark Hendy, John Patton, Liz Brown and Hugh Riches for syntax and readability.

From The Nabara by C. DAY-LEWIS (1904-1972) A celebration of a sea battle of the Spanish Civil War 'They preferred, because of the rudeness of their heart, to die rather than to surrender.'

Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.

Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes: She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird To home wherever man’s heart with seasonal warmth is stirred: Innocent is her touch as the dawn’s, but still it unleashes The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word.

I see man’s heart two-edged, keen both for death and creation.

As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing and mutilating the stone Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one— So man is wrought in his hour of agony and elation To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of his bone.

Burning the issue was beyond their mild forecasting For those I tell of—men used to the tolerable joy and hurt Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic part; But history’s hand was upon them and hewed an everlasting Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn heart….. …… ...They bore not a charmed life. They went into battle foreseeing Probable loss, and they lost. The tides of Biscay flow Over the obstinate bones of many, the winds are sighing Round prison walls where the rest are doomed like their ship to rust— Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.

Simple men who asked of their life no mythical splendour, They loved its familiar ways so well that they preferred In the rudeness of their heart to die rather than to surrender …

Mortal these words and the deed they remember, but cast a seed Shall flower for an age when freedom is man’s creative word.

Freedom was more than a word, more than the base coinage Of politicians who hiding behind the skirts of peace They had defiled, gave up that country to rack and carnage: For whom, indelibly stamped with history’s contempt, Remains but to haunt the blackened shell of their policies.

For these I have told of, freedom was flesh and blood — a mortal Body, the gun-breech hot to its touch: yet the battle’s height Raised it to love’s meridian and held it awhile immortal; And its light through time still flashes like a star’s that has turned to ashes, Long after Nabara’s passion was quenched in the sea’s heart.

C. DAY-LEWIS (1904-1972)

Contents Introduction Mise en scène Paris Across The Pyrenees Rendezvous In Madrid Arrest And Interrogation Carabanchel Prison Council Of War The Seventh Gallery The Garrote-Vil The Fifth Gallery Tholing My Assize The Prisoners’ Tales Acquiring An Education Friends And Neighbours Birth Of The First Of May Group Arrests And Diversions The Sixth Gallery Alcalá de Henares Pardon and Release

i ii 1 18 22 28 50 77 86 99 105 115 127 138 146 158 164 173 183 196

Background papers Defensa Interior (DI) The Blue Division The Movimiento Popular de Resistencia (MPR) And The Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL) The Soviet Secret Services in Spain Crime In Spain Otto Skorzeny And The ‘Circle Of Friends’ Anthropometrics Renseignements Généraux Report on Spanish Anarchists in France The OAS And Aginter Press Brigada Político Social Report 28/09/1961 Brigada Político Social Report 10/11/1961 Brigada Político Social Report 01/04/1963 Brigada Político Social Report 22/04/1963

217 220 222 225 230 232

My World — And Welcome To It A chronology: (January 1960 to Summer 1968) Index

234 252

202 204 205 208 209 211 215

On anarchist resistance THE ANARCHIST CREED is simple, if at times exacting: only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice. Also, the one article of unshakeable faith shared by all anarchists is that power corrupts, and institutional power corrupts absolutely. Anarchists have sought, and seek, neither the domination nor the exploitation of others, but rather the strengthening of resistance to these twin evils, until they have been eliminated from society. The thoughts and acts of rebellion that such a goal requires are universal — and never-ending. They demand the participation and cohesion of the vast majority of humankind, and they can be jointly performed, coordinated and extended only by individuals who feel strongly and are convinced both of their own need for social liberation and of their ability to join with others and achieve it — and, let it be said, having once achieved it to sustain it.

The Spanish Civil War was, in my opinion, probably the most important moral reference point in the whole of the 20th century. The sacrifices and blood spilt by the people of Spain and their unparalleled example in resisting tyranny and defending freedom was an inspiration not only to myself and a good number of my generation, but also to many of later generations. Under the Francoist fascist dictatorship the anarchist groups described in this work found themselves with the task not just of resisting the murderous harshness of the regime but also of turning popular despair and frustration into hope within as many hearts as possible, not least their own. By so doing and by fanning the glowing embers of resistance the anarchist groups within Spain and across its borders sought also to keep the suffering of Franco's prisoners firmly in the public eye. Thus while the nature of the repression meant that the best prospect for its end was the end of the dictator's life — the sooner the better, and therefore by human hand — it was necessary to continually perform, in public, acts of resistance that were audacious, pointed, and defiant.

With the broad mass of people in the west living cushioned, insulated lives away from the sights and sounds of human suffering, and with all other political and diplomatic avenues closed to them, the only way forward for the Spanish anarchist resistance was to capture attention by carrying out dramatic, headline-catching actions.

Those who did this achieved their goals without inflicting death or serious injury on a single innocent — but at great cost to themselves in terms of their lives and their freedom.

In pursuing an end to exploitation and oppression anarchists do not seek to capture the levers of power, or even to place everyone’s hands upon them, but to disconnect them. Nor do anarchists seek to forge new levers of power, in the belief that these can be operated on behalf of those who are unable to think and act in their own interests. Nor, finally, do anarchists wish to place everyone’s hands upon the levers, so that those who are strongest, either individually or in alliance with others, are able to develop and advance their own interests, the very participation of the weakest setting the seal on what will sooner or later become their own slavery.

Anarchism is both a theory and practice of life. Philosophically, it aims for the maximum accord between the individual, society and nature. Practically, it aims for us to organise and live our lives in such a way as to make politicians, governments, states and their officials superfluous. In an ideal anarchist society, mutually respectful sovereign individuals would be organised in non-coercive relationships within naturally defined communities in which the means of production and distribution are held in common.

But anarchists are not dreamers obsessed with abstract principles and theoretical constructs. Events are ruled by chance and people’s actions depend on long-held habits and on psychological and emotional factors that are often antisocial — and usually unpredictable. Anarchists are well aware that a perfect society cannot be won tomorrow. Indeed, the struggle is never-ending! However, anarchism is the vision that provides the spur to struggle against things as they are, and for things that might be.

Introduction THE HISTORY OF SPAIN over the 39 years of Francoism was an unbroken chain of mass murder, terror, repression and unimaginable suffering inflicted on the many by criminal and avaricious opportunists operating under the cloak of a religious and moral crusade led by a megalomanic general who saw and styled himself as the captain of the besieged Numantine fortress. What is hard to believe is that in the 27 years since Franco’s death in 1975 not one of the perpetrators of what were major crimes against humanity, the petty chiefs under the tyrant, the middling and small tackmen or the institutions and companies who benefited from the hierarchy of patronage or the deaths, property and misery of others has ever been called to account for their crimes or their active support for the regime. It is significant that the magistrates and judges who sought to bring General Pinochet to justice made no such attempt to do the same with the secret police and security service bullies who enforced the bad laws of the Franco regime, the lawyers and judges who made them work, the Roman Catholic church which morally sanctioned its excesses, and the men for all seasons who profited in the land, the property, and the forced labour of those who lost the war — the ‘damned’.

The transition from dictatorship to parliamentary monarchy (with the minor hiccup of the attempted Tejeiro coup in March 1976) appeared seamless. In fact it was engineered between the principal power-brokers of the old and the new regimes with who-knows-what behind-the-scenes deals. One of those powerful figures was, undoubtedly, General Eduardo Blanco, head of Franco’s secret police, the Gestapo-trained Brigada Político Social (BPS) and security apparatus, the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS) — a man who played no small part in the events described in this book. We can only assume that since there have been no war crimes tribunals or truth and reconciliation commissions (a là South Africa) set up to investigate the summary executions, the ‘disappeared’, the years of imprisonment and all the other tragedies of the Franco period, deals have been done to allow Franco’s enforcers, retainers, praetorians, prelates and bureaucrats who shared in the booty and benefited from the despotism to escape justice.

What is certain is that — to their eternal shame — all Spanish governments since 1975, including that of the Socialist Party, have turned a blind eye to those responsible for the murderous and legal spoliation of Spain and its people since 1939. They have also continued to honour the smoke-filled back room fixes which brought them to power. In fact, until 20 November 20002, when the Spanish parliament passed its first motion condemning Francoism — in the most general terms — they have consistently refused even to acknowledge the crimes of the regime whose bloody mantle they took on with never a backward look. The hundreds of thousands (perhaps upwards of a million) of Francoism’s victims and their families remain without even the briefest of hearings, apologies, or justice. Until they acquire an audience and recompense Spain, Europe and the world will remain permanently stained and scarred by the barbarity of the 39 years of clerical-fascist tyranny.

Some may believe Franco to have been just another ‘man on a white horse’, a de Gaulle kind of statesman whose saintly role has been wilfully misrepresented by those who did not share his agenda or his ultraconservative world view, predicated as it was on medieval Catholic faith, fascist governance, an authoritarian model of the family, a paranoid obsession with freemasonry and a zealous anti-communism. This is not the case, as recent research has proved beyond doubt.

The background to this book goes back two-thirds of a century to 18 July 1936 when the Spanish Army headed by a cabal of reactionary Spanish generals in Spain and Africa attempted to seize power by rebelling against the country’s first democratically elected government. This was not a simple coup d’état whereby a group of politicians elected by popular vote found themselves supplanted by a regime of uniformed thugs chosen by plutocrats. These men were criminal megalomaniacs on a self-appointed mission to impose their reactionary will on the Spanish people and take cold-blooded revenge on all those they believed had contributed in some way to the advent of the Spanish Republic in 1931 and the collapse of the old clerical, monarchical and antiquated conservative landowning order. Their intended victims were not just the republican, liberal or revolutionary protagonists of a better society, but also their relatives, spouses and children.

Although the plans of the military were initially thwarted in most of Spain by the spontaneous armed resistance of the rank and file of the Spanish labour movement, in particular by the militants of the anarchosyndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) and the Socialist General Workers Union (UGT), the military, led by General Francisco Franco de Bahamonde, supported militarily by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and morally by the Roman Catholic Church, finally defeated the Republic on 1 April 1939.

A recently published academic book called Morir, matar, sobrevivir. La Violencia en la dictadura de Franco (To die, to kill and to survive. Violence under Franco’s dictatorship) edited by the respected Spanish historian Professor Julián Casanova, has shown that in the Nationalist (Francoist) zone the wartime terror claimed the lives of at least 100,000 people, all murdered between July 1936 and April 1939 (60,000 were killed in the Republican zone in the same period). After the war, this arbitrary slaughter and repression became institutionalised and in the subsequent six years between Franco’s victory and the collapse of his patrons of the Berlin-Rome Axis, the dictator’s executioners overtly and covertly orchestrated the cold-blooded summary murders of a minimum of 50,000 people i

Introduction — and perhaps as many as 200,000. The Francoist Ministry of Justice itself FORCED LABOUR IN FRANCOIST JAILS gave the figure of 192,684 executions carried out between 1939 and 1945. Of FROM 1937 to 1970, prisoners were used as these, 103,129 took place between April 1939 and 30 June 1944. (If this figure cheap privatised labour for State and private is correct it amounts to more than twenty times the numbers executed in ventures, the Franco regime clawing back 75 France following the Liberation.) per cent of payments made by private firms Professor Casanova points out that in addition to these blood-chilling for use of this labour through the 1938 figures there are at least a further 13,000 still unrecorded victims of the decree on ‘Redemption Through Labour Francoist terror machine whose remains are still being dug up from mass Service’. One of the ideologues of this labour service for political ‘sinners’ was the Jesuit unmarked graves almost 60 years later. Archives recovered recently by José A. Pérez del Pulgar. Prisoners received an Casanova and his colleagues provide heart-rending example after example average of 2 pesetas a day when nonof how the informers who fingered real and imagined enemies of the prisoner labourers were being paid 12 to14 church, the state and the ruling single party, the Falange, benefited pesetas per day. Of this 50 centimos or 25 per cent went to the prisoner (and was rarely financially and materially from their acts of betrayal. The fate of each victim was sealed on the basis of three reports; one was contributed by the accessible to him), the rest to the state. In local commander of the national paramilitary Civil Guard, while another late 1944 prisoner disciplinary battalions were deployed on the building of had to come from the mayor, who was also usually the local Falange leader, fortifications along the Andalusian coast in while it was the local priest who had the final word — and that was usually southern Spain to deter a possible Allied to confirm the death sentence. Remember, during the 1930s, 1940s and invasion there. Historian Pedro Pascual 1950s the Roman Catholic church in Spain was strongly pro-Nazi and estimates there were 72 concentration camps fascist, concerned not with the Christian niceties of redemption and located near work-sites and projects. Luis reconciliation, but with the extirpation of all opposition to its hegemony Carrero Blanco, then a secretary in the Office of Prime Minister, held a coded account in his and the wreaking of vengeance on the godless ‘reds’ and ‘adulterers’ whom name at the Banco de España into which 75 its leaders held responsible for the deaths in the Civil War of 7,000 clerics per cent of all prisoner ‘earnings’ were paid. and 3,000 members of Acción Catolica (Catholic Action).

There remains also the still unresolved matter of the 10,000 or so Firms using prisoner labour at slave rates children of anti-Francoists forcibly taken from their mothers and given up included the following: DRAGADOS Y for adoption to ‘responsible Catholics’, while their mothers were CONSTRUCCIONES (used prison labour on dispatched to convents in order to purge their offences. It is equally dam-building projects for 20 years); BANÚS (used slave labourers up until 1969); unlikely anyone will ever know how many of the 500,000 anti-Francoists CONSTRUCCIONES ABC; A. MARROQUÍN; held in prisons, concentration and forced labour camps died of hunger, HERMANOS NICOLÁS GÓMEZ SAN ROMÁN;. disease and ill-treatment. According to recent research by Professor Antonio Miguel Bernal of the University of Seville, Franco’s post-war prisoners are On a lesser scale, prisoner labour was used by: ANTRACITAS GAIZTARRO; I. ARRIBALAGA; estimated to have numbered about 280,000, so that prisoner-workers accounted for about 12 per cent of the active population, most of whom BABCOCK-WILCOX; CARBONES were in the 20 to 40 age group. (See sidebar.)

ASTURIANOS; CARBONÍFERA PALOMAR; A. CARRETERO; CIMENTACIONES Y OBRAS; CIRSA; J. DOBARCO; DURO-FELGUERA; ECIA; ELIZARRÁN; EXPERIENCIAS INDUSTRIALES; JULIÁN A. EXPÓSITO; FERROCARRILES Y MINAS; GUTIÉRREZ OLIVA; HIDRO NITRO ESPAÑOLA; M. LLAGOSTERA; MAQUINISTA Y FUNDACIÓN DEL EBRO; SOCIEDAD MARCOR; C. MARDELLANO; E. MEDRANO; MINAS DEL BIERZO; MINERO SIDERÚRGICA DE ORALLO; MONTES DE GALICIA; MÚGICA-ARELLANO Y CÍA; E. OSIS; JOSÉ M. PADRÓ; D. L. PASTORA; C. PEÑA; PORTOLÉS Y COMPAÑÍA; RAMÓN ECHAVE; REGINO CRIADO; RIEGOS ASFÁLTICOS; SACRISTÁN; SALVADOR CUOTA; SANZ BUENO; SICOT; VÍAS Y RIEGOS; A. VILLALÓN.

BY THE TIME I went to Spain in 1964 the bloodiest excesses were over, the regime having exhausted its own bloodlust. Now it was seeking to reinvent itself as a stalwart of the NATO Alliance, the US’s closest partner in the Mediterranean, — in short, a ‘good European’. As a young British prisoner sentenced to 20 years by a summary court martial for what was clearly in the eyes of most of the world a ‘political’ rather than a self-serving criminal offence, I benefited from the attention of the international media being constantly being drawn to my case as a result of regular demonstrations, direct actions — and was the subject of frequent press editorials and letters to the editor. I had become a useful pawn in a game of international diplomacy and, consequently, a privileged prisoner, hardly a witness to, let alone the victim of, many of the usual horrors. My character make-up and the personal context of my situation inevitably make my own history partial, precise and relative. It cannot begin to reflect the vicious, cruel and (Source: Symposium ‘Los presos del Canal bloodthirsty nature of the Franco regime and its prisons between 1939 and 1940-1962’ (February 2002) jointly run by the the early 1960s, but I hope my own highly subjective experiences in Spanish Confederación General de Trabajo (CGT), the prisons will connect the reader in some way with the experiences of others Fundación El Monte and the University of and prompt some thought about the struggle to be human and the Sevila.) hundreds of thousands of brave people who fought, suffered, died and lost loved ones in the selfless cause of resisting the reactionary priest, gun- and prison-backed ideology that was Francoism. These are the forgotten dead and the dying generation to whom I — at least — have an obligation of remembrance, a duty of commemoration.

ii

Mise en scène

W

HERE’S CHRISTIE?’ I could hear the shouts distinctly in my sleep. They came from fearfullooking moustachioed Guardia Civil, who all through my dream had been chasing away beautiful girls beating on the door of my cell. I rubbed my eyes. The door had crashed open and the room had filled with a mutter of aggressive male voices. The dark-eyed muchachas had vanished.

I was out of bed and and into a pair of trousers before I realised none of the intruders were wearing green uniforms or tricorner hats. I was now wide awake and these were tough-looking characters in overcoats and plain clothes. They were all British coppers. It was the early morning of 27 February 1968, just over five months since I had returned from serving a little over 3 years of a 20-year sentence for my part in an attempt by the Spanish resistance to kill General Franco, the last of the fascist dictators.

The CID officer in charge of the raid introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Ian Ferguson — a fellow Scot, for all the difference that made. He was from West End Central police station, with a warrant from Bow Street Magistrates Court to search my flat in Crouch End, North London, for explosive substances and weapons. I felt like telling him that he had it all wrong — this was not the Cadogan Hotel, nor was I Oscar Wilde, but he might not have appreciated the Betjamenesque allusion so I restrained myself, having learned not to be a smartarse to Scotsmen with pointy caps, even if they are not wearing them at the time.

‘Mr. Woilde, we’ave come for to take yew ‘Where felons and criminals dwell, ‘We must ask yew to leave with us quoietly ‘For this is the Cadogan Hotel.’

They then proceeded to rip up floorboards, dismantle my prized reel-to-reel tape recorder and the bed, rummage through cupboards and drawers, and throw everything into the middle of the floor. Trying to look behind the wallpaper, they nearly pulled down the ceiling. One even plunged his fist into the lavatory pan.

Then they pulled the bed away from the wall and looked in the cupboard behind. ‘Chrise!’ two of them cried in unison. ‘Wossiss?’ ‘Leaflets,’ I said. They had already passed over small packages of these in the drawers without comment. Seen in neatly stacked bundles of fifty at a time, done up with rubber bands, they seemed just what they were, innocuous political gimmicks. Seen in bulk, several thousand dollar bills have a traumatic effect on the viewer. They even had a traumatic effect on me and I had printed them.

These bills were propaganda leaflets to be smuggled into Franco’s Spain for that year’s coming First of May demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona. They weren’t forgeries in any sense of the word. They were printed in the form of U. S. dollar bills, but instead of One Dollar the inscription said Una Vida — One Life — overprinted in red with the words Primero de Mayo (First of May). It was Monopoly money of the poorest sort.

The sergeant was obviously perplexed. He had come to find guns and bombs, and instead seemed to have stumbled upon a quite amateurish international forgery ring who couldn’t even spell ‘dollar’. He asked me what Una Vida meant. Meanwhile the other sleuths went back to the drawers, picking out the little rolls they had previously passed over with disdain. They waved the packets about eagerly as if each were a nail in my coffin. ‘Look at this, Sarge — here’s another bundle . . . ’ ‘They’re all the bloody same,’ I said. I could see my lack of drama hurt them a little.

Ferguson called downstairs to the police who were exploring the room of my flatmate, Ross Flett, with much the same delicacy as their colleagues had used in examining mine. There shortly appeared a far more dramatic figure than the hearty CID sergeant: the reserved, cultivated, sombre — some even say lugubrious and sinister — figure of Sergeant Roy Cremer of the Special Branch, Scotland Yard's ‘expert’ on Anarchism. (So expert was Sergeant Roy that one fears his superiors may have come to doubt his loyalty. Did they think, perhaps, that one does not comprehend where one does not love? Certainly, it took years before he eventually made inspector (just before transferring him to MI5), something he may well have had me to thank for.)

Cremer was clearly in charge now, although, as on later occasions, no mention was made of him in the subsequent court case. I asked my visitors why I had been selected for a raid under an explosives warrant. They first replied that I had a record. That was rubbish, I retorted; I'd never had a conviction in my life. Surely they didn’t count Spanish courts martial! What next? Would they be arresting British agents imprisoned by the Gestapo in wartime France, or people who had appeared before Russian or Chinese courts?

Sergeant Ferguson then said that an explosive rocket had been planted opposite the Greek Embassy. iii

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The previous year, before my release from a Spanish prison, a military junta had come to power in Athens, imposing itself by force of arms and US diplomatic and military support. Now someone had delivered a small shrub in a tub to the portals of a house near Grosvenor Square. Inside the tub was a rocket with an explosive charge pointed straight at the window of the Junta's ambassador to London, directly across the street.

I agreed it sounded cleverly done, but my only attempt at dealing with explosives had been clumsy, and experts had proved me to be a distinct amateur in the field. Cremer did not press the point about the Greek Junta. In fact they were working on information from a Francoist infiltrator into the anarchist resistance in Spain. My friend and comrade Octavio Alberola, identified by the Spanish Special Branch, the Brigada Politico-Social, as Franco’s Public Enemy Number One, had been arrested and detained two weeks earlier in Brussels during negotiations between Spain and the European Union for admission into the Common Market, a manoeuvre Octavio had been preparing a press conference to denounce while at the same time bringing to the attention of the world the plight of Franco’s political prisoners. Four days later, on 3 March, six explosions damaged the buildings of Spanish diplomatic missions in London, the Hague and Turin, also the Spanish Embassy and the US Officers’ Club in London. All these actions were claimed by the First of May Group, the organisation which on earlier occasions had machine-gunned the US Embassy and the private cars of two Spanish diplomats in London.

I was given clearly to understand that I was now regarded by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and the UK Security Service (MI5) as the Spanish resistance’s front man in Britain. I was better out of the way, and what neater way to achieve this than a charge of attempting to bomb the Greek Embassy?

But in Crouch End that day they found no bombs, guns, or explosive devices — and Cremer was (at least so far) rendered sufficiently sympathetic by his avid reading of the anarchist press to be the last man on the force to pretend to find anything that he might have brought along himself. I was asked to accompany them to another address, for which they also had a search warrant. They would not tell me where it was, but took me into the car (stuffing my Una Vidas into the boot) until the other premises had been searched. If anything was found there, presumably I was to be readily available as a fall-guy. I'd heard of people being driven to crime by the police, but I hadn't known before that they used a Hillman Hunter saloon.

During the car journey I explained that the bills were for use in a demonstration but not in this country. They weren’t intended to pass as negotiable currency and certainly didn't look like it. I couldn’t say who gave them to me nor who was to take them to Spain for fear of implicating members of the resistance movement in Spain. But any fool knew the words Una Vida and Primero de Mayo in large letters would ruin any faint chance the bills might have of being passed off as the genuine article, even to a drunk or a lunatic.

A few days later, after the Europe-wide bomb campaign by the First of May Group on Francoist, Greek Junta and US diplomatic and military targets on 3 March 1968, the round-the-clock surveillance outside my flat was lifted. The cars with their ‘watchers disappeared overnight. But this was by no means the end of the matter. I shortly received a summons to appear at Highgate Magistrates’ Court charged with having in my possession four thousand pieces of paper upon which had been ‘printed words, marks, and devices similar to and used on banknotes of one dollar by the United States of America contrary to section 9(z) of the Forgery Act 1913.’ From there, I was committed to appear at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, on 1 May 1968. No kidding! ‘Dearie me’, I thought when the summons arrived in the post, ‘from “terrorist” to “forger” and “defacer of the currency”— another fine pickle.’ I pondered on what the maximum sentence would be if I did go down. I thought back to August 1964 and wondered if the next four years would prove just as dramatic.

iv

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Down in London, Out in Paris

I

T WAS the early morning of Saturday 1 August 1964. With around £20.00 and some loose change in my pocket, a Bergen on my back with a kilt folded carefully through its top flap and my veins piping adrenaline, I took the tube from Notting Hill Gate to Victoria Station and bought a single ticket for the morning boat train to Calais and Paris where I had a rendezvous with members of the clandestine Spanish anarchist resistance organisation, the Committee of Interior Defence, Defensa Interior (DI) (see Background Paper 1). My mission, if successful, would lead to the end of the last surviving fascist dictatorship in Europe — that of Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde.

As things turned out, it was fortunate I planned to be away some time and didn’t buy a return ticket.

I had visited Brussels and Paris briefly on my first hitchhiking holiday the previous year, during the Glasgow Fair — the traditional annual summer holiday, in July, for working-class Glaswegians — when I was sixteen, but as I stood on deck and watched the tumbling wake of the ship snake back towards the white cliffs around Dover harbour, I felt a rising sense of excitement. I was travelling abroad on a dangerous mission.

When my small remaining funds were converted into a little over a hundred new French francs by the ship’s purser, I knew there was no going back. I’d lose out on the exchange rate.

At Calais, I boarded the train to Paris, arriving late in the afternoon at the Gare du Nord — near the top of the Boulevard de Magenta. It was one of the hottest days of the year and even at 6 p.m. the temperature was still about 24 degrees centigrade.

The train had hardly stopped when the doors were flung open and I spilled out with the other passengers on to the platform and through the barriers to be confronted by a surging mass of people waiting to greet friends or queuing for trains to take them from the sweltering August heat of the city to the relative cool of France’s valleys, forests, rivers and beaches. I made my way towards the row of Romanesque arches that led from the station concourse to the taxi rank and the stairs down to the Metro. Easing through the islands of luggage, small family groups chattering away and craggy, black-bereted workmen in blue overalls with thick, maize-paper Boyar cigarettes dangling from their bottom lips while they muttered to themselves, I was overwhelmed by the noisy excitement and the pungent aromas of freshly baked bread and pastries, the uniquely Gallic smell of black cigarette tobacco and roasting coffee.

After traipsing up and down many flights of stairs, through long tiled corridors and consulting maps with lines of torch bulbs which lit up when you pressed a button to indicate the best route, I found the line and direction I needed. It was just three stops with no confusing correspondences to Jacques

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The Gare du Nord, Paris.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The arrest of Ravachol, 1892. © Flavio Costantini

12 Rue de Lancry, Paris

Bonsergent at the bottom of the Boulevard de Magenta, near the Place de la République.

It had been on this very boulevard — outside M. Véry’s restaurant at number 22 — that the French anarchist, François Koenigstein, better known as Ravachol had been arrested in 1892 for blowing up the homes of a judge of the French supreme court and the deputy prosecutor of the Republic. The restaurant itself was the target of a bomb attack by anarchists shortly afterwards, presumably in the belief that M. Véry had something to do with Ravachol’s arrest. Emerging from the street well, I crossed the boulevard with its hooting, impatient streams of traffic into the relative quiet of the rue de Lancry and the apartment of Germinal García, one of the ‘safehouses’ of the anti-Francoist resistance organisation in Paris.

12 Rue de Lancry, Paris THE RUE DE Lancry brings together the great Parisian arteries of the Boulevard Saint Martin, the Boulevard de Magenta and the slow-flowing waters of the Canal St Martin, the liquid boundary between the bourgeois Xth and the working-class XIth arrondissements of Belleville.

Walking slowly up the cobbled rue de Lancry, I scanned the blue and white enamelled street numbers fixed by the imposingly wide gateways to the old apartment blocks that separated the little épiceries and bakeries looking for the entrance to number 12, the block where Germinal lived. Eventually I found the entrance beside an old and noisy printshop.

I stepped through the fortress-like double doors of number 12 into the half-lit gloom of an enclosed courtyard, similar in size to the pend closes in Glasgow through which a horse and cart could be driven. To my left, in the dark recesses of her loge, from which drifted the smell of boiled cabbage and the sounds of Edith Piaf, sat a pretty young woman concièrge in carpet slippers, knitting, with a baby beside her in a pram. She looked up as I entered asking for ‘Monsieur García?’ and brusquely indicated a narrow dark circular flight of stairs off to the right, muttering ‘premiere étage à droite’. I discovered subsequently that both the concièrge and her husband had got the job — and apartment — because they were FIJL members and friends of Germinal.

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12 Rue de Lancry, Paris

I climbed the winding staircase to the first floor and groped for a light switch. When I did find it, it was on a timer which turned the light off after the briefest period.

I finally located the door with G. García engraved on the brass nameplate and pressed the bell. After a short interval there was the sound of shuffling steps and the door opened to reveal the figure of a square-faced man in his early forties, with jet-black hair and a pencil-thin moustache, wearing shorts.

Intrigued by the informality of his attire and his rather stiff deportment, I introduced myself in French, under the delusion that I spoke the language rather convincingly.

‘Allo. Je cherche Monsieur García. Vous est lui, non?

Je swee Christee. Zoot Alors!'

I don’t know where I got the last bit from; I must have thought it was how all French conversations ended, a bit like ‘over and out’. In any case it broke the ice and Germinal — for it was he — immediately smiled, extended his arms in a warm gesture of welcome and motioned me inside.

The flat was small — bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and lounge — and spartanly furnished, with tall windows, louvred shutters, and a small balcony. Germinal took me through to the kitchen where he sat me down, poured two glasses of wine and opened the fridge, pulling out all sorts of continental goodies, chorizo, saucisson, hard-boiled eggs, Emmental cheese and a baguette from a breadbin. We exchanged a few mutually unintelligible pleasantries — I, with my confusing grammatical constructions, delivered loudly and painfully slowly in a broad Glaswegian accent, which I thought mirrored how French and Spanish people put sentences together. Presumably I had some lingering belief that all that distinguished English speakers linguistically from foreigners was pronunciation and speed of delivery.

Germinal’s knowledge of English was only fractionally better than my command of French and had been culled from French films noirs gangster films and cheap novellas.

My host was a Spanish anarchist with a long history. Although a member of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias — FIJL) and trusted confidant of Defensa Interior (DI), Germinal avoided direct involvement in the armed activities of the clandestine organisation and kept his participation to a strictly supportive role.

The French security services, however, were aware of Germinal’s part in the clandestine anarchist network. For example, anxious to avoid potential embarrassment or trouble from the anarchists during Soviet premier Nikita

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Top: Germinal García (in short-sleeved checked shirt) on his way to the international anarchist camp in southern France with other young Spanish anarchists of the FIJL. Bottom: Germinal outside his old apartment at 12 Rue de Lancry, 2002.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Germinal García on enforced ‘holiday’ in Corsica during Khrushchev’s state visit to France in 1962.

Francisco Sabaté Llopart (‘El Quico’) with propaganda mortar, Barcelona, 1955.

Khrushchev’s state visit to France in 1962, President Charles de Gaulle’s police and security services knocked on Germinal’s door early one morning and told him to pack a bag quickly as he was leaving the country. They drove him to a military airfield on the outskirts of Paris where other Spanish and French anarchists had been rounded up. They were then put on board a French air force plane and flown to Corsica. The French government apologised to the anarchists’ employers, put them in first class hotels for a month with all expenses — and salaries — paid. Germinal enjoyed the free holiday enormously.

I was not the first British anarchist to have worked with the DI or stayed at Germinal’s. Two other British anarchists, KM and BB, had been on earlier clandestine liaison missions into Franco’s Spain. The rue de Lancry apartment had been a Parisian safehouse for DI meetings and countless anarchist activists, fugitives and partisans over the years, including the most famous Spanish urban guerrilla of them all, Francisco Sabaté Llopart — ‘El Quico’. One of El Quico’s more spectacular actions took place in September 1955 during a visit to Barcelona by Franco. El Quico hailed a taxi and blithely drove around the Catalan capital firing anti-regime leaflets through the sun-roof from a mortar on the back seat.

After a painfully slow and difficult-to-follow conversation over some glasses of wine, we went for a stroll around the nearby Place de la République before heading back to Germinal’s apartment. He set up a camp bed in the lounge and left me to my thoughts and an undisturbed night’s sleep. Before bidding me goodnight Germinal explained, mainly in sign language, that this was the very bed in which el Quico had slept, with his Thomson sub machine-gun beside him under the sheets.

I woke the next morning, Sunday, slightly stiff, to the unfamiliar sounds of early morning Paris through the open window; the noisy phut-phuts and throaty whines of unfamiliar vehicles, the banging of doors, snatches of loud aggressive conversations in French and the hungerinducing whiffs of freshly baked bread and roasting coffee. Germinal came in with some loaves and lit the gas under the octagonal aluminium coffee percolator while I went to the toilet. The bathroom perplexed me because I had never heard of a bidet before, let alone seen one, and I was genuinely puzzled as to its function.

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24 Rue Sainte Marthe, Belleville

Up the hill to Belleville GERMINAL WENT OUT TO DO some shopping and to telephone the comrades from a public call box to let them know that I had arrived, and to find out when and where we were to rendezvous.

While he was out I passed the time browsing through his record collection, playing haunting French songs by Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel on his portable record player. The songs and music evoked a sepia-tinted vision of a bygone Paris of leafy boulevards, cafés and sentimental accordion music. When my host returned he suggested we get some fresh air and take a stroll up to the offices of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the exiled Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labour union, at 24 rue Sainte Marthe in nearby Belleville.

Given the supposedly secret nature of my voyage, this suggestion seemed odd, but I assumed my host knew what he was doing, and that this visit would not compromise my mission. I didn’t read anything sinister into his idea of taking me on a social visit to the rue St Marthe, but it did reflect the general lack of security within the exile movement — and my ingenuousness.

A military parade was taking place round the corner in the place de la République. We had to push our way through the onlookers and the brightly uniformed soldiers, across the bustling boulevard Magenta and down the continuation of the rue de Lancry to the quiet shrub-lined quais of the tranquil waters of the canal Saint Martin. We crossed the elegant arched Japanese-style metal bridge into Belleville and continued up the rue de la Grange-aux-Belles past the dull grey stone and soft pink brickwork of the St Louis skin hospital, then turning right into the rue Juliette Dodu, crossing the avenue Claude Vellefauz and into the darker rue Saint Marthe.

Belleville and adjoining Menilmontant were at the heart of old workingclass Paris; the place where the communards of 1871 had made their last courageous stand against the troops of the Versailles government. On the benches of the boulevard sat brown, wrinkled old women in long skirts, black cardigans and headscarves staring pensively into space. Now it was the home of Tunisian Jews, Algerian Muslims and the ageing remnants of the Parisian apache gangs of hoodlums and their women.

24 rue Sainte Marthe THE WORKSHOP-LIKE CNT offices were located upstairs in what reminded me of the Blantyre Cooperative Hall, where the local dances took place.

They were in the rue Sainte Marthe, in Belleville. Having no paid officials, the premises rarely opened before the early evening during the week, but at weekends there were usually people there by mid-afternoon. The hall, whose caretakers were a couple of leather-faced veterans of the Spanish Revolution, was also a meeting place for the young French anarchists of the Noir et Rouge

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El Quico’s Thomson submachinegun (Guardia Civil Museum, Barcelona).

CNT offices in Paris, 24 Rue Ste. Marthe, Belleville.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

publishing collective, and it was also the base of the LEA, the ‘Anarchist Student Liaison’ group (which later became the core of the ‘March 22 Group’, that played such a pivotal part in the events of May 1968).

As we walked across the square and upstairs to the shabby hall which had served as a centre for the Spanish anarchist exiles almost since the Liberation of Paris in 1944, I didn’t realise that I was being photographed from a nearby window by a regular surveillance team of the French equivalent of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, the Renseignements Généraux.

This operation apparently had been going on for years. Federico Arcos, an old Spanish friend, a CNT and FIJL activist from the 1939 to 1949 era, told me this many years later. No one knew at the time, obviously, although perhaps given the nature of their resistance activities they should have suspected something.

Unaccustomed to clandestine protocol, I behaved in a hopelessly naive way, chatting and socialising with everyone in the hall as though such things as police spies and informers had never been heard of in the movement.

There are 3 types of spy: journalists, security service or police officers who infiltrate an organisation, and those suborned as agents and informers from within.

Liberal and left-wing journalists make the best spies and have been used as such by security and intelligence services for years. A reporter’s stock in trade is swapping information, something which takes place at many levels. They may tip off the police about a particular event, but keep other relevant information to themselves. There are honourable exceptions, but on the whole they are a thoroughly untrustworthy lot who fish in troubled waters, which they stir when necessary to give themselves a story. But they are trained fact finders and can judge the value of disparate bits of gossip, following up a lead until they have enough facts to present a credible story. Their reports often contain sufficient hard information for the security service either to mount an official domestic police investigation, or to pass it on as a quid pro quo to a friendly foreign security or intelligence service that can then do the dirty business of bugging telephones, intercepting mail and monitoring the movements and friendship networks of troublesome exiles.

Hacks can move easily into any sensitive situation on the pretext of writing a profile or following up a news story and ask probing questions. Specialised journalists with good and trusted contacts also have their finger on the pulse of what is happening within particular movements or organisations. Depending on their political bias and integrity — if a spy can be said to have integrity — journalists’ facts, at least those of the broadsheet and periodical variety, are usually reasonably accurate.

This contrasts with reports from police or security officers, who tend to have little understanding of — or sympathy with — the people with whom they are dealing. Also, they lack insight into the nuances or subtleties of political rhetoric, which they tend to take at face value, and colour their reports to please

6

Exploring Paris

their superiors or paymasters, providing them with the information they feel they want to hear.

A well-placed informer, on the other hand, may once have been a member of a group, sharing its ideas and objectives, and still knowing what an organisation is about and what particular individuals within it are capable of.

One problem with this type of informer is that their sense of guilt over the betrayal of people whom they may still count as friends can add another psychological layer to the selective quality of information. Others will do anything for cash or to ingratiate themselves with the authorities. Others still find themselves in a position where pressure can be placed on them — the ramifications and possibilities are endless. And once an informer has started giving information he must go on, or be exposed by those to whom he has informed.

Exploring Paris THE FOLLOWING DAY was Monday 2 August. I woke early, heated the remains of the previous night’s coffee in a pan — because I couldn’t figure out how the percolator worked — and went out on my own to explore Paris. The early morning traffic was light and the broad pavements were almost empty, apart from a housewife returning home with the day’s bread, a street cleaner leaning pensively on the handle of his broom, and a few concièrges with besom brooms sweeping the dust from the entrances to their courtyards.

I spent the day as a tourist, wandering around seeing the places of interest and generally enjoying being aimless in a great city — trying to read its thoughts and moods. I visited the precincts of Notre Dame, explored the medieval rabbit warrens of the Ile de la Cité where fugitives from feudalism used to huddle within the city walls, strolled along the banks of the Seine looking at the stalls of books and the ranks of paintings, wandered around the place de la République, saw the Arc de Triomphe and sat on the terrace of the Café de l'Elysée, a few feet away from the endless roar of traffic, as it advanced relentlessly along the avenue des Champs Elysées.

I sipped a beer while scanning the kaleidoscope of faces, musing to myself that if such an innocuous looking character as myself was about to go into Spain as part of an attempt to kill Franco, what dramatic stories could each of these busy and purposeful passers-by tell?

That evening three of my FIJL contacts came to collect me from Germinal’s apartment and we drove to a small bistro in Belleville.

One of these was my principal contact Salvador ‘Salva’ Gurucharri whom I had first met in London earlier that year.

Salva — the son of Félix Gurucharri y Mendivil (1898-1962), an old cenetista from Navarre who served with the 361st “A” Company Pioneer Corps during WW2 and settled in Britain after demob in 1944 — was

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Left to right: Suceso Portales, Félix Gurucharri, Acracio Ruiz, Félix’s companion, Salvador Gurucharri (circled), Hortensia Ruiz, companion of A Fenoy (on extreme right) — London late 1950s.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

born in Barcelona in 1936 and moved to London with his father in the mid 1940s. In the mid-1950s he joined the newly formed FIJL (Libertarian Youth) group and the CNT-in-exile in London One of the prime movers in the London branch of the Libertarian Youth, he quickly forged close links with other young activists from like-minded Libertarian Youth groups in France. In addition to organising anti-Francoist demonstrations and propaganda, these young militants were doing everything they could to reunite the warring factions within the various CNT groups in exile and focus on ridding Spain of Franco and Francoism.

The young activists networked socially and organisationally at the annual international anarchist camps held each year in different parts of the south of Salva, ‘El Inglés’. France: Maurellas, Aymare, Remoulins, Istres and Beynac. The camps provided valuable friendship-building opportunities for likeminded activists among the scattered Spanish anarchist diaspora and young anarchists from Britain, France, Belgium and Italy.

It was at these camps that Salva, known as ‘El Inglés’, and his comrades struck up a friendship with Francisco Sabaté (El Quico) and the five younger anarchists (Francisco Conesa Alcaraz, Antonio Miracle Guitart, Rogelio Madrigal Torres and Martín Ruiz Montoya) who accompanied Sabaté on his last ill-fated guerrilla incursion into Spain in 1960; but they disagreed strongly with Sabaté’s strategy, arguing that the political and military situation had El Quico’, 1958. Killed in changed substantially since World War Two. They argued that the days of the an ambush, 5 January 1960. maquis crossing the mountains on foot and engaging in armed confrontations with Franco’s security forces were over and a whole new approach to resistance was needed. They also believed above all that if they were to open up a ‘more coherent’ libertarian front inside Spain, the reunification of the CNT in exile was their absolute priority Salva was appointed secretary of the FIJL Liaison Commission in 1962, when he moved from his North London home to Paris. He also served on the CNT’s Defence Commission and in the clandestine planning group Defensa Interior until September 1963 when he was arrested in the repression of FIJL activists in France which followed the execution of Delgado and Granado. The Above: Rogelio Madrigal Torres. Below: FIJL’s clandestine action apparatus was untouched by the arrests, but the police Martin Ruiz Montoya, killed raids targeted the homes of nearly 100 identifiable leading FIJL militants in

by Guardia Civil, 4 January 1960. several regions and severely disrupted the activities of the organisation. Of these, only thirty FIJL militants were imprisoned, including Salva. Oddly, only two CNT veterans were arrested, Cipriano Mera and José Pascual Palacios, both of whome were also FAI members who served on Defensa Interior.

The charges of “criminal conspiracy”were eventually dropped and the last few remaining anarchists were freed after a hunger strike and growing public outcry in March 1964. Even so, those the Gaullist authorities believed to be the ringleaders — such as Salva and his fellow Commission member Antonio Ros Monero — were served with enforced residence orders and had to report daily to Paris police headquarters to sign a register. (Salvador and Ros moved to

8

Meeting The Resistance

Brussels at the end of 1964 where they were granted political asylum.)

The two with Salva were the boyish-looking Antonio Ros Monero who spoke no English and Nardo Imbernón, a smartly-dressed comrade who worked for Aerolineas Argentinas and who spoke good English, having lived in London from 1956 to 1958. (Nardo’s mum, Angeles, was in effect, the DI’s treasurer.) Ros and Salva were both members of the FIJL National Committee — ‘Salva’ being secretary of the FIJL Liaison Commission — and Nardo was the general secretary of the FIJL Local and Regional Federations (and a member of the FAI). All three had been among the twenty-one Spanish anarchists arrested the previous September and held for five months’ preventive detention in Fresnes prison for their membership of the FIJL, which had been declared an illegal organisation in France the previous October. (See Vol. I Background Notes.)

From the restaurant we drove to a planning meeting at one of the two workshops owned by Pedro Moñino Zaragoza. Pedro was a highly sought-after bespoke shoemaker who helped support the DI financially and whose large workshop and storeroom near the place Denfer-Rochereau in the XIV arrondissement provided a discreet venue for sensitive meetings.

Another of the DI’s financial backers — although one who was always kept at a distance because of the hostility of many of the older cenetistas to his ‘illegal’ methods and extensive ‘criminal’ network — was the extraordinary and daring Laureano Cerrada Santos.

Cerrada, then 62 years of age, had been a pupil of Octavio’s father, José Alberola, and a leading figure in the pre-civil war CNT rail union. In July 1936, in Barcelona, he had played a prominent part in the attack on the Atarazanas barracks, the Captaincy-General and in the taking over the Estación de Francia to prevent the initial military success of the Francoist rising, but his main claim to a niche in the anarchist pantheon revolved around his exploits in the French Resistance. A tireless anti-Nazi, Cerrada liaised between the clandestine guerrilla groups, organised arms dumps for the maquis, escape networks, safe houses, the printing of propaganda and false documents and so on. After the Liberation, Cerrada dedicated his talents, his illegally acquired wealth and his extensive clandestine network of hotels, garages, weapons dumps and ‘illegals’ to taking on the Francoist state.

A member of the FAI Liaison Committee in 1948, he funded the CNT paper Solidaridad Obrera and printed false papers for comrades on the run as well as those involved in illegal activities. But his talents in the graphic arts were not confined to forging false IDs; he was also one of the most notorious currency forgers in France in the post World War Two period. His activities came to light in 1951 when he was betrayed to the French police while working on a plan to flood Spain with false bank notes. The subsequent hostile press coverage of his

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Pedro Moñino Zaragoza, shoemaker, c 1942. Born Guadalupe (Murcia) in 1917, he died in Montpellier hospital on 23 June 1995 following a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the chest.

Above: Laureano Cerrada Santos (murdered, Paris, October 1975). Below: Cerrada, second from left.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

‘criminal empire’ did not go down at all well among the more ideologically puritanical leaders of the CNT in exile who felt he had compromised their otherwise ‘friendly’ relations with the French authorities, on whose goodwill they depended, and brought the organisation into ‘disrepute’.

On his release from prison Cerrada found himself shunned and sidelined by many of his old friends and comrades in the CNT and FAI, and he was eventually expelled from the CNT, under the general Primitívo Pérez Gómez. secretaryship of José Peirats, for his ‘unacceptable methods’. In spite of this rejection and enmity, Cerrada remained totally committed to the Spanish Libertarian Movement and put all his resources at the disposal of the DI during the 1960s (much against the wishes of José Pascual Palacios who disliked Cerrada intensely and, in fact, it was one person’s job — that of Luis Andrés Edo — to keep them apart). Laureano Cerrada Santos was rearrested in France in 1970, aged 60, and served four years in jail on forgery charges. He was shot dead in October 1975 in a Paris street in a gangland style execution by a professional killer, Ramón Benichó Canuda (aka Ramón Leriles), who escaped with suspicious ease to Canada where he remained at liberty from prosecution under the protection of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Cerrada’s murder may in facts have been the result of a criminal vendetta, but it has also been suggested that Benicho Canuda was an employee of the ‘Paladin’ group, one of the plausibly deniable murder gangs run by Franco’s secret police chief, General Eduardo Blanco, recruited from Italian, German and Spanish fascists and headed by Madrid-based ex-SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny.

One of Cerrada’s most imaginative earlier ventures, in September 1948, had been to organise and fund a plot to Primitívo Pérez Gómez and Antonio Ortíz (right). kill Franco by dropping bombs from an aeroplane on the dictator’s motor launch in the Bahia de la Concha in northern Spain during a naval regatta. Cerrada handed the then secretary of the French Anarchist Federation, Georges Fontenis a suitcase containing 3m French francs to purchase an aeroplane. (The money was part of the 12m FF proceeds of a Crédit Lyonnais bank robbery in Paris in 1944.) The plane was piloted by Primitívo Pérez Gómez with the legendary Antonio Ortíz riding ‘shotgun’. Ortiz’s job was to drop the 20 kilos of bombs through a hole knocked in the floor. The small plane made The target: Franco attending the naval regatta, 1948 it across the frontier and into the bay during the regatta,

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Cipriano Mera Sans

but unfortunately the plot was foiled by the arrival of 6 Spanish fighter planes, obliging them to abort the mission and return to French territory, flying all the way almost at sea level.

It was at the lame shoemaker’s — Moñino’s — that I met more of the important figures in the anti-Franco resistance, veterans with the glamour of the underground struggle and the Civil War still attached to them, activists such as José Pascual Palacios, a member of the FIJL, FAI and CNT, secretary of the CNT’s prisoner support group, Solidaridad Internacional and a coordinator of the urban and rural combat groups in Catalonia since the late 1940s. Pascual was at the time considered Franco’s ‘Public Enemy Number 1’.

But the person who impressed me most was Cipriano Mera Sans, the nearlegendary anarchist who, along with Buenaventura Durruti and Dr Isaac Puente, had been members of the revolutionary committee which declared Libertarian Communism in 1933, in a widespread popular revolt after the victory of the right-wing parties in the November elections to the Spanish parliament, the Cortes.

During the tense run-up to these elections, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT had called for an electoral boycott with the slogan ‘Social Revolution, Not the Ballot Box’, announcing that if the Right won, the CNT and FAI would launch the social revolution.

True to their word, the activists ‘declared’ Libertarian Communism on 8 December and for five days the economic and social life in substantial parts of Aragón, Rioja and Navarre was transformed in accordance with anarchist principles of social justice. But the rising was short-lived and brutally repressed, leaving an estimated 87 dead, many wounded and some 700 militants jailed.

I was embarrassingly nonplussed when introduced to Mera. This shabbylooking 64-year old man with intelligent twinkly eyes set in a craggy face burnished by rich experience and weathered by years of prison and the building sites of Paris — where he still worked as a bricklayer — was a truly historical figure; a man assured of his place in the history of freedom fighters.

It was hard to believe I was meeting him in the flesh.

Apart from his activities in pre-Civil-War Spain, Mera had been one of the foremost defenders of Madrid. In July 1936 he led the attack on Campamento, Alcalá, Guadalajara, Sigüenza and Cuenca and the following month, after the establishment of the Del Rosal column, he commanded the CNT battalion in the Buitrago and Arenas de San Pedro sector which broke through the fascist cordon at Cebreros and reached Robledo in October. He also played a crucial role in the defence of Madrid in November 1936.

Among many battle honours he commanded the XIV Division that stopped the fascist advance at Pingaron, and captured Guadalajara (and not El Campesino, as claimed) and Brihuega (March 1937). He fought in Alcolea and

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José Pascual Palacios (b.

20 February 1915 d. 12 May 1970), an Aragonese anarchist, worked during the German occupation in France as a blaster for the French water board in the Haute Pyrénées. He played an intensely active role in the French Resistance and escape networks. After the Liberation (from 1948 to 1951) he was coordinating secretary of the National Committee of the CNT responsible for liaising with all the independent antiFrancoist urban and rural guerrilla groups. From 1961 he worked closely with Cipriano Mera on the formation of the DI and the plans to assassinate Franco and was among the FIJL activists arrested by the French police during the antianarchist repression in 1963 and spent many months in Fresnes prison, Paris.

Cipriano Mera Sanz (right) in conversation with Spanish anarchist militant and historian Antonio Tellez Solá, 1959.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Brunete and from October 1937 he took command of the IV Corps of the Army of the Centre with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. An illiterate until the age of 20, Mera had ended the Civil War commanding the IV Army Corps under Colonel Lopez Casado and was considered the most effective anarchist commander thrown up by the Civil War. In the closing days of the Civil War Mera resisted the coup plans of the Spanish Communist Party: he also declined promotion to Colonel and the offer of command of the Army of Extremadura.

After standing down his men in 1939, Mera escaped 1939: French concentration camp for anti-Francoist refugees. to Oran and began his calvary through North Africa.

Jailed in Oran he escaped from the Morand concentration camp to Morocco and settled in Casablanca, awaiting passage to the Americas. However, he was arrested there in March 1941 and handed over to Franco in February 1942 and sentenced to death on 26 April 1942. This sentence was later commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment. In prison he was contacted — through the CNT’s general secretary Amil — by the envoys of General Alfredo Unlikely bedfellows: plotter General Alfredo Kindelán, Antonio Aranda (left), General Beigbeder and other senior Francoist officers Kindelán y Aranda and General Beigbeder who were who in the 1940s, backed by the British government, sought the looking for the CNT’s support in overthrowing Franco. assistance of the CNT to help bring down Franco.

The generals had been promised financial, diplomatic and military support by the British and French, but in June 1942 the British backed out of the intrigue when they realised Franco was unlikely to join the Axis or allow German troops into Spain to attack Gibraltar.

Freed from a Francoist jail in October 1945, Mera maintained contact with the generals until they finally betrayed him, but he managed to escape to France on 11 February 1947. After the reunification of the Spanish Libertarian Movement he was co-opted as CNT representative onto the Directorate of the Defensa Interior which he was running with Alberola and Juan García Oliver (in Mexico) — although I did not know this when I met him in 1964. He was among those arrested in 1963 and held in ‘preventive’ detention for 5 months for his involvement in the clandestine activities of the DI. An iron-willed activist, he was not one of those subject to the delusions of power that afflicted others in a similar position. In his latter years he contributed most of his old age pension to supporting the Spanish anarchist journal Frente Libertario. He always said that he would die with a trowel in his hands and worked as a bricklayer in Caen and the Paris area until the age of 72.

12

Octavio Alberola Surinach — ‘Juan el Largo’

He died in Paris, aged 78, in October 1975.

These men and women were not fanatics. They were ordinary rational and dignified people who lived deliberately and passionately, with a vision and a tremendous capacity for self sacrifice; they had been abandoned by the Allies in the ‘post-fascist’ world of the Cold War and deprived of diplomatic or democratic means of resisting Franco’s state terror. Propagandistic force — spasmodic and small-scale — was the only strategy and agency of change left open to them. They weren’t looking for short-cuts; they simply had no other instruments of change.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the German anarchist poet, portrayed them sympathetically in A Brief Summer of Anarchy: The Life and Death of Buenaventura Durruti: ‘They are not tired, nor neurotic, and they don’t need drugs.

They do not complain. They do not bemoan their fate. Their defeats have not made them cynical. They know that they made mistakes, but they do not try to wipe out the memory of them. These old and still revolutionary men are stronger than all who came after them.’

We moved on to a nearby café where I first met Octavio Alberola Surinach — ‘Juan el largo’ or ‘El Méxicano’ as he was more commonly referred to. ‘Juan’ was the charismatic prime mover and coordinator of Defensa Interior, the DI’s man on whose shoulders lay the responsibility for killing Franco.

Alberola, an engineer and journalist (see Vol 1), was thirty-six years old at the time. Originally from Minorca, Alberola’s family had gone into exile in Mexico in 1939 where he became involved with Castro, Guevara and many of the Latin-American anti-dictatorial movements of the time. The complications and dangers of Alberola’s clandestine life in Europe had meant his wife, Irene, and two children had been forced to return to the relative safety of Mexico.

‘The brave man who is willing to go must be prepared for the greatest sacrifices a man can make. He must leave his wife and children, his father and mother, his friends and his people. Never again to return to the earth. He must wander forever in the sky, shield in one hand, lance in the other, always ready to fight the evil gods. For the gods of darkness will not rest. Again and again they will try to put out the light of the sun, which is their enemy.’

B. Traven, The Creation of the Sun and the Moon My first impression of Alberola was the similarity between him and the 1930s screen actor Basil Rathbone, famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. He was

13

Octavio Alberola Surinach and other anti-Batista guerrillas training in Mexico in the late 1950s.

Octavio Alberola Surinach (aka: ‘Juan El Largo’, ‘El Méxicano’), the DI coordinator responsible for planning and organising all attempts on the life of General Franco.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

tall for a Spaniard, about 6 foot 2 inches, slim, with a distinctive pencil-thin liphugging moustache, aquiline features and intelligent, deep-set eyes.

Alberola was always immaculately dressed, with black patent leather tasselled-loafer shoes, sharply creased flannel trousers and a blazer, white shirt and a Paisley-pattern cravat. His jet-black hair was thick, shiny and swept back in a high quiff. The effect was definitely raffish.

I continued my grand tour of Paris for the next few days, absorbing as much of the sights, smells, tastes and sense of the place as I could. In the evenings I would meet Salva, Nardo, and the other FIJL comrades for a drink and a meal.

My last day in Paris, Thursday 6 August, I spent wandering along the grand boulevards, through intriguing little back streets, finally returning late in the afternoon to the rue de Lancry to collect my rucksack and say goodbye to Germinal.

The Quartermaster’s Stores

Salvador Gurucharri, Antonio Ros Monero and Octavio Alberola near the French-Spanish border, 1963.

EVERYTHING WAS NOW READY for my journey to Spain. The explosives and detonators were waiting to be collected and my ticket booked on the night train to Toulouse. Finishing our beers we walked across the place d’Italie, down the rue Bobilot and into a narrow and neglected side street with grubby tenements.

Checking to ensure we had not been followed, Salva gave a prearranged knock on the curtained street-floor window and, when the door opened, we filed quickly into the shadowy hallway. The Spartan furnishings in the room indicated this was no-one’s home; it was the quartermaster’s stores where the weapons, explosives, forged documents and all the accoutrements of clandestinity could be kept with some degree of safety and ease of access.

Three people were already in the room. Two were seated, Octavio Alberola and Antonio Ros Moreno. The third man, referred to as ‘the chemist’, was standing by the sink wearing rubber gloves, measuring and weighing chemicals. Octavio organised some coffee and we sat round the table chatting until the chemist was ready for us.

Being thirsty I went to the sink for water, and was about to put a glass to my lips when the chemist turned round and saw what I was doing. He and Salva shouted at me to stop and rushed across, removing the glass carefully from my hands, explaining that it had just been used for measuring pure sulphuric acid.

Shaken (but not stirred), I stood back to lean on the sideboard and went to light a cigarette. This triggered another equally volcanic reaction from the chemist as he explained that the sideboard drawer was full of detonators and the cupboard underneath held highly flammable chemicals. Embarrassed by my error, I retreated to the table, and was very cautious after that, asking first before making any sudden movements.

The chemist placed on the table five slabs of what looked like king-size bars

14

Mission Briefing

of Granny’s home-made tablet (a crumbly Scottish toffee similar to butter fudge) and a number of small aluminium tubes, some with red wires protruding from the end, five small, dark-brown 250ml medicine bottles filled with a liquid, five replacement caps for these bottles and a bag of what looked like sugar but was in fact potassium chlorate.

Through Salva, he explained, that each of these slabs contained 200 grams of plastique (plastic explosive) and the tubes were detonators. The ones with the wires sticking out of them were electrical and detonated by a battery while the plain ones were detonated by extreme high temperature caused by the chemical reaction of sulphuric acid and a mixture of sodium chlorate and sugar. The bottles contained sulphuric acid and the extra caps had been specially modified, and were to be exchanged for the original caps when the explosives were ready to be primed and planted.

Alberola went through the details of the operation while Salva translated. My job was to deliver the explosives to the contact, together with a letter, addressed to me, which I was to collect from the American Express offices in Madrid. It was better not to have the letter on me in the event of something happening to me before I reached Madrid, as it would have compromised the operation.

My collection of this letter in Madrid turned proved to be the fatal flaw in the whole operation.

The rendezvous was to take place in Madrid in the plaza de Moncloa, on the pavement opposite the Air Ministry at the intersection of the calle Princessa with calle Meléndez Valdés. The time was between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. on any day from 11 to the 14 August. The contact would identify me by a handkerchief wrapped around one of my hands. He would approach me and say, in Spanish, ‘Que tal?' (‘How are you?’), to which I was to reply ‘Me duele la mano’ (‘I’ve a sore hand’).

I spoke no Spanish, so to avoid the embarrassment of forgetting my lines and unloading a kilo of high explosives on the first friendly Spaniard I met, Octavio wrote the words down for me, along with all the instructions. Big mistake number two. Once the contact had identified himself correctly, I was to hand over the parcel containing the material, together with the letter and was then to leave immediately and not make any conversation with the contact. If he said anything I was merely to reply ‘Soy alemán’ (I am German), and give him to understand that I did not speak any English.

15

My travelling arsenal: plastique, detonators, chemicals and bottles.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

How I crossed the border was down to me. Alberola handed me an envelope containing 350 new French francs, which was a fair bit of money at the time, so I had the choice of taking the train or flying from Toulouse. I had, however, made up my mind that the safest method would be to hitchhike.

Alberola placed an automatic pistol on the table and asked if I wanted a weapon. The appearance of the gun suddenly brought it home to me that this was not a simple breaking and entering into a British Regional Seat of Government or the consulate of a tinpot dictator in the relative safety of Britain.

This was real life, and death — mine or someone else’s — was a real possibility.

Alberola and Salva advised me against taking the gun on the grounds that were I to be arrested I might be tempted to use it, which could have been suicidal.

Also, if I was not carrying a gun they would be unlikely to apply the ‘ley de fugas’, Spain’s notorious fugitive law that allows the authorities to shoot anyone on the grounds they were ‘attempting to escape arrest’. I decided against taking the gun.

From the ‘laboratory’ we drove to the apartment of another comrade, where we had supper and went over the details of my journey for the last time. It was getting close to the time for my train to Toulouse so I rolled the explosives carefully into my sleeping bag, packed my Bergen and we drove to the station.

By 10.30 p.m. we were on the crowded platform by the carriage door, under the station’s huge glass roof.

The Night Train To Toulouse THE NIGHT TRAIN from the Gare d’Austerlitz to Toulouse was about sixteen carriages long and was noisy and crowded. It was also the end of the first week in August and it seemed that the entire population of Paris was trying to board the train. I said my cheerios and shook hands with Alberola, Salva and Nardo amid the noisy hissing clouds of steam and climbed into the carriage. It was a scene reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart hustling Ingrid Bergman out of Paris in Casablanca, just before the Germans arrive.

Edging my way up the corridor I found a compartment with space for a small one in the middle. Muttering apologies in pidgin French, I manoeuvred the rucksack into the luggage rack directly above a French army officer sitting opposite me and sat down. Within minutes, amid orchestrated explosions of steam from the engine, the train lumbered slowly and noisily out of the station on its way to the Mediterranean. One by one we nodded off to sleep.

The train pulled into Toulouse station shortly before dawn on Friday 7 August after a clammy and uncomfortable night. I was still tired, having dozed only fitfully during the night, waking often to check my rucksack and for anyone suspicious-looking in the corridor.

After a hurried coffee and croissant I caught the local Michelin, a smaller local train, which took me on the final stage of my journey across to Narbonne and then down the Mediterranean coast to Perpignan. Here I prepared myself for crossing the border. The best way to take the explosives in, I thought, was

16

To The Pyrenees

on my body, not in my rucksack in case it was searched by a punctilious customs officer.

In Perpignan, I found the public baths and paid for a cubicle. After a hot soak I climbed out of the bath and, still naked, unpacked the slabs of plastique, and taped them to my chest and stomach with Elastoplasts and adhesive tape.

The detonators I wrapped in cotton wool and hid inside the lining of my jacket.

The bag of potassium chlorate, the base of the chemical trigger, was too bulky to hide on my body, so I emptied it into a packet of sugar with a layer of sugar on top, and left it in the rucksack.

There was one tense moment when the lady attendant came in unannounced with clean towels, having opened the cubicle door with her keys.

She appeared surprisingly nonplussed by the sight of a naked skinny and still steaming young man with bedraggled long hair and from whose chest and stomach were protruding what appeared to be either full colostomy bags or brown paper poultices. Not realising she was in the presence of a Glaswegian kamikaze, she muttered something in French, presumably apologising for intruding on so modest and afflicted a young man and quickly backed out, closing the door hastily behind her.

The only way to disguise my now misshapen and lumpy body was with the baggy woollen jumper my granny had knitted to protect me from the biting Clydeside winds. It would be an understatement to say it — but I looked out of place on the Mediterranean coast in August.

With a couple of slabs of plastique stuffed down my underpants, which made my crutch bulge embarrassingly, and the big hairy jumper on one of the hottest days of the summer, I looked like Quasimado’s and Esmeralda’s lovechild.

‘Like some rough beast, its hour come round at last’, I began *The Road Not Taken slouching the last twelve miles towards the sunlit peaks of the Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, Pyrénées Orientales and my destination, Spain.

And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood I walked through the outskirts of Perpignan until I came to a And looked down one as far as I could junction with a road sign pointing to Spain. It was a straight and To where it bent in the undergrowth; wooded road where prospective lifts could stop easily and safely Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, and I could shelter in the shade of a tree. I placed my rucksack on Because it was grassy and wanted wear; the roadside with my kilt protruding as ostentatiously as I could Though as for that, the passing there manage and sat close by, waiting patiently under a tree hidden Had worn them really about the same, from the raging heat of the August sun. It was a scene conjured out And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. of Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken.* Oh, I kept the first for another day!

After what seemed like hours, a car driven by a middle-aged Yet knowing how way leads to way, English commercial traveller from Dagenham pulled over. He was I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling with a sigh going all the way to Barcelona.

Somewhere ages and ages hence: I shouldn’t have been quite so effusive; it soon dawned on me Two roads diverged in a wood, and I that his charity was driven to a large extent by enlightened self I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. interest. Every few kilometres the old banger would chug to a Robert Frost standstill and I would have to get out in the full blast of the August

17

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Mediterranean sun and push the bloody car up the foothills until we got it bump-started. Between my vigorous exertions pushing the car uphill and the sweltering heat locked between my body and Granny’s jumper, I now had sweat percolating out of my pores like a human * Ramón Vila Capdevila, ‘Pasos largos’ cafétière.

In Figols, in northern Catalonia, a plaque marks the proclamation of libertarian communism in the town back in Waterproof Elastoplasts or tape had not been 1932. In another little mountain village in the same invented at the time so the cellophane wrapped packets comarca another plaque has been put up which reads: of plastique kept slipping from my body with the sweat 'Here lie the remains of Ramón Vila Capdevila. Militant of that poured from me and I had to keep nudging them up the CNT and the last of the Catalan anarchist maquis, he was involved in the proclamation of libertarian communism with my forearms.

(1932), the civil war (1936-39) and the French Resistance (1939-45) and, for a further 18 years, the fight against Francoism. In memory of him and of all who gave their lives for freedom and the anarchist ideal — The Libertarian Movement, Castellnou, 15 July 2000.’

With their own battle against fascism lost, the exiled Spanish republicans had fought on virtually every front in World War Two: at Narvik, with the Eighth Army in North Africa, Crete and Italy and even as guerrilla units behind enemy lines in the Ukraine.

During the Nazi occupation of France, Ramón Vila Capdevila had led the Spanish anarchist battalion ‘Libertad’, which played a crucial role in the storming of Royan and Cap Grave, the last German strongholds in France. His battalion then joined forces with ‘La nueve’, Number 9 company of General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division, whose official language was Spanish and which had a complement of 3,000 Spanish anarchists, socialists, Basques and republicans. The tanks and armoured cars of the ‘la nueve’ bore the slogans ‘Durruti’, ‘Ascaso’, ‘Teruel’, ‘Ebro’, ‘Guernica’ and ‘Guadalajara’ on their sides and were the first Allied soldiers to liberate Paris in 1945. More than fifty important French towns — including Toulouse, Marseilles and Nimes — were liberated almost exclusively by some of the 40,000 or so Spanish anarchists, socialists, communists and republicans who joined the Maquis. Their contribution to the ‘French’ Resistance is mentioned only briefly in the official histories of the period.

After the fall of Mussolini and Hitler, many of those who survived returned to take up the fight against Franco in the belief that the Allies would support them. One old friend was told personally by de Gaulle — while being decorated for his part in the battle for Monte Cassino in 1943 — ‘Today Paris, tomorrow Madrid’. An army of several thousands of hopeful ex-maquisards invaded Spain through the valley of Aran in the Pyrenees at the end of 1946. No Allied support was forthcoming and the invaders were routed by the waiting Francoist army.

The Communist Party abandoned the armed struggle after the Valley of Arán fiasco and it was left to the anarchists to maintain a rearguard urban and rural guerrilla campaign against the Franco regime. The repression of this campaign occupied Franco’s forces of law and order until Capdevila’s death in 1963.

Across The High Frontier TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY when we reached Le Pérthus, near to the Catalan border town of La Junquera, the busiest of Spain’s frontier mountain passes.

After queuing for a bowel-churning eternity we were summoned up to the parking ramp for customs examination. I had to push the car on to the ramp while my companion steered. I pulled my jumper taut as I waited with my heart in my mouth while two dourfaced Civil Guards in sage-green uniforms with submachine-guns at the ready and strange, shiny, patent leather three-cornered hats looked me up and down suspiciously. I handed my passport over to the border guard while the customs officers examined the boot and searched behind the seats of the car.

‘Why have you come to Spain?’

‘Turista!’ I replied, hoping my accent didn’t make it sound like terrorista.

A pair of dark eyes looked at me suspiciously as if to say ‘Are you sure?’ and then the stamp descended finally upon the passport. A frisson of excitement passed

Franco’s hated Guardia Civil, whose continued existence today expresses the legacy of bloodthirsty repression which public life in Spain continues to ignore.

18

Uphill All The Way

through me as the grim-faced Civil Guards ushered us on our way south down through the fresh smelling mountain pinewoods and high terraced fields of the Catalan Pyrenees. It was near here, just a year earlier that the last anarchist guerrilla Ramón Vila Capdevila, ‘Pasos largos’(see box), had been shot in a Civil Guard ambush, thereby ending the Civil War in the mountains.

The winding roads looked at first like a continuation of France, but we began to notice a certain indefinable difference in the terrain, range after range, as we descended through smaller step-like hills covered with rocks and fir trees until at last we emerged into the ancient and crumbling golden-brown landscape of Spain. Even the soil appeared to be of another colour. Louis XIV’s theory that Europe ended at the Pyrenees was beginning to make sense to me.

The car made it in one piece through the gitano shacks of Figueras as far as Gerona’s main square, where it broke down again. This time in the middle of the rush hour at what felt like the main arterial confluence of the whole of northern Spain.

As I struggled single-handedly and nervously to push the car through a set of traffic lights — with a long queue of impatient motorists shouting abuse behind me — I felt a packet of plastique slip and almost fall out of my jumper at the feet of the Policía Armada directing traffic and shouting at us to get a move on.

It seemed as though that in my short time in Spain I had not heard Spanish spoken once; it was clearly a shouted language. Clutching my stomach, I murmured an excuse about a sudden attack of diarrhoea and rushed off to the nearest toilet to make good the damage, leaving the driver to fend for himself.

Eventually we got going again and before I knew it we were driving through the dilapidated red-roofed outskirts of industrial Barcelona.

‘I never thought we’d make it,’ said my companion.

‘Neither did I,’ was my reply.

We said goodbye and went our separate ways.

Barcelona REBELLIOUS AND INDUSTRIOUS Barcelona was the city of anarchism. The great anarchist union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT — National Confederation of Labour), had been founded here in 1911.

It was also the cradle of secular education in Spain. Francisco Ferrer Guardia had founded La Escuela Moderna (the Modern School) in the Catalan capital to educate Spanish workers in a rational, secular and non-coercive setting. This made him deeply unpopular with the reactionary clerical regime whose media blamed Ferrer for the strikes against the unpopular Moroccan war. They also demonised him for the subsequent insurrectionary situation which developed during the ‘tragic week’ in mid-July 1909. Ferrer was executed by firing squad

19

Plaque at Figols, Catalonia, commemorating the life of Ramón Vila Capdevila, last of the anarchist maquis.

Ramón Vila Capdevila (‘Captain Raymond’ of the Resistance escape and evasion networks during World War Two).

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Execution of Francisco Ferrer Guardia, October 1909 Illustration by Flavio Costantini

on 13 October 1909 and his body lies in the cemetery of Montjuïc, close to the fortress where he was shot. Beside it lie the graves of many others who incurred the enmity of the Roman Catholic church and the Spanish ruling classes — including that of the anarchist militant Buenaventura Durruti, killed in 1936. It was this city that, in 1936, was the first to rise against military insurrection by its own army.

There were a few similarities between the workers of Glasgow and Barcelona. In the industrial belt of central Scotland where I grew up there remained only a handful of miners and a few engineers who formed pockets of survival for the original ideas of working-class resistance.

The Labour and Marxist parties had gutted the revolutionary movement. They had substituted middleclass leadership and obedience to the state, for workingclass action. When this corruption of socialism first occurred, it was successfully challenged by syndicalism, which in turn was penetrated and subordinated by bolshevism. In Barcelona, at least, the workers had resisted bolshevism to the bitter end — just as they did fascism.

CNT barricades thrown up during the ‘May Days’, the Communist Party coup of 1937.

I WANDERED AROUND Barcelona’s Hogarthian back streets for an hour or so looking for cheap lodgings and taking in the atmosphere and sounds of the city with its Mediterranean smells of sea ozone, rich black tobacco, garlic sizzling in hot, smoking olive oil, and long-simmering meals mingling with the occasional discordant odours of stagnant drains and sewers, I finally found a place in a black-stone, fortress-like tenement in the barrio gótico, the old gothic quarter, just off the Rambla de Santa Monica. This was at the lower and seedier, southern part of the long bustling artery that leads from the centre of the city to the docks and the sea. Its rows of plane trees provided dappled shade to island promenades dotted with bootblacks, noisy street traders at colourful kiosks and stalls which sold everything from flowers to caged birds.

The foyer was dark, stark and stank of decay; it was an uncarpeted B&B, but it was cheap. I handed over my passport to the dumpy woman receptionist and was given a registration card to complete; these went to the Jefatura de Polícia each night.

I tried to make her understand I wanted a room with a window overlooking either the back or the front of the house; instead I was escorted by a little girl, the daughter of the manager, to a featureless room in the centre of the Rambla de San José, Barcelona.

20

Barcelona

place with no windows at all. I could have been in London, Paris or Berlin; the only touch of Spain was a picture of the Virgin Mary and Child hanging above the bed.

This rat-trap of a room did nothing to calm my feelings of anxiety, but by this time I was too tired to complain, so I took it. I locked the door behind me and threw myself on the bed, fully dressed, and dozed off, drifting in and out of sleep.

After a half-hour nap I undressed, untaped the explosives from my stomach, packed them into my sleeping bag, and took a shower. As I dressed I heard someone moving in the corridor outside my door. I opened it hesitantly to discover the little girl who had shown me to my room earlier. Had she been watching me through the keyhole? I shooed her away, but she kept hanging around the door. Perhaps it was my longish hair that fascinated her.

The pension did not provide meals so I decided to eat out. As I stopped at the desk in the lobby to drop off my key, a loud and pushy American heard me speaking English to the concièrge and introduced himself. Proudly showing off his sun-tanned arms, he said he had just driven down from Paris in an open sports car. Somehow it came out that he lived in Notting Hill Gate and we had some common friends. He also claimed, unreasonably loudly I thought, given where we were, to be an anarchist, which made me even more nervous. He called his wife down from their room and insisted we all go out together for a meal.

While this compromising discussion was going on in the foyer, two sinisterlooking men in plain clothes were checking through the passports, including my own which they had in their hands. As we passed they gave me a sideways glance while continuing their discussion with the concièrge. Outside I asked my companions who they were and was told they were secret policemen come to collect the passports of that day’s guests. It was normal procedure.

My companions took me to an old-fashioned restaurant, Los Caracoles, in the heart of Barcelona’s red-light district, off the Napoleonic plaza Reál, in the calle de Escudellers. On the corner wall, in the street, rows of sizzling, dripping chickens were being grilled on a jerky mechanical spit. The house speciality was snails and bouillabaisse, but I settled for barbecued chicken and salad, washed down with sangria.

Bad decision. Hardly had I finished the meal when I was hit by gastric enteritis, the bloody flux — diarrhoea. When I discovered the restaurant toilet was a stinking and unflushed human slurry pit in the floor I made my excuses and power walked back to the pension, tense and tight-arsed. I was also anxious to check out if my room had been disturbed in my absence. The ‘coincidence’ of meeting people with mutual friends under such circumstances added uneasiness to my queasiness.

21

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The dun-coloured road to Madrid

THE POSSIBLE DATES FOR my rendezvous in Madrid were from Tuesday the 11th to Friday 14 August. I left Barcelona on Monday the 10th, taking a taxi to the city limits, on the N11, the road to Madrid.

By late afternoon I had only got as far as the bizarrely-serrated mountainous outcrop of Montserrat which broods behind Barcelona. Just as I had made up my mind to return to the Catalan capital and fly to Madrid, a lorry pulled over. The driver said he was going to Madrid so I carefully passed up my Bergen, clambered into the cab and we were off.

I was probably paranoid, but there were things about the driver that struck me as unusual. Hadn’t he stopped to pick me up on a steep incline, something heavily laden lorries seldom do? Whenever we pulled over for The Castillian plain. something to eat or drink, he insisted on paying for the meals, drinks and cigars from a thick roll of thousand peseta notes. Call me over-sensitive or cynical, but his generosity — or my paranoia — in such an impoverished country made me uneasy.

It was an eight-hour or so, hot and dusty but interesting 450-mile journey across the plains and mountains of Catalonia, Aragón, Castille and León to La Mancha and Madrid.

This ever-changing landscape of sparse, yellowybrown unfenced horizons with dark brooding shadows which glided along chasing sunny peaks and ridges was punctuated by fleeting glimpses of medieval villages, Moorish towers and the picturesque towns of Lérida, Fraga, Zaragoza, Calatayud, Guadalajara, Alcalá de Henares and Barajas.

We lumbered along a chalky grey road which snaked far ahead through the dun-coloured plains of Castille until it met a clear blue sky. Around us was a stony vista of mountains and tablelands dotted with rocks and giant boulders. It was a poverty-stricken soil out of which jutted ancient, stumpy blackened trees. We passed clusters of flat-roofed, whitewashed pueblos and ruined castles clinging precariously to steep hillsides. Large and The New Madrid: Vallecas, the Castlemilk of Madrid tiny women dressed from head to foot in black carried pails of water from village fountains, washed clothes in streams or shepherded tinkling herds of goats and sheep along the roadside. Black bereted, nut-brown, wrinkly old men played chess by the roadside or drowsily plodded along on

22

Madrid

mules with mangy-looking dogs jogging behind them.

After many hours the rooftops of our destination appeared on the horizon.

Madrid is built on a high plateau on seven hills overlooking the Manzanares valley in the geographical centre of the Iberian Peninsula.

Castille’s trees had been chopped down centuries before and little of the topsoil remained. Squinting down through the harsh rays of the August sun I could just make out the jagged roofline of the city spread out across the valley floor. Puncturing the heat haze was a mosaic of spires, domes, and irregular planes. Beyond was a parched landscape which encircled the town. It was an encampment in the desert.

To my left was the line of the vast uncluttered plain, gradated in shades of brown, with its ravines and the low hill of the cero de los ángeles, which marks the geographical centre of the peninsula. Far off to my right rose the blue and purple ridges and peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains.

As we approached the city the roadsides were bedecked with massive commemorative banners and posters displaying pictures of Franco with slogans proclaiming ‘25 Anos de Paz’ — ‘Twenty Five Years of Peace’ — the pax Franquista which had subjected Spain to the despotic status quo of the victor. The triumphalist posters should in fact have read ‘Twenty Five Years of Victory!’ They were interspersed with colourful, dramatic, bullfight posters promoting past and future corridas of matadors such as ‘El Lítri’ and ‘El Cordobés’. Bloody repression and bloody circuses!

When we came to the new, high-rise apartment blocks that overlook the shantytown of Vallecas on the outskirts of Madrid, I indicated to my generous driver that I wanted to be dropped here. He looked at me a bit strangely as if to say ‘are you sure?’, but when I insisted he nodded and pulled over.

It was like opening an oven door as I climbed from the cab and was immediately engulfed by the scorching mid-day sun and the heat rising from the road.

Vallecas is to Madrid what Castlemilk or Drumchapel is to Glasgow, a slum clearance scheme designed to keep the workers in their place, the peripheral ghettos. It was where the chabola people, as they are called, lived in self-built shacks without running water or sanitation.

ACCORDING TO GOVERNMENT STATISTICS, 1964 was the year Spain ceased to be an agricultural country.

Vallecas was a direct consequence of this policy; it was where most of the immigrants from the poorer southern

23

Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

(Matthew 23:7)

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

agrarian provinces of Extremadura and Andalusia ended up, a bit like Glaswegians around King’s Cross and Euston or the Irish in Kilburn.

My reason for asking to be dropped off here was that were anyone following me I would soon spot them as I wandered around the relatively empty back streets. The place was deserted. It was like Addlestrop railway station, ‘no one left, and no one came’. After meandering around for about twenty minutes, I managed to hail a taxi and asked for central Madrid.

The cab driver dropped me at the Puerta del Sol, the hub of Madrid’s wheel whose spokes are the ten main radial arteries of the city and Spain’s ‘kilometre zero’. All the highways converge here from the farthest reaches of the Spanish compass: the Atlantic and Pyrenean coast in The Puerta del Sol and the Dirección General de Seguridad, HQ the north and north-east, Extremadura and the of Franco’s secret police, the Brigada Político Social.

Portuguese border in the east, the Straits of Gibraltar in the south and the Mediterranean in the west.

I bought a street plan of Madrid from an estanco, a packet of Celtas cigarettes and a box of fósforos, matches made from waxed paper, then found a café where I ordered a thirst-quenching cerveza con limón and a sandwich.

It was a relief to lay down my rucksack with its worrying contents. It drew my attention constantly, like touching a bruise, or the throbbing heart beneath the floorboards in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’. I sat and took my bearings. What I didn’t know was that the café, the Café Rolando, was the ‘local’ of the Spanish secret police, whose headquarters were across the road.

ETA blew up the café ten years later.

The oval-shaped Puerta del Sol was dominated by the brooding presence of the Ministerio del la Gobernación. The buildings, boulevards and fountains around it bore the stamp of the Austrians and Bourbons, but nothing of the Moors who had occupied most of Spain for 700 years. I was intrigued by bundles of old and desiccated palm leaves tied to the balconies around the Plaza. Later I discovered that these came from the date palm at Elche, in the south-east near Alicante. Every Easter these palm leaves were tied into bundles, blessed The Security Directorate by the priests and sold all over Spain as a protection against lightning.

(DGS).

The Seguridad, as the Gobernación was otherwise known, had been built as a Post Office in 1768 by French architect Jacques Marquet. Now, as I said, it was

24

Last Moments Of Fredom

the headquarters of Franco’s hated secret police, the Brigada de Investigación Social, better known as the Brigada Político-Social (BPS), and the Spanish security service.

Its other claim to fame was its clock, which had been made in London by a Spanish clockmaker in the eighteenth century. In the square beneath it the annual uvas or grape-eating ritual took place on New Year’s Eve. This ritual requires a bag containing twelve grapes.

At each chime of the New Year, a grape is eaten, the twelve grapes representing good luck for every month of the year. The pips spat out represent the misdeeds and bad luck of the year just gone.

The Seguridad was also where one of the bombs had exploded the previous July which led to the summary court martial and executions of Delgado and Granado less than three weeks later (see Vol 1).

The world’s indifference to their judicial murder was the reason I was here. I felt I needed to give some reason to their deaths and those of the countless others who had died or sacrificed their freedom resisting the last of the fascist dictators.

I sipped my beer, fascinated by the cockroach-like figures of priests and nuns and the cool smartness of the other passers-by: the clean-shaven, cotton-suited men in highly polished patent-leather boots. Most sported sunglasses and wore their jackets draped around the shoulders, like cloaks. Despite the heat, the women in brightly coloured summer frocks were usually hatless, showing off their perfectly coiffeured hair, their long, pale, oval faces, their great black eyes, their arched Levantine noses and pomegranate-red mouths. They were strikingly beautiful.

In stark contrast with this sophisticated elegance was the discordant flotsam and jetsam of the Civil War who roamed the streets begging for charity; the legless pulling themselves along on home-made bogies (carts) with castors or pram wheels, the one-legged on home-made crutches with arm supports made from rolled-up rags, the mentally damaged wandering aimlessly, dead-eyed and twitching spasmodically. Some begged with dignity, others did not; their dignity having evaporated with whatever trauma it was which had changed their lives for the worse. These were the vanquished reminders of Franco’s ‘Twenty-Five Years of Peace’.

The Puerta del Sol was close to my first port of call, the offices of American Express. Instead of going to the railway station for a left luggage locker and leaving my rucksack there like any sensible would-be assassin, I strolled with it on my back down the carrera San Jerónimo to the Amex offices at the plaza de las Cortes to collect the letter for my contact.

25

Scene of the bomb blast in the passport office of the DGS (July 1963). Within one month of the explosion the anarchists Delgado and Granado paid for this with their lives even though they were innocent.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Franco’s secret police, the Brigada Político Social.

It was siesta time and most Madrileños were either on holiday, at lunch or asleep. The streets were quiet and the plaza de las Cortes appeared empty apart from a few men standing about in doorways reading newspapers in the shade.

Turning the corner to go into the American Express office, I was immediately aware of three smartly-dressed and tight-lipped men in heavy-rimmed sunglasses standing, self consciously, by the entrance muttering among themselves. Their well-cut jackets were firmly buttoned. My frayed nerves flickered to an instant of suspicion. I felt instinctively by the way they looked at me that they were policemen. If they were, was I their quarry? If so, when would they make their move? And would I be able to give them the slip?

Then I relaxed again. I was just being paranoid, I thought. There was nothing to show I had been rumbled, but some inborn sense of danger was whispering warnings in my ear. I forced myself to go on, repeating silently to myself ‘don't panic’. I hadn’t come this far to abandon my mission on what may have been purely an irrational hunch, but I felt a growing premonition of disaster. Silly me.

I walked past the group and crossed the threshold. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had also crossed another metaphorical threshold from which there was no turning back.

I asked for the letters desk, which was pointed out to me at the far end of the L-shaped room.

Handing my passport to the receptionist I asked if there were any letters for me. At this same moment I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, two men sitting in the alcove to my right talking to a woman. I knew immediately they were policemen. I had walked into a trap.

I fought to control my fear. It was difficult. The blood and lymph drained from my face and upper body. My stomach churned. Something was wrong.

The supervisor approached the girl who took my passport and had found the letter. It had what looked like a pink bookie’s slip folded over it. She looked at it. The slip bore that day’s datestamp, 11 August. The supervisor handed the pink slip to the girl indicating she should take it across to the two men. The supervisor then handed me the letter with my passport. I turned to see the two men quickly walking out with the pink slip in his hand.

My diaphragm tightened even more and my heart thumped like a drum. All my senses suddenly became highly sensitised as I tried to marshal all the thoughts buzzing round my brain. How did they know? How much did they know? Would I be arrested there or would they wait until I had met my contact? But if they knew about the Amex pick-up, they probably knew the details of my rendezvous as well.

In spite of the storm of emotions inside me, I felt curiously detached as I

26

Arrest

took a deep breath and walked out trying to keep my face expressionless.

Mustering as much as self confidence as I could manage, I paused at the doorway to look at the group of five men now standing to one side of the office entrance. I discovered later they were: Chief Inspectors Don Gonzalo Toledo Julián and Don Juan García Gelabert, with Inspectors Don Juan Antonio Manzáno Hernández, Don Manuel Angel Puell Espino and Don Enrique González Herrera.

Until I appeared they had been deep in animated conversation. They stopped briefly, turned to one another and carried on. Although only one was looking directly at me, I was acutely conscious of the awareness of the others.

Something self destructive made me make direct eye contact with the short fat man who had preceded me out of the building, Don Juan García Gelabert.

He had a round face — ba’-faced as they say in Glasgow — balding, with slicked back heavily pomaded hair and a carefully trimmed moustache.

I assumed what I hoped was the jaunty devil-may-care air of a well-heeled tourist who had just cashed his letters of credit and was passing a group of street corner loafers. The anorak draped over my arm covered the hand with the crumpled-up letter that I hoped to get rid of at the first opportunity, but I also realised it might give the impression I was armed and carrying a pistol.

The knot of secret policemen followed me up the street, still discussing among themselves. I hoped my arrest was not imminent and thought I still had a chance to escape.

Strolling as slowly as I could up the carrera San Jeronimo back towards the Puerta Del Sol, I stopped to peer in all the shop windows I passed as though I was window shopping In fact I was checking the reflections to gauge the distance between us.

Excitement and fear sharpened my senses and I was now hyper-aware of everything around me as my brain tried to identify and assess every opportunity of escape. They had allowed me a good twenty yards start before moving on behind me. An empty taxi pulled in to the pavement beside me and the driver appeared to invite me to get in. I knew intuitively it was an undercover police car and smiled to myself, somewhat smugly, that they must think either I came up the Clyde in a ‘banana boat’ or they had seen too many gangster films. I had seen enough myself and wasn’t falling for that one. I continued walking, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: ‘Like one, that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round, walks on, and turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.’

The men paced me from behind, slowly unwinding across the full width of the pavement like the Earp brothers in Tombstone. Was this going to be a replay of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, I thought to myself?

Like the unfortunate Billy Clanton, I was hoping to leave town, pronto!

27

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

By this time I had reached the corner of the calle Cedaceros, a busy street to my right which led to the calle de Alcalá. As I prepared myself to make a dash through the crowds I was suddenly grabbed by both arms, the anorak ripped from me, my face pushed to the wall and a gun thrust into the small of my back.

I tried to turn my head but I was handcuffed before I fully realised what had happened.

Detectives surrounded me on all sides, waving guns in my face. My legs were spread-eagled and I was forced against the wall while they patted me down for weapons.

In spite of the fact that a sense of complete helplessness had descended upon me, I mustered all the pompous indignation and saliva available to me under the circumstances. With an ingratiating smile and croaking like a frog, I demanded of the short fat man, Don Juan García Gelabert, the arresting officer, why I, a respectable British citizen, was being treated like a criminal.

‘Do you have any ID?’ I asked, weakly.

‘We don't need ID,’ he replied, coldly, in English. ‘We have some questions we want to ask you at police headquarters.’

‘Why?’ I exclaimed, trying to control the flickering fear in my face and dismay in my voice. ‘Is there something wrong with my passport?’

One of them punched me in the face, telling me to speak Spanish and that I was a lying son of a whore, ‘un hijo de puta’.

‘No’, he said, ‘But you are a young anarchist of the Juventudes Libertarias,’ he stuck his face into mine then pulled back and belted me unexpectedly on the side of my head.

‘You have come to kill Spaniards. We’ll see about that when we get you back to police HQ.’ My mind conjured up the unforgettable words and image of Ming the Merciless to Flash Gordon: ‘For you the end is already over’.

The words ‘young anarchist’ reminded me of something. The BBC2 programme The Question Why, featuring a group of anarchists being quizzed by Malcolm Muggeridge, was to be shown on British screens within the next fortnight. Then I remembered my answer when Muggeridge had asked me if I would really assassinate General Franco if I had the chance. Here I was in Madrid for that very purpose, with explosives ... and under arrest (see Vol 1).

Secret Police Headquarters I WAS LED through the gathering crowds and bundled unceremoniously into the back seat of the taxi I had snubbed earlier. It was, as I suspected, an undercover police car. Don Juan García Gelabert sat in the front with the driver.

It raced through my mind that they seemed to know a great deal about me, my name, and my political views.... Certainly they had my passport, but how had they known about the letter? I could only play for time and try to prepare myself psychologically for whatever they had in store for me. Sooner or later I would have to say something. What would I say to them? How easy was it

28

Inside The Security Directorate

going to be to interweave my fiction with the truth?

Would I be able to meet this great and trying moment in my life as my Covenanting forebears had done, with nobility of gesture and defiance? I doubted it.

We drove the few hundred yards in complete silence, reaching our destination in minutes. The car entered through an innocuous arched passageway at the rear of the building and emerged into a large central courtyard.

Less than an hour before I had been outside enjoying a beer, a fag and watching the world go by. I was now no longer a tourist contemplating the architectural facade of what was, metaphorically, the highest and most dominant building at the geographical and political centre of Spain. It was said that from here Franco’s secret police could see the Pyrenees, Gibraltar and, it appeared, Notting Hill Gate.

NOW I WAS ON THE INSIDE; a prisoner in the hands of Franco’s powerful and ruthless secret police, in their central detention and interrogation centre at the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS), the Spanish Lubyanka. Franco’s secret police organisation had been set up under the Ley de Vigilancia y Seguridad of 8 March 1941, a law which replaced the earlier Ley de 23 de septiembre de 1939. The 1941 law brought all the police and auxiliary security services under the sole command and control of the General Security Directorate (DGS). This, in turn, came under the Interior Ministry, headed at the time by Blas Pérez González of the Spanish army’s Legal Corps. The BPS operated with impunity inside the Francoist state and enjoyed absolute discretionary powers in the exercise of its broad remit. In spite of the appearance of control by the civilian Interior Ministry, the BPS in fact operated under military jurisdiction. This meant it was unsupervised and not required to render account of its activities to anyone. On an official visit to Spain in October 1940 SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler advised Serrano Suñer and Franco to set up a secret police force which would allow him to contain his political enemies and to consolidate and strengthen his power base. Himmler sent Commandant Paul Winzer, his most senior Gestapo officer, and a team of advisers to Spain to train the new secret police organisation. Many of its first recruits were drawn from

29

Top: Rear entrance to the DGS and courtyard. The arched windows at street level are those of the notorious subterranean cells.

Top: Franco’s envoy Serrano Suñer with SS boss Himmler, 1940.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

General José Ungria’s Servicio de Informacion y Policia Militar (SIPM), the organisation that had formed the core of Franco’s infamous ‘fifth column’ of saboteurs and spies who operated behind Republican lines during the Civil War. According to Edouard de Blaye, the Agence France-Press correspondent in Spain in the early 1960s, the BPS numbered around 8,500 superintendents and inspectors at the time, all of whom operated in plain clothes.

Pagan and Christian meet to compare notes on how to defend civilisation from liberty, equality and fraternity—by means of a few score of megadeaths.

Pushed from behind and pulled from the front, I was hustled out of the taxi. I glanced up at the sky for what — it occurred to me — might possibly be my last time, and the three floors of barred windows that overlooked the interior of the open yard. With the walls rising around me on all four sides I felt as though I was at the bottom of a deep well. Still handcuffed, I was manhandled through a door guarded by two impassive Policía Armada in uniform and escorted silently but purposefully up flights of stairs and along winding corridors to the operations room of the Brigada Regional de Investigación Social de la Jefatura Superior de Policía.

The atmosphere was clinical. It reminded me of a hospital or a dental surgery. As I was marched through brightly lit passages we passed small ‘consulting’ rooms with open doors or with strengthened glass windows through which I caught fleeting glimpses of people seated at tables faced by smartly dressed men in brilliant white shirts and natty linen jackets. Some were being shouted at and one was being pushed around the room and being beaten.

From closed rooms I could hear the sounds of loud voices. One of these I thought was American and for a moment I wondered if the couple from the Barcelona pensión had been arrested. But no reference was ever made to them.

More questions than answers THESE IMAGES AND SOUNDS were being etched into my mind as I was frogmarched towards my Nemesis. We came to a brightly lit office at the end of a long, open-plan beige-coloured room that extended the full width of the top floor. A window at the far end overlooked the noisy Puerta del Sol; the other opened on to the courtyard. It was strange hearing the normal sounds of the city drifting in through the open windows while I was in a parallel universe.

Plainclothes policemen and policewomen stood around in small groups or were seated at the desks that divided the room at regular intervals. They stared at me in silence as I was frog-marched between their desks — some looked blankly, some curiously, others aggressively.

Grey filing cabinets ran along the length of one wall. On top of these lay dusty, discarded piles of files, folders, papers and books.

The room was much larger than any of the others we had passed. In the far corner was smaller room with a desk and some tubular chairs. On the opposite wall were two large rectangular windows into other rooms. These turned out to 30

Interrogation

be two-way mirrors through which suspects could be observed, unseen, during interrogations.

I was thrust into a chair while the detectives emptied the contents of my pockets: some pesetas, French francs, a snotty tissue, a packet of fags and a box of matches.

Gelabert sat back at his desk and addressed me in flawless English ‘Well, then, Mr. Christie. What do we have here?’

They emptied the contents of my rucksack onto the floor and began examining its contents. First they discovered the bag with the potassium chlorate and sugar mix. Gelabert tasted with his finger and grimaced.

‘What is it?’ he asked, in English. ‘It isn’t sugar.’

I replied, weakly, that I had bought it in France and had not yet used it, despite the fact that the bag had been opened.

In my rucksack were two books that I had bought in Paris. One of these, Voltaire’s Candide, they confiscated triumphantly, presumably on the grounds that it, too was explosive in its own way. The other they let me keep; it was the Olympia Press edition of De Sade’s Justine.

News of my arrest had spread and the outer room was now filling with curious bystanders, some in uniform but most in plain clothes, all straining to see the foreign terrorist in the flesh. There must have been fifteen to twenty of them hovering around before they were finally ordered out by a tall man who entered the room. He had a slight stoop and a face that could have The Registry of the Franco’s secret police where files were kept been painted by Velazquez. I sensed by the demeanour on all the regime’s enemies . of those around him that he was the senior BPS officer, Comisario Jefe, Don Saturnino Yagüe González, the officer in charge of my case.

He was a tall, middle-aged grandee with the air of someone who expects to be obeyed; authoritative with a greyish sallow complexion and grey-flecked hair. He removed his jacket and sat at the desk opposite me, took the automatic pistol from his shoulder holster and placed it on the desk between us while he proceeded to roll up his shirtsleeves. The barrel of his gun was pointed ominously towards me. It felt as though he was daring me to grab it. He said nothing, but his eyes darted between the searchers on the floor and me.

The searchers finally came to the sleeping bag. I had resigned myself to the fact that crunch time was approaching and that the serious questioning would soon begin. I would have to come up with some convincing answers. As they say in Glasgow, ‘Ma heid wis sair’ as I tried to keep track of all the plausible and implausible scenarios that had been swarming through my brain. From the moment of my arrest I had undergone the emotional bends, racking my mind for a credible story, trying to concentrate on what to say. I was filled with a strange mixture of foreboding and a sense of resignation. Unable to foresee

31

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

what was going to happen next, I could only wait in trepidation.

They knew a lot more about me than I about them. They knew I was to collect the letter, which meant they probably knew I was carrying explosives.

Clearly I had to jigsaw my story with what they probably already knew. But what that was I hadn’t the faintest idea. I would have to garner as much of the truth as I could while minimising how much I gave away about myself and what little I knew about the organisation. Had I been older and wiser I would have said nothing.

My shabby orange sleeping bag was unrolled to its full length on the floor while they prodded it with their fingers. At the foot of the bag they felt around the outline of the incriminating packages that they produced triumphantly.

They removed them and layed out the five 200-gram packets of plastique on the desk in front of me.

All eyes turned to me. I tried dissimulation, a ‘What on earth is that and whatever is it doing in my sleeping bag?’ look. It didn’t work.

Two of the detectives went into a role-play ‘bad cop’ and ‘worse cop’ routine; an unexpected development, as I thought at least one of them had to be a ‘good’ cop. Each grabbed tufts of my hair and yanked me backwards until the chair was balanced on its two back legs at a 45-degree angle. I was held in this position while another slapped me about the face.

The faces closed in around me, shouting menacingly in Spanish and in English that I was an anarchist come to kill and maim the happy and peaceful people of Spain.

The scene was being set. I was insecure and disoriented in highly hostile surroundings facing aggressive secret policemen and explicit threats of worse beatings yet to come and implicit threats of torture at the hands of brutal interrogators.

After a few minutes of rough treatment, the top man of the Brigada Político Social (BPS), Comisario General Eduardo Blanco, came into the room. He had probably had been watching events from behind one of the mirrors. The others stood up abruptly, but greeted him rather casually. He sat at the table beside Don Saturnino Yagüe González, the Comisario Jefe, looking pleased with himself. his smile exuded a sensual enjoyment of power. He knew that with my arrest he had earned himself a few ‘Brownie points’. In fact, shortly afterwards he was made head of the Spanish Security Service, the DGS, with the rank of General.

Blanco was a dapper wee man with thin bloodless lips, greying hair, a jowly anaemic face and hooded eyes which glittered snake-like behind his thick yellow-tinted glasses. He bore a remarkable similarity to General Franco. They all did. He was more Goya than El Greco and had the air of a man used to wielding absolute power over his subordinates and prisoners alike. With a nod Blanco introduced himself and his colleague. His voice General Eduardo Blanco, the man who ran Franco’s secret police. croaked like an unoiled hinge and as he spoke he thrust

32

General Eduardo Blanco

his head forward like an inquisitive bird. His face was an inscrutable mask.

Blanco didn’t strike me as demonic. He was neither a Beria nor a Himmler, more of a Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s sinister Minister of Police. His security organisation, unlike that of the NKVD, the KGB or the Gestapo, was ruthless and brutal but it did not have — or at least it did not exercise at that time — the power to arrest and hold prisoners indefinitely, or to make people ‘disappear’.

Those powers, and worse, were left to their lackeys, the unattributable ‘parallel’ and ‘plausibly deniable’ commercial ‘security’ firms such as Otto Skorzeny’s Madrid-based Paladin Group.

But Blanco’s was an important decision-making force in the Spanish power structure. The DGS was the keystone of Francoist law and order: its task was ‘to foil all plots, discover all schemes, contain all sedition, illuminate all intrigues’ — and preserve the Francoist status quo.

This was the first day of my apprenticeship in Francoist interrogation techniques. I was about to be given a master class in the subject of interrogation by the descendants of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. (It was Eymeric, the Grand Inquisitor of Aragón, author of the Directorium, with its five ‘steps’ of preparation before the actual torture and the Dominican monk, Fray Tomás de Torquemada in his ‘Articles of the Inquisition’ who had developed the pitiless work of his office to perfection, indeed almost to an art form.)

Blanco and Yagüe were professional secret policemen. There was no overt aggression during that first confrontation; they left that to their minions. Both men addressed me as Stuart throughout. Yagüe, whose English was good, began by asking what I had been planning to do with the plastique on the desk in front of us like slabs of Granny’s toffee.

I was in a dilemma. Sooner or later I knew I would talk. Heroic gestures of defiance seemed inappropriate. Should I tell the truth — at least about that which I could not deny — say nothing or come up with what I thought would be a plausible story? I had also just been given the briefest foretaste of what to expect if I remained silent. Both telling the truth and staying stumm, seemed counterproductive, given the evidence laid out on the table in front of me. There was also the possibility that this would allow them to put me in the frame à la Delgado and Granado (see Vol 1) for other recent explosions in Madrid.

The BPS had the explosives and there was also the incriminating letter collected from the American Express office. Presumably it contained the details of the planned attentat against Franco. They also had the note with directions, dates, times and the coded recognition signals for my meeting with the Madrid contact.

Clearly my arrest had not been a matter of chance or ‘someone telling lies about me’, as in the case of Joseph K in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The plausible lie seemed a more attractive option.

All the disjointed thoughts which had been streaming through my head during the last hour or so suddenly fell into place with the framework of a story.

A member of the youth section of the Labour Party in Glasgow, I had

33

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Margaret Hart, 1964.

mentioned to a teacher friend, David , that I was moving to London and asked if he could recommend somewhere to stay while I found work.

David gave me the address of a woman he knew in Notting Hill Gate who would put me up, a Margaret Hart. Later, when I told her I was moving on to Paris she gave me the address there of a man called Germinal García with whom I stayed for three nights. He, in turn, introduced to a man who asked me to deliver a package containing anti-Franco propaganda in Madrid, in return for which I received 350 new French francs.

I told them I had hitchhiked from Paris to Perpignan and crossed into Spain on 8 August. Only when I reached Barcelona did I discover that the parcel contained explosives. This left me in an untenable position. I could dump the stuff and return to Britain, but the explosives might have been discovered by an innocent passer-by, leading to a possibly fatal accident.

Handing the explosives in to the police was another possibility, but that would have involved me in lengthy complicated proceedings with the likelihood of not being believed. The other option was to deliver them and get out of the country as soon as possible. I chose to continue on to Madrid.

BLANCO AND YAGÜE were artists and scientists in interrogation techniques.

They understood psychology, physiology and human nature. They watched me closely, noting my every movement and response. They listened attentively at first and didn’t take notes, nor did they make any comments or ask questions, unless I got side-tracked, confused or lost my train of thought and started gabbling. Yagüe would then pull me back on track by asking what I did next or why I did such and such a thing.

That was the easy bit. After going through my story, with linking bits which I made up as I went along I was given a cup of coffee and a cigarette. They then moved into more serious interrogatory mode. Blanco ordered everyone out of the office, apart from the men searching my belongings on the floor.

They went back over my story, point by point, this time taking notes and asking the same questions over and over again. What disturbed me most was that they never really challenged my account of events or took me up on any of the blank spaces or conflicts in my story. My memory was a rubbish heap of inconsequential and poorly remembered details. But it was as though they knew what was fact and what was fiction. Their questions implied they knew everything about my mission: how I had been recruited, where I had received the explosives and all my movements prior to my arrest. The interrogation appeared to be a formality. What broke the spell of infallibility was when Yagüe said I had been trained in weapons and explosives at the ‘terrorist training school near Toulouse’— a town which I had only passed through briefly once, without stopping. But I still didn’t know how much they really knew.

While I was getting into the swing of my story, convincing myself in the process, there was the sound of sharp intakes of breath behind me. The searchers ripping up my green corduroy jacket had discovered the detonators

34

‘We’ve Been Waiting For You...’

in my jacket lining together with the instructions and directions for the rendezvous with my Madrid contact.

Blanco had no grasp of understatement: ‘This is a very serious matter, you know!’ As if I didn’t already know.

What I had done, he continued, was classified in Spanish law as ‘Banditry and Terrorism’; a charge that came under military jurisdiction and automatically incurred the death penalty by the garrotte.

‘Don’t think the British government will protect you,’ he admonished. ‘We have a lot of information on you from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch as well as our own people in Britain and France. We’ve been waiting on your arrival since nine o’clock yesterday morning.

We know, for example, that your operation is timed to coincide with the anniversary of the executions of Delgado and Granado.

‘Don’t you know we have our agents at the core of your organisation. We know everything that goes on.

Our machinery is so efficient, both here and abroad, including London, that anyone who moves pays the Joaquín Delgado and Francisco Granado, executed August 1963. price. Sometimes we don’t even bother the courts, if you take my meaning.’ I took his meaning only too well.

He pointed to a large organisational chart of the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) pinned to the wall behind him. On it were boxes and flow lines of the organisational structure with the names and photographs of known organisers and militants.

Anarchists, he said dismissively, were badly organised. They did not understand the concept of security and were easily kept under surveillance; they were far too open for anything they planned to succeed.

What could I say? I had to agree. Some people were geared to deception. Most people, including me and most anarchists I knew were not — that was one of the Joaquín Delgado at a wreath-laying ceremony (France, 1959). reaons we were anarchists. I began to understand just how steep my learning curve was going to be.

Blanco then produced an album from a desk drawer from which he took out a photograph of myself leaving Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park with two Spanish exiles, Acracio Ruiz and Bernardo Gurucharri, Salva’s brother.

‘You see,’ said Yagüe, ‘your police don’t share the same view of Spain as yourself’. He smiled. ‘We knew about you in London and we have had you under surveillance since you entered Spain’.

‘This was taken in Hyde Park, your temple of free Spanish anarchist exiles (London, 1962).

35

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

speech. I see you appear friendly with Spaniards who are known both to the British police and us as troublemakers.’

He produced other snapshots of Octavio Alberola, Joaquín Delgado and Francisco Abarca and asked if I had met any of these men, particularly Alberola whom he referred to variously as ‘the Mexican’ and ‘Juan el largo’. I said I did not know any of them, nor had I met them.

These looked like someone’s personal photographs. I wondered where they came from, and if they had been found on the two garrotted anarchists, Joaquín Delgado or Francisco Granado, when they were arrested the previous July.

Francisco Abarca, 1964.

Perhaps they had come from the briefcase of Francoist police agent, Jacínto Angel Guerrera Lucas, opportunely ‘stolen’ from Alberola’s car in June 1963.

Known as El Peque, Jacinto (‘Angel’) Guerrero Lucas (see Vol 1) originally made contact with anarchists in the Madrid barrio of Puente de Vallecas in 1960. They put him in touch with Cipriano Mera who introduced him to the FIJL. He attended the FIJL plenum in France as a ‘delegate of the interior’ at the end of 1961 where he learned of the the decision to establish the DI. Questions were raised about his character and it was discovered that he was the son of a policeman and, possibly, a policeman himself. The FIJL, however, gave him the benefit of the doubt and he gained the trust of CNT Secretary Roque Santamaría, Germinal Esgleas, Hiraldo, Octavio Alberola (left) and Jacínto Guerrero Lucas, summer 1963. José Pascual Palacios, Octavio Alberola and others. A Renseignements Généraux (the French police intelligence service) report identifies him as playing a part in the 1962 Spanish bombing campaign, but this may have been to safeguard his double role as agent. (Salvador Gurucharri does not believe Guerrero Lucas was a police agent at this time and is firmly of the opinion that the informer in the case of Delgado and Granado was Inocencio Martinez).

After the mysterious theft of Guerrero Lucas’s document case containing the names and details of anarchist activists inside and outside Spain, and the executions of Delgado and Granado in 1963 , he was marginalised by the FIJL and the DI Lucas, however, had an undoubted genius for duplicity which it would be wrong to deny and he went on to acquire some prominence among the leadership circles of the CNT in the later 1960s. He spoke at official rallies and conferences in Marseilles in 1967 and 1969, and in Toulouse in 1969. He was even nominated for a place on the CNT’s Intercontinental Secretariat. He was finally exposed as a government agent and expelled from the CNT in May 1971. After Franco died he re-emerged as Jacínto Guerrero Lucas, Spanish security service officer, 2000.

36

Another Side Of History

Rafael Vera’s adviser in the Interior Ministry in Madrid during the socialist PSOE era and was heavily involved in the anti-ETA death squads run by the Spanish secret police. What no one has discovered is whether he was driven into duplicity out of self importance, ambition, fear — or if he had always been a policeman.

A few photos were not posed but appear to have been taken by professional surveillance experts with a special wide-angle lens that takes sharp pictures from about 18’ to infinity. Most, however, were personal snapshots taken by friends or family.

‘Juan’ and Abarca I had met in Paris, but I did not let on. I shook my head and told him I had never seen either of them.

‘That’s unfortunate’ said Yagüe. ‘You know that lying will get you nowhere’.

Neither he nor Blanco pursued the matter, though they did give me withering looks.

I was genuinely taken aback at how much they appeared to know. Why had they not arrested me at the frontier? Perhaps the British police had provided the photographs and personal details. I had only just turned eighteen and still retained some lingering naïve idea that whatever the faults of our state, it was at least anti-fascist because it had fought Hitler and Mussolini in World War Two. I became a marginally wiser person at that point. In their heart of hearts, most of the Spanish resistance fighters I had come across held the same illusions about Britain. Because the British Empire had fought the Nazis in World War Two, they believed it must be anti-fascist — though they did not think the alliance with Russia made it communist.

In that room in the centre of Madrid I felt real fear, a fear heightened by the fact I felt isolated, betrayed, confused — and facing the unknown. I was now in another side of history, in a different life.

No one knew where I was, nor was there any hope of help or rescue. In cowboy films this was when the US cavalry appeared on the horizon. In real life there was never a Cavalry troop when you needed one.

The quality of my captors’ information had knocked me for six and I now had serious doubts about the comrades in Paris. There were just too many imponderables. Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t experienced anything like this before and had no idea what to expect next or how I would cope. But strangely, I was no longer frightened. The shock and surprise had numbed my emotions like Novocain and I was prepared for anything. This was exactly the state of mind my interrogators wanted.

The questioning continued throughout the rest of that Tuesday afternoon, evening and into the early hours of the morning. The first session lasted three or four hours, until about seven in the evening when they brought me a coffee and a ham sandwich.

37

UK passport photograph, July 1963.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Guns were on display all the time. Whenever Yagüe and the others left the room, two Policía Armada armed with submachine-guns stood guard by the door. Every time Yagüe returned he wanted more details, but having kept myself as ignorant as possible there was little else I could tell him. I could not betray what I did not know.

Unfortunately, the dynamic of making a statement based on partial truths is that you have to keep adding to it and amending it — all the time giving away a bit more than you intended.

By the end of the day, having pored over a large-scale street map of Paris, I had given them the rue de Lancry, but not the number, which I genuinely could not remember. I also claimed to be confused about Germinal’s name and referred to him throughout as Geronimo. I suppose I was thinking of cowboys and Indians again. After all, Germinal had told me himself he had no direct involvement in my mission, he knew nothing, his flat was presumably clean and as a political refugee in France he was untouchable by the BPS. Also, if they knew enough to arrest me, they must have known the name of the person with whom I stayed.

The interrogations stopped about 11 p.m. They handed me my sleeping bag; I rolled it out on the floor of the interrogation room, eased myself in and was asleep within minutes. It was a welcome escape from reality.

But my escape was short-lived. Just over an hour later, around half-past midnight, I was jerked suddenly out of this safe haven of sleep by a detective shaking me roughly on the shoulder. He indicated I was to get up and go with him. Held by the arm, I was then escorted, groggy and bleary-eyed, through the dark and empty labyrinthine corridors of the Puerta del Sol to a starkly lit room for more questioning.

NIGHTTIME IS THE SECRET POLICEMAN’S best friend. They know it is the best time to break their victims down, when they are at their most vulnerable, half asleep and lacking the confidence that comes with daylight.

Again I had to go through my story chronology in meticulous detail as they probed for my ‘pressure points’. My bullying, shirt-sleeved, interrogators, their faces — in turn — inches from my own, would ask or shout the same questions over and over again. My memory, not good at the best of times, was constantly being tested. But I stuck to what I told them originally, that I could not remember by whom or where I had been given the parcel or who wrote the instructions.

The police acted throughout as though I was holding out on them and the ‘bad’ cops were sent in regularly to bully me with more slaps. Yagüe or his ‘good’ cop deputy would then return insisting that they had no alternative but to believe that I was still not telling the full truth; I had to help them, otherwise it would be worse for me. He asked again and again about the ‘Mexican’, ‘Grand Jean’ or ‘Juan el largo’, the nom de guerre of Octavio Alberola whom I denied meeting or, that if I had, that I had been aware of his identity. Yagüe and

38

‘Our Friends In The Special Branch’

Blanco insisted he had been the key figure in the operation.

They then moved on to the letter I had collected at the American Express office. The handwriting, Alberola’s, was identical to the note with the details for the Madrid rendezvous. The letter, he claimed, contained instructions for the preparation of the bombs and information as to the time and place of the attentat against Franco.

After a few more hours of this circular conversation I was allowed to crawl back into my sleeping bag. The problem was the draining sensation of those drowsy nanoseconds between sleep and harsh reality as full consciousness flooded back in.

So many had been tortured in this building, * Links between right-wing elements in the British security sometimes to the point of death. All I had experienced so services and their fascist colleagues in Franco’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were not unknown. far was a few beatings — so far.

The following morning, Wednesday, 12 August, I In 1929, Colonel Carter, then Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, was passing was again wakened roughly about 7 a.m., still tired. My photographs and information on the activities and stomach knotted as the harsh fluorescent-lit room friendship networks of a London-based Italian anarchist, gradually materialised around me and I took in the ring Emidio Recchioni, to agents of the Italian secret police (OVRA) in London. A Home Office file which was due to of hard faces looking down on me. It had not been a remain closed until 2035 contains copies of OVRA reports nasty dream after all. which had been forwarded to Rome in 1929. One of these A detective took me for a wash and then back to the read: ‘The enclosed recent photograph of Recchioni has provided by Colonel Carter’. Another report to Rome same room for a cup of coffee and another shift of been stated: ‘Recchioni has a personal friendship with Prime questions and more questions.

Minister MacDonald’.

Recchioni was an Italian anarchist born near Ravenna Yagüe arrived about nine o’clock and he went in 1864 who came to London in 1899 after becoming through the ritual of removing the gun from its holster involved in an assassination attempt on Prime Minister and placing it on the table in front of me. Each time he Francesco Crispi. He opened a delicatessen in Soho’s Old did this I fantasised briefly about the scenario of Compton Street called King Bomba which became grabbing the gun and shooting my way out. I discovered legendary for the quality of its imported Italian foodstuffs.

The shop also became an important centre of intellectual later that this was a popular trick of the Brigada Social. and political activity against the Mussolini dictatorship.

These guns, apparently, were not loaded, but the Influential activists and writers who frequented the shop psychology I never understood. Presumably it was a included the Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, George Orwell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Emma Goldman and many others. power thing and an ever-present threat.

Recchioni’s campaign against Mussolini began in Yagüe told me that someone else was coming to 1921 when the Italian ‘Fascio’ opened an office at 25 Noel ‘talk’ to me, someone who also spent a great deal of time Street, Soho, and by 1929 rumours were circulating that he in England and who knew all about my circle of friends. was organising and financing plots to kill the Italian fascist leader. The Home Office file reveals that Carter did The mystery man arrived a short time later and took a everything in his power to oppose Recchioni’s application seat at the desk beside Yagüe. He was businesslike and for naturalisation under successive Conservative kept his jacket on despite the heat. He was another governments, but he was overruled soon after MacDonald arrived in Downing Street. Lord Trenchard, who became beady-eyed Franco clone with the standard BPS Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police after Carter’s moustache. departure wrote, in a ‘very secret’ note: ‘Recchioni was His English was good, and he appeared to know a lot naturalised in spite of a hostile report from the about me. He claimed to have been the BPS Legat in Superintendent of the Special Branch who called him “an intriguer of the first order”. But after discussion with Sir Spain’s London Embassy. He said he had good friends John Pedder (Principal Assistant Secretary at the Home among Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.* There was also Office) Colonel Carter felt he could not oppose naturalisation’. something familiar about him which I couldn’t place.

39

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The new man’s questioning focused on general points: my background, political activities in Glasgow and London, the names of friends and who knew whom. At one point I remember being stuck for an explanation when he produced a crumpled sheet of paper found in my jacket pocket with the words ‘In the early morning of ... the offices of Iberia in London were damaged when two anarchists threw …’ The sentence stopped there.

It was an article I had started to write in Paris for the FIJL newspaper about the smashing of the plate glass window of the offices of Iberia Airlines in London. It referred to the incident for which my friend Adam Nicolson had been arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. I hadn’t been happy with the opening sentence and had crumpled the paper up, absent-mindedly putting it in my pocket.

I then suddenly realised where I might have seen him before — at Bow Street Magistrate’s Court when my friend Adam Nicolson appeared there, charged with causing criminal damage to the enormous plate glass windows of Iberia Airlines. There was a tall, clean-shaven Mediterranean-looking guy — he looked a bit like the golfer Tony Jacklin — with us in the public gallery who kept talking urgently to an usher, and looking in our direction during the hearing. Was it the same man I asked myself, panicking somewhat.

My response was to waffle. I mumbled something about picking it up to scribble on while in London, but denied knowing what it referred to. He sensed my discomfort but did not pursue the point, saying simply that he thought he knew the incident to which it referred.

The questioning continued much as before. But when it was over I was told to collect my belongings and, flanked by two armed Policía Armada, the grey uniformed ‘grises’ and two BPS detectives, I was ushered along more corridors and up a narrow flight of stairs to the top floor and into a smaller corridor which ran the full length of the back quarter area of the Ministério.

Leading off the left-hand side of this narrow corridor were doors to small, cell-like rooms. A detective unlocked one of these, indicating that this was my room. It was a dark attic with a single truckle bed covered by a rough brown horsehair blanket, a small table and a chair. There was no room for anything else. The bulb in the ceiling gave off a weak and unpleasant light. A small barred window high in the wall overlooked the central patio of security headquarters, which was also a car park for the BPS and their fleet of undercover vehicles. When I peered out I was surprised to see this included an ice cream van as well as a number of taxis; this gave a whole new meaning to ‘Mr Whippy’.

The focal viewpoint of the window, however, was the Ministério clock directly opposite me, the reloj de la Gobernación. This not-very-impressive tower crowned with a gazebo-like structure and lightning rod was Madrid’s equivalent of Big Ben — the heart of Spain.

My captors shut the door behind them and turned the key in the lock, leaving an armed policeman seated in the corridor. With a sigh of resignation I

40

Fernando Carballo Blanco

settled back on the bed and closed my eyes while I tried to gather my thoughts.

Outside the relentless passage of time was marked out by the quarter-hour peals from the Gobernación clock opposite. I dozed off in a few minutes.

When I awoke the room and its dull light was exactly the same, I didn’t look at my watch but I sensed only a short time had passed. A detective brought me a sandwich and wine in a cup. He was pleasant and tried to be sympathetic. He told me, in good English, that his wife had died a short time before and he was thinking of leaving the police. This strange confession made him surprisingly human. When he left I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling; not thinking at all.

I was in the grip of forces beyond my control and experience. I was like a child again. The initiative was completely out of my hands.

After a sandwich I was taken back to the interrogation room and put through my story yet again. Later, while snoozing in my garret cell, a group of BPS detectives bundled into the room and told me to get dressed. We were going for a ride. My heart raced. Was I about to be taken out and shot under the infamous ley de fugas, the so-called ‘fugitives law’? This was the traditional Francoist way of getting rid of enemies of the state, by shooting them dead and claiming they had been killed attempting to escape.

I was squeezed between two detectives in the back seat of the police ‘taxi’ that had brought me to the security HQ on the day of my arrest. It was the evening of Thursday 13 August. Good job it was not a Friday.

Yagüe, seated in the front with the driver, turned to tell me we were going to the rendezvous. The taxi drew up by a busy café and Yagüe sat me down at a pavement table while he sat at an adjoining table. I was clutching a handkerchief and was instructed to remain there until approached by my contact. If I drew attention to myself in any way, Yagüe said his men would shoot me; after all, they already had the evidence they required to show that I was a terrorist. I took my place, like a lemon, and waited for something to happen.

A recognition signal I had not told the police about was that I had to carry an English newspaper. I hoped whoever my contact was he (or she) would smell a rat when there was no newspaper, and avoid me. As far as I could see, most of the café seats were occupied by plainclothes BPS men and women. Up and down the pavements on both sides of the street I saw other BPS officers I recognised, paseando — strolling arm in arm — among the crowds; parked by the pavement were cars with policemen, all waiting for my contact to appear.

There was certainly no shortage of secret police in Spain. (In addition to the five previously named senior BPS officers, others included: Don Alfredo Robledo Tejedor; Don Antonio Jesús Gómez Saez; Don Jesús Simón Cristobal; Don Antonio Cerezo Trabada; Don Francisco Colino Hernanz; Don Felipe Pérez Luengo and Don Joaquín Gómez Zarranz.)

I sat for two hours drinking cup after cup of café solo, nervously scanning the river of faces passing before me for some flicker of recognition.

Yagüe was becoming increasingly edgy. He whispered that if I had tricked

41

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

them I would suffer for it when we returned to HQ. Finally he decided he had had enough and told me to finish my coffee and walk up and down the pavement a few times and then head for a police car waiting at the next corner.

I wandered nervously and somewhat conspicuously up and down the pavement in front of the café like a bear with a sore paw, all the time praying to myself that the contact would not appear. But August 1964 was not a lucky month for me. Nor was it lucky for my contact.

The moment I moved towards the car someone tapped my shoulder. I turned round, hoping it was Arrest of an anarchist (archive photograph — Fundación de Estudios Libertarios Anselmo Lorenzo, Madrid — anarchist library). policeman, but it was a short and wiry dark-haired man of about thirty with a weather-beaten face. Pointing towards my hand he asked me something in Spanish. Without saying anything I looked at my watch and shook my head as though he had asked me the time, at the same time giving him the most imploring look I could, trying desperately to signal with my eyes that he should get out of there, pronto.

It was too late. BPS men waving guns surrounded us while pedestrians and people seated at the café tables backed away, staring with horrified incredulity.

I was handcuffed and dragged off to one car and my contact was dragged off in another, back to the Ministerio.

I was taken to my usual interrogation room. Fernando Carballo Blanco, my Fernando Carballo Blanco. contact, was taken somewhere else.

Chief Inspector Don Gonzalo Toledo Julián started on me again, going back through every detail of my story point by point. He spoke with the slow vicious sincerity of a man swearing a vindictive oath. Whenever I said I did not know or could not remember something his men lifted me by my hair, belted me across the face and accused me of being, among other things, an ‘existentialist’, something they obviously thought was an insult. I imagine it was my green corduroy jacket that gave him this idea.

COMISARIO YAGÜE’s job now was to pave the way for a confession from me that would convince not just a Francoist military court — which didn’t need any convincing at the best of times — but also a hostile and cynical world beyond.

He needed to overcome any remaining psychological barriers that might prevent me from making such a statement which would stand up when exposed to a public trial. The last thing he wanted was a martyr.

Normally with people like me he would have depended on his ability to manipulate or persuade without the need to resort to physical violence. But he obviously felt he still did not have

42

On The Nature Of Torture

the statement he wanted so he decided to proceed more aggressively.

In regimes such as Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union, Pinochet’s Chile and Franco’s Spain in earlier days, the words of secret policemen are normally supplemented by differing degrees of physical abuse or torture: the plastic bag over the head, ice cubes inserted in the rectum, pliers or high voltage electricity applied to the testicles or, as in the case of Chilean guitarist and singer Victor Jara, having your fingers and wrists pulped by Pinochet’s soldiers to stop him writing and playing his powerful songs of dissent and protest in the Santiago de Chile football stadium before they murdered him in cold blood.

Ad hoc brutality like that , however, was unprofessional and had more to do with vengeful security forces demonstrating their power than extracting information. Genuinely useful confessions, as Justinian recognised nearly 2,000 years before in his Digest, are never obtained by torture.

‘Torture is untrustworthy, perilous and deceptive. For most men, by patience or the severity of the torture, come so to despise torture that the truth cannot be elicited from them, others are so impatient that they will lie in any direction rather than suffer torture, so it happens that they depose to contradictions and accuse not only themselves but others.’

Whether or not Yagüe had read Justinian I don’t know, but he did not put me through anything so dramatic or painful as physical torture. I suspect this had more to do with my nationality than his sensitivities. The man was an infamously brutal interrogator devoid of any compassion. He also knew I was shortly going to stand trial and the attention of the world would be focused on how he and his men had handled me during my arrest and pre-trial detention.

He used the psychological approach to show his total control of the situation. The fact I was unable to provide names or helpful descriptions of my Paris contacts and their whereabouts, other than Germinal’s address in the Comisario Bretanos, General Blanco’s right hand man. rue de Lancry, he took as either as wilful recalcitrance or valiant obstinacy rather than genuine ignorance and a poor memory on my part.

Feeling he was not getting anywhere with his strategy of honeyed voice sandwiched between bouts of aggressive abuse and cracks around the head from his detectives, Yagüe nodded to his men.

I was dragged across the room and held by the arms, neck and hair and forced to look through the one-way mirror into the adjoining room. As I watched, Carballo was dragged in and tied to a chair. One policeman took a coil of rope from a drawer and expertly bound Carballo’s ankles to the chair legs, passing the ends of the rope round his waist and arms. The other man lashed Carballo’s hands and forearms to the arms of the chair. Then, pulling out his automatic pistol one of the policemen proceeded to hammer his wrists with the 43

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Above and below: the calabozos of the Dirección General de Seguridad

butt, while the other systematically punched him in the kidneys and stomach.

Although I was horrified at the sight of this coldblooded, professional and ruthless brutality, it did not make any difference to my answers. The reality was I could not talk because I knew nothing about the people and the mechanism of the organisation to be a danger to it. There was nothing I could add to what I had already told them about the people who had given me the explosives or where I had met them, for the simple reason that I did not know. My interrogators knew as much and probably a lot more than I did, and they knew it.

I was surprised to discover that detainees in Francoist Spain could not remain in BPS custody for longer than seventy-two hours without charges being brought against them. But they had ways round this.

On my fourth day in custody, 14 August, Carballo and I were taken downstairs and handed over to the Jefatura Superior de Policía de Madrid, Policía Armada, the grises who occupied the ground floor offices and the cells of the subterranean dungeons, the infamous sotanos, beneath the building.

Here we went through the process of having our fingerprints and handprints recorded, first the fingers of one hand, then those of the other. This was reassuring in a way. At least now we had been registered by the Inspección de Guardia we were ‘in the system’ so it was unlikely we would ‘disappear’ to be found later in a ditch with bullets through the backs of our heads.

Come dungeons dark and garrotte grim THE DUNGEONS, los calabozos, beneath the Ministerio de la Gobernación in the Puerta del Sol had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century. No improvements had been made to them in the last hundred years. The dark, low-vaulted subterranean chambers were reminiscent of a Dürer etching of Dante’s Inferno or Dickens’s description of Marshallsea Prison in Little Dorrit. The air reeked of blocked drains, old urine, acrid sweat and damp. Dim, naked light bulbs cast a weak light and dark shadows down damp stone passageways hewn from the solid rock. Daylight glimmered weakly through narrow arcs of thick, translucent glass bricks set in the wall at pavement level. It was also surprisingly noisy.

44

In The ‘Calabozos’

Carballo was shoved into a cell at the far end of the reception area while I was escorted to another at the other side. The sign on my door read: ‘Incomunicado y vigilado con guardia a la vista’ — no unauthorised contact allowed. I was to be to be guarded day and night by an armed officer.

The only people permitted access to me were BPS or the military juez instructor, the examining magistrate.

Even in the case of the latter, under whose jurisdiction I was, the jefe superior de policía had to be informed on all occasions. The door was left open and a guard sat nursing a sub-machine gun in the corridor.

The cells were narrow, dark and damp; primitive rock tombs with a stone slab for a bed, straw-filled hessian mattress and a foulsmelling rough horsehair blanket for warmth. What tragedies had their walls enclosed over the centuries? It was a saga in which I was now a direct protagonist. I settled back on the lumpy straw mattress and dozed into unconsciousness.

I was woken by the raucous banter of a group of women, young, middle-aged and old, laughing and joking with each other and the duty policemen as they swept and scrubbed the floor of the central reception area and the steps of the main staircase. I felt itchy and uncomfortable and was horrified to see my mattress and my legs and chest crawling with chinches. In their hungry state these translucent blood-sucking bedbugs are the size of tiny fleas, but when gorged they become the colour and size of crimson, bloated Ladybirds. These were crimson with my blood!

I gazed unseeingly at the walls and bars, wondering what was next on the cards when my train of thought was interrupted by a voice from a crackly radio on the guardia’s desk and the mention of my name. Intrigued, I asked the guard in what I hoped was understandable pidgin Castilian grunts and sign language what the report had said, but he looked at me blankly.

The BPS came for me early the next morning to sign me out of the grises’ custody and take me back upstairs. Yagüe’s was no longer coldly professional; his mood had swung to one of manic hysteria. He exploded like a tornado, without warning, pushing his face into mine shouting about how I could have killed innocent women and children.

It didn’t seem the right time to argue that throughout the whole of the current FIJL campaign no one had been killed — apart from the two anarchists Delgado and Granado, whom they had murdered — or even seriously injured.

He went to his side of the desk, opened a drawer and produced a

45

Order of vigilance by Policía Armada on Delgado and Granado in the calabozos of the DGS, 1963.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Letter and instructions collected from the offices of American Express, Madrid, 11 August 1964.

typed confession that he pushed in front of me to sign.

By now the stresses of the previous four days had taken their toll. My physical and mental resources at that moment were exhausted and I was now resigned to the consequences of my action. I did not really care if they shot, strangled or imprisoned me. I was tired, disoriented, bruised and worried, but my overriding concern was how my Mum and Gran would take the news. All I wanted to do was sleep and distance myself as far from my tormentors as possible.

Yagüe clearly was not going to waste any more time or energy looking for information he realised I did not have. He was a professional policeman who knew when to go with rather than against human nature. The means he used on me were far more effective than torture: stress, guile and good intelligence.

But he also needed to procure a credible public confession and, if possible — like the Inquisition or in the Stalinist show trials — a conversion before I was finally consigned to the flames, firing squad or garrotte.

He was confident in his powers of persuasion. The ‘torture’ had to come from within my own mind as opposed to anything he did.

Curiously, the final paragraph in the statement they gave me to sign referred, somewhat gratuitously I thought, to the letter I had collected from the American

Express offices.

Were they trying to tell me that the plan was thin on cunning? As the letter must have been posted the same night or the day after I left Paris, they were bemused by the fact I had not brought it with me.

At the time, I believed the plan to be as complicated as it needed to be.

Perhaps my role had been that of Charlton Heston at the end of the film in which he starred as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar or El Cid Campeador, a dead man riding out on his trusty steed Babieca, with his sword Colada strapped to his hand and a pole up his arse to rally the troops.

I Walk The Line

The underground corridors of the DGS.

THAT EVENING I WAS SENT back to the dank subterranean cells. All in all I spent four days being shuttled up and down the stairs of the Seguridad, being slapped and knocked around, allowed to drop off to sleep, then woken after fifteen minutes and dragged off in a befuddled state to go through my story, boringly

46

Fear And Loathing In The Calle San Ricardo

and repetitively, over and over. I also had to watch Carballo being pistolwhipped again and again.

The most frightening incident occurred near the end of my four-day stay at the Seguridad. I was being taken downstairs when my BPS escorts totally unexpectedly and apropos of nothing rushed me to an open landing window.

They twisted my arms behind my back and a paralysing grip on the back of my neck forced the top half of my body out through the window above the small street which runs along the back of the Seguridad, the calle de San Ricardo.

Gelabert, holding me tightly, hissed in my ear that in case I was toying with the idea of jumping, I should know that this was the very window out of which they had bundled former commissar Julián Grimau García, the Communist Party member executed the previous year for ‘war crimes’ during the Civil War. Down we continued, deep into the underground caverns of the Seguridad until we came to a dark Lshaped room with a long, narrow, white tiled passageway. At the far end of this was a brightly-lit and sinister looking chair with straps and clamps attached to its arms, legs and headrest.

Along the centre of the passage was a small channel in the floor, covered with wooden boards. A tall lever stuck out of the floor at the other end, facing the chair. It looked like a points lever by a railway track or in a signal box. The scene was ominous. My first thought was ‘Jings, Crivvens and Help Ma Boab’. This was the garotte and I was about to be strangled then and there!

Despite my growing sense of panic I allowed myself to be clamped and strapped into the chair, wondering whether or not this was the right time to shout something defiant and noble.

My escort walked back along the passageway, behind the blindingly bright lights, to stand by the lever. Calle San Ricardo. The rear windows of the DGS. It was from All I could see was his face and hands gripping the lever one of these Julián Grimau was thrown in November 1962. and behind him other vague faces in the dark. Beside the * Yagüe and Gelabert had also been the senior officers in the Grimau case. The two junior BPS officers responsible man holding the lever was someone adjusting another for his ‘defenestration’ (which also happened while he was device on a tripod. The atmosphere was electric. All I being taken down to the Inspección de Guardia for registration) were Ramón González Morales and Luis was conscious of was the thumping of my heart.

Suddenly someone shouted ‘listo’(ready), and there Muñoz Sáez. Grimau had been arrested in Madrid on 7 November1962 where he was beaten and tortured and was a blinding flash from the tripod as he pulled the then pushed out of the window of the Dirección General lever and I heard the sound of clanking gears. I thought de Seguridad by the two BPS detectives who claimed he to myself, ‘This is it, me old china’ — the end, not with a had tried to escape. It appears to have been a panic-driven attempt to explain away the terrible injuries he had bang, but a clunk and a click. received at their hands. But he lived to be executed the My seat suddenly swivelled around ninety degrees following year. Grimau was just one of more than 100 antion its axis like some demented Dalek, and there was Francoists tried by court martial in the spring of 1963.

47

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

another bright flash. Then it dawned on me what they were doing. I was in the Gabinete de Identificación and this was what I later learned was an ‘anthropometric’ chair. They were taking my police mugshot,* full face and profile. I tried blowing my cheeks out in the hope of disguising my appearance, but it was pointless; all I got for my trouble was a slap across the face from an irritated photographer who had his own views on client satisfaction, and another session on the Dalek.

The Examining Magistrate

My police portrait.

Police photos were called mugshots because in the early days of police photography most criminals made faces for the camera and had to be physically restrained until a decent shot had been taken.

ON THE MORNING of my fourth and final day in police custody, Saturday 15 August, Carballo and I were taken by a heavily armed convoy to the HQ of the First Military Region of Spain to face the next stage of our Calvary. Before we left the Seguridad, however, some top-level visitors came with a retinue of followers-on to gloat over us, silently and briefly, through the doors of the interrogation rooms. Fernando told me later that these had included Franco’s infamous Minister of the Interior, General Camilo Alonso Vega, and his Director General of Security (DGS), Carlos Arias Navarro, a military prosecutor during the Civil War and close friend of Franco’s who came to be known as ‘the butcher of Malaga’. These two men were the principal architects of Franco’s repression.

Five years later Arias Navarro was to replace Carrero Blanco as Prime Minister when an ETA commando blew the latter to hell in a handcart by a carefully executed culvert bomb in Madrid.

At the barracks we were handed over to the military to be interrogated by the recently appointed juez instructor, the examining magistrate of the Juzgado Militar Especial Nacional de Actividades Extremistas, Lieutenant-Colonel Balbás Planelles.

Spanish criminal law was based on inquisitorial principles in which all preliminary inquiries are carried out by an examining magistrate, as opposed to the British adversarial system of rigorous cross-examination of the accused and the accuser.

Balbás was a newcomer to the job. I was lucky. He had only recently replaced the soulless and sadistic ‘inquisitor colonel’, Don Enrique Eymar Fernández, the infantry colonel who headed the Primera Región Militar and the Juzgado Militar Especial from January 1958 until March 1964 and was Franco’s personal appointee as ‘special’ military judge responsible for prosecuting subversion. His writ as both magistrate and policeman ran the length and breadth of Spain; he could go anywhere at will, including into the prisons, and do anything he wanted to his suspects, with impunity. He even had his own office in the Dirección General de Seguridad where the secret policemen of the Brigada Politíco Social were at his personal orders.

Eymar was a sadist with power of life and death. His victims were

48

The Examining Magistrate

rumoured to have eclipsed even those of Torquemada and since the end of the Civil War in 1939 he was reputed to have been personally responsible for the torture, executions and murders of more than 12,000 people.

Fortunately for me, this wounded war veteran officially ‘retired’ in March 1964, four months before my arrest. In fact he was forced to ‘retire’ as a result of the international outrage which followed the 1963 executions of the beaten and tortured communist Julián Grimau and the anarchists, Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granado. Eymar personally presided over all three executions.

Balbás was a different kettle of fish. He was over fifty, but still in his prime; a tall, imposing, square-jawed figure in riding breeches and highly polished boots, a highly polished bald pate with close-cropped white hair at the sides and a large silver-grey full military moustache who looked for all the world like the villainous and treacherous General Huerta in the film Viva Zapata! His matt complexion looked as though it might have been lightly talcum-powdered and his neck bulged out of his tightly buttoned collar.

My ‘examination’ took place in a room with only a desk and three chairs — one for him, his interpreter-secretary, a captain, and myself. A brooding paterfamilias photograph of Franco hung on a wall behind him. Balbás’s voice was deep and mellow and his demeanour was amiable and straightforward as he told me I was being charged under the Decree Law of 1960 on Military Rebellion and Banditry and Terrorism (Decreto-Ley 1974/60 de Rebelión Militar y Bandidaje y Terrorismo). When reading, Balbás had a curiously disarming habit of adjusting the gold pince-nez clamped to his nose, a gesture which somehow made him seem less intimidating.

Our ‘examinations’ lasted a few hours and involved going through my police statement and amplifying it where he felt my story required more detailed explanation. Then it was Carballo’s turn and I was sent out to sit on a bench in the hall with two armed soldiers on either side of me.

Once Balbás had finished with me we were taken down to the barracks square, ushered into police cars and driven under military escort, with jeeps and motorcycle outriders, to the notorious Carabanchel Prison on the outskirts of Madrid.

When we were handed over to the prison authorities on the Saturday afternoon, I was in an unemotional and trance-like state of exhaustion. The events of the previous week now seemed distant. I was no longer ‘master of my fate’ or ‘captain of my soul’. My destiny was now in the hands of others. Looking back, it seems strange, but at the time I felt quite indifferent to my circumstances and seemed only to see the surreal side of things.

49

General Huerta (photofit likeness of Colonel Balbás).

Big Brother: portraits of the Caudillo, Francisco Franco de Bahamonde, looked down from every wall.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Carabanchel Alto

The Prisión Provincial de Madrid, Carabanchel Alto, in the 1980s. A number of the galleries shown here had not yet been built in 1964.

THE PRISIÓN PROVINCIAL DE MADRID clings like an enormous Martian red spacecraft to the slopes of Carabanchel Alto in the southern suburbs of Madrid. Carabanchel was Spain’s central remand (preventive) prison and played a pivotal role in the Francoist penal system (coincidentally, the prison was opened for business around the same time the first UFOs were first being spotted in the USA at the start of anti-Red hysteria early in the Cold War). It was the dictator’s redbrick university where students matriculated with honours degrees in either crime and corruption or politics and dissent. Prisoners didn’t normally remain in Madrid longer than eighteen months or two years.

Built by forced labour in the 1940s to contain the massive number of defeated victims and opponents of the newly victorious military regime, Carabanchel replaced the pre-war Madrid jails: Porlier (which in June 1939 held 4,000+ prisoners); Torrijos (3,000+); Yeserias (3,000+); Ventas (4,000+); San Antón (2,000+); Atocha (2,000+); Santa Rita (4,000+); Comendadoras (1,000+); Santa Engracia (1,000+); Claudio Coello (1000+); Duque de Sexto (800+); Conde de Toreno (700+). There were also unknown numbers of prisoners held in the many concentration camps around Madrid as well as those being held in the basement cells of the Dirección General de Seguridad, the 10 comisarias de vigilancia and the various Falangist centres. All in all it has been estimated there were around 50,000 prisoners in the Madrid area alone in the year immediately after the Francoist victory.

Carabanchel was the jewel in the repressive crown. It had been the epicentre of the reign of post-Civil War terror in the 1940s; by the 1950s and early 1960s it had established a reputation for ferocious brutality and inhuman conditions. By 1964, however — although still unfinished — it was considered a model prison.

I had heard so many horror stories about Carabanchel that my chest was 3a galería and patio No tb ui lt

6a galería

Visits and execution chamber Centro

ría 1a gale n and io t p e Rec

Inf irm ar y

patio ría and 5a gale

No tb ui lt in

19 64

Not bu ilt in 19 64

7a galería

50

Punishment and condemned cells

atory Reform

W or ks ho ps

Carabanchel Prison

tight with foreboding and guts watery as we drove through its gates into the outer courtyard. Our escort of soldiers and Policía Armada tumbled out of their vehicles, machine-guns at the ready, and took up positions around us.

Once through the barred entrance into the gloomy reception area our army escorts removed our handcuffs and signed us over like pieces of freight to men in dark olive-coloured uniforms with silver- and gold-braided caps and epaulettes. We were then taken through long wide corridors through an apparently unending series of barred gates. At each of these stood a warder, a funcionario, responsible for opening and locking that particular partition.

Finally we came to a long and high gallery where we were ushered into a large holding cell, the celdas de cacheo, where we were searched and our clothes and belongings removed, listed and dropped into a big cardboard box. Six or seven other prisoners were sitting around on the stone-flagged floor while others sat uncomfortably on wooden benches around the cell.

Every so often the door would be unbolted and more prisoners would file in or be called by name and leave.

This was the first opportunity Carballo and I had had to talk about the arrest. Using sign language and gestures I asked him how he was. He lifted his shirt and showed me his swollen wrists and bruised stomach and kidneys. They were masters at inflicting the maximum amount of pain with the minimum outward display of their brutal handiwork. Carballo was remarkably cheerful in spite of his injuries.

Then it was Buggins’s turn. The door opened and my name was called out by a green-uniformed guard who escorted me to the adjoining room, the dactilografía, for my official induction into the Spanish penal system — and yet more fingerprinting. This process was known as el piano.

I was handed a pair of brown horsehair trousers and jacket, a blue striped shirt, and a pair of canvas covered shoes with rope soles, alpargatas, and told to strip and change. The next stop was to collect my bedroll. A strong-smelling straw-filled mattress with two brown blankets made from the same itchy-coo material as the trousers and jacket was thrust into my outstretched arms.

51

External views of Carabanchel.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

What! No sheets or pyjamas? I thought to myself. But by that time I knew enough to keep those thoughts to myself.

Prisoners didn’t warrant sheets unless they paid for them, only coarse grey blankets and a chinche-infested straw mattress. An ordenanza, a prison orderly, then escorted me to the pivotal point of the jail, the ‘centro’.

Top: reception gallery. Below: glass-bricked entrance to the Centro and the main body of the prison.

CARABANCHEL, MADRID’S ALCATRAZ, appeared to have been modelled loosely on the Pantheon in Rome.

Laid out like a cartwheel, its four main galleries fed out from the saucer-domed central nave to the high walls which formed the outer rim of the prison. The main administrative office with its panopticon view of all the galleries was located in the nave, below the dome.

We came into this spacious nave through the primera galería, the induction gallery where new prisoners were marshalled, initial processing took place, where screws slept at night or during siesta time in small cells and where the offices of the jefes de servicio, the chief warders, and the director were located. Special prisoners were also held here on occasion.

Around me I could see three other long galleries, with the numbers 3, 4, 5 and 7 above their respective barred gates. I wondered briefly where 2 and 6 had gone, but that was a passing thought. In fact, they hadn’t yet been built.

I was impressed. Narrow windows made of translucent glass bricks circled almost the entire circumference below the saucer dome. Four illuminated stained glass panels were positioned at the four points of the compass depicting Cibeles, blind justice, Roman justice in the form of the crucifixion of Christ, Christ the King and mercy in the image of Mary, the mother.

This basilica of repression made it architecturally clear how closely intertwined were Roman Catholicism and Francoist legitimacy.

The dazzling August sunlight bounced off the brilliant white interior emphasising the geometric pattern of the black and white marble flagged floor. The contrasting squares on the floor gave the impression of a masonic temple of Solomonic proportions.

The walls were stark white to knee level and then dark green, with stone seats built into them. High,

52

Processing

vertical windows adjoined either side of each of the barred gateways to three of the high cellular galleries, making the place appear lighter still.

The focal point of this Francoist cathedral was a simulacrum of the building in which it was contained. It was a circular and flat-roofed rotunda about twenty-five feet in diameter, a catafalque-like structure built on a platform with external steps leading from the landing at the top of the stairs up to its roof.

I could not make up my mind as to whether it looked like an airfield control tower, a captured flying saucer or a replica of the tomb of St Peter in the Vatican.

Records of every prisoner held or executed in Carabanchel since the mid 1940s were kept here. The roof of the centro also doubled as a high altar on which priests celebrated high mass every Sunday, feast days and all of the many holy days in the Roman Catholic calendar. Prisoners stood nine deep in serried ranks in each of the three cellular galleries listening to the echoing litanies, the solemn singing of the Miserere with its harsh descants, and the bells, bugles and whistles of the fascist tridentine mass.

Set low into the base of the centro were windows made of thick translucent glass bricks, and steps led down to a subterranean level. I discovered later these led to the cells where condemned men spent their last few hours of life before they were strapped into the medieval strangulation and spine crushing device known as the garrote-vil. (In Barcelona’s Modelo prison executions took place in the patio, in the open air.)

The ordenanza accompanying me told me to wait at the perimeter of the rotunda while he took the now frighteningly thick dossier, my expediente, into this glasshouse for archiving.

He beckoned me inside a few minutes later. This ‘rotunda of illustrious souls’ was a hive of bureaucratic activity run entirely by inmates. These prisoner clerks faced out towards the three main galleries, typing, writing, indexing or filing. A row of desks down the centre completed the layout.

A funcionario lounged at the far end, his feet on the table and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He was sipping a coffee while reading a newspaper which had our mugshots filling most of the front page. I was a bit nonplussed. It was the first time I had seen how the press was handling our arrest. The sinister-looking fullfront and profile police photographs were enough to put the fear of God into me, let alone the world at large.

53

The Centro: The steps on the left lead up to the makeshift altar; other steps lead down to the kitchens and provide an alternative access to the execution chamber.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Prison index cards of Delgado and Granado. The top card above is marked ‘for completion of capital penalty’. The card below is marked with a cross indicating the death sentence has been carried out.

Some of the prisoner clerical workers were dressed in hairy brown trousers similar to those with which I had just been issued, but most wore ordinary casual clothes and appeared relaxed.

A hush descended as the escribientes turned to examine me in the doorway.

The screw put down his paper and made some humorous crack, obviously at my expense, at which most of the clerks laughed. He went back to reading his sports pages. Interest in my presence passed and the buzz of the office returned to a more natural level as the clerk dealing with my file got down to business.

Victor, the clerk dealing with my file, was in his early thirties. He was friendly, spoke passable English and smoked ‘Bisonte’ cigarettes, ‘blonde’ tobacco from the Canary Islands, in an ostentatiously long cigarette holder. He told me he was a writer ‘on the street’, a bit of an intellectual and, he whispered, a ‘radical’.

My file was open in front of him; on it was stamped in red ink Terrorismo y Bandidaje: Vigilancia!

Having gone through his checklist of questions he gave me a prison number and gallery. Then, looking around to see if he was being watched he produced the fichas (index cards) of Delgado and Granado. The sight of these had a chilling effect on me; they were normal A5 size card indexes with the stark words ‘ultima pena’ underlined in red ink across the release date box.

Victor quickly explained prison procedures to me.

Because I was awaiting a summary court martial on a charge which automatically carried the death penalty, I would be kept in solitary confinement as a maximum security prisoner in the septima galería (seventh gallery) until my consejo de guerra.

In a clumsy attempt to reassure me, he added that I wouldn’t have long to wait, as summary or ‘drumhead’ courts martial were usually held in a matter of days, or a few weeks at the very most. Normal courts-martial took up to six months.

No one would be allowed to communicate with me without the written permission of the military examining magistrate and the Dirección General de Seguridad. I would be on 24-hour watch, which meant my bed, bedding and all my belongings would be removed following the first morning recount (recuento) and not returned until the last recuento at night. My light would be on 24-hours a day and my cell would probably be inspected two or three times every hour.

I would not be allowed out of my cell during the tenday quarantine, known as ‘el periodo sanitario’. Even then

54

Pedro ‘el cruel’

exercise would be limited to the siesta period when the other prisoners were locked up for their afternoon snooze between 2 and 4 p.m.

Pedro 'el cruel' VICTOR WISHED ME LUCK and then, loaded down with my bedding, plastic cup, aluminium plate and spoon, I walked with the cabo the twenty yards or so across the echoing marble flag floor to the high barred iron gateway to the septima galería (seventh gallery), ‘home’ to prisoners charged with ‘blood crimes’, crimenes de sangre, socially dangerous criminals, PSs or peligrosos sociales, Spain’s incorrigible recidivists — ‘scum’ as they were called in Partick.

I contemplated the high-vaulted ceiling of the gallery and the thick watery green glass brick wall at the far end and scanned the four empty silent landings on either side. So this was to be where I would live for the foreseeable future. I wondered for just how long? * The orderly rang a bell on the gate and shouted: ‘Don Pedro. Hay dos nuevos ingresos’ (Two new ones for you). A minute or so passed and then a burly greyhaired funcionario with a coarse, brutal face ambled out of his office. He wore a dark blue shirt that marked him out as a Falangist of ‘the first hour’. On his left sleeve he wore a curious badge with a swastika. I discovered later that this was the emblem of the Hermandad de la Division Azúl. The silver braid on his epaulettes and cap denoted he was a warder of lower rank; uniforms of senior officers were decorated with gold braid.

Don Pedro was probably the most infamous screw in in the Francoist prison service. He was a character straight out of Weird Tales. Apart from the fact that one of Pedro’s eyes was set disconcertingly at thirty degrees to the other, he bore a remarkable resemblance to Ernest * The septima galería Borgnine as the sadistic jailer Fatso in From Here to Carabanchel’s galleries were each originally designed to Eternity, the one who beats the Sinatra character to death hold 700 prisoners. During the regime’s clamp-down on Grand Orient freemasons after World War Two, the septima and is challenged to a knife fight by the Clift character, alone held 1200 of the 7000 freemasons imprisoned in who kills him but is mortally wounded himself.

Carabanchel for almost a year. Freemasonry and masonic With sinking heart it dawned on me that this screw conspiracies to subvert Catholic Spain were an obsession was the infamous ‘Pedro el cruel’, a prison warder with Franco. He wrote about the subject regularly in the Spanish press under the masonic nom de plume Joachim whose reputation for brutality was the stuff of national Boor. He also had his own private masonic temple, a sort of and international legend. I had read about the ‘Black Museum, in the Pardo Palace. I suspect the fact that Carabanchel jailers in Direct Action and knew a little Joaquín Delgado was a freemason and that the French Grand Orient Lodge had interceded on his behalf played a about this Cyclopic ‘lurker at the threshold’. It was really part in Franco’s decision to proceed with the execution of quite disconcerting when his glass eye locked on me. I the two anarchists in 1963, in spite of their innocence — had heard stories about Don Pedro having gouged out and the lack of fatalities — in the Puerta del Sol bombing.

55

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The Blue Division return from the Eastern front to a heroes’ welcome. Below: The deathly duo inspect the cannon fodder, some time before the Blue Division’s debacle on the Eastern Front.

An emblem of the Blue Division.

the eye of an imprisoned striker to whom he had taken a dislike, but I was never able to confirm this as I never got round to asking him.

The warders were all Falangists and most had fought in the Civil War. The crème de la crème had been Falangist volunteers and fundamentalist Catholics who fought in the Blue Division with Hitler’s SS at Leningrad, against the Russians. Their services to the patria had been rewarded at the end of the Civil War with sinecures and jobs for the boys, particularly in the prison service.

The guards did not carry weapons, not even truncheons. These were locked away in their gallery offices. The only people with guns were the Policía Armada, the grises, and they were in their sentry boxes located every twenty yards or so along the outer wall of the prison. I looked around the cavernous gallery as the gate clanged shut behind us. Some prisoners were standing about or coming up or going down a staircase next to the warder’s office that led down to the exercise yard or patio.

Don Pedro and Joachim, the German encargado de galería, the trusty prisoner responsible for the smooth running of day-to-day life in the gallery, took me into the warder’s tiny windowless office with Don Pedro grumbling loudly about ‘rojos’ and ‘asesinos’.

His small office contained a desk with a silverframed photograph of him as a younger and slimmer man wearing the dress uniform of the División Azul with its red Carlist beret, blue Falangist shirt (from which the division took its name) and the khaki trousers of the Spanish Foreign Legion (see Background Paper: The Blue Division).

Settling back with his feet on the desk Pedro ordered me to empty my pockets. I had only a packet of Celtas cigarettes and a box of matches.

Everything else from my rucksack not kept by the BPS had gone into my prison ‘property’ box. The few pesetas I had on me had been confiscated as ‘terrorist funds’, probably for their Christmas box.

The encargado explained that I would spend the next ten days in solitary confinement, el periodo to ensure I was not harbouring communicable diseases such as TB, syphilis, hepatitis or ‘la miseria’ (lice).

Strangely, Don Pedro appeared to take a liking to me. To describe him as grumpy would be gross understatement, but although our later discussions often became heated, he argued with me without getting apoplectic, unlike some of the other Falangist warders. He ‘didn’t mind’ anarchists, he said, and in fact, anarchism, in his view, was part of the picaresque character of Spaniards, but he hated communists and Marxism, which he saw as antiSpanish and an imported ‘foreign ideology’.

56

Funcionarios

The role of the funcionario in Francoist prisons and penitentiaries had nothing to do with rehabilitation. The warder was basically the hired help whose job was to enforce a rigid authoritarian order on his gallery fiefdom without regard to the individual and his rights. A warder could run his gallery without ever leaving his office, other than taking the morning, afternoon and evening recuentos.

The recuentos (re-counts), overseeing meals and occasional cell searches were the only things the warder was obliged to do, personally. Almost everything else — including ‘good order and discipline’ — was left to the trusty prisoner-flunkeys, the encargados de galería, cabos de planta and ordenanzas who were usually informers for one or other of the funcionarios de turno, the warder of the day.

Some funcionarios made a few bob on the side by running a black market in alcohol, crime and cowboy novellas, drugs or anything else that was needed by prisoners who had money.

Prisoners ran most of the Francoist prison service. Basically, they guarded themselves. The funcionario appointed an encargado to run the gallery from among the prisoners and delegated much of his power to him. This gave the encargado considerable clout: he could use the funcionarios’ hotplate to cook his own meals and he could get more or less what he wanted from outside.

The encargado, in turn, imposed his own order in the gallery, allocating cushy jobs to his friends or those prepared to pay him or provide some service in return. Less salubrious jobs went to those to whom he took a dislike: cleaning, distributing parcels. He was also responsible for appointing the cabos de planta, or machacas, the prisoners responsible for each landing. These were his eyes and ears, his subalterns. If he wanted someone sent to the cells, he could.

Funcionarios worked a 24-hour shift every three days. This meant a third of their working lives was spent behind bars. All of them had other jobs for the other two days. It was the only way they could survive on their poor wages.

Each funcionario had his personal batman, an ordenanza personal, which meant that each gallery had three ordenanzas, one for each funcionario.

Sometimes the encargado had one as well. These acted as personal informers to brief the warder on what had been happening during the two days he had been off duty. There were also cabos de limpieza— cleaning; rancho — food; medical assistant and enfermero — nurse; cubos, handling the buckets of food and goods brought in by families; hairdresser, the economato (which came under the Administracion).

Spanish prisoners accepted this state of affairs as perfectly normal, but most foreigners like me were quite nonplussed and bemused by the extent to which the prison was run by the inmates.

In mid-1965 the Dirección General de Prisiones appears to have made a conscious decision to bring Spain’s prisons into the twentieth century by introducing a new generation of young and more professional recruits into the service. A surprising number of these well-educated law students were

57

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

genuinely shocked when they discovered that the jails they had to run did in fact hold political prisoners, something their lecturers had denied during their training courses.

Until that time all the posts in Franco’s prisons from lowliest auxiliary through jefes de servicio to directors, had been reserved for timeserving Falangists. Their jobs were now being taken by ‘upstarts’, ideologically uncommitted university-educated youngsters.

The older warders did not take kindly to this challenge to the established pecking order and made their discontent known to the prison management.

There was some talk about going on strike, but this would have cost them their jobs and brought them back into prison— and not just for 24 hours out of every 72! Their discontent subsided when it became clear this was a long-term strategy and was no immediate threat to their livelihoods.

The message we ever optimistic prisoners read into this was that Falangist political influence was weakening. We thought this was a hopeful sign which presaged ‘liberal’ reforms.

As well as the gallery trusties, each of the prison services — censors’ office, financial services, administration, the chiefs of service, workshops, the school, library and the priests, the sacerdotes and prison chaplains, capellanes de prisones — all had their secretaries and ordenanzas to do their * Quinquis (quinquilleros) bidding.

Quinquis or quinquilleros were rootless, itinerant travellers There were no clocks. The passage of that abstraction whose young men had a reputation, deserved or not, as called time was marked by the slow movement of sun muggers and burglars. Quinquis are not a distinct race of and shadow while the day’s rituals, such as díana people like the gypsies, but extended families, clans, constantly moving from town to town through the provinces (reveille), recuentos, patio, workshops, meals and the arrival of any dignitaries in a gallery were observed by of La Mancha, Extremadura, Madrid, and Old and New Castille, but rarely found in Catalonia, Andalusia, Galicia or the discordant bugle calls of the cornetas. Most of the the Basque country. Unlike the dark-skinned Andalusian cornetas, or buglers, were quinquis* or gypsies, who gypsies, they preferred the town to the country. What they announced the endless recuentos, calls to work, meals, did have in common with the gypsies was that both were a exercise, visits and the comings and goings of the great permanent feature of the Spanish prison system. and the good.

From Don Pedro’s office I was taken to be registered with the gallery secretary, the escribiente, a trusty prisoner who was responsible for maintaining the gallery register and all its documents and files. His job was to keep a record of the daily comings and goings of the gallery population. The escribiente could also sign and authorise documents, petitions and orders on behalf of the funcionario.

A good escribiente combined the roles of notary public and one-man Citizens' Advice Bureau. He prepared official petitions for and on behalf of prisoners petitioning the administration, the Dirección General de Prisiones or the Ministry of Justice.

For those who could not read and write — of whom there were many — he would also write personal letters home. if asked, for 5 pesetas.

58

Periodo — Alone At Last!

With another index card completed, I was taken by the cabo de planta, across the gallery to cell number one, directly opposite the funcionario’s office.

The cabo was a surly light-skinned and wiry Moroccan, a Berber, in his early twenties. He had a hanging lower lip and a European physiognomy. His closely shaven head gave him a monkish look. As I crossed the threshold of the cell to begin my ten days of periodo, Don Pedro shouted something in Spanish. I looked quizzically at the humourless orderly, shrugging my shoulders saying ‘No hablo español’.

The orderly translated in halting English, with a sardonic grin, that by the time I left Spain I would be a ‘dyed-in-the-wool Francoist’. The door slammed behind me with an echoing crash, double-locked and bolted with two heavy clicks. I was alone. I looked around with a sinking feeling at the starkness of the whitewashed and white-tiled cell. Austere and unpretentious were the words that sprang to mind. This was to be my universe for the foreseeable future. The numbness which had possessed me since leaving the Seguridad that morning began to recede.

I surveyed the wreckage. How old, I wondered, was I going to grow behind these walls?

Apart from health controls, periodo was also a means of preparing prisoners psychologically for their new life. It also gave us important personal time and space on our own after the first shock of arrest to reflect on imprisonment, loss of freedom, love and affection, as well as the possible consequences of separation from friends and family.

I LAID OUT MY MATTRESS on the bare tubular bed and had just stretched myself out when the door was unbolted and a group of gold-braided prison officers shuffled in like Flanagan and Allen’s ‘Crazy Gang’ in uniform. Leading them was a man who turned out to be the prison director, Don Ramón García Labella and his deputy director, a dumpy wee fat man by the name of Don Fulgencio Ruiz Torrano. They gathered around my bed, filling the cell, and looked down at me. The governor, Labella, was yet another Franco lookalike and carried himself in the same manner: proud, parchment-skinned, tight-arsed, straight-backed and stiffnecked. A prisoner acted as his interpreter — a polite and intelligent-looking man by the name of Joaquín Costas. He was a balding man with glasses and a thick bushy walrus moustache who spoke English with an American accent.

59

Franco’s big hoose, a home from home for 3 years.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

* Post Civil War executions and Franco’s ‘disappeared’.

According to government figures, at the beginning of 1940, nine months after Franco’s victory, Spain’s prison population had been 270,219. By 1962 the prison population had dropped to 14,920 prisoners. One man I came across was serving sentences totalling six thousand years, but in effect no one served more than 20 years.

There are no official statistics as to the number of people executed by the Franco regime after the end of the civil war. According to the Libro Blanco sobre las Cárceles Franquistas 1939-1976 (Ruedo Ibérico, Paris 1976) ‘elements of the Spanish opposition quote figures of 370,00 or more executed after 1939’, but there is no way of verifying these numbers. A figure of 192,684 people executed between 1939 and 1944 is quoted by American academic Stanley G Payne (Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, 1967), information apparently given to him by a Francoist government source. That appears to be the only ‘official figure’ admitted to by the regime. Historian Gabriel Jackson (La República Española y la guerra civil, Grijalbo, Mexico, 1967, p446) says 200,000 prisoners were executed between 1939 and 1943. The conservative Spanish historian Ramón Tamames (La Republica. La Era de Franco, Madrid 1974) gives a figure of 105,000 executions between 1939 and 1945. Victor Alba (Histoire des Républiques espagnoles, NordSud, Paris 1948) states that in the years between 1939 and 1942 80,000 prisoners passed through Barcelona’s Model Prison, of whom 7,800 were executed 'legally' and 3,500 executed without any form of trial. In Madrid’s Porlier prison alone in the 30 months between between July 1941 and January 1944, Cipriano Mera Sanz recorded almost 500 executions.No one will ever know the final figure, but even as this edition goes to press (September 2002) there are press reports from Spain that mass graves are being discovered today and newspaper stories about people still trying to find out what happened to their loved ones who disappeared without trace. Even more horrifying was the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children of anti-Francoists were taken forcibly by the Falangist social aid and priests to be baptised, had their names changed and never returned to their parents. These children of ‘vile reds, assassins, atheists and criminals’ were either given up for adoption or taken to closed convents where many remained for the rest of their lives.

Costas told me, politely, it was a rule that prisoners should stand to attention whenever an officer entered the room or walked past.

After a brief huddle with Don Pedro at the door, the group trooped out of the cell and as I sat down again, two trusties came in, indicating that I should get off the bed again. I was dumbfounded to see them dismantle the bed and walk out of the cell with it, together with everything else I had brought with me, including writing material, mattress and blankets!

This sanction was known as ‘el regimen de pistas’; it certainly pista me off. Presumably the regime did not want a re-run of the Julián Grimau ‘suicide attempt’, which had done so much damage to Franco’s diplomatic attempts to establish international legitimacy and be accepted into the European Union. This had been an primary objective of Francoist foreign policy since 1962.

I was banged up: alone in an off-white and featureless cell.

The only objects that broke the visual monotony of the cell were a small stone table that jutted out from a wall and a botijo, an elliptical earthenware jar with short stubby spouts for pouring and filling. There was also a malodorous toilet that did not flush, and a wall basin — but no water. There was neither comfort nor company in any of them.

Water was a particularly precious commodity in Franco’s Spain that summer. It was available for only two hours in the morning, two hours at mid-day and two hours in the evening.

This shortage continued until December 1964.

The taps were purely decorative. The water pressure was not capable of suppplying the three upper landings so water had to be carried up the stairs in buckets. I was on the ground floor and I could only get a weak dribble. That was it.

Tired and with a headache from so many thoughts and fantasies swirling around in my brain, I slumped on the floor against the far wall, under the window, looking vacantly at the grey, armoured cell door with its recessed spy hole, ‘el chivato’.

The only movement in the room was that of the slow shadow of the bars across the cell walls and floor.

An enervating tiredness overwhelmed me. The sense of desolation I felt was enough to depress even the most clinically cheery. All I wanted to do was lie down and escape into sleep. As I stretched out on the hard stone-flagged floor and slipped off down the welcome escape tunnel of sleep I imagined myself encircled by the ghosts of unfulfilled and truncated lives. How many people had been taken from this very cell and been shot or garrotted?* Men and women whose crime was resisting Franco,

60

Goodbye To All That

the ecclesiastical tyranny of a medieval church, feudal landlordism and one of the most reactionary middle classes in Europe.

I lay awake for a long time that first night on top of the bed, naked, hot and sweaty. My mind raced like an engine with all the ‘might-have-beens’ and ‘what-ifs?’ Eventually I sank into a disturbed sleep only to be woken with disgust to feel my body crawling with phalanxes of chinches, miniscule creatures of the night marching determinedly and in a highly disciplined manner to and from their pre-arranged blood donor points. I was also vaguely conscious of the sound of the chivato cover on my cell door being raised and swinging shut as curious funcionarios peered in to check that this mysterious foreigner about whom they had been reading and hearing hadn’t topped himself.

The door was kicked once or twice, but I ignored this and slept determinedly on in another more carefree world. Hassan Risooni, the cabo of the gallery, a scion of the Moroccan royal family, had been charging 3 pesetas to let prisoners have a look at me through the chivato.

When I awoke in the morning and took in the walls, bars and cell door, and remembered what had happened and where I was, it was as though someone had turned on a tap of foreboding and negativity in my head. Somehow, I had to reconcile myself to saying goodbye to everything that had gone before. The recent past and prospects for the immediate future seemed to suffocate all my normal optimism.

THE SPANISH MEDIA had a field day with my story. Accounts of my arrest had preceded me in lurid newspaper headlines and word-of-mouth stories that passed into prison mythology. Particularly colourful and prevalent was the one about me entering Spain wearing a kilt. For almost a fortnight the media had published the most extraordinary stories about the kilted anarchist assassin who had come to kill Franco and murder the best part of the population of Madrid, if not Spain. One Spanish paper had me crossing the border in full highland regalia, skhean dhu (short sock-dagger), feathered cap and all. Presumably the skhean dhu was to be plunged into Franco’s flaccid belly. Some thought all Scots habitually wore the kilt anyway. By the time the stories reached Buenos Aires, I was dressed as a woman, a mistranslation of la falda escocesa. I never troubled to deny the story, it did not seem all that important, and most of my friends accepted that I had gone wearing the kilt in order to distract attention from what I was carrying in my rucksack. One story had me being parachuted in while others claimed I had crossed the frontier on a white horse.

Emiliano Zapata had nothing on me during that short period between my arrest and court martial. Journalists stated quite matter-of-factly that I had been paid sums ranging from quarter of a million to five million pesetas for this assignment, and had been specially trained at a anarchist ‘terrorist’ camp in the French Pyrénées. I was a figure shrouded in mystery, intrigue and awe, hence my commercial value to Risooni.

61

Falangist press coverage.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The so-called terrorist training camp near Toulouse was a recurring myth and a major theme in the case against me at my trial. The camp they referred to was, in fact, an annual summer camping holiday attended by anarchists of every shape and political hue: the elderly, the middle-aged and the young; families and individuals, trade unionists, ordinary workers, artisans, artists, professionals, vegetarians, carnivores, bon-viveurs and fruit-juice drinkers, the halt, the lame — and the occasional crank.

Far from being a terrorist training camp for rural or urban guerrillas, it was more a cross between a Health and Efficiency readers' convention and Glasgow Fair holiday excursion of ‘The Broons’ to their wee bit ‘But ‘n’ Ben’ in the Campsies in the Glasgow hinterland. There were guerrillas in the camp but all of them had day jobs and this was their month off. I had been nowhere near the camp, although to cover my movements with friends who asked where I was going, I had told them I would be there during August, and was intending to stop off there on my way back from Madrid. It did not dawn on me for a long time that the Spanish authorities circulated the kilt story for the same reason that they were so prompt to claim their agents were active in Britain: they wanted it thought that they were following me because I was a cross-dresser or a transvestite in order to hide the co-operation between Scotland Yard and Spanish fascism, which was a more potent form of political dynamite than the stuff I was carrying.

The Spanish Ministry of the Interior (Gobernación) took the unusual step of announcing to the media that the success of my arrest was due to the ‘excellent information’ supplied by Spanish agents operating in Britain. This may or may not have been bullshit, but it was almost unprecedented for a government to admit cheerfully and openly that they are operating an espionage network in friendly territory, something usually regarded as an embarrassing secret.

How would the press have taken it had the Russians openly admitted that their spies had been photographing and collecting information in Britain designed to lead to the arrest of a Briton in Moscow?

The British press took the announcement in its stride. One Scottish Daily Express journalist was typical in his bland acceptance of the penetration of foreign agents into British political life, despite the fact that his newspaper took a vastly different line regarding Iron Curtain countries. With that incomparable mixture of news and propaganda for which the Beaverbrook Press was famous, Charles Graham of the Scottish Daily Express declared: ‘Even James Bond would have been hard put to keep a straight face about the tales of terror and imagination — mainly imagination — circulating about the anarchist movement in Glasgow. Yes, anarchists, from Drumchapel and Hillhead and small towns in Lanarkshire; anarchists allegedly plotting international espionage and the overthrow of governments, also allegedly under the expert surveillance of the Spanish Secret Service. This is the tale Spanish spokesmen put out after a Blantyre youth, Stuart Christie, was held on suspicion of plotting violence and accused of carrying explosives…’

62

Taking Stock

Prior to my trial, Special Branch in Glasgow vetted my background. This involved interviewing my English teacher, George Bradford (‘Wee Brick’) in Blantyre. They asked George if they could read through my school essays in order to get some insight into the development of my political ideas.

He refused. No doubt the police of two countries were annoyed to find a stand on academic freedom and confidence between teacher and pupil should be made, not in a historic university, but by the dominie of a secondary school in Blantyre.

Taking Stock AS THE FIRST MORNING of imprisonment progressed I began by taking stock of my surroundings and measuring my new universe. My cell was perhaps 10 feet long by 5 feet wide; it seemed larger because it was white. A good part of the width was taken up by the bed, in the middle, below the window.

I paced the cell, taking 5 paces from end to end, pivoting around on the last step in such a way as to keep the rhythm even. I found this somehow hypnotic and soothing. I whistled softly to myself as an aid to concentration — and confidence. The tunes were either ‘The Red Flag’ or ‘The Sash’. Both were gestures of defiance, one political, the other religious, but I was whistling for myself. If any Spanish prison warder had been listening to my discordant sibillations he might well have assumed it was the Scottish equivalent of gypsy cante jondo.

To help the day pass and take my mind off my preoccupations I constructed a series of rituals. I would start off counting my steps to see how many miles I could walk before something interesting happened, but inevitably the seething activity going on in another part of my brain would flood in and I would lose count and have to start again.

Another piece of arithmetical therapy was counting the tiles on the walls, but I kept losing the place here as well. For the first couple of weeks the wall became my calendar, with each tile representing first a day then a week as I tried to work out how many times I’d be round the wall before I went up it, metaphorically or otherwise.

It wasn’t long, however, before I reached the end of my creative repertoire and was reduced to the main pastime of those in solitary confinement: pacing up and down the cell.

The window was a reasonable size and by pulling myself up on the rusty bars I could look out on to an unused and overgrown building site of an unfinished gallery. Disposessed urban cats socialised here at night — making a cacophonous racket in the process — either on the pull or communicating news of the day’s alarums and excursions to the feline population of Madrid.

The first time I heard them, I thought my cell adjoined the torture chamber.

63

‘While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is soul in prison, I am not free.’— Eugene V. Debs, 1855 – 1926.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Not sodding beans again!

At some point in the day my cell door was unbolted and a warm, freshly-baked loaf, about two feet in length, thrust into my arms. I broke off a small piece and savoured its warmth, taste and texture; it was reassuring. At least I would be fed. I ate some more, and then the bread was all gone. I didn’t fully appreciate until then that the prison day consisted of two halves — before dinner and after dinner — and to get through it meant careful rationing of your daily bread, particularly during periodo. The morning was hungry, but it had a clear end — lunch. Once your loaf was gone there was nothing to eat between lunch and dinner. Sleep and lights out marked the clear end of the day.

By dinnertime on that first full day in Carabanchel I felt acutely hungry. At last the door opened and there, framed in the doorway, stood two men carrying a large metal cauldron with a dark, greasy, yellowish broth which slopped from side to side as they dropped it on the ground. Risooni handed me a battered, round aluminium bowl and a spoon and ladled in the lumpy broth.

The unappetising looking mixture consisted of a watery soup in which chickpeas (garbanzos) and other unrecognised vegetables, black pudding, and chunks of pork fat floated.

I was lucky. Finding a cockroach in the fabada or garbanzo bean stews was not unusual. Despite my hunger, the food, which was swimming in grease, looked distasteful. In spite of my hunger, I ate hardly any of it. I was paranoid by this stage, thinking they might be trying to poison me as a way of short-circuiting the international public relations problem I presented to the regime.

Instead of leaving the food to be disposed of at slop-out, I decided to get rid of it by throwing it out of the window. There was no water to flush it away so it could not go down the toilet. However, the part of the window that opened to allow fresh air into the cell was small; consequently only part of the slop went out the window. The rest clung to the bars, stuck to the glass and caked the brickwork below my window. Supper went the same way.

The final bugle call of the day, around 10.00 p.m, announced silencio and lights out. My bed and bedding had been returned to me a few minutes earlier. But ‘lights out’ didn’t apply in my case.

Gradually, the sound of the jailers’ footsteps receded and apart from the occasional echoing clank of the gallery gate as someone entered or left, a blanket of

64

Counting Time

silence descended over the prison.

I unrolled the unwholesome looking straw mattress on to the bed-frame and, overwhelmed by weariness, I lay down and soon was fast asleep. Once or twice during the night I was wakened by the sound of the chivato cover swinging open or closing. Someone was watching me. I had a sudden panic attack, but I feigned sleep and did not move or change my breathing pattern.

My heart was pounding. Were they going to make me disappear? Would I be shot under the infamous fugitive law, while trying to escape?

The chivato cover slid shut, the footsteps became more distant then I heard the sound of the gallery gate being unlocked, banged shut with an echoing clang and locked again and the jailer’s footsteps faded into silence, leaving the world to darkness and to me. My anxiety coupled with the heat, the chinches and the stagnant, motionless air made it difficult to sleep after that.

Madrid stands on a high plain, but in summer there is no breeze so the air remains stagnant all night. The most bearable hours of the day were from six until about nine o’clock in the morning. The heat in August and early September was stifling and debilitating. It was much as I could do to keep shifting to the shaded side of the airless cell.

Time in prison is only measurable in terms of successive events, most of them undistinguished and all of them marked by the bugle call of the corneta.

The blast of a bugle outside my door woke me with a shock early next morning. It was Sunday 17 August. I was depressed to find I was still in jail. It hadn’t been a bad dream; it was bad reality.

The first bugle call to punctuate the day was Díana (reveille) and first recuento was at 7.00 a.m. This was followed by the cacophonous racket of cell doors being unlocked, unbolted then slammed and bolted again as the jailer counted us on his hurried way along the landing.

If the count had gone well and no one had escaped, hanged themselves or been miscounted, breakfast was brought to the cell door at 7.30 a.m. This consisted of a plastic mug of milky brown liquid that was passed off as coffee.

There was nothing to eat; we were expected to have some bread left from the previous day’s ration. Unfortunately, no one had told me this.

Another bugle call at 8.00 a.m. signalled cleaning duties. These had to be carried out with the cell door open. Bedding had to be rolled, the cell brushed out with a besom broom made from twigs, the symbolic brass tap polished and, finally, the floor washed. We would then have to stand by the door, outside the cell, until the gallery warder had made his inspection.

The 8.30 a.m. bugle announced morning association in the patio. I shifted around hopefully behind my cell door, peering through the chivato to see if mine would be unbolted. It wasn’t. But I did see prisoners strolling about quite nonchalantly.

65

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Carabanchel operated what was called an ‘open-door’ regime. Cell doors were unlocked from first morning recuento until lunch and the obligatory twohour summertime siesta from 1.30 p.m. to 3.30-4.00 p.m. when they were open again until after supper around 9.00 p.m.

The lack of regimentation surprised me. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be so bad after all. As Voltaire’s character Pangloss, said in Candide, ‘All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’

Sunday Mass.

Sunday morning mass was celebrated at 9.30 a.m.

Assembly was sounded by the corneta at 9.15 a.m. All prisoners were obliged to attend except those subject to periodo — like me. Before the ceremony, the prisoners from each of the three main galleries, the youths from the reformatory and the políticos from the sexta galería would be marched in columns of three from their various wings, lining up in ranks on the ground floor, facing the makeshift altar set up on the roof of the Centro, visible to all the galleries.

Three blasts on the cornet heralded the arrival of the prison governor, the administrator with the senior funcionarios. The mass could now begin. The colourfully robed priest then entered to the chanting of the miserere, followed by a grotesquely swaying file of chaplains and acolytes, some of them swinging smoking censers, with the sunlit glint of a gold processional cross appearing through billowing clouds of smoking incense.

This fascist mass, accompanied by the martial sound of cornets, drums and the anomalous tinkling of handbells, usually lasted about 40 minutes or so, sometimes longer if it were a special saint's day.

That first Sunday the spyhole on my door was open, allowing me a narrow tunnel vision glimpse of the outside world. All I could see were lines of shuffling brown-suited prisoners, like telephone poles dwindling into the distance. The prisoner nearest my door caught my eye and muttered something. It sounded sympathetic and helpful, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was saying. In an attempt to inject some humour into the situation I put my mouth to the chivato and whispered to the man standing nearest to me, in English: ‘My name is Christie and I’m in a spot of bother. I’ve run out of cigarettes, but the priest and the Levite have passed me by so I wondered if you could oblige me with a fag and a light.’

Perhaps it was my Glasgow accent or the obscure biblical allusion, but he didn’t understand a word I said. He told me weeks later that all he could make out were the words ‘chiste’ and ‘un amigo llamado Levy’ — which he took to mean that I was ‘a joker with a pal called Levy’.

I returned to my bed frustrated, like the mufflered Thurber cartoon lady

66

Optimism Returns

skating on a frozen lake quoting A.C. Swinburne to an elderly blank looking man on a toboggan being pulled along by a dog ‘I said the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces”— but let it pass, let it pass!’ — and gazed distractedly at the ceiling and walls while the tinkling bells, Latin chants and discordant brass bands echoed throughout the gallery and my brain.

On weekdays, the change of guard usually took place at 10 a.m. This was one of the most important events of the day. It meant the difference between an easy-going and a difficult 24-hour shift, depending on which wardens were on that relief. The changeover meant another recuento, both in the yard and in the gallery.

The clanging of doors being unlocked, bolted and banged open or closed, the buzz of people clattering and chattering as they trooped downstairs or upstairs, going to and from work or the yard was reassuring. I wondered when it would be my turn to be unlocked and step into my strange new world. Dinnertimes and suppertimes were equally noisy, with shouts, the banter, banging on doors and the clatter of aluminium plates and utensils.

My strategy for survival was simple. Adapt to my new circumstances, do the best I could and keep going — focus on the short-term and whatever silverlining I could find, and try to get as much as possible out of whatever variety and opportunities this new life had to offer; ask the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ as opposed to the ‘wheres’ and ‘whens’. I was likely to be here for some time so I had to be patient and accept the situation for what it was, slip into reclusion and try to turn it to my advantage. If they weren’t going to kill me then hopefully the experience should at least make me a bit wiser. I’d certainly be older.

I was embarking on a voyage of discovery, mainly of myself, and if I was going to learn from the experience I had to keep my mind as well as my eyes open. So far it hadn’t been too bad.

My natural optimism soon returned. I had seen films showing how to play up the Germans in Colditz. Like the Colditz prisoners, I was privileged. I had the opportunity to play up this vicious dictatorship and get away with a great deal more than others. Hadn’t all those film noires about prisoners of war shown them playing it for laughs? They had defied their captors, played silly jokes on them and generally run rings round them, keeping up each other’s morale by their antics. But of course they had been protected by the fact that reasons of high policy made it difficult for their captors to treat them in the same draconian way as they did their own citizens or those of countries who were not signatories of the Geneva Convention. Strangely enough, I don’t remember seeing war films about Buchenwald, Belsen or Auschwitz.

At least I was young and had no personal commitments or family attachments other than my mum, gran and sister, and they weren’t depending on me financially. For breadwinners with wives and children to support it was a far greater sacrifice.

Having paced up and down in my cell for hours, whistling, singing and declaiming the few lines I could remember of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

67

From Men, Women and Dogs.

© Hamish Hamilton, 1963.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

and Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’ — and getting a chill in my eye from peering through the spy hole — the door was noisily and unexpectedly unbolted and there stood the prison governor, Don Ramón García Labella, with his translator, Costas.

He looked at me curiously. Then he said something to Costas which the latter translated for him: ‘Was there anything I needed?‘ This was surely something unique in the history of the prison administration! I was being treated like a VIP. Books, cigarettes and writing material would be nice, I said. I added that I would also like my money which had been confiscated by the Brigada Política Social. Even in the short time I had been in Carabanchel, I had realised that without money it was difficult to get very far, even in prison.

Spanish prisons operated on a semi-privatised basis; people either worked and earned money, or starved — as distinct from state-socialist principle operated in British prisons, by which prisoners worked as directed and are fed according to rule. Spain was wage slavery, Britain just slavery.

Costas turned up later with cigarettes, a freshly baked bocadillo (roll) with Manchego cheese and chorizo piquante, real coffee and a freshly made pastry from the gallery coffee shop. He also brought a few dog-eared Agatha Christie paperbacks.

I felt as though I was starting to get into the swing of things. I asked if he could make sure Carballo had what he wanted as well, but I was the only one with whom he was allowed to communicate. Risooni, however, took some cigarettes and pastry from me to Carballo later that morning.

When the paper and biro arrived I wrote to my mum to reassure her that I was in good health and was being treated reasonably, under the circumstances.

My main concern was how my plight was affecting my Mum, Gran and my sister, Olivia. I had been allowed to write a few lines to my mother on a postcard of Madrid from security HQ, saying briefly that I had arrived safely and would write to her in more detail as soon as possible. The card arrived the morning the news of my arrest broke in Britain.

My next visitor was the sacerdote, a sinister-looking Dominican priest, an El Greco character dressed in a long black soutane with a breviary in one hand. He was tall and beefy, bull-necked, clean-shaven with a ‘number one’ haircut, sharp-featured and with an aura of dissipation. He had the waxy, sallow skin of a corpse. Thin-lipped, sanctimonious and tight-arsed, he was the reincarnation of Fray Tomás de Torquemada, the first Inquisitor General of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the Roman Catholic equivalent of Ian Fleming’s SMERSH. There were two of these humourless Dominicans in Carabanchel. They stalked the prison like black crows waiting to peck out the metaphorical eyes, the immortal souls, of fifth columnist apostates and heretics like me. The hatred of these capellánes de prisión for political prisoners — whom they denounced regularly at mass as ‘red scum’, ‘murders’ and ‘the godless host’ — was not always rhetorical. One capellan at Portceli prison in Valencia insisted that any food brought in by the families of polical prisoners be eaten in front of him,

68

Eppur si muove

there and then. Anything they couldn’t eat quickly was taken from them and given to the pigs. In one notorious incident in the prison at Castellón de la Plana, a group of political prisoners told the prison capellan that they were nonbelievers and were immediately beaten and humiliated for their ‘intolerable insolence’. One Sunday, during Mass, when the bell signallied the congregation to go down on their knees, they remained standing and as a result they were brutally punched and kicked as they were dragged out by the funcionarios. Most horrifically of all, after the Mass was over the refractory politicals were taken out into the patio and shot in front of the other prisoners.

The priest was accompanied by his trusty and interpreter, José Pineda, a tall, dark-complexioned and effete young man with a distinctive hawk nose and long lank black hair brushed Hitler-like, diagonally across his forehead. Pineda dressed according to what he believed was the Andalusian take on Oxbridge fashion: a white collar, an old school tie, blazer, cavalry twill trousers and shiny patent leather loafers. All he lacked was a felt Córdoba hat. José Pineda was an Andalusian gigolo, a pathological liar, an embustero (a ‘show-off’), and the bane of my life in Carabanchel.

The priest put his questions to me coolly, but through Pineda they came across in a blustering and patronising manner: ‘Can you really be an atheist? It is not possible!’

‘Yes.’ ‘But you are really a Protestant? In what religion were you brought up?’

‘In the Church of Scotland.’

The remark angered the priest.

‘The Church of Scotland, ridiculous! There is only one Church, that of Christ our Saviour! That is not a Church, it is a heretical Protestant cult.’

This man really believed the Edict of Faith. which invited the faithful to denounce: ‘… all who hold opinions which are heretical, suspect, erroneous, reckless, scandalous, or blasphemous against our Lord and the Holy Catholic Faith… and especially those who are still attached to or speak favourably of the Law of Moses, the sect of Mahomet, and that of Luther, and also all those who have read or possess books written by heretical authors or others who are listed in the Index of Prohibited Books, published by the Holy Office’.

He pointed in the direction of a trusty standing by the entrance to the gallery with a slip of paper in his hand. I had a visitor.

His parting shot, delivered through Pineda, was ‘At least one good thing will come through your stay here. We shall make you a Christian in spite of yourself. You will confess the Catholic creed before you leave.’

I should have said ‘Fuck you!’, but I didn’t. Instead, in a moment of inspiration and unable to contain my smart-arsedness I replied, through Pineda: ‘Perhaps’, then muttered Galileo’s famous remark — Eppur si muove,

69

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

(‘but it does move’) with as insolent a tone as I could manage.

He appeared to grow paler with anger at this reminder of the astronomer’s forced recantation. For a moment I thought he was going to land me one there and then or pronounce the anathema: ‘May all the maledictions of Heaven and all the plagues of Egypt come: let them be cursed in the towns and the fields: let the curse of Sodom and Gomorrah fall upon their heads’.

But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled himself together and moved on to minister to the more pious and deferential of the other new prisoners.

It would have been unfortunate for the priest if he had given way to his impulse.

The visitors waiting for me were the British vice-consul, Mr Harding, and an affable Spanish clerk from the British Embassy.

Carabanchel’s main visiting room was a large rectangular hall modelled on a zoo cage. The prisoners’ area was a narrow corridor which ran around three sides of the outer perimeter of the hall. Visitors were separated from prisoners by a floor-to-ceiling three-foot-wide barred and grilled walkway. This was a no-man’s land patrolled by warders walking up and down monitoring the prisoners’ conversations.

Prisoners and visitors bawled intimacies, news, questions and answers across to each other in the darkened interior. The visitors clung to a curtain of chicken wire, shouting first and then pressing their ears to the wire grills for an answer.

The babble of excited voices was overwhelming and it was difficult to hear anything.

I was lucky. As a high-security risk, I saw my visitors in the lawyer’s locutorios. These were small cubicles in which prisoners and visitors were separated by a wall with a large glass window. They also had chairs in either room.

After introducing himself and asking how I had been treated, Mr Harding told me how the outside world was reacting to the news of my arrest.

The unusual circumstance of a Scot being held in a Spanish prison on a charge of terrorism had made a few people wake up to the fact that there were also a great many Spaniards in prison with me. He also told me my mother had been in contact with the Foreign Office.

He said Carballo and I would be tried by a summary Council of War, a Consejo de Guerra, within the next few days and that my friends in London had formed a defence committee.

They were planning to send a QC to the court-martial as an observer. He assured me that the Embassy would organise a barrister for me. Harding added that the press, radio and TV were having a field day with my ‘girl-friends’, one in particular, Margaret Hart, whom they were presenting as the evil genius behind the attentat.

70

Niall MacDermott QC, MP

The defence committee’s QC turned out to be Niall MacDermot QC, MP, an ‘Old Rugbeian’ who later that year became Financial Secretary to the Treasury in the the first Wilson government. He was chosen by the defence committee because of his reputation as a sympathetic leftwing barrister who also headed up the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and its British branch, ‘Justice’. He had also been an MI5 (Security Service) officer during the war with the rank of major and had incurred the vindictive enmity of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS) for refusing to cover up the role of Kim Philby, the senior SIS officer who was also a Stalinist spy. MacDermot’s idealistic integrity was later to cost him his Cabinet and ministerial career when he was forced out of Wilson’s government in September 1968 by ‘D’ branch of MI5 who accused his half-Russian and halfItalian wife, Ludmila, of being a Soviet spy.

MacDermott visited me in Carabanchel a few days before my trial. I explained to him, off the record, that I knew exactly what I had been doing, but he struck me as being slightly bewildered by the situation, as was everyone, including me.

He could do little more than be there, a symbolic moral presence, and argue my case to the press; I was an immature youth and that anarchists in Britain were a small and innocuous group, a slightly weird but morally laudable section of the peace movement, who had nothing to do with dangerous international anarchist revolutionaries. What else could he have said?

The Harts’ role in the whole affair was that they had acted as ‘spotters’, introducing me to the FIJL, the DI and the Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL) with a view to my participating in the anti-Francoist resistance. (See Background Paper: The Movimiento Popular de Resistencia (MPR) and the Iberian Liberation Council [CIL]) I had wanted to do something that would make a difference; not embroil myself in the petty day-to-day intrigues and expediencies of party or organisational politics, be it of the Labour Party Young Socialists, the International Socialists (IS), the Socialist Labour League (SLL) or the Communist Party.

Talk of ‘composite conference resolutions’, ‘permanent class struggle’, ‘industrial organisation’ and ‘workers’ councils’ was all very well and intellectually stimulating, but to me these were self delusional concepts, dreams which might or might not become reality, given ‘ideal people’ in a ‘perfect world’ and the application of an imprecise ideological, economic, historical and social alchemy. This ‘imprecision’ and, more importantly, the power-obsessed opportunists and would-be social engineers attracted by the Marxist and neoMarxist groups smacked too much of sociological witchcraft and psychic

71

Niall MacDermot, QC, MP. © BBC Hulton Picture Library

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

divination for my liking. Certainly, many of the cadres, or would-be ‘leaders’ I came across in my teens and subsequently were highly intelligent people; brilliantly persuasive as to the policies and principles of their particular group.

But basically they didn’t convince me. I couldn’t help feeling these people weren’t really motivated by socialist ideas, but by a desire for power and their own personal need to belong, to be looked up to and admired by their peers.

THE NEED to bring down Franco was, I felt, both natural and achievable. And, who knows; perhaps some spark of the social revolution ignited in Spain between 1936 and 1937 and doused by the Republicans and Communists, might conceivably be reignited among what the novelist B. Traven called the ‘untouched one fifth’. It was worth a shot, anyway.

‘No example exists where human beings should be oppressed, muzzled and beaten so long that finally they give up all thought of resistance or rebellion. The less somebody governing a nation is gifted with brains, the more he attempts to make all resistance impossible through measures of brutal force. Even in the most arbitrary dictatorship imaginable, one fifth of the population remains untouched.

And this, precisely, is never the worst part of the population. This one fifth of the population which he, the dictator, has never been able to reach, causes his downfall.’

B. Traven, March to Caobaland One late August afternoon, after siesta, while I was still incomunicado and allowed neither visitors nor exercise, Risooni unbolted my cell door and said the examining magistrate, el juez instructor, was here to see me. Lieutenant-Colonel Balbás Planelles was already there with his secretary and interpreter, an Englishspeaking Captain, Don Francisco Martínez Pariente.

Balbás went through my statement with me and asked if there was anything I wanted to add or change. I said no, everything appeared to be as I had told him during our previous interview. He advised me to organise my defence quickly as the ‘drumhead’ court martial would be convened shortly.

The military had appointed defence counsels for Carballo and me. Mine was Captain Alejandro Rebollo, an infantry officer who had defended both Guy Batoux and Julián Grimau. Apparently he had done so with gusto, but not much success. Fortunately, the British Embassy insisted that I be defended by a civilian lawyer, Don Gabriel Luís Echevarría Follos, to which the army agreed. This was the first time a civilian barrister had ever appeared as counsel in a Council of War. The days dragged on. A comforting letter came from Mum telling me that everyone was well and that she would be coming to Spain for the trial. Mr Harding turned up again, this time with my Embassy-appointed lawyer with whom I went through my defence, what there was of it, with the assistance of an Embassy translator.

I didn’t expect much mileage from my defence case. My involvement was self evident, but at least my trial and sentence would focus world attention on 72

A Place In The Sun

Franco’s Spain, raising again the matter of ‘unfinished business’ in the struggle against fascism.

My ten-day periodo finally ended. While the rest of the prison slept during the two hours of siesta after lunch, Carballo and I were taken from our cells and escorted downstairs to the patio and left to stroll about on our own, but always under the scrutiny of two warders in a small concrete hut close to the foot of the gallery stairs.

Armed policemen stood on guard with rifles at the ready from the three watchtowers on top of the high redbrick walls. As maximum security prisoners we were not allowed to mix with other prisoners.

It was about 1.30 p.m. and the August sun burned from above as well as being reflected up from the concreted prison yard. I was just happy to get out of the cell and sit with my eyes closed, shirt open and face turned towards the sun. I was determined to get a tan. Carballo sat in the shade, close by, anxiously indicating that I should get out of the sun. During this time we were somehow able to communicate a little about what had happened after our arrest.

The police had told his sister that I had been sent to murder him for failing to carry out an earlier attempt to blow up Franco at the Santiago Bernabéu football stadium. I laughed sardonically at the idea, as did he when he got a closer look at me. He showed me his swollen and bruised stomach and wrists where they had gone to work on him, mercilessly, with their coshes and pistol butts. He had also been pissing blood.

I took my bearings of the patio. The septima galería’s communal dining room was situated to the left of the stairs, off a walkway which ran directly under the gallery itself. One side was open to the patio where prisoners could shelter from the sun and the rain. This ground floor was divided into workshops where the prisoners made model galleons, shoes and baskets for the tourist trade.

Carballo produced a home-made ball from somewhere. These were made by prisoners from a core of tightly wound rubber bands rolled in a ball of string sewn into an outer skin made from old shoe leather. He wanted a game of frontón. After a mimed run-through of the rules the two of us had an exhausting game of frontón, or Basque pelota as it is sometimes called, a fast and exciting game played against the prison walls. Before we knew it the two hours were over and we returned to our cells before the rest of the gallery came down for their exercise.

It didn’t take me long to grow accustomed to the daily routine of prison life.

At 7.00 a.m. cell doors were opened and closed in rapid succession as the funcionario hurried past on the first recuento, of the day to make sure no one had escaped or topped themselves since the previous count. I was at the sink when the jailer walked past on my first morning, so he stopped, retraced his steps and stuck his head in the door and warned me:

73

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

‘During recuento you will stand to attention at the cell door, and you will do likewise when speaking with an officer.’

Before the door was banged shut again Risooni threw me a trapo, a cloth rag, and told me to wash the floor.

With the first morning count over and tallied against the previous evening’s numbers and with the administration's figures, a bugler would blow the ‘all clear’, signalling morning coffee. If the numbers didn’t add up, we were counted again and again until either the mistake was sorted out or the escape discovered.

After first recuento, the straw mattress was rolled neatly, blankets folded geometrically, then the contents of the toilet flushed with a bucket of water brought up from the patio. Risooni and two trusties on kitchen duty would then pass along the cells, ladling out a hot, sickly sweet mauve-coloured milky liquid from a tarnished black cauldron.

Another recount took place at 8.00 a.m., after which the bugle signalled the all-clear. Those with paying jobs made their way to the prison workshops, los talleres penitenciarios; the others went off to their various service jobs with the administration or assembled for the interminable cleaning duties.

My few days in the August sun with the temperature soaring to over 30 degrees soon took their toll. I woke one morning with a severe headache, feeling weak and so dizzy I was unable to get out of bed.

Risooni called Don Pedro who sent for Mario, the practicante, the prison practice nurse, who came to my cell with the doctor. I tried hard to glean some reassuring shard of information about what was wrong with me from the theatrical arm waving, curt exclamations and the rapid staccato exchanges which sallied back and forth between the white-coated medicos and the greenuniformed funcionarios across my sick-bed. I felt like an uncomprehending Vulcan beamed down into the middle of a Klingon men’s doubles tennis final.

Eventually they stopped and Mario rummaged in his medical bag and triumphantly produced what looked like a creamy-coloured bullet encapsulated in plastic. I looked at it inquisitively, wondering what on earth it was — were they now going to produce a gun and would I be left to commit suicide? Seeing my incomprehension Mario started making gestures towards his fat arse, as though scratching his sphincter. The full horror of what they wanted me to do with the ‘bullet’ suddenly sank in and chilled my presbyterian soul to its core. They wanted me to stick this thing up my bottom! Was I being subtly induced into depraved practices by slippery backhand methods? Hadn’t they heard of pills and injections?

Somehow I was able to deduce from the gestures and Spanglais noises that I had contracted a mild case of sunstroke and this anal bullet, a supositorio, was a stopgap measure until I could be transferred to the prison infirmary where they planned to monitor me for a few days.

The prison infirmary at the time was located at the rear of the prison, above the

74

Julián Grimau

carpentry shop, adjoining the sexta galería, where the politicals were held, and next to the juvenile reformatory.

The infirmary was the easiest regime in the prison. Apart from the occasional genuinely ill patient, it was a much sought-after haven for the enchufados (well-connected), Mafioso types, important fraudsters and politically and diplomatically sensitive cases.

The ward had thirty or forty beds, but only three patients. One was an old Stalinist by the name of Miere who had the bed next to me. He had been a comrade of the recently executed Julián Grimau. It didn’t take me long to discover my neighbour was a particularly malevolent party hack of the 1930s school.

Miere spoke some English, but it was impossible to discuss anything with him on either a friendly or a rational basis, not even the weather. We wound each other up on so many occasions that the doctor in charge of the infirmary was forced to place us at opposite ends of the ward.

Julián Grimau had been kept in Carabanchel’s infirmary before he was marched out to face his firing squad in 1963. The prison medical authorities had initially refused to accept him because of the terrible physical injuries he had received at the hands of the BPS and his ‘attempted escape’ from the second floor window of the Seguridad building in the Puerta del Sol. They only agreed to take him under threat from the Ministerio de la Gobernación.

No one really believed he would be executed, including the prison staff, friends and relations. After all, he had only ‘carried out his duty’ while on active service in the Barcelona Cheka (see Background Paper: The Soviet Secret Police) during the Civil War. Grimau had been responsible for the notorious ‘tunnel of death’ which ended the lives of many brave anti-fascists as well as Franco’s Nationalists.

Nonetheless, a military escort called for him early one morning, and he was marched out of prison and executed, as an ‘honourable’ soldier, by firing squad in the nearby military barracks — not by garrote-vil, as were all the anarchists sentenced to death for their part in the resistance.

Grimau’s case had been an international cause célèbre. He had returned to Spain as a Communist Party organiser but had been arrested and charged, not with what he was doing then, but with ‘war crimes’ allegedly committed during the Civil War. When Spain was conquered by the fascists, thousands had gone to the execution squads or the garrotte and hundreds of thousands more had fled into exile or gone to prison. People who had done no more than take up arms to defend their city fell at the whim of someone who denounced them.

The scale of Franco’s post-civil war pogrom against his opponents and ‘enemies of the church’ may never be known. The most conservative figure for executions between 1939 and 1946 is arond 50,000; others estimate the number as high as 370,000. All that can be said is that local authorities in Spain are still

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

excavating the mass graves of Franco’s victims, the Republican desaparecidos 63 years after the end of the war. There was also the still unanswered question of the fate of the unknown number of children of anti-Francoists taken away by the regime’s social services, priests and nuns and never heard of again.

It was always hoped that next year (with the amnesty, some time by Christmas, or Easter, on the twentieth anniversary of this or the twenty-fifth anniversary of that) the regime would be liberalised. The raking up of charges dating back to the Civil War sent a shudder through the country. Was it to revert to the terrible days of 1939-1949?

Some people believed that the new emphasis on tourism, industrial investment and the mass emigration to the Common Market countries meant that those days were over. But with the execution of Grimau the regime showed that it had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

However, Grimau’s death did benefit the Spanish and other European communist parties politically. By giving them a martyr, it helped restore some of the party’s lost kudos and membership after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising.

The alliance between the Christian Democrats, representing the employers, and the comisiones obreras, the simulated trade union dominated by the Communist Party, also dated from this time.

The second of the three infirmary inmates was a teenage gypsy who had swallowed a live rat for a twenty peseta bet. He’d done something similar before, biting off the head of a live rat then swallowing it. The doctor made his anti-rabies treatment as painful as possible with an injection directly into his stomach with the biggest syringe I had ever seen in my life.

The third patient was a quiet and sinister American called Jay who was awaiting extradition back to the States. I never found out his surname.

A Philadelphian in his early thirties, he looked like Clint Eastwood with a similar athletic build. Unusually for a WASP American, he spoke perfect Spanish and French. He had clearly been around and did not appear unduly perturbed by his current situation. I tried chatting to him, but the conversation was one-sided; he was laconic, clearly right-wing, hostile to my friendly overtures and was not going to open up to me. In short, he was a miserable, sour-faced bastard and if anyone ever looked like an amoral outlaw, it was this guy.

Jay’s treatment by the prison authorities and the many visitors he received indicated he was on the A-list of well-connected prisoners — an enchufado. He certainly wasn’t in the infirmary for medical treatment.

One morning I woke up to find he had gone. They had released him in the middle of the night. Very strange. I have often wondered subsequently if this man was in fact Jay Sablonsky, a founder of the OAS-backed Aginter Press who, among other things, later helped train and organise the CIA-sponsored Latin American murder squads in Guatemala. These killers and torturers had been trained in the infamous ‘School of The Americas’ at US Infantry HQ at Fort

76

Council Of War

Benning, Georgia. This was a notorious military base from which the US recruited and manipulated a covert and proxy terrorism which allowed them to break — under the guise of military and civil aid — the ‘rules of the game’, and to terrify, torture and murder in order to maintain American hegemony in Latin America.

The Council of War RESTORED TO GOOD HEALTH and back in my cell after three or four days in the infirmary, I was wakened early on 1 September and told to collect my belongings. Carballo and I were to be tried that morning by a ‘council of war’ of the First Military Region. I was eighteen years and six weeks old.

Our fingerprints were taken again, more documents added to our expedientes and old ones checked to ensure everything was in bureaucratic order. Carballo and I were then handcuffed together and taken to the perimeter gate where we were signed into the custody of an army captain with a platoon of soldiers. We also had an escort of Policía Armada escort in jeeps and Guardia Civil motorcycle outriders.

We were bundled into a windowless armoured truck with a sealed inner compartment and manacled to the floor with leg irons. In each of the outer compartments at the front and rear sat two Guardia Civil officers with submachine guns. The convoy consisted of two jeeps before and two behind, with four motorcyclists. Leading the procession was a car carrying men of the Brigada Político-Social.

Massive security precautions were in place.

Exaggerated stories had been circulating about the kilted hit man and the nature of our mission. Rumours included a story about an anarchist commando planning to ambush our convoy and the authorities were taking no chances; a decoy convoy had apparently left the prison before us. The ‘anarchist commando’ never materialised so we ended up at our intended destination.

The consejo de guerra was held at number five calle del Reloj, the military headquarters of Spain’s ‘First Military Region’. Escorted through a waiting detachment of soldiers who acted as a barrier between us and a few curious bystanders, pressmen and photographers on the pavement, we were marched up the white marble stairs to the first floor into a large hall and then into a side room to await the arrival of the military panel. Police, Guardia Civil and soldiers milled around by the doors and windows.

77

Calle del Reloj, HQ of the First Military Region and the Juzgado Militar Especial Nacional de Actividades Extremistas.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Echevarría, my embassy-appointed lawyer, popped his head around the door looking quite preoccupied, and told me the prosecution was asking for twenty years for me and thirty years for Carballo. Looking on the bright side, at least it wasn’t the garrotte or the firing squad. Carballo’s military defender also came in to have a few words with him. Two Civil Guards arrived soon after to take us into the courtroom.

Still handcuffed, we were marched to a wooden bench facing the dais where the presiding officers would sit. On either side of us sat a Civil Guard carrying a submachine gun. On the platform was a long table with two shorter tables at right angles to the main one. These tables were occupied by my defence counsel, Carballo’s counsel, a Captain, and the military prosecutor.

The large window to our right, overlooking the calle de Reloj, was wide open. Behind us was a barrier beyond which were the ‘public’ benches for selected pressmen and Falangists.

The doors opened and a hundred or so people flocked in, anxious for seats nearest the front. Within minutes all the seats in the Consejo de guerra courthall were filled. room 40 years on. It has changed a bit since 1964.

Lieutenant-Colonel Balbás, the examining magistrate, stood by a small table leafing through papers. His orderly, beside him, flashed a friendly smile in our direction. Then in came the military prosecutor and my barrister who took their places at opposite ends of the dais facing each other.

I looked behind me at the faces in the public gallery and smiled warmly when I saw my mother sitting next to the British consul, Mr Simon Sedgewick-Gell.

Mum replied with a comforting smile, but she was clearly under a great deal of strain and was doing her best to appear her normal cheery self for my benefit.

Carballo and I sat on a bench facing the dais, with Civil Guards on either side. Balbás sat with his secretary and the military interpreter. He gave me a smile and a nod as we trooped in; it was the smile on the face of the tiger. A soldier entered through a door on the dais and announced the presiding officer, Illustrissimo Sr Coronel de Infantería Don Jesús Montes Martín. Everyone stood as he marched in, resplendent in full military ceremonial dress followed Balbás lookalike again (General Huerta). by a chorus of the hard-faced, tight-collared captains.* The colonel and the captains lined up along a table * Members of the Consejo de Guerra draped with a Francoist flag, removed their caps and The vocal ponente, or prosecutor, comandante auditor Don Ramón unsheathed their swords from their scabbards, placing González Arnau Diez; the físcal juridico, comandante Don Enrique them ceremoniously in front of them. I knew nothing Amado del Campo, the vocales efectivos, a military jury of 6 army about military rank but I guessed from the gold braid captains: Don Carlos Torres Espíga; Captain Don Manuel Palmero Luque; Captain Don Vicente Romero Ortíz; Captain Don José Penín and medals my judges wore, that the president of the Fuertas; Captain Don José Pérez Manso de Zuniga. court was well connected

78

The Prosecution Case

The trial started after a few ceremonial formalities. The prosecutor, comandante Don Enrique Amado del Campo, opened proceedings with an impressively theatrical peroration, apparently demanding the maximum sentence for both of us. No chance of a fine and being bound over to keep the peace here, I thought. An army captain, Don José Bellído Serranco, defended Carballo. The case against my co-defendant flew by. Then it was my turn. I knew this because my lawyer stood up and said something. He could have been saying his rosary for all I knew, but I discovered later he was asking for clemency on the grounds I did not know what I was doing or carrying.

My memories of the proceedings are hazy. I felt like a detached, invisible observer looking out through the windows of my brain into the middle of a film set or centre stage in some Grand Guignol play. It was fascist theatre and I was the villain. The atmosphere in the courtroom seemed unreal, but I did not feel afraid or intimidated by the ceremonial splendour and solemnity of the proceedings. I was more bemused than anything else.

Nor did I have any sense of time passing.

When the prosecutor turned to my role in the plot, I felt his tone became unreasonably vindictive. He was a good actor and quickly worked himself up into a frenzy, shouting and gesticulating in my direction. So much so that I began to wonder whom he was talking about and turned round to see who he was pointing at, which wound him up even more The prosecution case turned out to be a brief history of recent Spanish anarchism. According to the prosecutor there had been numerous attempts to undermine and destroy the ‘Glorious National Movement’ begun by General Francisco Franco in 1939. The most consistent offenders against this ‘Glorious National Movement’ had been the international anarchist movement of which I, irrespective of my youth, was a good, or rather evil, example. The prosecutor went on to describe anarchism and its history with an insight that would have put to shame most British investigative journalists, political commentators and academics.

‘Anarchism, formalised in the First International held in London in 1862 under the name of the International Workingmen’s Association, first appeared in Spain in 1869 with the formation of the Spanish section of the International. At different times in its history this section of the First International has adopted different names: Federación Regional Española in 1871, Federación de los Trabajadores de la Region Española in 1881, Pacto de Unión y Solidaridad in 1889, Solidaridad Obrera in 1904, Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in 1911, Libertario Español (LE) in 1938 and then recreated in the Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL) in 1932 and the Movimiento Libertario Español (MLE) in 1938, and now manifesting itself in international informal affinity groups among which we find the Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL) to which Christie and Carballo belong. This group, along with many other anarchist bodies, continues the tactics and activities of the First International which are directed toward the violent subversion and the destruction of the political, economic, social and judicial organisation of the state, and the repeatedly proclaimed social

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Mum arriving at Madrid airport for the trial (preceded by ‘Stashy Dan’ — Wilson Russell — of the Scottish Daily Express).

ideas which reject outright the whole concept of authority as contrary to the idea of individual liberty, and accepts, as irreconcilable, the antagonism between Society and the State with the belief in the violent suppression of the latter.’

The prosecutor continued in this vein for some time before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the evidence against me, which was overwhelming and which I did not in essence deny. I had been arrested with explosives knowingly in my possession. What I did deny was that I knew the parcel contained explosives when I crossed the border.

I told the court that I believed I was carrying printed propaganda until I unwrapped the parcel in Barcelona and discovered it contained explosives and detonators. Having come so far, I was afraid to hand the explosives over to the police in case they didn't believe me. I couldn’t dump them in case some inquisitive, innocent passer-by picked up the explosives and was injured or killed. I felt there was no alternative but to carry on and hope for the best. I didn’t mention my Granny’s role in making me an anarchist. Blaming one’s Granny would not have gone down well in such a matriarchal society.

My evidence was translated for the court by a paratroop captain, Don Francisco Martínez Pariente. I felt embarrassed for the man. He had obviously been suckered into the job against his better judgement, or else he had been drawing a foreign language allowance under false pretences and was now having to prove his worth.

Perhaps he was confused as a result of the tension in the courtroom and the added difficulty of understanding my thick Glaswegian accent.

The sweat trickled down his face as I tried to make it easier for him to understand what I had to say. I spoke slowly, loudly and gesticulated. This only compounded his confusion. On one occasion I corrected his translation to the court in my pidgin Spanish. It was like the famous occasion in the House of Lords when the Edinburgh Provost shocked their lordships by replying to an English duke that the gun he used was the sort you shot ‘dukes and fools’ with for sport.

The military judges retired at lunchtime. The trial had lasted all morning, about three hours. My lawyer told me that the proceedings were now over, but that the sentences would not be pronounced for a day or so.

We were taken to a small side-room with the door open and curious people peering in at us. Carballo and I had to make do with a piece of dry bread and cheese. I felt uneasily like Lee Harvey Oswald coming out of Dallas Police Station just before Jack Ruby shot him.

Balbás came in with my mother and said how

80

Meanwhile, Back In Blantyre...

charming she was and told our guards that she could have a few minutes with me, but not alone.

I kissed her as best I could given the restrictions of my handcuffs and my Civil Guard escort. I introduced my mother to Carballo who was manacled to my wrist. I could not help but feel that she believed that it was all his fault.

It was a pity Carballo’s mother was not there to balance matters, but she was dead. Being a dignified lady, however, Mum asked him — in English, and with genuine compassion — how he was bearing up. The dialogue was more in keeping with a Kelvinside drawing room than a Spanish court martial.

I tried to impress upon her that I was all right and things would soon take a turn for the better. She was staying in Spain for a few days and she had been told she could visit me whenever she wished.

Just Another Saturday Back in Carabanchel, life resumed what passed for normal routine in prison. Of the days which followed, most days in fact, I remember little, mainly because nothing much happened. Days in prison tend to be distinguishable only when particular incidents make them memorable.

It was not unknown for first-time prisoners to be so overcome by worry, the deprivation of social contact, the poignancy and helplessness of their situation, in the solitude of their cells, that they committed suicide before the ten days were up. Most men took it in their stride.

As the days passed, however, I become gradually less preoccupied with my own feelings and problems, and more able to take stock of my surroundings.

Fellow prisoners, the people who shared my situation and indignity, started to come into focus and, almost without being aware of it, I became absorbed into the prison community and became ‘one of them’.

I was now allowed a bed in my cell during the day and to have the lights turned out at night. The screws had discovered I was throwing my food out of the window, so I was put on the infirmary diet, which was slightly more varied and palatable. They also let me see my mum a few times over the next couple of days before she returned to Blantyre. I also had a brief meeting with Niall MacDermott QC, who was to report back to my London solicitor, Benedict Birnberg, and the hurriedly formed Christie-Carballo Defence Committee.* On her first visit Mum told me about the day she received the news that turned her world upside-down. It had been her half-day, a sunny Saturday afternoon, and she had just sat down with a cup of tea to read a postcard from me.

Then came a knock on the door. It was two reporters from the Scottish Daily Express with the news that I was being held a prisoner in Madrid on charges of ‘banditry and terrorism’. She couldn’t take the news in at first; it was heartwrenching, both for her and for my Gran.

In a trance-like state, she put on her coat and hat and walked down the road to catch the bus to Lesmahagow, the home of her constituency MP, Tam Fraser,

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

the then Minister of Transport in the Wilson government.

Fraser had been opening a local fête when she found him, but he quickly took her to his home and telephoned the Foreign Office, who said what they always said in these circumstances: ‘not to worry’ and not to make a ‘fuss’.

By the time Mum got back to Blantyre the dung-beetles of the Scottish press were out in force and the normally traffic-free Victoria Street where my Gran lived had cars parked nose-to-boot on either side of the road.

The pavement and path to Gran’s door was a seething mass of reporters and Mark Hendy, secretary of photographers. Mustering as much dignity as she could manage, Mum made the Christie-Carballo Defence Committee. her way through the wall of flashing lightbulbs and aggressive notebookwielding reporters into the besieged house.

One of Gran’s long-time friends had been visiting that Saturday. Dismayed at Gran’s appearance, she told mum she had never seen her before like this, ‘a broken reed’. But Gran was not one to take a knock like that lying down so that night she pulled herself together, put on her best suit and hat and went off to the old folks’ whist drive at the Blantyre Miners’ Welfare as though nothing had happened.

No one was going to keep Gran behind closed doors and drawn curtains; she was a fighter and had her pride.

She would face the world no matter what inner heartache she was suffering. Olivia, my sister, was too young to fully understand what was happening. She had Christie-Carballo demo leaves Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, 1964. been sent out to the pictures that Saturday night and it was only on her way home when she saw the ‘Free * The Christie-Carballo Defence Committee The C-C Defence Committee had been set up in Britain Christie!’ slogans now appearing on walls and bridges within a few days of the news of our arrest. At the time the and the reporters in their cars outside the house that she anarchist movement contained some people who appeared realised something serious had happened to me. to be against any form of violence, even in self defence, some of them being prominent in the Committee of 100 News of my arrest broke on Saturday 15 August and and the Freedom Press group, and seeking to steer the within hours anti-Francoist demonstrations were being anarchist movement in line with the non-resistant cause. organised in a number of countries. Glasgow was among However, with one notable exception, these were happy to the first with a march and a picket held the same campaign to save us from the threatened death sentence, and indeed one of the ‘nonresistors’ was among the first to afternoon the news was announced. offer more robust assistance. The editors of Freedom, on the Organised by different radical and liberal groups in other hand, while supporting the campaign, were particularly the city, it drew my old Trotskyist pals from the anxious to stifle any mention of a tourist boycott, probably because Vernon Richards, the owner and primus inter pares International Socialists. They had acquired a Spanish of Freedom Press, earned his living as a courier from Spanish Falangist flag from somewhere and planned to burn it and Soviet tourism. The defence committee’s line was consistent with everything I said at my trial, i.e. that I had no outside the offices of the Spanish Consul in Glasgow.

Ian Mooney was the IS member who did the prior knowledge of the explosives I was carrying before crossing the frontier. The dominant theme of the campaign honours. Unfortunately, he was extremely near-sighted, (which garnered support from across the whole leftist and and instead of dousing the flag with petrol he liberal spectrum) as run by the Christie-Carballo committee was that fascism should be on trial and at a rally in Trafalgar accidentally soaked his trouser leg, so when he lit the Square, a large blown-up photograph was displayed of match it was his trousers that went up in flames rather Franco and Hitler shaking hands. than the Francoist flag. The first reaction of the Glasgow

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Fasts And Pickets

polis that this was a Buddhist protest of self immolation; the second reaction was one of relief when they realised the victim was as anxious to extinguish the flames as they were. Meanwhile, there was concern in London about what I had said on the Muggeridge programme, admitting that if given the chance I would settle Franco’s hash. Mark Hendy, who was the secretary of the defence committee, and a number of other comrades arranged to meet Stanley Hyland, producer of ‘The Question Why?’, to ask him to cancel the show, due to be broadcast the following Sunday, 23 August.

With one exception, all those who had taken part in the programme asked for it to be pulled or at least that my contribution should be cut. At the last minute, with the full agreement of Sir Hugh Green, controller of the new BBC2 network, Stanley and his secretary edited me out of the programme. The one participant in the programme who wanted it screened left the anarchist movement completely, having presumably found the publicity he so clearly joined it to seek.

WHEN THEY HEARD of my arrest, two friends from the Scottish Committee of 100, Walter Weir and Walter Morrison, hitched-hiked from Glasgow to London. They planned to hold a fast and a picket outside the Spanish Embassy, where Walter Morrison was arrested on Wednesday, 26 August. He had earlier telephoned Scotland Yard to ask permission to hold the fast, giving his name in the process. The senior officer to whom he spoke said it would be all right so long as it was peaceful. Walter then settled down on the pavement outside the Embassy while Walter W. went off to collect their sleeping bags from the left luggage lockers at Victoria bus station.

Suddenly, a Black Maria cellular police van drew up and three or four policemen jumped out and set upon Walter M. A PC Guppy on duty in Belgrave Square that evening claimed he had arrested Walter for shouting ‘Down with Franco’ at a group of pro-Francoist Spaniards who complained about his behaviour.

PC Guppy bundled Walter into the van and drove off to an unidentified London police station. But instead of being charged and taken to the police cells as normal, Walter was taken to what seemed like a large gym hall

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Mike Callinan of the Syndicalist Workers Federation (SWF), Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park (August 1964).To Mike’s left in the white shirt is Tony ‘Spud’ Murphy who was jailed for infiltrating the National Socialist Movement (NSM) and planting explosives on Colin Jordan at Arnold Leese House. Princedale Road.

Anti-Francoist demonstrations erupt in Italy and Germany.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Demonstrators attack the Spanish Embassy in Paris.

Nardo Imbernón (second from left) with Morales on his right.

where three men sat at a table, one in uniform and the other two in civvies. These men then began questioning Walter about his relationship with me, about the Committee of 100 and the activities of the Scots Against War group. The Scots Against War had recently claimed responsibility for setting fire to Ardanam pier in the Holy Loch, where the US Polaris submarine fleet was based.

The Daily Telegraph even had a cartoon of me in a boat quickly rowing away from the scene.

After some aggressive questioning, Walter was taken to the cells, where he tried to sleep, but the authorities had other ideas for him. On two separate occasions through the night other men, supposedly prisoners, were introduced into the cell who, after what they thought was an appropriate period of general chit-chat, brought up my name and the subject of the Scots Against War. Walter appeared at Marlborough Street Magistrate's Court the following morning where he was fined £10 and bound over for 12 months in the sum of £100. The situation was redeemed slightly with a moment of contrived drama when PC Guppy ostentatiously fainted in court after Walter claimed the officer had told him, inside the police station, that he was framing him for badmouthing Franco. Walter was an old hand at being arrested and locked up, but the sinister and surreal events of that night in jail were such that he began to question his sanity. It shook him up so badly in fact that he resigned for a time from the Scottish Committee of 100.

Mum also told me of story going the rounds that I was undergoing psychiatric treatment for a ‘fugue state’.

This apparently affects people with a certain type of hysterical personality who are highly suggestible during such a state and do things they normally would not do. I may have been suggestible. But I certainly was not hysterical. (Others had less kind explanations of my predicament; among these, one well-known anarchist held that ‘this bum Christie’, whom he had scarcely met, was a young ne’er-do-weel who lived by scrounging off the movement, getting my come-uppance when I had wandered into Spain and been framed by the Francoist secret police.)

It was not only diplomatic considerations that were responsible for pulling out the stops on my behalf. A British anarchist arrested in Spain was unusual, it is true,

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Sentence Is Passed

but over the years quite a number of French and Italians had been arrested for their role in the resistance, all of whom had been given the most barbaric treatment with the minimum of diplomatic or media concern. But my arrest, as the first Briton, came just at the moment when Spain was plunging into the gold rush of international package tourism on a gigantic scale. Had I been given the death sentence, the prospects of big business backing tourism might have gone the same way.

The manner in which the case was presented to the British press was that of an innocent teenager doing no more than was normal in Britain, handing out leaflets, being threatened with a death sentence, and finishing up by doing twenty years in a fascist prison. It was not at all the sort of thing that went well with Iberia Airlines’ pretty brochures. A defence of temporary insanity would save everyone's face. But I was irritated when I heard about the suggestion. In fact I had no defence apart from claiming that when I crossed the border I was unaware of what I was really carrying.

It seemed monstrous to me that anyone who attempted to put an end to the life of the butcher Franco and his ilk should be considered even slightly abnormal.

Abnormality to me consisted in allowing a man such as Franco to continue unchallenged in power.

‘E’en now, e’en now, on yonder Western Shores Confirmation of my twenty year sentence (signed by Balbás).

Weeps pale Despair, and writhing Anguish roars; E’en now in Afric’s groves with hideous yell Fierce SLAVERY stalks, and slips the dogs of hell.

Conscience must listen to the voice of Guilt: Hear him, ye Senates! Hear this truth sublime, ‘HE, WHO ALLOWS OPPRESSION, SHARES THE CRIME.’ Erasmus Darwin, ‘The Loves of the Plants’, 1789 I had been sentenced on Thursday 3 September, but I didn’t receive news of this until two days later when a slip of paper with that date on it was pushed under my cell door, after lightsout, informing me that my sentence had been confirmed by the captain general of the First Military Region as one of twenty years. Minor reclusion, they called it. Had it been twenty years and one day it would have been reclusion mayor, a whole different tariff. The date of my release, it stated blandly, was 1984. Jesus! I thought to myself, I’d be 38 years old when I finally emerge. Will it be into a ‘Brave New World’ or, more importantly, what will I be like after 20 years behind prison walls, let alone the rest of the world?

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Release date — 30 August 1984.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Ich bin ein stranger here myself CARABANCHEL PRISON in the 1950s and 1960s was the sociological black hole of Spanish society. Locked behind its high redbrick walls were a multitude of redoubtable individuals and picaresque rogues from among the widely differing communities of the peninsula: Galicia, León, Old and New Castille, Navarre, Astúrias, Aragón, Catalonia, Extremadura, Murcia, and Andalusia and the Basque country.

A rich variety of Spanish life was to be found in Carabanchel; it was a blind eyrie from which I could see the whole of Spain in sociological panorama. It was a Press coverage of Council of War sentence unique learning experience There was little violence and tension in the prison. I don’t recall any serious violent incidents other than a child murderer being thrown to his death from the fourth landing of the gallery.

I don’t even recall ever feeling particularly angry with a Spaniard, or any genuine anger towards me other than in voices raised during heated discussions over the morality of bullfights.

I began to feel a deep affinity and sense of kinship with Spaniards. In terms of cheerful temperament and generosity of spirit they were on a par with the Irish. They also took pride in their individuality, were full of delightful paradoxes and contradictions, possessed a largeness of spirit, had a great sense of humour and were naturally antipathetic towards officialdom. It may even have been genetic. Who knows, I might have been the descendent of a survivor of Philip II’s great Armada, shipwrecked on the wilder shores of Scotland during the storms of 1588.

Flaubert, who fell in love with Egypt on his travels in 1849, suggested a new way of defining nationality. It was not by country of origin or where one chose to settle, but according to the place to which you were attracted.

The diversity, style and distinct cultures of the Spaniards were striking. I found them proudly insular with a pronounced sense of individual and collective self importance — and unashamedly chauvinist.

Spanish lights were not hidden under bushels. No other nation on earth was in its own members’ eyes, so inventive or had such a rich history nd culture. (Until then I had understood that the Scots had been the creative driving force of modern civilisation.) But although the Spanish were aggressively patriotic and proud of their common culture, with all its faults and animosities,they were also intrinsically parochial, and defined themselves primarily not as Spaniards but in terms of their own village or urban district, the pueblo or barrio.

Many of the Spaniards I came across had only recently moved from their villages, and from working the land, to the factories or unemployment in the big industrial cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. Their cultures and appearances varied from cosmopolitan and sophisticated European,

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Meeting My Fellow Man

Barceloneses and Madrileños; Moorish Malagueños and Murcianos; gitanos, gypsies from the labyrinthine cave city of Guadix and the Sacrimonte; Celtic cantabrian Gallegos from Vigo and La Coruña; mountain men and miners from the Asturias, the quinquis, and, of course, the mysterious Basques.

Aggressively patriotic, each extolled — loudly, excitedly and often — the unique virtues of their particular pueblo over those of the rest of Spain, and the world of the extranjeros (foreigners) beyond the Pyrénées, of which they were mostly ignorant (as most Americans who dwell outside the cosmopolitan centres of New York, Washington and Los Angeles are of the world overseas).

George Orwell observed in Homage to Catalonia that during the civil war, the political loyalties of individual Spaniards often depended on which pueblo or barrio they came from.

They claimed to defer to no one, including Franco. The Aragonese were fond of quoting the oath of loyalty sworn by their nobles to the Spanish king. It bore remarkable similarities to the sentiments expressed in the Scottish Declaration of Arbroath, written in 1320, six years after Robert the Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn: ‘We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our sovereign lord, provided you observe all our statutes and laws, if not, not.’

The attitude of most of the comunes, the non-political prisoners, towards me was friendly. My nombre de patio (patio nickname) was ‘el bombero escocés’, ‘the Scottish fireman’, or ‘el petardista’, ‘the bomber’.

Although they tended not to bear grudges, a few proud Spaniards, including some bitter anti-Francoists, resented that I had taken it upon myself to intrude in what they saw as a purely Spanish affair. But what most of the comunes simply could not come to terms with was the fact that I had done what I did in pursuit of an ideal, not for monetary gain. They had me marked down immediately as a jilipolla, a stupid foreigner; nice but dim — and slightly inferior.

Two of my fellow inmates were in for what were to me unusual bullfightrelated incidents. These men were espontáneos whose crime was to have jumped into bullrings during corridas. One was an eccentric Gallego who had been sentenced to six years for recidivism in interrupting bullfights. His particular modus operandi was to vault into the ring at ‘the moment of truth’ brandishing his Galician bagpipes like an espada, push the matador to one side and confront the bull — just as the former (or the latter) was about to make his kill — blasting away on the pipes and playing the banned Galician national anthem for all he was worth. I learned from him — or someone — that the word ‘toreador’ had in fact been invented by Bizet because ‘matador’ did not scan with the tune in ‘Carmen’. Amazing what you pick up.

The second was a mischievous, troll-like Asturian; I could never work out if

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

some north-western village was missing an idiot or if he was a Spanish KenKeysian merry prankster. His trick was to leap into the ring the moment the bull bounded in and confront the bull himself. On the last occasion, he had accidentally stuck his sword in the eye of one of the matadors who tried to escort him out of the ring.

‘ORGANISED’ CRIME was not something I was aware of in Carabanchel. Most of the Spanish comunes were what Havelock Ellis described as opportunist criminals who were inside for small-time robberies and burglaries. One lad had been sentenced to three years for stealing a jacket in winter.

There were no Moriarties or criminal geniuses. There were a few highly imaginative villains, but not intelligent enough to avoid capture in the long run.

They were victims of their own over-reaching temperaments and sheer bad luck. Only a few Spaniards were inside for the more creative and larger-scale crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, high-value thefts, cigarette smuggling and bank robberies.

Murderers were the sorriest bunch. Most had killed people they loved most in a moment of hysteria, madness or jealous rage and now lived with their guilt as best they could every moment of every day. A very few were psychopaths devoid of conscience or sense of guilt. These had killed or maimed not because they didn’t know what they were doing, but because they didn’t care about what they had done, or the consequences for other people. The other prisoners avoided these characters. There must have been ‘nonces’ (sexual offenders or child abusers), but I never came across these and I suspect they were kept in solitary confinement in the tercera (third) gallery.

THE IMPACT OF PACKAGE TOURISM on Spain in the early 1960s had been enormous, and not only for the coffers of the Francoist regime; its exposure of the political and cultural weaknesses of the system had far-reaching and unforeseen consequences for Spanish society.

From 6 million in 1961, the number of tourists had more than doubled by 1965 to 14 million. Nothing, it appeared, could stem the flow; neither appeals to conscience, nor propaganda by word or by deed, by pamphlet or bomb.

But with the tourists had come not only money, but also liberal ideas and models of how life could be without the stultifying and reactionary dead hand of the Spanish Roman Catholic Church and the antiquated conservatism of the land-owning elite and super-rich.

Tourism raised the aspirations of disenfranchised Spaniards and their expectations for a higher standard of living. It encouraged them to challenge the system and provided the impetus to push harder for economic, political and cultural change. Strikes, political discontent and crime escalated, and the barometer of all these changes was behind the walls of Carabanchel.(See Background Paper: Crime in Spain.)

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Evil Is As Evil Does

The ‘banality of evil’ BECAUSE OF ITS LACK of formal extradition treaties with most of the rest of the world, Spain in 1964 had become not only a centre of right-wing conspiratorial intrigue; it was also a safe haven for global criminals and desperados with nowhere left to run. The poorer, more careless, or unlucky ones inevitably ended up spending time in the prison of the national capital, Carabanchel.

And so it was that when I was released from the solitary confinement of periodo Carballo had gone, transferred to another prison. I emerged into an unfamiliar wall-bounded world to meet my fellow man and fond myself passing the time of day with a crosssection of humanity, some exemplary, others criminal geniuses, opportunists, wasters (scum as they are known in Glasgow), and the marginalised political detritus of cold war Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Before I went to prison my world-view was simple and clear-cut — black and white, a moral battlefield in which everyone was either a goody or a baddy. But the Fernando Carballo Blanco after his release in 1977. ambiguities in people I came across in prison made me * Fernando Carballo Blanco uneasy and I began to question my assumptions about Fernando Carballo Blanco, a native of Valladolid, was the the nature of good and evil. I came to recognise that son of a CNT member shot after the Civil War. Carballo apparently kind people sometimes had a duplicitous was first arrested in 1940, aged 18, when he was jailed for side to them that was amoral, treacherous, self seeking six months for stealing a packet of peanuts. Six years later, or brutal, while those with a reputation for cruelty while while working as an agricultural labourer in Morea de Ebro, he was arrested for attacking a night watchman sometimes showed themselves capable of great and served 18 months in Tarragona prison. Released in selflessness and generosity of spirit. This didn’t make 1947, he was rearrested in April that same year accused of me cynical, but it did make me less judgemental about membership of Socorro Rojo Internacional (International my fellow human beings. Also, it was hard to fan the Red Aid), a charge that was amended to one of theft — and which earned him a thirteen year sentence in the flames of righteous anger in the face of the sheer notorious penitentiaries of Puerto de Santa Maria and ordinariness of people. The ethical template in my head Ocaña. Carballo was released in August 1955, when he no longer seemed to fit reality and my clearly drawn married Juana Rodríguez and became an active member of moral blueprint became smudged and fuzzy when I was the CNT and the FIJL until his arrest in August 1964. brought face to face with what Hannah Arendt termed ‘the banality of evil’.

Where better than prison to sort yourself out, to understand — or at least question — the role of good and evil in human nature? This would at least prove an interesting place in which to grow up and pass into manhood.

My first confrontation with the ambiguities of people came with Pedro ‘El Cruel’, a man with a welldocumented history of cruelty and bloody-mindedness, yet during my periodo he had been surprisingly kind and

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Patio perambulations.

considerate when I caught sunstroke. In some indefinable way he even appeared curiously civilised. Ian Dixon and Trevor Hatton of the Committee of 100 had found themselves in a similarly strange situation when they were banged up in Springhill Prison with Colin Jordan, the British national organiser of the National Socialist Movement.

It is difficult to keep the flames of righteous anger alive when faced with the ordinariness of human beings.

Morning and afternoon exercise was something else.

Walking head-down, ruminatively, backwards and forwards, up and down and occasionally, for a change of perspective, around the perimeter of the high-walled yard of the septima galería, I would usually be joined by one or more of the English-speaking Spanish or foreign prisoners.

Some were looking for an advantage in my friendship, many were curious about Scotland or simply wanted to pass the time of day with a new face and a fresh story to tell. Others were not so much interested in listening as waiting for an opening for their own tale. A few, however, were genuinely concerned to mark my card about which prisoners to look out for, the good and the bad screws, and how use the system to my advantage.

Most of the Spaniards I came across were tactile and demonstrative, unlike the extranjeros, or giris. They were incapable of walking and talking without direct eye contact. Every few yards they would grab your arm to stop you and look into your face to discern the effect on you of what they were saying.

My twenty-year sentence meant I would probably be sent to ‘the University’, as Burgos penitentiary was known. Burgos held around 80 political prisoners; it was the largest concentration of políticos in any Spanish prison at the time. Sentences of two years or less were usually spent in Carabanchel’s tercera galería (third gallery) while two- to six-year sentences were usually served in Caceres in Extremadura, near the Portuguese border.

It took me a little time to discover who my newfound companions were and why they were in prison; it was a useful learning experience. Some were genuinely nice and kind people whose solidarity, company and guidance provided the focus and direction that made even prison life seem bearable.

But there were others with more complex and darker characters. There were no equations that made human behaviour understandable. Thus, in the early days, after a long and intelligent conversation in the yard with a new acquaintance, thinking I had made friends with a nice chap — I was always surprised when I discovered he was an SS or Gestapo officer awaiting

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Joachim’s Tale

extradition on charges of mass murder, or an OAS terrorist, a South American gangster, a professional assassin, an arms dealer, a rapist, a swindler, a pickpocket, or a pimp.

I was disturbed and fascinated by my fellow prisoners, some of whom were the aristocracy of European crime at the time. These patio conversations with enthusiastic, sophisticated, convivial, jovial or placid men, some with clearly outstanding abilities and highly specialised knowledge coupled with defective morality, gave me valuable insights into the complexity of human behaviour. These were not ideal people. Nor were they predictable. I soon discovered that people come in as many varieties as individual grains of sand, and no two people respond in the same way to a particular situation or similar pressures.

Learning that apparently kind people sometimes had a side to them that was amoral, treacherous, self seeking or brutal — and vice versa with those who appeared ‘cruel’ but who showed themselves to be generous, gentle and unselfish — didn’t make me cynical, but it did make me a bit more wary, less dogmatic and not so quick to judge or pigeon-hole my fellow human beings.

As far as I could tell, there was no psychological or sociological equation between intelligence and bravery, conviction and courage, ideology and humanity or class and generosity of spirit.

Prison also opened up a sociometric network which, had I been inclined to take advantage of it, could have had interesting consequences. I suppose you will see the better sides of pimps and dictators when they are deprived, respectively, of whores and minions — in much the same way as you will see the better side of drunks when they are sober.

Carabanchel’s septima was the transit gallery for convicted prisoners awaiting dispersal to long-term prisons such as Ocaña or the Puerta de Santa María and extranjeros awaiting expulsion or extradition to face their nemesis elsewhere.

One of the prisoners who occasionally joined me on my ruminative paseos or patio marathons in the weeks after my arrest was an Austrian by the name of Joachim, the encargado de galería of the septima, the ‘trusty’ prisoner responsible for the day-to-day running of the gallery. He was a tall, formal and austere sort of man, a bit schoolmasterish, with a square lantern jaw, high forehead and hairline, dark, greying hair and a sallow, waxen complexion. He was intelligent, well-read and spoke good Teutonic English.

Even though he was always anxious to help me out in little ways, he did make me slightly uncomfortable. Perhaps I knew subconsciously what he was.

Why would a German of his age be in a Spanish jail? His only friend among the prisoners was another Belgian war criminal. But the Falangist administrators and funcionarios, such as Pedro ‘El Cruel’, thought highly of him,

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Patio conversation.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Otto Skorzeny in his Madrid offices, mid-1960s.

hence his position as encargado de galería.

Joachim had been an SS officer in a Nazi concentration camp and was fighting extradition back to Germany for war crimes. I discovered this later.

With me he was always vague as to why he was being extradited, other than that it had to do with his military service.

His Belgian friend was also awaiting extradition, to Belgium, for war crimes. He had been a Nazi collaborator who had fought against the Russians in Léon Degrelle’s Walloon Legion, a Waffen SS Division raised from the French-speaking provinces of Belgium and Degrelle’s right wing Roman Catholic Rexist Party, which, like Spain’s Blue Division, had fought alongside German troops on the Eastern Front. Degrelle had been a leader of Christus Rex, a Belgian right-wing Roman Catholic organization, and had been sentenced to death in 1944, in absentia. He escaped to Spain with the help of exSS Colonel Otto Skorzeny and became a naturalised Spaniard in 1954, taking the name León José de Ramírez Reina. Degrelle remained a key player in international neo-fascist circles until his death in 1994.

Joachim had powerful friends and was visited regularly by Otto Skorzeny.

Skorzeny, Mussolini’s kidnapper-rescuer, was the Spanish coordinator of Odessa (Organisation der SS Angehoerigen or Organisation of SS members), the postwar escape network that provided new identities and shelter for wanted Nazi war criminals and collaborators and organised their escape to the Middle East, Latin America or South Africa.

Skorzeny was given this job in the final months of the war in his role as head of the sabotage section of Dept VI of the Reich Security Office (RHSA VI).

Joachim was another of those who disappeared one day. I never found out if he had been extradited or if Skorzeny and his chums had managed to obtain his release. (see Background Paper: Skorzeny and ‘The Circle of Friends’.)

A more sympathetic conversationalist was a French ex-legionnaire from Marseilles. Jacques was a professional criminal awaiting trial on charges of burglary and armed robbery. He had broken into the apartment of a wealthy Spanish financier and was arrested trying to blow open the safe. Unfortunately, he used too much explosive, knocked himself unconscious with the blast and blew the windows out instead of the safe door. On an earlier, less disastrous occasion he had been interrupted during a robbery in Paris and ran into the backyard where he opened the rear gate then doubled back and hid in the dustbin until the police had gone.

On another occasion still, he and his friends had been unable to open a safe so they dropped it out of the first floor window of the

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Jacques’ Tale

office they were robbing, stole a wheelbarrow from a nearby building site and wheeled the safe through the streets of Paris back to their garage where they finally managed to torch it open — burning all the money and securities that were inside at the same time.

Jacques told wonderful stories about the French underworld, the Gaullist gangsters of the Service d’Action Civique (SAC) (set up by De Gaulle’s security services to neutralise the activists of the OAS), and the Corsican Mafia.

A Marseillais, he knew and was friendly with many of the Corsicans, including the infamous Antoine and Mémé Guérini and Jo Attia.

Jacques’ constant topic of conversation was his plan to rob the vaults of the Société Générale Bank in Nice. He wanted me to come in with him on this project when I was released. He had the plans of the bank, which had a very old vault built at the turn of the century and close to a main sewer, which made it an easy target. Access to the sewer could be gained from an underground car park directly opposite the bank.

Jacques was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and disappeared into the outer reaches of the Spanish prison system.

Interestingly, the Société Genérale Bank in Nice was robbed in 1976, twelve years later, by precisely the method described by Jacques. The gang managed to get away with sixty million francs in cash, bonds and jewellery, having welded the vault’s doors shut to delay discovery of the crime.

The French police arrested three members of the gang, Albert Spaggiari, an OAS gunman, Gaby Anglade, who had been involved in the 1962 assassination attempt on De Gaulle, and Jean Kay, a conman — but of Jacques there was no mention. Spaggiari got away by jumping through an unguarded courtroom window and escaped to freedom on the pillion of a waiting motorcycle.

Andrés Ruiz Márquez, known as ‘Colonel Montenegro’, was another patio companion. Marquéz had been arrested two months before me, on 24 June, also on charges of ‘banditry and terrorism’, and had been sentenced to death by a summary consejo de guerra on 7 July. However, Franco intervened and commuted his sentence to one of thirty years.

A short, swarthy and taciturn man, Marquéz had been a lieutenant in Franco’s Army. He was also a bit of a national sporting hero, having been a Spanish Olympic ski champion.

Julio Alvárez del Vayo, a Socialist Party member and minister in the Negrín government during the civil war (then living in Milan), was the alleged éminence gríse behind Marquéz’s group, the Spanish National Liberation Front (FELN), formed in Geneva earlier in 1964. The FELN, whose first communiqué was dated 16 February 1964, claimed to be the armed wing of the so-called ‘Third Republic Movement’, an umbrella group of republicans and socialist dissidents, but there was no evidence for Alvárez del Vayo’s involvement and the whole affair was extremely murky.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The two people arrested with Marquéz, a father and son, had no apparent political affiliations other than membership of the Grand Orient masonic lodge.

Marquéz had been charged with planting up to fifty bombs in Madrid between 23 November 1963 and 23 June 1964. These had targeted the cars of civil servants, banks, pro-Francoist embassies and the Castellano Hilton, a hotel popular with visiting government officials and US businessmen. The explosions stopped after Marquéz was arrested and both the Third Republic Movement and Alvárez del Vayo sank into obscurity.

Talking the talk FOR THE FIRST FEW months of my imprisonment the main problem I faced was my inability to communicate directly or easily with my fellow prisoners. It took me almost a year before I could think in Spanish, although I did manage to make myself understood well before that.

I soon began to feel like a Spaniard, however. While still in the isolation cell of the septima, the Andalusian fop, Pineda, had been appointed my chaperon.

He had been given this job through his sycophantic relationship with the prison teacher and the priests.

The teacher, Roig, was a rabid Falangist, as were the priests. The tallest of the latter I referred to, mentally, as Torquemada. Pineda knew a few words of English and dressed in what he imagined to be the ‘English’ style. He looked look like a cross between Lord Peter Wimsey and a Monégasque ponce. He claimed to have degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge.

Pineda stuck to my side every waking minute of the first month or so after my periodo. He reported back to the jefes de servicios, the chief prison warders on whom I associated with and what we talked about. We attended literacy classes together every morning; he was my Spanish teacher, ‘moral tutor’— and personal spy.

Spain at the time was a Roman Catholic country in much the same way that Saudi Arabia is Muslim. The church played a key role in legislation, in schools, universities and in all other public and private institutions.

Primary and secondary education, which was geared towards spiritual salvation, was orthodox and ultra-conservative. It was based on a literal (when it suited them, e.g. not on killing) reading of the Bible, a rigid interpretation of Roman Catholic liturgy, and a constant harking back to the lives and deeds of the saints and martyrs of the church. Even the Spanish novelist Ramón del Valle-Inclan argued that that ‘no education for the masses was better than an education which turned healthy peasants into putty-skinned merchants’.

Lessons began with a prayer and swearing an oath of loyalty to the Caudillo. I was obliged to stand up, but was always able to avoid taking any oaths, not even mumbling. This was followed up with the teacher delivering an exaggeratedly venomous and perverse attack on the forces of anti-Catholicism.

I was aware that education in Spain had always been in the hands of the

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Letters Home

clergy, but when I first opened the textbooks I couldn’t believe my eyes. The first page showed recorded history beginning with the an illustration of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden!

While I could not sustain a conversation in Spanish for any length of time, after two or three months I found that I could at least make myself understood.

That helped me become independent of Pineda.

Our relationship by that time had deteriorated to such an extent that I could not bear having him around me. I explained my frustration with him to a sympathetic jefe de servicio, who had words with the governor and, much to my astonishment, I was released from his custody. But one consequence of this snub was to make me his enemy. Anything and everything I did he reported immediately to his friends among the Falangist warders.

MY LETTERS HOME were in English, so they could not be read by the normal prison censor. This brought me into contact with another Blue Division veteran and rabid fascist who was in charge of the censor’s department and prison visits. He was an ugly man who bore a remarkable resemblance to Edward G. Robinson; with a Levantine bullfrog face, thick rubbery lips and gold-rimmed spectacles. His name, Don Benigno (meaning benign), belied both his appearance and his character.

My early letters to Mum were full of complaints about the food and the armies of unusual insects and parasites with whom I had to share my cell, my bed, and my food — cockroaches, lice, scorpions and enormous centipedes.

I opened my eyes one morning, disturbed by something moving on my face, to see a scorpion marching in stately fashion across the bridge of my nose. I froze, my eyes following its delicate progress. After what seemed like a very long time it dropped off my cheek and continued on its way over the side of the bed.

Thinking it might have bitten me and I had only a short time left to live, I leapt out of bed and banged on the cell door, like a man possessed. It didn’t occur to me that I felt no pain anywhere, so it was unlikely I had been stung.

No one appeared to take my near-death experience seriously, nor did they care about the infestation of seething scrums of cockroaches with their mahogany polished backs and constantly twitching antennae scuttling around the floor, or the myriad bedbugs that were sucking my life-blood like minuscule vampire bats every night. I wrote quite forcefully and dramatically to Mum about how I would lie awake at night, unable to sleep listening to the sounds of cockroaches scuffling in the corner.

Next day I was called to Don Benigno’s office where he handed me back my letter and told me to rewrite it, this time without mentioning prison conditions.

I argued with him that if I could not write about the prison, what else could I say apart from the weather and my health?

Shortly after I had been released into the normal prison regime, our gallery went to see the 1959 sword-and-sandals film Hercules Unchained in which there

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

was considerable seduction, slaughter and plunder. The sight of Sylvia Lopez as Queen Omphale of Lydia hanging on to Steve Reeves’s knees must have triggered something in the mind of one of my neighbours, an elderly man jailed for strangling his beautiful young actress wife in a jealous rage; that night he hanged himself from the window bars sometime after the last count.

His body was discovered at recuento the following morning. I mentioned this incident in a letter home to my mother, and later that morning was summoned again to appear before Don Benigno. He was angry and accused me of trying to bring Spanish prisons into disrepute and needlessly worrying my mother. As if! He assured me that if I continued to denigrate the penal system he would see to it that I would never be released.

My only communication I had with the outside world during those early months was with my Mum. But I knew through prisoner friends working in the censor’s office that bags of letters, magazines, newspapers and books were arriving for me every day.

All post arriving in the prison went through the censor’s office where it was read and either rejected or cleared. My post was collected every morning by a trusty from the mailroom and taken to Don Benigno, my own private censor.

Fortunately, I soon discovered that in return for 25 pesetas a week, the trusty would bring me all my correspondence before taking it on to Don Benigno. I had a couple of hours to read all my letters and cards before returning them for censorship. Eventually the trusty gave up passing them on and left everything with me.

This went on for almost a year until my man was caught performing the same service for another prisoner. After that the censor’s office moved to the administrative section outside the main body of the prison. But it didn’t take long to find an alternative method of getting hold of my mail. Don Benigno’s new trusty was an avid collector of stamps, so I arranged for my mum to send me a cheap package of used foreign stamps with each letter. I gave him these in return for the letters, magazines and books that came for me each week. This system continued throughout my period in Carabanchel until I was finally transferred to the political gallery, where it was more difficult to move around and maintain contact with my former network.

BY THE END of 1966 and in the early months of 1967 the books, magazines and newspapers I was receiving showed that a cultural renaissance was taking place in Britain. From where I was, it felt similar to the exciting changes which had taken place ten years earlier with the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.

When I left the UK in 1964, before the Wilson government took over, society was still relatively grey and conservative. But now even popular music in Franco’s Spain was changing. That much we had been able to pick up from listening to the funcionarios’ radios and the weekend radio broadcasts played over the patio tannoy system. A game was afoot and the counterculture was on the march.

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Literature And The Outside And Inner Worlds

Tangible evidence of these changes came in the form of parcels of complimentary books which started to arrive in 1965, presents from the avant garde publishing house of John Calder. These books, mainly in the Jupiter series, were cerebral ‘manna from heaven’, particularly the highly congenial novels of Samuel Beckett: Murphy; Watt; Molloy and Malone Dies. These extraordinary, surreal and time-stopping dark stories about the hilarious and tragic antics of decrepit and degenerate characters who find themselves physically and psychologically disintegrating in the most absurd and dramatic situations were a revelation. I had stumbled upon what were to me unknown masterpieces of the English language and a literary encapsulation of the human condition as they describe, with real warmth and humanity, the humdrum progress through time and space. With his presents of these books, John Calder became an earth-bound angel who brought inspiration and laughter to the cells of Carabanchel and for that alone he deserves his place in the Panthéon of literature.

Radical journals and newspapers also started arriving around the same time. The content and layout of these publications showed that the pace of events outside was quickening. The Wooden Shoe, a new bookshop in London's New Compton Street run by an Australian, Ted Kavanagh, and the veteran London anarchist Albert Meltzer, began sending me their new publication Cuddons’ Cosmopolitan Review with a clutch of articles by exciting new (to me) writers such as Tuli Kupfberger and news about ideas and events, particularly about what the Dutch ‘Provo’ movement was doing in Amsterdam. This was the same team who also published the one-page broadsheet Ludd which created a bit of a furorearound the time of the seamen’s strike in the summer of 1966.

Heatwave, edited by Christopher Gray and Charles Radcliffe, was another stimulating duplicated magazine that arrived. The content and tone of these publications were light years away from the old-fashioned Freedom and Direct Action papers I had left behind two years earlier.

They were amalgams of the best of the old anarcho-syndicalist ideas melded with those of the libertarian socialist Solidarity group, dadaist and surrealist texts, together with a new social critique propagated by a group calling itself ‘Situationist’.

The ‘Situationists’ were a small but influential French-based circle of elitist and paranoid intellectuals who had developed a critique of ‘alienation’ and ‘recuperation’ based on what its leading light, Guy Debord, described as ‘the Spectacle’. Basically, they were radical and bloody-minded advertising copywriters and graphic artists manqué who had gone over the top in their use of aggressive, obscure and incomprehensible language. Their critique of capitalist consumer society was that images had come to replace the real and people had become conditioned players in a global film or TV advertisement.

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Censor’s authorisation form signed by the priest and the Falangist teacher.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Cuddons’ Cosmoplitan Review, 1965. One of the first of the new wave ‘alternative’ titles published using the revolutionary new ‘Varityper’ typesetting machine and printed on a small Gestelith offset.

They wanted to break down what they saw as the borders (De Borders!) between life and art in order to live with ‘imaginative intensity'. This they proposed to do by a strategy of creating dramatic situations that could be anything from an artificially created riot to vandalism to suicide. They did, however, produce lots of witty and trenchant posters, parodies and slogans that caught the mood of the period and — if it did nothing else — provided amusing and thought-provoking graffiti and artwork for a new generation of radicals.

Perhaps the most important and wider cultural influence and barometer of late 1966 and 1967 was the appearance of International Times (IT). IT was an intriguing newspaper which became the English-language voice of the new counterculture, the harbinger of the hippies. It was professionally produced, printed on a letterpress machine with an innovative layout and a striking masthead that incorporated a half profile of what was supposed to be IT girl Clara Bow, but in fact was Theda Bara.

Edited in its early period by Tom McGrath, IT was the paper of the flowerpower generation; it avoided political analysis, it was eclectic, nonjudgemental, anti-political, anti-Vietnam War, libertarian, hedonistic, sybaritic, drug-oriented and sexually liberated. It carried articles about music, legalising cannabis, William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, underground events, women’s issues, blacks, CIA conspiracies, UFOs and hippies. To me, locked away in the Castilian sierra it was a clear sign that something new and exciting was happing on the outside, but quite what I hadn’t the foggiest idea.

COMMUNICATION WITH THE OUTSIDE world became easier as time passed. I learned to know which screws were being bought and who would take letters out and bring them in — for a price. Within a few months I was sending and receiving letters through these unofficial channels.

Don Alberto was a prison officer who was my conduit to the outside world.

He seemed unsuited to the job of prison warder. To him it was just a good job, something scarce in Spain where wages were extremely low. The screw who smuggled my letters in and out, and also British Sunday newspapers at a time when even Spanish newspapers were not allowed inside the prison, was gentle, kind and unassuming. He was small and quietly spoken with a shy smile I recognised later in the character Lofty played by Don Estelle in the BBC comedy series It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum! Don Alberto was also responsible for issuing the twice-daily wine ration to prisoners, two glasses of wine at one peseta a glass. Two prisoners accompanied him, one carrying a wooden tub with the wine and the other carrying a small demijohn to fill the tub as it emptied. As long as we were discreet about it, we could have as much wine as we wanted. Often we would have two or three litres each day. His charges were two pesetas on top of the cost of the stamp for a letter, the same for my Sunday papers and about five pesetas on top of the cost of a bottle of whisky, brandy or whatever drink we

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Midget With Attitude

wanted. These had to be brought in plastic containers, or else someone would have grown suspicious at finding empty spirits bottles in the prison dustbins.

This particular officer lasted about nine months in Carabanchel. One of the prisoners on wine duty, a quinqui by the name of Antonio, earned quite large sums of money by watering down the wine and selling it to his own private customers at well over the odds. So he did not like our funcionario, who literally gave the wine away and as far as possible made sure it was not diluted. On one occasion Antonio mistakenly overwatered the wine and almost caused a riot.

Antonio was caught in a spot search when the screws discovered 7000 pesetas in street money hidden in his cell (no prisoner was allowed to hold more than 300 pesetas, in prison currency, at any one time). When questioned he told the chief of services that it was for Don Alberto, his boss, to take out to his family.

When Don Alberto clocked on for duty the following morning, he was stopped by the chief of services and two security screws and asked to open his case. Inside were two bottles of scotch, a bottle of vodka, five hundred grams of hashish and bundles of letters for prisoners. He was immediately arrested and the last I heard was that he had been sentenced to five years in a military penitentiary. He could not have been earning more than 250 pesetas a week (about £1.50) on top of his wages.

Don Alberto had been a popular funcionario and a lot of people relied on him for news and goodies from home, so when Antonio came out of solitary confinement two months later he was ostracised by the other prisoners.

He was lucky to avoid a much worse fate.

The 'Ultimate Penalty' MOST OF THE PRISON WARDERS were Civil War veterans and had some physical or mental disability to show for their allegiance to Franco and clericalism. One of the most unpleasant was Don Fernando, a self important court-dwarf of a man with a big head, an unhealthy complexion and a lopsided, fleshy face with skin that hung in loose baggy folds, like theatrical drapes, from his eyes to his neck. A walking, talking Habsburg portrait, he had the face of a degenerate with a drooping lip which hung from a protruding jaw which appeared for all the world like a kitchen sink about to fall from its mounting. His teeth did not meet and he had to gulp his food like a dog. But that comparison is unfair on dogs. If you had a dog with a face like his you’d shave its arse and teach it to walk backwards.

There were two of these dwarfs. I first laid eyes on the ‘twin piques’, Don Tomás and Don Fernando, during morning recuento (count) when they came on duty. Don Tomás, the slightly taller of the two, wasn’t too bad; he at least had a sense of humour, but Don Fernando, el enano, the original poison dwarf, was a Troll with attitude, who would have been unwelcome even in the Goblin Market.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Don Fernando could not have been more than 4 feet 6 inches tall. He assisted at all prison executions. His job included setting up the garrote-vil, escorting the prisoner to the execution chamber, manacling him and standing witness to the foulest murder in the name of justice. He was a sanctimonious wee numpty who went on and on about the executions he had attended and was always recounting the grisly details of those horrible killings to anyone who would listen to him.

I was standing in the front row the first time he walked past taking the first recuento of his shift. It was impolite to smirk, but I couldn’t help but smile as he strutted pompously down the line, shouting at prisoners twice his size.

Outside he would have been the man who was always having sand kicked in his face. Inside he had no need to be like Charles Atlas to improve his standing. When he was nervous or angry he would stand in front of the linedup prisoners tapping one of his disproportionately large feet on the ground like a marionette on strings. Then he’d berate us in his high-pitched falsetto voice.

Don Fernando saw me smile as he passed and stopped. He ordered the gallery corneta, his gofer, to fetch a stool from his patio office. The wee man then climbed on to the stool, stuck his face into mine and began spluttering and haranguing me about arrogant foreign reds that came to assassinate his beloved Caudillo. He would teach me to behave. At least that’s what I assumed he was saying from the few key words I was able to pick up on.

There was probably little he could have done, given my standing as a foreigner and, diplomatically, a potentially hot potato. The Central Prison Administration, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the prison governor were obviously monitoring my treatment closely, which would have offended his fundamentalist Falangist sense of propriety. He nearly burst a blood vessel trying to ruffle me, but by this time I had learned the old army trick of dumb insolence, and found it went unpunished in my case.

TWO EXECUTIONS took place during my time in Carabanchel. I witnessed the penultimate stages of the gruesome ceremony preceding one of these, that of a quinqui by the name of El Lute.

There was no love lost between the gypsies and quinquis and the Guardia Civil. They had been sworn enemies since the formation of the rural paramilitary force in the previous century. El Lute’s crime had been to murder the Civil Guard who had tried to arrest him.

I was medical orderly of the quinta (fifth) gallery at the time and was not normally banged up until 10 or 11 p.m. However, on the evening before the execution everyone in the prison, including all the trusties, were locked up until El Lute had been brought from the isolation cells below the sexta galería through the quinta to the condemned cell which adjoined the execution chamber.

That night I lay in bed reading and re-reading Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Jail. It seemed the only way to understand what was about to happen.

With an execution imminent the prison was on high alert, with a full

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The Corridor Of Death

complement of jailers in attendance. The macabre ritual of institutional murder required the presence of the captain general of the region, attended by senior Francoist civil servants, general staff officers, ecclesiastical dignitaries, the arresting civil guard or police officers, the prison governor and high funcionarios.

The condemned man was led out of his cell in the calabozos, the punishment cells, and took his place in the grotesque procession which would march through the prison on its way to the place of his ceremonial murder.

The high dignitaries of Francoist justice waited in the gallery of the punishment cells to fall in line behind the manacled prisoner as he was taken on his own funeral procession. From the condemned cell it filed slowly along the camino de la muerte, the death road, past the sexta, up the stairs past the infirmary, through the quinta and the rotunda, then down stairs to the tiny chapel below the locutorios where the priest was to hear his last confession.

As I was the medical auxilliary, my cell door had not been locked. It was pushed to, on the latch, which allowed me to open it by six inches to witness part of the condemned man’s last journey. He was brought through the quinta just after 11 p.m. Through the chivato I could see this horrifying troupe advance slowly on its processional path through the gloom of the dimly-lit gallery. As they trudged closer I heard the hypnotic murmur of the deep, slow, rhythmical chant of the creed they were intoning. It was a spectacle which bore the stamp of a medieval autoda-fé, or an inquisitorial act of faith, carried out with all the pomp and drama of the church.

The macabre mumbling procession was preceded by the priest dressed in gold-embroidered brocade reading from a missal; then ecclesiastical ‘familiars’, an acolyte brandishing a cross high above him, the sword, and the olive branch, symbols of justice and mercy.

Accompanying the cross bearer were two more acolytes chanting and swinging incense burners. Behind them marched more ‘familiars’ in their cohorts, bearing other banners, crosses and lighted candles. It was a chilling reenactment of the calvary of Jesus.

Behind the priest and acolytes walked the condemned man, a tall, dignified and handsome young fellow in a white open-necked shirt, his head and shoulders held high and his hands manacled behind his back. He

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Condemned cells and calabozos (6a galería) Carabanchel Prison.

Below: ‘Corridor of death’, Carabanchel Prison.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

towered above the two small funcionarios, Don Fernando and Don Tomás, who waddled along incongruously on either side of him.

He was followed by a phalanx of perhaps 20 or so military, legal and lay official witnesses led by the Captain General in his dress uniform complete with ceremonial sword. Through the chivato I looked closely at the face of the condemned man as the staged tableau passed my cell, trying to read his emotions and thoughts. I thought of the two innocent anarchists, Delgado and Granado who followed the same calvary only a year earlier, and then I thought of myself who could so easily have been in the Gypsy’s position.

He was the only one not chanting the creed.

Oscar Wilde wrote:

Execution chamber, Carabanchel Prison, 1966.

‘Like two doomed ships that pass in storm We had crossed each other’s way: But we made no sign, we said no word, We had no word to say; For we did not meet in the holy night, But in the shameful day…

‘And strange it was to see him pass With a step so light and gay, And strange it was to see him look So wistfully at the day, And strange it was to think that he Had such a debt to pay…

‘They glided past, they glided fast, Like travellers through a mist: They mocked the moon in a rigadoon Of delicate turn and twist, And with formal pace and loathsome grace The phantoms kept their tryst…’

From the small chapel the condemned man would be taken to the adjoining cell where the governor would ask him if he had any requests for the six remaining hours of his life. (I was told by my friend Busquets that Manuel Sabaté, the youngest of the Sabaté brothers, had apparently asked for a rice pudding which was cooked for him before his execution in January 1950 by the wife of a funcionario.)

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Garrote-Vil

EXECUTIONS TOOK PLACE at 5.00 a.m. Few prisoners could sleep the night before an execution. I certainly couldn’t. The hour before the execution dragged by. I paced up and down my cell, smoking cigarette after cigarette, reading Wilde’s harrowing poem, line by line, verse by verse, feeling intensely emotional and attempting to empathise with the man I had seen pass by a few hours earlier. A different spin on the wheel of fortune and that man could have been me.

‘But there is no sleep when men must weep Who never yet have wept: So we — the fool, the fraud, the knave — That endless vigil kept, And through each brain on hands of pain Another’s terror crept.

A tangible sense of melancholy descended on the prison in the final minutes before the execution.

At last I saw the shadowed bars, Like a lattice wrought in lead, Move right across the whitewashed wall That faced my three-planked bed, And I knew that somewhere in the world God’s dreadful dawn was red…

‘We waited for the stroke of eight!

Each tongue was thick with thirst: For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate That makes a man accursed, And Fate will use a running noose For the best man and the worst…’

Garroting of the anarchist Michele Angiolillo (1897) for the assassination of the reactionary Spanish premier Canovas del Castillo (Silk screen by Flavio Costantini). Below: public execution and early garrote.

I don’t know how we knew the time, but at five o'clock, a hellish tympani broke the silence of the dawn.

We were the inmates of Bedlam performing O Fortuna from Carmina Burana, without music.

Prisoners banged discordantly on their plates and rattled the window bars with their spoons while others kicked the cell doors in unorchestrated unison. Their cries of abuse against the executioners and jailers rose up to the heavens, a cacophonous noise that echoed through the galleries and over the prison walls. That outburst of impotent frustration, despair and anger cost us 24 hours without exercise or privileges.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

‘There is no chapel on the day On which they hang a man: The Chaplain’s heart is far too sick, Or his face is far too wan, Or there is that written in his eyes Which none should look upon.

‘So they kept us close till nigh on noon, And then they rang the bell, And the Warders with their jingling keys Opened each listening cell, And down the iron stair we tramped, Each from his separate Hell.

‘Out into God's sweet air we went, But not in wonted way, For this man’s face was white with fear, And that man’s face was grey, And I never saw sad men who looked So wistfully on the day.

Franco’s executioners: Vicente López Copete and Antonio López Guerra.

‘I never saw sad men who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue We prisoners called the sky, And on every careless cloud that passed In happy freedom by.’

Anthropometrics WEEK OR SO after I received my sentence a hospital orderly came to escort me to the ‘anthropometry’ room that adjoined the infirmary. I had never heard of anthropometrics before and had no idea what was involved, or its purpose. (See Background paper 6 — Anthropometrics.)

It was a grey room, furnished and smelling like a dental surgery. Starkly lit by fluorescent tubes it had an adjustable chair, scales and glass cabinets in which sinister-looking stainless steel instruments were laid out in neat rows.

A small, balding, and precise-looking man dressed in a white coat and steel-rimmed glasses was writing away on a clipboard. He nodded to me as I entered and pointed to an examination table. For a brief moment I panicked, thinking I was going to be trepanned or subjected to some other form of sub-Pyrenean psychoneurosurgery.

After a brief introduction the man in the white coat began making notes on his clipboard. The form he was completing had pre-printed outlines of cranial

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Anthropometrics

and body parts, full-face, profile and plane, which he was checking off. The form also had my police mugshot attached to it.

He clamped a pair of steel callipers at various points around my head. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I thought to myself, ‘I’m being measured for an iron mask.’

The distances between each and every conceivable part of my head were noted, as was the size and shape of my nose, the tilt of my forehead and the distance between my eyes. He peered closely at my skin looking for scars and blemishes, meticulously recording every detail on his form. He noted my height, head size, the extent of my outstretched arms, the length of my left forearm and left middle finger, and the circumference of my wrist. His crowning moment came while he was examining my ears and discovered I didn’t have any earlobes. His thin dark face became animated and he let out a sharp intake of breath. He had discovered anthropometric gold.

La quinta galería ABOUT SIX WEEKS after my court martial the governor, Don Ramón García Labella, summoned me to his office to tell me that the system had plans for me.

I was to be transferred to the quinta gallery, which was considered more salubrious with a ‘better class of prisoner’, and that I would have to work in order to ‘redeem’ or reduce my sentence.

By this time I knew that with the exception of the political prisoners, most inmates in Franco’s jails usually served around a quarter of their sentences. Up to half a sentence could come off if a pope died and even more when an other was elected. (According to the governor, I had been sentenced by a military tribunal therefore I was not classified as political; only those sentenced by the civilian Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP) were considered political prisoners.

But he was making this up as he went along as there were other prisoners in the sexta, such as Alain Pecunia, who had been tried by court martial.)

That year, 1964, Francoist Spain was celebrating ‘Twenty-Five years of Peace’ and on 15 September Franco authorised an indulto, a reduction by a sixth part of all prisoners’ sentences, including those whose death sentences had been commuted. I now had 16 years and 9 months left to do. Apart from the occasional indultos, a further third could be deducted from one’s total sentence by ‘redemption’ or working. This meant that for every two days a prisoner worked, one day was deducted from what remained of their sentence. Another ‘Get Out Of Jail’ card was ‘conditional liberty’, which was similar to parole.

There was also the possibility of a special reduction in sentence for outstanding behaviour in prison or for reasons of political expediency.

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Bertillonage. Illustration

by Flavio Costantini.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Don Agustín told me I could choose between a number of jobs available in the prison workshops. I resented the idea of having to work for Franco. It was bad enough being kept a prisoner by him. My time until then had been spent enjoyably, learning Spanish, passing the time of day with an interesting crosssection of multi-talented fellow prisoners, drinking coffee, walking around the exercise yard, sunbathing behind the washing lines, playing pelota and finishing off the day with a cool shower.

But I was to have no say in the matter. Also, it was getting on for the middle of October, and the winds blowing down from the Sierra de Guadarrama were turning colder so the option of exchanging a bitter, damp and grey patio or cell for a warm workshop was appealing.

I returned to the septima for the last time, collected my bedding and belongings and, having completed the necessary bureaucratic amendments to my expediente, was escorted through the Centro to the adjoining quinta galería.

Don Pedro ‘El Cruel’ hid his emotions well as he waved me farewell, with an admonition to behave myself otherwise he would be after me.

A single cell on the ground floor of the quinta had been set aside for me. I was privileged. Most prisoners were banged up four or six to a cell, a prospect so dire it would have driven me to convert to Roman Catholicism had I been forced to share. Fortunately, the priests weren't aware of this.

Don Benigno called for me the following morning after the 10 o’clock recuento to take me on a guided tour of the talleres penitenciarios, the prison carpentry and print workshops. These were located in a block that ran at right angles to the hub of the prison. Access was either through a barred gate at the far end of the quinta or through a tunnel at the end of the arcaded passageway that ran under the gallery. The sexta galería, the sixth gallery, which housed the political prisoners and the reformatory, for juveniles, were also located here.

At the far end of the arcaded passage in the patio of the quinta was the economato, the gallery shop, and the entry to a covered communal area that provided shelter from the heat in summer and the dagger-sharp wind from the Guadarrama in winter. Here, too, was the coffee shop that sold real coffee made with ground beans in a Gaggia machine — and pastries. For 5 pesetas, un duro, you could buy a Madrid breakfast, a café con leche or café solo with a pastry or churro con chocolate, fried corrugated strips of greasy doughnut batter dipped in chocolate.

The talleres penitenciarios were privately owned and run, and consisted of a carpentry shop, a shoe workshop where they made everything from gun holsters to alpargatas, Spanish sandshoes, a blacksmith’s-cum-engineering shop, a wicker workshop and the print shop. I saw myself as an artisan and wanted to make model Spanish galleons. Failing that, I said I would like to work in the book binding section of the printshop.

It turned out I didn’t have a choice. They had made up their minds I was going to work in the printshop, a strange trade for a fascist dictatorship to teach an anarchist.

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‘You Will Win...But You Will Not Convince...’

The attitude of Franco’s regime to learning had been summed up in 1936 with the fanatical one-eyed General Millán Astray’s cry of ‘Muera la inteligéncia!’

(Death to intelligence!) during a speech critical of the new regime by Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936).

Don Miguel, Spain’s leading intellectual, poet, philosopher, novelist and rector-for-life of the University of Salamanca, responded with dignity to Millán Astray’s cretinous outburst: ‘I have always, whatever the proverb may say, been a prophet in my own land. You will win, but you will not convince. You will win, because you possess more than enough brute force, but you will not convince, because to convince means to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack — reason and right in the struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain. I have finished.’

Hadn’t these book burners learned anything about the power of the printed word over the past 40 years?

Weren’t they aware that the printing trade had been a radical and libertarian stronghold for many years, particularly in Spain?

Don Benigno left me with the printshop owner, a plumpish and cheerful businessman by the name of Don Carmona, who had jumped at the opportunity of cheap labour and minimum overheads in return for low capital investment. Carmona, a pear-shaped figure of a man, took me around the different departments explaining what went on in each room.

First stop was the compositors’ room to see these highly skilled craftsmen, the ‘comps’, plucking slivers of moveable lead type from large compartmentalised wooden frames (cases) at lightning speed, stopping every so often to refer to a typescript or manuscript.

Holding a small brass frame — a composing ‘stick’ — in one hand these men would slowly build up lines of type — letter by letter, space by space — to the required width of the page or column. One by one, the comp would drop the letters of each word, the proportional spaces between words to ‘justify’ the lines and the ‘leading’, the spaces between lines, into his stick, securing each one in place with the thumb of his left hand. Intriguingly, type being a mirror image of what appears on the printed page, the comp, in order not to have to read from right to left, read the type in the stick upside down.

When his stick was full with as many lines as it would hold, the comp would lift these lines of moveable type by grasping them with the fingers of each hand and lifting them out delicately, like a piece of solid metal, and place them in a long metal tray or ‘galley’. Occasionally these blocks of letters would

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Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936). Illustration

by Flavio Costantini.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

slip from the comp’s fingers and he would then have to pick up hundreds, perhaps thousands of letters scattered across the floor and start afresh.

From there we passed on to the foundry. This was where plaster casts (or stereotypes) were taken of existing pages of type formes, in case a reprint of a particular book or journal was required — thus saving the time-consuming job of composing the type all over again. Then we moved through to the print room where I was to work.

It was a Hell’s kitchen with noisy and busy printing presses of every shape and size: from massive electrically powered cylinder presses with flywheels the size of a Clyde steamer’s paddle to small hand-powered Minerva presses.

Carmona handed me a pair of blue overalls and told me without a by-yourleave that I was to start there and then as a machine minder on the newest and fastest of the machines in the printshop, a shiny black Heidelberg press, with a cheerful late twenty-something Valenciano, by the name of Pozas. Pozas was serving twelve years for armed robbery.

Pozas and the encargado (foreman trusty) of the printshop explained my duties to me. I was to watch the printed sheets as they came through to make sure the ink impression was consistent, grab any paper misfeeds as they came through, shut the machine down in an emergency and strip and clean the machine at the end of the day. Later I would move on to making ready, mixing inks, adjusting rollers and the more technically skilled aspects of printing.

Pozas was very friendly, but he had the irritating habit of constantly making homosexual advances, feeling my arse as he walked past and on occasions trying to snatch kisses. Telling him where to get off had no effect on him, nor did pushing him away or even, on one occasion, kneeing him in the balls.

Despite this predatory homosexual behaviour Pozas was a good lad who covered for me unquestioningly whenever I slipped out to exchange a few words with the one other anarchist, a French lad, Alain Pecunia, in the sexta, across the patio from the printshop.

As my Spanish improved I was able to sustain longer conversations. Once or twice a week Carmona, the boss, held classes in graphic arts in his office and at the end of the first course I came top of the class. This was not due to any particular cleverness on my part, but to the fact that I was one of the very few of the machine minders in the workshop who could read. Most of the other apprentices were análfabetos, illiterates.

I quickly grew bored operating the noisy Heidelberg press. It was a tedious eight-hour day. The jobs were usually long runs of five hundred thousand to one million sheets, and nothing in this world is more eye-glazingly tranceinducing than watching a million sheets of paper go by and having to ensure that each page is printing correctly and consistently. The only time the trance was broken was when a sheet of paper misfed, whether induced or accidental, or something went wrong with the platen and we had to strip the machine. This happened two or three times a day.

I was one of the lowest paid in the workshop; my monthly wage amounted

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The Printshop

to a couple of pounds, about 200 to 300 pesetas, while the chargehand, also a prisoner, earned nearly £20 a month, a lot of money at the time. This was still a far cry from the pittance British prisoners earned in a supposedly more progressive penal system. Fortunately, I was not dependent on my wages. Mum sent me £5 every month from home — a lot of money out of a weekly wage of £12 — and I also had 500 pesetas a month from the CNT prisoners’ support committee in Toulouse.

Each gallery had a store known as el economato. These were run by the prison administration and you could buy everything there from small sachets of Nescafé, stamps, stationery and tobacco to a needle and thread. You could purchase the most mouth-watering Manchego cheese and Serrano ham.

A coffee bar was open all day selling real espresso coffee and fresh pastries.

Cooked meals such as roast saddle or leg of lamb or bacalao a la Vizcaína (Basque cod) or anything else one fancied could be provided for a price from the kitchen in the economato.

The camaraderie of the printshop was good, but I had no intention of remaining there for the rest of my sentence. I was constantly petitioning the governor for a job as an orderly with the prison dentist, who came once a week.

After much humming and hawing, a compromise was reached. On the basis of my apprenticeship as a dental mechanic it was agreed I should work with the dentist on Tuesday mornings in his surgery and act as his personal assistant.

This was the thin end of the wedge, and before long I did no work at all in the print shop on Tuesdays.

Carmona did not mind, but it annoyed the dwarf, Don Fernando, who was now on regular duty in the talleres. By this time none of the other screws minded where I disappeared to, but Don Fernando insisted that he escort me at all times, but eventually even he too gave up trying to annoy me.

Don Mariano had a dental practice in Madrid. He wanted to improve his spoken English, so having me around gave him a chance to do so, to say nothing of his Lowland Scots, so he jumped at the opportunity and we quickly became friends.

The work involved drawing up a list on Monday night of all those who wished to see the dentist that week and accompanying them to the surgery the following morning. The hands-on aspect involved my sterilising the syringes and filling them with Novocain, mixing the mercury amalgam for fillings, casting impressions for dentures, and sometimes holding down patients during difficult extractions.

Working with Don Mariano gave me access to the whole prison and regular contact with the three CNT members in the sixth gallery: Francisco Calle Mancílla, (‘Florián’), José Cases Alfonso and Maríano Agustín Sánchez, and the one FIJL member, Alain Pecunia, the young French anarchist. The only other occasions to meet with them were during Mass, visiting times, during Saturday cinema or sneaking off from the printshop.

Films were shown in a hall directly below the quinta and each gallery had

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

their own showings over the weekend. The men from the sexta came with the kids from the reformatory and those who could walk from the infirmary. I would slip in with the men from the sexta and sit talking in the darkness to Pecunia.

According to Pecunia, there had been an executive order from the security directorate that all FIJL members had to be kept in separate galleries, which was his explanation as to why I was being kept with the comunes in the quinta. As I said, the governor gave a different reason, that I was under military jurisdiction.

My personal opinion was that I was being kept separate for geopolitical and diplomatic reasons rather than security concerns.

Anarchists were in the minority among political prisoners in Carabanchel, with about 15 or so scattered around the 4 cellular galleries that had been built at that time. Contemporary police records for the period 1960-1961 showed that the BPS had arrested 108 anarchists that year compared with 169 Basque and Canarías Libre separatists and 189 members of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). In 1963, the BPS arrested 22 anarchists and 139 PCE members while in 1964 they arrested 6 anarchists, including myself and Carballo, and 184 proRussian communists and Maoists. By the end of August 1964, the sexta gallery held between 60 and 100 political prisoners.

In spite of the Spanish Communist Party’s political neutralisation due to its constant re-alignment with Soviet foreign policy requirements (starting in 1956 with the Party's renunciation of all ‘violent actions’ in favour of ‘national reconciliation’, and the subsequent avalanche of favourable economic and trade treaties with Eastern Europe), most of my fellow political prisoners were CP members. Among these were most of the central committee, including its general secretary, José Sandoval, as well as the leadership of the CP-dominated Comisiones Obreras (Workers’ Commissions) under Marcelino Camacho. On reflection, perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising as the Spanish CP had recently tried to distance themselves from Moscow who responded by setting up a parallel Spanish CP in Moscow under the notorious General Enríque Lister (who had destroyed the anarchist collectives of Aragón and Catalonia in 1937).

The rest were Basque separatists from ETA, José Antonio Lasa from the Basque Nationalist Party, the PNV, José María Rodríguez Fernández from the Basque Workers’ Union, the STV, and about 10 members of the Roman-Catholicinfluenced Frente de Liberación Popular (FLP), including Nicolás Sartorius, Nicolás Redondo and Alfonso Guerra. There were a similar number of Maoists from the Frente Revolucionario de Acción Popular (FRAP) and pro-Cubans as well as students and academics arrested during the 10,000- to 20,000-strong student demonstrations of 1964 and early 1965.

Alain explained to me the circumstances of his arrest and those of his two fellow-accused, Guy Batoux and Bernard Ferry. Although Bernard had also been active in the anti-OAS movement and the anti-torture Asociation Vérité- Liberté, Alain neither knew nor had met either of the others until their arrival in the sexta.

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Victims Of An Informer

Their arrests bore remarkable similarities to my own. We had all been victims of an informer. A new anti-tourism campaign, ‘Operation Springtime’ (‘Operación Primavera’) had been planned by the DI to coincide with the Easter holidays in late March and early April 1963, but Alain had been advised against going back into Spain both by Octavio Alberola and by the mysterious Dr Alexandre Chevalier. However, both Pecunia and his FIJL mentor, Francisco Abarca Ruiz, ‘Paco’, had dismissed these objections as scare-mongering.

But it had been far from scare-mongering. The BPS had been waiting for the seventeen-year old French lad on his return to the French border at Cerbère in April 1963, after he had planted his small explosive device on the Barcelona–Palma de Mallorca ferry, the Ciudad de Ibiza.

The two other young Frenchmen, Bernard Ferry and Guy Batoux, were arrested within days. Neither of the latter was an anarchist, although they had been planting small explosive devices on behalf of the joint Spanish and Portuguese anti-fascist umbrella group known as the Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL).

Both Bernard and his unidentified comrade were understandably livid that they had been allowed to cross into Spain on 7 April, when it became known Pecunia had not returned.

Francisco Abarca Ruíz had been the DI contact who drove Bernard Ferry to Toulouse. Ferry then took the train into Spain on 7 April 1963, together with another unidentified comrade. They then split up; Ferry travelled to Valencia while his friend went to Alicante. Each carried a small device to be placed in front of the local offices of Iberia Airlines.

Ferry reached Valencia on 8 April, only to discover the target premises were already under surveillance. He did, however, manage to place the small charge on the window at 10.30 p.m. He then returned to the railway station, where he was arrested. The bomb exploded at 11.30 p.m., exactly on time.

His colleague in Alicante managed to place his bomb successfully and make his escape. Because he had joined Bernard at the last moment his identity and his existence were unknown to the informer and the police. The young lad was detained briefly at Barcelona railway station, but then allowed to return to France. Twenty-year-old Ferry, a member of the Parti Socialiste Unifie (PSU) and the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière, was not so lucky.

Guy Batoux’s mission was not part of the anti-tourism campaign. His targets were the US Embassy and NATO offices in Madrid. Guy had crossed the frontier at Irún and arrived in Madrid on 3 April.

But bad luck intervened and Batoux fell ill, collapsing in the street. When the police searched his luggage to ascertain his identity they discovered the explosives, which had been due to be planted outside the US Embassy on 8 April.

Twenty-three-year-old Batoux, from Lyon, was not an anarchist and, in fact

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Alain Pecunia.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

French press coverage of Pecunia, Ferry and Batoux’s Council of War.

belonged to no political group. He had been recruited by the CIL on the strength of his anger against the Franco regime.

To complicate matters, the BPS knew through their informer or informers that Alain Pecunia had entered Spain at least three times over the previous year, acting as a courier between the organisation in France and Jorge Conill’s FIJL group in Barcelona.

On these earlier occasions he had carried only documents, not explosives, but his visits had overlapped a series of small explosions in Barcelona in June and July 1962 and again in March 1963.

Conill’s group, which had not been directly involved in these explosions either, was arrested at the end of August 1962 and charged with the bombings.

During the police investigation and trial it came out that they had received assistance from a group of French anarchists. In fact, a small news item had appeared in Le Monde in October about the Barcelona group’s French connection.

Although Pecunia’s background was vastly different to my own, the process of our politicisation had been similar. The son of a senior naval officer who had served on de Gaulle’s staff in London during World War Two, Pecunia’s passions had been aroused not by the anti-nuclear movement but by the conduct of the French war in Algeria, particularly over the use of torture by the French army. He began by throwing himself into anti-war demonstrations, gradually becoming more deeply involved in anti-OAS activities with the Algerian Front de Liberatión Nationale (FLN).

He had been a Young Communist for a short time, much as I had been a Young Socialist, but had then discovered anarchist ideas through the French Anarchist Federation (FAF) newspaper, Le Monde Libertaire.

The FAF, like Freedom in Britain, was strongly pacifist with a few highprofile vegetarian, individualist and naturist obsessives (as opposed to carnivore, self abnegating and prudish compulsives) and Grand Orient masonic influences.

They were pleasant and well-meaning people, but not people given to action. Much of their activity focused on organising the grand annual anarchist gala at the Olympia Theatre in Paris which sought to celebrate the human spirit with sympathetic stars such as Georges Brassens and Leo Ferré.

Pecunia became involved with the Algerian Armée de Liberation Nationale through two members of the Union of Anarcho-Communists (UGAC), Dr Paul Desnais and Paul Zorkine, a Montenegrin guerrilla living in exile in France, and an Algerian anarchist called Milou. Pecunia’s role in the ALN was to help identify OAS militants, their meeting places and arms dumps.

The fourteen-year-old French anarchist was introduced to Francisco Abarca of the FIJL in the spring of 1961 . The introduction was through Desnais,

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De Gaulle’s Quid Pro Quo

Zorkine and Milou. Paco introduced Pecunia, in turn, to Octavio Alberola, who was then heavily involved in the process of setting up Defensa Interior.

Pecunia agreed to use his own small group of friends and comrades to travel to Spain on informationgathering missions, which he did during the school holidays in June and July 1962. He claimed that Paco had assured him and his friends that they had the tacit support of the French secret services in what they were doing and had been given a green light for their antiFrancoist campaign for at least six months.

This sounded highly unlikely to me, but one of Alain’s friends was the son of an apparently well-connected French doctor, Dr Alexandre Chevalier, who claimed to be a masonic grand master, a ‘hero’ of the French resistance and a friend of the French secret services. He knew of his son’s and Pecunia’s links with the Spanish resistance and was fully supportive of what they were doing. However, according to others who knew him, Dr Chevalier said more than his prayers. He promised much and delivered little.

The three young French lads were sentenced to twenty-four years, thirty years, and fifteen years respectively for acts of ‘banditry and terrorism’. Had they been Spaniards the probability is they would have been garrotted, even though no loss of life could be pinned on them, as happened in the case of Antonio Abad Donoso in March 1960.

Pecunia had placed a small explosives charge on the Barcelona-Ibiza ferryboat Ciudad de Ibiza in Barcelona harbour. Bernard Ferry had been convicted of bombing the offices of Iberia Airlines in Valencia and Guy Batoux of planning to bomb the US Embassy and NATO offices in Madrid.

Pecunia was the only anarchist among the three; the other two were socialists and passionate anti-fascists who had chosen to work with the Iberian Liberation Council, the flag of convenience under whose name the anti-tourist campaign had been organised. Pecunia was the only one of the three still in Carabanchel. The others had been sent to different prisons, so apart from the three CNT veterans, the anarchists were in a small minority among the political prisoners of the sexta.

In an attempt to show willing to the Spanish authorities, the French secret police, the Renseignements Généraux, carried out an orchestrated series of raids on the offices and homes of FIJL militants throughout France and arrested 21 of those named by the Spanish authorities as being involved in the case of the three French lads and in the case of Delgado and Granado. Pecunia’s father had in fact been pressing for charges of ‘corruption of minors’ against the named militants of the FIJL. The police briefing for the raids and arrests was drawn up on 27 August, coinciding with Pecunia’s, Batoux’s and Ferry’s consejo de guerra. A copy of

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

this briefing paper was sent to the BPS and Security Directorate by the French police. The orchestrated raids in France took place two weeks later on 11 September 1963. (See Background paper: Report of the Renseignements Généraux.) Much of the information the French police acted upon came from both the BPS in Madrid and from the Spanish police infiltrator Jacínto Ángel Guerrero Lucas’s recently ‘stolen’ document case.

I WAS STILL PUSHING for a transfer to the sixth gallery, but every time I petitioned the governor or the Dirección General de Prisiones my application was rejected. Pecunia, the three CNT, two ETA, one PNV, the Basque Nationalist Party, and the two or three remaining members of the Frente de Liberación Poplar (FLP) in the sexta were the only ones who supported my transfer.

The remainder of the políticos were mainly pro-Soviet CP rank-and- file or executive members (including Marcelino Camacho of the CP-front organisation, the comisiones obreras), or Maoists. They opposed my transfer on the grounds that I had been convicted of ‘banditry and terrorism’; therefore not a ‘genuine’ political offender. (Coincidentally, this was the same reason given by the then fairly recently formed Amnesty International when asked to intervene in my case. I was not, they said, a ‘prisoner of conscience’. Perhaps they believed I had been paid to carry the explosives.)

The more likely reason was that another anarchist in the gallery would change, even ever so slightly, the balance of power. The CP prisoners also refused to call Pecunia and the CNT members ‘comrades’ (which was normal practice among all the political prisoners), but addressed them instead as señor.

Nor would they tutear any of them, the familiar way of addressing a friend or comrade. They always used the more formal Usted.

Early on in my sentence I was in the cinema talking to Pecunia when Fausto, a member of the executive committee of the Partido Comunista Español (PCE) and my old adversary from the infirmary, went to the duty screws complaining that a common prisoner — me — was talking to Pecunia.

The lights went on and I was unceremonious marched out, dumbstruck and outraged, and kept under close surveillance for a couple of weeks afterwards whenever the politicals came to see a film. But that only lasted a short time. I soon built up my own network of friends and contacts who could get any messages to or from Alain fairly quickly.

Alain was the first among the three French prisoners in his expediente to be released. Since his arrest there had been a lot of high-level diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing between Franco’s Foreign Ministry under Fernando María Castiella and the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris.

Pecunia’s father carried a lot of clout in Gaullist circles and, according to Pecunia, Franco had insisted on a personal phone call from de Gaulle on the matter.

Others involved in the negotiations for his release included what sounded

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New Labour, New Opportunities

like the character list of a Dennis Wheatley novel: the Duc d’Aumale, various French and Italian fascists trying to negotiate an exchange of OAS prisoners, and even Otto Skorzeny, whom Pecunia subsequently claimed intervened at the request of a former French member of the Abwehr (the German World War Two counter-intelligence service), a German collaborator.

Stories also circulated about secret financial clauses in ongoing financial accords between France and Spain.

The French Foreign Ministry official responsible for the Southern Europe desk at the Quai d’Orsay, a certain M. J. de Folin, told Pecunia later that his freedom had cost the French government two Mirage jet fighters.

Pecunia was released on 17 August 1965, exactly two years to the day after the executions of Delgado and Granado. He had served twenty-eight months in prison.

A friend from the Centro came to the patio to tell me he was being released, so I raced upstairs to the gallery to see him off. He eventually came through around 4 p.m. accompanied by a funcionario, his Basque boina set at a rakish angle on his head, his pipe clamped between his teeth and his mariners’ bag on his shoulder.

The camino de la muerte was now the camino de la libertad. I waved and shouted ‘Salud! y suerte, companero!’ (health and good luck) from the third floor landing as he walked jauntily down the centre of the quinta. He turned and waved with an enormous smile on his face and shouted ‘Tu será el pròximo, compañero! Dentro de poco estaremos tomando una copa en la calle.' (You’ll be next, comrade. We’ll soon be having a drink in the street.)

I felt really happy for him, but then began wondering melancholically when exactly my turn would come and we would be able to take that drink.

Practicante makes perfect AN OPPORTUNITY TO GET OUT of the printshop came when the job of practice nurse in the quinta fell vacant. The practicante was the orderly responsible for the wing’s medical administration, helping the doctor and coordinating all medical and health problems of the gallery.

I mentioned to Don Mariano that I would like the job and he said he would see what he could do on my behalf with both the doctor and prison governor.

To add some leverage to my application, I told him that I wanted to make the fullest possible use of my time inside and study by correspondence for my A Levels.

This seemed a reasonable proposition. As I could not work all day and then study for my exams for only one or two hours every night before ‘lights out’, it

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Le Monde Libertaire, August 1965.

Diplomatic games: de Gaulle’s Foreign Minister Couve de Mourville meets Franco’s Foreign Minister Fernando Macía Castiella.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

was agreed, therefore, that I should have the practicante’s job.

The old doctor died about this time. He had been so bronchitic, unsteady and weak that towards the end he had been holding his surgery in an office near the prison entrance. He was unable to walk through to the infirmary at the rear of the prison. The halt, the lame and seriously ill cases were trundled out or brought to him by stretcher. One day he collapsed and died at the main gate.

This nearly upset my plans. The doctor appointed in his place, Dr Baeza, turned out to be a close friend of my main competitor for the post, Zurro.

Zurro was an intelligent and charmingly devious villain in his early fifties who was awaiting trial on major fraud charges involving government construction contracts. The deference accorded to him by the funcionarios, jefes de servicio and administration officials showed he was an enchufado: highly respected, well connected and pulled weight with government ministers who were up to their ears in his scam.

Fortunately, the political and diplomatic advantages of my rehabilitation proved to be as important as his connections, and the situation ended in a compromise with both of us sharing the best job in the prison. It was a job with hardly enough work for one.

An important perk that went with the job was an electric hotplate.

Ostensibly, it was for emergencies where boiling water was needed, but its main use was culinary.

Zurro also had a hotplate and was a wonderful cook who introduced me to the delights of Spanish cuisine, ‘Fundador’ brandy and Rioja wines which he had smuggled in on a daily basis.

Watching Zurro with a melon was an education. He would carefully select one from the economato and place it delicately on the palm of his left hand, raising its bottom ever so slightly and pressing the centre with the thumb of his right hand. He never once looked at the melon but kept his eyes upon an invisible point in the distance. He rarely bought the first melon he pressed; sometimes as many as a dozen melons would pass through his fastidious hands before he made his final, triumphant, selection — much to the relief of the man in the economato and everyone in the queue behind us.

My cell adjoined the doctor’s consulting room. It was an adapted cell equipped with cupboards, filing cabinets, a desk, an examination couch, chairs and a sterilising unit. When Zurro and I were cooking a meal in the evening we would sometimes make use of the old steriliser to boil the spaghetti to save time, but we always made sure it was cleaned out after use, in case of emergencies. Certainly no one became ill as a result of the culinary uses to which we put the instruments of medical science, at least not to my knowledge.

My daily regime started at eight-thirty.

By now the warders ignored me if I was still in bed when the cells were opened for the morning recuento. After a wash and giving the cell a quick brush out and wash down with a damp rag, I would head for the café for a breakfast of croissants and pastries and freshly ground café con leche.

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Prison Butterflies

At ten o'clock I would call the corneta and give him the list of those who had signed up the previous night to see the doctor. He would go downstairs and call out their names in the patio and in the talleres. I also had to supervise the cleaning of the consulting room by some of the maricones, homosexuals, who were kept in virtual total isolation on the fourth landing of our gallery. This was the only work they were permitted to do. The older ones redeemed their sentences by taking in washing, sewing and ironing.

Maricones were for the most part cheery and full of coquettish and flirtatious banter. They brought a little colour and life to the day-to-day drabness of the prison. Most of them had been convicted under the vagrancy laws, la ley de vagos y maleantes, and were usually homosexual male prostitutes and, therefore, offensive to the church, threatening the sexuality of ‘nice’ society. They frightened the horses.

When they could, they dressed up in clothes of the brightest colours and often there would be a hint of lipstick, rouge and eye shadow. When questioned by a screw as to how he had got hold of the make-up he was wearing, the maricon replied that he had smuggled it in his cunt, meaning, of course, his arse.

One of the more rebellious and irascible maricones received a terrible beating from a screw for wearing a bright red shirt and winding the funcionario up. He was never around for long; every few weeks would find him in solitary confinement for some escapade or other. He got three months once when he and the prison banker, José Luís Serrano, a hated informer and a Falangist to boot, were caught spliffing up and making the front-to-back monster.

The maricon who cleaned the surgery did my cell as well as Zurro’s. For this I paid him twenty-five pesetas a week and all the tea and coffee he wanted. He also did my laundry and any sewing I needed doing.

Haemorrhoids were among the most common ailments among the homosexuals. The reason for this was not what might appear the obvious one, but to long hours spent sitting on cold, damp stone seats in their patio, sewing and mending.

The doctor, accompanied by the professional practicante, a qualified nurse practitioner, arrived around 10.30 a.m. These male nurses accompanied the doctor on his rounds and did almost everything a doctor usually does except diagnose.

There were two external practicantes in Carabanchel. One, Don Antonio, was a poisonous numpty of a Madrileño, a humourless and unsympathetic man like the character played by Danny DeVito in Taxi — thin-lipped, abrupt and malicious. The other was Don Francisco, an easy-going but very lazy Extremeño (a native of Extremadura) who left most of the work to Zurro and me while he sat and chatted, drank café solos and smoked a puro. He occasionally brought us in a bottle of brandy or a packet of hard-to-get Cuban Partagas cigarettes — all for a price, of course.

The less seriously afflicted were seen first and prescribed the appropriate pills, lotions, injections or treatments. Zurro and I, or the practicante, issued

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

these later. If some needed closer examination or to be X-rayed they would be told to wait outside until he had finished his rounds of the bedridden.

Once everyone had been dealt with we would troop along to the radiography clinic above the infirmary. My job was to manoeuvre the patients into position behind the heavy battleship grey shield, and then stand to one side, unprotected, while they and I were blasted with more X-rays than Flash Gordon on a bad day on Mongo. (The first time I worked with this machine I half expected the doctor to say ‘Stuart, keep your foot on that red pedal or the G-forces will destroy us all.’)

After we had all been successfully radiated, I would complete the doctor's notes in each prisoner's medical file and then arrange the transfers of anyone who needed to be admitted to the hospital infirmary or sent on to Yeserías, the penitentiary prison in downtown Madrid.

One downside of the job was having to deal with cases of clinical hysteria, the red mist of uncontrollable anger, or violent epileptics suffering from grand mal. Epilepsy was common in Carabanchel, but it was mostly petit mal, which could be controlled easily with drugs.

One explanation I was given why there were so many epileptics in Spain was because Spanish midwives used forceps as a matter of course to grip the baby’s skull, to pull it out of the birth canal. The pressure constricted the veins and probably contributed to or caused the epilepsy.

Cases of grand mal were more worrying as they were dangerous to the sufferer and any passer-by. Small and slightly-built men would suddenly acquire extraordinary strength and bounce anyone near them off the walls. It was particularly dangerous for me. As practicante I had to be in pole position and wrestle them to the ground to stop them injuring or choking themselves.

Sometimes it took five or six of us to hold one guy until the fit passed. Two people died on me in their cells, in separate incidents, as a result of massive consecutive seizures.

Outbreaks of hysteria were even more violent. One big chap who lost it one night banged his head straight through thick steel window bars; another headbutted his way through a solid steel cell door. In these cases my job was to get hold of the guy somehow and inject him with Largactil, the liquid cosh, and get him into a straightjacket before he could do himself or anyone else any more damage.

Yeserías prison hospital CHATTING IDLY with the doctor one day, I made an off-the-cuff remark to the that I was having problems breathing through my nose. He pushed me onto the examination couch and after a brief examination diagnosed nasal polyps in my sinus cavities. Within days I was transferred to Yeserías prison hospital in downtown Madrid to have them removed.

It turned out to be the most miserable and uncomfortable fortnight in my time in prison. It was the winter of 1965–66 and Madrid was venomously cold.

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Nose Job

I was walking around like a character out of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a book I had read shortly before leaving Blantyre.

Yeserías was not a prison like the others. Close to the Atocha station in Madrid, it was always noisy with the hissing and clanking of trains braking and shunting, and constant rumble from the heavy road traffic beyond the high walls. There were no barred gates, just locked wards and one perimeter wall. The patio was a small garden surrounded by a high wall with a couple of sentry posts manned by the Policía Armada. The wards bore the name of famous Spanish doctors, and were stark, depressing and unheated.

Yeserías was run like an eighteenth-century Royal Navy warship under the absolute command of one Dr. Modesto Pineiro, the Inspector-General of Prison Hygiene. Pineiro, a surgeon who specialised in urology, operated on anything that took his fancy. He was known as ‘the butcher of Yeserías’— but never to his face. The prospects for anyone who fell under his scalpel or medical saw were uncertain to say the least. Prisoners were lucky to come out of Yeserías’s theatre alive — or at best with as many healthy limbs or organs as they went in with.

A priest came to see me before my operation. This worried me in case he’d come to perform the last rites, but it was simply a friendly visit to his flock. I just hoped that if I did make it through the operation I would still have a nose.

The operation reminded me of my tonsillectomy on a Glasgow kitchen table at the age of 5. I was ushered into what looked like a gynaecological chair, while the nursing staff, all prisoners, strapped my wrists, chest and legs. The seat was then cranked back until my head was at 45 degrees to the floor and my feet pointing at the ceiling.

A masked surgeon looking like Laurence Olivier playing the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man loomed over me wielding two stainless steel corkscrews that he proceeded to manoeuvre up my nostrils and crank open as though he was opening a bottle of claret. With a flourish, a large chrome syringe appeared in his hand, which he jabbed into the soft palate of my mouth like a matador in for the faena.

As the freezing Novocaine trickled down my gullet I could still feel

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Patio of Yeserías prison hospital ward, winter 1965.

Yeserías prison hospital ward, winter 1965.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Manuel Sabaté Llopart.

José Sabaté Llopart.

San Miguel de los Reyes.

Juan Busquets Verges.

everything, particularly pain. A stainless steel chisel then appeared in his hand, which he promptly poked into my nostril. Suddenly, what looked like an ice pick appeared in other hand of this latter-day Ramón Mercader. He swung back and then began battering his way into my brain cavity. Wincing under the relentless hammer blows I began to feel some sympathy for Leon Trostky. Was this man clearing my sinuses or was he planning to trepan me to open up my ‘Third Eye’?

One good thing that came out of my time in Yeserías was a lifelong friendship with Juan Busquets Verges. Busquets had fought originally with the Pyrenean rural action group of Marcelino Massana Bancells, ‘Pancho’, but then joined forces with the urban guerrilla group of José ‘Pepe’ Sabaté, the eldest of the three legendary Sabaté brothers. Manuel Sabaté, the youngest of the brothers, had been arrested with the twenty-one year old Busquets in a police ambush in October 1949.

Busquets was one of the fortunate few to have their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. A few years before we met he had been involved in an escape attempt from the prison of San Miguel de los Reyes with another anarchist, the writer and historian Juan Gómez Casas and a gypsy who had had it on his toes as soon as he was over the wall — without waiting to help the others — leaving Busquets a hanging target on the wall.

Busquets dropped thirty feet to the ground, breaking his leg in the process.

He crawled to a ditch where he remained in agony, slipping in and out of consciousness until the guards found him the next morning. They battered him mercilessly around the face and hands with their rifle butts until he was senseless, breaking his nose and the bones of his hands as well as his leg, then kept him in solitary confinement without medical treatment for two months.

Daily routines MARIO, THE CHIEF hospital practicante in Carabanchel, was the fat toady and sadist who ran the prison hospital. He prepared and maintained medical reports for the doctor, dispensed medicines and gave injections. He also thought himself a bit of a joker. A doctor on the outside, he was in jail for carrying out abortions.

Prisoners complaining of stomach troubles and who he (or the warders) thought were lead-swingers went to him to have their gastric fluids taken for analysis. For the purpose of extracting these fluids he used two long plastic tubes, one thick and the other thin.

An aficionado of the bullfight, Mario had his own favourite matador, El Litri. He could not bear the flashy antics of the new parvenu bullfighter El Cordobés, Manuel Benitez. El Cordobés had originally made his name as an espontaneo by vaulting over the fence, producing a hidden capa and taking on the bull with some highly risky but spectacular manoeuvres such as the salto de rana in which he would

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If It’s No’ Bugs, It’s Fleas

leap from his knees, turn a somersault in the air and then fall back on his knees to confront and confuse the bull. Whenever an unsuspecting patient came in Mario would ask him which toreador he preferred, El Viti or El Cordobés. If the poor fellow answered El Cordobés he would have the thicker of the two tubes fed down his gullet, a most unpleasant experience, but one which Mario and the funcionarios thought enormously funny.

When morning surgery was over I was free to do as I liked until lunchtime, when the different hospital and special diets had to be collected from the kitchen and distributed to the patients in the gallery. This really was Hell’s kitchen. Eight or nine large cauldrons sat on an enormous circular coal-fired hob with flames leaping and smoke belching out from beneath them in the centre of the rough-cobbled floor. Lizards and giant cockroaches scuttled around while chinches and other kamikaze insects climbed the walls and crawled across the ceiling until they were directly over a cauldron whose smell they had taken a fancy to, and then dropped into it. It was extraordinary behaviour, worthy of a David Attenborough documentary.

The bugs took the short-term view, with the enticing aromas of warm food short-circuiting what little common sense they might have had. In Buddhist terms it was self serving self sacrifice: they would go straight to the top of the food chain while we ended up with a bit more protein.

My attitude to my multi-legged cellmates softened after reading a piece by the poet Don Marquis called ‘pity the poor spiders’. This appeared in a collection ostensibly written overnight on his typewriter by a cockroach called Archy.

Archy had been a vers libre poet in his previous existence and was now being punished throughout eternity for being presumptuous. He couldn’t use the shift key because of his size and lack of leverage, so everything was typed in lower case and unpunctuated. The collection was called Archy and Mehitabel, the latter being his friend, an alley cat whose spirit had previously been incarnated in the body of Cleopatra.

Archy had been depressed by an advertisement for a ‘roach exterminator after meeting a weeping, middle-aged spider complaining about fly swatters killing off all the flies, leaving her and her family starving to death and left the attached note on Don Marquis’s typewriter (see box).

Infirmary food consisted of fish and occasionally bits of boiled chicken and offal. The fish was mainly rehydrated dried cod, bacalao a la vizcaina or bacalao al pilpil, or fried or boiled hake. Very occasionally we had whale steak — supposedly a treat — which looked remarkably like a fillet steak, but which tasted like Aberdeen harbour at low tide on a hot day.

The main meals were usually cocidos, chickpea-based soupy stews with bits of mutton, chorizo, vegetables, bacon, pork sausage, golden thistles, tomatoes

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Busquets in hospital.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

and saffron (at least that was what I was told were the usual ingredients), or a fabada Asturiana. Fabadas were greasy haricot bean-based boilings with bits of pork, including a pig’s ear, Asturian black pudding, corned beef, belly of pork and onions. On feast days, such as the curses on these here swatters fiesta de San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid, we what kills off all the flies for me and my little daughters would be fed callos a la madrileña, cow’s stomach, veal, unless we eats we dies black pudding, ham garlic and red peppers, paella a la swattin and swattin and swattin Valenciana with rice, shellfish and any leftovers the cooks tis little else you hear could find to throw in the mixture. and we ll soon be dead and forgotten with the cost of living so dear Hospital food leftovers were sought after by the ordinary prisoners and it was down to me to distribute my husband he up and left me what was left to whoever wanted it, or I felt deserving. lured off by a centipede That sometimes caused problems with the Falangistas and he says as he bereft me tis wrong but i ll get a feed and chivatos. I was choosy as to who got what and they and me a working and working weren’t in the frame. I only gave them hospital food scouring the streets for food leftovers under duress from the prison warders when faithful and never shirking they intervened on behalf of the fascists. doing the best i could Distribution of that morning’s prescriptions curses on these here swatters what kills off all the flies followed. Once that was done, Zurro would usually me and my poor little daughters prepare a tortilla española and salad, which we would unless we eats we dies wash down with a couple of tumblers of wine. Zurro only a withered spider usually prepared the meal while I did the administrative feeble and worn and old work. and this is what you do when you swat In summer, Zurro regularly made a gazpacho, a you swatters cruel and cold refreshing tomato-based soup with bread, vinegar, green i will admit that some pepper, garlic, paprika and any other vegetables he of the insects do not lead could lay his hands on. Once it had been prepared he noble lives but is every man s hand to be against them would leave it in the medical fridge to chill. Another yours for less justice and more charity unusual trick of his was to beat eggs into soups and archy stews. It was supposed to protect against anaemia, but it had to be done at the last moment when the soup or stew was boiling otherwise the whole thing would turn into wallpaper paste..

Lunch, in summer, was followed by a siesta until four. Later, after a coffee, I would read or play or watch a game of pelota until the practice nurse arrived.

Teatime involved much the same routine as lunchtime. With my medical rounds over and the following day’s paperwork written up, I’d go for a paseo in the yard, on my own or with some friends, until last recuento and then spend the rest of evening reading or writing.

Conversations in the patio were fascinating — to begin with. There were many unique characters together here, each with a cocktail of extraordinary individual experiences, but after a few months hearing the same stories repeated over and over again became wearing and irritating.

The best way of pacing social relationships and keeping sane was literature. pity the poor spiders twas an elderly mother spider grown gaunt and fierce and gray with her little ones crouched beside her who wept as she sang this lay

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Transcending Walls And Bars

Metaphorically, books, any sort of books, were the closest thing we had to the X-ray specs that used to be advertised in men’s magazines of the 1950s. Books allowed you not only to escape from the prosaic and quotidian everyday life of prison, but they also helped you to see into other peoples’ consciousness and gave some insight into how others felt and coped with their own private and personal dramas. It was a sort of Rosetta Stone of consciousness; something of almost everything I read provided a least a tiny snippet of information which modified the way I viewed people — and the world.

English language books were rare at first, but over the years I slowly built up a library of almost 200 books: some potboilers, but mainly classics — Penguins and the handsomely bound and designed Everyman series. It was too good an opportunity to read the books I felt I ought to read, including Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (The Devils), Charles Johnston’s rhyming Penguin translation of Pushkin’s romance-novel Eugene Onegin and even an abridged version of the Iliad, which I found unputdownable — between Achilles skulking in his tent and Hector being dragged around the city by his feet.

Until late 1965 I found reading Spanish hard going , but I was gradually being introduced to Spanish literature by some of the increasing number of intellectuals, academics and students who were passing through the prison system at the time.

Pecunia had sent me over a smuggled copy of Federico García Lorca’s banned Romancero Gitano, a collection of poems dealing with the lifestyle and passions of the Andalusian gypsy. Lorca’s poems were vitriolic about the Guardia Civil and probably cost him his life. It is rumoured that his killers shot him in the anus, to punish him for his homosexuality — presumably eradicating their own repressed homosexual desires in the process, while at the same time getting off on an act of murderous symbolic rape. They must have been on a sadist’s cloud nine for the rest of their lives.

Other proscribed authors included Anatole France, Voltaire, Georges Bernanos, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Paul Sartre, Emile Zola and Stefan Zweig. It was strange to think that I was living in a European country in the middle of the twentieth century and was not permitted to read books taken for granted — ignored almost — elsewhere.

A sympathiser from Freedom Press in London sent me the three volumes of HT Buckle’s Civilisation in England, which I read over one weekend. Lillian Wolfe, an elderly anarchist lady in London and once a friend of Peter Kropotkin, sent me her treasured copies of Kropotkin’s’ Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid. These had to be smuggled in. Later, in Alcalá de Henares, I had them bound in red and black calf leather, in the diagonals of the CNT flag: black representing the agricultural labourers and red the industrial working class.

The quinta housed an eclectic mixture of prisoners. Daniel Lacalle Larraga was the only other political prisoner in my gallery at the time. The son of Lieutenant-General José Lacalle Larraga, Franco’s Minister of Aviation, Daniel Lacalle was a member of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and had been

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

arrested on 26 April 1964 at the height of the ferocious repression against the Asturian miners. He was in the quinta to keep him separate from the other PCE prisoners in the sexta, presumably at the request of his father and his father’s friends in Franco’s cabinet to prevent him developing further compromising relationships.

Locking up the dissident children of the elite for anti-Francoist activities was not uncommon. In the past, well-placed Francoist parents had got round this by the stratagem of having their wayward teenagers declared mentally ill, a device they shared with their opposite numbers in the Soviet Union. This had happened ten years earlier with José Martín Artajo, the anarchist son of Franco’s former Foreign Minister, Alberto Martín Artajo.

Despite his polite manner and youth, Lacalle was an unreconstructed Stalinist and clearly embarrassed whenever I made a point of joining with him on his walks. He politely confined his conversations with me to the commonplace and banal. I could not catch a glimmer of what made him tick.

His preferred associates were limited to one or two people who were presumably party members or fellow travellers. I was bemused to note his apparently enthusiastic friendship with the dissident Falangists Dionísio Ridruejo and Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez when they were held, briefly, in the quinta.

Lacalle and the PCE leader José Sandoval also spent a lot of time together, always deep in conversation.

LIFE IN CARABANCHEL was nowhere near as hard physically as it had been in the 1940s and 1950s, nor was I aware of any of the brutality, hunger and near starvation that had scarred those years. I was also receiving food parcels on a regular basis from anarchists and anti-fascist sympathisers in Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Britain.

Pesetas did not circulate in prison, in theory, but they did in practice.

Nothing could be bought for cash in the prison store; everything had to be paid for by peculio vouchers issued by the prison bank. Prison earnings and monies from home were all paid into Carabanchel’s internal banking system, known as the peculio, and distributed, weekly, in the form of coloured card vouchers. These vouchers were paid out on Fridays by a despised Falangist informer, José Luis Serrano, whose suitability for the job was that he had once been an accountant — a crooked one, obviously. He later turned the prison administration over as well, but not at all like the noble and self effacing hero in the later film The Shawshank Redemption.

There were a few ways to spend money indulgently in Carabanchel. The coffee shop had its pastries and churros con chocolate, fried corrugated strips of greasy doughnut batter dipped in chocolate. The canteen sold cigarettes and cigars, chorizo piquante and Serrano ham, Manchego cheese, boquerones, tins of sardines, mejillones en escabeche (mussels in hot pickled sauce), octopus in its own ink, squid, bacalao (dried cod), tomatoes and other goodies that made life that bit sweeter, or more savoury.

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Making The Best of Things

The canteen had its own kitchen where, if you had the money, you could order anything from egg and chips through roast kid and baked potatoes to roast cat and chocolate. The latter was considered a delicacy among some of the folks from Bilbao.

The very well-connected prisoners, the enchufados, mainly swindlers, estafadores, high-flyers such as the two directors of the Bank of Spain in the quinta, who had been sentenced to literally thousands of years of imprisonment, of which they would only spend a few years inside, rarely ate prison food. They always ate from the canteen. Everything was brought to their cells and they rarely ventured into the patio to mix with the hoi polloi.

Life in prison was not at all bleak and uncompromising, or even entirely predictable. Our time wasn’t spent waiting around, powerless and destitute on the arid margins of existence. If we couldn’t be masters of our situation at least we could adapt ourselves to events.

There were lots of moments of simple pleasure. People-watching was one fascinating way of passing the time. It fascinated me how day after day people managed to keep their overwhelmingly depressing personal worries and anxieties hidden, just to be able to face one another each morning.

Summer Saturday mornings were spent socialising around the large communal pool where people did their weekly washing. It was not as sophisticated as a Glasgow ‘steamy’; it came to waist level and had sloping ridged surfaces which provided a washboard. We congregated around here and gossiped like Mediterranean women around a village well. If it were a hot day, I’d strip off my shirt and spread myself out on the stone benches behind the sheets on the washing lines and tan myself in the hot Madrid sun.

Afternoons would be spent sitting chatting and bantering in the cool shadow of the high red-brick walls, each taking it in turn to drink from an earthenware botijo of vino tinto; holding it at arm’s length — its parabola of ruby-red liquid arcing between spout and lips or, more often than not, down my front, causing much amusement to my more adroit comrades.

Often we would pool our financial resources and food parcels and organise an ad hoc picnic. If we had money we’d celebrate with roast chicken or goat. If we were broke, it would be a tin of sardines or anchovies with maybe a few slices of Manchego cheese, chorizo and mejillones with freshly baked bread rolls.

Resting our backs against the high walls of our prison we would puff quietly away on a cigar or pitillo, staring silently at the sky or chatting inconsequentially about life, the universe and what we would do when we made it to ‘the street’. All thoughts of prison would disappear during these warm Saturdays or Sundays. From the tannoy, a young Julio Iglesias would croon Cuando caliente el sol aqui en la playa or Françoise Hardy would sing Nosotros, los chicos y chicas.

During these reflective moments, when the conversation waned, I would read, write a letter home to Mum or Gran or sit gazing, trancelike, at my horizon of terracotta red walls, gray patio slabs, barred windows and

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

cornflower blue sky. The only things that changed in my current landcape were the slow-moving clouds, shadows and Lowrie-esque figures trudging relentlessly backwards and forwards across the patio.

On sunny afternoons I would lean against the wall and gaze into my own blue patch of infinity above Castile, my mind’s engine shut off, coasting pleasantly, daydreaming about home and what the future might hold. I had not yet learned to count in months and years and was content to live day by day, filling them mostly with memories of green-remembered hills and rainy Glasgow streets.

Occasionally, the switchboard in my brain would connect me to speculating what might have been had I caused the death or deaths of innocent people and a shudder would run through my body. Even had I managed to escape the garrote-vil, it would have been a terrible burden to bear. As one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters comments, memorably, in The First Circle: ‘What is the most precious thing in the world? It seems to be the consciousness of not particpating in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you are, it was and always will be, but let it not be committed through you — a crippled conscience is as irretrievable as a lost life.’

Alan Ladd said much the same thing in the film Shane: ‘There’s no living with a killing.’

These stream-of-consciousness ruminations occasionally played on the possible unintended negative consequences of a successful Franco assassination: would it have led to a more severe and bloody repression and the emergence of an even more brutal dictator? After all, Franco was up there with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and their deaths had led to a better world. The permutation of possibilities and dialogue with myself went on and on, endlessly round in my head.

By what means, other than by resorting to violence, can ordinary people challenge a state apparatus which is evil, corrupt and repressive — whatever its excuse may be — where there is no fair play; no respect for justice and freedom; not subject to legal or social strictures, and is unresponsive to reason, appeals to morality and international diplomacy?

Franco’s regime was a rogue state supported by tourism, emigré wages and by the overwhelming economic and diplomatic clout of the USA. Negotiation, compassion and give-and-take were scorned and derided by it as evidence of weakness or Marxist or masonic manipulation. It ignored the protests of its own people and those of its opponents around the world, convinced in its own self righteousness that its use of state terror and repression would ultimately allow it to win through to being accepted as a European power on its own terms.

Franco was a military man who respected only one thing — overwhelming, devastating and lethal force.

But even so, the decision to kill a man, even to prevent greater violence and

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Life, Death, The Universe And All That...

evil, was a tragic and burdensome choice. Unlike the hanging judge who relies on the executioner, or the bomber pilot who drops bombs on innocent bystanders from 30,000 feet or the F16 fighter pilot who fires a ‘surgically targeted’ missile into a residential apartment block in Gaza from 200 metres, it was not merely some ‘unpleasant duty’ to be performed. Those of us outside the institutions of state had no clubs or regimental officers’ messes to return to for a port and brandy and absolution, or reassurance that ‘collateral damage’ — that weaselly euphemism for massacring the innocent — was the unavoidable price that had to be paid in the ‘national interest’. We anarchists had only our uneasy consciences to answer to.

Ultimately, what matters is that evil must be kept from destroying the good.

Jimmy Stewart — the idealistic eastern liberal who wanted to counter evil with reason and law in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — found this out at the end of the film: ‘When force threatens, talk is no good.’

As for my debate with myself, I concluded that my arrest had been the best possible outcome. I had now become a regular reminder to the world of the nature of Franco’s Spain. ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.

OCCASIONALLY my musings — negative and optimistic — would be broken, enviously, by the sight of a single stork winging its way westward, in the direction of Caceres, or the long white condensation trail of an aeroplane high above the earth. They were free, and I was not.

Towards the end of the afternoon, when the scorching heat had begun to ease, a sing-song or a fast-moving game of pelota played against the frontón of the high wall was usually enough to rouse me out of any creeping melancholy brought about by too much introspection.

Occasionally, the pelota would disappear over the double wall and we would have to plead with the grises in their watchtowers to go down and throw it back to us. Usually they would do this cheerfully for the simple reason that our ball games broke the solitary boredom of their sentry duties, but there were the occasional malas leches (literally ‘bad milk’ types — grouches, the unkindest cunts of all) who ignored us and the game would come to a standstill until another ball was purchased from a pelotera.

Another patio pastime was watching the bullfighting aficionados re-enacting what they considered the best corridas of their heroes: Manolete, El Cordobés or El Viti. One played the part of the torero and the other the bull. They divided this ceremonial slaughter into three acts — the tercios: the picadors, the banderillas and the act of death, the faena.

It was hypnotic and depressing to see them practising their mock elegant manoeuvres in slow motion, capeas, dextrous and intricate passes with an imaginary sword and cape. It was one thing to watch these guys play out the circus of the corrida, but I found

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Tauromachia. Illustration

by Flavio Costantini

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

it impossible to hide my distaste for the barbarity of the spectacle. Bullfighting was the one issue that caused me most arguments with Spanish friends. They simply couldn’t believe that anyone should think the baiting, torture and slaughter of a dignified and sentient creature was not great sport. They didn’t see it like that at all.

Evenings came round quickly, after the briefest of twilights. Before the patio lights were switched on, the red brick walls grew brown against low rosecoloured clouds that deepened quickly to an angry orange, and a hush would descend on a previously noisy patio. As the yard grew dark and the colour drained from the sky, the moon would sail into view and the stars would twinkle more clearly. Over the high walls, busy nocturnal Madrid threw up a dome of pale, diffused light that filled the northern sky with a red glow.

The patios supported a lot of entrepreneurial activity. They were small self contained communities with both service providers and opportunists. There were limpiabotas, shoe-shiners, and escribientes, educated people who would write an official letter or formal communication on behalf of an illiterate prisoner willing to pay un duro (5 pesetas).

It always impressed me that even in prison Spaniards were so extraordinarily neat, precise and meticulous about their appearance that they should have their shoes shined for them. Others made frontón balls or pelotas from abandoned rubber bands, string and old boots. There were also those who washed and ironed clothes or hired out cowboy, gangster or spy novels, the type of novellas read by MacPhail, Para Handy’s gloomy engineer.

The key entrepreneurs were the tabacaleros. The canteen opened for only a short period on weekdays, and if you ran out of cigarettes you had to do without or scrounge a pitillo, a single cigarette, until it opened again. To meet this demand, each gallery had its own tobacconist, the tabacalero. He was a prisoner who wandered around the yard like an ice-cream lady in the cinema with a tray of cigarettes suspended from his neck. Celtas and the Cuban Partagas cigarettes were my preferred brands; Peninsulares, which looked like giant spliffs were made up of dried tobacco stalks instead of leaves and fell apart when lit.

For the sophisticated Spaniard who couldn’t afford Pall Mall or Lucky Strike there was Bisonte, a sweet, blonde Virginia-type tobacco from the Canary Islands. The tabacalero would keep a stock of cigarettes and matches that he would sell for a few pesetas more than the going rate in the canteen.

One Englishman almost disgraced himself by applying the same commercial principles to the coffee shop pastries. He told me in all seriousness, his voice undulating in that affable good-humoured way unique to the English upper classes, that he was going to buy up all the pastries in the coffee bar and sell them at a substantial profit. Fortunately, I was able to talk him out of it otherwise he would have been thrown off the fourth floor landing.

Having this guy around was like a psychological bruise; you always had to touch it so see if it still hurt. He exuded a raffish air of aristocratic truculence —

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The Portuguese

morally weak, arrogant, intolerant, judgemental, priggish, and with the pathos of a man who has betrayed everyone, including himself. He was also a hopelessly incompetent character straight out of ‘Saki’, PG Woodhouse or ‘Sapper’: an insular Anglo-Saxon who looked down on ‘Johnny foreigner’, a drifter with no staying power who was always losing jobs through petty dishonesty; a philistine, one of the ‘Breed’, a remittance man, an endearingly maladroit and inconsiderate black sheep from a well-to-do family who had exiled him to Spain, out of their way. Here, on the costas, he moved among the lotus eaters and the idle sybaritic rich until he wrote one bad cheque too many.

But in spite of his irritating demeanour he was amusing company.

The Portuguese were interesting folk. One with whom I got on paricularly well was João, a well-known racing driver of his time on the Portuguese and international circuits. He looked remarkably like a cross between Peter Ustinov and Cantinflas, the Mexican comedian. He had silver-grey hair, heavily jowled cheeks, a rosy, weather beaten complexion and twinkly if somewhat lugubrious eyes. João was indomitable and ingeniously inventive.

Fed up with the inefficient cell-made cologne-burning stoves, João was anxious to get hold of a small electric hotplate so he could cook in his cell. I managed to get one for him, but pointed out that he didn’t have a plug point in his cell. This was not a problem for João, but it turned out to be one for the whole of the Carabanchel area. That night he fused all the power in the prison and the surrounding neighbourhood for about six hours by connecting a makeshift power cable to the light and earthing it to the water tap on the sink.

Somehow they never tumbled it was João.

João’s co-accused was a different kettle of fish. Like his affable friend, he was clever, well educated, well informed about current affairs and literature and spoke flawless English, but he was a sneaky wee ‘flyman’. He was also a sponger, whinger who was forever on the make, borrowing money, food and cigarettes.

The final straw came when he produced a single cigarette from his pocket without offering anyone else one. I asked him for a fag, to which he replied that it was his last. I knew he was lying as I’d seen him buy a packet earlier that afternoon. I said ‘Bad form, Pan’ and went on to tell him he was a tight-fisted mendacious wee bastard and stuck my hand in his jacket pocket, triumphantly producing the cigarettes he had just emptied out of the packet. He was the only person I ever met who could peel an orange in his pocket without letting on.

Joaquim, another Portuguese inmate, had been a senior manager with the Bank of Portugal and was awaiting extradition back to Lisbon. His job had been to oversee the printing of batches of Portuguese banknotes at Waterlow’s securities printing works in Britain. The official order had been for 50 million escudos, but Joaquim had added another 10 million to the order for his own use.

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Prison workshop, San Miguel de los Reyes (Photo, Juan Busquets).

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The French connection FRENCH DIPLOMATIC pressure increased on the Francoist government throughout 1965 and led to further police crackdowns on the exiled OAS high command in Spain. This was primarily the result of a fresh wave of OAS terrorism: from the unsuccessful assassination attempt on de Gaulle by JeanJacques Susini’s Z commandos at the Faron monument in Toulon in 1964 to the 29 October 1965 kidnapping and murder in Paris of the Moroccan anticolonialist politician, Mehdi Ben Barka.* The killing of the latter in Paris had Jean-Jacques Susini: Z commando organiser been a particularly serious humiliation to de Gaulle, * Mehdi Ben Barka who had been intent on strengthening France’s role as General Mohammed Oufkir, the infamous head of Moroccan the Third World’s only reliable friend, at the expense of Intelligence, was probably the man responsible for Ben Barka’s the US. murder (with the active support and connivance of ‘rogue’ Most of the Spanish-based OAS leaders had been elements in the French Intelligence Service, the SDECE. and the forewarned by sympathetic colleagues in the BPS of the CIA ). Oufkir had maintained close links with the OAS since the crackdown and had fled to offer their murderous skills war in Algeria. elsewhere. Some sought sanctuary under the protective wing of the extreme right-wing military regimes of Latin America. Others went to Italy where they were protected by pro-fascist and anti-communist elements within the Italian security and intelligence services. Portugal was another country where they found an employer with need of their terrorist expertise.

(See Background paper The OAS and Aginter Press) Miguel de Castro de Castro, the quinta gallery’s escribiente, was aware of my interest in the murder of General Delgado and when he knew the two PIDE men were coming to his office for induction he asked me to sit in with him as his assistant while he took their details for the files.

They were edgy men who kept themselves to themselves on the few occasions they ventured into the patio. Of the two, the likely killer was Casimiro Emérito Roso Teles Jordão Monteiro, a ba’faced and surly 45-year old Portuguese Goan who had fought for Franco during the Civil War. Monteiro, an ex-soldier who spoke reasonably good English, said he had worked for MI6 in India during the war. He claimed he had been questioned by Scotland Yard detectives in a murder investigation but he never went into Casimiro Emérito Roso Teles Jordão Monteiro: detail about this incident. I heard, however, that he had been cleared of another PIDE officer and killer of General Umberto Delgado. murder in Lisbon only the previous year.

His PIDE identity card gave his rank as chief of brigade. Intriguingly, it had been issued on 17 December, less than two months before the Delgado murder.

The case proved too much of a diplomatic hot potato for the Franco regime, and charges against the two men were dropped within two weeks and they were released.

Monteiro re-emerged a few years later in Portuguese Africa as leader of the Flechas groups, mercenary killer squads linked with the Lisbon-based neofascist mercenary and intelligence gathering organisation, Aginter Press who murdered anyone perceived as a threat to the domestic and colonial policies of Antonio Oliveira Salazar and his successor Marcelo Caetano. Monteiro’s name

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Skorzeny’s ‘Circle Of Friends’

resurfaced again in 1969 as the chief suspect in the letter bomb that killed Frelimo leader Eduardo Mondlane in Dar es Salaam that year. He disappeared from view in Mozambique in 1974, following the left-wing army coup which overthrew the Caetano government and which gave independence to the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé and Principe, Angola and Portuguese Timor.

Allied to Aginter Press and the Portuguese Flechas was the Madrid-based ‘Paladin Group’, an agency and strategic centre for the recruitment of mercenary killers and terrorists. This company, headed by Otto Skorzeny, specialised in sabotage and assassination operations in the Maghreb, subSaharan Africa, Latin America, Asia — and Europe. Its personnel also carried out deniable killings and acts of terror on behalf of General Eduardo Blanco’s Dirección General de Seguridad and were probably responsible for the murder of José Alberola Navarro, Octavio’s father, in Mexico City on 1 May, 1966.

In the weasel vocabulary of intelligence and security agencies, companies like Skorzeny’s permitted clandestine state agencies to ‘respond to a crisis without transgressions of administrative jurisdictions’.

In other words, it allowed them to murder troublesome dissidents and political opponents without fear of comeback. In a letter from SAS founder David Stirling, a friend of Skorzeny for many years, to Charles Foley, the author of Commando Extraordinary, a biography of the infamous SS colonel Skorzeny’s war years, the author noted that since the early 1950s the Nazi had: ‘been toying with the idea of setting up an international directorship of strategic assault personnel whose terms of reference would enable it to straddle the watershed between paramilitary operations carried out by troops in uniform and the political warfare which is conducted by civilian agents.’

Skorzeny was convinced that the political turbulence and polarisation which marked the mid 1960s, particularly the rise of the Soviet-backed Third World liberation movements and the escalation of the Vietnam War, meant the time was ripe to implement his long-nurtured idea of a parallel military-cum-security organisation which would meet the West’s need to firefight the growing number of internal domestic conflicts which accompanied the break-up of the old colonial empires.

Third World revolutions, civil disorder and liberation struggles all had serious implications for the international balance of power and regional ‘political stability’ at the height of the cold war. One particularly striking example of this Cold War paranoia had been in Asia on 1 October 1965 when a British- and US-backed coup in Indonesia ousted President Sukarno and installed the pro-Western Suharto. Sukarno, it was thought, had been drifting under the influence of Chinese communism.

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Skorzeny arriving at Madrid airport, mid-1960s.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

The coup inflicted an enormous death toll on the world’s fourth largest country, with more than a million supposed communists being exterminated in a matter of months. So thorough was the security surrounding the massacre that only a single photograph of an incident during them survives. A possible further million Indonesians were murdered over the following thirty-two years of Suharto tyranny.

In the Argentine, Skorzeny’s company provided the personnel for ad hoc killer groups such as José Lopez Rega’s Argentina Anticommunist Alliance, the notorious pro-Peronist AAA death squads. In Spain, with the tide of angry opposition rising month by month and the increasing number of actions against military and political pillars of the Franco regime, Skorzeny was given a contract by the Dirección General de Seguridad to deal with its enemies, particularly the Basque separatist organisation ETA. The public face of the Paladin Group was that of a legitimate security consultancy, but the reality was that it provided cover for its primary function which was to recruit and run mercenaries and killers for dictators and failing colonialist regimes around the world.

In France and Spain its covert activities were implemented under a variety of names of convenience: among others these included the ‘Spanish Basque Batallions’, Mariano Sánchez Covisa’s ‘Guerrillas of Christ the King’ and the ‘Apostolic Anti-Communist League’.

Aldo Tisei, an Italian neo-fascist supergrass and associate of the Italian terrorist eminence grise Stefano Delle Chiaie, told an Italian examining magistrate many years later: ‘We eliminated ETA members who had fled to France, and did so on behalf of the Spanish secret services.’

Some of those who failed to escape to Latin America, Italy or Portugal with the other OAS leaders — such as Pierre Lagaillarde and Yves Guérin Serac — during these periodic diplomatic clampdowns in Spain, ended up in Carabanchel.

In the spring of 1965, five OAS leaders were arrested and charged with the attempted assassination of a French general in Germany. This turned out to be one of the last attentats in the bloody history of the OAS. Two of these men ended up with me in the quinta, a Colonel Raymond and Pierre, a chubby, white-haired, balding, Pickwickian academic who had been a professor of oriental studies in Algiers.

The professor had been attached to the 5th Régiment Étranger d’Infanterie during World War Two and had fought his way 500 miles across North Vietnam into China, pursued and harried all the way by Japanese soldiers and aircraft.

After the Japanese surrender he had been based in Saigon where he had worked in an intelligence–cum–security capacity during the Indo-China war against the Viet Minh, the predecessors of the Viet Cong. After the defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 he moved to Algeria the same year, when the FLN uprising was beginning.

Colonel Raymond, the man responsible for the attentat, was a more

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The French Connection

imposing military figure. He had been a company officer with the 1ère Régiment Étranger Parachutiste (1e REP). He was well over 6 feet tall with an athletic build, closely cropped blond hair and a rugged and scarred Teutonic face. He had escaped from Germany to Italy, where he had been arrested, released, and then passed through the Cité Catholique network of monasteries that run from northern Italy through France to Spain.

This Roman Catholic escape line was essentially the same as that set up by the pro-Nazi prelate Bishop Alois Hudal to smuggle war criminals and Nazi collaborators out of Europe. Surprisingly, Raymond was quite indignant at being arrested on an international warrant in a ‘friendly fascist’ country.

Despite his age, military experience and sophistication, he still had not understood the fundamental reality that states have reasons that override all private or partisan moralities. I had also found that out too late and to my cost.

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ people did not come in the expected packages. Both men spoke good English. They were cultured, sophisticated, had a dry sense of humour and enjoyed debate.

It was paradoxical to see the humanity in these men run in parallel with their capacity for authorising, justifying and participating in cold-blooded murder. They were fully paid up Catholics and held very right wing conservative views of the world. Raymond epitomised Byron’s description of Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat; with such true breeding of a gentleman. You could never divine his real thoughts.’

The professor wanted to teach me Chinese after I expressed a polite interest in the subject. But I was not a focused pupil and our conversations usually drifted into highly charged, but friendly, discussions on colonialism, religion and politics.

These were passionately idealistic and driven men who took the loss of what remained of the French empire badly — and personally.

The surrender of Dien Bien Phu and the loss of Indo-China in 1954 had been bewildering and humiliating blows to what they saw as France’s ‘honour’. It was this loss that had made them all the more determined to hang on to Algeria, which they were planning to reinvent, along with the Francoists and Salazarists, drawing on the original fascist ideas of José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

They claimed that they and their colleagues had been forced into doing whatever they had done as a result of the non-negotiable nature of the war for ‘unconditional surrender’ and the horrendous massacres by the FLN of innocent French settlers and loyal Arabs before and after independence. Also, they had faced the vicious and murderous Gaullist parallel police, the Service d’Action Civique (SAC), ‘les barbouzes’, professional criminals and thugs totally devoid of any morality or compassion.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Raymond and Pierre agreed that the means they had sometimes used appeared savage and that innocent civilians had been killed by the OAS — ‘collateral damage’ — but in their eyes the ends were redemptive. It was, they said, the ‘Z Commandos’ run by the more doctrinaire Jean-Jacques Susini, that had been responsible for much of the extreme violence in Algeria. Susini and his colleague Degueldre were the two men primarily responsible for the murderous strategy of the OAS in its final months: planting bombs in public places, stabbings, drive-by shootings, robberies, racketeering and, finally, the scorched-earth policy which left Algeria in ruins. Susini and his men turned what the more old-fashioned colonists Raymond and Pierre felt was a defence of French honour and Christian values into a self serving, Mafia-type operation by murderers and criminals. But then all power structures, colonial empires in particular, have tended to resort to barbarism when the ruled cease to be compliant and start to organise, such as Britain in Kenya and the Portuguese in Angola — the template for them all being surely the Black and Tans in Ireland.

The likes of Susini are always on hand when the occasion demands.

A protégé of General Jacques Massu, the victor of the Battle of Algiers, Susini fled to Madrid before he could be arrested and tried for his part in the pied noire settler uprising of January 1960, the infamous Barricades Week. In Madrid he had worked with Pierre Lagaillarde, the Corsican gangster Jo Ortíz and Raoúl Salán, the former French commander-in-chief in Algeria.

Susini’s power base was among the students of the Nationalist Front, a group which had initially refused to amalgamate with the OAS, but which, with its Z Commando militants, had sufficient leverage with the colonels to get Susini appointed head of the notorious 5th Bureau of the General Staff that dealt with psychological warfare and propaganda (APP), the ‘Black Operation’ (At the height of its activities, the OAS probably numbered only about 3,000 militants of whom perhaps 1,000 were directly involved in the armed struggle.

These were responsible for killing around 2,000 people, 85 per cent of whom were native North Africans.)

As Catholic traditionalists, the colonel and the professor justified what they had done in much the same way as David Livingstone and other British missionaries rationalised their activities. They were on a civilising mission in which the cross followed the flag and vice versa. They were not interested in democracy or equality for the peoples they colonised and administered. Their role was to bring Christian (i.e. European) culture and higher forms of organisation and economic development to heathen and less evolved peoples, by force where necessary.

Authoritarian government was what they sought at home and they had nothing but contempt for the politicians whom they believed had betrayed the army in Indo-China and Algeria. de Gaulle’s treachery and duplicity was even more heinous as he had been brought to power on the back of the extreme right, who believed him to be their Napoleonic saviour, the ‘man on the white horse’.

Raymond and Pierre were convinced the military victory had been won and

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The Marrano

then lost by de Gaulle’s decision to let the Algerian people decide their own future. The OAS saw itself as defending France’s national honour by attempting to force de Gaulle to meet his solemn national obligations.

As well as being old-fashioned chauvinists, my French patio companions were also obsessive anti-communists. They saw themselves as misunderstood victims of a global power struggle to defend Western civilisation against godless Communist barbarism. Perhaps the reason they related to me so frankly and sympathetically was the fact that as an anarchist I was hostile to Marxist ideology and the Communist Party.

The collapse of the colonies, the growth of dissent and the loss of French influence in the world was, in their view, all down to the machinations of the international communist movement under Soviet and Chinese politburo control. They saw the movements for self determination in Africa, Asia and Latin America as willing or unknowing instruments in Soviet or Chinese geopolitical strategy. Discipline, obedience and unity were the values they cherished and these were collapsing around them.

The only time I saw them angry was when an old enemy arrived in the gallery in January 1967 — an exiled former leader of the Algerian FLN, who had been arrested in connection with the shooting in Madrid of Mohammed Khidir, an associate of General Oufkir.

Khidir and another exiled Algerian, Belkassem Krim, former leader of the FLN, had been the only two people who knew the account number of the FLN’s war chest of 20 million US dollars. The money had been deposited in Khidir’s own name in the Banque Commercial Arabe in Geneva.

Krim himself was murdered in a Frankfurt hotel room on 20 October 1970.

The Algerian was moved back to the safety of the septima after a heated and violent confrontation with my French associates in the patio.

The Marrano of the coffee shop IT WAS ONE OF THOSE BITTERLY cold, damp, winter mornings in Madrid, made even colder by the biting wind which blew down from the snowy peaks of the Guadarrama mountains. I was leaning on the zinc counter of the coffee shop sipping on a café con leche and staring into the middle distance, thinking about nothing in particular, while savouring the pleasant sensory buzz from a Partagás cigarette. I was disturbed from my mindless reverie by the appearance at my side of a small, dark skinned, middle-aged-to-elderly Spaniard.

He was a new face on the block and had just been released from periodo. He produced an individual sachet of Nescafé from his coat pocket and asked the coffee shop encargado for a cup of hot water — for free. This amused me as much as it angered the coffee shop manager, given the relatively low price of coffee in prison as compared with the street price.

A compromise was soon reached and the encargado sold him a cup of hot water for his Nescafé for one or two pesetas. I made some smart-arsed comment to him about being Aberdonian, a joke that proved impossible to

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

explain to a Sephardic Jew in Spanish, but it did break the ice and we became friends.

Luís had been charged with defrauding an influential Madrid businessman, a charge he claimed was false and that he had been framed because he was Jewish. I hadn’t come across any obvious signs of anti-Semitism in Spain, even among the Falangists. As I said, he was a Sephardic Jew and as we became friendlier he confided in me that he was a Marrano.

The Sephardim were the mainly wealthy and cultured Spanish and Portuguese Jews who came originally from the Moorish south — Cordoba, Seville, Toledo, Granada and other cities — and who observed the Eastern or Sephardic rite and order of prayer in their synagogue services.

To confuse matters even more, although the Sephardim were eastern, it was they who came west to Spain while the Ashkenazi from the west went east to Russia. But I had only come across the name Marrano as term of abuse, an insult, meaning ‘pig’ and never particularly related it to the Jews.

It was a fascinating story. The Jews in Spain had enjoyed good relations and equal treatment under the Islamic caliphs until the arrival of the Almoravids in 1086 and the arrival sixty years later of the even more fanatical Almohads. The latter were an aggressive fundamentalist Berber tribe from the Atlas Mountains who helped the Moors eliminate the threat from the northern Christian kingdoms that had united under Alfonso VI of Castille.

When the new Muslim fundamentalists arrived in Spain in 1146, the Jews were forced to choose between conversion to Islam and death. Many Jews perished. Others fled to Egypt or to the more sympathetic Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. The forcibly — or opportunistically — converted Sephardic Jews to Christianity became known as conversos.

After almost a hundred years of relative peace in the Christian north, the year 1411 marked another catastrophic turning point in Jewish history in Spain.

That year mobs of crusading Roman Catholic fanatics and looters swept through Castille, their fears and jealousies inflamed by the rhetoric of the Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer. The aim of the crusade was, ostensibly, to bring Jews to the baptismal font, but in fact it had less to do with devotion and more to do with cupidity and the struggle for power and influence.

Converting the infidel provided a useful smokescreen for robbery and, more importantly for the Church, sidelining the Jews politically. Envy was at the heart of the anti-semitism. Like the Knights Templar in France a hundred years earlier, the Jews in Spain had become too rich, too powerful, and too important in too many walks of life for the peace of mind of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

In an atmosphere of self perpetuating fear, violence, treachery and intimidation, informers, eager for reward or approval, denounced real and imaginary heretical opinions and practices of the conversos to the Dominicans.

Their heresy in fact consisted of relapses into Jewish religious beliefs and practices. Thousands of Marranos were promised amnesty if they confessed to their Judaizing sins. Those who confessed voluntarily discovered they had

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The Expulsion Of The Jews

been lured into a trap and many implicated other Marranos under torture.

These, in turn, were stretched on the rack to implicate still others Anxious to maintain an aura of legality for their actions against heretics and apostates, the Church set up a tribunal in 1237. This consisted exclusively of Dominican friars whose remit was to investigate and extirpate heretics and heresy.

By 1480 the Inquisition, or Holy Office, under the implacable control of Tomás de Torquemada, the bitter and uptight Dominican confessor of Queen Isabella, was able to operate like a national police force throughout Spain, much like the Brigada Politíco-Social in Franco’s Spain.

It set the pattern of intolerance in Spain for more than 300 years. During this time, thousands of Marranos and other backsliding Christians and enemies of the Roman Catholic Church were arrested, tried and burnt at the quemadero, the stake, or had their bodies broken on the rack.

Torquemada finally convinced Los Reyes Católicos that it would be impossible to suppress Judaism among the Marranos unless the source of the contagion itself was removed. The expulsion of the Jews therefore became an essential prerequisite for the stability of Spain, the Church and the Christian religion. The edict of expulsion was signed on 31 March, 1492 and Jews were given the choice of being baptised or having to leave the country. If they chose to leave they were allowed to take with them their personal effects, but no gold, silver or jewels. Christopher Columbus, claimed by the Spaniards as Spanish, not Genovese, was rumoured to have been a Marrano, wrote in his diary: ‘In the same month in which Their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies.’

Columbus’s discovery of America was rumoured to have been financed largely by the wealth confiscated from those Jews who preferred exile to conversion. The expulsion edict remained law for almost 500 years until, ironically, the Franco government explicitly revoked it.

According to some stories I heard, Franco, whose patronymic was Bahamonde, a common Sephardic name, was rumoured to have been of Marrano descent.

It was extraordinary that this sect or tribe of people had been able to survive clandestinely and duplicitously as outwardly practising Catholics for almost five hundred years.

Their existence in the peninsula only came to light in 1919, when an organised community of some 10,000 families of Marranos was discovered, by accident, living a double life and secretly practising arcane adaptations of Jewish rites in Portugal.

For appearance’s sake they attended Catholic masses and so, over the years,

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

they absorbed Roman practices into Marrano Judaic ritual.

They celebrated Passover, but without the Seder, the religious service for the home. Other ritualistic changes included kneeling rather than standing in prayer, and reciting prayers rather than chanting them. Nor did they have prayer books, as these could have been used as evidence against them.

Talmudic lore and doctrine were passed down orally from one generation to the next. Marranos had secret Biblical names, which they used only with each other. Public Catholic wedding services were followed by private Jewish ceremonies.

Emphasis was on fasting rather than feasting, and they resorted to elaborate measures of deception to keep their domestic servants from discovering their secret. Employees would be sent out on errands at mealtimes and plates quickly dirtied to give the impression the family had eaten.

Another ploy was to stage a family row before mealtime. The red mist would apparently descend on one member of the family who would feign a fit of rage, then run out of the house with everyone following close behind, trying to pacify the upset relative. When the ‘quarrel’ eventually appeared resolved, everyone would be too emotionally drained to eat anything.

Another unusual aspect of Marrano culture came to light when Luis fell ill and was running a high temperature. He asked me to smuggle in an endurco made up by one of his relatives. Endurcos were traditional Sephardic medicines, the secret recipes for which were guarded by elderly tías, post-menopausal Sephardic women.

Luís claimed it wasn’t just the ingredients that made these old herb-and spice-based potions and mixtures work, it was the white magic — the chants, prayers, spells, Ladino (Spanish Hebrew) songs and gestures — that went with them that did the trick. Whatever it was, the antibiotics or the old Jewish magic, Luís got better. He was later sentenced to six years and a day and disappeared out of my life to another prison to complete his sentence.

A Levels THE CALVINIST ALBATROSS hanging round my shoulders was making me feel increasingly guilty about not using my time in prison constructively.

I needed something on which to focus my mind so I decided to apply to take English, Spanish and History A Levels. I wrote to Mum to ask the Associated Examining Board in England for advice on how to proceed in my situation.

They wrote back almost immediately. Not only did they overcome all the problems presented by the Dirección General de Prisiones and the Carabanchel administration, but also Mr Mackintosh, the man with whom I liaised at the AEB in London, generously sent me all the expensive textbooks I needed free of charge.

I found it difficult to study. I had left school four years earlier and with a twenty-year sentence facing me I had little sense of urgency or focus.

Reading was a way of passing time enjoyably; reading to study was a chore.

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Don Quixote And The Spanish Character

My other problem was covering the syllabus without the help of teachers or tutors, or anything other than the old A Level exam papers Mr Mackintosh had kindly sent me.

I still read Spanish laboriously, struggling with the words and the sentences and constantly having to consult a dictionary. Two or three pages would sometimes take me nearly an hour. But I persisted and it became easier.

Often I would read a sentence that would trigger off a train of disparate thoughts and images in my mind, and before long I would be miles away. This was especially so when studying English literature. Not that I hoped to be able to put my learning to much use in 1984, but it provided something constructive and satisfying to do in the meantime.

The reading I did around my A Level exams gave me a much better grip on Spanish literature and culture than that provided by the Falangist teacher, Antonio Ruíz, and his priestly cohorts.

The set Spanish A Level text that year was Pio Baroja’s Zalacaín el Aventurero, but discussing this title with the Madrid university students, academics and writers imprisoned during the cycle of demonstrations of 1965 and 1966 led to more stimulating patio seminars about Spain’s classical and contemporary writers.

While I never got past the first couple of chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’s epic Don Quixote de la Mancha, these al fresco lectures gave me some insights into Don Quixote’s eccentricities, his idealism, compassion, nobility, realism and insight into humanity. I also began to understand a bit more about Quixote’s and Sancho Panza’s importance in the Spanish national psyche, like Pushkin’s to Russian mentality and culture. In fact the more I read, the more the pueblos of La Mancha became the villages of Sussex and Kent (as opposed to Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Dumbartonshire) and Quixote took on the character of Richmal Crompton’s William Brown. Jumble, William’s mongrel dog was Rocinante but I couldn’t work out the role of Violet Elizabeth Bott, there was no way she could be the home counties reincarnation of Dulcinea del Toboso, ‘mistress’ of William Brown’s most hidden thoughts. Extraordinary.

My enthusiastic tutors introduced me to other writers such as Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and the later writers such as Ramón Sender and the Andalusian genius Federico García Lorca.

What was inspiring was the fact that although Lorca was a banned writer, many otherwise cynical and even illiterate prisoners could quote large chunks of his poems. His Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads) was particularly popular with the gypsies. It was this collection which made Lorca I realised I had been murdered. hated by the Guardia Civil and which led to his murder at ‘Then They looked for me in cafés, cemeteries and churches. the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In one of his poems But they did not find me Lorca appears to have foreseen his own fate. His body was They never found me.

No. They never found me.’ never found.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

CARABANCHEL PROVED TO BE as intellectually stimulating as a university campus. It was a place of education in unexpected areas, which helped me survive both spiritually and mentally (I can say this, having later completed a three-year degree course at Queen Mary College, London University). In fact, Franco’s prisons were the only places in Spain where there was genuinely free and frank discussion on politics, history and contemporary literature. Here was the real Spain whose creative spirit was captured by the shepherd poet Miguel Hernández in his poem ‘The Winds of the People’. In addition to the crash course in Spanish literature, culture and arts from some of the finest representatives of Spain’s intelligentsia of the 1960s, I also learned about the historical importance of Isabel and Ferdinand, Philip II, also the impact of Cortes and Pizarro.

A few of the students and academics were either anarchists or sympathetic to anarchism. One told me a story about the American writer John Dos Passos who had been a student in Madrid during and immediately after the First World War, in which Spain had been neutral (like America, till 1917). In 1919, the young American writer came into contact with an anarchist who had escaped from a Barcelona jail and who had grown cynical and was now pessimistic about the prospects for revolution:

* The Winds of the People ‘I come not from a people of oxen, my people are they who enthuse over the lion's leap, the eagle’s rigid swoop, and the strong charge of the bull whose pride is in his horns.

Oxen were never bred on the bleak uplands of Spain.

Who speaks of setting a yoke on the shoulders of such a race?’

‘We are being buried under industrialism like the rest of Europe… If only we could have captured the means of production when the system was young and weak we would have developed it slowly, made the machine the slave of man.

Now it is a race as to whether Spain will be captured by communism or capitalism.’

I often wonder if John Dos Passos’s anarchist friend survived to take part in the extraordinary libertarian social revolution of 1936–37. If he had, he would at least have learned that a second opportunity of grace is not just the prerogative of the Roman Catholic Church.

The same sympathetic academic was a mine of information on the subject of Dos Passos’s paisano, Ernest Hemingway, a writer who probably did more than most to prejudice his readers against anarchists by portraying them as simpleminded idealists or self serving criminals whose lack of discipline and pursuit of the social revolution allowed the fascists to win.

Hemingway’s hostile judgements on anarchists appear mainly in a brief passage in For Whom The Bell Tolls and in his play Fifth Column. Although he was apparently never a member of the Communist Party, Hemingway was susceptible to their flattery. Fifth Column, either a flagrantly dishonest or phenomenally naive play (which portrayed the Communist Party's Sovietsponsored secret police organisation, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar [SIM], as a heroic ‘fascist-hunting’ organisation, as opposed to a gang of killers dedicated to the summary murder of anti-Stalinists) was apparently written in Gaylords, the Madrid hotel reserved exclusively for Russian officers and important Comintern and Communist Party officials.

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Own Goal

Hemingway blew his brains out in 1961. Perhaps he did this because he had discovered he had cancer — or perhaps it was because he finally realised how pathetically different his life had been to the grotesquely romanticised image he had invented for himself.

Somewhat perversely, maybe it was a subconscious wind-up, I chose the Russian revolution as one of my special subjects in history. Don Benigno, the prison officer who controlled my correspondence, had a different view however. He summoned me to his office when he saw my choice of subject in a letter to Mr Mackintosh of the AEB. Somewhat indignantly, he explained that I could not take this subject, as the required reading material would not be allowed into the prison. My second choice was the history of the English working class in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

When the exam papers arrived, the prison authorities arranged for me to have a small classroom for myself and the invigilator, Don Benigno.

For one of my Spanish language papers, I had to write an essay on one of three themes. As Benigno handed me the paper he said, with what he presumably thought was a smile, that he knew which theme I would select.

I looked at the three subjects, which were: ‘A trip to the moon’, ‘What I would do if I had my life to live over again’ and ‘The pros and cons of dictatorship’. I grinned inwardly as I thought how right he was. I chose the last.

Personally, I thought I was quite circumspect in my arguments and made no reference to Franco, but I did write scathingly and pointedly about the corporate states of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini's Italy.

Don Benigno’s froglike face furrowed when he saw I had not chosen ‘What I would do if I had my life to live over again’. He was genuinely disappointed at his failure to convert me.

Somewhat rebukingly, he said that he thought I would have had more sense in my choice of paper and gone for the subject which would have shown how I had been rehabilitated, having been given the opportunity to become a worthwhile member of society.

This thought simply hadn’t occurred to me and I snorted sardonically, which he took as sarcasm, annoying him all the more.

The governor, Don Ramón, sent for me the following day. Don Benigno was with him and he had my exam papers on the desk in front of him. He looked at me paternally, shaking his head with an overstated air of resigned sorrow. The papers, he said, would have to be sent for clearance to the Dirección General de Prisiones before they could be returned to the AEB in London but he knew they would be ‘very disappointed’ in what I had written.

Basically he was telling me that I could kiss bye-bye to any thoughts of a presidential pardon or any further reductions in my sentence.

I came away slightly depressed by the whole episode — all because I had wanted to make a ‘smart arse’ point. But in the long run it didn’t make any difference and I passed with reasonable marks in all three subjects, thanks to a sympathetic AEB who had made it all possible.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Prison paisano THERE WAS ONLY ONE other British prisoner in Carabanchel when I arrived in 1964, John Melvin Upright. Melvin, a 19-year old Brummie, was not held in the main cellular prison but in a dormitory in the adjoining Reformatory with the rest of the under twenty-ones.

Although I was under age, I had not been sent to the Reformatory because of the nature of my offence, which presumably placed me beyond reform. The young offenders’ wing was a large and open dormitory block rather than a cellular gallery like the rest of the prison.

It was either bitterly cold and damp or suffocatingly hot. The glass panes in the windows were supposed to be removed in the summer and replaced in the cold, wet period — which in Madrid lasted for about nine months. But somehow the prison administration never managed to work it out quite right and the boys usually ended up freezing for nine months and suffocating from the heat for the other three.

When Melvin heard that a paisano, a fellow-countryman, had arrived he wangled his way to see me in the septima. And when I was eventually transferred to the quinta, he talked himself into being relocated there as well, to be with me. He argued the toss with the governor and jefes de servicio that it would be much easier and more efficient for the prison administration to have all the British prisoners together.

Melvin had been sentenced to six years for smuggling hashish from Morocco and a further two years and a day under the ‘public health’ law. He had been set up. The dealer from whom he had bought the eight kilos of hashish in Morocco informed on him to the Spanish police, who were waiting for him when he got off the boat at Algeciras. This was a regular quid pro quo by the dealers to keep the customs and police off their backs while keeping the seizure figures and arrest rate up.

By the time Melvin came to trial almost a year later the amount of hashish he was charged with possessing had dropped from eight kilos to one kilo. The police had either kept the rest for themselves or sold it back to the Moroccan dealer.

Melvin was training to be a barber. A benevolent and elderly Madrid barber who leased the premises from the prison authorities had taken him under his wing as an apprentice. Melvin taught the old man to read and speak a few words and phrases in English, so he had it a bit easier than the other youngsters.

We spent quite a lot of time together. Melvin was into ‘beatnik’ culture, which I was not, nor was he particularly politically minded, but being of a similar age we still had lots of overlapping common culture, so there was always something to talk about to help pass the time of day.

The barbershop owner was delighted to have another British person on whom to try out his English, but my Glaswegian accent proved too much for him and he always ended up looking at me in a bemused way, nodding politely,

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Melvin Upright

but understanding nothing of what I said.

It was an old-fashioned barbershop where clients were prepared for shaving with hot towels and Sweeney Todd razors, like the ones my grampa had used.

Melvin would practise his cut-throat razor skills on my sparse, newly sprouting facial fluff. Because he was a beginner no one else trusted him with a razor anywhere near their throats, ears or noses. This was something I was not aware of at the time.

One day business was slack and Melvin was giving me a relaxing hot towel shave. I had hardly any growth and didn’t particularly need a shave, but I was hoping it would encourage my beard. The first wisps of my moustache were emerging faintly, and I was extremely proud of this symbol of my manhood.

Suddenly Melvin’s hand slipped and he wheeched off half of my new-growing pride and joy. When I realised what he had done, I swore at him with every newly acquired Spanish and Glaswegian expletive that came to mind.

The man being shaved in the adjoining chair, Félix Carrasquer, was blind and when he heard me shouting in Glaswegian Spanglish that I had lost half my moustache and had been disfigured, he went into paroxysms of hysterical laughter at the image this conjured up in his mind’s eye. It took him half an hour before he finally stopped crying with laughter. Me, I had to forfeit the other half of my moustache and start the long process of growing it again from scratch.

Carrasquer was an old CNT member, a libertarian teacher, who had been kicked downstairs during his arrest, even though he was blind. He had an extraordinary memory for voices and whenever he heard a new one he immediately wanted a full description of the person and if possible their history.

Nicolás, his inseparable companion, another cenetista who had been in prison since the late 1940s, would then describe the person talking to Carrasquer. At football or frontón matches the two old comrades would sit together while Nicolás described the action and Carrasquer listened intently, as though he could see the play.

Melvin somehow adopted a cat, or a cat adopted him. Where it came from no one knew. The funcionarios let him keep it as long as the governor or administrator didn’t find out. It lived with him in his cell and went everywhere on his shoulder. He had a real cat and I had a metaphorical albatross.

For Christmas that first year Mum had sent me a stylish and expensive leather jacket which Melvin admired and borrowed whenever he saw I wasn’t wearing it. The cat loved it as well — as a claw sharpening accoutrement acquired by Melvin specifically for its benefit. By the time I reclaimed it the shoulders and sleeves were in tatters where the cat had mauled it.

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The author with pristine leather jacket, Carabanchel, February 1965.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

MY FIRST CHRISTMAS and New Year behind bars were not what I expected.

A mass celebrated the former and the eating of the grapes the latter, on noche buena, at the Hogmanay bells.

Bang-up was much later that Hogmanay, and I had a half-bottle of brandy, a Partagás cigar and two litres of wine squirreled away, so we managed to see in the New Year in the appropriate spirit.

The main fiesta was the eve of Epiphany, 5 January, the night before el Día de los Reyes.

It was a cheerful time. The seasonal songs, Spanish Christmas songs sounded even more spirited played by bands with exotic and discordant instruments: bugles, tabors, tambourines, flutes and zambombas, a kind of drum.

But the highlight of the Xmas holiday period for most Spaniards was the monotonous Gregorian-type chant by orphans of the Spanish national lottery numbers. A form of muted mass hysteria descended on the patio as cons and funcionarios alike listened intently to the droning voices, hoping and praying that this year they would tocar el gordo, strike it lucky with the big one!

AN UNUSUAL but welcome feature of Spanish prisons were the three annual fiestas when prisoners’ children and siblings — boys up to the age of eleven and girls up to nine or ten — were allowed into the prison for the day. These were the fiestas of the Día de Los Reyes, 6 January, Epiphany, commemorating the day the three wise kings, Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar, who had followed the star to Bethlehem, finally caught up with Mary and Joseph and brought gifts for the wean. The next in the calendar was 16 July, the patron saint of prisoners, Nuestra Señora de la Merced, and the third on 24 September.

These invasions of the prison by screaming and laughing kids were the cheeriest events of the year. From 11 a.m. in the morning until 4 p.m. in the afternoon three days a year they turned the drab monotony of everyday prison life into a noisy, unpredictable and colourful school playground.

It was carnival time in Carabanchel.

Giggling children chased each other up and down stairs, their noisy laughter echoing through this strange monastic institution. In and out of cells they ran, banging cell doors, trampolining on beds, shouting and throwing sweeties over the landings.

Funcionarios were at their most friendly during these fiestas, producing sweets and caramels for the children presented to them by their charges.

A stage was built in the patio of the quinta for the Municipal Orchestra of Madrid who came to entertain us with paso doble and other popular music of the day. When the band wasn’t playing or prisoners singing, songs such as Bésame mucho or Cuando caliente el sol ahí en la playa were relayed over the prison tannoy system.

The prison walls were decorated with bunting, flags and balloons, the kitchen provided an extra special menu for the day and officially approved

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Bad Milk

photographers were allowed in to record the memories.

But as 4 o’clock came round, and the time came for the children to leave, a sense of sadness descended on the patio. This sense of melancholy was not confined to the parents and brothers left behind, but to all the prisoners and many of the funcionarios who had been touched by the kids’ infectious happiness during the day.

By 5.00 p.m. the galleries had become a prison again and the memories bittersweet.

Mala leche SOME PRISONERS WERE paranoically obsessed by the fact that a foreigner and a red, had been given the cushy job of medical auxiliary. One of the perks was being in charge of the hospital food and special diets. These were an enormous improvement on the normal sloppy stew of garbanzos (chickpeas), pork fat and potatoes. Any leftover hospital food I was allowed to dish out to anyone who came along. Normally I distributed it among the older and poorer men who had nothing to supplement their prison earnings. After that it was first come first served.

Pineda was one of those who resented my having this job. Matters came to a head one day, after I shouted ‘Extras!’ One who came running was Jeff, a young English lad, a recent arrival who had been charged with attempting to murder his girlfriend. It had been a genuine accident, I believe. She had gone for him with a kitchen knife during an argument, Jeff diverted her thrust and as a result she stabbed herself in the stomach. In fact she admitted this to the police and was trying to get them to drop charges against Jeff. But Francoist justice, once started, was unstoppable and ground slow and exceeding small.

It was chicken that day. Pineda, flamboyantly resplendent in his blue shirt with polka dots, black velvet bow tie, blazer and grey slacks, followed immediately behind Jeff with his aluminium plate outstretched, only to find the last piece of chicken had gone to Jeff. The screw standing beside me chuckled to himself — few of them liked Pineda’s sycophancy to the priests and the top brass — but said nothing. Jeff was about to return to his cell with his food when Pineda started on him.

Those who know something about Spanish characters will know that the Andalusian can be the most flamboyant of those who profess machismo as a creed.

Pineda epitomised this torerismo (the cockiness of the strutting Andalusian braggart). Sticking his face up close to Jeff’s he gesticulated wildly, waving his head from side to side and screaming in Spanish, of which Jeff spoke very little at the time, about damned foreigners who came to his beloved Spain to assassinate the Caudillo — and then had the effrontery to steal the very food out of the mouths of deserving loyal Spaniards and give it to other murdering foreigners.

Jeff was an easy-going lad and had no idea what Pineda was spluttering

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

about. But his aggressive and intrusive behaviour, with his arms waving around all over the place, made Jeff think Pineda was about to punch him — so he landed a pre-emptive smack on the mouth that knocked the Andalusian staggering across the gallery.

As Pineda hit the far side of the gallery and slid slowly down the wall everyone cheered at his come-uppance and fell about laughing, including the screw beside me who had witnessed the whole affair. However, an attack as audacious as that under the noses of the screws had to be seen to be punished.

It didn’t turn out too badly for Jeff. He only received two days’ bang-up and I was allowed to visit him with food and cigarettes. Had he been a Spaniard, he probably would have been given two months’ solitary in the calabozas, the punishment cells in the sexta galería.

Falsificador FORGING PASSPORTS and official documents was another skill I acquired as a medical orderly. Two of the best forgers in Spain were in the quinta and commissions were constantly being smuggled in to them. One kept himself to himself and spent most of his time in his cell which was kitted out like a workshop with engraving tools, copper plate and etching equipment. In fact he was constantly working on officially sanctioned commissions from the Spanish Ministry of Communications to design new postage stamps.

The other forger was the escribiente, Miguel de Castro de Castro, a venerable and cultivated old gentleman in his late sixties, but wily and with a mind as sharp as a razor. Unsurprisingly, he was in for forgery and had been sentenced to something extraordinary, like 6,000 years in total, but didn’t expect to do more than 20. Miguel was my prison mentor, a wise guide on the art of the possible. Our relationship was similar to that between the old convict Norman Stanley Fletcher and the young and naïve Godber in the TV classic Porridge.

The warders were required to search the cells on a regular basis, but they never bothered to search the surgery. Consequently, passports, identity cards, driving licences and official documents were all hidden at various times in the cushion of the doctor’s chair.

My job as dental assistant also meant I could get hold of many of the materials Miguel needed — dental composition, wax, plaster of Paris and talcum powder.

I would sit by the old man for hours on end, watching him work his magic on documents of state, identity and commerce. About fifty passports and goodness-knows how many identity cards and other official papers and documents must have passed through our hands during my nearly three years in Carabanchel.

THIS CAT’S CRADLE of rivalries, friendships and dramas provided me with valuable insights into the complexities of human nature and consciousness.

The twelve months between 1965 and 1966 was the so-called ‘liberalisation’

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Reading The Runes

period, with rumours of new press laws and religious freedom. It was a façade of course. Strikes were still illegal and brutally repressed. The press remained under tight government control and newspapers and magazines were quickly closed down if they published anything offensive to the regime. Spain was still as much a military dictatorship as it had been in 1939.

What had happened was that Franco was cutting his previous close ties with the Falangists and realigning the regime with the quasi-masonic and ultra conservative Roman Catholic lay technocrats of the semi-secret priest-run cult of Opus Dei (known as ‘Octopus Dei’), a covert fulcrum of power founded and run by Josemaria Escrivá de Balaguer. Escrivá was an unashamed clerical fascist priest who manouevred and influenced Franco and the Spanish elite in much the same way as the monk Rasputin controlled the Russian royal family in the last days of the Romanovs. A palace power struggle had taken place between the clerical fascists in Opus and the political fascists of the Falange Española and the clerics had won.

Escrivá’s men were recruited mainly from among Spain’s wealthy and influential families. Members of this particularly exacting branch of evangelical Catholicism were divided into two groups: followers and the elect: the former could marry and live in the community, others took vows of chastity, lived in sex-segregated communities and gave much of their income to the organisation. They provided a new managerial generation of (literally) self flagellators and technocrats who were being appointed to key posts in government, industry, commerce, and even within the prison service — much to the displeasure of the old Falangist bureaucrats and placemen.

But the regime remained as authoritarian, clerical, narrow-minded, undemocratic, rigidly upper-class-oriented and militaristic as ever.

On another level, however, the political situation in Franco’s Spain appeared to be evolving in line with mainland Europe. Every time there was a cabinet reshuffle we would spend hours trying to read the implications of the changes; whether it had been a victory for the ‘liberals’, the Democrats, the aperturistas (those seeking an ‘opening up’ of the regime), or the hard-liners, the inmovilistas.

The aperturistas appeared to be ahead on paper at least, with promises on the ‘conditional’ right to strike, new press laws and trade union legislation.

Franco’s age and the poor state of his health added to the uncertainty in the air, weakening even further the country’s political and industrial stability.

Social and industrial unrest erupted again in January 1965 with the arrest of thirty railway workers charged with derailing and holding up locomotives and freight trains in Malaga. On 18 February more than 2,000 students from Madrid University, the privileged children of the Francoist elite, marched through the streets of the capital shouting slogans such as ‘Democracy yes, dictatorship, no!’

This was followed by angry student demonstrations in Barcelona, Granada, Salamanca, Bilbao, Murcia, Valencia, Santiago, Seville, Zaragoza, Oviedo, Valladolid and La Laguna. In March the students, showed their discontent with

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The Students Are Revolting

Hitler greeting Franco’s Captain General, Augustín Muñoz Grandes.

the state-run student unions by demanding more democratic and representative bodies. This led to demonstrations against police brutality and demands for civil liberty — events unheard of in the previous 25 years.

Like everywhere else in Europe, young Spaniards were becoming increasingly unwilling to accept a system that didn’t even pay lip service to basic human rights. As the year progressed, more and more students, intellectuals and professors such as José Luís López Aranguren, Enríque Tierno Galván and Agustín García Calvo came into conflict with the authorities and ended up in Carabanchel.

Franco’s new constitution, the Ley Orgánica del Estado, the Organic Law of the State, which attempted to deal with political life and governance after Franco, was finally approved in December 1966 by an enormous 95.9 per cent majority of the 19.4 million votes cast in a referendum.

Another indication of the changes taking place was the removal in 1967 of the old guard fascist, Captain General Agustín Muñoz Grandes as vicepresident of the Council of Ministers. Muñoz Grandes, former commander of the Spanish Blue Division, had fought for Hitler at Leningrad, and had been one of Franco’s closest associates. He was the chief of general staff, the highestranking officer in the Spanish Army, apart from Franco himself.

Muñoz Grandes’s removal may have been linked to an alleged plot to oust Franco, a plot that was reputed to involve the most unlikely bedfellows — including the CIA and the CNT. This was not the first time Muñoz Grandes had been involved in a plot to oust Franco. In his book Spain was Right, José Maria Douissainague, Franco’s then director of Foreign Affairs, on 7 February 1943 the Germans planned to send German troops into Spain and replace Franco with the general in whom they had most confidence — Muñoz Grandes.

Admiral Luís Carrero Blanco, a supporter of the liberal Prince Juan Carlos, the heir to the throne, took Muñoz Grandes’s place. This was seen as the first step towards making Carrero Blanco premier, a new position outlined in the ‘organic law’.

Uncertainty in the economy with an upsurge in the cost of living led to more and more labour conflicts, university disturbances, student demonstrations and even the emergence of radical priests. All this political turmoil was becoming apparent in the numbers and the ideologies of the new prisoners passing through Carabanchel.

The Marxist-Leninists (the Maoists), the ETA (the armed Basque independence movement) and a handful of Trotskyists — all of them poles apart from the anarchists — were increasing their influence and presence among the students and lecturers. This influx of fresh blood meant a distinct change in the balance of the sixth gallery’s political affiliations.

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The Alianza Sindical Obrera

There were four anarchists in the sexta at the time. Guy Batoux and Bernard Ferry, the two libertarian socialists arrested at the same time as Alain Pecunia, had been sent to Burgos to complete their sentences before I arrived leaving only Pecunia. He had been joined early in 1964 by three CNT members: Francisco Calle Mancilla, known as ‘Florian’, José Cases Alfonso and Mariano Agustín Sánchez. These men represented the CNT ‘of the interior’ on the sevenman committee of the Alianza Sindical Obrera (ASO). The ASO was a joint union body originally set up in 1961 in the wake of the first wave of Asturian miners’ strikes to coordinate relations between the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), the Basque Workers’ Union (STV) and the CNT of the interior.

The Alianza was funded largely by the large Swedish anarcho-syndicalist union, the SAC, led by a German anarchist Helmut Rüdiger who often travelled to Spain carrying cash for the socialist, Christian and anarcho-syndicalist trade unions. The SAC also provided funds for the clandestine planning organisation, the DI. The three anarcho-syndicalists now in Carabanchel had a long history of militancy inside Spain since the Civil War. Florián, a tall, seventy-something, sophisticated Andalusian from Ronda, was the political ‘mover and shaker’ of the group. On 19 July 1936, when the Spanish army rose in rebellion against the Republic, the then thirty year-old Florián had been personal secretary to the civil governor of Ronda.

Unknown to the governor, however, was the fact that he was also secretary of Ronda’s Libertarian Youth and had secreted an arms câche in the cellar of the governor’s mansion. On the morning of 19 July, amid all the confusion and uncertainties as to what would happen locally that day, Florián confronted the governor with a pistol and forced him to pronounce the town and surrounding villages in favour of the Republic. He later commanded an army unit in the central region.

José Cases, a bespectacled and cheery Valenciano who always wore a Basque beret, was the theoretician of the group. He had also been a member of the Juventudes Libertarias and served in the Columna de Hierro, the anarchist Iron Column, in Levante, during the Civil War. The third cenetista, Mariano Agustín Sánchez, was a carpenter and union organiser. He was a man of few words, but he had been a man of destiny in his time. As a lieutenant in the Signals Corps monitoring radio traffic during the last days of the Civil War it was Mariano who had intercepted the crucial message that both Prime Minister Juan Negrín and Foreign Minister Alvárez del Vayo were planning to flee the country. He immediately ordered a flying column to arrest the two politicians at Monovar aerodrome, near Alicante.

The ASO, or certainly Florián at least, had been involved in what became known as the ‘Muñoz Grandes plot’. Muñoz Grandes, vice-president and chief of the general staff, had been the US’s man in Spain during the Kennedy administration. Before that he had been Hitler’s man and had been involved in

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a plot to oust Franco and allow the German army to enter Spain to take Gibraltar. The Americans wanted to shift attention away from the US’s increasingly reactionary role in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America by being seen to be ‘pro-democracy’ in Spain and supporting the ousting of Franco.

The fact that they believed Muñoz Grandes would be an improvement on Franco shows exactly the type of people they considered ‘democrats’. The captain general and some of his military and Falangist colleagues had apparently been inspired by the example of de Gaulle’s successful decolonisation programme so he reinvented himself as the Spanish de Gaulle; the man who would facilitate the transition to the new, modern Spain.

Muñoz Grandes and his co-conspirators needed a pretext to seize power.

That excuse was to be Franco’s inability to maintain civil peace in the face of the rising industrial and social unrest that troubled Spain from 1962 onwards. (BPS arrests jumped from 1,335 in 1961 to 2,438 in 1962, of whom 996 were charged in relation to strikes and labour disputes.)

The hoped-for final nail in Franco’s coffin was to have been a staged guerrilla uprising, with Florián as leader. (Arms, ammunition and sufficient supplies to support twenty or thirty guerrillas for two or three weeks (the amount of time thought necessary to carry out the coup) were to have been smuggled in to Andalusia by yacht. It is possible that the BPS had got wind of this plot and arrested the ASO cenetistas as a warning to Muñoz Grandes. I don’t know; it may also have had something to do with the captain general’s subsequent ‘illness’ and unexpected replacement by Carrero Blanco.)

This quite fantastic and unlikely plot, as I understood it from the CNT people concerned, involved an American ‘trade unionist’(this US trade unionist imprudently arranged a meeting of the seven representatives of the ASO coordinating committee on the telephone from his Madrid hotel room. All of them were promptly arrested and jailed) of Spanish extraction who was either stupid or CIA-sponsored and the Benedictine monks of Montserrat under their Abbot, Dom Escarré.The Benedictine Abbot and his monks were in the frame as ‘honest brokers’ to ensure the good faith of the army in the ‘uprising’ and to reassure the ‘guerrillas’ that they would not be murdered to cover the tracks of the principal plotters. The weapons were to be provided by a Swiss anarchist, André Bösiger. Bösiger had been a key figure in the French Resistance and was linked to Pierre de Gaulle, Charles’s brother and head of the French Deuxième Bureau office in Switzerland. During the Algerian war Bösiger had been an important link in the FLN support network in Switzerland. The Swiss anarchist made about fifty visits to Spain between 1961 and 1966 in an attempt to get the ASO off the ground, but the organisation never succeeded, mainly due to obstacles created by the CNT leadership in Toulouse.

The leverage of the non-party political prisoners in Carabanchel’s sixth gallery was not strong during 1963 and 1964, but as the libertarian, socialist and nationalist groups began to show more and more cohesion they were able to improve their position.

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Hunger Strikes And Homosexuals

Tensions came to a head as a result of a ‘singalong a Marx’ and an antifascist singsong on Christmas Eve 1964. This impromptu party led to a few of the non-party prisoners in the sexta being sent to the punishment cells for a short time. The remaining prisoners decided to push the authorities into dropping the punishments and restoring the prisoners’ relative autonomy within the gallery by calling a hunger strike.

The Communist Party leadership denounced the idea as ‘petit bourgeois’ and ‘infantile’ and the seventy or so communists refused to take part; the others began to refuse food on a staggered one-prisoner-a-day basis.

The maricones, the homosexuals, were cleared out of the top landing of the quinta and the hunger strikers were brought in one by one and put in alternate cells, in isolation.

In spite of the fact that I was the gallery’s medical orderly, I was not allowed to accompany the doctor and practicante on his rounds. The hunger strikers were drinking water, however, which was brought to them by the maricones.

The prisoner who ran the cafeteria was a sympathiser and gave me a couple of boxes of sugar lumps which the maricones slipped to the hunger strikers on their water rounds. The sugar helped them hold out for much longer than they would otherwise have done.

The authorities conceded to the strikers’ demands on 8 January. They did not want to run the risk of creating a martyr by having prisoners dying on them, providing a fresh focus for an already hostile international press. Also, there was a major trial of 19 Basque nationalists due to start in Madrid on 21 January, less than two weeks away. It was easier to back away from a potential public relations disaster by returning to the old ways of leaving the politicals to run their gallery as they saw fit.

Floreál, José and Mariano, the three ASO/CNT men, received sentences of between five and six years and were shipped out of Carabanchel to other prisons in May 1965. Once again Pecunia was left as the sexta’s only other anarchist.

Perhaps it was for this very reason that he was made encargado de galería by one of the warders. It was either a decision worthy of Solomon or a wind-up of the thirty-odd Communist Party prisoners remaining in the sexta. Any other prisoner in charge would have been insufferable to the Basques, Maoists, the few Trotskyist prisoners and the thirty or so PCE prisoners, the other party members had been moved to the primera galería at the opposite end of the prison to reduce friction between the different Marxist groups.

WHENEVER A POLITICAL prisoner came in, either to serve his sentence in Carabanchel or in transit to or from another prison, I would hear about him within an hour or so of his arrival through my network of friends in the Centro.

In February 1966, my good friend Juan Busquets was discharged from Yeserías after yet more operations on his hand and leg and was in transit to Burgos via Carabanchel. He sent word by one of the cabos that he was in the

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septima and could I get in to see him. Fortunately, a friendly warder was on duty and I managed to get in that same afternoon for a chat. He was in Carabanchel for three weeks, during which time I managed to see him almost every day.

Juan’s periodo lasted only a week, instead of the usual ten days, because of his post-operative condition; as a medical orderly I could draw on my good relationship with the doctor and practicante, impressing on them that that Juan was an old friend and needed fresh air and exercise. They knew perfectly well what I was up to, but they saw me as simpatico and swung a reduced periodo for him anyway.

We usually managed at least an hour’s paseo every day, chatting and walking up and down, backwards and forwards across the patio, him limping and me strolling. One of the subjects that particularly concerned us was how to improve communication between the different prisons, particularly with Burgos, the main holding prison for politicals.

Busquets’s regular visits to Yeserías involved complicated and tiring transit movements through the prisons of Francoist Spain. But this regular movement also meant he played a crucial role in the clandestine inter-prison communication network which linked anarchist prisoners across Spain. He brought the latest news and gossip from Burgos about how my co-defendant, Fernando Carballo Blanco, and the other comrades were getting on. (Carballo had been transferred to Burgos from Carabanchel in 1964 where he remained until 1971. From there he was moved to Alicante where he remained until 1975, then on to Valladolid, Alcalá, Jaén, and finally to the Puerto de Santa Maria. The last of the political prisoners, Carballo was amnestied in 1976 and became a regular speaker at anarchist rallies in Paris, Bordeaux and at the famous San Sebastián de los Reyes rally on 27 March 1977. He was re-arrested in Spain in January 1979 and sentenced to six months imprisonment for some non-political offence.)

It was Busquets who organised my monthly payments of 500 pesetas from the MLE-CNT Prisoners’ Defence Committee in Toulouse. These were paid by giro cheque, from, in rotation, George, Paul, John and Ringo, the only English names known to the political prisoners’ support fund. This led to the rumour that the Beatles were bankrolling me, something which gave me a bit of kudos among my fellow prisoners.

Occasionally, I would bring along another old cenetista, Ramón, who had been on the general staff of the 5th Army Corps during the Civil War. Ramón, then inside for a ‘common’ offence, was the encargado of the carpentry shop and was in the quinta with me. When Busquets’s transfer back to Burgos finally came through, both Ramón and I went to see him off, carrying his bedroll for him as far as the spiked gate, the furthest we were allowed to go.

Ramón had some fascinating stories to tell. He had been a close friend of the extraordinary Antonio Ortíz, one of the Nosotros anarchist affinity group, who later commanded a militia column on the Aragón front in 1936-1937. The

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Antonio Ortíz’s Tale

‘Nosotros’ group later changed its name to ‘Los Solidarios’. The members were young working class Barcelona-based CNT defence group militants whose ideas and attitudes had been forged during the murderous period of pistolerismo (governmental and employer terrorism) following the end of World War One. Its membership was almost indistinguishable from the CNT’s Confederal Defence Committee. They included some of the most famous names in the history of Spanish anarchism — Buenaventura Durruti, a mechanic from León; Francisco Ascaso, a waiter from Zaragoza; and Juan García Oliver, an apprentice chef.

The group’s influence was to prove crucial in the development of the Spanish anarchist movement in the first half of the 1930s. Aurelio Fernández, one of the founders of Los Solidarios, defined the group’s aims as resisting pistolerismo, defending the anarchist objectives of the CNT and organising a nationwide anarchist federation that would unite all the groups close to each other ideologically, but scattered geographically throughout the peninsula. This was basically the core of the FAI, the specifically anarchist organisation of the Iberian Peninsula, including as it did, theoretically anyway, Portugal.)

Ortíz had also been the bombardier on the imaginative and daring aerial attempt on Franco’s life in 1949, during the dictator’s review of the Spanish fleet at San Sebastian.

According to Ramón, Ortíz told him how on one occasion during the Civil War his old friend and comrade Dionisio Eroles (a FAI-appointed executive member of the ‘Security Council’, a body set up under the Generalitat , the Catalan regional government, to coordinate and oversee the various security services) summoned him from the Aragón front to take delivery of a shipment of Mauser pistols.

When Ortíz arrived at Eroles’s office in downtown Barcelona, the latter insisted that before they collected the arms Ortiz should go with him to see something the anarchist security chief described as being ‘quite out of the ordinary’.

The two men and a driver drove to Hospitalet, an anarchist stronghold on the outskirts of Barcelona, doubling back every so often to ensure they were not being followed. Eventually they came to a warehouse in a secluded industrial part of town. There the doors were thrown open on their arrival and the car drove inside. Three armed men closed the doors behind them.

The men saluted Ortíz as he got out the car and he returned their salute.

Ortíz knew the men by sight, but only one by name, Hilario Estéban, a fellow member of the Los Solidarios group well known for his involvement in clandestine revolutionary action operations and a veteran of the 2nd Militia Column.

A lorry was parked in the centre of the warehouse. Beside it stood a

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Antonio Ortíz.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

medium-sized man in his sixties with a great nimbus of white hair. Eroles signalled Ortíz to follow him and they approached the white-haired man, who shook Eroles hand warmly and Ortiz was introduced as a well-known militia column commander from the Aragón front and an anarchist comrade ‘of confidence’. Eroles then explained to Ortíz that this was Attilio Astolfi,* an Italian engineer, and comrade, with something special to demonstrate.

At the Italian’s instructions, two of the guards undid *Attilio Astolfi the ropes holding down the tarpaulin on the back of the I wonder if Attilio Astolfi was related to Silvio Astolfi, the lorry and uncovered what appeared to be two large husband of Argentinian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni's teenage lover, America Josefina Scarfo. Silvio was a oxyacetylene cylinders attached by hoses and cables to a member of the Di Giovanni group who was possibly killed generator and a searchlight. The Italian explained they later by the Argentinian police. Amleto Astolfi was another were working on an apparatus that produced a ray Italian anarchist who escaped from Italy through the capable of disintegrating matter. The light source acted network run by Alfredo Brocheri, the so-called ‘Brocheri railroad’. This anarchist organisation was broken up in as a conductor for a fluid, formed under pressure, from 1934 by the OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police. a mixture of the gases from the two cylinders. Anything that stood in the path of this ray was vaporised.

Ortíz said that he remembered stories of British planes being brought down mysteriously in the desert between Libya and Egypt. There had been talk at the time of secret experiments being carried out by Marconi. The Italian laughed and confirmed that he had been working with Marconi on the desert experiments, but these had been inconclusive test runs. The apparatus on the lorry, however, worked on a slightly different principle from that of the electromagnetic one used by Marconi.

Eroles suggested the Italian show Ortíz exactly what the machine was capable of. The guards covered the apparatus again with the tarpaulin and climbed into the lorry. The Italian got into Eroles’s car and the two vehicles drove into the countryside surrounding Hospitalet. Up and down narrow lanes they went, through orchards and meadows until they came to a fallow field.

At the far end of this field was a grassy knoll with a few trees surrounding an old, ruined, farm building. A path, bordered by two parallel barbed wire fences, led up to the ruins at the end of which was a basket filled with alfalfa grass. The end of the path was also wired off.

Four armed men appeared from the ruined building and greeted the Italian and his visitors. The lorry was then reversed into position facing the hillock, its tarpaulin removed and the apparatus made ready by the engineer who then proceeded to aim the searchlight on the basket on the knoll. From behind the ruined building one of the men led out a donkey which he tethered next to the basket and from which it proceeded to graze contentedly.

Indicating to the others to stand clear, the engineer focused the searchlight’s weak beam on the donkey’s midriff, and adjusted a few switches and levers.

Although it was daylight, a dazzling bolt of luminescence shot along the barely visible tunnel of light and the donkey simply melted into a liquid black heap on the ground. From this smouldering viscous puddle rose thin plumes of smoke that filled the air with the acrid smell of burnt flesh and hair.*

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Goliardo Fiaschi’s Tale

Ortíz could hardly believe his eyes. The Italian engineer turned off the valves, disconnected the hoses and cables to the apparatus and climbed down from the back of the lorry. Almost apologetically he told Ortíz that the purpose of the device was not to kill donkeys, but to bring down planes and the criminals who bombed cities, killing innocent women and children. This test device had a range of only 2,000 metres, he said. They needed to extend its range to 6,000 or 7,000 metres if they were to succeed in shooting down planes.

To this day I still don’t know what to make of Ramón’s amazing story: was it true or was he winding me up? Who can tell? But certainly Marconi and his contemporary the Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla, and presumably many others, were engaged in strange ‘Star Wars’ type experiments that remain secret even to this day.

* Nikola Tesla This story may not be as fantastic as it sounds. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), the reclaimer of alternating current [a.c.] (a.c. was actually discovered by Michael Faraday when he invented the electric generator, which generated it from the start. However, he was persuaded by lesser men that it was useless, and that what was wanted was d.c., so every electric generator was fitted with a rectifier to convert the a.c. it generated automatically to d.c.) spent much of his life attempting to provide the world with free power by means of high-voltage and high-frequency wireless transmissions. Tesla experimented with ball lightning in 1899 and was the first to create lightning bolts a hundred feet long and one million volts strong. He was reported to have transmitted sufficient power over 26 miles without wires to light a bank of 200 lamps, totalling 10 kilowatts in power. In 1934 he announced he had developed a 'death ray' machine and had offered it to the British War Office who apparently rejected his offer.

ANOTHER LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP forged in Carabanchel was with Goliardo Fiaschi, an Italian anarchist partisan who had fought Mussolini’s and Hitler’s troops as well as Franco’s.

Goliardo, a man in his mid-thirties who still retained a twinkle in his eyes, was a native of Massa di Carrara, the Tuscan marble-quarrying region whose people were reputedly the descendants of Rome’s indomitable Phoenician slaves who quarried the prized white stone for the Imperial capital. (Carrara marble was also the only material Michaelangelo would use.)

Carrara was also the cradle of Italian anarchism and a historical centre of rebellion for hundreds of years.

The stories he told me about his life and the town of Carrara were riveting. The years of fascist rule in Italy, from 1922 onwards, had been particularly bitter ones.

During the war anarchist partisans had twice liberated the town from the Germans prior to the arrival of the Allied troops, who had stood off a few kilometres for almost a year before deciding to enter it. He also taught me a number of Italian anarchist songs, one of which was the hauntingly beautiful and ironically titled Inno dei malfattori which, roughly translated means the “song of the ‘Bad Guys’”, written by A Panizza in 1882. Its chorus ended expressing the desire ‘... not to serve, but to live in freedom’.

I took great delight in humming and whistling this exhilarating tune loudly while walking through the prison’s high echoing galleries on my medical rounds.

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Goliardo Fiaschi (c 1966).

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Not only did it raise my spirits but there was always the possibility it did the same for anyone hearing it from behind a cell door, and recognising it.

Goliardo had joined the partisans in 1943, aged 13, having falsified his birth certificate to pass himself off as older. Armed Deh, t'affretta a sorgere, with a captured rifle almost as big as himself, he escorted the o sol dell'avvenir, vivere vogliam liberi, women who regularly crossed the Apennines on foot to bring non vogliam più servir. food to the starving inhabitants of Carrara from Parma, Reggio Folli non siam nè tristi, or even from as far away as Modena, some 150 miles away. The nè bruti, nè birbanti, ma siam degli anarchisti Costrignano partisan brigade adopted Goliardo as their mascot pel bene militanti; al giusto. al ver mirando, in 1944 and it was in that role that he was photographed in strugger cerchiamo gli errori; April 1945, a young teenager proudly leading the Brigade’s perciò ci han messo al bando col dirci malfattori. official entry into Modena as standard-bearer.

Deh, t'affretta a sorgere...

After the Liberation Goliardo returned to the marble Al grito y lamento quarries where he had worked alongside his father and uncle del pueblo traicionado la ley del poderoso since the age of eight. By the early 1950s he was involved in the se aplica sin piedad: Jueces y magistrados work of the Spanish Refugee Committee where he became Aliados a señores friendly with José Lluis Facerías, a veteran Spanish anarchist Penan los agraviados Cual rudos malhechores who had fought with the Ascaso militia column during the Spanish Civil War. Freed from a Francoist jail in 1945, Facerías had been living illegally in Carrara since 1952. He was the companion of the sister of Gino Lucetti, author of the 1926 attempt on Mussolini in Rome. Facerías was also responsible for a series of spectacularly successful and lucrative bank robberies across Italy, the José Lluis Facerías. proceeds of which he used to finance the anti-Francoist struggle.

Facerías and Goliardo crossed the Pyrenees together on 15 August 1957 to launch a series of urban guerrilla actions against the regime.

However, the Francoist police located the two men within a fortnight. Goliardo was arrested in his forest hideout above Barcelona, but Facerías was not so lucky. The Spaniard was shot down in a BPS ambush in the Barcelona suburbs on his way to collect Goliardo.

Systematically beaten and tortured, Goliardo was brought before a Council of War on 12 August 1958 where his denunciation of Francoism and praise of the murdered Facerías contributed to a sentence of 20 years and one day.

Goliardo spent almost a decade in forty or so Spanish prisons.

When his release came in 1966 he was met at the prison gate by Italian police officers. He had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Italy, in absentia — and without his knowledge or any notification of the charges, defence or representation in court — for his alleged involvement in a 1957 bank robbery with Facerías in Monferrato.

Goliardo was finally released from prison in Italy after 17 years on 31 March 1974.

Inno dei malfattori

Ai gridi ed ai lamenti di noi, plebe tradita, la lega dei potenti si scosse impaurita e prenci e magistrati gridaron coi signori che siam degli arrabbiati, dei rudi malfattori.

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Miguel Garcia’s Tale

ONE DAY news came that another old cenetista had arrived in transit from Alicante Central Prison where he had spent the previous five years — Miguel García García. I had heard a lot about Miguel from Juan Busquets Verges in Yeserías. Busquets and Miguel had been involved in an unsuccessful escape attempt from San Miguel de los Reyes prison (prior to the one in which Busquets broke his leg). Miguel had smuggled two 6.35 calibre pistols into prison, but these were discovered and the escape had to be aborted.

Miguel was also to become another lifelong friend.

He had first been imprisoned for 22 months in 1939, after the war, just one of the 16,000 or so political prisoners held in Barcelona’s Cellular Prison, originally built to hold 1,000. Fourteen to 16 people stood, sometimes lay, ate, slept and pissed and shat in a space meant for one.

Miguel was one of the Tallión urban guerrilla group that operated in Barcelona from 1945 until their arrest 21 October 1949. Their downfall had resulted from one of the group attempting to sell a stolen gold watch to a police informer in the Barcelona flea market.

Miguel’s speciality had been the printing and forging of documents (in which he told me he had been trained by the British SIS [MI6] during World War Two). He later wrote about his experiences in his book Franco’s Prisoner.

‘When we lost the war, those who fought on became the Resistance. But to the world, the Resistance had become criminals, for Franco made the laws, even if, when dealing with political opponents, he chose to break the laws established by the constitution; and the world still regards us as criminals. When we are imprisoned, liberals are not interested, for we are “terrorists”. They will defend the prisoners of conscience, for they are innocent; they have suffered from tyranny, but not resisted it. I was among the guilty. I fought, I fell, I survived. The last is the more unusual.’

As Miguel noted, he was one of the lucky ones; his sentence was commuted to twenty years on 13 March 1952. Many of his friends were not so lucky. The following morning five of his closest comrades were marched from their cells in the condemned gallery, the cuarta, in Barcelona to face a Francoist firing squad.

When I first met him in 1966 it was hard to imagine that Miguel had already spent seventeen years in prison. For a man in his mid-fifties Miguel had a clear and smooth complexion — which he swore was due to using lemon juice as after-shave — and such a fiery dynamism and optimism that one would have thought he had only just been arrested and would be out by the end of the week.

The same energy and enthusiasm characterised Busquets and many others like them. The strength of their characters and morale was an inspiration.

My job meant I was able to wangle Miguel on to the sick list when he

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Miguel García García.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

arrived. This allowed us to meet for the few days he had to spend in Carabanchel before continuing on his way to Soria via Zaragoza. Miguel had been learning English for some time, but I was the first British person with whom he had been able to hold a conversation. I explained to him a system I had for getting letters in and out of Carabanchel and gave him a spare bottle of diluted lemon juice I had for invisible writing. I discovered later he used most of this as aftershave.

My last words to him as he passed through the spiked gate were, ‘Don't forget to look me up in London when they let you out.’ Little did I know that three years later he would be living with me and driving me up the wall in Coppetts Road, Muswell Hill, in North London, forever cooking tortilla española for supper and ruining my new Teflon-coated frying pan with a metal scourer!

The First of May Group ON 1 MAY 1966, all the world’s leading newspapers carried front-page stories about the mysterious disappearance the previous evening in Rome of Monsignor Marcos Ussia, the 40-year-old Spanish ecclesiastical attaché to the Vatican. The communiqué announcing the kidnapping was signed by the Grupo Primero de Mayo, the First of May Group.

This previously unknown group operated under the banner of the equally unknown International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement. It was, in fact, the continuation of the Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL) and its 1961 precursor, the Directorio Revolucionario Ibérico de Liberación (DRIL) which had prepared the ground for the formation of Defensa Interior in 1962. The Grupo Primero de Mayo shared the same objectives of the DRIL inasmuch as it sought to denounce the Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships in the most spectacular manner possible and to demonstrate an active international revolutionary solidartity. Like the DRIL and CIL, the Grupo Primero de Mayo was a loosely organised affinity group of international anarchists centred on a core of young Spanish militants of the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL), Portuguese, Latin American and Italian anarchists.

The Ussia kidnapping was the first action carried out by the First of May Group and the first of its kind since

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The First of May Group

the ship and aeroplane hijackings carried out by the DRIL in 1961 and the kidnapping of the Spanish vice-consul in Milan in 1962.

Defensa Interior (DI) had effectively ceased to exist in 1965. Its role as a planning and coordinating body for clandestine actions had been taken over by more or less the same activists involved in the DRIL and CIL. The non-sectarian name was simply an ad hoc flag of convenience for a disparate group of European and South American anarchists.

Ussia had driven off from the Embassy around 8.40 p.m. on the evening of 30 April in his small Peugeot car. Only a few hundred yards from his destination, he was driving along the narrow via Dei Farnesi when the car in front braked suddenly, forcing him to stop. The driver’s door opened and a man fell out of the driver’s seat and collapsed in the street. Two male passengers jumped out of the car and ran to help their friend.

Responding like most people to such a situation, Ussia went to help the two men assist their friend into the car to take him to a hospital. However, as he lifted the shoulders of the limp body into the back of the car, the victim suddenly came to life and produced a revolver, ordering him in Spanish to keep quiet and saying that he would not be harmed.

The priest did as he was told and got into the back of the car between the two accomplices. He was handed a pair of taped-over sunglasses and told to put them on and not to speak or to draw attention to himself in any way. The kidnappers then drove off to their hideout on the outskirts of Rome.

After driving for about three-quarters of an hour they reached their destination. The priest was ordered out of the car and up a flight of stairs to a first floor apartment. When his glasses were removed he found himself in a small room with two beds and a boarded over window.

He was told to undress and handed a pair of pyjamas that he was to wear throughout his captivity. Two of his kidnappers, who always wore Basque berets pulled down over their ears and dark glasses, reassured him in Spanish, always using the formal form of address when they spoke to him, that he would not be harmed. The third member of the group never spoke in Ussia’s presence.

The priest was treated with respect and given newspapers every day, including Le Figaro and Le Monde.

He was always asked what he wanted to eat and provided with a Bible. His captors were not particularly well-versed in theological niceties and this turned out to be a Protestant Bible, but Ussia didn’t complain and took it in good humour.

The alarm was raised when his abandoned car was

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discovered blocking the via Dei Farnese at 9.00 p.m., about twenty minutes after Ussia had left the embassy. The driver’s door was open, the lights on and the engine still running. It was a mystery, like Wilfred Gibson’s poem Flannan Isle or the empty Mary Celeste. Something untoward had happened to the priest, but no one was quite certain what.

Theories advanced by the media included the story that he had suffered a mental breakdown or amnesia because of his mother’s recent death; another had him running off with the Pope’s housekeeper. One newspaper’s speculation was closer to the truth: that the incident bore remarkable similarities to the kidnapping four years earlier by Italian anarchists of the Spanish vice-consul in Milan, Señor Isu Elias.

But the speculation about the missing priest did not last long.

The following day, 1 May, Antonio Garrigues, the Spanish Ambassador to the Holy See, a liberal-minded international lawyer who represented many US firms in Spain, a successful former Ambassador to Washington, a close friend of the Kennedy family since the 1930s, and publicly linked with Jacqueline Kennedy, received a letter stating that Ussia was safe and well and being held hostage by ‘compatriots’. In exchange for the priest’s release they wanted the release of a number of prisoners being held in Spanish jails.

In Madrid, CNT and FIJL spokesman Luis Andrés Edo, secretary of the Paris Federation of the CNT (and FIJL) and propaganda secretary of the CNT National Committee (he was also one of four members of the FAI in the Paris FIJL branch), held a clandestine press conference on 1 May confirming that anarchists had indeed carried out the kidnapping to draw the world’s attention to the plight of Franco’s political prisoners. Andrés Edo had been in Spain clandestinely since 3 April to counter moves by a breakaway CNT group seeking a compromising association with the CNS, the Falangist labour front. He had held an earlier press conference in Madrid on 5 April denouncing the negotiations between the Falangists and four renegade cenetistas of the so-called cincopuntista tendency.

In Italy, the police and Carabinieri launched a nationwide hunt focusing on the homes of known anarchists. Sixty or so Spanish anarchist exiles were also pulled in for questioning, but no clue as to the identity of the kidnappers was found.

Ussia wrote a second letter outlining the kidnappers’ demands in more detail which was delivered to the Spanish Embassy in Rome on 4 May. The Italian security service at first claimed that the organisation behind the abduction was Julio Alvárez del Vayo’s Milan-based Spanish National Liberation Front (FLNE), but this was kite-flying. The Carabinieri questioned a further twenty anarchists, who were quickly released without charge. There

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Ussia’s Release

was also innuendo from police sources that Ussia’s kidnapping had been carried out with his own connivance, a charge forcefully rebutted by the Vatican which vouched for Ussia’s absolute integrity.

The next day, 5 May, Agence France Press’s Rome office received a letter from the First of May Group stating Ussia would be released as soon as the Vatican made a public declaration in support of an amnesty for Spanish political prisoners. The letter added that the kidnappers were averse to violence but had been compelled to act in this way owing to the world’s indifference to the plight of Franco’s prisoners. The letter stated that their hostage was receiving treatment that was ‘as cordial as the circumstances permit’.

By the end of the first week the Italian police and security services were still no closer to catching the kidnappers. Ussia sent a third, personal letter to his two sisters with reassurances as to his well-being and with general chitchat about family and personal matters.

The final letter was sent on 10 May. Postmarked Castelgandolfo, close to the Pope’s summer residence, the letter reiterated the group’s distaste for the course of action they had taken, but added they felt it had been the only way to draw the Pope into making a public statement on behalf of Franco’s political prisoners.

The anarchists felt that Ussia was the best intermediary between the Vatican and the Spanish government. The letter ended with a promise to free the priest the following day, Wednesday, 11 May, at 7.30 p.m. at one of Rome’s large public parks. The letter was signed by ‘the First of May Group (Sacco y Vanzetti)’ and sealed with the triangular stamp of the Peninsular Committee of the FIJL. (Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian-American anarchists executed in Boston in the USA in 1929 in the face of enormous worldwide protest for a murder, which they went to their deaths claiming they did not commit.)

Ussia’s release came sooner than expected. The priest was woken around two o’clock in the morning of Wednesday 11 May, given a suit and told to dress.

He put on the taped glasses and was escorted downstairs to a car. They drove for about an hour then, about five in the morning, the car pulled in by the side of a deserted country road and the priest was ordered out. One of the men got out with him and escorted him a few yards down the road then, standing behind him, removed the priest's glasses and told him not to move or turn his head until the car had driven off. The man told him there was a village close by, dropped a package beside him, one with the surplice, money and watch which had been removed from him on the night of his kidnapping; then walked back to the car and drove off into the dawn.

The priest realised he was about eight kilometres from the village of Bracciano, close to the Radio Vatican transmitters at Santa Maria de Galeria, some 50 kilometres from Rome. He caught the first bus at 6.00 a.m. and bought a ticket to the radio station. The only other passenger on the bus was so engrossed in that day’s first editions of the papers with its front page headlines and photographs of the kidnapped priest and the news he was to be released

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later that day that neither he nor the driver recognised him or paid any attention to him as he sat quietly waiting for his stop and a return to normality.

The kidnappers made their escape and were never identified or arrested. The failure by the security services to find the kidnappers led to the sacking of General Alavena, the then head of SIFAR, the Italian secret service agency.

The consequences of the kidnapping were felt quickly. No political prisoners were released, but many of the group’s other demands were met. In Carabanchel, at least, the food improved, and prisoners held illegally beyond the length of their sentences were released. A few regime-friendly journalists were allowed inside Carabanchel to photograph the prison and, amazingly, were permitted to interview some prisoners, including the two remaining young French lads in Burgos, Guy Batoux and Bernard Ferry. Pecunia had been released the previous August, after serving only two years of his twenty-four-year sentence.

Among the demands for the release of Ussia was the freeing of Batoux, Ferry and myself. Franco pardoned the two French lads twelve weeks later on 10 August. They had already served almost three years of their sentences, but in my case the authorities obviously felt they could not afford to lose face so blatantly. So far I had served only two years. Neither did I have the equivalent support from the Foreign Office. Pecunia later told me that his source in the Quay d’Orsay had said I would be the last to be released. (Bernard Ferry was killed in a climbing accident in the Pyrenees ten years later, in 1976. Also, Alain Pecunia, originally sentenced to 24 years imprisonment and the first of the three to be released, was the victim of a mysterious motor scooter accident which left him wheelchair-bound almost exactly a year after his pardon in August 1965.)

One possible reason for the success of this action was that it coincided with intensified diplomatic moves by the Francoist authorities to improve Spain’s standing in Europe prior to applying for EEC membership.

After the priest had been released, Andrés Edo, still in Madrid, gave a final interview to the Agence France Press correspondent. He told the journalist that the original target of the kidnappers had in fact been Antonio Garrigues. But his close involvement with Jacqueline Kennedy meant he had a constant US Secret Service bodyguard, so ‘plan B’, the priest, had been put into operation.

IN THE YEARS between my arrest in 1964 and 1966, a heated debate had been going on between the conservative old guard of the CNT and the FIJL militants over the question of the armed struggle against Franco. The ‘antis’ were led by Federica Montseny, Germinal Esgleas Jaume, secretary general of the Intercontinental Secretariat of the MLE-CNT in France, and the French anarchist writer Pierre Piller, more widely known as Gaston Leval.

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Changes In The Air

The main reason for the concern of the CNT’s Toulouse leadership was the increased police pressure the legal exile movement faced in France as a result of activities of FIJL militants. The youth movement had been outlawed and most of its principal activists had been expelled or were living in clandestinity.

Effectively this meant that during this period the FIJL was forced to call a halt to its bombing campaign, inside and outside Spain.

However, the period also provided an opportunity for the activists to reconsider their strategy. Apart from a bomb attack on the Spanish consulate in Naples on 2 January 1966, there had been few organised actions since my arrest in 1964, although Spanish embassies, consulates and Iberian Airline offices throughout the world continued to be the target of demonstrations and acts of vandalism by people passionately opposed to Franco’s unspeakable regime. The platform for the internal debate on armed action was the Venezuela based anarchist journal Ruta, edited by Victor García (Germinal Gracia Ibars) of the FIJL. The main spokesmen for the FIJL and those who supported the armed struggle against the Franco regime were Octavio Alberola and Salvador Gurucharri, ‘El Ingles’, had been arrested by the French police and officially expelled from France. At the time Salva was living legally in Belgium, but much of his time was spent secretly in France. The French authorities, on the other hand, had been unable to locate Alberola to expel him so he remained in France.

Sensitive to the increasingly radical mood of young people, particularly among those working-class kids attending the new redbrick universities such as Nanterre, the FIJL felt it needed to adapt to this new political and social atmosphere within Europe. The focus for this more general debate was a new journal, Presencia, a Spanish-language journal founded in Paris in late 1965 by anarchists and non-aligned libertarian Marxists.

The FIJL’s position as it developed during 1966 began to attract new militants and anarchist sympathisers — irrespective of age and nationality — who wanted to throw off the old sectarianism and the suffocating bureaucratic, centralising control of the CNT-FAI leadership under Montseny and Esgleas.

This had never fully acknowledged the disastrous compromises during the Civil War period and was now effectively a head without a body, lacking all but the most skeletal and clandestine trade union organisation in Spain.

With Presencia not only did the language of the old ‘romantic anarchism’ disappear, but with it went the anti-Marxist sectarianism which had for so long been so deeply-rooted among Spanish libertarians as a result of their persecution by the Communist Party during the Spanish Civil War. Presencia, Los Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico and Mañana were to become the three most important platforms of the Spanish ‘New Left’, both inside Spain and in exile for the next ten years or so.

The enemy now was not only Franco. Spain was no longer the ‘last of the Axis powers’, isolated politically and diplomatically. There was not going to be any military humiliation for Franco. The tyrant would survive, thanks to the Americans. Spain had become an important strategic client state, a proxy of the

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

US, a global power that was now exercising its military and economic muscles far beyond its traditional spheres of influence. To fight Franco meant taking on its sponsor, the USA, the daddy of all rogue states. The struggle against injustice had to be extended beyond anti-Francoism to challenge colonial interests, dictators and warlords everywhere and the US, Soviet and Chinese governments that sustained them in power.

Since the early 1960s, the US government had appointed itself the global sheriff whose remit was to thwart the aspirations of nascent anti-colonial and liberation movements — from its clearly unjust and disproportionate war in Vietnam and South-East Asia, to the Americas (where it had actually played this role since the turn of the century), to Africa, and to Europe — all in the name of anti-communism.

Apart from the British colony and naval base at Gibraltar, Spain now provided important nuclear bases for the US Strategic Air Command in Torrejón (Madrid), Sanjurjo-Valenzuela (Zaragoza), Morón y San Pablo (Seville), and the naval base in Rota (Cadiz), an operational base of the US Sixth Fleet.

The dangers of having these bases on Spanish soil was brought home dramatically on 17 January 1966, when a US Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber blew up over Andalusia and dropped three H-bombs on land near Palomares in Almeria and a fourth H-bomb in the sea nearby. Fortunately, they didn’t explode.

FIJL activists tried to galvanise anarchists and revolutionaries internationally on the need to awaken consciences and to confront the injustices created in the wake of the USA’s and the Soviet Union’s struggle for global dominance. This was the background to the birth of the First of May Group and the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement; the means were to be exemplary, dramatic, spectacular, direct actions that would capture the headlines of the world's press, radio and TV. The Ussia kidnapping was the first such action.

The Brigada Politíco-Social Strike Back THE BRIGADA POLÍTICO-SOCIAL took their revenge for the Ussia kidnapping later that year on 24 October 1966, when they arrested five anarchists in Madrid. Among those arrested was their bête noir, Luis Andrés Edo, 41. With him they arrested Antonio Cañete Rodríguez, 49, Alicia Mur Sin, 33, Jesús Andrés Rodríguez Piney, 39, and Alfredo Herrera Datívo, 31.

According to the police statement, they had successfully foiled an ambitious anarchist plot to kidnap Angler Biddle Duke, the US Ambassador to Spain, Rear-Admiral Norman G Gillette, Commander-in-Chief of American forces in Spain, and the Argentinian dictator, Juán Perón, who had been living in exile in Madrid since 1955.

The failure of ‘Operation Durruti’, as this particular kidnapping plan was known, was due to a police infiltrator by the name of Inocencio Martínez.

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Targeting Franco’s Backer

Alícia Mur Sin, a veteran FIJL activist, had arrived with Martínez from Paris in August 1966 and had rented a fifth floor flat for the group at nos. 84–86 Paseo de Santa Maria de la Cabeza, in the Madrid suburbs, under the assumed name of Luisa Vidal Sorolla. The other members of the group began arriving individually during the first part of October.

But bad feeling was growing between members of the group. Things kicked off badly when Piney made advances to his companion Alícia Mur while they were alone in the flat. Alicia politely told him to back off and that that they could not afford personal emotional involvements at this stage of the operation. Piney was an unashamed chauvinist and did not take kindly to rejection. The tension between them was noticeable. The bad atmosphere began to affect the others as well and squabbles between them were not uncommon.

Matters were made worse with the arrival of Antonio Cañete, an indomitable 52-year-old FAI militant and exFIJL member with a long record of militancy inside and outside Spain since the early 1930s. During the Civil War Cañete had fought with the Maroto Column in Izmalloz and had been one of the niños de la noche (‘the children of the night’ — not Dracula’s little helpers) who specialised in helping fugitives from Francoism escape from Granada. He had fought with the urban guerrilla groups in Catalonia and was wanted by the police for a shootout in Barcelona in 1949 in which a number of policemen had died. Cañete had escaped to safety across the Pyrenees and was now living with his companion in a small town on the outskirts of Paris. He had volunteered for the operation and despite his elderly appearance he was a perfectly capable militant. Cañete was, however, one of those people who are difficult to live with at the best of times and to make matters worse he had developed a dislike for Piney. This made life in the flat distinctly uncomfortable for everyone.

Andrés Edo was not expected for a few days so Cañete decided to visit relatives in Granada. This triggered another argument with the rest of the group. If he were seen or recognised in Granada it could give the whole game away and lead to their arrest and, possibly, their deaths. Cañete was unconvinced by their arguments and went off, unconcernedly, on his travels.

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Press coverage of the arrests at the Paseo de Santa Maria de la Cabeza.

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When he arrived in Granada, however, he discovered that the Brigada Político Social had been at his relative’s house two days earlier making inquiries about him. To cover the fact that they had an informer within the group they said later that the BPS agents in Paris who monitored the movements of well-known militants had noticed that Cañete was not in his usual place. Suspecting he might be in Spain they had decided to investigate his possible movements in the Peninsula. The reality was that they knew precisely what Cañete’s movements were. Cañete returned immediately to Madrid.

In the meantime, Andrés Edo had arrived at the flat to discover just how badly mismatched the team members were. When Cañete told him what had happened in Granada, Andrés Edo decided his continued presence in Madrid was a danger to the group and that he should return immediately to Paris.

Cañete caught the Madrid-Zaragoza express that same night, 23 October, but was arrested by the BPS who were waiting for him when he got off the train at Zaragoza. When they searched him the police discovered the contract for the flat in the Paseo de Santa Maria de la Cabeza in his possession. Alicia had given it to him to return to Alberola for accounting purposes.

The following day the sixth member of the group, the spy Inocencio Martínez, made his excuses to Andrés Edo and left for France. He was the only one of the group to escape arrest. (According to Alberola Martínez had not previously been involved with the DI, having only become active after the Delgado and Granado executions in 1963.)

The object of the kidnapping was to denounce the US military presence in Spain, to protest against the two atomic bombs accidentally dropped near Alicante and to demand the release of Spain’s political prisoners.

The kidnapping was to have taken place on the main road to the Torrejón US airbase on the northern outskirts of Madrid. It was to have been carried out in the same manner as the Ussia kidnapping a few months earlier — a faked accident and then transferring the rear admiral to a waiting van. The group was armed with two Sten guns and pistols.

The Brigada Político-Social prepared a massive police action on the night of 24 October, saturating the streets around Santa Maria de la Cabeza with police officers. Andrés Edo returned to the flat between 10.30 and 11 p.m. The police were waiting for him inside the doorway at the foot of the stairs. Alicia and Piney were alone in the flat when the knock came. Piney answered the door with a Luger tucked into his waistband, but before he had time to react he was overpowered. Alfredo Herrera, the youngest of the group, who had been sent

by Alberola to make up the group’s numbers, was arrested the following morning when he arrived at the flat from Paris Unusually, none of them was tortured or badly beaten up at the Puerta del Sol. Equally surprising was the dispute over jurisdiction — between the

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Tension Between Military and Civilian Tribunals

military authorities who wanted to try them by a council of war, as was usual in cases involving anarchists, and the civil authorities of the recently introduced Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP). Their defence counsel was the best-known liberal lawyer in Spain at the time, Jaime Cortezo Velázquez-Duro.

The competition between the civilian and military legal authorities was by now quite fierce. Spain was technically still under military rule and until late 1963 every political dissident, no matter what their crime — from urban guerrilla, to striker, to freemason or possessor of illegal leaflets — was tried by councils of war, usually on charges of ‘military rebellion’ or ‘banditry and terrorism’. Councils of war doled out twenty- and thirty-year sentences as well as occasional death sentences as though there were no tomorrow.

The new TOP, on the other hand, tried political offences in the civil courts as civilian crimes rather than as military rebellion. TOP sentences ran from two to six years and caused far less international outrage than those passed by the military tribunals.

The introduction of civil tribunals was part of the attempt to foist on the world the illusion that Franco’s Spain was moving towards a democratic and law-based society. The global indignation which followed the military execution of Grimau and the barbaric strangulations of Delgado and Granado had shaken the regime and forced the Francoist apparatus to change tack to avoid further international ostracism.

The TOP had been created on 5 May 1963 after the furore caused by Grimau’s execution, but it had not become operational until December that same year.

With the indictments against Andrés Edo and the others prepared, the five anarchists were handed over to the prison authorities. Alícia Mur was taken to the Madrid women’s prison at Alcalá de Henares on 31 October and the four men were brought to Carabanchel Alto, where I was awaiting their arrival.

Alícia Mur discovered during her interrogation in the Puerta del Sol that she had been under surveillance for weeks. She had not been arrested because the police were awaiting the arrival at the flat of the other members of the group.

On 8 December, Octavio Alberola Surinach flew to New York where he gave a press conference and confirmed that the target had been Rear Admiral Norman G Gillette, Commander-in-Chief of American forces in Spain.

Copies of Alberola’s press statement denouncing the policies and injustices of the Francoist regime were sent to the Secretary-General of the UN, and to all the UN delegations. He also sent a letter to Franco’s ‘liberal’ Foreign Minister, Castiella, stating that unless the trial were seen to be fair, the First of May Group would launch an international campaign to further discredit the Franco regime.

In response to the threat of the group being court martialled, the First of May Group issued an immediate warning shot; another kidnapping. On 25 April 1967, the personal secretary of the Spanish Ambassador in London was taken at gunpoint from outside his home and held for a few hours, before being released with a warning of other actions to follow.

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Two days later, on 27 April, two members of the group handed in a letter to the legal attaché of the London Embassy explaining the reasons for the brief kidnapping 48 hour previously. The intention was to make it clear that next time it would be for real unless their demands were met. The letter demanded that the ‘Madrid Five’ be tried by the civil authorities, and my early release. A week later the Andrés Edo file was returned to the Tribunal de Orden Público.

Andrés Edo and the others were tried by the Tribunal de Orden Público (Case no. 314/66) on 4 July (American Independence Day) 1967 and sentenced to three years for illegal association (membership of the FIJL), 6 years for illegal possession of weapons and a 25,000 peseta fine for using a false identity card.

He was released in July 1972. During his sentence he had mounted a number of hunger strikes and spent a lot of time in the punishment cells of Soria, Segovia and Jaén. At the beginning of 1968, while his case was being heard by the Spanish Supreme Court and while he himself was seriously ill in Yeserías prison hospital, he was accused by an informer, Emilio Romero, publisher of the newspaper El Pueblo, of having been involved in planting bombs in Spanish consulates throughout Europe, including on dates when Edo was in jail. Andrés Edo took Romero to court for defamation of character and won his case. When the court invited him to suggest how much Romero should be fined for ‘impugning his good name’, Andrés Edo demanded just 1 peseta in damages.

He was re-arrested in June 1974 charged again with illegal association (Case no.

682/74) and with involvement with the GARI action groups. This was as a result of his involvement in a clandestine press conference in Barcelona explaining the reasons for the recent abduction in Paris of the Spanish banker Baltasar Suárez. For his alleged part in this kidnapping he was sentenced to 5 years’ imprisonment on 17 February 1975, but was released in 1976 some months after the death of Franco, in November 1975.

Another action by the First of May Group in London made front-page headlines all over the world when submachine gun fire raked the front of the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square at 11.35 p.m. on 20 August 1967, shattering the windows and plate glass doors, but injuring no one.

According to the Daily Telegraph, leaflets claiming the action on behalf of the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement were scattered in front of the US Embassy: ‘It was only a few minutes before midnight that the bullets raked the embassy building. The Ford Cortina slowed down near the white, stone-faced building, then the rattle of fire echoed through the normally quiet square as the car sped along Upper Grosvenor Street, along Park Street and away. The gunmen escaped without anyone getting their car registration plate.

‘Police from West End Central police station were rushed to the embassy and found a large number of machine-gun bullets on the pavement.

‘Mr Reuben Hutley, 57, a porter at a nearby block of luxury flats, said: "I heard about a dozen bangs— short bursts like a Sten gun. It was like something from a Chicago gangster film. Police rushed everywhere and Marines dashed out of the embassy. It was chaos.

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Machin-Gun Attack On US’s London Embassy

‘Every available man at West End Central was immediately sent to the area, and adjoining divisions as well as Home Counties forces were alerted to set up road blocks and stop any white car. Police were ordered to act with caution.

‘But it is thought that the machine-gunner must have known that the consular offices would be closed; it is probable that he did not intend to injure anybody, only to make a militant protest. Detectives found nine bullet holes in windows and doors. All four doors were crazed. Two of the bullet holes were about 20ft up.'

The investigation was headed by Detective Superintendent Arthur Butler and Chief Superintendent Leonard ‘Nipper of the Yard’ Read of C Division CID. According to the Evening News of 21 August. ‘Leave has allegedly been cancelled for at least half of the Special Branch who have been put on call at two minutes notice.’

Thirty-man detective teams raided the homes of more than twenty suspects. The Islington base of Michael de Freitas or ‘Michael X’, the West London gangster and born-again leader of the British ‘Black Muslims’ was raided by British police accompanied by FBI officers, as were the offices of the Committee of 100 in Goodwin Street, Finsbury Park, but no hint as to the identities of the three gunmen was ever found.

In the meantime Octavio Alberola had been declared public enemy number 1 by the BPS and their allies. A few days after the London kidnapping of 25 April, there were reports of Francoist agents in Paris trying to identify and locate suspected members of the First of May Group, including Alberola.

Less than a week later, on 1 May 1967 the bruised and tortured body of Octavio’s father, 72-year old José Alberola Navarro, a highly respected professor of literature, was found bound, gagged and hanged in his Mexico City apartment. It had been no ordinary murder.

It bore all the hallmarks of a ritual death squad killing similar to those carried out by the notorious Mexican ‘parallel’ police squad, the Brigada Blanca, or, possibly, Otto Skorzeny’s ‘Paladin Group’, the BPS’s preferred ‘plausibly deniable’ proxy killers.

The date of the murder, 1 May, was significant. The elderly José Alberola was no threat to either Franco or the Mexican state so the likelihood is that it was an attempt by the BPS or their proxies, to ascertain the

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First of May Group machine-guns US Embassy, London, 1967

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

whereabouts of the young Alberola in Europe. Octavio Alberola returned to Europe, secretly, in early 1962 to work with the DI, but the clandestine lifestyle was not conducive to bringing up two young children so his companion, Irene, and their two children Helie and Octavio, returned to Mexico.

Thirty-five-year-old Alberola had already had 18 years’ experience in the revolutionary struggles of South America. He had worked closely with Guevara and Castro in the ‘Anti-Dictatorial Front’ of South America, the group that later gave birth to the 26 July Movement which overthrew the Batista regime in Cuba. He had also been active in the struggle against both the Trujillo dictatorship in Santo Domingo and that of Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela.

Octavio had been invited to take on the full-time role of planning and coordinating the attempts on Franco's life in Spain. The man who invited him was Joaquín Delgado, one of the key organisers of the FIJL action groups later framed and garrotted in Madrid.

José Alberola Navarro: murdered 1 May, 1967.

Alberola had been one of the founders of the FIJL in Mexico. His first run-in with the authorities was at the age of 17, in 1946, when he was arrested on a charge of illegal propaganda and held in one of Mexico's notorious secret jails. He was released after a month on the orders of the Mexican Premier, Corrines.

He studied engineering at Mexico University, where he wrote his thesis for the Scientific Congress in Mexico City in 1949. The Autonomous National University of Mexico published this two years later under the title Octavio Alberola with his mother and father, Mexico.

‘Determinism and Liberty’ in Memorias del Primer Congreso Científico Mexicano. It ran to two editions. He later took up journalism, which allowed him to travel through Europe in the late 1950s prior to going underground in 1962. The father was sacrificed to punish his son. Four young men were seen by neighbours and the concierge leaving the professor’s flat on the day of the murder, but they were never identified.

When news broke of the arrest of Andrés Edo and the others, I arranged with my spy at reception to ensure that the men had everything they needed when they arrived and to get Andrés Edo to report sick as soon as he arrived. He kept me up to date with all movements of prisoners, and informed me whenever the police turned up at the prison to speak to any prisoners.

My spy really was a spy. He was the only Spaniard arrested for spying for the Soviets since the end of the Civil War. As second secretary in the Spanish

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Fresh Faces In Carabanchel

Embassy in Lebanon he had been suborned by the Russians to photograph documents from the Embassy safe and hand the photographs over to his contact. When the deal was completed he received his thousand dollars from the Russians, whom he claimed made no further demands on him.

No one suspected for one minute that he had done anything wrong, but for some inexplicable reason his conscience started to prick him — about three years after the event. Eventually, racked by the guilt of betraying his country he broke down and confessed to his ambassador. He was sent back to Spain where he was tried and sentenced to six years imprisonment. He came from a good family and was well connected, so it did not take him long to wangle a cushy job with the prison administration at reception. (A similar overwhelming sense of guilt at betraying his country caused General Zaghoud, head of General Nasser’s intelligence services during the Suez Crisis in 1956, to confess voluntarily to his superiors that he had passed all Egypt’s secrets to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Zaghoud was summarily executed, paying with his life for his sense of honour.)

When Andrés Edo and the others arrived the spy passed on my message to him about reporting sick as soon as he had been transferred to the seventh gallery for periodo. By this time I had more or less free access to most places within the prison on the pretext of collecting or delivering medication from or to other medical auxiliaries. Basically, I could get in to see whomever I wanted, depending upon which guards were on duty. The screws were only concerned if the governor or one of the jefes de servicio who visited the patios sporadically discovered me in a yard where I ought not to have been.

When this happened a bugler sounded attention and everyone had to freeze where they stood. This occured a couple of times while I was in the septima yard, not only with Andrés Edo and the others, but (on separate occasions) with Miguel García García and Juan Busquets as well. I had to hide behind as many people as possible before the bugler stopped bugling. It was a bit like musical chairs.

Usually I succeeded, but on one occasion I was caught at the very front by the governor himself who gave me and the funcionario a roasting for my presence in a gallery which was not my own.

On this occasion I was lucky and managed to speak to Andrés Edo later that afternoon. The cell keys were kept by the cabo, Risooni, who opened Andrés Edo’s cell for me and let me in for ten or fifteen minutes. Andrés Edo briefed me on the details of the arrest and the events leading up to it. He composed a lengthy and densely written report on sheets of Kleenex in his extraordinarily minute script which I collected later and managed to get out to Paris the following day. But he made no mention of any suspicions about Martínez’s complicity in the arrests. Martínez had in fact been selected for the mission by Alberola.

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Carabanchel, January 1967.

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After serving their ten-day periodo, Andrés Edo and the others were allowed into the septima’s exercise yard on a normal regime. I had met Andrés Edo briefly in Paris, but none of the others. They appeared fairly chirpy, apart from Cañete, who refused to speak to Piney whom he blamed for their arrest.

Suspicion had not yet fallen on Martínez.

WITH THIS INFLUX of anarchists, especially with such a charismatic and forceful character as Andrés Edo, a natural leader of men, our bargaining position within the prison became that much stronger. Andrés Edo and the others were told that they would not be sent to the sexta, because they did not come under the civil jurisdiction of the Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP). Like me, they were charged initially under the ‘Banditry and Terrorism’ laws — military jurisdiction — and would have to remain in the seventh gallery until they were dispersed to other prisons.

In the meantime, I had received word from Paris that an escape attempt would be organised based on a plan proposed by Andrés Edo. We managed to get impressions of cell and gallery keys using dental wax, composition and plaster of Paris. The casts were smuggled out to comrades in Madrid who had duplicates made.

Ramón from the carpentry workshop smuggled out three hacksaw blades that I passed on to Andrés Edo. The blades and keys were taped inside a guitar belonging to a young student arrested during a demonstration, who was also being held in the seventh gallery.

Disastrously, Andrés Edo involved a prisoner — a pied-noir — a shoemaker whom he had entrusted with other fairly sensitive matters. This man had an outstanding fine of 5,000 pesetas which Edo arranged to be paid and was subsequently released. This pied-noir was supposed to telephone Paris and liaise with the group coming from France. But instead he went straight to the Brigada Político-Social and informed them of our plans.

The morning after the shoemaker’s release the police swarmed into the prison before the first recuento, accompanied by senior prison officials. They went directly to the cell in the septima where the musical instruments were stored and smashed the guitars one by one until they discovered the keys and blades.

They could not prove anything, but Andrés Edo was given thirty days’ solitary confinement in the fourth landing of the seventh gallery. Fortunately, the people coming from France failed to turn up.

The treacherous shoemaker also told the police that I was involved in some way. My cell was searched but nothing was discovered so I was left alone for a time, though I was never allowed into the seventh gallery after that.

Fortunately they didn’t check the surgery, where the forged ID documents were hidden. The guards were told that on no account should I be allowed out of the gallery unescorted. Zurro was put in overall charge of the botiquín (medicine chest) and I was demoted to being his assistant.

The only way I could get to speak to Andrés Edo now was by shouting up to

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Transferred To The Sexta

his cell window from the patio of the quinta in the septima. It reminded me of the backcourts of Glasgow, shouting up to my Gran to throw me down a ‘piece ‘n’ jam’. We could not say much but at least it was a way of communicating and keeping our morale high.

Cañete, Piney and Herrera I saw on Sundays when they came to the cinema in the quinta. Relations between them had not improved. As I got to know them better and was able to compare their versions of the story with my growing knowledge of their characters, I began to suspect that the group’s arrest was not entirely due to Cañete’s trip to see his family, as Piney believed. The young Herrera had his head screwed on and knew that it was probably Martínez who had caused the group’s downfall.

Piney was a quietly brooding man in his late thirties. He disliked Cañete intensely and believed he had been to blame for their arrest, each blamed the other. Cañete, the wily, wizened and diminutive Andalusian was, for his part, much more cheery and philosophical than his sculptor comrade and did not seem to mind Piney's open hostility in the least.

Cañete was an inveterate practical joker, but he hated being on the receiving end of practical jokes. Provided no one played a joke on him he was as cheerful as they come. But, like an elephant, he neither forgot nor forgave.

Herrera was a young Gallego from El Ferrol del Caudillo whose family had moved to France while he was still very young and who was more French in outlook than Spanish. He was also slightly older than myself, but accepted the fact of his arrest with the same stoicism and good humour as Cañete and Andrés Edo, men twice his age. He held no grudge at all against Cañete. In fact, everyone got on well with each other except for Piney, who was the odd man out and nurtured a lot of resentment.

Alícia Mur, who had rented the flat, was held in the women’s prison in Alcalá de Henares where she developed a close relationship with the Duchess of Medina Sidonia. The ‘Red Duchess’, as the press called her, was serving a sentence for organising protest marches in her native Andalusia against the Franco regime and its US allies following that accidental dropping of the four Hbombs.

Andrés Edo was released from solitary after a month. When we got together to discuss our situation we decided it was time to increase the pressure in our efforts to be treated as political prisoners and transferred to the sexta. When the military handed their case over to the civilian jurisdiction of the Tribunal de Orden Público, Andrés Edo and the others were transferred to the sexta after spending about six months in the septima.

I was not. This was a blow which made me lose my normal Glaswegian urbanity and threw me into exasperated ‘See you, Jimmy’ mode.

I was now frustrated at being out of the ‘political’ loop and being treated as a ‘common’ criminal, as though my actions had been motivated by pecuniary or anti-social motives. The debate inside my head about what to do about my situation grew more and more confusing.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Día de los tres reyes magos (Epiphany, 6 January 1967) in the rotunda of Carabanchel. I am on the left in the white Aran-knit jumper. With me are three Londoners, Jeff on my left and two others whose names have gone from my memory. The man crouching is Alfredo, an Argentinian hit-man, or so he claimed. I suspect he said more than his prayers.

It could be argued that my motives in going to Spain with explosives had been selfish (not that selfishness convicts or unselfishness acquits), inasmuch as what I had done I had done because it made me feel good to have followed my conscience. But I rejected that line of argument as a pointless and negative philosophical exercise which led only to self doubt and indecision. I didn’t want to go down that road.

I got on well with most of the prisoners in the quinta. With a few notable exceptions most were fundamentally decent people. But what I found difficult to come to terms with, being young and idealistic with high expectations, was the fact that even the ‘good’ guys tended to be unreflective, crushingly pragmatic and driven by unenlightened self interest and ‘common sense’. I hoped for more from people. Life in the sexta would be, I felt, more ‘Athenian’, in the sense of good comradeship and stimulating intellectual discussion, especially now that Andrés Edo was there. I wanted to be free of the distasteful and morally eroding company of the small number of self serving dissipates and informers whom I felt watched my every step — lowlife Dickensian characters who were always looking for the ‘edge’, to gain the advantage on people.

The moral and psychological benefits from living in what I imagined to be a collectively united community with trustworthy, principled and virtuous people around me outweighed, I felt, the very real benefits I had in the quinta. In the sexta I would be with — and learn from — men who took ideas seriously enough to suffer the consequences: ‘Athenians’ and ‘Romans’, people such as Horatius — who defended the bridge against Tarquin the Proud and Lars Porsena — and Mucius Scaevola, who stuck his hand into the flames to demonstrate that he would never betray Rome. (I ignored the fact that the Romans were also murderous, avaricious and power-hungry slave-owners and that Athens was a citadel of arrogant, elitist chauvinists.)

On the other hand, in the sexta I would be cut off not only from good friends, but from the very people with whom, as an anarchist, I should have been sharing my ideas and values — ‘extending outwards the area of sanity’.

I still hadn’t really understood the dynamics of power politics and how even the most idealistic groups can become self perpetuating and paranoid. However, my ingenuity was short-lived. What I hadn’t understood was that with the sole exception of the anarchists, Franco’s political prisoners, including the occasional renegade Falangists, shared only two things in common — opposition to Franco and an insatiable desire for exclusive power.

After Andrés Edo’s move to the sexta I deluged the governor with petitions in uncharacteristically intemperate terms, writing through red-misted glazed eyes, that unless the Dirección General de Prisiones (DGP) approved my transfer I would begin an immediate hunger strike.

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The Political Wing

The last petition worked. Perhaps the governor and DGP thought I was now so angry I might be tempted to do something spectacular or stupid that would cause embarrassment to the regime. Orders for my transfer came within a matter of a few days of the petition being sent.

The ‘flitting’ was quite touching. My friends from the quinta turned out to help carry my belongings as far as the gate leading to the Reformatory. They embraced me in turn. Zurro and Miguel de Castro, the escribiente, were genuinely sorry to see me go, as I was sad to be parting from them. It felt like a bereavement. They shook their heads ruefully and told me in no uncertain terms that I was making a big mistake.

They couldn’t understand my reasons for wanting to move. In their view, the quinta was the best of all possible galleries in the best of all possible prisons. I had everything I could possibly expect in a prison and my move to the sexta would undermine any chances I had of getting a pardon. The prison governor had said the same every time I raised the subject with him.

I knew I was forfeiting things of value by leaving the quinta, but I had made up my mind that change was necessary and that I needed a new beginning and fresh and exciting challenges if I was to regain any sense of being alive. I was now on my way to the political gallery. I had burnt my bridges.

The Political Wing THE SEXTA WAS A SMALL gallery located at the farthest end of the prison. It consisted of only two landings and was situated directly above the punishment block, the calabozos, which also housed the condemned cells at patio level. It was a ‘remand’ wing and through it passed every political prisoner in Spain to be tried either by the new Tribunal de Orden Público or the consejo de guerra del Juzgado Militar Especial Nacional de Actividades Extremistas in the Calle del Reloj.

Under normal circumstances the sexta could hold around 120 prisoners, at four to a cell, but in more politically quiescent times the políticos usually occupied only the cells on the bottom floor; those on the two upper landings were used for accommodating ‘at-risk’ juveniles who had to be kept away from the influence and company of some of the flaneurs, cozeners and degraded predators in the Reformatory.

A prison guard was always on duty inside the little office by the gallery gate, but we rarely saw him and he didn’t interfere much in the day-to-day running of the gallery. His job consisted of locking and unlocking the gallery gates, counting and recounting the prisoners and collecting petitions to the governor. The dayto-day running of the gallery itself was managed entirely by the prisoners on a communal or, rather, a bipolar basis — Communist Party members and non-CP members. CP members would have nothing to do with us and kept themselves strictly to themselves.

Andrés Edo, Cañete, Herrera, Piney and all the other políticos, with the exception of the CP prisoners, were waiting at the gate to welcome me. When I

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

arrived with my bedding and bits-and-pieces they burst into the anarchist anthem Hijos del Pueblo (sung to the tune of the Warsovian).* Andrés Edo embraced me and escorted me to his cell, my new home. It was strange, but I had now to get used to sharing my private space with someone else.

A PERCEPTIBLE CHANGE had taken place in the comparative strengths of the organised anti-Francoist groups between 1964 and 1966. Since the collapse of the armed urban and rural resistance movements in northern Spain at the beginning of the 1960s, the Spanish Communist Party had managed to halt its declining membership and consolidate its control over the labour movement by the well-used tactic of creating a popular front.

Luis Andrés Edo. The mid 1960s manifestation of this was the Comisiones Obreras (Workers’ Commissions), an organisation that claimed to embrace all *Hijos del pueblo Hijos del pueblo te oprimen cadenas the working class and opposition movements in Spain under one Y esta injusticia no debe seguir, Si tu existencia es un mundo de penas banner, from the Roman Catholic rank-and-file movements through Antes que esclavo prefiere morir. the social democratic UGT to the Communist Party.

Estos burgueses, asaz egoístas, Que así desprecian la Humanidad The numbers and political affiliations of the prisoners in Serán barridos por los anarquistas Al fuerte grito de libertad.

Carabanchel’s sixth gallery acted as a barometer of social tension and the identities of the opposition groups and movements which posed Rojo pendón, No más sufrir, the greatest threats to the regime.

La explotación Ha de sucumbir.

The gallery, at that time, held its full complement of 120 prisoners, most of them CP members or union militants and strikers. It seemed as Levántate, pueblo leal, Al grito de Revolución social though the entire Spanish Communist Party was in jail.

Vindicación No hay que pedir; By the end of the year I went to jail, 1964, around 100 political Sólo la unión prisoners had passed through the sexta, about 70 of whom were La podrá exigir Nuestro pavés members of the PCE. This had been the result of a stunningly No romperás, Torpe burgués successful series of arrests by the BPS which had netted almost the ¡Atrás! ¡Atrás! entire central committee of the PCE. It was rumoured that Franco’s secret police had had a little help in this from General Enríque Líster’s parallel central committee in Moscow. (By the end of 1965, around 250 or so political prisoners had been processed through Carabanchel, of whom 170 or thereabouts had been members of the PCE). The Comisiones Obreras (Workers’ Commissions) were formed in Madrid on 2 September 1964 and in Barcelona in November of that year, but membership of the organisation was not declared illegal until a ruling by the Francoist Tribunal Supremo in 1967.

As a result of this preponderance of the CP’s ‘great and good’, the little democracy which had previously existed within the PCE dining and social comunidades (prison communities organised along party or affinity lines) and between them and the non-PCE comunidades, disappeared completely.

The CP rank-and-file activists were mostly miners from the Asturias, Levante, Valencia and Saragossa; academics and cadres made up the middle ranks, while the 15 or 20 central committee members constituted the peak of the organisational structure.

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The PCE’s blatant lack of democracy and their elitist and strictly hierarchical pecking order genuinely shocked me. They were arrogant, exclusive and refused to acknowledge the existence of non-party prisoners. Their language was one of slogans, dogma and jargon which provided ready-made answers for everything. They heard only what they wanted to hear. Their apparatchiks, the cadres, were aloof, ruthless and dogmatic men who gave up everything, including any humanity they may have had, for the ‘idea’.

Anything that did not contribute to the evolution and clarification of the Party line was dismissed out of hand. Personal insights or the altering and compromising of their views was simply not permitted in their world.

To avoid the embarrassment of cherished illusions and established dogma being put to the test and challenged by facts, the party leaders lost no time in imposing a strict regime on the others. Rank-and-file members needed express permission before talking to any non-PCE prisoners. We were enchanters whose rhetorical spells might destroy their illusions and muddy the rarefied purity of their exquisite dialectic. Thus, liaison between CP members and other prisoners was the sole preserve of two or three specially designated commissars who met by night, after dinner, to report on the day’s events — and themselves.

It bore all the hallmarks of the Catholic confessional. Anarchists, other Marxists, socialists or Basque separatists were not to be addressed as ‘Comrade’ or spoken to informally as tu. We were Ustedes and referred to disparagingly as señoritos and petit bourgeois. It was reminiscent of Marx’s disowning his illegitimate son and his disapproval of Engels’s avoidance of marriage. As Albert Camus remarked: ‘Marx may have been a revolutionary prophet, but he was also a bourgeois one.’ For CPers to engage in any form of debate or banter with us — anarchists, Basques, Maoists or FLPers — was enough to have them sent to Coventry, or worse, by fellow Party members.

I WAS NOW WITHOUT work and my movements were strictly limited to the sexta. Political prisoners were not employed in the workshops, probably for fear of politicising the other prisoners. I was now effectively cut off from my old network in a tinier world of cells, dining rooms and a patio, but there were still opportunities to get letters smuggled in and out through sympathetic cabos, auxiliaries and even warders.

Daily life was very different from that which I had been used to in the quinta. We would get up about nine and breakfast on coffee, toast or pastries from the economato. Everyone would take a turn at cooking and cleaning our allotted areas. We had our own kitchen in the wing, and a pantry where we could share and cook all our food. The communists had a pantry, kitchen and dining room for their own exclusive use.

Cañete shared a cell with Herrera and was an inveterate early riser. He usually got up around seven to bring Andrés Edo and me a cup of coffee. If I had had a parcel recently it would be tea. At 10 a.m. I would give English lessons to anyone interested, with usually about a dozen or so turning up on a

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Making Do

regular basis. Again, no CPers attended. Privately, the rank-and-file and one or two of the middle-ranking cadres apologised for having to pass up on the opportunity but the ‘central committee’ had told them that there was to be no collusion with the anarchists.

Nor would the party leadership allow their members to be sociable with the youngsters who occupied the top landings or give them any spare loaves which they often asked us for. Being banged up most of the day, they usually ate their entire bread ration within an hour or so of it being delivered.

After classes we would go down to the patio for a game of pelota, football or table tennis, or relax, chat and take the sun.

Lunch was served about one-thirty, after visiting time and once food parcels had been delivered. This usually consisted of a soup made from the liquid in which the solids in that day’s dinner floated — or sank — enhanced with a stock cube or curry powder. The curry powder was provided by the British Consul, a marvellous Home Counties heroine by the name of Miss Mildred Forrester who was wonderfully kind, reassuring and conscientious.

Miss Forrester was a lady straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel or a Saki story. She always arrived with fruit, Capstan Full Strength cigarettes, stock cubes — and tins of curry powder given to her for me by the Indian Ambassador. Charming and delightful Mr Sedgwick-Gell, the previous consul, had been shunted off to Nicaragua. There was no ‘side’ to him. His concern for me was genuine and he struck me as being totally devoid of hypocrisy or cynicism. He had been truly upset when my twenty-year sentence was confirmed. I thought he was going to burst into tears and had to reassure him that everything would work out in the end. I was sorry to see him go.

Soup was followed by whatever seconds were in the pantry, and wine. If we had no provisions of our own then we had to make do with prison fare. After siesta, around 4.00 p.m., we would sit around in our dining room, where we socialised, drinking coffee and holding impromptu seminars in history, economics and literature.

Life was relatively pleasant, simply because we made the best of our possibilities, not because we were indulged by the regime. But, at the end of the day we were locked away behind steel doors without handles and barred windows, away from our families and friends — and without control of our destinies.

The cultural and intellectual freedom we enjoyed in prison was far in advance of anything Spaniards had outside, at least in public. For me, the essential spirit of the 1960s was distilled here. We argued, discussed ideas and the political events or the latest rumours of the day and debated for hours, excited and enthused by the heady atmosphere of stimulating ideas and opinions. Evening paseo in the yard followed and then it was back to the gallery for dinner. After dinner we played chess or draughts, , or played charades in which we mimed a historical or literary figure and the others had to guess who he or she was.

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Andrés Edo’s Tale

One of my mimes almost caused a riot. It was Karl Marx whom I portrayed as a bearded self serving academic who lived in the past and had a predilection for stabbing people in the back.

Andrés Edo guessed first and when I confirmed this you could have sliced the atmosphere and sold it for coal briquettes, especially from the Maoists and the PCE-led Workers’ Commissions prisoners.

Apart from the anarchists only the ETA prisoners thought my mime was funny, and appropriate. But the atmosphere suddenly turned quite cold.

Fortunately, the charismatic Andrés Edo, whom everyone either respected or was cautious of, successfully defused the situation and calmed everyone down.

After much discussion we finally agreed that in future we would avoid such contentious or provocative mimes.

After bang-up in the evening, Andrés Edo and I played draughts, chatted, read, or discussed possible escape plans and ideas for the future. I tried to teach him English, but it proved impossible; either he was not particularly interested or I was an incompetent teacher. Probably a bit of both.

Much of his time was spent writing coded articles and letters, covering sheets and sheets of thin, cheap, toilet paper in tiny handwriting that were later smuggled out to Rosa, his companion in Paris.

Andrés Edo’s letter code was too complicated and time-consuming for me.

I preferred invisible ink. Andrés Edo also discovered that the paper from the prison canteen reacted in a peculiar way when soaked in water. Written on with a wooden stylus and dried, the writing disappeared. All one had to do then was write the normal letter on top, taking care not to cover the secret message underneath, and when the recipient soaked the letter and placed it on a smooth dark surface, the writing would then reappear, clearly and legibly.

The 41-year old Andrés Edo also told me a little of his extraordinary life.

Born in Caspe (Zaragoza), the son of a Guardi Civil, he had worked for the Spanish railway company RENFE from the age of 13, joining the CNT at 16. His earliest radical activities included holding up goods trains and distributing food to the families of hungry workers. After leaving RENFE at the age of 20 he took a job in a factory making medical thermometers. His job involved sucking the mercury into pipettes. In fact, he swallowed so much in the process that it affected his health badly. In December 1947, three months into his military service, he deserted and crossed into France where he became active in the Dijon FIJL group, returning to Spain on clandestine missions on several occasions. He was finally arrested in Spain on a charge of desertion in August 1952. He was released and returned to the ranks in October 1953, but promptly deserted again. Arrested again, he served six months in the military punishment cells.

After his release he deserted again and escaped to France where he became active in the FIJL and the CNT in Paris from 1955 — and, from 1961, in the FAI. In Paris he had worked for some years at the Alhambra Maurice Chevalier Theatre as assistant scenepainter to Rafael Aguilera, the famous Andalusian artist from Ronda, in Málaga province. What few people knew, however, was

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that Aguilera — a hero of the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance who had been imprisoned by the Nazis in a concentration camp near Bremen in northern Germany — was also responsible for maintaining an important arms deposit in Paris for the CNT and FIJL. One of these câches was in his workshop above the Alhambra Theatre. When there was no work to be done in the theatre, Andrés Edo and Lucio Urtubia, another anarchist, a friend and protegé of Quico Sabate who specialised in forging documents and currencies, would help Aguilera clean and oil these weapons, keeping them in good condition for whenever they might be required. On one dramatic occasion Lucio was conscientiously cleaning an old Mauser pistol when it accidentally went off in his hand, almost blowing Andrés Edo’s brains out.

We discussed the possible escape routes in the sixth gallery. Finally we came up with what we thought was the best option. On the ground floor landing that led into the patio, behind the stairs, we discovered the entrance to a sewer that led to a small underground stream.

The Alhambra Theatre, Paris, an unlikely anarchist arms cache. Directly under the cover of the sewer we could see bars so there was a good possibility there would be other bars further down, at least as far as the perimeter walls of the gallery.

Andrés Edo asked for someone on the outside to investigate the sewer entrance and to establish whether it would be possible to escape through this tunnel. A mass breakout of every political prisoner in Madrid’s notorious central prison would have been a major blow to the regime.

The escape was scheduled to take place before the trial of the ‘Madrid Five’ in June 1967 and was being organised entirely from the outside. It would have been impossible to work on the bars from the inside with guards and prisoners constantly going up and down the stairs, which provided no cover.

Lucio Urtubia, specialist An action group was to enter the prison at night, through the sewer, in forging documents and currencies. overpower the duty funcionario, unlock our cell doors and lead us back down the tunnel.

A van would be waiting at the other end to whisk us away before the escape could be discovered. If we were lucky this would not be until the following morning. That was the plan. But fate intervened, as it does when you make plans, and the escape had to be aborted.

Prior to this, on 25 and 27 April 1967, the First of May Group had carried out two, brief confrontations — mini kidnappings — with the private secretary of the Spanish Ambassador in London and the legal attaché.

Letters were given to them on their release to pass on to the Spanish Foreign Minister, Sr Castiella, demanding that Andrés Edo’s group should be tried by the civil as opposed to the military authorities.

The reason for this was that the army was in competition with the Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP), demanding the case be tried under military

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jurisdiction. The First of May Group promised that if these demands were not met, there would be an embarrassing international campaign targeting Francoist embassies and commercial institutions all over the world.

Shortly afterwards I moved in with Herrera. The incessant bickering between Cañete and the young Herrera was causing serious problems within the group. The two men were constantly at each other’s throats. Herrera liked a lie-in in the mornings, but Cañete had the habit of rising very early each morning and bustling about, washing dishes, moving tables and chairs, and in general being noisy and making a nuisance of himself to his cellmate who was trying to sleep.

If allowed to develop the lark versus owl situation could easily have led to a physical assault and a collapse of morale among the four men. Just the thing they needed before going to trial.

There was no way I could have moved in with Cañete; he would have driven me mad. Andrés Edo had known him the longest, so he drew the short straw and Herrera moved in with me after getting the all clear from the sympathetic encargado, an ETA prisoner by the name of José María Rodríguez Manzano.

I liked Cañete, but he could be and often was cantankerous and irritating and I found his practical jokes cruel rather than funny. His idea of a laugh was to bring me a cup of tea in bed in the morning with two spoonfuls of salt instead of sugar. I gagged and almost threw up. Andrés Edo, who shared Cañete’s sense of humour, collapsed in a fit of laughter at this, as did Cañete himself, who roared gleefully at my facial contortions and spluttering. I pretended to see the funny side. But, instead of going back to sleep I said that I would make another drink. Cañete, suspicious as he was, thought I had something up my sleeve and followed me into the kitchen.

He was right; I did have an idea in mind. I explained to him that we would now play a joke on Andrés Edo. I made up a mug of cocoa in which I dissolved six laxative tablets from the pharmacy. I also threw in a potassium permanganate pill for good measure. Cañete went off chuckling to himself.

Then, while waiting for the milk to heat up, I went back to the cell and whispered to Andrés Edo I was going to get my own back on Cañete, with knobs on. Taking a loosely packed cigarette from a packet of Celtas I carefully extracted half the tobacco, filling it with match heads. I repacked the cigarette with tobacco and replaced it in the packet, noting its position, and went off to bring in the hot cocoa. Andrés Edo was still in bed trying hard to control his laughter when Cañete came in and sat on the edge of his bed. Each was smirking at the joke that was about to be played on the other.

As Andrés Edo lifted the laxative-saturated concoction to his lips, I quickly

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Antonio Cañete.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

offered Cañete the explosive cigarette that I had partially pulled out from the packet. His guard was down and his eyes were fixed, haw-klike, on the intended victim, frightened of losing one second of Andrés Edo’s imminent discomfort. He took the cigarette, unsuspectingly and stuck it in his mouth while I obligingly lit it for him. Both men watched each other closely, waiting for the moment of truth. Hubris and nemesis were together in the same room at the same time.

Cañete had an affectation of raising his cigarette in dramatic fashion and flourishing it above his head before he took a drag. The cigarette exploded just as he put it to his mouth. He jumped three feet and fell off the bed, white as a sheet and visibly shaken.

Andrés Edo, meanwhile, had drained his chocolate and was crying with laughter when the laxatives kicked in and he had to rush for the toilet where he had to spend almost the rest of that day. That and his piss turning blue with the potassium permanganate made his and Cañete’s day memorable.

One of the ETA prisoners happened to come in at the moment Cañete’s cigarette exploded and he too, unsurprisingly, broke down in tears of laughter at the scene. Cañete did not take kindly to being the victim of someone else’s practical joke. He also thought the Basque was somehow involved in the cigarette incident so he decided to get his own back.

Cañete’s revenge was simple and quick. Early the following morning he got up, filled a bucket with ice-cold water and walked into the Basque’s cell immediately after first recuento and emptied it over the still-sleeping man, bedclothes and all. Cañete never forgot!

Cañete’s tenacity and unforgiving nature was illustrated in an incident told to me by Andrés Edo. During one of the summer camps in the south of France, Cañete and Salvador Gurucharri had had a running feud as a result of the practical jokes they played on each other. Salva would pull stunts like cutting the guy ropes to Cañete’s tent and glue and nail his shoes to the ground.

Salva was well aware of Cañete’s elephantine memory and would not sleep in his own tent at night. He would wait until everyone was asleep and then sneak off into the woods to sleep under a tree.

Cañete, the crafty old fox, watched and waited for the first opportunity to get his own back. He followed Salva to his hideout one night and waited until he was asleep. When he was snoring with his mouth wide open, Cañete rolled up a sheet of newspaper and stuck one end into Salva’s open mouth, then lit it.

Salva woke up sputtering and choking on the inhaled smoke. He never played a joke on Cañete again.

After a couple of months in the sexta I was in the middle of giving my English class when I was called to the gallery screw’s office and told to pack my belongings and make my farewells. I was being transferred that afternoon to the maximum-security penitentiary in Alcalá de Henáres. No reason was given for this decision, but the orders had come directly from the Dirección General de Prisiones.

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Off To The Camp In The Country

Andrés Edo thought the reason might have been that the BPS had got wind of the escape attempt which was in the offing. We called a meeting of the gallery to discuss the transfer and whether or not I should refuse to go.

Whatever I decided the others would back me up. I spoke with the governor about it, but he said there was nothing he could do. The order had come from ‘the very top’. He did, however, promise to inform the Consulate of my transfer.

Visitors from the British Embassy had been telling me for some time that high-level negotiations were currently taking place to secure my release and that they were optimistic. The outcome, they said, was ‘almost a foregone conclusion’. The vice-consul, Mr Harding, asked me to ask my mum to write a personal letter to General Franco asking for clemency. But I was to say nothing to her about the Embassy believing this had a particularly good chance of success. It looked as though this appeal might have something going for it, so I decided to leave for Alcalá without further fuss.

I was sad to leave Carabanchel. I had made many friends and learned much there; it also held lots of good memories, including my first shave. On the whole the place had provided lots of useful insights and my experiences there had been educational, stimulating and happy in their own peculiar way.

Alcalá de Henares ALCALÁ DE HENARES is an old university town 30 kilometres north of Madrid. Don Juan of Austria (HRE Charles V’s bastard and Victor of Lepanto [1571]) was educated here. Like Colchester in Essex it was a police, military and prison complex and the garrison town for Madrid. It was also the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, and the site of various civil, military and ecclesiastical penal establishments for women, men, priests and nuns.

It was from this jail, during the Spanish Civil War, that the Russian Secret Service, the OGPU, and their colleagues, the Spanish Communist Party’s secret police, the Servício de Inteligéncia Militar (SIM), had kidnapped Andrés Nín, the anti-Stalinist leader of the POUM. The kidnappers who murdered him were never identified and Nín’s body was never recovered. (The POUM was not Trotskyist inasmuch as it was criticised by Trotsky for its lack of ‘discipline’ and ‘infantile leftism’. The POUM was, in fact, affiliated to the ‘Two-and-Half International’, like the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the French leftist PSU party later headed by Mendès-France, the French PM who negotiated the Geneva Accords in 1954 that ended the Indo-China War. The POUM was certainly never in the 4th International.)

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Way to go: order of transfer to Alcalá de Henares

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Once a convent, now a museum, Alcalá penitentiary (entrance on right of square).

The journey across the featureless Castilian countryside from Carabanchel to Alcalá was suffocatingly hot and uncomfortable. It was early June and six of us were crammed into a small SEAT civil guard van fitted with tiny individual windowless box cells with only a ventilation grill which worked like a fanassisted oven, stirring the hot air rather than allowing cool air to circulate. The compartment was so small that every part of my body was buffeted against the walls and ceiling when we moved or stopped. Peering through this grill I could see a treeless, rocky landscape with the occasional village or leathery-faced muleteer trotting slowly along on the hindquarters of a mule or a donkey with his legs almost trailing on the ground.

My destination was the Talleres Penitenciarios de Alcalá de Henáres.

Originally it had been been a convent around which had been built paratroop and civil guard barracks. Spain’s main women’s penitentiary — where Alicia Mur was now being held — was also close by. The town boasted a special ecclesiastical prison for wayward priests and nuns.

We were unloaded at the prison entrance located in an old tree-lined square and once again taken through the tedious induction formalities: filling in forms and having the fingerprints and palmprints of each hand taken. I was told that I had been put down to work in the print shop.

Alcalá was supposedly a maximum-security establishment, but from what I could see of the prisoners around me who were wearing their own shirts, it appeared a fairly relaxed regime.

From the induction centre I was escorted to my new accommodation. I was quite pleased when I saw it — a monkish cell situated in the heart of the prison in a quiet and picturesque colonnaded cloister of warm honeycoloured stone.

Twelve large and airy monastic cells with wide, high arched wooden doors and large grills faced into a serene and sunny courtyard. The scene was that of a Moorish garden lined with arcades, supported by slender columns. The courtyard was shaded by the fronds of eight palm trees which grew in small squares of grass. It was like the patio de Machuca in the Alhambra. All it lacked was a water feature, a pool and a fountain.

I passed the statutory ten days of periodo banged up in solitary. It provided a good chance to catch up on my reading.

My next door neighbour in the courtyard was an American ‘beat’ by the name of James B Wagner. There were no screws in the yard, so we could talk quite

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An American In Alcalá

openly at night and he filled me in on how Alcalá functioned. He also made sure I had books and fags smuggled in to me by the cabos during my periodo.

His books included The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson, a particularly dour Victorian Scot who was completely unknown to me. It was an unremittingly depressing poetic vision of urban inhumanity. He also sent in the more recently published Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was a bit more modern, but just as bleak and sordid as the Thomson book. Exactly what I needed to see me through solitary confinement.

There was one, however, that was particularly powerful and compelling. But being in solitary it did nothing to make my mind easier. It was Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, a sardonic novel about the relationships between patients and nurses in a mental institution near Portland, Oregon.

It was also, probably, one of the important transitional books between the old ‘beat’ generation and the emergent American counterculture, the ‘hippies’.

The Vietnam War and the draft were making many of America’s younger generation seriously question people in power. It was also giving impetus to an increasingly radical protest movement. Young Americans, like young Europeans of the time, were beginning to challenge conformity and the warfare state and to idealise love and the beauty of life.

In 1959 Ken Kesey had been involved in voluntary experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, particularly LSD, the drug that was later to define the 1960s counterculture. He had supposedly written the book while working on the night shift in a mental ward and parts of it were believed to have been written under the influence of LSD and peyote. Kesey’s view was that the patients weren't really crazy, they just had a different take on reality and were more individualistic than society was willing to accept.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was the story of an imaginative chancer, Randall Patrick McMurphy, who tried to get out of being sent to a prison work gang by faking insanity and having himself transferred to a mental institution. Once admitted, a sequence of unjust circumstances and the control freakery of the ward matron, nurse Ratched, thrust McMurphy into becoming a rebel role model.

The story concerns the struggle between the libertarian McMurphy, the apathy of the other inmates and the autocratic and unfeeling nurse Ratched, the symbol of bureaucracy and authority. She is the antithesis of

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James B. Wagner.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

McMurphy. McMurphy’s self sacrifice, redemption and the collapse of nurse Ratched’s power over the ward is also an allegory of modern society. These books, particularly the latter, made harrowing reading for someone arriving in a new prison. I was beginning to wonder if James was trying to tell me something.

MY FIRST OFFICIAL visitor was a jefe de servicio. I had been dozing in bed in the mid-afternoon and woke to the sound of the door being unbolted and opened.

Framed in the doorway stood a tall, slim figure silhouetted against the blinding afternoon sun.

At first I could not make out his features, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the light my first impression was of a uniformed SS officer.

I thought to myself that perhaps this place was not going to be quite the monastic retreat it appeared. Don Paulo was my visitor’s name and he was out to impress and intimidate.

He smacked of anal retention. His clean-shaven, vulpine face and rigid demeanour screamed it. His shoes were polished with a mirror finish and he wore an immaculate green dress uniform with razor sharp creases in his trousers.

A belted jacket with gold braid signified his rank, while his delicately shaped hands were encased in white gloves. Tightly tucked under his arm he clutched a swagger stick . On his head sat a high-peaked cap with a black visor pulled down tightly over his forehead. Below the cap he wore impenetrable mirror-lens reflective sunglasses. He was the very model for Boss Godfrey, ‘the man with no eyes’ in the film Cool Hand Luke.

Don Paulo looked at me silently for a few moments, tapping his swagger stick intimidatingly against his leg, then said that he had wanted to see for himself the hijo de puta inglés who presumed to do away with Spain’s Caudillo and to let me know that he would be keeping a close watch on me.

Fortunately, he was transferred shortly after I came out of periodo so whatever he had planned for me never worked out.

Patio of Alcalá de Henares penitentiary.

IT DID NOT TAKE LONG to become accustomed to my new surroundings.

Once you’ve been in one prison, you’ve been in all of them.

Nor did it take long to identify and cultivate the networkers who make prison life comfortable. There were no political prisoners here, but there were older prisoners who had been members of the CNT and still called themselves anarchists.

After my ten days of solitary confinement I was taken to the office of the jefe de servicio and told what my daily routine would be. Maximum-security prisoners such as myself breakfasted in our cells after morning recuento and then worked a rota of sweeping and scrubbing the prison corridors. After that we went to work in our respective workshops.

In Alcalá, as in Carabanchel, the main industry was

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James B Wagner’s Tale

printing. Redención, the weekly national newspaper for prisoners, was printed here.

Written and edited in Alcalá by Falangists and assorted clerical reactionaries, this paper was distributed throughout every prison in Spain. Prisoners who paid a quarterly 7-peseta subscription received special ‘rights’ of 14 extra letters or visits every three months. Non-subscribers were allowed only one letter and a ten-minute visit a week.

Upstairs from the printshop was the bookbinding workshop where my neighbour and now friend James B Wagner worked. Being a beat or Dadaist, as distinct from a proto-hippy, his philosophy, if you could call it that, was almost Stirnerite: ‘Whatever you believe imprisons you.’

James had moved to Spain in the early 1960s to escape the daily harassment the beats were receiving from the New York Irish policemen and the vicious attacks from the street gangs of the local Catholic Youth Organisation (CYO).

There were also problems with the growing numbers of tourists who started to invade Greenwich Village’s ‘scene’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

James and his friends had set up an ‘apolitical’ or, rather, an ‘anti-political’ commune for beats in Formentera, a small and sandy Balearic island an hour’s boat ride from Ibiza. James had got into an argument with a Barcelona pawnbroker and the pawnbroker was killed.

James was arrested and charged with the murder and a few other members of the commune were charged as accessories, including a young Scots girl from Hamilton, near Blantyre.

James was convicted of the murder and received the longest sentence, thirty years. He had originally been sentenced to death, but this had been commuted because of pressure from the US Embassy.

The first morning out of periodo in Alcalá I was told to report to the cabo de limpieza, the cleaning orderly. The cabo turned out to be a CNT veteran, Joaquín Pueyo Moreno. Joaquín was one of the many Spanish republicans who had served with ‘La Nueve’, number nine company of General Leclerc’s 2nd armoured division.

Joaquín called me into his little office where he told me that he was a comrade and I was not to report for cleaning duties as he had enough men to cover the job. Instead, I was to pop in to his office every morning, for a coffee, a pastry and a chat. I felt quite elated plugging into the network so quickly and getting one over on the system. Most mornings we spent breakfast time in his private cubby-hole chewing the fat about his experiences during the war while I should have been swabbing the floors.

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The author (with the Bob Fletcher button-down shirt) and James B. Wagner (summer 1967).

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

ALCALÁ’S PRINTSHOP was Dickensian compared with Carabanchel, with enormous flatbed machines dating back to the end of the nineteenth century.

I was put on one of the largest and oldest of these antiques. It looked more like the Armada flagship of the Duke of Medina Sidonia than a printing press.

Alarmingly, the screw in charge of the print shop was not only an unreconstructed Falangist, but also a paranoid xenophobic and visibly resentful of the apparently favoured attention he believed I was receiving from the senior funcionarios and administrators.

Once I got into the swing of life in Alcalá I was always disappearing upstairs to the bookbinding workshop, to chat with James and watch him work.

The process of fine-binding fascinated me: the gathering and collating of the folded pages; beating and sewing; lining up, trimming, gluing, backing, lacing on the boards and pressing, marbling the end-papers. The most interesting was the ‘blowing out’ of ethereal sheets of fine leaf-gold from a small goldbeaters book to gild the edges of expensive books. This final touch made the pages when viewed edge on look as through they were made of solid gold. The covers of these fine books were also usually tooled or embossed with ornate gilt motifs or letters.

James’s artisanal work made me want to become a bookbinder and I petitioned the governor to change my job, but my fate had been decided elsewhere. The Madrid authorities were determined I was going to be a printer.

The xenophobic screw was never off our backs and was always preventing my visits upstairs. When James then came downstairs he also tried to stop this too. But James had too much clout with both the governor and the jefes de servicio because of his specialist bookbinding skills and the screw ended up being ignored, much to his resentment.

Smuggling letters, papers, books and alcohol in Alcalá de Henáres was as easy as in Carabanchel. My books were supposed to be censored, not only by the priest and teacher, but also by the Dirección General de Prisiones in Madrid.

However, few if any of my books passed through the hands of any of these people. They would have had heart attacks had they known the titles of the forbidden books I had on the shelves of my cell. It was a comprehensive clandestine anarchist library in the very heart of the Francoist beast.

James bound all my anarchist books in red and black leather covers, complete with marbled end-papers and tooled lettering. Anyone found with these books in their possession on the outside would have been arrested.

After work in the evening, around 6.00 p.m., my new circle of friends — Spaniards, Americans, Canadians, Frenchmen and Basques — would sit under the high brick walls and chat, muse or stroll in lines up and down the large patio exchanging thoughts on ideas, art, places, people, music, books, stories and the subject which dominated all our conversations, what we would do when we eventually got out.

In summer when it was light these paseos could last until ten o’clock in the evening. Two or three nights a week we were allowed to watch an hour or so of television.

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Gitanos — Bloody Fahsends Of Them!

Lunch and dinner were served in a large and noisy dining hall. The food was much the same as that served in Carabanchel: chickpeas, potatoes and sardines supplemented with curry powder and condiments sent by the British Consul and my mother. I was now receiving regular food packages from sympathisers in England, France, Germany, Belgium and Holland, so hardly a day went by when we had to rely solely on the prison menu.

Alcalá also had its own restaurant which supplied any meal that took your fancy, provided of course you had the money to pay for it. Alcalá’s economato, however, was not as well organised as the one in Carabanchel.

During that hot summer of 1967 we often sent the prison messenger out for bars of ice cream. The economato sold beer and cokes and there was a hatch where you could buy fresh coffee and pastries.

We had our own film club, which booked and paid for our own films in Alcalá. We had three films on a Saturday, three on fiestas and two on Sundays.

Sometimes we had as many as six or seven films a week, and they weren’t the old pro-fascist, pro-clerical and second-rate B feature rubbish we had been subjected to in Carabanchel: religious films, travelogues and old newsreels.

Most of the films we screened at Alcalá were new and classical films; some in fact were showing in Madrid cinemas the same week as we saw them.

Occasionally we would see films months before they were released in other European capitals. The most popular films were those starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, a ‘man’s man’ and a ‘crook’s crook’ with prisoners. Suave Belmondo’s highly imaginative ‘caper’ movies — such as El Hombre de Rio (That Man From Rio) were particularly appreciated because they involved imaginative and successful heists and cons, and were watched avidly for plots to adapt, styles to copy and postures and gestures to emulate.

When the weather was too good to spend indoors we would pass the afternoon in the patio sharing bottles of wine, beer, roast chicken, fresh salad, sardines in olive oil, tins of squid, mussels and freshly baked bread.

These ad hoc parties would often end with everyone getting drunk. Most screws did not object provided we didn’t cause any trouble. It was a far cry from our own dear British prisons.

ALCALÁ HOUSED a high proportion of the flamboyant and irrepressibly enthusiastic Andalusian gypsy prison population. To paraphrase Michael Caine in the film Zulu, ‘Gitanos’ there were ‘bloody fahsands of them.’

They spent weekends and evenings bunched together at the most distant corner of the exercise yard. They were theatrical, ebullient and noisy.

It could have been a scene outside a Sevillian tobacco factory at closing time as they swaggered, gesticulated and shouted loudly and noisily at each other in caló, the gypsy language. The only time they shut up was when one of them broke into a hoarsely forlorn and interminable cante jondo accompanied by curt vocal flourishes and harsh, metallic bulerías as the guitarist built up to a frenetic climax. This was inevitably followed by raucous flamenco guitar music

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

punctuated by countless ‘Holás!’ in other unintelligible Andalusian-Arabic- caló interjections and much strutting, posturing, heel clattering, thumb, forefinger and castanet-clicking and macho pirouettes — all to the painfully harsh accompaniment of las palmas (timpanous hand-clapping).

I struck up a friendship of sorts with a couple of the gypsies who insisted on trying to teach me to speak their language,the giri gachó, or chanar el caló, but to me it was as interesting as parsing Sanskrit, from which caló was reputedly derived. When they were not thieving or horse-trading, the gypsies made their money by ‘la bakí’, ‘la buena ventúra’ — fortune telling.

The gypsies were good-natured and cheery as long as you didn’t offend their delicately balanced sense of honour, but they were irritatingly loud and noisy in everything they did. Every morning before work a large queue would form in the hall outside the small hatch which served as Alcalá’s coffee bar. It was also directly opposite the office of the jefes de servicio.

One morning James and I were chatting in the queue, waiting our turn for coffee while the gypsies sang, danced, and clapped ear-piercingly loudly to flamenco rhythms in the hall. The duty jefe de servicio stuck his head out and shouted at them to quieten down, which they did for a moment or two, but started singing cante jondo as soon as he’d disappeared back inside. By this time he was really pissed off and came out shouting the odds at everyone, calling for the cabo de limpieza to take the names of everyone in the queue, including those of James and me. This was unfair; I couldn’t sing in English, let alone in caló.

James and I went straight to the jefe de servicio’s office to protest against the punishment. He was a nice guy who knew perfectly well that we had not been making the ruckus, but he said that he could not be seen giving foreigners preferential treatment.

He was apologetic but adamant we would have to scrub the corridors next morning. In fact, this didn’t worry us at all as the cabo de limpieza had told us to go straight to his office for coffee during the punishment period.

Perhaps the sweltering midsummer heat had made us irritable or we were in a mood for a wind-up, but the arbitrary decision by the jefe had irritated us way beyond reciprocity. What started off as a minor inconsequential incident became, in our minds, an affair of honour. The battle lines had been drawn.

We opted for a Schweikian strategy. If he wanted us to clean up the prison, we would carry out his orders to the letter. For this it was necessary for us to take the whole day off work to ensure we made a conscientious job of it.

The following morning James and I went to the cleaning orderly’s room where we drank coffee until all the corridors, kitchen, dining room and administration offices had been scrubbed and polished and all the prisoners marched off to the workshops. Once everyone had cleared off to the workshops we found some long-handled dustpans and brushes and sauntered out into the patio, sweeping up little piles of dust here and there, wandering around the patio in the early morning sun, stopping for a leisurely smoke every so often until the prison canteen opened at nine-thirty.

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Schweikian Interlude

Having stocked up with fresh bread-rolls, butter, tomatoes, Manchego cheese, mussels, Serrano ham and a few bottles of beer, we sat in the shade of the wall for a bucolic and leisurely breakfast. The dustpan and brush beside us indicated to the world that we were engaged on official business.

Breakfast lasted for a couple of hours. We sat, two solitary figures, in the empty patio, the object of considerable amusement among the prisoners passing between the workshops and the main prison building. They knew perfectly well what we were up to and thought it a great joke.

The xenophobic print shop funcionario kept coming back to the patio to see what we were doing. Every time he saw us he became more and more angry.

We explained to him, in as straight-faced a manner as we could manage that we had been punished and were on cleaning duty on the orders of the jefe de servicio. Unfortunately, because of the amount of work involved it was unlikely we would make it into the printshop that day.

To make matters worse, instead of standing to attention according to the rules, we explained all this to him while remaining seated with our backs against the wall, continuing to stuff our faces and taking slugs from beer bottles.

Overwhelmed with anger by our dumb insolence he spluttered and raged and ordered us back to work, but we stonewalled, literally, and pleaded a higher authority. The man finally gave up and stormed back to the printshop.

About eleven-thirty we decided we should show a little willing and do a little more sweeping before the mid-day wine ration came round and the canteen opened at twelve.

In addition to the food we had come prepared with a two-gallon plastic container which we filled with wine from the economato.

Randy and Pete, two Canadians who worked in the basket shop, decided they wanted to join us for lunch and brought their wine ration to add to the pool. Soon afterwards we were joined by Gerlac, a Frenchman, with his wine ration as well. By the time they were due to go back to work after the siesta everyone was falling-down drunk. The Canadians and the Frenchman decided not to go back to work and stick with the party. By this time I was in such a bad state I could hardly stand up, and felt nauseous into the bargain.

James then came up with the idea of hosing down the prison walls. When he grew bored he decided to hose me down instead, in an attempt to sober me up.

By this time I was lying flat out, semi-conscious in the middle of the patio. The next thing I knew James was drenching me.

The printshop screw came by at that moment and started shouting at us again. James told him to fuck off and do something useful, so he rushed off in a rage to get someone with a bit more authority than he was able to exercise. He stormed into the jefe de servicio’s office, almost in tears of frustration, shouting about the foreigners, dangerous reds and murderers, who were cavorting about in the prison yard, drunk and making obscene remarks about him, his wife and General Franco.

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

In the meantime I had made it to my feet and staggered off towards what was euphemistically known as the ‘water’, a filthy hole in the ground with two white-knobbed porcelain footrests.

Behind the footrests was an open cesspit over which you hung your bare arse.

Fat, noisy bluebottles and flies buzzed on and around the brown stinking mire that oozed out of this heaving morass. To make the whole process dangerous as well as distasteful, the fearless resident rats would venture out to wallow and scavenge directly under one’s unprotected backside.

It was into this putrescent pit that I collapsed.

The next thing I remembered was Randy shouting my name at the top of his voice. I groaned weakly and attempted to stand up, but my legs refused to respond. I lay there muttering and hoping he had heard me. Randy opened the door and I saw that he was in only slightly better shape than I. They had been having a swim in the large communal washing pool, and had been caught by the print shop screw coming hotfooted from the chief warder’s office on his way to find us again. Pete came along too, and within a few seconds they had me on my feet and under a cold shower, still with all my clothes on. I regained consciousness to be told by Randy that the jefe de servicio wanted to see James and myself.

We made our way to his office and swayed before him, the jefe, the same one who had handed out our punishments the previous day. He groaned audibly when he saw the state we were in. He was one of the new breed of funcionarios, a young, liberal-minded fellow. Perhaps he felt that if anything untoward happened involving me it might affect his future promotion.

Jim cleverly remained silent when asked the reason for our deplorable behaviour, but I insisted on sticking my ha’porth in.

Waving my arms around I sounded off indignantly about the disgracefully unjust nature of our punishment. Apparently I only got as far as mumbling something unintelligible before collapsing in a stupor on the floor.

James and the jefe pulled me up. Anxious to get rid of us, the jefe told James that we had made our protest, and that we should return quietly to our work. He didn’t want to hear any more from us that day.

James and Randy helped me back to the printshop. The screw who had been pestering us all day was standing smugly by the door so I gave him the filthiest look I could muster as we passed him.

My mates deposited me on a bed of cleaning rags by the machine where I promptly fell fast asleep. About half an hour or so later the workshop director was walking past on the way to his office when out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of my prostrate figure on the floor. Inches above my head a massive flywheel and drive belt whirled round at a frightening speed. Had I sat up suddenly my head would have been ripped from my shoulders. The director went berserk and called on the screw to have me taken to the jefe de servicio’s office.

Back we went. This time I had to be carried by my arms and legs and was in

192

Pressure Builds

no state to bandy words with him or anyone else. He looked at me in despair and told my bearers to carry me back to my cell until I sobered up. I remember thinking to myself that this almost certainly meant three months’ solitary, but at that moment I could not have cared less. All I wanted to do was escape into sleep.

I woke next morning still wearing the same clothes and with the most terrible hangover. I wondered what was going to happen next. Before I had time to ponder on my fate the cell door was unbolted as normal for breakfast. I ventured outside hesitantly, waiting for someone to pounce on me, but nobody said anything either to James or myself so we went for a shower, a coffee and then to work. As I passed the jefe’s office he called me in. He was extraordinarily amicable; all he said was that I should remember my position as a political prisoner and a ‘cultured foreigner’, who should set a good example to the other prisoners. As I left he chided me not let it happen again. That was the last I heard of an incident that for anyone else would have meant a month in the calabozos.

THE CAMPAIGN FOR MY release was now building momentum. The British Embassy in Madrid was forwarding two or three postbags of letters and parcels a month from friends and sympathisers all over the world to Alcalá.

My appeal was now well under way and visitors from the Embassy kept reassuring me that this one would be successful. When the British Consul, Miss Forrester, came to see me we had the use of the governor’s office, where he left us to talk alone in comfort and without observers. Twice she visited me at Alcalá with a Spanish marquis who was liaising with the Francoist authorities on my appeal.

Miss Forrester told me everything had been prepared for the appeal. I had to write to Mum and tell her the time was now ripe for another letter from her to Franco, petitioning him for my release. It appeared to me that she had written so many times to Franco they might have had a thing going. What irony — Franco as step-dad!

At the beginning of August 1967, my friend Ross Flett wrote secretly bringing me up to date with moves to get me out of jail. Ross had been meeting regularly with my London solicitor Benedict Birnberg and he seemed very well informed. More and more articles pushing the British government to support my release were appearing in the broadsheets. George Gardner in the Sunday Times was the prime mover and his articles, which began in the early summer of 1967, were being picked up by other heavyweight broadsheets and MPs, who in turn were pushing the British Foreign Office to throw its weight behind my official plea for clemency.

Ricky Cook, a friend from the Glasgow Anarchist Federation, managed to visit me in Alcalá that August. I was amazed when I was told that I had a visitor who was not family. It was most unusual. Again I was ushered into the governor’s office where Ricky was chatting away to the governor and a couple of senior jefes de servicio. A civil servant from the prisons department in Madrid, the DGP, was with Ricky. He introduced himself and shook hands, explaining

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

that he had long wanted to meet me, having been so closely involved in my case over the previous three years.

Formal introductions over, I was then allowed to spend about fifteen minutes or so with Ricky, unsupervised. He had been amazed at the friendly reception he had received from the directorate of prisons when he went to ask permission to visit me. The response had been almost enthusiastic and the official he spoke to insisted on driving Ricky out to Alcalá himself. It was a chance to get out of the office and to meet me, he explained. He bought Ricky coffee on the drive out and some cigarettes for me. We sat around chatting for some time; then they had to leave. It had been an unexpected and pleasant break for me; it also boded well for an early release.

THE EFFECTS OF THE revived British press campaign were immediate. A fellow prisoner who worked in the prison administration told me that he had overheard a telephone conversation about me between the governor and someone at the Direccion General de Prisiones in Madrid. Apparently I was to be given VIP treatment and a delegation would be arriving from Madrid to inspect the conditions in which I was being held. That same afternoon I was pulled out from the printshop to the governor’s office and asked what colour I would like my cell painted. Taken aback somewhat, I replied that white would be nice and added quickly that a desk, bookshelves, easy chair and bedside lamp would come in handy as well.

The governor made some notes and then dismissed me. When I returned to my cell that night, it had been transformed into a desirable bachelor flat.

As The Times articles continued so too did the number of visits from the ministry men, and I began to feel like some rare animal in a zoological conservation project.

As my twenty-first birthday approached on 10 July, I suggested half jokingly to the jefe de servicio that it might be a nice idea if I could have a proper birthday party to which I could invite my friends. He agreed, and after consulting with the governor it was arranged that I be given the use of the infirmary dining room.

A Spanish friend, a chef who worked in the prison kitchen, organised the menu. We had kid goat cooked in wine with roast potatoes, salad, coffee, cheese and ice cream. There was beer, wine and brandy. The cabaret was performed by a well-known Filipino rock star who was inside for murdering his agent, gypsies singing cante jondo and playing and dancing flamenco and the cook who sang Spanish ballads while accompanying himself on the guitar.

The party lasted from two in the afternoon until eleven at night. It was noisy, good-humoured and everyone got absolutely legless.

THE DECISION TO PARDON ME by indulto personal, a personal pardon, was approved by General Franco in the middle of August. It was rubber-stamped by his Council of Ministers on Friday 18 August 1967 but was not made official

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A Pawn In The Game

until its publication in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on Thursday 21 September.

This was the same day Admiral Carrero Blanco was appointed vice-president.

The Spanish Ambassador in London, the Marqués de Santa Cruz, wrote a letter to Mum dated 16 September informing her that I would be released within a matter of days. The Ambassador continued: ‘I am sure that this decision is owed in great measure to the dignity and motherly concern shown in your letter and also, if I may say so, to the restraint and propriety with which you have approached this unhappy incident right from the start. I cannot but stress that it is to you that the credit for Stuart's release must go, and that he could have had no better advocate than his Mother. With best wishes for your future happiness and that of your son — Santa Cruz’ An important element in the background to my pardon was the fact that I was a pawn in the flurry of international diplomatic activity that year over the future of Gibraltar. Since the introduction of a new constitution in September 1964 (coinciding with my court-martial), which granted the colony greater self government and autonomy, Spain had been imposing more and more restrictions on vehicular traffic and the free movement of workers to and from the Spanish mainland to Gibraltar. The situation deteriorated still more in 1965 when a new coalition Gibraltarian government announced it wanted free association with the UK. In 1966 Anglo-Spanish discussions on the colony broke down completely and ended with the Francoist government closing the customs post at La Linea on 5 October and Britain threatening to submit the question of Gibraltar’s sovereignty to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Then, between 4 July 1967 when Britain announced a referendum on the colony’s future and 10 September when the plebiscite actually took place (of 12,762 registered voters 12,138 favoured remaining a British possession while 44 voted for union with Spain) tensions ran so high that all out war was expected. In fact the Gibraltar garrison was reinforced in September to defend against an expected invasion by Spanish marines from Cadiz, an artillery and tank attack from La Frontera and a sea blockade of the colony by Spanish frigates and submarines.

Also, not only had Spain closed its land and sea frontiers but it was also imposing severe air space restrictions, effectively laying siege to Gibraltar. The gates of Gibraltar were no longer secure. The fortress was under threat. Decolonisation was a major issue in the mid-1960s and in spite of fascist nature of the state, Francoist demands for the return of the rock had the support of not only the General Assembly of the United Nations, but also of the Comonwealth governments represented in the UN’s Committee of 24 and the United States who were especially anxious to keep Spain on side. The timing of my release after the Gibraltarians’ unsurprising vote in favour of continued association with the UK

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Franco’s Council of Ministers.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

was a public relations exercise by the Spanish government to throw a sop to international public opinion with regard to the nature of the regime, the question of Franco’s political prisoners and as a gesture of goodwill to ensure that AngloSpanish negotiations on Gibraltar should continue.

SOMETHING STRANGE HAD HAPPENED to me shortly after I arrived in Alcalá at the beginning of the summer of 1967. It has always puzzled me.

Like many of the US ‘beats’, James Wagner had been deeply interested in all sorts of esoteric arcanery such as Zen Buddhism and the I Ching, and insisted on charting my birth sign. He did this by consulting a battered antiquarian copy of Papus’s book The Tarot of the Bohemians which apparently he had picked up in a Barcelona junkshop before his arrest. I remember wondering if it was from the shop whose owner he had murdered.

I had never heard of the book before and, glancing through its — to me — ponderous ramblings leavened with tidal, astrological and astronomical charts and Egyptian hieroglyphs, I wasn't particularly worried if I never heard of it again. Jim, however, was a ‘Papus’ enthusiast and refused to take no for an answer.

The Tarot of the Bohemians had been published originally in France in the mid nineteenth century and claimed to preserve the initiatory wisdom and arcane symbols of ancient Egypt, prior to its destruction by the Persians. Legend had it that this knowledge, in the form of cards, had been given to the gypsies for safekeeping, hence the name Tarot, as Tar in Caló means card. An eighteenth century archaeologist and cabalist, Count de Gobelin, discovered the divinatory and repository significance of the cards and, in 1781, published his work on the subject, Le Monde Primitif.

Gobelin’s theories were developed first in 1860 by French occultist, Eliphas Levi, and another French author, ‘Papus’ (which may possibly have been Levi’s nom de plume) who published the original The Bohemian’s Tarot. Edward Waite, a member of Aleister Crowley’s Golden Dawn Society, then translated the book into English at the turn of the 19th century as ‘The Tarot of the Bohemians’. Later, in 1910, he published The Key to the Tarot.

According to Jim’s reading of my astrological charts in his parchmentbound copy of the Tarot of the Bohemians, the bottom line was that 22 September 1967 would be the luckiest day of my life. I was released on Thursday 21st and returned home to Britain on Friday 22nd September. Spooky or what?

NEWS OF MY PARDON had been one of the closest kept secrets ever in Alcalá.

Everyone seemed to know, and the streets outside had apparently been crawling with Spanish and British reporters and television crews for three days, but no one told me a thing.

The regime milked it for all it was worth. The first I knew of it, however, was when Miss Forrester came to tell me the news that I would be freed the following day. I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of relief and could

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Divvying Up

say nothing but beam happily. I rushed to tell my friends, but they already knew and were genuinely pleased for me.

We had a celebration drink, but it was tinged with sadness at our imminent parting. We had come to a major fork in the road and the friends I was leaving behind were going to remain in jail for who knows how many years. I felt particularly for James as there was no outside interest in his case, and it seemed unlikely that much could be done on his behalf in the future. Unless they were extremely lucky, those whose sentence had been commuted from death to imprisonment must serve the full twenty-year tariff, the maximum consecutive time anyone could theoretically spend in a Spanish prison.

Following well-established prison tradition, I divided my belongings among my friends. In some way this ritual helped assuage the strange sense of guilt I felt at leaving friends behind while I went off to pick up my life in the outside world. With the most time still to serve — and as my closest friend — James got most of my books and the detritus I had somehow accumulated over the previous three years .

When the time came we shook hands, hugged emotionally, and said our farewells. I went back to my cell, uneasy about my future, to be locked in and counted for the last time.

Before breakfast the following morning, Thursday 21 September, I packed up the few remaining books I wanted to keep and was escorted to the prison reception. When all the required forms were completed, I was released into the custody of two BPS men waiting to escort me to Madrid and hand me over to the custody of the British Embassy.

As we walked to the waiting car, I noticed the street was empty. I saw that the Guardia Civil had placed barriers at both ends of the road. Behind the barriers were crowds of television cameramen, journalists and photographers. As we drove off down the cleared street, a car drove through the barrier at the far end and raced to catch up with us. The BPS driver braked suddenly and forced what turned out to have been a photographer’s car into a wall. My two BPS minders jumped out, dragged the poor photographer out of his car, removed the film and threw his camera on the ground. They also took note of his car number and told him that he would lose his licence the following day.

We were followed all the way to Madrid by a posse of press cars. Those who overtook us to take a photograph had their car numbers noted. I gathered from my minders that those involved would be receiving a visit within the next day or so. We lost most of them in the Madrid traffic. Our car just turned on its siren and

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Indulto particular: Fanco’s personal pardon.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Happy reunion.

flashing lights and drove straight through all the red traffic lights. Being driven through Madrid was a strange experience after having lived in the city for three years and seen almost nothing of the place. I discovered from our conversation on the way to Madrid that my minders were the same BPS officers who had accompanied Alain Pecunia to the airport when he was pardoned in 1965. It was they who broke the news to me that Alain had been the victim of a hit and run accident, a year after his release, and was now a paraplegic. I was stunned by this and wondered at first if these men beside me were in some way responsible for the accident, or at least knew more than they were telling, but I couldn’t see any signs of satisfaction on their faces. Pecunia later told me that his memory of the crucial twenty minutes immediately before and after the accident remains blank and the details of what took place on a dark country road in southern France in the early hours of the morning are still obscure and confused. Pecunia did tell me that it was the local Renseignements Généraux officer investigating the case who raised the question that perhaps it had been no accident but a deliberate attempt to intimidate, injure or murder him.

The secret policemen sitting in the back with me had his arms resting on my Bergen. On top were my hastily packed books and as we went into a particularly sharp bend the top book fell out. The BPS man picked it up and looked at it. It was the Penguin edition of Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin. He then tucked it back into my rucksack, face down, without a word.

I cringed when I saw what it was. A blood-draining vision flashed through my mind of being driven straight to the Dirección General de Seguridad instead of the British Embassy, being charged with possession of illegal propaganda.

Mutual Aid, a classic documentation and celebration of cooperatism in nature and human society, and the very apotheosis of Darwin’s pessimistic dogmas, was still a prohibited book in Spain and possession of it could have landed me in prison for another six years!

On arrival at the Embassy I was rushed up the stairs to Miss Forrester's office where I was signed over to British custody and my BPS escorts were handed a receipt for the safe delivery of one Scot! I was taken to meet Mr Harding, the consul, who was sitting with Mum and Benedict Birnberg. The Scottish Daily Express had flown Mum out the previous evening. Seeing her there in the flesh without any glass partition between us was an extraordinarily elating experience. Mum was beside herself with happiness, as was I. What could I say? I was at a loss for words. I was free and surrounded by Englishspeaking people for the first time in almost three and a half years. I was dazed by it all. Someone asked me a question in English and I found myself replying in Spanglish, English words and Spanish grammar.

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Press Gang

Mum also broke the news to me that the Scottish Daily Express was now expecting payback for having paid her travel and accommodation costs on this and earlier trips. It wanted an exclusive story.

Two Scottish Daily Express reporters, Wilson Russell (known to his colleagues as ‘Stashy Dan’) and James Hastie, had accompanied Mum from Glasgow and had booked her into one of the most exclusive hotels in Madrid. Their strategy was to manipulate their way by means of psychological dependency into Mum’s trust and confidence; I would be grateful for their financial and moral support and would give them my exclusive story.

I was appalled and angry at this moral blackmail. But they were in for a shock. Russell, I discovered much later, had been trying it on regularly with my Mum during these trips, knocking on her bedroom door late at night and generally making himself a nuisance.

Ben Birnberg was perhaps not quite so overjoyed at my early release. He had packed his bags thinking the process would take at least a week to formalise and had been hoping for at least a couple of days free time in Madrid.

Unfortunately for him, I was released the morning he arrived and given twenty-four hours to get out of the country. My passport had expired, but the British Embassy had prepared a travel document that permitted me to leave as soon as possible.

After spending some time with Mum and Ben, Miss Forrester asked if I would have a few words with Nicholas Henderson, the then British Chargé d’Affaires, for a debriefing session on the political climate of the country as reflected in Franco's jails. I explained as much as I knew about the recent strategy of distributing political prisoners throughout the new prisiones centrales of Palencia, Jaen, Soria, Burgos and that the most notorious of Spanish political prisons, Soria, was being run down, although a number of political prisoners were still being held there. After this session Miss Forrester asked if I would take part in a press conference in the Embassy library.

Word had spread among the journalists assembled in the library that my story had been bought by the Daily Express. This belief was reinforced by my circumspect replies of ‘no comment’ to the more direct and contentious questions. The other hacks thought they were wasting their time and that I was saving all the interesting bits for the Express. Exasperated, they asked me bluntly if the Scottish Daily Express had bought my story and if that was why I was refusing to commit myself to any specific answers. I replied quite forcefully that this was not the case. But the smug grins on the faces of Stashy Dan and James Hastie seemed to belie the truth of my statement. The fact that they themselves didn’t ask me a single question throughout the conference but simply sat with their arms folded added fuel to the other journalists’suspicions.

The press conference contained no surprises. I was neither silly nor brave

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With Mum at the British Embassy. Miss Mildred Forrester, the British Consul, is on the left, and Nicholas Henderson, then British chargé d’affaires, is immediately behind me.

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enough to say anything remotely controversial or hostile while still on Spanish soil. At the end of the press conference a woman journalist asked me to describe my feelings on being a free man again. I thought for a moment and the words that immediately sprang to mind came from a favourite Siegfried Sassoon poem in a dog-eared anthology of First World War poetry, An Anthology of Armageddon, I had lugged around with me. I replied, simply, that ‘It felt as though “everyone suddenly burst out singing”’.

When we left the library both Express reporters came up to me quite threateningly. This served only to harden my resolve not to let them have the story at all, no matter what they were prepared to pay for it. When it finally dawned on them they were not likely to get my story after all, they decided that the next best tactic was to increase the pressure on my Mum. The scurrilous methods and lack of ethics of Scottish Daily Express reporters were legendary, so I assumed they would make their main move when we reached London. With this in mind I rang John Rety in London from the Hotel Palacios in Madrid and explained my concerns to him. John said he would arrange with Mark hendy, Lyn Hutt and others for us to be met at Heathrow airport when we arrived. Reassured by this piece of pre-emptive planning, I took advantage of my first evening of freedom to relax and soak in a hot bath in a real bathroom, on my own, without having to line up in file and march to a grey, concrete shower room which looked as though it had been designed by the Auschwitz plumber.

Purged of the last of prison sweat and smells by the unique floral fragrance of Maja soap, I went downstairs for a celebratory dinner with Ben, Mum, Miss Forrester and one or two others from the British Embassy. Our party was watched over by four somewhat bored-looking officers of the Brigada Político Social who sat at a table in a far corner of an otherwise deserted restaurant.

Their brief, presumably, was to ensure nothing happened to me, or alternatively that I did nothing embarrassingly dramatic while still on Spanish soil.

I slept like a log that night. It was the first time in over three years that I had slept on a soft mattress between clean linen sheets without a single chinche to feed on my blood. But nothing could beat the sense of exultation the following morning when I emerged from sleep to find myself in a comfortably furnished room with a handle on the inside of the door and no recuento! I was really free.

It hadn’t been a dream; I was out of prison and I felt as though the previous three years had been a dream, like the episode which brought back Bobby Ewing from the dead in the US soap series Dallas.

Mum, Ben and I returned to the Embassy after breakfast to collect my travel documents. Miss Forrester then drove us to the airport, followed closely by a car of the Brigada Político Social.

Having checked in at the airport we made our way to the bar area where I

‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on — on — and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away … O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.’

Siegfried Sassoon

John Rety, ChristieCarballo defence committee (C-C dc).

Lyn Hutt (C-C dc).

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recognised a number of the reporters and photographers who had been at the press conference the previous evening, including the scowling Scottish Daily Express men who were pacing around like hyenas around a watering hole.

Our flight had yet to be called so I went off to buy some English newspapers, Ben went in search of souvenirs to take home and Miss Forrester went to the ladies, leaving Mum on her own. Immediately they saw she was alone, Stashy Dan came loping over and told my mother with all the malevolent menace he could muster, that she had better make sure that he got the story or it would be the worse for her. Mum told me what had happened when I returned. She was visibly upset by his threats.

My initial reaction was to go over to Russell’s table and confront him, but on reflection I decided that would be unwise as it might easily trigger what could become an international incident while we were still in Spain. Nor would it have been fair to Miss Forrester, to involve her in a crude punch-up while I was still in her care. I might also end up back inside on an assault charge. I had now made up my mind; the Scottish Daily Express would get nothing from me. The previous day they had told me they had made all the necessary arrangements for my return to England and had booked a first-class seat on the flight to London; Mum would have travelled second-class. I told them that I was being repatriated by the Embassy, and already had a second class seat booked together with my mother and Ben. Our flight was called and by mid-day, Friday 22 September 1967, Mum, Ben and I and a good part of the British press were 30,000 feet in the air on board a BEA jet from Barajas airport and safely out of Spanish airspace. The two Scottish Daily Express reporters sat in their first-class seats fretting and fuming and plotting. They now knew for certain the story was not theirs, and that if they wanted to be players they would have to bid for it on equal terms through Ben, like the rest of the press.

Meanwhile, Mum, Ben and I celebrated my flight into freedom with champagne. We toasted liberation and the future, whatever that might hold.

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Off to ‘swinging’ London and pastures new.

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Background Paper 1 — Defensa Interior

CNT logo.

DEFENSA INTERIOR (DI) was the clandestine activities planning and resistance organisation set up at the Limoges Congress in France, in late 1961, by the Defence Commission of the recently reunited three organisations of the exiled Spanish libertarian movement (MLE) — the CNT, the Spanish anarchist trade union; the FAI, the Iberian Anarchist Federation, and the FIJL, the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth.

The DI’s strategy was to generate a specific, purposive response, not through hurt but by providing the example of resistance through the propaganda of the deed. Its short-term objectives were: to remind the world, unremittingly, that Franco’s brutal and repressive dictatorship had not only survived World War Two but was now flourishing through tourism and US financial and diplomatic support; to provide solidarity for those continuining the struggle within Spain; to polarise public opinion and focus attention on the plight of the steadily increasing number of political prisoners in Franco’s jails; to interrupt the conduct of Francoist commercial and diplomatic life; undermine its financial basis — tourism; to take the struggle against Franco into the international sphere by showing the world that Franco did not enjoy unchallenged power and that there was resistance to the regime within and beyond Spain’s borders.

The hoped-for long-term objective, taking into account the specific historical and cultural context of the time — with the overthrow of Latin American dictators Fulgencio Batista and Rafael Trujillo and the rising industrial and student militancy within Spain itself, which could have been interpreted as a pre-insurgent mood — was the overthrow of the regime. Parallel with these was the ultimate objective — kill Franco, the root cause of 28 years of murder, misery and oppression in Spain, in the belief that beneficial political change would follow.

Funding for the first year’s operations of the DI came from the Defence Commission (on behalf of the CNT, FAI and FIJL) which agreed to hand over 10 million French francs. In fact, due to scheming and sabotage by a faction in the CNT’s Toulouse leadership, only 200,000 francs of this was ever received by the DI which survived for a further three years and was formally wound up at the Montpellier Congress of July-August 1965.

The DI’s arms came from the substantial weapons deposits the Spanish anarchists had maintained after the Liberation. They firmly

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Defensa Interior

believed that the Allies would press on to topple Franco. The Spanish exiles had, after all, provided a very substantial part of the so-called ‘French’ Resistance during World War Two; the plastic explosive, detonators and timing devices came from sympathisers in the Algerian FLN. The first planning session of the DI took place in March 1962. Its members were mainly CNT and FAI appointees: Germinal Esgleas, Vicente Llansola, Cipriano Mera (FAI), Acracio Ruiz, Juan Jimeno (FAI-FIJL), Juan García Oliver (FAI); Octavio Alberola was the only FIJL representative. Esgleas was responsible for propaganda, Llansola was initially given the job of organising the attempts on Franco and Alberola was appointed coordinator of the action groups. García Oliver, apart from helping to draw up the DI’s campaign strategy, used his considerable influence and prestige to raise financial support from a range of anti-fascist and trade unions, particularly from the Swedish anarchist-syndicalist labour union, the SAC. Delegates from the DI were sent to Portugal in May 1962 to establish contact with the Portuguese anarchist resistance and to Morocco to organise the setting up a clandestine radio transmitter near Tangiers. March 1962 also saw the beginning of a DI bombing campaign (under the ‘acronym of convenience’ the Consejo Ibérico de Liberación, CIL) targeting government agencies, institutions and property in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Manresa, Rome, the Valle de los Caídos and Franco’s summer residence in San Sebastián (the latter involving contacts with the nascent ETA, formed in 1959 as a revolutionary socialist movement of national liberation and not as a political party). The CIL, in fact, never existed as an organisation. It was simply a set of initials used in DI operations against the Franco and Salazar dictatorships.

With the exception of the San Sebastian explosion (which was an aborted assassination attempt on Franco) all the other attacks — in which small cigarette packet size explosive devices were used — were intended as symbolic gestures and timed with the intention of not injuring or killing ordinary citizens. In fact, none of the actions carried out by the DI — nor any of its offshoots or successor groups — such as the First of May Group — caused any deaths, innocent or otherwise.

However, the French-based DI’s symbolic attacks on Francoist targets and the Spanish-based OAS’s ruthless and indiscriminate terrorist attacks on French civilians exacerbated diplomatic tension between France and Spain. An informal collaborative quid pro quo between the ‘freemasonry’ of French and Spanish security ‘experts’ led to a clamp down on the OAS in Spain and on FIJL activists in France. Strong political and psychological pressure was also brought to bear on the comfortably placed, highly compromisable and bureaucratic leadership of the exiled MLE committees in France to deny the FIJL organisational support and economic aid. The effective dissociation of the MLE from the activities of the DI signalled that the ‘Toulouse-based official’ movement had finally abandoned its support for armed resistance against

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FIJL logo.

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Franco and Llansola made no attempt to set in motion any plans to kill Franco.

In early 1963 — faced with open hostility from the FAI and CNT’s official and public representatives in Toulouse (particularly Montseny and Esgleas) who did everything in their power to obstruct and subvert the clandestine and — to them — ‘compromising’ activities of the DI — García Oliver decided to return to Mexico where he felt he could be more effective in implementing the DI’s remit and supporting his activist comrades in France. DI operations were now left mainly in the hands of Cipriano Mera, José Pascual Palacios and Octavio Alberola.

The remaining activists launched a fresh anti-tourism campaign early in 1963, ‘Operación Primavera’, specifically targeting European airports and travel offices. But the August 1963 executions of Delgado and Granado (probably betrayed by police agent Guerrero Lucas), together with the arrest in September of 21 of the leading FIJL activists and the victory of the conservative wing of the CNT and the FAI at the congress in Toulouse that October, finally put paid to the DI as an official offshoot of the MLE. The movement was once again divided against itself. Even so, the DI remained nominally active up until the Montpellier Congress of the MLE in 1965

Background Paper 2 — The Blue Division Don Pedro ‘El Cruel’ had served as a liaison officer with the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War because of his knowledge of German. This Nazi foreign legion consisted of between 10,000 and 25,000 German Luftwaffe ‘volunteers’, personnel sent by Hitler and Goering, under the command of Wolfram von Richthofen, the cousin of the near-mythical ‘Red Baron’ of World War One. The role of these fighter and bomber air and ground crews was to acquire experience, test equipment and develop the tactics and strategy of ‘blitzkrieg’ — sudden, coordinated air war and ground assault. The Germans took part in critical battles of the Spanish Civil War: the Aragón offensive, the Battle of the Ebro, and the final assault on Catalonia. They honed their skills in the skies over Madrid and Bilbao, but their most infamous exploit occurred in April 1937, when they carpet-bombed the ancient Basque town of Guernica with aluminium incendiary bombs, razing it to the ground and then machinegunning the fleeing civilian population from the air.

Spanish prison warders who were members of the Hermandad de la División Azúl were allowed to wear its badge on their left sleeve. It was one of the few badges permitted on prison uniforms. It featured a swastika with a spray of laurel leaves on either side, with the leaves arranged differently on both ends. A sword with two shields superimposed on it crossed the centre. On the left shield was the Wehrmacht eagle, the other featured the Falangist crushed arrows insignia. Directly above the shields was an M-43 German helmet facing left bearing the faint outline of the Wehrmacht eagle. The other shield had an Iron Cross, with the ribbon spread above it intertwined with a spread of leaves on both sides: laurel on the left and oak on the right. In the

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The Blue Division

centre, the medal bore the inscription ‘División Española de Voluntarios En Russia’ (Division of Spanish Volunteers in Russia) in capital letters. This was the badge of the veterans' organisation of the Blue Division, the dyed-in-thewool Falangists and anti-Communists sent to ‘fight Bolshevism’ on the Russian Front in the World War Two under General Agustín Muñoz Grandes.

Don Pedro was always boasting that he had been one of the first Spanish volunteers to train in Grafenwohr, Bavaria, before the Spanish legion was incorporated into the 250th Wehrmacht Infantry Division. It was at Grafenwohr that he and 18,000 other members of the Spanish Legion took their oaths in front of Hitler on 20 August 1941 before leaving for Smolensk, just two months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The plan was to join up with the central army group for the main assault on Moscow, but the Spaniards were unexpectedly rerouted north to Leningrad where they remained, cold and miserable, until October 1943 when Franco, under pressure from the Allies, ordered the Legion to return to Spain.

A ‘Blue Legion’ of 3,000 diehard anti-communists under a Colonel Navaho chose to stay behind, but even they were ordered to withdraw in March 1944.

A number of fascist diehards refused to return to Spain and transferred instead to the Waffen SS while others in platoon-sized units, attached themselves to the 3rd Mountain Division and the 357th Infantry Division. Two more companies of Spaniards were transferred to the Brandenburg unit for anti-partisan action in Yugoslavia, and in September 1944 one of these Brandenburg companies was sent to Austria where it became the Spanische-Freiwilligen-Kompanie der SS 101. A second company was formed soon afterwards, the SpanischeFreiwilligen-Kompanie der SS 102. 101 Company merged with the 28th Waffen SS Division (Wallonien) and saw action in Pomerania. Finally, the 101st, commanded by Waffen Haupsturmfuhrer der-SS Miguel Ezquerra, was seconded to the 11th SS Division Nordland and fought to the end defending Berlin. Ezquerra survived the battle, and later escaped from a Russian prison camp to return to Spain. It is thought that as many as 45,000 Spaniards fought on the eastern front, of whom 4,500 were killed in action and a further 16,000 taken prisoner or wounded in action.

Background Paper 3 — The Movimiento Popular de Resistencia (MPR) and the Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL) (Iberian Liberation Council) THE FIRST (and unsuccessful) attempt to set up a non-sectarian anti-Franco resistance movement — the Movimiento Popular de Resistencia (MPR) — came in 1959. The MPR was the brainchild of Liberto Sarrau Royes, a long-standing FIJL activist, recently released from prison in Spain where he had served 9 years of a 20-year prison sentence for trying to reorganise the Libertarian Youth organisation (FIJL) in the Interior.

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Liberto Sarrau Royes

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

Sarrau, now in exile in France, issued leaflets and manifestos as if the MPR was a functioning organisation, which it was not. But it did represent an important first attempt to bring together the different libertarian and other anti-Francoist movements with a view to setting up a ‘Resistance Council’, one that would provide an umbrella organisation for armed resistance to the dictatorship. It should also be remembered that there was no effective libertarian resistance at this time other than the sporadic actions of two or three urban guerrilla groups, and that the then still-divided Libertarian Movement in Exile was only just starting to come together.

According to its May 1959 manifesto, the MPR aimed to ‘. . . move as soon as possible to the establishment of a Resistance Council or Liberation Junta representing all parties and organisations involved in the fight for the liberation of the Spanish people... The People’s Resistance Movement is merely a provisional body that does not seek to replace existing organisations and parties. It will melt away automatically as soon as the dictatorship has been toppled and the Spanish people liberated.’

The MPR had a National Coordinating Committee (headed by Jorge Fuente) and issued a Boletín de información. In France it had the backing of a number of French intellectuals, particularly through the CARE (Comité d’Aide à la Résistance Espagnole). This body included, among others, Jean Cassou, Clara Malraux, Colette Audry and Henri Torrès who supported the MPR because they thought it a good idea. The reality was that they knew little about the substance behind the initials. Save for a few friends, Sarrau was simply ignored or not taken seriously among his own comrades and he received no moral or financial support from the CNT, FAI and FIJL. He also sought financial aid, unsuccessfully, in Algeria, Yugoslavia and Cuba.

The main reason the MPR never got beyond the drawing-board was probably the fault of Sarrau himself. Sarrau was considered by many to be too much of an egoist, a lone operator whose contemporaries described him as a ‘glory-hunter’ who saw himself as a ‘man of destiny’ at the centre of resistance to Franco. The phantom MPR allowed him to play out this role and he considered it his personal fiefdom. Sarrau’s failure to attract support across the spectrum of anti-dictatorship forces, particularly from within the libertarian movement which by 1962 had the focus of the considerably more efficient DI meant that by the end of that year the MPR had effectively withered away.

But in fact the rhetoric and manifestos of the MPR — which accurately reflected the activist currents of the time and the combative mood of many libertarians and anti-Francoists — was an important contributory factor in persuading the CNT to set up its own resistance agency — the Defensa Interior (DI) — on a more responsible and serious footing. In fact, when the DI was set up in 1962, Octavio Alberola, who had been in touch with Sarrau while the latter was still in jail in Spain — through some Valencia anarchists — asked Sarrau to work with them, an offer which the latter turned down flat.

Another attempt to organise, galvanise and unite the activist resistance to

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The MPS and the CIL

Franco in the face of the CNT in exile’s passivity was Francisco ‘Quico’ Sabaté’s short-lived ‘Movimiento Unificado de Resistencia por la Liberación de España’ (MURLE). This ad hoc organisation died on 5 January 1960 when ‘Quico’ Sabaté was ambushed and murdered

by Falangists in San Celoni. His four comrades: Antonio Miracle, Rogelio Madrigal, Francisco Conesa and Martín Ruiz had been killed in a gunfight with the Civil Guard in the foothills of the Pyrenees two days earlier.

THE CIL, the Consejo Ibérico de Liberación, never existed as an organisation. It was a rubber stamp for the media, a set of initials, a ‘flag of convenience’ used by the FIJL activists to vindicate Defensa Interior operations against the Franco and Salazar dictatorships. The first mention of the CIL appears in an ‘Open Letter to President Kennedy’ dated 9 April 1963 requesting him not to renew the US-Spanish military treaties and to withdraw US support for Franco. It concluded: ‘Franco’s friends, even though they call themselves democrats, will always be enemies of genuine Spanish democrats who, through the CNT-UGT-STV Alianza Sindical and their combat organisations will, in due course, restore freedom to Spain.’ The letter was signed by the CIL, which described itself as ‘The Spanish Libertarian Movement and the Portuguese Libertarian Movement’.

The use of the name ‘CIL’ itself was the commitment — following the formation of the Defensa Interior (DI), the clandestine planning and operational arm of the exiled movement at the 2nd Inter-Continental Congress of the Local Federations of the CNT-in-Exile held in Limoges (Haute Vienne) from 26 August to 3 September 1961— by the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) to escalate the fight against Francoism and, hopefully, extend it into a joint struggle with the Portuguese anarchists against the Portuguese dictator Salazar.

In an attempt to embrace the anti-Salazarist resistance by extending their operations to cover the whole of the Iberian Peninsula (both the FIJL and the FAI were, theoretically, peninsular organisations) a Defensa Interior delegate met with representatives of the Portuguese opposition (linked to General Humberto Delgado and militants of the Portuguese Libertarian Movement) in Portugal in

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CIL publicity.

General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’

May 1962. They agreed that the DI would provide the umbrella resistance body and responsibility for operations would be claimed under the banner of the ‘Iberian Liberation Council (CIL)’. The DI, however, was to be solely responsible for issuing statements to the media — as only they would be in a position to provide information.

But the planned joint operations never got off the ground, owing in large part to the fragmented nature of the domestic Portuguese opposition groups and the fact that General Delgado did not inspire much confidence among the anarchists (particularly after his role in the Santa Maria hijacking) and that he took a rather irresponsible and cavalier approach to his clandestine activities.

When the Portuguese contribution to the struggle failed to materialise within six months, the Defensa Interior committee decided against the continued use of the acronym CIL, but its initials were never formally replaced.

In spite of this the militants responsible for carrying on the armed struggle within the peninsula, and internationally — with or without the assistance of Defensa Interior — continued to claim operations on behalf of the CIL. The idea was to invest their fight for freedom in Spain with some resonance and a less sectarian and more internationalist cachet. The fact is that the CIL never existed as a group, but its initials were chalked up to the joint activities of Spanish and Portuguese libertarians, even though the latter were never involved in its antitourist campaigns.

From March to June 1963, the world’s press carried banner headlines relating to series of symbolic direct actions carried out against Spanish and the Portuguese airlines Iberia and TAP at airports in London, Paris, Geneva, Rome and Frankfurt. In March 1963 Foreign correspondents in Madrid received the following statement: ‘THE IBERIAN LIBERATION COUNCIL, pursuing its fight for the freedom of the peoples of Iberia, has mounted Operation ‘CAUTION’ for the purpose of warning international tourists of the grave dangers they run by using Francoist and Salazarist airlines IBERIA and TAP, and by continuing to come to our country. Until such time as the last remaining redoubt of Nazifascism has been eliminated from Iberia, there can be no peace in Europe.’

Background Paper 4: The Soviet Secret Service in Spain IT WAS the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, who brought the Russian Inquisition to Spain. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Communist Party in Spain had been smaller than the dissident Marxist grouping, the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista (POUM). The influence of this group had been magnified by foreign observers because of the foreign volunteers it attracted, like George Orwell; men who were repelled by orthodox Stalinism. But the socialists and republicans in the government refused to trust the workers with the arms they needed to repulse fascism, which were in the government's own army and police barracks. This created a situation where the workers could defend but not attack. Consequently, the Spanish republican

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The Soviet Secret Service in Spain

government turned to Russia to help them against fascism. The Soviet Union, which gave nothing for nothing, sold arms and imported the Communist Party with its inbuilt secret police force to act against the workers' revolution. Many anarchists and non-Soviet aligned socialists fell victim to the NKVD- and GRU(Soviet military intelligence) led Republican Army and police who demonised them as the enemy within. Some of those who had fought against the libertarians in the internecine battles of the Republic were later jailed themselves by the fascists. In 1937 the NKVD-led cadres and army units moved in to destroy the collectives that would have given hope to libertarian socialism, but were the dismay of their would-be allies in the capitalist democracies. These collectives were extensive cooperative communities set up on the basis of common ownership and workers’ control of the land and factories in those parts of Spain where the fascist uprising had been defeated. Not only did the CNT and the UGT set these up separately; but they were often established and run by the joint efforts of members of both organisations. The Stalinist commanders who broke them up included Enríque Líster, who later became a hero-comrade of Fidel Castro, and ‘El Campesino’, who, according to FIJL friends of the author with whom he sought to associate, became a wretch haunted by his use of state terror against the collectives.

Background Paper 5: Crime in Spain THE RISE in crime levels in Spain in the early sixties was undoubtedly linked to the enormous disparities in wealth between the ostentatiously affluent foreign tourists and the less well off Spaniards, particularly among those who saw easy opportunities for themselves in crime.

Figures submitted in October 1963 by the General Assembly of Caritás, a Spanish Catholic charity, showed that 3 million out of a total population of 34 million were under-nourished. Between 6 and 7 million Spaniards did not earn enough to buy food with sufficient proteins, 3 million (from the same group) suffered from some kind of physical disease and 1.5 million from mental disturbances. Census statistics for 1960 showed 3 million illiterates, and over 300,000 children, mainly in Andalusia, Ciudad Real and Albacete who did not attend school. Foreign tourists, ordinary working people just like them, had extraordinary purchasing power. A Frenchman could buy a luxurious 90 square metre apartment with a swimming pool, an indoor tennis court and balcony overlooking the sea for 50,000 French francs at the time, something that would have cost the ordinary Spaniard 600,000 pesetas. Spaniards had to work three times longer than French people in 1959 to pay for one kilo of rice, five times as long for coffee, four times as long for a litre of wine and twice as long for a newspaper. Little wonder then that resentments against the tourists were building up. Havelock Ellis, an early writer on the subject of crime and criminals, divided crime into four categories: ‘…the political, the passionel, the insane, and the occasional’. He said that the political criminal is ‘the victim of an attempt of a more or less despotic government to preserve its own stability.

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He is not necessarily guilty of an unsocial offence; he simply tries to overturn a certain political order which may in itself be anti-social. This truth is recognized all over the world, except in America where the foolish notion still prevails that in a democracy there is no place for political criminals. Yet John Brown was a political criminal; so were the Chicago Anarchists; so is every striker.’

Consequently, said Ellis, ‘the political criminal of our time or place may be the hero, martyr, saint of another age’. Cesare Lombroso called the political criminal ‘the true precursor of the progressive movement of humanity’.

‘The criminal by passion is usually a man of wholesome birth and honest life, who under the stress of some great, unmerited wrong has wrought justice for himself.’

‘The insane criminal really can no more be considered a criminal than a child, since he is mentally in the same condition as an infant or an animal.’ ‘ The occasional criminal ‘represents by far the largest class of our prison population, hence is the greatest menace to social well-being.’What is the cause that compels a vast army of the human family to take to crime, to prefer the hideous life within prison walls to the life outside? Certainly that cause must be an iron master, who leaves its victims no avenue of escape, for the most depraved human being loves liberty.’

There is a close relationship, according to Ellis, ‘between crimes against the person and the price of alcohol, between crimes against property and the price of wheat’. He quoted Quetelet and Lacassagne, the former looking upon society as the preparer of crime, and the criminals as instruments that execute them.

The latter found that ‘the social environment is the cultivation medium of criminality; that the criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when it finds the medium which causes it to ferment; every society has the criminals it deserves.’

Edward Carpenter, a socialist writer, estimated that five-sixths of indictable crimes consisted in consisted in ‘some violation of property rights; but that is too low a figure. A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes out of ten could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic and social iniquities, to our system of remorseless exploitation and robbery. There is no criminal so stupid but recognises this terrible fact, though he may not be able to account for it.’

Interviews with criminals compiled by Havelock Ellis, Lombroso, Davitt and other early criminal psychologists proved to them that the offender invariably justified their actions by claiming to be driven to crime by society. A Milanese thief said to Lombroso: ‘I do not rob, I merely take from the rich their superfluities; besides, do not advocates and merchants rob?’ Another, a murderer, wrote: ‘Knowing that three-fourths of the social virtues are cowardly vices, I thought an open assault on a rich man would be less ignoble than the cautious combination of fraud.’

Yet another commented: ‘I am imprisoned for stealing a half dozen eggs.

Ministers who rob millions are honoured. Poor Italy!’

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An educated convict said to Davitt: ‘The laws of society are framed for the purpose of securing the wealth of the world to power and calculation, thereby depriving the larger portion of mankind of its rights and chances. Why should they punish me for taking by somewhat similar means from those who have taken more than they had a right to?’ The same man added: ‘Religion robs the soul of its independence; patriotism is the stupid worship of the world for which the well-being and the peace of the inhabitants were sacrificed by those who profit by it, while the laws of the land, in restraining natural desires, were waging war on the manifest spirit of the law of our beings . . . Compared with this,’ he concluded, ‘thieving is an honourable pursuit.’

Background Paper 6: Otto Skorzeny and the ‘Circle of Friends’ INFORMATION ON the Nazi escape networks emerged in 1946 when the US Treasury department published the recently discovered files of a secret Nazi meeting held in Strasbourg in August 1944, a year after the German army had been crushed at Stalingrad and twenty days after Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life. The conference, in the Hotel Maison Rouge, pulled together the most powerful industrial, political and commercial interests of the Nazi power structure. The conference chairman, Dr Scheid, declared: ‘Germany has already lost the battle for France. Henceforth, German industry must prepare itself for the economic campaign that will follow the end of the war. All industrialists must strengthen their contacts with companies abroad, each on his own account and without drawing attention to himself. And that is not all.

We must be ready to finance the Nazi Party, which is going to be driven underground for some time.'

The conference agreed on a plan that provided for the transfer to neutral or non-belligerent nations of a significant portion of the liquid funds of the major companies of the Third Reich — an estimated $800 million. Companies were set up throughout the world by Germans using Nazi funds: 112 in Spain, 58 in Portugal, 35 in Turkey, 98 in Argentina, 214 in Switzerland and 253 in various other countries. An inventory discovered in 1945 among RHSA VI papers showed cash paid out to leading Nazi agents. This included an amount of five million gold Reichs marks charged against ‘Cash Office’ and signed for by Otto Skorzeny.

Skorzeny had been living in Spain since his so-called ‘escape’ from a denazification camp at Oberursal in 1948. Spain had provided asylum to many Nazi leaders and war criminals such as Hans Ulrich Rudel, Hitler’s air ace, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s finance minister (and Skorzeny's father-in-law), Fritz von Papen, Vice Chancellor under Chancellor Hitler in 1933, former Belgian SS commander Leon Degrelle, the Croatian Ustashi leader Ante Pavelic, the Romanian Horia Sima and many others.

The year I was arrested, 1964, a major Nazi war criminal, Zech Nenntwichs, had escaped arrest by the skin of his teeth and stories were circulating in the Spanish and international press of Skorzeny’s involvement in this affair.

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Joachim, however, was one of the unlucky or expendable ones whose escape Skorzeny had been unable or unwilling to engineer, but he was visiting him regularly in Carabanchel and providing him with legal, financial and moral back up. Nor did he get to be encargado de galeria of the sexta galería without some influence.

Skorzeny was well connected in Spain, his adopted homeland, and my fellow prisoner, Joachim, often chatted quite proudly about their relationship, particularly his friendship with Skorzeny’s wife, Countess Ilsa von Finkelstein.

This ‘circle of friends’ of the Third Reich dined regularly at Horcher’s in the Calle Alfonso XII, where they plotted survival and realistic alternatives.

Horcher’s was the Spanish end of an up-market European chain of old, established Austrian restaurants where Skorzeny and his comrades dined. I imagine Horcher's other restaurants in Vienna, Berlin, Brussels and other European capitals provided useful bases for Skorzeny’s intelligence, military, diplomatic, business and neo-fascist intrigues. Skorzeny’s Madrid-based import-export, engineering, arms-dealing and mercenary recruitment companies provided a ‘plausibly deniable' parallel security and intelligence service under the protection of the US intelligence organisations and their other client European agencies, particularly the Spanish Security Directorate, the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS) and the Francoist intelligence service, the Servicio Central de Documentación (SECED).

SS Colonel Skorzeny was also an arms broker for the Portuguese government of the dictator Salazar and was the Iberian agent for the CIA-linked Interarmco, the Virginia-based multinational weapons company founded by former CIA agent Samuel Cummings. He had also been trafficking in arms for many years to sub-Saharan African countries. In 1960, Skorzeny had been the main figure in Bonn's negotiations for Bundeswehr bases in Spain. His security company had consultancy contracts with various right wing governments in Latin America and the Middle East as well as the Brigada Político-Social. It was alleged that Eduardo Blanco, the head of the BPS and my nemesis, was on the board of directors of at least one of Skorzeny's many Spanish companies.

Satisfyingly, it was probably a Christie, John Christie OBE, an MI6 officer responsible for 'Operation Straggle' against President Nasser in Egypt in 1956, who ensured that Skorzeny was consistently refused entry into Britain because of his role as adviser to the Egyptian security and intelligence services in the period leading up to, and during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Allan Dulles of the CIA had, incidentally, brokered his contract with the Egyptian secret services.

The Nazi exiles maintained a high level of political activity, but paid little attention to the domestic Spanish political situation, other than to pay polite lip service, as did the OAS, to the ideas of José Antonio Prímo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange. Their public role was confined to a defence of Nazism and Nazi collaborators who were being prosecuted by law and defending Nazism as the historical bulwark against Soviet communism.

In 1966, as the anti-colonialist phase of the cold war was gathering

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momentum in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Skorzeny's ‘circle’ helped fund a small group of Barcelona-based neo Nazis to set up what became one of the most prestigious and active of the European neo-Nazi publications, the Círculo Español de Amigos de Europa (Spanish Circle of Friends of Europe — CEDADE).

CEDADE — a glossy high-quality monthly magazine, edited at first by Ángel Ricote, and then, after some months, by Pedro Aparicio — devoted most of its pages to hagiographies of Hitler and his pals, the exploits of the army of the Third Reich, the Waffen-SS, Degrelle’s Walloon Legion and Muñoz Grandes’s Blue Division. There were also editorials supporting German reunification, and campaigns for the liberation of Rudolph Hess, the last of the Nazi leaders imprisoned in Spandau. Ideologically, in this early phase, the paper linked itself more to the theories of the Italian fascist writer Julius Evola, but increasingly adopted a more aggressively hard-line, neo-Nazi, anti-semitic, racist and eugenic position as it sought to build up membership and influence.

This was in contrast to the ‘veteran’ Falangist circles with their relatively laidback fuzzily totalitarian attitudes and unsophisticated ideological training.

Like other extreme fundamentalist religious and political groups, such as the Roman Catholic lay organisation Opus Dei, CEDADE was a ‘no pain, no gain’ group which exalted the ideas of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘rigorous morality’ and called for iron discipline: no smoking, no alcohol, no disco-dancing and no partying apart from sing a longs on mountain-tops and on 20-mile hikes. They claimed they had a spiritual side and regularly attended masses celebrated in Barcelona and Madrid for the repose of the immortal souls of Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom had been baptised Roman Catholics and were never excommunicated.

This was the height of the cold war and the US intelligence and security communities were intent on turning Europe into an effective bulwark against Soviet-bloc communism. US policymakers were prepared to work with whomever it took to ensure America's global interests were defended. In addition to acting as the public relations arm of the Third Reich and keeping the international neo-Nazi network funded and motivated, CEDADE provided the eyes, ears and occasional muscle of the Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s foreign intelligence service under Hitler’s former intelligence chief, Reinhardt Gehlen, and the CIA. Apart from the Odessa organisation, Skorzeny had also put together a network of foreign agents organised as intelligence gathering and terrorist groups who were to operate behind allied lines. These agents had mostly been recruited from among French, Italian, Belgian and Spanish fascist movements.

Large numbers of these ultra-right-wing terrorists were later absorbed into the NATO cold-war ‘stay-behind’ groups — that is, people who would remain behind enemy lines after an invasion (in Italy it was known as ‘Operation Gladio’) — and were subsequently responsible for many of the terrorist outrages of the late 1960s and 1970s throughout Europe, Africa and Latin

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America.

The raison d’être of these groups and their terrorist campaigns had been set out in May 1965 during a conference at the Parco dei Principe Hotel in Rome.

The theme of this anti-communist conference — ‘Revolutionary Warfare: Instrument of World Expansion’ — was perhaps the pivotal point which led, inexorably, to the indiscriminate bombing campaign which killed and maimed hundreds of innocent people and undermined Italian and European political life for the next fifteen to twenty years. The presentations, chaired by Italian secret service (SIFAR) officer Guido Giannettini, were directed at: '. . . preparing a military instrument capable of facing up to the techniques and expansion of revolutionary warfare…an instrument encompassing the setting up of standing defence groups capable of resisting clandestine penetration by revolutionary warfare and which will give battle without hesitation and with all necessary energy and ruthlessness, even in the least orthodox of circumstances.'

These defence groups were recruited exclusively from among the ranks of known and trusted anti-communists. The Parco dei Principe Conference effectively established the credentials of the neo-fascists and the extreme right as 'experts' in the theory and practice of counter-revolution. (Many do not realise that the centre right is in fact quite close to the far right. For example, the fascists often assist Tory election candidates, just as the CP used to help Labour ones. The leaders may stay aloof from one another but at middle and rank-andfile level there is mingling. Of course I am talking about the Mosley-style fascists not the skinhead race warriors.) As a result, all of the Parco dei Principei conference team were recruited into the Italian secret service, directly responsible to its new head, Admiral Hencke, and established as ‘men of confidence’ and key advisers within the Italian security and intelligence infrastructure.

The interest stimulated by the 1965 Parco dei Principe conference was such that NATO officials approved a secret report on Civil and Emergency Planning.

Under the terms of this agreement, all the countries of the alliance, including Britain, were to establish ‘an organisation composed of trustworthy and able individuals endowed with the necessary means and capable of intervening effectively in the event of an invasion’.

In Germany, Belgium and Britain these 'stay behind' organisations were set up within the framework of the regular and reserve forces. In Italy, this auxiliary force was made up of ‘specialists’ recruited because of their ‘anticommunist’ reliability. The function of these forces was to establish secret bases, arms dumps and equipment câches and go into action within the framework of the current NATO survival plan ‘in the event of external socialist aggression or internal political upheavals’. In the Italian context it was this NATO report that led directly to the recruitment of fascist terrorists who could act with impunity and under official cover as part of a legitimate military back-up force.

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Background paper 7: Anthropometrics ANTHROPOMETRICS was a combination of the theories of two men. The first theory was concocted by the Italian psychiatrist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who in 1876 published a book attempting to explain criminal behaviour — L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man). The other was the creation of an anally retentive French bureaucrat by the name of Alphonse Bertillon who started his career as a clerk in the Paris Prefecture of Police in 1879.

Lombroso was a Social Darwinist. He had arrived at his theories as a result of measuring and comparing the heads of living and executed criminals against the skulls of apes, prehistoric humans and what he and his contemporaries described as ‘primitive’ peoples. His conclusions, arrived at in the wake of the brutal aftermath of the Paris Commune, were that criminals were victims of atavism, the reversion to evolutionarily primitive traits, and that at least 40 per cent of them were prisoners of their biological inheritance. They were, in effect, evolutionary throwbacks. He also believed that ‘physiognomy’ proved beyond doubt that anarchists had, generally speaking, the same physiological traits as criminals.

Drawing on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Lombroso argued that a small number of individuals in any population were likely to exhibit extremely primitive instincts. In early human societies, individuals with such traits would have been more fitted for survival. A strong desire to kill, for example, would have made them successful hunters and desirable mates. However, in civilized urban Europe, atavism was likely to cause criminal and anti-social behaviour, in his view, the identifying traits of the anarchist.

He claimed that anarchists’ features showed peculiar physical characteristics that were common among the inmates of lunatic asylums.

Lombroso’s researches in Turin prison showed that 34 per cent of his ‘anarchist’ sample possessed the ‘criminal type’ face as compared with 43 per cent among 'ordinary criminals'. He also claimed to have examined police mugshots of anarchists arrested in Chicago and found that 40 per cent of them were ‘criminal types’ and 17 out of 43 had ‘disagreeable peculiarities of the face’.

Lombroso became obsessed with the idea that in the remoter parts of Italy and Spain and in the slums of Europe's urban manufacturing centres in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, where the ideas of anarchism were gaining popularity and causing industrial unrest, individuals displaying these primitive characteristics were producing offspring who exhibited the same highly undesirable social qualities. The anarchists were breeding more anarchists! His theory posited that crime was almost a matter of pre-ordination; criminals did not become criminals simply because they fell victim to unfortunate social circumstances: they were born with an innate or genetic potential for anti-social behaviour. According to Lombroso, anarchism was a pathological phenomenon: ‘Unhealthy and criminal persons adopt anarchism. In every city, in nearly every factory, there are men with active minds but little education. These men

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stand, day after day, before a machine handling a tool, doing some mechanical action. Their minds must work. They have little to work upon. They are starved for proper food and air and for the mental food which is necessary to a proper understanding of society and of the duties of men. Into the hands of these fall the writings of the anarchists with subtly worded arguments. Conditions which are apparent everywhere are shown forth, the evils of the city and of industrial conditions are set forth plainly, so that the reader gets an idea that the writer is truthful and impartial. Then the writer sets forth how anarchism can remedy these things. Later on comes the suggestion of violence. Then “strike down the rulers.”

‘The workman may not be moved in the least by the first perusal. He may even be amused. But later, little by little, as he stands at his work, they come back to him, and he broods over them again and again until they become part of his mind and his belief, and sooner or later he becomes a violent anarchist.

For such men Johan Most and his followers form little groups which can hold secret meetings, and through them deeds of violence are plotted and accomplished.’

Alphonse Bertillon, the second social engineer of eugenic criminology, was the obsessive son of an obsessive anthropologist who realised that elements of Lombroso's theories and his father's phrenological researches might have some application in identifying criminals, both actual and potential. A bean-counter and statistician by nature, Bertillon fastidiously recorded all the data he could collect on convicted criminals. The filing system he developed was based on studies of 1,800 convicted criminals whom he divided into three main categories according to the size of their head. These categories were further subdivided into eleven different body measurements.

Bertillon’s career and reputation soared and before long police forces around the world were using his system to identify suspects. Needless to say, none of these really stood a chance as all of them already had police records, thereby providing a powerful incentive for judges to convict.

He became more and more carried away with his anthropometric and statistical theories. These plumbed new depths of idiocy during the antianarchist hysteria that swept Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Like Lombroso, Bertillon was convinced that trouble-making anarchists fitted quantifiable anthropometric or physiological types and he published a set of cards called Le pocket parle which secret policemen carried around in their pockets for quick identification of likely anarchists.

European police chiefs officially endorsed and adopted Bertillon’s system following a presentation at the 1898 anti-Anarchist Congress in Rome. The Chief Constable of Glasgow, William Douglas, gushingly described the Frenchman’s method of rooting out revolutionaries in an article published in 1901: ‘Once again, the genius of M Bertillon has triumphed. He has come forward with a system that approached very near perfection.'

I never found out what my own anthropometrician made of my features

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and phrenology, but lobeless ears were apparently a dead giveaway for atavistic criminal anarchists. How I survived without exhibiting socially dangerous primitive instincts until I reached the age of eighteen, God alone knows.

Background Paper 8: Renseignements Généraux briefing paper on Spanish anarchists in France INTERIOR MINISTRY OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC GENERAL DIRECTORATE OF NATIONAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE OF RENSEIGNEMENTS GÉNÉRAUX PARIS, 27 August 1963 (translation of the French original) TERRORIST MACHINATIONS OF SPANISH ANARCHISTS IN FRANCE 1. THE METHODS AND NETWORK OF THE IBERIAN LIBERATION COMMITTEE (CIL) The existence in France of a group of Spanish anarchists organised for the purpose of carrying out acts of terrorism in Spain and sabotaging the installations and planes of the Spanish and Portuguese airlines in the major cities of Europe, has been demonstrated through the arrests and inquiries made on foot of several attacks over the past year.

1) Following the explosions in the summer of 1962 in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, San Sebastian and Lisbon, the French Trotskyist Yvette Parent, formerly an agent of the FLN support networks, acknowledged when arrested by the Spanish police that she had travelled down from Paris to carry out a mission in Spain as a courier as part of a terrorist operation run by Antonio Mur Peiron and Jorge Conil Walls [sic], members of the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL).

2) On 9 April 1963, three young Frenchmen, Pecunia, Alain; Batoux, Guy; and Ferry, Bernard, members of the VéritéLiberté association [specialising in exposes of the torture employed by the French army during the fight against the FLN] or of the Parti Socialiste Unifié [Unified Socialist Party — PSU], were arrested in Spain after planting or getting ready to plant bombs on the ship that shuttles between Barcelona and the Balearics (in Pecunia’s case), in front of the United States Embassy in Madrid (in the case of Guy Batoux), or near the offices of the Iberia Airlines company in Valencia (in the case of Bernard Ferry).

Their statements revealed that they had been approached in Lyon by Spanish FIJL members and had initially agreed, for a first mission, to carry into Spain materials (plastic explosives and timing mechanisms) and then, at the end of March, to place bombs in the aforementioned locations. The information supplied by Guy Batoux and Alain Pecunia (as well as by the father of the latter who has complained to the court authorities of the corruption of a minor) has made it possible to identify a number of FIJL leading lights in Paris, Lyon and Toulouse, members of the terrorist organisation going under the name of the ‘Iberian Liberation Committee’ (CIL).

3) On 3 June, three incendiary devices placed in luggage in the holds of Iberia and TAP airline planes in the airports of London, Geneva and Frankfurt exploded moments before the aircraft were due to take off for Madrid.

In Geneva, Federal Police suspicions focused upon one Abarca Ruiz, who arrived from Paris and stayed in a Geneva hotel on 3 and 4 June. Abarca Ruiz was acknowledged as a militant of the FIJL, based in Paris, at I bis, rue de l’Arbalète. Sought under an international warrant from M Curtin, an examining magistrate in Geneva, he has yet to be located.

4) On 29 July, two bombs exploded in Madrid, one near the Casa de los Sindicatos, the other on the premises of the General Police Directorate, leaving 27 wounded (three seriously) among those waiting to be issued with passports.

On 31 July the Spanish police carried out the arrests in Madrid of a Spaniard and a Frenchman of Spanish extraction, Granado Gata, Francisco and Delgado Martínez, Joaquin, respectively, both of whom had arrived from France. The pair acknowledged at first that they had been involved in the planting of the bombs, but they retracted this during the trial. They were found in possession of 21 kg of French-made plastic explosive, a handgun, a machine-gun, a fused bomb and a remote-control detonator.

A 9 August international warrant issued by the Frankfurt court of first instance in charge of investigating the explosion on board an Iberia airline plane in Frankfurt on 6 June disclosed that Delgado Martínez, Joaquin, living at no. 19, Allée de l’Alma in Perreux, had visited Frankfurt on 4, 5 and 6 June and had left the suitcase containing the bomb at the Iberia airline counter under the false name of Chica Amate, José.

Details gleaned from statements made in Madrid by Delgado Martínez and Granado Gata have confirmed previous intelligence regarding the presence in France of the chief organisers of terrorist expeditions operating in the name of the CIL. The persons identified are all members of the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias, the (5-member) National Committee which is the clear inspiration behind the fly-posting of anti-tourism in Spain posters and leaflets (distributed in large quantities in Paris, Toulouse, Geneva and Madrid in early June) and secretly coordinates terrorist activity.

Launched in Madrid in August 1932, the FIJL has no lawful status on French soil. It enjoys merely administrative tolerance as a

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sister organisation of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. They both have their headquarters at 4, Rue de Belfort in Toulouse.

The latter, the CNT, is an anarcho-syndicalist movement bent on introducing first democracy and later anarchy in Spain by means of syndicalism and it does not approve of and terrorism.

For its part, the FIJL view is that ‘unless national and international democratic sectors succeed in promoting a political solution to the problem of fascism in Spain, courses leading to rather more abrupt actions will necessarily remain open.’

Within the FIJL, the Paris Federation has been the greatest advocate of subversive activity. Its militants make up the core of the CIL terrorist group, together with some French, Portuguese and Italian personnel. And a group in Lyon, a group in Toulouse and personnel in Grenoble and Perpignan should also be mentioned.

The existence of a network of complicities likely to be used by these groups during ‘operations’ has also come to light, following the July 1962 discovery of documents carelessly mislaid in the Pyrénées Orientales by one of the terrorist godfathers (animadores) of the FIJL, Guerrero Lucas, Jacínto. This was a list of correspondents in France and in countries in Europe and South America, where Spanish anarchist cells were founded after the civil war.

Now, virtually all of the terrorist godfathers who have come to light over the preceding operations are included in that list. There are also many others who profess to be syndicalists but who are opposed to violence. Often, these are naturalised French active in respectable French trade unions and parties, just as long as these are not communist (FO, CFTC, SFIO, PSU, etc,). But Guerrero Lucas was relying upon them, not unreasonably, as a source of financial assistance, hiding-places, couriers and propaganda backup in the event of arrests and difficulties. The anarchist tradition and hatred of Francoism are still strong among the Spanish exiles and, no matter whether they be old or young, or seemingly well-settled in France and bourgeoisified, they are liable to embark upon terrorist expeditions, unprompted and if persuaded that they are running very little risk, particularly on account of their being French nationals.

II. — OBJECTIVES AND SEIZURES DURING INTERROGATIONS AND SEARCH Pay particular attention to the following: 1) Explosives, delayed-action bomb mechanisms, weapons. It is highly unlikely that these may be on the official premises of the FIJL or in militants’ own homes.

But there may be indications (documents, letters, codes, photographs) found during searches which may steer investigations towards hiding-places.

2) Any typewritten or written documentation must be seized, along with any letters, the contents of which may carry allusions to subversive activity. Broadly speaking, any correspondence between Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French anarchists may be of interest, even if, at first glance, they appear to be of a harmless family character. Among Spanish anarchists, terrorism remains a family concern.

3) With an eye to clearing up the attacks mounted at Geneva, Frankfurt and London airports, look out for the passports, rail and airline tickets, receipts, expenses sheets, etc. that may help establish that certain persons made trips to those cities between 1 and 6 June.

4) Since the beginning of the year, the CIL has issued five typewritten statements in which it has claimed responsibility for various attacks mounted and promising retaliation. Such notices should be seized.

5) The FIJL newspaper, Nueva Senda, printed in Toulouse, has been banned under a ministerial order of 26.3.1963 as carried in the Journal Officiel of 3 April 1963, because of its calls for violence and its activity in support of subversion in Spain [which would be] damaging to France’s diplomatic interests.

It has just resurfaced clandestinely with the same 28 x 38 format and the same typographical features, with, as its title, the initials ‘FIJL’ against the background of the red and black anarchist flag. Copies of this newspaper are to be seized and those in possession of it should be prosecuted for distribution of a proscribed organ.

III. — ARRESTS AND SEARCHES TO BE CARRIED OUT 1) IN PARIS Premises at 24, Rue Ste-Marthe (10th arrondissement), which is the headquarters of the Local and Regional Federations of the FIJL and CNT and of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). There is also a libertarian bookshop stocking Spanish language materials that is an important meeting place and rendezvous. at 3, Rue Ternaux (11th arr.), headquarters of the French Anarchist Federation (FAF) and a likely meeting place for the clandestines of the famed Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI).

Lastly, Le Monde Libertaire bookshop.

Individuals Arino Sahun, Robert— a participant in the 29 July terrorist operation in Madrid.

Sanchez, Agustin — secretary/treasurer of the FIJL National Committee.

Abarca, Luis — travelled to Geneva at the time of the 6 June attack.

Drouet, Claude (Frenchman). Member of the Jeunesses Libertaires françaises, liaison agent in Spain during the two attacks in the summer of 1962.

Mera, Cipriano — In touch with Joaquin Delgado.

Bornichon, Monique — Liaison agent, girlfriend of Alain Pecunia.

Poli, François — participant in the operations in Spain in the summer of 1962, friend of Alain Pecunia.

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Chevalier, Alexandre — instigator of Alain Pecunia’s mission.

Lucas Guerrero, Jacínto — CIL official.

Foncillas, Francisco — FIJL member likely to be the ‘Paul’ who organised the expedition of the three young Frenchmen to Spain in early April 1963.

Piquer, Hermes — in touch with Salvador Gurucharri, aka ‘El Ingles’, a member of the FIJL National Committee.

Quesada Márquez, Juan — arrested in Perignan on the night of 26 August while carrying weapons and leaflets.

Nervi — Italian anarchist.

Imbernon, Nardo — general secretary of the FIJL Local and Regional Federations.

Pascual, José — leading light of the Paris FIJL. Martin Armendariz — (probably the José Ros who gave the order to Joaquín Delgado to take a bomb to Frankfurt).

Dot Arderieu, José — founder of the first anarchist terrorist movement, the Movimiento Popular de Resistencia, and a former hold-up specialist.

2) IN LYON Premises An Adrian hut at 286, Cours Emile Zola in Villeurbanne, the premises of the CNT Local Federation and a meetingpoint for Lyon anarchists.

Individuals Carlucci, Bruno Carmine — Italian anarchist whose situation in France is irregular.

Flores Bartolomé, aka Fernandez, Pedro — Lyonnais anarchist militant who asked Guy Batoux to carry out an attack in Spain (April 1963).

Barbezat, Joséline — in touch with Flores Bartolomé.

Martínez, Juan — propaganda secretary of the CNT’s Lyon branch.

Ros, Antonio — organising secretary of the FIJL National Committee. May well be the Martin Armendariz who gave the final go-ahead in Lyon for attacks, just as he did to Delgado in Paris.

Ros, Matias — anarchist militant, brother of the above.

Sita Setbon, Nicole — doctor, erstwhile liaison agent with the FLN, presently with the Lyon anarchist group.

It would also be advisable to go after the following: Izquierdo, Martin, and Pilar, Françoise — [ both unidentified] 3) IN TOULOUSE Premises — at 4, Rue de Belfort,headquarters of the CNT and FIJL. Individuals Sos Yagüe, José Luis — the FIJL National Committee’s secretary for foreign relations — the wife of the latter, herself an enthusiastic anarchist militant.

Gurucharri, Salvador, aka El Ingles — a member of the FIJL National Committee.

Molina, Antonio — member of the FIJL National Committee Liarte Ruiz, Ramón — named by Pecunia as a CIL official.

Fernández Diez, Ángel — former organising secretary of the FIJL National Committee.

Guinard Fabregat, Enríque — FIJL member in the Toulouse region.

Ramos, Ángel — in Toulouse (Gard), in touch with Ros, Antonio, organising secretary of the FIJL National Committee.

Martin, Moise — in Gaillac (Lot), general secretary of the FIJL National Committee.

Peréz González, Deogratias — distributed FIJL leaflets in Geneva denouncing the financial aid foreign tourists afford Franco. His parents (his father is a CNT member) reside in Albi (Tarn).

4) IN PERPIGNAN Arénas González, Aniano — harboured the famous anarchist terrorist Caraquemada, killed recently by the Civil Guard while trying to sabotage the rail line between Port Bou and Barcelona.

Soler Ciercoles, Francisco — named as a CIL member by Pecunia and in touch with CIL official Guerrero Lucas.

Fernández Afens, Aurelio [sic, possibly Aurelio Fernández Asens]— named by Alain Pecunia and a contact of Guerrero Lucas.

Noel, Jacques — go-between who organised the mission to Spain of young French and Italians from the Pecunia group during the summer of 1962.

Gonzalvo Esteve, Jorge — in Perpignan (Pyrenees-Orientales), member of the FIJL and in touch with a large number of young Italian and Spanish libertarians.

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Lalet, Jeanne — wife of Gonzalvo Esteve, in charge, as is her husband, of liaison between libertarian groups in France, Spain and Italy: frequent visitor to Spain.

5) IN AVIGNON Marquéz Rodríguez, Antonio — CNT sympathiser in Avignon, likely to be entrusted with criminal missions on account of his simple-mindedness.

Municha Larraona, Auguste — treasurer with the CNT in Vaucluse, arrested in June 1963 while distributing FIJL leaflets.

Martí Verdu, Vicente — leading light of the Vaucluse CNT branch, arrested in June 1963 while handing out FIJL leaflets.

Clavero Flores, Andrés — in Avignon (Vaucluse), addressee of telegram from Granado Gata: the latter reported from Madrid to him on the carrying out of his mission.

6) IN GRENOBLE Toledo Nieto, Juan — CNT member, aligned with the ‘hard-line’ tendency.

Morchon, Daniel — CNT member aligned with the ‘hard-line’ tendency.

7) IN SAINT-ETIENNE Navarro, Floreál — in Rouen (Loire), FIJL member. Made several trips to Switzerland and Italy. Could be a liaison agent.

On 11 September 1963, the French authorities arrested twenty-one militants of the Juventudes Libertarias on charges of ‘criminal conspiracy’. On 19 February 1964, Salvador Gurucharri, Vicente Martí Verdu, Antonio Ros Monero, José Pascual Palacios and Agustín Sanchez Fuster, who were still in custody in Fresnes prison in Paris, informed the Minister of Justice by letter that they were beginning a total hunger strike that same day.

José Pascual was released on 23 February 1964, Agustín Sanchez Fuster and Vicente Martí Verdu were freed on 28 February. Salvador Gurucharri and Antonio Ros Monero were released on 29 February.

Background Paper 9: The OAS and Aginter Press THE DIEHARDS of the OAS Z and Delta commandos under French army captain Yves Guillou, also known as Yves Guérin-Sérac, together with various anti-communist and neo-fascist activists, set up an international press agency in Lisbon, in 1966, called Aginter Press. The agency was sponsored by Salazar's secret police, the Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE). The PIDE was the brutally repressive apparatus of the last great European colonial power that, like Franco’s Spain, saw itself as providing the final 'bulwark against international communism'. Aginter Press’s goal statement was: '…to focus the attention of an anxious elite upon the perils of insidious subversion which slowly infiltrates through everyday reports, to denounce its methods and the mechanics of its manoeuvres'.

The agency’s real role was to provide a 'plausibly deniable' proxy and covert intelligence and mercenary agency for the security services of right-wing client states. Its clients included the CIA, the Portuguese PIDE, the Spanish DGS, South Africa’s BOSS, the West German BND, the Greek KYP and the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), Aginter’s primary purpose was to counter and ‘neutralise’ the activities of the growing anti-colonialist movement and the Cuban-backed Tricontinental Congress.

The Tricontinental Congress had been announced at a summit meeting of 31 African states at the end of May 1963. Africa’s leaders agreed that their priority was to rid the continent of the last bastions of old-style white colonialism and replace them with their own privileged elites. The African states may have been

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financial and diplomatic liabilities to the old colonial powers, but there were two new global powers — America and the Soviet Union — hovering in the wings waiting to turn these new client states into geopolitical assets.

The publicity surrounding this first Tricontinental Congress had built it up as a Third World watershed. It was to be a focal point for Third World solidarity in the battle against colonialism and imperialism. For the Americans this meant nothing less than a strong, united Soviet-backed offensive against the US’s containment policy and sphere of influence doctrines and a direct challenge to vital US business interests in key areas of the Third World.

Describing Aginter Press’s personnel, Guerin-Serac wrote: ‘Our number consists of two types of men: 1) Officers who have come to us from the fighting in Indo-China and Algeria, and some who even enlisted with us after the battle for Korea. 2) Intellectuals who, during this same period, turned their attention to the study of the techniques of Marxist subversion… Having formed study groups, they have shared experiences in an attempt to dissect the techniques of Marxist subversion and to lay the foundations of a countertechnique. During this period we have systematically established close contacts with like-minded groups emerging in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Portugal, for the purpose of forming the kernel of a truly Western League of Struggle against Marxism.'

The SDCI, the Portuguese intelligence service set up to replace the hated PIDE, following the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship of Caetano in 1974, confirmed that Aginter Press had begun its operations in Lisbon towards the end of 1965. It also noted, briefly, that the agency had its operational chiefs operating in: ‘…the countries bordering Portuguese Africa…Their aim included the liquidation of leaders of the liberation movements, infiltration, placing informers and provocateurs, and the creation of false liberation movements.’

The disappearance and murder of Ben Barka, the champion of Moroccan independence from Franco, was part of a pattern that saw a similar fate befall other Third World anti-colonialists. Well-known victims included Frelimo leader Eduardo Mondlane and Amilcar Cabral, one of Africa’s foremost revolutionary figures. Another victim was Portuguese opposition leader and self appointed figurehead in the spectacular high-seas hijacking of the Portuguese cruise liner the Santa Maria, General Humberto Delgado. Delgado, a former Portuguese Air Force officer, had probably been the most influential opponent of the Salazar regime and had stood against the Portuguese dictator in the 1958 elections.

Following his defeat due to corruption and fraud, Delgado had gone into exile where he had become a focal point of resistance to the Salazarists. His murdered corpse was discovered on 14 February 1965 on the outskirts of the Spanish town of Badajoz, close to the Portuguese border. Two of Delgado's suspected murderers, officers of the PIDE, were arrested for a short time and ended up with me in the quinta galeria in Carabanchel.

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Background Paper 10: BPS brief (28-9-1961) GENERAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE GENERAL SOCIAL INVESTIGATION COMMISSARIAT GENERAL AND TECHNICAL SECRETARIAT RS. No 10690/XXIV 28 September 1961 CNT ACTIVITIES — IMPORTANT

Required reading for the Regional Brigades and Local Social Investigation Sections in accordance with paragraphs d) and e) of the Organisation of Central and Regional Agencies of the General Security Directorate of 28 October 1959.

Said agencies are to retain this Boletín Informativo for their own use, taking whatever measures its contents may require in the comarcas under their jurisdiction.

Madrid, 28 September 1961 The National Confederation of Labour has recently held two meetings of exceptional interest. One was of a general nature — the 2nd Inter-continental Congress held in Limoges — and the other of a more restricted character, but involving the adoption of accords that may have a direct bearing on public order and peace on our territory. The latter was the Plenum of Local and Comarcal Federations of the Regional Confederation of Labour of Aragón, Rioja and Navarre ‘extraction’.

Whilst not precluding the possibility of a forthcoming fuller report on that 2nd Congress, these are the data relating to the individuals elected on to the incoming Secretariat, insofar as these seem to be decided supporters of ‘direct action’ in the interior, and those relating to the Plenum of the Federations of Aragón, Rioja and Navarre, because it was agreed at the latter, among other things, that ‘shock’ groups would be formed that are prepared to seize the most significant communications centres, power and electricity stations, radio transmitters and other strategic points.

The entire matter is summarised in accordance with the following table of contents: 2nd CONGRESS OF THE CNT IN EXILE Incoming Secretariat; Quality of the leaders; Violent action tactics; Tasks in the interior ; Special sitting THE CNT’S ARAGÓN RIOJA AND NAVARRE REGIONAL

Plenum of Groupings; the delegates; the Regional’s circumstances; ‘The Regional’s development within Spain’; action in the interior; the incoming Regional Committee; Background note II CONGRESS OF THE CNT IN EXILE

The 2nd Congress of the National Confederation of Labour of Spain in exile took place in Limoges (France) during the period 27 to 31 August 1931 and over a number of sessions the items relating to various provinces were dealt with.

The incoming Secretariat

In accordance with customary practice, the aforementioned Congress proceeded to appoint a new Inter-continental Secretariat, with very tight votes being cast, until the line-up made up of the following individuals was arrived at.

General Secretary: ROQUE SANTAMARIA CORTIGUERA, who filled the position during the preceding term, was reelected.

Coordinating Secretary: ÁNGEL CARBALLEIRA REGO. Some 50 years old, a native of Luzon-Villalba (Lugo), in which town he has relations living including his brother Antonio. In exile he served on the Iberian Anarchist Federation’s Liaison Commission from 1955 to 1958. His home is in Toulouse. It should also be pointed out that ÁNGEL CARBALLEIRA was active during the 1936-1939 period as a member of the Action Groups. In France he lives with EULALIA MONTORIO and their three children, one of them GLORIA CARBALLEIRA MONTORIO, born in Barcelona on 28 September 1937.

Cultural and Propaganda Secretary: MIGUEL CELMA MARTI, native of Calanda (Teruel), in which area he was prominent before and during the red era, when he served as Company Political Secretary with the III Battalion of the 119th Mixed Brigade, fleeing to France at the end of the conflict. Since 1954 he has been Secretary of the Calanda Liaison Commission and in 1957 he was appointed General External Relations Secretary with the Iberian Libertarian Youth Federation. In 1958 CELMA MARTI joined the Culture and Propaganda Secretariat of the Inter-continental Secretariat, subsequently serving with the CNT Delegation to the International Workers’ Association.

Organisational Secretary: the previous post-holder, JOSÉ BORRAZ, was reelected.

Administrative Secretary: MARCELINO BOTICARIO. A leading member of the Iberian Anarchist Federation,

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serving as General Secretary of its Liaison Commission. He currently holds the same post on the FIJL’s Liaison Commission.

Director of CNT: Federica Montseny Mañé was reelected to run the confederation’s newspaper.

Quality of the Leaders

It is interesting to note that the incoming leaders of the Inter-continental Secretariat are drawn from the orthodox confederal faction and most of them held organisational office in the specific (anarchist) youth wing of the Spanish Libertarian Movement.

This has triggered a degree of unhappiness among erstwhile militants from the ‘collaborationist’ group which meant to have CIPRIANO MERA SANZ elected to the aforementioned Secretariat, as it appears that he had been canvassed in advance for election, so much so that the groundwork for the organisational work in the interior which he would hope to carry out as holder of the post of Coordinating Secretary had already been laid. As a consequence of this, CIPRIANO MERA SANZ quit the gathering before its business was concluded.

Violent Action Tactics

It appears to be the case that the overwhelming mood of the new post-holders on the Inter-continental Secretariat corresponds to the tactics, principles and aims of libertarian communism, and the launching of ‘direct action’ in the interior, since, at the recent gathering, it was discovered that JUAN PINTADO VILLANUEVA, the previous holder of the post of Coordinating Secretary, had done nothing with regard to the interior of Spain. During his mandate, the more or less organised nuclei lacked aid and propaganda material for distribution.

Tasks in the interior

While those named were appointed to fill their posts beginning on the 21st of this month, they have yet to take possession. It is regarded as highly likely that from this coming October onwards, they may effect a regrouping of the nuclei in the interior, through the sending of Delegates or Liaisons, capitalising upon the fact that one can cross the border with no more than a French identity document, a document that lots of CNT members possess on account of their being French subjects.

Special Sitting

It is known that at meetings that took place outside of the parameters of the Congress an eighth item on the Agenda regarding the interior was dealt with. Two individuals who had travelled up from Madrid attended, as did one representing the Andalusia-Extremadura Regional Committee. Thus far their names and particulars are unknown, although the delegate from the latter body may have been LUIS DEL MORAL GIMENEZ, an individual known for his organisational activities in the interior and who has travelled to France on CNT business on previous occasions.

THE ARAGÓN, RIOJA AND NAVARRE REGIONAL OF THE CNT IN EXILE Plenum of Groupings

In mid-August last, there was a Plenum held in France of the Comarcal and Local Federations, Residential Groupings and militants of the Regional Confederation of Labour of Aragón, Rioja and Navarre ‘extraction’.

It was chaired by the leading CNT member FÉLIX CARRASQUER LAUNED, with a certain MARTIN, the latter representing the Toulouse Delegation and acting as recording secretary, with the former a part of the Paris delegation.

The Delegates

The following individuals featured at the meeting as delegates from the locations set out.

Representing the Paris Organisation.

FÉLIX CARRASQUER LAUNED, JOSÉ ABOS and GIMENO ABOS was bookkeeper with the CNT’s National Sub-committee in 1957 and a member of the Regional Committee. At present no further information is available on GIMENO. Representing the Toulouse Grouping JOSÉ MARTI, who lives in that city, at No 22, Rue de Travaseurs.

Representing the Utrillas Comarca HERRERO and PAZ. Representing the Valderrobles Comarcal JULIAN FLORISTAN, resident in Décazeville, where he lives with NIEVES GONZALEZ GIL. Contributes articles to the anarchist press.

Representing the Albalate de Cinca Comarcal JOSÉ ARISO, resident at 23 Rue Bellegarde, Toulouse, where he acts as treasurer with the Local Branch of the SIA (Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista, the anarcho-syndicalist aid network).

Representing the Uncastillo Comarcal CARMELO CASALE CANO, resident in Valence-sur-Baises (Gers) and formerly Secretary of the Condon Local Federation.

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VILLA, regarding whom no further details are available.

Representing the Monzón Comarcal A certain MUR, no further personal details available.

Also in attendance were members of the Regional’s Liaison Commission, JOSÉ BORRAZ, LORENZO BERNAL and MIGUEL VALLEJO SEBASTIAN. IGNACIO LAZARO was unable to attend due to illness and it was noted that other militants were absent.

The Regional’s Circumstances

In the course of the proceedings and with regard to the matter of the Organisation in the interior, it was pointed out that there is at present no direct liaison with the comrades, even though, they stressed that they were cognisant, through other avenues, of the existence of the odd nucleus.

Even so, FÉLIX CARRASQUER spoke up to offer an analysis of the Regional, in exile as well as in the interior, acknowledging that, due to abandonment by the exterior and disillusionment within Spain, the organisational situation was one of utter inactivity due to loss of the confidence and prestige that the CNT had once upon a time enjoyed on account of the mettle of its personnel who had ensured that Aragón was anarcho-syndicalism’s staunchest bulwark.

In his conclusions, CARRASQUER stated that it had proved impossible to keep a Regional Committee up and running in Zaragoza for more than four months, and that in the days when there was an Organisation, for example during the 1943 to 1947 period. He also pointed out that as a result of police repression it was hard to find ‘untouchables’ suited to organisational office in the interior. However he argued ‘they do exist in exile, from where the Organisation must draw its sustenance.’

Development of the Regional in Spain

Among the resolutions up for discussion was No 5, relating to ‘Development of the Regional in Spain’ and those assembled agreed that whilst in the interior there were not enough comrades to tour the towns and cities on organisation business, the Regional Committee was going to be needing precious personnel for the purpose of carrying out such activities.

Similarly, use would be made of written propaganda insofar as possible so that, once the appropriate body had been set up in the interior, there could be direct liaison between the two responsible bodies. But, for the sake of improved personal safety and effectively in moving around, recourse will be had to ‘lawful’ Delegations, with extralegal ones on stand-by should these fall through, although said liaison would be ensured as long as the Intercontinental Secretariat was kept briefed on activities.

Action in the interior

Another of the resolutions discussed related to ‘means of identifying the struggle and coordination in the interior’.

Here it was agreed that every one of the human and economic resources in exile available to the Regional would be mobilised and deployed so as to raise the spirits of the comrades in the interior.

Since, in the estimation of those assembled, the militants, including those in Zaragoza are known and under surveillance, it was deemed appropriate THAT UNKNOWN EXILE COMRADES SHOULD ENTER SPAIN in order to pursue the following objectives: a) Slowly and deliberately expand the base in order to create a firm and homogeneous climate of opinion. b) To examine crossings and support and reference points for both contacts with the outside as well as between Comarcals, the object being to facilitate communications with other regions. c) Set up the ‘shock’ Groupings required for the seizure of nerve centres (communications centres, trade unions, power and electricity stations, radio stations, armed forces barracks, control points, etc.) with each nucleus taking responsibility for carrying out its own mission. These groups are to be bolstered at crucial moments by the exiled comrades standing by and will abide by the determinations of the representative Committees and in accordance with plans drawn up by the Organisation as a whole.

The incoming Regional Committee

Finally, the new Regional Committee “of origin”, that is, the [regional committee] abroad, was elected. It is made up as follows: FLORENTINO ESTALLO VILLACAMPA, JOSÉ ARISO, JOSÉ MARTI, MIGUEL VALLEJO SEBASTIAN and JOSÉ BORRAZ. Since the Plenum did not specifically appoint a General Secretary, it was agreed that the members of the Committee themselves, named in the preceding paragraph, should co-opt one of their number to fill that post.

Background Note

Apropos of JOSÉ ARISO, this Commissariat-General possesses the following background.

ARISO LLESTA, José — Known as ‘Escanilla’, some 48 years old, son of Eusebio and Maria, a native of Albalate de Cinca (Huesca). A leading member of the Iberian Anarchist Federation who, during red rule in his native village, where he was present, was the material author of murders, looting and theft. Played an active part in attacks upon the Civil Guard and civilian members of the Movimiento Nacional.

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Background Paper 11: BPS brief (10-11-1961) GENERAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE GENERAL SOCIAL INVESTIGATION COMMISSARIAT General and Technical Secretariat RS. No 12.220/XXVIII

Madrid, 10 November 1961 CNT ACTIVITIES IN SPAIN I. DATA ON POLICE INTERVENTION

Point of departure; Madrid, focal point for investigations ; Intervention in other provinces ; Significance of what has been done II. ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE

The National Committee; The Catalonia and Asturias Regional Federations; The Provincial Committees in Andalusia; The Organisation in Zaragoza ; Ramifications in other provinces III. THE ORGANISATION AND ITS OPERATION

Liaison with the exterior; a) Asturias and its contacts with France; b) Liaison between the SI and the National Committee; c) The envoys from exile; d) Economic aid ; Organisational trips; a) Distribution of areas; b) The meagre success of contacts; Propaganda; Other matters IV. DETAINEES

Affiliation and data on their activities (Folio 11 is missing from the photocopy of the original).

IMPORTANT— REQUIRED READING FOR THE REGIONAL BRIGADES AND LOCAL SOCIAL INVESTIGATION

SECTIONS IN ACCORDANCE WITH REGULATIONS d) AND e), PARAGRAPH 16 OF THE ORGANISATION OF CENTRAL AND REGIONAL AGENCIES OF THE GENERAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE, 28 OCTOBER 1959. SAID AGENCIES ARE TO RETAIN THIS BOLETÍN INFORMATIVO FOR THEIR OWN REFERENCE, CARRYING OUT WHATEVER MEASURES ITS CONTENTS MAY RENDER APPROPRIATE IN THE COMARCAS UNDER THEIR JURISDICTION I - DATA ON POLICE INTERVENTION Starting point

At the latest meetings of leading members of the National Confederation of Labour in exile and at the 2nd Congress of Local Federations held recently, a number of decisions were taken regarding reorganisation of the CNT in the interior of Spain, once the two halves into which the entity had been split for some time had been united.

All of which led to the adoption of timely police measures, subjecting potential activities by former CNT personnel (regarded as ideal choices upon which to base this intended reorganisation) to strict surveillance.

Thus the Oviedo Regional Social Investigation Brigade managed to come by a letter addressed to Miguel GONZALEZ LOPEZ, who has plenty of anarchist antecedents, by one Eduardo MADRONA who wrote from Madrid in terms that raised suspicions that he may be engaged in certain subversive activities.

At which point the first named individual was interrogated in the Asturian capital, with the latter clearing up any doubts on this score. In fact, Eduardo MADRONA, aside from his private address, had supplied him with two addresses to which he might turn. These were No 12, Paseo Reina Maria Cristina and No 13, 5º Puerta del Sol, these serving as the starting points for the investigations begun by the Madrid Regional Brigade.

Madrid, focal point of investigations

In the Spanish capital, following extended examination of the details supplied, surveillance focused upon apartment No 11, on the 5th floor of the building at 13, Puerta del Sol. Formally the tenant there was the ‘Gorrón-Madrona’ firm, but no indication of activity of a trading or industrial character justifying its rental could be detected.

Finally, on 19 October last, the arrest was made of Ismael RODRIGUEZ AJAX just as he was preparing to enter the apartment in question. A simple glance established that inside there was a copying machine and numerous copies of CNT propaganda within.

This individual turned out to be the General Secretary of the CNT National Committee which had been set up in Madrid, the information supplied by him and the documentation seized there leading to the capture not just of the other members of the National Committee and of the Madrid local Organisation but also of those in a variety of provinces who had consented to take up various positions in the hierarchy of the CNT Organisation being set up at this point. Thus Madrid served, thanks to the communications exchanged between the corresponding Local Brigades and Sections, to ensure that a simultaneous effort of police activity was crowned by the greatest possible success.

Intervention in other provinces

In tireless trips ranging through a number of locations in our territory, the members of the National Committee had planted, in what they deemed the most strategic points, a number of ‘couriers’ to take delivery of propaganda

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issued from Madrid for further distribution to members of the Organisation linked to the Committee or local organisation where the ‘courier’ was based.

Information regarding the individuals entrusted with this task appeared in the documentation seized in the Spanish capital from the CNT leaders. In each centre, these details supplied the basis for steps taken to smash whatever organisational stirrings had emerged there.

In Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, Asturias, Galicia and various Andalusian cities, it was thereby possible to proceed with the arrests of personnel involved, exposing the structure that the CNT Organisation had adopted in the various localities, under the overall leadership and coordination of the Committee which had been established in Madrid as a body with a national remit.

The particulars of the operation and format adopted by the CNT in these towns will be examined in detail below.

Significance of what has been done

The fact is that the CNT Organisation was now at an embryonic stage, having scarcely developed in terms of its rank and file elements. But the organisational ambitions in terms of reaching out to every single region in Spain through the establishment of Provincial and Regional Committees, something that was being achieved through the tireless endeavours of the members of the National Committee, the huge quantity of propaganda material seized, the direct liaison that had been established with the exile leaders, the plans for the use of violence agreed at various meetings held beyond our borders and similar circumstances speak volumes by themselves for the significance of the police intervention in nipping in the bud something that could undoubtedly have attained a genuinely impressive scale.

II. ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE The National Committee

Towards the end of 1959, Eduardo MADRONA CASTAÑOS set about reorganising the CNT, capitalising upon the fact that, since he had suffered an accident at work, his sickness insurance would cover the costs of a few trips to Asturias and Barcelona.

But the fact is that his efforts met with very little success since he failed to secure the expected assistance from the former CNT personnel whom he visited. His greatest success was a meeting with Ismael RODRIGUEZ AJAX, another CNT old hand, who began to work determinedly on the Organisation’s behalf, coming up with better results and successfully establishing contact with the leaders in exile, who, through an envoy who seems to have been called Joaquin PIJUAN, furnished him with financial support and the necessary instructions to set up a National Committee in Madrid, made up of Ismael RODRIGUEZ AJAX as general secretary, Fidel GORRON CANOYRA as coordinating secretary and Eduardo MADRONA CASTAÑOS who held no specific portfolio.

The Catalonia and Asturias Regional Federations

Whatever was accomplished in Barcelona in terms of organisation was due to the trips and the efforts made by members of the National Committee and above all, in the last instance, by the work done there recently by Fidel GORRÓN CANOYRA. The committee set up in the Catalan capital as a regional committee was made up of Ladislao GARCÍA VELASCO as ‘courier’ in charge of receiving propaganda and liaison with the National Committee, Ginés CAMARASA Í and Francisco J TORREMOCHA ARíAS. These last two fled their homes and have yet to be arrested.

With regard to Asturias, the process of shaping the organisation has been very different. Some CNT veterans from the principality made trips to France for various reasons and there had meetings with a few leaders from the same trade union, among them Ramón ALVÁREZ PALOMO, who encouraged them to try to reorganise themselves into a Regional Committee.

The recipients of this sort of instruction were Nicolás MUÑIZ ALONSO and Aurelio IGLESIAS ALVÁREZ who, upon their return to Asturias, embarked upon the tasks entrusted to them. Soon a committee was set up that had Antonio BERMEJO PEREA as its general secretary and on which Aurelio IGLESIAS PEREA served as ‘courier’ and liaison with the National Committee.

Now, this linkage with the National Committee that had been set up in Madrid came later, through the trip that Eduardo MADRONA made to Asturias. By the time the National Committee was set up, the Asturias Regional was already up and running, having established its own links with the leaders of the CNT in exile.

It had been established that the Local Federation would be based in Gijón and there were Local Committees in La Felguera and Avilés with Manuel FERNÁNDEZ CABRICANO and Nicolás MUÑIZ ALONSO, respectively, as the top leaders.

The Provincial Committees in Andalusia

RODRIGUEZ AJAX took charge of seeing to it that committees were set up in several Andalusian cities which he toured at some length on one of his trips, with widely varying degrees of success. Apparently, each of the organisations set up was of a local or provincial character, although it is reasonable to assume that the trend was towards the establishment of future coordination with the subsequent formation of a Regional Committee.

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In Granada, Carlos SORIANO AGUILA and Rafael ADARVE ESTURIA were the prime movers.

The Almería committee was beginning to be broken down into specific posts and missions. The post of Organising Secretary went to José NUÑEZ ESTRELLA, whilst Francisco VICENTE CORTES was Propaganda Secretary and Francisco PEREZ SEGADO would perform the duties of treasurer.

In Jaén, Francisco CARRASCO Martínez was the ‘courier’ and liaison with the National Committee and he had help from Manuel CHICA GONZALEZ. In Linares propaganda was received by Francisco JUSTICIA CASTRO and José María ROA JUSTICIA set up an offshoot of the Committee in Huelma in Jaén province.

In Seville, José CASTRO BARTUFF was the main figure and he served as ‘courier’ in the receipt of propaganda emanating from the National Committee in Madrid. Mention should also be made of José MARIN SANCHEZ and José ROMERO GONZALEZ. The supreme leader in Córdoba, whose task it also was to take receipt of propaganda, was Joaquín MILLAN MENDOZA who roused some interest in Bartolomé MONTILLA RUIZ, José ESPEJO TRILLO and Juan PARRAGA RAMIREZ in helping out with his clandestine activities. In Castro del Río the Córdoba organisation could count upon Rafael GARCÍA MARIN. Finally, Málaga also came in for some attention from the CNT leadership. Here the role of ‘courier’ and liaison with the National Committee fell to José RAMIRO PORRAS, the most prominent figure, assisted by José CORDOBA GÓMEZ. The organisation in Zaragoza

As a result of the efforts made by RODRIGUEZ AJAX who aimed to set up a Regional Committee covering Aragón, Rioja and Navarre, a Committee was launched in Zaragoza made up of Luis BALLOTA GIL, as Propaganda Secretary, ‘courier’ and liaison with the National Committee, Mariano LENCINA CRESPO as Organising Secretary and Alfredo SOLANAS CAVERO as Coordinating Secretary.

Mariano LENCINA is presently in Colombia, a country to which he emigrated on the appropriate documents, and Alfredo SOLANAS died in the Aragonese capital at the beginning of this year.

Ramifications in other provinces

The personnel of the National Committee tried to set up a Levante Regional based in Valencia. But, in spite of their efforts, all that they had achieved to date was the co-operation of Francisco OROZCO GALLARDO to whom they sent propaganda on several occasions.

Galicia was also visited on their organisational travels by one or other of the CNT leaders. However the practical results of this were practically zero. They did manage to establish a ‘courier’ to take receipt of propaganda in Vilagarcía de Arous (Pontevedra) under the name of one Francisco DURAN, who has yet to be identified.

Nor was Valladolid overlooked on one of the trips of which more later. In that city they secured the co-operation of one JOSÉ — efforts to trace him have yet to yield any results — who even supplied his opinion in writing of the Agenda of a Plenum of CNT Local Federations soon to be held in France. The text of that report was found in the possession of Ismael RODRIGUEZ AJAX. Militants in Madrid

It was only logical that the members of the National Committee based in the Spanish capital would not forget to carry out proselytisation in their own city, alternating this work with those carried out elsewhere.

Among those who cooperated in helping the national leaders in their efforts we might cite Emiliano MIER RODRIGUEZ, Diego CIVICO GARRIDO, Mariano RUIZ GUTIERREZ, Juan MARTÍNEZ GARCÍA and Tomás CÓRDOBA PEREZ. The last of those named was recently commissioned to travel to Andalusia to carry on with the organisational work started there previously by RODRIGUEZ AJAX. For his part, Diego CIVICO had the task of taking receipt at his home of a number of communications which might be sent up from the provinces by members of the various local organisations, in their liaising with the National Committee. Plainly the addresses in the Puerta del Sol cited earlier were also used for these purposes.

Julio PUJOL ARÍAS, visited at his home by Eduardo MADRONA and commissioned by the latter to see to the reorganising of the CNT in the mining district where that city is located has just been arrested in Ponferrada (León).

It seems that he never got around to carrying out any sort of activity.

III. THE ORGANISATION AND ITS OPERATION Liaison with the outside

One point that helps throw into relief the significance that the CNT Organisation which has now been smashed was beginning to acquire is the contact successfully established with the anarchist leaders in exile and even with Roque SANTAMARIA CORTIGUERA himself who, up until the Congress of Local Federations held recently, occupied the post of General Secretary on the CNT’s Inter-continental Secretariat.

The details relating to these relations between the interior and the outside, which are naturally of undeniable

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interest, are dealt with below under the following headings: a) Asturias and its contacts with France

The relations of the Asturian CNT members with those in exile were independent of and predated those established with the Madrid-based National Committee itself.

Nicolás MUÑIZ ALONSO, an individual with plenty of anarchist antecedents, arrested in 1947 for carrying out clandestine activities of that sort, struck up a connection after he came out of prison, with other old militants or prison comrades who had moved to France. Among these were Arturo BOTAMINO GONZÂLEZ and Félix CARRASQUER LAUNED. At the end of 1959 he made a trip to the French capital and there dealt personally with BOTAMINO, the spokesman of the Asturian Regional in exile and with Ramón ALVÁREZ PALOMO, secretary of the Sub-Committee.

They introduced him to an individual living in Gijón who happened to be in the neighbouring country, an individual called Aurelio IGLESIAS ALVÁREZ, and they urged them both, upon their return to Asturias, to talk with Antonio BERMEJO and try to set up a Regional Committee.

After that, propaganda and appropriate instructions arrived from France addressed to IGLESIAS or BERMEJO. Later, once contact was established with Madrid, a large portion of the material came from that city. b) The SI’s formal relations with the National Committee

Once the National Committee had been established in Madrid, something which happened under a year ago, RODRIGUEZ AJAX decided to dispatch Fidel GORRON to France to make contact there with members of the SubCommittee abroad, to press for aid and instructions as well as to establish that the talk of reunifying the CNT was true.

The upshot of these overtures was a promise of help from the leaders in exile and an announcement that specific individuals would be sent to Spain to offer them guidance in their organisational endeavours.

These promises were duly honoured and instructions and propaganda reached the Puerta del Sol premises in the mail.

But the important point to stress here is the invitation issued by the CNT leaders for the members of the recently formed National Committee to travel to Limoges (France), there to attend the II Congress of the Local Federations of the CNT (the I Inter-continental Congress of the CNT in Limoges, August—September 1961 ) albeit only in an observer capacity since only legal Local Federations had any right to take part in the proceedings. This was supposed to signal something akin to an ‘official’ acknowledgment of their existence.

This invitation was taken up by Fidel GORRON and RODRIGUEZ AJAX, the latter having an interview in France with Roque SANTAMARIA himself, who repeated his promise to feed all sorts of support through to the normal development of the Organisation in our country’s interior.

Thus, through the observance of this whole series of formalities, a close relationship was established between the Organisations of the interior and in exile, with the latter able to pass on to the former any instructions and watchwords it saw fit. c) The envoys from exile

In January of this year (1961), in keeping with the above, Joaquín PIJUAN — there is some uncertainty regarding this surname — and Acracio GONZÁLES GUTIERREZ arrived from France.

The former accompanied RODRIGUEZ AJAX on a trip on Organisation business through various regions in Spain in an effort to persuade them to join the new Organisation.

As for Acracio GONZÁLEZ, what he did was to make straight for Andalusia where he knew a number of CNT personnel in order to carry out there the Organisation business entrusted to him. Certain particulars are known regarding this person: He was born in Nerva (Huelva) on 9 May 1915, a married worker, son of Juan and Maria, he lived in Almería up until 1956. It seems that prior to the Movimiento he was a member of no political organisation, and fought as a volunteer in the ranks of the Red Army, being sentenced at the war’s end. In 1947 he belonged to a clandestine body going by the name of the Alianza Nacional de Fuerzas Democraticas, representing the CNT, something that cost him a year in prison. In 1953 he crossed into France with the proper papers and there served on the Local CNT Committee in Clermont-Ferrand, attending a Congress held in Toulouse as its representative.

There is another individual who goes by the name of Manuel MOLINA, who left for France some 12 years ago and who has now popped up again in Córdoba where he visited former CNT members to encourage them to reconstitute themselves organisationally. Several of the persons arrested in Córdoba had had interviews with MOLINA on occasions when the latter had just arrived from the neighbouring country. The relationship between this person and the other two named earlier is unknown. d) Economic aid

The sums of money that the leaders in exile funnelled by various means to those in the interior who had taken on the task of reorganising the anarchist trade union have been quite significant. On the tip that RODRIGUEZ AJAX and Joaquín PIJUAN made through various regions, all of the costs were borne by the latter who, in the month of March

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and in order to egg them on in their endeavours, promised the three members of the National Committee a sort of wage of 100 pesetas a day, each. In July he had Ismael RODRIGUEZ AJAX send the sum of 19,000 pesetas, boosting this shortly afterwards with a further 21,000 brought to Spain by an unidentified woman who came down from Perpignan.

Later and after the interview RODRIGUEZ AJAX had in France with Roque SANTAMARIA, the latter transferred the sum of 46,000 pesetas into the account that Eduardo MADRONA kept at the Banco de Santander. Nor, in this regard, should we overlook the 20,000 pesetas handed over to Fidel GORRON CANOYRA when he was in France to attend the II CNT Congress.

Similarly, small sums of money were handed over to the members of other regional or provincial organisations to cover expenses incurred in carrying out organisational missions.

All of which gives a clear picture of the concern shown by the higher CNT leaders in the Organisation’s making good the growth that it had lost in the interior.

Organisational trips

Several references have been made already to the visits made by National Committee personnel to former CNT members residing in various locations around Spain, with an eye to getting them back on a war footing, incorporating them into the incipient Organisation or trying to coordinate with the leaders in Madrid the stirrings that had spontaneously arisen here and there.

Eduardo MADRONA looked after the North of Spain and his most important business was carried out in Asturias and Galicia. RODRIGUEZ AJAX, although he travelled the entire country, concentrated especially on Aragón and above all Andalusian provinces. For his part, GORRON CANOYRA was in charge of organising Catalonia and at the time of arrest he was in fact in Barcelona tending to the mission entrusted to him.

On the last trip that it was thought opportune to make to Andalusia, RODRIGUEZ AJAX conferred his representation and that of the National Committee upon one of the individuals they had recruited into the Madrid local Organisation. This was Tomás CORDOBA PEREZ, who never got to make the trip. b) The meagre success of contacts

The old CNT personnel who unreservedly accepted the suggestion from members of the National Committee or from envoys from the exiles that they openly assist with reorganisation plans and later engage in the activities that this implied were very few.

The fact is that old CNT hands, after serving a sentence in connection with our war and, in some cases, having been punished for clandestine activities, were weary of having waged an utterly pointless struggle and their ideological ardour had cooled and all they displayed was a wish to carry on living a peaceable life.

It can be said that only those persons who agreed to serve as ‘couriers’ in various places around the country and a few others showed any disposition to carry on and implement the watchwords of the anarchist leaders.

The truth is that failure almost always greeted the organisational endeavours of those who had set themselves the task of refloating the CNT in the interior.

Propaganda

Initially some samples of propaganda were sent from abroad to the Asturian leaders and later to the offices in the Puerta del Sol, together with other writings with instructions and watchwords which arrived in the post or through some person dispatched from the neighbouring country.

But once the National Committee had been set up in Madrid, its members decided to put together large quantities of propaganda material so as to give encouragement to the veteran CNT personnel by giving them the impression that unprecedented activity was already under way.

RODRIGUEZ AJAX, after leasing the apartment in the Puerta del Sol, rented a typewriter and bought a duplicator, thereby beginning to churn out propaganda consisting of CNT, Solidaridad Obrera and the occasional ‘open letter’. All three members of the Committee took their turn at writing all the propaganda material.

As for its dissemination, those copies destined to go beyond the ranks of the Organisation were sent out by post to various addresses or slipped underneath doors on the visits that RODRIGUEZ AJAX made to many buildings in the capital in his capacity as a travelling salesman.

Now the bulk of the propaganda material produced was sent out to the Organisation’s own members across Spain, and to this end transport agencies were used, with packages addressed to the pre-established ‘couriers’ detailed earlier.

The number of copies of anarchist propaganda impounded during the various house searches carried out has proved considerable. It has to be said also that a hand-operated press was found in the Puerta del Sol apartment along with a round seal from the National Confederation of Labour’s N[ational] C[ommittee].

Other matters

One of the tasks that certain CNT personnel carried out was the sending to the leaders in exile of news and reports on the situation in this country so that possible frictions of a social or political character could be picked up by the

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anarchist press. In this regard the general secretary of the Asturian organisation, Antonio BERMEJO PEREA who corresponded with Ramón ALVÁREZ PALOMO, mentioned above, and passed on to him any news that seemed to be of interest, especially distinguished himself.

Sticking with the Committee of Asturias which was no doubt the one that achieved the greatest amount of activity we ought to point out its custom of holding periodic meetings in Gijón, drawing the leading personnel from that city, from La Felguera and from Avilés.

In a different connection, we ought to labour the point that whereas the National Committee formally established only a few months ago made no impact in the interior, this was due to the rapid police intervention that managed to eradicate something that could have achieved a greater significance.

But those few signs of life offered by the Organisation were enough for the outside world to seize upon for propaganda purposes, portraying it with a scale and strength that it never attained.

In exile they insisted that one of the political groups that could oppose the Regime with the greatest chances of success had just been formed and it appears that they were planning shortly to introduce action groups which, mingling with what had been established in the interior, were due to carry out sabotage operations and terrorism, to which end thought was given to furnishing them with the requisite materials.

In the home of Lázaro ARJONA SALAS, the most recent arrest in Madrid, another duplicator machine was found which had been hidden there by RODRÍGUEZ AJAX, apparently until such time as it might be of service to one of the Regional Committees.

Background Paper 12: BPS brief (1-4-1963) BOLETÍN INFORMATIVO OF THE GENERAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE GENERAL COMMISSARIAT FOR SOCIAL INVESTIGATION GENERAL AND TECHNICAL SECRETARIAT To: REGIONAL BRIGADES AND LOCAL SOCIAL INVESTIGATION SECTIONS 1 April 1963 (The document is incomplete. The text is from pages 3, 4 and 6. Names marked with dots are blanked out in the original photocopy.)

ANARCHISM CAMPAIGN AGAINST SPANISH-PORTUGUESE TOURISM Further to the information supplied in Boletín No.XXXIII/1963, ‘OPERATION WARNING’ there are indications that in exile circles the campaign against tourism in Spain and Portugal has been stepped up in an attempt to deny both countries the financial income that tourists’ welcome presence in the peninsula brings in. Trade unionists from the General Workers’ Union and from the

General Confederation of Labour have issued an appeal to the democrats of France and Europe to refrain from visiting Spain or, should they visit this country, to do so with the firm intention of upholding the morale and schooling the Spanish people politically in the circumstances of clandestine struggle.

The ‘activist’ anarchists from the Iberian Liberation Council have decided, and have already acted upon it, to sabotage tourism to the peninsula by means of terrorist outrages, through deeds such as those carried out against planes belonging to the Iberian and TAP airlines.

As stated, the most violently active Spanish anarchist group, the Iberian Libertarian Youth Federation, an offshoot of the National Confederation of Labour of Spain (CNTE) has been planning bomb attacks in Spain and Portugal for the past two years, for the purpose of creating a climate in those two countries favourable to carrying out the revolution in every stratum of society.

As a general rule, this involves younger elements and intellectuals who, stimulated by Castro-ism, believe there are greater opportunities for successful action in libertarian Organisations than in any other.

Likewise, older Spanish anarchists, seemingly supporters of the moderate political views of the CNT’s leaders, such as ********* , bourgeoisified by comfortable material circumstances, are nevertheless ready to participate in dangerous operations, albeit mainly as liaison agents or recipients of materials.

The discovery last April of significant documentation on the ‘activist’ anarchist groups from France ****** has shown that under the FIJL umbrella there lurks a clandestine anarchist network which reaches into most countries in Europe and South America.

With the assistance of home-grown personnel from said countries, they all make up an ‘international team’ equipped with a command staff and driven by a new spirit of discipline that contrasts with the uncontrollable anarchist methodology of the old specific groups of Sabaté and ‘Caraquemada’.

The centre for the preparation and propaganda of these subversive intrigues and campaigns is in Paris, where the FIJL branch has for some time now been regarded as the best-equipped adversary of the reformist policy of the CNTE’s leaders and as a determined champion of direct action.

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In any case, the Iberian Liberation Council has claimed responsibility for the attacks mounted during the summer of 1962 in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, San Sebastian, Lisbon and Milan.

According to reports, the main commandos originated in France and returned to France upon completion of their mission and the young French and Italian anarchists involved had back-up from former members of the French ‘support networks’ of the National Liberation Front (FLN).

At one stage in these operations, the Organisation’s immediate target was the premises of official Spanish state agencies: the Instituto Nacional de Prevision in Madrid and Barcelona, the Colegio Universitario in Barcelona, the Ayuntamiento in Valencia, the environs of the Ayete Palace in San Sebastian, the editorial offices of the newspapers Ya and La Vanguardia in Madrid and Barcelona, etc., in a political-terrorist campaign against the Regime.

From autumn 1962 on, the Iberian Liberation Council determined to concentrate its offensive on the sabotage of European tourism to Spain and Portugal, by means of leaflets distributed in profusion in those countries and in France, alerting international tourists to the risks they run in using the Iberia and TAP airlines. Those leaflets were reprinted by Nueva Senda, the FIJL organ, and, since the beginning of the year, by the CNT’s Espoir, published in Toulouse.

Moreover, also in the Toulouse area, the Alianza Sindical Española (ASE), an umbrella group for the socialist trade unionists of the UGT, the Basque Christian-Democrats from Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos and the ‘realist’ Anarchists of the CNT, has just associated itself with the Espoir campaign.

Likewise, a further wave of attacks began in the early days of the month of June at four different points in Europe: London, Geneva, Frankfurt and Madrid, with explosions and ensuing fires in trunks or suitcases, in this instance.

On the other hand, during the same period, nothing of the sort happened in France, even though the largest and most active group of the FIJL anarchists is based in that country.

This absence may be explained by two hypotheses:

The recent investigations, examination and confirmation of the status of activists and anarchists, have led the latter to fear that, in the event of terrorist acts like the previous ones, police action might hit important personnel who have thus far been regarded as untouchables.

- Because the terrorist centre from where the commandos leave with instructions and material has been set up in France itself, it is now regarded as advisable that France, as the seat of the driving force and coordinating centre, should be left out and kept separate from the ‘centre of operations’.

Bear in mind the fact that, at the time of the attacks in Spain between 6 and 8 April, the three young anarchists set out from Paris and Lyon without any known prior contact between them, and likewise ignorant of the fact that their own respective terrorist act would be replicated in other Spanish cities.

On the other hand, the impact made by the Iberian Liberation Council has not been very effective, in terms either of quantity or quality, so much so that, as we have stated, it has not hesitated to use young and ‘green’ French students likely to break down under questioning, added to the fact that one of them, PECUNIA, could reasonably have been assumed to be known to the Spanish police, as indeed he was, on account of his involvement in last year’s terrorist acts.

However, the coordination in the movements of the terrorist commandos indicates the presence on the Iberian Liberation Council of a guiding hand carrying out a preconceived tactic and demonstrating an overall vision and consistency in its aims.

Finally, the existence within the anarchist network on an international scale of an undeniable spirit of selflessness and a growing enthusiasm for mutual aid more than compensate for the principles of discipline and hierarchy traditionally missing from every libertarian Organisation.

Background Paper 13: BPS brief (22-4-1963) BOLETÍN INFORMATIVO THE GENERAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE GENERAL COMMISSARIAT FOR SOCIAL INVESTIGATION GENERAL AND TECHNICAL SECRETARIAT To: THE REGIONAL BRIGADES AND LOCAL SOCIAL INVESTIGATION SECTIONS 22 APRIL 1963

(This document is incomplete) TERRORIST ACTIVITIES IN BARCELONA, VALENCIA AND MADRID INTRODUCTORY NOTE

At 10.25 a.m. on the 6th of this month, while it was near the Atarazanas wharf in Barcelona, there was a sizable explosion on board the vessel Ciudad de Ibiza belonging to the Compania Transmediterranea, shuttling between Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona: initially the explosion was put down to some failure of the engine pistons.

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When an inspection was carried out in an effort to establish the cause, the ship’s officers were able to establish that in lifeboat number one, located on the deck, there was a gash measuring some 50 by 20 centimetres towards the bows and on the port side, and it could be seen that the timber of said boat was broken and splintered.

A once-over inspection later by police officers from the Barcelona Regional Brigade, whilst establishing that it bore all the characteristics of a terrorist action, shed no light upon the sort of explosives used.

Likewise, on the 8th of that month, there was a loud explosion in the Calle de La Paz in Valencia in the vicinity of the central office of Iberia Airlines, causing material damage and slightly injuring a few passers-by.

Immediately following the terrorist attack upon the boat mentioned earlier, the Barcelona Social Investigation Agency, in ongoing contact with colleagues in Madrid and Valencia, launched appropriate inquiries to trace the perpetrators and, if possible, the political affiliations of same and their connections abroad, which were in fact not in doubt, given the anti-Spanish campaign waged by extremist exiles and organisations based mainly in France and Italy.

Background

The investigations carried out took account of the activity and trajectory of the Spanish Libertarian Movement and, naturally, of its ‘Defensa Interior Committee’ which, as we know, had taken on the task of preparing autonomous groups, each one independent of the other, for the carrying out of acts of terrorism and sabotage in the interior as well as against our diplomatic representations abroad.

The clandestinity and independence of the groups is so emphasised that in fact the ‘commandos’ operate completely independently of one another and their members are not familiar with one another. c) Madrid Immediately after the act of terrorism mounted against the Ciudad de Ibiza was officially notified, police officers from the Madrid Regional Social Investigation Brigade implemented intensive surveillance measures, mainly at the termini of the various airlines and premises of Embassies, Consulates and diplomatic outlets, in order to proceed with the arrest of the student of French nationality who travelled to Madrid carrying the explosive materials with instructions to plant it immediately.

The requisite inquiries were made in hostelries and recreational establishments frequented by foreign students so to thwart the terrorist plan designed to disrupt tourism in Spain and hinder the successful conclusion of trade treaties with the United States.

In the interim, at 1.30 a.m. on 8 April, a telephone call was received from the University station reporting that at No 48, Calle de Joaquín María López, on the steps of the park, an individual had been discovered, unconscious and in a heavily intoxicated state.

Identified at the first-aid post as French subject ******* he was moved to the Provincial Hospital: after a comprehensive search, he was found to be in possession of a cigarette pack containing two fulminate detonators, a plastic container containing white powder, a tiny bottle containing a colourless liquid, a wallet holding notes in French and German plus the sum of 4,512 pesetas.

After appropriate steps had been taken to prevent any possible escape from the hospital in question, since there was every indication that ******* was, in any case, a dangerous individual, once he had recovered from the heavy drunkenness from which he was suffering, officers from the Brigade proceeded to arrest him and escort him to the station.

It also turned out that the last time he spoke with******* the latter handed him some plastic gear like his own, which he in turn passed on to a certain ******* — doubtless an assumed name — at Bayonne station and he made the journey from Irun to Madrid on the same train but in a different compartment, and whom he last saw in the Estación del Norte in Madrid when they both arrived in the capital on the 4th of this month.

On the 6th he visited the Valle de los Caídos together with a Jesuit priest whom he had happened to meet on the trip to Madrid and on that occasion had not been able to plant the explosives which he was carrying because the opportunity did not arise, since he could not get away from his companions, the aforementioned priest and his secretary. He consequently abandoned the package of explosives in some rocks on the return journey.

During the time he spent in Madrid he also made a number of exploratory visits to the environs of the US Embassy in the Calle Serrano, in order to reconnoitre its precise location, the movements of personnel, the timing and opportunities to plant the explosive device with which he had been issued, and finally planned to plant it at the main door of the Embassy in the Calle Serrano at 11.00 p.m. on Tuesday, the 9th of this month, in which intention he was thwarted due to his having been arrested in the circumstances described.

Whereas he claimed not to know if the Organisation had dispatched people into the Spanish interior to carry out acts like the one it had entrusted to him, it transpired that ******* had the specific task of travelling to Seville to plant explosives on a ship and another at the US Consulate in the city: it emerged in any event that, on the decision of the leaders, the Paris groups would take charge of the carrying out of said acts against airlines, travel agencies and tourist offices, whilst the Lyon groups in turn would see to the Embassies and Consulates in conjunction with the Toulouse groups, which, for the time being, would look after the introduction and distribution of propaganda.

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NEW APPROACH TO OPERATIONAL TACTICS

Through questioning of those arrested in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid, it emerged that there was a new tactic in the approach to and development of acts of terrorism, as follows: 1. - Raising the profile, which consists of creating a climate of insecurity in international tourism, in order to prevent visits to Spain, mounting a campaign of agitation and propaganda to that effect, including by means of anonymous telephone calls announcing acts of sabotage against aircraft, etc.

2. - Issuing warnings, or a campaign of terror consisting of the planting of explosive devices at airline and shipping companies and, in a special way, at US Embassies and Consulates in Spain for the purpose of disrupting relations between the two countries.

3. - Symbolism, rooted in the mounting of acts of sabotage against para-state organisations, like the Instituto Nacional de Prevision, the newspapers of the Movimiento, the Banks and attacks upon the life of the Head of State.

4. - Through the courts, consisting of a campaign in support of political prisoners, an amnesty for same, etc., and, specifically, on behalf of the young libertarians arrested as well as other gestures, such as demonstrations against our diplomatic representations abroad, etc., etc.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EXPLOSIVES

The aforementioned interrogations also made it possible to determine the characteristics, composition, etc, of the devices that exploded on the Ciudad de Ibiza and in the Calle de La Paz in Valencia, as well as the ones that were due to be used in Madrid.

Broadly speaking, these are long packages about 10 cms in length, 8 cms across and 3 cms thick, with a malleable or ‘plastic’ explosive base into which a detonator is stuck, with one end sticking out and with the whole thing covered with gunpowder: some 100 gms of a potassium chlorate-sugar blend, topped off with an inverted capsule of sulphuric acid so that the acid oozes out slowly and ignites the gunpowder.

THE DETAINEES AND THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES

(1******* { 1. = Alain Pecunia} born 23 August 1945 in Ivry-sur-Seine (Paris), residing at No 1, Rue Dr Labbe, a student with Communist Party links from the age of 13 and later linked with the French Anarchist Federation as part of the so-called ‘Louise Michel’ group.

For the past year he has, in accordance with the precepts of the FAF, been collaborating with the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) and, as stated, with the terrorist ‘commandos’ in Spain. In order to carry out his mission in Spain he received the sum of 30,000 francs from the Organisation. He operated absolutely on his own, without any contacts or back-up in Spain, in implementing the tactics currently employed by the Organisation vis à vis actions to be carried out in our country.

(VERBATIM REPRODUCTION OF PAGES 5, 9, 11 and 12, the only ones we have. The names indicated by dots are blanked out in the original copy.)

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My World — And Welcome To It January 1960 to Summer 1968 THE FOLLOWING CHRONOLOGY is my personal and subjective political tapestry — seismograph, perhaps — of what I believe to be some of the life-determining issues and events that made the 1960s a particularly radical decade. I have included it because I think it provides a useful geopolitical and parapolitical backdrop to the events described in the present work, and it also helps explain a little about the world we live in today.

Since the early 1950s we had been subjected to a constant threat of imminent nuclear war — a final confrontation from which there would have been no escape for humanity. Things came to a head in October 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis. The ten days or so of the Caribbean standoff created a real sense that events were getting catastrophically out of hand and that if we were to achieve anything we had to act outside the existing power structures. Also, still fresh in our collective conscience was the powerful judgement handed down at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal that individuals have a moral duty to resist wrongdoing by states in pursuit of their domestic or global interests.

My listing might appear to be a bit of a disparate mishmash, but the underlying storyline is that the struggle between the forces of selfish acquisition and fairness grew steadily until 1968 when the governments of the leading capitalist industrialised countries became seriously concerned about the widespread collapse of acquiescence and the questioning of authority among the young, particularly among students. Governments were simply unable to accommodate the uncompromising political and social demands being made by a new generation of frustrated, dissatisfied and overeducated young idealists who were challenging and undermining their political, military and economic pre-eminence. The response to this 'communist' subversion by the governments of the Western industrialised states was to begin the roll-back of democracy, a manipulative process which took different forms in different countries. In Europe, the most dramatic example occurred in Italy, with the government-backed 'strategy of tension' in which hundreds of innocent people paid with their lives as the US-backed Christian Democrats sought to hang on to power by demonising the left as 'terrorists'.

Many of my generation saw the 1960s primarily in terms of personal relationships, material standards, customs and behaviour, drugs, sexual liberation, music and fashion. Beatniks became hippies who confused libertarian ideas with libertinism. They also confused self-expression with self-indulgence. The 1960s youth subculture gave birth to new media stars and business tycoons who were being created out of the alchemical reaction between technology, travel, communications and rock music which was to become the universal language of young people everywhere.

But for me (as for many others), we wanted radical change — as well as a good time. We were children of the age and resistant to the bullying pressure to conform to the will of arbitrary authority. The principal threads and important themes which ran through my particular tapestry were those of the (to me) still unfinished Spanish Civil War; decolonisation; anti-racism; the antinuclear and anti-Vietnam War movements. But the political catalyst of the decade was, undoubtedly, the Vietnam War which cost the lives of 47,000 Americans and 1.4 million Vietnamese.

Irrespective of ideology, the Vietnamese people were clearly fighting a war of independence. Unlike World War Two, the war in Vietnam — prosecuted by the United States with no sense of righteousness in pursuit of a policy of global power and containment which few people understood or sympathised with — was widely seen as an unjust and asymmetrical American war which incited disgust and anger, and sparked off a dramatic upsurge of dissent in the West, connecting and politicising a new generation to the struggles for liberation in the Third World.

The hidden hand which I saw in the geopolitical weft and warp of the 1960s (and subsequently) was that of an aggressive global foreign policy pursued by the USA to contain and roll-back communism which it saw as the principal threat and obstacle to its sphere of global influence. America wanted to make the world safer for the spread of its particular brand of aggressive capitalism by arranging — both overtly and covertly — the internal affairs of Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America to its own direct advantage. This meant, in effect controlling demands for popular democracy and economic equality in the distribution of wealth.

And so began America’s post-World War Two rise to global power. It became a ‘Holy War’, one based on what Norman Mailer described in his account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon, Armies of the Night, as a consensus ‘among the most powerful wasps in America — statesmen, corporation executives, generals, admirals, newspaper editors...’. It was a ruthless and prolonged crusade driven by the fanatical fixed idea that communism had to be defeated no matter what the cost. American capitalist hegemony was the best and only solution for the rest of the world (and American interests). This Jihad acquired momentum with US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s ‘alliance’ building in the 1950s (eg SEATO), but for me, the moment of peripeteia — the turning point on which depended the outcome of much of which happened later — was the election of John F Kennedy and the coming to power of the associated financial and corporate elites in Washington in January 1961. In the pursuit and sustenance of its global objectives, the US government established and sustained its own network of corrupt and terror-sponsoring surrogates and client states throughout Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia (as well as Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and Christian Democrat Italy). The leaders of these US-acquiescent states were guilty of the most heinous crimes against humanity, and all in the name of a near religious anti-communism.

Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the implosion of Marxism as a credible ideology of liberation, the new demon is ‘terrorism’, the non-governmental use of violence and intimidation for social and political ends. The means employed are arbitrary pre-emptive actions subject to none of the generally accepted 'rules of warfare'. It is ironic that the principal ‘terrorists’ in the US’s eyes in 2003 are the very ‘freedom fighters’ they employed and financed in the 1980s to topple Soviet communism. The chickens are coming home to roost!

1960 1 January: Madrid — Following US President Eisenhower’s visit to Spain (21-23 December), Spanish media publish Franco's end-of-year message denouncing masonic plots against Spain and the 'formalist inorganic' Western democracy. He praises the 'organic democracy' of the fascist Movimiento Nacional and proclaims that because his regime is provisional it is, therefore, not a dictatorship.

4 January: Spanish Pyrenees — Gun battle between a 100-strong Civil Guard unit and a small anarchist guerrilla group of the Movimiento Unificado de Resistencia por la Liberación de España (MURLE). Four young members of the group — Antonio Miracle, Rogelio Madrigal, Francisco Conesa and Martín Ruiz — are killed, as is a Civil Guard lieutenant. The group’s leader, Francisco Sabaté Llopart, Franco's ‘Public Enemy No. 1’, is badly wounded but manages to escape.

A member of the local Falangist (fascist) militia, the Somatén, shoots Sabaté dead in cod blood the following day in the Catalan village of San Celoni.

24 January: Algiers — A state of siege is declared following a week-long uprising by white European settlers protesting at de Gaulle’s recall to France of General Jacques Massu, the senior military commander in Algiers (for suspected complicity with the colonial settlers). They launch a murderous campaign in Algeria using the new plastic explosive. Nineteen settler activists are indicted for rebellion; a military tribunal in Paris tries 16; 3, including Pierre Lagaillarde, the ideological ‘father’ of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrèt - OAS, flee to Spain and Portugal where they set up their operational bases.

31 January: USA — John F. Kennedy announces his candidacy for the forthcoming US presidential elections in November.

February: Paris — The Directorio Revolucionaria Ibérica de Liberación (DRIL) (Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian Liberation - DRIL) launches its anti-Salazarist and anti-Francoist resistance campaign with a series of propagandist bomb attacks on key government buildings throughout Spain and Portugal.

February: USA — Widespread protests by students and others at the execution of the murderer Caryl Chessman who had been held on death row for twelve years.

1 February: Greensboro, North Carolina — Sit-in of four black students at a

‘whites only’ lunch counter in Woolworths store. Others join them and a wave of sit-ins in protest against racial discrimination sweeps across the American South.

(On the legal grounds of the 1954 US Supreme Court judgement that racial discrimination was unconstitutional.)

3 February: London — Prime Minister Harold Macmillan makes a pivotal speech to South Africa’s parliament stating that a 'wind of change' is blowing through Africa, i.e. that independence for European countries’ colonies and dependencies on the continent is inevitable and will be irreversible. The geopolitical consequences mean a shift in the strategic thinking of NATO (i.e. the USA government) to influence the emergence into sovereignty of the old colonies and dependencies, and to counter anti-western nascent national liberation movements in both Africa and Asia in order to keep them within the West’s sphere of influence. One clandestine option to this end is to kill the more intractable nationalist leaders and replace them with ‘friends of the West’, champions of private enterprise and committed anti-communists who will support NATO and the US in preventing former colonialist regimes and interests being replaced by pro-Soviet or Chinese Communist ones like Castro’s in Cuba.

3 March: Madrid — Two bombs planted by activists of the Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian Liberation (DRIL) explode in Madrid, one in the Ayuntamiento (City Hall), the other accidentally in the hands of the man carrying it, Ramón Pérez Jurado, killing him instantly. Three more bombs are discovered when police raid the flat of Antonio Abad Donoso, another member of the DRIL team.

8 March: Madrid — Antonio Abad Donoso is garrotted in Carabanchel prison, 5 days after the City Hall explosion.

25 March: Sharpeville — During a turbulent demonstration organised by the Pan African Congress (PAC) in protest against the apartheid pass laws, the South African police shoot dead 56 black Africans and injure 162 others in the black Transvaal township of Sharpeville. Almost all the dead and wounded are shot in the back with expanding dum-dum bullets while trying to escape the massacre.

The outrage provokes international condemnation of the National Party’s apartheid regime and brings about South Africa’s expulsion from the British

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Chronology — 1960-1961 Commonwealth. Widespread consumer boycotts of South African produce begin, which last until the ending of apartheid over thirty years later.

Spring: USA — The American Socialist Party sets up a separate youth organisation, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

April: USA — Formation of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in protest against hostile US government policy towards Castro’s Cuba.

May: San Francisco — Student-led demonstrations against the reactionary activities and influence of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

20 May: Spain — Franco cancels both legs of the quarter-finals of the first-ever European nations Cup between Spain and the Soviet Union. Franco insists both legs be played on neutral ground, to avoid the predicted popular demonstrations in favour of the Soviet team.

21 June: Congo — Patrice Lumumba nominated first premier of an independent Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo).

26 June: Africa — British Somaliland and French Madagascar given independence.

27–29 June: Spain and Portugal — Concerted bomb attacks by the Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian Liberation (DRIL) directed against government buildings throughout Iberian Peninsula.

Summer: Italy — The shift to the 'centre-left' (as perceived by the reactionary right) in European politics causes alarm and concern within conservative circles, particularly in Italy. The Vatican hails authoritarian Christian Democrat Prime Minister Tambroni as the 'wise and strong man'. The fascist Movimiento Sociale Italiano (MSI) is sufficiently confident to convene a national party conference under the chairmanship of Carlo Emanuele Basile, a former fascist prefect of Genoa whose name had figured in the list of war criminals. Twelve people are killed and many hundreds are injured in the anti-fascist riots that follow in most industrial cities throughout Italy. Stefano Delle Chiaie (SDC), a member of Pino Rauti's Nazi Ordine Nuevo (ON) organisation, later claimed it was around this time that he was recruited by an officer of the (Christian Democrat-controlled) Ministry of the Interior's Bureau of Confidential Affairs under Federico Umberto D’Amato to undertake covert operations against anti-fascists and left-wing militants. SDC leaves ON to set up his own neo-fascist organisation — Avanguardia Nazionale (AN), whose gangs become the core activists of statesponsored terror for two decades. AN is financed to the tune of 300,000 lire a month by Lombard cement manufacturer Carlo Pesenti.

Summer: London — Solidarity group (or 'Socialism Reaffirmed') formed by disenchanted veterans of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League (SLL) and the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although avowedly Marxist, they are antibureaucratic in structure, libertarian in outlook, very industry focused and close to the anarcho-syndicalist concept of workers' control, i.e. direct self-management by the workforce.

6 July: Africa — Congolese army mutinies against Lumumba's government and European settlers. Five days later, Katanga province splits from the new republic, claiming total independence.

12 July: Africa — French Congo, Chad and Central African Republic gain independence from France. Swift decolonisation is de Gaulle’s strategy for winning the Third World’s support for a French Commonwealth and between 1961 and 1962 de Gaulle grants autonomy to nearly all French Africa. De Gaulle’s eminence grise, Jacques Foccart, head of the security service, the SAC (Service d’Action Civique) sabotages the idea at the outset.

7 August: Cuba — Castro nationalises all US-owned property in in Cuba in retaliation for what it describes as 'US economic aggression'.

30 September: UN — 15 new African states are admitted to the U N. Autumn: UK — Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (formed 1958) evolves into the new London-based Committee of 100, a group committed to the Ghandian tactic of non-violent civil disobedience. The C100 attracts radicals from the traditional left and the libertarian left, as well as old pacifists and new antimilitarists.

9 November: Washington DC — John Fitzgerald Kennedy is elected President of the United States with a 120,000 majority over Richard Nixon. This majority is due to the Italian vote, mobilised by the mafia, which in assuming office he proceeds to persecute, signing his own death warrant in November 1963.

29 December: South East Asia — Laos appeals for UN aid against ‘North Vietnamese aggression’.

London — Prime Minister Harold Macmillan tries to persuade the War Office (Ministry of Defence) to locate the US Polaris missile-carrying submarines (which are medium-range and require a forward base closer to the Soviet Union than American waters) anywhere but Clydeside. Macmillan, whose family originates from the Island of Arran in the Clyde estuary, knows siting the missiles in the Holy Loch could cause major political problems and believes the idea to be politically ‘unsaleable’, being too close to Glasgow, a city with ‘large numbers of agitators’.

Macmillan finally capitulates to US pressure and agrees to locate the American

nuclear submarine base on the Clyde. In 1956, the US effectively halted the joint British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis, which led to the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden as prime minister and his replacement by Macmillan. The Conservative government had then been close to open conflict with the United States over who should be the dominant power in the Middle East, but by 1960 Macmillan had come to terms with the new realities of world power and committed Britain to a close working relationship with the US, making the country America’s bridge to the European Common Market. In return, the US would support Britain as a nominal world power. Central to the new relationship is the US’s support for Britain's nuclear weapons system. In 1951 Britain had become the world's third nuclear power and by 1957 had exploded its first hydrogen bomb, but its problem was delivery. During the 1950s Britain relied heavily on its fleet of V-bombers that were now obsolescent.

Attempts to develop a British missile system had failed and Britain now had no way of delivering a nuclear strike on Moscow — except by Pickfords. With the country's status as a world power and membership of the UN Security Council at stake, Macmillan's deal is crucial: the US offers Britain use of its Polaris missiles using US rocket power and British atomic warheads — but based on the Clyde.

Macmillan is proved right about Clydeside being the worst place to locate the Polaris missiles and the decision provokes a mass protest movement and politicises large numbers of young people, including myself.

19 December: Spain — Mariano Navarro Rubio, Franco's Finance Minister, announces Spain’s first Development Plan, drawn up in conjunction with the World Bank.

1960: London — British army counter-insurgency expert Frank Kitson publishes Gangs and Counter Gangs, a memoir of his role in the anti-Mau Mau emergency in the mid 1950s in Kenya. In much the same way as the Guardia Civil in Spain ran their own pseudo-’guerrilla’ gangs to discredit and entrap the genuine rural guerrillas who operated throughout Spain in the early 1950s, Kitson develops and hones this same technique which he later uses against anti-colonialist rebels in Malaya, Aden, Kuwait, the Oman, Cyprus and Northern Ireland.

1961 UK — THE British government sets up a Committee of Enquiry under Lord Robbins into the state of higher education in the UK, dominated for 700 years

by Oxford and Cambridge universities. In 1901 Britain had fewer universities per head than any other country in Europe except Turkey and by 1957 this situation had hardly improved. In a league table published by UNESCO, out of twentyeight countries, Britain was fourth from the bottom — better only than Ireland, Turkey and Norway. New redbrick universities are proposed for East Anglia, York, Lancaster, Warwick. Kent and Sussex, the last at Brighton, with its focus on social studies, proves to be the most popular. The thinking behind these new universities is to obscure class barriers by extending higher education and absorbing young working- and lower-middle-class people into the system.

However, the unintended consequence of this policy is that it also creates a seedbed of problems of ‘governability’ for the state. The first intakes of new redbrick students (particularly those studying sociology, the arts and politics), effectively creates a large number of highly educated young people — the 'generation of 1968' — whose expectations of society and democracy the state will find impossible to meet. The explosion in higher education creates, from 1967 onwards, a generation of discontented, 'over-educated' college students drawn from mainly working-class backgrounds. Many of the new student intake share a declining respect for traditional authority and party loyalties and are increasingly imbued with democratic, egalitarian and individualistic expectations that the political system can never meet. Lord Robbins obviously never saw Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest: in which Lady Bracknell declaims at length about the dangers of educating the working classes: ‘The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.’

The lack of deference is accompanied by a growing sense of ‘alienation’ that permeates industrialised societies at the time as a result of being separated from the goods they produce and the fact that the machines they operate are regulating their very lives. Some of this ‘alienation’ can be seen in the popular new films of the time such as Karl Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, based on Alan Sillitoe’s novel. Politically, the gap is widening between a bureaucratically controlled society and the people whose decisions control the quality of life. One example of this is an insensitive housing policy. Developed apparently for the purpose of work and profit, the new, vast, impersonal highrise housing estates show no evidence in their design of any regard for the needs of the people who have been forcibly uprooted from their inner city areas with — whatever else they lacked — a strong sense of community.

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Chronology — 1961 A similar process is at work on the industrial front where the authority of the trade union leadership is also being challenged by a rebellious rank and file. Even apprentices precluded from strike action (according to the terms of their indentures) take industrial action — as in the Glasgow engineering apprentices strike of 1959. The Royal Commission on Trades Unions (the Donovan Commission) notes that unofficial strikes called by militants beyond the control of the full-time officials who constitute the trade union leadership are now commonplace, to the extent that actual pay levels by far exceed those negotiated between employers and official union representatives; this difference is known as the ‘wage drift’. The government responds by adopting a strategy of either incorporating militants into the formal negotiating machinery, to maintain ‘consensus’ or, if the militants refuse to be tamed, to expel them, depriving them of both influence and livelihood. The lack of confidence in the institutions and processes of government is accompanied by a lack of enthusiasm for any alternative existing institutions. As far as many young people and rank-and-file activists are concerned, the political and trade union leaders no longer fulfil the function for which they were elected. Generally speaking, people at the base of society begin to question the usefulness of leaders logic and loyalty invariably appear to undergo a massive about-turn on election to parliament or co-option on to a government planning body. They are now inside the tent pissing out, rather than the other way about. Activists increasingly look to resolving their own problems through collective or individualistic processes which completely bypass the traditional instititional systems and political parties.

Rome — Interior Ministry agent and Avanguardia Nazionale founder Stefano Delle Chiaie is arrested and charged with removing the flag of the wartime antifascist and anti-German Resistance from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

3 January: Washington — Although not officially in power, the foetal Kennedy administration breaks off diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Scotland, Holy Loch — US Polaris nuclear-missile-carrying submarines arrive in the Clyde estuary, turning Glasgow into Ground Zero, a first-strike target in the event of what appears to be a highly possible nuclear attack.

20 January: USA — J. F. Kennedy is sworn in as US President. Among his first appointments is to make John McCone Director of the CIA and James Jesus Angleton head of CIA counter-intelligence. Angleton, an old Italian hand is a close friend and protector of the leading Italian fascist Prince Valerio Borghese.

Angleton is also one of the most important US Intelligence manipulators in postwar Italian politics and security issues, up to and including the early 1970s. (He is, incidentally, reputedly the model for the sinister omnipresent background figure of ‘the smoking man’ in the 1990s and later TV series, The X Files). JFK’s inaugural address clearly signals US foreign policy intentions and global aspirations for the new decade — with Africa, Asia and Latin America as the main prizes. Kennedy’s agrressive global strategy, heavily dependent on covert operations, proxy guerrilla warfare and terrorism by plausibly deniable agents as a means of avoiding direct military (and hence possibly nuclear) confrontation with Russia and China, spells disaster for the peoples of the young emergent nations of Africa, Asia and South America struggling to discard the influence of the old colonial rulers and warlords.

The consequence of aggressive military, diplomatic and economic US interventionism, as expounded by Kennedy, with its policy of bombing and intimidating recalcitrant Third World regimes into fragile or more often illusory peace and prosperity by shoring up the regimes of barbaric and ruthless clan chieftains and warlords, condemns millions of people emerging from the yoke of colonialism to years of misery, violence or death.

21–22 January: South Atlantic — A group of 24 Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American anarchists and other anti-fascists operating under the name of the Directorio Revolucionaria Ibérica de Liberación (DRIL) seize control of the Portuguese luxury liner the SS Santa Maria, bound from Caracas to Port Everglades on the Florida coast, on the high seas. The objective is to mobilise world opinion against Iberian dictators Franco and Salazar. The hijackers’ intention is to land on the island of Fernando Pó in Spanish Guinea and from there move on to the Portuguese colonies of Säo Tomé y Principe in the hope of launching an insurgency to liberate Equatorial Guinea and the Portuguese colony of Angola.

3 February: Brazil — The hijackers of the SS Santa Maria (now renamed the SS Santa Liberdade and surrounded by ships from the US’s Sixth Fleet) surrender the ship to the Brazilian Navy in the port of Recife. The 24 DRIL hijackers are welcomed as heroes and political refugees and given a presidential banquet.

Ironically, that same day sees the first armed clashes of the anti-colonial struggle in Luanda, the capital of Angola.

23 February: London — C100 organises sit-down of 4,000 demonstrators outside Ministry of Defence. In Glasgow 10,000 protest against decision to site the US Polaris submarine base in the Holy Loch.

23 February: Madrid — Franco, distrustful of the new Kennedy administration and its more aggressive projection of US corporate interests (compared with the

defensive anti-communism of his recent friend, former US President Eisenhower), is convinced it consists of leftists, liberals freemasons and other enemies of his regime and commissions Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco to report on the likely consequences for Spain of the Kennedy's presidency. Carrero Blanco’s report backs up Franco’s worst fears and concludes that the world is dominated by three internationals: the communist, the socialist and the masonic, all of them determined to destroy the Franco regime.

13 February: Congo — Murder of Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

March: USA — President Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps ‘to channel the activity of idealistic [US] youth’ and advance US global interests in an international ‘hearts and minds’ campaign.

3 March: Holy Loch, Scotland — The Polaris fleet base ship USS Proteus enters the Clyde and is followed five days later by the Polaris-carrying submarine USS Patrick Henry. Popular anger grows against the government for its decision to locate the US base with its untried, potentially lethal weapons system only twenty miles upwind of an urban conurbation of over two million people. When the USS Patrick Henry arrives three anti-Polaris demonstrators using homemade canoes board it; these are the original ‘Glasgow Eskimos’ (they were Londoners).

3 April: England — 32,000 anti-bomb marchers from Aldermaston and Wethersfield air base join a crowd of 100,000 supporters in Trafalgar Square.

10 April: South Vietnam — President Ngo Dinh Diem, right-wing founder of the South Vietnamese Republic, wins presidential elections and is returned to power for a second term. US ratchets up its aid to the regime in an attempt to prevent South Vietnam becoming communist.

19 April: Cuba — US-backed Cuban exiles invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. The invasion fails due to the withdrawal of US air support. It also creates on US territory a veritable army of thousands of highly-trained Cuban parapolitical malcontents, many of whom turn to organised crime and drug trafficing between Latin America, SE Asia and Europe.

Panama Canal Zone (USA): Fort Gulick — Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the growth in Central and South American rural and urban guerrilla activities, the Kennedy Administration beefs up its support for its Latin-American proxies through the School of the Americas. Founded in 1946, the policy of this US Army Spanish-language training facility is to provide ‘professional training’ for soldiers and paramilitary police units from Latin America, and to ‘inculcate in them American notions of democracy’. US Counter-intelligence instruction manuals used in coursework explain methods of recruiting and controlling informants (arresting and beating their relatives, if necessary), extortion, blackmail, false imprisonment, how to administer a truth serum intravenously, and how opponents can best be ‘neutralised’, the statist euphemism for murder.

(These manuals are also later used in training counterintelligence officers in Vietnam). Graduates include officers who later emerge as he most brutal military dictators, death-squad leaders and human rights violators in Latin America’s history: Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama; Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua; Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina; Generals Hector Gramajo and Manuel Antonio Callejas of Guatemala; Hugo Banzar Suárez of Bolivia; El Salvador death-squad leader Roberto D’Aubisson. In all, more than 500 of the soldiers who trained at the academy are responsible for some of the most hideous atrocities carried out on the continent since the Conquistadors.

22 April: French Algeria — Right wing French army officers led by four senior generals mutiny and attempt to seize power. The organisation behind the rising is the newly formed Secret Army Organisation (Organisation de l’Armée Secrèt OAS) which has been formed with the aim of provoking a rebellion among the Algerian French, or at least halting the government’s negotiations with the FLN. The coup fails when most of the French army refuses to take part.

24 April: France — Paris prepares to repel airborne invasion by mutinous French parachute units from Algeria. The invasion is aborted as a result of a strike by Algerian airport groundstaff who prevent the aircraft carrying the French paras from leaving.

May: USA — Freedom Riders protest against transport segregation. Participants are brutally attacked by Southern whites (including police officers).

1 May: Havana — Castro abolishes elections and declares Cuba a one-party socialist state.

20 May: France — Talks with rebel leaders open at Evian-les-Bains and a 30day ceasefire is declared in Algeria.

May: Algeria-Spain — The collapse of French influence in Algeria as an outcome of the French referendum over the colony’s sovereignty causes great resentment among the 60,000 pied noirs (French people of European ancestry resident in N. Africa), Algérie Française supporters who had fled to Spain.

Around half of these live around Alicante where makeshift training camps are set up by the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), the paramilitary umbrella organisation for the Algérie Française movement to train men in clandestine operations and combat to prepare for the day when a hand-picked commando

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Chronology — 1961 will cross the Pyrenees to coordinate terrorist activity throughout French territory and to kill de Gaulle. The OAS receives financial and infrastructural support not only from French right-wingers, but also from other European mercenary and neofascist organisations, including ex-SS colonel Otto Skorzeny’s Nazi friendship network, the ‘Circle of Friends’, which controls the laundered funds of the Third Reich. This operates from Madrid as a plausibly deniable front for the Spanish Security Service, the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS). Many of these people re-emerge later as the main players in the terrorist ‘Strategy of Tension’ campaigns that are to destabilise much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Greece and Italy throughout the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. They are responsible for the murders of ‘anti-American’ politicians and anti-colonial militants and the manipulation of popular feeling against the prevailing anti-authoritarian and antiUS mood through terrorist actions committed by provocateurs. These actions are geared to presenting marginal anarchist, Marxist and nationalist groups as implicated in cold-blooded murder and terrorism. The kidnapping and murder of Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka, the Milan Piazza Fontanta bombing in December 1969 which results in the killing of 16 people, the later defenestration of the anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli from Milan police headquarters, and the 1980 Bologna Railway Station massacre are just a few of the outrages of the time. The aim is to create a continuous and mounting climate of fear among the population during the years of the so-called ‘opening to the left’ which will in turn justify the introduction of draconian security powers under a revived neo-fascist and Christian Democrat government. It will also ensure that the US Navy retains the use of its HQ in Naples; the only remaining naval base the Americans have in the Mediterranean.

29 May: London — C100 organises mass ‘sit-down’ of 2,000 in Whitehall: 826 people are arrested.

June: USA — Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issue the 60-page Port Huron Statement which calls for an alliance of blacks, students, peace groups, liberal organisations and publications to bring about a progressive ‘realignment’ of the Democratic Party (the Trotskyist tactic of ‘boring from within’).

30 June: Blantyre — I leave school aged almost 15 to begin my apprenticeship with RB Wilson at his dental laboratory in West Princess Street in Glasgow. It is here that one of the older apprentices introduces me to the Springburn Labour Party Young Socialists, then under the influence of the International Socialists (IS) faction of the British Trotskyist movement (later the Socialist Workers Party).

Summer: USA — The Student Committee for Non-violent Action (SNCC) launches a civil disobedience campaign in protest against US military policy in Vietnam.

10 July: Blantyre — My 15th birthday.

11 July: France — General Raoul Salan and other leaders of the failed Algerian coup are tried (in their absence) for military rebellion and sentenced to death.

18 July: Basque country, Spain — Sabotage of the railway line into San Sebastian shortly before the arrival of a train carrying fascist ex-combatants to the annual Francoist victory celebrations in Guipuzcoa. This is the first action claimed by the Basque nationalist movement Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA).

19 July: Spain —Twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1936 military uprising, during which time Spain is subject to a fascist process that destroys the labour movement and traumatises the workforce. As historian Paul Preston notes: ‘The Franco regime's contribution to economic growth was the decades of hardship which left Spanish workers willing to work long hours for low wages. Combined with the repression of strike activity and good facilities for the repatriation of profits, this made Spain an obvious target for foreign capital in the early 1960s. The situation changes with a new generation of young workers emerging ready to strike against factory conditions in which hours are long and safety regulations ignored, students protest against the stifling atmosphere of the Francoist universities, and are encouraged by the appearance of young Basque and Catalan priests willing to denounce the repressive nature of the regime.

24 July: Catalonia — High-voltage power lines near Manresa are sabotaged by anarchist resistance fighters Ramón Vila Capdevila and Pedro Sánchez.

31 July: Spain — Eleven anarchist prisoners escape from San Miguel de los Reyes prison, but are quickly rearrested.

August: Catalonia — Shoot-out in the Pyrenees between Capdevila's resistance group and a Civil Guard unit. One guard is killed and another seriously injured. One member of the anarchist group, Pedro Sánchez, is captured.

31 August: West Berlin — Buildup of international diplomatic and military tension from South-East Asia to Berlin. Earlier, in July, President Kennedy adds to the sense of impending doom by pledging that the US will go to war to uphold its access to West Berlin. Amid rising international tension the barbed wire barrier erected by the East German security forces across Germany on 13 August is completed on 18 August, and by the end of the month Berlin is divided by a concrete wall.

2 September: France — Inspired by the successful overthrow of the Batista dictatorship in Cuba by armed guerrillas, the Spanish anarchist labour union, the

CNT (the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, split since November 1945 over its role in exile) buries its differences and reunites at a Congress in Limoges (France).

During a closed session of the Defence Commission of the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) — consisting of the coordinating secretaries of the CNT, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) and the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) — it is agreed to set up a clandestine section known as Defensa Interior (DI) (the Commission of Interior Defence) to plan the assassination of Franco and to coordinate resistance and propaganda actions against his regime.

8 September: France — Assassination attempt on President de Gaulle by OAS commando near his home at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. De Gaulle survives due to the driving skills of his chauffeur.

16-17 September: Holy Loch and London — Despite a ban on demonstrations by Home Secretary Henry Brooke, the Committee of 100 calls a weekend of major demonstrations. Thirty-two of the leading C100 members, including Bertrand Russell and his wife Edith, are arrested pre-emptively prior to the demonstration and jailed for a month. In spite of this draconian action there is a large-scale demonstration at the Holy Loch nuclear submarine base on the 16th (with 351 arrests), followed the next day in London by the largest ever ban-thebomb demonstration, with some 30,000 people taking part, of whom 1,314 are arrested.

Autumn: France — Following strong diplomatic presssure from Madrid, the French government bans the publication of exile Spanish anarchist newspapers and journals. Industrial trouble erupts during Spain's negotiations for entry into the Common Market and Civil Guard units open fire on striking railway workers demonstrating in Besain, a town between Pamplona and Bilbao in the Basque country.

2 October: Spain — The power struggle within the Francoist coalition increases in intensity between the Opus Dei technocrats and the old guard Falangist fascists. During his annual speech to the Falangist moment, Franco quite ostentatiously fails to refer to the Falange itself —the Consejo Nacional de Falange Española y Tradicionalista (FET) de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalistas (JONS) — by name. Instead he refers to the more generic Movimiento Nacional. At the close of the proceedings, during the singing of the traditional fascist anthem ‘Cara al Sol’ when the Falangists raise their right arms in the fascist salute, Franco only stands to attention with his arms firmly by his sides. The Falangists, who constitute an important part of the state bureaucracy, civil service and state labour front, see this as an affront and an attempt to marginalise them in favour of Opus Dei. 4 October: France — Paris’s Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon, an unrepentant fascist, a former Vichy police official, Nazi collaborator and Algérie Française sympathizer orders the arrest of thousands of Algerians (11,000), in an attempt to thwart a pro-Front de Liberatión Nationale (FLN) demonstration against a discriminatory 8.30 p.m. curfew on Muslims. Many Muslims are arrested, beaten, tortured and an estimated 200 murdered. Papon is subjecting the Algerians to the same treatment he used on the Jews twenty years earlier. Some are lynched, shot while ‘trying to escape’ or drowned by having their hands bound behind their backs and thrown from the bridges into the River Seine. Scores of Algerians are beaten to death in the courtyard of the central police headquarters in full view of senior police officers. This butchery is carried out not by the CRS, the brutal but disciplined riot/security police, but by the ordinary Parisian police, right wing pieds noir sympathisers and the Harkis, a French Muslim Gestapo, made up of peasant pro-French North Africans, many of whom had been recruited directly from the French jails and given ‘complete liberty of action in dismantling the FLN networks in Paris’.

13 October: Spain — Neo-fascist European Assembly of Ex-Combatants organises large international rally at the Valle de los Caídos to pay homage to Franco, the only victorious fascist military leader of World War Two. Extreme rightwingers and neo-Nazis attend from all over Europe (the majority from Italy, Germany, Croatia and Belgium) 20 October: Paris — Thousands of pro-National Liberation Front (FLN) North African women demonstrate passively against the curfew on Muslims.

25 October: UK — First issue of Private Eye published.

November: Annapolis, USA — General Pedro del Valle, commander of the US Central Naval Academy, invites Guido Giannettini, a right-wing Italian journalist of high standing in western intelligence circles, to give a three-day presentation to an invited audience on ‘The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d’État in Europe’.

10 November: Morocco — A six-man DRIL commando hijacks the TAP (Portuguese national airline) Casablanca-to-Lisbon flight to drop leaflets and manifestoes on the Portuguese capital before returning to Tangiers.

1 December: Algiers — French secret service death squads of the Service d’Action Civique (SAC) arrive in Algiers to target and assassinate key Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) terrorists led by Jean-Jacques Susini and Roger Degueldre. (The OAS, responsible for an ongoing campaign of terror in both

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Chronology — 1962 Algeria and mainland France, are now carrying out 300 bombings a month in restaurants, buses, metro stations and other public places, killing hundreds of innocent bystanders.) The SAC’s arrival is followed by a massive upsurge in deaths on both the settler and the Gaullist sides.

6 December: London — MP Special Branch raid C100 offices with warrant under the Official Secrets Act. Two days leter five members are arrested, 9 December: England — 6,000 people take part in anti-bomb ‘sit-downs’ at Wethersfield NATO base, Ruislip USAF headquarters, and in Manchester, Bristol, York and Cardiff with 860 arrests.

23 December: Spain — FIJL member Juan Salcedo is arrested following bomb explosion in Valencia’s Palace of Justice.

1961: Cuba — Che Guevara publishes Guerrilla Warfare — seen as one of the most inspirational revolutionary tracts of the time. A generation’s imagination is captured by Guevara’s insistence that dedicated fighters could form a foco insurreccional which could generate a revolutionary sutuation.

1962 France: — L’Internationale Situationniste journal publishes Raoul Vaneigem’s The Totality For Kids, a revolutionary text challenging both ideology and religion.

Northern Ireland: — IRA border campaign of 1958-1962 comes to an end.

January: Glasgow — Influenced by the ideas of the libertarian socialist Solidarity group I become active in the Scottish Committee of 100 based in the Dundas Street offices of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). At work I am increasingly involved in the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) and am nominated as works representative to Glasgow Trades Council where I come into contact with old-time 'Red-Clydeside' Labour, Communist, Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) and anarchist activists of the Clyde Workers' Committee and the Clydeside Shop Stewards' Committees.

29 January: Algiers — OAS terrorists detonate a massive bomb in SAC headquarters, killing 19.

Winter: UK — The original London-centred National Committee of 100 is replaced by a dozen or so regional ad hoc committees which take over the organisation of demonstrations and direct actions, all loosely coordinated by a federal National Committee of 100.

9 February: Spain — Spain’s Ambassador in Paris, Jose Maria de Areilza officially requests Spain’s entry into the Common Market to EEC President, Maurice Couve de Murville.

20 February: London — Six members of the Committee of 100 are tried, convicted and sentenced at the Old Bailey on charges of Conspiracy (under Section One of the Official Secrets Act) for their part in organising sit-down protests the previous December at Wethersfield RAF base and other military installations at Brize Norton and Ruislip. While in jail, two of the accused, Pat Pottle and Michael Randle, meet and befriend the imprisoned Soviet spy George Blake and later, in 1966, help organise his escape from prison.

March: France — Octavio Alberola arrives in France from Mexico to take up his role as coordinator of the Committee of Interior Defence (DI). (Alberola had toured Europe in 1958 and again in 1961, establishing contacts and liaising with activists in the European and exiled Spanish anarchist movements.)

18 March: France — The French Algerian War (raging since 1 November 1954) ends with the signing of the Evian accords which lay the foundations for an an independent Algeria.

24 March: London — Parliament Square is the scene of the last-ever major sitdown demonstration organised by the original Committee of 100.

Spring: UK — Civil Defence (contingency) exercise (codename ‘Parapluie’) proves disastrous (to the planning authorities).

April: Algeria — French European settler community rise in rebellion when faced with the prospect of a negotiated settlement between the French government and Algerian rebel forces, the FLN. Both the settlers and the army had been under the impression that the military struggle against the FLN had already been won. The uprising proves a failure and is put down by loyal Gaullist forces.

Lisbon: — Following the collapse of the settlers’ putsch in Algiers, OAS ringleader Captain Yves Guillou, an Indo-China and Korean War veteran, and key French army plotter, deserts his command of the 11th demi-Brigade Parachute Shock Troops and escapes to Lisbon. Under the name of Yves Guérin-Sérac he joins his political mentor Pierre Lagaillarde. A few years later (1966), protected by Salazar’s secret police organisation, the Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE), the OAS men and their colleagues establish Aginter Press, an ‘international news agency’ whose declared role is ‘to focus the attention of an anxious elite on the perils of insidious subversion which slowly infiltrates through everyday reports, and to denounce its methods and the mechanics of its manoeuvres’. Years later, in an interview with Paris Match (November 1974), Guérin-Sérac explains that he chose to offer his services and experience to Portugal, the one remaining colonial empire (and no plans to shed it!) which could provide the last bulwark against

communism and atheism: ‘The others have laid down their weapons, but not I. After the OAS, I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper dimensions — which is to say, a global dimension.’

Documents discovered in raids by the post-1974 revolution Portuguese intelligence service, the SDCI (set up to replace the hated PIDE of Salazar and his successor Caetano) show that Aginter Press provided: 1) A private espionage bureau operated on behalf of the PIDE and, through them, the CIA, the West German BND, the Spanish Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS), South Africa’s Bureau of State Security (BOSS) and, post 19 April 1967, the Greek colonels’ Central Service of Information (KYP).

2) A recruitment and training centre for mercenaries and agents specialising in sabotage and assassination.

3) A strategic centre for neo-fascist and right-wing propaganda and psychological warfare operations in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Europe. This centre had the support of a number of sub-fascist regimes, well-known right-wing figures and international neo-fascist groups.

4) An international organisation, ‘Order and Tradition’, with a clandestine paramilitary section called Organisation de l Armée Contre le Communisme International (OACI).

Founding members of OACI are Guérin-Sérac, Giannettini and Skorzeny.

Describing his organisation, Guérin-Sérac writes: ‘Our number consists of two types of men: officers who have come to us from the fighting in Indo-China and Algeria, and some who even enlisted with us after the battle for Korea; intellectuals who, during this same period, turned their attention to the study of the techniques of Marxist subversion… During this period we have systematically established close contacts with like-minded groups emerging in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Spain or Portugal, for the purpose of forming the kernel of a truly Western League of Struggle Against Marxism.’ The role of the OACI was described as being prepared ‘to intervene anywhere in the world to confront the gravest Communist threats’.

Belgium — Civil Emergency Planning (CEP) (i.e., counter-insurgency planning) becomes an important element in NATO strategy with the McConnell Plan which ranks member countries in a league table according to the strategic significance of their geopolitical location.

April: Spain — The EEC rejects discussions with Spain, a move that fuels Franco’s paranoia that he is a victim of masonic intrigues. Rejection by Europe is followed by an outbreak of economically motivated industrial strikes and social unrest in support of improved wage levels in the Asturian mines and in the Basque steel industry. In spite of the deployment of Civil Guard units and the Policia armada (grises), the strikes spread to Catalonia and Madrid. Wage levels improve, but the strikes expose the inadequacies of the Falangist state labour organisation and mark the beginning of the end for the state syndicates. They also mark the emergence of new popular aspirations. The rise of a combative working class and student movement supported by young radical priests makes an increasing number of the Spanish middle classes aware that they can only have security if they have power and influence in a genuinely parliamentary regime, thereby increasing the pressure on Franco for political liberalisation.

1 April: London — London Committee of 100 formed.

7 April: Spain — Miners from the Nicolas de Mieres coal mine in the Asturias strike in support of a minimum daily wage of 140 pesetas (70p), the right to strike and free trades unions. Since the beginning of the 20th century approximately 50 per cent of all Spanish coal has come from the Asturian coalfields. In the early 19th century, a large number of displaced farm labourers moved to the Asturias from Castille and the South and quickly assimilated with the native Asturians, losing all cultural traces of their origins. Each industrial region did, however, develop its own political preferences: socialism in Mieres, communism in Sama and anarchism in Felguera and Gijón. The revolutionary tradition in the Asturias was always strong and in fact it was the Asturian miners who precipitated the downfall of the Monarchy in 1930 and prepared the way for the ill-fated Republic.

Four years later the same miners and industrial workers rebelled against the bourgeois Republic that had failed miserably to take their side against the harsh behaviour of the big landowners, the latifundistas, and the industrial plutocracy, and occupied Oviedo, the provincial capital, declaring the social revolution. The Asturian Commune, as it came to be known, lasted from 5 until 19 October when it was bloodily suppressed by Moorish soldiers and Spanish Legionaries commanded by the Republic's most prized general — Francisco Franco.

20 April: London — Aldermaston march ends with rally of 150,000 addressed by Hiroshima victims in Hyde Park. Two days later, US starts a new series of nuclear bomb tests on Christmas Island.

20 April: Spain — Strike action closes all the coal mines in the Asturias. Factories thoughout the region also close while others go on reduced output as a result of solidarity actions.

22 April: Spain — Two Civil Guard companies and three companies of the

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Chronology — 1962 Policia armada are rushed to the Asturian coalfields to break the miners’ strike by brute force and intimidation.

May: Algiers — OAS terrorists kill 230 Muslims in a single week and escalate terrorist outrages in metropolitan France. This tactic proves counterproductive and strengthens de Gaulle’s position, allowing him to introduce direct elections for the French presidency.

May: Spain, Portugal and Italy — With the collapse of Algérie Française the OAS, under the operational command of Colonel Antoine Argoud, an expert in psychological warfare, recruits its Commando Delta killers from among the many loyal exiled pieds noirs and mutinous ex-legionnaires in the Iberian peninsula.

These men have access to substantial financial backing from wealthy and resentful North African French businessmen — as well as the landowners who had once controlled the commerce of Algeria.

4 May: Spain — Franco declares a ‘state of emergency’ in Asturias, Viscaya and Guipuzcoa. Police and Guardia Civil repression grows increasingly brutal. Franco declares martial law and his security forces are given ‘special powers’ of arrest and detention without trial to deal with the situation.

6 May: Glasgow — Labour Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, right-wing, pro-nuclear and pro-American, is shouted off the stage by Labour Party rank-and-file, trades unionists and Young Socialists at the Glasgow May Day rally in Queen’s Park after calling anti-Polaris hecklers pro-Soviet ‘peanuts’. For years afterwards, throughout Britain, many folksong clubs slanted towards political protest adopt the title ‘Peanuts Club’.

6 May: Catalonia — Solidarity strikes extend to Barcelona. Workers and students distribute leaflets supporting of the miners' demands and declare their solidarity with the Asturian workers.

11 May: Catalonia — Units of the Policia armada occupy Barcelona University following large-scale student demonstrations in the Catalan capital.

14 May: Asturias — 1,200 strikers held in Oviedo's four main prisons.

15 May: Spain — Silent demonstrations by women outside the Security Directorate (DGS) building in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol in solidarity with the strikers.

They demand a total amnesty for all political prisoners. Police arrest eighty women.

26 May: Spain — 52,550 people are recorded, officially, as being on strike throughout Spain: Barcelona, 17,000; Asturias, 15,000; Basque country, 10,500; Salamanca, 750; Leon, 5,200; Jaen, 3,000; Madrid, 1,100.

27 May: Spain — Franco comments publicly on the current wave of industrial unrest to an audience of Falangist war veterans, the Hermandad de Alfereces Provisionales (Brotherhood of Provisional Officers), at the Cerro Garabitas. He dismisses the strikers’ demands as unimportant and only taken seriously abroad because of the exaggerated claims of a few priests. The negative publicity surrounding the regime's abortive overtures to the EEC and its brutal police response to the 1962 strikes stimulate a resurgence of sympathy throughout the world for the anti-Franco opposition. Serious differences develop between Franco and the Vatican over the Church’s apparently liberal stand under the leadership of the new pope, John XXIII. Late May: France — The exiled Spanish anarchist movement’s clandestine Committee of Interior Defence (DI) launches its direct action campaign against the Franco regime. The Committee sends a representative to Morocco and Portugal to examine the possibility of setting up clandestine radio transmitters to broadcast anti-Francoist programmes.

10 June: Scotland — Scottish Committee of 100 organises successful sit-down demonstration at Holy Loch Polaris missile base.

5, 7 and 12 June: Spain — DI bomb attacks at the Madrid residence of Papal representative, Mgr Momerolas; the Madrid HQ of the Falange; the Opus Dei controlled Banco Popular de España in Madrid and at the Barcelona HQ of the Falange.

16 June: Valencia — Franco publicly denounces foreign criticism of his regime.

18 June: Basque country — Defensa Interior (DI) makes an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Franco in San Sebastian.

30 June: Catalonia — DI bombs explode in the Opus Dei college in Barcelona and in the Falangist Catalan Instituto de Previsión.

3 July: Algiers: — Algeria finally gains independence from France after a brutal 8-year war, including a recent two-year campaign that claimed the lives of 110 SAC, over 400 OAS terrorists, and an untold number of innocent bystanders.

July: Iberian Peninsula —The exiled OAS activists set up clandestine networks in the main cities of Metropolitan France supported by formally organised structure based in Spain, Portugal and Italy. But it is mainly in Spain, where they have the support of the Falange Española and other extreme right-wing and anticommunist groups, that the OAS plots its widespread and indiscriminate terrorist campaign in Metropolitan France, targeting Gaullists and leftist publishers, journalists and intellectuals, in fact anyone who dares to denounce the violence, abuse of justice and institutionalised use of torture by the French army (which is

by now becoming an everyday fact of French life). It is in Spain, too, that the pieds noirs absorb the fascist ideology of José Antonio Prímo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange Española. Their goal is a fascist French-settler dominated Algeria.

10 July: Blantyre — My 16th birthday.

10 July: Madrid — Franco re-shuffles his council of ministers, which now includes seven generals: law professor Manuel Fraga Iribarne is appointed Minister of Information and general Agustin Muñoz Grandes, an extreme rightwinger, is appointed vice-president of the council, i.e. Franco’s deputy. Alonso Vega remains as minister of the interior. By appointing Muñoz Grandes, a military man to this position, Franco strikes two birds with one stone: he appoints his successor and keeps the Falange happy. The appointment of Irribarne gives the appearance of liberalisation and keeps the middle classes happy.

13 July: Russia — C100 members demonstrate in Red Square against Soviet nuclear missiles..

14 July: Italy — DI bomb explodes in St Peters’ Square, Rome.

15 July: Spain — DI bomb attacks in Barcelona and at Valencia’s Casa Consistorial. (The bomb was in fact meant to explode during a state visit by Franco earlier in the month but the mechanism was faulty.)

August: Spain — DI bomb damages the Basilica de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los CaÍdos near Madrid, a Pharaonic tomb built by forced prison labour to glorify the eternal memory of General Francisco Franco. It is the dictator’s attempt to put himself on an historical pedestal with Philip II and his magnificent palace at El Escorial. (The Valle de los Caídos was officially inaugurated on 1 April 1959, the 20th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, and cost the year 2002 equivalent of £200,000,000.)

Rome: — Stefano Delle Chiaie's (SDC) Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) gangs are used by Rome police inspector Santillo to infiltrate and disrupt street demonstrations protesting against the state visit to the Vatican of Congolese leader Moise Tshombe (Tshombe is widely regarded as a tool of reactionary western interests and is believed to be responsible for the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the man who had led the Congo to independence.) SDC’s men are issued with police truncheons and official IDs but are recognised. The ensuing scandal over the overt connivance between the police and the fascists causes a major scandal and embarrassment to the government.

12 August: Spain — DI bomb explodes behind the altar in the chapel of Franco's monument to the fascist war dead at the Valle de los Caídos, near Madrid.

16 August-September: Spain — A new outbreak of strikes in Asturias and Catalonia (with more than 16,000 men on strike) meets with ferocious police repression, and a wave of summary court martials.

19 August: Spain — DI bomb explodes close to Franco's summer residence, the Palacio de Ayete. No one is injured. More DI bombs explode later that same day in the offices of right-wing papers in Madrid, Ya and Pueblo and the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia.

22 August: France — A 13-man OAS Commando Delta led by a French Air Force officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiery, come close to assassinating General de Gaulle in his presidential convoy driving down the Avenue de la Liberation in Petit-Clamart, near Paris. Only one of the identified conspirators — hit-man Georges Watin — manages to escape to safety in Spain. The others are sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment.

September: UK — First student intake at new (redbrick) University of York; yet another disastrous failure of Europe-wide civil defence (emergency contingency) exercise simulating nuclear war, ‘Fallex ‘62’.

9 September: London — C100 sit-down demo in Whitehall is cancelled due to lack of support.

18 September: Barcelona — Franco’s Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS) issues the following communiqué — 'As a result of recent investigations into acts of terrorism carried out in Spanish territory, officers of the Brigada PoliticoSocial have arrested a number of militants of the Young Libertarians (FIJL): Jorge Conill Vals, Marcelino Jimenez Cubas and Antonio Mur Peron. These individuals operated under instruction from foreign elements who financed their activities aimed at disturbing the social peace and tranquillity of the Spanish people.' The three anarchists are tried by summary court martial within days of their arrest.

The prosecutor demands and is granted the death sentence for Conill Vals.

20 September: Algeria — Ahmed Ben Bella is elected head of the first independent Algerian government.

22 September: France — Bullets fired by an OAS commando pass within centimetres of de Gaulle’s head.

30 September: USA — James Meredith becomes the first black student to register in the University of Mississippi, triggering race riots which result in President Kennedy sending in 30,000 troops and National Guard. Two people are killed.

23 September: Rome — Two bombs explode close to the Pope as he inspects

239

Chronology — 1962-1963 the seating arrangements for the opening of the Vatican council in St Peter’s.

29 September: Milan — Spanish Monarchist paper ABC publishes the following report from its Milan correspondent: ‘According to a police statement issued tonight “persons unknown have kidnapped the Spanish Vice-Consul in Milan, Sr. Elias“.’ Sources close to the police assume it to be the exclusive work of the Italian Communist Party’. The kidnappers are, in fact, young Italian anarchists.

2 October: Milan — Isu Elias, Spain's Vice-Consul is released entirely voluntarily and his kidnappers issue the following statement: 'The kidnapping of the Spanish Vice-Consul was organised by a group affiliated to the International Federation of Libertarian Youth (a body invented for the occasion) with the sole aim of drawing the world's attention the tragic fate of three libertarians recently arrested in Barcelona, and to prevent the execution of Jorge Conill Vals. As promised, we return Sr. Elias safely to his family to demonstrate that our methods are vastly different to those employed by the Francoist regime. Unlike the prisoners locked in the Caudillo’s dungeons, Sr. Elias will be able to embrace his family.’ The pope is reputed to have told Franco in a telegram, ‘There are better ways of keeping order.’

3 October: Milan — Elias’s kidnappers are arrested following police tip-off from an Italian Communist journalist who had been used as a conduit to the media by the young anarchists.

6 October: Madrid — FIJL member Julio Moreno, a 28 year old electrician, is sentenced to thirty years imprisonment by a court martial accused of membership of an ‘illegal organisation in exile' and of ‘participating in actions against the security of the State’ (Banditry and Terrorism).

7 October: New York — DI bomb explodes outside the residence of Cardinal Spellman. The actions against the church and Opus Dei form part of a campaign to embarrass these institutions into renouncing their support of the Francoist dictatorship. The actions are claimed by La mano negro group who send letters to the pope explaining their actions.

20 October: Madrid — Eleven young Spanish workers and students, all FIJL members, receive prison sentences ranging from six to twelve years for printing and distributing illegal propaganda.

18-28 October: Cuba — President Kennedy's brinkmanship and the US-imposed blockade of Cuba leads to the Cuban missile crisis. The mood of the moment is articulated by Normal Mailer who later wrote: 'The world stood like a playing card on edge while the superpowers played poker with humanity.’ All over the world people believe nuclear war is imminent. The shift from reformism to revolutionary militancy gathers momentum in the 18-month period between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. Black organisations in the US consider arming themselves for self-defence in the belief that the federal government has proved itself unwilling or unable to defend negro dissidents. By 1963 the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) have moved from reformist protest demonstrations and sit-ins aimed at shaming the system into action, to community organising and the creation of dual power structures aimed at making central authority superfluous.

November: UK — Bertrand Russell resigns from C100 after the latter dissociates itself with Russell’s support for the Castro regime.

7 November: Barcelona — Arrest of Communist Party member Julián Grimau on an alleged war crimes warrant.

17 November: Madrid — Three FIJL members sentenced by court martial for editing and distributing Juventud Libertaria: J. Ronco Pesma (23), 11 years, Antonio Bayo Poblador (23), 11 years, Rafael Ruiz Boroa (23), 3 years.

22 November: Varese, Italy — Italian anarchist kidnappers of Spanish ViceConsul Sr. Elias walk free after a 7-day trial. Sentences are nominal given that the weight of Italian public opinion in their favour makes any other sentences difficult.

In Spain, Jorge Conill's death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment.

29 November: Madrid — Four members of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) are sentenced by court martial to terms of imprisonment ranging between four, nine and eleven years. The charges are 'Reconstituting the CNT' and 'illegal propaganda'. Another consejo de guerra held that same day sentences another three CNT members from Valladolid to four year's imprisonment for inciting industrial unrest. In Barcelona another CNT member, Antonio Sanchez Perez (51), is charged with sabotage and sentenced by military tribunal to thirty years imprisonment.

2 December: San Sebastian — DI bomb explodes in the Military Governor's residence. The following day others explode in the Palace of Justice in Valencia, the Treasury building in Madrid, the Spanish Consulate in Amsterdam and in the administrative offices of two Lisbon prisons. The newly formed Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL - Iberian Liberation Council, a DI cover name) claims responsibility for these actions.

1963 France — Publication of The Damned (The Wretched of the Earth), Frantz Fanon’s

influential book attacking colonialism. Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his introduction: ‘Try to understand this: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors.

‘You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the “new continents”, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals, and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the threat of a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a human being is to be an accomplice in the crime of colonialism, since all of us, without exception have benefited by colonial exploitation. Worse than that: since the others became human beings in name against us, it seems that we are the enemies of humankind ; the elite shows itself in its colours — it is nothing more than a gang.’

Rome: — CIA station chief William Harvey coordinates and finances recruitment of action teams from a list of 2,000 vetted right-wingers (including SDC’s AN gangs) to act as a ‘parallel’ police security force to break up ‘leftist’ demonstrations. The teams first practice their skills (some dressed as policemen, others in civilian clothes) during a peaceful demonstration by building workers.

Two hundred of the demonstrators are badly injured. The link to the CIA is made later by a General in the Italian secret service during investigations into the NATO stay-behind ‘resistance’ organisation in Italy codenamed ‘Gladio’ (see 3-5 May 1965).

Uruguay: — Formation of the Movement for National Liberation (MLN) the Tupamaros (named after the last independent Indian leader, Tupac Amaru (d 1781). Basing their ideas and actions on the urban guerrilla theories of exiled Spanish anarchist Abraham Guillen. They begin operations by raiding a rifle club.

Later they launch a series of actions designed to generate public support: revolutionary ‘expropriations’ and food distributions carried out by the Tupamaro ‘hunger commandos’.

Venezuela and Guatemala: — Guerrilla warfare erupts in Venezuela and Guatemala. In Venezuela Tactical Combat Units of the recently united Venezuelan Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), establishing liberated zones. In Guatemala the Marxist Armed Rebel Forces led by Yon Sosa and Turcios Lima, go for the strategy of ‘armed education’, occupying villages and organising classes on socialism January: Spain — An increasingly paranoid Franco confides in his cousin Pacón that he is collating information from the secret police agents of the Brigada Politico Social (BPS) and his secret service abroad on what is happening in international masonic lodges. 'Nothing will catch me by surprise', he claims. ‘It is necessary to be prepared for the struggle. ' Franco circulates lengthy memos to his ministers and security officials on the links between freemasonry and catholic liberalisation.

30 January: France — Le Monde publishes an editorial entitled ‘A Paris-Madrid Axis’ describing de Gaulle’s admiration for Franco. Talks take place between French and Spanish security services which are followed by arrests in France of exiled Spanish anarchists on charges of belonging to 'an association of evildoers' and issues orders restricting the activities of the exiled anti-Francoists.

6 February: UK — London C100 publishes Beyond Counting Arses, a pamphlet which calls for more radical and subversive action than passive sit-downs.

Proposals include promoting civil disobedience in print, unmasking and publicising the secret preparations of the Warfare State (given that the Official Secrets Act is not designed to prevent espionage, but to withhold information from the people).

14 February: France and Spain — During the trial of Bastien-Thiery and twenty-one others arrested in the Petit-Clamart plot for the attempt on President de Gaulle’s life, the DST, the French equivalent of MI5, uncovers another OAS plot on de Gaulle’s life. Organised by OAS Colonel Antoine Argoud, the plan involved a sniper targeting him as he delivered a speech to cadets at the Ecole Militaire on the Champ de Mars. (Argoud is later kidnapped in West Germany by Service d’Action Civique (SAC) and French Intelligence agents of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre Espionage (SDECE) and taken to Paris — 22/8/62) Embarrassed by the discovery of this plot hatched in Spain, Franco’s police are forced to arrest Spanish-based OAS leaders. Some are deported to Latin America while others are interned in southern Spain. This assassination plot proves the last straw for the French authorities who, believing France close to civil war, decide closer collaboration between the Spanish and French security and intelligence services is to their mutual advantage. Both countries hold trump cards when it

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Chronology — 1963 comes to bringing pressure to bear on each other, and neutralising, in their respective countries, the two opposition groups which pose the principal threats to each other’s government — the OAS in Spain and the FIJL in France. (Between December 1962 and July 1963 regular meetings take place between the Spanish Minister of the Interior, General Camilo Alonso Vega, the French Interior Minister, Roger Frey and the Chief of Staff of the French army, General Ailleret, to cement the so-called Paris-Madrid Axis and clamp down on the activities of the OAS in Spain and the anarchist Defensa Interior-FIJL in France.)

16 February: UK — C100 members locate and break into a secret regional seat of government (RSG 6) at Warren Row, near Reading (close to the route of the annual Aldermaston Easter peace march). They photograph the area and buildings, and remove documents relating to the site. (The RSGs are a network of underground shelters and command posts from which post-nuclear Britain is to be controlled by non-elected civil servants.)

22 February: Spain — Young dissident poet Manuel Moreno Barrancos dies shortly after being thrown from an upper landing in Jerez de la Frontera prison.

23 February: UK — C100 members return to RSG 6 Warren Row to collect more information.

March: Spain — The Iberian Liberation Council (CIL- DI) begins an anti-tourist bombing campaign with small explosive charges intended to provoke publicity and damage to property rather than to kill or injure in an attempt to starve the Franco regime of an important source of revenue.

6 March: Rome — Concerted bomb attacks on Iberia Airlines' office and the Ministry of Technology in Madrid. A communiqué issued by the Iberian Liberation Council (CIL) states it has 'mounted ‘Operation Warning’ in its struggle for the freedom of the Iberian people. ‘The object of this operation is to demonstrate to international tour operators that they run a real danger in using airlines of the fascist regimes of Franco and Salazar (Iberia and TAP). There can be no peace in Europe until the last vestiges of Nazi-fascism have been eliminated in the Iberian Peninsula. Down with Dictatorship! ‘Viva la Libertad!' (Iberian Liberation Council - Communiqué March 1963).

11 March: France — OAS conspirator Bastien-Thiery is shot by firing squad.

20 March: Washington — House Foreign Affairs Committee criticises aid to Spain as excessive.

25 March (Easter): London — C100 members responsible for break-in at Warren Row prepare to publish their research on the Regional Seats of Government under the name ‘Spies for Peace’. Their pamphlet, Danger! Official Secret RSG-6, exposes secret UK government plans to shelter government ministers and civil servants in fourteen top-secret locations throughout Britain in the event of a nuclear war. Four thousand copies are run off on Solidarity's duplicator in the Independent Labour Party’s office in King’s Cross Road, ready for distribution. The pamphlet publishes the top secret locations and telephone numbers of most of the RSGs, together with a list of the RSG system’s main personnel — and a plan of the layout of RSG-6 itself. Apart from exposing the secret plans of the authorities for the imposition of an undemocratic political system which will operate during or after a nuclear war or political breakdown, the importance of the Spies for Peace affair is that it exposes for the first time the nature of the secret state and establises the precedent for whistleblowing.

April: Asturias — General strike throughout the Asturian coalfields. In the Oviedo region of northern Spain alone, more than 40,000 coal miners and metal industry workers go on strike. A letter signed by 102 Spanish intellectuals protests against the arrest and ill-treatment of strikers and states that eyewitnesses have seen miners in Sama de Langreo being tortured, castrated, and one killed by a Guardia Civil captain and sergeant.

10 April: UK — 4,000 RSG-6 Spies for Peace pamphlets posted to sympathisers, journalists and MPs. This publication provokes enormous hostile media coverage, with talk of treason and the publication of a government D-Notice banning further newspaper publication of the information contained in the pamphlet.

11 April: UK — 11,000 start out on anti-bomb march from Aldermaston and stop off at RSG-6 in Reading, location of bomb shelters for the UK’s ruling elite.

16 April: Spain — Three young Frenchmen, Bernard Ferry, Alain Pecunia and Guy Batoux are arrested and charged under the ‘Banditry and Terrorism’ laws for their part in the CIL's anti-tourist bombing campaign (specifically an explosion in the Iberia Airlines office in Valencia; a bomb on the Barcelona–Mallorca ferry, and an attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Madrid).

18 April: Madrid — The trial of communist Julián Grimau Garcia exposes the barbaric nature of the regime in general and of Franco in particular. Beaten and tortured, Grimau had been thrown out of a window at national security headquarters by BPS interrogators attempting to cover up their violence. Despite his appalling injuries, Grimau is condemned to death for 'military rebellion'. The indictment covers crimes allegedly committed during the Civil War. He is one of more than 100 members of the opposition tried by court martial in the first few months of 1963. Before the trial, ‘liberal’ information minister Fraga Iribarne

states publicly that Grimau is 'a repellent murderer'. The trial itself is marked by serious legal flaws and provokes a wave of angry anti-Francoist demonstrations throughout the world. Grimau's trial coincides with the publication of Pope John XXIII's liberal encyclical Pacem in Terra (published on 11 April). The document advocates freedom of association, popular participation in the political process and freedom of expression for ethnic minorities. Franco sees the content and timing of the encyclical as a direct criticism of his regime and irrefutable proof of successful masonic and communist infiltration of the Vatican.

Pleas for clemency for Grimau come from international political and religious leaders, including: Nikita Khrushchev, Willy Brandt, Harold Wilson, Queen Elizabeth II, the Pope and Cardinal Montini. Franco’s council of ministers meet to discuss the papal encyclical and the verdict of the council of war. Castiella, the ‘liberal’ foreign minister, holds out for clemency, but Franco is adamant that Grimau must die and the majority of his ministers agree.

20 April: Madrid — Julián Grimau is executed by firing squad outside Carabanchel Prison provoking massive international demonstrations which set back the regime’s efforts to clean up its image. It also sabotages de Gaulle's hopes of bringing Spain into the EEC. 3 May: Spain — Following the unexpected virulence of the protests against Grimau’s trial and execution, Franco’s cabinet asks for the ‘retirement’ of Colonel Eymar, the notorious military prosecutor and head of the Juzgado Especial de Actividades Extremistas. The council of ministers also agrees to the setting up of the civil Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP) to try political offences as civilian crimes rather than as cases of military rebellion.

14 May: Spain — Francisco Granado Gata drives from Avignon to Madrid in a car specially modified by Vicente Martí to carry explosives, weapons and equipment for the DI’s next attempt on Franco’s life at the Palacio del Oriente. In Madrid the materiel is transferred to the workshop of an anarchist locksmith.

15 May: Madrid — Granado receives a telegram from Marti telling him to collect a further suitcase with explosives at another rendezvous.

22 May: Athens — Left-wing deputy Grigorius Lambrakis is deliberately run down in the street and killed by a vehicle after an anti-government demonstration in what is clearly a criminal act by government supporters.

13 June: Frankfurt, Geneva, London — The Iberian Liberation Council (CIL) claims responsibility for firebombs which explode in the holds of Spanish and Portuguese aeroplanes while still on the ground at a number of European airports.

21 June: Rome — Cardinal Montini, an enemy of Franco, is elected Pope Paul VI. Summer: Glasgow (Mitchell Library) — I renounce membership of the Young Socialists and tear up my Labour Party card to join the newly re-formed Glasgow Federation of Anarchists and the Syndicalist Workers' Federation (SWF).

10 July: Blantyre — My 17th birthday.

9-12 July: London — King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece who are on a state visit to the UK are booed in the streets by hostile demonstrators protesting against the murder of MP George Lambrakis the previous May and demanding the release of Greek political prisoners. (King Paul dissolves the Greek parliament on his return to Athens.) Police make ninety-four arrests. A year later Det. Sgt Challenor is found ‘insane’ after claiming to have found a brick in the pocket of an anarchist demonstrator.

25 July: Spain — News is received by DI coordinator Octavio Alberola that no new ambassadors will be presented to Franco this summer so he calls off the plans for the latest attempt on Franco (being prepared by Francisco Granado in Madrid). José Pascual Palacios, however, another member of the DI committee, convinces Alberola that the explosives held by Granado should be passed on to another group ‘controlled’ by one of his protegés, Jacinto Guerrero Lucas.

Roberto Ariño, another FIJL activist, is sent to Madrid to inform Granado of the change in plan, but is late in setting off and misses his rendezvous with Granado. Alberola then, fatefully, sends his trusted friend and comrade Joaquin Delgado to contact both Granado and Guerrero’s team to tell them to return to France. Granado is instructed to leave the explosives at a safehouse in Madrid before returning to France.

28 July: Spain — Joaquin Delgado arrives in Madrid and immediately makes contact with Ariño, but is unable to meet Granado until the following day.

Nothing more is known of their movements until their arrest. Ariño, who had been in Madrid since the 20th, returns to France on 28 July.

29 July: Madrid — Antonio Martín Bellido and Sergio Hernández, members of a separate DI group (and unknown to Delgado and Granado), place small bombs in the Security Directorate (DGS) building in the Puerta del Sol and in the HQ of the Falangist Labour Front (considered as two the most important and obvious symbols of Francoist torture and repression.) The DGS bomb explodes prematurely causing a number of minor casualties, but no deaths or serious injuries.

31 July: Madrid — Delgado and Granado are arrested by a Guardia Civil officer

241

Chronology — 1963 as they prepare to leave the city. The Guardia claims he believed them to have been acting suspiciously, but it later it become clear the two anarchists had been under constant surveillance by the BPS, at least since Delgado’s arrival in Madrid.

The police discover Granado’s cache of explosives, weapons and radio transmitter and, under torture, the two men ‘confess’ to causing the explosions of 29 July.

2 August: Spain — Franco’s Director General of Security, Carlos Arias Navarro, Comisario Eduardo Blanco and Inspector Martin Herreros of the BPS make public the arrest of Delgado and Granado. At Port Bou in Barcelona the railway line to France is damaged by an explosion, which holds up traffic for more than five hours. Simultaneous explosions blow up electricity pylons at Cam Prim. The explosions are blamed on Ramón Vila.

28 August: USA — Massive civil rights ’March on Washington’ with more than 200,000 protestors. Martin Luther King delivers his 'I have a dream' speech.

7 August: La Creu de Perello, Catalonia — Ramón Vila Capdevila (57) (Pasoslargos, Jabalí or capitán Raymond), the last of the rural guerrillas operating in the Pyrenees (both as a resistance fighter and a Maquisard guide escorting thousands of escaped Allied prisoners of war into Spain), is ambushed and killed by a Guardia Civil patrol in the early hours of the morning.

11 August: Paris — The Iberian Liberation Council (CIL-DI) issues the following communiqué: 'According to press reports two explosions took place in the Spanish capital on 29 July of this year: one inside the offices of the General Directorate of Security, which caused light injuries, and the other in the Chamber of the Falangist Syndicates, at 17.30 hours and 24.00 hours respectively. Two days later, following a massive police operation, the Francoist police arrested Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granado. The coincidence and proximity of these two events have no relation to each other — the first people to know this are the Francoist police themselves — but every effort is being made by the regime to present the two arrested men as the material authors of the 29 July explosions. This is absolutely false. The Iberian Liberation Council has always accepted responsibility for its actions, and we hereby declare to national and international public opinion the following: 1. Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granado were in no way responsible for the events in Madrid on 29 July this year.

2. The arms cache attributed to Francisco Granado (as many others which exist in our country for specific purposes) had been unused and remained intact until its discovery by the police. (The Brigada Politico-Social discovered two Colt 45s, a machine gun with two magazines, a radio transmitter, hand grenades and other materiel in an apartment).

3. Joaquin Delgado is completely innocent of the other charges made against him by the police.

4. The author or authors of the events of 29 July in Madrid have not been arrested. If, in Spain, 'justice' were carried out with a minimum of legal normality then the truth of our affirmations could be easily proved in the interests of the defence of the two men. However, this is not the case. The Iberian Liberation Council holds the Francoist regime, imposed by force of arms, responsible both individually and collectively, for all victims who have fallen or may yet fall in the struggle for the freedom of the people of the Iberian Peninsula. We are the first to lament these victims, wept over with crocodile tears by the forces of reaction to justify their atrocities. Those responsible for placing the bombs in the Falangist building and in the Directorate of Security inform us that the former was carried out to expose the government unions as the servants of the employers and the regime. The latter was a protest against the arbitrary arrest and deportations of the Asturian miners. Also, because it is the building in which men and women are barbarically tortured for supposed political and social crimes (i.e. opposing tyranny). The action group that carried out the two attacks acted on its own initiative. The Iberian Liberation Council declares its solidarity with that group and revindicates the actions as a protest against the regime.' (Communiqué issued by Iberian Liberation Council (CIL).

13 August: Madrid — A court martial of the First Military Region (Madrid) imposes sentence of death by strangulation (garrotte-vil) on Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granado.

17 August: Madrid — The Director of Carabanchel Prison, Madrid, sends an official memorandum to Colonel Eymar, still head of the Juzgado Especial de Actividades Extremistas: ‘I have the honour to inform you that your orders have been fulfilled. Sentence was carried out at 5.00 a.m. today. Without further news.

God guard you many years.’ According to the medical report both men died from ‘a coronary haemorrhage’ (during which blood is pumped into the aorta and the arteries that lead to the lungs) and ‘bulbar traumatism’.

18 August: Madrid — 'In the early hours of this morning, subject to the formalities of Common Law, the two terrorists Francisco Granado Gata and Joaquin Delgado Martínez were executed in accordance with the sentence imposed by the Council of War of the 1st Military Region.’ (Extract from Official communiqué 18/8/63

CIL communiqué: — ‘Joaquín Delgado and Francisco Granado denied any knowledge of the events of 29 July in Madrid. The Iberian Liberation Council states that the Franco regime was afraid to reveal the real reason for their trial as it was considered the accused would win the sympathy of world opinion if it became known that the mission in which they participated, and the material found in their possession, was intended for the execution of the Assassin of the Spanish Working Class — General Francisco Franco. This was the real reason behind the farce mounted on 13 August behind closed doors in Madrid's Calle de Reloj.’

27 August: France — Following an official visit to Paris by the head of the Barcelona secret police (BPS), Eduardo Polo, five young Spanish anarchists living in France are arrested: Salvador Gurucharri, Jose Catalá, Juan Quesada, Josep Morato and Esteve Gonzalbó.

September: Norwich — The first intake of students arrive at the University of East Anglia.

6 September: France — Le Figaro news item: 'Police operations targeting Spanish anarchist circles took place yesterday in Pans and the S.E. of France. A number of extremists are being interrogated and their homes searched. Thirty arrests have been made so far in the Paris region and the HQ of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) in the rue Sainte Marthe have been searched. These operations appear to have been inspired by the discovery of documents in Perpignan detailing plans for aggressive actions and “attentats” in Spanish territory.'

11 September: France — French police raid the homes and meeting places of more exiled Spanish anarchists and arrest another 50 known activists throughout France.

21-23 September: Madrid — CIL-DI bombs explode in the German Embassy, Moroccan Embassy and in the Church of Loyola.

25 September: Madrid — Bomb explodes outside the home of US Ambassador.

This is followed, hours later, by another explosion at the home of the head of the Falangist Movement.

27 September: Madrid — Explosion at the home of Aramburu, Civil Governor and head of the Falangist National Movement.

29 September: Madrid — Bomb explodes outside the US Embassy. (A ‘Colonel Montenegro’ of the IV Republican Army claims responsibility for all the recent Madrid explosions).

October: Brussels — FIJL member Francisco Abarca is arrested in Belgium accused of participating in a bomb attack on an Iberian aeroplane at Geneva airport.

Autumn-Winter: Glasgow and London — Anarchist demonstrations in protest against the escalation of terror and repression in Castro's Cuba. (Cuba’s vice Consulate in Glasgow is occupied for a few hours.)

18 October: Spanish frontier — Alain Pecunia, Bernard Ferry and Guy Batoux, young French socialists and anarchists who were arrested on 16 April, are tried and sentenced by consejo de guerra in Madrid: Alain Pecunia (17) is sentenced to 24 years imprisonment. Bernard Ferry (20) ito 30 years imprisonment and Guy Batoux (23) to 15 years imprisonment.

20 October: Toulouse — French authorities allow the CNT to hold their Third Congress of CNT Local Federations in Toulouse (after having refused it permission to meet in Toulouse for many years). The quid pro quo is the CNT’s abandonment of its commitment to the armed struggle against Franco and the withdrawal of the CNT’s financial support for the Committee of Interior Defence (DI). The CNT’s office-holders are all people who are susceptible to pressure from the French authorities and who are anxious to maintain the legal status of the CNT in France above all other considerations. This effectively means the end of Defensa Interior as an official arm of the Spanish Libertarian Movement. The FIJL decides to continue the armed struggle (under the initials of the Iberian Liberation Council (CIL) and, later, the First of May Group), something foreseen by the French authorities who declare the FIJL an illegal organisation. (Shortly after the failed attempt on Franco’s life in San Sebastián and the firebombs on the Spanish aeroplanes in European airports, the general secretary of the CNT met with a delegation of Spanish reserve colonels — at the latters’ request — who offered to support the CNT’s pro-prisoner campaign in return for the anarchists calling a halt to their actions. They also suggest a plan to facilitate a change of government.)

20 October: Paris — The same day the CNT Congress meets, the French Interior Ministry announces that ‘in accordance with the Law of 12 April 1939 relating to foreign organisations, further modified by the Decree of 1 September 1939: Art. 1.: the legality of the foreign association known as the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth has been annulled . . . ' (Extract from the 'Journal Officiel', 20 October 1963).

23 October: London — Publication of Robbins report on higher education calling for expansion of universities.

242

Chronology — 1964 25 October: Mexico City — Bomb explodes at a stand in the Spanish Trade Fair.

A young anarchist is arrested after being wounded in the explosion.

South Vietnam — It becomes clear to the US administration that its surrogate president, Ngo Dinn Diem, can no longer remain in power in South Vietnam and is assassinated. US and South Vietnamese forces begin the ‘pacification’ of South Vietnam by attempting to rid rural areas of armed opposition to the government.

Milan: — Anarchist railwayman Giuseppe Pinelli joins Giuventu Libertaria (Libertarian Youth) 20 November: France — Franco’s Foreign Minister Castiella meets French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville in Paris 22 November: Dallas, Texas — President Kennedy assassinated by gunman (or men) acting for the Cuban exiles and mafia, both of whom resent his treachery.

1964 February: Barcelona — Arrest in Barcelona of CNT members Francisco Calle and Mariano Pascual. Industrial actions and strikes spread from the Basque country and the Asturias to most parts of the peninsula.

19 February: Paris — Popular protests force the French authorities to release the last of the Spanish anarchists charged with membership of an 'association of malefactors'.

28 March: London — C100 organised ‘sit-down’ outside Ruislip USAF base ends with 302 arrests.

29 March: Clacton (UK) — Police arrest ninety-seven teenagers in fight between ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’.

Spring: Rome — Members of Stefano Delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) attend courses on the theory and practice of terrorism, psychological warfare and the use of explosives. Three AN members plant explosives in a branch office of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in Rome but are discovered and escape. Bombs explode at the same time in RAI TV studios and the HQ of the Christian Democratic party. The five AN men involved are arrested and name Delle Chiaie as the instigator, but no action is taken against him, therebye enhancing his reputation as ‘untouchable’.

Spring: USA — Young members of the left-wing 2 May Movement refuse to do military service in protest against US policy in Vietnam.

April: Spain — Franco’s 'Twenty-Five Years of Peace' celebrations are marred by a resurgence of strikes in the Asturian mines. The immediate cause is a new labour law which is rejected by the miners as it fails to deal with the problem of silicosis.

As the strikes spread, Franco’s government responds with a savage repression.

Men are dismissed and strikers arrested, a number of whom remain in prison until 1970.

12-24 April: Bristol — I attend the founding meeting of the Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB). It is my first meeting with Spanish anarchists of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) and the CNT in exile.

26 April: Madrid — Arrest of Daniel Lacalle Larraga, the son of Franco’s Minister of Aviation, for membership of an illegal organisation (CP).

1 May: The US’s escalating Vietnam War begins to take precedence over antinuclear concerns among radicals and anti-militarists.

2 May: Madrid — 600 British troops sent as reinforcements to Aden, bringin garrison total to 2,000.

10 May: Madrid — Bomb explodes in Castellano Hilton Hotel.

11 May: Madrid — Four more bombs explode in the capital and another in Gijón. The American Embassy, the Ministry of Commerce and the Institute of Immigration are the targets. Bombs continue to explode in Madrid at the number of three or four per day.

23 May: Madrid — 'Colonel Montenegro', an NCO in the Spanish army and national ski champion, is arrested and charged with most of the bombings that summer. ‘Montenegro’ claims to be an officer in former Spanish Republican minister Julio Alvarez del Vayo’s Army of the Third Spanish Republic.

25 May: Scotland — ‘Scots Against War’ group publish and distribute a duplicated leaflet during a Holy Loch demonstration called How to disrupt, obstruct and subvert the Warfare State. This is followed by further similar publications and escalation in sabotage actions (fires at the Holy Loch pier and the Faslane submarine base) and attacks on Army recruiting offices throughout Scotland.

June: London — I move to London to stay at 57 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill Gate, the flat of Margaret Haines and her companion Brian Hart, friends I had met at the AFB conference in Bristol. The Harts are the driving force in the Notting Hill Anarchist Group and friends of Salvador Gurruchari and other London-based FIJL militants.

3 June: Mississippi — Young northern white civil rights worker murdered.

June: Washington — US Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater, a major general in the US Air Force Reserve, proposes dropping 'baby' nuclear bombs in Vietnam Summer: Brighton — Three years after the arrival of its first intake of 1,000

undergraduates, students begin to graduate from the new University of Sussex.

The Economist comments: '’To have a child at the University of Sussex is beyond question the most absolutely OK thing in Britain now.’ Nanterre University in Paris also opens in 1964.

Summer: New York — Black riots in Harlem.

5 August: South East Asia: — A US frigate in the Gulf of Tonkin provokes an attack by a Vietnamese vessel which in turn provides the USA with a pretext, for a congressional resolution that gives President Lyndon Johnson almost unlimited authority to escalate the Vietnam War. Rome: — Licio Gelli, an old-guard fascist from the Mussolini era and friend of Argentinian ex-dictator Juan Perón, returns from exile in Argentina (he had been accused of torturing and murdering partisans under Mussolini) and is inducted into the elite or ‘covered’ masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), of which he becomes Organising Secretary. (Until Gelli’s arrival, P2 had been a lodge in decline. Its membership consisted of middle-ranking civil servants, junior army officers and small businessmen. But within two years, using his international network of extreme right-wing political, military and business contacts — which was particularly strong among the power elites of the Latin American dictatorships — Gelli more than doubled P2’s membership to 573 and covered every key sector in the Italian establishment. Members included cabinet ministers, generals, admirals, the heads of the intelligence and security services, MPs, police chiefs, mayors of important cities and senior media people. The conspiratorial and criminal nature of P2 was only discovered during the later investigation into the La Rosa dei Venti organisation, whose leaders were all P2 members, and the fraud investigation into Michele Sindona’s Banca Privata Finanziaria. Gelli was later arrested attempting to withdraw $120m from the private account of Roberto Calvi, the Vatican banker whose body was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London on 18 June 1982.)

10 July: London — My 18th birthday.

14 July: Rome — Fearful of the so-called ‘opening to the left’ under Christian Democrat (CD) premier Aldo Moro and the electoral advances of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) — with nine million voters and 25 per cent of the vote in the previous year’s general election — the Italian establishment plans the installation of a government of ‘public safety’ consisting of right-wing Christian Democrats, senior industrial figures and military men. ‘Plan Solo’, as it is known, is drawn up by the powerful General Giovanni De Lorenzo, head of the Italian army secret service, SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate) (later to become the Servizio Informazioni Difesa — SID) since 1956 and chief of the paramilitary Carabinieri since 1962, and twenty other senior army officers, allegedly with the full compliance of Italy’s president, Antonio Segni. ‘Plan Solo’ was to have concluded with the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and his replacement by the right-wing Christian Democrat leader Cesare Merzagora. The coup is called off at the last moment following a parliamentary compromise between the socialists and CDs. Rose of the Winds: — Following the aborting of ‘Plan Solo’, General de Lorenzo and 87 senior officers (who between them represent every corps and all of the security and intelligence services), set up another clandestine planning organisation known as La Rosa dei Venti — Giunta Executiva Riscossa Sociale Italiana (the Rose of the Winds — Executive Council of Italian Social Salvation).

The organisation's aim is to ensure that the Italian officer corps consists solely of men loyal to La Rosa’s objectives and to this end de Lorenzo methodically purges the Carabinieri and secret service of all socialists and anti-fascists and replaces them with his own ‘men of confidence’. He also begins to build up the Carabinieri into a highly trained regular army unit, equipping them with heavy weapons, armoured vehicles and a special parachute detachment. La Rosa dei Venti effectively creates a secret parallel army within the armed services and police forces which comes to control the state’s main instruments of social control and repression. (In 1967 it is discovered that SIFAR/SID has unlawfully built up dossiers on some 157,000 Italians it considered subversive.) General Miceli, the later head of the SID, the Italian security service, admitted that he had personally been responsible for the day-to-day running of the Rosa dei Venti, but that he had set it up ‘at the request of the Americans and NATO’. (He is referring here to the FTASE, the NATO intelligence service in Verona, part of the general command of NATO in Southern Europe.)

Robert Cavallero, a leading right-wing Italian trade unionist and Rosa plotter, later, in 1974, described the organisation’s raison d’etre: ‘We opted for the strategy of tension as it was necessary for us to create a desire for order in the man in the street… The organisation had a legitimate role, which was to prevent our institutions being placed in jeopardy. When disorder and trouble erupts in the country — rioting, strikes, violence and a breakdown of public order — the organisation’s job was to provide the means of ensuring a return to order. When there was no trouble, it would be contrived by the far right, and directed and financed by members of the organisation.’

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Chronology — 1964 -1965 July 31: London — I leave London for Paris and Madrid.

15 August: Madrid — Fernando Carballo and I are arrested by the BPS (who are waiting for me) and charged with Banditry and Terrorism. The explosives were to have been used in an attempt on Franco’s life at Bernabeu football stadium.

1 September: Madrid — Francoist Military Tribunal sentences Fernando Carballo Blanco to 30 years imprisonment, and me to 20 years.

2 September: Spain — Formation of the CP-dominated Workers' Commissions (Comisiones Obreras) trades union confederation (later declared illegal in 1967 by the Tribunal de Orden Publico).

September: Paris — The French Anarchist Federation’s newspaper Le Monde Libertaire calls on anarchist students to meet to discuss and coordinate their university activities during the following academic year at the Sorbonne and the new Nanterre campus in the Parisian outskirts. Behind this initiative is a group of people from anarchist and Trotskyist-Marxist backgrounds who share a vision of anarchism removed from the ‘non-violent, humanistic individualism’ that had dominated the French Anarchist Federation (FAF) for some years. They are open to Marxist analyses and, in particular, an acknowledgement of the class struggle as ‘the locomotive of history’ (or revolution by proxy) Two Nanterre students, JeanPierre Duteuil and Georges B are among the ten young anarchists who turn up for the first meeting of what is to become the Anarchist Students’ Liaison (LEA) in the Belleville offices of the CNT in the Rue Sainte-Marthe.

September: Colchester, Lancaster and Warwick — First student intake arrives for the three new Redbrick universities.

October: Berkeley, California — Free Speech movement protest against Berkeley University’s refusal to allow on-campus civil rights activity. For the first time young middle-class Americans come face-to-face with a substantial corporate institution. Immediately preceding the Free Speech movement, Berkeley had been one of the main recruiting grounds for the civil rights activists during the summer of 1964 and a number of Berkeley students had travelled down to Mississippi for the ‘Freedom Summer’ organised by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The murder of three civil rights workers, one young black and two whites (after the refusal by the federal government to defend blacks against violence) contributes much to their politicisation and the students returned west that autumn highly motivated, bringing with them their considerable anger at the blatant injustices they had seen and experienced at first hand. They also bring with them the southern blacks’ sense of community, militant idealism and the tactics of civil disobedience and non-violent direct action. With this heightened sense of political awareness students quickly see that the role of the universities is to act as socialising agents; they begin to understand the connections between the struggle against racism in the south, free speech in the west, and the US’s agenda for the war in South East Asia. The paternalistic and hierarchical structure of university life is increasingly perceived as a microcosm of power in the outside society. This critique of university life extends to the wider sphere of traditional political parties, liberal organisations and ideologies, all of which are seen as complicit in the different forms of oppression that permeate everyday life.

16 October: London — Harold Wilson becomes Labour Prime Minister. With his election (by majority of 5 MPs) it appears that ‘consensus’ politics is now out of phase with the popular mood. Voters increasingly use the political system to satisfy their own personal requirements, as opposed to voting along more traditional ideological or class lines of previous generations. The electorate may be uncertain as to what they do want, but they are becoming increasingly certain as to what they do not want. Right-wing ideologue, Ex-major general turned sociologist Richard Clutterbuck later claimed that people began to vote from fear: 'people who fear a Conservative government fear industrial confrontation and a society disrupted by unrest. People who fear a Labour government fear bureaucracy and economic collapse.’

21 October: Copenhagen — CIL bomb attack on Spanish Embassy.

27 November: Rome — CIL firebomb guts Opus Dei seminary. Another CIL bomb explodes inside the Vatican and in the Spanish Pontifical College, Rome.

2-3 December: California — Mass occupation of Sproul hall, berkeley, follows suppression of pro-civil rights Free Speech Movement on the campus. 800 police break up what turns out to be the start of the ‘student revolt’.

1965 2 January: Naples — CIL bomb explodes in Spanish Consulate.

7 February: Washington — President Lyndon B. Johnson orders first US B47 saturation bombing of North Vietnam, hitting civilian targets with high-explosive, napalm and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs.

14 February: Spain — Murdered Portuguese opposition leader General Humberto Delgado is found on the outskirts of Badajoz, near the Portuguese border. Two officers of the Portuguese secret police (PIDE) are arrested in Spain in connection with his murder and held for a short time in Carabanchel prison.

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19 February: Copenhagen — CIL bomb explodes in Spanish National Tourist Office.

March: USA — Black Power leader Malcolm X assassinated; US Marines intervene to support right-wing forces in Dominican republic; massive civil rights march led by Martin Luther King to Selma, Alabama.

5 March: Madrid — Franco’s council of ministers discuss serious internal political difficulties facing the regime.

Spring: Portugal — OAS exile Yves Guérin-Sérac establishes Aginter Press in Lisbon as a ‘plausibly deniable’ cover for Third World mercenary recruitment, intelligence-gathering and terror operations, mainly in Portuguese Africa and the bordering countries. Aginter’s aims include the liquidation of leaders of the liberation movements, infiltration, the recruiting of informers and provocateurs, and the use of false liberation movements.’

(Source: post-1974 Portuguese SDCI report.)

Spring: Spain — Major anti-Francoist university demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona with students, like their counterparts elsewhere, inspired by new currents of left-wing thought.

April: USA — SDS organizes university teach-ins and the first national antiVietnam War march in Washington which draws over 15,000 people, mostly students. Over the next three months the number of local SDS groups triples to well over 100 and the national membership grows to several thousand.

Demonstrations grow against the Vietnam War. The word ‘hippie’ is used for the first time in print in an article by Michael Fallon in the San Francisco Examiner.

1 April: Madrid — Franco’s deputy, Muñoz Grandes, diagnised with renal cancer.

1 5 April: London — 150,000 attend anti-bomb rally in Trafalgar Square at end of Aldermaston march. Some contingents carry anti-Vietnam war slogans.

25 April: Milan — CIL bomb wrecks Iberia office.

Easter: Europe and US — First major international demonstrations against the Vietnam War. May: Holland — Robert Jasper Grootveld, a Dutch street performance artist attracts massive crowds in Amsterdam with exhibitionistic ‘Happenings’ (agitational-propaganda (agit-prop) street theatre). Roel van Duyn, a philosophy student at the University of Amsterdam attends one and distributes a manifesto announcing the birth of the Provo movement, an attempt to turn the aggression of the ‘Nozems’ (disaffected Dutch teenagers), ‘into revolutionary consciousness’. Inspired by anarchism and Dadaism the Provo movement is the first to combine non-violence and absurd-surreal humour to provoke social change. Grootveld is impressed with the first Provo manifesto and cooperates with van Duyn. As he later recalled: ‘When I read the word anarchism in that first pamphlet, I realised that this outdated 19th century ideology would become the hottest thing in the 1960s’. Van Duyn’s leaflets are soon followed by the so-called ‘White Plans’, one of which is the provision of 50 free bicycles for the people of Amsterdam to use as and when required. Another Provo publication causes a major scandal when it refers to the Nazi affiliations of members of the Dutch Royal family.

May: Morocco — Mehdi Ben Barka’s party, the UNPF, wins 28 seats in the Moroccan National Assembly.

3-5 May: Rome — Under the aegis of the ‘Alberto Polli Institute for Military and Historical Studies’, La Rosa dei Venti convenes an anti-Communist symposium at the Parco de Principe Hotel on the theme of ‘Revolutionary Warfare — An Instrument of World Expansion’. The three-day conference, chaired jointly by a parachute regiment colonel and the president of the Milan court of appeal, proves pivotal in the implementation of the ‘strategy of tension’ and subsequent terrorist outrages in Italy and elsewhere. The principal speakers included the right-wing journalist and secret service (SID) agent Guido Giannettini, the neo-Nazi Ordine Nuovo founder Pino Rauti, and Edgardo Beltrametti and Enrico De Boccard, two right-wing journalists who went on to set up the Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato (State Defence Nuclei) — and the neo-Nazi agent Mario Merlino and his mentor Stefano Delle Chiaie.

The topic of the symposium was the appropriate short-term strategy to be adopted in the face of perceived Communist advances and to keep Italy within the Western orbit. The main paper, ‘Hypothesis for a Revolution’, was delivered by the university lecturer and Orientalist, Pio Filippani Ronconi, a cryptographer with the Italian Ministry of Defence and the SID. In it he suggested a security organisation structured on various levels — operational as well as hierarchical. The grassroots would be recruited from among professional people such as teachers and small businessmen, people capable of carrying out only passive and non-risky activities, but the sort of people in a position to challenge and boycott communist-promoted activities. The next level consisted of people capable of ‘bringing pressure to bear’ through

Chronology — 1965 - 1966 lawful means, people who would rally to the defence of the state and its legals structures. The third and more skilled professional level, argued Filippani, would be the ‘very select and hand-picked units, set up secretly and immediately, and trained to carry out counter-terror operations and what he described as ‘upsets at times of crisis to bring about a different realignment of forces in power’. These units, each unknown to the others but coordinated by a leadership committee, could be recruited partly from among those youngsters who were currently squandering their energies to no effect in noble demonstrative ventures’.

[Presumably this is a reference to Stefano delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale and Pino Rauti’s Ordine Nuovo.] As far as the senior level of the organisation was concerned, Filippani added: ‘A Council should be established above these levels on a “vertical” basis to coordinate activities as part of an all-out war against subversion by Communists and their allies. These represent the nightmare which looms over the modern world and prevents its natural development.’

Among the proposals outlined by SID agent Guido Giannettini is the creation ‘of a military instrument capable of facing up to the techniques and expansion of revolutionary warfare… an instrument encompassing the setting up of standing defence groups capable of resisting clandestine penetration by revolutionary warfare, and which will give battle without hesitation and with all necessary energy and ruthlessness, even in the least orthodox of circumstances…’ So impressed are the Italian general staff with the presentations that they commission a report from Guido Giannettini. (A similar confidential report, Communist Propaganda in the Armed Forces is later published in September 1967 by the Greek Colonels in justification for their ‘pre-emptive’ coup the previous April.)

All the Parco dei Principe ‘counter-revolution experts’ are recruited into the Italian secret service by its new head, Admiral Hencke, to whom they are personally responsible.

NATO planners are equally impressed and its officials approve a secret report on Civil Emergency Planning (CEP), under the terms of which agreement, all of the countries of the alliance are to establish secret ‘stay-behind units’, ‘composed of trustworthy and able individuals endowed with the necessary means and capable of intervening effectively in the event of an invasion.’ These are terroristguerrilla-intelligence gathering groups with a role similar to that of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) or the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in occupied Europe, during World War Two, the difference being that their role is to operate in their home countries in the event of a Soviet invasion or a Communist Party win in the polls. In Britain, Germany and Belgium these organisations are set up within the framework of the regular and reserve forces.

In Italy, ‘Operation Gladio’, as it is known, is primarily an auxiliary force recruited among ‘specialists’ known for their ‘anti-Communist’ reliability. The function of these forces is to establish secret bases, arms dumps and equipment caches and communications centres and to go into action within the framework of the current NATO survival plan ‘in the event of external socialist aggression or internal political upheavals’. In the Italian context, it is this NATO plan that leads directly to the recruitment of fascist terrorists permitted to act with impunity, uncontrolled, and who benefit from official cover as part of a ‘legitimate’ military back-up force.

Summer: Los Angeles — Blacks riot in Watts district; students burn their military call-up cards following the introduction of the draft (selective conscription)..

July: Madrid — Franco reshuffles his council of ministers with technocrats from the Roman Catholic Opus Dei predominating. Falangists, however, still retain some influence.

July: Holland — The first issue of Provo magazine appears, a development that proves shocking to the Dutch establishment who begin to realise the extent of the organisational abilities of radical Dutch youth. The movement spreads throughout Holland where almost every provincial Dutch town has its own local Provos, with anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and direct actions the major focus of radical activity.

July: Morocco — King Hassan II’s security adviser, the obsessive anti-communist and arch-reactionary General Mohammed Oufkir, claims to uncover a plot against the king (who is also the Moroccan prime minister), involving opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka, who has already fled into exile. Oufkir, the CIA’s man in Morocco, is appointed minister of the interior. (Ethiopia and Morocco are at this time the US’s most important African allies). The US ambassador to Morocco in 1965, Henry J Tasca later becomes known for his role in supporting the Greek colonels’ junta.) The CIA’s station chief in Morocco, Robert Wells, is responsible for coordinating CIA assistance to the Moroccan security police and advising on eradicating political opponents of the regime.

August: France — Annual summer camp organised by Spanish anarchist exiles in the south of France begins to attract more and more young anarchists from all over Europe and Latin America, including Dutch Provos, Italians, Nanterre students and British anarchists.

1 August: France — The FIJL announces an international campaign of direct action in support of Spanish and Portuguese political prisoners.

17 August: Madrid — Alain Pecunia is released from Carabanchel prison on the second anniversary of the judicial murders of Delgado and Granado.

Autumn: Italy — Stefano Delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) launches a campaign of disruption, provocation and ‘black propaganda’ aimed at destabilising the Italian Communist Party (PCI) on the eve of its national congress.

September: Kent, Canterbury — First student intake arrives for Britain’s latest new Redbrick university .

September: France — The new university at Nanterre is the first campus in France to be built on a green field site. The students (who are in the main not from Paris, but drawn from the provinces and foreigners) are angry that they are some distance from the city with no bars, cafés or cinemas and deprived of a normal social life. Lack of mediation and a failure of administrative-management experience provoke Nanterre students to resort to direct actions — in the sense of doing things for themselves — instead of relying on officials. The small anarchist nucleus — the Liaison des Étudiants Anarchistes de Nanterre (LEAN), with around ten members to begin with — becomes increasingly active in the psychology, philosophy, sociology and history faculties where libertarian ideas begin to flourish. LEAN members work closely with the Noir et Rouge anarchist group based in the Sorbonne. New anarchist students arriving in the 1965-–66 academic year include Elysee, Marie-Clair, Willy, Gerard, Nilo and Dany CohnBendit.Autumn: — More and more international demonstrations against the Vietnam War. 1 October: Indonesia — A British and US-backed coup ousts the populistnationalist President Sukarno and installs pro-Western Suharto. The death toll following this coup is enormous with more than a million alleged communists murdered in a matter of months. A possible further million Indonesians are murdered over the following 32 years.

3 October: USA — The New York Times reports that 170,000 civilians have been slaughtered in Vietnam, 800,000 people tortured, 500 burnt alive, 100,000 poisoned by chemical weapons and unknown numbers disembowelled, castrated, raped and eviscerated. Addressing an anti-Vietnam War demonstration SDS activist Carl Oglesby says: ‘We are here to protest a growing war. Since it is a very hard war we acquire the habit of thinking it must be caused by very bad men. But we only conceal reality, I think, to denounce on such grounds the menacing coalition of industrial and military power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around us that heresy may soon no longer be permitted. We must simply observe, and quite plainly say, that this coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this demand for acquiescence are creatures, all of them, of a Government…’

3 October: Aden — Start of a general strike. More British troops flown in.

29 October: Paris — Mehdi Ben Barka, exiled Moroccan socialist leader and chairman of the steering committee for the imminent first Tricontinental Congress is lured to Paris from Geneva by the French intelligence servive, the SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre Espionage, headed at the time by General Paul Jacquier), where he is kidnapped off the street in broad daylight by uniformed officers in a police patrol car. The Tricontinental Havana conference is seen by many in the Third World as a crucial milestone, demonstrating solidarity and brotherhood in the battle against imperialism and by the US government as a cause of major geopolitical concern. Ben Barka’s body is never recovered. General de Gaulle’s support for the Moroccan socialist leader suggests that the Moroccan was lured to Paris by rogue pro-CIA elements in the French intelligence service, the SDECE, on behalf of the CIA and the head of Moroccan Intelligence General Mohammed Oufkir. The latter is alleged to have personally tortured Ben Barka then killed him.

18 November: Rome — Formation of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa (SID, the Italian Secret Intelligence Service) under Admiral Eugenio Hencke.

1966 January 3-10: Havana — First meeting of the Soviet- and Chinese-communistbacked TriContinental Congress, described as ‘the first solidarity conference of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America’.

Uruguay: — Exiled Spanish anarchist Abraham Guillén publishes Strategy of the Urban Guerrilla.

Italy — Stefano Delle Chiaie dissolves Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) and its hardline members vanish from circulation or reappear within the MSI, Italy’s mainline fascist party. Delle Chiaie himself goes underground to coordinate the campaign of infiltrating target leftist organisations on behalf of the Interior Ministry’s Bureau of Confidential Affairs, the UAR (ufficio affari riservati). Within these organisations the neo-fascists play the role of informers and agents provocateurs, urging and organising bombings and contriving confrontations with the police.

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Chronology — 1966 AN member Mario Merlino later claims that during this period of clandestinity, he planted a bomb in the South Vietnamese embassy in Rome with the intention of ‘blaming the left’.

February: Spain — Franco tells his cabinet that the British will never concede sovereignty over Gibraltar.

March: Holland — Princess Beatrix marries former Hitler Youth member Claus von Amsberg. Provos open a bank account to collect donations for an antiwedding present. Wild rumours spread through Amsterdam as to the intentions of the Provos: they are planning to dump LSD in the city water supply, building a giant gun to attack the wedding procession and that collecting manure to spread along the route of the parade. Dressed as ordinary citizens, the Provos manage to sneak past the police lines and set off lots of smoke bombs behind the palace as the procession begins and the wedding turns into a public relations disaster.

April: France — International get-together of young anarchists in Paris; also, but separately, the foundation of the Trotskyist Jeunnesse Communiste Revolutionnaire (JCR).

25 April: London — British Communist Party changes the name of the Daily Worker newspaper to the Morning Star.

30 April: Rome — Mgr Marcos Ussia, ecclesiastical attaché at the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican, is kidnapped. News of the operation is announced simultaneously by Luis Andrés Edo in Madrid and the First of May Group kidnappers in Rome.

May: USA — University sit-ins in protest against the Vietnam War; US soldiers begin to disobey orders.

May: France — Situationists take control of the Strasbourg Students’ Union.

12 May: Rome — Mgr Ussia is released unharmed and the First of May Group announces it will continue its activities in support of Franco's political prisoners.

15 May: UK — First issue of Ludd, an anarchist broadsheet, published by the Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review team (an occasional anarchist journal edited by Ted Kavanagh and Albert Meltzer), to coincide with the National Union of Seamen (NUS) strike. Interestingly, Ludd is one of the first of the ‘alternative’ press to be printed on the innovative small offset Lithograph machines with text set using the new non hot-metal typesetting technology, a do-it-yourself process which revolutionises the printing of radical publications and turbocharges the spread of radical ideas; fake US dollars carrying slogans against the Vietnam War circulate in London.

June: US — ‘Black power’ enters the popular vocabulary when Stokely Carmichael (leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee – SNCC) defines it as the ‘acquisition of economic and political power at local level’ by black people. This signals the end of a commitment to the tactic of ‘non-violence’ in the SNCC and more stress on the building of an all-black organisation and a move towards the exclusion of white organisers. Carmichael begins his march to the right, ending up as one of Nkrumah’s henchmen. Martin Luther King counters that he believes in ‘striped power’.

Summer: Holland — Repression in Holland increases with hundreds of protestors being arrested every week for disturbing the peace at ‘happenings’ and anti-Vietnam War rallies. A police ban on demonstrations leads to bigger demonstrations. Hans Tuynmann is made a martyr after being sentenced to 3 months imprisonment for whispering the word ‘image’ at a ‘happening’. At the same time, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, a war criminal responsible for deporting Jews to the death camps, is released from prison and a student fraternity member is given a small fine for manslaughter.

Summer: Britain — Publication of the first issue of Heatwave, a libertarian, surrealist and pro Situationist International publication edited by Chris Gray and Charles Radcliffe, (re-launched the following year as King Mob). Also around this time we have the earliest references to the word ‘subculture’ and organised attempts to legalise cannabis. Wooden Shoe bookshop (anarchist) opens in central London.

Summer: Italy — 2,000 Italian army officers receive a leaflet from an organisation called the Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato (NDS) calling on ‘loyal’ officers to form NDS units and to ‘join the victorious struggle against subversion’. The authors of this leaflet are Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, two of Stefano Delle Chiaie’s men and key protagonists in the terrorist ‘strategy of tension’.

10 August: Madrid — Bernard Ferry and Guy Batoux receive personal pardons (indultos personales) by Franco and released from prison.

Autumn: Strasbourg University — Situationist pamphlet published under the auspices of the Students’ Union appears entitled Of the Poverty of Student Life

‘Unconsciously, the new breed of delinquent, the vandal, the young thug, use violence to express their rejection of society. They embody the first side effects of “consensus” politics, the disintegration of values…This kind of youth despises work, but accepts the goods; they want what the “spectacle” (as the authors describe consumer capitalism) offers, but with no down payment…In the end, the contradiction proves too strong (to this end, to recuperate him, clothes, records, motor scooters, transistors, purple hearts, all beckon him to the land of the consumer) or else they are forced to attack the laws of society itself, either by stealing or by moving towards revolutionary consciousness.’ By lionising the adoption of anti-social values by large numbers of the masses the situationists ‘justified’ their own schizoid adoption of these values. They could then have their cake and eat it (true to their Marxist roots!).

The university authorities respond by closing the Students’ Union and suspending the five students involved. The judge’s summing up underlines the inability of the political establishment to understand the deep dissatisfaction felt by the privileged young people with university places — the principal beneficiaries of economic growth and extended educational opportunities — with ‘consensus’ politics. ‘One has only to read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday lives, made the empty, arrogant and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow students, their teachers, God, religion and the clergy, the government and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality these cynics do not hesitate to condone theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a worldwide proletarian revolution, with unlicensed pleasure as its only goal.’

Although the ‘Situationists’ and members of other ‘revolutionary’ groups of the period constitute a tiny minority, their rejection of paternalistic ‘consensus’ politics and re-affirmation of democratic ideals undoubtedly captures the mood of the time and mobilises a wider circle of people. The dominant ideas thrown up are those of direct action, self-management and regional autonomy. These provide much more satisfactory and political fulfilling alternatives to the neutered morality and half measures of the highly compromised and virtually indistinguishable corporatist and bureaucratic industrial societies of East and West. American student leader (SDS) Carl Oglesby observes: ‘Capitalism and socialism are different means for pursuing the common and general aims of industrialisation’.

October: Britain — First issue of International Times appears, the fortnightly voice of the new British ‘hippy-libertine counterculture’. Committee of 100 members Pat Pottle and Mike Randle help Soviet spy George Blake (whom they had befriended during an earlier sentence for anti-militarist demonstrations) escape from Wormwood Scrubs.

2 October: Britain — Nine libertarian and anarchist anti-militarist objectors are arrested and imprisoned for interrupting Foreign Secretary George Brown and Prime Minister Harold Wilson while reading the lessons during a pre-Labour Party conference religious service in Brighton. The demonstrators are protesting against the hypocrisy of politicians reading the lesson ‘Nation shall not lift sword against nation — neither shall they learn war any more’ — while providing unconditional political and economic support for the continuing American atrocities and genocide in Vietnam.

25 October: Madrid — Five anarchists arrested: Antonio Cañete Rodríguez, Alicia Mur Sin, Jesús Andrés Rodriguez Piney, Alfredo Herrera Dativo and Paris FIJL secretary Luis Andrés Edo, accused of preparing to kidnap the US Commander in Chief in Spain and the Argentinian ex-dictator in exile General Juan Perón.

November: France — Anarchist influence in Nanterre increases with the LEAN forming the Federalist Revolutionary Syndicalist Tendency (TSFR), the forerunner of the 22 March Group (who also distribute the surreal cartoon strip The Return of the Durruti Column which uses the figure of Durruti as an exemplary revolutionary role model, recently published by Situationist students in Strasbourg).

November: Northern Ireland — Loyalist terror campaign (under the aegis of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) begins, in reaction to public nationalist celebrations of the 1916 rebellion.

22 November: London — 1,500 students at the London School of Economics Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual and Particularly Intellectual (LSE) call a one-day lecture boycott in protest against suspension of some Aspects and a Modest Proposal for their Remedy. It points out to the new generation students following the publication in The Times of their letter protesting against of students that their lives are beyond their control. The authors stress that away the government White Paper on the economy. from student life, the rest of youth is beginning to revolt against the boredom of 8 December: New York — First of May Group spokesman Octavio Alberola everyday existence…, the dead life’ that was still the essential product of modern gives a press conference explaining the reasons behind the failed kidnap attempt in Madrid and distributes copies of the communiqué which Luis Andrés Edo was capitalism.

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Chronology — 1967 to have distributed once the operation had been carried out successfully.

Autumn-Winter: Italy — Major Amos Spiazza, officer in charge of the Italian army’s Intelligence Bureau in Verona is tasked by his superiors to ‘shadow’ the NATO Gladio structure. He is also informed that three-man partisan teams are being set in place throughout Italy. He later tells investigators into the ‘strategy of tension’ and the attempted coup d’état of 7 December 1970 that he was personally responsible for the 5th Legion, with 50 hand-picked people and that everything he did was known and agreed to by his superiors in the Intelligence Bureau and the FTASE (NATO Intelligence Southern Europe).

1967 27 January: Spain — Workers and students demonstrate in Madrid. Franco argues that aggressive anti-British propaganda over Gibraltar is a mistake and that it is pointless to try to humiliate the British, and quashes Castiella’s proposal to fly barrage balloons around Gibraltar to obstruct British access to the Rock. In spite of UN resolutions demanding an end to Gibraltar’s colonial status, Franco admits that nothing can be done without first convincing British public opinion that the Rock belongs to Spain.

February: France — ‘Happening’ at Nanterre University organised by performance artist Jean-Jacques Lebel. Guy Debord (in my view a vicious paranoid megalomaniac), but with some radical ideas on art, publishes his book, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord’s main thesis is that everywhere reality is being replaced by images which, in turn, themselves become reality. His theory begins as a critique of alienation and what he calls the ‘spectacle’ — the idea being that capitalism has reduced the world to mere spectacle. ‘All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. All real activity has been channelled into the global construction of the spectacle.’ The objective of the Situationist International (SI) is to create situations aimed at constantly wrong-footing the enemy. An important part of Debord’s ideas is that of recuperation, the way in which even the most radical gesture is ultimately commodified and turned into an item of leisure interest by the ‘spectacle’, such as Che Guevara T-shirts.

February: Athens — US Ambassador Talbot recommends that the CIA undertake extra-parliamentary political action to defeat the candidacy of Papandreou in Greek general elections.

26 February: Vietnam — US troops launch the biggest assault of the war when more than 25,000 soldiers attack the Viet Cong stronghold near the Cambodian border 1 March: Aden — British troops open fire on anti-colonialist demonstrators in Aden.

10 March: South East Asia — US aircraft bomb a major industrial installation in North Vietnam for the first time.

13 March: London — First British student occupation takes place at the LSE involving more than 2,000 students.

Easter: Italy — International conference of young anarchists in Milan.

1 April: London — First of May Group kidnap and hold hostage for a few hours the First Secretary and legal attaché of the Spanish Embassy in London demanding my release and that the trial of Luis Andrés Edo and four other anarchists, arrested the previous October in Madrid, be held under the aegis of the civilian Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP) rather than a court martial. (The Spanish military court relinquishes its right to try Edo and the others who are tried by the TOP two months later and who receive relatively low sentences, except for Edo who was sentenced to nine years. But even so, this prison sentence is unheard of for an anarchist in Spain charged with such a serious offence.)

3 April: Aden — Three Arab civilians die as British troops clash with 1,200 demonstrators protesting against British rule.

7 April: Paris — 129 people arrested during anti-Vietnam War protest against state visit of US vice-president Hubert Humphrey.

21 April: Athens — Military coup in Greece. Following a period of political instability and acts of terrorism which follow closely the pattern of the ‘strategy of tension’ as set out by the extreme right in Italy during the Parco dei Principe conference and people with whom they are in close regular contact, Greek army colonels, supported by the KYP (Central Service of Information), National Security Service (Asphaleia), the National Military Security (ESA), the army, navy and air force, order the deployment of three hundred troops of the US-trained and NATOcontrolled Mountain Assault Brigade to seize the Greek parliament building and implement ‘Plan Prometheus’, a NATO contingency operation, and topple the democratically elected government.

Brutal repression and torture of the regime’s enemies follows. Pino Rauti, Italian Ordine Nuovo leader and one of the organisers of the Parco dei Principe conference, is among the very first official guests of the ruling Junta. Among those with whom Rauti has meetings is Dimitrios Ionnidis, the new head of Greece’s military police, Colonel Ioannis Ladas of the Ministry of Public Order and Kostas Plevris, an officer of the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. During the next few

months Rauti and Delle Chiaie organise a series of semi-official trips to Greece of handpicked right-wing Greek students studying in Italy and around 50 selected members of Ordine Nuevo and Avanguardia Nazionale. Officially described as ‘cultural exchanges’, the trips are in fact sponsored by General Enza Viola of the Italian General Staff and the Greek intelligence service. These students, mostly died-in-the-wool fascists, undergo mass ‘Damascus road’ conversions and return to Italy as convinced ‘socialists’, ‘communists’, ‘Maoists’ and ‘anarchists’. Mario Merlino, Stefano Delle Chiaie’s close friend and comrade, forms the XXII March Group on his return from Athens, in 1968, taking the name from the group of young anarchists from Nanterre University, the group that spark the May events in Paris that year. The XXII March Group is dissolved after a month and Merlino makes overtures first to the Maoist Avanguardia Proletaria then to the Maoist Partita Comunista d’Italia (Linea Rossa), where he is unknown. He does not move back into anarchist circles until September 1969, three months prior to the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan.

International demonstrations organised outside Greek embassies.

1 May: Mexico City — José Alberola Navarra (Octavio Alberola's father) is tortured and murdered in his flat by five unidentified men.

May: Amsterdam — Provos dissolve unexpectedly after achieving their demands to sack Amsterdam’s Mayor and police chief and the acceptance and incorporation of some Provo VIPs into the Dutch establishment.

1 May: Spain — Students demonstrate against clerical-fascist control of Spain’s universities. Police arrest and charge over 100 students in Madrid alone.

16 May: Spain — Three Madrid University students are arrested during protest demonstrations. This triggers more major disturbances and the office of the Dean of the faculty of sciences is attacked. From this incident emerge the new generation of student anarchists in Spain — the acratas.

21 May: France — Nanterre students occupy the women’s halls of residence; anarchist students distribute The Poverty of Student Life during lectures by Henry Lefebvre.

2 June: Berlin — Student demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg is shot dead by German police during a protest against the state visit of the Shah of Iran to Germany. (It is from this murder the anarchist urban guerrilla group Bewegung Zvei Huni [B2J — 2nd June Movement] take their name.)

Berlin — A hysterical Springer Group press demonises anarchist-hippy Fritz Teufel of Kommune: K-1 and student leader Rudi Dutschke, calling on the authorities to detain them indefinitely for their subversive activities. (Teufel was later imprisoned in the 1970s, accused of being a founder member of the 2 June Movement and involved in bank robberies and the abduction of CDU politician Peter Lorenz, the only successfgul political kidnapping in West Germany. (Seven imprisoned guerrillas were released in exchange for Lorenz and flown to South Yemen.)

5-10 June: Middle East — Six-Day War erupts between Israel and Egypt. US military facilities in Greece and Turkey become essential for the defence of Israel.

Israel halts its 12-mile military advance into Syria, having taken Arab territory many times larger than Israel.

22 June: Carabanchel — Following a failed escape attempt with Luis Andrés Edo, I am transferred from Carabanchel Alto Prison to Alcalá de Henares.

Summer: USA — Further black riots and protests against the Vietnam War; formation of Black Panther Party (‘revolutionary nationalists’) which, by this time is no longer a continuation of the civil rights movement, but a completely different body with a largely new leadership and social base 1 July: Algeria — Moise Tshombe's plane is hijacked to Algiers on a flight from Ibiza to Majorca.

4 July: Madrid — Trial of Luis Andrés Edo’s group by the Madrid Tribunal de Orden Publico (TOP). Edo is sentenced to 9 years while the others receive considerably shorter sentences.

5 July: Israel — Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan announces the annexation of Gaza thereby placing Palestine under Israeli control. George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) announces that the world has ignored the Palestinian Arabs since the disaster of 1948.

10 July: Alcalá de Henares — My 21st birthday.

27 July: US — Race riots sweep through US cities.

15-29 July: London — Dialectics of Liberation event at the Roundhouse, London. This is seen variously as an important event in the development of the British hippie counterculture or as an attempt by the non-Communist Party Marxists to upstage the ‘Christian-Marxist’ dialogue (vox populi vox dei, etc.).

18 August: Madrid — General Franco authorises my personal pardon (indulto) during a meeting of his council of ministers. The pardon is not official or made public (nor am I aware of it) until its publication in the Boletin Oficial del Estado on 21 September.

20 August: London — First of May Group members machine-gun cars of two Spanish diplomats. US Embassy is raked with machinegun fire by First of May

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Chronology — 1967-1968 Group in protest against US's role in supporting the Franco regime, the Vietnam War and other Third World countries. It also ties in with the Madrid trial of Luis Andrés Edo and his four colleagues.

September-October: France — Sociology and psychology students rally round the Nanterre anarchist group (LEAN) in protest against the inadequacies of the traditional students union. Protests soon extend to challenging the content and methodology of university lectures. As the agitation becomes more politicised it extends into a wider libertarian critique of the state and society.

10 September: Madrid — Even after the plebiscite organised by the British in which Gibraltarians vote nearly unanimously to remain British, Franco remains adamant that an aggressive stance by Spain will be counterproductive 21 September: Spain — Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco is appointed vice-president of Franco’s Council of Ministers; my pardon becomes official and I am released from Alcalá de Henares penitentiary, returning to London on 22 September.

October: UK — First intake of 120 students at new University of Stirling 10 October: Spain — FIJL member Julio Millán Hernández is arrested in Barcelona charged with membership of an illegal organisation (the FIJL).

21 October: Washington — Massive anti-Vietnam war rally turns violent when 50,000 demonstrators attempting to storm the Pentagon and halt the Vietnam war by occupying the building are attacked by soldiers and federal marshals with rifle butts and truncheons. Norman Mailer was the second person, of thousands, arrested by Pentagon marshalls that day and he wrote about it in Armies of the Night: ‘Authority was the manifest of evil to this generation... The authority had operated on their brains with commercials and washed their brains with packaged education, packaged politics... Authority had lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and in its mass magazines where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority... were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy: the corporation ofice worker and his high-school son.’

22 October: — Vietnam Solidarity Campaign organise a demonstration in support of Vietnamese National Liberation Front, marching to the US Embassy from Trafalgar SQuare; 5,000 are involved in fights with police.

November–December: France — Large demonstrations in Parisian Latin Quarter with up to 100,000 striking workers and students.

12 November: Bolivia — Cuban revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara is ambushed and wounded near the village of La Higuerra where he is interrogated

by Félix Ramos, a Cuban exile employed by the CIA. Guevara is executed at 2.00 pm the following afternoon by Bolivian army sergeant Mario Terán on the direct orders of Bolivia’s president, General Barrientos. His body is put on public display to journalists at Villa Grande in Bolivia. Colonel Joaquin Zenteno, the Bolivian commanding officer on the ground, responsible for tracking and ambushing Guevara, was himself later tracked and assassinated in Paris in May 1976.

Germany, Italy, Holland: — Simultaneous bomb attacks on Greek, Bolivian and Spanish Embassies in Bonn and the Venezuelan Embassy in Rome. Actions are claimed by the First of May Group in solidarity with Latin American guerrillas and against the fascist regimes in Europe. That same evening bombs also explode at the Spanish Tourist Office in Milan and at the Spanish, Greek and American Embassies in The Hague, Holland.

Cuba — Carlos Marighela, until then a CP stalwart, changes tack after attending the Conference for the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity in Havana (about the time Guevara is killed in Bolivia). Embracing Abraham Guillen’s ideas of the urban guerrilla he sets up the clandestine Revolutionary Communist Party. Marighella is killed in a gunfight with troops two years later. Regis Debray, then a university lecturer in Havana, publishes Revolution in the Revolution.

14 November: Washington — US secretary of State Dean Rusk states that the US’s escalation of the Vietnam War cannot be avoided.

21 November: South East Asia — In spite of growing protests in the US and worldwide against the war in Vietnam, US warplanes attack North Vietnam with increased ferocity. B-52 heavy bombers based in Thailand bomb Hanoi and Haiphong causing heavy civilian casualties. Elsewhere US aircraft support US troops in the Central Highlands near the Cambodian border using napalm, bombs and machine-gun fire.

30 November: Aden — Local Arabs surge into port city of Aden to celebrate the departure of British troops after 128 years of colonial rule and the formation of the new People's Republic of South Yemen.

14 December: Spain — Franco holds referendum on his Ley Orgánica. The vote is expressed in terms of a vote of confidence for Franco (‘Franco Si’). Eighty-eight per cent of the possible electorate vote in the referendum with less that two per cent voting 'no'. Voting stations have armed policemen, unfolded voting slips in glass urns, no envelopes or cubicles. Some voting stations record a vote of 120 per cent of the local electorate (a figure that is put down to transient voters).

26 December: South East Asia — North Vietnamese attack Laos.

26 December: Spain — FIJL member David Urbano Bermúdez is arrested on his arrival in Madrid on charges of being a member of the First of May Group.

1968 THE GUERRILLA STRUGGLE IN LATIN AMERICA, Third World Liberation movements, the US Civil Rights movement and the rising tide of student protests on European, American and Asian university campuses — all following each other in quick succession — contribute to the radicalisation of many young people who reject society’s repressive structure. This radicalisation clearly takes many different forms but through their now extensive Europe-wide contacts the anarchist First of May Group seeks to channel this widespread sense of revolutionary urgency and solidarity to launch joint actions with other European activist groups.

Discontent and frustration with the poor moral and ethical quality of people’s lives grows exponentially, particularly among students. People react against the duplicity of a mechanistic society that is geared to production and consumption and shows little regard for more social human values — to say nothing of the cant and hypocrisy of politicians who are either unable or unwilling to confront the moral contradictions of liberal-democracy. This distaste expresses itself increasingly forcefully in the spontaneous direct-action oriented anti-Vietnam War, anti-racist self-management movements. These actions, marches and demonstrations are not simply negative expressions of social alienation, but an affirmation of a newly rediscovered morality in political life, values that are based on participatory democracy, solidarity and mutual aid. They provide the synthesis for a new community-oriented counter-culture that seeks to challenge nascent corporate globalism and reassert the rights of the individual and smaller communities. The traditional political parties are rejected and the young turn to direct action to resolve the problems of the day. As far as they are concerned, ‘No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in’. The homeless turn to squatting, the unemployed and underprivileged form claimants’ unions to overcome the obstacles placed in their way by the welfare state; women, consumers, tenants, racial groups, students and all sorts of other minority groups begin to organise to assert their identities in a society in which all traditional ideological roads lead back to the same faceless and bureaucratic state. Also, the same unaccountable, unrecallable, lieing politicians drilled in parties marching to the tune of vested interests.

January: London — A mortar device is discovered facing the UK Embassy of the Greek military junta.

9 January: France — Dany Cohn-Bendit (23-year old student at Nanterre) confronts and denounces French Minister of Youth and Sports François Missofe over French government education policies. Strikes, demonstrations and student protests escalate throughout France.

31 January: Saigon — Viet Cong launch coordinated series of attacks in Tet offensive against major cities in South Vietnam. The more intelligent among the US military and intelligence community begin to realise the war is unwinnable.

1 February: Saigon —General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, director of South Vietnam’s national police force, is photographed on the streets of Saigon firing a bullet through the head of a Viet Cong prisoner standing with his arms tied behind his back.

8 February: Brussels — Spanish anarchist Octavio Alberola is arrested during preliminary negotiations for Spain's admission into Common Market (EEU).

Alberola had been preparing a press conference to denounce this manoeuvre and bring the plight of Franco’s political prisoners to the attention of the world.

13 February: France — Major anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

27 February: London — My Hornsey home is raided by police from West End Central police station with a warrant to search for explosives. Metropolitan Police Special Branch Det. Sgt. Roy Cremer accompanies CID detectives. The warrant for the raid is issued in connection with the mortar device discovered outside the Greek Embassy. They also have information (from an informer) that bomb attacks by the First of May Group are imminent in London and elsewhere.

3 March: London, The Hague, Turin — Six bombs damage buildings of diplomatic missions in Europe: the Spanish Embassy and the American Officers Club in London; the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese Embassies in the Hague, and at the US Consulate in Turin. The actions are claimed by the First of May Group.

6 March: West Berlin — Moabit Criminal Cour is firebombed by the people who will later adopt the name Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction — RAF).

7 March: Spain — Student disturbances close Madrid University’s Science Faculty 10–11 March: International — Violent confrontations between police and demonstrators at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations from Warsaw to Tokyo.

16 March: Washington — US President Lyndon Johnson announces he is to send between 35,000 and 50,000 more troops to Vietnam.

15–16 March: International — More anti-war demonstrations in Rome, Paris, Berlin, Algeria. US offices bombed in various cities.

17 March: London — The ad-hoc Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) organises

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Chronology — 1968 an anti Vietnam War march of 20,000 or so to the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. Despite the fact that the march is denounced by the traditional party-oriented left, the Communist and Labour parties, nor is it supported by the trades union movement or the pacifists.

Because of its confrontational and combative nature, the event proves to be one of the most significant, effective and widely publicised demonstrations of the1960s — and one of the bloodiest — with over 300 arrests. It also changes the nature of protest in the UK and brings home to the civil service mandarins in the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence, Scotland Yard and Leconsfield House (MI5’s then HQ in Curzon Street) and reactionary businessmen and retired army officers that for the first time in hundreds of years there is a real threat of revolutionary civil disorder on the streets of London. Special Branch officers are ordered to shift their attention away from industrial activists and plant agents and cultivate informers in the groups on the extra-parliamentary left and in the antiVietnam War movement. Perhaps the best analysis appears in New Society (21/3/1968): ‘The demonstration was something new, something that indicates the pattern of major protests we shall have in the future… things cannot be the same again after Sunday. The time of the orderly peace-platform marches are gone.’ The departure from orthodox CND type marchers could be seen in the demonstration’s ‘method of moving down streets, in its reaction to the police, in its speakers and in its platform’… The 17 March demonstration ‘had become street occupation… the idea was to seize the area, not march on the side of the road… the aim was maximum disruption’. The main lesson was that ‘the British tradition of polite politics is past’. For the thousands who took part in the Grosvenor Square confrontation with the police things will never be quite the same again.

The extensive media coverage of the Vietnam War over the previous months brings home the full horror of the war into more and more people’s consciousness and provokes widespread anger against Britain's support for US war aims in South East Asia. People openly admire the fact that the most technologically advanced global military power is unable to defeat the resistance of a predominantly peasant people.

18 March: Paris — Bomb attacks on offices of three US multinationals: Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of America and Transworld Airlines.

20 March: France — Students from the Sorbonne and Nanterre occupy the American Express office in Paris 22 March: Nanterre — Following a confrontation with the University authorities, a group of around 140 students (anarchists and Trotskyists from the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire (JCR) occupy Nanterre’s administration block around midnight. University authorities respond by sending police onto the campus and locking the students out, automatically turning it into a major media event.

25 March: Madrid — First of May Group bomb US Embassy.

31 March: Washington — President Lyndon B Johnson announces he will not run as for re-election as president in November.

Spring: Czechoslovakia — The eastern bloc country experiences a blossoming of freedom and creativity known as the ‘Prague Spring’, a process that deeply disturbs Moscow and the other Warsaw Pact countries.

2 April: Frankfurt — The group later to become known as the Red Army Fraction firebomb a major department store in protest against US napalm bomb attacks in Vietnam. Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are among the four people arrested.

9 April: Memphis — Martin Luther King is assassinated.

11 April: Germany — Rudi Dutschke, the student activist demonised by Axel Springer newspapers, is shot and wounded in the head by a right-wing gunman.

The attack triggers riots and demonstrations against Axel Springer newspaper group offices (considered responsible for creating the climate of intolerance that made the shooting inevitable) in Italy, Holland and the UK. 15 April: UK — 25,000 demonstrators in Trafalgar Square at end of Aldermaston march. A breakaway demonstration marches on the London offices of the Axel Springer newspaper group in Holborn in protest against the Dutschke shooting.

21 April: Birmingham, UK — 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.' With this inflammatory classical quotation Tory shadow Minister of Defence Enoch Powell sparks racist demonstrations and violence throughout the UK. 29 April: France — Protest meetings and demonstrations against the arrest of 22 March Group member Dany Cohn-Bendit for allegedly causing ‘public disorder’.

April-May: USA — Black and white students occupy Columbia University.

Demonstrators close the campus in protest against the university’s expansion into the black community of Harlem, CIA-funded and supported research institutes and programmes. Mark Rudd, later to emerge as a major figure in the US urban guerrilla group, the Weathermen, becomes nationally prominent for his role in the Columbia revolt. Major student protests also take place at Berkeley University.

Industrialised democracies: — Opposition to the Vietnam War provides a focal point for the growing political tensions which appear to be reaching critical mass throughout the industrialised world. Protestrors and dissidents take to the streets

in angry confrontations with the forces of public order; universities and colleges of higher education are occupied; popular demand grows for greater democratic controls, wage and pension demands lead to strikes; factory occupations and direct actions become daily events affecting every facet of public life.

1 May: International — Traditional labour day demonstrations. Few confrontations.

2 May: France, Thursday — To prevent the situation in the university campus deteriorating even further Nanterre’s Dean Grappin instructs the police to shut down the Faculty of Letters. Five hundreds students are arrested and he summons five students from Nanterre, two anarchists, Jean-Pierre Duteuil and three Trotskyists, to appear the on the 6th before the University of Paris’s disciplinary panel, thereby bringing the Paris Sorbonne students into the equation.

3 May: France, Friday — A meeting is called in the Sorbonne courtyard to protest against the closure of the Nanterre faculty and the carpeting of the Nanterre students. In response Sorbonne rector Paul Roche calls in the French riot police, the CRS, using teargar, and has the activists arrested for trespass. The students, evicted from the university, take to the streets demanding the liberation of their comrades who have been beaten up and summarily convicted, the reopening of the university faculties and the withdrawal of the police. This, in turn, leads to the first major street fighting in the Latin Quarter. Until now the confrontation has been exclusively university-oriented; but over the next 24 hours it develops into a much wider social and industrial struggle.

5 May: Paris — Paris is the scene of the worst street fighting since the Liberation in 1944. Up to 30,000 students take to the streets, having been locked out of their campuses by Sorbonne rector Paul Roche.

6 May: France — CRS riot police occupy the Latin Quarter over the weekend to break up the 20,000-strong students march from Denfert Rochereau to St Germain des Prés who are calling for the release of all arrested demonstrators.

Police attack the demonstrators, resulting in 422 arrests and 800 wounded.

Demonstrations, strikes and factory occupations spread like wildfire to other French towns and cities.

7 May: France — 50,000 students and teachers march through the streets of Paris behind a single banner: Vive la Commune and sing the Internationale at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

7 May: Essex — Police and dogs are called to Essex University after students break up a meeting addressed by a chemical warfare expert.

8 May: France — The Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) — which has previously denounced the students as ‘groupuscules and provocateurs made up of children of the high bourgeoisie serving Gaullist objectives — changes tack and claims to support the students.

8 May: UK — Lord Mountbatten and Cecil King, owner of the Daily Mirror, meet at King’s instigation to discuss removing UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

10 May: France — Demonstrations and campus occupations extend to secondary schools and colleges. Students and teachers occupy the Latin Quarter en masse. Interior Minister Fouchet and Deputy Premier Foux orders Paris police chief Grimoud to clear the streets which leads to the gas-masked CRS baton charging their way down the Latin Quarter’s rue Gay-Lussac and the infamous ‘night of the barricades’ in which over 1000 are wounded and at least 500 are arrested. The events of the night of 10-11 May capture the admiration, imagination and solidarity of radicals and trades-unionists throughout France and the rest of the world. The events of that night also strike fear into the authorities.

Many average militants cease being obstreperous students and perceive themselves as active revolutionaries. The streetfighting and the tactical and strategic debates which go on throughout Paris give the participants — and observers — a practical and theoretical sense that dramatic revolutionary change is possible, if the momentum can be maintained and the envelope pushed that bit further.

10 May: London — Cecil King, Daily Mirror editor and Bank of England director, calls on Wilson to resign in front page article, and talks of grave financial crisis threatening the country.

13 May: France — Over one million French workers and students demonstrate in Paris. The 22 March Group declares that the ‘struggle against repression’ has turned into ‘the struggle against the State’. The CRS withdraw from the Sorbonne and the students move in to occupy the buildings, a move which is followed by an unprecedented intellectual explosion with every lecture theatre packed out, day and night, with students enthusiastically debating all the possibilities and every conceivable political, cultural and social idea.

The Hague — First of May group bombs Spanish ambassador’s residence 14–21 May: France — The country’s industry and commerce is at a virtual standstill with up to 10 million striking workers supporting the students.

15 May: France — Workers occupy the Renault car factory in Cléon near Paris and students occupy the Odeón theatre in Paris. The strike movement acquires

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Chronology — 1968 greater momentum with more than 122 factories throughout France occupied by workers.

20 May: France — With ten million workers on strike the entire country is on the verge of revolution and the Communist Party warns its members against anarchist ‘provocations’.

25 May: Bonn — First of May Group bombs Spanish Embassy.

28 May: London — Hornsey College of Art sit in lasting seven weeks, following victimisation of popular teachers.

30 May: France — President de Gaulle announces he will not resign and claims that France is threatened by a communist dictatorship. He dissolves the National Assembly, calls a general election and authorises Prefects as 'Commissioners of the Republic' to suppress subversion with all available means. He calls for a public show of strength on behalf of the Gaullists and more than 1 million Gaullists take to the streets in support of the president. The ‘Events of May’ are over, but the memory lingers on.

June: Italy — Tens of thousands of pro-Chinese flyposters and graffiti appear on the walls of Italian cities. These turn out to be the work of neo-fascists not Maoists. The black propaganda campaign is the brainchild of Federico Umberto D’Amato, head of the Bureau of Confidential Affairs (UAR) at the Italian Ministry of the Interior and Stefano Delle Chiaie’s paymaster and boss, as part of the ‘strategy of tension’ of which he is the puppetmaster.

5 June: USA — Assassination of Robert Kennedy after he wins primary and looks set to become Democratic candidate in the 1968 election.

11 July: Moscow — Pravda expresses alarm at growth of liberalisation in Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubcek is introducing ‘socialism with a human face’ and economic reforms to make the economy more efficient.

20-27 August: Czechoslovakia — Tanks from Russia, Poland, Hungary and East Germany invade in the early hours of the morning. Workers and students offer passive resistance, telling tak crews to go hom.

28 August: USA — Chicago’s Mayor Daley’s police brutally attack young demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention Summer: Alghero, Sardinia — Italian general staff establish training camp in Western Sardinia where Stefano Delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) members receive CIA-sponsored training in terrorism and ideological indoctrination under the auspices of the NATO ‘Gladio’ plan which required member states to establish a national security authority to fight Communism and other perceived enemies of the status quo by means of clandestine citizen cadres.

The nearby HQ of the US Army’s Southern Land Forces at La Maddalena in northern Sardinia is one of the many camps used for the training and coordination of ‘parallel’ forces. ‘Gladio’ consists of 40 main groups divided into independent cells specialising in different fields of clandestine activity: 10 in sabotage, 6 each in intelligence gathering, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics and 12 in guerrilla activities. Another division handles the training of agents and special forces with access to secret arms caches which include handguns, automatic weapons, grenades, high-tech explosives, 60-mm mortars, 57-mm machine guns and sniper rifles. Within 4 years more than 4,000 people (predominantly right-wingers and neo-fascists) will have undergone training in Sardinia with control over at least 139 arms and munitions caches in different parts of Italy — all part of a NATO/US obsession with preventing a communist or ‘leftist’ ‘takeover’ of Italy through either insurrection or the ballot box.

Summer: Madrid — Infuriated by the student disturbances that have spread to Spain from France and elsewhere in Europe, Franco is convinced that university unrest is the work of foreign agitators and that the growing number of younger priests involved in supporting the labour and regionalist opposition to the regime are disguised communists. Franco authorises his minister of justice, Antonio Maria Oriol, to set up a special prison for priests at Zamora where more than 50 priests are imprisoned. The extreme right within the Francoist coalition respond to this leftward shift of the clergy with the emergence of an ultra-right wing anticlericalism which is strongest in Blas Piñar's neo-nazi political association Fuerza Nueva and its armed terror squads, the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey (the warriors of Christ the King) who are closely linked to General Eduardo Blanco’s security services (DGS/BPS) and Stefano delle Chiaie’s Italian terror network Avanguardia Nazionale (AN).

22 July: Middle East — Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijack an El Al airliner. ‘ When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we killed 100 Israelis in battle – the world is talking about us now’, says George Habash, leader of the PFLP. 18 November: Washington — Richard Nixon is elected President of the United States

of the cold war, a heightened consciousness of racism, nuclear weapons, community action projects and, later the Vietnam War and the alternative culture of the ‘underground’) begins to crumble as the movements that formed it lose their sense of purpose and commitment, particularly after the US invasion of Cambodia and the killing of students at Kent State University by state troopers.

As the New Left grew, many of its dominant personalities came to be influenced by the competitive and authoritarian attitudes and strategies of the ‘old left’ and, under the guise of providing ‘leadership’, oligarchies were fostered at the expense of individual initiative and all that was new, dynamic and radical in the movement. Also, many of the ‘responsible’ leaders were gradually co-opted into the system, and divisions were further aggravated by the fragmentation of the movement into more exclusive black power, feminist and traditional political organisations. The black movement, for example, had by now deteriorated from being an instrument of black radical activism through groups such as CORE and the SNCC into institutionalised power elites, as later happened with the Black Panthers, who started off as one of the most interesting and in many ways libertarian groups that emerged in the USA during the 1960s. They were pioneers in community selforganisation — feeding programmes and educational work — as well as defence, but were gradually turned inside out by a vicious and sustained campaign of US government repression and infiltration under the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Programme) with most of their best members dead or, Like Bobby Seale, in prison.

The women’s movement, which had grown out of the constituent groups of the New Left also went down the same road as the maledominated organisations. From developing important theories about the nature of the power relationship between men and women, and developing a participatory, non-competitive and anti-authoritarian practice, the women’s movement underwent a hierarchical transformation. Dominant women inside the movement developed oppressor roles while more reticent women gravitated to more deferential ones and the dynamic of the movement shifted from consciousness-raising to a more competitive agitprop function. The women’s movement had a tremendous effect in terms of the ideas it launched in relation to understanding sexism and authority, but organisationally it too became a means for the advancement of the few rather than the liberation of the many and was thus sucked into the black hole of power politics.

The New Left had emerged in response to the widening gulf between the morality and practice of western liberal democracy and had responded with what it saw as a harmonious morality and practice of its own. By the end of the 1960s it effectively collapsed because the sense of hope and the social, political, educational and economic environment which had nourished it over the previous eight or nine years had turned hostile. As the organisational dynamic and competitive hierarchical attitudes of the old left gradually reassert their influence, horizons narrowed dramatically and options came to be judged on grounds of expediency rather than fundamental principles. Fear of an increasingly mobilised and highly educated left provoked an authoritarian right-wing backlash throughout the West.

BY MID-1968 — for the first time since the 17th century — there is open talk in Britain of a military coup d’état and, with industrial decline, inflation and unemployment. Nationalism, racism and fascism all re-appeared to further heighten social tension. The officer class of the British army is waiting in the wings. The Ministry of Defence lobbies strongly through Cabinet Office and joint police working parties to increase the role of the military in providing aid to the civil power to contain the growing sense of disorder— at least in terms of intelligence gathering and harassment and intimidation. Senior army officers such as counter-insurgency expert Frank Kitson argue that the increased industrial militancy, protest activities such as those of the Spies for Peace, the Committee of 100 and the demonstrations called by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (particularly those of 17 March and October 1968) are not just FROM LATE1968 ONWARDS the cohesion of the so-called ‘New Left’ (which began ‘subversive’ or public order threats, but are the opening skirmishes life in the mid-1950s as an ad hoc confederation of morally committed reformist, in a revolutionary war which threaten the security of the state and radical, autonomous and overlapping movements fertilised by the global tensions prepare the way for open insurgency.

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Chronology 1968 As state pressure grows in response to the wave of major strikes, confrontational demonstrations and civil disobedience, morale and effectiveness decline as an increasing number of activists become burnt out or cynical about the possibilities for change within the system while others accept it for what it is and chose to work with or within it — some for piecemeal reform, others for self-advancement. A tiny minority opt for the urban guerrilla struggle in the hope that by dramatic headline-catching exemplary actions they will at least keep the plight of the global and domestic victims of oppression before the broad mass of people who choose to live cushioned and insulated lives away from the sights and sounds of human suffering.

The crisis of liberal democracy and the phenomenon of the collapse of governmental credibility is common to all Western ruling elites. Realising there is a real threat to their ability to govern, governments of the industrialised nations begin to examine why all the traditional agencies of ‘political socialisation’ are falling apart. People are no longer as deferential as they were in the time of Walter Bagehot, the Victorian political theorist, accepting without question whatever the established authorities told them. Clearly, the value structure of industrial society has changed and new expectations have revolutionised political life. One important reason for this is undoubtedly the fact that a new generation of university-educated, mobilised graduates committed to participant democracy have come on the scene and who — cut loose from ties of obedience and traditional values — are now making political and economic demands which neither the state nor capitalism can hope to meet.

Governments have to adapt and change their tactics to survive. The way they choose out of the impasse is to withdraw from their commitment to plan and spend for full employment, social welfare and higher education. They break with the promise-ridden politics of affluence in favour of a minimalist state that recognises the inherent limits of political economy. People are to be ‘liberated’ from the state so that they can compete for the limited resources of late capitalism. The ‘ideal’ state is now to be one strictly limited to protecting property, life, economic liberty — and the enforcement of contracts.

Experienced counter-insurgency advisers such as Brigadier Frank Kitson are brought in by the Cabinet Office to advise on psychological operations tactics (psy-ops) such as disinformation and black propaganda, which include re-defining and criminalising as ‘terrorist’ the New Left’s direct action tactics and its prominent spokespeople. They put the fear of God into the mass of young people by showing demonstrators that to challenge the state is career-damaging as well as being physically dangerous and life-threatening. If killing dissidents (Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 through to Kent State students in February 1970 and later with the Red Army Fraction prisoners in Stammheim jail) is what it takes to restore state authority and halt the drift towards ungovernability, then so be it. The resultant polarisation leads ultimately to the ‘burn out’ and atomisation of what remains of the ‘New Left’. Many activists feel they have given everything they can and there is nothing further they have to offer without endangering their careers, their freedom and their lives.

Euphoria, the predominant mood of the movement throughout most of the decade until the end of 1968 or mid 1969, changes to one of fear. Confronted by an all-powerful state with its back to the wall and now prepared to kill openly, if necessary, the movement turns in on itself and slowly loses impetus as people move on either to pursue a career or focus on the more libertine and relatively hassle-free lifestyle of drugs, fashion and rock ‘n’ roll.

However, this process of disintegration in the face of the State upping the ante precipitates, in turn — among the more committed — a shift away from attempts to influence the democratic process by means of symbolic, mass-based non-violent direct actions towards cell-oriented violent symbolic gestures and urban guerrilla warfare. Activists move on to form clandestine pressure groups such as the 2 June Movement, Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers, Weather Underground, the Red Army Fraction and the Angry Brigade. These try to follow through the logic of their commitment by abandoning the clearly ineffective strategy of street confrontations with the forces of public order in the fight against injustice by going underground and taking up the armed struggle.

A few of these, like the Angry Brigade, see the struggle in terms of strictly limited goals of consciousness-raising or headline-grabbing publicity for a political or social statement. Others, such as the RAF and the (NATO/FTSE intelligence service manipulated) Red Brigades see armed actions as absolute ends in themselves, as part of a wider military or guerrilla strategy in pursuit of political goals or creating an insurrectional focus in the hope of replicating the success of the small band of Cuban revolutionaries who overthrew the USsupported government in an astonishingly rapid rural guerrilla campaign between 1958 and 1959.

Unfortunately, because illegality is the inevitable consequence of any antistate activity that is perceived as a threat, the negative psychological impact of being obliged to live by theft, robbery and fraud — coupled with the dynamics of state repression, suspicion, popular disinterest or hostility and being forced to lead a clandestine lifestyle — all these things contribute to increasingly distancing group members from the aspirations, ideas and the people whose interests they seek to represent. This is certainly the case among those who come to see their role as that of the disciplined vanguard , but far less likely among those people who come together for a specific action for a particular purpose and then return to their ordinary everyday lives. It also provides the state with the opportunity and excuse to intimidate the far less committed majority of the movement and hassle the hippies into keeping out of radical politics and sticking to drugs and counterculture capitalism.

On the positive side, the movement of the 1960s does succeed in advancing humanity in terms of experience and awareness: it creates an effective counterforce to the Vietnam War and eventually brings the war to a close; it highlights the weaknesses and emphasises the dual standards of Western liberal democracy and the current limits of protest — and it also subjects authoritarianism in all its forms, including sexism and racism, to strong scrutiny. That in itself is quite a lot.

It was also good fun while it lasted — and it’s not over yet!

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Index 1ere Regiment Étranger Parachutiste (1ere REP) 133 II Inter-Continental Congress of the Local Federations of the CNT-in-Exile 207 III Battalion of the 119th Mixed Brigade 223 11th SS Division Nordland 205 2 June Group 247 22 March Group 246, 249 26 July Movement 170 28th Waffen SS Division (Wallonien) 205 357th Infantry Division 205 3rd Mountain Division 205 5th Army Corps 152 5th Bureau of the General Staff 134 5th Regiment Étranger Infantiere 132 A Levels 138 Abad Donoso, Antonio 234 Abarca Ruíz, ‘Paco’, Francisco 36, 242 Abós, José 223 Abwehr 115 Adarve Esturia, Rafael 227 acratas 247 Alberto Polli Institute for Military and Historical Studies 244 Agence France-Press 30 Aginter Press 76, 130, 220, 238, 244 Aguilera, Rafael 179 Agustín Sánchez, Mariano 109, 149 Ailleret, General 240 Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de 139 Alavena, General 161 Alba, Victor 60 Alberola Navarro, José 113, 169, 247 Alberola Surinach, Octavio 13-15, 38, 113, 169, 238, 241, 246, 248 Alcalá de Henáres, Talleres Penitenciarios de 183+ Alfonso VI 136 Algerian independence 239 Algerian settlers’ putsch 238 Algerian War 238 Algérie Française 236, 237, 238 Alhambra (Maurice Chevalier Theatre) 179 Alianza Nacional de Fuerzas Democraticas (ANFD) 229 Alianza Sindical Española (ASE) 231 Alianza Sindical Obrera (ASO) 149 Almohads, The 136 Almoravids, The 136 Alonso Vega, General Camilo 48, 240 Alvarez del Vayo 243 Alvarez Palomo, Ramón 226, 228, 230 Amado del Campo, comandante Enrique 79 American Socialist Party 235 Amnesty International 114 An Anthology of Armageddon 200 Anarchism 79 Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB) 243 Anarchist Student Liaison Group (LEA) 6, 244 Andrés Edo, Luis 162, 164, 166-7, 171-172, 174-175. 179-182, 246-247 Andrés Rodriguez Piney, Jesús 246 ANFD (Democráticas) Anglade, Gaby 93 Angleton, James Jesus 236 Anthropometrics 215 anthropometry 104 Anti-Dictatorial Front 170 Antonio, Don (practicante) 117 Aparicio, Pedro 213 aperturistas 147 Apostolic Anti-Communist League 132 Aramburu, Civil Governor 242 Archy and Mehitabel 121 Arcos, Federico 6 Arénas González, Aniano 220 Arendt, Hannah 89 Areilza, Jose Maria de 238 Argentina Anticommunist Alliance (AAA) 132 Argoud, Colonel Antoine 238, 240 Arias Navarro, Carlos 48, 241 Arino Sahun, Robert 219, 241 Ariso Llesta, José 225 Arjona Salas, Lázaro 230 Armée de Liberation Nationale (ALN) 112 Artajo, Alberto Martín 124 Artajo, José Martín 124 Ascaso column 156 Ascaso, Francisco 153 Ashkenazi Jews 136 Asociation Verité-Liberte 110 Associated Examining Board (AEB) 138, 141 Asturian Commune 238 Atlas, Charles 100

Attia, Joe 93 Audry, Colette 206 Aumale, Duke d' 115 auto de fe 101 Autonomous National University of Mexico 170 Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) 235, 239, 243-245 Avanguardia Proletaria 247 Baader, Andreas 249 Baeza, Doctor 116 bakí, la 190 Balbás Planelles, Lieutenant-Colonel 48 Ballad of Reading Jail, The 100 Ballota Gil, Luis 227 Banca Privata Finanziaria 243 Banditry and Terrorism (Law of) 35 Banque Commercial Arabe 135 Banzar Suárez, Hugo 236 Bara, Theda 98 Barbezat, Joseline 219 barbouzes 133 Barcelona Cheka 75 Baroja, Pio 139 Barricades Week 134 Basile, Carlo Emanuele 235 Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) 110 Basque Workers’ Union (STV) 110, 149 Bastien-Thiery, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie 239-240 Batista, Fulgencio 202, 237 Batoux, Guy 72, 110, 111, 113, 149, 217, 219, 241-242, 246 Battle of Algiers 134 Battle of the Ebro 204 Bay of Pigs 236, 240 Bayo Poblador, Antonio 240 Beatles, The 152 beatniks 196 Beatrix, Princess 245 Beigbeder, General 12 Bellído Serranco, José 79 Beltrametti, Edgardo 244 Ben Barka, Mehdi 130, 221, 236, 245 Ben Bella, Ahmed 239 Benicho, Ramón 10 Benigno, Don 95, 141 Benitez ‘El Cordobés’, Manuel 23, 120, 127 Bermejo Perea, Antonio 227, 228, 230 Bernal, Lorenzo 224 Bernanos, Georges 123 Bertillon, Alphonse 215-216 Betteridge, David 34 Beyond Counting Arses 240 Biddle Duke, Angler 164 Birnberg, Benedict 81, 193, 199 Black and Tans 134 Black Muslims 169 Black Operation 134 Black Panther Party 247 Blake, George 238, 246 Blanco, Comisario General Eduardo (BPS — DGS) 32-34, 241 Blas Piñar 250 Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente 139 Blaye, Edouard de 30 Blue Division (División española de Voluntarios en la Unión Soviética — División Azul) 56, 204-205 Bogart, Humphrey 16 Boletín de información 206 Boletín Oficial del Estado 195, 247 bookbinding 188 Borghese, Prince Valerio 236 Borgnine, Ernest 55 Bornichon, Monique 219 Borraz, José 224, 225 Bösiger, André 150 BOSS (Bureau of State Security) 221 Botamino González, Arturo 228 Boticario, Marcelino 223 Bow, Clara 98 Bradford, George ('Wee Brick') 63 Brandenburg companies 205 Brandt, Willy 241 Brassens, Georges 112 Brel, Jacques 5 Brigada Blanca 169 Brigada Político-Social (BPS) 25, 240 Brigada Regional de Investigación Social de la Jefatura Superior de Policía 30 Brown, Olivia 68, 82 Brown, George 246 Buckle, H.T. 123

252

Index buena ventúra, la 190 Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND) 213, 221 Bureau of Confidential Affairs (UAR) 235, 245 Bureau of State Security (BOSS) 238 Burgos penitentiary 90, 151, 199 Busquets Verges, Juan 102, 120, 151, 171 Butler, Detective Superintendent Arthur 169 Cabral, Amilcar 221 Cáceres Prison 90 Caetano, Admiral Marcelo 130, 221 Café Rolando 24 Caine, Michael 189 Calanda Liaison Commission 223 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 139 Calle Mancilla ‘Florián’, Francisco 109, 149 Callejas, Manuel Antonio 236 caló 190 Calvi, Roberto 243 Camacho, Marcelino 114 Camarasa García, Ginés 226 Candide 66 Cañete Rodríguez, Antonio 164, 165, 177, 182, 236 cante jondo 190 Captain General of the First Military Region 85 Carabanchel Alto Prison 49 Caracoles, Los 21 ‘Caraquemada’ (Ramón Vila Capdevila) 231 Carballeira Montorio, Gloria 223 Carballeira Rego, Angel 222 Carballo Blanco, Fernando 42, 243 Carlucci, Bruno Carmine 219 Carmichael, Stokely 246 Carmona, Don 107 Carrasco, Martínez, Francisco 227 Carrasquer Launed, Félix 143, 223, 224, 228 Carrero Blanco, Admiral Luís 148, 195, 236, 247 Carter, Colonel (MP Special Branch) 39 Casale Cano, Carmelo 224 Cases Alfonso, José 109, 149 Cassou, Jean 206 Castiella, Fernando María 114, 167, 180, 241, 243 Castro Bartuff, José 227 Castro de Castro, Miguel de 130, 146 Castro, Fidel 170, 235-236 Catalá, Jose 242 Catholic Youth Organisation (CYO) 187 Cavallero, Robert 243 Celma Marti, Miguel 223 Central Service of Information (KYP) 238 Cerezo Trabada, Arturo 41 Cervantes, Miguel de 139, 183 ‘chemist, The’ 14 Chessman, Caryl 234 Chevalier, Dr Alexandre 111, 113, 219 Chica Amate, José 217 Chica González, Manuel 227 chinches 45 Christie, Agatha 68 Christie, John Christie OBE 212 Christus Rex 92 CIA 76, 150 Circle of Friends of Europe — CEDADE 213 Cité Catholique 133 Ciudad de Ibiza 232- 233 Civico Garrido, Diego 227 Civil Emergency Planning (CEP) 238, 245 Civilisation in England 123 Clanton. Billy 27 Clavero Flores, Andrés 220 Clutterbuck, Richard 244 Clyde Workers' Committee 237 Clydeside Shop Stewards' Committee 237 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 245, 248, 249 Colegio Universitario 231 Colino Hernanz, Francisco 41 Colonel Montenegro 243 Columbus, Christopher 137 Columna de Hierro (militia column) 149 Comisiones obreras 76, 114, 179, 244 Comité d’Aide à la Resistance Espagnole 206 Commando Delta 238-239 Commando Extraordinary 131 Committee of 100 82, 90, 169 Communist Party, Spanish (PCE) 140, 176 Communist Propaganda in the Armed Forces 245 Condor Legion 204 Conesa Alcaraz, Francisco 8, 207, 234

Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) 5, 6, 11, 109, 114, 180, 187, 218; CNT of the interior 109; CNT-UGT-STV Alianza Sindical 207 Confederal Defence Committee 153 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 240 Conill Valls, Jorge 112, 217, 239, 240 Conquest of Bread, The 123 consejo de guerra 54, 70, 77, 93 Consejo Ibérico de Liberación (CIL) 71, 79, 111, 112, 158, 203, 205, 207, 208, 231, 240-242, 244 Consejo Nacional de Falange Española y Tradicionalista (FET) de conversos 136 Cook, Ricky 193 Cool Hand Luke 186 Cordoba Gómez, José 227 Cordoba Perez, Tomás 227, 229 CORE 250 Corsican Mafia 93 Costas, Joaquín 59, 68 Costrignano partisan brigade 156 Council of Ministers 194 Count de Gobelin 196 Couve de Murville, Maurice 238, 243 Cremer, Det. Sgt. Roy 248 Crime in Spain 88, 209 crimenes de sangre 55 Crispi, Francesco 39 Crowley, Aleister 196 Cuddons’ Cosmopolitan Review 97, 246 Cummings, Samuel 212 Curtin, M. 217 D’Amato, Federico Umberto 235, 249 D’Aubisson, Roberto 236 Dadaist 187 Daily Telegraph, The 84, 168 Damned, The (The Wretched of the Earth) 240 Dayan, Moshe 247 Dante, Alighieri 44 Darwin, Erasmus 85 Davitt 210 De Boccard, Enrico 244 De Gaulle, General 234, 236-237, 245, 249 De Lorenzo, General Giovanni 243 Debord, Guy 97, 247 Debray, Regis 248 Declaration of Arbroath 87 Defence Committee, Christie-Carballo 70, 81 Defensa Interior (DI — Committee of Interior Defence) 1, 3, 113, 202, 207, 237239 Degrelle, Leon 92, 211 Degueldre, Roger 237 Del Valle, General Pedro 237 Delgado and Granado 25 Delgado, General Humberto 130, 207, 222, 244 Delgado Martinez, Joaquin 36, 241-242 Delle Chiaie, Stefano 132, 235, 236, 239, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249 Dept VI of the Reich Security Office (RHSA VI) 92 Desnais, Dr Paul 112 DeVito, Danny 117 Día de Los Reyes 144 Díaz de Vivar, Rodrígo (El Cid) 46 Dickens, Charles 44 Dien Bien Phu 132, 133 Dinh Diem, President Ngo 236, 242 Dirección General de Prisiones (DGP) 57, 58, 114, 138, 141, 174, 182, 188, 194, Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS) 54, 236, 238, 239 Direct Action 55 Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War 235 Directorio Revolucionaria Ibérica de Liberación (DRIL) 158, 234, 236 234-235, 237 Directorium 33 Dixon, Ian 90 Dom Escarré (Abbot of Montserrat) 150 Dominicans 68, 136 Don Juan of Austria 183 Don Quixote de la Mancha 139, 183 Dos Passos, John 140 Dostoevsky 123 Dot Arderieu, José 219 Douglas, William (Chief Constable of Glasgow) 216 Douissainague, José Maria 148 Drouet, Claude 219 DST 240 Duke de Medina Sidonia 188 Dulles, Allan 212 Durán, Francisco 227 Durruti, Buenaventura 11 Duteuil, Jean-Pierre 244, 249

253

Index Dutschke, Rudi 247, 249 Echevarría Follos, Gabriel Luís 72, 78 Eden, Sir Anthony 235 Eisenhower, President 234, 236 El Escorial 239 Elias, Isu 239-240 Ellis, Havelock 88, 209 endurcos 138 Ensslin, Gudrun 249 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 13 Epiphany 144 Eroles, Dionisio 153 escribiente, el 58 Escrivá de Balaguer, Josemaria 147 Escuela Moderna, La 19 Esgleas. Germinal 36, 203 Espejo Trillo, José 227 Espoir 231 espontaneos 87 Estallo Villacampa, Florentino 225 European Assembly of Ex-Combatants 237 Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) 24, 179, 237 Evening News 169 Eymar Fernández, Colonel Enrique 48, 241-242 Eymeric, Grand Inquisitor of Aragón, 33Ezquerra, Miguel 205 Facerías, José Lluis 156 Falange Española 239 Fallex ‘62’ 239 Fallon, Michael 244 Fanon, Frantz 240 Fascio 39 FBI 169 Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) 11, 202, 219 Federación de los Trabajadores de la Region Española 79 Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL) 3, 6, 109, 112, 170, 180, 202 Federalist Revolutionary Syndicalist Tendency’ (TSFR) 246 Fernández Asens, Aurelio 153, 220 Fernández Diez, Angel 219 Fernando, Don 99, 109 Ferré, Leo 112 Ferrer Guardia, Francisco 19 Ferrer, Friar Vincent 136 Ferry, Bernard 110, 111, 149, 217, 241=242, 246 fiestas 144 Fifth Column 30, 140 Figaro, Le 159, 242 Finkelstein, Countess Ilsa von 212 First Circle, The 126 First International 79 First of May Group (Grupo Primero de Mayo) 158, 160, 167, 168, 169, 180, 203 242, 246-248 Flannan Isle 159 Flaubert 86 Flechas Las130, 131 Fleming, Ian 68 Flett, Ross 193 FLN 133, 150, 231 Flores Bartolomé, Pedro (aka Fernández) 219 Floristán, Julián 224 Foccart, Jacques 235 Foley, Charles 131 Folin, M. J de 115 Foncillas, Francisco 219 For Whom The Bell Tolls 140 Foreign Office, British 70, 82 Forrester, Mildred 178, 193, 196, 198 Fouché, Joseph 33 Fouchet, Interior Minister 249 Foux, Deputy Premier 249 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel 239 France, Anatole 123 Francisco, Don (practicante) 117 Franco de Bahamonde, General Francisco 28 Franco’s Prisoner 157 Fraser MP, ‘Tam ‘ 81 Freda, Franco 246 Free Speech movement 244 Freedom 97, 112 Freedom Press 82, 123 Freedom Riders 236 Freitas, Michael de 169 Frelimo 131 French Anarchist Federation (FAF) 112, 233, 244 French Communist Party (PCF) 249 Frente de Liberación Popular (FLP) 110, 114 Frente Libertario 12

Frente Revolucionario de Acción Popular (FRAP) 110 Frey, Roger 240 Front de Liberatión Nationale (FLN) 112, 237 Frost, Robert 17 FTASE (NATO intelligence service) 243, 246 Fuente. Jorge 206 Fuerza Nueva 250 Gabinete de Identificación 48 Gaitskell, Hugh 238 Galileo 69 Galtieri, Leopoldo 236 Gangs and Counter Gangs 235 García Calvo, Agustín 148 García García, Miguel 157, 171 García Gelabert, Juan (BPS) 27-28 García Labella, Don Ramón 59, 68, 105, 141 García Lorca, Federico 123, 139 García Marín, Rafael 227 García Oliver, Juan 153, 203 García Velásco, Ladislao 226 García, Germinal 2 Gardner, George 193 Garrigues, Antonio 162 garrote-vil 53-233 Gaulle, Charles de 4, 93, 112, 130, 134 Gaulle, Pierre de 150 Gehlen, Reinhardt 213 Gelli, Licio 243 Generalitat 153 Gestapo 33 Giannettini, Guido 214, 237-238, 244 Gibson, Wilfred 159 Gide, André 123 Gillette, Rear Admiral Norman G. 164, 167 Gimeno 223 giri gachó 190 Giuventu Libertaria 243 Gladio 240, 245-246, 249 Glasgow Eskimos 236 Glasgow Federation of Anarchists 241 Glorious National Movement 79 Golden Dawn Society 196 Goldman, Emma 39 Goldwater, Senator Barry 243 Gómez Casas, Juan 120 Gómez Escolástica, Agustín 105 Gómez Sáez, Antonio Jesús 41 Gómez Zarranz, Joaquín 41 Gonzalbó, Esteve 242 González Gutiérrez, Acracio 228 González Herrera, Enrique (BPS) 27 González Lopez, Miguel 225 Gonzalvo Esteve, Jorge 220 Gordon, Flash 28 Gorrón Canoyra, Fidel 226, 228, 229 Graham, Charles 62 Gramajo, Hector 236 Granado Gata, Francisco 36, 241, 242 Grand Orient freemasonry 94 Grappin, Dean 249 Gray, Chris 97, 246 Greece, King Paul and Queen Frederika of 241 Green, Sir Hugh 83 Grimau García, Julián 47, 240-241 Grimoud, Paris police chief 249 Grootveld, Robert Jasper 244 GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) 209 Guardia Civil 77, 100, 139 Guérin Serac, Yves 132, 220, 238-244 Guerini, Antoine and Meme 93 Guernica 204 Guerra, Alfonso 110 Guerrero Lucas, Angel Jacinto 36, 204, 218-219, 241 Guerrilla Warfare (Guevara), 237 Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey( Guerrillas of Christ the King) 132, 250 Guevara, Che 237, 247-248 Guillen, Abraham, 248 Guillou, Captain Yves 220, 238 Guinard Fabregat, Enrique 219 Guppy, Police Constable 83, 84 Gurucharri, Bernardo 35 Gurucharri, Salvador ‘Salva’ (‘el inglés’) 7, 242 Habash, George 247, 249 Harding, Mr (Vice-Consul) 70, 72, 183 Hart, Brian and Margaret 34, 243 Harvey, William 240 Hassan II, King 245

254

Index Hastie, James 199 Heatwave 97, 246 Hemingway, Ernest 123, 140 Hencke, Admiral Eugenio 214, 245 Henderson, Nicholas 199 Hendy, Mark 83 Hercules Unchained 95 Hermandad de Alfereces Provisionales 239 Hermandad de la División Azúl 55 Hernández, Miguel 140 Hernández, Sergio 241 Herrera Dativo, Alfredo 164, 224, 246 Herreros, Inspector Martin (BPS) 241 Heston, Charlton 46 Himmler, Heinrich 29 Hiraldo 36 Histoire des Republiques espagnoles 60 Holy Office of the Inquisition 33 Homage to Catalonia 87 How to Disrupt, Obstruct and Subvert the Warfare State 241, 243 Horcher’s Restaurant 212 Hornsey College of Art 249 Hotel Maison Rouge 211 Hudal, Alois 133 Huerta, General 49 Humphrey, Hubert 247 Hutley, Reuben 168 Hutt, Lynn 200 Hyland, Stanley 83 Hypothesis for a Revolution 244 I Ching 196 Iberia Airlines 40 Iglesias Alvarez, Aurelio 226, 228 Iglesias Perea, Aurelio 227 Iliad, The 123 Imbernón, Nardo 16, 219 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 237, 241 indulto personal 194 Inferno 44 inmovilistas 147 Inquisitor General of the Holy Office of the Inquisition 68 IRA 238 Inspección de Guardia 44 Inspector General of Prison Hygiene 119 Instituto Nacional de Previsión 231 Intelligence Bureau (Italian Army) 246 Interarmco 212 International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) 71 International Federation of Libertarian Youth 239 International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement (First of May Group) 158, 168 International Socialists (IS) 82, 237 International Times (IT) 98, 246 interrogation techniques 33 Izquierdo, Martin 219 IV Republican Army 242 Jackson, Gabriel 60 Jacques (French ex-legionnaire) 92 Jacquier, General Paul 245 Jaen prison 199 Jara, Victor 43 Jefatura Superior de Policia de Madrid 44-45 Jeunnesse Communiste Revolutionnaire (JCR) 246, 249 Jews (expulsion of) 137 Jimenez Cubas, Marcelino 239 Jímeno, Juan 203 Joachim 56 Johnson, President Lyndon B 244, 248 Jordan, Colin 90 Jordao Monteiro, Casimiro Emérito Roso Teles 130 Journal Officiel 218, 242 Juan Carlos, Prince 148 Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalistas (JONS) 237 Justicia Castro, Francisco 227 Justinian 43 Juventud Libertaria 240 Juzgado Militar Especial Nacional de Actividades Extremistas 48, 241, 242 K, Joseph 33 Kafka, Franz 33 Kavanagh, Ted 97, 246 Kay, Jean 93 Kennedy, Jacqueline 162 Kennedy, President John F. 207, 234-237, 240, 243 Kent State University 250 KGB 33 Khidir, Mohammed 135 Khrushchev, Nikita 3, 241

Kindelán y Aranda, General 12 Kitson, Frank, 235 King Bomba 39 King Mob 246 Koenigstein, François (Ravachol) 2 Kommune: K-1 247 Krim, Belkassem 135 Kropotkin, Peter 123 Kupfberger, Tuli 97 KYP (Greek Central Service of Information) 221, 247 L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man) 215 Lazaro, Ignacio 224 L’Internationale Situationniste 237 La mano negro 239 La Republica espanola y la guerra civil 60 Lacalle Larraga, Daniel 123, 243 Lacalle Larraga, Lieutenant-General José 123 Lacassagne 210 Ladas, Colonel Ioannis 247 ladino 138 Lagaillarde, Pierre 132, 134, 234, 238 Lalet, Jeanne 220 Lambrakis, Grigorius 241 Lasa, José Antonio 110 Lebel, Jean-Jacques 247 Leclerc, General 187 Lencino Crespo, Mariano 227 Levi, Eliphas 196 ley de fugas 16 ley de vagos y maleantes 117 ley orgánica del estado 148 Liaison des étudiants anarchistes de Nanterre (LEAN) 245, 247 Liarte Ruiz, Ramón 219 Libertarian Communism 11 Libertario Español (LE) 79 Libro Blanco sobre las Carceles Franquistas 1939-1976 60 Lima, Turcios 240 Limoges Congress 202 Litri, El 23, 120 Llansola, Vicente 203, 204 Loan, General 248 Lombroso, Cesare 210, 215 López Aranguren, José Luís 148 Lopez, Sylvia 96 Lucetti, Gino 156 Ludd 246 Lumumba, Patrice 235, 236 Lute, El 100 Luther King, Martin 242, 244, 246, 249 Lutte Ouvrière 111 MacDermott QC, Niall 71,81 MacDonald, Ramsay 39 Mackintosh, Mr. 138 Macmillan, Harold 234-235 Madrigal Torres, Rogelio 8, 207, 234 Madrona Castaños, Eduardo 225-228 Mailer, Norman 240 Malraux, Clara 206 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The 127 Manolete 127 Manzáno Hernández, Juan Antonio (BPS) 27 Marathon Man 119 March 22 Group 6 March on Washington 242 Mariano Sanz, Don 109, 115 maricones 117 Marighella, Carlos, 248 Marin Sanchez, José 227 Marlborough Street Magistrate’s Court 84 Maroto Column 165 Marquet, Jacques 24 Márquez Rodríguez, Antonio 220 Marranos 136, 137, 138 Martí Verdu, Vicente 220, s41 Martí, José 224, 225 Martín Armendariz 219 Martín Bellido, Antonio 241 Martín, Moise 219 Martínez García, Juan 227 Martínez Pariente, Captain Francisco 72, 80 Martínez, Inocencio 164, 166 Martínez, Juan 219 Marx, Karl 178 Marxist Armed Rebel Forces (FALN) 240 Mary Celeste, The 159 Massa di Carrara 155 Massana Bancells, Marcelino‘Pancho’ 120

255

Index Massu, General Jacques 134, 234 McCone, John 236 McConnell Plan 238 Medina Sidonia, Duchess of 173 Meltzer, Albert 97, 246 Memorias del Primer Congreso Científico Mexicano 170 Mera Sanz, Cipriano 11, 60, 203 Mercader, Ramón 120 Meredith, James, 239 Merzagora, Cesare 243 Merlino, Mario 244-245, 247 Miceli, General Vito 243 Mier Rodriguez, Emiliano 227 Miere 75 Millán Astray, General 107 Millán Hernández, Julio 247 Millán Mendoza, Joaquín 227 Milou 112 Ministerio de la Gobernación 24 Miracle Guitart, Antonio 8, 207, 234 Mirage jet fighters 115 miseria, la 56 MLE-CNT Prisoners’ Defence Committee 152 Modelo prison (Barcelona) 53 Molina, Antonio 219 Molina, Manuel 229 Momerolas, Mgr 239 Monde Libertaire, Le 112, 219, 244 Monde, Le 112, 159, 240 Monde Primitif, Le 196 Mondlane, Eduardo 131, 221 Moñino Zaragoza, Pedro 9 Montes Martín, Illustrissimo Sr Coronel de Infanteria Don Jesús 78 Montilla Ruiz, Bartolomé 227 Montini, Cardinal 241 Montorio, Eulalia 223 Montpellier Congress 202 Montseny Mañé, Federica 204, 223 Morato, Josep 242 Moreno Barrancos, Manuel 240 Moreno, Julio 239 Mooney, Ian 82 Moral Giménez, Luis del 223 Morchon, Daniel 220 Moro, Aldo 243 Morrison, Walter 83-84 Mountain Assault Brigade (Greek) 247 Movimiento Libertario Español (MLE) 79 Movimiento Popular de Resistencia (MPR) 205 Movimiento Sociale Italiano (MSI) 235 Movimiento Unificado de Resistencia por la Liberación de España (MURLE) 207, 234 Muggeridge, Malcolm 28 Municha Larraona, Auguste 220 Municipal Orchestra of Madrid 144 Muñiz Alonso, Nicolás 226, 227, 228 Muñoz Grandes, General Agustín 148, 205; plot 149. 239, 244 MUR 224 Mur Peiron, Antonio 217, 239 Mur Sin, Alicia 164, 167, 184, 246 Mussolini, Benito 39, 92 Mutual Aid 123, 198 Nasser, General 171, 212 National Military Security (ESA — Greek) 247 National Security Service (Asphaleia — Greek) 247 National Socialist Movement 90 Nationalist Front 134 NATO survival plan 214, 234 Navaho, Colonel 205 Navarro, Floreal 220 Navarro Rubio, Mariano 235 Negrín, Juan 93, 149 Nenntwichs, Zech 211 Nervi 219 New Left (the) 250 New Society 248 New York Times 245 Nicolas de Mieres (coalmine) 238 Nín, Andrés 183 niños de la noche 165 Nixon, Richard 250 Nkrumah 246 NKVD 33 Noel, Jacques 220 Noriega, Manuel 236 Noir et Rouge 5 Nosotros (anarchist affinity group) 152

Nuclei di Difesa dello Stato (NDS) 244, 246 Nuestra Señora de la Merced (fiesta) 144 Nueva Senda 218, 231 nueve, La (Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division) 187 Nuñez Estrella, José 227 Ocaña Prison 91 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 245 Oglesby, Carl 245-246 OGPU 183 Olivier, Laurence 119 Olympia Press 31 On the Poverty of Student Life 246 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 119 Ohnesorg, Benno 247, 250 Operation ‘Caution’ 208 Operation Durruti 164 Operation Gladio 213 Operation Warning 241 Operación Primavera 111, 204 Operation Straggle 212 Opus Dei 147, 213, 237, 239, 244-245 Order and Tradition 238 Ordine Nuevo (ON) 235, 244, 247 Organisation der SS Angehoerigen (Odessa — Nazi escape network) 92, 213 Organisation de l Armée Contre le Communisme International (OACI) 238 Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) 76, 91, 93, 112, 115, 135, 203, 220, 234, 238236, 237 Oriol, Antonio Maria 250 Orozco Gallardo, Francisco 227 Ortega y Gasset 139 Ortíz, Antonio 152 Ortíz, Joe 134 Orwell, George 39, 87, 208 Oufkir, General Mohammed 135, 245 OUM. 183 OVRA (Mussolini’s secret police) 39 Pacem in Terris 241 package tourism 88 Pacto de Unión y Solidaridad 79 Paladin Group 33 Palencia prison 199 Pan African Congress (PAC) 234 Pankhurst, Sylvia 39 Papandreou 247 Panza, Sancho 139 Papen, Fritz von 211 Papon, Maurice 237 Papus 196 Para Handy 128 Parco dei Principe Symposium (Strategy of Tension) 214, 244 Parent, Yvette 217 Parraga Ramirez, Juan 227 Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) 111, 217 Partido Comunista Español (PCE) 114 Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista (POUM) 208 Partita Comunista d’Italia (Linea Rossa) 247 Pascual Palacios, José 11, 36, 204, 219, 241 Paulo, Don 186 Pavelic, Ante 211 Pax 224 Payne, Stanley G 60 Pecunia, Alain 108, 109, 111, 114, 149, 217, 219, 231, 241-242, 245 Pedder, Sir John 39 Pedro ‘el cruel’ 55 Pérez Galdós, Benito 139 Pérez González, Blas 29 Pérez González, Deogratias 219 Pérez Jimenez 170 Pérez Luengo, Felipe 41 periodo, el 55 Peron, General Juan 164, 246 Pesenti, Carlo 235 Philby, Kim 71 Philip II 86, 140 Piaf, Edith 5 piano, el 51 Pijuan, Joaquin 226, 228 Pilar, Françoise 219 Pineda, José 69, 95, 145 Pineiro, Doctor Modesto 119 Pinelli, Giuseppe 236, 243 Piney, Jesus Andrés Rodríguez 164, 166, 175 Pinochet, General 43 Pintado Villanueva, Juan 223 Piquer, Hermes 219 Plan Prometheus (NATO) 247 Plan Solo 243

256

Index plastique 15 Plevris, Kostas 247 PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) 114 pocket parle, Le 216 Poe, Edgar Allan 24 Poli, François 219 Policía Armada 19, 30 Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) 220, 238, 244 Politics and the Military in Modern Spain 60 Polo, Eduardo (BPS) 242 Pope John XXIII 241 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 247, 249 Pottle, Pat 238, 246 Poverty of Student Life (on the) 247 Powell, Enoch 249 Pozas (prisoner) 108 Presencia 163 Preston, Paul 237 Primera Región Militar 48 Prímo de Rivera, José Antonio 133, 212, 239 Propaganda Due (P2-masonic lodge) 243 Provo 245 Provo movement, Dutch 97, 244-245 Pueblo, El 168 Puell Espino, Manuel Angel (BPS) 27 Puente, Dr Isaac 11 Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz Prison) 91 Pueyo Moreno, Joaquín 187 Pujol Arias, Julio 228 Queen Isabella 137 Queen Omphale of Lydia 96 quemadero 137 Quesada Márquez, Juan 219, 242 Question Why, The 28 Quetelet 210 quinqui 100 Radcliffe, Charles 97, 246 Ramírez Reina, León José de (Leon Degrelle) 92 Ramiro Porras, José 227 Ramón (prisoner) 152 Ramos, Angel 219 Randle, Michael 238, 246 Rathbone, Basil 13 Rauti, Pino 235, 244, 247 Raymond, Colonel 132 Read, Chief Superintendent Leonard 169 Rebelión Militar y Bandidaje y Terrorismo, Decreto-Ley 1974/60 de 49 Rebollo, Captain Alejandro 72 Recchioni, Emidio 39 Red Army Fraktion 248, 250 ‘Red Duchess’ (Duchess of Medina Sidonia) 173 Redbrick universities 235 Redención 187 Redondo, Nicolás 110 Reeve, Steve 96 Rega, José Lopez 132 regimen de pistas 60 Regional Seat of Government (RSG 6) 16, 240 Renseignements Généraux 6, 217 Resistance Council 206 Return of the Durruti Column 246 Revolutionary Warfare: Instrument of World Expansion 214, 244 Revolution in the Revolution (Debray) 248 Revolutionary Communist Party (Brazil), 248 Reyes Católicos, Los 137, 140 RHSA VI 211 Richards, Vernon 82 Richthofen, Wolfram von 204 Ricote, Ángel 213 Ridruejo, Dionísio 124 Risooni, Hassan 61, 64, 68, 72, 74 Roa Justicia, José María 227 Road Not Taken, The 17 Robbins, Lord 235 Robert the Bruce 87 Robinson, Edward G. 95 Robledo Tejedor, Alfredo 41 Roche, Paul 249 Rodriguez Ajax, Ismael 226, 227, 228, 229 Rodríguez Fernández, José María 110 Rodriguez Manzano, José María 181 Romancero Gitano 123, 139 Romero González, José 227 Romero, Emilio 168 Ronco Pesma, J. 240 Ronconi, Pio Filippani 244 Ros Monero, Antonio 14

Ros, José 219 Ros, Matias 219 Rose of the Winds 243 Ruby, Jack 80 Rudel, Hans Ulrich 211 Rudd, Mark 249 Rüdiger, Helmut 149 Ruiz, Acracio 35, 203 Ruiz, Antonio (teacher) 94, 139 Ruiz Boroa, Rafael 240 Ruiz Gutierrez, Mariano 227 Ruiz Jiménez, Joaquín 124 Ruiz Márquez, Andrés (Colonel Montenegro) 93 Ruiz Montoya, Martin 8 Ruiz, Martín 207, 234 Ruiz Torrano, Don Fulgencio 59 Rusk, Dean 248 Russell, Bertrand 240 Russell, Wilson (‘Stashy Dan’) 199 Sabaté Llopart, Francisco (el Quico) 4, 234 Sabaté Llopart, José ‘Pepe’ 120 Sabaté Llopart, Manuel 102 Sablonsky, Jay 76 Sade, Marquis de 31 ‘Saki’ 129 Salán, General Raoúl 134, 237 Salazar, Antonio Oliveira 130, 212, 222 Salcedo, Juan 237 Salvemini, Gaetano 39 San Francisco Examiner 244 Sánchez, Agustin 219 Sánchez Covisa, Mariano 132 Sánchez, Pedro 237 Sanchez Perez, Antonio 240 Sandoval, José 124 Santa Cruz, Marques de 195 Santa Maria 208, 222 Santamaria Cortiguera, Roque 36, 222, 228 Santillo, Inspector 239 ‘Sapper’ 129 Sarrau, Liberto 205 Sartorius, Nicolás 110 Sartre, Jean Paul 123, 240 Sassoon, Siegfried 200 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 235 Schacht, Hjalmar 211 Scheid, Dr 211 School of The Americas 76, 236 ‘Scots Against War’ 84, 241,243 Scottish Committee of 100 83, 84 Scottish Daily Express 62, 81, 198, 199, 201 SDCI (Portuguese intelligence) 221 Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) 71, 130, 171 Seder 138 Sedgewick-Gell, Simon 78, 178 Segni, Antonio 243 Sender, Ramón 139 sentence confirmed 85 Sephardic Jews 136 septima galeria 73 Serrano, José Luís 117, 124 Serrano Suñer, Ramón 29 Service d’Action Civique (SAC) 93, 133, 149, 203, 235, 237, 240 Servicio Central de Documentación (CESED) 212 Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre Espionage (SDECE) 130, 240, 245 Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM) 30 Servício de Inteligencia Militar (SIM) 140, 183 Servizio Informazioni Difesa (SID) 243, 245 Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate (SIFAR)161, 214, 243 sexta galería 66 Sharpeville massacre 234 Shawshank Redemption, The 124 Silent demonstration of women (Madrid) 238 Sillitoe, Alan 235 Sima, Horia 211 Simón Cristobal, Jesús 41 Sindona, Michele 243 Sita Setbon, Nicole 219 Situationist International 246 Situationists 97, 246 Skorzeny, SS Colonel Otto 33, 236, 238 SMERSH 68 Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) 237 Socialist Workers Party (SWP) 237 Société Genérale (Bank) 93 Society of the Spectacle 247

257

Index Solanas Cavero, Alfredo 227 Soler Ciércoles, Francisco 220 Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos 231 Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) 11, 218, 224 Solidaridad Obrera 79 solidarios, Los (anarchist affinity group) 153 Solidarity 97 Solidarity group 235, 237 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 126 Somatén 234 Somoza, Anastasio 236 Soria prison 199 Soriano Aguila, Carlos 227 Sos Yagüe, José Luis 219 Sosa, Yon 240 Soviet Secret Service 208 Spaggiari, Albert 93 Spain in 1964 89 Spanische-Freiwilligen-Kompanie der SS 102 205 Spanish Foreign Legion 56 Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) 35 Spanish National Liberation Front (FELN) 93, 160 Special Branch (Metropolitan Police) 39 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 245 Spectacle, The 97 Spellman, Cardinal 239 Spiazza, Major Amos 246 Springer, Axel 249 SS Santa Liberdade 236 SS Santa Maria 236 Stanley Fletcher, Norman 146 Stauffenberg, Claus von 211 Stirling, Colonel David 131 Strasbourg Students’ Union 246 strategy for survival (my) 67 Strategy of Tension 236, 244, 249 Strategy of the Urban Guerrilla (Guillen) 245 Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) 237, 240. 244, 246, 250 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 235, 237, 244, 246 Suez crisis 235 Suharto, President 131, 245 Sukarno, President 131, 245 Sunday Times. The 193 Susini, Jean-Jacques 130, 134, 237 tabacaleros 128 tSyndicalist Workers' Federation 241 Talbot, US Ambassador 247 talleres penitenciarios 74, 106 Tamames, Ramón 60 Tambroni, Prime Minister 235 Tarot of the Bohemians, The 196 Tasca, Henry J 245 terrorist training camp (Toulouse) 62 Tet offensive 248 Teufel, Fritz 247 Third Republic Movement 93 Tierno Galván, Enrique 148 Times, The 194 Tisei, Aldo 132 Tolédo Julián, Gonzalo (BPS) 27, 42 Tolédo Nieto, Juan 220 Tomás, Don 99 Torquemada, Fray Tomás de 33 Torremocha Arías, Francisco J. 226 Torrès, Henri 206 Torrijos, Omar 236 torture 43 Trenchard, Lord 39 Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP) 166-168, 172, 175, 180, 241, 244, 247 Tricontinental Congress 221 Tridentine Mass 53 Trujillo, Rafael 170, 202 Tshombe, Moise 239, 247

Tupamaros (MLN) 240 Tuynmann, Hans 246 UGT 176, 231 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 246 Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de 107, 139 Ungria, General José 30 Unified Socialist Party — PSU 217 Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) 149 Union of Anarcho-Communists (UGAC) 112 Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) 237 United Nations 167 Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers 250 Upright, John Melvin 142 Urbano Bermúdez, David 248 Urtubia, Lucio 180 US Central Naval Academy 237 Ussia, Monsignor Marcos 158, 246 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 94 Vallejo Sebastian, Miguel 224, 225 van Duyn, Roel 244 Vaneigem, Raoul 237 Vanguardia, La 231 Vayo, Julio Alvárez del 93, 149 Vega, Lope de 139 Velazquez-Duro, Jaime Cortezo 166 Ventura, Giovanni 246 Vera, Rafael 37 Vérité-Liberté 217 Very. M. 2 Vicente Cortes, Francisco 227 Viet Cong 132 Viet Minh 132 Vietnam Solidarity Committee (VSC) 248 Vila Capdevila, Ramón (‘Pasoslargos’, ‘Caraquemada’) 19, 237, 242 Viola, General Enza 247 Viti, El 121, 127 Viva Zapata! 49 Voltaire 31 von Amsberg, Claus 245 Wagner, James B. 187, 196 Walloon Legion 92, 213 Watin, Georges 239 Weather Underground 249-250 Wells, Robert 245 West End Central police station (London) 168 Wild Bunch, The 55 Wilde, Oscar 103 Wilson, Harold 241, 244, 246 Wilson, RB 237 Wimsey, Lord Peter 94 Winds of the People, The 140 Winzer, Paul 29 Wolfe, Lillian 123 Wooden Shoe, The (bookshop) 97, 246 Woodhouse, PG 129 Workers’ Commissions (comisiones obreras) 176 World Anti-Communist League (WACL) 221 X, Malcolm 244 X, Michael 169 XXII March Group 247 Ya 231 Yagüe González, Saturnino (BPS) 31 Yeserías (prison hospital) 118, 151 Z Commandos 130, 134 Zaghoud, General 171 Zalacaín el Aventurero 139 Zapata, Emiliano 61 Zen Buddhism 196 Zola, Emile 123 Zorkine, Paul 112 Zulu 189 Zurro 116 Zweig, Stefan 123

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