Pistoleros 2: 1919

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Dedicated to the memory of Edward Polin poet and "physical force" Chartist from Paisley who died in 1843

HISTORY says, “Don’t hope on this side of the grave.” But then, once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

— Seamus Heaney ANARCHISM swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words.

— Victor Serge – Memoirs of a Revolutionary CONCERNING original history...the content of these histories is necessarily limited; their essential material is that which is living in the experience of the historian himself and in the current interests of men; that which is living and contemporary in their milieu.

The author describes that in which he has participated, or at least which he has lived; relatively short periods, figures of individual men and their deeds...it is not sufficient to have been the contemporary of the events described, or to be well-informed about them. The author must belong to the class and the social milieu of the actors he is describing; their opinions, way of thought and culture must be the same as his own. In order to really know phenomena and see them in real context, one must be placed at the summit — not seeing them from below, through the keyhole of morality or any other wisdom.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Reason in History THERE is a history in all men’s lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased; The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured.

— William Shakespeare – King Henry IV (Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1)

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Farquhar McHarg

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ChristieBooks

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THE CHRONICLES OF FARQUHAR MCHARG ¡PISTOLEROS!

2:1919

Copyright © 2010 Estate of Farquhar McHarg (‘B’ McHarg) First published in Great Britain in 2010 by ChristieBooks/Read ‘n’ Noir PO Box 35 Hastings East Sussex, TN34 1ZS, UK ISBN 978-1-873976-41-8 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover illustration: Funeral of the anarchist Galli, 1911, Carlo Carrá (oil on canvas) Jacket designed by: Les Prince All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Distributed in the UK by: Central Books Ltd 99 Wallis Road London E9 5LN orders@centralbooks.com

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CONTENTS The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg. Vol 2:1919 1976: 19 October, Paris, Boulevard St Germain 1919: 51 January, Spain, Winter of Discontent 1919: 51 January, Barcelona, La Canadiense 1919: 56 January, Barcelona, Trouble at Plant 1919: 55 February, Barcelona, Pen-Snappers Unite!

1919: 55 February, Strike! La Canadiense, Strategy and Tactics 1919: 21 February, Barcelona, the Day the Lights Went Out… 1919: 23 February, Barcelona, La Canadiense, Phase 2 1919: 23 February, A Strategic Miscalculation 1919: 23 February>March, State of Siege 1919: 18 March, A Pyrrhic Victory 1919: 19 March, Barcelona, Las Arenas Bullring 1919: 19 March, Barcelona, Back to Work 1919: 19 March, Barcelona, Martial Law — Again!

1919: 19 March, Barcelona, Heads on Plates 1919: 23 April, Barcelona, Murder Incorporated 1919: 19 May, Tarragona, Last Train to Sitges 1919: 19 May>June, The Pistoleros of the Lion D’Or 1919: 19 May>June, Bravo Portillo’s ‘Great Detective Agency’ 1919: 18 July, Barcelona, Death of ‘El Tero’ 1976: 20 October, Paris, Boulevard Jean Jaurès 1919: 25 September, Barcelona, Justice for Manuel Bravo Portillo 1919: 16 September, Barcelona, Death of a Traitor 1976: 27 October, Paris, Père Lachaise Cemetery 1919: 10 December, Madrid, the La Comedia Congress 1919: 10 December, Barcelona, the Sindicatos Libres 1919: 12 December, Barcelona, Confronting the Libre 1919: 10 December, Corruption, A Two-Way Process

1 8 10 11 15 16 18 20 22 26 30 31 34 38 39 40 43 48 49 53 64 72 81 89 91 93 97 100

NOTES & OBSERVATIONS — 1919 Setting the South Ablaze The Anarchist Wave That May Deluge Us All The Sometent Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Europe...

107 108 110 110 113

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The Birth of the Patronál General Severiano Martínez Anido Fugitive Law Pestaña Returns to Barcelona Milans Backs Bravo Portillo We’re Getting Angry The Plot Thickens Amado — Social Engineer The Mixed Labour Commission Lockout!

The La Comedia Conference Meanwhile, in Centralia The Palmer Raids Laureano Cerrada Santos

115 117 118 119 120 127 127 129 130 132 136 140 141 142

Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

173

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¡Pistoleros! 2: 1919 The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg 1918-1976 ¡Pistoleros! 2: 1919 is the second volume of the memoirs and

notebooks of Farquhar McHarg, a seventy-six-year-old anarchist from the Govan district of Glasgow, its writing prompted by the murder, in October 1976, of his lifelong friend, Laureano Cerrada Santos. McHarg’s Chronicles record his evolving beliefs and sense of mission, and the remarkable adventures he experienced from the day he sailed into the neutral port of Barcelona in the spring of 1918, a naïve but idealistic eighteen-year-old, and 1976.

Farquhar’s Chronicles are folk history, bringing the changes that shook the political and social landscape of Spain (and the world) between 1918 and 1976 into the framework of adult lifetime. They make a vexatious but fascinating story that provides a deep insight into the spirit that moved the selfless, generous, occasionally naïve and recklessly idealistic people who were involved in the bitter social struggles that marked the hectic insurrectionary and utopian aftermath of the great imperialist war of 1914–1918.

Contemptuous of traditional political parties and professional politicians, and inspired by the example — and the myth — of the Russian Revolution, these men and women aimed to rid the world of a cruel, corrupt, arbitrary and oppressive political and economic system that abused authority and exploited, degraded, tortured and murdered in the name of profit and power.

The transformation of the unworldly young Farquhar, in the climactic and rebellious years between 1918 and 1924, is fascinating to observe as he acquires consciousness and identity through his experiences in a world for which he is little prepared. The journey he embarks upon in these pages is not simply a personal memoir or an exploration of his own psyche; the many hitherto untold stories that unfold along his way provide profound understanding of the circumstances, thoughts and deeds of people who tried to rescue the Europe of the twentieth century from the cycle of disaster, war and death.

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If anyone should ask me: ‘Do you think that anarcho-syndicalism is an ultimate factor in Spanish politics?’ my answer is ‘Yes’ and that neither today nor ever can it be neglected. Lastly, if anyone should beg me to be explicit as to my own view on anarcho-syndicalism as a political fact, I return to what I have said already. Here is my formula; it is a non-political formula. People too full of humanity dream of freedom, of the good, of justice, giving these an emotional and individualistic significance. Carrying such a load, an individual can hope for the respect and loyalty of his relations and friends, but if he should hope to influence the general social structure, he nullifies himself in heroic and sterile rebellion. No man can approach mankind giving his all and expecting all in return. Societies are not based on the virtues of individuals, but on a system which controls defects by limiting the freedom of everyone. Naturally the system takes a different form under feudalism, capitalism and communism. Let anarchosyndicalists invent their own system, and until they have attained it, go on dreaming of a strange state of society in which all men are as disinterested as St Francis of Assisi, bold as Spartacus, and able as Newton and Hegel.

But behind the dream there is a human truth of the most generous kind — sometimes, let me insist, absolutely sublime. Is not that enough?

Ramón J Sender, Seven Red Sundays

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Capitalism, Helios Gรณmez

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1976: 19 OCTOBER, PARIS, BOULEVARD ST GERMAIN

Farquhar McHarg was next; he felt it in his aching bones.

Whether it was a sixth sense or long and bloody experience he didn’t know, but whatever it was it left an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was pointless trying to be rational, telling himself there was no reason to believe that he would be the next target. He trusted his senses. They had never let him down — so far! In his coat pocket he had his 9mm Star with a full magazine, a bullet in the breech and the safety off —just in case. Its warmth and solidity in his hand felt reassuring, as did the fact he also had his Catalan throwing-knife — long, slender and sharp — in its fitted sheath in the breast pocket of his jacket.

It was late, and the weather atrocious. He had just handed in his monthly column for Libération and was heading towards the Maubert-Mutualité metro station, on his way home to Belleville. Shoulders hunched, head bent against a wind that whipped raindrops pitilessly into his face, he made his way along the surprisingly empty Boulevard Saint-Germain, drips from the brim of his fedora hat tickling the corners of his eyes. The glistening boulevard looked more like the Canal Saint-Martín than a Parisian thoroughfare. Passing a darkened shop window, he paused to check his reflection, hoping to see something of his Byronic muse, an 18-year-old Conrad The Corsair. He was there all right, but now imprisoned in the frame of a portly, elderly man dressed in a calf-length, tan trenchcoat. He smiled to himself, a sardonic sneer that masked his anger — and his sadness.

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

Unable to discuss his concerns with anyone, Farquhar had busied himself in the newspaper office for most of the day.

Twenty-four hours earlier he had witnessed the slaying of his oldest friend and comrade, Laureano Cerrada Santos, gunned down in Belleville’s Rue des Couronnes. He had seen — and participated in — many shocking things in his life, but the memory of the previous night’s events had affected him more profoundly than he thought possible. He should not have gone into the office that day, but claustrophobia and paranoia had forced him out of his apartment. He wanted things to be normal.

He also needed to think through the whys and wherefores of Laureano’s murder. Farquhar shared many of Laureano’s secrets, and was the executor of his estate. He also knew where some of the bodies — metaphorical and real — were buried, a knowledge that put him above the parapet and in the firing line. In the circumstances, Libé’s busy office on the Boulevard Saint-Michel had seemed the best place to keep his head down.

The press had paid little attention to Laureano’s murder; it had happened too late for the morning papers. The afternoon editions had carried short, vague reports about the ‘bloody incident in Belleville’, but as far as the press was concerned it was one more internecine gangland killing. Nor was there any reference to Laureano’s reputation as a ‘gangster’, one of Europe’s leading falsificadores (forgers), facilitator for the Parisian and Marseilleise milieu, arms and documents supplier to many of the world’s anti-imperialist guerrilla movements, and financial sponsor of the clandestine anarchist Resistance to the recently deceased General Franco. They probably didn’t know, most journalists being hacks relying on others to make the connections for them, and sure as fate someone would soon start making those connections.

Farquhar had spent most of that afternoon ringing around old comrades and contacts, especially those from the Resistance years, one or two of whom now held senior positions in the French security and intelligence services. Best-placed of all of these was Alexandre de Marenches, who now headed the French secret service, the SCDE — the Service de Documentation et de Contre Espionage. Farquhar didn’t trust De Marenches; a professional deceiver, he was as duplicitous and unpredictable as they come, but he did owe a lot to the man from Govan, and it 2

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was payback time.

Lost in his thoughts, the sound of a car slowing behind him drew Farquhar back to reality. Adrenaline flushing his stomach, he clutched the Star in his coat pocket, but the car didn’t stop.

Gears crunching, the vehicle accelerated past him, ploughing through a large puddle from a blocked drain, splattering muddy water on his trousers. Cursing to himself, the thought of taking a shot at the fast receding car flashed through Farquhar’s mind, but disappeared just as quickly. Heart pounding, he hunched deeper into his coat collar as he continued on his way through the wet Parisian night. He cut a lonely figure silhouetted against the diffused light from the neon signs and streetlamps, and the refracted reflections on the wet cobbles and flowing gutters. *** It had been weather like this when Farquhar first met Alexandre de Marenches, then a twenty-one-year-old officer in the Vichy army of Marshal Pétain. A count, de Marenches acted like one.

They had met at a bar in the small town of Céret, near Perpignan, to discuss setting up escape and evasion lines for fugitive Allied personnel throughout southern France and across the Pyrenees.

The introduction came through Farqhuar’s old ‘friend’, Major George Marshall of the British Special Intelligence Service.

Farquhar’s and Marshall’s relationship dated back to 1918 when the British Secret Service Bureau officer was on attachment to the British Consulate in Barcelona.

Marshall, a product of the Scottish public schools system, was both brave and wily. Bemused that they had lived so long, given their respective life-choices, the two ‘friends’ met on and off over the years, when it suited them, and when it was to their mutual advantage. From September 1937 onwards, with the Spanish Civil War reaching its most critical point and the Soviet military and Comintern agents tightening their stranglehold over Dr Juan Negrín’s Republican government, contact between Farquhar and Marshall became more frequent.

Farquhar was, at the time, a sergeant in a guerrilla unit attached to the 127th Brigade. Billeted in a village near Huesca — part of the Army of the East — they were preparing an attack on Zaragoza, to liberate it from the fascists in what was to become known as ‘the Battle of Aragón’. Their unit, which was made up mainly of members of a co-opted anarchist action group called ‘El Grupo Libertador’ — sometimes known as ‘Los hijos de la noche’ 3

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

(‘the Sons of the Night’) — was attached to the Intelligence Branch of the 10th Army Corps Staff, the Servicio de Información Especial Periférico, also known as the SIEP. Led by Lieutenant Francisco Ponzán Vidal — a local teacher formerly with the Information Department of the anarchist-led Council of Aragón — their unit was comprised of twelve men, nine of whom, including Laureano and Farquhar, were former members of the Durruti Column. The other three belonged to the socialist UGT union.

Their job was to infiltrate enemy territory, establish contact with local agents, brief them as to what intelligence was required, and collect information already gathered. Other tasks included guerrilla and sabotage operations behind enemy lines, especially blowing up railway lines, bridges and roads between Zaragoza and Jaca in Upper Aragón.

On this occasion, Marshall and Farquhar had run into each other in Huesca, apparently by ‘accident’, one that Marshall had skilfully contrived. He was in Spain ostensibly as part of a team from the Scottish Ambulance Unit, a volunteer brigade raised in Glasgow, and of doubtful provenance, ‘to assist wounded combatants on both republican and nationalist sides’. Having heard that Farquhar was in Huesca he had come to glean what information he could on the progress of the war on the Aragón front, and about the morale of the Army of the East. He was particularly interested in establishing the intentions of the Sovietappointed command structure of the Vth Army Corps, Lister’s XIth, Walter’s 35th and Kleber’s 45th Divisions, all of which were being marshalled in Aragón with equipment never before seen on that front.

It was only natural that Farquhar should have introduced Marshall to Ponzán, explaining to his lieutenant —and friend and compañero — about their relationship in 1918, and how Marshall had helped the union during the pistoleros wars of the time.

Ponzán found Marshall simpático, but more importantly, the information he provided about what was going on behind the fascist side of the lines was not only useful but, on occasion, lifesaving. The two men were soon firm friends. Marshall became a regular visitor after that, travelling under cover of the SAU or the International Red Cross. He remained in contact with the anarchists until shortly before their unit crossed the frontier at Puigcerdà early in February 1939.

When the victorious fascists occupied Barcelona at the end 4

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of January 1939, Marshall based himself in Céret, about ten kilometres from the French border town of Le Perthus, and thirty or so from Perpignan. It was there, a year later, that he introduced Ponzán, Laureano and Farquhar to de Marenches. Farquhar smiled to himself as he conjured up a memory of how they must have appeared: gaunt, ragged, drenched from the rain, but burning with determination to carry on the struggle against fascism. *** Farquhar stopped for a moment. His left knee was hurting. The rain drummed a regular cadence on his hat as he leant to massage the painful knee with his left hand. His right hand remained deep in his pocket, clutching the Star. He shivered. Was it fear? Someone walking on his grave? — or just the droplets of water trickling off the brim of his hat down the back of his neck? The weather reminded him of dreich days in Inverary; it also called to mind his first meeting with de Marenches in Céret, with rain lashing down from the mist-covered eastern Pyrenees.

De Marenches, a staunch Petainist, had blanched visibly when Marshall introduced the men as anarchists but, polite chevalier that he was, quickly recovered his composure. He knew the extent to which the Stalinist-led Spanish Communist Party and the Soviet-backed secret police, the SIM, had repressed the anarchists, the most implacable opponents of their attempts to suborn the Spanish people’s struggle in the service of Stalin’s geopolitical interests. And, although the autocratic de Marenches was an obsessive anti-socialist and anti-communist, a dyed-in-thewool Catholic fundamentalist, a Sovereign Knight of Malta and a member of the secretive Hiéron du Val d’Or — he was, above all, amoral, ruthless and a self-serving pragmatist. Farquhar didn’t trust him an inch. His mantra was: ‘There are no true friends, there are no true enemies, but there are common interests.’

Farquhar wondered if Laureano had recorded their meetings in his diaries. He had been, after all, a compulsive note-taker.

Farquhar made a mental note to check what Laureano had to say on the subject of de Marenches when he received the archives.

Laureano, Farquhar and Francisco Ponzán had briefed the French intelligence officer on the latest information they had concerning Nazi operations in Spain, mainly about which Cantabrian, Atlantic and Mediterranean ports and fish-canning plants were being used by German tankers as supply bases for 5

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

the U-boat fleets. It was much later, after the Liberation, that they discovered de Marenches had been passing on all the secret information he was privy to about German activities in France and Spain straight to the ad hoc intelligence network run by the influential Republican Wall Street lawyer Bill Donovan, another Knight of Malta, through de Marenchess well-connected mother — an American — and his extended friendship circle among the grandees of Europe. All of which had earned him lots of Brownie points in the topsy-turvy world of espionage, particularly with the then recently formed American Office of Strategic Services.

De Marenches owed most of his early intelligence and evasion coups to the anarchist Libertador organisation. In November 1942, when the Germans occupied Vichy France, following the Allied invasion of North Africa, the former Petainist escaped to Algeria. There, on the strength of his previous ‘intelligence successes’, General Alphonse Juin appointed him as his aide de camp and liaison officer to the Americans. It was Farquhar who had introduced him to his wife-to-be, Lilian-Mary Witchell, a cheery and attractive Scotswoman living in Marseilles.

As far as the big man from Govan was aware, they were still together. So, yes, de Marenches owed him big time, unless of course Lilian-Mary had turned out to be a liability, in which case it would have been his pay-back time! *** Farquhar had finally got through to de Marenches late in the afternoon. The spymaster claimed not to have heard of Laureano’s murder, which was unlikely, but he promised to look into it and get back to him as soon as he had more information. Farquhar knew enough to take such promises with a pinch of salt. Promises from the likes of de Marenches meant nothing. The Star in his coat pocket provided its own certainty.

The driving rain had not let up as the elderly Scotsman reached the corner of the Rue Thénard. Pulling the brim of his Fedora lower over his brow to protect his eyes, he checked to see if the road was clear and stepped off the pavement. No sooner had he done so than a large black sedan came out of nowhere and screeched to a halt behind him. Three knuckle-trailing characters jumped out waving guns. Two of them carried automatics, Brownings, probably, the other had a submachinegun, a Schmeisser, tucked under his arm. Farquhar 6

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was clearly their intended victim. He was not, however, in victim mode; angry, buzzing on adrenaline, charged-up with his synapses snapping at twenty to the dozen he was ready for them.

One of the men raised his automatic pistol and fired.

Unluckily for the would-be killer, his hand was unsteady and his aim bad. Farquhar saw the little burst of flame spit from the barrel, and heard the shot whistle close by his head. His own pistol was out by this time and he, crouched, firing twice, in quick succession, once at the shooter, and again at the character with the Schmeisser. He didn’t miss. The one who had fired at Farquhar grabbed at his blood-splattered belly and looked at him, dumbfounded, moaned and dropped to the ground. The man with the Schmeisser, wounded in the arm, dropped his gun.

Groaning loudly, he bent over, fumbling to pick it up from the pavement, but before he could lift it Farquhar shot him again —a headshot this time, double-tapped, as he had been taught years earlier by Archs. The man’s head exploded, spewing out a messy splutter of claret with a mixture of blood, grey skull and brains.

The third gunman, who had exited on the far side of the car, was clearly shaken by the unexpected turn of events and had run for cover somewhere. He was nowhere to be seen.

The driver, meanwhile, was trying desperately to get the car into gear and drive off, but he wasn’t quick enough. As he pulled away, Farquhar scooped up the Schmeisser and opened fire on him, raking the door and windows, riddling the car with more holes than a cheese-grater. He didn’t release his grip on the trigger until the clip ran out and the gun clicked emptily. The driver lay sprawled and bloody, still twitching, across the passenger seat. The whole thing could only have lasted a few seconds, but for minutes after Farquhar stopped, the noise of the firing carried on echoing, relentlessly, inside his head, his hands and arms still shaking from the Schmeisser’s powerful blowback.

It wasn’t the first time he had killed someone, but it was something you never got used to. Nevertheless, years of experience had taught him to stay alert and reserve any feelings of shock until he was out of danger.

The noise drew a lot of attention. Lights went on in the surrounding flats, curtains twitched and windows were thrown open as neighbours peered out cautiously to see what was going on. Not that there was much to see; any view they might have had of Farquhar was blocked by trees and advertising hoardings.

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

Nervous and breathless, he hurried as fast his stiff, seventy-sixyear-old knees and ankles could carry him, up the Rue Thénard, along the Rue des Écoles — turning regularly to ensure he was not being followed — until he finally disappeared into the gaping maw of the Cardinal Lemoine metro station on the Rue Monge.

Forty minutes later he was home, safe — for the moment — in his Belleville apartment. As far as he was aware, no one knew where he lived. He had no telephone and the apartment was rented under a false name. Even so, he knew he would have to go into hiding, at least until he had completed his manuscript.

Tomorrow he would call on Maître Dumas, Laureano’s lawyer, to arrange collection of his dead friend’s archives. He would also arrange a meeting with ‘the cobbler’, Lucio Urtubia, one of the anarchist organisation’s’ fixers, to arrange a new identity and get him out of Paris to somewhere safer.

In the meantime, Farquhar had to find out who his would-be assassins were. They hadn’t left a calling card. Farquhar had his suspicions. De Marenches was in the top ten of suspects, but there were a lot more than ten contenders. Flipping open a pack of Partagas cigarettes, he tapped one out, lit it, poured himself a large Glenmorangie scotch and walked across to the writing desk to look through his manuscript.

1919: 1 JANUARY — SPAIN, WINTER OF DISCONTENT On New Year’s Day 1919, José Buenaventura Durruti Domínguez, a twenty-two-yearold anarchist from León, a mountainous region in centralnorthern Spain, slipped across the border at Arneguy, near Bayonne in France. For the past year he had been working in Marseilles, Toulouse, Val des Bains, Bordeaux and Biarritz. Now he was on his way to Gijón in Asturias on a clandestine mission on behalf of the Toulouse-based Commission for Anarchist Relations. He was also hoping to meet up with his old friend, Antonio ‘El Toto’.

The Spanish police also wanted to meet up with the two men, both of whom were wanted for sabotaging the Northern Railway Company locomotives and track during the 1917 general 8

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1 January 1919: Spain, Winter of Discontent

strike. The army, too, were looking for Durruti, having posted him as a deserter since August 1917, in the wake of the general strike.

Durruti plays an important part in my story. Over the next seventeen years we were to become and remain close friends and comrades. ‘What little interest I had in serving my country,’ he told me years later — when we were holed up in Cuba after a bank robbery —‘disappeared after I came face to face with the bully of a recruiting sergeant. From the first moment he acted towards me as though I were a soulless zombie at his mercy in the barracks.

As soon as he started abusing us in the recruiting station, I simply turned around and walked straight out again. From now on, I said to myself, Alfonso XIII can count on one less soldier, and one more revolutionary.’

Tall, well-built and Moorish-looking, with straight black hair, brown eyes and a dimpled chin, Durruti had left school at fourteen to work, with his father, as an apprentice engineer in León’s railway yards. His first political affiliation was to the ‘Socialist Party’ and the Union General de Trabajadores (UGT), but he soon grew disillusioned with these organisations because of what he described as their ‘lack of moral integrity’, and their class treachery during the 1917 general strike.

In Gijón, El Toto asked Durruti to stay on and work with their newly formed anarchist group, to which he agreed. The friends soon established their revolutionary credentials during an acrimonious union dispute by sabotaging the La Robla mine in the León basin. Originally, Durruti had intended spending only a few days in Spain, but, with their first successful action behind him and the scent of revolution in the air, he decided to stay on and do his bit for the ‘Idea’. A time-served metalworker, he soon found employment with the Sociedad Fabrica de Mieres, a small engineering firm in the coalmining town of the same name, twenty kilometres or so from Oviedo.

A few months later, however, calamity struck. On his way to Santiago de Compostela on CNT business Durruti was arrested during a random Guardia Civíl stop-and-search operation and taken by military escort to San Sebastián where he was courtmartialled for desertion and sentenced to three years imprisonment. Spain’s military prisons couldn’t hold him for long, however, and by June the following year he had escaped and was back in France.

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

1919, JANUARY, BARCELONA: LA CANADIENSE It was my first winter in Spain. I hadn’t realised how bitterly cold Barcelona could be in January, with biting, chilling winds blowing down incessantly from the snow-peaked Pyrenees. Even though out of doors I was frozen to the marrow, and suffered from painful chilblains, Spain — or Catalonia rather — had stolen my heart. My mind was made up to stay, but I did need a proper paid job. The ‘retainer’ I had been receiving from Captain Marshall had dried up after the Armistice in November. Since then I had been surviving on odd jobs as a waiter and working part-time in small engineering workshops. Although I hadn’t formally completed my engineering apprenticeship, I was, to all intents and purposes, a time-served apprentice — I just didn’t have the appropriate City & Guilds certificate and Indentures papers to prove it.

My spoken Spanish and Catalan were passable by this time, and improving daily, with lots of help from Lara and Maestro Barba. I even picked up a bit of caló from the Andalusian gypsies who congregated every evening around the Plaça Reial. I still helped out most evenings as an editorial assistant on Solidaridad Obrera’s international pages, but the work was unpaid. No one at Soli was paid — not even the editor or publisher.

Before Christmas, with a view to getting me a job, Pestaña introduced me to an engineer at Barcelona’s main electricitygenerating station on the Avenida del Paral.lel. This man arranged an interview for me with the company’s general manager, Fraser Lawton, a ‘Newfie’ or native of Newfoundland who was of Scottish origin. He was delighted to have a fellowScot working for him, and I doubt if it even occurred to him to ask if I belonged to a union, let alone to the CNT. My new employer was the Ebro Irrigation and Power Company, the Sociedad Anonima de Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro, popularly known as La Canadiense since its main shareholder was the Canadian Bank of Commerce of Toronto.

The Canadians — or rather the British, because it was a UKregistered company based in London — had done what the Catalans should have done years earlier, but hadn’t, namely invest in the electrification of Catalonia. That in itself wasn’t unusual, however, as most of Spain’s industry and commerce was controlled by foreign-owned companies.

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January 1919: Barcelona, Trouble at Plant

Carlos Montañes, the entrepreneurial Catalan engineer behind the scheme, had been unable to find anyone in Spain willing to back his idea for the Canadiense project so he raised the capital in London instead. His intermediary in London was Spain’s then military attaché, Milans del Bosch, who introduced him to Fred Stark Pearson, the main shareholder of the Canadian bank. Pearson, unfortunately, was on board the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed in May 1915 by a German submarine.

Since then the company boardroom had been a war zone for control of the company between the Heidamann and SOFIMA financial groups.

La Canadiense was one of Catalonia’s biggest employers with thousands of workers on its payroll, and not only in electricity generation, but also in the parallel and subsidiary associated-energy industries as well, including the gas companies. Gas, however, was yesterday’s energy, as was steam power. Electricity was the nation’s main new power source, and La Canadiense’s dams and small generating substations were everywhere, their ugly high-tension Masts and cables dotting and criss-crossing the hills and valleys of Catalonia like some enormous cat’s cradle.

The company controlled most of Barcelona’s — and Catalonia’s — electricity supply. And it wasn’t just the factories and workshops that La Canadiense’s energy serviced; more and more domestic consumers were wiring their homes for electricity, while local municipal councils replaced their street gaslamps with electric lampposts.

1919, 6 JANUARY, BARCELONA: TROUBLE AT PLANT I remember my first day at work as though it were yesterday. I started work at the big generating station on the Paral.lel at 6.00 a.m. on Monday, 6 January 1919; it was the early-morning shift, and by 9.00 a.m. I was a fully paid-up member of the sindicato único of Water, Gas and Electricity. I still had my metalworkers’ union card in the name of Eduardo Principe, the identity Laureano had created for me, but at La Canadiense I was employed under my real name.

The shift was a long one, twelve hours in fact, but I was glad of the job, not just for the money, but for the warmth it provided.

Working indoors on the Massive turbines was a luxury that bitterly cold winter, and it helped cure my chilblains. But the job 11

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didn’t last long, less than a month in fact.

The Canadiense, like most of Catalonia’s industries, was experiencing serious labour problems at the time, but the labour unrest didn’t seem to worry the contending factions in the London boardroom; anything that caused the company’s share price to drop, albeit temporarily, served both groups’ interests.

A strike the previous month at the company’s generating plant up in Camarasa had been brutally put down by the Guardia Civíl, who broke up the picket line with a sabre charge, wounding —and angering —many workers in the process. At the same time, clerical workers in the company’s head office in the Plaça de Catalunya were involved in an ongoing dispute over wage cuts.

Wages were already low, but that didn’t prevent the Londonbased board insisting on even greater economies, demanding a higher return on their investment. The clerical workers were among those expected to contribute to the shareholders’ bonuses; when they opened their wage packets on the first payday of the New Year they found their money had been slashed by almost a third! It was hardly surprising then that they were now organising their own independent union — and preparing strike action!

The Canadiense strike took place at a time of high political and social tension in the country. Hardly a day passed without news of another strike by carpenters, metalworkers, printers and other tradesmen. A recent carpenters’ strike had been particularly successful with the workers walking away with an untypically good deal from the bosses — a peseta a day pay-rise with an eight-hour day for journeymen and an eight-and-a-half hour day for apprentices — and sick pay!

Other employers were less accommodating. On 2 January 1919, employers’ gunmen shot and killed a CNT militant by the name of Julián Sailan Zuzcaya, a graphic arts union typesetter, on the picket line outside the Barcelona printshop of Heinrich and Co. Union growth in the construction industry was particularly healthy at the time. In fact, so many building workers were joining the CNT that a new union hall had been opened at No. 10 carrer del Olmo, much to the dismay of the region’s employers, especially the ultra-reactionary building magnate 12

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January 1919: Barcelona, Trouble at Plant

Félix Grauperá, president of the Patronál, the Catalan Employers' Federation.

At the same time, Catalan separatists and españolistas — ‘Unionists’ who supported a unitary Spain — similar to our own high tory ‘Unionists’ in Ireland and Scotland — were involved in violent street protests over the Madrid government’s failure to approve the much publicised autonomy statute for Catalonia, which had been presented to the Madrid Cortés the previous November.

These middle-class nationalists and republicans — each grouping as reactionary as the other — were divided between regional autonomists and centralists. Indeed, so great were the differences that the Ramblas and the narrow medieval streets of the old quarter were often the scenes of running battles between the police and the Catalanistas, so many in fact that the captaingeneral, Milans del Bosch, the former military attaché in London, demanded that the government of the Conde de Romanones declare a state of emergency and suspend the constitution in the province.

Martial law was Milans del Bosch’s answer for everything.

He and the vested interest groups controlling Catalonia were also concerned about the growing popular hostility towards the soldiers of the Barcelona garrison. In fact, the situation was so bad that soldiers refused to venture onto the streets of Barcelona in uniform; they would only leave the barracks in civilian clothes.

Spanish army uniforms were nowhere to be seen, an extraordinary state of affairs that led to frustrated monarchist officers threatening to shoot Catalanist protestors in the street.

Milans del Bosch’s real enemy, however — his overriding obsession, even at the height of the Catalan nationalist crisis — was always the CNT, a working-class enemy that he detested to the core of his autocratic soul. It was class war, red in tooth and claw.

On 16 January, Romanones finally gave in to Milans’s demands, and declared a state of emergency in the Catalan capital. With civil liberties and the constitution suspended, and Milans’s dictatorial powers confirmed, the captain-general had become an unstoppable force, free to act with secrecy and despatch, and able to do as he pleased with his enemies.

If the gloves had ever been on, they were certainly off now.

Milans’ power to detain, interrogate, torture or kill anyone 13

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he defined as an ‘illegal combatant’ in his personal war on the union was absolute and unrestrained. Not content with suspending habeas corpus, Milans’ next move was to introduce internment — but not for the militant Catalanistas for whom the legislation had originally been intended! His target was the CNT. First he outlawed the union, closed down all its branches, ateneos and workers’ centres, and arrested thousands of cenetistas with a complete disregard for the due process of law, or for any generally accepted standards for the treatment of prisoners.

Union activists were marched to police headquarters in the Plaça Antonio López, where they were ‘processed’ and then taken either to the Modelo prison or to the ancient prison hulks Pelayo and Giralda, which were moored in Barcelona harbour.

Salvador Segui was among the first to be arrested, having been one of the unlucky ones at the Soli offices when the Special Brigade raided the premises. Pestaña, however, managed to escape and went into hiding down the coast.

I was at work at the time, otherwise I’d have been arrested as well, and wheeched off down the road quicker than tongue could tell. By the time I arrived at the Soli office at 8.00 that evening the premises had been sealed and a police guard placed on the door. Soli and all the other anarchist publications were banned under the governor’s emergency powers, which were intended to ensure that there would be no workers’ voice to challenge Milans’s authority, or to coordinate protest and solidarity campaigns for the prisoners.

But the raids were only partially successful. Although the police arrested the entire Regional Committee and most of the secondary committee members, the only member of the National Committee they picked up was Manuel Buenacasa. And they had absolutely no idea as to the identities of the other National Committee members, a serious intelligence failing.

Ultimately, the government’s attempt to break the CNT failed because neither the employers nor the authorities were able to grasp the fact that the CNT was its rank and file. Workers joined the union on their own initiative and weren’t prepared to abandon it, certainly not in their current mood. Nor were they intimidated by the repression. If anything, it made them even angrier and more determined to face down the employers. But 14

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5 February 1919: Barcelona, Pen-Snappers Unite!

the CNT was prepared, and had in place a devolved, clandestine structure with substitutes for each of its committees, which carried on as before, but in secret: meeting, planning and coordinating. However — and this is crucial to the subsequent history of the CNT over the next few years — these new parallel committees consisted mainly of unknown, young, radical, directaction-oriented militants who were also the driving force of the defence groups. Ironically, in its attempts to crush the CNT by jailing its most prominent spokesmen, the unintended consequence of the government’s action was to bring to positions of influence within the union radical activists who were the most committed and uncompromising.

Nor did the ban prevent the publication of Soli. Anticipating the repression, we had an alternative print facility organised at David Rebull’s printshop in Vilafranca del Penedés, where Governor Rothwes’ writ didn’t run, and from there we kept the paper going throughout the emergency, printing 100,000 copies per issue.

By the end of January, Prime Minister Romanones found himself forced to choose between alienating the army or the Catalan autonomists. It was Hobson’s Choice! The very real threat of revolution meant he needed the army on his side, hence his decision to back off from implementing the autonomy statute, one of the Spanish officer class’s main bugbears; they simply weren’t prepared to concede anything that might weaken or dismember Spain.

1919, 5 FEBRUARY, BARCELONA: PEN-SNAPPERS UNITE While most of us on the Canadiense shopfloor belonged to the sindicato único of Water, Gas and Electricity, the CNT itself wasn’t, as yet, directly involved in the dispute.

All that changed at the end of January, when the company sacked eight members of the independent clerical workers’ union because of their union activities. Because their union membership was so small and lacked the clout to take on a company the size of La Canadiense, their members voted to affiliate with the CNT and set up a strike committee, which was headed by Simó Pierá, a battle-hardened member of the building workers’ union. Pierá tried to open negotiations with La Canadiense’s management, but Lawton and the board refused point blank to negotiate or even to meet with him.

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It was on Wednesday, 5 February 1919, that the dispute came to a head in a dramatic, neatly choreographed and highly cinematic gesture worthy of Charlie Chaplin or Busby Berkeley.

All 117 accounting clerks employed in La Canadiense’s head office in the Plaça de Catalunya suddenly and unexpectedly stood up and, almost as one, snapped their pens, dashed their inkwells to the floor, and announced to the stupefied English supervisor, a Mr Colson, that they were going on strike until their eight sacked colleagues were re-instated.

Colson told them that not only would the dismissed men not be re-employed under any circumstances, but also that their own jobs were now at risk. The clerks responded by lining up with military precision and filing out of the office, down the stairs and out of the building where they assembled outside to march down the Ramblas to governor Gonzales Rothwos’s office near the port.

When he met the demonstrators, the governor appeared sympathetic to their demands and told them they should return to work, assuring them of his personal commitment to resolving the dispute. By the time the protestors returned to the Plaça de Catalunya, however, and tried to re-enter their offices, their way was blocked by lines of police and Civil Guard. After the protesting clerks had left, the weak-willed governor received a visit from Fraser Lawton and the captain-general to ‘advise’ him not to get involved.

For more than an hour there were angry scuffles in the Plaça de Catalunya as a crowd congregated outside La Canadiense’s headquarters. At last, a senior manager came to the main entrance with Barcelona’s new police commissioner, Francisco Martorell, and read out a statement to the effect that those who had walked off the premises earlier had been summarily dismissed.

The news of the sackings spread through Barcelona like a trail of lit gunpowder.

STRIKE!: LA CANADIENSE — STRATEGY AND TACTICS The CNT strike committee met in emergency session that night to discuss strategy, tactics and objectives! Apart from the workers’ immediate demands, which included the full reinstatement of the sacked workers — and no reprisals — the committee decided to 16

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February: Strike! La Canadiense, Strategy and Tactics

up the ante and demand an eight-hour day. The strike was to be phased and progressive. If the company refused to negotiate, which the union leaders knew it would, the next stage was to hit them where it hurt most — in their pockets.

Next to walk out were the meter-readers and revenue collectors. Only one man refused to join the strike — a scab meter-reader by the name of Joaquín Baró. The managers were depending on blacklegs to break the strike, but the scabs who turned out were so intimidated by the strength of public feeling against them, and the verbal and physical abuse to which they were subjected, that most didn’t return to work after the first day.

Two blacklegs were shot, in fact, on the same day, 13 February. The first victim was the scab meter-reader, Joaquín Baró, who was fatally wounded returning home from work. The other victim was textile foreman Luis Más, a police informer. He was shot dead in the carrer Juan de Malta in the Clot district.

Más’s killing wasn’t directly connected with the strike, however; it had been a ‘settling of accounts’ dating back a few years to when Más was involved with a gang of Catholic anti-union provocateurs and blacklegs. He mistakenly assumed his treacherous past had been forgotten, but it hadn’t, at least not by his former workmates, the ones he had betrayed years earlier.

They had long memories that had been refreshed by the strike, and they weren’t going to let him escape their justice again.

Lawton posted a 10,000-peseta reward for information leading to the arrest of Baró’s killers, but it found no takers. A few days later, on 17 February, Lawton announced he was ready to negotiate and asked for a meeting with the strike committee at La Canadiense’s headquarters. But it was gamesmanship, a power ploy. Hardly had the five workers’ representatives sat down around the conference table when Lawton — who was in a foul mood when he arrived — asked if all the delegates present were Canadiense employees. When he discovered Simó Pierá was a CNT representative, and not a company employee, he flew into a rage and had the delegates thrown out, shouting after them as they left the room that under no circumstances would he negotiate with the CNT — something he would have been obliged to do had the company been located in Britain or most other European countries.

But Lawton’s refusal to talk to the union had nothing to do with petulance, psychotic mood swings or even his deep-rooted 17

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anti-union prejudices; it was the result of a wider strategy of noncollaboration agreed beforehand with his board and supported by the Catalan employers’ federation. Years later, I obtained documents from the company’s lawyer, Josep Cigat i Figuerola, proving that the non-compliance strategy had originated with La Canadiense’s board in London, and that Lawton had been leant on heavily by Milans del Bosch. The board needed a strike, and the captain-general and the Fomento needed to break the union.

This was their opportunity.

21 FEBRUARY, BARCELONA: THE DAY THE LIGHTS WENT OUT… By 21 February, with no resolution of the dispute in sight, the strike committee finally called out the company’s power workers, including me. The plan was to close down every La Canadiense generator across Greater Barcelona, and all the way to the Camarasa plant, hundreds of kilometres away in the Eastern Pyrenees, leaving most of the city and the province without power or light.

Shortly before the 4:00 pm strike deadline that day, an encargado — a foreman — came to tell me that Fraser Lawton wanted to see me in his office.

It was like being called to the headmaster’s study. I knocked and a voice shouted out ‘Enter!’ I opened the door, and there stood Lawton, in front of the fireplace, warming his arse like the uptight aurocrat he was, hands clasped behind his back. Looking me up and down with irritating condescension he made me feel like a twelve-year-old schoolboy caught smoking behind the lavatories. I half-expected him to go through the ‘I’d let-himdown, the-company-down-and-worst-of-all-I’d-let-myself-down’ routine, but he didn’t. Not that I gave him the chance to reproach me. I had a fair idea what was on the cards and was ready for him.

‘Yes?’ I said, with as much Govan belligerence as I could muster — not being a naturally aggressive sort of chap. ‘You asked to see me, I believe?’

‘Deary me!’ he said, more to himself than to me. ‘What on earth have you got yourself into, Farquhar? Do you have any idea of the sort of people with whom you are involved? I don’t believe you do. Anyway, be that as it may, the situation is now out of hand and the only way you are going to be able to keep your job 18

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21 February 1919: Barcelona, The Day the Lights Went Out ...

is by tearing up your union card, here and now. Hand it over, please. I promise nothing more will be said about the matter. You can then get straight back to work.’

‘I’m sorry?’ I said. His words and attitude triggered my red mist syndrome; my sphincter started clenching and declenching twenty to the dozen and purple steam shot up my spine like mercury in a thermometer dropped into boiling water. As I moved closer towards him, he backed away around the desk.

‘Are you threatenin’ me with the sack, pal?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no option, Farquhar.’ His tone was now apologetic. ‘It’s out of my hands; take it or leave it.’

‘Well, pal,’ said I, ‘I do have an option. We’ll see what the union has to say about this.’ Storming out the room, I slammed the door behind me and went straight to my locker to collect my things. I then spoke to the delegado del taller, the CNT shop steward, who told me to wait for him outside while he went to see Lawton.

Lawton sacked him too.

By 4:35 that afternoon the entire workforce had walked out, and over 2,000 Canadiense employees were milling around the Plaça de Catalunya and surrounding streets. Inside the vast underground plant beneath the Plaça the generators and turbines ground to a halt and fell silent without one transformer engineer left on site to provide emergency cover. Within the hour Barcelona had come to a standstill as over 70 per cent of the city’s manufacturing and service industries, including public transport, were forced to close down. One company that wasn’t caught napping was the Belgian tram company, whose managers appeared to have understood the seriousness of the situation and had all their vehicles back in the terminus before the 4:00 pm deadline. The power cuts took everyone else by surprise.

When darkness fell that night and the extent of the blackout became apparent many of the upper and middle classes began to panic. After the January crackdown on the union, they had been mollified by government’s assurance that the anarchistsyndicalists were no longer a threat; suddenly that threat had reemerged, more threatening and more sinister than ever. Many were convinced that the strike was the signal for the longexpected anarchist insurrection, and that the ‘people of the abyss’ — which was how they viewed the workers — were about to rise up and slaughter them in their beds under cover of the blackout.

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Some barricaded themselves in their homes, while others fled the city altogether.

The authorities, quick to capitalise on bourgeois nightmares, declared a state of emergency and sent out army, police and auxiliaries carrying fire-torches of burning pitch to patrol Barcelona’s darkened streets and avenues. It rained heavily that night and the flickering flames cast long eerie shadows as the patrols moved slowly through the city’s wet cobbled streets. I am reminded of those nights every time I see old Frankenstein films with angry villagers, brandishing fire-torches and pitchforks, flocking to the Baron’s castle in pursuit of the monster and his Master. The monsters in this case being the strikers of the sindicato único!

But there was no breakdown in law and order, nor had there been any plans for an insurrection — although someone did try to murder a scab building contractor by the name of Joan Vila; he escaped with a superficial knife-wound. A few bombs went off, but they weren’t intended to kill – they were more morale-boosters, and to add a touch of drama to the situation.

One of the bombs, however, the one planted at Heinrich and Co’s premises — the printshop where the CNT picketer had been shot dead in January — did injure an innocent passer-by. That’s the problem with bombs: you never can tell when exactly they’ll go off or who’ll be around at the time.

By next morning, the stoppage was almost total and the only company providing electricity in the region, albeit on a much smaller scale, was the German-owned Energía Electrica de Catalunya.

A letter from Lawton was published in that day’s La Vanguardia, in which he claimed his hands were tied and that the strike committee hadn’t bothered to inform him of their demands.

It was a downright lie.

23 FEBRUARY, BARCELONA: LA CANADIENSE — PHASE 2 Two days later, on 23 February, with neither the Canadiense management nor the government showing any willingness to talk, the strike committee launched its second phase of solidarity actions by calling out the employees of the Energía Electrica de Catalunya.

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23 February 1919: Barcelona, La Canadiense Phase 2

The strike now extended to most of Catalonia’s power industry workers. The region was paralysed, with only a handful of smaller electricity-generating companies — those who hadn’t yet converted to steam — still operating. Their output, however, was minimal — and nowhere near enough to meet the needs of Catalan industry.

That afternoon Milans del Bosch convened an emergency meeting in the Capitanía. Among those present were police and military advisers; leaders of all the parties of the right, including representatives from the autonomist Lliga Regionalista, Francisco Cambó and Puig i Cadafalch; major industrialists representing the Patronál; and the strike-breaking cabinet assembled by Barcelona’s mayor, Manuel Morales Pareja. After a heated discussion, Milans del Bosch unveiled his master plan to break the strike — temporary nationalisation with the Catalan government taking control of La Canadiense.

There was a legal problem, however: La Canadiense was a UK-based company, which meant that before anything could be done, permission was needed from the British Embassy in Madrid, as well as the agreement of the Canadiense board in London. This was a formality. Milans del Bosch had already sounded out La Canadiense’s directors and the head of the Spanish desk at the British Foreign Office, with whom he had close personal relations, having previously been on attachment at Spain’s London embassy.

The Capitanía meeting concluded with a memorandum being sent to Prime Minister Romanones requesting permission for the military authorities to take over the running of the power company. The go-ahead came through from the British Embassy later that evening.

Early next morning, army engineers and troops from the 4th Regiment of Zapadores (Engineers) commanded by Colonel Madrid — along with marines from the warships in port — occupied the cavernous generating plant located beneath the Plaça de Catalunya. By 11:00 that evening they had restored power to some of the wealthier parts of the city, and, by the following morning, the conservative newspapers were publishing editions with predictably lurid and hysterical antiunion headlines and editorials. Milans’s audacity and apparent success in ending the strike delighted the authorities and the bourgeoisie. The evening, the brightly lit Ramblas was the scene 21

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of wildly triumphalistic — but premature — celebrations.

The bourgeois euphoria was short-lived — as were some of the inexperienced army engineers. By the end of the first week, eight of them had been turned into crackling as a result of their incompetence and inexperience. The authorities didn’t have enough trained engineers to ensure a consistent power supply, especially as we had had the foresight to remove vital pieces of equipment before we left. Nothing major, but enough to ensure the machinery didn’t function properly in the wrong hands. As a result, regular and frequent power cuts left large parts of the city without light or power.

The government sent in another thirty military engineers from Zaragoza, but the use of troops in an industrial dispute was dangerous and provocative, and fed into the already strong antimilitarist sentiments in the Catalan capital, which in turn led to fights and confrontations between workers and soldiers across the city.

With the dispute now militarised, the CNT’s Regional Committee convened an extraordinary general meeting that concluded with a call to all its affiliated unions and supporters to declare a general strike and come out in solidarity. The response exceeded all our expectations. Out of the blue, providence had provided us with the ideal opportunity to prove how capable we were of representing organised labour — and to show our strength.

1919: FEBRUARY — A STRATEGIC MISCALCULATION For all their money, power and influence, the Canadiense management, the Patronál, Milans del Bosch and all their satanic little helpers had made one major strategic miscalculation: they hadn’t calculated the extent to which the conflict had strengthened the CNT; the sindicato único was now solidly embedded within the psyche of Catalan workers.

CNT membership had grown enormously since the previous year’s Sants Congress. We had also just completed a successful propaganda and recruitment drive, focusing on the landless agricultural workers of Andalusia and the Levante, regions where people still lived like medieval serfs. These agricultural daylabourers often didn’t work for up to six months of the year, and if the cacique — the local oligarch — bore a grudge against 22

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someone for a real or imaginary slight, they were unlikely ever to work in the area again. Starving and angry labourers expressed their discontent by tearing down fences and ploughing up parts of the vast acres of untilled and uncultivated land on the great estates. Many were arrested, tortured and beaten senseless by the police, the landlord’s auxiliaries and the Guardia Civíl.

By the early part of 1919, CNT membership nationally had jumped to around 700,000, of whom 25,000 were in Andalusia.

In Catalonia, we had 345,000 members, which was about 30 per cent of the total Catalan labour force. It was this astronomical growth of the CNT that decided the Employers’ Federation, the Patronál, to crush the union and halt the apparently relentless rise in confederal membership in the region. We had a considerable amount of goodwill and credibility among the working people of Greater Barcelona, and, although we didn’t know it at the time, the Canadiense strike was to be the crucial turning point in the CNT’s history; it was to be the making of our union.

Next day, 26 February, workers from the French-owned Lebon Company, Catalonia’s main water and gas utility company, joined us on strike. Then it was tram-drivers, who abandoned their trams in mid-shift, and left them in the streets to be hauled back to the terminuses by the cavalry. Milans responded by conscripting the tram workers and, when they refused even then to return to work, he had them arrested under military law and marched up the hill to Montjuic. The tram company then recruited blackleg drivers and conductors, which led to even more angry confrontations and the fatal shooting of a scab conductor on the platform of his tramcar in the carrer Pelayo. By the end of the first week of March, Barcelona’s urban transport system was at a complete standstill.

While we had public opinion in Barcelona more or less solidly behind us, that wasn’t the case with the bourgeois press.

Every day newspapers ran virulently hostile banner headlines and editorials. One right-wing journalist, Sánchez Pastór, a nasty piece of work if there ever was one, penned particularly venomous anti-anarcho-syndicalist leader pieces daily for the conservative La Vanguardia and, as a result, he was inundated with hate mail and death threats from outraged readers. So terrified was he that, for months after the strike was over, he 23

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refused to leave his apartment, and the editor had to send messengers every day to collect his copy.

Ironically, most of La Vanguardia’s print workers were cenetistas, as were a number of its editorial staff — journalists like Puig I Ferrater and proofreaders like Josep Viadiu. Their view was that if it was all right for the government and the press barons to impose their selective censorship and biased reportage on the press, then why shouldn’t the union do likewise? Sauce for the goose was, after all, sauce for the gander. Union members refused to sub-edit, typeset, proof or print Pastór’s articles or any others that were hostile to the strikers. Much the same thing happened in the offices of La Publicidad. The aptly named Acrata (English: ‘Anarchic One’) Vidal, a typesetters’ spokesman, informed the editor, Sr Jolis, that his article on the strike was unacceptable to union members and that it wouldn’t be printed.

‘Workers’ censorship’ was taken up by the CNT’s graphic arts union and implemented across all the papers where CNT members had influence — which was most of them. A similar incident was to occur in Britain seven years later when the printers on the Daily Mail refused to print an editorial attack on the threatened national general strike, at which the government withdrew from negotiations and the strike went ahead.

Milans del Bosch, meanwhile, continued to ratchet up the pressure on Prime Minister Romanones, pressing him to extend martial law throughout Catalonia. Since we’d first walked out on 21 February, he’d been pushing Romanones to allow him to conscript Barcelona’s public service workers — as he had done with the tram workers.

The prime minister held back on this until 4 March, when a countrywide outbreak of food riots finally panicked him into allowing Milans to have his own way. One overwhelming reason for these riots was greedy shopkeepers exploiting the economic crisis, with some raising food prices by almost 200 per cent.

Andalusia, meanwhile, was in flames, literally, with insurrections spreading like forest fires. Agreeing to Martial law was a last-ditch attempt by Romanones to restore public order and halt the spread of revolution. Even so, the prime minister was always dubious about Milans’s policies in Catalonia, and made it clear that he held him personally responsible for the deteriorating situation in Catalonia.

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Milans’s master plan to break the strike — and the CNT — was to draft the power-industry workers into the army.

Unfortunately for him, the workers’ censorship imposed by the graphic arts union meant he had been unable to publish the mobilisation decree in either the national or the regional press — a legal requirement. Newspaper typesetters and printers flatly refused to print it.

The edict was eventually published on 5 March, but only in a low-circulation weekly —on which the CNT imposed a fine and which the paper promptly paid — and in the right-wing Diario de Barcelona, which had to be printed and distributed by the Army, who also printed and fly-posted the mobilisation decree on public and private buildings across the city.

The decree, which drafted all able-bodied workers in the electricity-generating sector between twenty-one and thirty-eight years of age, presented a genuinely serious dilemma for the workers involved. If they obeyed, they betrayed their comrades, and if they refused to be conscripted, it meant up to five years in a military prison. *** Being only nineteen, and not a Spanish national, I wasn’t directly affected by the call-up, and although I carried a fake identity card in the name of Eduardo Principe — the identity that Laureano had created for me, and which I used in most situations — I was employed at La Canadiense under my real name. No one had a record of me, I hoped.

Initially, the strike committee advised everyone to act according to their conscience, but after much heated debate, we agreed to comply with the draft and play along with the mobilisation order — then, if necessary embark on a strategy of mass disobedience!

So, on the morning of 7 March 1919, 3,000 union members presented themselves for induction at the Atarazanas barracks, an enormous grey stone building with high walls that linked the port ends of the Ramblas and the Paral.lel. I waited across the road around the base of the Columbus monument amid a massive crowd of supporters.

Inside the barracks, the cenetistas, lined up in ranks, were handed yellow armbands, which they were told to put on. But when the officer in charge told them that the armbands meant they had agreed to subject themselves to military law, the men 25

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refused to put them on and threw them on the ground. The ‘conscripts’ were then divided up into companies and told they would be marched under military escort to the various electricitygenerating plants around the city, while others were to be loaded onto army lorries and driven to plants across the region. Again they refused. This time, however, the men broke ranks and spread out across the drill square, handing out anti-militarist leaflets and pamphlets to the conscript soldiers guarding them, something that didn’t do much for army morale and discipline — or for the officers’ tempers.

The authorities hadn’t foreseen this reaction, but they couldn’t force the men to work, and there were far too many to shoot or court martial, so they had no choice but to march the electricity workers up the hill to Montjuic to join the tram-drivers and conductors already behind bars.

Even though the whole of Barcelona knew what had happened — many of us had accompanied them up to the gates of Montjuic — the authorities brazenly denied they were holding 5,000 prisoners. The civil governor, accompanied by Police Commissioner Francisco Martorell, gave a press conference the following day, claiming that only 70 unionists had been imprisoned since the suspension of civil liberties — not the 5,000-plus everyone knew to be behind bars.

1919: FEBRUARY>MARCH — STATE OF SIEGE Milans’s plan had failed. Not only had his heavy-handed measures caused the regime serious embarrassment. He had also created a major administrative problem by locking up 5,000 of the province’s key service-industry workers in the military fortress of Montjuic and in the civil Model Prison. To make matters worse for the employers and the state, his actions had stiffened union resolve, radicalised countless otherwise passive and quiescent workers, made anti-militarist and pro-strike street protests more frequent and, potentially, more violent — and given legitimacy and credibility to our argument that the only way to topple predatory capitalism was through social revolution and workers’ control.

The CNT, with its massive working-class support and extensive social service network, began organising public kitchens in all the working-class neighbourhoods in an effort to 26

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feed the strikers and their families, and anyone else who was hungry. The strike was both general and popular, with almost the whole of Barcelona’s workers now involved, one way or another.

In its first week, the strike fund drew over 50,000 pesetas in donations and street collections. More importantly, from Milans’s point of view, the debacle was fast losing him the hearts and minds of the lower and middle-ranking bourgeoisie who, until then, had supported the authorities against the union.

Food shortages, power cuts and torchlit army patrols had turned Barcelona into a besieged city, and the middle classes were rapidly tiring of the suffocating situation in which they now found themselves, all of which they now blamed on the intransigence of the Capitanía and the Patronál. Then the Patronál announced its counter-plan, an employers’ lockout.

Their reasoning being that with all the workers locked out they would be unable to support each other financially and would be starved into submission. That was the theory.

Barcelona’s mayor, Morales Pareja, was aware, however, of the growing potential for bloodshed and asked Madrid to intervene and defuse the tension. Although Romanones was responsible for introducing martial law in the first place — under pressure from the military, as he later claimed — the prime minister kept his lines of communication open with both the CNT Regional Committee and the Canadiense management, through his private secretary, Juan José Moróte, a liberal monarchist and a well-known novelist.

Romanones’ problem was finding the right people to replace Barcelona’s discredited authorities. Moróte was one of the few people he trusted who understood the situation, and knew the people and issues involved. That evening Romanones announced Moróte’s appointment as his personal representative in Barcelona to head up a mediation team with executive power to break the deadlock. Sacking Rothwos, the pusillanimous civil governor, he replaced him with the engineer Carlos Montañes, founder of La Canadiense. Romanones also appointed a new police commissioner, Gerardo Doval — a cultured man who was both a lawyer and secretary to the Madrid magistrates — to replace the compromised Francisco Martorell. Accompanying Moróte and Doval were a number of other senior police officers and civil servants from Madrid.

Catalonia’s nationalist Establishment took Madrid’s public 27

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intervention in Catalan affairs as a personal insult, and the megalomaniacal Milans del Bosch was reportedly beside himself with rage when informed what Romanones had done. The officers of the Barcelona garrison were equally angry that the resolution of the strike should be given to civilians, while Cambó and the autonomists of the Lliga Regionalista were equally outraged that Madrid had extended its power in the province so arbitrarily without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’. As for the hardline employers from the Patronál, they were convinced that Romanones’s intention was to recognise the CNT and concede to the workers’ demands.

Milans made his move before Madrid’s appointees reached Barcelona, declaring another state of emergency on the morning 13 February. Dividing Barcelona into five military zones as though it were an occupied city in enemy territory, he appointed generals as zonal gauleiters with absolute executive power over all the inhabitants in their respective areas. Police and army units swept through the city in a series of dawn raids, arresting all the dissidents and ‘troublemakers’ they could find. Among those arrested that morning were the CNT’s republican lawyers, Lluis Companys and Ramón Agullo, who had had the effrontery to bring a legal action against Chief Superintendent Manuel Bravo Portillo for corruption.

Fortunately, the arrival of Moróte and Doval at midday forced Milans to suspend his plans and release the detainees.

Moróte’s assessment of the situation was that it was fast spinning out of control and that the employers had to make the first concession. His priority was to make contact with the strike committee, but he had no idea as to who they were or how to communicate with them. His first port of call, therefore, was to Montjuic prison to speak to Salvador Segui and the other imprisoned members of the CNT’s Catalan Regional Committee, where he asked them to call off the strike — in the interests of social peace, of course. ‘Señor,’ said Segui when Moróte put this to him, ‘the CNT’s concern is social justice, not public order. That is your responsibility.’

Moróte next call was to see the Conde de Güell, the hardline integrist president of the employers’ federation, who told him point blank that his members would concede nothing to ‘the enemies of Spain and God’. The workers would first have to 28

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concede unconditional defeat and tear up their union cards before they could return to work. It was a standoff.

Barcelona’s new civil governor, Carlos Montañes, arrived the following day, 14 February, and was met at the station by crowds of cheering well-wishers, all anxious for a rapid end to the strike and a return to normality. His first appointment was with the Canadiense management team who were only just beginning to realise that their intransigence had opened a veritable Pandora’s box, which was releasing all sorts of expensive and politically dangerous ills both on Spain and the company. Apart from loss of revenue, company spies infiltrated into the workforce were feeding back worrying reports that anarchist and confederal (i.e.

CNT) defence groups were planning to sabotage the company’s dams, pipelines and its network of high-tension cables and pylons.

Everyone was surprised then when Lawton arrived at the meeting with the new civil governor and his British lawyer, and announced that he was prepared to negotiate with the CNT. The problem, however, was identifying the members of the clandestine strike committee, but in fact contact was made later that day through one of the CNT’s lawyers, the Republican councillor, José Guerra del Rio. The first meeting took place at the Institute of Social Reform, a neutral venue adjoining the Borne, at 3:30 in the afternoon of 15 March. As Guerra Del Rio was both president of the Institute and mayor of the Borne district he was well placed to vouch for the security of the venue, and for the safety of the CNT strike committee, who arrived at the Institute two hours late. The delay angered Lawton and his team no end, but in the circumstances they had no choice but to wait.

Leading the CNT negotiating team, Simó Pierá restated the committee’s minimum demands for a return to work: the rehiring of all workers without reprisals, the required wage increase — and the introduction of an eight-hour day. Then came the problems. Lawton wouldn’t agree to a blanket rehiring of the sacked workers, insisting on the management’s right to choose their employees. The strike committee remained adamant, however, and rejected Lawton’s ploys for getting round this requirement. Negotiations dragged on for another two days until Romanones again intervened, insisting that the civil governor end the strike within twenty-four hours. Largo Caballero, the 29

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socialist leader, was threatening a nationwide general strike if a deal wasn’t concluded that day.

1919: 18 MARCH — A PYRRHIC VICTORY Following a private meeting with Moróte and Milans del Bosch — who also brought strong pressure to bear on the Canadiense manager — Lawton finally agreed to all the strikers’ demands, including the ‘no reprisals, no recriminations’ clause. The agreement was signed at 9:00 that night; its terms included the rehiring of all strikers, wage increases and two weeks’ pay indemnity for time lost during the strike.

The icing on the cake was the unexpected legislation confirming an eight-hour working day throughout industry — something that benefited the whole of the Spanish working class.

It was the first law of its kind in Europe, and proved a major morale-and membership-booster for the CNT as well as showing to the world the strength and commitment of the anarchosyndicalist organisation.

But the agreement still had to be approved by the union’s membership, in whom the CNT’s authority resided, a process that was normally done by acclamation in a full assembly.

Next day, 18 March, the strike committee called a preliminary meeting of Canadiense shop stewards and delegates at the Teatro del Bosque where Simó Pierá read out the terms of the agreement on behalf of the strike committee, and asked delegates for their views. The agreement was approved unanimously, in principle — that is until someone pointed out that there was no mention of the fate of the imprisoned compañeros still being held in Montjuic and in the Modelo. Embarrassingly, in their anxiety to settle the dispute, the committee had completely overlooked the question of the prisoners. The governor then assured the committee that all prisoners would be released within three days. The terms of the settlement now had to be agreed by a full membership meeting of the CNT rank-and-file.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to move matters along and show willing, Romanones lifted martial law, much to the displeasure of Milans del Bosch, who promptly submitted his resignation to Madrid, protesting that neither he nor the army would be party to implementing the government’s policy of recognising and collaborating with the CNT. 30

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This was bluster on Milans’s part, theatrical posturing to face down Romanones. Milans was a man obsessed with the ‘honour’ of the army, and an insult to him was an insult to the army —and vice versa. But in spite of all his talk about taking a ‘principled’ stand and resigning, Milans clung on as captain-general of Catalonia. He was the very model of one as well; relinquishing power was the furthest thing from his mind. Milans and Barcelona’s ‘men of honour’ had their own secret agenda, which was to sabotage the settlement and provoke the CNT into continuing — and extending — the general strike.

1919: 19 MARCH, BARCELONA: LAS ARENAS BULLRING The full membership meeting of the CNT was convened on 19 March in the only venue in Barcelona large enough to hold it — the Las Arenas bullring —and authorised by Governor Montañes, to the disgust of Milans del Bosch. The problem that now faced the reformist Regional Committees was convincing the rank-andfile to accept the agreement and return to work.

Many of us in the groups had mixed feelings about accepting the deal, but we were in a minority, albeit a substantial one. We felt we now had the strategic advantage and needed to press it home, pushing back the boundaries as far and as fast as possible. For us, the strike was going to be the ‘big one’ that would trigger social revolution and herald the dawn of Libertarian Communism! Even so, it was still a difficult call to make, although it shouldn’t have been, especially for a union whose stated objective was Libertarian Communism. This tension has always been the core contradiction of anarcho-syndicalist labour unions: on one hand, as a labour union it is obliged to represent its members’ material interests, making it an integral part of the administrative apparatus of capitalism and the state — yet at the same time it seeks to function as a subversive organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the state and capitalism. As in poker, the art was in knowing when to hold the cards, and when to fold them.

As Simó Pierá explained to governor Montañes, none of the members of the strike committee had the standing or credibility to convince the younger anarchist militants who now dominated the union committees, to accept the agreement and return to work. There was only one man capable of this, Salvador Segui, considered to be one of the more prudent único leaders — and 31

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he was still under arrest with the other 5,000 union members.

Convinced by the logic of Pierá’s argument, Montañes ordered Segui’s immediate release from jail to allow him to address the assembly and, hopefully, to ensure that the members would accept the committee’s recommendation to return to work.

The Las Arenas meeting was unforgettable. Lara, Laureano, Archs and I were there in the bullring on that historic evening.

At least 50,000 euphoric, fired-up and noisy cenetistas packed the place to overflowing, anxious to hear what the employers were offering. On the platform with Segui were the other members of the strike committee, Saturnino Meca, Simó Pierá and Francesc Miranda. Seated beside them, surprisingly, was the new police commissioner, Gerardo Doval, and police superintendents from each of the Barcelona barris. The meeting started at 9:00 pm sharp.

There was no public address system in those days so speakers needed plenty of lung-power as well as charisma. Simó Pierá was first to speak, and although he was initially welcomed with loud cheers, these were quickly followed by boos and heckling and he was forced to stand down. Next up was Saturnino Meca, a cobbler and a respected CNT activist. He, too, was forced to stand down when his call for hush met with angry jeers and shouts of ‘traitor’ and ‘reformist’. Francesc Miranda — another elderly compañero and acknowledged militant, stepson of the veteran anarchist Anselmo Lorenzo — was also shouted down.

Then came Segui. Insults, threats, jeers and boos from angry unionists echoed around the bullring, but Segui just stood there, totally silent and expressionless, his sad eyes staring fearlessly across a sea of faces, waiting for silence, challenging them almost. Inside I cringed with embarrassment for him. Thinking back, I remember feeling a similar nervous embarrassment during a Jack Benny performance at the Albert Hall in London in 1950, when the comedian came on stage with his Stradivarius, and just stood there, deadpan and silent, looking around the audience for what felt like an eternity.

But Segui wasn’t playing it for laughs. When the noise died away, he spoke. Again they shouted him into silence. He waited, silent, calm and unphased until the noise abated. Again he began to speak and again there were more catcalls. And so it went on 32

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and on until, at last, the crowd fell silent.

Then his oratory lashed out over those thousands and thousands of cenetistas assembled in the bullring, capturing their respect and attention. Boy, did he have cojones! Listening to him made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

Praising the strikers for their courage, and the ordinary people of Barcelona for their solidarity with the CNT, he warned against triggering clashes with a substantially more powerful enemy, and of the dangers of pressing the union into an unequal military confrontation.

‘Of course I understand your anger and frustration. Your heckling is neither malicious nor personal. Your justifiable anger reflects your frustration that our victory over La Canadiense has not been total. Remember, however, that the army will take to the streets against us at the slightest excuse.

‘If we insist on freeing the prisoners before we return to work, we shall have to face the army’s cannons, defeat the armed forces of the state, and free them with our bare hands. It’s not enough to shout loudly here from the safety of the bullring.’

Pointing up at the fortress of Montjuic looming behind him, he said, with an audacity and conviction that took everyone aback, ‘If you are indeed ready to launch the revolution, then go ahead. Let us start here and now. Let us march up that hill and release our comrades! But if the army’s cannons still present an insuperable obstacle, then we have no choice but to accept Maróte’s word that the captain-general will free our comrades as soon as we return to work. It’s not that I believe the captaingeneral, nor the civil governor — nor even Maróte the civil servant and politician — but I do believe the word of Maróte the writer!’

He stepped back. His audience knew he meant what he said. If and when it came to it he would indeed lead from the front. Slowly the cries and whistles of support and approval built into a thunderous applause that echoed around the arena. Segui had carried the day.

There were a few heckles and catcalls from ideological ‘diehards’ hostile to what they saw as Segui’s ‘betrayal’ of anarcho-syndicalism and his ‘treacherous compromise’ with the state and capitalism, but these were drowned out by the noisy approval from the crowd.

‘Is everyone agreed then that we return to work tomorrow?’

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Simó Pierá asked the assembled unionists. ‘And are we agreed that if the prisoners are not freed by the 24th we should resume the general strike?’

‘Yes!’ roared back the crowd.

The meeting was over, and so was the strike. The former had lasted just three-quarters of an hour, the latter lasted forty-five days, paralysing Barcelona and ending with a resounding victory for organised labour and the sindicato único. El Sol, the Madrid daily, described the Las Arenas meeting as ‘the triumph of the only organised power in the land’. Indeed, the Canadiense victory marked the pinnacle of CNT’s strength until 19 July 1936.

Lara, Laureano and I left the meeting in exultant mood and headed off to a nearby bar for couple of celebratory finos before returning to our respective lodgings. I walked Lara home through the noisy streets of the Old Town and as I said goodbye on her doorstep I was strongly tempted to kiss her on the lips, but at the last moment my nerves got the better of me and, instead, I gave her a fraternal peck on the cheek.

The euphoria didn’t last long, though. Dark clouds were gathering. A new military governor had arrived in town — General Severiano Martínez Anido — a man who was to become the greatest figure of hate in the dramas that were about to unfold.

20 MARCH, BARCELONA: BACK TO WORK Although we returned to work on Thursday, 20 March 1919, tensions remained high, with many of the big employers — Gas de Catalonia, for example —ignoring the settlement and refusing to rehire shop stewards and known militants. At La Canadiense, however, things weren’t too bad.

The deadline for the prisoners’ release was Saturday, 22 March. Montañes was as good as his word and released all the ‘governmental’ prisoners under his jurisdiction in the Model Prison within the three days we had agreed upon. Milans del Bosch, however, wasn’t so accommodating with those in military custody. Saturday came and went with the five prisoners, including National Committee secretary Manuel Buenacasa, still in Montjuic.

In Spain, it has always been the army, not the politicians, who have held real power; Spain’s politicians only exercised 34

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power on the sufferance of the former. Furious with the government for undermining his authority so publicly by settling the dispute without his approval, Milans del Bosch decided to show them that he called the shots in Catalonia.

The fact that the government had sidelined him to negotiate directly with the strikers was, in his mind, the ultimate betrayal of a loyal servant — and a dangerous and unprecedented concession to anarchism and Bolshevism. It was after all the army, was it not, that had restored vital services and public order and was now paying the price of national vilification as a result of its role in the repression? As a result it now faced mutiny and revolutionary subversion within the ranks, and dissent from the middle-ranking officers of the juntas militares.

On the Sunday morning, Milans received a telephone call from his boss, the minister of war, ordering him to release the remaining five imprisoned cenetistas. Refusing to back down, Milans insisted that the only way to resolve Barcelona’s social problems was with what he called a ‘firm hand’. Later that day, he received a visit from the acting governor, Montañes, and a CNT delegation consisting of Segui, Simó Pierá and Saturnino Meca. Milans’s answer remained the same: ‘I will only release the Montjuic prisoners when I am satisfied that the situation has been fully resolved, not before!’

He was lying. Milans del Bosch, backed by the Patronál’s leading industrialists, had no intention of releasing the prisoners under his jurisdiction. The military and the diehard employers were only interested in forcing the workers back to work on their terms, and destroying the CNT. Their strategy called for a long and debilitating strike. They also needed to engage in the politics of fear and manipulate the wider population into accepting the militarisation of civil society — hence the decision to ‘normalise’ the position of the hitherto suspect nationalist Sometent and bring it under military control.

The government’s refusal to honour its promise to release the Montjuic prisoners left the CNT’s Catalan Regional Committee no choice but to follow through with the general strike they had committed themselves to at the Las Arenas meeting — even though it was against their own better judgment.

It was a serious provocation. Milans del Bosch and his new military governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido, knew that their refusal to release the prisoners would provoke the defence 35

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groups into actions and further radicalise the CNT’s rank-andfile, deepening popular hostility to the parliamentary process and the distrust of even the most liberal politicians, including their so-called ‘friend’, governor Carlos Montañes.

Nor did it do much for the reputation of the CNT’s so-called ‘moderates’ — men like Segui who had long been pushing for a ‘negotiated settlement’ with the employers. If liberals, conservatives and social democrats showed themselves unable to govern without army approval, what chance did so-called ‘reasonable-minded’ union spokesmen have in convincing their members to negotiate with politicians who were clearly unable to control their own affairs in the face of rigid and unresponsive autocrats and a reactionary officer class? The only solution was insurrection.

The ‘diehard’ employers and army officers weren’t the only ones opposed to ending the strike; most of us in the defence and affinity groups saw it as the first stage of delivering the coup de graçe to capitalism.

When news came through that Milans del Bosch still refused to release our comrades, we sent a delegation from the prisoners’ committee and the defence groups to remind Segui of his promise at the bullring to support a general strike if the prisoners weren’t freed, and to insist he make a stand.

Segui, knowing that another strike was precisely what the military and the bosses were hoping to provoke, continued to advise caution and compromise, arguing that with one long strike just over and the workers heavily in debt, with no cash resources, further confrontation with the state and the employers would only lead to a disastrous defeat for the union. The bourgeoisie, oligarchs and the ruling class, he contended, wanted another confrontation, hoping to seize back what the union had just won. It would be senseless, he argued — but nothing he said could convince them otherwise. Segui was on seriously dangerous moral ground here — the idea of the ‘greater good’, and that it was better to sacrifice the freedom of the five imprisoned comrades than risk the gains of the Canadiense strike, a position that flew in the face of one of the CNT’s core beliefs — working-class solidarity.

As far as we in the defence groups were concerned, there was no contest: solidarity with the compañeros held in Montjuic 36

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and the fight against injustice was paramount. It was a moral imperative that took precedence over ‘enlightened self-interest’ — and everything else come to that. At the time, some people, myself included, believed Segui to be more concerned with industrial peace than industrial justice, which was unfair, really.

He wasn’t; he was probably just a better strategist than the rest of us. But as far as those of us in the defence groups were concerned, the army and the employers had crossed our line in the sand.

And so, in the early hours of 24 March 1919, three days after what we thought had been a successful conclusion of the Canadiense dispute, the strike committee agreed — by one vote — to call another general strike. But once that decision had been taken there was no prevarication, not from Segui, Pestaña or anyone else, and everyone threw their full weight behind it. We were unanimous in our determineation that this time the strike would continue until the five compañeros in Montjuic were released.

So, at 6:00 the following morning, the committee sent out bicycle messengers to inform the civil governor, Montañes, and the barri committees around the city of the decision to call a general strike.

The response was both reassuring and immediate. Picket lines were organised, and in the factories and workshops where a shift system operated, workers downed tools and walked out whether or not they belonged to the CNT. Nor was there any coercion on our part. Our people were genuinely angry; everyone felt a strong sense of grievance at the government’s duplicity, and believed that strike action was the only solution, or at least it was the first option. We were in no mood to submit quietly to the employers’ concerted assault on our union, our rights and our livelihoods.

By midday the strike was total. Barcelona had fallen silent with almost every shop, café and restaurant shuttered and closed — including the restaurant used by the civil governor. The strike then started spreading out to Greater Barcelona and the surrounding towns and cities.

24 MARCH, BARCELONA: MARTIAL LAW — AGAIN! The ‘diehards’ among the employers were also making plans.

That afternoon they met in the Capitanía to decide on tactics. In 37

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their favour was the fact that the strike was illegal: we hadn’t provided the authorities with the requisite paperwork, the required statutory fifteen days advance notice, which gave the state carte blanche to do as they pleased with regard to the strikers.

Their plan was simple: impose ‘public order’, immobilise the anarcho-syndicalists and isolate the city from the rest of the province, while the Patronál and the other middle-class mutual aid organisations took over responsibility for restoring public services.

At 6:00 that evening, Lara and I were taking our now near regular evening stroll on the Paseo de Gracia when, imperceptibly at first, in the distance, we heard the tramp of boots marching to the sounds of a bugle and drum band leading an infantry company, which was approaching the Plaça de Catalunya with fixed bayonets. Intrigued, we followed the crowd of curious spectators to the Plaça and watched as the soldiers lined up in ranks and presented arms. Stepping forward, the captain put on his glasses and read out a proclamation, declaring that a ‘state of war’ now existed in Barcelona, that martial law had been re-introduced in the city and that from 8:00 that evening a curfew would be imposed. The troops then proceeded to spread out to take up strategic positions across the city; it seemed that a revolution was imminent.

We hurried off to spread the news among the comrades.

Next morning, 25 March, when I went to the bar for my morning café con leche and churros, I saw that cannons and machinegun emplacements had been set up in all the main squares and in front of public buildings. Overnight, the Plaça de Catalunya had been turned into one enormous military encampment, complete with a Red Cross field hospital.

Army, police, Guardia Civíl and Sometent auxiliaries were patrolling the streets of the workers’ quarters, humiliating passers-by with arbitrary and brutal stop and search routines. In the city centre the middle-class thugs of the Sometent were the most most prominent, and determined to show the workers they were the masters now.

Anyone found in possession of a CNT card during these searches had their details taken and their union card confiscated; there were many arrests. Cyclists in particular were targeted, as 38

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27 March 1919: Barcelona, Heads on Plates

they were the means by which the barri committees maintained contact. There were rumours of summary executions, but these turned out not to be true. Towards evening the streets emptied and people hurried home; the city’s shops, bars and restaurants closed and shuttered their doors. But there was still no sense of panic.

Two days later, on the morning of 27 March, governor Montañes finally met with a CNT delegation in an attempt to find a dignified resolution to the strike. The only two conditions we insisted on were an amnesty, and no reprisals. Montañes was powerless, however, and the employers refused outright to accept any conditions imposed by the CNT. With no alternative but to submit to force majeure, the strike committee conceded defeat on 3 April and advised the union’s separate, independent sindicatos to negotiate their own return to work.

But the ‘diehard’ employers didn’t just want to get the workers back to work —they wanted them back to work on their terms. They demanded absolute power over their workforce.

From then on, wages and conditions were to be dictated by the employers. They were reinventing the world anew, and establishing their own dominant position in that new world order.

The new rules laid down by the Patronál demanded that CNT members seeking re-employment hand in their membership cards, and sign a personal contract agreeing to a wage rate negotiated directly with the management — without union involvement.

I was one of the first victims of this new hardline approach.

HEADS ON PLATES Arriving at the Paral.lel sub station at 6:00 in the morning, I expected to go straight to work after clocking in, but before any of us could get to the time clock we were stopped by company security guards who told us we had to wait on the street with everyone else until the general manager arrived.

Fraser Lawton turned up half an hour later, and although I was standing at the front of the crowd, he gave no sign of recognition. He stared straight through me, blankly, as he read out the new conditions of employment, including the bit about handing in union cards. Then, without waiting for a response, or 39

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questions, he walked back through the main gate.

No one was prepared to return to work under the new conditions, so we immediately set up a picket line on the street outside. The same thing happened when the foremen of the Lebon Gas Works and at Electric Energy of Catalonia tried to cherry-pick who would and who wouldn’t work, based on their previous history of union militancy. In the long run, however, it proved an effective and divisive strategy. There were too many tired and hungry apolitical workers with families to feed, who needed to work, even at the price of their dignity.

Then, in the early hours of 31 March, there had been a sinister turn of events: during a police raid on his apartment, the outspoken secretary of the CNT’s tanners’ union, Miguel Burgos, was shot dead in cold blood. The police claimed they were forced to shoot as he had been ‘attempting to escape arrest’; his partner described it as cold-blooded murder. Burgos’s murder was the opening salvo in what was to become the bloodiest stage of the class war in Barcelona. This was when the ley de fugas — the ‘fugitive from lawful custody law’ — became formalised practice in Barcelona.

One positive survivor of our short-lived victory of the Canadiense strike was the eight-hour day legislation, which the king approved on 3 April and became law in October.

23 APRIL, BARCELONA: MURDER INCORPORATED On 23 April 1919, just ten days after the end of the general strike and three weeks after the Burgos murder, the death squad headed by Manuel Bravo Portillo, the disgraced former police chief superintendent, carried out their first contract killing, on behalf of the construction industry cartel. The victim this time was Pedro Massoni, secretary of the building workers’ union, and the price the employers paid for his life was 3,000 pesetas. The motive for killing him was to intimidate Barcelona’s increasingly militant bricklayers and labourers.

The murderers, three of Bravo Portillo’s top henchmen: Antonio Soler — ‘El Mallorquin’ — Luis Fernández García and Octavio Muñoz — also known as ‘El Argentino’ — arrived at Massoni’s apartment in the early hours of 23 April with warrant cards, claiming to be policemen, and ‘asked’ him to accompany them to the police station.

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‘Please do not worry, Señora, it is purely a formality,’ Soler told Massoni’s wife. ‘Your husband will be back home in a matter of hours.’

A witness saw the four men leave the tenement close and approach the waiting car, at which point the three ‘policemen’ moved away from Massoni and a fourth man, Epifanio Casas, emerged from the shadows of a nearby doorway and fired two shots into their helpless victim.

Casas was an informer and a provocateur, but he wasn’t a killer. Trembling as he fired, he only succeeded in wounding Massoni. Then, panicking at the enormity of what he’d done — or thought he’d done — he ran to join his colleagues in the waiting car without checking to see if Massoni was dead — or delivering the coup de graçe. The gunman and his accomplices then drove off at high speed, leaving their wounded victim bleeding on the pavement.

Meanwhile, Massoni’s wife and daughter, who had witnessed everything from their apartment window, ran downstairs, stopped a passing car and managed to get him to hospital in time to save his life. He survived the attack, but was left semi-paralysed, and for the rest of his life he worked in the CNT local in the carrer del Olmo as a caretaker.

The highest circles of the Patronál appeared to have had prior knowledge of the attempt on Massoni’s life and feared reprisals. Jaume Agustí, for example, one of the Patronál’s top men, organised his son’s wedding ceremony at a secret and secluded venue at 6:00 on the morning of the Massoni atentat — something unheard of among Catalonia’s ostentatiously conspicuous ruling family circles. *** With General Milans del Bosch wielding viceregal powers in the province, Bravo Portillo’s standing in Barcelona’s high society grew by leaps and bounds. His success as ‘adviser’ to the Sometent made him a hero in the eyes of the military, especially to General Turner, the Chief of the General Staff of the Catalan region. Until Bravo Portillo came along, the army had been dependent on police sources for their intelligence, and had little or no independent information on the structure of the workers’ movement or the identities of its leaders and militants.

Following a seminar on the ‘Red Threat’ organised by Bravo Portillo for General Turner and his General Staff, the army 41

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commissioned him to produce a report on all known and suspected union members and their friendship networks. These secret dossiers, which were to have disastrous consequences for activists in future repressions, were maintained in the home of a ‘retired’ cavalry captain by the name of Julio de Lasarte. In fact, so secret were they that only a handful of people were aware of their existence until many years later.

Captain Julio de Lasarte, who collated, filed and crossreferenced Bravo Portillo’s intelligence reports on all the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist militants across the region, was to become the intelligence coordinator of the ‘pistolero’ campaign.

As more and more comrades were arrested and questioned, so too did the number of Lasarte’s files grow until he ended up with a complex card index system of more than 30,000 names.

Known as ‘the Lasarte dossiers’, these files contained all the information the authorities had — real and imaginary — on the anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist militants across Catalonia — and beyond.

In addition to having ‘oversight’ of the Sometent and responsibility for intelligence gathering, Bravo Portillo’s organisation —which he modelled on the U.S. Pinkerton Agency, and rather extravagantly called the ‘Great Private Detective Agency’ — functioned both as a parallel security service for the Capitanía and as the Patronál’s industrial espionage agency. Its ornately-designed shingle hung outside No. 6 Rambla de las Flores, and advertised the fact that it was now the home of Barcelona’s own Sherlock Holmes — who was very much a popular fictional character at the time.

The former chief superintendent, released from prison the previous December, with all charges dropped of espionage and conspiracy to murder the industrialists Barret and Pastór, was now the spider at the centre of a web of inner oligarchic parapolitical power, acting on behalf of an ‘invisible’ Catalan government’ capable of any act in the pursuit of its objectives, principally protecting the status quo. To do his bidding, he had at his command a tightly-knit group of experienced police officers from the notorious Special Brigade: Inspectors Fernández Valdés, José Malillos and Gregorio Martínez. But the men who did the actual dirty work, the killings and the beatings, 42

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were drawn from the Sometent and Carlist militias, the Baron de Koenig’s networks of disaffected trade unionists, small-time crooks, Catholic and Monarchist obsessives — and a hotchpotch of mercenary low-lifes.

The Capitanía now had at its disposal a clandestine, parallel Catalan police state with a legion of informers, agents provocateurs, thugs and killers — people who set themselves above the law and beyond all morality.

The secretive Baron de Koenig, Bravo Portillo’s main ‘subcontractor’, was rarely seen in public. Since sticking his head above the public parapet briefly at the previous year’s Hiéron conference, the Baron was no longer living a conspicuously ostentatious lifestyle. He now kept a low profile, worried his past might catch up with him – all his gambling debts and the frauds he had perpetrated not only in San Sebastián but also elsewhere across Europe and the Americas. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself. Too many people were looking for him to allow himself to be sucked into Cottonopolis’s hectic and high profile social life, which was why he never allowed himself to be photographed. The only people aware of the Baron’s role in industrial espionage, strikebreaking and murder were Bravo Portillo and de Koenig’s patron and sponsor, Joan Miró i Trepat, the ‘Mr Big’ of Catalonia’s building contractors, and the treasurer and eminence grise of the newly created national employers’ union — the Fomento Patronál Española.

LAST TRAIN TO SITGES Things had been so hectic during those early months of 1919 that Lara and I hadn’t had much time alone together. Sunday was the day we met up to take a leisurely paseo, usually up the arboured Ramblas to the Plaça de Catalunya to explore the bookshops in the Pelayo. On other occasions we would walk up the Paseo de Gracia, past the old cathedral and the Audiencia, through the narrow streets hung with washing, around the ancient sailors’ church of Santa Maria del Mar, engrossed in a world of our own, talking earnestly and endlessly about ideas, ideas, ideas.

As for taking things further, I was unsure about making what was possibly an irreversible leap from friend to lover. Was it possible to make that transition? What if she didn’t want me as a lover, would she then reject me as a friend? Maybe it just wasn’t 43

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the right time. Perhaps she was worried about becoming pregnant. I thought of asking her to a dance hall, where many of the younger libertarians of my generation socialised on a Sunday afternoon, but put the idea off until an ‘appropriate’ moment came along. So many ifs, buts and ‘should I’s.

Barceloneta, the fisherman’s quarter, was another of our regular Sunday afternoon jaunts. Separated from the rest of Barcelona by the railway yards, it was an area markedly different from the rest of Barcelona’s working-class barris. The fisherfolk who lived here were superstitious, religious, conservative — if not downright reactionary — and highly resistant to the ideas of anarchism whenever we tried to raise the subject with them; they weren’t all that much different from fishing communities back home in Scotland. Our proselytism never got us very far with the fishermen, who either chose not to comprehend what we were talking about or, if they did, refused to rise to our bait and adroitly changed the subject to far-fetched but fascinating tales of the sea. *** That summer, Laura and I decided that our outings should be a bit more adventurous, and that we should range a little further.

Lara decided on Tarragona. This was the Catalan equivalent of ‘goin’ doon the watter’ — which was how Glaswegians referred to trips to the seaside resorts on the Firth of Clyde. Catching an early train from the Estación de Sants for the journey of 100 kilometres or so to Tarragona, we boarded a busy third-class carriage, a long, open one with benches instead of seats. It was packed to overflowing with elderly leather-faced peasants heading back to the country with their shopping. Some of them looked as though they were doing a ‘flitting’ — moving house — with all their worldly goods and chattels: live and dead chickens, hares, babies and children with snotty noses, clothes, bed-linen, pillows, pots, pans — anything and everything. It was bedlam, a smelly one, a kindly, travelling community of cheery country folk, with everyone jolly, smiling, laughing and cracking jokes.

Most of these were at my expense, as a giri — a foreigner — especially when to the carriage’s great amusement I squeezed too hard and failed to get the stream of wine from a bota, a leather wineskin, held high above my head, into my mouth, dousing my face and shirt with red wine in the process. But it was all good44

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natured. At mid-day, food appeared, as if by magic, conjured out of the deep shopping bags of our fellow passengers: bread, tomatoes, omelettes, chorizos, cheeses. No one went without.

Throughout the journey, I was constantly conscious of Lara’s beauty. I was besotted and surprised she didn’t have any suitors, although she had plenty of admirers. As we travelled, following the coastline for most of the way, her eyes seemed to change colour in the reflected light from the sea and the sky. She tried explaining to me a little of Tarragona’s exotic history, about Roman and Arab invaders and the more recent arrival of the French Carthusian Fathers, but I could only take in the odd phrase. It was fortunate she chose not to examine me about what I’d learned from her history lecture that morning, otherwise I would have exposed myself as a bumbling, tongue-tied halfwit.

At Garraf station we bought tostadas, toasted bread and cheese, from the platform vendors. As the train approached the fashionable seaside resort of Sitges with its fussy little white villas, we were so entranced by the beauty of the coastline with its lines of poplars, clusters of beeches and golden sweeping beach that we decided to spend some time there on our way back from Tarragona.

When we arrived at our destination it seemed that an entire regiment of soldiers had also been travelling on our train. As they disembarked, another regiment was queuing to board.

Something was afoot: trouble in Morocco — or Andalusia. The platform was a heaving mass of khaki uniforms. Leaving behind

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the bustling red station with the smoky, puffing locomotive that had brought us all the way from Barcelona, hissing impatiently to be on its way, we made our way uphill, arm-in-arm, up the Rambla de San Juan, towards the centre of the town.

Having explored the Gothic quarter, we strolled around the outer perimeter of Tarragona’s ancient fortifications. At last, the afternoon sun obliged us to shelter in the shade of a cluster of carob and hazel trees where we sat and ate the last of our sandwiches. Then, side-by-side, we lay on our backs, staring in into the cobalt blue cosmos.

As the afternoon wore on and long shadows reached out from the great Pelasgian Wall behind us, my passion for Lara suddenly overwhelmed me. Afraid of rejection, I had always felt slightly awkward about making any irrevocable leap of intimacy towards her. Now it felt different. Sitting up I leant over her and kissed her on the lips. To my great delight, and without opening her eyes, she responded by putting her arms around my neck and pulling me into a passionate embrace. I wanted the moment to last for ever. It was only the incessant cacophonous cawing of dozens of crows circling directly above us that made us disentangle ourselves from each other.

A storm was on the way. With an overcast sky and ominouslooking clouds approaching from the sea, we helped each other to our feet, kissed in a tight embrace, as if to seal the new path our friendship had taken, and started walking, hand held tightly in hand, rapidly down the path towards the lower town. Just as the storm broke, we found a small bar in which to shelter. Others had had the same idea, including an old street musician with his banjo-mandolin, an instrument I could play a little, having been taught it by my uncle. I was in a particularly euphoric mood with Lara having responded so positively to my advance that once the old man had exhausted his repertoire of tragic songs about life in Málaga, I asked if I could borrow his instrument. I then proceeded to regale everyone with my renditions of ‘The Road and the Miles to Dundee’, ‘The Bonny Lass o’ Balochmyle’ and — as a wee joke — ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ and ‘The Battle of Garvagh’. Even though the storm had passed, the singing had brought in a number of passers-by — including soldiers and a couple of civil guards — and we soon found ourselves at the centre of a gaping, foot-tapping crowd who’d never heard 46

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anything like it. The landlord was more than happy with the unexpected boost to his trade, and plied us with food and drink to keep us there as long as possible. Our audience was equally appreciative, and when we left the bar later that evening, not only had we eaten well, but we were also fifty pesetas richer than when we’d arrived.

The last train to Sitges left at ten o’clock, arriving at the coastal resort just before midnight. The two-hour journey was nowhere nearly as pleasant as the morning’s trip. The train was slow and noisy and our carriage draughty and fetid. Because it was so late we were uncertain as to where we would spend the night in Sitges, but when we arrived the weather was warm for the time of the year so we headed for the beach. Someone had left a makeshift shelter there, a temporary structure made of canvas and cloth, suspended over poles. It was as though some beneficent genie from the Arabian Nights had specially prepared a desert wedding canopy for us. Inside we found blankets and pillows that the thoughtful owners — or genie — had provided for us. We laid these out on the sandy floor, our bodies brushing against each other, laughing and giggling at our good fortune, the laughter quickly turning to passion. The scent of her skin and the touch of her hair as it brushed against my face intoxicated me.

With my hands shaking, my mouth dry and my heart beating wildly I fumbled awkwardly with the buttons of her blouse but couldn’t undo them. Laughing, she moved back and undid them herself. Taking off her blouse, she stepped out of her skirt and slipped off her underskirt, then her knickers — to stand before me naked and proud. Nervous and still trembling I undressed quickly, too quickly and somewhat gawkily, and lost my balance in the process, falling over on my back with my trousers half on and half off. Giggling and laughing Lara fell on top of me, wheeching off my trousers and underpants with the panache and dexterity of a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Rolling over onto her back, Lara parted her smooth thighs and pulled me down to her warm sensual body, kissing my neck and biting me gently. I could feel her heart pounding. I kissed and nibbled her neck and earlobes, breathing in the heady scent that so excited me. Taking my hand she led it down over her belly until I felt the downy hair that concealed the moist, warm opening between her legs. She began rubbing my willing fingers 47

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against her womanhood. Her breathing grew faster and louder.

She pulled me closer and manoeuvred me until I finally slid deep inside her. Lara’s gasp of pain as I entered her made it clear she was still a virgin, as I was too. She held me tightly, her fingers gripping my neck and shoulders. I kissed her passionately. When I began moving too fast, she slowed me down until it all suddenly seemed natural and we began pulsating in unison. I was astonished at how responsive she was to my body, and how unrestrained and vocal her passion.

Afterwards we lay sticky with sweat but sated. Eventually Lara got up, framed in the moonlight, to wash herself by the shore, then having finished her necessary ablutions she slipped back under the blanket, snuggling into my body to warm herself, and promptly fell asleep, head resting on my chest. For a long time after she had dozed off, I lay there, wide awake, musing to myself how wonderful it was that my first experience of passionate physical love had happened with a dear loving friend on a Mediterranean beach. I closed my eyes and drifted off into a deep trouble-free sleep.

It was nine o’clock before we woke again and ran naked, racing each other across the sand, not a care in the world, into the shimmering green-blue Mediterranean, splashing and washing each other gently with seawater.

At the station we breakfasted on chocolate and churros (doughnuts) before catching the 10:30 train back to Barcelona and reality. Those forty-two-kilometres across the flat coastal plane, with its picturesque fishing villages and golden sands, sped past like subliminal images in an intense dream — all I was conscious of was the presence on the bench next to me of my beloved Lara, her warm thigh pressed against mine.

Looking back, I can see I underwent some primal rite of passage that weekend with Lara. I had gone to Tarragona as a boy, but came back to Barcelona as a man.

THE PISTOLEROS OF THE LION D’OR The Lion d’Or, a large café-restaurant and music hall in downtown Barcelona, was the unofficial headquarters of the ‘pistoleros’, where Captain Julio de Lasarte and his colleagues congregated with the city’s right-wing low-lifes and dilettantes.

Here they held their ‘work’ suppers and celebratory champagne 48

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banquets, where they out-boasted each other with detailed and exaggerated accounts of their outrages, describing murders as they would a bullfight: who led the attack, the victim’s behaviour — and who delivered the coup de grâçe.

Many Lion d’Or waiters moonlighted as pistoleros, and the worst and most notorious of these was Ramón Berguno Balcells, ‘El Penças’, a drug-dealer who was later to emerge as a pillar of the the ‘Libre’, the scab so-called ‘Free’ union.

Women, too, played an important role in the Lion d’Or’s network of killers, following and monitoring the intended victims, identifying them for the waiting killers and covering their escape after the deed. We were aware of at least four women working with the pistolero gangs. One of these creatures was Carmen Olivella, a religious studies teacher whose job it was to liaise with the police to secure the release of any pistoleros arrested by mistake. Gloria Sandoval, the caretaker of the CNT union hall in Sant Andreu, was another even more treacherous woman who fed Bravo Portillo with information and idle gossip about union members’ activities and the anarchists who frequented the hall. She was a pistolero mule, who transported weapons to and from the gunmen around the city, and on at least two occasions she sheltered pistoleros in her apartment in our own union hall!

BRAVO PORTILLO’S ‘GREAT DETECTIVE AGENCY’ Bravo Portillo reinvented himself as a freelance gangster and professional ‘hit-man’ in the immediate aftermath of the general strike. It began as a sideline when he was hired by a businessman to warn off two former employees who were pestering him for unpaid back wages. It was easy money. Bravo Portillo’s thugs attacked the men on their way home in the evening and beat them up pretty badly, leaving them with broken jaws and cracked ribs, after which they withdrew their claims.

Word of this service soon got about, and before long Bravo Portillo was being sought by other employers prepared to pay handsomely for his ‘extralegal’ services that no one else was offering. Between his army contract and the word-of-mouth recommendations from Barcelona’s main employers about his ‘expertise in matters of labour disputes’, it’s hardly surprising that Bravo Portillo’s ‘Great Detective Agency’ thrived and prospered.

None of this interfered in any way with the intelligence and 49

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advisory services he provided for the Capitanía. In fact, the impunity of this parallel police job complemented his freelance ‘security’ work. Soon Bravo Portillo had moved his operation to a plushly furnished office suite in the carrer Septembrina.

Ostensibly a ‘detective agency’, Bravo Portillo’s company’s real function was industrial and political espionage, providing the army and the employers with information acquired by his deep-level infiltrators and spies, shop-floor informers and provocateurs.

With the Agency’s day-to-day administration handled by a retired Guardia de Seguridad officer, Fernández Terán, Bravo Portillo focused on organising and tasking his agents, whom he divided into small groups, and who specialised either in intelligence-gathering and malicious infiltration or in violence.

Members of the former group were usually either suborned or disillusioned and frustrated union members in financial difficulties, who had wormed their way into positions of confidence in the union by making themselves generally useful, and doing what they could to influence and manipulate policy and tactics. Others focused on identifying hard-line militants, defence group members, and compromised strike leaders, or provoking violent incidents that could be blamed on union activists and lead to sackings and arrests.

Antonio Soler, who was also known as ‘El Mallorquin’, ran the reprisal groups, the plain-clothes squadristi (squadrists; members of fascist cadres) of the ‘Great Detective Agency’. This gentleman was responsible for the company’s dirtiest and most sinister jobs. Under him were killers like Luis Fernández, Jerónimo Botanero, Juan Rodríguez, Angel Fernández, Paco ‘el Rubio’, ‘Espejito’ and Epifanio Casas.

It’s sad to admit, but many of Bravo Portillo’s employees were former cenetistas, such as Bernat Armengol and Eduardo Ferrer, men who had lost all self-respect and dignity and become class traitors, paid police informers — and murderers. Some had been prominent figures within the union and had been compromised by sex scandals or gambling or some other peccadillo or crime known to Bravo Portillo who used it as leverage against them.

Bravo Portillo’s foot-soldiers were paid fifteen pesetas a day, plus expenses — a sum not even the most skilled worker could 50

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earn legally in those days. They were also provided with a blue Sometent identity card, a handgun licence issued by the Capitanía and a ‘go-anywhere’ pass issued by the tram company, who also provided each of them with a cover occupation such as ‘Tram Inspector’. Before going out on a job, the killers were briefed by one or other of Bravo Portillo’s police inspectors from Lasarte’s intelligence files, and given photographs and the names and home addresses of real and suspected anarchist and radical subversives.

No one can properly explain why any of these people —the pistoleros — did what they did. The motives for their treachery are legion; their actions, however, remain inexcusable.

During and immediately after the general strike, one of Bravo Portillo’s jobs was identifying and destroying CNT printshops, which he did with help from his agents and informers. His men also ransacked ateneos, and raided and vandalised the apartments of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists — and also those of sympathisers who might be hiding cenetista leaders. One apartment subjected to the pistolero rampages was Tomás Herreros’s flat in the Ronda de San Pablo, which was also the editorial office of the specifically anarchist-communist weekly Tierra y Libertad (as opposed to the anarcho-syndicalist daily Solidaridad Obrera). Herreros wasn’t at home when they came for him, but they still attacked his wife and children and threw his furniture and belongings out into the street.

Throughout this period, Laureano and I were still working a couple of evenings a week helping compile Soli’s foreign news pages. The clandestine printshop was a magnet for news about the revolutions then sweeping Europe.

‘The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution,’ Prime Minister David Lloyd George told the Paris Peace Conference in a confidential memorandum. ‘The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is now being questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other.’

Bavaria had declared itself a workers’ and soldiers’ republic in which anarchists Ernst Töller, Erich Muehsam and Gustav Landauer were playing prominent roles. In Hungary, state power had collapsed and workers were taking over the factories and the great estates. Budapest, surrounded on all sides by Entente troops, was run by an uneasy alliance of Bolsheviks, anarchists, 51

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left communists and socialists, known as ‘the Commune’.

In Ukraine, the anarchist Nestor Makhno, with his 20,000strong insurgent army of revolutionaries, controlled large areas east of the Dneiper and had convened a Regional Congress at Gulayai-Polye, drawing delegates from seventy-two districts, representing more that 2 million people.

It is difficult to convey in words the excitement of the time: it was euphoric — tangible almost. It seemed to us that the world was being born again before our very eyes — and that we were participants in that rebirth. *** In the midst of all this activity, Ramón Archs was bringing a degree of coordination to the twelve or so defence groups that were operating in Barcelona at the time. Previously, their ad hoc actions lacked direction, with local groups targeting anti-union employers and managers at random. Many of their actions either had no moral legitimacy or were poorly thought-out and implemented. On 8 May, for example, two weeks after the attempt on Massoni’s life, members of a confederal defence group from the local barri shot and seriously wounded a foreman at the Can Girona works — a tragic mistake as they had only intended to frighten him.

Meanwhile, some of the more progressive-minded textile factory bosses, who had been among the first of Spain’s employers to enter into talks with the unions, contacted the CNT in an attempt to negotiate a series of agreements before the violence escalated further.

The union agreed and began the process of electing representatives in each barri with the idea that, from among these, a commission would be elected that would negotiate with the employers. Martial law was still in force throughout Catalonia, so it was a slow and dangerous process for both sides — especially because the Patronál did not want the textile industry bosses talking to the CNT. Negotiations proper began in June at the offices of the Federación de Fabricantes de Hilados y Tejidos. It was the first high-level meeting ever between unions and employers, and a lot depended on the outcome, especially for the more forwardthinking bosses.

With both sides starting from completely opposing positions, 52

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the first few days were the most difficult. The main problem was that these particular employers wanted to improve society and make life easier for themselves; the workers’ representatives, for their part, saw socialism without the state as the solution to society’s problems. Even so, there was a surprising amount of goodwill on both sides and, gradually, the differences narrowed, and they began compromising over matters that seemed to be of secondary importance until it looked as though an agreement would be reached. Another indicator that the tension was levelling out was the fact that the number of armed actions remained at the same level as the previous month.

One particular murder stood out at the time — that of Felipe Serrano, a former partner in a furniture workshop. The Patronál tried to capitalise on it by blaming the CNT, an accusation that seemed to be supported when it emerged that the killer, Miguel Villalonga, was a member of the CNT’s cabinetmakers’ union.

Everyone thought it strange at the time because the CNT wasn’t in dispute with Serrano as an employer. It was only years later that we discovered Villalonga had been hired by Serrano’s former business partner to kill him.

18 JULY, BARCELONA: DEATH OF ‘EL TERO’ Although a number of CNT militants had been murdered over the previous eighteen months, it wasn’t until Pau Sabater Lliro’s murder on Friday 18 July 1919, that pistolerismo became institutionalised.

Pau Sabater, also known as ‘El Tero’ (‘The Lapwing’), was the thirty-five-year-old secretary of the CNT Dyers’ Union. Three weeks earlier he had been tried and acquitted for the attempted murder of an employer named Trinchet. El Tero had been a marked man for some time; Bravo Portillo had become obsessed with him, convinced that he was a key figure in the CNT’s defence groups, which he wasn’t. Bravo Portillo had tried to frame him — unsuccessfully — for the Barret and Pastór murders in January 1918 — murders that Bravo Portillo himself had commissioned.

The decision to kill El Tero, however, hadn’t been the personal whim of Bravo Portillo. It was approved, in cold blood, at a closed meeting of the Patronál board, the fateful meeting at which the employers launched their terror campaign — now known as pistolerismo — aimed at liquidating the spirit of revolution in Spain and crushing the CNT, the embodiment of that 53

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spirit. Their immediate objective was to sabotage the negotiations then taking place between the CNT and the textile employers, intimidate the union rank and file and, where necessary, physically eliminate all prominent cenetista leaders and militants.

‘It is the considered opinion of the vast majority of both employers and employees, that there is no need for labour unions,’ said meeting chairman Félix Grauperá, a man who owned large chunks of Barcelona. ‘The existence and conduct of labour unions in this country are inimical to the best interests of the employees, the employers and the general public, and we have no choice but to crush them. If we fail to do so then it will not be long before we hear bombs detonating and the tramping boots of Bolshevist armies as they march down the Ramblas…’

The result was a Patronál contract, worth 25,000 pesetas, paid to Bravo Portillo’s ‘Great Detective Agency’ for the ‘elimination’ of eight prominent cenetistas, but it wasn’t a job put out to tender. The first two victims on the employers’ hit list were El Tero and José Castillo, a former member of the CNT’s National Committee. The Patronál’s orders were simple: kill the militants.

‘It’s about hunting people,’ said Félix Grauperá. ‘I want heads on plates.’

On the evening of Thursday 17 July 1919, Bravo Portillo met with the three men he had selected to carry out the Sabater murder: Luis Fernández, Joan Serra and Angel García — the same three who had killed Miguel Burgos four months earlier. They were members of Barcelona’s gilded youth, rich young bourgeois hooligans: one, the son of a motor dealer, another the son of a textile magnate and the third, the driver of the second car, a member of Catalonia’s titled nobility.

Bravo Portillo handed the gunmen a photograph of their intended victim, along with a note of El Tero’s home address and a copy of his file from the Lasarte dossier. The plan was the same as that of the Massoni shooting; this time, however, the former police chief was going with them to make sure they did the job properly.

Late that evening, Pau Sabater returned to his apartment at 274 carrer Dos de Mayo in the barri de San Martí de Provençals.

He was tired, having been engaged in non-stop negotiations with employers’ representatives since early afternoon. The talks had gone nowhere and members couldn’t afford to hold out much 54

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longer without a wage coming in, nor could the union offer them more than the absolute minimal support. The men and their families were tired, hungry and increasingly dispirited. Sabater stopped at the foot of the stairwell for a brief conversation with the local night watchman, Angel García, before making his way up to his apartment.

Sabater, who headed the top ten of the employers’ blacklist, had been unemployed and unemployable since his acquittal in the Trinchet murder trial. The only wage coming into the household now was the pittance earned by his partner, Josefa Ros, who ran a small tailoring business from their apartment.

Bravo Portillo met his three killers at 2:00 the following morning, Friday 18 July, outside the old La Bohemia brewery, in the nearby carrer Mallorca. The streets were normally empty at that time so men like them could usually move around, unnoticed.

On that occasion, however, one set of ready eyes was watching from the shadows and saw them park their cars: Angel García, the night watchman with whom Sabater had been chatting earlier.

After a brief discussion, three of them walked towards Sabater’s tenement building and went inside. García saw the fourth man, who remained standing by the cars, light up a cigarette, the flare of the match clearly illuminating the unmistakeable mustachioed face of Bravo Portillo.

A couple of sleepless neighbours, sitting on their balconies, taking the cool night air also saw the men walk up the street, but preferred not to inquire too closely. They looked too much like policemen. It was inconvenient for the assassins to have so many people around, but they had gone too far to turn back. *** Luis Fernández banged loudly on El Tero’s apartment door while the others drew back into the shadows. After a short time the sleepy-eyed cenetista opened the door, his anxious wife standing behind him, a shawl hurriedly thrown round her shoulders.

Fernández asked for Sabater by name and produced a warrant card identifying him as a police officer from the nearby San Martín police station. When Sabater confirmed his identity, Fernández asked him to accompany them to the police station to answer some questions. It was a formality, he claimed, and he would be back home within the hour.

Collecting his jacket and some money, Sabater went with them quietly, trying to reassure his wife he’d be all right. Once 55

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out in the street, Fernández seized him roughly by the arm while the others came up, handcuffed him from behind, then bundled him into the back seat between himself and Bravo Portillo.

The night watchman overheard parts of the last conversation between the men. Sabater, he said, was remonstrating with them about the way they were manhandling him. ‘Don’t treat me like this, sir. I am a poor worker, not a criminal.’

That was the last time Pau Sabater was seen alive. The night watchman watched the cars drive off at high speed, and was surprised to see them turning left at the end of the street, heading for the outskirts instead of turning right towards the centre of town.

El Tero’s journey ended early that morning in the secluded Camp de l’Arpa, on the Moncada Road, where he was dragged from the car, brutally beaten, shot six times, and his body thrown into a ditch where it remained undiscovered for two days.

All next day, Josefa Ros waited for news of her husband, fear gnawing inside her. With no one to turn to, all she could hope for was that her partner was still ‘helping police with their enquiries.’

That same afternoon, Friday 18 July, Bravo Portillo’s killers struck again — at a barbershop in Sants. The victim this time was José Castillo, a CNT national committee member and the second name on their list. According to the Lasarte dossier that he was shaved there each afternoon.

Epifanio Casas was the nominated gunman this time. Having botched the earlier attempt on Massoni, Bravo Portillo, presumably in order to compromise him in a blood crime, insisted that he carry out the murder. At first Casas refused, either out of fear or because he didn’t want a murder on his conscience, but the former chief superintendent had him beaten mercilessly until he agreed to the task.

Casas and his two accomplices parked close to the barbershop, watching until their intended victim arrived and took his seat in the barber’s chair. Waiting until their victim was being lathered, Casas walked into the shop and went straight across to Castillo in his chair. Pushing the barber aside he fired four shots into his victim’s head at point-blank range, then walked out again.

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It was a classic gangster-style slaying. *** It was the neighbours who broke the news to Josefa Ros on Sunday morning. After two sleepless nights worrying about her partner’s fate she was at her wits’ end. The neighbours had read a brief newspaper report about the discovery of the body of a tall, fat man in the Camp de l’Arpa. The man’s description, and that of his clothes, fitted their neighbour, El Tero.

Josefa’s world collapsed around her when they read this news to her. Accompanied by her three small children, she hurried across the city, on foot, to the mortuary at the Clinical Hospital where the dead bodies in all fatal accident and murder cases were brought — either to be claimed, or buried in a common grave and covered in quicklime. It was there, on a marble slab, she identified the bruised and battered remains of her beloved partner.

The news of Sabater’s murder spread quickly. Coming so soon after the killing of José Castillo, it provoked a massive wave of anger and indignation. Everyone believed that the Barcelona police had been responsible for the murders; no one imagined for a moment that it was the work of a private mercenary company contracted to the Catalan Employers’ Confederation, the Patronál.

That evening, across Barcelona and the surrounding Catalan towns and villages, anarchists and cenetistas met to discuss the weekend’s events and how to respond to the murders. With so many union militants already under arrest and now being coldbloodedly murdered, Ramón Archs insisted that the Defence Commission organise an emergency distribution of pipas among the militants believed to be most at risk from the gunmen. But these pipas weren’t for smoking, pipa being the affectionate nickname for the semi-automatic Star pistol. Also known popularly as the ‘syndicalist’, it was the weapon of preference of anarchist defence group militants. In fact, one turned up in 1971, fifty-two years later, during a police raid on a London flat used by the so-called Angry Brigade action group, but that’s a later story.

Manufactured in Eibar in the Basque country for the French Army during the Great War, the supply of Stars was nigh-on inexhaustible. Available on the black market in their thousands, Stars cost about 45 pesetas each at the time, but not all the 57

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compañeros could afford this sum so Archs organised a lendlease scheme under which the weapons could be leasepurchased for 1 peseta a month. (The Browning, on the other hand, was the weapon used predominantly by the pistoleros.)

Pau Sabater’s funeral took place on Thursday 24 July. His brother had requested official permission for a cortège to follow the coffin, which was grudgingly approved on the condition that the procession followed a strict itinerary through Barcelona’s backstreets, along a route where it would attract less attention and could be more easily controlled by the police.

We were due to leave from the Clinical Hospital at 10:00 in the morning, but because of the unexpectedly large numbers of friends, neighbours, compañeros, fellow workers and crowds of sympathetic onlookers from the barri who turned out to say their farewells to a popular man and dedicated union representative, we were almost an hour late setting off from the mortuary at the rear of the hospital.

The emotional tension emanating from the ominously silent crowd was electrifying. The only sounds came from the thousands of shuffling feet, and the snorting and clip-clopping of the hooves of the horses of the Guardia Civíl and the mounted police units marshalling us on either side of the street as we followed Sabater’s coffin down the carrer de Villareal del Ensanche. Josefa Ros and El Tero’s brother preceded the coffin, which was carried on the shoulders of his closest union comrades.

At the bottom of the carrer de Villarreal del Ensanche, the procession halted, as prearranged by the funeral organisers, the Regional Committee of the CNT. This was where the Guardia Civíl officer in charge that day, Lieutenant-Colonel Tizol, had ordered us to turn off the main road at this point and follow a back street route to Montjuic cemetery, on the far side of the hill.

We refused, insisting we march instead along the Gran Via, the main thoroughfare, as a public protest against Sabater’s murder.

While all this was being discussed, an angry LieutenantColonel Tizol galloped up to the head of the cortège, ordering everyone off the Gran Via and down the sidestreets. As he harangued us, his men lined up in front of the procession, blocking our access to the Gran Via with fixed bayonets. Tizol ordered them to raise their rifles and take aim to prevent us 58

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continuing on our preferred way.

Up until that point the crowd had been silent, then came isolated shouts and angry cries of ‘asesinos!’ and ‘police murderers’, individual voices that began to turn into a menacing chorus. Suddenly, in an attempt to force us off the Gran Via, the police and Guardia Civíl charged into us, their sabres flashing and flailing, leaving a number of bloodied casualties in their wake.

In the ensuing mêlée, the crowd panicked and parted, and the pallbearers jostled and shoved until Sabater’s coffin fell to the ground, its lid falling open, leaving the shroud-wrapped body hanging grotesquely from the coffin. To make matters worse, Sabater’s brother suffered a heart attack and had to be rushed back to the Clinical Hospital. Fearing a riot was imminent, the owners of the surrounding shops and businesses closed and shuttered their premises until the cortège had passed.

Lt-Colonel Tizol, meanwhile, concerned at the likelihood of a bloodbath — which was highly possible given the probability that many of the anarcho-syndicalists were carrying weapons, although no shots had yet been fired — used his discretion and allowed us to carry on down the Gran Via. Once this was agreed, order was quickly restored and we continued on our way in angry but dignified silence to Montjuic cemetery where Pau Sabater was finally laid to rest.

As far as the Patronál was concerned, Sabater’s murder succeeded in at least one of its desired effects: it signalled the end of negotiations between the unions and the liberal textile industrialists who had been on the verge of accepting the eighthour day. New strike calls were issued, including a callout of Barcelona’s dockworkers, while the employers launched their ‘lockout’ campaign.

Disoriented and confused by all that was going on, Catalonia’s middle classes were aware that the current troubles were somehow linked to the death of Pau Sabater, but they had no idea how or why. Their understanding, formed through newspaper disinformation, was that he had been murdered in an inter-union settling of accounts. They were convinced that Sabater had been killed by his own people because he was either a police informer or by German spies because he was an Entente Cordiale agent. *** 59

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The Patronál conspiracy started to unravel towards the end of July, less than two weeks after El Tero’s murder. A young lawyer who was friendly to the CNT, Jesús Ulled, received a visit from the carrer Roca night watchman, Ramón García, who told him that he strongly suspected that a man in his street, Luis Fernández, was involved in the Sabater murder.

Ramón described Fernández as a ‘strange man’ of irregular habits and questionable friends, who arrived home later than usual in the early hours of the morning in question, and had been acting suspiciously. He had noticed what he believed to be bloodstains on Fernández’s jacket sleeve, but hadn’t reported the matter to the police, suspecting that they too might also have been involved in the murder. What convinced Ulled of Ramón García’s credibility was the fact that, twelve years earlier, in 1907, he had been a key witness against the police provocateurterrorist Joan Rull.

The young lawyer immediately contacted José Guerra del Rio, the CNT lawyer responsible for preparing the private prosecution against Sabater’s killers as and when they were eventually identified and brought to justice. Their initial inquiries gave credence to the night watchman’s suspicions, so, distrustful of the police, they approached an examining magistrate named Alberto Pareja, a friend of Guerra del Rio, to whom they explained their suspicions about Fernández and their reservations about the police.

The magistrate agreed with their assessment and called on his friend Valles i Pujols, the president of the Catalan Council, to provide some mozos de escuadra — Catalan civil police officers who were answerable only to the Council, not to the civil governor or the Barcelona police commissioner. Valles i Pujols arranged for everyone to meet at the Café Mallorquina in the Ramblas, opposite the Gran Teatro Liceo, at 5:00 in the morning of 6 August. (Then, as today, most bars and cafés in the Ramblas were open day and night.)

Parera, the examining magistrate, arrived at the café at 5:00 sharp, along with two clerks and a deputy. Guerra del Rio and Jesús Ulled were already there having breakfast. A few minutes later, five plainclothes mozos de escuadra led by corporal Agustí Serret joined them.

After a quick briefing over coffee and churros, the group 60

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headed off for their destination, 6 carrer Roca, where Ramón García and Luis Carruel, another night watchman, were waiting to take them to the apartment Fernández shared with another family.

When the flat’s main tenant — who sublet a room to Fernández — answered the corporal’s insistent banging on the door and was shown the search warrant by the magistrate, he had no choice but to let the men into the flat. At this point, a surprised Fernández, who was dressed and ready to go out, emerged from his room and was immediately seized and searched by the mozos, who found he was carrying a revolver.

That, in itself, wasn’t an offence as he carried a firearm permit signed by General Perales, but on searching his room they also discovered a large bloodstained hunting knife and a Browning automatic of the same calibre as the one that had killed Sabater.

When questioned by the magistrate, the main tenant’s wife confirmed that Fernández had given her some clothes to wash the day after the murder. Among the items was a jacket with blood on the sleeve, and she hadn’t been able to remove the stain.

Fernández claimed the blood was that of a delinquent whom he had tried to detain on the night in question, but the explanation didn’t satisfy the magistrate, who had him arrested and taken to the Palacio de Justicia for questioning.

At first, Fernández denied all knowledge of Sabater’s murder, but he did admit to working for Bravo Portillo. The breakthrough came when Josefa Ros identified him as the man who came to the door that night and arrested her husband. After that traumatic face-to-face confrontation, Fernández broke down and confessed everything to the magistrate. He also implicated Barcelona’s police commissioner, Colonel Alvarez Caparrós, whose car Bravo Portillo had used that night to drive Sabater to his death.

In spite of Fernández’s confession in which he named the other members of Bravo Portillo’s death squads, including Octavio Muñoz — El Argentino — no one else was arrested or brought in for questioning, not even Bravo Portillo.

Guerra del Rios did question Colonel Caparrós in his office, but the commissioner flatly denied lending Bravo Portillo his car or indeed having had any dealings with the former police chief since his release from prison the previous year. This was a blatant 61

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lie as he himself had appointed Bravo Portillo to oversee the repression of the November demonstrations.

Although we knew of Fernández’s arrest and the involvement of Bravo Portillo’s gang and their police connections, the general public remained in complete ignorance as to what was happening. Press censorship was still in force throughout Catalonia so none of this information ever made it into the newspapers, other than the clandestinely produced and distributed Solidaridad Obrera. Needless to say, all of this reinforced our conviction that the authorities were complicit in the murders, and that it was ‘business as usual’ for the ‘untouchable’ puppet-master, Bravo Portillo.

But there was no censorship of Madrid’s newspapers, and on 7 August El Sol’s Barcelona correspondent published the story in considerable detail. The impact was dramatic — and highly embarrassing for the new government.

‘How is it possible,’ asked El Sol’s editorial writer, ‘for the ruling class of a supposedly modern European state to behave so criminally against its own working class?’

To compound the government’s problems, that afternoon, Deputy Francesc Layret read out the letter from the Catalan CNT to the Cortés about the situation in Barcelona.

The members listened in stunned silence.

When the story broke, Interior Minister Manuel Burgos y Mazo telephoned Barcelona’s civil governor, the Marqués de Retortillo, demanding an explanation, adding that he had also received many complaints from a number of Barcelona’s business leaders blaming the civil governor for the deteriorating situation in the provincial capital.

Retortillo insisted he was unaware of police complicity in Bravo Portillo’s affairs, but nothing he could have said would have made the slightest difference; the Marqués de Retortillo was to be the sacrificial goat and Burgos y Mazo demanded his resignation on the spot.

Meanwhile, in a clumsy attempt to cover up Bravo Portillo’s links with both the killers and the Capitanía, the Barcelona authorities removed Alberto Parera, the examining magistrate, from the investigation into Sabater’s murder. The case was handed over to a less experienced and more compliant judge, who quickly dropped charges against the other members of Bravo 62

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Portillo’s gang, with the exception, of course, of Luis Fernández.

But we in the anarchist groups, especially the most militant ones associated with the metalworkers’ union, were not about to forget or forgive Sabater’s murder. *** Bravo Portillo’s private security company was flourishing. Since Sabater’s murder, he had been moving in Catalonia’s most exalted social circles, and was flooded with requests to provide security to the region’s most prominent oligarchs. One of his top operatives, Octavio Muñoz, El Argentino, was now personal bodyguard to Fèlix Grauperá, president of the Catalan Employers’ Confederation.

With no recognisable system of justice to speak of, and with union militants under constant threat of imprisonment, exile, torture and murder, it was time for us to take matters into our own hands. Bravo Portillo had to be called to account for his bloody crimes. In a country where there was no ‘rule of law’ (by which I mean a country where the law stands above everyone, and is applied without favour and discretion, as opposed to defending vested interest groups) or any honest and credible political process worthy of the name, there was no other way to register protest effectively or to prevent further criminal outrages by the man responsible for the murders of Pau Sabater, Miguel Burgos and José Castillo.

In the meantime, Ramón Archs had been improving his links with the autonomous and disparate clandestine networks that constituted the CNT defence groups and the anarchist action groups. Most of these were only tangentially connected to the CNT Defence Commission, and it was only because of Archs’ standing within the movement that their members were prepared to listen to him.

For some time now, anarchist militants within the CNT had been trying to build an effective international revolutionary solidarity movement through informal meetings with comrades from other European anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist action groups. Evelio Boal, then CNT national secretary, had recently been to Portugal to cement contacts with the Confederação General do Trabalho (CGTP), while Pere Foix had travelled to Russia, stopping off en route to take part in the International Congress of Labour Unions then taking place in Amsterdam.

Buenaventura Durruti, who had escaped from the military prison 63

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in San Sebastián, was back in France working at the Renault factory in Paris, and collaborating with French and Belgian socalled ‘illegalist’ groups; Juan Figueras had visited Milan to meet compañeros from the Italian anarcho-syndicalist union, the Unione Syndicale Italiana. He had also met with Errico Malatesta and Armando Borghi, and had travelled to Massa Carrara to meet Alberto Meschi, Gino Bibbi, Gino Lucetti and compañeros from the local Camara del Lavoro.

Nor was it all talk. Since early August, when the news first broke about Bravo Portillo’s responsibility for the Sabater murder, members of a metalworkers’ action group, led by a young militant by the name of Progreso Ródenas Domínguez, popularly known as ‘el Puni’, had been monitoring the former police chief’s every move.

Ródenas, who came from a large anarchist family from Cherta, informed Archs — in his role as Defence Commission coordinator — that his group planned to kill Bravo Portillo.

Naturally, however, he stressed to Archs that, for reasons of security, knowledge of the operation had to be limited to the smallest possible number of people. Archs agreed, but suggested that Laureano and I should be involved as we were trustworthy and reliable, and that it would be good experience for us. We could act as liaison between his group and the Defence Commission.

Surprisingly, Ródenas agreed.

And so, we — the Ródenas brothers, Laureano and myself — monitored Bravo Portillo’s movements solidly day and night for over three weeks. By the end of that time we knew his daily routine inside and out. El Puni had the operation so well planned that Bravo Portillo had no idea he was under surveillance — until it was too late.

1976, 20 OCTOBER, PARIS: BOULEVARD JEAN JAURÈS Next morning Farquhar went to see his old comrade, Lucio Urtubia, at his apartment on the Boulevard Jean Jaurès. Lucio had collaborated with Laureano on a number of his ‘projects’ and Farquhar was hoping he could provide him with leads as to his latest venture, and who might have wanted to murder them.

They’d been friends since he’d joined Farquhar’s local anarchist group, ‘the Clichy Group’, in the mid 1950s, soon after he’d 64

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arrived in Paris from Cascante, a rural community in Spain’s Ribera de Navarra.

Lucio was a short, stocky man in his mid-40s — and fit. By day he worked as a tiler on building sites; by night he was, among other things, one of Laureano’s talented apprentices — a counterfeiter of currency and documents. He had also robbed a few banks in his time, and was a protégé of Francisco Sabater Llopart, el Quico, the penultimate guerrilla to be killed in Spain in January 1960. When in Paris, El Quico had used Lucio’s singleend bed-sit at 32 Rue des Castérès as his base. Another of Lucio’s maestras was Madeleine Lamberet, an anarchist artist whose talent as an engraver-draughtswoman forging ration cards and identity documents for the Resistance had saved countless lives during the Occupation. She provided the artwork and Laureano printed them. Her older sister, Professor Renée Lamberet, was also closely involved in the Resistance, as was May Picqueray, publisher of the journal Amis de Louis Lecoin.

‘Salud!’ said Lucio, welcoming Farquhar in his gravelly voice, usheringhim through to the kitchen. They sat at the table while Ann, his partner, a medic with Médecins Sans Frontières, set out the cups and poured them all strong black coffees, adding a splash of brandy to each cup. They talked about Laureano’s murder and Farquhar described the attempt on his life the previous night. The story of the so-called ‘gangland slayings’ was all over the front pages of that morning’s papers, but neither the police nor the reporters were offering any explanations as to why three men had been killed, or even their identities.

‘Laureano had been targeting the First National City Bank and the Luxembourg-based BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International,’ said Lucio. ‘It’s a new bank that’s become an important funding source for international right-wing groups, especially the Francoist “bunker” and those tied in with the CEDI, the European Centre of International Documentation.

Every year they sponsor seminars in the Escorial for Opus Dei leaders from all over the world. The only subject on the agenda of this forthcoming congress, which is scheduled for Madrid in two months’ time, is the post-Francoist constitution. It will be presided over by Archduke Otto von Habsburg, Europe’s wouldbe Holy Roman Emperor.

‘The First National City Bank and the BCCI also fund “offthe-books” covert operations for the CIA, the German BND, the 65

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Francoist and pro-Caetanoist special services — and for the recently formed Safari Club set up in the wake of the Watergate fiasco by your “friend” Alexandre de Marenches. These banks are hornets’ nests of ultra-right conspirators, crooks and spooks.

Most of Laureano’s information on these banks came from a guy he shared a cell with in Fresnes in ’74. He’d been one of BCCI’s auditors and knew where all the bodies were buried.

Unfortunately, he too soon joined the buried bodies. He was murdered shortly after release on bail.

‘Laureano had stockpiled good quality paper, perfected the watermarks, fine-tuned the plates, and bought a binding machine for making books of travellers’ cheques. Travellers’ cheques being easier to get rid of than counterfeit currency. Remember, between them First National and the BCCI have almost 50,000 branches worldwide where cheques can be cashed. The advantage of forging travellers’ cheques is that if you’re caught the charge is limited to “possession” or “passing” “counterfeit banking documents”, as opposed to the far more serious charge of passing “false currency”, which carries a heftier sentence. They also take longer to uncover as the cheques have to be returned to the central clearing bank before the fraud comes to light.

‘There were no problems with the quality of the cheques – it was the distribution that was the problem. Originally, the plan was for 30 two-man teams to travel to different European and Middle-Eastern capitals to hit different bank branches on the same day, at approximately the same hour, but it just wasn’t feasible to put that many trustworthy and capable comrades together in time, and so the number was reduced to 10 two-man teams hitting banks inside Spain simultaneously, which they did.

They walked away with three-and-a-half million francs – 63 million pesetas.

‘The next phase of the operation was offloading the remaining 8,000 sheets, each sheet representing twenty-five $100 cheques which — at 6FF to the dollar — represented about a 120 million francs. A lot of them he gave to GARI, the anarchist action group. A memo from the Direction Centrale de Renseignements Généraux stated that GARI militants had been arrested in Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona and Brussels while attempting to cash false travellers’ cheques, all of them emanating from the same source.

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‘I do know that Laureano recently recruited one of his old associates, Ramón Benicho Canuda — also known as “Leriles” and “Le Caïd de Pigalle” — a former comrade turned gangster, to pass some of the first batch of cheques in Spain. Canuda introduced him to a ‘businessman’ who he said would buy any number of the cheques at thirty per cent of their face value.

Laureano had known and worked with Canuda since the Liberation, but he didn’t trust or even like him. In fact Laureano was convinced that it was Canuda who had informed on his operation in the early 1950s and he was always looking for proof of that betrayal. No, Canuda is a tipo who has long since bartered his conscience for gold to the mafia, and who knows who else, while still claiming lip-service to the “Idea”. To Laureano, however, who has always had an eye for the main chance, it must have been too tempting an offer, allowing him to unload the cheques with the minimum of risk. He should have smelled a rat, though; the fifty-two-year-old Benucho Canuda was an unrepentant, degenerate low-life, pimp and police informer, something Laureano was well aware of, but, amazingly, he still chose to do business with him.

‘Canuda’s “businessman” friend, a Greek-Canadian by the name of Tony Greco, was a real pro who passed all the tests set

by Laureano to gauge his trustworthiness. After a week’s vetting Laureano decided that although he liked the guy even less than he did Benicho Canuda, he couldn’t fault him as a potential client. On the day of the deal, Greco, the buyer, was to sit at a terrace table in the Café Bonaparte in the Place Saint-Germain while Laureano and Canuda sat across the square on the terrace of the Café Les Deux Magots, facing the church, from where they had a panoramic view of the other terrace. At 10:55 am precisely they were each to cross the square and switch brief cases half way.

‘But there was a problem. Early next morning, on his way back from collecting the travellers’ cheques from their hiding place, Laureano sensed he was being followed. It was seven o’clock and a grey Peugeot van had been stuck close behind him all the way across the city. To ensure he wasn’t imagining things he made a number of stops in Clichy, one of them at the Café Gambetta and another at the home of Madame Boldy, the mother of a conscientious objector he had helped smuggle across to the UK. From there he drove to the house of another friend, someone 67

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with no political or criminal connections, but it proved impossible to shake off his pursuers so he made his way back home where Marina, his young Russian girlfriend, was taking a shower. ‘“I’ve got the briefcase with the cheques” he explained “but the police are on my tail so I’ll need your help to shake them off.

Follow me in the van and we’ll drive down the Rue de la VilleNeuve, behind the Town Hall. That’ll fix them. It’s a narrow oneway street and if you can stall the car half-way down they won’t get past you.”

‘Marina dressed and followed Laureano. As planned, when they got to the Rue de la Ville-Neuve, she stalled the car bringing the traffic behind her to a halt, including the ubiquitous grey Peugeot, and no matter how loudly they sounded their horn they couldn’t get past her. Lucio continued safely to his rendezvous with Canuda and Greco at Les Deux Magots where they made the switch as arranged: genuine dollars for phoney travellers’ cheques.’

Lucio chuckled maliciously. ‘It was all too easy. Canuda contacted Laureano next day saying his friend wanted to buy more cheques for cash — two million francs’ worth this time. The thought of treachery never occurred to Laureano, but something wasn’t quite right; again the grey Peugeot was parked outside his apartment, as was at least one more car and a motorcyclist.

Deciding to play it cool he called Canuda to arrange a second rendezvous for the following morning — same time, same place.

‘They met at 10:30 on the terrace of Les Deux Magots as arranged. Across the road Tony Greco sat at the terrace of the Bonaparte with a brown leather case balanced on his lap.

Tucking his own brown leather case between his legs, Laureano was about to start on his café au lait and toast when their table was surrounded by ten or more plain clothes and uniformed police officers waving guns, and before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ both men were handcuffed, bundled into separate police cars and driven off to police headquarters. Greco, meanwhile, had disappeared.

‘The detectives were full of themselves as they faced Laureano across the table in the interrogation room at Police Judiciaire HQ at the Quai des Orfèvres. “My goodness, you are famous”, said Chief Inspector Didier Flament admiringly — or 68

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sarcastically, it was difficult to tell which, reading a telegram from the Security Directorate in Madrid. Between them, on the table, lay Laureano’s brown briefcase. It was unopened. A bunch of 25 keys taken from Laureano at the same time was on the table beside it. “What can you tell us about these keys, Monsieur Cerrada?” said the detective. “Not a lot, Monsieur l’inspecteur, other than they include keys for my car, house, toolboxes and workshop. The others I can’t talk about, for political reasons; they relate to properties in fascist Spain. That small key, however, is for my briefcase here”.

‘Removing the key from its fob and after a brief struggle with the lock, the Inspector flung open the case. The police officers’ faces were a sight to behold, said Laureano. Their jaws dropped. Instead of the books of forged travellers’ cheques they had expected, the briefcase was filled with packets of multicoloured tiles for his bathroom. Nor did they find anything incriminating when they searched Laureano’s apartment and workshop — nothing that could lead them to any of his garages, basements or warehouses. The investigation had run into a brick wall, and the examining magistrate, Francine Caron, had no choice but to release Laureano and Canuda, without charge, after 24 hours.

‘Who was the informer? Tony Greco was an obvious suspect, having conveniently disappeared during their arrest at Les Deux Magots, a possibility that Canuda denied vehemently. Had the second meeting been a ploy to lead them to Laureano’s cache, plates and printing presses? Perhaps he had been under police surveillance all the time. If that were the case why hadn’t he been arrested earlier? Laureano did a bit of digging through a journalist friend on the magazine Interviú, José Vicente Ortuño, and discovered that Canuda was involved with the Wiesbadenbased Schiller Institute, the cult headed by Lyndon H. La Rouche Jr, publisher of the Executive Intelligence Review, a network described by the American National Security Council as one of the best private intelligence services in the world — and, possibly, one of the strangest political groups in American history.

Was Canuda complicit in the arrest, even though he’d been picked up himself? — not that that meant anything. Tony Greco — what had been his role? Was he a front man for the La Rouche organisation? They certainly had the resources and the network to encash large quantities of travellers’ cheques on an 69

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international scale in one fell swoop … So many questions.’

‘So who do you think is behind it?’ Farquhar asked Lucio.

‘Difficult to say, it could be anyone,’ he said. ‘Someone from the past, perhaps? Laureano definitely had information on the CNT-FAI funds that disappeared after the war, and about the role of Germinal Esgleas and André Germaine, his French ‘banker’ and ‘man of confidence’. That might have had something to do with it. Remember all the mysterious deaths around that time? When bodies of comrades returning from missions inside Spain were turning up in the river Garonne, trussed up like turkeys, hands tied behind their backs and a bullet in the back of their heads.

Esgleas was supposed to be heavily implicated in those murders.

It’s equally possible it had something to do with the present: Canuda, hit-men from the BICC-First National, de Marenches, the La Rouche people — anyone. You knew Laureano better than most. He had his fingers in lots of other peoples’ pies — and lots of enemies. My money, however, is on Canuda and his associates, whoever they might be: gangsters of the milieu, secret service agents of any number of varieties, neo-fascist pistoleros of Aginter Press, the Hiéron du Val d’Or, or possibly even our own people.

Esgleas is old now, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he were involved, somehow. He’s a cunning, conniving, malicious piece of work if there ever was one.

‘Canuda’s mixing with real bottom-feeders now; he’s greedy — and he hated Laureano with a vengeance. Even though he carried on working with him, Laureano always despised him; he was convinced that it was Canuda who betrayed him to the police in 1951. He was a pimp and heroin-trafficker tied in with the Corsican syndicate, something that really upset Laureano. They argued constantly about it. For Laureano it was difficult to believe that someone as committed to the ‘Idea’ as apparently Canuda had been, could have flipped so radically. It all goes to show there’s no escaping the cancerous consequences of collaborating with the low-lifes of the milieu. In the end you become just like them, capable of any act in the furtherance of your objectives. First your integrity breaks down, then your values and self-respect. It’s not only power that corrupts — gold and the prospect of gold corrupts just as much. As with politicians and state agencies, anarchists cannot associate with organised crime and criminals and expect not to see their ideas polluted, their traditions 70

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corrupted, and their aspirations and relations with the outside world manipulated out of all recognisable shape. Laureano was, I believe, one of the exceptions, but even he had his dark side, like the moon. You know about the file?’ said Lucio.

‘Yes,’ Farquhar replied. ‘That’s where Laureano had been that evening, arranging its release to me with Maître Dumas. I was waiting for him in the Café de L’Europe when he was gunned down outside. I saw the whole thing.’

‘Yes, he had arranged to collect the file, but not from Maître Dumas. It was from another lawyer entirely, Nicolas Reveillard, who happens to be a close friend of Benicho Canuda, as well as being his lawyer. Reveillard is also legal adviser to most of the mafia clans in Paris. Laureano paid Reveillard 3,000 francs to bribe a clerk of the juge d’instruction to steal the 1,500-page prosecution dossier on him, which contains police reports going back over 25 years. It’s a hefty file that probably identifies some of the confidentes and traitors inside the CNT in exile, people who betrayed him, including Canuda, and no doubt many others over the years. It’s possible Reveillard read the file and, realising it contained highly compromising documents, contacted Canuda to warn him. Canuda then made his move to ensure the file never reached either Cerrada or yourself. If it was Canuda, then on whose behalf was he acting — his own or someone else’s?

Rumour has it that he was on a retainer from Otto Skorzeny’s Madrid-based Paladin Group of contract killers, pistoleros, who were working for, among others, General Eduardo Blanco’s Brigada Politico Social.

‘But there’s another strange coincidence. The day before he was shot, on 17 October, the Spanish magazine Gaceta Ilustrada ran the third in a series of sensationalist articles by Eliseo Bayo — the former comrade-turned-journalist. The articles were based on Laureano’s tell-all interviews about his role in the anti-Franco resistance and the anarchist attempts on the dictator’s life, especially the attempt to bomb him from the air. It’s possible a clue to his murder lies in what he disclosed in the Bayo interviews. In them he refers to a number of people by initials — IJ, LR, MA and DGM. There is also a mystery “Rodolfo”. I don’t know for sure about MA, DGM or “Rodolfo”, but I’m pretty sure IJ was Domingo Ibars Juanías, the Barcelona Defence Secretary, who spent twenty years behind bars and came out in 1969, only seven years ago. No, there’s no doubt in my mind about Juanías; 71

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Edo served time with him in Burgos and knows him well. “LR”, Laureano’s trusted business partner, the man who fronted the thriving and legitimate haulage firm Empresa Transportes Galicia, was, I’m pretty sure, Luis Robla. Mind you, there were a lot of suspicious arrests, sixty of them, and far too many other coincidences in his immediate orbit, including the fall of José Blanco, the CNT national secretary inside Spain, the exposure of the haulage firm, Raúl Carballeira’s ambush in Barcelona, and of course Roblas’s miraculous escape. It might all be coincidental of course, but then again it might not. Also, Bayo’s recent history is highly suspect, ever since he became involved with Lyndon La Rouche’s Schiller Institute … I never trusted journalists anyway, especially former comrades who write luridly extravagant articles for the titillation of café society bourgeois.’

‘Mmm …’ Farquhar replied, non-committally. ‘Riddles blanketed in enigmas, eh? When’s the funeral?’

‘I’ve spoken to Floreal, Laureano’s son,’ said Lucio. ‘The interment is on Wednesday, the 27th. The cortège is due to leave from the police mortuary in the Place Mazas on the Quai de la Râpée at 10 o’clock. The funeral itself is scheduled for 10:30 in Père Lachaise. It might be worth your while having a word with Floreal, and maybe even Laureano’s Russian partner, Marina. Do you think it’s wise for you to attend?’

‘Wise or not, I’ll be there,’ Farquhar replied, ‘but I’ll leave Paris immediately afterwards. Can you arrange a van for me? I’ll need keys for the apartment in Céret and a new carte nationale d’identité and driving licence. Here are some recent headshots for the documents. As for the name, I’ll take whatever comes along.

I’ll pick up the van tomorrow, if possible; I’ve a lot of packing and business to attend to between now and the funeral. I’ll ring tomorrow to confirm where and when I can collect it.’

Thanking Ann for the coffee Farquhar said goodbye and returned home to pack. He made sure, however, that no one was trailing him.

1919: 5 SEPTEMBER, BARCELONA: JUSTICE FOR MANUEL BRAVO PORTILLO Justice finally caught up with Manuel Bravo Portillo on Friday 5 September 1919. If there is a hell, that’s the day he went to the bad fire.

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With his wife and daughter on holiday in the Pyrenean hill town of Puigcerdà, Bravo Portillo spent the morning at home catching up on paperwork with his private secretary, Fernández Terán. Ramón Ródenas, Laureano and I were seated at a café close-by, in the Paseo de Gracia, where we had a clear line of sight to the entrance of his luxury apartment building in the adjoining carrer de Rosellón. We were waiting for him to emerge and to follow his usual Friday routine.

The two men left the apartment together at midday, crossed the street, exchanged a few words, and then went their separate ways. Bravo Portillo headed for the nearby Torrent de l’Olla where one of his mistresses had a penthouse apartment. He stayed with her for a little over an hour before emerging at 1.15 pm precisely, to catch the Plaça Santa Ana-Plaça Rovira tram to the apartment of yet another mistress, one with whom he usually spent the afternoon siesta. He was a randy so-and-so.

As the tram moved off, the three of us jumped on board and sat opposite Bravo Portillo. His sixth sense must have kicked in at that point because he definitely registered our presence, but I’m not sure he suspected he was a target. Even so, he slid his hand under his jacket to his belt holster to reassure himself that he had his gun. We shifted our gaze to the window beyond him and watched the streets speed past as the tram rumbled on its way, but every so often our eyes would meet his cold, relentless stare.

He got off at the stop on the carrer de Còrsega, close to the Diagonal. We followed close behind, my fingers nervously gripping the butt of the Star in my jacket pocket.

Bravo Portillo looked back at us only once. By this time he must have known we were following him, and that it wasn’t to present him with a surprise ‘Policeman of the Year’ award. His pace increased as he walked along the carrer de Còrsega, drawing closer to his mistress’s apartment block on the corner of carrer de Santa Tecla. Someone shouted as he was about to enter the building. He looked up at a woman waving to him from an upstairs balcony. He waved back, and then turned to look at us, almost triumphantly —a flash of arrogance in his eyes, as though he had beaten us and walked into the close.

He didn’t see Progreso Ródenas — el Puni — who was waiting for him at the foot of the staircase. Stepping out of the shadows Progreso looked the surprised captain of murderers 73

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straight in the eye and fired twice, deliberately low, into Bravo Portillo’s knee and groin. The ex-policeman drew his gun and tried to shoot back at his attacker, but he was in such pain and shock that his shot went wide. He lunged at el Puni’s gun, but missed, and the two men grappled for a few moments, until Bravo broke free. He hobbled grotesquely out of the building and down the street, heading for cover in a nearby shop, a coal merchant’s, clutching his blood-stained groin with one hand, and turning at intervals to fire at us with the other.

We watched as he ran past us, thinking he would never survive his injuries, but we had to be certain. I fired, and a lucky shot from me hit him in the shoulder before he reached the safety of a shop doorway. He fell to the pavement, one leg bent awkwardly under him. The pain must have been horrendous. In spite of his wounds, however, Bravo pulled himself up, stumbled and dragged himself under a parked taxi, all the while firing at us. We had to finish him off.

Meanwhile, Ramón and Progreso edged their way down the street towards him, moving from one tenement entrance to another. Laureano and I raced across the road, behind some parked cars, before moving along, gradually, until we were parallel with the taxi under which Bravo Portillo had taken cover.

Doubling back across the road, I dropped onto the cobbles and fired two shots into him from behind, but still he carried on firing. He seemed to be indestructible, and his bullets innumerable. As he turned towards me, however, the gun slipped from his hand and clattered across the cobbles. Grabbing it, I fired another round blindly under the car, at which point I heard Ródenas shouting that the police were on their way and we had to make our escape.

By this time the street was packed with curious onlookers peering out from behind doors and windows. We were close to the big Heinrich printshop, and a lot of printworkers were milling around the gate. Hurrying down Còrsega through this crowd, Progreso Ródenas recognised Adolfo Bueso, a member of the CNT’s graphic arts union, and hurriedly reassured him in a low voice, ‘Don’t worry, Bueso. It’s Bravo!’

At the Diagonal, we slowed to a walking pace, and made our way, still somewhat breathless, through the crowds to the Sarría rail station where we lost any would-be pursuers among the 74

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crowds of passengers as we jumped on the first train back to Sants and safety.

The police arrived soon after we left, but they had little to go on. No one knew anything or could provide them a description of us. All they found were bullet holes in the walls, some spent cartridge cases and a man’s beret, which had been bought in Clot. Most Catalans wore berets so it wasn’t much of a lead, and no shopkeeper remembered selling the item. Nor did they find Bravo Portillo’s gun — I had it!

Bravo Portillo was still alive but in agony when the taxidriver pulled him, screaming, from beneath his vehicle and drove him to a nearby pharmacist’s dispensary in the Plaça de Rius i Taulet. The taxi-driver and the pharmacist carried him into the clinic and laid the policeman-turned-gangster on the examination table. As he lay there, heaving and gasping for breath, his fingers twitched by his sides. All they could hear between his anguished groans were the mumbled words, over and over again in a harsh singsong voice, which grew steadily weaker: ‘Please, please, please help. Holy Mother of God! They’ve killed me, the bastards killed me!’ He stared up at the ceiling with glazed eyes. ‘Treason,’ he whispered.

After a few minutes he gave one final convulsion; there was a gurgling sound in his throat and he died.

The news of Bravo Portillo’s death spread quickly across Barcelona. It was as though a shadow had been lifted from the city, and that night there were spontaneous celebrations and street parties in all of Barcelona’s working class barris. Sales of cava and cigars went through the roof, with many bars and kiosks selling out of both items.

The spot where Bravo died became a place of macabre pilgrimage, as people insisted on seeing the ‘crime’ scene for themselves, presumably to reassure themselves he was dead.

The upper middle classes were in a state of shock. If the anarchists could kill such an experienced and dedicated upholder of law and order, then clearly no one was safe.

That evening, Segui was summoned to a meeting with Julio Amado, the civil governor of Barcelona newly appointed by Burgos y Mazo, the Minister of the Interior, to discuss the situation. He arrived as the captain-general was leaving, and Milans del Bosch looked straight through him as he walked past.

The governor’s wife, Dolores Martínez Arniches, was present 75

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during the meeting and, according to Segui, she was so terrified by the presence of such a notorious anarchist that she refused to release her tight grip on her husband’s hand and she trembled from head to toe throughout the meeting.

Basically the reason the governor had called in Segui —with whom, he now felt, he had an amicable relationship — was to reassure himself that the anarchists weren’t planning a St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Patronál leadership. Not that Segui knew, or could — or would — have told him anyway.

With their boss dead and facing the prospect of unemployment and the likelihood that they too would be targeted and hunted down by the anarchist defence groups, Bravo Portillo’s network of outraged thugs and minions went on the offensive and began planning their reprisals. Angel Pestaña was to be their first victim.

One of Bravo’s top men, Epifanio Casas, had got it into his head that Pestaña was somehow responsible for his master’s death — probably because of his standing among the militants.

Although the pistolero leaders wanted Pestaña dead, they also wanted to know who had actually killed Bravo. It wasn’t long before one of their confidentes —a traitor by the name of Manuel Mahjuelk —heard a whisper that the Ródenas brothers had been involved. Not much could be kept secret in the union.

Fortunately, neither Laureano’s nor my name was mentioned.

On the pretext of having inside information on the movements of Milans del Bosch, a priority target for the groups, Mahjuelk, a hitherto trusted cenetista, arranged to meet the Ródenas brothers in a bar in the Ronda de San Pablo, on the corner of Aldana.

The brothers didn’t suspect a trap, but erring on the side of caution they asked Laureano, myself and a couple of other action group members to act as backup and get there ahead of them.

The brothers arrived about twenty minutes after us and sat at an adjoining table at the back of the bar, close to the kitchen door, to await Mahjuelk’s arrival. Meanwhile, outside in the shadows, giving the informer his last-minute instructions, was Antonio Soler, el Mallorquin, and four of his gunmen.

Mahjuelk came in first, looked around the bar and saw the brothers in the corner. He waved and walked over to join them.

Laureano, myself and the other two comrades —whom Mahjuelk 76

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didn’t know or pay attention to — were playing dominoes at an adjoining table.

As they shook hands, Progreso Ródenas saw el Mallorquin enter the bar and move towards us, his men behind him. The Ródenas brothers, who were still pumping adrenaline and whose reactions were on a hair trigger, suddenly realised it was a trap and pushed Mahjuelk to one side, kicking over their table to shield themselves as they opened fire on their attackers.

We did the same, which no one expected. El Mallorquin and his men were counting on the element of surprise, which they lost in the pandemonium of the brief and hectic wild-west type shootout that followed. We escaped, unscathed, through the kitchen and out the back door into the night, leaving the panicstricken informer Manuel Mahjuelk behind.

Mahjuelk knew his cover had been blown, but instead of disappearing, the idiot’s spur-of-the-moment response — in the midst of the panic and shooting — was to fire a couple of shots through his fedora and run out after us. He didn’t even try to shoot himself in the foot. But his unsubtle ploy didn’t work; early next morning his body was dumped on the pavement outside Sometent headquarters.

That wasn’t the only trap set that night. Around the time our gunfight was taking place, there was another group of pistoleros, led by Epifanio Casas, lurking outside the entrance to Angel Pestaña’s apartment block in Pueblo Seco, in the shadow of Montjuic. As Pestaña walked out of the tenement close, two gunmen opened fire on him from across the street. Fortunately they were either poor shots or too far away and he managed to escape, unhurt — by outrunning them. *** The mortal remains of Manuel Bravo Portillo were buried in Montjuic cemetery on 17 September 1919. Like that of Pau Sabater less than two months earlier, his funeral cortège also left from the Clinical Hospital. The mourners, led by his son, included General Martínez Anido and other top brass from the police and the military, as well as leading figures from the church, the Patronál and the Sometent. But in the barris, celebrations continued well into the early hours of the next day.

Bravo Portillo’s assassination, however, didn’t halt the cycle of violence — not that it was intended to; his killing was an ajusticiamiento, a ‘settling of accounts’ — an act of vindication, 77

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justice and retribution.

Bravo Portillo’s death squads did not disappear. They regrouped, and Bravo’s mantle passed to the shoulders of his sinister associate, the Baron de Koenig, whose appointment as his replacement had been personally requested by the tribal leaders of Catalonia’s ruling families, men such as the lawyer and Catalanist Lliga deputy Josep Betrán i Musito — Catalonia’s strongman of the right — and the Marqués de Foronda, another prominent Lliga member and a close friend of the king.

It was Betrán i Musito who bankrolled the Baron’s takeover of Bravo Portillo’s ‘Great Detective Agency’. If the Baron hadn’t continued paying the wages and filled the vacuum left by Bravo Portillo’s death, Barcelona’s gangsters and lowlifes would have dispersed and gone their own way, probably setting up uncontrolled criminal protection rackets of their own, a prospect the Barcelona bourgeoisie could not countenance. Within a matter of days, the Baron had taken over all of Bravo Portillo’s anti-labour, security and intelligence-gathering contracts — as well as his prestigious office at No. 6, Rambla de las Flores.

The Baron served many masters, not just the Capitanía and the Patronál. According to the man I hesitate to call my ‘friend’, Captain George Marshall of the British Secret Service Bureau in Barcelona, he was moonlighting for Captain Février, the head of the Deuxième Bureau in Barcelona, reporting to him on ‘social movements’ and the activities and connections of foreign anarchist and socialist radicals in the city. He was also still working for the Germans. I didn’t ask Marshall if the Baron worked for him. I knew he wouldn’t give me a straight answer, but I’m sure there was some connection.

As far as the Capitanía and Patronál were concerned, the Baron’s brief was to continue with Bravo’s work and do whatever was necessary to crush the CNT, break the will of its rank-andfile and eliminate its leading militants.

As well as inheriting Bravo Portillo’s army of informers, delinquents and killers, the Baron had his own retinue of ruffians and scoundrels: Manuel Madrenas; Dionisio Martín; Conrado Giménez; André Penon; Juan Fernández aka ‘el Mico’; Angel Fernández; Manuel Grau aka ‘el Más’; Luis Alberic; Mariano Sans; Julio Laporta; Pere Torrens i Capdevila; San Vicente; Antonio Jilletes; Manuel Martín; Julio del Clot; Ernesto Querakto aka ‘el 78

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Pintor’; ‘el Calero’; ‘el Sabandija’; Jaime Rose and ‘el Xato de Soller’.

Like Gaul, the Baron’s ‘Banda Negra’, (‘Black Gang’) as it was known, was divided into three. The first-league team consisted of intelligent, well-dressed, well-appointed and wellconnected individuals who exploited their charm and their extensive friendship circles to gather information and gossip in bars, cafés, casinos, gambling dens, cocktail parties and tertúlias — wherever.

The second group were men with sufficient charisma or social, artisanal or labouring skills who could pass themselves off as ‘workers’, join the union and establish a rapport with other members, collect information on activists, worm their way into positions of trust and confidence — and, where necessary — act as agents provocateurs.

Last of all came the shock troops, the squadristi: thugs, bullies and psychopaths who only knew violence as a means to achieve their ends — beatings, kidnapping, torture and murder. *** With the eight-hour-day legislation due to come into effect on 1 October, the same date as the official launch of the Comisión Mixta (an arbitration panel of employers and employees), the civil governor thought it was time to bring the union and employer representatives face-to-face.

Amado had been holding informal meetings with union spokesmen and employers since he first arrived in the city, but the first official meeting in which both sides sat down together didn’t take place until Monday, 8 September, three days after Bravo Portillo’s murder.

With social tension appearing to ease, and over 60,000 workers back at work — about eighty-five per cent of the victims of the lockout — an atmosphere of relative calm had begun to return — until Bravo Portillo’s death that is. As I’ve said, Catalonia’s ruling elite and upper middle classes were badly shaken by his murder and they began casting around anxiously for anyone or anything that offered them some degree of security and social stability.

Segui led the CNT delegation, and because none of the major industrialists bothered to send delegates, all the Patronál’s representatives were ‘low-level’ small businessmen who had no problems about working with the unions. It soon became clear 79

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that an amicable and historic agreement would shortly be reached, as it was on 16 September.

Most of us in the defence groups —the anarchist core of the CNT — looked on these negotiations with a fairly cynical and jaundiced eye, some more than others. The feeling was that, much as they liked and admired Segui, the fact remained that, by negotiating with the class enemy, the state and the employers, he was seriously compromising the CNT’s revolutionary anarchist objectives, which were the overthrow of capitalism and the rebuilding of society on the principles of libertarian communism.

Personally — and this was a view I shared with Laureano, Lara, Ramón Archs and most of the compañeros in our immediate circle of action group members — I thought that, although there were serious moral and political dangers attached to the process of negotiating with the class enemy, it was still a necessary part of the process. The important thing was not to lose sight of our ultimate objective and to continue to push forward the boundaries of the possible.

This wasn’t an easy balancing act for a revolutionary: jam sandwiches today against possible high teas tomorrow. The bottom line, however, was that the CNT was a labour union; it wasn’t our ideological call to make, even though we, the anarchist militants, provided the elemental driving force within the union. The fact remained that the único was a ‘broad church’ whose whole raison d’être was to represent, defend and advance its members’ interests.

Certainly, while a substantial number of CNT members would have described themselves as sympathetic to anarchist ideas, only a minority could be considered active, committed anarchists or even anarcho-syndicalists, who could be counted upon to put their hands in the metaphorical fire. Most workers joined the union out of economic self-interest, and the CNT was, after all, the biggest, most powerful and effective union around.

That, anyway, was how Segui, Pestaña and most other ‘prominent militants’ of the Regional Committee saw it.

As for the groups, we were prepared to bide our time — mostly.

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16 September 1919: Barcelona, Death of a Traitor

1919: 16 SEPTEMBER, BARCELONA — DEATH OF A TRAITOR Some things, like betrayal, are difficult to ignore or forgive. So, on the night of 16 September, less than two weeks after Bravo Portillo’s ajusticiamiento, members of another metalworkers’ action group, led by Ramón Archs, shot dead the traitor Eduardo Ferrer, the cenetista turned confidente and the man responsible for the previous year’s murder — on Bravo Portillo’s instructions — of the industrialist Josep Barret, and his friend, Pastór.

Archs and others had long suspected Ferrer of treachery, but it was only when his wife confirmed those suspicions — after he left her for another woman — that anyone knew for certain that he was on the Special Brigade payroll.

Another victim that night, though not fatally injured, was Agustí Sabater’s son, a businessman and right-wing stalwart of the Patronál. The young Sabater was also a member of the Sometent, but the motive for the attack on him had nothing to do with politics or union matters — it was the result of a fight over a woman in a dance hall. For the Patronál bosses though, the attack provided a useful pretext to sabotage the proceedings of the mixed commission.

The news that the commission was about to sign an agreement with the CNT sent the Patronál leaders into a panic.

The chickens were coming home to roost. They had allowed small workshop owners to represent them at the negotiating table, men who had more in common with the workers than with the big industrialists, men who clearly didn’t ‘understand’ the Patronál leadership’s strategy — which was to play for time until after they had held their national conference, which was still over a month away.

They had to prevent the agreement being signed at all costs.

The morning after Ferrer was killed and the attack had taken place on Agustí Sabater’s son, a considerably more highpowered employers’ delegation, led this time by Tomás Benet, the Patronál’s top legal adviser, turned up at the civil governor’s office for the signing ceremony. Amado and the CNT delegates didn’t pay much attention to this at the time, thinking they had come to add gravitas to the ceremony.

With the documents spread out on the table, ready for signature, Amado opened the meeting with a few appropriate words about the importance of the agreement for the country’s future prosperity, when Tomás Benet suddenly interrupted him.

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‘I have to inform you, governor, that the employers’ representatives are withdrawing from the Comisión Mixta. We are not prepared to sit at the same table and negotiate with those we believe to be morally responsible for last night’s murder of Eduardo Ferrer and the attempted murder of the son of our colleague Agustí Sabater...’

Segui later told me that the blood visibly drained from Amado’s face. All the time and effort he had expended bringing the two sides together was suddenly going down the pan. He was ready to explode.

Segui, however, saw a possible advantage in the situation and leapt to his feet. ‘Sr Benet,’ protested Segui, angrily stabbing his finger at the cadaverous old lawyer, ‘I can assure you that the CNT had absolutely nothing to do with yesterday’s attacks. This is simply another opportunistic excuse on the part of yourself and the Patronál to break off talks and pursue your objective of destroying the CNT.’ Turning to Amado, Segui said, ‘Sr governor, please be assured that the CNT will honour its obligations to the Comisión Mixta and will stick to its side of what has already been agreed.’

Amado — his composure now slightly restored, was still livid, his hands shaking with frustration — stood up and angrily berated Benet and the other Patronál representatives.

‘Gentlemen, I shall give you twenty-four hours to reconsider your decision. If you are not here in my office to sign this document by mid-day tomorrow, I will have each and every one of you jailed for contempt. Don’t ignore me! If you do, I promise you by tomorrow night you will all be behind bars.’

Amado’s threat shocked the bosses. Rising from the table they collected their papers and filed out of the room in silence.

No one had ever spoken to them like that before, especially a government official whom they expected to be on their side.

That afternoon, and through most of the night, the employers discussed their response to Amado’s threat. Finally they decided to call the civil governor’s bluff. They reckoned, correctly, that he needed them more than they needed him.

Next day the CNT delegates waited with Amado for the Patronál representatives to arrive — but they never came. Late in the afternoon a messenger arrived with a letter from Benet requesting more time to consider their decision.

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Benet had gambled correctly. The governor didn’t have them arrested. It was a battle he couldn’t win, and one that would succeed only in alienating the middle classes on whose support he depended. The governor chose instead to wait until he could find some diplomatic means to bring the employers back to the conference table. *** Two days later, the surge of Guardia Civíl reinforcements the civil governor had requested arrived from Madrid, along with seventy secret policemen from the special services brigade. With them came the news of the appointment of a new chief of police for Barcelona, Guardia Civíl Colonel Miguel Arleguí y Bayones — a sullen, highly-strung, demented alcoholic who would prove to be one of the most brutal figures of that tragic period in Spain’s history.

Meanwhile, the question of the CNT’s participation in the state-backed Comisión Mixta had become a serious node of friction within the union. We trusted Segui, Pestaña and Pierá absolutely, but we were also aware of their vulnerabilities. Many of us were growing increasingly uncomfortable with the extent to which these ‘influential militants’ were compromising the union’s fundamental principles by negotiating so extensively with the employers and participating in what was a statesponsored structure. There seemed to be just a bit too much ‘adapting to circumstances’ to keep in the game, when we should have been considerably more intransigent in dealing with people who were our class enemies. But that is ‘staircase wisdom’. We should have though of that coming up the stairs instead of on the way down.

The somewhat spurious argument of the ‘influential militants’ was that it served the union’s long-term interest to collaborate with the commission, as it provided a platform for a peaceful transition of society.

‘It has to be worth trying,’ insisted Segui. ‘None of our other plans for revolution have led anywhere.’

We believed differently, but the mood of the country was such that everyone — including Segui — was convinced that the social revolution was ‘just around the corner’, and that this was a less bloody and more efficient and civilised way to go about ending capitalism. That was the message carried by Segui, Pestaña and Pierá that October during their public speaking 83

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tours in Madrid and Castille — areas where CNT membership figures were relatively low compared with those of the socialist UGT. The recruiting drive was an attempt to redress this imbalance. It was targeted mainly at the capital’s lower-middle classes who were urged to join the CNT before it was too late.

As Segui never tired of pointing out, they were as much victims of the existing social order as the industrial and service workers.

These public meetings certainly boosted union membership in Madrid, but at what price?

The success of the CNT’s recruitment campaign in Castille probably owed more to the fact that it was the only organisation around with the moral fibre to take on the country’s rigid social and political hierarchies and, possibly, achieve its goals. At least the único had a clear idea where it was going, and not because of any mass ‘road to Damascus’ conversions to anarchosyndicalism among Madrid’s professional classes. Strangely, the CNT’s success in Madrid didn’t appear to worry the capital’s ruling families. The sindicato único was a workers’ thing, and the workers were, after all, both inferior and a race apart.

Governor Amado, meanwhile, was prepared to bide his time with regard to the recalcitrant Patronál, at least until the Mixed Commission of Catalonia finally became a legal entity on 10 October 1919. If the Patronál continued to ignore the commission’s directives after that date it would be breaking the law. Even so, they still asked for a further fortnight’s grace, until after their upcoming national conference on 21 October.

Amado decided not to force the issue, announcing he was prepared to wait until then before convening the commission’s next meeting. The CNT’s ‘influential militants’, however, confirmed the union’s participation in the next round of talks with what seemed to us in the groups as an unseemly haste to engage in politicking. *** The proceedings of the second national congress of the Federación Patronál Española opened on the morning of 21 October 1919, in the Palau de la Música Catalana. It was the first time Spain’s employers had come together nationally since September 1914, a month after the outbreak of the Kaiser’s War. Antonio Martínez Domingo, a lawyer and the recently elected 84

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mayor of Barcelona, and a prominent member of the Catalan Lliga, chaired the meeting.

Representatives came from all over Spain, and from all industries. Their mood was aggrieved and aggressive. As the real economic power in the land they were not prepared to tolerate governmental interference in how they dealt with their own workforce. The first item on the agenda was the election of a president and vice president — Félix Àngel Grauperá, as president, and Francesc Junoy, head of the organisation in Madrid, as vice-president. Together with their organising committee they were the most reactionary, prideful, intolerant and inflexible employers in the whole of Spain.

Grauperá’s election came as a surprise to many who suspected, rightly, that he was a ‘man of straw’, the front man for Joan Miró i Trepat and Josep Bertrán i Musito, the real autocratic powers behind the Catalan throne, men who preferred to maintain a low public profile.

Top of their agenda was to halt and to roll back the apparently relentless and unprecedented rise in working class radical dissent and the threat to their right to rule. The worried mood of the delegates could be gauged by the uncompromising nature of the resolutions approved by the conference: that there should be no cooperation with the government-sponsored industrial tribunals, the Comisiónes Mixtas de Trabajo, and that members should not rehire any known card-carrying cenetistas.

The most important and far-reaching resolution, however, called for an immediate country-wide lockout to defeat the CNT. The employers’ congress closed on 26 October with a massive vote of no confidence in the government and a sinistersounding press statement to the effect that the employers’ organisation would no longer accept the current level of social disorder and that, ‘Only in the army do we, the employers, find any guarantees of order.’

It wasn’t long before we found out what the employers had in mind. The night Grauperá rallied his troops, we were doing likewise with an emergency meeting of the Regional Committee in the carrer del Olmo union hall. The only item on our agenda was the lockout.

With the possibility of an attack by the Sometent or pistoleros, the groups posted guards in the adjoining streets to 85

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protect the meeting. I stood by the door, with Laureano.

The atmosphere was tense as Manuel Buenacasa and Ramón Archs argued forcefully for an armed offensive against the employers and a takeover of the factories, following the recent example of the Italian compañeros.

‘Comrades,’ said Buenacasa, the CNT’s anarchist national secretary, ‘we cannot just sit back and passively accept these closures. Our answer has to be occupying their factories and running them for the benefit of the people, not for capitalists and rentiers.

‘The authorities don’t have enough police or soldiers to take on the entire Barcelonan working class. Of course they’ll call out the army and there will be bloodshed, but there will be bloodshed anyway. And if blood is to be spilled, then let it at least be spilled in the cause of social justice and libertarian communism.

‘Across Spain — from Andalusia, Valencia, Aragón, Castille and the Basque country — compañeros are waiting for the signal to rise up and overthrow the corrupt and venal ruling classes and the capitalist system by which they live off our labour. We can — and must — give that signal.’

Archs spoke next: ‘Comrades! I agree with Buenacasa. We don’t need government-sponsored “mixed commissions”. It’s just one more state stratagem to marginalise the union and turn us into managers and administrators for capitalism. Why not seize the factories and run them ourselves? What do we need with management commissions? The factories can be managed perfectly well by councils of democratically mandated and recallable shop stewards.

‘General strikes and protest demonstrations upset no one.

What concerns the bosses is when they lose their property —and their profits! But apart from upsetting the bosses, isn’t seizing control of the factories and the workshops, the land, the public service industries, transport and distribution what revolutionary syndicalism and libertarian communism are all about?

‘The defence commission can organise armed patrols to protect the factories against attack, while the factory councils pay wages and coordinate production and distribution for the benefit of the community.

‘We also need to be careful that we are not betrayed by well86

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meaning comrades promising the authorities a return to normality in exchange for whatever sops the bosses choose to throw at us. By accepting their so-called assurances we will lose everything, including our dignity and our hard-won credibility as a union.

‘And, just as importantly, we shouldn’t be taken in by any false sense of discipline and solidarity that binds us to fears and mistaken calculations — and possible betrayals by our own wellintentioned leaders and prominent spokesmen.

‘Look at the disastrous consequences of accepting the word of the cowardly leadership of the Socialist Party and the UGT during the General Strike in 1917!’

Buenacasa’s and the charismatic Archs’ speeches were spine-tinglingly inspirational. For a few moments it seemed that everyone in the hall was ready to pour out onto the streets, red and black flags fluttering in the breeze, prepared to declare libertarian communism there and then.

It didn’t happen though. In spite of Archs’s direct dig at Segui, Pestaña and Simó Pierá, el Noi didn’t take Archs’s comments personally. The two men had their differences, but they were, first and foremost, old friends and good comrades.

Segui argued passionately against the motion, pleading for caution, calm reflection and passive resistance —and to avoid the trap of Patronál provocation, soberly reminding everyone that far from all the workers in Catalonia belonged to the CNT. ‘Comrades! The harsh reality of our situation is that only a tiny number of workers will answer any call we make today for revolution. The police, army and civil guard — whom, as you know, have just been reinforced — will retaliate quickly, brutally and bloodily against any insurrection we are able to launch.

‘The Spanish state is too powerful at the moment. Premature action on our part now will lead only to the useless and wasteful sacrifice of our best militants. Revolutions needs time, money and arms to prepare — and we have none of those, at least at the moment.

‘But we are looking to change that. Revolution and Libertarian Communism must remain at the top of our agenda — but when we do take over the means of production and distribution it has to be on our terms. We cannot allow ourselves to be manoeuvred into a violent and unwinnable struggle engineered and provoked by our class enemies.

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‘This lockout,’ he continued, ‘is just one minor skirmish in the long class war. It is not the end — far from it. And remember, comrades, the CNT will fight and, sooner or later, success will be ours!’

Segui’s sombre reasoning effectively dampened the revolutionary fervour generated by Buenacasa and Archs. When it came to a vote, the meeting sided with the ‘watchmaker’ and the ‘painter’, and ended with a weak agreement calling on cenetistas, through the pages of Soli, to opt for passive resistance and to not allow ourselves to be provoked into responding violently.

After the vote, Archs announced that the Defence Commission and the groups would respect the decision of the meeting, but he made it clear to everyone present that the consequences of the lockout and the union’s failure to respond vigorously would be a lot worse than simple repression —it could lead to the dismantling of the organisation.

The employers stuck to their guns — literally — and in a matter of days they had brought most of Catalonia to a standstill.

The lockout began on 1 December and quickly affected more than 150,000 workers and their families across Greater Barcelona.

Building sites came to a standstill, and businesses, large factories, small workshops, shops, bars and restaurants closed and boarded up.

Businessmen and traders who ignored or refused to comply with the Patronál’s instructions — and there was a surprising number of them — received visits from the Patronál’s enforcers from the Sometent or from the Baron’s mercenaries, who patrolled the streets with clubs and guns, forcing reluctant employers and trades people to close their shutters.

The recently reorganised Sometent now had around 15,000 men in Barcelona, with a further 60,000 across the rest of Catalonia. But it wasn’t just the parapoliticals who were imposing the lockout — the Guardia Civíl who received Patronál ‘subventions’ were doing their bit to enforce it.

In Sant Martí de Provençals, for example, workers occupying their factory —the Hijos de José Salva —were savagely beaten up and evicted by the Guardia Civíl. Similar events happened elsewhere across the province.

Despite Grauperá’s attempts to extend the lockout throughout Spain, it only really succeeded in the Greater 88

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27 October 1976: Paris, Père Lachaise Cemetery

Barcelona area. In Madrid, for example, where the Socialist Party and the UGT were strong, the lockout was partial and short-lived.

In Barcelona, where the bosses were determined to continue with the lockout until we surrendered, absolutely and without reservation, the situation of the workers and their families grew worse by the day.

It was now a question of survival.

We received some financial support from unions in other parts of the country, and a little help came from the international movement, but nowhere near enough to provide proper succour for the numbers of workers involved. People relied on their ingenuity to survive — and they did, somehow. It became known as ‘the pact of hunger’.

The police, the Guardia Civíl, the Sometent and the Baron’s men were quick to take advantage of the misery and despair of the workers and their families to recruit more informers. For a few pesetas they could buy a little information from some needy worker who then found himself ensnared in their despicable net.

If they refused to carry on informing they were threatened with exposure as traitors — which meant anything from loss of selfrespect to death.

This happened with at least one young comrade in particular, Inocencio Feced, who betrayed himself and his comrades to buy medicine to treat his tuberculosis. He later claimed that he turned informer out of ‘desperation’ and because he felt he had nowhere else to turn, having fallen out with his father, an army colonel, over his politics. Feced’s treachery was to have tragic repercussions for the movement.

1976: 27 OCTOBER, PARIS, PÈRE LACHAISE CEMETERY The morning of Wednesday 27 October, 1976 was appropriately mournful and overcast with leaden skies. There was no elaborate funeral procession or priest present to lead the burial of Laureano Cerrada. Only a dozen or so close friends and family members followed him to his final resting place in Père Lachaise cemetery.

They stood at the graveside paying silent homage. There was no weeping, no obsequies, no dirges as they listened to the sound of clumps of hard clay falling on the coffin.

Floreal, Laureano’s son, had asked Farquhar to say a few words. As he began he noticed three men watching the mourning party from the tombs near the Communards’ Wall. He turned away 89

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from them a little as he spoke: ‘It is a difficult task speaking over one’s dead friend. Firstly, I do not believe it is possible for any one individual to know truly every aspect of another, or to define a man or fully encapsulate his life’s work — especially a man as complex as Laureano who, as we know, was many different things to different people. It would be a thankless task to try and satisfy all those who were aware of the different facets of his eventful and complicated life.

There were many who treated him as an enemy and maligned his reputation — so-called honourable men and women — who sought to denigrate him. It is perhaps due to these honourable people that we are gathered around Laureano’s graveside this cold October morning.’

Farquhar cast a brief look over at the men watching us. Their coat collars were turned up either against the cold morning air or to make them more difficult to identify. They were too far away to hear what he was saying. One of them stubbed a cigarette out on a tombstone.

‘But as well as burying Laureano, we cannot help, as friends, but praise him. He was a simple man who allowed neither ambition or wealth to corrupt his spirit; nor poverty. He never shied away from danger, risk and harzard, all of which he embraced in his struggle for freedom and justice.

‘In spite of the calumnies and lies with which he has been tarred by both the bourgeois press and other internal enemies it should be remembered that Laureano —who consistently refused high office in the union he loved — helped the Spanish Libertarian Movement survive through one of the most difficult periods in its history. Some of his methods might have been considered by some to have been dishonourable, but he saved the lives of thousands of refugees from European fascism. We must also honour Laureano for remaining faithful to the anarchist ideas for which he lived —and also, so it now seems, for which he died.

‘But we are here to bury Laureano — not to debate his peculiar methods of struggle, or to applaud or condemn this or that form of revolutionary action. What is important is that the enemies of the people, and the so-called honourable functionaries within our movement who once claimed to be his friend, should not be allowed to stain the memory of a true revolutionary who dedicated his life to the movement and paid 90

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for his ideals — and his shortcomings - with his life. I should like to conclude with a quote from Thucydides: ‘”For a manly spirit more bitter is humiliation associated with cowardice than death when it comes unperceived in close company with stalwart deeds and public hopes.”’

After exchanging a few words with Marina, Laureano’s partner, Floreal and the other mourners, Farquhar and Lucio walked up the hill to the rear of the cemetery. Ann was waiting for them in a bar in the Place Gambetta. She had an attaché case on the chair beside her which she picked up and handed to Farquhar, saying: ‘Inside you’ll find the key to the Céret apartment and the new documents you’ll need — national ID card, driving licence and a passport. I’ve just heard that the police arrested Benicho Canuda yesterday for questioning — someone identified him as being at the scene of the murder along with a couple of guys from the Pigalle gang — but this morning the examining magistrate ordered his release. He went straight to the airport and caught the first available flight to Canada. Apparently he has business interests there.’

‘Have you everything packed and ready to go?’ asked Lucio.

‘Yes,’ Farquhar replied. ‘The van is parked outside Tellez’s apartment down the road in the Boulevard de Charonne, but I’ll take a roundabout route getting back to it. Three characters were watching us from near the Communards’ Wall. I’m not sure if they were press, police or someone else. I’d better play hide-and-seek for a bit on the Metro. Could you drop me off at the Porte de Bagnolet, please? I’ll take the Metro from there. No need to make it easy for them. Thanks again for everything. I’ll call you every day for news. Hopefully, we’ll get to the bottom of this.’

1919: 10 DECEMBER — LA COMEDIA CONGRESS Spain’s oligarchs, meanwhile, continued to marshal their reactionary battalions, and on 5 December 1919, they forced the resignation of the liberal government of Sánchez de Toca, which was replaced by a coalition of ultra-reactionary conservatives headed by Manuel Allendesalazar, a man inextricably linked with the Patronál.

Five days later, on 10 December, the CNT’s second national conference, an eight-day affair, opened in Madrid’s La Comedia Theatre. It was the union’s first national conference since 1911, and was attended by 450 delegates from across Spain and 91

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Portugal.

Not being a delegate I couldn’t attend, not even as the international correspondent for Soli, but it was a truly historic Congress inasmuch as it confirmed — for the first time — that the CNT was an anarcho-syndicalist labour union with ultimate objectives which were specifically defined as ‘libertarian communism’. There was also a lot of millenarian rhetoric by the speakers and, if nothing else, the radical motions and resolutions passed at La Comedia Congress certainly put the wind up Spain’s aristocracy and bourgeoisie, all of whom were convinced that the revolutionary wave sweeping Europe at the time was about to engulf them, and that they would soon share the recent fate of the ‘allegedly’ murdered Romanovs.

I say ‘allegedly’ because Archs had told me that the Cartagena Defence Commission sent him a report that the Romanovs had landed there, in secret, in June, from a steam yacht flying the Papal flag, the Lamara. This 300-foot yacht was the biggest in the Mediterranean at the time, with 14 luxury cabins and a 50-man crew. Further investigation threw up the fact that the yacht had been chartered by Sir George MacDonald, an influential English Catholic, a papal Knight Commander of the Grand Cross — and the papal chamberlain at the Vatican. The Lamara had docked in Cartagena at midnight and its seven mysterious passengers and dozens of cases were whisked away in a convoy of royal limousines waiting for them at the dockside. Dockers who saw them claimed they recognised the Tsar from the newspapers.

Years later I asked Marshall about this. ‘It’s a lot of nonsense, laddie!’ he said, unconvincingly. ‘Best forget you ever heard that story. Folks will think you’re mad.’

A little over twenty years later, in June 1940, I again reminded Marshall of this incident. I was still curious. We were in a bar in Foix (Ariège), on the Montgaillard Road, waiting for a car to take Marshall to Bordeaux where a submarine was waiting to take him, Sir Ronald Campbell, the British Ambassador, and other British diplomats and secret service agents back to England before the Nazis arrived.

We’d been through a lot together by that time, and although he was head of the Special Intelligence Service in the Ariège, he trusted me as much as I trusted him — up to a point.

‘If it were true,’ he said, ‘and I’m not saying it is, one possible 92

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reason why nothing more’s been heard about the Romanovs since they were supposedly murdered in Ekaterinburg is because it’s in no one’s interests. They were — and still are — a political threat to the Bolsheviks, just as the Tsars were a serious threat to British rule in India, at least according to Rudyard Kipling and the then prime minister, Arthur Balfour, and Lord Curzon. So who knows?

Perhaps they are living out their lives, contentedly, somewhere in Surrey or Sussex under assumed names. Wherever they are, in the Home Counties or at the bottom of a mineshaft in the Urals — they’re history!’

THE SINDICATOS LIBRES With the prospect of revolution still in the offing and the fundamental institutions of their society —tradition, property and privilege —under serious threat, Spain’s oligarchs were desperate to find new ways to create and exacerbate divisions within the labour movement.

In spite of the relentless onslaughts by the Madrid and Catalan governments on constitutional liberties and the campaign of intimidation and murder, the CNT’s membership and popularity just kept on growing — like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

It was the ideologically driven Jaimistas, the praetorian guard of clerical-monarchist reaction, who came up with the answer — the sindicatos libres — that became known simply as the ‘Libre’, the ‘Free Union’.

Ironically, this rival to the CNT, and its would-be nemesis, the Corporación General de Trabajadores, Unión de Sindicatos Libres de España, was born on 10 December 1919 — the same day the CNT Congress opened in Madrid. *** The Libre was a labour union in name only — and was anything but ‘free’. It was a Mafia-type confederation of gangsters, Roman Catholic zealots and anti-cenetista unionists whose allotted role was to protect the Catalan establishment’s class interests by dividing the labour movement.

The inaugural meeting of this false-flag union took place in a hall owned by the Legitimist Workers’ Association, the Ateneos Obreros Legítimos, at No. 32 carrer Tapineria, next to Barcelona’s Cathedral.

Most of the hundred or so people in the audience were Jaimistas, integrist-Catholics (traditionalists who rejected the 93

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principles of the French Revolution — liberty, equality and fraternity — in favour of the doctrines of the Council of Trent, including blind obedience to the Papacy), and ultra-traditionalist Carlists, but there were others there too, including a number of renegade members of the único opposed to the dominant radical socialist influence of anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists. In fact, the previous year, prior to the Sants Congress, the Carlists had made a serious attempt to infiltrate the CNT and take over the anarchist-dominated committees, but since then they appeared to have given up on that particular idea to form their own rival union.

The convenor of the Libre meeting was Ramón Sales, a devout nineteen-year-old integrist Catholic, a member of the Carlist Crit de Patria group. It had long been his dream to found a mass workers’ movement tied to the Carlists in the same way that the CNT was linked to the anarchist movement, or the UGT to the Socialist Party.

Until that evening, Sales had been a member of the CNT’s Maritime Workers’ Union. A driven man, he had long guarded an obsessive — almost pathological — hatred of anarchism and the influence of working-class anarchist militants within the único, and had been informing on his colleagues to the police from the day he joined.

Many of those present had no idea what was on the agenda, and Sales’s proposal — to create a new union to rival the CNT — came as a complete surprise.

‘Friends’, he urged, ‘only by setting up a new union will it be possible for “responsible” workers to reassert traditional Catholic values of moderation. It is the only way we will be able to turn the tide against the Godless, anarchist-led CNT. ‘We all know that the CNT doesn’t defend working-class interests. It defends the cause of social revolution, and the interests of the anarchist groups and the German-Jewish bankers who control it.’

Some of the audience shifted uneasily in their seats when they heard Sales’s comments. Although there was some hostility towards the anarchist activists in the union, there was also a lot of respect for what they had achieved for the workers. Many of those who agreed with Sales thought it would be too difficult and dangerous to take on the CNT. There were massive problems 94

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involved in setting up a new union, which would be widely seen as divisive, counter-productive and a pawn of the employers.

Someone suggested throwing in their lot with the Sindicatos Católicos, the Catholic unions, but this was rejected because of their reputation as scabs and blacklegs. Nor were they really unions; they were more like religious charities for the deferential poor.

Sales, who had trained as a Jesuit, was persistent and convincing. Point by point, he overcame the objections raised by members of the audience until, by the end of the evening, the new union — the Corporación General de Trabajadores, Unión de Sindicatos Libres de España —had become a reality with Sales elected its first president.

Next day — with surprising speed and efficiency for an organisation supposedly set up only the previous night — the new union, the first properly fascist-corporatist labour organisation in Spain, published its constitution and its first manifesto, the core of which was a scathing attack on the CNT. But Sales hadn’t been working alone, nor had the founding meeting been entirely spontaneous. Behind him was a cabal of political, business, bureaucratic, religious and labour leaders from across the ultra-right and integrist spectrum. Sales’ compliant corporate-fascist union was being funded by Catalonia’s largest employers, especially those in the building industry, men such as Muntadas and Joan Miró i Trepat. Other Libre sponsors included the textile oligarchs, Subirana, Marsá and Domènech Sert, brother of the well-known Catalan painter and the second Conde de Sert — the scion of a prestigious bourgeois Catalan family who served as Patronál president between 1922 and 1929.

With the endorsement of the Church prelates and the backing of the big industrialists, the capitanía, Catalanist and Carlist institutions, the Libre quickly acquired centres across Barcelona, and soon claimed around 10,000 semi-militarised sympathisers, of whom perhaps a third were white- or blue-collar workers. A not unsubstantial number of these were renegade or dissatisfied CNT members opposed to the union’s anarchist objectives.

The Libre also launched its own weekly newspaper, La Trinchera, whose masthead slogan stated that it stood for ‘the liberation of the Spanish working class from the sindicatos 95

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únicos and anarchist tyranny’. The new union was equally hostile to the moderate Catholic labour unions then being organised by another Jesuit, Gabriel Palau — but at least their members weren’t being targeted for slaughter. Not yet, anyway.

The Libre formed its own ‘action service’ groups, which quickly became another unaccountable arm of the Special Services Brigade serving Barcelona’s new police chief, General Miguel Arleguí, who appointed a number of senior officers such as Agapito Marín, Escatín, Perez and Domínguez to liaise with the scab union. All of them were seconded to the Libre and authorised to sanction the ley de fugas, the law that legitimised the shooting of prisoners allegedly attempting to escape.

Arleguí regularly provided Sales with ‘intelligence’ from the Lasarte files on cenetistas they wanted eliminated. When a name was ‘suggested’, the victim’s file was collected from Captain Julio de Lasarte by Arleguí’s adjutant, Superintendent Alejo Pita, and delivered personally to Sales so he could brief his teams of killers. We also had reports that when compañeros were being ‘interrogated’ at police headquarters, the sinister Pita would sit in, listening quietly and taking notes.

Sales planned his hits with a trusted accomplice, another former Jesuit by the name of Jesús Laguía — a psychopath from Valencia who became one of the Libre’s most notorious killers.

Occasionally Sales himself acted as executioner, but it was mainly Laguía who did the dirty work.

Another of Arleguí’s Special Brigade officers liaising with the Libre was Honorio Inglés, who was also on a retainer from the Hispano-Suiza car company. Inglés’ agents were bullies and thugs such as Andrés Hortet, Ramón Ródenas, Miralles and Carlos Baldrich (‘Onelo’), another moonlighting police officer who acquired his notoriety because of the number of men he had killed while they were supposedly ‘escaping from lawful custody’.

Libre blood money was divided among its executive committee: Sales, Laguía, Lorenzo, Martínez, Anselmo Roig, Marco Rubio, Antonio Olivares and Feliciano Batarach. Sales, however, was the ‘bagman’ who agreed on the blood tariff with police commissioner Arleguí, and it was he who handled all the payments for the pistolero ‘hits’.

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12 December 1919: Barcelona, Confronting the Libre

CONFRONTING THE LIBRE The CNT responded quickly to the threat from the rival union.

On 12 December, two days after the Libre’s founding conference, the CNT published a leaflet and organised a public meeting in the carrer del Olmo union hall to denounce the Libre manifesto.

Prior to the meeting, a group of angry cenetistas went to the café Forno, in the carrer Talleres at the top of the Ramblas, where the Libre was holding its own meeting, and marched the fascist union members at pistol point through the streets of District V to the carrer del Olmo hall where they were publicly harangued about the immorality and perilous consequences of splitting the labour movement.

That night in the docks, a cenetista tossed a grenade at scab Libre stevedores unloading a ship, but it exploded prematurely and seriously injured the comrade who threw it. From then on the violence escalated. A few days later, on 15 December, pistoleros kidnapped, tortured and murdered a comrade by the name of Francisco Enrich. We later learned that it was the Baron de Koenig who tortured and killed him, personally. But at the time very few people were aware of the Baron’s role in events — apart from his patrons and his top men.

As the misery increased, so too did the number of violent incidents, especially when frustrated comrades saw — as Archs had correctly predicted — how badly it was affecting union morale. The understandable need to survive by ‘making do’ was seriously undermining union solidarity and causing considerable anger and frustration among action group militants.

The incident that had the biggest impact at the time was the assassination attempt on Arturo Elizalde, the textile magnate who was believed to have financed el Tero’s murder back in the summer. It happened on December 19, shortly after 2:00 in the afternoon. Two of Archs’ men, Pedro Mateu and Ramón Casanellas of the metalworkers’ action group, waited on Elizalde — who was also their employer — at the corner of Rosellón, opening fire on his car as it drove down the Paseo de San Joan.

Some bullets hit the car, others missed and ricocheted off the walls, but when the two comrades saw the car lose control and zigzag across the road and crash into a lamppost, they thought they had succeeded in killing their man. Making their escape, they calmly returned to work at the Elizalde factory.

But Elizalde had escaped, uninjured. It was his driver, 97

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Florentí Prats, an innocent employee, who died in the shoot-out, a tragedy that the press made much of —and that didn’t go down well among the CNT rank-and-file. In fact, Prats’ funeral provided an opportunity for a highly emotional anti-CNT demonstration, heavily exploited by the right.

Segui, Pestaña and Simó Pierá arrived back in Barcelona from the La Comedia Congress in Madrid on the day Elizalde’s driver was shot. Travelling on the train with them was a disillusioned Julio Amado who was returning to sort out his affairs after being sacked as civil governor. It was the end of Amado’s political career. Amado warned the CNT leaders about the new government’s plans to stamp out the único once and for all, and the extreme measures the new civil governor, the Conde de Salvatierra, had in mind — a brutal White Terror. These three ‘influential militants’, however, chose not to report Amado’s warnings to Archs or to the Defence Commission, which meant that when the crackdown came we weren’t adequately prepared to defend ourselves.

In their defence, Segui and the others claimed they thought the former civil governor was exaggerating Salvatierra’s plans because of his bitterness at losing his job. But what really concerned them was that if the groups had been forewarned about a repressive crackdown, the likelihood was that they would launch a pre-emptive cycle of defensive actions, which would compromise the leadership’s negotiations and be the end of their softly-softly tactics.

Although their silence left the único seriously exposed, few comrades in the groups believed the ‘influential militants’ of 1919 to be ‘class traitors’ — unlike those of a later generation such as Montseny, Esgleas, ‘Marianet’ and others —but they had lost a lot of credibility among the rank-and-file (especially Segui, who had stuck his head well and truly above the parapet over the CNT’s shortsighted collaboration with the state and the bosses in the mixed commissions), leaving themselves open, as they had done, to the accusation that they had become middlemen in the labour market. Now, with a more biddable civil governor and police commissioner in place, as well as a sympathetic military governor and captain-general, the Patronál executive and Barcelona’s ‘men of order’ decided it was time for them to escalate their campaign of false-flag terrorism.

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As part of its measures to reassure the Catalan high bourgeoisie that the CNT would be broken — as would the government-backed workers’ tribunals, the Comissiones Mixtas de Trabajo — the Patronál organised a closed meeting for local business leaders in Barcelona’s Novetats Theatre. Milans del Bosch, who chaired the meeting, received a standing ovation from the ‘diehards’ when he outlined to them his plans to destroy the CNT —‘by any means necessary’.

Three groups of pistoleros were now operating in Barcelona. As well as the Baron’s men — who answered only to the captain-general — and Sales’ Libre pistoleros — who came under the orders of police commissioner Arleguí — there was a third gang of ruthless killers who were responsible to Barcelona’s military governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido.

This third cabal was headed by Pere Homs, a lawyer who was also a secret service agent working for the Madrid-based General Directorate of Security in Madrid, the DGS. A drunk, a womaniser and a heavy gambler, Homs was devoid of any apparent morality. Drawn into the clutches of the Spanish secret service by the excesses of his debauched lifestyle, whatever dignity he may have had they plucked like a chicken.

First they coerced him into betraying his friends, then they turned him into a murderer.

A solicitor by profession, Pere Homs became, through his connections, a court-appointed lawyer who won the trust and respect of the CNT Prisoners Aid Committee because of the impressive number of acquittals of his clients, compañeros facing fairly serious charges. Genú, the secretary of the Madrid prisoners’ support committee, was so impressed with Homs’s record on getting cases dismissed that he had him listed as a CNT defence lawyer of choice. No one suspected for a moment that the reason Homs was so successful was because the authorities were colluding with him, allowing him to win his cases in court in order to gain our confidence.

Pere Homs was sent on attachment to the private office of Barcelona’s military governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido, with a brief to ‘monitor and neutralise’ the ‘anarchist menace’ — a sterile euphemism for murdering those whose activities threatened the status quo.

Another of his jobs was to spy on his colleagues in the legal profession, particularly ‘progressive’ lawyers such as Eduardo 99

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Barriobero, a former anarchist who represented CNT prisoners in the Madrid region. On one occasion, during a defence case meeting in Barcelona, Homs planned to murder Barriobero, but the plan had to be aborted when, unexpectedly, Barriobero was obliged to return to Madrid. Homs’s two regular hitmen were Calomarde, a Jesuit novice, and a man who ran a church workhouse in Barcelona’s Fifth District.

Homs’s modus operandi was to provide his mistress, La Payesa, a brothel madam, with photographs and a list of names from the Lasarte dossier that she kept in a locked drawer in her room. When anyone on the list visited her establishment, she immediately telephoned Homs who sent his killers to wait at the Bar Izquierda, across the road from the brothel. As the ‘target’ left her premises, la Payesa would stand at the door, marking him to the assassins across the road, who then followed and murdered him in a dark alley or down some mean back street.

CORRUPTION — A TWO-WAY PROCESS But, as Barcelona’s oligarchs discovered, corruption is a twoway process that infects the corrupters as much as it does the corrupted. There is no institution in the world, no matter how idealistic or well-intentioned, that can sell its soul to murderers and give its inner ear to such medieval reactionaries as those in the Patronál and the Hiéron, without their brutalising and corrupting values ultimately being turned against it.

Obsessed with destroying organised labour, Barcelona’s ‘men of order’ turned to the dregs of society and gave them free rein to cause havoc and mayhem. But the demons they conjured up quickly grew too powerful, and refused to return to the pit from whence they came. The oligarchs had given them the city — but lacked the political will to take it back.

Nemesis’s choice of medium for its admonitory ends of atonement, reparation and injustice can at times be truly poetic.

The blurring of the weakly delineated moral lines that separate ‘legitimate’ police action from criminality and delinquency proved to be a double-edged sword for the oligarchs who planned and funded Spain’s ‘white terror’. It also weakened the moral authority of the more cautious, gradualist elements in the CNT — men like Pestaña and Segui, especially 100

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after an unsuccessful attempt on the latter’s life that summer.

‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap,’ as my old granny used to say.

Milans del Bosch was now facing increasing criticism from within the conservative and liberal establishments, and from the army itself. The repression he unleashed had yielded the opposite of what had been promised, as the CNT’s influence continued to grow; hardly a week went by without gunfights and murders on the streets of the Catalan capital. Also, the moral influence of the CNT’s so-called ‘moderates’, who had worked hard to mollify the groups and stop them responding precipitately to employer and pistolero provocation, had diminished substantially, while that of the groups had risen.

The argument for martial law and state-sponsored terror as a means of social control had been discredited.

A fear bordering on hysteria now pervaded Barcelona, with people venturing out of their homes only when absolutely necessary. The bourgeoisie were now more convinced than ever that the workers were about to rise up and murder them in their beds. An example of how this affected civic life was the abysmally low turnout at the usually well-attended annual procession of illuminated carriages, which drove through the Parque de la Ciudad on 21 December. In 1919, only a dozen carriages turned up — and there were hardly any spectators.

Throughout this tense period, the Baron de Koenig was providing the captain-general with daily intelligence reports of CNT plans. For the most part, it was chatter and gossip, but there was enough high-level material to make Milans del Bosch reasonably well informed as to what was happening in the smoke-filled union halls and cafés of the workers’ barris.

General Arleguí, the new chief of police, on the other hand, was less well informed, which was embarrassing for him in his twice-daily meetings with the captain-general who clearly knew considerably more about what was going on than he did.

Most of these meetings ended with Arleguí being wrong-footed and made to look stupid by the captain-general.

Determined to identify Milans’s informant, Arleguí discovered that it was the Baron de Koenig — a man about whom, surprisingly, he knew nothing. But that was about to change. Arleguí made a point of learning everything there was to know about the Baron, including the fact that apart from his espionage activities and being wanted for numerous crimes all 101

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over Europe — and in Santander — he was now running a protection and blackmailing racket in Barcelona, targeting the very people who were bankrolling him. Just the previous month, he had staged a phoney attack on Félix Grauperá in the carrer Salmerón, in the barri de Gracia, shortly before his Madrid trip.

Armed with statements from informers and victims as to the Baron’s complicity in the blackmail plots against Barcelona’s great and good, General Arleguí made his move in the early hours of December 22. Led by his top man, Special Services Brigade Inspector Luis de León, police officers raided the Baron’s office at No 6. Rambla de las Flores — Bravo Portillo’s old premises — and his luxury apartments in the prestigious Gaudi-built Pedrera de Barcelona and the Casa Milà at No. 80 Paseo de Gracia, where they found incriminating documents implicating the Baron in blackmail and ‘staged’ assassination plots. They also discovered evidence linking the Baron with Milans del Bosch in some compromising and potentially criminal relationships. Arleguí had more than enough evidence, not only to arrest or deport the Baron, but also to implicate captain-general Milans del Bosch in his conspiracies as well.

After ‘sweating’ him for a few hours, Arleguí offered the Baron a deal he couldn’t refuse: his protection, in return for being included in all his reports. He was now Arleguí’s man.

The wily police commissioner insisted that there should be no direct contact between them, and appointed Inspector Luis de León as his personal liaison officer. Now the police commissioner could meet the captain-general with confidence and from a position of power, without fear of contradiction, embarrassment or being made to look foolish.

December 1919 proved to be a terrible month for the CNT, with hundreds of comrades arrested and imprisoned on the flimsiest of reasons. In an attempt to redress the imbalance, the Defence Commission made plans for a mass break-out from the Modelo Prison for Christmas Day, a day when prison security and discipline would be more relaxed — and because the publicity value of such an action would be enormous.

On 25 December, at 5:30 in the afternoon, the bugle sounded for the prisoners in the exercise yard to line up in 102

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columns to return to the gallery for the evening meal. As they shuffled into their columns, a fight broke out among a group of gypsies. Warders from the adjoining galleries were called to help quell the disturbance and get the prisoners back upstairs, all of which caused a serious set-back for our escape plan, which had been arranged for 6:00 that evening.

Meanwhile, from 5.30, about thirty of us had been assembling around the prison walls, preparing for the breakout.

At 6.00, when the nearby church clock struck the hour, our signal to the comrades inside that we were ready, and in place, was to be the the sound of whistles and gunshots that they could hear over the wall.

Inside the galleries, at a time when the prisoners should have been collecting their evening meal from cauldrons on the ground floor, close to the gallery gates, everyone was still lined up on the landings.

On hearing the prearranged signal, cenetistas in each of the prison’s three wings broke ranks on their landings and rushed downstairs wielding sticks, knives and any other weapons they had been able to fabricate or smuggle in. They rushed en masse to the gates of each of the three galleries in an attempt to seize control of the centre and the main gate, but they weren’t quick enough. The duty warders retreated to the central rotunda in time and successfully locked the gallery gates, with all the prisoners still inside.

Suspecting an armed attack from outside, the prison director telephoned the cavalry barracks in the nearby carrer de Tarragona requesting urgent assistance, and troops to guard the prison gates and secure the outside walls. When the cavalry and the soldiers arrived it was clear we didn’t stand a chance of success , so we had to make our own escape back to the Old Town as best we could. Fortunately, none of us on the outside were arrested or injured, but the same couldn’t be said for those on the inside.

Within half an hour, Barcelona’s recently appointed civil governor, Francisco Maestre Laborde, the Conde de Salvatierra de Alava, arrived on the scene with a hundred or so Guardia Civíl to take personal charge of the situation. With him was the director-general of prisons, who happened to be visiting Barcelona at the time. Salvatierra ordered the Guardia Civíl to go into the prison and quell the riot. They were to shoot any 103

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prisoners who refused to obey their commands.

So brutally did the Guardia Civíl beat up the prisoners — urged on enthusiastically by the Conde de Salvatierra de Alava who was watching everything from the centre — that the director-general of prisons felt obliged to intervene to restrain them.

Sixty-two compañeros were badly injured in that incident.

Many were taken to the Guardia Civíl barracks where they were brutally tortured in classic Guardia Civíl manner — testicle distortion, brain compression and wedges inserted between fingernails and flesh. *** And so ended 1919 — not triumphally, but dismally, with unprovoked vigilante attacks on workers’ street-corner meetings and with police and Sometent raids on union premises across Greater Barcelona, and beyond. The repression was ferocious, cruel, ruthless — and relentless!

With Hogmanay and Ne’erday 1920 fast approaching, I was at a low ebb, and felt frustrated and slightly despairing at how little progress we had made given our earlier successes. I was also a bit homesick and melancholic, and seriously considering returning to Glasgow.

It was Lara who convinced me otherwise. We had grown very close over the past few months, escaping whenever we could into the countryside or the Parc de la Ciutadella. With all the enthusiasm of youth, we laughed and talked about books and ideas and life and our hopes for the future, about anything and everything that came into our heads, in fact — but we had never made love since our night together on the beach at Tarragona.

On that last day of 1919, as we strolled down the Ramblas arm-in-arm, I told her I was considering leaving Spain. She halted abruptly and turned me to face her, and said in the most matter-of-fact and determined voice, ’No, escocés! Por favor! No te vayas!

Te quiero! y te necesito aqui al lado mia. Hay demasiado que hacer aqui!’

She was telling me she loved me and wanted me to stay with her — there was too much to do. What could I say? I looked into her clear hazelnut-brown eyes and pulled her to 104

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me, tightly. Our lips met in a long and passionately hungry kiss.

I was such a big softie. ‘Of course I’ll stay,’ I replied with a grin. ‘Your place or mine, hen?’

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NOTEBOOK: 1919 NOTES & OBSERVATIONS â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 1919 PHOTOGRAPHS & CUTTINGS ALBUM 1919

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NOTES & OBSERVATIONS —1919 SETTING THE SOUTH ABLAZE The social crisis in Spain was as profound as anything that was happening elsewhere in Europe at the time. From all corners of the country, tens of thousands of illiterate and semi-literate rural workers flocked to industrial Barcelona over the previous five years, where they had been absorbed into the Catalan proletariat — much to the horror of the racist, almost Boer-like Catalanista ethnic supremacists, who referred to them disparagingly as Murcianos, mainly because many were dark-skinned immigrants from Murcia and other parts of Andalusia.

This large pool of unskilled labour was a fertile recruiting ground for the union. In spite of subsequent problems, the initial success of the Canadiense strike gave the CNT enormous credibility, and they remained conspicuously predominant in Barcelona’s working-class suburbs.

Ever since the previous year’s Sants Congress, the CNT had been heavily focusing its membership drive on Andalusia, where strikes had been running continuously since the previous March.

For much of 1919, large areas of southern Spain were literally and metaphorically ablaze, as government buildings and crops were burned, land seized, and villages and towns occupied.

Córdoba was the epicentre of the movement, with impoverished day labourers occupying and working the untilled and uncultivated areas of the large estates, and generally putting the fear of God into the big landowners, many of whom fled to the cities with their families and lackeys.

There was no doubt that this widespread agrarian unrest in Andalusia was moving rapidly to the insurgency stage. The anarchist historian Diaz del Moral chronicled the events in his History of Agrarian Agitations in the Province of Córdoba, in which he recounted the anarchist millenarianism sweeping across the rural countryside:

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Notes & Observations 1919: Setting the South Ablaze We who lived through that time — 1918–1919 — will never forget those amazing sights. Like some great religious revival … in the fields, in the shelters and yards, wherever peasants met to talk, for whatever purpose, there was only one topic of conversation, always discussed seriously and fervently — the social question. When men rested from work, during the smoking breaks in the day and after the evening meal, whoever was the most educated would read out loud from pamphlets, leaflets and the newspapers while others listened with great attention. Then came the perorations, corroborating what had just been read, and an unending succession of speeches praising it. They did not understand everything. Some words they did not know. Some interpretations were childish, others malicious, depending on the personality of the man, but at bottom all agreed. How else? Was not all they had heard the pure truth, which they had felt all their lives, even though they had never been able to express it?

Everyone read at all times. There was no limit to the men’s curiosity and to their thirst for learning. Even the riders read on their animals, leaving reins and halters trailing. When they packed their lunch, they always put some piece of literature into the wallet … Admittedly 70 to 80 per cent were illiterate, but this was not an insuperable obstacle. The enthusiastic illiterate bought his paper and gave it to a comrade to read. He then made him mark the article he liked best. Then he would ask another comrade to read him the marked article and after a few readings he had it by heart and would repeat it to those who had not yet read it. There is only one word to describe it, frenzy.

In a few weeks the original nucleus of ten or twelve adepts would be converted into one of two hundred; in a few months practically the entire working population, seized by ardent proselytism, propagated the flaming ideal frenziedly. The few who held out, whether because they were peaceable or timid, or afraid of losing public respect, would be set upon by groups of the convicted as they ploughed the furrow on the mountainside, or in the cottage, the bars, in the streets and squares. They would be bombarded with reasons, with imprecations, with contempt, irony, sarcasm, until finally they agreed. Resistance was impossible. Once the village was converted, the agitation spread… Everyone was an agitator. And so the fire spread rapidly to all the combustible villages.

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THE ANARCHISTIC WAVE THAT MAY DELUGE US ALL Seville’s captain-general advised the Madrid government to pursue a softly-softly approach to the local agrarian unrest, but to no avail. Prime Minister Maura responded by declaring martial law, and ordering his minister for war, General Luis Santiago, to send more troops into Córdoba province to crush the general strike there. In addition to the large numbers of Guardia Civíl units already in the area, Santiago sent another fourteen infantry and six cavalry companies. In Andalusia, the reprisals were even more brutal than in Catalonia. Entire towns and villages were besieged, and taken and retaken after pitched battles between the agricultural workers and the forces of repression. The CNT, of course, was proscribed, union centres and ateneos closed and thousands of activists were arrested.

Although the repression halted the revolutionary agrarian movement in Andalusia, it did not destroy it, but it did underline the fact that it was the army that was holding the system together, not the elected politicians.

In Catalonia, CNT membership continued to grow, in spite of Milans and Anido’s relentless and draconian repression. As the único grew in strength and influence, the bishops, landowners, bankers, businessmen and industrialists all ratcheted up the pressure on the army for a military dictatorship to protect their semi-feudal system against what General Aguilera, the captaingeneral of Madrid, euphemistically called ‘the anarchistic wave that may deluge us all’.

THE SOMETENT The Canadiense strike and the wave of secondary solidarity strikes that swept Catalonia during the first three months of 1919 put the fear of God into the Catalanist middle classes, especially those of the nationalist Lliga and the Monarchist Union. When push came to shove, their economic interests took precedence over any nationalist affectations they may have had. Their nightmares were now more about the CNT and social revolution than about the conspiratorial machinations of Madrid politicians and the Barcelona garrison. God may have been on their side, but they still needed the army and their own auxiliaries, the Sometent, if they were going to hang on to their power, property and privileges.

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Romanones and Milans del Bosch had won over the Catalanist bourgeoisie by the simple stratagem of modifying the charter of its ‘heroic paladins’, the Sometent. They brought this right-wing and primarily rural middle-class militia under the wing of the military and allowed it to be legally deployed in the cities and towns of Catalonia, as opposed to the villages and small rural communities where it normally operated.

Although officially forbidden by its medieval charter from entering towns and cities — because of its strong separatist links — the Sometent was first used in Barcelona against workers during the 1902 general strike, and was now regularly called upon to help repress urban labour protests, intimidate workers and act as a parapolitical auxiliary police force. It was a Sometent squad, for example, that arrested Francisco Ferrer í Guardia after the events of Semana Tragica in 1909.

While its members came from all walks of life, this vigilante force was in fact the armed wing of the anti-liberal Catalan bourgeoisie, an ultra-rightist posse comitatus directed by Catholic and monarchist fundamentalists who modelled themselves on the Requetés, the rural militias of the reactionary Carlists of Navarre, supporters of Don Jaime de Borbón, the pretender to the Spanish throne. Their role, as they saw it, was defending ‘civilised society’ against the masses whom they genuinely thought of as belonging to an inferior race.

By 1919, with the separatist and nationalist threat now superseded by the ‘Red Peril’, Milans del Bosch and Romanones needed a popular counterweight to the CNT and felt sufficiently confident to co-opt the Sometent auxiliaries, give them official status and provide them with military training — under close military control. *** Political oversight of the organisation was in the hands of its capo di tutti capi, Josep Bertrán i Musitu, a close friend and confidant of Milans del Bosch and a strong man of the Catalanista right, a character as vicious as his military-police adviser, Bravo Portillo.

When briefing new Sometent recruits, Bertrán i Musitu pulled no punches. His advice on dealing with recalcitrant suspects and uppity workers was explicit: ’If your “Hands-up!” order is not obeyed immediately, you must shoot, and shoot with effect.

Anyone approaching you with their hands in their pockets, or who looks remotely suspicious — shoot them dead, immediately.

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Don’t hesitate. You’ll occasionally make mistakes and shoot innocent people, but that cannot be helped. Sooner or later you are bound to get the right parties. The more often you shoot, the better I will like you — and rest assured that none of you will get into trouble for wounding or killing anyone.’

Bertrán i Musitu, however, had no military experience and was a purely political figurehead, a sop to the Catalanists and the Lliga. The day-to-day running of the Sometent was, in fact, in the hands of the captain-general’s protégé, the disgraced former chief superintendent, Manuel Bravo Portillo, whom Milans del Bosch had appointed to head up the Capitanía’s new covert operations unit — despite Madrid’s specific instructions that the government was to have nothing further to do with him.

Bravo Portillo’s responsibilities included turning Barcelona’s shopkeeper- and middle-class vigilantes into a disciplined fighting force, a role for which he was well equipped, having been a lieutenant of guerrillas in the Philippines during the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. Also, during his short summer sojourn in Barcelona’s Modelo Prison, Bravo Portillo had prepared his revenge on the CNT, particularly on Angel Pestaña, whom — like Captain Hook with Peter Pan —he blamed for all his misfortunes, and whom he swore he would kill. Now, as chief security and intelligence sub-contractor to the Capitanía — a position that was subject to neither public scrutiny nor public accountability — he began recruiting men from his overlapping networks of former policemen and informers, as well as the criminal lowlifes he had met in prison. These men formed an elite ‘ghost’ squad within the Sometent who were prepared to do whatever Bravo Portillo ordered them to do — including torture and murder.

Bravo Portillo’s lieutenants included the following: Fernández Terán, a psychopathic former-security guard, who was his secretary and bodyguard and accompanied him almost everywhere; Antonio Soler, also known as ‘El Mallorquin’; Luis Fernández García; Octavio Muñoz, ‘El Argentino’; Epifanio Casas; Bernat Armengol; Jerónimo Botanero; Juan Rodríguez; Paco ‘El Rubio’; ‘Espejito’; and Eduardo Ferrer, the former cenetista whose gang had killed the elderly industrialist Barret.

By the end of 1919, Catalonia’s ‘White Guard’, as the Sometent Freikorps was also known, had around 20,000 members and chapters in Madrid, Zaragoza and other towns and cities 112

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across Spain. In Catalonia, it became Martínez Anido’s private plainclothes army — a hotchpotch alliance of petit-bourgeois squadristi; shopkeepers; ultra-conservative españolistas and Catalanistas; Integrists, obsessed cultists of the Sacred Heart of Jesús and the Immaculate Heart of Mary; and the arrogant, testosterone-driven gilded youth of the merchant city.

When the state of emergency was first declared, the Sometent were issued with red armbands and given old Remington rifles dating from the Cuban War. The issue that caused most contention was the colour of their armbands, and they spent the first few weeks arguing over which colour best reflected their politics —or matched their hatbands. After a few days, the red armbands were changed for yellow ones, then blue.

Not all of the Sometent were cold-blooded killers, but it certainly attracted a lot of bullies who saw themselves as the moral guardians of ‘traditional values’, by which they meant the values of the Church, the state, good order and discipline.

Violently anti-liberal and anti-secular, they were hostile to anything and everything that smacked of modernity.

‘God, Fatherland, King!’ was one of their slogans. Another was ‘Peace, Peace, Forever Peace’, which they never tired of proclaiming as they postured and strutted their way through the barris in their dark suits, boaters, fedoras and bowlers — stopping, searching, and intimidating anyone who looked as though they might be remotely sympathetic to the workers’ cause.

Those found carrying CNT membership cards were beaten up and handed over to the military.

MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE...

They were also tumultuous times in England. Charlie Lahr’s letters to me from London told of insubordination and mutiny spreading through the British army like an incoming floodtide. At Folkestone, 10,000 soldiers returning from France mutinied; 2,000 at Dover, and at least 60,000 more were involved in mutinous behaviour at other camps across Britain.

In London, 3,000 angry soldiers marched in protest from Victoria Station to the War Office, and in Epsom, soldiers stormed the police station and killed the station sergeant. At Kimmel Park, the red flag was raised, and five men were killed and twenty-one wounded in the ensuing riot. In Glasgow, unemployment, housing shortages, high rents and pressure for the forty-hour 113

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week all came to a head in George Square on Friday 31 January 1919, when the Riot Act was read to disperse more than 60,000 strikers and protestors, this provoked a pitched battle with the police. Next day, English troops occupied the city centre with tanks, while Glaswegian troops of the Highland Light Infantry were confined to Maryhill Barracks.

In Paris, on the same bitterly cold March day that the victors of the Great War began carving up Europe at Versailles, an anarchist by the name of Louis Emile Cottin fired six shots at French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau, who was on his way to meet US President Woodrow Wilson. Cottin had been arrested on three previous occasions for anti-militarist agitation while still in the army.

‘What use are noble, liberating ideas,’ argued Cottin at his trial, ‘while bandits like George Clémenceau rule the world?’

Despite being shot close to the heart, Clémenceau survived the assassination attempt, and as for Cottin, he would have died on the guillotine if Clémenceau had not intervened on his behalf and asked the court for leniency. His sentence was commuted to eight years’ imprisonment.

In Milan, fascism was formally launched onto an unsuspecting world on 23 March 1919, when Benito Mussolini, Italy’s would-be Lenin, addressed the fasci italiani di combattimiento. His first speech, in the morning — nationalist in tone —was to an audience of arditi veterans, the shock troops of the Italian army. Eulogising Italy’s war veterans, he berated the shabby treatment they received, and ended by demanding that Austria cede to Italy the territories of Fiume and Dalmatia. In the afternoon, he outlined the basic tenets of fascism — antimonarchy, anti-clerical and anti-capitalist — and attacked the Italian Socialist Party as reactionary and conservative.

‘The fascist slogan “economic democracy”, he claimed, ‘means workers’ control of industry, because we want the workers to become accustomed to managerial responsibilities.’

Basically, he co-opted syndicalist socialism as the ideology of the corporate state.

Fascism was a theatrical charade aimed at winning popular support. Arms, transport, publications and uniforms — the black uniform of the arditi became that of the fascist blackshirt — were all paid for by Italy’s men of property — landowners and 114

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industrialists, who realised early on how the popular opportunistic braggart Mussolini could be used to their advantage.

According to Mussolini, fascism was a ‘socialist’ workers’ movement, but his backers, however, saw it differently. Their plan was to use the fascist gangs — the squadre — against the landless agricultural workers squatting on their country estates, and against the strikers who had taken over the factories.

It didn’t take long for the squadristi to moved on from strikebreaking to attacking leftist newspapers, cooperatives and trade unions. Anyone they considered antifascist was forced to take a purging dose of castor oil or was beaten up with bastone and manganello, the truncheons favoured by the squadristi.

BIRTH OF THE PATRONÁL The success of the Canadiense strike provoked a predictable reaction from Catalonia’s ruling families, clans and the ‘men of order’ to whom the CNT’s victory had been like a red cape to a Saltillo bull. The workers’ organisation had to be destroyed, but clearly the old Foment de Treball Nacional — the National Federation of Labour —was not up to the job. A new organisation was needed.

During the first week of the strike, a new and even more reactionary capitalist entity was born, whose aim it was to unite the country’s employers in common cause against the CNT — and restore working-class deference. Its first act was to convene a meeting under the aegis of the integrist Hiéron du Val d’Or, ostensibly to assess the implications of the CNT’s latest challenge to the social order.

Chaired by Milans del Bosch and Joan Miró i Trepat, the ‘byinvitation-only’ audience consisted of prominent old-money industrialists, new-money businessmen and entrepreneurial movers and shakers drawn from across the right-wing political, security and religious spectrum. Catalan nationalists, Españolistas (supporters of a unitary Spain), monarchists, Carlists and lay and ecclesiastical Roman Catholic integrists — they were all there, as were senior police, army officers and civil servants.

What they all had in common was the fact that they were rabid free-marketeers, who opposed any concession to collective bargaining, either directly with unions or through state-backed arbitration and conciliation tribunals.

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Their unshakeable point of principle was that employers should have no checks and balances on how they ran their businesses, or the manner in which they treated their employees — which, for the most part, was like slaves.

In their permanently besieged world, the only legitimate role for government was to provide the repressive means with which to crush the unions and halt the slide towards anarchy and revolution.

Top of their agenda was a name change from the National Federation of Industrialists to the Spanish Employers’ Federation, The semantics of this were never clear to me, but it clearly wasn’t intended for cosmetic reasons; it was meant to send a signal to the CNT and the organised labour movement that it was now facing a united national employers’ organisation as opposed to the previous regionally federated one.

The new Patronál was no ordinary business lobby or pressure group out to challenge the tax regime and advance the upper-middle class legislative agenda. Nor was it content just to destroy the CNT; it wanted to erase, totally, the idea of organised labour from the consciousness of the Spanish workingman — and woman.

The nominal president of the new body was the Catalan entrepreneur Félix Grauperá, the puppet of the real stringpuller and sceneshifter — Joan Miró i Trepat. The building industry felt it had most to lose from a militant labour union, something that was reflected in the appointment of other diehards to the Patronál board, including Francesc Junoy, Jaume Agustí and Tomás Benet.

Greedy, ambitious and arrogant, Grauperá was notorious for his vicious tongue, while his deputy, Tomás Benet, a lawyer, was another of the Patronál’s sinister eminence grises. Whereas Grauperá was foul-mouthed, crude and histrionic, Benet was articulate, suave and sophisticated, but, in spite of his affected airs and graces, he was a man as much driven by hatred for anarcho-syndicalists as was Grauperá.

Their speeches were inflammatory and emotional diatribes threatening physical violence and economic sanctions against anyone offering concessions to the CNT unions. As far as they were concerned, only the Patronál had the authority to deal with labour disputes.

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Notes & Observations 1919: General Severiano Martínez Anido

Within a month, the new employers’ organisation had recruited nearly 5,000 individual and corporate members, and had built up a war chest of nearly half a million pesetas with which it openly subsidised the Guardia Civíl, the police and the Sometent auxiliaries. The quid pro quo was the employers’ overt and covert support by the forces of public order, as and when required.

Another outcome of this meeting was the decision to set up a clandestine section whose inner workings were shrouded in deep secrecy, but whose function was to coordinate and finance ‘extra-legal action’ against union militants. ‘Extra-legal action’ was here a clear a euphemism for a campaign of disinformation, intimidation, mayhem and — later — murder and terror in pursuit of the Patronál’s ultimate political and social objectives.

GENERAL SEVERIANO MARTÍNEZ ANIDO As Barcelona’s social war intensified, proportionality went out the window. Much of this was due to the city’s new military governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido, who proved to be the most vicious of all its military governors. With Milans’s blessing and the financial and political support of the city’s diehard employers, Martínez Anido embarked on a blitzkrieg against Barcelona’s anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists.

But it wasn’t all down to the general. What was to become the institutionalised slaughter of cenetistas was a nationwide phenomenon, and not simply the whim of a few out-of-control army officers and policemen acting out their own reactionary fantasies. No, the policy initiative came from the very top, from central government in Madrid, from officials at the highest level, all of whom, up to and including the prime minister, were complicit in the pistolero campaign.

Severiano Martínez Anido was a caricature of the Prussian officers I’d seen in The Graphic. A brutal, thin-lipped blockhead of a man, he had a cleft chin, puffy sacks under his narrow, rheumy eyes, close-cropped dark hair, prominent ears, a Kaiser Wilhelm-type moustache — and the shoulders and neck of an Aberdeen Angus. The man was a brute, given to roaring and braying at his subordinates — though, unfortunately, those roars and brays always meant bad news for CNT militants.

I first saw Martínez Anido in the flesh outside the Ritz Hotel, when he arrived to give a speech — his first to the Patronál — on to how he intended dealing with labour unrest — the so-called 117

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‘social question’. Dressed to intimidate, in his full-dress uniform, he was bedecked with ribbons and medals, a sword, gold lanyards and a plumed hat, and a fleshy neck and chin that bulged out in folds over his tight, high-necked tunic collar.

In this first off-the-record briefing to the Patronál leaders, he promised to eradicate the anarcho-syndicalist threat: ’Believe me, gentlemen, I shall resolve Barcelona’s social problems, and it will be without recourse either to the police or to the Guardia Civíl. I shall do it by raising the public’s sense of civic responsibility. I shall force them to lose their cowardice. My message to all free workers is that for each one of them that dies, ten anarchosyndicalists will pay with their lives.’

He was deadly serious. Throughout his time in office, an average of 15 trade unionists were murdered each week on the streets of Barcelona — a total of 700 dead in all.

In private, among his cronies, Martínez Anido boasted openly about his methods of ‘resolving’ the union problem: ‘When I want rid of someone,’ he told Milans del Bosch, ‘all I have to do is “enquire” after them. That simple enquiry becomes an unspoken order, and within a matter of days the individual in question has “disappeared”.’ *** Anido’s responsibility for the pistolero campaign ran much deeper than merely ‘expressing an interest’ in someone. Every morning, over coffee and churros at a bar near the Atarazanas barracks, Bravo Portillo briefed him on the events of the previous night: the number of raids, arrests and ‘summary executions’ made by each of his ‘action groups’.

Bravo Portillo meticulously recorded all of this information, including the murders —which he listed as ‘shot while attempting to escape lawful custody’ — in his special carbon-copy notebook, which he called the ‘The Manifold’. The notebook made two copies, of which he one gave to Martínez Anido, keeping the second and the original himself.

FUGITIVE LAW Segui was right about the likely outcome of the strike. The solidarity strike of March 1919 had little chance of success, especially without support from the surrounding towns and villages. We were isolated.

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Notes & Observations 1919: Pestaña Returns to Barcelona

Barcelona was now an occupied city, held by its own troops.

Shopkeepers who closed in solidarity with their customers were forced at bayonet point to open their premises. If the owners didn’t appear at the ordained time, the soldiers broke open the doors and shutters, leaving the premises open and unguarded for anyone to help themselves to the stock.

The strike committee met regularly in an apartment in Bonanova, just below Tibidabo, but it was clear the will to resist had gone. Even the groups were unusually quiet throughout this period, and there had been no serious actions or atentados since the strike began. Then, in the early hours of 31 March, there occurred the killing of the cold-blooded extra-judicial murder of outspoken secretary of the CNT’s tanners’ union, Miguel Burgos while ‘attempting to escape arrest’.

Burgos’s murder was the opening salvo in the bloodiest stage of the class war in Barcelona — the ley de fugas.

Although legislation formally introducing the ley de fugas didn’t come onto the statute books and become de jure for another two years, 31 March, 1919 was when it became de facto.

It was, in effect, a shoot-to-kill policy legitimising the summary execution of activists whom the law-enforcement agencies claimed were a ‘threat to life and limb’. It was the state’s ‘elegant’ solution to legally eliminating trouble-making militants.

PESTAÑA RETURNS TO BARCELONA The eight-hour day was anathema to the Catalan oligarchs; it was the slipping point of the old social order. Anything gained by the workers was, as they saw it, at their expense.

Many employers, priests and army officers believed that the eight-hour working day would lead, inevitably, to shop-floor indiscipline and the collapse of management authority, with workers taking over the factories and agricultural labourers the land, as was then happening in Italy. In short, it presaged bloody revolution.

But not all employers were as rabidly anti-unionist as Grauperá and his Patronál colleagues. One liberal employers’ faction, who strongly disagreed with Patronál methods and their self-appointed role as judge and jury in their own cases, asked governor Montañes to open up talks with the CNT. Montañes contacted the Roca brothers, Josep and Jaume, who — although not themselves cenetistas — had good CNT connections. The 119

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Rocas, in turn, contacted Angel Pestaña, who was then living with his wife and daughter in Tarragona, and asked him to return to Barcelona to act as an intermediary in the negotiations between the liberal employers, the governor and the strike committee. The thinking was that because Pestaña hadn’t been involved in the Canadiense strike he could bring a fresh and independent perspective to the negotiations.

Pestaña accepted the Rocas’ invitation and returned to Barcelona, but even though he had come on the governor’s invitation, Pestaña had to be extremely careful — and came disguised as a priest. Bravo Portillo had sworn to kill the cenetista, and he meant it. Since Bravo Portillo’s release from prison, the former police chief’s spies and agents were on the lookout everywhere for him.

Pestaña and his family moved into a first-floor apartment at No. 62 carrer Conde de Asalto, in the middle of the barri xino, where a local police informer identified him within days of his arrival. It was only a matter of luck that that particular confidente worked for Doval’s man, chief inspector Roldán, rather than Bravo Portillo, but Roldán knew that Bravo Portillo would also soon discover Pestaña’s whereabouts, and so, on 3 April, he sent two of his own trusted men, inspectors Más and Grimau, to bring the union activist into protective custody.

Pestaña was taken straight to police headquarters where he had a long discussion with Doval about the proposals being made by the moderate employers, and if and how he could help negotiate an end to the strike. After the meeting, the bemused Pestaña was taken to the warship Catalunya, moored in the harbour, while his wife and daughter were placed in a safe house under police guard.

MILANS BACKS BRAVO PORTILLO The Rocas brothers, meanwhile, continuing in their roles as unofficial negotiators for Governor Montañes, made what looked like a decisive breakthrough. Over the two weeks of the solidarity strike they diligently contacted as many different employers who were willing to negotiate with the CNT. In the middle of these discussions, the Rocas brothers were betrayed, denounced for allegedly keeping the strike going and arrested on the orders of General Perales, the general 120

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commanding the zone where they lived. As a result, the crucial meeting between the employers and the strike committee was cancelled, drawing the strike out more — ironic as this was the point of the denunciation in the first place.

But the Rocas weren’t particularly worried, at least not to begin with. They had no reason to be — they were, after all, working for the governor. It was only when they realised that they were being taken to army headquarters, instead of police headquarters, that they knew things were not as they seemed.

When he heard of his envoys’ arrest, Commissioner Doval did everything in his power to have the Rocas’ case transferred to his jurisdiction. At first General Perales refused, but after two days he agreed to allow Doval to interview the men at police headquarters. When they arrived, Doval asked the officer in charge of the Rocas’ military escort, Captain Mariano Mulguizo, to remain in the hall while he questioned the men in his office.

The captain agreed, and, once inside Doval’s office, the chief inspector allowed the Rocas brothers to leave by a side door.

When Captain Mulguizo discovered his charges had escaped, obviously with Doval’s complicity, he immediately informed General Turner, who was apoplectic with rage, convinced that the civil authorities were protecting the strikers for their own conspiratorial pro-revolutionary ends.

The Rocas’ escape proved a good result for Bravo Portillo, as it was to him, instead of the police, that General Turner turned on hearing Captain Mulguizo’s report. Turner ordered Bravo Portillo to find and re-arrest the Rocas, which he did — within two hours, a coup that improved his standing enormously with the military. *** When informed of the Rocas’ re-arrest, Commissioner Doval and Civil Governor Carlos Montañes immediately submitted their resignations to Madrid, along with a report on the captaingeneral’s continuing close links with Manuel Bravo Portillo and the latter’s criminal activities and thinly-veiled connections with the police and the Barcelona General Staff.

The upshot was that Bravo Portillo was summoned to Madrid for questioning by the Director General of Security at the Interior Ministry headquarters in the Puerta del Sol. Milans del Bosch was outraged by Madrid’s ‘presumptuousness’ in daring to discipline his confidential agent 121

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and loyal servant and, to demonstrate the extent of Bravo Portillo’s support among Barcelona’s business leaders, the captain-general asked José Palleja, Secretary General of the Federación Patronál de Barcelona to write an endorsement of his ‘captain’ of murderers, which he forwarded to the interior minister. Interestingly, the letter confirmed, for the very first time, the existence of the ‘private police force’, and of Milans del Bosch’s knowledge of the activities of this parallel force, if not his complicity in its formation: Barcelona, 9 April 1919 Dear Sir: We, the undersigned, representing almost the entirety of the Employers of Barcelona, respectfully give notice to Your Excellency: That, given that Barcelona’s police force has more than amply demonstrated its inability to prevent the coercion and outrages besetting employers and free workers alike, we have decided that a specialist police force is required to make good these shortcomings, and to protect their lives, which are under constant threat. The organisation of this police force is being entrusted to Don Manuel Bravo Portillo, whose police expertise has been so amply demonstrated, among other things, by his having been the only Chief of the Special Services Brigade during whose term of office no atentados were mounted. In fact, he was responsible for the capture of alleged perpetrators of previous attentats, a record that has earned him the enmity of all the unions active in this region. However, we are dismayed to have received a confidential report that Sr. Bravo Portillo has been ordered to leave immediately for Madrid to report to the Most Excellent Sr. Director of Security, something which we find incomprehensible when Your Excellency has indicated that you have the utmost regard for Sr. Bravo Portillo, as do we, when you appointed him to carry out confidential missions.

Consequently, we ask Your Excellency to forward to H.M. Government our most energetic objections to Sr. Bravo Portillo’s leaving Barcelona, where he has rendered the most valuable services to Trade and Industry, and has earned the complete trust of the under-signed, and, most importantly of all, the trust of Your Excellency, whom we all look upon as the real stalwart of [law and] order and sole guarantor of our lives.

Yours faithfully, José Palleja (acting Secretary General of the Federació Patronál de Barcelona) 122

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With the backing of his general staff officers and the middleranking army officers of the Barcelona garrison, members of the Junta Militares, Milans del Bosch asked Romanones to sack both the civil governor and his police chief, Gerardo Doval, for their role in engineering the Rocas brothers’ escape from military custody. Romanones responded with a press statement saying both men were doing an invaluable job in Barcelona and were irreplaceable. He then sent another delegation— the Conde de Figols and Alfons Sala, a member of the Cortés — to Barcelona, to discuss the matter with Milans del Bosch and report back directly to him.

With the government clearly not prepared to rid them of their troublesome civil governor, the Barcelona Patronál sent their own delegation to Madrid to see the king, to whom they painted a nightmarish picture of a city ‘in thrall’ to the CNT. ‘What Barcelona needs,’ claimed their spokesman, ‘is a man of steel and experience to take control of the collapsing social order and restore law and order —a man of the calibre of Manuel Bravo Portillo.’

‘I do share your opinions’, replied the King sympathetically, ‘but unfortunately there is little I can do without compromising either myself or the possible future of the monarchy.’

Romanone’s new emissaries, Figols and Sala, arrived in Barcelona on the morning of 12 April. It was a Saturday, and many of the strikers were back at work, believing that things were returning to normal.

The bullyboys of the Sometent had tried to prevent the factories opening and breaking the ‘lockout’ agreement, but to no avail; the bosses’ economic interests had won the day and they were back in control. There had been no formal agreement to end the strike. It simply collapsed, so it was pointless to continue with the ‘lockout’. *** The CNT had again been outlawed and the gains made during the Canadiense strike were now, effectively, lost, and — to make matters worse — the militants were now on the employers’ blacklist files and unable to find work anywhere. For the workers, it was a disaster, a gamble that hadn’t paid off.

Figols and Sala met with Milans del Bosch that afternoon.

With the initial reasons for the disagreements between the 123

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captain-general and the civil governor now apparently gone, they thought that was the end of the matter and, having elicited what they thought was an agreement from Milans de Bosch to leave the civil governor in place — with the proviso that he subordinate himself to the captain-general and consult him on all decisions — the two men returned on the Madrid Express on Sunday 13 April.

But it was far from over. That Sunday afternoon, Milans met with with senior officers from the Barcelona garrison; the military governor, General Martínez Anido; and his old friend the Marqués de Foronda, the director of Barcelona’s tram company, to reassure himself that the army and the Patronál would back him if he proceeded with his plan to expel the governor.

They gave him the assurances he needed. None of the clans, families and tribes that made up the Catalan ruling class, — the bolsheviks of good order and discipline — wanted a governor who was sympathetic to the anarcho-syndicalists. The army officers, for their part, promised that, should Milans be sacked, they would refuse to accept his replacement, which would have created serious problems for Madrid, as it would have left the troops in Catalonia without a commanding officer.

Next morning, Monday 14 April, at 11:00, General Martínez Anido paid Governor Montañes an unexpected visit. The unsuspecting Montañes thought the affair had blown over — as did Figols and Sala who had already returned to Madrid — so he was surprised to see Anido, and was taken aback when the military governor walked into his office unanounced and said, ‘Señor Montañes, can I ask when you intend leaving for Madrid?’

Taken aback by the directness of the question, Montañes replied, ‘General, I have no immediate plans to return to Madrid... And will only do so when I am ordered to do so by my immediate superior, the Minister of the Interior.’

Martínez Anido, who remained standing, continued, ‘Señor Montañes, I strongly advise you to call the minister at once. An express train is leaving for Madrid at one o’clock this afternoon.

I expect you to be on it.’

Having delivered his not-so-veiled warning, the military governor saluted, turned around and left the office.

Montañes didn’t take the threat seriously, nor did he telephone Madrid. A little over an hour later, however, there was 124

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another knock on his door. This time it was Colonel Aldir of the Guardia Civíl, who repeated Anido’s question as to when he was planning to return to Madrid. Once again Montañes didn’t telephone the minister, even to let him know that he suspected a military conspiracy was seeking to remove him.

At 1:00, Colonel Aldir reappeared, this time with a platoon of Guardia Civíl — and no polite questions.

‘I have come, Señor Montañes, to escort you and police commissioner Doval to the railway station where you will be put on the next train to Madrid. I have my orders.’

Only at this point did Montañes twig what game was afoot.

He asked Aldir if he could call Madrid, to which the colonel said he had no objection. Montañes then telephoned the interior ministry in Madrid.

Coincidentally, at that very moment Prime Minister Romanones was meeting there with a cheerful and satisfied Figols and Sala, who were reporting to him on what they believed to have been the successful outcome of their trip.

Montañes spoke directly to a shocked Romanones.

‘You must do what you think best my friend,’ replied Romanones. ‘As of this moment I am no longer prime minister.’

When the conversation ended, Romanones drove straight to the palace and presented his resignation to King Alfonso XIII, who accepted it without any attempt to dissuade him.

Lacking support from Madrid, there was little Montañes could do to resist so, packing his few belongings, he accompanied Colonel Aldir and his Guardia Civíl escort to the Paseo de Gracia station where the Madrid Express was being held for them.

The Paseo de Gracia rail station had been chosen for their departure because it was less busy, with fewer people around than the Estación de Francia, Barcelona’s main train terminus, where the sight of the civil governor being put on a train by a Guardia Civíl escort might have caused problems. On board the train, he found his colleagues were already waiting for him: police commissioner Gerardo Doval and his two senior police inspectors, Francisco Martorell, acting head of the Special Services Brigade and his deputy, Ramón Carbonell. When they arrived in Madrid, there was no official reception committee waiting for them, only Juan José Moróte, the cabinet secretary.

Apart from accusations of cowardice against Montañes and 125

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Doval by opportunist Republican and nationalist politicians, the whole affair was quickly passed over and forgotten by the press within days. Neither Montañes nor Doval returned to political life. The army had won its battle of wills and had successfully forced the downfall of the Romanones government.

On 15 April, the king asked the ultra-conservative Antonio Maura to form a new government. Maura had been out of power for more than ten years, ever since the shameful and bloody aftermath of the Semana Tragica, over which he had presided.

After years of dreaming of a return to power, Maura once again held the reins of the state in his hands, but, with Spain on the verge of bankruptcy, recession and, possibly, revolution, it wasn’t the most propitious time for him or his government. *** Maura’s administration was presidential in style, wielding power through an inner ‘war cabinet’ of selected ministers and nonelected advisers, mainly military men or ideologues who considered possession of a conscience to be a weakness, and who had little or no regard for ‘niceties’ such as civil liberties or human or constitutional rights. But with the entire country in such a parlous state, they needed a political breathing space, which meant cutting deals with the various contending and disputatious parliamentary pressure and interest groups.

One of the deals Maura struck was with the Lliga, which represented the most powerful industrial and economic interest groups in Catalonia. The arrangement was an implicit one rather than formal. In return for the Lliga’s support in the Cortés, Maura’s government would leave the Catalan ruling classes to do more or less what they wanted within their own ‘sphere of influence’. This was reflected in Maura’s choice of civil governor, the Marqués de Retortillo, a ‘yes-man’ who was happy to confine himself to purely formal and ceremonial duties, and who wouldn’t interfere in the domestic affairs of the local power elites.

It seemed as if the bosses had won, but those of us in the groups took a more sanguine, long-term view. They had won a battle, but it was far from being the end of hostilities — there would be other battles and other opportunities.

Even so, at that moment we were back to square one, with Barcelona an occupied city, the union outlawed, anarchist 126

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publications banned and thousands of unionists imprisoned for ‘reasons of state’. Militants were being deported, troops were running the public services and ‘white guard’ Sometent vigilantes and gentlemen volunteers were strutting the streets ‘halting anarchy’, ‘confronting criminals’ and euphemistically restoring what they called ‘public order’ and ‘social hygiene’ with as much vicious, counter-revolutionary brutality and shedding of blood as was happening elsewhere in Italy, Germany, and the former Austro-Hungarian empire.

WE’RE GETTING ANGRY The affinity and confederal defence groups had been quiet during both the Canadiense strike and the subsequent general solidarity strike. Now, in the current state of siege, with all legitimate protest outlets closed to us — and the police apparently murdering unionists one by one —we felt it necessary to make a stand.

The campaign began with anonymous written warnings to the bosses, managers, foremen and chargehands, and moved on to groups taking potshots at the Sometent’s nightime patrols.

These were actions intended to frighten, rather than to kill or create victims —a signal to the employers that they weren’t going to have it all their own way.

The more liberal employers didn’t have a problem with the unions, but they did want them stripped of revolutionary and ideological content. Unions were acceptable to them, just as long as they limited their activities purely to settling labour disputes within capitalism, along British trade union lines.

THE PLOT THICKENS One of the most important meetings took place on 20 July— the Sunday that Francisco Sabater’s death was announced —and was held in a tenement in a narrow backstreet adjoining Barcelona Cathedral, the Perot lo Lladre — Salvador Segui’s apartment and command post. It was a meeting of the National Committee of the CNT, the purpose of which was to discuss preparations for an insurrection and, more importantly, how to generate and attract moral, economic and material support from international working-class movements and organisations.

The plan was to send trusted compañeros on fund-raising missions across Europe: Evelio Boal from the Artes Gráficas 127

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union was going to Portugal, my old friend Pere Foix of the Mercantile Workers’ union was off to Russia, while Simó Pierá was due to attend the International Syndicalist Congress in Amsterdam at the end of July.

Both the national and regional committees urged caution in the rank and file’s response to the murders, insisting it was essential that the understandable anger and despair should be constrained and we should try to avoid triggering any incidents that could provoke a backlash that would allow the state to pick us off one by one.

Segui and Simó Pierá convinced the Defence Commission delegates present not to embark on vengeful direct actions, which, they argued, would only undermine the union’s long-term strategic plans and trigger wholesale repression. It was agreed that the CNT would make a final attempt at a peaceful resolution to the social war by addressing Madrid’s parliamentarians directly through Francesc Layret, a friend of the union, a man of integrity, a parliamentary deputy and a widely respected lawyer.

On 20 July, three CNT national committee members, Salvador Segui, Simó Pierá and Angel Pestaña, signed an open letter to the Cortés, to be read out by Francesc Layret, describing in detail the nature of the repression and the cruel persecution to which union members in Catalonia were being subjected. It explained the background to the violence in the province — and the possible bloody consequences of the recent murders.

Next day, a delegation from the CNT’s textile workers’ union met Barcelona’s civil governor, the Marqués de Retirillo, to press him to ensure that the investigations into the recent murders were being pursued vigorously. The governor insisted he would not rest until those responsible for the deaths Sabater and Castillo were found and brought to justice.

The investigations, if there were any, came to nothing, but, for whatever reason, Bravo Portillo held back from pursuing the other victims on his contract-to-kill list.

The CNT, however, wasn’t prepared to abandon matters to politicians and state agencies. As well as making representations to parliament and the civil govenor, the textile workers’ union also approached another CNT lawyer, the republican councillor José Guerra del Rio, and asked him to be ready to prepare a private prosecution against the killers as and when — and if — 128

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they were ever identified.

The situation improved slightly on 21 July with the defeat of Antonio Maura’s hard-line minority government on a parliamentary technicality. The new prime minister was Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, a much more liberal-minded politician than the zealously reactionary Maura.

His new interior minister, Manuel de Burgos y Mazo, one of Spain’s first Christian Democrats, shared de Toca’s view that the only way to end the political stalemate and escalating class violence was by meeting ‘moderate’ labour demands, something that could be achieved only if the ‘moderates’ on both sides were willing to compromise and negotiate a mutually agreeable settlement. Burgos y Mazo had long been critical of the way that the Catalan oligarchs had mishandled events in the province, and he blamed Milans del Bosch and Severiano Martínez Anido for the degenerating and bloody political situation in Catalonia.

Within days of the new government’s installation, Salvador Segui travelled to Madrid to meet Francesc Layret and the new interior minister to discuss the situation in Barcelona.

Segui explained his concern that the defensive reprisal actions being planned by the anarchist affinity groups and the confederal defence groups would escalate the situation. The minister told Segui that he intended replacing the reactionary and passive Marqués de Retirillo with Julio Amado, a more sympathetic and dynamic new civil governor. Amado, a journalist and the editor of La Correspondencia Militar, ‘the voice of middleranking army officers’, was a liberal closely linked with the army officers’ union — the juntas militares.

AMADO — SOCIAL ENGINEER Julio Amado took up office as Barcelona’s new civil governor on 20 August 1919. He was a man with a plan and had spent most of that summer at El Escorial — a royal palace, library, hunting lodge and monastery complex about thirty miles from Madrid — considering ways to break Barcelona’s cycle of violence.

He was totally unprepared for the bleak reality that awaited him with at least 15,000 workers either in prison or deported to other provinces, and a further 50,000 workers subject to a Patronál lockout. And the closures weren’t confined to Barcelona; they affected the whole province, with women from Manresa having to travel as far as Bajo Llobregat to find work. To cap it all, 129

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in spite of all the scandalous publicity, Manuel Bravo Portillo was still running his death squads, with the full knowledge and complicity of the army high command — captain-general Joaquín Milans del Bosch; the chief of the Barcelona general staff, General Manuel Tourné Esbry; and Barcelona’s military governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido.

Before taking on the job, Amado tried to insist that if Bravo Portillo couldn’t be arrested and charged with any crime then at least he should be allowed to deport him on the grounds that the former poiceman’s continued presence in the capital was inflaming an already sensitive situation. Apart from the security threat, he was also a serious political obstacle to Amado’s plan to improve industrial relations in the city.

Milans del Bosch, however, wouldn’t hear a word against Bravo Portillo, and vigorously defended him, which was hardly surprising as he was the captain-general’s own creature. The former chief superintendent wrote to Burgos y Mazo in his own defence, confirming that he had been officially subcontracted by the Capitanía, but denied any involvement in the murder of Sabater, whom he described as a ‘common delinquent’.

In the end, nothing was done and Bravo Portillo remained in Barcelona.

THE MIXED LABOUR COMMISSION Amado’s master plan was to set up a joint workers-employers government arbitration panel, the so-called ‘Mixed Commission’ — the Comisión Mixta de Trabajo — which would consist of five cenetista delegates, five employers’ representatives from the Federación Patronál Española and two lawyers. This Commission would constitute an ad hoc labour ‘parliament’, which would negotiate and agree on all legislation relating to employment and labour matters.

If his ‘mixed commission’ idea succeeded in defusing the social war in Barcelona, Amado hoped to extend the scheme to cover industrial relations in the rest of Spain.

His problem was, however, that as Madrid’s man nobody trusted him.

Salvador Segui, however, saw the benefits of participating in the project —or at least appearing to —and he talked the national and regional committees into supporting the scheme. The 130

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advantages, he argued, were the legal recognition of the union and the release of all cenetista prisoners. If the CNT remained illegal, the employers would have no legitimate workers’ representatives with whom to negotiate. Most CNT militants, however, saw working with the Commission as an act of betrayal, of class collaboration —as did the Patronál. The fact that the CNT was participating, however, meant the Federación Patronál Española had no choice but to play along with Amado’s Mixed Commission.

Neither side really believed the project could — or should — be made to work, but both groups needed to be involved in order to appear to be defending their class interests — and to use the Commission as a platform to advance their own political agendas.

The Patronál was playing for time. It had an important national congress coming up at which it hoped to recruit the majority of Spain’s employers to its cause. The eight-hour day was due to come into effect at the beginning of October, and they did not want that at any price. Their intention was to build an allpowerful monolithic employers’ organisation that could display a sufficiently solid united front that no workers’ organisations — or government — would dare challenge.

But Julio Amado wasn’t stupid. He knew both sides had their agendas, but he hoped to frustrate these by absorbing them into the power structure. Everything looks so much different from inside the palace. Amado had his own fallback plan, which was to ask Madrid to send him Guardia Civíl, secret police reinforcements and a new chief of police. And, although he had the lockout ended and martial law lifted on 2 September, the new civil governor wasn’t able to restore civil liberties or declare the promised general amnesty until a week later — after meetings with both sides daily, where he pressed them until they eventually appointed their representatives for the Mixed Commission.

Thousands of workers were now free to return to work, but the diehard employers remained determined not to concede anything to the workers without a fight.

Oddly, in spite of the wide social and political gulf that separated them, the civil governor and Salvador Segui struck up the most unlikely of friendships.

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LOCKOUT! The employers’ lockout, which was to apply to factories, workshops, offices, shops, bars and restaurants was not due to begin until 3 November, though the diehards, led by Félix Grauperá and Sánchez Pastór, implemented the decision immediately. But not all the employers agreed with this action; some put it off as long as possible, while others tried to ignore it. In all, the lockout was to last eighty-four days — until 26 January 1920.

The employers’ actions were unprovoked, inasmuch as there were no major industrial disputes were on at the time to justify them. Their objective was, purely and simply, to break the CNT by sacking all the organised workers in the Greater Barcelona area. The price for getting their jobs back was to be the sacrifice of their union card, and a return to work on the bosses’ terms.

Within a week, over 150,000 workers —almost half of Catalonia’s workforce — had been locked out, and effectively sacked. The CNT’s answer was to turn the lockout into a general strike, creating a classic industrial ‘stand-off’ situation.

Governor Amado took advantage of the tensions among the employers, and met regularly with moderate employers, as well as political leaders, such as Francesc Cambó and the Conde de Caralt, who favoured keeping open lines of communication with the CNT. Together, Amado and the employers brought sufficient pressure to bear on Grauperá to force him to meet with the commission, as he was now legally obliged to do — but it was purely for show. Amado’s strategy was to impose what he hoped were un-meetable conditions, which the CNT would have to reject out of hand. Grauperá also refused to suspend the lockouts that were already in place, insisting that future meetings of the Mixed Commission be held in the Town Hall, presided over by the mayor — not by Governor Amado. Surprisingly, the ‘influential’ leaders of the CNT conceded to Grauperá’s demands —much to our disgust —but at least they insisted that the strikes already in place would continue. *** The new commission met for the first time on 6 November with two legal advisers, Felipe Rodes and Roig i Bergada, in attendance. The CNT delegates, led by Segui, were in a conciliatory mood while the Patronál’s men were focused on 132

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sabotaging the negotiations and creating as many obstacles to any agreement as possible.

It was, therefore, highly frustrating for Grauperá when the CNT refused to rise to their obstructionist bait, and dealt with the employers’ challenges objectively and with common sense, slowly chipping away at their demands clause by clause until they reached what seemed, even to the mayor and his legal advisers, an acceptable compromise.

While these negotiations were going on inside the Town Hall, outside, in the Plaça de San Jaime, workers and small employers met daily in the hope that, behind the ornately-carved closed doors, a solution could be found so everyone could get on with their lives.

At last, on 9 November, both parties finally agreed to end the conflict with an agreement that all disputes in which at least fifty per cent of the workers’ demands were conceded should be considered resolved.

The mayor and his two legal advisers declared the agreement just and fair, but at the last moment, the Patronál pulled a fast one by demanding that current strikes should end forty-eight hours before the lockout was lifted. The CNT, however, insisted that both should end at the same time — and threatened another general strike if the Patronál failed to sign the agreement within two days.

With the commission now apparently about to implode, the matter was resolved when the mayor asked Milans del Bosch to intercede with the Patronál. The captain-general — who had distanced himself from the domestic political arena for some time — surprisingly agreed, and the problem appeared to be resolved by the following day. The agreement was signed on Tuesday 12 November, and instructions went out from both organisations to confirm that the strikes were to end and the factories to reopen.

Work resumed in most places on the Thursday morning, but in a number of the most important factories, workers turned up to find that instead of the usually wide-open main gates they now had to file through small side doors, one at a time, past the foreman who was standing at one side refusing entry to known union militants. This was in clear breach of the ‘no reprisals’ clause in the agreement. One of the factories where this occurred was that of Eloy Detouche, who had been a signatory to the agreement.

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The sacked militants were furious, and there were angry threats of setting fire to the factory. A crowd of them marched to the Town Hall where Segui was still negotiating with the employers. When el Noi came out to see out what all the noise was about, they told him what had happened at Detouche’s factory. Detouche was inside at that moment, so Segui stormed back into the conference room to demand an explanation. The recalcitrant employer’s embarrassed response was that the workers concerned were troublemakers and slackers who were looking for excuses not to go back to work.

To the mayor’s consternation, as well as that of his legal advisers, Segui told them that, in the circumstances, the agreement they had just signed was a time-wasting farce and that the CNT was withdrawing both from the negotiations and the commission. The employers, he said, had thrown away the last opportunity for a stable and enduring peace.

The authorities interpreted Segui’s comments to mean that the CNT was about to launch a workers’ uprising, and declared a state of emergency, so they doubled the number of police and Guardia Civíl patrols, and sealed off the city, preventing anyone from entering or leaving without written permission from the captain-general’s office.

This stunt by the employers effectively undermined what remained of Segui’s, Pestaña’s and Pierá’s standing among the militants — and, at the same time, enhanced the credibility of the action groups. We were, after all, the ones who had been pressing for direct actions. Apart from a few small bomb explosions, however, nothing much happened. Life went on as usual. No convents, monasteries, seminaries or churches were blown up or burned, nor was the Town Hall or the Capitanía occupied.

Most factories remained open, and the majority of workers were able to return to their jobs without hindrance. In fact, the Regional Defence Commission requested that Archs ask the defence groups to act in a restrained manner —at least until after the big CNT Congress, which was to be held in early December.

The Patronál ‘diehards’, meanwhile, were getting nowhere with Amado, and were lobbying the government to outlaw the CNT and abandon the mixed commissions, or at least substantially modify their remit; they sent a high-level delegation to Madrid, led by Grauperá, to argue the Patronál case with the 134

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Interior Minister. The CNT, however, had also organised a delegation, led by Segui, to put the union’s case to the minister.

Neither side realised that they were both travelling on the same train to Madrid.

Segui had another reason for going to Madrid, one that had nothing to do with meeting the minister: he was on the planning committee for the forthcoming CNT National Congress — the union’s second since 1911 — which was due to be held in Madrid’s La Comedia theatre on 10 December.

While all this was going on, the more sinister elements among the Patronál’s leadership were plotting to wean Milans del Bosch away from his recently adopted position of ‘armed neutrality’, back to his more usual policy of aggressive interventionism. The means by which they hoped to achieve this was a provocation organised by the Baron de Koenig at the instruction of Bertrán i Musitu and Miró i Trepat.

Shortly before the Patronál delegation was due to meet the minister in Madrid, one of the Baron’s men in Barcelona, Antonio Soler, El Mallorquin — Bravo Portillo’s former right-hand man — planted a bomb against the wall of the Capitanía, in the narrow carrer de Simón Holler.

The bomb exploded without doing much damage, other than slightly injuring two soldiers and breaking a window. Milans del Bosch, who was in the building at the time, emerged shaken but unscathed to inspect the damage. Soler, mingling among the crowd of inquisitive onlookers, shouted: ‘There they are, the real guilty men … doing nothing, as usual, while the anarchosyndicalists bomb us all back into the Dark Ages ...’

That’s when the booing started, to the captain-general’s intense irritation.

The Capitanía bombing had its intended effect: the anarchists were blamed for the outrage, and Milans del Bosch demanded that the government declare a state of emergency.

Prime Minister Burgos y Mazo, however, recognised the provocation for what it was and declined the captain-general’s request. He also refused to outlaw the CNT nationally or pull the plug on the mixed commissions.

Grauperá returned from Madrid on 30 November, furious that Burgos y Mazo had taken the CNT’s side and chosen to ignore the employers. Milans del Bosch, however, although he was denied the state of emergency he’d asked for — something 135

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that would have given him absolute power in the region — was given control of public order in the capital, which meant meeting twice-daily with his new chief of police, General Arleguí.

That night Grauperá reported back to his Patronál executive committee. ‘We are on our own,’ he said, grimly. ‘Madrid has left us to fend for ourselves. In fact it’s worse. They are pandering to the unions — to Segui and Pestaña. If they won’t declare a state of war, then we must declare our own. We have to enforce the lockout rigorously on all businesses, whether or not they are Patronál members. We also need to ensure it extends throughout Spain as quickly as possible. The only businesses and public services that will be allowed to function will be those that we approve.’

His words met with nods of approval and an enthusiastic standing ovation. This time the bosses would be better prepared.

The objective was clear — total submission of the workers.

THE LA COMEDIA CONFERENCE As 1919 drew to a close, Spain’s oligarchs marshalled their reactionary battalions, and on 5 December forced the resignation of Sánchez de Toca’s liberal government, replacing it with a coalition of ultra-reactionary conservatives headed by Manuel Allendesalazar, a man linked inextricably to the Patronál.

Five days later, on 10 December, the CNT’s second national conference opened in Madrid’s La Comedia theatre — eight years after their first, in 1911. Attending the historic 8-day event were 450 delegates from across Spain and Portugal.

The CNT had come a long way in the 4 years since it reemerged from clandestinity in 1915, with a national membership of 15,000. Since then, economic pressure and the dramatic rise in social agitation had led to a 5,000 per cent jump in membership to almost three-quarters of a million. Catalonia alone had close to half-a-million members, over half of whom lived in the greater Barcelona area.

Membership of the CNT was fairly eclectic, with many different ideological and political tendencies other than anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary syndicalist, including Marxist, socialist, republican and reformist trade unionist.

But for the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, one of the 136

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principal objectives of the La Comedia Congress was to get the national organisation to endorse the resolution passed at the previous year’s Catalan regional congress in Sants — that the union should prepare itself for revolution and officially adopt anarchosyndicalism, as opposed to the more broad-church revolutionary-syndicalist position it had held until then.

The union’s aims and principles were now defined as: The absolute moral, economic and political liberation of mankind — anarchist communism. This can only be achieved when capitalism has been overthrown and the means of production and exchange have been socialised and state power eliminated by the appropriate, opportune, tactical and effective use of direct action and sabotage.

But ensuring a successful revolution required money, arms, logistical and moral support, so it wasn’t entirely surprising that the CNT should seek help from the recently formed Moscowbased Communist International (the ‘Third International’ or ‘Comintern’), which meant requesting affiliation.

The problem with the CNT’s proposed affiliation with the Third International — the pressure for which came from the proMarxist syndicalists in the union — was the fact that the union’s relationship with Bolshevik Russia and the nature of the ongoing Russian Revolution were still subjects of intense debate among members.

One motion presented to the Congress gives some insight into the impact the Russian Revolution was having, even on committed libertarians, with regard to the tension between liberty and authority in practice: That the Russian Revolution, in principle, embodies the ideal of revolutionary syndicalism. That it abolishes class and caste privileges and gave power to the proletariat, so that it could itself gain the happiness and welfare to which it is entitled, imposing a transitional proletarian dictatorship in order to guarantee the success of the revolution...

According to Soli, the Russian Revolution was the template to copy: ‘We can learn from their actions in order to triumph ourselves, taking by force what is denied to us.’

Manuel Buenacasa was a staunch defender of the Russian 137

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Revolution at the time, but even he wouldn’t commit himself to supporting the CNT’s proposed affiliation to the Third International. His views on Russia surprised many of the delegates, especially given the number of column inches he’d dedicated to the subject in Soli since 1917.

In conversation, a few years later, he told me, ‘For most of us, even you, I imagine, the Russian Bolshevik was a kind of demi-God, the carrier of freedom and human happiness.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t know then what we know now.’

The poor level of the debate made it clear just how little any of us knew about what the Bolsheviks were up to in Russia.

Hilario Arlandis, the Levante delegate —another Marxist —urged the members to support unconditional affiliation with the Comintern. He based his arguments on a patchy report on the first Comintern congress in March 1919.

‘I recognise the fact there are major differences between the CNT and the Bolsheviks,’ he said — completely ignoring the fundamental ‘anti-party’ tenet of syndicalism, ‘but it would be difficult to find a ‘concrete formula’ capable of uniting the world’s proletariat and satisfying all tendencies. However, what the Third International does succeed in doing is embodying and exemplifying all our aspirations.’

Not for me it didn’t, nor Archs, nor Laureano nor many others.

Arlandis was supported by Andrés Nin, another Marxistsyndicalist, and a member of the Socialist Party as well as the CNT — something that none of us were aware of when he addressed the Congress.

‘Comrades!’ he said, ‘I am an enthusiastic supporter of action, of the revolution. I believe in actions more than I do in distant ideologies and abstract questions. I admire the Russian Revolution because it is a reality, and I support the Third International because it too is a reality — and above ideology. It represents a principle of action, a principle of coexistence between all the genuinely revolutionary forces who aspire to implement communism immediately.’

Despite Segui’s diminished popularity, as a result of the brouhaha over the mixed commissions, he was still the most capable, respected and influential militant the CNT had, and although he disliked the Bolsheviks and the fact that the Russian 138

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Revolution was being directed and guided by a political party, he still believed that the CNT should be represented in the Third International, even though the CNT remained committed to the Bakuninist principles of the First International: ‘Not because of its theories, which we strongly oppose, but because we need to be realistic. The CNT should affiliate to the Third International because that way we will endorse the CNT’s call to the world’s syndicalist organisations to form the one, true, unique, genuine workers’ International.

‘And,’ he continued, ‘just as the CNT is the largest labour movement in Spain, its status needs to be recognised internationally, and by affiliating with the Moscow International we can strengthen our revolutionary credentials.’

What Segui couldn’t say publicly was that the main reason for ‘coorying doon’ with the Bolsheviks was because it was the ideal way to acquire funds and arms for the proposed revolutionary uprising — as it would make the CNT the official organisation of the Third International in Spain.

The fundamental mistake we made — apart from believing the revolution was imminent — was underestimating just how dedicated the Bolsheviks were to their pursuit of domination of the world-wide labour movement — and how astute. We naively thought that the Comintern would somehow become an autonomous revolutionary International, independent of the Bolsheviks.

We needed Russian aid, however, for the planned insurrection, so the astute Segui came up with the idea of affiliating provisionally to the Third International — at least until such time as an international congress could determine the true nature of what was happening in Russia.

After much heated discussion, Congress chose the delegates who would travel to Moscow to present the CNT’s application for provisional membership, find out more about the nature of the Bolshevik regime, and quietly seek military and financial support for our planned insurrection.

Two of the comrades who were chosen, Eleuterio Quintanilla and Pedro Vallina, had previously attended the International Revolutionary Syndicalist Congress in London in 1913, but both men declined on this occasion because of their hostility to the Bolsheviks. Eusebio Carbó, a respected member of the Valencian CNT, and Salvador Quemades, who was on the 139

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committee of the Catalan CNT, took their places instead.

Coincidentally, that same weekend, the first two Comintern agents arrived in Spain to set up the Spanish Communist Party.

Neither of them were Spanish — Michael Gruzenberg, a.k.a.

Mikhail Borodin, was Russian and Charles Phillips, a.k.a. Jesús Ramírez, was a US citizen who had learned Spanish in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. Nor were the Bolshevik emissaries particularly well briefed on the situation of the local labour movement, and neither indeed appeared to have much interest at all in Spain. They seem to have been just passing through, and were intent on enjoying themselves in the process.

Also on 10 December, Barcelona’s civil governor Amado was summoned to Madrid by the new minister of the interior and summarily sacked. Amado had consistently ignored Milans del Bosch’s orders to have no contact with Segui, Pestaña or any other cenetista, and, by negotiating with representatives of a stillillegal organisation he was undermining Milans del Bosch’s authority as captain-general.

Amado had challenged Milans del Bosch’s authority and paid the price. His replacement was José Maestre Laborde, the Conde de Salvatierra, a diehard reactionary who had long been pressing the government to revert to a policy of full-scale repression.

MEANWHILE, IN CENTRALIA Spain wasn’t the only country where anti-union violence was commonplace; it was now accepted practice across the industrialised world. For some time, press reports had been coming in from the United States about vigilante and police attacks on the Wobblies — as the members of the Industrial Workers of the World were known. These reports were unusually gruesome, especially given America’s pretensions to be the land of the free and the home of the brave — more like the home of paranoid racists, xenophobes and bullies.

One case in particular stuck in my mind.

In the late autumn of 1919, in Centralia, Washington, about eighty-five miles south of Seattle, the Wobblies had been organising the lumber workers, which brought them into conflict with the town oligarchs. On 11 November, Armistice Day, a mob of rednecks led by members of the pseudo-masonic local Elks 140

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Lodge and the American Legion, a para-military organisation of extreme right-wing veterans, similar to the Sometent, marched to the local IWW union hall, broke down the door and started shooting the Wobblies inside.

The Wobblies returned their fire, killing two Legionnaires, which led to four Wobblies being arrested. Another four, however, escaped out the back door — one of them was Wesley Everest, a Great War veteran and an IWW lumberjack. In the ensuing gunfight, Wesley shot and killed another two Legionnaires before he was finally overcome and carted off to jail where, in spite of having his teeth smashed with a rifle butt, he refused to give his name.

That night, a mob cut off the local electricity supply and attacked the jail, forcibly removing Everest from his cell. As he was being dragged away by the vigilantes, his last words, shouted to his compañeros, were: ‘Tell the boys I did my best.’

Waiting on the street outside was a crowd of hooded men brandishing blazing tar torches. A man wielding an open razor pushed forward from the crowd and advanced towards Wesley Everest, who was being held between three men.

Slashing open Wesley’s trousers, the hooded man sliced off his penis and testicles and brandished his bloody trophies in the air. The whooping and jeering crowd then dragged their bleeding victim to the bridge on nearby Mellon Street where, in the glare of car headlights and the flickering flames of tar torches, they tied a noose around Wesley’s neck and threw him off the bridge, leaving him jerking on the end of a rope over the Chehalis River while the mob of American Legionnaires on the river bank took pot-shots at the hanging, bleeding body of the dying man. No one was ever charged with the murder of Wesley Everest. The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as ‘suicide’.

THE PALMER RAIDS Anti-anarchist hysteria continued to sweep across the ‘land of the free’, culminating in December in what became known as the ‘Palmer Raids’ — their name being derived from the fact they were led by US Attorney General, Alexander Mitchell Palmer and his paranoid sidekick, J. Edgar Hoover.

On the morning of 21 December 1919 the SS Buford, an ancient and barely seaworthy former troop transporter, which had last seen service during the Spanish-American war of 1898, 141

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sailed from New York heading for Soviet Russia, via Finland. On board were 249 deportees, Palmer and Hoover’s radical victims, of whom 43 were anarchists, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.

They were the first. Within a month, another 6,000 were arrested — mostly Wobblies — and within six weeks Palmer and Hoover had carried out the largest mass arrests in US history, detaining more than 10,000 people linked to organised labour and progressive movements.

Palmer’s justification for his ‘anti-Red’ crusade was that he had received ‘solid intelligence’ that Communists were planning a revolution in the United States for 1 May 1920. So, when May Day came and went with no revolutionary disturbances occurring anywhere in the country, Palmer’s credibility plummeted. The press and his many political opponents accused him, rightly, of engineering a ‘Red scare’ to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, which he subsequently lost over his massive human rights violations. Sneaky J. Edgar Hoover, however, managed to get out from under and went on to head the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation and, it is widely believed, to become a tool of the Mafia who were able to blackmail him over his closeted homosexuality.

LAUREANO CERRADA SANTOS Although the French police and security services had had Laureano under regular surveillance since the Liberation, they had only been able to arrest and convict him on a handful of occasions. According to Spanish and French police reports, he had been involved in large-scale black-market and counterfeiting operations during and after the Occupation, and was reputed their reports to have amassed a fortune: ‘reckoned at over two hundred million francs, with which he funds the Spanish Libertarian action groups — within Spain as well as abroad’.

Equally they knew Laureano’s counterfeit IDs, driving licences and ration cards had saved the lives of countless members of the Resistance, Allied and Jewish evaders and escaping POWs, as well as ordinary French men and women who had to reinvent themselves to escape the Gestapo and the Milice. For that reason — and for his role in the Resistance — they respected him and to a large extent turned a blind eye to his activities. But as the bitter 142

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memories of the Occupation receded, new geopolitical and domestic pressures began eroding French sympathies for the exiles who had contributed so much to the Liberation.

The French authorities knew, for example — as did the Spanish — that it was Laureano who had organised and financed the abortive attempt in 1948 to bomb Franco’s yacht Azor in San Sebastián’s La Concha Bay. He paid over one-and-a-half million francs, in cash, for the purchase and modification of the Norécrin 1202 aeroplane used in the attentat. The front man who purchased the plane on Laureano’s behalf was French citizen, Georges Fontenis, secretary of the French Anarchist Federation and managing editor of Le Libertaire. The ‘La Concha Bay’ incident, as it became known, was the cause of a major diplomatic row between France and Spain at the time.

In exile after Franco’s victory, apart from a brief spell as a foundry worker in Chartres and forced labour on the Nazi Atlantic fortifications, Laureano spent most of the Occupation in Paris where he played a prominent role in the Resistance. His wartime CV included attacks on German barracks for weapons and on town halls for ration cards, stamps and any other official documentation he came across. On one occasion he was involved in robing a Post Office van carrying a large amount of cash and securities, but robberies were never his ‘cup of tea’.

In Paris he was one of the 4,000 or so Spaniards involved in the 21 August 1944 insurrection which held off the German army for three days until the arrival of the 9th Tank Company, ‘La Nueve’ — the Spanish-led vanguard of General Leclerc’s Second French Armoured Division —to take the German surrender at the Hotel de Ville. Over 3,200 Spaniards served in Leclerc’s Second French Armoured Division, most of them veterans of the 26th Division, formerly the Durruti Column. They had joined the French army from the concentration camps in 1939, and from there they had gone on to fight in North Africa, Lebanon and French West Africa.

For those of us who remained to fight in France, our particular franc-tireur network, the ‘Manouchian Group’, had been effectively wiped out when we were betrayed at the beginning of 1944. The Gestapo arrested twenty-three of our people, of whom twenty-two were tortured, summarily tried and executed by firing squad against the wall of Fort Mont-Valérien on 21 February 1944.

The twenty-third comrade, a woman, Olga Bancic, was 143

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decapitated in Stuttgart. Olga and her Romanian partner, Jacob Salomon, had worked with the CNT-FAI foreign intelligence organisation procuring arms for the Republic since 1938.

We had scored a few little victories, however, including the assassination of two of Hitler’s most brutal Wehrmacht officers: General Ernst de Schaumburg, commandant of the Greater Paris garrison, and General Julius von Ritter, the top man in the hated Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), the forced-labour organisation that sent non-Germans into slavery in Germany. The Nazis tried to discredit us during and after the trial by focusing on the fact that the Manouche Group consisted of foreigners — ‘anarchists’ and Jews — not at all the sort of activity that decent ‘French’ folk would engage in. Fortunately, Laureano and I had been organising an arms cache down in Siradan at the time of the Gestapo raids, so we were among the few members of the Manouchian Group to survive. *** Within a month of the Liberation of Paris, Laureano again proved his organisational and entrepreneurial skills by getting Solidaridad Obrera published and onto the streets for the first time in almost five years. His money helped, as did his black market and milieu connections.

When the Leclerc Division left Paris to join the drive for Berlin on 8 September 1944, Joaquín Blesa, four comrades from the former Durruti Column and myself were invited to join them to collect arms and ammunition from battlefields and surrendered German army units along the way. This inspired subterfuge was organised between Laureano and Sergeant Miguel Campos, a comrade from the FAI. Campos, a native of the Canaries serving as a section leader with the Ninth Company, headed up this hushhush unit within La Nueve and provided our uniforms, trucks and weapons. He also arranged for us a crash-course in half-track and tank-driving, including operating the turret gun, something that proved useful when we were unexpectedly pressed into action against the Germans crossing the Moselle River. The night before we were to leave Nancy for Strasbourg, however, Campos came to our tent with safe-conduct passes signed by the company commander himself, Captain Dronne, to tell us, apologetically — but without further explanation — that we had to return to Paris the following morning. Someone had informed on us, and clearly 144

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we had become an embarrassment; our presence in the column was no longer expedient. We had already established two major caches along the way; now it was time to return to Paris, travelling back along the division’s route, collecting the hidden arms in three lorries provided courtesy of La Nueve. In this way we acquired a substantial amount of weapons, ammunition, explosives, radio transmitters and receivers, and other military materiel, enough to supply a substantial number of the 15,000 or so guerrillas who continued to operate in Spain from 1944 to 1950.

However, prominent individuals on the FAI Secretariat and the CNT’s National Committee deeply resented Laureano’s standing and growing financial influence within the Organisation, and the fact that he effectively controlled materiel that they wanted for their own power games. The fault lines were clear-cut; a collision was inevitable.

It had never been a secret that Laureano was involved in counterfeiting, the black market and various other rackets, but never drugs or prostitution, which were anathema to him. His enemies on the exiled CNT National Committee in Toulouse launched a malicious whispering campaign against him, the main accusations being that he was ‘bringing the Organisation into disrepute’, and ‘endangering its legal status’ in France. What these people — who, with one or two exceptions such as José Peirats, were sanctimonious hypocrites — chose to ignore was that the reason Laureano became the most influential and respected member of the CNT in exile between 1944 and 1950, was that he had not only been an exemplary hero of the Resistance since July 1936, but he used his entire fortune to bankroll most, if not all, of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist newspapers in exile, paying all their print costs — including printers’ wages — purchasing presses, and leasing most of the exiled CNT’s meeting halls.

On one occasion, towards the end of the Occupation, I attended a meeting in Toulouse with Germinal Esgleas Jaume and Roque Santamaría Cortiguera of the CNT-FAI Secretariat (which was, in exile, known as the MLE — the Spanish Libertarian Movement) who tried to co-opt me into their intrigues against Laureano, despite the fact that they and their fellow conspirators owed everything to his largesse and generosity of spirit. Wanting to know what game was afoot, I listened politely to what they had to say.

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Santamaría, a bitter, power-driven, latter-day real-life Iago, nursed a visceral hatred for Laureano, whom he sought to undermine and demonise at every opportunity. The activities of the CNT’s radical sector — represented by Laureano, and largely funded and sustained by him — threatened the increasingly settled existence of the exiled union’s ‘quietist’ wing which, in any event, had ceased to function as a proper trade union the moment it left Spain. This was the reason why they needed to seize complete control of the National Committee and the International Secretariat, and remove Laureano from his position of power-broker.

‘Look, Farquhar,’ said Santamaría, ‘whatever Cerrada’s past history as a militant, everything he has now has been acquired in the name — and at the expense — of the Organisation — most of it the proceeds of outright criminality: black-marketeering, counterfeiting and armed robberies. It is immoral, even if it is carried out in the name of high ideals and the ‘sacrosanct’ Organisation. As libertarian revolutionaries we have to turn our backs on such sordid activities. And no matter what you think, in terms of betraying principles, what Laureano is doing is a thousand times worse than sending ministers into the governments of Largo Caballero and José Giral.’

And while I wasn’t prepared to admit it to this pair of scheming, self-serving, manipulative lowlifes, they did have a point — one that had niggled at my conscience for many years, but with which I had come to terms in my own way — the ageold conundrum of ends and means; how to retain moral integrity and ideals, and aspire to achieving the ‘free society’ by clandestine, illicit and violent methods without risking terrible, unintended and counter-productive outcomes?

Faced with the alternative of allying with and acquiescing to connivers such as the treacherous Montseny, Esgleas and Santamaría — the ‘man who would be king’ — it was ‘no contest’.

We had no option but to carry on wrestling with our individual consciences, aware of our moral shortcomings and our mortality.

I did, however, report the conversation back to Laureano, but he was already aware of their duplicitous machinations. *** In the late summer of 1944, the national committee of the CNT in exile — without any mandate from the members — declared 146

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its support for De Gaulle’s 23 August decree that the maquisards — including the thousands of battle-hardened Spanish guerrillas of the CNT-FAI in the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and the Vercors —should either disband and return to civilian life, or join the regular army and accept military order and discipline. It was the tactic used in November 1936 by the Stalinists, bourgeois republicans and the CNT’s collaborationist leaders Federica Montseny, Juan López Sánchez, Juan Peiró and, last but not least, our old friend García Oliver, a crude manoeuvre to consolidate their various power bases and subvert the revolutionary dynamic by militarising the workers’ columns that had so successfully routed the rebel army four months earlier and launched the most truly profound social revolution in modern history.

De Gaulle issued his decree in the immediate wake of the successful maquisard insurrection in Paris, having drawn clear parallels with the revolutionary events of July 1936 in Barcelona.

He was very aware of the possibility of unleashing social revolution, especially in Paris and in the southwest, which the guerrillas, mainly the remnants of the Spanish Republican Army, had liberated — with no Allied assistance whatsoever.

De Gaulle needed to prove to the Allies, particularly to the Americans, that he was in total control of a disciplined and powerful national army, and that there was no need to leave an Allied occupation force in France. By ordering Leclerc’s Second French Armoured Division to enter Paris before the Americans — defying Eisenhower’s instructions to the contrary — De Gaulle had successfully imposed his political authority and boosted his domestic popularity by ensuring that French troops were seen to have liberated their own capital. What was unpalatable to the French was that it had been Spanish Republicans who liberated Paris, a truth that remained obscured for over sixty years.

For most exiled CNT members, at the time, the priority was ousting Franco, and for that reason alone many agreed to the union leadership’s call to join the French army — on the understanding that once the last German bastions on the Atlantic coast had fallen, their units would be transferred to the Spanish border where they would receive full Allied logistical support to go into Spain and overthrow the tyrant. However, when Victory in Europe Day was proclaimed on 8 May 1945 —the last German stronghold on French soil having fallen on 19 April 1945 — no mobilisation orders were forthcoming regarding crossing the 147

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border, and the tens of thousands of men and women who had fought fascism unrelentingly since 1936 waited in vain for the newly created United Nations Organisation to throw its institutional weight behind the move to oust Franco. It was not to be; the spectre of communism had again risen in the East to overshadow the apparently spent force of fascism. Franco was no longer an enemy; he had reinvented himself as the ‘sentinel of the West’ and was now an ally. *** In October 1944, I was chatting with Laureano in the CNT’s Paris offices at 6 Rue de la Douane (now the Rue León Jouhaux), a street linking the Place de la Republique and the Canal St Martín, when we had an unexpected visitor, Antonio Ortíz Ramírez, an old comrade from the 1920s. It was Ortíz who, In July 1936, had organised the second anarcho-syndicalist militia column dispatched to liberate Zaragoza. He had landed in France, from Algiers, with Colonel Fernand Gambiez’s Number One Shock Battalion, and Gambiez had given him leave of absence to travel to Paris to find out more about the background to ‘Spanish National Union’ (UNE), the communist-led guerrilla force that was then preparing to invade Spain through the nearby Arán Valley. Laureano advised him to have nothing to do with the UNE; they had recently been involved in murderous punitive actions against members of the CNT and FAI regional committee in nearby Décazeville. Their death squads were suspected of murdering at least three anarchist militants in the area, and they had tried to murder another comrade, Antonio Tellez Solá — one of eighteen anarchists attached to the XIth Brigade of the French Forces of the Interior and the UNE itself.

Before returning to his unit, Laureano asked Ortíz, who had arrived in Paris in an army lorry provided by Gambiez, if he would take back with him — to one of our caches in Siradan, in the High Pyrenees — some of the materiel we had stockpiled around Paris from various battlefields, American army depots and German bases with the help of the comrades of La Nueve and the Spanish formations of Comité National de la Resistance (CNR). Ortíz agreed and delivered the weapons to José Pascual Palacios, the CNT-FAI Defence Secretary. A few months later, Ortíz was wounded in battle and was finally discharged from the French army in August 1945.

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At the end of April or early May 1945, soon after the summarey execution of Mussolini and his hangers-on, Laureano received a message from Umberto Marzocchi, an Italian comrade, asking him to come to newly-liberated Milan on a matter of great urgency — and secrecy. Marzocchi, a trusted friend from the days of the Arditi del Popolo, a veteran of the struggle against Mussolini’s blackshirts, had organised arms shipments to the CNT in the early days of the Revolution and fought in the Italian anarchist column at the battle of Almudévar in Huesca, on the Aragón front. Following the events of May 1937, and the murder of Italian comrades Camillo Berneri and Francisco Barbieri on the orders of Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Comintern leader in Spain, the Organisation sent him, for hios own safety, to France as an agent of the CNT-FAI Defence Commission’s foreign intelligence section. So when Marzocchi said the matter was both urgent and secret there was no doubt in Laureano’s mind that he should go immediately.

To cut a long story short, during the fighting with the retreating German army, comrades from the ‘Malatesta-Bruzzi’ partisan units had occupied the premises of the Milan securities printer Calcofrafia & Cartevalori in the fashionable Via Giorgio Vasari, where they discovered a number of intaglio-engraved plates for Franco’s banknotes, ranging in denomination from 50 to 1,000 pesetas. Calcofrafia & Cartevalori, whose directors were long-standing fascist grandees, were under contract to the Bank of Spain’s National Currency and Stamp Works, who were, at the time, unable to produce sufficient quantities of their own highvalue banknotes.

Laureano hurried to Milan and took possession of the plates, which became his most prized assets. They were what he had always dreamed of – revolutionary tools with which he intended to destabilise the regime and, hopefully, bring it tumbling to the ground. There was a problem, however. The exiled CNT-FAI leadership in the Rue Belfort in Toulouse got wind of the fact that Laureano had these intaglio plates and began pressuring him to hand them over. It was this issue of the plates’ ownership that became central to the growing tension between Laureano and the committees.

‘Why on earth should I hand them over to you?’ replied Laureano when they first demanded them. ‘All you want to do is destroy the plates. They frighten you’… Don’t you understand 149

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that money has no value whatsoever other than as an instrument of revolution? That’s precisely how I intend to use these plates.’

After the Liberation, Laureano — by this time a millionaire —was effectively bankrolling the CNT in exile, funding the union from behind the scenes and providing work for many comrades whom he put on the payrolls of his various enterprises. He also acquired and paid the rent for the CNT’s new Paris meeting hall in Belleville’s rue Sainte Marthe, covered the salaries and running costs of most of the movement’s newspapers and magazines — and was paying the delegates’ expenses at most congresses.

Consequently, he enjoyed unparalleled prestige and exerted a profound influence within the CNT-FAI bureaucracy and among the rank and file, especially when it came to blocking the candidacy of Pedro Mateu (one of the action group that killed prime minister Eduardo Dato in 1921) as secretary of Coordination, a job that was given to Pascual Palacios, who was Laureano’s man — at the time.

In January 1945 Laureano was elected secretary of the first Paris (and Normandy) Regional Committee of the CNT in exile, but he refused to allow his name to be included in the list of candidates for the position of CNT general secretary, a refusal that led directly, and ironically, to the appointment of Germinal Esgleas, Federica Montseny’s partner, and although he and Federica were in thrall to Laureano, Esgleas later turned out to be his nemesis.

On his return from his exile in South America, the anarchist historian José Peirats, wrote to fellow writer and historian, Juan Gómez Casas, former secretary general of the Juventudes Libertarias, that he had seen Federica Montseny ‘on her knees before the “gangster” Cerrada’. He didn’t say why she was on her knees or what she was doing there, but added that Esgleas lacked the balls to stand up to Laureano. (Juan Gómez Casas had been arrested in Spain in 1948 following a visit to the CNT headquarters in the Rue Belfort, Toulouse, and was sentenced to 30-years imprisonment. He wasn’t released until 1962.) This venal pair, because of their history during the war, not least of which was their acceptance of ministerial portfolios and their counter-revolutionary role in government, were, to say the least, controversial and seriously divisive figures within the movement.

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known as ‘Father Abbot’, while his poisonous toad of a wife, Montseny — a mercilessly ambitious woman — made Lady Macbeth look like Mary Magdalene. Curiously, whereas most members of the General Council of the Libertarian Movement (CNT-FAI-FIJL) who escaped into France were quickly arrested, the only ones to escape were Esgleas and Montseny, who bought a farm on 14 June 1940 in Salon (Dordogne). Where the money for this purchase came from remains a mystery to this day, but the possibility exists it came from the missing funds of the CNTFAI. Esgleas’s man of confidence, and banker, the mysterious and itinerant Alain Germain, a ‘commercial traveller’ in trusses, acquired a similar-sized property soon after a few kilometres away in Saint Michel de Villadeix. (Esgleas was eventually arrested and interned towards the end of 1941 and was sentenced, in September 1942, to three years’ imprisonment.

Unlike many other prominent anarchists and cenetistas, he was not deported to face Francoist justice.)

Between them and Roque Santamaría, a former member of the Valencian Iron Column and a contender for the post of Intercontinental Secretary of the CNT, they orchestrated a campaign demonising Laureano, referring to him disparagingly as ‘The Mongol’ or ‘El Chino’ because of his slightly oriental looks. Another abusive name they had for him was ‘The Golden Calf’, the implication being he was a ‘false God’ idolised by so many of the rank and file. Their objective was to oust the ‘Cerradistas’ in a palace revolution and install their own courtiers in the CNT’s National Committee HQ in the rue Belfort in Toulouse. They also plotted, successfully, to oust Larrinaga as secretary of the FAI, claiming that he was a tool of Laureano and was using the organisation’s assets for his own ‘criminal’ ends.

Larrinaga’s place was taken by one of the key anti-Cerradist conspirators, Roque Santamaría. It was a dirty, messy business indeed.

After nine months as regional secretary of the CNT in exile for Paris and Normandy, Laureano resigned to take on the job of coordinating secretary of the moribund and somewhat euphemistically named Sección Fomento, the ‘ways and means’ or ‘clandestine facilitation’ committee. His reason for standing down was, he said, because he wanted to revitalise this body in order to recover and consolidate the organisation’s scattered resources dispersed around France and Spain; by ‘scattered 151

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resources’ he meant money, logistics, and military materiel. The problem was that what was Laureano’s was almost indistinguishable from that which belonged to the Organisation.

His dream was to establish a combat organisation that would fund and coordinate subversive and guerrilla actions inside Spain without compromising the único’s precarious legality in the eyes of the French authorities. Absolutely everything had to be thrown into the pot, and it was to this end he purchased, in his own name, a number of properties, including a sawmill in Saverdun in the l’Ariège department, close to Andorra and to the Spanish border town of Puigcerdà. This was just one of a number of commercial operations he set up to help fund and provide cover for the proposed clandestine action organisation. Apart from providing work for comrades, the sawmill also served as a training camp facility, a central arms deposit and an operational base for the guerrilla groups entering and returning from Spain.

In 1947, he purchased a couple of ultra-fast Vedette patrol launches from contacts in the US navy in Marseilles, which he put at the disposition of a comrade by the name of Queralt to transport men, arms and propaganda into Spain. Queralt, a FAI member, was an ingenious ballistics engineer and inventor who, during the Spanish Civil War, had come up with the idea of launching missiles targeting the Vatican from Palma de Mallorca.

Personally, I thought it was a good idea given Pope Pius XI’s support for Franco, but the FAI Liaison Commission rejected it on the grounds that bombing the Pope would do more harm than good.

Laureano was not a violent man, temperamentally, and although he had been involved in a number of hold-ups he was dismissive of them as a means to an end, believing them to be counter-productive, a distraction to the revolutionary struggle, and too often costing the lives and freedom of good militants. His strategy was to topple the Franco regime by counterfeiting the peseta and devaluing the Francoist currency. It was an idea that struck a chord with the rank-and-file, and horror in the hearts of the bureaucrats who ran the committees, and in 1947 the proposal was carried unanimously by a national plenum of the CNT. The plan was to bankrupt the regime by flooding Spain with counterfeit 100, 500 and 1,000 peseta notes using the intaglio plates Laureano had acquired in Milan in 1945.

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Laureano’s man for this was Antonio Verardini, an industrial engineer and a trusted comrade of long-standing. Verardini was the ‘Q’ of the Defence Commission, and of the later Interior Defence organisation (Defensa Interior – DI), for which he designed and built radio transmitter devices and radio-controlled model aeroplanes capable of carrying explosive devices. When Spain’s generals launched their coup on 18 July 1936, Verardini was serving a sentence in Madrid prison for forging cheques.

After he was liberated by the CNT militias on 19 July, Cipriano Mera, his old comrade, now commander of the XIV Division (of General Miaja’s Army of the Centre), appointed him as his chief of staff, and in March 1937 Verardini played a central role in defeating the Italians and Nationalists at the Battle of Guadalajara, the last Republican victory of the Spanish Civil War. He was the ideal person for co-ordinating the counterfeiting operation and he quickly began recruiting graphic artists, printers of confidence, and purchasing the necessary equipment and the specialist inks and paper.

Verardini’s plan was to launder Cerrada’s counterfeit currency through the Casa de Moneda, the department of the Spanish mint responsible for burning old paper currency, by substituting the false bank notes for the withdrawn notes scheduled for destruction. Verardini’s contact in the Casa de Moneda, the man responsible for destroying these notes, was prepared to exchange them for between 20 to 40 per cent of the cover value. Unfortunately — and unforgivably — the National Committee of the CNT decided to issue Laureano’s notes to comrades going into Spain on clandestine organisational missions, a move that quickly led to their arrest when they used them to pay for goods and services.

By late 1948, Laureano’s extra-legal and black market activities, practices and gangster connections had brought him under increased pressure from the Esgleistas and the new FAI secretariat in Toulouse, led by Roque Santamaría. They insisted that the assets Laureano held in the organisation’s name, including the intaglio plates, had to be transferred to their control. They also demanded he abandon his quartermaster and paymaster-role in provisioning and funding the clandestine operations that were causing the official CNT serious embarrassment with their French hosts.

The exiled CNT-FAI notables — many of whom had been 153

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compromised and corrupted by Faustian pacts made in 1944 with the Gaullist secret services — were ‘quietists’, content to adapt to their situation as exiles and settle down into a passive, bureaucratic existence in their new homeland. They had longsince abandoned the idea of pursuing the armed struggle against the Francoist tyranny, in the same way they had abandoned the revolutionary struggle by joining the Republican government in November 1936, and again in May 1937 when they called off the defence groups in Barcelona in the face of Stalinist provocation.

Laureano, however, stuck to his guns and refused to give in to their demands.

‘Look, Farquhar,’ he told me, ‘if I thought these people genuinely intended doing something with our resources, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to hand everything over to them.

But the reality is that all they want to do now is to live out their comfortable and secure lives in Toulouse, unmolested, and they are prepared to kill the goose that’s been laying the golden eggs, which, to mix a metaphor, is now threatening to upset the apple cart.’

Laureano was closer to the truth than he knew. His enemies, namely Germinal Esgleas Jaume and Roque Santamaría Cortiguera, broached the subject of killing him to two highly respected urban guerrilla leaders, Wenceslao Giménez Orive and José Lluis Facerias. Both men, shocked by the approach, refused point blank. Esgleas, the secretary-general, was certainly capable of conniving at murder and was strongly suspected of having the blood of a number of comrades on his hands. He had sent José Peirats into Spain on a mission that proved to be a trap — which failed — to get him out of the way to ensure Peirats couldn’t stand against him for the position of secretary-general of the CNT. A year or so later Peirats — by this time secretary-general and highly shootable in the eyes of the Francoists — went back into Spain with Marcelino Massana to meet with the activists of the interior. It was a trip that had to be kept secret, as there was a real fear that Esgleas would again betray the mission to silence Peirats. Esgleas then spread the story that Peirats had gone into the interior to meet with Francoist agents.

Again, in 1950, during Peirats’s second spell as secretarygeneral of the CNT, he was fingered by an informer by the name 154

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of Poncel, at the behest of Esgleas, who claimed the CNT secretary-general had been involved in planning the January 1951 Lyons post office robbery and had received millions of Francs from other robberies.

It wasn’t the first time the national committee had acted like some latter-day Committee of Public Safety. In 1938, the Catalan Regional Committee and the CNT National Committee, under secretary-general Mariano R. Vázquez, the despicable ‘Marianet’, sent eight men from Manuel Escorza del Val’s ‘investigation commission’ to France, to track down and murder two comrades of impeccable integrity, our old comrades Antonio Ortíz, former commander of the 24th Division, and Joaquín Ascaso Budría, former President of the Defence Council of Aragón, having arbitrarily judged and convicted them of treason.

The plot, which involved poisoning Ortíz and Ascaso with arsenic, failed when the killers administered insufficient doses.

The two men were rushed to hospital, given an antidote and survived. But the most shocking thing of all about the incident was that one of those present when the order was given was our former comrade Juan García Oliver, who failed to challenge the murder plot, and who, thereby, by the iron law of responsibility, became complicit in it. It also calls into question the moral character of the other members of the national committee and those sent to France to murder Ortíz and Ascaso.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the growing number of bank robberies in September 1942 in both France and Spain by the action groups, and their incursions and subversive actions across the border, were causing serious problems for the official committees and commissions of the exiled CNT. And whenever these involved fatalities in the host country, whether of the robbers, bank staff or innocent bystanders, which they occasionally did, French repression of Spanish libertarian exiles ratcheted up dramatically. In May 1948, for example, masked men attempting to rob the Rhône Poulenc factory payroll in Peage de Roussillon (Lyons), accidentally killed a guard. No one was charged at the time, but it was widely conjectured that the robbers were Spanish anarchist exiles and provoked a serious backlash against the MLE. Laureano’s name had come to the attention of the French police in late April 1949, a month before the Rhône Poulenc robbery. Having received information that Spanish anarchists 155

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were operating an illegal printing press at 4 Passage Goig in the 18th district — the garage of the Hôtel des Vosges, a hotel frequented mainly by North Africans and Spaniards and managed by a Romanian woman, Madame Borsici, detectives from the Goutte d’Or precinct anti-forgery squad set up a surveillance operation around the premises. For two weeks they watched foreign-looking men loading and unloading heavy packages delivered regularly from grey, unmarked Citröen H vans and two 10-ton Studebaker lorries registered to Empresa de Transportes Galicia, a Zaragoza-based transport company. Finally, at midday on 10 May, senior investigating officer Inspector Clot, ordered his men to seal off the area and enter the premises where, in the front office, they were confronted by two men wielding revolvers. The standoff was short-lived: ‘Police! Throw down your weapons!’

‘How do we know you really are French police?’

It was easily confirmed, however, when they looked out of the window and saw the large number of uniformed police and police cars surrounding the premises. It was clear that they were, indeed, French policemen. The men handed over their weapons to the officers without heroics or further resistance, saying: ‘All right, don’t shoot, officers, we’ll come quietly…’

Inside the printshop three Spaniards were concentrating on the front- and rear-ends of noisy presses, which meant they didn’t hear or see ‘les flics’ enter, so when the policemen tapped them from behind and cut the mains supply to the machines they were taken completely by surprise. The detectives, however, had a greater shock when they discovered what the men were printing — counterfeit Spanish lottery tickets — 40,000 of them!

They had a bigger surprise when they searched the storeroom and discovered an arsenal that included thousands of detonators, twenty kilos of plastic explosive, fifty hand-grenades, anti-tank mines, a heavy machinegun, twenty-five submachineguns, four automatic rifles, four rifles, thirty revolvers and several thousand cartridges.

Again there was nothing on the premises to connect Laureano with the printshop, the arsenal or the hotel, but the police intelligence report stated that information from ‘a wellplaced informer’ indicated that the operation, including the hotel, was part of Laureano’s extensive Sección Fomento. Personally, I 156

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have always been convinced that someone in the National Committee was one of these confidentes; it was in the National Committee’s interest to get Laureano out of the way for a variety of reasons — mainly, I suspect, because of his money and influence.

One Francoist infiltrator at this time — and no doubt there were others —was the Galician Miguel Vázquez Valiño, the CNT’s attaché to the JEL who, in 1947, served as organisational/ statistical secretary of the CNT’s Intercontinental Secretariat in Toulouse. In 1950, after the betrayal and massacre of the action groups in Catalonia, he left France for Brazil and from there on to Uruguay where he ‘collaborated’ with the Francoist consuls and was a major contributor to the split that broke up the exile communities.

The seven comrades arrested in the Passage Goix raid were represented in court by a well-heeled and expensive lawyer who couldn’t get them acquitted but did manage to obtaing the minimum sentences. In their joint declaration to the court they stated: ‘We are all anarchists, all equally committed to the struggle against Franco, communism and capitalism. As for the weapons found in the garage in the Passage Goix, and the money from the sale of the counterfeit lottery tickets, all of these were intended for the comrades in Spain struggling against the dictator Franco.’

It was Laureano, of course, who paid the well-heeled lawyer’s fee.

By the early 1950s, relations between the higher committees of the Toulouse-based CNT and Santamaría’s new FAI Secretariat and the action groups in the front line of the armed resistance to Franco had broken down. The committees were running terrified of anything that might remotely compromise France’s legally countenanced recognition and tolerance of the CNT, the anarchist youth organisation (FIJL), and even the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). After the Passage Goig arrests, however, the MLE notables — Esgleas, Montseny, Santamaría — feared they would be implicated in the growing number of armed robberies being carried out by the action groups, and the counterfeiting and other illegal and subversive — and compromising — operations in which Laureano and other socalled ‘uncontrollables’ or mavericks were involved, and so they began the process of expelling the embarrassing lifelong 157

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militants who were threatening their legal existence.

The gulf between the activist and quietist wings of the movement had widened considerably by this time. Many cenetistas had grown comfortable and apathetic in exile and didn’t want anyone or any thing to rock their boat. It’s important to remember that the CNT had ceased to function as a trade union as of 1 April 1939, and had become, instead, an old comrades’ association feeding on past glories and anticipating future ones, but with no involvement in current union activity.

Nor did the Toulouse notables have any recent credentials of their own, other than their shameful history of betraying the Revolution in order to fight an unsuccessful bourgeois war.

It was, therefore, essential to the Toulouse leadership that ‘their Organisation’ appear ideologically pure and unsullied, ready for the day when ‘the call’ should come for them to return, victorious, to Spain. The sort of ideological and moral compromises required by sheer activity — with practicality knocking the rough edges off ideological dogma — were anathema to them.

Many of the exiles were content with their bureaucracies and committees, interminable meetings and conferences, and so apathy, guilt, age, family and selfish interests carried the day. The illegal but constructive subversive work of the resistance was anathemised and its ‘unorthodox’ advocates marginalised or expelled. Had the ‘prominent leaders’ of the CNT bureaucracy opted to separate the legal and ‘illegal’ activities of the Anarchist Defence Commission, they might possibly have been able to shake the majority of members out of their apathy, but nothing could have been further from their minds; their pernicious poltroonery and vicious denunciations of those who refused to accept their authority only accelerated the alienation and disinterest of the majority. What had once been a great, combative labour union was, by 1950, reduced to such ridiculous abstractions as arguing about what policies the organisation should adopt in the event of another world war, carefully avoiding any discussion of the war declared against fascism in 1936. These divisions, in my view manipulated by Federica Montseny and her crew, ultimately led to the movement splitting in 1945; it was a schism that was never properly healed.

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October 1949 and January 1950 saw the action groups decimated. One after another, militants were ambushed in the mountains or gunned down on the streets of Barcelona. Those who weren’t slaughtered under the ley de fugas were rounded up, tortured, tried by drumhead councils of war and executed by garrote-vil in a matter of weeks — or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. That winter proved the blackest in the history of the libertarian movement, the worst since Franco’s victory ten years earlier. Confidentes close to or within the CNT’s Defence Commission and National Committee were clearly responsible for the seemingly unending ambushes and arrests across the border.

Suspicion and paranoia were rife as comrade accused comrade of treachery.

As the split between activists and quietists within the exiled organisation widened, Laureano increasingly became the scapegoat for the venom of his detractors, even although he was not responsible for coordinating the groups, and had no prior knowledge of the missions or the people concerned. That role belonged to José Pascual Palacios, who was secretary of the CNT’s Defence Commission and officially responsible for coordinating all clandestine and ‘conspiratorial’ activities inside Spain. Pascual Palacios had been a close friend and collaborator of Laureano, a ‘Cerradista’ as they were known, from 1944 up until 1950 when he unexpectedly sided with Esgleas and Santamaría during their final takeover of the National Committee of the CNT. Laureano felt deeply betrayed by Pascual Palacios when his old friend failed to come to his defence during the process of his expulsion; they never spoke again, although they did meet by accident on occasion.

The final confrontation occurred when one of Santamaría’s agents, who had wormed his way into Laureano’s confidence, stole the disputed intaglio plates in Paris and took them to Toulouse, intending to hand them over to the local FAI, which was controlled by Santamaría. Laureano’s men caught up with the thief at the Toulouse-Matabiau metro station, where they ran into armed men from Santamaría’s faction of the FAI who were waiting to collect the plates. It ended in a farcical Keystone Kopstype chase, with two armed gangs chasing each other up and down the Allées Jean-Jaurès and the Rue Bayard, each trying to out-intimidate the other. In the end, Laureano was obliged to travel down from Paris to negotiate a resolution to the situation.

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Both factions met halfway between Toulouse and Montauban, where the plates were hidden and where they were destroyed, in the presence of both parties. Another incident that was to affect Laureano’s fortunes and those of the action groups in France occurred on the afternoon of Thursday 18 January 1951, when a black saloon car drove in front of a post office van as it left the Lyons sorting office in the Rue Duguesclin. Three men carrying submachineguns leaped from the car and ordered the driver out of his cab. Things took an unexpected turn for the robbers, however, when two armed guards emerged from the rear of the van — an obviously unplanned-for contingency. Hesitating for a moment, the robbers decided to make their escape and ran to their car, stopping to give themselves covering fire.

Unfortunately, one of the guards was shot dead in the ensuing firefight and the other died a fortnight later. Nine innocent bystanders were wounded, including a sixty-four-year-old woman, who died a few days later.

Within days, the French police had arrested and charged three young Spanish anarchists, CNT members, with the robbery.

A fourth committed suicide before he could be taken into custody. One of those arrested, Francisco Bailo Mata, the suicide’s brother, signed a police statement that Francisco Sabate Llopart, ‘El Quico’, had been involved in the 1948 Rhone Poulenc robbery, a connection that added even more hysteria to the media coverage. As well as informing on El Quico, he told them that Laureano was the mastermind behind a thriving trade in ration cards and false residence documents, which he was selling for 800,000 francs a time, and that he was involved in arms- and gold-smuggling.

The French press had a field day with the story, dedicating banner headlines, front pages and editorials to dramatic illustrated accounts of the ‘Spanish Gang’ and their ‘trail of death’.

Never ones to miss an opportunity, the Francoist press launched a media campaign demonising the exiled Spanish libertarians.

The bottom line was that the French authorities clamped down hard on the Spanish exile movement, arresting over 100 comrades, and harassing, interning and sending into internal exile hundreds of others. The examining magistrate’s investigation into Laureano’s business affairs led to the police uncovering many of his labyrinthine holding companies and

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related bank accounts which, they claimed, held deposits of hundreds of millions of francs. Across France, police raided and closed his printshops, including the CNT’s flagship printshop in Evreux, hotels, transport companies, and even a chain of shoe shops run by Laureano’s close friend Pedro Moñino. They also confiscated his fleet of lorries and high-speed motor launches.

The investigation led to the feared Police Judiciaire (PJ) raiding a hangar at the civil aerodrome of Guyancourt on the outskirts of Paris, where they discovered the aeroplane used in the attempt to bomb Franco from the air in 1948.

Laureano was already in jail at the time, having been arrested a few months earlier during a raid on one of his printshops in Normandy. He and other comrades from the CNT graphic arts union were discovered there in the act of forging the new German Deutschmarks. They had been betrayed, but by whom? No one knew. He had so many enemies; many of them supposed comrades. A special magistrate from the Ministry of the Interior in Paris was sent to Toulouse to investigate the CNT’s bank accounts and business affairs — and to interrogate the committee members based in the Rue Belfort. All were bluntly told the same thing: ‘I have been sent here from Paris to investigate the activities of Mr Cerrada. What can you tell me about him?’

Laureano’s enemies on the National Committee — Federica Montseny, Miguel Celma, José Borrz, Florentino Estallo, Angel Carballeira, José Peirats and Roque Santamaría (the latter by then on the Inter-Continental Commission) — now felt they had the excuse they had been waiting for, and Laureano was finally expelled, in January 1950, from his beloved CNT, the union to which he had dedicated his entire adult life. The charge against him was for use of ‘inadmissable methods’. Even so, expulsion couldn’t extinguish his dynamism, imagination or his idealism — or deter him from pursuing his objective of toppling the tyrant.

Everything fell apart for Laureano after that. Imprisoned and demonised for ‘bringing the movement into disrepute’, he was shunned everywhere. Only the closest of friends such as myself would talk to him, and if his name came up in conversation, it was usually spoken in a furtive whisper. He told me later: ‘I was left isolated — abandoned by everyone, including my old comrades. It was a very curious situation. Everyone I approached for help turned their back on me as though I were a leper. People 161

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were frightened to be associated with me. All the others, Peirats, El Quico, Pascual Palacio and so on, they all received support and solidarity from the Organisation — but not me. It was as though the pope had pronounced anathema on me.’

However, although he was no longer the secretario de Fomento or allowed to attend CNT meetings — even socialising with him was frowned upon — Laureano was still immensely wealthy, well-connected, and knew where the bodies — and the arms — were buried. He also had the respect and trust of most of the committed and experienced activists and guerrillas who formed the core of the anti-Francoist resistance — the Apache sector. *** Released from prison in 1954, Laureano was soon back on his feet, and by the spring of 1955 he was working with Sabaté and other activists in the Iberian Federation of Anarcho-Syndicalists — again to avoid compromising the legal position of either the FAI or the CNT in France. When those organisations made clear their displeasure at the choice of name, it was renamed the Federation of Anarcho-Syndicalist Groups — which continued to be denounced by the national committee. In spite of their differences, it never occurred to either Cerrada or Sabaté to set up an organisation in competition with what they always regarded as the ‘parent body’. They belonged to the CNT body and soul, even though they had been expelled and disowned.

Their overriding concern was always to act, to make the union an effective tool in the class struggle and against fascism. The committees accused them and their paper, El Combate, of splitting the movement, while their actions inside Spain were denounced as irresponsible, lacking common sense and a usurpation of union authority.

The ‘specific’ groups of the ASGs finally ceased functioning in 1957, following another clamp-down by the Renseignements Généraux, which saw Sabaté going to prison for twelve months, with a subsequent five years of restricted confinement in Dijon.

Laureano also went to prison on a charge of possessing ten million counterfeit Spanish pesetas.

Francisco Sabaté Llopart, a.k.a. El Quico, was killed in an ambush in the Catalan town of San Celoni on the morning of 5 January 1960. The Guardia Civíl had shot dead four other 162

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members of his group the previous day on a hill near Gerona.

Laureano continued to influence and fund the clandestine struggle, but from the sidelines, and when, in 1961–62, the secret planning organisation Defensa Interior (DI) took over responsibility for the armed struggle against Franco from the Defence Commission, Laureano became an important supporter in terms of providing finance, weaponry, documentation and introductions. Even then, his name still couldn’t be mentioned openly. A couple of us, namely Luis Edo, Lucio Urtubia and myself, were given the job of ensuring that former old friends Laureano and José Pascual Palacios, a member of the DI — never came face to face. They did meet on one occasion though.

Laureano, Edo and I were having coffee at a terrace table in the Place de la Republique when Pascual passed by, saw us came over and sat down, but without a flicker of recognition that his former friend Laureano was seated directly opposite. We talked for a few minutes — the conversation was slightly strained for obvious reasons — and then Pascual stood up and continued on his way, without a word or a nod to Laureano. There was too much history between the two men.

Laureano’s final run-in with the law occurred on 27 May 1970, when the police raided another of his premises, a garage in Saint-Denis, and arrested seven men taking delivery of a large quantity of forged French identity cards and driving licences.

Apart from Floreal, his son, Edo and I were the only comrades who visited him regularly in the La Santé and Fresnes prisons.

He seemed to be enjoying the monastic peace and quiet of his barred cloisters, and perhaps even the security. At last, he said, he had the opportunity to catch up on his reading. Two books he specifically asked me for were Machiavelli’s Discourses and The Prince. Released in 1974, Laureano continued to work on various imaginative projects that he hoped would topple the Franco regime and, as he called them, the ‘greedy villains of international finance’.

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The Paris Uprising: 23-25 August 1944

19-25 August 1944: the Battle for Paris

25 August 1944: outside the Hotel de Ville

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‘La Nueve’Liberates Paris (Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division)

General Leclerc chats with his anarchist soldiers

Captain Raymond Dronne briefs Martin Bernal (left) and captain Putz (right)

25 August 1944: M3 half-track ‘Guadaljara’ arrives at the Hotel de Ville Half-track ‘Madrid’

Half-track ‘Guernica’

‘La Nueve’ on the rue Rivoli

‘La Nueve’ liberates Charpassant

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Von Choltitz Surrenders to ‘La Nueve’: 25 August 1944

Top left - 25 August 1944: General Dietrich von Choltitz, military governor of Paris, surrenders to Antonio Gutierrez of La Nueve at the Hotel Meurice. Above: high-ranking Nazi prisoners escorted through Paris by Spanish republican and anarchist soldiers of ‘La Nueve’.

General Dietrich von Choltitz

Captain Raymond Dronne

General Leclerc, commander of the 2nd Armoured Division, parades Von Choltitz before the Parisian 25 August 1944: crowds of Parisians line the public streets to salute the liberators of ‘La Nueve’

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Paris Liberated!: 25 August 1944

Spaniards of ‘La Nueve’ resting in the Bois de Boulogne following the Liberation of Paris, August 1944

29 August, 1944, ‘Victory Day’: General de Gaulle salutes the men of ‘La Nueve’ at the Arc de Triomphe

With Paris liberated, the men of ‘La Nueve’ raced towards Lorraine, capturing Colmar and Strasbourg. Their final action took place in May 1945 when they captured Berchtesgaden, where Martín Bernal shat on Hitler’s chair, symbolically ending the war for so many Spanish soldiers

29 August, 1944, ‘Victory Day’: General Leclerc with the Spaniards of ‘La Nueve’

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Comrades of ‘La Nueve’

Sgt. Major. Moreno (adjutant to

Sgt. Victor Baro (Juan Rico)

Sgt. Andrés Rodríguez Leira (aka López Cariño)

Martin Bernal (bullfighter)

Miguel Campos (adjutant-chef)

Captain Joseph Putz

Lt. Amado Granell Mesado

Luis Royo (on half-track ‘Madrid)

El Fañon de ‘La Nueve’

‘La Nueve’: group photograph of the Nueve company of the 3rd Regiment de Marche du Tchad (RMT) led by Captain Dronne

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Laureano Cerrada Santos

Above: Café de l’Europe, rue des Couronnes

Murder scene: rue des Coronnes (19 October 1976)

Above: interior, Cafe de l’Europe. Farquhar McHarg, with scarf, is standing behind Laureano (seated) Below, left: Laureano’s house in Clichy Paris, May 1945, CNT Congreso de la Mutualite: (front, l/r) Laureano Cerrada Santos, Fernando Gómez Pelaez, n/known; (rear l/r) n/known; Federica Montseny Mañé, Germinal Esgleas Jaume, José Borrás Cascarosa

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Laureano Cerrada Santos

Press report of raid on print-shop in the passage Goix, but not being in his name, Cerrada was never charged. Le Parisien Liberé: 11 May, 1949

Above: some of Laureano Cerrada Santos’s forged Francoist currency, ranging in value from 501000 pesetas, printed using the intaglio-engraved plates acquired from Italy. Below: one of Laureano’s print shops and arms deposits

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Laureano Cerrada Santos 27 October 1976

27 October. 1976: A day mournful and overcast...

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Give flowers to the rebels who failedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Laureano Cerrada Santos (1902-1976)

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El Sometent (Helios Gรณmez)

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NOTEBOOK: 1919 PHOTOGRAPHS AND CUTTINGS ALBUM, 1919 NOTES & OBSERVATIONS, 1919

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

Top: Barcelona, general.

Bottom: Barcelona, Old City

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

Top: Buenaventura Durruti (working on locomotive boiler) in León rail marshalling yards.

Left: Durruti in 1915, standing (centre) in the engineering workshop of Melchor Martínez.

Antonio del Toto (Los Justicieros action group)

José Buenaventura Durruti Dominguez (mugshot)

Durruri (left) in Vals des Bains (November 1918, during his first exile in France.

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919 ABC, 27 February 1919

Blanco y Negro (ABC), 2 March 1919

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

La Vanguardia, Sunday, 23 February 1919

La Vanguardia, Saturday. 1 March 1919

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1919, 12 March: soldiers occupy the Canadiense generating plant in the carrer de la Mata

Above :Barcelona’s tramworkers join the strike Left: police stop cyclists suspected of acting as couriers between CNT’s barri and local committees.

1919, when the transport workers come out in solidarity with the Canadiense workers the strike becomes general and spreads across Catalonia. Above: the army guarding a tram stop in Sarriá.

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

The military occupy and operate the water-pumping station in Cornellรก.

The army controls water pumping and electrity generation throughout Catalonia.

Canadiense generating station in the Pyrenees

Solidarity meeting in Pallars

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Stringsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of arrested strikers being marched up to Montjuic

Strike meetings take place across the province

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

Angel Pestaña (CNT)

Paulino Díez (CNT)

Simó Piera (CNT)

Above: Comisión Mixta. Left: Saturnino Meca, Angel Pestaña and Salvador Seguí Below: awaiting a meeting of the Mixed Commission with Pestana and Seguí centre

On October 11 1919, a government decree created the Mixed Commission, an arbitration board composed of workers, employers, and government mediators, to resolve differences between the parties.

On 20-26 October the employers voted to renew the lockout on 3 November, after declaring that only the army can guarantee ‘order and tranquility’ .

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Cabinet of the Conde de Romanones (seated to the left of King Alfonso XIII)

Joaquin Milans del Bosch, Captain General of Barcelona: Milans’ power to detain, interrogate, torture or kill anyone he defined as an ‘illegal combatant’ in his personal war on the union was both absolute and unrestrained. Not content with suspending habeas corpus, Milans outlawed the CNT, closing down all its branches, ateneos and workers’ centres and arrested thousands of the union’s most active members with a complete disregard for the due process of law, or for any generally accepted standards for the treatment of prisoners.

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

La Patronal (top and bottom), employersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; federation, meet following Canadiense strike to discuss workersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lockout

The guilty men: some of the clerico- politico-military-industrial cabal responsible for the post WWI strategy of tension and pistolero death squads.

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General Joaquin Milans del Bosch i Carrillo

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Juan Cardinal Soldevilla y Romero (Archbishop of Zaragoa)

General Severiano Martínez Anido (Military Governor, 1919)

On 15 April 1919, the King asked the ultra-conservative Antonio Maura to form a new government.

Maura had been out of power for more than ten years, ever since the shameful and bloody aftermath of the Semana Tragica, over which he had presided. After years of dreaming of a return to power, Maura once again held the reins of state in his hand. His administration was presidential in style, wielding power through an inner ‘war cabinet’ of selected ministers and non-elected advisers, mainly military men or ideologues who considered possession of a conscience to be a weakness, who had little or no regard for ‘niceties’, such as civil liberties or human or constitutional rights.

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

General Miguel Arlegui Bayonés: Inspector of the Guardia Civil and Barcelona police commissioner under Martínez Anido.

Ramón Sales Amenós (pistolero leader): Carlist from Lerida.

Joined the CNT’s Maritime Union in 1918 and in 1919 formed the Unión de Sindicatos Libres —the ‘Libre’.

King Alfonso XIII with his enforcers: Generals Severiano Martínez Anido and Milans del Bosch

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Josep Bertrán y Musitu, leader of bourgeois vigilante Somatent and liaison between de Koenig and military governor Milans del Bosch.

Féliú Graupera, president of the Spanish employers’ association, the Federacion Patronál Española, the funders of ‘pistolerismo’.

Above and right: contemporary cinematic representations of the employers’ murder campaign targeting union activists.

Manuel Bravo Portillo, former head of the Barcelona’s Special Services Brigade and death squad chief from December 1919.

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The ‘Baron de Koenig’, mercenary spy, confidence trickster, and head of private ‘security company ‘(the Black Gang’) employing 70 killers.

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

Evelio Boal (CNT): Murdered by Libre pistoleros

Josep Canela (CNT): Murdered by Libre pistoleros (inc. Ramón Sales)

Miguel Burgos (CNT): Murdered by Bravo’s police (‘ley de fugas’)

Antonio Jiménez, ‘El señorito’(CNT): Medí Martí (CNT): Defence group activist from the Poble Nou barri defence group acttivist

Pau Sabater, ‘el Tero’ (CNT): Murdered by Bravo’s pistoleros

31 March 1919: scene of the extra-judicial (cold-blooded) murder of Miguel Burgos, the outspoken secretary of the CNT’s Tanners’ Union, during a police raid on his apartment. This was the first official application‘ of the ley de fugas’, a law that officially sanctioned the shooting of prisoners allegedly attempting to escape ‘lawful custody’

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Salvador Quemades, Salvador Seguí and Ángel Pestaña (CNT leaders)

Solidarity meetings in support of the Canadiense strikers were held across Catalonia

19 March: Scene outside Las Arenas bullring following a show-of-hands decision to return to work

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

Top: Angry workers sack a butchers. Below: Women picket a bakery

Above: Protesters attack a grocery store. Below (left): Rent strike (right) attack on a bakery store

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

10 December 1919, Teatro de la Comedia, Madrid: Venue for the Second National Congress of the CNT, the first national congress since 1911. Attending the historic eight-day event were 450 delegates from across Spain and Portugal. It was at this meeting the CNT formulated its revolutionary strategy based on industrial unions, anti-parliamentarianism and direct action.

Above: Manuel Bravo Portilloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corpse in the mortuary of the Hospital Clinico (5/9/1919).

Below (left): Carrer de Còrsega where Bravo Portillo was shot; (right) obit photo in Blanco y Negro

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

Press coverage of the killing of Manuel Bravo Portillo. Above: ABC (Monarchist daily, Madrid) Below: La Vanguardia (Catalanist daily, Barcelona)

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

Above: The Executioner: Martinez Anido by Helios Gómez

‘El Cepo’ (the ‘stocks’): torture procedure used by police and Guardia Civil

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Below: The Modelo Prison, Barcelona

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

Exterior and interior of La cárcel Modelo: Barcelona’s infamous Model Prison

Francisco Maestre Laborde, Conde de Salvatierra de Alava, civil governor of Barcelona

25 December 1919: Francisco Maestre Laborde, Conde de Salvatierra de Alava, civil governor of Barcelona, orders the Civil Guard to repress a mutiny of CNT prisoners in the Modelo (following an unsuccessful mass escape attempt). Sixty-two compañeros were injured in the incident, including Felipe Sandoval (left), whose jaw was broken in several places. The beatings, urged on by Maestre Laborde, were so severe that the Director General of Prisons was forced to intervene to restrain them.

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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg: Pistoleros! 2: 1919

The Lasarte files (death list used by pistoleros)

Eduardo Barriobero y Herrán — CNT lawyer

Public protest meetings

The Ritz Hotel Public demonstration in the wake of the Canadiense strike and employers’ lockout

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Photographs and Cuttings Album, 1919

Pere Mateu (left) and Ramón Casanellas of the metalworkers’ defence group, the men responsible for the attempted assassination of Arturo Elizalde, the textile magnate who financed the murder of ‘El Tero’

Above: Francisco Ponzan Vidal, 1936 (Regional Defence Council of Aragón). Right: photograph taken at the door of the Council of Aragón (Caspe), August 1937. Circled (at the rear) is Farquhar McHarg (CNT —then using the nom de guerre Miguel Giménez Herrero); circled right, standing next to Council President Joaquín Ascaso Budría (CNT), is Francisco Ponzán Vidal (CNT).

The Libertador anarchist group (escape, evasion and sabotage) of the Servicio de Información Especial Periférica (SIEP): Rafael Lopez Laguarte, ‘El Navarro’, Agustín Remiro, Francisco Ponzán and ‘El Mánico’

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Barcelona’s civil governor, General Severiano Martinez Anido, lunching with leading Patronál bosses

Sometent of Flix (between Lleida and Tarragona): The armed forces of reaction

1919,‘White Terror’: Special Services Brigade and pistoleros launch a new terror campaign against the único

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Barcelona’s industrial skyline

Durruti’s mentor

Farquhar’s London connection

Paris, October 19, 1976

Interior courtyard of Farquhar McHarg’s apartment block in the Carrer des Escudellers (with FM top right)

Above: Lara Medora (police file): Farquhar McHarg’s first love

A woman of the Raval

Police surveillance photo of Lara and Farquhar

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What they said about ¡Pistoleros! 1: 1918!

The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg ¡Pistoleros! 1: 1918 “‘Astonishing — a new sort of history fiction or ‘doction’, thrilling to read and the most gripping illustrations I ever saw in one book — only wish the publisher had given them a full page each.”

Neal Ascherson, journalist, author, lecturer, screenwriter, editor of Public Archeology, and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London “When I was in Spain making Dr Zhivago I well remember a strikingly dashing and charismatic Scot who was working as an extra. His name was Farquhar and one night after shooting we spoke for hours in the bar. He said that he had been in a love with a woman called Lara. I recall that he had had a remarkable life and I told him that he should one day write it down. What a thrill to find out that he did so.”

Julie Christie, actor “It's not quite the Farquhar I remember, but I can confirm he knew a girl called Lara because she was the sister of a lover of a very close acquaintance of mine.

Her memories were, according to him, not untinged with bitterness. Not my business of course. And who knows what really went on ? I was told Lara found a certain revenge by running off with his false tooth (the original being knocked out, you'll recall, by a Fascist gun butt at the bakery siege in Barcelona). I got all this from 'Colonel' M.A.Pyatnitski who had been part of the aborted German aerial experiments of 1938 and have to admit he was a bit unreliable. His implacable hatred of anarchists coloured everything he told me.”

Michael Moorcock, author and musician "Written with tremendous brio, this is a passionate and gripping tale of an idealist's 'coming of age. McHarg’s gripping narrative convincingly taps the rich historical seams of intrigue, protest and conflict of an age in which many of the streets of Barcelona, like those of many other European cities, became stained with blood due to the struggle between the defenders of the established order and those who dreamed of overthrowing it."

Dr Chris Ealham, author of Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898–1937 “The first volume of memoirs from Farquhar McHarg, is a highly charged narrative that fires from the hip in its scattergun treatment of revolutionary politics. It made me think of Marx’s Herr Vogt meets Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry. Punchy as a bare-knuckle boxer, the writing in this vivid ‘red noir’ captures the craziness and complexity of the period, as well as exploring the big issues of commitment, faith and violence. In its heady brew of poetry and 198

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What they said about ¡Pistoleros! 1: 1918! polemics and its dynamic depiction of the anarchist version of revolution it also does what it says in the title, and offers an explosive account that is as anarchic as the worldview it espouses. A book you’d want to carry in your bandolier.”

Professor Willy Maley, Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Glasgow “Having known Farquhar McHarg in his prime, and despaired of him ever putting down on paper his extraordinary experiences, I am delighted that he has finally done so. Glasgow’s answer to Victor Serge has produced a document of remarkable value, so grippingly written that one might almost think it was a novel.”

Professor Paul Preston, historian, Hispanist and Principe de Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies, LSE “A fact-packed history of anarchist struggle against the Spanish Catholic Church and state written by a Glaswegian whose revolutionary syndicalism is felt to be partly the inheritance of ‘the Presbyterian and Covenanting tradition’ in which he was brought up. As such this instructive and entertaining memoir is not only both a kind of retrospective ‘prequel’ to the story and ideas of Stuart Christie’s excellent Granny Made me an Anarchist, but its Scottish antecedents also take in not only the anarchism of Guy Aldred, but the polemical and committed covenanting history of John Galt’s great novel Ringan Gilhaize.”

Tom Leonard, poet, professor and author of outside the narrative. Poems 19652009 "What a remarkable and rollicking tale Farquar McHarg has to tell, one that will fascinate anyone interested in anarchy, life, love, Scotland, Spain and the world.

When we met very briefly in the late sixties in Les Deux Magots in Paris, he kept a bunch of us entranced with his adventures — then he borrowed some francs off me to buy his round and must have lost his way back to the table for I never saw him again. What a treat to be able to read those stories in all their vivid historical splendour at last."

Duncan Campbell, journalist (The Guardian — former senior reporter, Los Angeles’ and crime correspondent), author of The Paradise Trail, and screenwriter ‘This splendid memoir is marred only be some carelessness in the caption writing that (for example) misdates a picture of Clyde pleasure steamers to a much later epoch.’

Ian Jack, journalist, columnist, former editor of Granta and author of The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. “...A rare plunge into the dark whirlpool of politics, passion and intrigue that swirled around the docks, bars and tenements of Barcelona in 1918. B. Traven would be envious of McHarg’s skill in re-creating the dangers and treachery of the times with such historical accuracy. The story is a fascinating bildungsroman; a young Scots seaman has hardly set foot on shore before he is caught up in the 199

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What they said about ¡Pistoleros! 1: 1918! maelstrom. Chance encounters with charismatic characters of Barcelona’s anarchist movement combined with tests of his resolve bring about the dawning of his own political consciousness and commitment. It is above all a richlytextured adventure story, refreshing in its humour and in its illuminating depiction of life in a period and place that will be unfamiliar to many readers of British fiction. ¡Pistoleros! is a crack shot that rings out to remind us of times that were less bland.”

Pauline Melville, writer, actress and author of Shape-Shifter, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, The Migration of Ghosts and Eating Air “¡Pistoleros! Is the story of twentieth century anarchism as witnessed by McHarg, a Glaswegian anarchist sailor who became embroiled in Spanish revolutionary politics at the end of the First World War. Curiously echoing the editor Christie’s own life fifty years later, the youthful and naïve McHarg jumps ship in Barcelona and enlists with the CNT (the anarchist national workers union) in their struggle against the bosses proto-fascist murder squads and para-military catholic groups (which provided training for the likes of Franco in murder and suppression techniques). ¡Pistoleros! is written in the style of a genre thriller with all of the accompanying intrigues; double dealing spy networks, evil foreign agents, love and betrayal all framed within the romantic backdrop of post WW1 Barcelona — and in this way it’s is a gripping read, yet these characters and events are real, the colourful backdrop the grim reality of poverty versus the opulence and wealth of the Barcelona bourgeoisie.

Anarchists are often caricatured as firebrands and disorganised individualists and universally accused of being better at ‘analysing the problem’ rather than providing practical solutions. ¡Pistoleros! shows that the history of Anarchism has been that of pragmatism; Anarchists were always on the frontline of providing real-world solutions through organised labour in effective opposition to the exploitation and corruption of the ruling classes – when the traditional left were constantly mired in internal power politics and global machinations.”

Simon Crab, musician and designer (http://crab.wordpress.com/)

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