by Paul Preston
Both General Sebastián Pozas Perea and Manuel Blasco Garzón, who, on 19 July, became respectively Ministers of the Interior and of Justice, were simply swamped by the enormity of the task facing them. At the end of July, the Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, resigned in frustration at the impotence of the apparatus of the state to prevent uncontrolled criminals and militia groups taking the law into their own hands.46 To replace Alonso Mallol, Pozas had turned to the forty-eight-year-old Manuel Muñoz Martínez, a retired army major from Chiclana just outside Cádiz. Muñoz had represented Cádiz in the Cortes as a Left Republican deputy.47 Described by the Chilean diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch as ‘tall and terse, very dark, very hard and very obstinate’, he was, by most accounts, a mediocre individual.48 He was also distracted by fears for his own family in Cádiz.
When Muñoz first went to the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS – Security Headquarters), he found the building completely deserted. Attempting to rebuild the apparatus of law and order, Muñoz faced the unreliability of the police, the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards. Those that could be relied upon were needed at the front.49 An indication of the consequent impotence was his ineffectual announcement that porteros (concierges) would be held responsible for any searches and arrests carried out in their buildings by unauthorized personnel.50
Muñoz’s basic problem in trying to rebuild his department’s central role in public order was that every party and trade union had squads that autonomously carried out house searches, arrests and executions. The most numerous and the most disorganized were the anarchist ones. The one run by the Madrid branch of the Socialist Party was more efficient and was soon given official status. It was known as the CIEP because it used the file-card system built up by the party’s Electoral Information Committee (Comisión de Información Electoral Permanente). Its principal leaders, who went on to play important roles, were Julio de Mora Martínez and two professional policemen who were also Socialists, Anselmo Burgos Gil and David Vázquez Baldominos. Julio de Mora would later become head of the Departamento Especial de Información del Estado (DEDIDE – Special State Intelligence Department). Burgos Gil would lead the bodyguards of the Soviet Ambassador. In June 1937 Vázquez Baldominos would be made chief of police in Madrid.51
Aware of their own impotence and in a first desperate attempt to regain some vestige of control, General Pozas and Muñoz agreed that it was necessary to get the left-wing parties and unions involved in supporting the DGS. The result was the creation on 4 August of the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública. Muñoz’s declared objective was ‘to contain the assassinations and excesses being committed in Madrid because of the lack of authority and control over the armed masses’. The scale of the problem was revealed when, four days later, Enrique Castro Delgado, the commander of the most highly disciplined militia unit, the Communist Fifth Regiment, was obliged to announce that any of its members found to have carried out unauthorized arrests and/or house searches would be expelled.52 It was perhaps no coincidence that two battalions of the Fifth Regiment shared the premises of the most important Communist checa, known as ‘Radio 8’.53
By creating the Comité Provincial de Investigación Pública (CPIP), Muñoz was placing law and order in the capital in the hands of a committee composed of thirty representatives of the left-wing parties and trade unions. It was dominated by the CNT–FAI, whose representatives were Benigno Mancebo Martín and Manuel Rascón Ramírez. They would later acquire notoriety for their role in the sacas – the removal and subsequent assassination of prisoners. The same was true of Arturo García de la Rosa, the representative of the Communist-dominated United Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas). These poachers turned gamekeepers operated initially out of the Círculo de Bellas Artes located in the capital’s great Calle Alcalá at number 42. At the first meeting, Muñoz said that he simply could not trust the staff of the DGS and that, once it had been properly purged of rebel supporters, he would bring in members of the CPIP as ‘provisional police officers’ to fill the gaps. Nevertheless, his statement that all arrests must be made in collaboration with the police was rejected out of hand by some delegates, who made it clear that they reserved the right to shoot those considered ‘indisputably fascist and dangerous’. Muñoz was alleged to have smiled and to have said that some things did not need to be spelled out.
The Committee designated six tribunals to function round the clock with two of them working eight-hour shifts each day. These tribunals, under the overall supervision of Benigno Mancebo and consisting of men without any legal training or experience, sometimes themselves criminals, undertook the arrest, trial and sentencing of suspects. The men responsible for arresting suspects were able, with credentials provided by the DGS, to enter any premises, seize any property they considered questionable and arrest anyone they thought suspicious. Mancebo made decisions on the basis of statements from the employees or domestic servants of those detained. He was merciful with those said to have treated their staff well. Those found guilty by these tribunals would be taken to prison. Often, militiamen from the Committee or some independent checa would go to the prisons with an order of liberation on DGS notepaper. As the man left the prison, usually between midnight and dawn, he would be picked up by militiamen, driven away and shot. Among those given DGS badges and identification papers were common criminals such as the notorious Felipe Emilio Sandoval Cabrerizo, a fifty-year-old anarchist who used the sobriquet ‘Dr Muñiz’.54
Not long after the creation of the CPIP, Muñoz was so concerned by the continuing wave of paseos that he turned to the CNT leadership for help. He was particularly appalled by the spectacle of large numbers of corpses being found each morning in the Pradera de San Isidro, the popular park to the south-west of the city. Muñoz knew that David Antona, the secretary of the Regional CNT, was hostile to the paseos. Through Antona, he was able to meet some young CNT leaders, including Gregorio Gallego, in the hope of securing their help in putting an end to the paseos. They told him it was impossible since that would involve them taking on their own comrades from the CPIP and the other checas. When Gallego discussed the meeting with Eduardo Val and Amor Nuño, who ran the anarchist checas, Val was critical of uncontrolled violence, but he may have been making a distinction between that and the violence that he did control. Nuño expressed approval of the paseos, saying ‘instant justice strengthens the revolutionary morale of the people and commits it to the life-and-death struggle in which we are involved’.55
On occasions, Muñoz would telephone the Círculo de Bellas Artes to order the arrest of a given individual, only for the anarchists to refuse. With ample reason not to trust the anarchists of the CPIP, Manuel Muñoz assigned to the Dirección General de Seguridad two somewhat more reliable armed units which would operate largely, although not exclusively, on his own orders. One such squad, consisting mainly of Assault Guards, was headed by Captain Juan Tomás de Estelrich. Thanks to an imaginative journalist of Heraldo de Madrid, the squad came to be known as ‘Los Linces de la República’ (the Lynxes of the Republic). Operating out of the ex-royal palace, it was used, on the specific orders of the DGS, for the arrest of named individuals and the confiscation of valuables. Many of its operations took place in small towns and villages outside Madrid in the provinces of Toledo and Ávila, where they shot local rightists. The unit would de dismantled in December 1936. After the war, several of its members were accused of murdering some of those arrested.56
The other group was known as the ‘Escuadrilla del Amanecer’ (the Dawn Squad) because of its practice of arrests and house searches from 1.00 a.m. until dawn. Like the Lynxes, it consisted mainly of Assault Guards, although it was more directly responsible to Muñoz and operated out of the DGS.57 It made important arrests such as those of the great liberal politician Melquíades Álvarez and Dr José María Albiñana, who had founded the diminutive Spanish Nationalist Party in 1930. It acquired a reputation for its ruthlessness and often worked in collaboratio
n with the CPIP and some of the anarchist checas, including the group led by the notorious killer Felipe Sandoval at the Cine Europa.58 After the war, members of the Escuadrilla del Amanecer were tried for theft, murder and sexual crimes. The most notorious case was that of María Dolores Chicharro y Lamamié de Clairac, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Carlist. Despite her family’s beliefs, Dolores’s only crime seems to have been her beauty. She was arrested in April 1937, gang-raped and then murdered in the Casa de Campo.59
Obviously, the overlap between police and parallel police organizations opened up considerable opportunities for corruption and abuse. The wages of those who worked in the CPIP were paid from money confiscated during house searches. Three weeks after its creation, the CPIP was obliged to issue a statement insisting that no unauthorized house searches were to be carried out, that only weapons, compromising documents and valuables of use to the war effort were to be confiscated and that everything taken was to be handed in to the CPIP.60 Accordingly, all the left-wing political parties and unions jointly announced that detentions or house searches could be carried out only by agents or militiamen carrying documentation from the DGS or the CPIP. Citizens were instructed to denounce to the authorities any attempts at either without such authorization.61
As might have been expected, this did not deter some of the groups ostensibly undertaking security functions, even those linked to the CPIP. In part to counter the disproportionate anarchist influence in the CPIP, on 5 August General Pozas ordered the reorganization of the criminal investigation section of the police, the Cuerpo de Investigación y Vigilancia. As a result, about one hundred men, the majority Socialists, were sworn in as temporary police officers. On the recommendation of the PSOE’s executive committee, Agapito García Atadell was appointed to head a unit supposedly under the supervision of a professional policeman, the commander of the Criminal Investigation Brigade, Antonio Lino. García Atadell was a thirty-four-year-old typesetter from Galicia who claimed later to be a close friend of Indalecio Prieto. This was far from the truth and was not why he was recommended for the job. He certainly knew Prieto but merely because he had been part of his armed escort during the February election campaign. He would betray the trust placed in him. Through his nefarious activities, he was to become the most celebrated example of a man turned into a criminal by the temptations of his role.62
The García Atadell Brigade, and another set up at the same time under the command of Javier Méndez, a career policeman, effectively operated on their own initiative. The authority of their supervisor Antonio Lino was no more than nominal. García Atadell established his forty-eight men in the confiscated palace of the Condes de Rincón on Madrid’s grand Paseo de la Castellana.63 Méndez set up headquarters in the Gran Vía above the Cafetería Zahara and the press regularly recorded the arrests of spies, saboteurs, snipers, Falangists and other rebel supporters by his unit. García Atadell went to some trouble to ensure that ever more flattering accounts of the exploits of his own men were published almost daily. These legitimate duties in rearguard security usually led to the discovery of weapons and large sums of money and valuables as a result of denunciations by the porteros and cleaners of buildings in upper-class areas. Considerable amounts of money and valuables were handed over to the authorities by García Atadell, although part of the booty remained in his hands and those of his two closest cronies, Luis Ortuño and Pedro Penabad.64
Antonio Lino, who was secretly a rebel supporter, later alleged that the militiamen brought in by García Atadell and Méndez included ‘common thieves, gangsters and murderers’. He claimed that he and other professional policemen did not dare come out of their offices unless armed. According to Lino, Méndez was corrupt and responsible for the deaths of numerous policemen, although it is likely that Méndez was uncovering the treachery of rebel supporters within the force. Lino, fearful that his own rebel sympathies were about to be exposed, eventually took refuge in the Mexican Embassy.65 When García Atadell fell into rebel hands, he tried to put himself in a favourable light by claiming that he had often helped Lino neutralize Méndez, who used to tip off the CPIP about suspect policemen. He also boasted that he had arranged for Lino’s family to be given refuge in the Mexican Embassy. This is plausible since he ran a racket with an attaché at the Embassy whereby right-wingers arrested by his men could buy sanctuary there.66
While it was certainly the case that there were criminal elements at work in the Republican rearguard, some of the robberies and other abuses were the work of right-wing agents provocateurs. In pursuit of its legitimate duties, the Atadell Brigade uncovered an organization that provided Republican uniforms so that its members could carry out night-time shootings with impunity. García Atadell himself felt obliged to issue a statement that only men carrying an identity card with his signature were authentic members of his unit.67 Given the mix of official functions and abuse, it is extremely difficult to estimate the scale of the crimes committed by the Atadell Brigade. When he fell into rebel hands in November 1936, he tried to ingratiate himself with his interrogators by exaggerating the number of robberies and murders and claiming that they were all approved by the Republican authorities.
He admitted that the brigade carried out many executions on its own initiative after nightly judgments reached by a ‘sentencing committee’. This consisted of the so-called ‘control committee’ which administered the overall operation, augmented with a different rank-and-file militiaman each day. The prisoners were sentenced to death or imprisonment or freed. In the cases of dispute, Atadell had the casting vote. In Atadell’s version, the hundred or so persons sentenced to death were immediately driven to the outskirts of Madrid and shot. One of the committee’s members, Ángel Pedrero, who later attained prominence in the Republican security services, denied any knowledge of such executions throughout interrogation and torture and at his trial on 20 February 1940. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to death by garrotte vil for involvement in at least fifteen of the Atadell Brigade’s killings as well as for his role in the Republic’s military counter-intelligence organization from 1937 to 1939.68
The majority of the brigade’s prisoners were handed over to the DGS, along with confiscated valuables and weapons. Some of the more important, however, were kept as hostages in the brigade’s Rincón Palace. In some cases, they were held until they paid a ransom or bought the passports that enabled them to escape to the rebel zone. In others, they were murdered to cover up the theft of their property. Several others, such as the Duquesa de Lerma, were saved. Indeed, in gratitude, the Duquesa later travelled from San Sebastián to Seville to speak at Atadell’s trial. Atadell also ‘graciously extended his protection’ to people from his native village of Viveiro in Lugo. Life in the Palace gave an insight into García Atadell’s bizarre mentality. His exquisite treatment of some aristocratic prisoners perhaps suggested an ostentatious desire to show off, an impression confirmed by the tawdry arrangements in the Palace itself. He often received visitors in a dressing gown. The reception hall was staffed by attractive typists wearing diaphanous, low-cut dresses in pastel shades and others dressed like French maids in lace aprons. The gateway into the garden was crowned by an arch of coloured lightbulbs that spelled out the name ‘Brigada García Atadell’.69
On 24 September 1936, Atadell made his most famous celebrity arrest – that of a forty-three-year-old widow, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano’s sister, Rosario. Virtually the entire Republican press carried the story that she had said, ‘Kill me but don’t make me suffer,’ to which it was alleged that Atadell replied, ‘Madame, we neither murder nor execute. We are more human than those who shoot workers en masse.’ Heraldo de Madrid accompanied a big piece on the arrest headlined ‘The Humanization of the War’ with a photo of Atadell and Rosario. The text compared ‘the decency, the nobility, the chivalry of the chief of the people’s investigation militias’ with ‘the ignoble and inhuman conduct, the sheer abjection of the way the war is carried out by the rebels’. Rosario alleged
ly thanked him for ‘his kindness and consideration’.70
The press version implied that Rosario had been located as a result of brilliant detective work – ‘with the diligence that is the hallmark of this brigade, Atadell personally carried out the investigation that unearthed this person’s hiding-place’. This was contradicted by Ángel Pedrero who, in his post-war interrogation, revealed that she had contacted the brigade through a friend, to ask for protection. This is confirmed by Rosario’s own post-war account that, weary of living in clandestinity and terrified that she might be caught by anarchist ‘uncontrollables’, she gave herself up to Atadell. She hoped, rightly, that she might thereby be looked after for a potential prisoner exchange.71 According to the press, she was handed over to the Dirección General de Seguridad and, after processing, sent to a women’s prison. However, García Atadell told his interrogators in Seville that he kept her in great comfort in the Rincón Palace until 20 October when Manuel Muñoz, three of whose sons were being held by General Queipo de Llano, requested that she be transferred to his custody.72 Rosario Queipo de Llano was not the only woman to give herself up to Atadell in the hope of avoiding a worse fate at the hands of the FAI.73
