by Paul Preston
The report in the Communist press denounced the perpetrators as incontrolables in the service of fascism, ‘real enemies of the people and of the revolution who, like cruel and heartless highwaymen, murder in cold blood the best defenders of the people’. The PCE called for exemplary punishment and, to avoid a repetition of the crime, for the militia groups outside Madrid to be disarmed. It was claimed that ‘certain organizations’ were heavily infiltrated by the fifth column, a clear reference to the CNT. The accusation was in fact entirely justified.12
The initial response of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership was emollient. It was stated that left-wing unity would be endangered by the accusation that those who shot Yagüe were fifth columnists. Then, on 25 December, three CNTistas were found dead with their union cards stuffed into their mouths. Those murders were avenged by Eduardo Val’s Defence Committee, which left three Communists dead with their party cards in their mouths. In reply, two more CNTistas were killed and the PCE press stepped up its campaign for a purge of the CNT. Outraged, the CNT published a list of militants killed by Communists in Málaga, Cabeza de Buey in La Serena (eastern Badajoz), Las Herencias (Ciudad Real), Miguel Estaban and La Guardia (Toledo) and Perales de Tajuña and other towns in Madrid.13
Carrillo failed in his demand for the Junta to condemn to death the militiamen responsible for the attack on Yagüe, something which was outside its jurisdiction. He was furious when the case was put in the hands of a state tribunal at which the prosecutor refused to ask for the death penalty when it was claimed that Yagüe had not shown his credentials at the CNT control point. With the Communist press baying for the militiamen’s blood, José García Pradas, the editor of the newspaper CNT, published a demand that they be released and threatened that, if this did not happen, CNT forces would be withdrawn from the front to release them by force. It was the sort of incendiary comment that convinced many others that the anarchists were irresponsible, if not downright subversive. CNT was the mouthpiece of the Defence Committee, run by Eduardo Val, Manuel Salgado Moreira and García Pradas, all three violently anti-Communist. Miaja ordered the suspension of CNT, but García Pradas refused to obey. He printed, and was about to distribute, the next issue when Miaja had the paper’s offices surrounded by Assault Guards and declared that it was absurd, after the sacrifices made to defend Madrid, for a squabble between anarchists and Communists to provoke its fall. Only Miaja’s intervention prevented serious bloodshed. In the event, to the chagrin of the PCE, the tribunal decided that the men who had shot Yagüe had acted in good faith. The immediate reaction of both organizations was an agreement not to let this hostility undermine anti-fascist unity. It was short lived.14 This war of organizations was symptomatic both of the continuing weakness of the state and of the CNT’s exiguous loyalty to the Republic.
Carrillo’s successor, José Cazorla, was determined to put an end to parallel police forces. He found it intolerable that many files on right-wingers seized by militia groups in July 1936 had not been handed over to the Dirección General de Seguridad. In consequence, the Tribunales Populares had released many fifth columnists because there was no record of their political affiliations. Cazorla started the job of centralizing files and organizations when he took over the DGS in the capital from Serrano Poncela in December. He saw this as the first step towards his principal goal which was the investigation and punishment of pro-rebel sabotage and subversion. His zeal in this led to a bitter conflict with the anarchists and anti-Stalinist dissident Communists. The Communists believed that opposition to a tightly centralized war effort constituted sabotage and subversion. Moreover, they had little doubt that some of the rearguard violence was the work of agents provocateurs embedded within the CNT working to discredit the Republic internationally and to spread demoralization.
Another factor poisoning relations between the CNT and the Communists was suspicion of Melchor Rodríguez, who was arranging for more than one hundred prisoners to be released each day. Suspicions that he might have links with the fifth column were intensified when several of those whose release he arranged went over to the rebels, including Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes and the Falangist radio personality Bobby Deglané. In a meeting of the Madrid Junta on 8 January 1937, Cazorla complained that Melchor Rodríguez gave prisoners permission to hold pro-rebel demonstrations and have private meetings with members of the diplomatic corps. He called him ‘protector of the prisoners’ because he treated right-wing detainees as if they were exactly the same as the CNT prisoners of old. On 19 February, Cazorla accused Melchor of opposing his public order policy. He further infuriated the CNT leadership when, in his campaign against sabotage and espionage, he began to investigate the infiltration by fifth columnists of the ineffective secret services run in the Ministry of War by the CNT’s Manuel Salgado.15
As a result of these investigations, the Brigada Especial led by Santiago Álvarez Santiago arrested over thirty anarchists and Socialists in mid-February. The CNT press protested that anarchist militants deemed to be enemies of the state were being interned as part of a dirty war being carried out by Cazorla’s Public Order Council.16 After shots were fired at a Communist policeman on 23 February, Cazorla reiterated his view that the CNT sheltered fifth columnists and his agents started to rearrest prisoners released by the courts even as they left the building.17
Complaints emanated both from diplomats on behalf of rightists and from the CNT on behalf of its militants that those arrested were being sent to punishment battalions in dangerous front-line positions to work on fortifications.18 Ironically, forced-labour camps were the brainchild of the Minister of Justice, the CNT’s Juan García Oliver. Two days after he had taken over his Ministry in November 1936, he had called for the creation of camps where fascists could be used in constructive labour. On 31 December, accompanied by Mariano Gómez, the president of the Supreme Court, he explained in Valencia his idealistic vision of justice. Common criminals, whom he saw not as the enemies of society but as its victims, would find redemption in prison through libraries, sport and theatre. Political prisoners would achieve rehabilitation by building fortifications and strategic roads, bridges and railways, and would get decent wages. García Oliver believed that it made more sense for fascist lives to be saved than for them to be sentenced to death. He established the first camp in Totana, in the province of Murcia. Above its entrance was a huge placard with the words ‘Work and Don’t Lose Hope’.19
On 28 February 1937, the preventive detention of released prisoners saw a major clash between Melchor Rodríguez and Cazorla. Melchor was asked by the under-secretary of Justice, Mariano Sánchez Roca, to help find his nephew, Ricardo Pintado-Fe. Melchor located the young man in a Communist checa where he had been held for more than two months and wrote to Cazorla to get him released. Cazorla secured his freedom, but Melchor Rodríguez gave damaging publicity to the detention rather than the release.20 In fact, Melchor Rodríguez was sacked by García Oliver on 1 March because of growing suspicions about the warmth of his relations with the many detained rightists that he had helped. He was replaced by Julián Fernández, the secretary of the CNT Federation of Madrid Unions. Fernández continued Melchor Rodríguez’s policy of preventing the abuse of prisoners, although unlike his predecessor he did not establish controversial links with them.21
On 12 March, the second-in-command of the Transport Council of the Madrid Junta, a CNT militant, was murdered and three of his comrades wounded.22 Four days later in the small town of Villanueva de Alcardete (Toledo), Communist militiamen led by the Mayor assaulted the local CNT headquarters and killed nine men. In an astonishing turn of events, the PCE agreed to a judicial investigation. The Mayors of Villanueva and nearby Villamayor were found guilty of murders, rapes and looting committed since the summer of 1936. The Tribunal Popular of Cuenca condemned the ringleaders to death and imprisoned eight others. Throughout the spring of 1937, there were clashes in several other villages of Ciudad Real, Cuenca and Toledo. Six anarchists were killed in Torres de
la Alameda near Madrid. However, the picture presented by anarchist literature of innocent victims of Communist aggression is only part of the story. There was a genuine ideological struggle between anarchists committed to collectivization and the Communist policy of supporting the smallholders in order to improve agricultural production. Some of the clashes derived from local resistance against anarchists from Madrid who requisitioned food without payment.23
In mid-March, there were clashes in Vinalesa, north of Valencia, between ostensible left-wingers and Assault Guards. The Ministry of the Interior denounced the infiltration of left-wing organizations by agents provocateurs and instructed all parties and unions to investigate those who had joined their ranks since 16 July 1936 and to surrender all weapons. The Communist press also demanded strong measures against ‘those out of control’ and those who protected them, calling for the annihilation of the agents provocateurs, who were described as ‘new dynamiters’, a term deliberately meant to provoke echoes of anarchist terrorists of earlier times.24
The enmity reached such heights in mid-April that it provoked the dissolution of the Junta de Defensa. On 14 April, Cazorla announced in Mundo Obrero that an important spy-ring in the Republican Army had been dismantled. He revealed that one of those arrested was Alfonso López de Letona, a fifth columnist who had reached a high rank in the General Staff of the 14th Division of the Popular Army, commanded by the anarchist Cipriano Mera. López de Letona was a member of the extreme monarchist party Renovación Española, and had been private secretary of Antonio Goicoechea, its leader. He had been arrested by Salgado’s men and persuaded, either by threats or by financial inducements, to act as a double agent. However, Cazorla claimed that López de Letona had become a member of Manuel Salgado’s secret services in the Ministry of War on the basis of a recommendation by Mera’s chief of staff, Antonio Verardini Díez de Ferreti.25
There was no doubt of a connection between López de Letona and Verardini since they had collaborated in an operation mounted by the CNT to flush out fifth columnists. The December 1936 raid on the buildings under the protection of the Finnish Embassy had exposed how the right of asylum was being abused in favour of the fifth column. Accordingly, Eduardo Val and the CNT’s Defence Committee had established a fictitious Embassy of Siam, a country that had no diplomatic relations with Spain. With López de Letona as a ‘guarantee’ to his fifth-columnist contacts, the Embassy made offers of asylum that were eagerly accepted by several enemies of the Republic. Hidden listening devices picked up their conversations and thus gathered intelligence about their networks. When General Miaja learned that some of these rebel supporters had been murdered by Val’s men, in early January 1937, he ordered the operation closed down on the grounds that it was illegal and that the struggle against the fifth column should be conducted according to the law.26 In November 1939, López de Letona would be sentenced to death by the Francoists for his part in the Siam Embassy operation.27
Verardini was arrested in early April as a result of an operation by the Brigada Especial led by Fernando Valentí to hunt down a Falangist network founded by Félix Ciriza Zarrandicoechea. Ciriza’s principal collaborators were Falangists like himself, who had been tried by Tribunales Populares but released for lack of proof of their guilt – a stark contrast with the ‘judicial’ situation of Republicans arrested in the rebel zone. Ciriza’s group was large and its activities included demoralization of the population, provocation of discord between left-wing parties and, above all, espionage.28 When Valentí’s men went to arrest a member of the spy-ring, called Manuela Pazos Queija, they found her in bed with Verardini, who was a notorious womanizer. Important documents belonging to secret services of the Ministry of War were discovered in her apartment, presumably brought there by Verardini, who was arrested. Cipriano Mera responded by threatening Miaja that he would bring a truckload of militiamen armed with machine-pistols and hand grenades from the front to break Verardini out of jail. Miaja prevailed on an irate Cazorla to release Verardini. In the evening edition of CNT on the same day, García Pradas accused Cazorla of being a fascist agent provocateur.29
At Cazorla’s behest, CNT was banned for two days, failing to appear on 15 and 16 April 1937. On 15 April, what would be the last-ever meeting of the Junta de Defensa was entirely concerned with this bitter conflict. It began at 7.30 p.m. and went on until 2.15 the following morning. With the abstention of the outraged anarchist councillors, the Junta gave Cazorla a vote of confidence. However, a committee of the Republican and Socialist members was nominated to investigate anarchist accusations of irregularities committed by the police and in the prisons.30
When CNT reappeared on 17 April, the front-page headline called for the immediate dismissal of José Cazorla and demanded that he be investigated by the Ministers of Justice and the Interior. Inside, there was a long article claiming that a majority of the Junta believed Cazorla’s note of 14 April about López de Letona and Verardini to be ‘unfounded’. With shameless hypocrisy, given the CNT’s own record in terms of extra-judicial murders, tortures and checas, the article denounced Cazorla’s record as Public Order Councillor: ‘For some time, murderous activities occurring in Madrid have been denounced in the CNT press. The victims of these actions were sometimes genuinely revolutionary workers, true anti-fascists, and at other times indubitably right-wing elements, against whom implacable action should be taken but always inside the law.’ The article ended by claiming that the commission of inquiry set up the previous day had found evidence of ‘criminal acts that reveal the existence in Spain of a “chequista” political terrorism against which it is necessary to react, not only from below, but also from above, from the Government, and especially from the Ministries of the Interior and of Justice, which under no circumstances can allow murders, beatings, arbitrary arrests, and provocations lest the unity that we all need to face the enemy should be drowned in fraternal blood’.31
In the same issue, there was also a coruscating article by Melchor Rodríguez denouncing Carrillo, Serrano Poncela and Cazorla. He quoted letters and documents exchanged between Cazorla and himself,
relative to the deceptions, secret orders and codes given by this Cazorla to the agents under his command for people absolved by the Tribunales Populares apparently to be released from government prisons where they had been detained on his orders, but actually to be taken to clandestine prisons and to Communist militia units, to be used at the front building ‘fortifications’ … (in his words). I declare that I am ready to appear before any authorities or committees, with documents, to expose the sinister ‘policy’ pursued in the Public Order Council first by Santiago Carrillo and Serrano Poncela, and more recently by José Cazorla.
At his trial in 1940, Cazorla was accused of sending right-wing prisoners to the units commanded by Líster and El Campesino ostensibly to work on fortifications when, in reality, they were being sent to be executed.
Melchor Rodríguez went on to use the case of Ricardo Pintado-Fe as an illustration of what he called ‘outrages committed by the “Communist” and “Communistoid” hordes with police badges and warrant cards, under the orders of Councillor Cazorla’, and of ‘how in the “Communist” “Checas” converted into clandestine prisons, men and women are held kidnapped for days, weeks and months just on the basis of denunciations real or false, by dint of which all kinds of personal outrages are committed against all elemental laws, whether written or human’.32
The ensuing scandal saw confrontation in the cabinet between Communist and Socialist ministers. Largo Caballero, already irritated by Miaja’s popularity, silenced the clash by simply closing down the Junta de Defensa on 23 April. He did not bother to inform Miaja, who learned of the decision in the newspapers. The Junta was replaced with a new Madrid town council.33 Despite anarchist claims that the commission of inquiry set up on 15 April was gathering devastating evidence that Cazorla had run a network of secret prisons in which CNT militants were interrogated, often tortured and sometimes executed,
its report was never completed because the dissolution of the Junta deprived it of any jurisdiction over the issues raised. On 25 April, Cazorla, on handing power over to the new national Director General of Security, Wenceslao Carrillo, said he welcomed any investigation that might be carried out. Wenceslao, father of Santiago, praised Cazorla’s work in making the streets of Madrid safe. In an article published the following day, Cazorla himself wrote that he had remained silent only while awaiting the conclusions of the investigation and now felt free to comment. He attacked what he called ‘the verbal terrorism of those who beg in private and attack in public’ – a clear reference to Melchor Rodríguez and the Pintado-Fe case. He went on to defend his record against ‘those who having recently infiltrated the CNT–FAI use a union card to hide their murky past and to enable them to work against the interests of the anti-fascist masses’.34 Two days later, the Communist press published news that a fifth-column network had been discovered using CNT membership cards.35
