by Paul Preston
At first, Negrín had interpreted Ortega’s behaviour as the incompetence of a non-commissioned Carabinero officer promoted beyond his ability. As soon as he was informed that Ortega was a Communist, Negrín and Zugazagoitia agreed that he must be replaced. To minimize friction with the Communist ministers over his removal, they concocted the fiction that he was urgently needed at the front. Morón, the Inspector and deputy Director General of Security, became acting Director General.110 In response to the international outcry provoked by Nin’s disappearance, Negrín authorized Irujo to set up a judicial investigation to investigate the case. Morón is alleged to have said to Zugazagoitia: ‘Given that the Prime Minister wants to know the truth, you can tell him that the truth is that the kidnapping of Andrés Nin was planned by the Italian Codovila, Comandante Carlos, [Palmiro] Togliatti and the leaders of the Communist Party, Pepe Díaz among them. The order to torture him was given by Orlov and they have all done their best to satisfy Stalin’s desire for the disappearance of the secretary and confidant of the creator of the Red Army. Tell Negrín and if he wants them arrested, I’ll have them all in prison tomorrow.’ Vidarte’s account suggests that Morón’s information came from David Vázquez Baldominos.111 There was an attempt on Vidarte’s life. The front axle on his car had been cut and he crashed into an elm tree.112
For his inquiry into the case, Irujo gave plenary powers to a state prosecutor, Gregorio Peces Barba del Brío, who had Vázquez Baldominos, Fernando Valentí, Jacinto Rosell Coloma and Andrés Urresola Ochoa arrested. Convinced that Vázquez Baldominos was not the guilty party, a furious Gabriel Morón denounced Irujo as a ‘poor lunatic’ and immediately had them released, and they were not rearrested. Although Negrín approved of Morón’s directness, he felt he had to be replaced.113 In mid-November he was succeeded by Paulino Gómez Sáiz, who had been highly successful as the government delegate in Catalonia since early June.114 Negrín, though he supported the sacking of Ortega and had far-reaching suspicions of Orlov, was not prepared to see further revelations undermine the unity of the cabinet. He took the difficult decision to suspend Irujo’s investigation because, just as he opposed the unofficial repression, he also believed that the reckless and indeed treasonous rebellion of the POUM could not be tolerated in wartime.
To consolidate the security of the Republican state, a major reorganization of counter-espionage services was made in the summer of 1937. On 12 June, the Special Services Bureau of the General Staff of the Army of the Centre, which had been commanded by the anarchist Manuel Salgado, was dissolved. In addition to concerns that prisoners had disappeared in suspicious circumstances, there were suspicions that Salgado’s staff had been infiltrated by Falangists. In fact, his secretary was the Falangist Antonio Bouthelier España. The functions of the Special Services Bureau were fused with those of the Brigadas Especiales and other groups that worked on internal security to create the Special State Intelligence Department (Departamento Especial de Información del Estado – DEDIDE). Initially led by David Vázquez Baldominos, the new body was entrusted with the eradication of espionage and sabotage in loyalist territory, under the direct orders of the Minister of the Interior, Julián Zugazagoitia.115 The DEDIDE targeted not only the supporters of Franco but also those on the left, like the POUM, who were considered to be treacherously subversive. There was considerable suspicion of foreigners – both the POUM and the International Brigades were regarded as potential havens for spies, whether of the Axis or, in the more paranoid vision of the NKVD, of Trotsky’s Fourth International. The Republic was, in fact, extremely vulnerable to enemy espionage, whether directed by the Gestapo, the OVRA or the ever more sophisticated fifth column.116 Bilbao fell on 19 June and constant defeat intensified anxiety and paranoia.
Barely six weeks later, on 9 August, a military counter-espionage unit, the Servicio de Investigación Militar (SIM), was created by Prieto in the Ministry of Defence. As it assumed ever more responsibility for collecting political intelligence in – and therefore policing – the rearguard, in late March 1938 the SIM absorbed the DEDIDE.117 Initially, the SIM was directly responsible to Prieto, who suggested that it had been created on the advice of the Soviet ‘technicians’. However, he also claimed that, in the light of the Nin affair, he had hesitated to take the advice for fear of the police acting independently of the government, as had happened with the Communist Antonio Ortega. Keen to place all the Republican special services under his own command, to head the SIM Prieto appointed his friend Ángel Díaz Baza, who, according to Orlov, was a speculator with an interest in night clubs.118
The key role of chief of the SIM of the Army of the Centre (Madrid) was initially given to a brilliant young officer, Major Gustavo Durán, at the suggestion of Orlov, via Miaja. Prieto accepted, and later claimed that he knew that Durán was a Communist, but kept him under surveillance by naming Ángel Pedrero García as his deputy. After the dissolution of the García Atadell Brigade, Pedrero, its second-in-command, had served briefly as a police inspector at Chamberí in central Madrid before being transferred, in December, to Salgado’s Special Services Bureau in the Ministry of War. His growing importance in military counter-intelligence saw him become SIM chief for the Army of Central Spain in October 1937.119
In the decree creating the SIM, Prieto had stipulated that all agents be approved by the Minister himself and that their credentials carry his signature. However, Gustavo Durán proceeded independently and named about four hundred SIM agents. Claiming that they were all Communists, which Durán and Orlov denied, Prieto used the excuse that Durán was needed at the front to suspend him from the SIM after barely two weeks in the job. Orlov intervened on Durán’s behalf. Pedrero claimed that Durán also received support from Eitingon and Ivan Maximov, the adviser to the General Staff of the Army of the Centre, other Soviet military advisers and Miaja.120
The overall chief of the SIM, Ángel Díaz Baza, hated the role and had soon been replaced on an interim basis by his deputy, Prudencio Sayagués. Seeking a more appropriate long-term appointment, Prieto named Major, later Colonel, Manuel Uribarri Barrutell. On Prieto’s own admission, this was a disastrous choice. While at the Toledo front, Uribarri had allegedly been guilty of large-scale looting. Now, at first he followed Prieto’s instructions but became increasingly aligned with the Communists.121 Uribarri eventually defected in April 1938, with a substantial amount of money and jewellery. Negrín seized the opportunity to purge the SIM. On the advice of Zugazagoitia and Paulino Gómez, he appointed a Socialist, Santiago Garcés Arroyo, as head of the SIM to limit the influence of the Communists.122 By February 1938, only Socialists could get jobs in the SIM.123
The Republic, like other democratic societies faced with an existential threat, adopted undemocratic norms such as censorship, internment without trial, suspension of civil liberties, strike bans in essential industries and conscription. To root out fifth-column networks and to get confessions, from May 1938 the SIM carried out illegal arrests and its operatives sometimes used refined tortures, disorientating prisoners with bright lights, constant loud noises and freezing water. Beds and benches were placed at a sharp angle, making sleep or sitting difficult. Floors were scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from pacing up and down and leaving them to stare at the walls, which were curved and covered with dizzying patterns of cubes and spirals which, with special lighting, gave the impression that the walls were moving. These cells were created in Barcelona in the so-called Checa de Vallmajor or ‘Preventorio D’, a converted convent, and in the ‘Preventorio G’ in Carrer Saragossa, both run by the SIM. The psycho-technic designs were the work of a bizarre international adventurer called Alfonso Laurencic, who was part of the Grup d’Informació of the Generalitat’s secret intelligence service when it was absorbed by the SIM. A self-proclaimed music-hall pianist and architect, Laurencic was a Frenchman of Austrian parents and Yugoslav nationality, who had served in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He had belonged variously to the CNT, the UGT an
d the POUM, had made money selling false passports and eventually defrauded the SIM.124
Another element of the Republican clamp-down on the anarchist movement was the abolition of their autonomous Council of Aragon, which had been created in early October 1936 in Bujaraloz, under the presidency of Joaquín Ascaso, leader of the Zaragoza construction workers and representative of the Ortiz Column. It had had some success in limiting the excesses committed by the militias in Republican Aragon but its principal objective of co-ordinating ‘the needs of the war and the rearguard’ was never achieved because the leaders of the anarchist columns had been determined to maintain their autonomy. Republicans, Socialists and Communists regarded the Council as an anarchist dictatorship imposed by the militias. Its closure by the central government in August 1937 was achieved only at the cost of some violence. Land that had been collectivized was returned to its owners and a definitive end was made to the anarchist repression in the region.125
The clandestine war of the Russian security services against foreign Trotskyists, however, remained beyond the control of the Republican authorities. In September 1937, Orlov managed to eliminate Erwin Wolf, who had become Trotsky’s secretary in Norway. In 1936, Wolf played a key role in refuting the accusations made at the Moscow trials and was a central figure in the International Secretariat which was the predecessor to the Fourth International. He came to Spain to work with Grandizo Munis’s Bolshevik-Leninist group. In Barcelona, he was arrested for subversive activity on 27 July 1937, released on the following day but then immediately rearrested. He was officially released on 13 September but was never seen again.126
Another prominent Trotskyist who disappeared ten days later was the Austrian Kurt Landau. A one-time collaborator of Trotsky, Landau had a long history of anti-Stalinist militancy in Austria, Germany, France and Spain. Using the pseudonym ‘Wolf Bertram’, he was secretary of Der Funke (the Star), an international Communist opposition group. In Spain, he worked closely with Andreu Nin and conducted liaison between the POUM and foreign journalists and writers as well as writing virulent polemics against the militarization of the militias and their incorporation into the Republican Army. He had outraged the Soviets with his pamphlet Spain 1936, Germany 1918, published in December 1936, which compared the crushing of the revolutionary workers of Germany by the Freikorps in 1918 to Stalinist hostility to the CNT and the POUM in Spain. In consequence, he had been smeared by Soviet propaganda as ‘the leader of a band of terrorists’ and the liaison agent between the Gestapo and the POUM.127 Kurt Landau managed to remain at liberty until 23 September 1937 when he was abducted by Soviet agents from his hiding place. Like Rein and Wolf, he was never seen again.128
It has been alleged that Stanislav Vaupshasov, a guerrilla-warfare expert, had constructed a crematorium in the basement of a building in Barcelona. He ran it with a Spanish NKVD agent, José Castelo Pacheco. Those targeted for liquidation were lured into the building, killed and their bodies eradicated in a single operation.129 Whether this is what happened to Rein, Wolf, Landau and some of the other foreigners who disappeared is not known. Manuel Irujo ensured that Nin would be the last Spanish Trotskyist to be murdered, but he was unable to stop the persecution of foreign leftists by the Soviet security services.
While these clandestine abuses were still being perpetrated by the Russians, Negrín and his ministers pressed on with their efforts to regularize the policing and justice functions of the state. In late June 1937, the Special Court for Espionage and High Treason had been created. It reflected Negrín’s view that the authority of the state should not be flouted. However, he was totally opposed to any arbitrary form of repression such as that practised in the Francoist zone.130 With Negrín’s approval, Irujo ensured that the Special Court was staffed by judges of impartiality and probity. Many rank-and-file POUM militants were in prison, infuriated at being held alongside fascists and saboteurs. Still not formally charged, they were awaiting trial by the new Special Court. Among them were several foreign anti-Stalinists. One of them, Kurt Landau’s wife, Katia, had been arrested by a Brigada Especial operating on Russian orders. Their intention was to flush her husband out of hiding.
When Kurt disappeared, Katia demanded a judicial inquiry. By then, Ortega had been dismissed and Negrín’s new Director General of Security, the Basque Socialist Paulino Gómez, tried unsuccessfully to ascertain Kurt’s whereabouts. When the authorities were unable to clarify the fate of her husband, Katia led a hunger strike of five hundred inmates in the women’s prison in Barcelona. In addition to the investigation by Gómez, an international commission of inquiry went to Catalonia in November 1937 to study conditions in Republican prisons and to look into the disappearance of Andreu Nin, Erwin Wolf, Mark Rein and Kurt Landau. Led by John McGovern (general secretary of the British Independent Labour Party – George Orwell’s radical left group which had separated from the Labour Party) and the French pacifist Professor Felicien Challaye, it was permitted to interview Katia in the General Hospital where she was a patient as a result of her hunger strike.131
Irujo visited her in hospital and convinced her that the trials would be fair. She was sufficiently impressed to call off the strike. When Irujo sent prosecutors and judges into each prison with the appropriate paperwork, they were applauded by the prisoners who saw them as guarantors against Stalinist illegalities.132 Everything about the role of the Spanish authorities in the Landau case, particularly the success of Katia’s demand for an inquiry and of the hunger strike, contrasted with procedures in the rebel zone. Women in a rebel prison in 1938 could not have gone on hunger strike as there would have been hardly any food for them to reject and, even if they did, no one would have cared, certainly not a minister.
Shortly after taking possession of his ministry, Irujo had commissioned Mariano Gómez, the president of the Supreme Court, to draw up a draft decree to be applied to crimes perpetrated in the Republican zone since the beginning of the war, including all cases of extra-judicial deaths. It also included a revision of the release of common criminals amnestied by García Oliver.133 On 30 July 1937, Boris Stepanov reported to Dimitrov that the ‘fascist Irujo’ had tried to arrest Carrillo because of Paracuellos and ‘is organizing a system of searches of Communists, Socialists and anarchists, who brutally treated imprisoned fascists. In the name of the law, this minister of justice freed hundreds upon hundreds of arrested fascist agents or disguised fascists. Together with Zugazagoitia, Irujo does everything possible and impossible to save the Trotskyists and to sabotage trials against them. And he will do everything possible to acquit them.’134 In fact, in the light of opposition from Communists and anarchists alike, Irujo’s decree was never fully applied.
Irujo’s approach was illustrated by the case of General José Asensio Torrado, who was arrested and charged with sabotage after the precipitate fall of Málaga in February 1937. He was brought to trial in October that year, just as the north was falling, and given a prison sentence. While in prison, Asensio was permitted to write and publish a book defending his position and to send autographed copies to members of the government. The book was openly sold in Barcelona bookshops. Largo Caballero claimed that the arrest and trial of Asensio was provoked by Communist pressure on Prieto. If so, it is testimony to Negrín’s independence not only that Asensio was able to publish his book but also that, after appeal, the case was dismissed in July 1938.135
As the trend of the war worsened, however, the work of the Special Court expanded beyond Irujo’s original intentions. Those found guilty of espionage or sabotage ran the risk of execution, yet far fewer death sentences were passed than were demanded by prosecutors and even fewer were implemented than actually passed. In Catalonia, whose courts were by far the most active, 166 such sentences were carried out between December 1937 and 11 August 1938, although only seven were shot thereafter. Unlike the military courts in the rebel zone, the Special Court often found the accused not guilty. Moreover, many who were found guilty had their sentences reduced or qua
shed on appeal. Those suspected of more minor fifth-column offences, of defeatist propaganda and black-market activities were interned either in prisons or in the work camps created by García Oliver. As the military situation got worse throughout 1938, deserters and draft-dodgers were imprisoned.136
With the fifth column getting more confidently aggressive, the SIM became more ruthless and several notably brutal individuals came to the fore. Ramón Torrecilla was one. Another individual who brought immense disrepute to SIM was Loreto Apellaniz Oden, a former post office official, who became a police inspector in Valencia after running the notorious Checa de Sorní. The Brigada Apellaniz spread terror with its activities in the area around Játiva. He later became a much feared chief of the SIM in Valencia from August 1937 to the end of the war. Accused of robbery, torture and murder, he was alleged to have taken instructions directly from Orlov. He was captured by the Francoists in March 1939 and shot.137
From April 1938, the SIM ran six work camps in Catalonia where the conditions were reputed to be harsh and the discipline fierce. There were cases of prisoners shot for trying to escape. Nonetheless, in stark contrast with the rebel zone, literacy and other educational classes were provided and prisoners were freed at the end of their sentences.138 The largest prison camp in the Republican zone was at Albatera in the province of Alicante. With the mission of draining 40,000 hectares of saltmarshes and converting them to arable production, it had been opened in October 1937.139 As food shortages became ever more prevalent in the Republican zone, conditions in all the camps also became progressively worse, although they never reached the levels of overcrowding, malnutrition and abuse that characterized the rebel camps.140
