The Spanish Holocaust (76 page)

An illustration of the personal ethics of Negrín and Irujo was the extraordinary case of Amelia de Azarola. She was a Basque nationalist and an anti-fascist who was also the wife of, and deeply in love with, Julio Ruiz de Alda, one of the founders of the Falange. She was arrested in August 1936, shortly before he was murdered in the massacre of the Cárcel Modelo. She was tried on 29 March 1937 for ‘hostility to the regime’. Both Irujo and Negrín showed up as witnesses at her trial. Irujo knew her as a firm Republican from her native village in Euskadi. Negrín had studied medicine with her at Madrid University and spoke of her activities then as a left-wing student and as a Republican. In consequence, she was found not guilty, but Cazorla refused to release her and had her detained as a hostage for a possible prisoner exchange. She was permitted to work in the women’s prison of Alacuás just outside Valencia. After intervention by Negrín, in the autumn of 1937, Dr Azarola was released by the DGS and permitted to return to her home in Barcelona under protective custody and then, in early 1938, she was exchanged and went to Navarre.
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The prison at Alacuás where Dr Azarola worked had once been a Jesuit residence, refurbished on the orders of Irujo. Light, airy, with a gymnasium and swimming pool, conditions there were relatively comfortable. Queipo de Llano’s sister Rosario arrived there in July 1937, and encountered a distinguished roster of Francoists, including José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s sister Carmen, his aunt María Jesús and his sister-in-law Margot Larios, as well as María Luisa Millán Astray, the sister of the founder of the Foreign Legion, Franco’s niece, Pilar Jaraiz Franco, a cousin of the Duque de Alba and female relatives of several prominent rebel officers.
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Irujo had accepted the post of Minister of Justice on the condition that freedom of conscience would be respected and religious practice legalized. Safe-conducts and identity cards were provided for priests and religious and efforts were made to establish the right to practise the liturgy. He created the Office of Religious Orders and worked tirelessly until he succeeded in arranging for the first public Mass to be said in the Basque Delegation in Valencia, on 15 August 1937, and for the first chapel to be reopened in Barcelona. These achievements provoked strident CNT criticism. Jesús de Galíndez, who worked in the Office of Religious Orders, served as an altar boy at that first Mass. The fifth column tried to undermine the initiative by spreading the rumour that the chapel was deconsecrated and that anyone who attended Mass there would be excommunicated. They realized that, with the churches open, they had lost one of their principal propaganda weapons against the government.
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The one thing that Irujo and Zugazagoitia could not do was to control the activities of Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the NKVD station chief known as Aleksandr Orlov. Theoretically, Orlov had various tasks – counter-espionage, especially within the International Brigades, the organization of guerrilla and sabotage activities and the creation of a small, elite Republican secret police force to counter internal opposition to the government. This latter was his principal activity and the fruit of this was the Brigadas Especiales. Their initial purpose was to combat the fifth column, but they had soon been turned against those elements of the Spanish left perceived as subversive traitors. On 3 May 1937, Grigulevich led one of the Brigadas Especiales to Barcelona to eliminate, under the cover of the disorder, a number of prominent foreign Trotskyists linked to the POUM.
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It has been suggested that Grigulevich’s group may have been responsible for the murder, on the night of 5–6 May, of the Italian anarchists Camilo Berneri and Francesco Barbieri. Since Berneri constituted a far greater danger to Mussolini than to Stalin, it is possible that this was the work of the Italian OVRA. The CNT’s own investigation concluded that Berneri had been killed by members of Estat Català working for the OVRA.
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As far as a paranoid Stalin was concerned, Orlov’s principal task was the eradication of foreign dissident Communists in Spain. Indeed, Russian security personnel in Republican Spain were much more concerned with this task than with any action against the POUM, which was considered to be the job of the Spanish police. Many eastern Europeans were arrested and imprisoned by agents of a Catalan unit,
similar to the Madrid-based Brigadas Especiales, known as the Grup d’Informació. It was part of the secret service of the Generalitat’s Defence Council with which Orlov had established links. The arrested Trotskyists were taken to the convent of Santa Úrsula in Valencia, where they were interrogated and tortured by Russians, Germans and east Europeans, all members of their respective Communist parties.
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One of Orlov’s victims was Mark Rein, the son of the Russian Menshevik leader Rafail Abramovich. Rein had come to Spain as correspondent for several anti-Stalinist publications including the New York Jewish daily,
Forward
. On 9 April 1937, he left the Hotel Continental in Barcelona and was never seen again. He had been abducted and murdered by agents of the Grup d’Informació.
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Another of Orlov’s targets was Andreu Nin, more as a one-time close collaborator of Trotsky than as leader of the POUM. Already, in a report to Moscow in late February 1937, Orlov had noted that the war effort was being undermined by ‘inter-party conflicts in which the energy of most people is devoted to winning authority and power for their own party and discrediting others rather than to the struggle against fascism’. After dismissive comments about both Gorev and Berzin, he went on to say:

the time has come when it is necessary to analyze the threatening situation … and forcefully present to the Spanish Government (and Party leaders) the full gravity of the situation and to propose the necessary measures – if the Spanish Government really wants help from us: (1) bringing the army and its command into a healthier state of discipline (shooting deserters, maintaining discipline, etc.) and (2) putting an end to the inter-party squabbles. If, in the face of immediate danger, we do not bring the Spanish Government to its senses, events will take a catastrophic turn.
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Now, after the May events, Orlov made the elimination of Nin his prime objective and the task was made easier because of the POUM’s role during those events. Nin became the object of what was known as a
liter
operation. A
liter
(letter) file was a letter-coded file opened on a person scheduled for assassination who was given a codename. In the case of Nin, this was ‘Assistant’, a reference perhaps to his one-time work with Trotsky. The file was designated with the letter ‘A’ for such operations where ‘A’ stood for an ‘active measure’ (
aktivka
or direct action, that is assassination). It was presumably no coincidence, if the Communist Minister Jesús Hernández is to be believed, that, on the day following the
murder of Nin, a cable sent to Moscow read ‘A.N. business resolved by procedure A.’
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Orlov’s plan was based on two carefully choreographed ‘discoveries’. The first involved a bookshop in Girona belonging to a Falangist called José Roca Falgueras. Roca was part of a fifth-column network run out of a small hotel in the town by its owner, Cosme Dalmau Mora. The network had been discovered by the police but kept under observation rather than shut down. One day in May, an elegantly dressed man went into Roca’s shop, leaving some money and a message for Dalmau. He asked if he could leave a suitcase that he would pick up some days later. The next day, there was a police raid and the suitcase was found to contain an incriminating collection of technical documents about bomb-making together with plans to assassinate key Republican figures. All were apparently sealed with the stamp of the POUM Military Committee.
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The second discovery was initially genuine but was doctored by Orlov to ‘demonstrate’ the collaboration of the POUM with the Falange. The principal element was a detailed map of Madrid seized when the Brigadas Especiales, led by David Vázquez Baldominos and Fernando Valentí Fernández, broke up a large fifth-columnist network, with the help of Alberto Castilla Olavarría, a paid double agent. Castilla was a Basque of right-wing ideas. The fact that he had taken refuge in the Peruvian Embassy gave him the plausibility to infiltrate the fifth column. He became the liaison between the four Falangist groups that made up the substantial network known as the ‘Organización Golfin-Corujo’ run by the architect Francisco Javier Fernández Golfin. When the organization was dismantled thanks to Castilla’s information, Fernández Golfin had in his possession a street plan of Madrid on which his brother Manuel had drawn details and positions of military installations. This map was part of the group’s plans to facilitate the rebel entry into the capital.
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Well over one hundred Falangists were arrested by Vázquez Baldominos’s squad, although only twenty-seven were tried. Their confessions would play a key part in the complex plot being hatched by Orlov, although it is unlikely that Vázquez Baldominos was party to what Orlov did with the street map. Orlov’s elaborate scheme was outlined in a report sent to Moscow on 23 May 1937:

Taking into consideration that this case, in connection with which the overwhelming majority have pleaded guilty, has produced a great impression on military and government circles, and that it is firmly documented and based on the incontrovertible confessions of
defendants, I have decided to use the significance and the indisputable facts of the case to implicate the POUM leadership (whose [possible] connections we are looking into while conducting investigations). We have, therefore, composed the enclosed document, which indicates the co-operation of the POUM leadership with the Spanish Falange organization – and, through it, with Franco and Germany. We will encipher the contents of the document using Franco’s cipher, which we have at our disposal, and will write it on the reverse side of the plan of the location of our weapons emplacements in Casa del Campo, which was taken from the Falangist organization. This document has passed through five people: all the five Fascists who have admitted passing the document to each other for dispatch to Franco. On another seized document we will write in invisible ink a few lines of some insignificant content. It will be from this document that, in cooperation with the Spaniards, we shall begin to scrutinize the document for cryptographic writing. We shall experiment with several processes for treating these papers. A special chemical will develop these few words or lines, then we will begin to test all the other documents with this developer and thus expose the letter we have composed compromising the POUM leadership. The Spanish chief of counter-intelligence department [Vázquez Baldominos] will leave immediately for Valencia where the cipher department of the War Ministry will decipher the letter. The cipher department, according to our information, has the necessary code at its disposal. But if the department cannot decipher the letter for some reason, then we will ‘spend a couple of days’ and decipher it ourselves. We expect this affair to be very effective in exposing the role POUM has played in the Barcelona uprising. The exposure of direct contact between one of its leaders and Franco must contribute to the government adopting a number of administrative measures against the Spanish Trotskyites to discredit POUM as a German–Francoist spy organization.
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According to a police report of late October 1937, the captured document was first examined by the then Director General of Security, Wenceslao Carrillo, by General Miaja and by the recently promoted General Vicente Rojo. At this stage, the damning reverse side of the document had not been ‘discovered’ since it had not yet been added. Its later ‘discovery’ was attributed to its being in invisible ink.
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The police report spoke appreciatively of the invaluable technical help received from foreign (Russian) experts who were given free access to the captured documentation in the office of the Brigada Especial and then allowed to
take it back to their own Embassy. Orlov reported to Moscow that the faking of the actual document was carried out by Grigulevich. Valentí told his post-war Francoist interrogators that Grigulevich had had the map for some time. On returning it to the Brigada Especial, he suggested to Vázquez Baldominos that it be chemically tested for messages in invisible ink.

The police report explained how the Russian technicians also supplied the necessary chemical reagents and the electrical plate to heat the document. When the map was heated, there appeared on the reverse a message in code. At this point, Vázquez Baldominos was sent for. Unable to decipher the message, he and Valentí, accompanied by two of the foreign technicians (Orlov and Grigulevich?), took the document to Valencia to the newly appointed Director General of Security, Colonel Ortega. They struggled for nearly eighteen hours in Ortega’s office in a vain attempt to decipher the message. Finally, military codebreakers, using a Francoist codebook, were able to interpret the message. All concerned then went to the Russian Embassy in Valencia to draw up a report.
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The definitive ‘text’ of the coded message stated that one of the members of the Fernández Golfín organization had met ‘N., the leader of the POUM, who had offered his forces which would constitute crucial support for the victory of the Nationalists’. There was also a letter to Franco outlining the services of the POUM in terms of espionage, sabotage and the provocation of anti-Republican disorder. The message in itself was as implausible as the idea that Nin would use ‘N’ as his codename. Six months later, in January 1938, an analysis of the message by two calligraphic experts reported that it could not have been written by any member of the network and was a forgery.
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Now, the report drawn up in the Russian Embassy presented the story of the Fernández Golfín network and the document at face value. It concluded with a recommendation that the POUM be ‘extirpated’. Dated 1 June 1937, copies were sent by the counter-espionage service of Vázquez Baldominos’s office of the Madrid police to Zugazagoitia and Ortega.
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