The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston
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Rojo. Pedro Checa also had a key meeting at PCE headquarters with Gorev’s messenger Mikhail Koltsov.84 This was almost certainly the same encounter described in Koltsov’s diary as being between Checa and ‘Miguel Martínez’. In Koltsov’s version, ‘Miguel Martínez’ urged Checa to proceed with the evacuation of the prisoners. Koltsov/Martínez pointed out that it was not necessary to evacuate all of the 8,000 but that it was crucial to select the most dangerous elements and send them to the rearguard in small groups. Accepting this argument, Checa despatched three men to ‘two big prisons’, which almost certainly meant San Antón and the Cárcel Modelo – from which prisoners were indeed taken away on the morning of 7 November.85 The removal of prisoners was known as a saca. Clearly, three men alone could not organize a large-scale saca, which required written authorizations, means of transport, escorts and other facilities.
Accordingly, Koltsov’s account seems to confirm Carrillo’s statement that the Consejería de Orden Público had begun to function late on the night of 6 November or in the early hours of 7 November and started the process of evacuation of prisoners. This required committed personnel, and Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela turned to ‘Carlos Contreras’ (Vittorio Vidali). Although in Spain as an emissary of the Comintern, Vidali was also an agent of the NKVD. Both Vidali and Josif Grigulevich, who was briefly his assistant at the Fifth Regiment, belonged to the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks (assassination, terror, sabotage and abductions) commanded by Yakov Isaakovich Serebryansky. Grigulevich was a twenty-three-year-old Lithuanian who spoke fluent Spanish as a result of having lived in Argentina.86
Enrique Castro Delgado, the Communist commander of the Fifth Regiment, described how, on the night of 6 November, he and Vidali/Contreras gave orders to the head of a special unit: ‘The massacre starts. No quarter to be given. Mola’s fifth column must be destroyed before it begins to move.’87 The clear implications of the encounter between Contreras/Vidali and Castro Delgado are that elements of both the Fifth Regiment and the NKVD were involved in what happened to the prisoners in November. There were many JSU members in the Fifth Regiment. In a revealing interview in 1986, two years before his death, Grigulevich stated that, in Madrid, he had worked under the orders of Santiago Carrillo, heading a special squad (brigada especial) of Socialist militants in the Dirección General de Seguridad dedicated to ‘dirty’ operations. The squad was formed by Grigulevich from what he called ‘trusted elements’ recruited from members of the JSU who had been part of the unit responsible for the security of the Soviet Embassy in Madrid.88
Grigulevich’s assertion is sustained by the record in the Francoist archive, the Causa General, of the post-war interrogations of JSU members of what came to be three brigadas especiales. Grigulevich had arrived in Spain in late September and worked for Contreras for some weeks before beginning to collaborate with Carrillo in late October or early November. Carrillo, Cazorla and the unit’s members knew Grigulevich as ‘José Escoy’, although he was known to others as ‘José Ocampo’.89 The documents in the Causa General are further corroborated by a report, written in the autumn of 1937, by the Republican police that referred to the frequent visits made to Carrillo’s office by Russian technicians specializing in security and counter-espionage matters. The report stated that these technicians had offered their ‘enthusiastic collaboration to the highest authority in public order in Madrid’, which would seem at first sight to have been a reference to Carrillo although it might have referred to Miaja since he was the authority under whom Carrillo worked. If the latter, it would mean that Carrillo’s activities were covered by Miaja’s approval, as he was quick to emphasize shortly after the publication of The Spanish Holocaust. Of course, his collaboration with the Russians would have happened anyway given the Soviet links with the Communist Party. The report went on to state that Carrillo had directed these technicians to ‘the chief and the officers of the brigada especial’.90 This was confirmed by Grigulevich, who later described himself as ‘the right hand of Carrillo’ in the Consejería de Orden Público.91 According to the records of the Soviet security services, their friendship was so close that years later Carrillo chose Grigulevich to be secular ‘godfather’ to one of his sons. Carrillo’s three sons were born in Paris between early 1950 and late 1952. During those years, Grigulevich was living in Rome under the name Teodoro Bonnefil Castro. The Russian security services had managed to create an identity for him as a Costa Rican businessman and his success in this role had seen him named as first secretary in the country’s Embassy to Italy. The ease of connections between Rome and Paris certainly made it possible for him and Carrillo to meet.92
It is clear that Miaja, Rojo, Gorev and the senior leadership of the Communist Party were all anxious to see the prisoner question resolved with the greatest urgency. There is no doubt that Miaja and Rojo approved of prisoner evacuations although not necessarily of executions. What is likely is that, in the meetings immediately following the creation of the Junta de Defensa, they delegated responsibility to the two-man leadership of the PCE. Checa and Mije, who, like the Russians, certainly did approve of the execution of prisoners, passed organizational responsibility to Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. To implement their instructions, the trio drew on members of the JSU who were given posts in the Public Order Delegation headed by Serrano Poncela, effectively head of the Dirección General de Seguridad for Madrid. They could also count on assistance from Contreras/Vidali and the Fifth Regiment and from Grigulevich and the brigada especial. However, they could do nothing against the will of the anarchist movement, which controlled the roads out of Madrid. Given that the anarchists had already seized and murdered prisoners, it was not likely that they would offer insuperable opposition to the Communists. Indeed, the formal agreement of senior elements of the CNT militias was soon forthcoming.
The inaugural session of the Junta began at 6.00 p.m. on 7 November.93 Before the meeting, at around 5.30 p.m., Carrillo, coming out of Miaja’s office in the Ministry of War, met a representative of the International Red Cross, Dr Georges Henny, with Felix Schlayer, the Norwegian Consul. Carrillo invited them to meet him in his office immediately after the plenary session. Before returning for that meeting, Schlayer and the Red Cross delegate went to the Cárcel Modelo where they learned that several hundred prisoners had been taken away earlier that day. On coming back to the Ministry of War, they were greeted amiably by Carrillo, who assured them of his determination to protect the prisoners and prevent any murders. When they told him what they had learned at the Cárcel Modelo, he denied knowledge of any evacuations. Schlayer reflected later that, even if this were true, it raises the question as to why Carrillo and Miaja, once having been informed by him of the evacuations, did nothing to prevent the others that continued that evening and on successive days.94
Later the same evening, a meeting took place between, on the one hand, two or three representatives of the JSU who controlled the newly created Public Order Council and members of the local federation of the CNT. They discussed what to do with the prisoners. Despite mutual hostility, liaison between both organizations was necessary, since the Communists held sway inside Madrid, controlling the police, the prisons and the files on prisoners, while the anarchists, through their militias, controlled the roads out of the city. The only record of the meeting is constituted by the minutes of a session of the CNT’s National Committee held the next morning. Those minutes include a report by Amor Nuño Pérez, the Councillor for War Industries in the Junta de Defensa, who had been one of the CNT representatives at the previous evening’s negotiation with the JSU. Amor Nuño’s report outlined what had been agreed at that encounter with the JSU. The minutes did not include the names of the other participants at the CNT–JSU meeting. However, it is reasonable to suppose that the JSU representatives included at least two of the following: Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. The gravity of the matter under discussion and the practical agreements reached could hardly have