In the novel The Man Who Was Thursday he portrayed a poet who, recruited by Scotland Yard to infiltrate an anarchist group, rose to the point of being chosen to be part of a global Central Council of Anarchists. A Council in which he would end up discovering that of the seven members that made up it, five were also police officers or undercover agents. The PCE of the 1940s was close to reaching this extreme, says historian Fernando Hernández Sánchez, “undermined by police spies who have managed to sneak into the inner circles of the party without being discovered,” as the US intelligence services judged. The time.
Snitches, traitors and infiltrators successfully fulfilled their mission and the consequences were devastating for the party: between October 1946 and January 1947 there were more than two thousand detainees, 46 death sentences and 1,744 years in prison were handed down. The organization was dismantled and only isolated and inexperienced groups remained, as Hernández Sánchez portrays in Falsos Comrades (Crítica), where he shows how two of the three members of the party’s leading troika in the interior, José Tomás Planas, el Peque, and Luis González Sánchez, el Rubio, collaborate with a Political-Social Brigade in which one of the main protagonists is Commissioner Roberto Conesa, with his reign of terror and his ability to infiltrate and even become the botched typographer who complicated the appearance of Mundo Worker. He received direct information from Peque and Rubio.
“The fall dismantled the PCE for almost a decade,” points out the historian, who recalls that 1947 was a key year. “Until 1946, the Franco regime was in a situation of distress. World War II has ended. Nobody could conceive that Hitler and Mussolini had fallen and Franco did not fall. But in 1947 the cold war began. And Franco is still a fascist, but the territory of the Peninsula is a good base of operations in the event of a European conflagration for North American medium and long-range bombers.”
A Franco regime whose internal repression is enormous. “The state of war was not repealed until June 1948. They want to exterminate pockets of resistance. Between 1939 and 1944 the cadence of files, summary trials and death sentences is infernal. In the military archive of Madrid, which covers the first and third military regions, there are 440,000 files. In Teruel, General Pizarro carries out a war of almost colonial annihilation, but the communists since 1939 say that they are not going to be a party of exile. They are going to try to act within the country and maintaining a propaganda apparatus was one of the fixations, the feeling that there is opposition.”
And the great fall will occur in a special context. “Since 1944, an internal process of purging the old leadership has taken place in the PCE. It was headed by Jesús Monzón, who had established contacts with the North American services. The OSS had trained Spanish communists in Algeria in guerrilla warfare techniques and the use of radio to infiltrate them into Andalusia, an operation that failed. When the old leadership headed by Carrillo returned to France in 1944, the interior leadership would be purged. Monzón is captured by the police, but Gabriel León Trilla and Alberto Pérez Ayala are executed by agents sent by the device. Experienced leaders are going to be replaced by very disciplined young people, but under pressure from the police they turn around. They become demoralized, they see that the party’s propaganda about the imminent fall of the dictatorship is not true, they put pressure, threats, promises and they reveal what they know. All those who come to constitute an internal leadership are falling. “Someone always puts themselves at the service of the police.”
At the service of the Political-Social Brigade and people like Roberto Conesa, “the evil of evil, a physically weak and self-conscious man. They call him the Ears. He says that during the war he was a fifth columnist. When the Francoists enter Madrid, he already appears as an agent of the Falange information service. He immediately goes into the police. During the war, he had to try or infiltrate the Unified Socialist Youth. And it does not arouse distrust in some of the, especially girls, who began to try to rebuild an initial organization to assist prisoners and who would end up being the 13 Roses, the ones who were shot in 1939, accusing them of a false crime of murdering a general. It is his first major successful operation. Then in Barcelona he is in the fall of the 80s, he is in Zaragoza, he goes to Toulouse. He becomes public enemy number one of the PCE. He was infiltrated until 1947, then his figure was too notorious.” The police stations are at that moment places of horror: the detainees feel relief when they go to the prisons.
Regarding the false comrades, the historian portrays the adventures of Luis González Sánchez, the Rubio, “who I think was a fifth columnist before returning to Spain. Someone remembered him from tourism school as a scab during the student strikes. And then he goes to France and the Gestapo arrests him twice in 15 days, trafficking in ration cards, and they let him go. He is probably a long-time agent of the information services.” On the other hand, José Tomás Planas, el Peque, says, “he had a very early militancy and with the endorsement of the Carrillo leadership he went to Spain. Once here he must be under pressure. His father was in prison, he had been in the Cuellar anti-tuberculosis prison, a death row. They would promise him treatment and return property seized in his town. The top leadership was a troika, Santiago Medina, Peque and Rubio. Two out of three. “Everything fell.”
Only much later would the PCE change to the strategy that the International had already suggested to them in 1939: infiltrate the vertical unions. “It is what will give them the success of the Workers’ Commissions in the sixties. 20 years were lost,” concludes the author.
