Spanish anarchist Germinal García Campo in front of an old CNT 'safehouse', Rue de Lancry, Paris (1997)
Stuart Christie (2011): 'The entrance to Germinal’s apartment building in the 10th arrondissement. This Paris safehouse was used by fugitives and anti-Francoist guerrillas of the CNT’s Defence Commission such as José Lluis Facerias, ‘Face’, (killed in a guardia civil ambush in 1957) and Francisco Sabaté Llopart (‘el Quico’ ambushed in January 1960 by the guardia civil – from which he escaped, hijacking a train in the process – only to be gunned down in a San Celoni street by a Falangist sometent, a standing fascist posse comitatus). It was here that Lucio Urtubia, the bank robber who almost brought down Citibank with his forged travellers’ cheques in 1977, met Sabaté for the first time. In the 1960s 12 Rue de Lancry was used as a safehouse by the anarchist Defensa Interior (D.I.), a clandestine section of the MLE/CNT-in-exile (Spanish Libertarian Movement) which, from 1962 until 1964, organised a number of international actions and three assassination attempts on the dictator. Subsequently the D.I.’s role was taken over by the ‘First of May’ affinity group
At the end of the Spanish Civil War, 13-year old Germinal was interned in Argeles-sur-Mer concentration camp where he was cared for by an unknown English woman, to whom he was ever grateful. Stowing away on a Danish freighter, the Kitty Skov, from the port of Barcelona, he escaped to the United States, where he remained for a time in New York, passing himself off as a French citizen, returning later to France to became active in the anti-Francoist struggle. Shunning the limelight, but always active in the background, Germinal was secretary of the Paris Local Federation of the MLE; as an employee of Aerolíneas Argentinas he travelled freely and frequently, maintaining close links with the international Spanish anarchist diaspora, especially in Central and South America.
In 1960, prior to the state visit to France of Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev, President De Gaulle’s security services knocked on his door early one morning and ordered him to pack a bag as he was leaving the country.* Escorted to a military airfield on the outskirts of Paris along with other Spanish and French anarchists, they were put on board a French air force plane and flown to Corsica for the duration of Khruschev’s visit where the French government put them up in first class hotels, paid all their expenses and salaries — and apologised to their employers for the inconvenience caused by their temporary deportation.
* In 1976, following the death of Franco and the accession of his annointed successor, Juan Carlos, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing’s government sent ex-Falangist prime minister Adolfo Suárez a formal invitation for a state visit to France. Prior to the Spanish king’s arrival, French Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski repeated the 1960 expulsion and ordered the arrest and temporary deportation of the most prominent, mainly Spanish, anti-fascist activists. The Basques he dispatched to the Île de Ré, and the anarchists, around 20 perhaps, including Octavio Alberola and Ariane Gransac, Lucio Urtubia, Vicente Martí, José Morato, Juan Busquets, Alicia Mur, Gonzalo Sánchez and Carlos Andreu, to the luxurious three star Le Grand Large Goulphar Hotel on Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island off the Britanny coast, where they were guarded for five days by 130 CRS and officers of the Renseignements généraux. Gabriel Auer made a feature-dopcumentary about this farce — ‘Vacance royales’ —in 1980'
Stuart Christie
1997
Branwen Christie, Lucio Urtubia, Stuart Christie (2009)
'A biography of anarchist <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Urtubia">Lucio Urtubia</a> by Stuart Christie (2011):<span>The life of Lucio Urtubia Jiménez (1931 - ), an anarchist from Navarre in northern Spain, is the stuff of legend. As an activist in 1950s Paris he counted André Breton and Albert Camus among his friends, worked with the legendary anarchist urban guerrilla Francisco Sabate (El Quico) in attempting to bring down Franco’s fascist regime, and carried out numerous bank robberies to fund the struggle to free Spain. But it was in 1977, after having his earlier scheme to destabilise the US economy by forging US dollars rejected by Che Guevara, he put his most infamous plan into action, successfully forging and circulating 20 million dollars of Citibank travellers cheques with the goal of funding urban guerrilla groups in Europe and Latin America, and bringing the bank to its knees in the process. In between he was involved in the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie from his hideout in Bolivia, aided the escape of Black Panthers from the US and not surprisingly was targeted by the CIA. Lucio defends his life’s work thus: ‘we are bricklayers, painters, electricians - we do not need the state for anything. The banks are the real crooks. They exploit you, take your money and cause all the wars.” Lucio, therefore, had no moral scruples about forging Citybank travellers’ cheques. His motivation was not personal gain, but to dent confidence in this powerful financial institution.</span><br /><br /><span>Lucio is — and has been — many things to different people, of which I can give three good examples:</span><br /><br /><span>The first is the opinion of the noted Spanish theatre director, Albert Boadella, the founder of the Els Jonglars theatrical group whose escape from Spain in the late 1970s was organised by Lucio. Boadella famously described him as ‘A Quijote who tilted, not at windmills, but at real giants..</span><br /><br /><span>The second is that of Chief Superintendent Paul Barril of the French police nationale who described Lucio as a criminal mastermind pulling the strings of an international criminal organisation of anarchists, like some latter-day Montecristo — a Moriarty of global terrorism with access to infinite funds from the international anarchist war chest and dedicated to promoting and funding terrorism and agitation against the established order around the world…</span><br /><br /><span>A third opinion is that the examining magistrate in the last and biggest of the criminal cases against Lucio – Louis Joinet – who scandalised police comissaire Barril by praising Lucio saying he represented everything the magistrate would have loved to have been – Joinot, incidentally became the first Advocate General with the French Court of cassation – and has had Lucio round to dinner twice, first in Matignon, which is the French equivalent of 10 Downing Street, and more recently at the Elysee, the French equivalent of Buckingham palace..</span><br /><br /><span>None of these opinions accurately capture the man, certainly not commissaire Barril’s, which is bollocks — he was clearly grossly exaggerating Lucio’s role as the most dangerous criminal he has ever met in order to enhance his own professional standing. As for Boadella’s comparison of Lucio and Don Quijote, Quijote was a fruitcake and a loner who refused to recognise that the golden age of his dreams had passed — and failed. Lucio, however, is not crazy, nor is he a loner and has always been able to tailor his actions to whatever the technological level of society required — and he was successful, for a time anyway.</span><br /><br /><span>Joinet’s opinion of Lucio is, I would say, probably closest to recognising the essence of Lucio inasmuch as in him he sees a man of generous spirit who values freedom and justice above all else, even above his own life.'</span>
Stuart Christie
2009
French anarchist Alain Pecunia, (1998)
Stuart Christie (2011): 'noir novelist, comrade and fellow prisoner in Carabanchel (1963-1965): Alain, the son of a French senior naval officer and well-connected Gaullist, was recruited into the anarchist movement in the spring of 1961 — at the age of 15 — by Francisco (‘Paco’) Ruiz Abarca at an anti-OAS (Organisation armée secrète) meeting. In much the same way as I was involved in the anti-nuclear movement in Britain, Alain had been involved in anti-OAS activities with the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Initially, a member of the youth section of the French Communist party, the Young Communists, he then discovered anarchism through Le Monde Libertaire, the newspaper of the French Anarchist Federation (FAF). Unimpressed by the anarchists of the FAF — many of whom were sandal-wearing pacifists, individualists, naturists, vegetarians, and very much under the influence of Grand Orient Freemasonry who viewed class-struggle as bolshevist — Alain teamed up with the more action-oriented Union of Anarcho-Communists (UGAC). This organisation, under the influence of Paul Desnais, a doctor, Paul Zorkine, a former Montenegrin guerrilla living in exile in France, and an Algerian anarchist by the name of Milou, was the first libertarian organisation to work with the Algerian Armée de Liberatión Nationale (ALN), the armed wing of the FLN. In September 1961 they had set up an intelligence gathering network to identify OAS activists, where they met and, if possible, their arms dumps. In 1962 Alain spent the school holidays of June and July in Spain with three other young French anarchists liaising with a Barcelona-based FIJL group and had gone in again in March and again, finally, in April 1963, when he was arrested and charged — along with two other young Frenchmen — with ‘Banditry and Terrorism’.
Alain was the first among the three young French prisoners in his ‘expediente’ to be released. Since his arrest there had been a lot of high-level diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing between Franco’s Foreign Ministry under Fernando María Castiella and the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Pecunia’s father carried considerable clout in Gaullist circles and, according to Alain, Franco had insisted on a personal phone call from de Gaulle on the matter. Others involved in the negotiations for his release included what sounded like the character list of a Dennis Wheatley novel: the Duc d’Aumale, various French and Italian fascists trying to negotiate an exchange of OAS prisoners, and even Otto Skorzeny, whom Alain subsequently claimed intervened at the request of a former French member of the Abwehr (the German World War Two counter-intelligence service), a German collaborator. Stories also circulated about secret financial clauses in ongoing financial accords between France and Spain. The French Foreign Ministry official responsible for the Southern Europe desk at the Quai d’Orsay, a certain M. J. de Folin, told Alain later that his freedom had cost the French government two Mirage jet fighters. Pecunia was released on 17 August 1965, exactly two years to the day after the executions of Delgado and Granado. He had served twenty-eight months in prison. I waved him off as he passed through the Fifth Gallery,
A few months after his release Alain was seriously injured in mysterious circumstances in a road accident and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. He is now a highly successful thriller writer( noir, polar and political)'
Stuart Christie
October 1998
Octavio Alberola Surinach, Ariane Gransac, Franco Leggio, etc., Campo Santa Margherita, Venice, September 1984
Stuart Christie (2011): 'IN 1962 Octavio was invited by the Defence Commission of the MLE (Spanish Libertarian Movement — the CNT-FAI-FIJL-Mujeres Libres) to come to Europe to become full-time ‘coordinator’ of ‘Defensa Interior’ (Interior Defence), the recently established clandestine planning organisation responsible for anti-Francoist actions inside and outside Spain (intended to radicalise the anti-Francoist opposition and to demonstrate to the world that resistance to the Franco regime still existed) — and for the attempts on the life of General Franco (with the objective of bringing about immediate political change in Spain).
DEFENSA INTERIOR ceased to exist as an official body of the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) in October 1963. The disbandment followed the garroting in Madrid (August 1963) of two young anarchists Francisco Granado and Joaquin Delgado, and an order by the French Ministry of the Interior published in the Journal Officiel de la Republique Francaise of 20 October 1963 — a month after the arrest of 21 FIJL activists in France, which made the FIJL an illegal organisation throughout French territory. The outlawing of the FIJL had been a quid pro quo between the Gaullist and Francoist security services: in return for French government action against the Spanish anarchist activists in France, Spain cracked down on ‘pied-noir’ OAS Commando Delta operations to assassinate De Gaulle, which were planned and run from Madrid and Valencia (Petit-Clamart and Georges Watin’s plan to shoot De Gaulle at the Ecole Militaire)
The DI’s activists, however, were not so ready to abandon the struggle against the Franco regime and it was at this point that the First of May Group emerged as an independent international anarchist action grouping to carry out out a number of spectacular coordinated direct actions on a Europe-wide scale. It later played an important part in the activist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. On May 1 1965, five days after the kidnapping of a Francoist diplomat in London on 25 April, Octavio’s father, José Alberola, was found dead in his apartment in Mexico City. He had been tortured and murdered by proxy killers of the ‘Brigada Blanca’, (four of whom were seen leaving the flat), a Mexican police death squad working on behalf of Franco’s Gestapo-trained secret police, the Brigada Politico Social (BPS).
Also in the photograph is Ariane Gransac Sadori, Octavio’s partner and co-author of their book ‘Spanish Anarchism and Revolutionary Action in Spain, 1961-1974’ (Ruedo Ibérico publishers, Paris), ‘Moni’ Tellez (partner of anarchist historian Antonio Tellez), and the Sicilian anarchist publisher, activist — and ‘First of May Group’ member — the late Franco Leggio.'
Stuart Christie
1984
Octavio Alberola and Stuart Christie, Venice, 1984
Stuart Christie
September 1984
Octavio Alberola and Ariane Gransac, La rue Léon-Jouhaux, Paris (1979)
Stuart Christie
1979
Octavio Alberola and Ariane Gransac, Paris (mid-1970s)
Stuart Christie
File on Stuart Christie held by the Dirección General de Seguridad/Brigada Político Social – DGS/BPS (1964)
In November 2012, Stuart wrote: 'Finally, after 10 years or so, I have now received the Spanish police files (Dirección General de Seguridad/Brigada Político Social – DGS/BPS) relating to my arrest in 1964. As I expected, they are heavily redacted, with missing (numbered) pages and contain little I didn’t know already. Interestingly, however, among the papers was a document (Diligencia 3276) dated 10 August 1964 — the day prior to my arrest — indicating that the source of the information (name redacted) about my mission and imminent arrival in Madrid came from an ‘active element of the C.N.T. (National Confederation of Labour) in Tours’. (Tours may be a red herring; only four or five people — all of them in Paris — knew of my rendezvous in Madrid). Equally interesting (to me, anyway) is the way the police presented my arrest as almost fortuitous, glossing over the fact they had been fully briefed beforehand by a well-placed, malicious — or co-opted — informer or infiltrator. The official BPS report, signed-off by acting Chief Superintendent (Comisario Jefe accidental) Don Saturnino Yagüe González, makes no reference as to how or what the BPS knew other than the fact that — certainly from August 10 1964— they were expecting ‘terrorist actions’ in the run-up to the anniversary of the garrotting of Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granada the previous 17 August. Almost intuitively it seems, Yagüe sent 4 BPS Inspectors (with a back-up team of armed officers) to the Plaza de las Cortes (the trap was, in fact, laid inside and around the AmeEx office building which they knew I would visit) where, at 3.00 pm on 11 August, they ‘observed a young man with a rucksack whose appearance raised their suspicions sufficiently to detain and interrogate him…’ — the rest is history! To paraphrase Rick Blaine’s mordent observation in ‘Casablanca’: ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…’ I had to walk into the Madrid offices of American Express…
At the same time I got hold of the DGS/BPS depositions and documents relating to the case of Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granado, two young anarchists whose arrest the previous August — on the grounds that they too appeared ‘suspicious’ — was also presented in the police report as ‘accidental’. The reality, however, is that we know the names of the two so-called ‘comrades’ responsible for their arrest and summary execution: Jacinto Guerrero Lucas and Inocencio Martínez — agents provocateurs working for the DGS/BPS and, certainly in the case of Guerrero Lucas, for the French Renseignements Généraux (RG). Neither of these characters was, however, involved in — or aware of — my identity or my mission to Madrid, so the informer(s) in my case have yet to be exposed and held to account for their actions….
(N.B. Delgado and Granado were innocent of the charges for which they were garroted — the bombings at Security HQ (DGS) in the Puerta del Sol and the HQ of the Falangist labour unions — having been deliberately and cynically framed by the DGS/BPS as fall guys, ‘pour encourager les autres’— that and the fact they were in Madrid preparing an assassination attempt on Franco, an attempt that was abandoned when Franco left Madrid unexpectedly early that summer, on July 25. An additional aggravating factor was, probably — given Franco’s obsession with freemasonry — the fact that Delgado was also a member of the French ‘Grand Orient’ Lodge. The bombings of the DGS and Falangist union HQ were carried out by two other anarchists from ‘Defensa Interior’ (D.I.), Antonio Martín Bellído and Sergio Hernández, both of whom returned safely to Paris after the actions. Neither group was aware of the presence of the other in the Spanish capital. However, Guerrero Lucas and Inocencio Martinez, separately and independently were aware of the mission, and that Joaquin Delgado had been sent to abort the action, cache the weapons and materiel for the assassination attempt, and get Granado out of Spain). '
Various
1964
Spanish
Octavio Alberola and Ariane Gransac in Ariane's studio (1970)
Stuart Christie (2011): 'Rue Léon-Jouhaux, 1970: studio apartment of Ariane Gransac and her partner Octavio Alberola (with yours truly in the mirror). Octavio, coordinator of the clandestine Defensa Interior (D.I.) betwen 1962 and 1964 when it was disowned and sabotaged by the exiled CNT leadership of Germinal Esgleas and Vicente Llansola (subsequently morphing into the First of May Group), was considered at the time to be Franco's Public Eenemy No.1. His dad, José Alberola, a highly regarded anarchist writer and teacher, was murdered by four men in his Mexico City flat on 1 May 1967, the anniversary of the kidnapping in Rome of Mgr Marcos Ussia, Franco's ecclesiastical envoy to the Vatican.'
1970
'Arrest of Two Dangerous Terrorists', La Vanguardia, 1964
1964
Brenda Christie, Octavio Alberola, Ariane Gransac, and Stuart Christie, Paris (1974)
Stuart Christie (2019): 'The plan on the wall in the background was of the Ayete Palace in San Sebastian, the location for the first Defensa Interior (DI) attempt on Franco's life (organised by Octavio)'.
1974
Clippings of Spanish state documents relating to Stuart's arrest (1964)
1964
Identity card of the (garrotted) Spanish anarchist, Joaquín Delgado (1963)
Stuart Christie (2011): 'Grand Orient de France identity card of 29-year-old anarchist cabinet-maker Joaquín Delgado Martínez, garroted (with fellow anarchist Francisco Granado) in Madrid’s Carabanchel Prison at 5.00 a.m. on 17 August 1963, the 24th year of Franco’s ‘victory’. Both were innocent of the actions of which they had been convicted just four days earlier by a drumhead Francoist court-martial. (Those responsible were two other members of ‘Defensa Interior’, the anti-Francoist defence committee of the Libertarian Movement in Exile [CNT, FAI, FIJL] 25-year-old Antonio Martín Bellido and 20-year-old Sergio Hernández, both of whom had returned to France.). The Grand Orient de France (GODF) is the largest Masonic organisation in France and the oldest in Continental Europe. It was formed out of the older Grand Lodge of France in 1773, which allows it to date its foundation to 1728 or 1733. It is generally considered to be the mother lodge of traditional Liberal, or Continental Freemasonry, the defining features of which are complete freedom of religious conscience (although largely anti-Church/anti-clerical) and active involvement in politics which is why it was attractive to many anarchists, libertarians and socialists in France, Spain (Gran Oriente Español) and Italy (Grande Oriente d'Italia)'.