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
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 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
Octavio Alberola and Ariane Gransac, Paris (mid-1970s)
Stuart Christie
Stuart Christie and Helios Téllez, son of Antonio Téllez Solá , Paris (1973)
Stuart Christie
'Arrest of Two Dangerous Terrorists', La Vanguardia, 1964
1964
Phil Hixson, José Vicente Ortuño and Vince Stevenson ("Persons Unknown"), Sanday (1981)
Stuart Christie
1981