File on Stuart Christie held by the Dirección General de Seguridad/Brigada Político Social – DGS/BPS (1964)

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