French anarchist Alain Pecunia, (1998)

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