The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The PSOE newspaper, El Socialista, and even Largo Caballero’s Claridad, had already been taken over by the pro-communist wing of the party. But the most disturbing event for Largo Caballero came at the end of September, when his supporters were disqualified from voting at the national plenum of the UGT. Nevertheless, many pro-communist socialists, including even Negrín, still held back from the fateful step of outright union with the PCE. Largo Caballero’s speech on 17 October (the first he had been allowed to make since May) explained the fall of his government and gave strong warnings of the dangers the party faced. Largo Caballero did not, however, recover any power, for he was kept off the executive committee, and his supporters on it remained in a minority. At the end of October he moved to Barcelona where, in a form of internal exile, he busied himself in minor affairs.¹¹

Probably the most ominous of all the developments in republican territory at this time was the rationalization of the security services, on 9 August 1937, into the SIM, Servicio de Investigación Militar.¹² Prieto had been the architect of this restructuring to increase central control. He believed that the fragmented growth of counter-espionage organizations was uncontrolled and inefficient. One intelligence chief complained that ‘everyone in our rearguard carried on counter-espionage’. Independent services with their own networks of agents were run by the army, the Directorate-General of Security, the carabineros, the foreign ministry, the Generalitat and the Basque government in exile (now based in Barcelona). Even the International Brigades had their own NKVD-run branch of heretic hunters based at Albacete. Its chief, ‘Moreno’, was a Yugoslav from the Soviet Union who was shot on his return.¹³

The new department was out of its creator’s control as soon as it was constituted in August, since the communists had started to infiltrate and control the police and security services in the autumn of 1936. The first directors, the socialists Ángel Díaz Baza and Prudencio Sayagüés, were not up to the work, while others such as Gustavo Durán, whom Prieto named chief of the SIM for the Army of the Centre, had to be removed because he recruited only communists. The next director was Colonel Manuel Uribarri, who reported solely to Soviet agents and managed to flee to France with a booty of 100,000 francs.¹⁴ Only the following year was communist control reduced. The organization did indeed manage to destroy a number of nationalist networks–‘Concepción’, ‘Círculo Azul’, ‘Capitán Mora’, ‘Cruces de fuego’ and others–but there can be no doubt that during its first eight months of existence the SIM, later described as ‘the Russian syphilis’ by the German writer Gustav Regler, was a sinister tool in the hands of Orlov and his NKVD men.

SIM officers included both unquestioningly loyal Party members and the ambitious. Its unchallenged power attracted opportunists of every sort to its ranks. The core of executive officers then created a network of agents through bribery and blackmail. They even managed to plant their organization in resolutely anti-communist formations as a result of their control of transfer and promotion. For example, a nineteen-yearold rifleman in the 119th Brigade was suborned and then promoted overnight to become the SIM chief of the whole formation with a greater power of life and death than its commander.¹⁵

Because of the destruction of records, it is difficult to know the total number of agents employed by the SIM. There were said to have been 6,000 in Madrid alone and its official payroll was 22 million pesetas. Its six military and five civilian sections, including the ‘Z Brigade’, covered every facet of life and its agents were present in every district and command.¹⁶ The most feared section was the Special Brigade, which was responsible for interrogation. When its infamous reputation became known abroad, it simply changed its name. The government insisted that it had been disbanded, but in fact there was an increase in the number of its victims who ‘crossed over to the enemy’ (the euphemism for death under torture or secret execution). It worked with a network of ‘invisible’ agents both at the front and in the rear.¹⁷

In the central region the SIM made use of mainly secret prisons which had belonged to the DEDIDE. The first was the religious college of San Lorenzo, which held 200 suspects. The second was Work Camp No. 1 in Cuenca. Those who had the misfortune to be held there are united in their evidence: maltreatment, the use of cold and hunger to extract confessions, punishment cells called ‘the icebox’ and the ‘fridge’, in which prisoners were left naked with water up to their knees, or they were sprayed with freezing water during winter months.¹⁸