June 1937

The first priority of the Negrín administration was the elimination of the POUM. All POUM leaders who could be found were arrested, many of them horribly tortured. Some, like Andrés Nin, arrested on 18 June along with many of his comrades, were never seen again. Although the arrests were carried out by the police, the general belief was that the arrests had been masterminded by Alexander Orlov, head of the Soviet GPU in Spain. Manuel Irujo, the new Minister of Justice, a Basque catholic, who had set up the special tribunals to try case of espionage and high treason in camera, confirmed that Nin had been taken to the penitentiary of Alcalá de Henares from which he had disappeared. Some POUM members managed to survive by going underground. On the walls appeared the mute protest: ‘Where is Nin?’ Below was often to be found scrawled the Stalinist retort: ‘In Germany!’

Bilbao fell to the Nationalists the day after the police clamp-down on the POUM.

The lessons of the ‘May days’ were not entirely lost on the anarchist committees. Conscious of the growing threat to their autonomy in the face of the revived power of the state, the national committees of the CNT, FAI and FIJL commissioned a study for the setting up of a co-ordinated anarchist intelligence and security service. In the early period of the war nearly every party and organization had its own intelligence network. The FAI, for example, had its own Servicio de Investigación, as did the Defense Committee of the CNT. With the exception of the anarchists and the Basques, the majority of these were later incorporated into the communist dominated Servicio de Información Militar (SIM) in August 1937. Conscious of the problems of libertarian organizations in times of crisis, given their voluntary nature, the anonymous author or authors of the report argued that the anarchists had suffered from ‘lack of guidance, of prior consideration of the resources of the enemy and of co-ordination in the affray.’ The re-organized anarchist intelligence services was to be known as the Servicio de Información y Coordinación (SIC).

On 22 June, issue No. 4 of El Amigo del Pueblo carried the news of the arrest of Jaime Balius, one of the leading figures off the Friends of Durruti group, for his part in drafting issue No. 1 of the paper.