36 The Young Broz
the leading French communist Maurice Thorez, in Paris Broz headed a group
of special agents including the Italian Vittorio Vidali, the Croat Ivan Krajačić,
the Slavonian Ivan Srebrnjak, and the Bosnian Vlajko Begović, leader of the
NKVD operative center in Albacete. All of them were “liquidators,” as Stalin’s
killers were known.^155 This is the most obscure chapter in the life of Josip Broz.
He himself confessed that he went to Madrid in 1936 or 1937, whereas the
Swedish communist Gusti Stridsberg allegedly met him in Barcelona in 1938.^156
These trips involved summary inspections of Yugoslav volunteers in Spain but
also, according to Dobrica Ćosić, a famous Serb writer and for some time Tito’s
intimate, “other activities, about which we as yet know nothing.”^157 It seems
that he wanted to join the International Brigades but was prevented from
doing so by his comrades because his presence was important at home and
in Paris.^158
Did he participate in the “liquidations” of Trotskyists triggered in Spain by
Soviet agents? It is still not clear whether Broz was one of “los Russos,” as the
Spanish called those who came to their country to fight in favor of the republic.
In a letter sent to Foreign Minister Anthony Eden in May 1944, Edith Wed-
derburn, an Englishwoman involved in the Civil War, accused Broz of organiz-
ing special military tribunals in Barcelona that were charged with judging
those who opposed the tyranny of the Soviet secret services. In another letter,
sent the following day, Foreign Office diplomat M. E. Rose mentioned to Eliz-
abeth Barker, who was active in British wartime propaganda, that word of
crimes committed by Tito during the Spanish Civil War were circulating in
London in the spring of 1944.^159 Fred Copeman, an English communist and a
commander of the British brigade, later wrote in his memoirs that Broz, under
the pseudonym Čapajev, led the Georgi Dimitrov brigade, composed of volun-
teers from Central Europe and the Balkans. However, Santiago Carillo, the
longtime secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party, denied this.^160 In
an interview with American journalist C. L. Sulzberger, André Malraux, the
French novelist who fought in Spain on the side of the republic, spoke about an
encounter with Broz there. And in June 1966, the Paris newspaper L’Aurore
wrote that “Tito does not like to remember this period of his life, since his
stay in Barcelona and Albacete at the end of 1936 coincided with the killings,
committed by Soviet agents, of the most important Yugoslav communists.”^161
Until the Soviet secret service archives are opened, it is impossible to say
how deeply Broz was implicated in the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. In a
report to the IKKI about the party’s work, he distanced himself from the “liq-
uidators,” stressing that they led a sectarian struggle and had harmed the party.
But which liquidators did he have in mind? Did this include those who acted
on behalf of the NKVD? One of those, Ivan Krajačić (Stevo), was a lifelong