His report at the time to Burgos identified Besteiro as a potential target for the Fifth Column. In April 1938, Luna was instructed by the clandestine organization of the Falange to try to persuade Besteiro to move beyond refusal to work with the government and to try actively to bring the war to an end. This initiative coincided with the division of Republican territory by the successful Francoist offensive through Aragon to the Mediterranean coast. With the Republic’s central zone cut off from the government in Valencia, Besteiro agreed. From the summer of 1938, he started to lobby energetically to be permitted to form a cabinet as a preliminary step to peace negotiations.20
Besteiro’s position was converging with that of Segismundo Casado. Already in the summer of 1938, shortly after Casado’s promotion to the command of the Army of the Centre, a prominent member of the Madrid Fifth Column, the Falangist Antonio Bouthelier España, had approached him. Bouthelier was able to get near to Casado because he was secretary to the prominent CNT member Manuel Salgado, who worked in the security services of the Army of the Centre. He had used this position to help Francoists cross the lines. Bouthelier also had a short-wave radio with which he passed information to rebel headquarters. For various reasons, the Francoist espionage service was aware of Casado’s anti-communism. His brother Lieutenant Colonel César Casado was a member of the Fifth Column, and Segismundo Casado was doing everything in this power to protect him. Given Bouthelier’s closeness to Casado, he was instructed to propose to him that he act as a spy for the rebels. He was emboldened to do so because he knew of the sympathies for the rebel cause of both Casado’s wife María Condado y Condado and his brother César. Casado did not immediately accept the proposal but, significantly, did not report the contact to the Republic’s security service, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, in order to open an investigation into Bouthelier. César Casado was only one of several pro-Francoist officers that Segismundo was protecting by giving them posts within his general staff. In fact, aware of these contacts, the SIM was already carrying out surveillance of Casado and his family. However, since the Socialist Ángel Pedrero García, the head of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar in the Army of the Centre, sympathized with Casado, no action seems to have been taken against him.21
One of the members of the Organización Antonio was a major in the army medical corps, Casado’s doctor Diego Medina Garijo. Another was a retired major of the medical corps, Dr Ricardo Bertoloty Ramírez. He was one of the team that had saved Franco’s life in 1916 when he was seriously wounded at El Biutz in Morocco. In 1931, Dr Bertoloty had taken advantage of Azaña’s reforms to leave the army, but he remained a close friend of Franco.22 Contacts with pro-rebel sympathizers in the Republican Army were monitored through the Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM), run within Franco’s general staff by Colonel José Ungría Jiménez. A key figure in the SIPM in close contact with the Organización Antonio was Lieutenant Colonel José Centaño de la Paz, Casado’s adjutant, who belonged to another fifth-column organization called ‘La Ciudad Clandestina’. Centaño was in constant radio contact with Franco’s headquarters in Burgos. In late January 1939, Antonio Luna’s group brought Besteiro and Casado together in order to discuss plans to overthrow Negrín. However, Ángel Pedrero García had already brokered a prior meeting with Besteiro at the end of October 1938, though it is unlikely that they discussed anything as dramatic as an anti-Negrín coup d’état. Not until 5 February did Centaño reveal to Casado his role in the SIPM.23
That the SIPM regarded Casado as potentially useful was hardly surprising. They were aware that, on 8 December 1938, Casado had met the British Chargé d’Affaires Ralph Stevenson in Madrid and discussed with him London’s desire to end the Spanish conflict.24 That together with the way in which Casado had run the Army of the Centre must have delighted them. He had imposed rigidly traditional military discipline and completely emasculated the corps of political commissars, which had been created shortly after the conflict began in response to the fact that war had been triggered by a rebellion of professional officers against the constitutional authority of the Republic. The commissariat existed in parallel with the traditional military structure. Commissars were essentially evangelists of the Republican cause. They worked to maintain morale and to explain the political purpose of the war effort, and provided a link between the rank and file, the officers and the Republican government. They held the same rank as the commander of the unit in which they served, even where that unit was the army as a whole. Inevitably, most career officers resented the authority enjoyed by commissars to question major military decisions. By early 1939, as the commissars worked to maintain the spirit of resistance, this resentment intensified in proportion to the growing defeatism of the professional officers, especially so in the case of Casado.25
The consequence was that new conscripts were left with little idea of what they fighting for. This fostered the spread of demoralization and desertions. At the same time, Casado showed no inclination to use his forces in battle, something for which Vicente Rojo would never forgive him. Casado was far from being the only or indeed the most senior defeatist in the Republican ranks. In late November, to take pressure off the retreating Army of the Ebro, Rojo had ordered three diversionary attacks by the armies of the centre-south zone under General Miaja, the commander of the Republican armies of the south and centre. With his chief of staff, General Manuel Matallana Gómez, Miaja was supposed to organize a major offensive westwards into Extremadura and a landing at Motril in Granada. Colonel Casado, commander of the Army of the Centre, was to carry out an advance on the Madrid front at Brunete. All three simply failed to carry out their orders. Many of the officers in the Army of Catalonia were committed Communists like Colonel Antonio Cordón, or had risen through the ranks of the militia like Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. In contrast, the senior officers of the Army of the Centre were professional officers who had made their careers in Africa. If, like Miaja, they had sought membership of the Communist Party, it was out of convenience rather than conviction.
The various offensives should have begun on 11 December 1938 but were inexplicably delayed until 5 January 1939, by which time the Francoist drive into Catalonia was virtually unstoppable. The lack of commitment by the southern army commanders was seen in Negrín’s immediate circle as the result of ‘treachery, sabotage and defeatism’.26 The failure to launch the operations owed much to the fact that the chief of operations of the Army of the Centre, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco García Viñals, was a close collaborator of the SIPM. He did everything possible to ensure that the Republican forces in the centre zone remained inactive.27 The landing at Motril never took place. Several commanders, the Communists Enrique Castro Delgado and Juan Modesto Guilloto, the moderate Republican (and anti-Communist) Juan Perea Capulino and the commissar general of the Group of Armies of the Centre (Grupo de Ejércitos Republicanos del Centro), the Communist Jesús Hernández, bitterly criticized Miaja in their respective memoirs. They alleged that Miaja had failed to use the troops at his disposal for the attack in Extremadura, preferring to keep them in defensive positions when he could have exploited the local numerical superiority occasioned by Franco’s concentration on the Catalan campaign.
Hernández denounced Miaja’s delays in launching the Extremadura offensive. Modesto declared that the decision to disobey Rojo’s orders