Death of an Old Secret Police
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista BY RAY ALAN Death of an Old Secret Police Portuguese fascism was not a flamboyant Mediterranean thing of chanting mobs and comic salutes. It was lower-keyed and more sluggish. But at...
...Its collaboration with the CIA was not, so far as I could judge, as close as many people assumed...
...As for the rest, 25-30 per cent are Socialists and Social Democrats, and 20-25 per cent are inclined toward Maoism and other extremist isms...
...Marxism and Freemasonry were identified as the main sources of evil, though liberalism was wicked and Protestantism exuded a positively sulfureous whiff...
...They are anxious to avoid being overheard and misunderstood by young Maoists and other ideological hopheads who take pleasure in insulting, and sometimes assaulting, those whose opinions are unfashionably moderate...
...With other journalists, I was shown around the pide HQ shortly after its capture by Portuguese Marines...
...Its chiefs' correspondence with the Spanish agency, however, was affectionate in tone...
...The rua Antonio Maria Cardoso had been renamed "Avenue of the Victims of the pide...
...A couple of weeks ago, I learned that several people working for the new organization were protesting against Communist attempts to manipulate it...
...The all-military High Council of the Revolution, in its recent rejection of ultra-Leftist demands for the abolition of political parties and the establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," pleased the Socialists by declaring in favor of political pluralism...
...But the outlook for democracy in Portugal is far from unclouded...
...Later I was given an opportunity to browse in a section of its archives and in its training school...
...They don't realize that an equally probable outcome would be a violent Right-wing reaction...
...Its 20,000 informers were being traced, but they would not be apprehended unless specific complaints were made against them...
...some, I believe, have resigned...
...A few weeks ago I decided to have another look at the pide's former HQ...
...The pide also had its private museum-a surrealistic collection that included time bombs, banned books and leaflets, a big display of captured Masonic regalia, photos of an American Protestant convention, student banners, primitive little printing presses, and blanket-ropes used by prisoners trying to escape or hang themselves...
...It would be unrealistic to expect a revolutionary government-or, for that matter, any other-to function without an intelligence apparatus, and there have been no reports that the new service is torturing anyone...
...An ambassador's wife was traumatized one day by the sight of a dying man dangling from power cables above that street after he had been flung from one of the upper windows...
...Of the Portuguese Communists (PCP), the Socialists said (but let me stress that I am giving a compressed outline of their views, not direct quotes): The PCP was ahead of other antifascist parties in infiltrating its militants into the trade unions...
...but the epithet "fascist" is used by many Leftwingers as loosely as "Red" is used by many Rightwingers, and often means roughly the same thing -someone who dissents from the true gospel...
...it has secured control of most daily newspapers and most radio and television news facilities...
...They can gain power in Portugal only by means of a takeover by pro-Communist military officers that would both alienate the majority of the people and split the AFM...
...Birth of a New One...
...what they really want is enough chaos and mass discontent to enable them to seize power...
...The most stubborn political suspects were taken to Caxias prison and thrown into medieval "water cells," where a rising tide came near to drowning them every 12 hours...
...Indeed, Portugal is at present racked by rhetorical as well as economic inflation...
...But at its heart was the usual, squalid secret police...
...Unfortunately, some of the officers in the Armed Forces Movement (AFM) are not sufficiently educated in politics to understand this either, so they drift along with the current...
...Opponents of the regime were sometimes told, as they were taken upstairs for interrogation in the oppressive headquarters of the pide (an acronym for International Police for the Defense of the State) on Lisbon's rua Antonio Maria Cardoso: "The Law doesn't reach beyond the second floor...
...For the Socialists, the fate of the newspaper Republica will be an augury...
...The "extinction of fascism" is something all sane men and women would applaud, like the extinction of forced labor and drug addiction...
...They also explain why one of the most popular actions of the revolutionary junta in April 1974 was to imprison pide officers and agents in the very cells (but not the "water" type) just vacated by their victims...
...Most of the AFM's members claim to want what they call "socialism," but it is not always clear to others what they mean or even if they themselves know what they mean...
...Every secret police has the reflexes of a mafia, and the pide was no exception...
...Nevertheless, the Communists have not won over the public...
...Its officers' reaction after the coup was characteristic: They rushed out of their headquarters and fired on a group of demonstrators, causing the only casualties of the revolution...
...Obscenities like these explain why so many Portuguese say they are willing to face any political risk- "even Communism"-rather than live under fascism again...
...Often these demands come from individuals who are less interested in raising workers' living standards than in provoking the collapse of the economy...
...Demands are being made, they said, for the transfer to public ownership of industries that the state lacks the personnel to administer, and for wage increases that cannot be met...
...Portugal's military rulers have seemed at times to favor the printers while tossing a few crumbs of comfort to the Socialists...
...At last I was received by a pleasant young officer to whom I had an introduction...
...The officer I spoke to asked me, "After what the Americans did in Chile, who will ever trust them...
...Recruits were given a thorough grounding in the virtues of Catholicism and the corporate state...
...The main task of this new outfit was to investigate the activities of a few hundred "fascists and counterrevolutionaries" thought to have been connected with coup attempts in September 1974 and March this year...
...As I write, the issue is undecided...
...The AFM is not under the Communists' thumb, according to the Socialists...
...The indoctrination dispensed in the training school was a throwback to Vichy France and the early days of General Franco...
...Looking over these trophies, it occurred to me that the pide's indoctrination program was perhaps intended more to delude than to enlighten its members-to conceal from them their essential purpose of defending not a system of values, but a petty dictator and his sycophants...
...Still, the mere thought of the pide's old HQ being used again as some kind of police center is disturbing...
...The PCP can, therefore, create faits accomplis, give jobs and promotions to party members, refuse jobs to critics, influence opinion, and foment grievances that appear to spring from the grassroots...
...About 20 per cent are Communists and another 15-20 per cent are impressed by the PCP-by its discipline and revolutionary credentials, and by the fact that it has powerful friends abroad...
...In a recent informal report to other Southern European Socialist parties, Portuguese Socialist leaders described the competitive demagoguery of noisy extremist factions as a major problem...
...The pide had friendly relations with the CIA, the French and South African police and the Spanish Directorate-General of Security...
...Limbo Portuguese democrats express themselves much more cautiously in public than they did a year ago, but not because they are afraid of a secret police...
...He told me the place now housed an organization dedicated to "the extinction of fascism.' All except five or six of the pide's 930 officers and agents in Portugal had been arrested, though several hundred were still at large in Africa...
...and through the Portuguese Democratic Movement (once a broad antifascist alliance, but now dominated by Communists and Left-wing Catholics), it controls several municipalities...
...Does Interpol also help the Spanish DGS and the KGB...
...Communist and extreme Leftist printers have been trying to take over the daily and fire its Socialist editor and reporters...
...The building seemed to be functioning as a headquarters again, but was harder to get into than a year earlier...
...And I was startled to discover that the pide received cooperation from Interpol, the international police service...
...then, cautiously, they were exposed to subversive ideas...
...And, I gathered, it was worried about the possibility of CIA intrigue...
Vol. 58 • July 1975 • No. 15
