“Just the facts, ma’am.” That line came from Dragnet—a 1950s TV show with detective Joe Friday. I was reminded of it a few months ago when retired academic Ray Hoff, one of my invaluable fact-checkers, cautioned me against speculating about what Jim Higgins was up to in the Spanish Civil War, especially after the international brigades were withdrawn. I was advised to “forget the 007 stuff”. Good advice. Still……

What about before the internationals were withdrawn? There was more to go on for that period. “Joe Friday” may have solved cases using only facts, but sometimes a good detective can make a solid case based on circumstantial evidence. As editor of my father’s memoir, I set out to learn what I could, guided by the following cryptic comments he made as he audio taped his stories in 1980; it seems that when he was taping, he let his guard down, allowing a peek into his secrets.

“I knew a few things that were happening. I was not the average guy. I was behind enemy lines more than I was in front of them.”

“Officers were friends. I was more or less an officer myself, but most didn’t know.”

“I had a very special and unique situation placed upon me.”

Though Higgins mentions reporting to officers who were in “intelligence,” he didn’t elaborate in his memoir. Plus there was no supporting documentation; probably explained by Higgins’ statement that documents for people like him were destroyed by the 5th Army Corps. Of course, I knew Higgins wasn’t any James Bond—agent 007—nor was there any evidence at all that he was a guerilla working with partisans, as was the fictional “Robert Jordan” in Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

However, I also knew in my bones, that just because there was no documentation, it didn’t mean there wasn’t something further to learn. I set out to bolster the circumstantial evidence that is in the memoir. My first clue had come from British author, Jason Webster, who’s written about the Spanish Civil War and has a new book out on Spanish history called, Violencia. He read the manuscript early on, and didn’t hesitate to tell me that Higgins was in “secret ops.” I’d had no idea. Clearly, Webster was able to easily read between the lines.

Then, this past winter, another of the book’s alert documentarians, Chris Brooks with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) in New York, inadvertently found a document that showed Higgins at Officer Training School in February 1938.

That helped explain a few things; like why Higgins didn’t write about the Battle of Teruel, even though his military book showed him at the Teruel front for much longer than the battle lasted. At the same time, his military book did NOT show he was at Officer Training School in February. Was the record of him being at Teruel a cover up for his training? Was the training something to do with “secret ops?”

I decided to come at it another way. Knowing Higgins was behind enemy lines some of the time, and not always with his battalion, I searched for a Spanish Civil War academic whose research included “intelligence.” I found the right person in England—Jorge Marco, at the University of Bath.

Marco read the manuscript and confirmed that Higgins was not in a guerilla unit. He went on to say, “For sure he was working on intelligence, but it is not clear whether he was doing this work in relation to the military activities of the 5^th Army or related to broader intelligence activities.” He also said, “it is pretty clear that he was working on intelligence and sabotage behind the enemy lines within his unit, which is not unusual. It is a shame that he did not expand much on this area.”

I’ve also learned more about the two captains Higgins reported to/through most of the time he was in Spain—Captain Jose Medina and Captain Brage. Other than these two officers, Higgins says that the only person who knew what he was up to was battalion commander, Edward Cecil-Smith.

The officer Higgins was closest to was a Spaniard named Captain Medina. There seemed to be no information about him in various archives, despite having fought with Canada’s Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and being appointed commander for a brief time when Major Smith was out because of an injury. I wrote a blog post about him last year, and circulated it through Facebook groups in Britain and Spain, in the hope that someone would know something. Nothing turned up.

Fortunately, there was information with ALBA about Captain Brage, with more surfacing recently. (See here also.) Brage was a multi-lingual, Spanish-American. An accomplished soccer player, he had arrived in Barcelona in the summer of 1936 with a US team to compete in the People’s Olympiad .

That event never happened. Instead Spanish army generals attempted a coup, and Brage signed up to combat them. As it turns out, he was with military intelligence almost from the beginning. In the fall of 1936, he was with a guerrilla dynamite unit in the Pyrenees. By October 1937 he had moved to the international brigades (Abraham Lincoln Battalion) and by May 1938, he had been moved up to the 15th Brigade level. (The mention of SIM is made in the caption under his photograph, not in his bio.)

This is in line with a statement Higgins makes in the March 1938 part of his memoir, that Brage “went on to become the brigade’s head of intelligence.” Interestingly, there is strong evidence that Brage, a dynamiter in the guerilla movement prior to October 1937, and who had been grilled by Hemingway, was likely the model for “Robert Jordan” in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Brage would also have been the one who cited Jim Higgins for bravery, though Higgins never mentions it, except when he was probed by a journalist for a feature article. Even then he downplays it.

Since Jose Medina was a Spaniard, I approached Mariado Hinojosa, an archivist/activist in Valencia, Spain. She found the evidence I needed—Captain Jose Medina-Lopez (I now had his full name) was with Servicio de Informacion Militar, or SIM, from March 1938 through March 1939, when Higgins was reporting to him. After the war ended, Captain Medina was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to 30 years imprisonment. He somehow made it into exile in the mid-1940s.

I asked Marco–also military historian, Tyler Wentzell,–to explain more to me about SIM. Here’s a brief snapshot. SIM had people working for it throughout the army, right down to the battalion level and below. Besides army strategists, senior officers, and guerillas working with partisans, there were generally two types of agent in the lower echelons, those who did the work that Higgins did, and others that were there to spy/report on any soldiers who weren’t toeing the party line.

As a strongly-committed anti-fascist, Higgins was well-placed in sabotage/intelligence near or behind enemy lines. Reporting on his fellow soldiers would not have suited his independent character. He had his own mind and I knew him to be non-judgmental to a fault. That doesn’t mean his opinions weren’t thoughtfully conceived and forcefully argued. He called it being “stubborn.” Others would call it being committed to his principles.

With this explanation of SIM, we can see why Higgins’ role wasn’t so unusual. What is unusual is to have anything written by those who were associated with SIM, no matter at what level they served, and it’s why my gurus wish he hadn’t been so secretive. All we’re left with is a tantalizing glimpse.

I have pursued all this because it is KEY to understanding Higgins’ memoir. I didn’t want to leave readers scratching their heads, as I have done. If I hadn’t, the memoir would still be interesting, as my early beta readers have attested, but this latest research gives it a new dimension which is captured in the notes to the book.

To be clear, I’m not putting words into Jim Higgins’ mouth; meaning that some of the really interesting stuff is in those notes, not only for the Spanish Civil War but for the rest of the memoir as well. (It turned out his Royal Canadian Mounted Police file, which I finally received in April, was a goldmine, despite its many redactions, but that’s another blog post.)

And while I’ve solved most of the puzzle of Jim Higgins’s time in Spain, there are niggling questions that remain, especially about what he was up to after the internationals were withdrawn in September 1938. He says that after time out for treatment of infected shrapnel wounds, he remained on to fight with Spanish units, accompanied by a young Spanish soldier named Jose Diaz who was his interpreter and fellow machine-gunner.

All I have are some random cryptic notes that suggest what he and Jose Diaz could possibly have been doing—but at least now I believe there is enough circumstantial evidence to make an educated guess. I plan to include those notes in the book but will refrain from speculating; I’ll let the reader decide whether they could mean anything, or not.

If you’ve paid attention, you will realize that six people have aided me greatly with this particular conundrum alone—two experts in SCW documents, one in Canada and one in the US, a military historian in Canada, someone familiar with archives in Spain, plus one author and one academic in Britain. All will be sincerely and gratefully acknowledged in the book.

I’ve kept my family informed about my findings and my sister, Susan, tells me, “I will never see acknowledgements in the same way again.” I agree—just as it takes a village to raise a child, I’ve learned firsthand that it takes a community of generous, committed and knowledgable people to nurture excellence in a book.

© Janette Higgins

Now Published

Fighting for Democracy: The True Story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982), A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War (2020) can be ordered here.

Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins is the latest book about the Mac-Paps, Canadians in the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion, which was part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Other books about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War include Not For King or Country by Tyler Wentzell , Mac-Pap by Ronald Liversedge with David Yorke and Renegades by Michael Petrou.