{"id":764,"date":"2023-01-17T23:10:59","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T23:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jailingopinions.com\/realhistory\/?p=764"},"modified":"2023-01-17T23:13:16","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T23:13:16","slug":"anti-fascist-spy-exposed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jailingopinions.com\/realhistory\/anti-fascist-spy-exposed\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-fascist spy exposed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A leading figure in several radical nationalist, national socialist and anti-Zionist groups in Spain can today be revealed as an undercover \u2018anti-fascist\u2019 agent. This expos\u00e9 has also been published in German<\/a>, in Spanish<\/a>, in French<\/a>, and in Italian<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beginning in late 2020 and with increasing prominence since late 2021, Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez has led a double life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One face of Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez is as a lawyer with an academic specialism in human rights, organising conferences with a strongly \u2018anti-fascist\u2019 theme, and sharing the Madrid office of a legal firm offering advice to German and English speaking clients in Spain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other face of Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez is as a radical leader of the \u2018far right\u2019, not only representing some of Spain\u2019s most noted national socialists, but also taking an active role in leading their organisations, raising troubling questions about the extent to which he and his controllers may have crossed the line between infiltrator and agent provocateur<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During November-December 2022 Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez (recently using the online identity ‘Armando Renacer’ and previously ‘Armando Basti\u00f3n’):
(1) became \u201cpolitical action secretary\u201d for a new movement that represents the \u2018National Bolshevik\u2019 faction of Spain\u2019s \u2018far right\u2019;
(2) infiltrated the circle of a British political activist and travelled to her home in Germany, where he met with several leading German national socialist activists;
(3) volunteered to act as liaison between a fugitive political dissident and the Iranian Government.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez on 26th November 2022 addressing a meeting of the new ‘Movimiento Pueblo’, his latest target for infiltration.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

For more than a year until the group\u2019s dissolution two months ago, Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez was co-leader of a national socialist youth group, Basti\u00f3n Frontal, and organised international connections with similar groups in France, Italy, Serbia, Poland and elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And until today he was still acting as lawyer for the activist who attracted international media attention to Basti\u00f3n Frontal, the 20-year-old student Isabel Peralta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez is not what he seems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

INFILTRATING THE \u2018FAR RIGHT\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the summer of 2020 \u2013 in the early months of the pandemic \u2013 Spain\u2019s secret police (the CGI, roughly equivalent to the old British Special Branch, or what is now SO15) began to monitor the activities of a new national socialist youth group, Basti\u00f3n Frontal, whose activities involved both opposing illegal immigration (especially immigrant street gangs) and drawing attention to the economic plight of many working-class Spaniards suffering under pandemic restrictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An 18-year-old history student at Complutense University of Madrid, Isabel Peralta, was first observed by the secret police at a Basti\u00f3n Frontal activity in September 2020. She had previously been active in other Falangist groups but had become disillusioned by some of their reactionary and corrupt leaders. Isabel attracted international attention on 13th February 2021 when she gave a speech in tribute to the heroic anti-communist volunteers of the Blue Division (Divisi\u00f3n Azul<\/em>), who fought on the Eastern Front after 1941 against Stalin\u2019s Red Army.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Isabel Peralta became one of Spain’s best known nationalists in February 2021: Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez had the task of infiltrating and undermining her national socialist youth group Basti\u00f3n Frontal<\/strong><\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

At the end of 2020, a 30-year-old lawyer named Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez suddenly appeared in \u2018far right\u2019 circles. He first turned up among football ultras in the tough Madrid district of San Blas-Canillejas, then gave a speech about the Blue Division\u2019s war record at a meeting of national socialists with an interest in military history. He had no known past political activity, or indeed even the remotest connection to any form of nationalist movement. No one knew anything about him and no one checked up on him. For reasons that now seem mystifying, Armando was accepted as a comrade by various radical factions, each perhaps assuming that someone else had vouched for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armando enhanced his credibility in such circles by latching onto Basti\u00f3n Frontal after it had become the most visible face of Spanish radical nationalism, largely thanks to its co-leader Isabel Peralta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a very short time he had emerged as one of the leaders of this national socialist youth group, partly because he was a few years older, and partly because he offered them free legal advice and even represented them in court without charge.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez introducing the historian Jos\u00e9 Luis Jerez Riesco at a meeting in November 2021 in Basti\u00f3n Frontal’s Madrid headquarters. By this point Armando was effectively leader of Basti\u00f3n Frontal because Isabel was temporarily resident in Germany.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Soon he was calling himself \u2018Armando Basti\u00f3n\u2019 and making regular speeches at the group\u2019s meetings, also acting as moderator for their online Telegram forum. After Isabel Peralta moved to Germany for a few months during late 2021 and early 2022, Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez established himself as effectively the leader of Basti\u00f3n Frontal, especially after co-leader Rodrigo Migu\u00e9lez was imprisoned. Armando represented both Rodrigo and Isabel in several criminal and civil cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the autumn of 2022 Basti\u00f3n Frontal collapsed, but Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez is continuing to represent Isabel in a long-running criminal case, where prosecutors are trying to jail her for a speech made at an anti-immigration rally outside the Moroccan Embassy in May 2021. He is also representing her in a continuing civil action that she has brought against the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jerusalem Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet in both of these cases (and earlier legal problems relating to Basti\u00f3n Frontal activists) Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez had a conflict of interest that made it grossly improper for him to act on behalf of such clients. While they are militant nationalists, national socialists and anti-Zionists, Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez has a long background (which he disguised from his new clients and \u2018comrades\u2019) working for an explicitly anti-fascist and anti-nazi academic foundation with close connections to Israel and international Jewish organisations.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez as a young lawyer working with the Berg Institute<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

ARMANDO AND THE BERG INSTITUTE<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez arrived suddenly in nationalist \/ national-socialist circles after a background of several years working with an important academic organisation that specialises in ‘Holocaust’ studies and other \u2018anti-fascist\u2019 themes, the Madrid-based Berg Institute (Instituto Berg<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He studied for a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His biography on the Spanish version of his former law firm\u2019s website was later edited to remove reference to his time in Jerusalem, but an earlier English-language draft of the same page still includes this reference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armando\u2019s master\u2019s degree in \u201cInternational Relations, International Law and Conflict Resolution\u201d was undertaken jointly with Alfonso X el Sabio University, Madrid; the UN\u2019s \u2018University for Peace\u2019; and the Berg Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He went on to work as part of the Berg Institute\u2019s \u2018academic coordination team\u2019 and took part in the Institute\u2019s joint training programmes with the Colombian Army and security forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez was not simply studying in Israel, or casually associated with the Berg Institute: he was actually an organiser and coordinator for several of their projects. This is especially disturbing when one looks in more detail at the content of the conferences that he organised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar connections with the Berg Institute were shared with both of the close friends with whom in 2015 Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez set up a law firm in Madrid called GABEIRO \u2013 Jos\u00e9 Feliciano Beceiro Armada and Jes\u00fas Gavil\u00e1n Hormigo. Gavil\u00e1n studied in Jerusalem during 2014 alongside Armando, and worked for the Fundaci\u00f3n Internacional Baltasar Garz\u00f3n, named in honour of Spain\u2019s most infamously left-wing, \u2018anti-fascist\u2019 judge. While Beceiro preceded Armando as organiser of the Berg Institute\u2019s international conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fourth lawyer who was part of this short-lived GABEIRO firm in Madrid (\u00c1lvaro Domec L\u00f3pez) was brought into Isabel Peralta\u2019s criminal case by Armando in January 2022 \u2013 a fact that was completely unknown to Isabel herself until it was revealed in court documents.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Armando giving a television interview in his other role as a respectable young lawyer<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It is necessary to look more closely at this Berg Institute, for which Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez acted as a coordinator \/ organiser before his sudden \u2018conversion\u2019 to the radical nationalist \/ national socialist cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many Jews in the world, and of course it would be ridiculous to assume that a lawyer is a Jewish agent if he simply had a passing connection with a Jewish client.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armando\u2019s connection is far more serious, especially when viewed alongside work with the police and military, and international work undertaken with the backing of this particular anti-fascist organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Readers should bear in mind that Armando has never at any stage confided in his new comrades, in order to explain his political conversion. His past as the organiser of anti-fascist conferences was completely secret until revealed during this investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A flyer for one of the Berg Institute Conferences organised by Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

ARMANDO THE ANTI-NAZI CONFERENCE ORGANISER<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2014 and 2015, Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez was the organiser of two international conferences for the Berg Institute. These were very high-level events lasting in each case for a fortnight, starting in Madrid and moving on to several other European cities. The academic directors of the conference were the two co-directors of the Berg Institute, one of whom was Armando\u2019s academic supervisor, Prof. Joaquin Gonz\u00e1lez Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These conferences were imbued with the \u2018anti-nazi\u2019 and anti-fascist ethos of the Berg Institute. On 23rd June 2014, the second day of the conference included a homage to an exhibition at the Museo Reina Sof\u00eda dedicated to the Picasso painting Guernica<\/em>, the Spanish town bombed by the Condor Legion (a German force supporting General Franco\u2019s Nationalists) in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, which has attained mythic, iconic status for anti-fascists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A co-director of the Berg Institute gave a lecture to the conference titled \u2018Colonialism, World Wars and the Holocaust\u2019, then on 1st July (after the conference participants had visited the European Court of Human Rights), Armando organised a visit to the concentration camp at Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace. This was the only such camp established by the German authorities on French soil, and is often described as a \u2018death camp\u2019. Controversially, there is claimed to have been a homicidal gas chamber at the camp, but only a primitive one supposedly used for occasional experimental killings, not the mass killings alleged at Auschwitz and other camps in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez organised two visits to the Natzweiler – Struthof concentration camp for the Berg Institute’s international conferences<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The late revisionist scholar Prof. Robert Faurisson analysed this Natzweiler-Struthof \u2018gas chamber\u2019 story in detail<\/a>. Faurisson discovered that even the scientific expert sent by French prosecutors to examine Struthof (Prof. Ren\u00e9 Fabre, Dean of the Pharmacology Faculty in Paris) concluded in December 1945 that there was no trace of hydrocyanic acid<\/a> (i.e. the active ingredient in the alleged mass murder weapon \u2018Zyklon B\u2019, actually an insecticide) in Struthof\u2019s alleged \u2018gas chamber\u2019. Neither did the corpses of allegedly \u2018gassed\u2019 victims that Fabre inspected in a Strasbourg morgue show any trace of this poison. Natzweiler-Struthof is thus unique among the alleged \u2018death camps\u2019 in having been inspected \u2013 not by a \u2018revisionist\u2019 but by an expert witness working for the new French government \u2013 and found not to have been used in the manner now described by the \u2018Holocaust\u2019 industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But none of this is mentioned by the Berg Institute, for whom the visit organised by Armando was simply a genuflection at a \u2018Holocaust\u2019 site. As with the trip to the Guernica exhibition in Madrid, this was an act of quasi-religious homage to the \u2018victims of nazism\u2019. As we shall see, the entire outlook of the Berg Institute is based on Holocaustian foundations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The day after this act of homage at the \u2018death camp\u2019, the conference discussed the Nuremberg trials, which again are fundamental to the version of \u2018international human rights law\u2019 promoted by the Berg Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year later, in June-July 2015, Armando organised a second Berg Institute conference along very similar lines, again incorporating a visit to the Natzweiler-Struthof \u2018death camp\u2019. This time there was also a lecture by the academic lawyer Javier Chinch\u00f3n from Madrid\u2019s Complutense University, on the theme of historical memory and the state\u2019s responsibility to \u2018victims\u2019. Chinch\u00f3n argued that Spain had failed sufficiently to condemn the crimes of the Franco era: he has been one of the main academic lobbyists pushing for a strict \u2018democratic memory law\u2019 of the type recently adopted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armando\u2019s present client Isabel Peralta has campaigned on the other side of this argument \u2013 but at no point has Armando admitted to her that he had himself been the organiser of academic conferences that actively promoted such a law; conferences that were thoroughly imbued with an \u2018anti-fascist\u2019 ethos seeking to ground the entire approach to \u2018human rights\u2019 in a politically-slanted approach to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2013 an earlier Berg Institute conference \u2013 run along similar lines to the two organised by Armando himself during 2014-2015 \u2013 was organised by Armando\u2019s partner in the GABEIRO firm, Jos\u00e9 Feliciano Beceiro Armada. This included a reception hosted by the Colombian Ambassador. (Beceiro and Armando were both involved in the Berg Institute\u2019s training sessions for the Colombian Army and Security Forces.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet again, this conference concluded with a solemn pilgrimage to the \u2018death camp\u2019 at Natzweiler-Struthof.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez, young lawyer and Berg Institute conference organiser<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Armando\u2019s colleagues at the Berg Institute have continued to organise these conferences every year, when not disrupted by the pandemic. In 2019 the conference was held in Israel, in coordination with the Berg Institute\u2019s longstanding academic partner, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It included visits to the ancient historic icon of Masada, where, allegedly, Jewish soldiers killed themselves in 74 AD rather than surrender to Roman forces that had besieged the fortress; to Israel\u2019s parliament, the Knesset; and of course a pilgrimage to the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In January 2022 a similar international conference organised by the Berg Institute included a pilgrimage to Auschwitz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE BERG INSTITUTE \u2013 ROOTED IN ‘HOLOCAUST’ STUDIES AND ANTI-NAZISM<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Berg Institute \u2013 for which Armando Rodr\u00edguez P\u00e9rez has worked and which was the co-organiser of his academic training \u2013 specialises in publishing the work of leading Jews in relation to the ‘Holocaust’, war crimes trials, and anti-Nazi activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formally incorporated in 2009 as the Fundaci\u00f3n Berg Oceana Aufklarung, its founder and co-director is Joaqu\u00edn Gonz\u00e1les Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez, a professor of international law and international relations at both the long-established Complutense University, Madrid, and at the much newer private university Alfonso X.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewed in January 2019, Prof. Gonz\u00e1les explained that the Institute was partly inspired by his political hero Nelson Mandela, and stressed that its entire outlook on \u201chuman rights\u201d was rooted in anti-fascism and anti-nazism:
\u201cWe always refer to the historic perspective, that probably the three worst legacies in the last centuries, the darkest hours, the darkest chapters, the most infamous moments in the last two centuries in world history were precisely created by Europeans. What I mean are the legacy of colonialism and fascism, all of them are European creations. So, Franco, Mussolini and Hitler and other historical characters are as European as van Gogh, Goya or Picasso. And in this program, we start with Auschwitz and we go to the Modern Art Reina Sof\u00eda Museum to encounter the Guernica<\/em> from Picasso. And we have this tool, which is a legal approach, but also historical, political\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prof. Gonz\u00e1les went on to describe how his Berg Institute had created \u201cthe most important human rights library in the Spanish language.\u201d This began in 2010 with Primo Levi\u2019s Auschwitz Trilogy<\/em>, which was \u201cthe cradle of the project, the first book of the collection, number zero, we were lucky to have the best departure point. \u2026Going to Auschwitz hand in hand with Primo Levi, it shows you not just the past, but what are your main responsibilities towards planet earth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Berg Institute and the Centro Sefarad Israel jointly organised this event promoting the memoirs of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who was a senior adviser at the Nuremberg trial and coined the term ‘genocide’.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

At the time of this interview in 2019, the Institute had just published Totalmente Extraoficial<\/em>, the memoirs of Raphael Lemkin, first published in English in 2013 as Totally Unofficial<\/em>. Most famous as the man who coined the term \u2018genocide\u2019, Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer who moved to the USA and became a special adviser to the US War Department. His 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe<\/em> is regarded as a \u201cfoundational text in Holocaust studies\u201d, and Lemkin went on to be the senior adviser to Robert H. Jackson, chief counsel to the Nuremberg trials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Spanish edition had 70 extra pages drawn from Lemkin\u2019s archive and a prologue by the Spanish writer Antonio Mu\u00f1oz Molina, a winner of the Jerusalem Prize who now resides in New York. Mu\u00f1oz also wrote an introduction to the Berg Institute\u2019s 2019 Spanish edition of the memoirs of Europe\u2019s most famous militant \u201cnazi-hunters\u201d, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld (first published in French in 2015 and in English in 2018 as Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld<\/em>). The video below shows an event jointly organised by the Berg Institute and a Jewish cultural centre in Madrid \u2013 Centro Sefarad Israel \u2013 paying tribute to the Klarsfelds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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