Jail Bait

Valentin Gonzalez is a legendary killer, bandit and patriot who, under the nickname ''El Campesino" (The Peasant), fought savagely in the Spanish Civil War as a Loyalist division commander. He fled to Russia when Franco won, but his outspoken bluntness was unwelcome in the Soviet Union. He was put to work digging the Moscow subway, was jailed twice and escaped to France in 1948, reporting bitterly that of 6,000 "Spanish comrades'' in Russia, nearly 5,000 had been killed. His disgust with Communism did not diminish his hatred of Franco.

El Campesino set up camp in the Pyrenees, styling himself "Chief of the General Staff for the Reconquest of Spain," and kept crossing the border into Spain on minor raids. Last week the small private war was halted owing to a larger war that El Campesino had nothing to do with--Algeria.

Last August a band of El Campesino's commandos slipped into Spain to blow up a power station. They failed but, getting back to France, killed a Spanish civil guard, wounded another. Franco sent a note of protest to Paris, France, however, pointed out that Spain was giving asylum to dozens of anti-Gaullist conspirators. Dashing Pierre Lagaillarde, 30, who led the 1960 Algiers "revolt of the barricades." was photographed lolling beside the pool at the exclusive Real Madrid Club. Ex-General Raoul Salan, head of the terrorist Secret Army Organization, used Spain as a safe retreat to receive visitors and plan rebellion.

Last week the French police suddenly tossed El Campesino into jail. Almost at once, Spanish security police returned the compliment by rounding up 17 anti-Gaullist Frenchmen. Among them: Pierre Lagaillarde and his crony, Cafe Owner Joseph Ortiz, who has been condemned to death in absentia for his part in the barricades revolt, as well as a handful of ex-colonels involved in the generals' Putsch.

As Charles de Gaulle was generally getting tougher on the S.A.O., neither Paris nor Madrid was saying how long the prisoners would be held in jail. Possibly there might be a swap--although many Frenchmen were arguing that this would be a betrayal of France's longstanding tradition of offering political asylum to all comers.

As for El Campesino, the man who survived everything from the battle of Madrid to the building of the Moscow subway, it did not seem likely that he had really reached the end of his career as a freelance warrior.

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