Counter-terror by proxy: The Spanish State's illicit war with ETA

By Emmanuel Pierre Guittet

Between 1983 and 1987, mercenaries adopting the pseudonym GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, Antiterrorist Liberation Group) paid by the Spanish treasury and relying upon national intelligence support were at war with the Basque militant group ETA (Euskadi (e)Ta Askatasuna, Basque Country and Freedom). Over four years, their campaign of extrajudicial assassinations spanned the French-Spanish border. Nearly thirty people were killed in a campaign comprised of torture, kidnapping, bombing and the assassination of suspected ETA activists and Basque refugees.

This establishment of unofficial counterterrorist squads by a Spanish Government was a blatant detour from legality. It was also a rare case in Europe where no less than fourteen high-ranking Spanish police officers and senior government officials, including the Minister of Interior himself, were eventually arrested and condemned for counter-terrorism wrongdoings and illiberal practices. Thirty years later, this campaign of intimidation, coercion and targeted killings continues to grip Spain. The GAL affair was not only a serious example of a major departure from accepted liberal democratic constitutional principles of law and order, but also a brutal campaign that postponed by decades the possibility of a political solution for the Basque conflict.

Counter-terror by proxy uncovers why and how a democratic government in a liberal society turned to a ‘dirty war’ and went down the route of illegal and extrajudicial killing actions. It offers a fuller examination of the long-term implications of the use of unorthodox counter-terrorist strategies in a liberal democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526158819

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Preface and acknowledgements

One of the key foundations of the modern liberal democratic State is the requirement that government safeguards the security of its citizens by enacting and enforcing laws which are designed to protect their interests. In the name of security, however, and most notably in the context of the ‘War on Terror’, this political obligation has been largely undermined by a common yet ultimately dangerous set of claims: necessity knows no law and, hence, one must fight fire with fire. Operations beyond legal boundaries have been very often legitimised by sweeping claims about global dangers and the necessity to derogate from the rule of law and the liberal credo of governing contingency through freedom.

With Counter-terror by proxy, I have tried to delve into this pernicious and complex phenomenon of illiberal practices of liberal regimes currently besetting our world. I thought that the best approach to such a complex issue did not lie in canvassing all the international facts; eventually offering a general argument about why illiberal practices of liberal regimes have won wide currency. Rather, I deemed it fit to make a thorough analysis of one significant episode in one European country, the Spanish illicit war against Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), the armed Basque nationalist group long known to the world as ETA. Between 1983 and 1987, mercenaries adopting the pseudonym GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups) paid by the Spanish treasury and relying upon national intelligence support were at war with ETA. For four years, that particular campaign of extra-judicial assassinations spanned the French–Spanish border, although most of its activities occurred in the south-western part of the French territory. This establishment of unofficial counter-terrorist squads by a Spanish government is a blatant detour from legality. The GAL episode has been relatively neglected in literature concerning political violence, terrorism and counter-terrorism. Hopefully, this book will contribute to reducing the deficiency. Why and how that happened are the book's central themes.

The GAL episode, which predates the current global fight against terrorism by decades, strikes me as emblematic for several reasons. From the outset, one could think that what happened in the 1980s is long gone. The past belongs to the past, as the saying goes. Yet, with this book, I beg to differ. More than thirty years later, this campaign of covered-up assassinations, coercion, death squads and targeted killings in a liberal democracy continues to grip Spain. Almost all the actions perpetrated by the GAL have been prosecuted. However, some remain unresolved. The GAL campaign and the prosecutions following from it are a strong reminder of a simple yet powerful hint for our present time: unlawful and illiberal activities of the past do not remain in the past. It is only a question of time before they resurface and become present matters. Furthermore, the GAL episode is also one which leads us to question one particular feature of our tormented world at war against terrorism: the belief that a mightier violence can end violence. It seems to be an attractive belief for many, and one must admit that a coercive response may sometimes yield immediate short-term gains. And yet, these immediate benefits, if any, are really an illusion, for beyond them lies a scenario of retaliation, of spiralling and mimetic violence.

In many ways, the GAL postponed by decades the possibility of a political solution for the Basque conflict. Additionally, this particular use of unorthodox counter-terrorist strategies in a liberal democracy illustrates unmistakably that the borders between the licit and the illicit in the exercise of power and in the political regulation of societies are extremely permeable. Counter-terror by proxy does not aim to justify or to forget the use and the outcome of noxious forms of violence. Despite the obvious emotional dimension of any work on violent means, actions and actors, I have tried to keep a self-consciously impersonal and analytic tone. What the reader is entitled to expect is that the analysis of what has already happened should aim to be objective and this is what I have striven to achieve in this book.

It is customary to say that a book has taken much longer to complete than originally anticipated. This one is no exception. The road to publication has been long, frequently interrupted and certainly not always smooth. For many years, I contemplated the idea of translating into English my previous book published by Athena Editions in 2010 under the title Antiterrorisme clandestine, antiterrorisme officiel (Covert and official anti-terrorism). While lecturing at the University of Manchester, I found myself beleaguered by the difficult task of translating long French sentences into brief and, hopefully, graceful English ones. Learning the art of writing in English and to cope with its renowned law of stylistic economy pushed me to the considered view that writing a completely new book was the only bearable option. Counter-terror by proxy is the result. In writing this book, I am indebted to many people, who helped me to gain insight into Basque politics and identities on both sides of the border, ETA's convoluted history, Spanish contemporary history, security institutions and diplomacy. During my various trips to the Basque country – whether south or north or the Pyrenean mountains – and to Madrid, I benefited from the hospitality and kindness of many people who have opened their personal archives, and shared their personal thoughts with me. I would like to thank the members of the Guardia Civil and of the Spanish intelligence services. The sensitive subject matter required assurances of confidentiality that prevent identification in these pages. Yet they offered me some insights into their view of their fight against ETA but also, and very often against all odds, shared their profound reflections upon their own institutions’ controversial past. Equally, I would like to thank the members of the editorial teams of Enbata and Jakilea, and also the members of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in the Basque Country in Bayonne who have always welcomed me so warmly and allowed me to dig into their archives. Claire Frossard, who patiently sent me over the years press clippings about ETA and the GAL, deserves a special mention. I am grateful to Oroit eta Sala and Bake Bideak, who have invited me many times to present this book-in-progress. I am grateful to Emilien Guillon who managed to transform a flow of information into the production of elegant maps. When it comes to advice and encouragement, the list of benefactors is even longer. In the course of thinking about and writing what appears here, I have incurred more debts to friends and colleagues than I am now able to recall. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Didier Bigo, who pushed me, decades ago, to investigate the European anti-terrorism official storytelling in a PhD thesis. He spent countless hours tossing ideas back and forth, forcing me to clarify assumptions. His mentoring became a true friendship. I am equally grateful to Elspeth Guild for inviting me many times to contribute to the Queen Mary Reflection Group on Terrorism and Human Rights and for endorsing this volume. I am grateful to my former colleagues at the University of Manchester who read portions of the book in draft form and encouraged me to go further. Nick Turnbull and Peter Lawler deserve special mention. Conversations with Nick have always been inspiring and stimulating and Peter's patient editing work of my French habitus made my writing skills better. They both embraced this project from the beginning and offered very friendly and thoughtful feedback and encouragement throughout. Equally, I would like to thank all the students I encountered in my nearly twenty years of teaching. They challenged my ideas and, perhaps unwittingly, helped me sharpen the argument and directed me to areas that needed further attention. I have learned a tremendous amount from them. I have been also very fortunate to be able to draw on the talents of a succession of PhD researchers including James Alexander, Benjamin Tallis, Emmy Eklundh and Luke Bathia. They have all happily landed in settings where they can concentrate on their own intellectual agendas. They have enormously enhanced my own. I am also grateful to the team at Manchester University Press for their ongoing encouragement of this project. I am similarly appreciative to the anonymous reviewer at MUP for their constructive feedback and informed recommendations. Sincere thanks are also due to Gareth Couch-Diewitz for his diligent proofreading. Any mistakes will be fewer because of his help. My family was my anchor in this long and sometimes arduous endeavour. My wife Amandine and my daughters Louise and Margaux are my greatest blessing. They deserve the utmost thanks for showing great forbearance and love. To all of them, my deepest thanks. While I acknowledge the contributions of others to this book, the responsibility for any errors or omissions is, of course, solely my own.

Brussels, April 2020

Abbreviations

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Introduction

Terrorism has been naturalised into a constant risk that is omnipresent out there, a sort of chaotic principle always ready to strike and create havoc, and against which society must now marshal all its resources in an unending struggle.

Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 1996

Sometimes, we should try to keep the present at a distance, protecting ourselves from the incessant noise of the news surrounding us. In order to understand the present, we must learn to look at it obliquely.

Carlo Ginzburg, Fear Reverence Terror. Reading Hobbes Today, 2008

The perennial contending issues of how best to deal with a violent insurgency while attempting to maintain adherence to the law are nothing new.¹ Yet, they have gained a new direction since the inception of a global war against terrorism.² The post-9/11 terrorist threat has been viewed as an extreme situation that makes dirty hands unavoidable. In times of emergency, authorities shed any pretence of being constrained by law and instead very often deploy it against designated enemies.³ Necessity knows no law and, hence, one must fight fire with fire. The claim that any attack should be met with swift, effective and merciless military retribution is now more than ever deeply rooted in international politics.⁴ Within the realm of international law it is acknowledged that, according to the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law, ‘States have a duty to refrain from acts of reprisal involving the use of force’.⁵ But perceptibly since the late 1970s at a time when terrorism became a major hindrance in our world, this international norm has acquired a different meaning. Clearly, the normative dimension of the declaration has been shattered by the ‘war on terror’ and its various auxiliary forms of extra-judicial use of violence.⁶ It did not resist the pressure of actual practice by states who have resorted to self-help in the forms of military retaliatory strikes and infamous practices such as extra-judicial assassination, rendition and, more recently, the use of drones.⁷ The claim that responses to terrorism should go beyond passive defence and therefore should consider means of active prevention, pre-emption and retaliation is not controversial any more.

The US policy and posture after 9/11, the changing values regarding the use of lethal force, the blurred boundaries and flexible legal background and their outcomes have been widely discussed since then. One should stop equivocating and adopt a policy of using military force against terrorist groups as ‘we cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond’, once said Secretary of State Shultz in his 1984 address at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York city.⁸ In many ways, one could even say that his much-quoted address was a foundational document not only of current American foreign policy but of the war mentality in international politics more broadly.⁹ The use of military force not only against terrorists but also against States that support, train or harbour terrorists is now part of the ordinary set of measures States employ, for they have acquired the confidence that in the ‘fight against terror’ the use of punitive measures is now part of the standard procedure in counter-terrorist actions. The idea that military strikes can be counter-productive does not prevail any more when the discourse of the fight against terrorism is invoked and the absolute necessity to derogate from the rule of law is pleaded.¹⁰ However, why and how a democratic government in a liberal society can turn to a ‘dirty war’ and go down the route of clandestine extra-judicial killing remains a serious question. Spain at war against ETA offers a fascinating case study that sheds important light on this fundamental and topical issue.

Contemporary democratic Spain has been plagued with serious campaigns of political violence. From the end of the Francoist authoritarian regime in 1975 until the announcement of a ceasefire in 2011, the Basque separatist clandestine group ETA (Euskadi (e)Ta Askatasuna, Basque Country and Freedom) unquestionably played a central part in this deadly process.¹¹ In response to the increasingly violent actions of ETA during the political transition and onwards, Spain adopted a determined and strong counter-terrorist stance, establishing one of the most impressive anti-terrorist arsenals in Western democracies,¹² pushing the agenda of a European-wide reformulation of police and judicial assistance between Member States and sparing no effort to secure French co-operation against terrorism in general and against ETA in particular.¹³

Less known were the extra-judicial strategies Spain used to suppress Basque radical nationalism and eradicate ETA. In the 1980s, initiatives to reopen channels to ETA by the Spanish Socialist government of Felipe González (1982–96) were twinned with a confusing if astute strategy of official enhancement of police and judicial co-operation with France on the one hand and a covert campaign of assassination of members of ETA on the other. Between 1983 and 1987, mercenaries adopting the pseudonym GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups) paid by the Spanish treasury and relying upon national intelligence support were at war with ETA. The ambition of the GAL, expressed in a single and unique communiqué released in 1984, was twofold: avenging victims of ETA by killing members of the Basque organisation who fled into France to avoid prosecution; and pushing French authorities to reconsider their generous political asylum and extradition policy towards greater co-operation with Spain in its fight against ETA. GAL disbanded shortly after France changed its policies and began to collaborate officially with the Spanish government in the struggle against ETA. Until the public declarations in the late 1990s of two Spanish police officers involved in the recruitment of the mercenaries, the cloak of ‘plausible deniability’ protected these extra-judicial killings. Yet these revelations triggered one of the biggest political scandals of the post-Transition years and became a source of political and diplomatic embarrassment for Spain. In vigorously promoting pan-European co-operation against terrorism, at a time when Member States were eager to discuss these matters, Spain managed to hide the GAL behind the veil of democratic solidarity in the fight against terrorism.

The organisation, procedures, tactics and the identity of the GAL victims and perpetrators are now almost public knowledge.¹⁴ The creation of the GAL entailed Spanish police officers and members of the ‘sharp end’ of the state military and security infrastructures acting perfidiously, Special Forces acting with de facto legal impunity and, perhaps most controversially, the GAL involved third-party paramilitary pro-Francoist organisations, petty criminal, far-right Italians, Portuguese and French activists who were given money and information to plan and carry out political assassination. The GAL engaged in a campaign against ETA, unquestionably in a manifestly illegal fashion, but with all the legal structure and resources at their disposal. Nearly thirty people were killed in this campaign of torture, kidnapping, bombing and targeted and indiscriminate assassinations of suspected ETA activists, Basque refugees and sometimes ordinary citizens, mostly on French territory.

Quite clearly, the GAL punitive actions dramatically impacted ETA's strategy and course of action. At a time when the Basque separatist organisation was crippled by internal fights about the options of armed activity or political engagement, the GAL campaign empowered ETA's hardliners’ views. The GAL contributed to the creation of a whole new pantheon of martyrs to the cause, nourishing ETA's radical narrative of oppression and bolstering its recruitment among a new generation of faithful and enraged activists who had witnessed the paramilitary groups battling across the Basque country.¹⁵ The GAL fuelled a cycle of violence, and ETA, consumed by its self-depiction of grandiosity, as a champion of the Basque separatist cause, could not perceive how the former acquiescence of the Basque people of earlier times was steadily fading away.¹⁶ The GAL encouraged a marked increase in the violence of ETA, and the Basque separatist organisation gradually lost sight of its local supports.

The GAL episode is one the darkest pages of the history of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), alongside the 1993 scandal of corruption and embezzlement involving the chief of Spain's Civil Guard, Luis Roldán Ibáñez, who was the first civilian to be appointed to the head of the service in 1986. The GAL and Roldán affairs were major contributors to a series of political and financial scandals that brought down the thirteen-year government of Prime Minister Felipe González in 1996.¹⁷ The GAL scandal is a rare case in Europe where no fewer than fourteen high-ranking Spanish police officers and senior government officials, including the Minister of the Interior himself, were arrested and condemned for counter-terrorism wrongdoings and illiberal practices. It is also safe to say that, even a full thirty years after its last known action, the GAL remain very much alive within Spain and across the Basque country. One could even say that they went beyond enduring in collective memory, as their initiators had surely hoped it would.

The 1980s GAL episode periodically erupts ever anew in Spanish political debates. In 2004, while acknowledging his defeat in the Spanish general election, former Prime Minister Aznar declared that, at least, he and his political party ‘never used quicklime to cover up an assassination’.¹⁸ The allusion to the 1983 abduction and assassination of Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala with their bodies covered up with quicklime was crystal clear to every Spaniard. Cal viva, quicklime, is now one of the persuasive colloquial expressions used in Spanish politics when there is a political spat – sometimes short of an argument – with the PSOE or an attempt to ridicule its representatives. It is a powerful understatement that alludes graphically to an attempted cover-up and as a derogatory comment towards the PSOE's liability. In a carefully constructed world of political language,¹⁹ the expression works as a potent political euphemism that provides an area of immunity from concern by identifying who is virtuous and who is not. In 2013, Diego Vivas, the councilman of the Popular Party (PP) in the city of Toledo railed against the Socialists in a tweet:

The PSOE is a party that has stolen, kidnapped, killed and buried people in quicklime […] And yet it authorised itself to lecture others.²⁰

In 2016, Pablo Iglesias, the secretary-general of the left-wing Spanish political party Podemos declared that one should ‘disregard any advice from those who have their past stained with quicklime’.²¹ Equally, in December 2018, Pablo Casado, leader of the PP, said during a tense parliamentary debate with the PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez over national security issues that he refused to be lectured on terrorism by a ‘party stained with quicklime’.²² José Amedo Foucé, National Police Superintendent of Bilbao and one of the very first state actors to be prosecuted for his contribution to the GAL episode, unequivocally used the expression for the title of his latest book released in 2013: Quicklime. A Shocking Tale: The Ultimate Truth about the GAL's Innards,²³ a book in which he restates his argument about the ‘PSOE's cowardice’ in relation to the GAL.²⁴ Of all the actions perpetrated by the GAL, the 1983 abduction and assassination of Lasa and Zabala became in Spain the most potent and gruesome illustration of that illicit war against ETA. The macabre images of their mangled and twisted bones published on the front page of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo following their long-awaited identification in 1995,²⁵ certainly contributed to transform this explicit case of torture and enforced disappearance into an emblematic and yet troubling representation of the GAL campaign in Spanish collective memory.

The GAL campaign disappearance and the assassination of Lasa and Zabala in particular triggered an important collection of journalistic investigations over the years.²⁶ Equally, although more recently, it has been a daunting source of inspiration and interrogations for novelists,²⁷ documentary and fiction filmmakers,²⁸ and, to a certain extent, for graphic novel creators as well.²⁹ While the subject has been widely treated in Spain, it is still a very discreet theme among French publications.³⁰ While publications on ETA, the Basque country and Basque nationalism are legion, very few English-speaking scholars have actually delved into this fascinating and intriguing case of illiberal practices in a liberal regime where state agencies colluded with Spanish and foreign mercenaries in order to kill members of ETA and push the French government towards more co-operation in the fight against Basque terrorism.³¹

Unsurprisingly, the impacts of the GAL campaign are even more significant within the Basque country.³² Every year since the families of Lasa and Zabala buried the remains in the little cemetery of Tolosa in 1995, a tribute has been paid to them on the day they were abducted. A mural in Bayonne is dedicated to them, alongside Jean-Louis Larre ‘Popo’ – a militant of Iparretarak, literally ‘those of ETA from the North’, who disappeared in 1983.³³ This mural, and its messages ‘herriak ez du barkatuko’, people cannot forgive, and ‘ez dugu ahaztu’, we do not forget, have been carefully protected and maintained since their creation in 1997.³⁴ Every 20 November in Bilbao, there is a rally in memory of two members of the Herri Batassuna coalition, Santi Brouard and Josu Muguruza.³⁵ Brouard was killed by the GAL in 1984 and Muguruza by the Spanish Neo-Nazi group Bases Autónomas in 1989, although during these years, Muguruza's assassination was perceived as yet another operation from the GAL. The 1980s extra-judicial campaign is a haunting memory in the Basque country. When the ETA militant Jon Anza disappeared in France in 2009 between Bayonne and Toulouse, the fear of a return of the GAL was largely shared across the political spectrum and ETA, at the time, was keen on exploiting this story.³⁶ But perhaps and even more crucially against the current backdrop of the peace process, the GAL operations remain a vivid issue and a source of considerable ongoing trauma in the Basque country on both sides of the border.³⁷

North of the Pyrénées and through the tumultuous years of criminal activities of the GAL in the 1980s, the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in the Basque Country continuously campaigned against unfair arrest, detention without trial, enforced expulsion and any other form of intrusion or repression, and it still does.³⁸ Enbata, the weekly bilingual French-Basque newspaper, eagerly covered every single aspect of the GAL campaign and its judicial whereabouts from day one, and still patiently reminds its readers about the knowns and unknowns. The collective Oroit eta Sala (To remember and to denounce) never failed to demand clarification about the French police involvement into the GAL campaign, and still does.³⁹

In Euskadi, the Basque country, the sordid memory of the GAL period is equally rife. When María Pilar Zabala Artano was a Podemos candidate for the 2016 Basque Parliament elections, she was known to everyone as ‘Pili’, the grieving sister of Joxi Zabala who lost her brother when she was fifteen. Perhaps most crucially, GAL victims and their relatives still have the greatest difficulties in being recognised as victims under the Spanish compensation scheme.⁴⁰ Nor are they recognised by the largest Spanish victims’ associations that were initially created in the 1980s and 1990s in order to defend the rights of victims of ETA.⁴¹ In this Spanish political landscape where victims of ETA's violence receive the highest standard of protection, any attempt to recognise the victims of the GAL is still largely interpreted as an effort to justify ETA's crimes.⁴²

The existence of GAL was only part of a broader set of contentious politics. Political violence is, in essence, rarely a simple toe-to-toe confrontation. By nature, political violence is not a smooth and regular world but a churned up and uneven one. Any (tactical) choice is thus deployed in a pre-established order, within a universe bearing all the scars of its history of conflict, where social reality often triumphs over strategic will.⁴³ Isolating violence from its historical, social and political background or overlooking personal and/or institutional motives tend to reduce drastically our ability to understand it.⁴⁴ The overriding theme of the book is to focus on the socio-political sequences of action and contexts in which violence is embedded and to reintroduce perspective about the all-pervading unpredictability which one encounters the moment one approaches the realm of violence.⁴⁵ By stressing a relational, conjunctural and contingent reading of violence, I aim to avoid the over-deterministic explanations of violence and state terrorism characterising much of the literature. In eschewing such a pure understanding of violence as instrumental – where violence is intentional and therefore the product of decision-making with a view to maximising expected political return while minimising the costs – I intend to stress the mix of strategy, structure and conjuncture at play. The emergence of violence is not only about some quality intrinsic to particular actors and/or groups (whether we speak of a clandestine organisation such as ETA, GAL or of some influential security forces among the Spanish State) but the result of a complex web of relational patterns and practices that shape and are shaped by the interactions among a variety of actors and parties involved in contention, as well as by surrounding, at times contingent, events and circumstances.⁴⁶

The idea that the violence and terror unleashed by the Spanish State was equivalent to ETA's violence, in the sense that the former would not have happened without the latter, is not entirely wrong but misses a crucial point. Key to the theoretical underpinning of this book is to underline that conflict is both imagined and performed, and this duality is crucial when examining the nature of violence but also when analysing the logics of escalation that eventually led to a campaign of assassination.⁴⁷ From the outset and all the way through, this book is thus inspired by the notion of ‘mimetic theory’ and its idea that we imitate the desire of others and that the contagious negative reciprocity of desire very often leads to rivalry and cycles of vengeance.⁴⁸ Every opponent swears by their radical difference, pushing the other into the realm of inhumanity through the language of complete eradication.⁴⁹ The escalation of violence is perpetuated by, and contingent upon, the effacement of differences between antagonists. Violence engenders counter-violence; counter-violence heightens the violence on the other side.⁵⁰

The main sources used in this book are