JACINTO GUERRERO LUCAS — The spy with three faces

Xavier Montanyà Jacinto Guerrero Lucas, the Spy with Three Faces Journalist Xavier Montanyá traces the career of a spy allegedly planted in anarchist and GRAPO (Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre) circles in France under the Franco dictatorship and allegedly a cohort of the GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación) under a democratic regime

Translated by Paul Sharkey

THE PUBLICATION TWO MONTHS AGO of papers from an alleged spy working for the Spanish Ministry of the Interior may open new leads on the lead-up to the dirty war against ETA during the 1980s. Investigations into and court proceedings relating to the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación/Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups (GAL) and the antiterrorist policies of Felipe González’s administrations, Interior ministers Corcuera and Barrionuevo and secretary of state for Security Rafael Vera have cast light on the culpability and responsibility both of politicians and of the police and para-police mercenaries making up the thugs of the GAL. Have the alleged papers of agent Jacinto Guerrero Lucas (known to anarchists as “El Peque” and to ETA leaders as the Spanish state’s “El Botijero”) opened up fresh leads in the investigation of the whole imbroglio or do they merely pursue some hidden purpose in the war between the Partido Popular (PP) and the PSOE? Time will tell, if the authenticity of the papers can be established or if more surface and, above all, if the will exists on the part of the Spanish and French states to get to the bottom of a matter that is profoundly embarrassing for them both.

In the meantime we can retrace the career of the supposed author of said documents, the spy Jacinto Guerrero Lucas, someone who has always operated in the shadows and through intrigue, shrouded in mystery and suspicion. His career may have had tragic consequences for anarchists and for supporters of Basque independence. If, some day, certainty can be achieved about

Jacinto Guerrero Lucas

the services that agents like him have always rendered to the state, we may well get an insight into the real mechanics of the “model transition“.

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1. Jacinto Guerrero Lucas, the diplomatic face of the GAL? On Sunday 3 April the front and inside pages of El Mundo carried a report entitled “Agent from Interior Ministry off to apply the brakes to the GAL trials in France”. According to this report, that agent was Jacinto Guerrero Lucas, alleged ex-anarchist, freemason, spy and consultant to Rafael Vera at the Spanish ministry of the Interior. On the basis of documents allegedly from the private archives of this agent, El Mundo reported that Guerrero fed lavish Uinancial aid to French police ofUicers and judges to stall the trials then being mounted in France against

GAL mercenaries and kept the minister and Felipe González himself briefed as to his activities. To support this, the paper published fragments of the alleged original correspondence.

The Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL) were set up to eliminate ETA activists living as refugees in Northern Euskadi and in the south of France and, between 1983 and 1987, the GAL murdered twenty seven people.

El Mundo does not disclose how it accessed Guerrero’s private archives, but it claims that Guerrero retains a copy of his personal and ofUicial correspondence from that time with the upper echelons of the government and Spanish Socialist Party, between 1989 and 2004. Quite apart from the question of authenticity or credibility of the said documents, their provenance and the timing of their release into the public forum, the information they contain places centre stage a minion of the BarrionuevoVera duo with a mysterious past, and a key Uigure in French-Spanish police cooperation, operating openly but more signiUicantly from the shadows.

So who is this Jacinto Guerrero Lucas aka Ángel Guerrero Lucas aka ‘El Peque’? It is hard to track the details of his career as a spy or whatever it is that he is today. But from time to time he has featured in media reports. It has been placed on record that Jacinto Guerrero Lucas was Rafael Vera’s most highly paid spy, because he was a

Charles Pasqua

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freemason and because of his excellent connections with French freemasons, especially French Interior minister (19861989) Charles Pasqua, a fellow freemason, as is Robert Pandraud the deputy minister in charge of the Sûreté.

Between 1980 and 1990, Guerrero Lucas’s name was mentioned in the role of mediator between the Spanish government and ETA. In 1988, the far right newspaper El Alcázar referred to his services as dating back to the days of the Francoist Interior ministry. His name has also been linked with the Renseignements Généraux (RG), the French secret service agency created by Marshal Pétain back in 1941 and directly tied to the Interior minister. A political police agency engaged in intelligence and disinformation, specialising in antiterrorism, drug smuggling, illegal gambling, prostitution, etc.

Be that as it may, Guerrero Lucas’s privileged position at the Spanish Interior ministry lasted over two decades. Verifying these claims is currently difUicult. According to El Mundo, Antoni Asunción tried to have him removed when he took over as Interior minister in 1994. Later, Margarita Robles, the secretary of state of the Interior in Belloch’s day, also tried to have him removed, but some sources insist that this proved impossible, following pressures brought to bear by French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. Whereas other sources argue that the failure followed payments made to ensure that the French authorities would endorse the extradition of ETA suspects. It is said, though this is hard to prove, that his fate might have been sealed when another French Interior minister (1995-1997), Jean-Louis Debré, insisted of Mayor Oreja that Guerrero be stood down and play no further part in the anti-terrorist struggle within France.

It was subsequently reported that Jacinto Guerrero had been recruited by CESID

Jose Barrionuevo, Eliseo Bayo (author and former ‘anarchist’ then working for the Lyndon Larouche organisation), Guerrero Lucas, Rafael Vera and José Luis Corcuera (at the launch of Bayo’s book — GAL: Punto Final)

EL MUNDO, 3 April 2011

precisely at a time when the CNT, the Libertarian Youth and the FAI had decided to set up a secret agency called Defensa Interior (DI) to mount operations against Franco. The council of the DI was headed by Cipriano Mera, Juan Garcia Oliver, Acracio Ruiz, Germinal Esgleas, Vicente Llansola, Juan Gimeno and Octavio Alberola*, who is now the sole surviving member of this lineup. In a phone conversation from the south of France about ‘El Peque’‘s trustworthiness at that time, Alberola stated: “I have no conclusive proof as to when he Uirst started working with the police. He was introduced to me in Toulouse in 1961, after the formation of the DI, as having just completed his military service.

(Centro Superior de Información de la Defensa — Superior Center of Defence Information, the Spanish intelligence agency before the current Centro Nacional de Inteligencia [CNI] took over as its successor in 2002). thanks to his close relationship with Civil Guard General Enrique González Galindo, former commander at the Intxaurrondo barracks.

But Jacinto Guerrero Lucas is his own chief publicist. Two photographs from that time immortalise the major players at the Interior ministry. Taken at the launch of two books endorsed by himself, defending his stance and that of his superiors. The Uirst dates from 1997 at the time of the launch of Eliseo Bayo’s book GAL: Punto +inal. The second, taken in 1999 during the investiture of Santiago Belloch as Interior minister, shows the Barrionuevo-Vera-Corcuera trio plus former Civil Guard Director, José Antonio Saez de Santamaria.

How did Javier Guerrero manage to become such a player? How had he climbed so far? How did he launch his career as a spy?

2. The 1960s. El Peque and the Spanish Libertarian Movement in France It was 1960 when Jacinto Guerrero Lucas, nicknamed ‘El Peque’ (Shorty), Uirst appeared in libertarian circles in Toulouse (France), during the Limoges congress,

(* Son of the rationalist schoolteacher José Alberola who served on the Council of Aragon during the 1936 revolution, Octavio Alberola reached France in 1960 from exile in Mexico, accompanied by Juan Garcia Oliver, the former minister of Justice of the Republic and onetime member of the Los Solidarios action group. The DI’s objective was to breathe new life into the armed struggle against the Franco regime. Alberola was to become the most active coordinator of all the actions mounted against the dictatorship by the DI in the 1960s and, later, by the First of May Group.)

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Octavio Alberola and Jacinto Guerrero Lucas (1961)

Jacinto Guerrero Lucas

Octavio Alberola Surinach (DI Co-ordinator)

When did you Jirst suspect him?

“In 1962 he was basically in charge of liaison with the Interior. Then, one day, a briefcase full of documents (including contact details of the organisation in Spain – SC), including, according to him, his I.D. papers, was stolen.

After that he was sidelined from all activity.

It was at that point that he got to know Commissaire Tatareau — and the briefcase turned up again, but I never did Uind out what it had contained and what had been taken from it.”

That may well have been when he was Uirst recruited by the Francoist services, and, on learning of the creation of the DI, they decided to send him in. That is a possibility, but there is no proof. What we do know is that in 1962 the leaders of the exiled CNT introduced him to the chief of the Renseignements Généraux in Toulouse, Commissaire Tatareau, in relation to his application for political refugee status.

Tatareau was the man in charge of monitoring the CNT for the French authorities. It’s possible that his [Guerrero Lucas’s] career started with that contact.”

What operations was he involved in?

“In July 1962 a bomb exploded on the balcony of Valencia City Hall, from where Franco had delivered a speech just days earlier. It was a warning. Only three people were in the know: El Peque, myself and an Italian comrade, Franco Leggio. No arrests were made, so, up until that point, I had no reason to suspect him.”

And did you keep in touch with him?

“I severed all connections with him. Later, on 19 August, there was to have been an attempt on Franco’s life at the Ayete Palace in San Sebastián (in the Basque Country, but the attempt failed due to Franco arriving late at his summer residence, although the detonators did explode. ‘El Peque’ had no knowledge of the plan and no arrests were made other than some ETA militants who had had nothing to do with the attack.”

Franco Leggio, 1972

Octavio Alberola heard nothing further about ‘El Peque’ until the latter succeeded in inserting himself into the mechanics of an attempt on Franco’s life in Madrid in the summer of 1963. Again, it did not succeed, but the plan had tragic consequences, in the shape of the affair involving Francisco Granado and Joaquin Delgado, the two young libertarians executed in Carabanchel

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Joaquin Delgado

Francisco Granado

Pueblo, 3 August 1963

prison on August 17 1963, charged with attacks in which they had had no involvement. His intervention here was crucial, as I shall explain anon.

In the aftermath of these events Guerrero distanced himself completely from anarchist activist operatives.

“When Granado and Delgado were arrested”, Octavio Alberola recalls, “we had no reason to suspect him. He then vanished.

Three of four weeks later there was a massive swoop on Spanish libertarian militants across France. Twenty one of whom were arrested for “criminal conspiracy”, including veterans Cipriano Mera and José Pascual. Sixty militants were questioned and their homes were searched.

Jacinto Guerrero Lucas’s name was on the list, but they did not arrest him. We saw no more of him until he popped up again in the anti-action faction led by Federica Montseny and Germinal Esgleas, a faction he had previously criticised harshly as ‘donothings’. As time passed he shifted ground.

Later, through Gordón Ordas, the president of the Republican government-in-exile, a

Cipriano Mera

José Pascual

freemason like himself, he made the acquaintance of Julio Alvarez Del Vayo, regarded as the inspiration behind the FRAP ... ‘El Peque’ shows up as connected to everything — but never gets arrested. “ 3. Granado and Delgado, a Lawful Crime Thirty years on, in 1996, in research linked to the documentary Granado y Delgado, un crimen legal, the production team managed to secure an interview meeting with Javier Guerrero Lucas regarding his part in those events. The meeting took place in a bar in Perpignan in the early hours. El Peque is a person of affected rather than natural mannerisms. He uses a peculiar rhetoric, gesticulates a lot, as it to underline the truth of his claims which are usually emphatic and

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‘El Peque’, Perpignan 1996

wreathed in Ulorid adjectives. We had a quick chat prior to the interview and he told me that, in his view, many reporters are “the absolute dregs” and that his political awakening had come very early on: “I remember watching from the window, as a boy, as herds of workers Uilled the streets at six o’clock in the morning, on their way to work. And do you know what the pavements were like after they had passed through?

Covered in sputum. Because TB was rampant in Spain.” I was taken aback by his vulgar (chulo) vocabulary, a style that I had never encountered among libertarians.

He stated that at that point he was working for the Interior ministry, describing himself as a “goodwill ambassador between France and Spain”. In the interview, El Peque roundly denied any involvement in the Granado-Delgado affair, his version being in stark contradiction with the stories from Octavio Alberola, Roberto Ariño, Luis Andrés Edo and Vicente Martí.

This is how things went. Under the supervision of Octavio Alberola, the DI had a plan in place to attempt Franco’s life on the day of his visit to the Oriente Palace for the formal presentation of diplomatic credentials by new ambassadors. It was subsequently discovered that this summer there would be no presentation of credentials, so the plan could not proceed.

Alberola passed the word to his comrades Cipriano Mera and José Pascual who told him that there was another team on standby which might be able to carry it out when Franco left for his holidays. The coordinator here was ‘El Peque’. They had to arrange contact between ‘El Peque’‘s man and Francisco Granado who held the actual explosives in Madrid. A rendezvous was arranged but El Peque was late sending in his man and the link-up failed. Franco then left for his holidays in San Sebastian. Alberola found himself obliged to send in Joaquin Delgado from France with instructions to

pull out and return to France, since there was no way for the assassination bid to proceed. ‘El Peque’‘s man pulled out in time, but Granado and Delgado were arrested, tried Roberto Ariño and executed by garrote vil, having been falsely accused of the planting of bombs two days earlier in the Security Directorate headquarters in Madrid’s Plaza del Sol and the HQ of the Falangist unions. In the documentary, thirty years after the event, Sergio Hernández and Antonio Martin publicly admitted that they were responsible for those bombings.

In the Uilm, Alberola stated that El Peque proposed an alternative plan to him, which he denies. Roberto Ariño identiUied himself as the man sent by El Peque — and again he denies that. Ever since, suspicions have grown that he may have been the person actually responsible for the capture of the two executed men, suspicions that gained even more substance following the publication of more detailed investigations such as that carried out by Carlos Fonseca

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Antonio Martín

‘El Peque’ (circled), Madrid October 2009

for his book Garrote vil para dos inocentes.

Years later, in October 2009, in a discussion of those events — held on CNT premises in Madrid — in which Guerrero Lucas agreed to participate on the condition that Octavio Alberola was not present, he acknowledged to a group of 1960s libertarian militants, his former ‘comrades’ (all of whom had been arrested and had spent years in jail) that he had lied in his TV interview. Alberola and Ariño had told the truth. It also became clear in the course of these exchanges that back in the day he had lied about or exaggerated the opportunities for action open to him, lying to Madrid libertarians on the one hand and to libertarians in France on the other. He has lied in triplicate about those events — in the past and in the present. He assured the people in Toulouse that he had a libertarian action group at his disposal in Madrid — there was nothing of the sort. What is more, their involvement with El Peque in 1962 led to the arrest and imprisonment of young people charged with planting explosives at the Valle de los Caidos — people who who had absolutely no involvement in the action.

SpeciUically, Francisco Sánchez Ruano, an acquaintance of El Peque, received a 28-year jail term of which he served 11 years in Burgos prison. Like Granado and Delgado, Ruano was innocent of the charges laid against him.

Today , in light of the later evolution of this individual and his public contradictions, Octavio Alberola muses: “Since he was in touch with the French police back in 1963,

‘El Peque’, Madrid October 2009

is it possible that they put a tail on Ariño and, through him, stumbled on Delgado, Granado and the explosives? The French and Spanish police were working very closely together back then. Swapping intelligence. France was watching us and the Spanish were watching the activists from the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrete/Secret Armed Organisation) harboured by Franco. It is possible. I have no way of knowing if he was actively working on behalf of the services back then, but I know that he had something to do with the whole imbroglio. The fact is that within a few years he was brazenly acting in concert with both police forces and admits to that, so it is for everyone to draw his own conclusions.”

4. Xavier Viñader and El Peque in 19701980 In 1989 reporters Xavier Viñader and Pere Costa Muste interviewed Jacinto Guerrero Lucas for the February issue of the magazine Interviu. The article, entitled: “The Mastermind of anarchist activism speaks out: When we tried to bump off Franco”,

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Xavier Viñader

General Eduardo Blanco, head of Franco’s security services

appeared in edition No 144. “He made himself known to the editors. Came down from France. A complete stranger. Seemed very eager to blow his own trumpet. An egocentric type. Simply refused to employ the Uirst person singular, a rather odd thing in an anarchist”, as Vinader remembers today.

An aside. It is odd to read that to Viñader he identiUied the birthdate of his political awakening as 1979, using terms pretty much identical to those he had uttered to me in Perpignan seventeen years later, with a remarkable Uixation with spitting and of post-war Madrid.

Was it commonplace back then for somebody just to walk up a media outlet and claim credit for sensational things like attempts to kill Franco? I asked Viñader.

No, but Eliseo Bayo’s book Los atentados contra Franco had come out and made no mention of him. There was something of the adventurer and opportunist about him. He was keen to blow his own trumpet.

What did he say?

He’s a great self publicist and at one point made it clear to us that he wanted to know who was up and coming, politically. Showed great interest in the PSOE. And it was a bit odd for an anarchist with his background to want to court the socialists. But I have mused

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upon that since, with hindsight.

In the interview he claimed actions in which he had had no hand, as later came to light, although it was not known at the time.

Precisely. Back then, in 1979, there were hardly any sources against which to check things out. I let him talk, And nobody piped up to contradict him.

Investigating police and far-right intrigues is a speciality of yours. For instance, in Interviu you exposed the forerunner of the GAL in Euskadi, something that led to your being put on trial, forced into exiled and tossed into prison. When did the Guerrero Lucas name next pop up again?

In Paris in the late 1980s I contacted a Renseignements Generaux inspector by the name of Jean-Marc Dufourg who was implicated in the kidnapping and murder of the Protestant pastor Douce. Dufourg was with the Manipulation branch at the RG, and it was he who mentioned Guerrero Lucas to me as implicated in the dirty war against ETA in the 1980s. I put that in a book later.

Were you able to check out that information?

Yes, I spoke to my contacts within the RG, among them Roger Duran who had headed up the RG Investigation branch in Toulouse, and he conUirmed that he [El Peque] was an informant.

Were you able to establish if he had been a Francoist police plant in the ranks of the anarchist exiles right from the start?

I had in mind the writing of a book called Toulouse, the red-and-black capital, which I was never able to complete. But I did keep tabs on him. It is complicated for he has thrown up many a smokescreen. He goes in for story-telling as a way of covering up the truth. You can never rely on a word he says.

You need to check it out, not in triplicate but against thirteen different sources. I got in touch with people who were with the Libertarian Youth in Madrid in the 1960s and

back then they had strong suspicions that he was working hand-in-glove with the Spanish police. His own father may well have been a policeman and Interior ministry ofUicial ...

Why did he show up in Toulouse in 1961?

That is not clear. Things are a bit nebulous there. He arrived in Toulouse with two other comrades, representing the National Committee of the CNT of the Interior. The other two slipped back across the Pyrenees using clandestine trails, but Guerrero — known back then as ‘Hidalgo’ — put off returning. A few days later the news broke that those who had attended the Toulouse meeting had been arrested in Madrid, and somebody put it about that, while questioning them, the police had been greatly concerned to learn about Guerrero’s whereabouts: he was to remain in Toulouse.

Years later an anarchist militant who witnessed the Madrid arrests at Uirst hand mentioned that the entire thing was highly suspicious. It was as if they were all expected. Given what we have learnt about the guy since, it seems all too clear that it was a police operation designed to bolster his foothold in exile circles.

And he was later recruited by the French police?

Yes, I know that for a fact. I had it from the French policeman sent to arrest and recruit him. A freemason, to boot. And he became an informer.

Was that in 1962, when he ‘lost’ that briefcase of documents?

More or less, I cannot exactly remember.

Commissaire Tatareau set up a meeting and returned the documents, claiming that a peasant had found them dumped in the Uields. But in actual fact it was a put-up job by the RG. From which one might conclude that he was a Francoist plant from the outset and that once in France he came into contact with the RG and started working for both agencies?

Rafael Vera, Secretary of State for Security in the government of Felipe González (24 octubre 1986 and 29 January 1994). Arrested and convicted in July 1998 on charges of kidnapping and malversion of public funds in relation to the GAL operation and the dirty war against ETA, his conviction was overturned by the European Tribunal of Human Rights on various technicalities.

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Exactly.

And where did the connection with Rafael Vera and the top echelons at the Interior ministry come in?

According to my notes, in 1984. On the strength of an introduction from Gabriel Urralburu, the president of the government of Navarra. Guerrero was representing a French building Uirm seeking a permit for a waste plant and drinking water works. He let it be known that he was on very good terms with the French Interior minister. Urralburu introduced him to Luis Roldán, the then government delegate in Navarra. Roldán was seeking a thaw in relations between the Civil Guard and the French PAF (Air and Border Police). This came hot on the heels of the incident in which four Spanish police ofUicers were arrested on French soil while attempting to abduct the ETA activist Larretxea. Roldán had a word with Vera, but the whole thing was a ruse by Julio Feo, Felipe González’s secretary, paving the way for Guerrero join the secret staff of the Interior ministry. The seal was set on the whole thing at a dinner in Irún, attended by

Inspector Jean-Marc Dufourg (RG)

Guerrero, Vera, the governor of Guipuzcoa Julen Elorriaga, Civil Guard Colonel Enrique Rodriguez Galindo and commissaire Joel Cathala from the PAF. What, assuming it can be pinned down, was Guerrero’s function?

He was in charge of cooperation with the French police, was involved in the dialogue with the ETA leaders in Santo Domingo, met with ETA lawyers in the south of France and gave all round support to the GAL’s parapolice operations. He ticked all the boxes. In their internal documents the etarras referred to him as the Spanish state’s ‘Botijero’.

And what is the most recent news you have of him?

During Montserrat Tura’s term in charge of the Interior department he was offered to the Mossos d’Esquadra to brief them but they rejected him.

5. French former Inspector Jean-Marc Dufourg, Guerrero and the GAL On the basis of El Mundo’s publication of those alleged documents from Jacinto Guerrero’s private archives, from which it appears — assuming they are correct — that a trawl was carried out among the French police and judges for Uigures favourably disposed to collaborating with the GAL, there is some interest in reviewing the charges levelled in this regard by one French police ofUicer at the start of the 1990s.

Inspector Jean-Marc Dufourg spent nine years in the 1980s working with

Renseignements Generaux’s ‘Manipulation’ branch. It was his job to investigate, recruit and handle informers in extremist and proindependent groups of every persuasion.

Dufourg was jailed over the murky abduction-murder of the gay pastor Douce. It was rumoured at the time that Dufourg was being used as a patsy.

In jail he wrote memoirs of his days in the force, Section Manipulation.

De l’antiterrorisme a l’affaire Douce (Michel Lafon, 1991). His lawyer — none other than Jacques Verges, states in a foreword: “For the very Uirst time a Renseignemnents Generaux inspector talks of what he has seen and shows how the ties of the political ‘establishment’ with the underworld are every bit as strong as those with business criminality.”

Of all the missions entrusted to him over this period, Dufourg reckons that the GAL episode was the most warped. One day he had a visitor to his ofUice who came with recommendations from his superiors. This was Jacinto Guerrero Lucas. The visitor made a bad impression on the inspector from the moment he walked in. “He introduced himself as being very close to the Spanish Interior minister. And spoke of the superintendents with whom he was closely in touch: Ballesteros and Fuce. He then went to have a word with Ferrand [his superior].

‘I’m the man in charge of the matter you know about.’“ One of Dufourg’s squad colleagues recognised Guerrero as one of the old informers he had planted in Spanish anarchist and GRAPO circles.

For about a year this strange character reported to Dufourg’s superior, in the company of a high-ranking Spanish ofUicial by the name of Pedro. ‘On every visit they brought Uiles containing snapshots, names and addresses of ETA militants. Guerrero Lucas was passing this intelligence on to the Spanish government, who forwarded it to the

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LE MONDE, 21 September 1997

killers of the GAL”, he concludes.

In a letter to the newspaper Deia (26 April 1991), Jacinto Guerrero Lucas denied the inspector’s claim declaring: “ETA, GRAPO and the GAL all come from the same stable and I hold each of them in equal contempt.”

And in that unmistakable style of his he announced that he would look to the courts.

I intend to make this corrupt, lying, pretentious, failed schemer of an inspector — this ‘war machine’ as he describes himself, although I reckon he is in need of psychiatric treatment rather than an mechanical overhaul — eat dust. “ The courts, as Octavio Alberola points out, will uphold his right publicly to rebut the facts set out in the book but cannot compel the author or the press to alter what they have already put into print.

The 9 July 1991 edition of Le Monde carried this small insertion: “Court notice: Under appropriate order of 24 May 1991, Angel Guerrero Lucas has been authorised to register with the public his objections to having been called into question and the intolerable trespasses inUlicted upon him by Jean-Marc Dufourg’s book entitled Section Manipulation.”

Even so, the information provided by Dufourg continued being reprinted. On 21 September 1997, in Le Monde, the reporter Roland-Pierre Paringaux published an extensive piece entitled “French Police Stand Accused of Having Collaborated with the GAL”. “Spanish revelations about the anti-ETA commandos shed light upon the role of several French police ofUicers suspected of corruption. Over and above any individual cases, questions are being asked about the entire anti-terrorist collaboration between France and Spain.”

“Several police ofUicers, including the former head of the Air and Border Police in the Pyrenees-Atlantiques department stand accused by their Spanish colleagues of having — since 1982 and in return for money — supplied GAL personnel with the photos and addresses of ETA militants. And likewise, of having helped recruit thugs. In addition to these personal stories, questions have been raised about the entire French-Spanish antiterrorist policy. Since 1983, cooperation between the two countries’ agencies os continually being reinforced”, wrote Paringaux.

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