On December 4th, 1983, a balding, middle-aged furniture salesman and amateur saxophonist was kidnapped from his home in the French Basque frontier town of Hendaye. Segundo Marey had no political affiliations, and no one could understand why he had been abducted.
Ten days later he was found by the French police, propped up against a tree in a border forest, emaciated and shivering, so terrified that he had not dared to take off his blindfold. He had been held prisoner by persons unknown in a shepherd's freezing hut in Spain. To this day he is severely marked, mentally and physically, by his ordeal.
In his pocket the police found a note which announced the formation of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion (GAL), dedicated to the "elimination" of the Basque terrorist organisation ETA.
Marey, who had been mistaken for an ETA member who lived in his street, had been relatively lucky. Over the next four years the GAL would kill 27 people and injure about 30 more. All but three of the killings took place in France. Many of the victims had no connection to ETA.
The GAL employed the full terrorist repertoire of the Latin American death squads. A bomb was left in a busy street in Biarritz. Two junior members of ETA were tortured for several weeks, allegedly under the direct supervision of a Socialist leader and a Guardia Civil colonel. They were then killed and buried in quicklime. Crowded bars in Bayonne were raked with sub-machinegun fire. The injured included two girls aged three and five. Next Monday in Madrid, a former Spanish interior minister, Jose Barrionuevo, and most of the senior figures in his anti-terrorist high command, will be tried by the Supreme Court for illegally detaining the hapless Marey. They are also accused of organising an armed gang, and financing it with public money. The prosecution demands 23-year jail sentences.
Most of the accused, though not the former minister, nor his deputy, Rafael Vera, have admitted their involvement. The distinguished former prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez, currently tipped as the next president of the European Commission, has been called as a witness. A controversial legal and journalistic investigation into state terrorism, which has uncovered a cancer of corruption, torture and murder at the heart of Spain's much-praised new democracy, may at last be approaching its long-obstructed climax. Why would members of Gonzalez's young and charismatic first Socialist administration have become entangled in such a grimly sinister affair? What on earth were they trying to achieve in kidnapping Marey? The answers, distinctly uncomfortable ones for democrats, lie in the Basque conflict, a piece of bloodily unfinished business from Franco's Spain.
The French Basque Country had been a safe haven for antiFrancoists under the dictatorship. Many of them returned to Spain after Franco's death in 1975. But ETA's hardline "military" faction argued that Spain's transition to democracy was a sham.
The group not only refused to participate in the new democratic institutions: it actually accelerated its campaign of terror in pursuit of an independent Basque Country, killing 110 people in Spain 1980, as against 16 in 1975.
Gonzalez swept to power in Madrid on a landslide of popular euphoria two years later. But ETA gave this new government, the first to have no links with the Francoist past, no respite whatsoever. Instead, they killed senior generals in an apparent attempt to provoke a military coup.
In this context, it was particularly frustrating for the Socialists that Francois Mitterrand's government appeared unwilling to take serious action against wellknown ETA figures living in France.
"There was a sort of non-aggression pact [between ETA and the French authorities] that was very difficult to break," Rafael Vera, one of the senior Socialists facing trial in Madrid, told me last year. The relationship with France was "not bad, or mediocre, but execrable," in the words of a sympathetic French diplomat. The Socialists' frustration with French policy, blended with their signal failure to purge either the police or the Guardia Civil of Francoist commanders, was the catalyst that created the GAL.
The GAL's dirty war had two aims. One was to "decapitate" ETA, by killing senior leaders. In this it demonstrably failed. New leaders quickly replaced the fallen, and sympathy for the victims among Basque nationalists gave ETA a crucial new lease of popularity. The death squads gave a dangerous gloss of credibility to the argument that the new democracy was a facade behind which the old fascism still operated.
The second aim was to "persuade" the French authorities, and the French public, to crack down on ETA. During the GAL's active period, Paris began to arrest and deport ETA suspects in large numbers, and the relationship with Madrid improved enormously. Apart from one apparently maverick killing in 1987, the GAL ceased operating in 1986.
A Socialist director of state security in this period, Julian Sancristobal , has admitted his involvement in the Marey kidnapping. He has explained why Marey was held for 10 days after they knew they had the wrong man.
He, Vera and Barrionuevo realised, he has alleged, that the kidnapping of an innocent French resident would probably put rather more pressure on the French authorities than the kidnapping of a suspected terrorist. The cynicism which was a hallmark of the GAL was there from the beginning. Rafael Vera, while denying involvement, says he believes that "objectively speaking, the dirty war was a help" in achieving the Spanish government's objectives with Paris.
Many people always suspected that the Spanish security forces were behind the GAL. Spanish police officers had participated in an earlier "dirty war" against ETA on French territory. When one of the mercenaries who kidnapped Marey was arrested by the French police, he had the phone number of the Bilbao police chief in his pocket.
The generic fingerprints of Spanish police involvement were clear enough at the scene of many of the subsequent GAL's crimes, but matching them to actual individuals proved very difficult. The normal difficulties were greatly exacerbated by the attitude of Gonzalez's government, which appeared to do everything possible to obstruct the journalists and judges who attempted to investigate the GAL.
Gonzalez, who has been accused by Spanish politicians of being "Senor X", the real boss of the GAL, made deeply ambiguous comments about the GAL at the time. "Democracy," he told reporters, "is not only defended in the salons and debating chambers, it is also defended in the sewers."
Eventually, in 1991, a middleranking police officer, Jose Amedo, was convicted of hiring the hostages who carried out two GAL bombings. He firmly denied all charges. Three years later he and his deputy, who had both clearly expected a pardon, called in the judge who had investigated them, and began to sing like canaries. Half a dozen GAL cases were reopened.
Their evidence, and its subsequent corroboration by their commanding officers and senior Socialists, has led directly to Monday's trial, and much more besides. The Spanish public, which showed a disturbing tendency to applaud state terrorism while the GAL was actually operating, was disgusted to find that public money had gone to illegally enrich the dirty warriors.
To further complicate a very complicated matter, financial, media, political and secret service figures have shamelessly manipulated the flood of GAL revelations in their own interests. The plethora of GAL trials was a factor in bringing down Felipe Gonzalez's long-ruling party in 1996.
The trial, which will probably not be fully concluded before September, is likely to be spectacular. The real focus will be on what happens if Barrionuevo, against whom there is substantial evidence, is found guilty. Will he, as his subordinates have done before him, then "spit upwards", and implicate Gonzalez, against whom the evidence to date has been purely hearsay? Will he implicate associates of the current conservative President, Jose Maria Aznar, in a previous dirty war?
This prospect opens up the "appalling vista" where the two main political groups in a democracy expose each other as practitioners of state terrorism. On the other hand, the whole case may collapse on technical grounds, leaving all the questions hanging in the air. Whatever happens, it will be a long, hot summer in Madrid.
AFP adds: Mr Gonzalez yesterday denounced the trial for being politically motivated and warned that it would only serve to "legitimise" ETA.
Paddy Woodworth is writing a book about the GAL