I. THE DEATH SQUADS IN SPAIN

(Updated December 3, 2011; new items are designated with asterisk)

* LaRouche's 1983 plan for winning the "dirty war"--bring back Franco's torturers. Journalist Darrin Wood, who spent years in Spain reporting on human rights violations against the Basques, finds--buried in a 1983 EIR article by Herbert Quinde (a LaRouche aide who'd been involved in discussions with Spanish security officials in the months leading up to the formation of the GAL)--a statement praising the decision by Spain's Socialist government to invite back former top cop Manuel Ballesteros as an adviser. Wood examines Ballesteros' horrifically sadistic deeds both under Franco and during the years after Franco's death. Also recounts the crimes of the BVE and GAL death squads, Ballesteros' role as a protector of the BVE, and the LaRouche organization's murky involvement in the launching of the GAL.

A sidebar analyzes the strange interview conducted by "correspondents" for LaRouche's EIR with José Barrionuevo, Spain's Interior Minister, in April 1983, and suggests that LaRouchian operatives who were trying to encourage a death-squad approach to the Basque insurgency were operating under the protection of Federal Republic of Germany security officials. (The head of LaRouche's intelligence operations in Europe was the brother of the chief of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, which had removed the LaRouche organization from its watch list of extremist organizations, thus stimulating the LaRouchians to churn out reports and dossiers on German environmental and peace activists--as well as terrorists--for government spooks in Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere.)

* LaRouche's EIR praises Opus Dei and the fascist Carrero Blanco. This 1979 article fits right in with Darrin Wood's description of how the LaRouchians wanted the new Spain to continue behaving as if it were still a fascist state, with business as usual in the prisoner interrogation rooms.

LaRouche and Herb Quinde in Spain. Article from leading Madrid daily El Mundo (1995) by Darrin Wood and two co-authors describes LaRouche and Quinde's role in encouraging the Spanish government to set up mercenary death squads that kidnapped, tortured and/or killed many Basques--some of whom were insurgent ETA members but others of whom were completely innocent--between 1983 and 1987. This was the first article to identify the true identity of the shadowy LaRouche operative known as "Kinde." The article quotes from a CIA memo and also from a book by two investigative journalists whose uncovering of details about the death squads helped to fuel the scandal that eventually brought down Spain's Socialist government.

More on LaRouche, Quinde and the Spanish death squads. Authors Ricardo Arques and Melchor Miralles--in Amedo: El Estado Contra ETA (Amedo: The State Against ETA), Barcelona: Plaza y Janes/Cambio 16, 1989--claim that Quinde, during one of his meetings with Spanish officials, offered to put them in contact with "professional killers." The relevant passage is presented in translation, as is a passage from Los GAL al Descubierto (The GAL Revealed) by Javier Garcia, Madrid: El Pais-Aguilar, 1988, which says that Quinde requested, in return for providing information on Basque refugees in France, a dossier from the Spanish police on the finances of former Waffen SS officer Otto Skorzeny's family--i.e., the SS's "ODESSA" money. Apparently Quinde's boss LaRouche felt himself to be the proper heir to this rumored Nazi nest egg.

* LaRouche visits Spain, December 1982. This news brief from EIR helps to establish the timeline of LaRouche's, and his organization's, dealings with Spain's "old crowd" leading up to the organizing of the GAL death squads over the course of 1983. The article says that LaRouche addressed a "select gathering of economists, politicians and diplomats" on Dec. 17, 1982, and that it was the "first time" he'd made a "public presentation" in Spain. The wording leaves open for speculation if he'd previously visited Spain for private meetings. Note also the reference to a scheduled meeting of the Club of Life (a LaRouche front group established to appeal to right-wing Catholics) that was to be held in Madrid in February 2003.

* Club of Life branch formed in Madrid. EIR news brief reports on Jan. 22, 1983 meeting. Speakers included Alberto Piñero of the Spanish Right to Life movement; Nariano Oyarzabal, president of Westinghouse Nuclear in Spain (the ETA and other Basque nationalists were strongly opposed to nuclear power plants in the Basque Country); EIR Paris "bureau chief" Katherine Kanter; and EIR's Elisabeth Hellenbroich, daughter-in-law of German internal security (BfV) chief Heribert Hellenbroich. (Kanter, E. Hellenbroich and the latter's husband, Anno Hellenbroich, the head of LaRouche's private intelligence operations in Europe, would interview Spanish Interior Minister José Barrionuevo--a top figure in the GAL conspiracy--in April.) This news brief is useful in establishing the timeline for the period of the GAL's formation, and lists a number of individuals, groups and organizations in Spain with whom the LaRouchians were in contact.

* Franco good, Basques evil: LaRouche's sly, indirect reply to El Mundo's 1995 exposé of his organization's death-squad intrigues. This unsigned Nov. 17, 1995 EIR article/dossier lambasts the conservative Spanish daily for "systematically watergating the key policemen, Civil Guardsmen, and Interior Ministry officials involved in the anti-terror struggle." Curiously, the article makes no mention of El Mundo's accusations about the LaRouchians that had appeared three months earlier, and neglects to tell us what the "key policemen," etc. were alleged to have done to warrant being watergated. (In fact, they were prosecuted in court for their role in kidnappings, torture and murder, and a number of them were convicted.) EIR is totally silent on all this, as if a huge chunk of the "dirty war" had disappeared into a memory hole, like in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four.

EIR's editors must have recognized that the cowardly role of LaRouche and his aides in encouraging the formation of the GAL and in providing intel about individuals who may have been tortured and killed as a result would not be easy to defend in the world of normal people. And they responded in what was probably the best way available to them--by ignoring their own role and the deeds of the Spanish authorities while one-sidedly demonizing ETA and Basque nationalism in general.

Note the following as you read the EIR dossier:

1. The heavy dose of admiration for the Franco regime albeit mixed with criticism of some of the brutality of Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish civil war (which EIR blames chiefly on pro-Franco Basque Carlists).

2. The affirming of the legitimacy of the Franco regime's repression against the Basques from the 1950s on.

3. The affirming of the legitimacy of Admiral Carrero Blanco--the unelected prime minister of fascist Spain during Franco's last years. Says that Carrero Blanco understood the "British" were the enemy. To buttress this, EIR blames the "group around Henry Kissinger" (LaRouche's Symbolic Evil Jew, who is often portrayed as a "British" agent) for instigating the ETA assassination of Carrero.

4. The depicting of the Basque nationalist movement in general as having been part of an evil "British" plot to overthrow Franco and destroy the "nation-state of Spain."

5. The demeaning of the Basques as an artificial nationality invented by occultists, racialists and phrenologists in the 19th century. (This would have been a surprise to the ancient Roman emperors and to Charlemagne, who tried, but failed, to conquer the Basque people.)

6. The demeaning of the Basque tongue--one of the oldest languages in Europe--as nothing but a "historical curiosity."

7. The demeaning of the Basque intellectual class as being unusually susceptible to the occult and to witchcraft; EIR sarcastically refers to these alleged proclivities as "a sign of Basque originality." (An earlier EIR article had discussed the alleged historic propensity of the Basque peasantry to engage in witchcraft under the influence of the Jesuits.) EIR also claims that the Basques have one of the world's highest rates of drug addiction.

8. The unsubstantiated claim that the ETA is a major drug trafficking enterprise (the LaRouche magazine based this on a single source--an unnamed doctor at a public health clinic, not a law enforcement expert). Commenting on ETA's attempts to crack down on drug pushers, EIR said this was just a reprisal against people who "were freelancing onto ETA's patch of the dope racket."

9. The complaint that the Basques promote the "Black Legend," i.e., the view that "Catholic Spain and Spaniards [were] uniquely cruel and destructive in their colonization efforts." This is significant because (a) the EIR article is itself full of a blatant Spanish supremacism; and (b) in Latin America, EIR has promoted what one might call Conquistador supremacism: read this preface by a well-known Argentine ultranationalist, Col. Mohamed Alí Seineldín, to a book published in 1993 by the LaRouchians that depicts indigenous people in Latin America in roughly the same way the 1995 EIR article depicts the Basques. The book calls for harsh treatment of indigenes--especially in Central America--lest they succeed in "annihilating" the nations in which they live.

10. The demeaning of the human rights movement in the Basque Country during the late Franco years by referring to human rights only in quotation marks, and by claiming that the lawyers who defended human rights at great personal risk were "Anglo-Saxon" agents whose assigned task was to "focus" the opposition to Franco, using instances of police brutality as a "springboard."

11. A strong indirect suggestion (springing from suggestions the LaRouchians made directly and bluntly in the early 1980s) that the Basque electoral party Herri Batasuna--which had for many years enjoyed widespread (although never majority) support in the Basque Country--should be banned along with its "youth and labor fronts" as terrorist support organizations. (This policy--which had been discussed by Spanish authorities among themselves before the LaRouche organization ever wrote about it--was eventually adopted by the conservative government that came to power in Spain in 1996.)

12. The listing of numerous acts of violence by ETA, but not a single instance of the violence perpetrated by police death squads. To EIR, the record of human rights abuses by the BVE and the GAL--and by notorious torturers such as Manuel Ballesteros--simply doesn't exist. And the word "torture" is not mentioned at all in the EIR report even though large numbers of Basques (and not just those involved with ETA) were tortured under Franco and under successive governments after his death, with some arrestees still being subjected to torture today. Of course, my evidence for this comes from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, which the LaRouchians believe are part of international terrorist support networks and should be treated like terrorist combatants.

* Darrin Wood on Spain's dirty war. This excellent report, published in Covert Action Quarterly (Winter 1995-96), provides the background for understanding the death-squad scandal in Spain that brought down the government of Felipe González. Includes a footnote on how "the LaRouchites came to Spain in 1983 [when the GAL death squads were first being planned] to join the fray against the ETA."

* Head of LaRouche's European intelligence office obtained 1983 interview with Interior Minister José Barrionuevo on the ETA problem shortly after Spain's top cops made their provisional decision to launch the GAL. Barrionuevo would become the central figure in the GAL scandal that played out in the Spanish media during the following decade, and would be convicted and sentenced to prison. Anno Hellenbroich, the LaRouche intelligence aide, and two other EIR "correspondents" conducted the interview with Barrionuevo (which begins on the second page of this file). They elicited an interesting comment from the Interior Minister about how the French were helping Spain against ETA. However, when they asked him about ETA's alleged involvement in the drug traffic, he flatly stated he had no evidence of such involvement.

This file also includes the text of an EIR interview with Spain's Minister of Justice conducted by the same "correspondents" on the same day.

* Sliming the Basques and making excuses for Franco. This two-part series from EIR, published in January 1982, depicts the Basques as having an evil and inferior culture manipulated by the Jesuits and rooted in witchcraft. Claims the Jesuits are promoters of Satanism and that a Jesuit-Basque cabal is plotting to dominate Spain on behalf of the usual suspects (the British, the Venetians, etc.). Praises Franco's righthand man, Admiral Carrero Blanco, who'd been assassinated by ETA in 1973, as someone who'd understood about the "British." Says that Franco's rule was "infinitely preferable to a Jesuit-ETA-dominated Spain" and complains about "Basque priests' destructive meddling in 'theology of liberation.'"

Quinde complained, in the Dec. 13, 1983 EIR, that his friends in the Spanish security forces weren't taking a hard enough line. The GAL killings and tortures had already begun--but how many killings would it have taken to satisfy Quinde and his master LaRouche? Hundreds? Thousands? And how much evidence of the LaRouche organization's secret past will it take to persuade certain ex-LaRouchians in Europe and the United States to finally come forward and tell what they know about the org's role in human rights violations (including the events that resulted in the death of Jeremiah Duggan)?

If any ex-members read the Quinde article they will get a sense of deja vu from his call for laws in Spain outlawing "apologies" for ETA. This is a classic LaRouchian view: treating thoughts and speech as criminal acts that should be punished on grounds that the person who does the thinking or speaking has a "criminal mind" and thus is every bit as guilty as the person committing the criminal act. The concept of the criminal mind is central to LaRouche's neo-fascist philosophy of politics and government.

Herbert Quinde circa 2010. He now claims he stayed in the LaRouche organization to gather information for the U.S. intelligence community (see below). But doesn't providing Spanish death squad organizers with the addresses of their targets classify as something a bit more than intelligence gathering? And wasn't the official policy of the United States government one of encouraging the democratization of Spain and opposing any return to Franco era methods?

* Quinde's patron today: Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence from February 12, 1981 to June 10, 1982). In 2010, Quinde obtained a high level job at the Illinois Department of Corrections. When The State Journal-Register inquired about Quinde's LaRouchian past, Quinde and state officials went into political spin mode:

"Quinde, 58, of Chicago, admits he worked for [LaRouche's] EIR for nine or 10 years, ending in 1989, several years of which he spent in Europe. But he also said he is not an advocate of LaRouche's ideas...

"Sharyn Elman, spokeswoman for Corrections, said Quinde stayed with the LaRouche publication because he could covertly collect information that was shared with the U.S intelligence community.

"Quinde started with the state's Department of Central Management Services in September and moved to Corrections seven months later.

"Elman said the state knew of his LaRouche-related background, but given his decades of work with computers, 'I don’t think we expected that it would be that big of a deal.'....

"Christine Cegelis, the assistant director of CMS, said she recruited Quinde because she knew his background in data integration with a private company called Evolutionary Technologies International.

"She said Quinde was brought to the company by retired Navy Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, a former director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the CIA, who chaired ETI.

"'He (Quinde) was responsible for growing our business in the federal contracts area, particularly in the defense and intelligence community,' Cegelis said.

"Inman in March wrote a letter of recommendation for Quinde to Jerry Stermer, Gov. Pat Quinn's chief of staff.

"Herb is a person of high integrity, responsibility, energy and creativity," Inman wrote. "He shines in situations that demand quick turnarounds and continuous improvement....Herb's interests extend beyond IT to international affairs and social policy. He also has a deep interest in social justice."

Somehow the Journal-Register failed to mention the El Mundo article and other evidence of Quinde's involvement in one of the biggest scandals in the history of post-Franco Spain. Guess the editors didn't want to embarrass Illinois' Democratic Governor Quinn.

* The Strange and Sometimes Sinister Past of LaRouche Aide Herbert Quinde. This a point by point refutation of Quinde's ludicrously sanitized version of his years with LaRouche--the version he provided to The State Journal-Register in 2010 (see above). Includes copies of Quinde's homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Jesuit, and anti-"witch" articles and documentation of how he drastically contracted the time-span of his LaRouchian sojourn. Also includes a summary of what journalists and authors in Spain have discovered about Quinde's role in facilitating the GAL campaign.

A whiff of Nazism. BBC News reports (1998): "Correspondents say the Spanish people would have overlooked the government's involvement--had it not been that more than a third of the people killed by the GAL death squads had no connection to ETA." Also summarizes a report from El Mundo that "agents from the Spanish military intelligence organization CESID were involved in GAL" and that "CESID agents kidnapped a beggar and two drug addicts as medical guinea-pigs in preparation for the kidnapping of a leading Basque terrorist, and dubbed their kidnap plan Operation Mengele--after the Nazi doctor who carried out medical experiments on Jews, vagrants and other victims of the Holocaust."

Fascist-style rant by Herbe Quinde (1985). Excerpt from Quinde's speech "The Cancer of Pluralism" that trashes democracy (along with the Gnostics, Aristotle, the Beatles, Henry Kissinger, the Eastern Orthodox Church etc. etc.) and ends with the memorable statement: "[I]t may be time to start burning witches again." Apparently Quinde would have fit right in ideologically with the neo-Nazi "professional killers" hired by GAL.

LaRouche's game plan (fall 1982) for escalating the struggle against ETA. Article in EIR urges Spain to choose strong leaders in upcoming elections who will stand up to the "vicious financial oligarchy." Analyzes three possible groups on the right that could rouse Spanish "patriots." Two of these groups are dismissed as hopeless, but EIR singles out as the good guys "those individuals associated with the internal security and anti-terrorism forces around Interior Minister Roson." Describes this faction, supposedly called the Azules, as being "derived from the Francoist [Falangist] student movement." Says they are "committed to the fight against terrorism and deeply patriotic, but crippled by extremely poor intelligence about the 'outside world.'" (The LaRouchians apparently aspired to bring them up to speed.)

The article then goes into the subject of the "enemies of Spain," chiefly the Basque ETA, and claims the Azules are waging a "desperate, rear-guard battle" against the ETA, which is supposedly backed by the so-calledBritish oligarchy and the Black Guelphs (basically, the Jews) and the Jesuits. Suggests that the Azules get tough with France, which functions "as a rest and resort center for ETA killers on leave, as well as the main entry point for the drug traffic which sustains ETA, and the place where over $20 million a year in protection money is paid by Basque industrialists to ETA, under the blind eye of the French police." The plan for setting up GAL that emerged after the LaRouche-Quinde meetings with Spanish police officials fits rather well with the suggestions contained in this article, co-written by Elisabeth Hellenbroich, sister-in-law of Heribert Hellenbroich, a high official of West Germany's Federal Office of Constitutional Protection (BfV) and its director from 1983-1985 (he kindly removed the LaRouchians and their European intelligence operation, headed by his younger brother Anno, from the BfV watch list on the ludicrous grounds that they did not manifest "excessive nationalism").

First official communique of the Spanish death squads (Dec. 14, 1983). Proclaims a strategy quite similar to what the LaRouchians were promoting in Executive Intelligence Review, i.e., do something about ETA's alleged "rest and resort center" in France.

EIR correspondents obtain interviews (1982) with Spanish Defense Minister Alberto Oliart and Interior Minister Juan Jose Roson. This suggests EIR was being taken seriously by the center-right government that preceded the Socialists. (The headlines of both interviews are coded allusions to the Basque problem.) Unfortunately, the Socialists who came to power later that year would also begin to listen to the seductive LaRouche line.

EIR proclaims (March 1983) that "the survival of the Spanish nation hangs on defeating the Basque operation." Alleges that U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz met with the Socialist Interior Minister, Jose Barrionuevo, and urged against rekindling a crackdown on the Basques. I am skeptical that Shultz ever gave such advice, but if he did, Barrionuevo should have listened. As it was, Barrionuevo ended up with a ten-year prison sentence for his role in setting up the death squads.

EIR (October 1984) panders to the ultranationalism of some elements in the Spanish security forces, while also demeaning the Basque culture and language. This article, appearing while the GAL mercenaries were on their rampage, could only have served to encourage and intensify the kidnappings and murders. And, hey, if the Basques are an inferior culture whose only goal is to destroy the Spanish nation on behalf of dope pushers, London bankers, and the KGB, well, why not torture a few more of them before delivering the final bullet to the brain?

LaRouche's EIR (1995) suggests ETA terrorists are active with the insurgency in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Since the LaRouchians could no longer induce the Spanish government to operate death squads against what they regarded as the Black Guelph-controlled, British-loving, Jesuit-brainwashed ETA, they decided to try to persuade the Mexican government to take up the task. The reader will note that this unsigned article focusses on accusing Basque emigres in Latin America of doing pretty much what the GAL did: kidnap and murder people on foreign soil. The propaganda tactic here is not dissimilar from when LaRouche in the mid-1980s accused his opponents of being drug traffickers while himself working for Manuel Noriega and the Panamanian Defense Forces' G-2 unit.

High Spanish officials are jailed for backing death squads (BBC News, 1998). Former Spanish Interior Minister Jose Barrionuevo, his security chief Rafael Vera, and former Civil Governor Julian Sancristobal were each sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Spanish Supreme Court for their role in the "dirty war." Supreme Court Justice Joaquin Delgado said there were "no mitigating circumstances." Article says that the death squads murdered 28 people they suspected of being ETA members. "It was later discovered that at least a third of them had no connection to the armed group [ETA]."

Herb Quinde a/k/a Herb Kinney, Herb Strong, Herb Goomi, Herb Kurtz, and David Feingold. He tried to fool NBC Nightly News by pretending to be a researcher for the Newark Star Ledger, but it didn't work.

Dennis King letter to Our Town (1982) on Quinde's tricks. "He bought a shuttle ticket and took a seat across the aisle from me. He introduced himself as an AFL-CIO official, gave a Jewish name, and pretended to be concerned about the 'LaRouche menace.'"

* The murders of Lasa and Zabala. Although Quinde complained in Dec. 2003 (see above) that the Spanish authorities weren't moving fast enough to crack down on terrorism (in part, he said, because of a leftist "fifth column" in Spain), the GAL death squads had in fact already launched on Oct. 17 their first operation: the kidnapping in Bayonne, France of two Basque insurgents who had fled from Spain in 1981 (when they were both 18 years old) and had petitioned for political asylum. The insurgents, José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala, were renditioned to Spain, where they were murdered, reportedly after being tortured and made to dig their own graves.

Remains in the Lasa and Zabala case. The bodies were found in 1985 but not identified until ten years later because they were buried in quicklime.

And the GAL carried out further actions between October and December, according to a timeline on Wikipedia.

"October 18: Kidnap attempt in Bayonne of alleged ETA leader José Mari Larretxea Goñi by four Spanish policemen. The four agents were arrested by French gendarmes. [Quinde mentioned this incident; he was indignant that the allegedly KBG-influenced French government would not allow Spain to carry out kidnappings on French soil.]

"December 4: Kidnapping of Segundo Marey by mercenaries hired by the Spanish police. They demanded the liberation of the four policemen arrested for the kidnap attempt on Larraetxea. The policemen were released on December 8 and Marey on the 13th. S. Marey was not related to ETA in any way and he was apparently kidnapped by mistake.

"December 19: Assassination of Ramón Oñaederra, alleged ETA member, in Bayonne.

"December 29: Assassination of Mikel Goikoetxea, alleged ETA leader, in Bayonne, by a mercenary sharpshooter."

(The entire time line from 1983 to 1987 is here.)

Eventually, five Spanish officials implicated in the murders of Lasa and Zabala would receive sentences totalling 365 years in prison, while convictions were also obtained for other GAL crimes. And Socialist prime minister Felipe González would be voted out of office in 1996 in no small part because of the public's outrage regarding the belatedly-revealed truth about the GAL squads, which were seen as a return to Franco-era methods.

As to Herb Quinde--the ideologue who didn't have the nerve to get his own hands dirty--he recently obtained a top job with the Illinois Department of Corrections (see above). When questions were raised about his LaRouchian past, state officials implied that he'd been some kind of intelligence community patriot. And yet there's no evidence--except Quinde's own spin doctoring--that he ever worked for the U.S. government. However, there's loads of evidence that he worked assiduously for many years for the fascist agenda of Lyndon LaRouche--and that there's nothing patriotic or American about LaRouche's agenda.