There are many legitimate reasons to read Paddy Woodworth’s fascinating first book, Dirty War, Clean Hands (ETA, The GAL and Spanish Democracy). For one thing, it is – to use the patois of the popular fiction novel – “a ripping yarn.” Better still, its flawlessly factual account of terrorist activity in the Basque Country met body-for-body by counter terrorists acting with – at the very least – the tacit approval of the Spanish Government, clearly has its parallels in similar war zones all over the world. Including Northern Ireland.

Paddy Woodworth, the fifty-year-old, Wicklow-born, former Sinn Féin member, is well placed to explore the conflict, given that he began teaching English in the Basque Country in the mid ’70s and now is Assistant Foreign Desk Editor at The Irish Times, “with responsibility for developing Spanish and Latin American coverage.” Woodworth also was Arts Editor of the same newspaper from 1991 until 1996 when he took a one year sabbatical to write this book. Five years later, and fully updated, it’s finally published and seems set to be “a great success,” he says, almost incredulously, during this interview in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel.

Joe Jackson: What would you say to hotpress readers who feel that this particular Dirty War is of no relevance to them, too far away, too much like a history we, hopefully, have passed through?

Paddy Woodworth: I’m not entirely convinced our history is over, in that respect. I hope it is. There’s still a lot to play for. But before I talk about the parallels between this conflict and Northern Ireland I must say that this is a damn good story in itself. What attracted me to it, as a journalist, was a sense of commitment and a desire to understand what actually was happening in the Basque country. The elements in the story are like a plot from a B movie.

Particularly, say, the story of Lasa and Zabala, two young members of ETA who were kidnapped in a French city in 1984, smuggled across the border, held in specially prepared cells in a disused mansion that is the property of the Socialist Civil Governor – the highest Civil Authority in the State – and tortured for probably six weeks. Then they were locked in the boots of cars and driven to the other side of Spain, where they were, apparently, made to dig their own graves, shot in the back of the head and buried in quicklime.

A year later a dog disturbs the bones and they are exhumed. But a local judge and the Guardia Civil say they don’t – surprise, surprise! – investigate missing persons’ record from outside the province of Alicante. Even though a local journalist made the suggestion: “couldn’t there be some connection with the two Basques who disappeared last year?” The judge, instead, decides it’s a settling of scores between drugs gangs and wants the bones of these two men thrown in a common grave. Yet the pathologist won’t let it go because it’s the one case in his life he hasn’t solved; as in, identified the remains. So the bodies are kept in a drawer for more for ten years.

Then a policeman in Alicante is reading reports of the GAL (Anti-Terrorist Liberation groups) trials and other murders committed by the GALs, which are being investigated in Madrid, and sees a reference to two bodies being buried in quicklime. So he thinks this tallies and sends the dental records to a judge in Madrid who calls in the families. Then it gets worse. The relatives are given permission to bury the bones but the remains are brought to the Basque Country in sealed coffins and the police have been given contradictory orders by the judge so they don’t give the coffins to the families, Finally, they are handed over but in the cemetery the Basque Autonomist Police run amok, beating up uncles and aunties! I just thought there was extraordinary drama and terror in such stories, so I had to investigate all this and write the book.

In the prologue to your book you say you believe “the use of violence can be justified” when the “essential democratic liberties” are “suppressed by the State.” So, as a Socialist, would you yourself, at one point, have supported ETA and, indeed, the IRA?

I would have supported ETA in the Franco period. I remember the morning ETA killed (Prime Minister) Carrero Blanco and I was in the car with my father (here in Ireland) and heard the news and applauded. My father said “how can you take pleasure in the death of another human being?” Those are the dilemmas I had to face. But I believed, very strongly, that once the basic democratic freedoms had been re-established in Spain, there was no justification for further violence.

And that’s why last night, at the launch of your book, you admitted to being “ashamed” of the so-called Socialist base of ETA?

ETA has very little claim to be socialist, though it does attract people who want dramatic social transformations. But it doesn’t have at its disposal any of the classic tools for socialist transformation – if socialist transformation is still possible. I’m not sure that it is. And, to set the record straight, as a young and not-so-young man, I supported the use of defensive violence in Northern Ireland. I was a member of Official Sinn Féin and believed, for a period, it was necessary that weapons should be held by the Left-Wing nationalists in the North, in order to defend themselves against pogroms. Both from the Provos and from Loyalist groups. I then came to believe that this position was fundamentally flawed

But for how long had you held that position?

From Bloody Sunday onwards I was close to Sinn Féin. I joined in ‘74 and remained a member for ten years. I left, for personal reasons, when the Official IRA was in the process of being dismantled. Within the party I already had begun to argue – from ‘77/’78 – that it was necessary to dissolve the Official IRA. And my experience in Official Sinn Féin convinced me that not only was there no justification for violence in Ireland but that the Provisionals’ campaign was an absolute disaster for progressive Nationalism and Socialism. That leaving bombs in supermarkets, for example, polarised many Protestants that might have been otherwise much more open. Protestants I knew – as a Protestant myself – told me they were driven back into the bunkers by the violence of Provisional IRA. Another appalling aspect of violence in an organisation is that the military wing will always control the political wing. That was the case within Official Sinn Féin. No serious moves could be made without the Official IRA Army Council approving. And that makes for secrecy, conspiracy. And is the inverse of democracy within an organisation. ETA’s experience has been very much that. Every time there is a debate in ETA the pistol wins out over the word.

Do you think there now is a healthier balance between Sinn Féin and the IRA Army Council?

Yes. And I’ve had to revise my own positions very much over the past five years. I would have been one of the people, when John Hume began talking to Gerry Adams, who said “a democrat should not be talking to someone associated with a terrorist organisation.” I now believe Sinn Féin did enter the Peace Process with as much good faith as anyone could. Sinn Féin and the IRA understood one critical thing: that negotiation means giving up some of your own positions. ETA has not understood that. ETA also is an extremely secretive and hermetic organisation. Much more than the IRA. In other words, although the IRA has extremely secret structures, the clear advantage of the IRA/Sinn Féin relationship always was that you knew that, let’s say, 75% of the Sinn Féin Ard Chomhairle are likely to be members of the IRA – and some very senior members of the IRA – so if you want to negotiate you know who to talk to.

People don’t know who to talk to in Spain. And there’s terrible tendency in the Basque country to sacramentalise ETA. Everytime I interview somebody close to the thinking of ETA and say “how can you possibly justify leaving a bomb in a graveyard, where somebody you’ve already killed, you’re now trying to kill their wife and child when they come to mark the anniversary of that death?” And most people say “that is horrifying but ETA have their reasons.” It’s “there is a political conflict and as long as that political conflict isn’t resolved violence is inevitable.” But I believe, very strongly, that violence is always a concrete responsibility of a concrete individual who takes out a gun and pulls a trigger. And though I was, as I say, a member of official Sinn Féin, I wasn’t a member of Official IRA. Though I fully recognise I have the same responsibilities as anyone on that organisation. We knew what we were doing when we went out with our Easter Lily boxes. We knew where the money was going. There was no bullshit about that link not existing.

As in, the direct link between Sinn Féin and the IRA?

Yeah. But there was something too cowardly in me to go that far. I was absolutely terrified of all that.

But when you realised that the Easter Lily cash you were collecting was directly funding the buying of arms to kill British soldiers, or whoever, did that, too, fire feelings of moral uncertainty?

Yes. I was constantly in conflict about this. But, like I say, when I joined Sinn Féin it was only two years after Bloody Sunday and Loyalists and Provos were carrying out those pogroms. The Officials also had the dilemma that the Provos carried out pogroms against the Officials, killed a lot of people. Some Provisionals were killed by our people as well. And to be brutally honest with you, I suppose there was a part of me that must have been fascinated by what Trish (Long, Paddy’s partner) calls that “boy’s stuff.” That is part of my nature. And maybe part of my fascination with ETA and the GAL. But back in my early days with Sinn Féin I also was terrified at the thought that if it ever came to a Civil War in Ireland or my own involvement in Sinn Féin deepened, I might ever have to kill somebody. I even had nightmares about that. Dreaming that I’ve shot somebody. But the point is that I know people (who) have and they’re not psychopaths. They’re human beings, just like you and me.

What’s your view of splinter groups like the

“Real IRA”?

I’m very worried about them. The leadership of the ‘Real IRA’ in Dundalk seem to be truly terrifying people. And that’s why Trimble has got to get it right. So these people don’t get a constituency. The critical thing about the ‘Real IRA’ is that at the moment they have very little popular support. The mark of both ETA and Provisional IRA is that over an extended period of decades they enjoyed the support of 10-20% of the population of the area in which they live. That was not the case with the Red Brigade, Bader Meinhoff and so on. All those groups that came out of the 60s faded because they had no real support from the people and that is why some really tiny terrorist groups do have a high proportion of psychopaths. People who really get off on killing. But the bigger ones are more inclined to use psychopaths.

There are, for example, certain acts senior paramilitary people don’t want to carry out themselves. Like killing in cold blood. They seem to be able to inoculate themselves from the consequences of planting bombs. But my understanding of the days when the Official IRA did go out and shoot soldiers, is that there were people who could hack that kind of operation but would find it difficult if a British soldier was put into their hands and they were told to make him kneel down and then shoot him in the head. But, as for now, I honestly hope the ‘Real IRA’ and the ‘Continuity IRA’ are the end of something, not the beginning of another cycle.

As a Socialist you obviously see culture, primarily, as a way in which people define themselves. Is that why, in your book, you seem to present as pretty reprehensible the fact that Basques – like the Irish – were, at one point, forbidden to use their own language,and parents were even banned from giving their children Basque names?

Obviously. And that is a stripping away of a people’s core identity. And that created Basque nationalism as we know it today. Because the identity the State is trying to take away then becomes your badge of identity. So people in the Basque Country, rather than seeing themselves as, say gay, or as rock musicians, or carpenters, see themselves purely as Basques. Because that’s what they’ve been told they can’t be. To be told you can’t even speak your own language is an absolute violation of the rights of a people. And the ironic thing is that many Basques had abandoned their own language voluntarily before that Francoist period. When Basque nationalism was “invented” at the end of the last century, as a conscious political force, its theses were rather fantastic. Namely, that the Basque Country was part of an occupied zone. But Francoism actually made that real. Even so, Basque texts were permitted from the 50’s onwards and by the time I went to the Basque Country, Basque was being taught privately very widely. Yet, given that political parties were banned, you couldn’t carry the badge of a political party. You carried, instead, a Basque text-book, or Basque grammar. But there were still occasions when people would be speaking the Basque language and some bollix from guardia civil would come along and give them a clout. That was the policy.

You also say in the book that you accept that Basques “have the right to constitute themselves as a nation” as opposed to the “aggressive Spanish and French nationalisms which attempt to portray the Basque Country as just one more region of a greater nation, and which denigrates Basque culture as inferior to their own.”

Yes. But I also believe in self determination for individuals as well as nations. I absolutely respect the position of somebody who lives in the Basque Country, and all their relatives are ethnic Basques, but they themselves say “I feel more Spanish than Basque.” Those people deserve their place in the sun, too. That’s why, after that quote you read, I say in the book, that I am also opposed to exclusive Basque nationalism. As someone said to me recently “the critical need in the world is not tolerance for the other, it is respect for the other.” That applies across all cultures. Yet a lot of Basque nationalists don’t want that. A lot of Spanish nationalists don’t want it. They want the “other” to be bad, dirty, evil. In our heart of hearts we know this is not true. But one of the great human tragedies is that we cannot act on what we know.

Isn’t there an irony in the fact that the first subversive act by ETA – derailing a train carrying Francoist military forces in 1961 – was less effective than it could have been because ETA which, of course, later became a murderous organisation, wanted to avoid any risk to human life? Whereas the State response to that attack was violent and indiscriminate?

Yes. And the State did arrest hundreds of people from ETA. But the fact is that ETA’s primary identity, when it was established, was cultural. It was a student’s study group formed in 1959. And they didn’t carry out their first killing until 1968. In fact, as I say in the book, in a sense, the whole story starts with Jose Pardines, a young guardia civil, checking cars near Villabona, between San Sebastian and Tolosa. Something, maybe the false number plate on their car, drew his attention to Juan Maria Etxebarrieta, a 23 year old leading member of ETA, and Inaki Sarasqueta, a 19 year old provincial leader. While Pardines was examining the car, Etxebarrieta drew his pistol and shot him several times. In fact, I’ve talked to Sarasqueta and he told me that this guardia civil was actually crawling under their car to look for something and Sarasqueta said to the other member of ETA “we can grab him and disarm him” but Etxebarrieta said “no” and shot him. Sarasqueta also told me that Etxebarrieta was using amphetamines. Either way, ETA had claimed its first victim. Etxebarrieta and Sarasqueta then went on the run and within 24 hours were stopped by a guardia civil near Tolosa. In a shoot out that Sarasqueta himself describes as “like the wild west” he himself escaped – but was later caught and tortured – and Extebarrieta was shot dead. Meaning ETA now had not just its first victim but first martyr as well. And that dynamic kick-started a process that would continue for 30 years.

In the book you don’t mention that Etxebarrieta chose to kill that guardia civil cold-bloodedly nor do you say he was on amphetamines. So was this use of drugs, among ETA, something you encountered often?

That was the only reference to drugs I’ve come across. ETA would have the same “official” view of drugs as the IRA. And have, on many occasions, shot people they claim are drug dealers. I remember meetings organised by ETA’s supporters, where huge syringes were burned in the town square. It was all very dramatic. They’re very good at theatre! Like Macnas with a giant syringe! But, in practice, among ETA political supporters there appears to be widespread de facto tolerance, at least of hash. I recall attending a large, official, post-election party of Basque radicals and practically getting stoned walking through the hall! ETA really does seem to have a more tolerant attitude to grass and hash.

Surely Sinn Féin/IRA did, too. Adopting, perhaps, one position, publicly, in terms of the “social abuse” of drugs – based maybe on the Marxist idea that drugs “demobilise political activity” – while accepting that you guys often got stoned, perhaps even at Sinn Féin meetings.

Either way, the IRA have knee-capped unfortunates for smoking a joint in public in Derry. The INLA were worse about that. And are total hypocrites because anyone who gets into the international guns market is also into the international drugs market. You can’t keep your hands clean in that sense. It’s all the Black Market. As for smoking dope at Sinn Féin meetings, no. That would have been frowned upon.

So, like schoolkids, you all went out behind the “schoolhouse wall” to smoke a joint?

Not exactly. (laughs) But some years before I joined Sinn Féin somebody, who had run as a candidate, was subsequently convicted for heroin. And Sinn Féin is a very puritanical organisation. Talk about schoolkids! I remember one member of the party asking me to watch another member of the party, at an Ard Fheis, while they searched his coat because they thought he was carrying hash! I found that very discomforting. I was very torn. Because before I joined Sinn Féin I was a hippie at weekends and a demonstrator during the week.

So you’d smoke dope at weekends?

Yeah.

And like a good Sinn Féin member stopped when you joined this party of “purists”?

No! But I kept it to myself! And one danger, with a party like Sinn Féin, which was already associated with illegal activities – you don’t want to up the odds. If somebody has illegal documents in a car, you don’t want to compound that by having hash. Give the police a reason to bust you. So there’s a very good reason for serious political organisations not to have anything to do with drugs. And as you say there is that “drugs demobilise political activity” argument. I remember a Trotskyist in college saying when I was doing dope “you shouldn’t touch that stuff – it makes you want to love everybody and this is bad for the class struggle!” I assured her that this was not my experience!

Do you still smoke dope?

It’s 20 years since I had dope in my possession. I did smoke joints that were passed to me, more recently than that. And I think all drugs should be legalised. The illegalisation of drugs has created mafias that are an absolute nightmare. And, terrible as heroin is, there should be a choice that if you are going to take it you can do so with a clean needle.

Do you believe that despite its anti-drugs stance Sinn Féin/IRA is actually involved in dealing drugs, profiteering in that sense while also knee-capping someone who publicly smokes a joint?

As I say, if you are involved with arms there is a pragmatic level at which you are probably involved with buying and selling drugs. I, too, have read that in the paper. And it does seem that some of the Loyalist feuds in the North are a result of turf wars about drugs, in terms of who sells and who deals. As for Sinn Fen/IRA I don’t know for certain. But I’m sure it occurs. It certainly happened within the INLA.

At the start of this interview you mentioned ETA’s assassination, in June 1973, of the General Franco-appointed Prime Minister, Carerro Blanco. This specific action, you say, marked the moment “the boys of the 1950’s became the giant-killers of the 1970s” and proved “incontrovertibly, that violence could be a very powerful political weapon.” But you also believe that in “destroying one monster, ETA conjured up others.” Such as GAL, the Francoist government’s counter-terrorist organisation, which carried out countless assassinations and, for example, placed bombs in public places, irrespective of whether or not this killed innocent bystanders.

That is how things evolved. But, also, as I said, ETA got so much prestige from people like me because they did kill Carerro Blanco. People thought the CIA had done it. And there still is a belief that some of the logistics might have been supplied by elements in the CIA. That there might have been some interest in unstitching the Franco regime. Carerro Blanco was the lynchpin of there not being a transition to democracy in Spain. Franco believed he was the man who would “keep everything well tied up.” In other words, the entire Spanish population! And, you have to remember, Blanco was killed in the heart of Madrid, miles away from the Basque country. And the murder was so dramatic it inspired Costa Gavras to make a movie, called, in translation, Operation Monster. ETA killed Blanco by building a tunnel under the road where he went to the Jesuits for mass every morning.

Incidentally, there is a wonderful libertarian communist writer in Spain called Manuel Vazquez Montalban, who was talking to Former Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez once, specifically about the GAL – though Gonzales, of course, denies this – and Gonzales said: “I don’t know General Galindo but I understand he’s a deeply religious man.” Manuel Vazquez said: “every torturer we have had took daily communion!” And it’s absolutely true in terms of these particular people and their devotion to the Virgin, their rubbing themselves with relics then, the next minute pulling out people’s toenails.

Religion drives you to these black and white positions. This feeling that you should be committed to something. And have that world view where those who are not with you are against you. As I say in the book, many members of ETA are priests or former seminarians. And all of this is part of the reason I have long since shed my Protestant roots and – though I hate the word “spiritual” – see myself more in terms of my interest in religions like Zen Buddhism.

When you write about atrocities such as bombs placed outside children’s play schools or “rape preceding death”, do you ever feel so overwhelmed you say ‘I can’t go on writing this book’?

You have to distance yourself from it all, emotionally. But I do often wonder could I deal with the horror of actually seeing the effects of a bomb that exploded outside a play school. I’ve never even seen a person killed in violence and can’t even say if I’d be able to deal with that if I was sent over to cover Sierra Leone for example. That’s why I have the greatest respect for some of my colleagues who can confront situations like that. However I was present – when I lived in the Basque Country at first – at many demonstrations which were extremely violent. And there were times, while writing this book, when I was so scared I wanted to stop.

Were there times when you feared for your own life? You write about how, at one point, Manuel Cobo del Rosal warned you that a certain Julian Sancristobal might try to implicate you in the GAL.

I’m not sure that I took that seriously. But in the beginning I didn’t know how ETA would respond to the book being written. I still don’t know. I’ve never spoken to anyone who said “I am a

member of ETA and I am speaking to you on behalf of ETA.” Yet I’ve talked to people who are “close to” ETA.

But my point is that before I went to Spain I had a dream about being on a steep slope with Orangutans. (laughs) And I kept thinking ‘they’re going to notice I’m not a Orangutans and kill me!’ But once you’re out there doing the interviews, and such, you’re not scared. It’s when you’re back in the bosom of your family you fear, in advance, what you might encounter. But I had no objective reason to be scared. Except with some of the lawyers representing the GAL. I discovered that one has a gang of violent criminals at his disposal who, if he doesn’t like you, he has your legs broken. Or your nose broken. Oddly enough, contacts with some of these lawyers, rather than GAL people themselves, were the scary moments. I felt a sense of evil in those moments I didn’t otherwise feel.

GAL attacks ceased in ‘87 but you title the epilogue of your book “less than the whole truth.” Does that sum up your fear that the links between the GAL and “Spanish Democracy” will never be fully explored or revealed?

That’s the terribly sad thing about it all. Had the Socialists found the courage, in 1987, to say, “look, we were under appalling pressure from ETA – which they were – and under appalling pressure from the military and the police, we were a young and inexperienced government, we made a mistake. we shouldn’t have done it, hands up, we apologise”, that could have cauterised the wound in some way. For Basques, as well as Spaniards in general. Instead you have the phenomena of the more evidence there is of the apparatus of the Socialist Party being involved in the GAL, the more they deny it. And that becomes terribly corrosive.

Because – don’t laugh! – people are saying that politicians lie every day and must know they are lying.

And Gonzalez own role, for example, remains a mystery. It seems to me that in political terms he is clearly responsible. The Anti-Terrorist High Command, broadly speaking, was involved in killing Spanish citizens on foreign soil, over the three years you were Interior Minister and you never ask questions about it? Then you are politically responsible, for starters. The most credible thesis is that Gonzalez didn’t know any of the details but somebody would have said “we’re going to start using unusual methods against ETA” and he would have said “do whatever you think is necessary.”

Does that also sound to you, like the kind of freedom Margaret Thatcher probably gave, say, MI5 in relation to the British ‘Dirty War’ on the IRA in the ’80s?

Yes. But we don’t know enough yet about MI5 or MI6 because it’s harder to investigate – either journalistically or judicially – those organisations than it is to access Spanish Intelligence. But I definitely believe there was collusion between the RUC and the Loyalist Death Squads. I think there were times the British Army was involved in that collusion. And there was undoubtedly a shoot-to-kill policy. Particularly in the Kitson period. His book, Gangs And Counter Gangs is more or less a manual for the kind of things that I remember happening when I was in Sinn Féin. Such as British Agents being found on the Falls Road with incredibly sophisticated weapons, with silencers. And the feeling was that they were there as agents provocateurs to shoot people so that they would think they’d been shot by the other side. Everything is still to be discovered in this area.

Have you any hopes that the final findings of the Bloody Sunday enquiry will “cauterise” wounds for nationalists in Northern Ireland, lead to the discovery of who, actually, was responsible for the shootings that day?

The facade is cracking. And, again, wouldn’t it have been so much better if they told us at the time? Bloody Sunday was a monstrous situation, the army using terrorism, there’s no other word for it. But the question definitely is where did the ultimate order come from? And how much was it part of a strategy or was it some paratroop commander saying “let’s get these fuckers.” That’s what we need to know.

Which do you believe?

That it’s tilting in the direction that the order came from the top. As for justice being done? It can never be fully done because you can’t give back life to the people who died. But what you can do is get the truth out in the open. Which, as with the GAL, can be very dangerous but must, finally, be the goal. Because it is healing for relatives of those who died. Laura Martin, who is the widow of the last victim of the GAL – neither herself or her husband had any association with ETA – says again and again that what would ease her soul is that although she doesn’t “want anyone to go to prison even for a day” she prays someone will just come to her and say “we did it and we are sorry.” That, too, would apply in the North. But the Socialists will never acknowledge what they did, I suspect. And I think there will still be GAL cases being investigated in the year 2015.

The last person you quote in the book is “one of the new generation of Basque radicals,” Egoitz Urrutikoetxea, the son of an ’80’s ETA leader and he, you say, “flatly refuses to accept” that either democracy or the rule of law applies in his homeland.

He was a remarkable young man in may ways but, yes, I fear he may be ready to follow a similar path as (the one taken by) his father. Egoitz is the leader of Abertzaleen Batzuna, the party close to the thinking of ETA in the French Basque Country. He was brought up in exile and his father is still an extreme hard-liner. But, in the end, what I really did try to do in the book was talk to everyone and treat everyone with equal respect. Whether they are close to ETA or the GAL. As in, let them have their own voices. The Basque Country is like Northern Ireland in that sense too. All people say these days is that “all they’re doing is talking about talks about talks about talks” but I still believe that talking is better than war. And sooner or later the situation in the Basque Country is going to have to be solved by talking. Likewise, in terms of the North.

Dirty Hands, Clean War is published by Cork University Press