I. THE DEATH SQUADS IN SPAIN

LaRouche and Herb Quinde in Spain. Article from leading Madrid daily El Mundo (1995) 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--both members of the insurgent ETA and innocents--between 1983 and 1987. Article quotes from a CIA report and also from a book by the investigative journalists whose uncovering of the death squads was a major factor in bringing down Spain's Socialist government. Claims that Quinde offered to put Spanish officials in contact with "professional killers."

More on LaRouche, Quinde and the Spanish death squads. As compensation for providing information on Basque refugees in France, the LaRouchians obtained 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 LaRouche felt that he himself was the proper heir to this rumored Nazi nest egg.

Quinde complained, in the Dec. 13, 1983 EIR, that his friends in the Spanish security forces weren't taking a hard enough line. How many killings would it have taken to satisfy Quinde and his master LaRouche? Hundreds? Thousands? And how much evidence 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 LaRouche movement's role in human rights violations (including the events that resulted in the death of Jeremiah Duggan)?

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 British, the Black Guelphs 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 Bureau of Constitutional Protection (BfV) and its director from 1983-1985 (he kindly removed the LaRouche organization from its watch list).

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.'"