The Ertzaintza and the Basque Government had access to the names and telephone numbers of the GAL mercenary network after seizing a briefcase from Deputy Commissioner José Amedo. In the briefcase, the recruiter of the commandos of the dirty war in the south of France, kept his personal agenda and documents of the anti-terrorist group.
The Bilbao police officer, who had been designated by the top of the Ministry of the Interior of the first Government of Felipe González as the coordinator of the paramilitary operations against ETA, suffered a traffic accident on the Basque toll motorway. In the midst of the confusion of the car accident and Amedo's transfer to a Bilbao hospital, the briefcase with the documents remained in the hands of Ertzaintza agents for a few hours, with more than enough time to make the appropriate photocopies.
In addition to a series of confidential documents on the location of ETA leaders and other ETA targets to bring down, the Ertzainas found a piece of great value: Amedo's agenda with all his contacts. Its pages contained, among other collaborators and confidants, the names and telephone numbers of the most prominent GAL mercenaries: "Cristian Hitier", "Dominique", "Gerar", "Mario", "Pirono" and "Filipo". ”, as Amedo himself had written.
The different colors of the ink and the calligraphy suggest that its content had been written at different times and in a chronological manner. But in its pages were the most significant assassins of the "dirty war", as can be seen in the documents held by OKDIARIO.
Jean Philippe Labade, the bridge man for Amedo in France and direct leader of the mercenaries, appeared on the agenda as "Filipo". Months after the accident he was arrested, for the first time, in June 1984 after the attack by the GAL with a motorcycle bomb against Pérez-Revilla, which caused the death of the historic ETA member. Labade was released, but before he declared before the judge that he was doing investigative work for the Spanish police.
Paradoxically, no one from the Ertzaintza, or the PNV, or the Basque Government suspected his presence on the agenda of the police officer whom the Ministry of the Interior had already listed as "the head of the GAL commandos." But the nationalist leaders did publicly accuse the socialist government of being behind the anti-terrorist operations.
Labade and the Portuguese plot
Labade fled France and took refuge in Portugal from where he continued to work for Amedo, with false documentation. There he recruited the mercenaries Paulo Fontes Figueiredo, who had worked in the security of the US Embassy in Lisbon, and Mario Correira da Cunha, who participated in the attacks against the bars La Consolation in San Juan de Luz and Batxoki in Bayonne, in February 1986. Da Cunha met with Amedo and Domínguez at the Ritz hotel in Lisbon a few days before the attacks.
On his trip to Portugal, Amedo had checked into the Lisbon hotel under the name “Genaro Gallego Galindo”. The deputy commissioner of the GAL had plenty of time to slip a touch of black humor by constructing a false identity based on the proper name of Genaro García Andoain, the surname of the head of the Civil Guard of the Intxaurrondo barracks in San Sebastián, Rodríguez Galindo, convicted of the kidnappings and murders of Lasa and Zabala, and his condition as a Galician, born in Lugo in 1946.
Da Cunha also appeared in the briefcase diary with his first name: “Mario”. The former DINFO agent, the Portuguese secret services, established a special bond with Amedo and participated in several violent actions. He was sentenced for the attacks on two bars in Bayonne and Saint Jean de Luz in February 1986, in which more than ten people were injured.
Cristian Hittier also appeared in the Bilbao police notebook under the name “Cristian Hitier” (sic). He was an important member of the GAL residing in Andorra, from where he provided the Ministry of the Interior with weapons and a whole network of mercenaries. He was the one who captured in 1984 the so-called "black ladies of the GAL": Margaret and the Franco-Vietnamese Dominique.
Hittier, who ran a hotel and the Jazz Club Águila bar in Andorra, was a paramilitary member of the Jaune Nation group that supported the OAS during the Algerian conflict. In 1987, after his name appeared in the press, he fled to Belgium where he was arrested. The intermediary, who had a Spanish DNI in the name of Pablo Cabello Muñoz, was a friend of the gunwoman "Dominique", who was prosecuted by French justice for allegedly participating in a series of attacks.
The name "Dominique" was also listed on Amedo's address book along with Hittier's. Next to his name appeared several telephone numbers, one of them from his sister's clothing and gift shop in Encamp (Andorra).
The Ertzaintza in the footsteps of Amedo
Another GAL hit man who had a special place in Amedo's notebook was Patrick Pironneau, in which he appeared under the pseudonym “Pirono”. The French mercenary - one of Hittier's men in the GAL - was sentenced to three years in prison in France for criminal association. He was captured by Raymond Sanchis in the underworld of Marseille. In his summary statements, he also accused Amedo as the commando's recruiter.
Another name, “Gerar”, corresponded to the Marseilles mercenary Gerard Pietri, in charge of the Café La Fraternité, a meeting place for members of the underworld. He was one of the men that the legionnaire Pedro Sánchez recruited for the GAL cause.
In the memoirs of the Bilbao police officer, in the possession of OKDIARIO, Amedo recounts that the traffic accident occurred on his return from one of his trips to France to meet with his collaborators, including Sanchis and Sánchez. In the briefcase he kept the notes he had taken during his encounter with the mercenaries. Hence his concern about whether the documents had fallen into the hands of the Ertzaintza.
“I was looking forward to getting home to open the briefcase and see the ordering of the different documents, more or less I remembered the first one that I should find. Its content was related to the annotations on a sheet of paper that I took in the last meeting in Bayonne with Raimon Sanchis and Pedro Sánchez, former members of the French Foreign Legion. Once opened, I verified that the document to which I have referred was the first as I thought, above the others I did not remember its position”.
But when Amedo reviewed the rest of the material, he began to suspect that the ertzainas had disrupted his order and had the documents in their possession: "I was surprised to find the photos of the terrorists on the papers, when I was clear that they must be kept in one of the briefcase flaps. This made me doubt, I even thought that, as a result of the impact of the vehicle in which we crashed, the briefcase collided with one of the seats and caused the photographs to come out of their place. Difficult because the compartment where he always kept them was a narrow place in which they entered in a compressed way and therefore it was difficult for them to get out. I had no choice but to accept the doubt and not rule out the possibility that the Ertzaintza had photocopied that documentation.
Years later, Amedo came out of his uncertainty when the person in charge of the Ertzaintza, Genaro García de Andoain, recognized him in a meeting at the Ercilla hotel in Bilbao, that his agents had photocopied his papers and since 1983 they had been after him. . Undoubtedly, the discovery meant that, from the first day, the Peneuvista Government of Vitoria knew who was behind the GAL when the dirty war actions began.
