Thanks mainly to a courageous judiciary, the Spanish public has learnt much about the "dirty war " run by the country's state terrorist network. Britain could learn from its experience, writes Paddy Woodworth
"Why should we lose sleep? Dirty tricks, settling of accounts, are normal in many countries." This was the response of Carmen Romero, a Spanish Socialist Party deputy, when asked if she or her colleagues suffered any bad nights over the state-sponsored "dirty war" against the Basque terrorist group ETA in the mid-1980s.
Ms Romero is the wife of the former Socialist Party leader Felipe González, who was prime minister of Spain in this period. He is regarded by many Spaniards as responsible, at least in political terms, for a state terrorist strategy that killed and injured uninvolved citizens, including children.
Mr González denies any involvement in this campaign of shootings, bombings, kidnappings and torture. He has never been charged with any crime. However, the highest Spanish courts have convicted top Socialist politicians and counter-terrorist top brass for crimes carried out by the so-called "Grupos Anti-terroristas de Liberación" (GAL).
Police chiefs, a general and two of Mr González's longest-serving cabinet ministers have been jailed. British security bosses and politicians, contemplating the Stevens report and the flood of allegations about agent "Stakeknife", can hardly relish this remarkable recent precedent in an EU democracy.
During the lengthy and controversial judicial and journalistic investigations into the GAL affair, the "dirty war" was frequently defended by Ms Romero on the basis that "other democratic countries do it too". One of the countries most often referred to was Britain.
The fact that one of the most notorious British "shoot-to-kill" operations took place in Gibraltar obviously influenced this assessment of British counter-terrorism. But the Spanish security establishment's closet admiration for British "realism" when dealing with the IRA went much deeper than that.
The Spanish public now knows a great deal about the GAL's dirty war, partly because two policemen implicated their bosses in the dirty war after being jailed for directing relatively minor GAL operations. Senior security chiefs, in turn, implicated cabinet members. Many, though not all, of the grim secrets of a state terrorist network were then revealed in court. At the time, leading Spanish figures often said, sotto voce, that "the British would never have let this mess happen". Had the British found they had two agents in such a position, the Spaniards argued, they would have made sure, in one way or another, the agents disappeared from public view.
Seen from Dublin, this view that British agents were licensed to kill - and potential victims of "disappearances" themselves - was easy enough to believe. But it was impossible to substantiate, until very recently. When revising a new edition of a book on the GAL less than a year ago, I wrote that "it is increasingly obvious that these allegations [of British state terrorism] are well founded, and that they should be investigated much more energetically". Nonetheless, it was still necessary to add that no-one had yet made a convincing case that British "dirty war" operations were authorised by cabinet ministers.
First the Stevens report, and now the allegations about agent "Stakeknife", mean that in a few weeks all that has changed utterly. Whatever "Stakeknife's" real identity (or identities), both developments greatly strengthen the case that the British security forces colluded in both republican and loyalist murders, and that this collusion was approved at the highest political level over several decades. From a democratic point-of-view, it would be heartening to think that we may now see investigations into the British "dirty war" which go at least as far as Spain's have. It would be salutary to see British (and Irish) politicians and security chiefs made judicially responsible for extra-judicial killings, if they were complicit in such crimes.
However, at least three major differences between the Spanish and Northern Irish situations make effective investigations much less likely in the latter. Firstly, the GAL court cases showed up a courageously independent - some would say maverick - streak in sections of the Spanish judiciary, then only recently freed from the constraints of Franco's dictatorship.
In contrast, the British judiciary has hardly distinguished itself for its independence in cases relating to the Irish conflict. A judiciary which preferred to let falsely accused Irish prisoners rot in jail, rather than acknowledge the "appalling vista" of miscarriages of justices, is unlikely to take up cudgels against dirty warriors highly placed in the establishment. Secondly, it is important to note that the Spanish investigations had powerful backing from conservative politicians as well as from human rights activists.
Spanish conservatives, despite their own alleged association with state terrorism in the past, saw the GAL trials as a vital lever in their 14-year struggle to discredit the very popular González, and force the Socialists from power.
Light was shed on the Spanish "dirty war" at least partly because the Spanish political establishment was deeply divided on issues other the Basque conflict. While the British Tories might well want to remove Tony Blair today by any means necessary, those means could hardly include inquiries which would largely implicate Conservative administrations.
Thirdly, compared with the immense hall of smoke and mirrors which still obscures the secrets of the British "dirty war", even the murky GAL campaign begins to look straightforward. Reduced to its simplest terms, the Spanish Socialist administration used a "dirty war" strategy primarily to terrorise the French Basque community until France agreed to collaborate in extraditing ETA suspects. Once Paris agreed to do this, the GAL disappeared from the scene after less than four years in operation.
The picture of the British strategy now emerging suggests multi-layered webs of agents and double-agents operating over many years, killing each other and being poached by rival intelligence agencies. It conjures up the nightmare world envisaged by Peter Weiss in his play about the French revolutionary terror, Marat-Sade: "hunting down traitors, by traitors betrayed".
Yet the enormous difficulty of investigating such operations only reflects the enormity of the crimes apparently committed in the name of democracy by democratic states. It should only redouble the determination of real democrats in both jurisdictions to awaken from this nightmare and see justice done, or, at the very least, the truth acknowledged. State terrorism undermines the foundations of democracy, and is a gift to the propaganda machines of revolutionary terrorists. It is certainly an issue over which democrats should lose much sleep.
• Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale University Press).