COLUMN ONE : Did Spain’s Leader OK Dirty War? : Charges are mounting that Premier Felipe Gonzalez was behind five years of bloody attacks aimed at Basque terrorists. The claims, which he vehemently denies, may help drive him from office.

In retrospect, it isn’t really surprising that the first operation carried out by the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups was a huge mistake.

A Spanish salesman named Segundo Marey was kidnaped still wearing his pajamas, held blindfolded for 10 days and released when his captors realized he was, well, just a Spanish salesman in pajamas, with no links at all to the armed Basque separatists they were fighting.

Still, the kidnapers left a handwritten note with their 51-year-old captive, introducing themselves and their mission--to destroy the Basque guerrilla organization ETA, itself responsible for hundreds of deaths.

The Basques have their own language and culture, and their homeland--which they call the Basque country--straddles the French-Spanish border in the western Pyrenees Mountains.

What followed that 1983 kidnaping was a five-year wave of attacks in the French border towns where Basque separatists lived in exile. Twenty-seven people, a third of them innocent victims, were slain by an assortment of hired killers, reportedly paid $15,000 per hit.

For years, Spain’s citizens wondered who was behind these brutal, often ham-handed attacks. Two Spanish police officers in the Basque region of northern Spain, as well as some mercenaries, were arrested and convicted. But who was the chief? Who paid the bills?

The answer, emerging now, has stunned Spain, threatening to topple the nation’s strongest democratic government in a century and drive its leader from office. The culprit, investigators and former high-level government officials contend, may have been Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez.

The dynamic Socialist leader who campaigned on the slogan “100 years of honesty,” a man once so popular that he was called “God” by his supporters, faces allegations that he approved a secret “dirty war” against Basque separatists. He strongly denies the allegations.

“The [premier] is in a very, very bad situation” is the understatement of Federico Trillo, a top official in the opposition Popular Party, which leads Gonzalez’s Socialists in opinion polls. “Did Mr. Gonzalez know? Of course. Back then, he was the owner of his party, the owner of his country. Nobody would have taken a step like this without consulting him.”

Gonzalez’s alleged link to the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups, known by the Spanish acronym GAL, comes amid a bevy of scandals in his government. The former chief of his civil service has been jailed, charged with filling his pockets with money from government slush funds. His Socialist Party is under investigation for receiving illegal financing. And the man he appointed head of the Bank of Spain has been fired for alleged fraud.

But it is the idea that the head of a Western democracy would fight terrorism with state-sponsored terrorism that shocks so many in a country that well remembers Francisco Franco’s ruthless rule, which ended 20 years ago.

“Our long fight for democracy has been betrayed,” said Carlos Paris, a left-wing professor emeritus at the Autonomous University of Madrid. “There is still a democracy here. It isn’t fiction. But, clearly, the climate has been destroyed.”

Gonzalez, who took power at age 40 with an overwhelming electoral victory, is on his way out after 13 years in office, analysts here say. Under pressure from his opponents, he has called elections for March, a year early, and has told associates that he will not seek another term.

As the prime minister travels the globe, relishing his six-month stint as president of the European Union, he cannot escape the embarrassing questions emerging back home. He denies any knowledge of the anti-Basque operation and contends that his accusers are part of a conspiracy to undermine his government.

But, like rising floodwaters, the swirling investigation has climbed steadily up the ranks of Gonzalez’s government. Spain’s former intelligence chief and former head of covert operations resigned in June after embarrassing disclosures that they tapped the telephones of investigators, journalists and even King Juan Carlos I. Now they are accused of drawing up the original blueprint for the death squads.

In the chambers of the Supreme Court, former government subordinates, seeking to evade blame for the anti-Basque operations, are pointing the finger at Gonzalez and his former Interior minister. When the Spanish Senate last month voted to launch its own investigation, some of the prime minister’s own party members crossed the aisle. And the Supreme Court is weighing a request by a prosecuting judge to force Gonzalez and others with parliamentary immunity to testify.

“All these scandals are really branches of the same tree, part of a contempt for the limits of power and disregard for the law,” said Pedro J. Ramirez, the crusading editor of El Mundo, the second-largest daily newspaper in Madrid and one of Gonzalez’s chief accusers. “Mr. Gonzalez thought when he assumed power that he had a kind of blank check to do whatever he wanted.”

The irony of Gonzalez’s troubles is that, back in 1983, there was substantial sympathy, if not outright support, for using terrorist tactics to fight the Basque guerrillas in the ETA, or Basque Homeland and Freedom, movement. Even Gonzalez’s opponents have called the ETA “an awful terrorist group without any logic.”

The ETA took up arms to create an independent Basque country in northeastern Spain in the late 1960s, and over the next 15 years the death toll rose to more than 500. Most of the victims were police, soldiers or government officials. ETA operations had reached their apex when Gonzalez came to power, and he declared the battle against Basque terrorism among his government’s top priorities.

“When the ETA was killing 100 people a year, some people asked us: ‘Why don’t you kill them? They are killing our policemen,’ ” said Joaquim Almunia, the parliamentary floor leader of the Socialist Party. “Time permits people to see things more clearly. So now everybody says, naturally, there’s no way we could use these illegal methods.”

A year after Gonzalez came to power, the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups surfaced with the Marey abduction. The kidnapers were paid--apparently with government money--1 million French francs, or about $200,000, according to recent testimony. From 1983 to 1987, the group’s operatives carried out 29 kidnapings and assassinations, according to court records. All but one of the murders occurred in southwestern France, where many Basque nationalists had moved after refusing to work within Spain’s new constitutional system.

At the beginning, the Basque separatists were sheltered in France by local law, which protected them as refugees. ETA operatives lived a clan-like existence, mixing little with the local French and, night after night, frequenting the same nightspots. That, as it turned out, made them easy targets.

The region’s anti-Basque operations were headed by Jose Amedo Fouce, the deputy police commissioner there, and Michel Dominguez Martinez, an inspector in the same office. They hired an array of killers, from France, Spain and Portugal, assuring them they were working for the Spanish government, the mercenaries have testified.

The assassins made plenty of mistakes. One of the worst involved Juan Carlos Garcia, killed outside his home in 1987 by a bomb planted in his car. Garcia, a young father of three, had no links with the ETA. Rather, he had moved to France to avoid military service in Spain.

Even though the anti-Basque assassins frequently missed their marks, the chaos created by their attacks destroyed ETA bases of operation in France. By the time the French government agreed to hand over Basque guerrillas to Spanish authorities, the opposition operations already had broken the ETA’s back.

“When GAL operations began, this Basque society in France was atomized,” said Fernando Reinares, a Madrid-based political scientist who has studied the ETA. “No longer could people in the ETA remain in France as refugees.”

Of course, many in Spain suspected that the government might be behind the anti-ETA death squads. But, as the number of ETA attacks in Spain dwindled, few expressed any interest in learning the truth.

“Back then, people thought it was a useful way to fight terrorism,” said Ramirez, the Madrid editor. “But now the government’s disregard for the law has become so frequent that the Spanish people can’t accept it anymore.”

In the prime minister’s defense, Gonzalez supporters point out that the government investigated the anti-Basque attacks and that 31 operatives, in France and Spain, have been jailed. Among them were the two Basque-area police officers, identified as the paymasters, who both received 108-year prison terms. But it was those two, and an aggressive investigating judge, who turned the spotlight on Gonzalez’s government earlier this year.

The judge was Baltasar Garzon, a cool, media-savvy investigator with, one might say, a history. Two years ago, soon after Garzon’s original probe led to prison terms for the two officers, he was wooed to the Socialist Party, which vaulted him into Parliament.

Garzon, a bespectacled 39-year-old with a shock of gray in his thick black hair, had high hopes of becoming Spain’s justice minister. But someone else got that job, and, as Garzon now explains, he became increasingly frustrated by the government’s unwillingness to take corruption seriously.

“They not only weren’t fighting corruption--they were showing they had no desire to fight it,” he has said. “There was no commitment.”

So Garzon resigned earlier this year and returned to his old job. Within weeks, he was talking again to the two cops he had sent to jail. Feeling abandoned by their high-level protectors, they began to sing.

Among other things, the pair contend that their work had been approved by Jose Barrionuevo, then the government’s Interior minister and still a member of Parliament. If Barrionuevo knew, most Spaniards figure, then Gonzalez had to know too.

For many in Gonzalez’s camp, the whole affair has the smell of a political vendetta, and there’s little doubt that politics plays a role. Gonzalez’s chief accusers include many of his political opponents, including Garzon, leaders of the conservative People’s Party and the editor Ramirez, a longtime critic of the Socialist government. One former disaffected Socialist Party leader now claims he discussed the death squad operation with the prime minister on several occasions.

And nearly every detail of the ostensibly “secret” investigation these days finds its way into the newspapers.

“It’s clear this old story is being used by politicians to attack the government,” said Almunia, the Socialist Party official. “GAL may have been operating in the state security apparatus, but it was not us. It was not our policy as a government.”

Almunia spoke in an anteroom of the Congreso, the spectacular domed hall of Parliament where an unsuccessful coup d’etat was staged the year before Gonzalez came to power. Gonzalez and his young Socialist Party had created a bulwark of democracy in that chamber, launching an impressive post-Franco modernization program.

“Back then,” muses one Socialist Party official, “we thought we were going to be good for the country. But we were young, with little experience. We couldn’t control everyone.”

For his part, Garzon--who declined to be quoted directly--denies any personal beef with Gonzalez, saying he was as surprised as anyone that the investigation led him to the prime minister.

Ramirez too says that “it’s nothing personal--it’s only business. And this business is democracy and what a democratic state can do. I really don’t want to see Mr. Gonzalez go to jail. I have the best wishes for his future--as a private citizen. Someone who has behaved as he has cannot remain in public life.”

So far, 14 former police and security officials have been indicted in the probe. This month, Parliament is expected to approve a Supreme Court request to lift former Interior Minister Barrionuevo’s immunity, forcing him to testify. The Supreme Court still is mulling Garzon’s request to question the prime minister.

The two police officers now enjoy “third-degree liberty,” meaning they are free during the day and spend their nights in jail. Madrid newspapers occasionally run photos of them cavorting in nightclubs.

Amid the cacophony of allegations and denials, Garzon and Ramirez endure harassing phone calls and move about with armed guards--protection, they say, against GAL as well as ETA guerrillas.

The Basque separatists, the all-but-forgotten targets of the dirty war, are still kicking.

In April, Jose Maria Aznar, leader of the Popular Party and Gonzalez’s likely replacement as prime minister, narrowly escaped assassination when a car bomb exploded near his own heavily armored vehicle. He and 16 others were injured.

At the hospital, Aznar tried to reassure well-wishers.

“Let everyone stay calm,” he said, “like I am.”

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BACKGROUND: The Basques

The Basques have their own language and homeland, which straddles the French-Spanish border in the western Pyrenees Mountains. About 890,000 Basque-speakers live in Spain and 80,000 in France, though a larger number identify themselves as Basques in both countries and a large number have migrated to North and South America. The Basque origins are a mystery. Their language is unrelated to any Indo-European language. Traditionally a fiercely independent fishing people, the Basques were known as early as the Middle Ages as skilled boat makers and courageous whale hunters. Today, they are staunchly Roman Catholic and noted for their distinctive music and a light-footed, acrobatic form of dancing. The Basques repulsed incursions by Romans, Moors and others until the late 1700s. They lost their autonomy in France after the French Revolution and in Spain during the early 1800s. The movement for Basque separatism rose in the 19th and 20th centuries.