The Anatomy of a Moment

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Twenty-three minutes after six on 23 February 1981. In the chamber of the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Cortes, they are holding the investiture vote for Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who is about to be confirmed as Prime Minister to replace Adolfo Suárez, who resigned twenty-five days ago and is still acting Prime Minister after an almost five-year term in office during which the country had come to the end of a dictatorship and built a democracy. Sitting in their seats while waiting their turn to vote, the deputies chat, doze or daydream in the early evening torpor; the only voice that resounds clearly in the hall is that of Víctor Carrascal, Secretary of the Congress, who reads the list of deputies from the speakers’ rostrum so that, as they hear their name, they stand up and support or refuse with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ Calvo Sotelo’s candidacy, or they abstain. This is now the second vote and there is no suspense: in the first, held three days ago, Calvo Sotelo did not obtain the support of an absolute majority of the deputies, but in this second round he needs only the support of a simple majority, so — given that this majority is assured — unless something unexpected happens, in a few minutes the candidate will be elected Prime Minister.

But something unexpected happens. Víctor Carrascal reads the name José Nasarre de Letosa Conde, who votes ‘yes’; then he reads the name Carlos Navarrete Merino, who votes ‘no’; then he reads the name Manuel Núñez Encabo, and at that moment an anomalous noise is heard, perhaps a shout from the right-hand door to the chamber, and Núñez Encabo does not vote or his vote is inaudible or gets lost amid the perplexed commotion of the deputies, some of whom look at each other, wondering whether or not to believe their ears, while others sit up straight in their seats to try to establish what’s happening, maybe less anxious than curious. Clear and disconcerted, the Secretary’s voice enquires: ‘What’s going on?’, mumbles something, asks again: ‘What’s going on?’, and at the same time a uniformed usher comes in from the right, strides urgently across the central semicircle of the chamber, where the stenographers sit, and starts up the stairs between the deputies’ benches; halfway up he stops, exchanges a few words with one of the deputies and turns around; then he goes up another three steps and turns around again. It is then that a second shout is heard, indistinct, from the left-hand entrance to the chamber, and then, also unintelligible, a third, and many deputies — and all the stenographers, and the usher as well — turn to look towards the left-hand entrance.

The angle changes; a second camera focuses on the left wing of the chamber: pistol in hand, Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard Antonio Tejero calmly walks up the steps of the dais, passes behind the Secretary and stands beside the Speaker Landelino Lavilla, who looks at him incredulously. The lieutenant colonel shouts: ‘Nobody move!’, and a couple of spellbound seconds follow during which nothing happens and no one moves and nothing seems to be going to happen or happen to anybody, except silence. The angle changes, but not the silence: the lieutenant colonel has vanished because the first camera focuses on the right wing of the chamber, where all the parliamentarians who had stood up have taken their seats again, and the only one still on his feet is General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, Deputy Prime Minister of the acting government; beside him, Adolfo Suárez remains seated on the Prime Minister’s bench, leaning forward, a hand gripping the armrest of his seat, as if he is about to stand up too. Four nearby shouts, distinct and indisputable, then break the spell: someone shouts: ‘Silence!’; someone shouts: ‘Nobody move!’; someone shouts: ‘Get down on the floor!’; someone shouts: ‘Everyone down on the floor!’ The chamber rushes to obey: the usher and stenographers kneel down beside their table; some deputies appear to cringe in their seats. General Gutiérrez Mellado, however, goes out to face the rebellious lieutenant colonel, while Prime Minister Suárez tries to hold him back unsuccessfully, clutching at his jacket. Now Lieutenant Colonel Tejero appears in the frame again, coming down the steps from the speakers’ rostrum, but he stops halfway, confused or intimidated by the presence of General Gutiérrez Mellado, who walks towards him demanding with categorical gestures that he immediately leave the chamber, while three Civil Guards burst in through the right-hand entrance and pounce on the scrawny old general, push him, grab him by the jacket, shove him, nearly throwing him to the ground. Prime Minister Suárez stands up and goes to his Deputy Prime Minister; the lieutenant colonel is halfway down the steps, undecided whether to go all the way down, watching the scene. Then the first shot rings out; then the second shot and Prime Minister Suárez grabs the arm of General Gutiérrez Mellado, who stands undaunted in front of a Civil Guard who orders him with gestures and shouts to get down on the floor; then the third shot rings out and, still staring down the Civil Guard, General Gutiérrez Mellado pulls his arm violently out of the Prime Minister’s grip; then the burst of gunfire erupts. While the bullets rip visible chunks of plaster out of the ceiling and one after another the stenographers and the usher hide under the table and the benches swallow up the deputies until not a single one of them remains in sight, the old general stands amid the automatic-rifle fire, with his arms hanging down at his sides, looking at the insubordinate Civil Guards, who do not stop firing. As for Prime Minister Suárez, he slowly returns to his seat, sits down, leans against the backrest and stays there, inclined slightly to the right, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desert of empty benches.

Chapter 1

That’s the image; that’s the gesture: a translucent gesture that contains many gestures.

At the end of 1989, when Adolfo Suárez’s political career was drawing to a close, Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrated in an essay the birth of a new type of hero: heroes of retreat. According to Enzensberger, instead of the classic hero, the hero of triumph and conquest, the twentieth century’s dictatorships have brought to light a new kind of modern hero, who is a hero of renunciation, reduction and dismantling: the first is a steadfast and principled idealist; the second, a dubious professional of fixing and negotiation; the first reaches the height of his achievement by imposing his positions; the second, by abandoning them, undermining himself. That’s why the hero of retreat is more than a political hero: he is also a moral hero. Enzensberger gives three examples of this innovative figure: Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was trying to dismantle the Soviet Union; Wojciech Jaruzelski, who in 1981 had prevented a Soviet invasion of Poland; Adolfo Suárez, who had dismantled the Franco regime. Adolfo Suárez a hero? And not just politically, but a moral hero? For the right as well as the left that was a difficult one to swallow: the left could not forget — had no reason to forget — that, although after a given moment he wanted to be a progressive politician, and up to a certain point he managed to be, Suárez was for many years a loyal collaborator with Francoism and a perfect prototype of the arriviste that the Franco regime’s institutionalized corruption favoured; the right could not forget — should not have forgotten — that Suárez never accepted his attachment to the right, that many policies he applied or advocated were not right-wing and no other Spanish politician of the second half of the twentieth century has exasperated the right as much as he did. Was Suárez then a hero of the centre, that political pipe dream he himself coined in order to harvest votes from the right and the left? Impossible, because the fanciful notion vanished as soon as Suárez left politics, or even before, the way magic vanishes as soon as the magician leaves the stage. Now, twenty years after Enzensberger’s report, when illness has destroyed Suárez and he is regarded as a praiseworthy figure by all, maybe because he can no longer bother anybody, there is among the Spanish ruling class an agreement to accord him a starring role in the foundation of the democracy; but it’s one thing to have participated in the founding of Spanish democracy and quite another to be a hero of democracy. Was he? Is Enzensberger right? And, if we forget for a moment that no one is a hero to their contemporaries and accept as a hypothesis that Enzensberger is right, does Suárez’s gesture on the evening of 23 February not acquire the value of a founding gesture of democracy? Does Suárez’s gesture not then become emblematic of Suárez as a hero of retreat?

The first thing that needs to be said is that this gesture is not a gratuitous gesture; Suárez’s gesture is a gesture with meaning, although we might not know exactly what it means, just as the gesture of all the rest of the parliamentarians — all except Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo — has meaning and is not gratuitous, those who instead of remaining seated during the gunfire obey the golpistas and seek shelter under their benches: that of the rest of the parliamentarians is not, let’s be honest, a terribly graceful gesture, which none of those involved has wanted to dwell on or return to, and rightly so, although one of them — someone as cold and calm as Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo — doesn’t hesitate to attribute the Parliament’s discredit to that desert of empty benches. The most obvious gesture Suárez’s gesture contains is a gesture of courage; a remarkable courage: those who lived through that moment in the Cortes all remember the apocalyptic din of the bursts of automatic-rifle fire in the enclosed space of the chamber, the horror of an immediate death, the certainty that this Armageddon — in the words of Alfonso Guerra, deputy leader of the Socialist Party, who was sitting opposite Suárez — could not end without a massacre, which is the same certainty overwhelming the television directors and technicians who watched the scene live from the Prado del Rey studios. That day the chamber was filled with about three hundred and fifty parliamentarians, some of whom — Simón Sánchez Montero, for example, or Gregorio López Raimundo — had demonstrated their valour in clandestinity and in Franco’s prisons; I don’t know if there’s much to reproach them for: whichever way you look at it, remaining in your seat during the skirmish was an act so rash it verged on a desire for martyrdom. In wartime, in the unthinking heat of combat, it is not unusually rash; in peacetime and in the solemn, habitual tedium of a parliamentary session it is. I’ll add that, to judge from the images, Suárez’s rashness is not one dictated by instinct but by reason: when the first shot sounds Suárez is on his feet; at the sound of the second he tries to bring General Gutiérrez Mellado back to the bench; at the sound of the third and the outbreak of the firing he sits down, settles on his bench and leans against the backrest waiting for the shooting to stop, or a bullet to kill him. It is a lingering, reflexive gesture; it appears to be a practised gesture, and maybe in a certain way it was: those who saw Suárez frequently at that time attested that he had spent a lot of time trying to prepare himself for a violent end, as if hounded by a dark premonition (for several months he’d been carrying a small pistol in his pocket; during the autumn and winter more than one visitor to Moncloa, the prime ministerial residence, heard him say: ‘The only way they’re going to get me out of here is by beating me in an election or carrying me out feet first’); it could be, but in any case it’s not easy to prepare oneself for a death like that, and it is especially difficult not to weaken when the moment arrives.

Given that it’s a courageous gesture, Suárez’s gesture is a graceful gesture, because every courageous gesture is, according to Ernest Hemingway, a gesture of grace under pressure. In this sense it is an affirmative gesture; in another it is a negative gesture, because every courageous gesture is, according to Albert Camus, the rebellious gesture of a man who says no. In both cases it is a supreme gesture of liberty; it is not contradictory to say that it is also a histrionic gesture: the gesture of a man playing a role. If I’m not mistaken, only a couple of novels completely centred on the 23 February coup have been published; they’re not great novels, but one of them has the added interest that its author is Josep Melià, a journalist who was an acerbic critic of Suárez before becoming one of his closest collaborators. Operating as a novelist, at a certain point in his story Melià asks himself what the first thing was that Suárez thought when he heard the first shot in the chamber; he answers: the front page of tomorrow’s New York Times. The answer, which might seem innocuous or malicious, is intended to be cordial; it strikes me most of all as true. Like any pure politician, Suárez was a consummate actor: young, athletic, extremely handsome and always dressed with the polish of a provincial ladies’ man who enchanted mothers of right-wing families and provoked the mockery of left-wing journalists — double-breasted jackets with gold buttons, dark-grey trousers, sky-blue shirts and navy-blue ties — Suárez knowingly took advantage of his Kennedy-like bearing, understood politics as spectacle and during his many years of work at Radiotelevisión Española learned that it was no longer reality that created images, rather images that created reality. A few days before 23 February, at the most dramatic moment of his political life, when he announced his resignation as Prime Minister in a speech to a small group of Party members, Suárez could not help but insert a comment of the incorrigible leading man that he was: ‘Do you realize?’ he said to them. ‘My resignation will be front-page news in every newspaper in the world.’ The evening of 23 February was not the most dramatic moment of his political life, but the most dramatic of his whole life and, in spite of that (or precisely because of it), it’s possible that while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber an intuition trained over years of political stardom dictated the instantaneous obviousness that, no matter what role fate had reserved for him at the end of that barbarous performance, he would never again act before an audience so absorbed and so large. If that’s true, he was not mistaken: the next day his picture monopolized the front page of the New York Times and that of all the newspapers and television screens in the world. Suárez’s gesture, in this way, is the gesture of a man who’s posing. That’s what Melià imagines. But thinking it through perhaps his imagination is too slight; thinking it through, on the evening of 23 February Suárez was perhaps not posing just for the newspapers and television screens: just as he would from that moment on in his political life — just as if in that moment he’d known who he truly was — perhaps Suárez was posing for history.

That’s maybe another gesture his gesture contains: a posthumous gesture, so to speak. Because the fact is that at least for its main leaders the 23 February coup was not exactly a coup against democracy: it was a coup against Adolfo Suárez; or if you prefer: it was a coup against the kind of democracy Adolfo Suárez embodied for them. Suárez only understood this hours or days later, but in those first seconds he could not have been unaware that for almost five years of democracy no politician had attracted the hatred of the golpistas as much as he had and that, if blood was going to be spilled that evening in the Cortes, the first to be spilled would be his. Maybe that might be an explanation of his gesture: as soon as he heard the first shot, Suárez knew he could not protect himself from death, knew that he was already dead. I admit this is an embarrassing explanation, which tastelessly combines emphasis with melodrama; but that doesn’t make it false, especially since deep down Suárez’s gesture is still a gesture of emphatic melodrama characteristic of a man whose temperament tended as much towards comedy as tragedy and melodrama. Suárez, it’s true, would have rejected the explanation. In fact, whenever anyone asked him to explain his gesture he opted for the same reply: ‘Because I was still Prime Minister of His Majesty’s government and the Prime Minister of the government could not dive for cover.’ The reply, which I believe sincere, is predictable, and betrays a very important characteristic of Suárez: his sacramental devotion to power, the disproportionate dignity bestowed by the office he held; it is also not a boastful reply: it presupposes that, had he not still been Prime Minister, he would have acted upon the same prudent instinct as the rest of his colleagues, protecting himself from the gunshots under his bench; but it is, furthermore or most of all, an insufficient reply: it forgets that all the rest of the parliamentarians represented the sovereignty of the people with almost the same claim as he had — not to mention Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who was going to be sworn in as Prime Minister that very evening, or Felipe González, who would be within a year and a half, or Manuel Fraga, who aspired to be, or Landelino Lavilla, who was the Speaker of the Cortes, or Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, who was Minister of Defence and responsible for the Army. Be that as it may, one thing is beyond doubt: Suárez’s gesture is not the powerful gesture of a man confronting adversity at the height of his powers, but the gesture of a man politically finished and personally broken, who for the last six months has felt that the entire political class was plotting against him and maybe now also feels that the seditious Civil Guards bursting into the chamber of the Cortes is the result of this same widespread conspiracy.

Chapter 2

The first feeling is quite accurate; the second not so much. It’s true that during the autumn and winter of 1980 the Spanish ruling class has devoted itself to a series of strange political manoeuvres with the objective of bringing down Adolfo Suárez’s government, but it’s only partly true that the attack on the Cortes and the military coup are the result of this widespread conspiracy. Two different things are involved in the 23 February coup: one is a series of political operations against Adolfo Suárez, but not against democracy, or not in principle; the other is a military operation against Adolfo Suárez and also against democracy. The two things are not entirely independent; but neither are they entirely united: the political operations were the context that fostered the military operation; they were the placenta of the coup, not the coup itself: the nuance is key in understanding the coup. For this reason we don’t need to pay too much attention to the politicians of the time who state that they knew in advance what was going to happen in the Cortes that evening, or that many people in the chamber knew, or even that the whole chamber knew; they are almost certainly fictitious, vain or self-interested memories: the truth is, since the political operation and the military operation barely communicated, nobody or almost nobody in the chamber knew, and very few people outside knew.

What everyone in the whole country did know was that a coup d’état was in the air that winter. On 20 February, three days before the coup, Ricardo Paseyro, Madrid correspondent for Paris Match, wrote: ‘Spain’s economic situation is verging on catastrophe, terrorism is on the rise, scepticism towards institutions and their representatives is profoundly damaging the soul of the nation, the state is collapsing beneath the assault of feudalism and the excesses on the part of the autonomous governments, and Spain’s foreign policy is a fiasco.’ He concluded: ‘There is the scent of a coup d’état, a golpe de estado, in the air.’ Everyone knew what could happen, but no one or almost no one knew when, how and where; as for who, prospective candidates to carry out a coup d’état were not exactly in short supply in the Army, although it’s certain that as soon as Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the chamber everyone or almost every one of the deputies must have recognized him immediately, because his face had been in the newspapers ever since mid-November 1978 when Diario 16 broke the news that he had been arrested for planning a coup based on taking the government hostage when the Cabinet was meeting at Moncloa and using the resulting power vacuum as an excuse to take over control of the state; after his arrest, Tejero was put on trial, but the military tribunal ended up imposing a laughable sentence and a few months later he was already at liberty and available for duty, that is without a concrete professional assignment, that is without any occupation other than making preparations for his second attempt with maximum discretion and the minimum number of people, which ought to prevent the leak that made the first one fall through. So, in the most absolute secrecy, counting on a very reduced number of military conspirators and with a very high degree of improvisation, the coup was hatched, and this explains to a great extent how, of all the threatened coups looming over Spanish democracy since the previous summer, this was the one that finally materialized.

The threats against Spanish democracy, however, had not begun the previous summer. A long time after Suárez left power a journalist asked him at what moment did he begin to suspect that a coup d’état might be in the works. ‘From the moment I gained the use of prime ministerial reason,’ Suárez answered. He wasn’t lying. Less than an accident of history, in Spain the golpe de estado is a vernacular rite: all democratic experiments in Spain have been finished by coups d’état, and in the last two centuries there have been more than fifty; the last had been in 1936, five years after the installation of the Republic; 1981 was also five years since the starting point of the democratic process; combined with the difficult time the country was going through, that chance turned into a numerical superstition and that numerical superstition gnawed away at the coup d’état psychosis among the ruling class. But it was not just a psychosis, nor just a superstition. In reality, Suárez had even more reasons than any other democratic Spanish Prime Minister to fear a coup d’état from the very moment when he showed by his actions that his intention was not, as might have seemed at the beginning of his mandate, to change something so everything would stay the same, prolonging the content of Francoism by airbrushing its form, but to restore a political regime essentially similar to the one against which forty years before Franco and the Army had risen up in arms: it was not just that when Suárez came to power the Armed Forces were almost uniformly Francoist; they were, by Franco’s explicit mandate, the guardians of Francoism. The most famous phrase of the transition from dictatorship to democracy (‘Everything is tied up and well tied’) was not spoken by any of the protagonists of the transition; it was spoken by Franco, which perhaps suggests that Franco was the true protagonist of the transition, or at least one of the protagonists. Everyone remembers that phrase spoken on 30 December 1969 in his year-end speech, and everyone interprets it for what it is: a guarantee issued by the dictator to his faithful that after his death everything would carry on exactly as it was before his death or that, as the Falangist intellectual Jesús Fueyo put it, ‘after Franco, the institutions’; not everyone remembers, on the other hand, that seven years before Franco pronounced an almost identical phrase (‘Everything is tied up and guaranteed’) during a speech to an assembly of Civil War veterans gathered at Garabitas Hill, and on that occasion he added: ‘Under the faithful and insurmountable guardianship of our Armed Forces.’ It was an order: after his death, the Army’s mission was to preserve Francoism. But shortly before he died Franco gave the military a different order in his will, and it was that they should obey the King with the same loyalty with which they’d obeyed him. Of course, neither Franco nor the military imagined that the two orders could come to be contradictory and, when the political reforms brought the country into democracy demonstrating that indeed they were, because the King was deserting Francoism, the majority of military officers wavered: they had to choose between obeying Franco’s first order, preventing democracy by force, and obeying the second, accepting that it contradicted and annulled the first, and consequently accepting democracy. That wavering is one of the keys to 23 February; it also explains that almost from the very moment he reached the premiership in July 1976 Suárez would live surrounded by rumours of a coup d’état. At the beginning of 1981 the rumours were no more tenacious than they had been in January or April of 1977, but never had the political situation been as favourable for a coup as it was then.

From the summer of 1980 the country is in an ever deepening crisis. Many share the Paris Match correspondent’s diagnosis: the economy is in bad shape, the decentralization of the state is dismasting the state and exasperating the Army, Suárez is proving incapable of governing while his party is disintegrating and the opposition is hard at work trying to bury him once and for all, the inaugural charm of democracy seems to have vanished in a few years and on the streets one senses a mixture of insecurity, pessimism and fear;* furthermore, there is terrorism, especially ETA terrorism, which is reaching unprecedented levels while venting its anger on the Civil Guard and the rest of the Armed Forces. The outlook is alarming, and talk begins to circulate of finding emergency solutions: not only from the eternal advocators of a military coup — unrepentant Francoists stripped of their privileges who fan the flames with daily patriotic harangues in the barracks — but also people of long-standing democratic affiliation, like Josep Tarradellas, an old Republican politician and former premier of the autonomous Catalan government who since the summer of 1979 had been asking for ‘a touch on the rudder’ to get the misdirected democracy back on course and who in July 1980 demanded ‘a surgical coup to straighten the country out’. Touch on the rudder, surgical coup, change of course: this is the fearful terminology that impregnated conversations from the summer of 1980 in the hallways of the Cortes, dinners, lunches and political discussions and newspaper and magazine articles in the political village of Madrid. Such expressions are simple euphemisms, or rather empty concepts, which everyone fills in according to their own interests, and which, aside from the resonances of coups they evoke, have only one point in common: for the Francoists as much as for the democrats, for Blas Piñar’s or Girón de Velasco’s ultraright-wingers as much as for Felipe González’s Socialists and many of Santiago Carrillo’s Communists and many of Suárez’s own centrists, the only one to blame for that crisis is Adolfo Suárez, and the first condition for ending the crisis is to get him out of government. It is a legitimate and sensible wish, because for a long time before the summer Suárez has been an ineffective politician; but politics is also a matter of form — especially the politics of a democracy with many enemies inside and outside the Army, a recently unveiled democracy, the rules of which are still being rolled out and no one has yet mastered, and whose seams are still extremely fragile — and here the problem is not one of content, but of form: the problem was not getting rid of Suárez, but how to get rid of Suárez. The answer the Spanish ruling class should have given to this question is the only answer possible in a democracy as frail as that of 1981: through elections; this was not the answer the Spanish ruling class gave to the question and the answer was practically unvarying: at any price. It was a savage answer, to a great extent the result of arrogance, avarice for power and the immaturity of a ruling class that would rather run the risk of creating conditions favourable to the conduct of the saboteurs of democracy than continue tolerating the presence of the intolerable Adolfo Suárez in the government. There is no other way to explain that from the summer of 1980 onward politicians, businessmen, labour and Church leaders and journalists were deliriously exaggerating the gravity of the situation to be able to play daily with constitutionally questionable solutions that made the already stumbling government of the country stumble, inventing unparliamentary short cuts, threatening to jam the new institutional gears and creating a chaos that constituted the ideal fuel for a possible coup. In the great sewer of Madrid, which is how Suárez referred to the political village of Madrid during that time, those solutions — those surgical coups or touches on the rudder, those changes of course — were no secret to anyone, and rare was the day when the press made no mention of one of them, almost always to encourage it: one day they spoke of a caretaker government led by Alfonso Osorio — right-wing deputy and Deputy Prime Minister of Suárez’s first government — and the next day they talked about an interim government led by José María de Areilza — also a right-winger and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the King’s first government — one day they were talking about Operación Quirinal, bound to make Landelino Lavilla — Speaker of the Cortes and leader of the Christian Democrat sector of Suárez’s party — Prime Minister of a coalition government and the next day they were talking about Operation de Gaulle, to make a prestigious military officer leader of a government of national unity, Álvaro Lacalle Leloup or Jesús González del Yerro or Alfonso Armada, the King’s former secretary and eventual leader of the 23 February coup attempt; barely a week went by without voices that disagreed over just about everything coming together to agree on their demand for a strong government, which was interpreted by many as a demand for a government led by a military man or involving military officers, a government that would protect the Crown from the turbulence, that would correct the chaos of improvisation with which they had made the change from dictatorship to democracy and would put a stop to what some called its excesses, check the spread of terrorism, resuscitate the economy, rationalize the regional autonomy process and make the country calm again. It was a daily jumble of proposals, gossip and secret meetings, and on 2 December 1980 Joaquín Aguirre Bellver, parliamentary reporter for the far-right paper El Alcázar, described the political atmosphere in the Cortes: ‘A Turkish-style coup, interim government, coalition government. . A horse race à la General Pavía [. .] At this stage anybody who doesn’t have his own formula for the coup is a nobody. Meanwhile, Suárez walks the corridors alone, and no one pays him any attention.’ Working things to the advantage of a coup, Aguirre Bellver conscientiously blends military coups in his list — the one led by General Evren a short time ago in Turkey or the one led by General Pavía in Spain a little more than a century before — with theoretically constitutional political operations. It was a deceitful, lethal blend; out of this blend arose 23 February: the political operations were the placenta that nourished the coup, supplying arguments and alibis; to openly discuss the possibility of offering the government to a military man or of asking the military for help in order to escape from the mess, the ruling class half opened the door of politics to an army clamouring to intervene in politics to destroy democracy, and on 23 February the Army burst through that door en masse. As for Suárez, the description Aguirre Bellver gives of him in the winter of the coup is very exact, and inevitably makes one think that the image of his solitary figure in the corridors of the Cortes prefigures his solitary image in the chamber during the evening of 23 February: it is the image of a lost man and a written-off politician who in the months before the coup feels that the entire political class, the entire ruling class of the country, is plotting against him. He is not the only one to feel this way: ‘we’re all plotting’ is the headline of an article published at the beginning of December in the newspaper ABC by Pilar Urbano in which she refers to the machinations against Suárez by a group of journalists, businessmen, diplomats and politicians of various parties dining together in the capital. He is not the only one to feel this: in the great sewer of Madrid, in the political village, many feel that the whole of reality is plotting against Adolfo Suárez, and during the autumn and winter of 1980 there is barely a single member of the ruling class who consciously or unconsciously does not add his grain of sand to the great mountain of the conspiracy. Or what Suárez feels as a conspiracy.

* The word of the moment is disenchantment; if it made its fortune as a description of the time it’s because it reflected a reality: in the second half of 1976, shortly after Suárez came to power, 78 per cent of Spaniards preferred political decisions to be made by representatives elected by the people, and in 1978, the year the Constitution was approved, 77 per cent defined themselves as unconditional democrats; but, according to the Metroscopia Institute, in 1980 barely half of Spaniards preferred democracy over any other form of government: the rest had doubts or didn’t care, or supported a return to dictatorship.

Chapter 3

Journalists are plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they are plotting against him). Of course, the far-right journalists are plotting, attacking Suárez daily because they consider that destroying him equals destroying democracy. It’s true there are not many of them, but they’re important because their newspapers and magazines — El Alcázar, El Imparcial, Heraldo Español, Fuerza Nueva, Reconquista — are almost the only ones that get inside the barracks, persuading the military that the situation is even worse than it actually is and that, unless out of irresponsibility, egotism or cowardice they allow themselves to be complicit with an unworthy political class that is driving Spain to the brink, sooner or later they’ll have to intervene to save the endangered nation. The exhortations for a coup have been constant since the beginning of democracy, but since the summer of 1980 they are no longer sibylline: the 7 August issue of the weekly Heraldo Español had an enormous white horse rearing up on the cover and a full-page headline demanding: ‘who will mount this horse? wanted: a general’; inside, a pseudonymously signed article by the journalist Fernando Latorre proposed avoiding a hard military coup by staging a soft military coup that would place a general in the premiership of a government of unity, bandied about a few names — among them that of General Alfonso Armada — and imperiously suggested the King should choose between two types of coup: ‘Pavía or Prim: let he who can choose.’ In the autumn and winter of 1980, but especially in the weeks before 23 February, these harangues were an everyday occurrence, especially in the newspaper El Alcázar, perhaps the most combative publication of the far right, and undoubtedly the most influential: three articles were published there between the end of December and the beginning of February signed by Almendros — a pseudonym that probably disguised the reserve general Manuel Cabeza Calahorra, who in his turn collected the opinions of a group of retired generals — calling for the interruption of democracy by the Army and the King, just as the reserve general Fernando de Santiago — who five years earlier had been one of the Deputy Prime Ministers in Suárez’s first government — called for fifteen days before the coup in an article entitled ‘Extreme Situation’; there, on 24 January, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Antonio Izquierdo, wrote: ‘Mysterious unofficial emissaries, who claim to be well informed about everything, are going around these days communicating to well-known personalities in news and finance that “the coup is about to happen, within two months everything will be settled”’; and there, in spite of the stealth with which the coup was hatched, the night before 23 February some clued-up readers knew that the following day would be the great day: the front page of the 22 February issue of El Alcázar showed a photo three columns wide of the empty chamber of the Cortes, beneath which, as the paper had done on other occasions, a red sphere warned that the front page contained agreed information; the information could be found by joining with a straight line the point of a thick arrow pointing to the chamber (inside which could be read: ‘All ready for Monday’s session’) to the text of the article by the editor that appeared to the right of the photo; the phrase of the article the straight line pointed to gave almost the exact time Lieutenant Colonel Tejero would enter the Cortes on the following day: ‘Before the clock marks 18.30 next Monday.’ So, although it is most likely that none of the deputies present in the Cortes on the evening of 23 February knew in advance what was going to happen, at least the editor of El Alcázar and some of his contributors did know. There are four questions: who provided them with that information? Who else knew? Who knew how to interpret that front page? Who was the newspaper trying to warn?*

But not only far-right journalists are plotting against Suárez — and against democracy — democratic journalists are also plotting against him — or Suárez feels they are plotting against him. It is the feeling of a cornered man, but maybe it’s not an inexact feeling. The final stages of Francoism and the beginnings of the transition had brought about a singular symbiosis between journalism and politics, a cronyism between politicians and journalists that allowed the latter to feel themselves protagonists of the first order in the change from dictatorship to democracy; by 1980, however, that complicity has broken, or at least the complicity has broken down between Suárez and the press, which considers itself disdained by power and attributes to this disdain the responsibility or part of the responsibility for the terrible time the country’s going through. The wounded pride the press is feeling then is a translation of Suárez’s wounded pride (and also a translation of the wounded pride the country is feeling) and, given that some significant journalists claim the mission of dictating the government’s policies and consider Suárez little short of an impostor and in any case a deplorable politician, in much of the media the criticism of Suárez is brutally harsh and contributes to spurring on the coup d’état mentality, feeding the phantom of an emergency situation and giving space on their pages to constant rumours of political operations and hard or soft coups under way that, rather than prevent them, serves to prepare the ground for them. Furthermore, four and a half years in power — and especially four years as intense as those experienced by Suárez — have been more than enough to make many enemies: there are spiteful journalists who change their adulation in a very short time into scorn; there are critical journalists who turn into kamikaze journalists; there are editorial conglomerations — like the 16 Group, owners of Diario 16 and Cambio 16, the most important political weekly of the time — that in the summer of 1980 initiate a ferocious campaign against Suárez instigated by the leaders of his own party; there are cases like that of Emilio Romero, undoubtedly the most influential journalist of the late stages of the Franco regime, who after being ousted by Suárez from his privileged position in the press of the Movimiento, the only party allowed to exist under Franco, developed a lasting hatred for the Prime Minister, and who, in his column in ABC a few days before the coup, proposed General Armada as a candidate to lead the government after the surgical coup or touch on the rudder that should displace Suárez. The case of Luis María Anson, a very prominent journalist in democratic times, is different and more complicated.

Anson was a veteran defender of the monarchist cause whom Suárez had helped in the early 1970s, when he thought he was going to be charged for insulting Franco as a result of an article published in ABC; later, in the mid-1970s, it was Anson who helped Suárez: encouraged by the future King, the journalist urged on Suárez’s political career while in charge of the magazine Blanco y Negro, boosted his candidacy for Prime Minister of the government and celebrated his appointment in Gaceta Ilustrada with an enthusiasm unusual in the reformist press; finally it was Suárez who helped Anson again: just two months after reaching the premiership he appointed the journalist to the post of director of the state news agency EFE. Although Anson remained at the head of the agency until 1982, this mutual exchange of favours was cut short a few months later, when the journalist began to feel that Suárez was a weak politician and had a complex about his Falangist past and that he was handing power in the new democracy to the left, and turned into an implacable detractor of the Prime Minister’s policies; implacable and public: Anson met periodically in the EFE agency canteen with politicians, journalists, financiers, Church officials and military officers, and in those meetings stirred up discontent against his erstwhile patron from very early on; also, according to Francisco Medina, as early as the autumn of 1977 he discussed a plan to rectify democracy — in reality a concealed coup d’état — inspired by the events of June 1958 that allowed General de Gaulle to return to power and found the French Fifth Republic: the idea was that the Army would put discreet pressure on the King to persuade Suárez to resign and oblige him to establish a theoretically apolitical government led by a technocrat, a government of unity or salvation that would place constitutional legitimacy in brackets for a time with the aim of re-establishing order, stopping the bloodbath of terrorism and overcoming the economic crisis; with the addition of a military officer leading the government, large doses of improvisation and recklessness, and a head-on crash with constitutional order, that was the plan the golpistas tried to execute on 23 February. Anson’s relationship with General Armada — described in his memoir as ‘a good friend’ with whom he’d kept in touch over ‘many years’ — the rigid monarchical convictions that united them, the fact that certain witnesses claimed Anson figured as a minister in the government Armada planned to form as a result of the coup, EFE’s resistance after 23 February to accepting the general’s role as leader of the rebellion, Anson’s belligerence towards Suárez’s politics and his prestige as perpetual conspirator extended suspicions about the journalist over time. However, the truth is that Anson and Armada’s relationship was not as close as the general made it out to be, that the journalist figured in the supposed list of Armada’s government along with numerous democratic politicians ignorant of the role the general desired to assign them as guarantors of the coup, and that EFE’s unwillingness to admit that the King’s former secretary would have led the attempted military coup was a reflection of a quite generalized incredulity in the days immediately following 23 February; as for the idea of the coup, it was most probably that of the general himself — who had arrived in Paris as a student at the École de Guerre shortly after de Gaulle’s ascent to power in France and had experienced its consequences up close — who conceived it and spread it so successfully that from the summer of 1980 it was circulating profusely throughout the political village of Madrid and there was hardly a political party that did not consider the hypothesis of placing a soldier at the head of a coalition or caretaker or unity government as one of the possible ways of expelling Suárez from power. In short, no serious indication exists that Anson was a direct promoter of Armada’s candidacy for the leadership of a coalition government — and much less that he was linked to the military coup — although there is no reason to disregard that at some point in the autumn and winter of 1980 he might have considered that emergency solution to be reasonable, because it is certain that the journalist encouraged any effort designed to replace as soon as possible a head of government who, in his opinion as in that of almost all of the ruling class, was leading the Crown and the country to disaster.

* I don’t have answers for these questions, but I do have some speculations. The newspaper probably obtained the information from General Milans del Bosch, who the next day would rebel against the government in Valencia, or from one of Milans del Bosch’s direct collaborators, or, more likely, from Juan García Carrés, former head of the vertical trade unions of the Franco era who in the months leading up to the coup acted as liaison between Milans del Bosch and Tejero: Milans del Bosch and García Carrés both maintained close links with El Alcázar. José Antonio Girón de Velasco, leader of a sector of the far right, president of the Confederation of Combatants and close friend of García Carrés, would probably likewise have known; also, generals in the reserves linked to Cabeza Calahorra and Fernando de Santiago and former Francoist ministers linked to Girón de Velasco, but not the far-right parliamentarian who had a seat in the Cortes: the leader of Fuerza Nueva, Blas Piar. Undoubtedly more people knew, but not many more. In any case, this is especially fertile ground for fantasy or, indeed, for hallucination: on 5 February Manuel Fraga, leader of the right-wing party Alianza Popular, writes in his diary: ‘Rumours everywhere [. .]. A clairvoyant mentions a coup for the 24th’; on the 13th the police receive a report from an informer who is about to be fired for his lack of credibility that announces a coup for the 23rd; Spic, a monthly commercial aviation journal devoted to leisure and tourism, goes on sale on the 18th; one of the articles, signed by its editor, says: ‘It is not true that I intend to launch a coup on Monday 23 February. . besides, I don’t know (además no sé)’ (further hallucination: the word además contains 6 letters; the word no 2; the word sé another 2; result: 6.22, almost exactly the time Lieutenant Colonel Tejero bursts into the Cortes). It is important to say that on the 5th, on the 13th and even on the 18th the date and time of the coup had still not been fixed.

Chapter 4

Bankers and businessmen are also plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they’re plotting against him) as well as the right-wing party that the bankers and businessmen back: Alianza Popular. It has not always been like this: businessmen and bankers have not always backed the party of the right, or they haven’t always done so with as much enthusiasm. Although it is likely that deep down they despised Suárez since he came to power (and not only because they considered him ignorant of economic matters), the fact is that at the beginning of his mandate bankers and businessmen supported the new Prime Minister unreservedly because they understood that supporting him was supporting the monarchy and because the monarchy convinced them that this likeable nonentity, who had started out as an errand boy in the Movimiento edifice and knew it like the back of his hand after having swept every last corner of the place, was the ideal foreman to direct the demolition job of an obsolete architecture that for forty years had been of great use to them but now was hindering their business and embarrassing them before their European colleagues. Suárez came through: he carried out the task successfully; once completed, however, he should go: this was the opinion of the majority of bankers and businessmen. But Suárez didn’t go; on the contrary: what happened was that the errand boy promoted to foreman fancied himself an architect and began to erect the brand-new edifice of democracy on the razed site of the edifice of the dictatorship. That’s where the problem started: after years of seeking their approval, emboldened by the repeated endorsement of votes Suárez began to give them the brush-off, to refuse their advice and pats on the back, avoid them or ignore them or snub them or make gestures that they interpreted as snubs, and ended up not receiving them at Moncloa or taking their calls and not even acknowledging the warning and lessons with which they tried to return him to the fold. That’s how they discovered to their cost something they’d suspected from the start, which was that the formerly obliging errand boy was concealing one of those cocky provincial upstarts who nurse like a grudge the dream of facing up to the strongest men in the capital. That was also how they discovered, as they noticed anxiously that business was getting worse and worse, the belated or improvised social democratic vocation afflicting Suárez and to which they indistinctly attributed his incapacity to rid himself of his upbringing as a young Falangist with the revolution pending, his eagerness to emulate Felipe González, the brilliant young Socialist leader, and his obsession with acquiring the credentials of democratic purity the approval of the newspaper El País could bestow. And that was how, over the course of 1980, they decided Suárez’s policies were definitely doing nothing but making the economic crisis worse and tearing the state to pieces; they likewise decided that this plebeian was practising the premiership fraudulently, because his power came from the right, who had voted for him and who had supported him for four years, but he was governing for the left. The conclusion came swiftly: the erroneous premiership of this illicit, insolent upstart must be ended by whatever means necessary. From there in the autumn and winter before the coup bankers and businessmen boosted the nightmare of a country rushing towards catastrophe, they backed any and every political operation against Suárez’s government that the right came up with and injected daily doses of disquiet into the disquiet of the most conservative sectors of the party that propped up government, with the aim of dismembering it, uniting the deserters with the minority Alianza Popular and forming with them a new government led by a politician or an independent technocrat or a high-ranking military officer, a coalition or interim or unity government, in any case a strong government underpinned by a new parliamentary majority. Because they must re-establish the natural order of things shattered by Suárez, and they called this majority the natural majority; since the natural leader of this natural majority could only be the leader of the Alianza Popular, the businessmen and bankers turned Manuel Fraga into their leader.

In the autumn and winter of 1980 that Fraga should be plotting against Suárez (or that Suárez should feel that Fraga was plotting against him) was an almost unavoidable fact, obeying not just political logic: after all, almost no one had more powerful reasons than Fraga to consider Suárez a usurper. Fraga had been the dictatorship’s wunderkind, for years he had sat in Franco’s Cabinet meetings and at the beginning of the 1970s, with a superficial liberal plating, he seemed to be the man chosen by history to lead post-Francoism, understanding such a thing to be a reformed Francoism that stretched the limits of Francoism without breaking it, which was what Fraga understood. No one had ever denied he had the intellectual capacity to carry out this labour. The anecdote is very famous: trying to flatter the leader of Alianza Popular and humiliate Suárez, during the debate of the no-confidence motion tabled against him in May 1980, Felipe González declared from the speakers’ rostrum in the Cortes that Fraga could fit the state inside his head; if the metaphor is valid, then it’s also incomplete: if it’s true that Fraga could fit the state inside his head, then it’s also true that there was absolutely no room for anything else in there. In this sense, as in almost all of them, Fraga was the antithesis of Suárez: honours student, exam ace, prolific writer, during the years of the regime change Fraga was a politician who gave the impression of knowing everything and not understanding anything, or at least not understanding what needed to be understood, and that is that the limits of Francoism could not be stretched without breaking because Francoism was unreformable, or was only reformable if the reform consisted precisely in breaking it; this dramatic intellectual weakness — added to his genetic authoritarianism, his lack of cunning, the distrust he’d inspired for no reason in powerful sectors of the Franco regime since the late 1960s, and his lack of personal harmony with the monarch — explains why the Prime Minister chosen by the King to direct the regime change was not the predicted Fraga but the unexpected Suárez, and in later years Fraga’s intimidating manner and political roughness as well as the strategic intelligence of Suárez (who at that time gave the impression of understanding everything or at least understanding what needed to be understood, even if he didn’t know anything) diminished his space until the theoretical liberal of the early 1970s ended up confined in the corner of the reactionaries and condemned to give vent to his frustrated ambitions by dragging a string of Francoist diplodocuses across a desolate stony wasteland. In the months before the coup, however, the tables have turned: while Suárez sinks down understanding nothing, Fraga seems to be on top of the world, as if he knows and understands everything; although his power in the Cortes continues to be scant, because the laboriously moderate coalition with which he’d stood in the last elections has barely a handful of seats, his public image is no longer that of someone incurably nostalgic for Francoism: they miss him in the Royal Household, where for years he had a loyal ally in General Alfonso Armada; his relations with the Army and the Church couldn’t be better; the same businessmen and bankers who used to exclude him flatter him and prominent figures from Suárez’s party pursue him, as they’ve now chosen him as their true leader and plan with him the best way to bring down the government and put in its place a coalition or interim or caretaker or national unity government, anything except letting Suárez remain in power and completely ruin the country. Anything includes a coalition or interim or caretaker or unity government led by a soldier; if that soldier is his friend Alfonso Armada, so much the better. Like so many people in those days, perhaps more than anybody in those days, Fraga, who is aware that he is a political reference point for many in the military with golpista instincts, weighs up the possibility: his diaries of the time abound in notes about dinners with politicians and officers where it’s considered; many outstanding members of Alianza Popular, such as Juan de Arespacochaga, former Mayor of Madrid, approve unreservedly; according to Arespacochaga, many members of the Party executive do as well. While he’s meeting every second day with leading figures of Suárez’s party, including his parliamentary spokesman, Fraga doubts, but he does not doubt that they have to somehow get rid of the subordinate who four years earlier, owing to the King’s error or whim, got in the way of his prime ministerial destiny: before the summer he’d worried the country with the warning that ‘if steps are not taken, the coup will be inevitable’; on 19 February, four days before the coup, he warned in the Cortes: ‘If a touch on the rudder is wanted, the change of direction we all know necessary, we’ll be found ready to collaborate. And if not, not [. .] The boat must be brought into dry dock and the hull and engine thoroughly revised.’ Suárez has not done the political transition well, and the moment has come to trim it or rectify it: that was exactly the objective of 23 February. Touch on the rudder, surgical coup, change of direction: that was exactly the terminology of the placenta of the coup. Otherwise, during the evening and night of 23 February the businessmen and bankers kept silent, not condemning or approving the coup, like almost everyone else, and only towards two in the morning, when the failure of the military uprising seemed sure after the King spoke against it on television, the director of the CEOE (the Confederation of Spanish Business Organizations), pressured by the head of the provisional government, finally resolved to publicly condemn the seizure of the Cortes and proclaim his respect for the Constitution. The political parties, and among them Alianza Popular, did not do so until seven in the morning.

Chapter 5

Is the Church also plotting against Suárez? Does Suárez feel the Church is also plotting against him? Just as in recent times he has made enemies of the journalists and bankers and businessmen and of almost the entire political class of the country, shortly before the coup Suárez makes an enemy of the Catholic Church; the Church, for its part, abandons him to his fate, if not actually doing everything in its power to bring him down. For Suárez, a religious man, a weekly Mass Christian, educated in seminaries and Acción Católica associations, very aware of the enormous power the Church still possesses in Spain and that its support is one of the few he has left in the disordered scattering of these final months, the setback is a terrible blow. The Church — or at least the upper echelons of the Church or an important part of the upper echelons of the Church — had favoured the change from dictatorship to democracy on the eve of Franco’s death and, since Suárez had come to power, Cardinal Tarancón, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference from 1971, established a complicity with him over the years that managed to weather the Church’s determination to maintain its eternal privileged status in spite of political transformations. In the autumn of 1980, however, Suárez and Tarancón’s relationship snaps; the provocation for the rupture is the divorce law, an unacceptable revolution for a large part of the Church and the Spanish right. By that time the law has been in the works for almost two years, always under the control of Christian Democrat ministers and always guarded by a personal pact between Suárez and Tarancón severely restricting its reach; but in September of that year, as a consequence of one of the cyclical crises that rock the government, the law passes into the hands of the leader of the Social Democrat sector of the Prime Minister’s party, who accelerates proceedings and manages to get the Congressional Justice Committee to approve in mid-December a much more permissive projected divorce law than the one agreed between Suárez and Tarancón. His response is immediate: furious, feeling betrayed, he breaks all links with Suárez, and from that moment on, wrong-footed by the Prime Minister’s feint — or by his weakness, which prevents him from keeping his promises — Tarancón is left at the mercy of the conservative bishops, partisans of Manuel Fraga, who also see their positions reinforced by the arrival in Madrid of an extraordinarily conservative papal nuncio representing the extraordinarily conservative Pope John Paul II: Monsignor Innocenti. So Suárez is also left undefended on the religious flank; more than undefended: it is a fact that the nunciature as well as members of the Episcopal Conference encouraged operations against Suárez organized by the Christian Democrats of his party, and it’s very likely that the nuncio and some bishops were informed in the days before the coup that a trimming or rectification of democracy with the backing of the King was imminent. It’s hard to believe all this had nothing to do with the Church’s behaviour on 23 February. That afternoon the plenary assembly of the Episcopal Conference was meeting at the Pinar de Chamartín Retreat, in Madrid, with the aim of electing Cardinal Tarancón’s replacement; on learning the news of the assault on the Cortes the assembly broke up without pronouncing a single word in favour of democracy or making a single gesture of condemnation or protest at that outrage against liberty. Not a single word. Not a single gesture. Nothing. It’s true: like almost everyone else.

Chapter 6

Of course the main opposition, the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Party, is plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they’re plotting against him). But, unlike Fraga and his party, the businessmen and bankers and even the journalists, the leaders of the PSOE have absolutely no experience of power and are barely beginning to penetrate the corridors of the great sewer of Madrid, so they operate with a naive rookie clumsiness that makes them easy to manipulate by those planning the coup.

The Socialists have been the surprise of the new democracy: run since 1974 by an impetuous group of young men with a clean democratic pedigree (albeit little or no relevance in the struggle against Franco), the PSOE is from then on a party clustered around the leadership of Felipe González, and in 1977, after the first democratic elections, becomes the second largest party in the country and the largest on the left, displacing Santiago Carrillo’s Communist Party, which throughout the Franco period has been in practice the only party of clandestine opposition. The electoral triumph plunges the Socialists into a perplexed euphoria, and for the next two years they develop, as do Fraga’s right and Carrillo’s Communists, a politics of accords with Suárez that culminates in the passing of the Constitution, but at the beginning of 1979, when the first constitutional elections are about to be held, they understand their time has come: like so many people on the right and the left, they think that, once the edifice of Francoism has been demolished and the edifice of democracy erected with the Constitution, Suárez has finished the task the King assigned him; they don’t despise Suárez (or not yet, or not in public, or not entirely) for being an upstart errand boy designated in haste as foreman and eventually self-styled architect, although they are absolutely sure that only they can successfully administer democracy, establish it in the country and integrate the country into Europe; they think the country thinks like them and they also think, as jittery as hungry children in front of a cake-shop window, that if they don’t win these elections they’ll never win; they think they’re going to win. But they don’t win, and that disappointment is mainly responsible for four decisions they make in the following months: the first consists of attributing their unexpected defeat to Suárez’s final television appearance of the campaign, in which the Prime Minister managed to frighten an electorate wary of the Marxist radicalism of a PSOE that according to its statutes was still a Marxist party but according to its deeds and words was already a social democratic party; the second is to interpret Suárez’s televised intervention as a dirty trick, and to assume that you can’t play fair with someone who plays dirty; the third consists of accepting that they would only get into government if they managed to destroy Suárez politically and personally, demolishing the reputation of the leader who had beaten them in two consecutive elections; the fourth is the corollary of the previous three: it consists of going all out for Suárez’s head.

From the autumn of 1979 — once the term Marxism was eliminated from the PSOE statutes and Felipe González’s power in the leadership of the Party reinforced — the offensive, increasingly endorsed by Suárez’s inability to curb the country’s deterioration, is merciless: the Socialists paint a daily apocalyptic picture of the Prime Minister’s administration, they dig up and throw in his face his past as a Falangist errand boy and Movimiento social climber, accuse him of ruining the democratic project, of being ready to sell Spain in order to remain in Moncloa, call him illiterate, a card sharp, a potential golpista. Meanwhile, they opt for dramatic effect, and in the middle of May 1980 propose a vote of no confidence against Suárez in the Cortes. The manoeuvre, destined in theory to make Felipe González Prime Minister, is a mathematical failure because the Socialist leader does not obtain enough votes to remove Suárez from his post, but most of all it is a propagandistic success: during the debate the television cameras show a young, persuasive and prime ministerial González facing an aged and defeated Suárez unable even to defend himself from his adversary’s attacks. This triumph, however, marks a limit: with the no-confidence motion the Socialists have used up the parliamentary mechanisms for taking the premiership; and this is when, goaded by desperation and fear and immaturity and greed for power, they begin to explore the limits of the recently debuted democracy, forcing its rules to the utmost without yet having mastered them; and this is when they turn into useful tools for the golpistas.

Since before the summer those recent arrivals in the salons, tertulias and restaurants of the political village of Madrid have talked and heard talk of golpes de estado, coups d’état, of governments of national unity, caretaker governments, governments of salvation, of de Gaulle-style operations; their attitude to this is ambiguous: on the one hand the rumours worry them; on the other hand they don’t want to be left to one side when it comes to replacing Suárez, because they are impatient to prove that, as well as knowing how to operate in opposition, they know how to operate in government, and they also begin to consider the idea of forming a coalition or caretaker or unity government chaired by a military officer, a proposal for which in the last week of August they seek support in discussions with Jordi Pujol, premier of the Catalan autonomous government. Undoubtedly with this idea in mind, in the autumn the Socialists make enquiries into the Army’s mood and about the murmurs of a military coup, and in mid-October, after an internal meeting during which Felipe González wonders whether all the warning lights of the democracy were not already flashing and in which they discuss the eventuality of the Party entering a coalition government, several PSOE leaders meet with General Sabino Fernández Campo, secretary to the King, and with General Alfonso Armada, his predecessor in the post, whose name had been on everyone’s lips for months as a possible leader of a government of unity. Felipe González is involved in the interview with Fernández Campo; not in the interview with Alfonso Armada: it is conducted by Enrique Múgica, the Party’s number three and until recently leader of the Congressional Defence Committee. In light of 23 February the conversation between Múgica and Armada takes on important significance, and its protagonists have told of it in public more than once. The interview, which lasts for almost four hours, is held on 22 October during a lunch given at the home of the Mayor of Lérida, in the province of which the general has been military governor since the beginning of the year, and is attended, as well as by the host, by Joan Raventós, leader of the Catalan Socialists. Múgica and Armada seem to get along personally; politically as well, at least on the crucial point: both agree that the situation of the country is catastrophic, which according to Armada is of great worry to the King and is putting the Crown in danger; both agree that the only one responsible for the catastrophe is Suárez and that Suárez leaving power is the only possible solution to the mess, although according to Armada the solution would not be complete unless an interim or unity government was immediately formed with the participation of the principal political parties and led by an independent, if possible from the military. Múgica does not say no to this last suggestion; then Raventós interjects and asks Armada if he would be willing to be the military officer who heads the government; Armada does not say no to this suggestion either. The lunch ends without promises or commitments, but Múgica writes up a report on the interview for the Party’s executive committee, in the weeks that follow various members of that organization sound out leaders of minority parties about the possibility of forming a coalition government led by a soldier and over the course of the autumn and winter several different rumours spread around Madrid — the PSOE plans a new no-confidence motion supported by a sector of Suárez’s party, the PSOE plans to enter a caretaker or interim government with Fraga’s party and a sector of Suárez’s party — united by the common denominator of a general with whom the Socialists intend to remove Suárez from Moncloa.

That was all. Or that’s all we know, because at that time the leaders of the PSOE often discussed the role the Army could play in situations of emergency such as the one they believed the country was going through, which was a way of signalling the landing strip for military intervention. In any case, the long lunchtime chat between Enrique Múgica and General Armada in Lérida and the movements and rumours to which it gave rise constituted backing for Armada’s golpista inclinations and a good alibi enabling the King’s former secretary to insinuate or declare here and there in the months before the coup that the Socialists would readily participate in a unitarian government led by him or were even encouraging him to form one, and on the night of 23 February, again waving the banner of the PSOE’s acquiescence, to try to impose that government by force. All this does not of course mean that during the autumn and winter of 1980 the Socialists were plotting in favour of a military coup against democracy; it only means that a strong dose of irresponsible bewilderment induced by an itching for power led them to press to a frightening degree the siege of the legitimate Prime Minister of the country and that, believing they were manoeuvring against Adolfo Suárez, they ended up manoeuvring unknowingly in favour of the enemies of democracy.

Chapter 7

But more than anyone else it is his own party that is plotting against Suárez (that Suárez feels is especially plotting against him): the Unión de Centro Democrático. The word party is imprecise; in reality, the Union of the Democratic Centre is not a party but a painstaking cocktail of groups with disparate ideologies — from Liberals and Christian Democrats to Social Democrats, by way of the so-called Blues, who like Suárez came from the very belly of the Francoist machine — an electoral brand improvised in the spring of 1977 to stand in the first free elections for forty years at the inducement of Adolfo Suárez, who according to all prognostications would win thanks to the success of his trajectory as Prime Minister, during which he’s managed to dismantle in less than a year the institutional framework of Francoism and call the first democratic elections. Finally the predictions are fulfilled: Suárez achieves the victory and over the two years that follow the UCD remains united by the glue of power, by Suárez’s undisputed leadership and by the historical urgency of constructing a system of liberties. The spring of 1979 sees Suárez’s stellar moment, the peak of his command and also that of his party: in December the Constitution had been passed, in March he won his second general election, in April his first municipal ones, the edifice of the new state seems on the point of being completed with the processing of the statutes of autonomy of Catalonia and the Basque Country; just at this moment of fulfilment, however, Suárez begins to sink into a sort of lethargy from which he will not emerge until he leaves the premiership, and his party begins to splinter irremediably. The phenomenon is strange, but not inexplicable, it’s just that it doesn’t have one single explanation, but several. I’ll suggest two: one is political and it is that Suárez, who had been able to do the most difficult things, is unable to do the easiest; the other is personal and is that Suárez, who until then has appeared to be a politician of steel, collapses psychologically. I’ll add a third explanation, at once political and personal: the jealousies, rivalries and discrepancies that germinate at the heart of his party.

In effect: at the end of March 1980, when the inefficient running of the country can no longer be hidden and pessimism is overwhelming in the opinion polls the government commissions, three bitter defeats at the ballot box (in the Basque Country, in Catalonia and in Andalusia) reveal unsatisfied ambitions in the UCD and ideological disagreements until then covered by the glitter of victory, so that any relevant matter (economic policy, autonomy policy, education policy, the divorce law, whether to join NATO) and more than one irrelevant matter provoke controversies that are postponed to avoid an internal explosion and that time does nothing but exacerbate; for his part, Suárez is increasingly absent, perplexed and locked away in the domestic labyrinth of Moncloa, and has lost the energy of his early years in government and seems unable to restore order to the rebellious ruckus his party has become, perhaps because he suspects that for quite a while, encouraged by his own weakness, like animals who’ve got the scent of fear in their prey the leaders of the theoretically fused groups of the UCD again consider him what maybe deep down they have never stopped considering him: a little provincial Falangist consumed by ambition, an ignorant nonentity, a textbook arriviste who had thrived in the corrupt environment of Francoism thanks to flattery and fiddling and who continued to thrive afterwards thanks to the King putting him in charge of dismantling with a card sharp’s tricks and huckster’s verbosity the whole Movimiento set-up, a rogue who years earlier was perhaps a necessary evil, because he knew the cesspits of Francoism better than anybody, but who is now driving the country to the brink with his risible statesman pretensions. This is how Suárez begins to suspect the leaders of his party see him; his suspicions are not groundless: arrogant lawyers, prestigious professionals from good families, high-ranking career civil servants, cultured, cosmopolitan men or men who think themselves cultured and cosmopolitan, the UCD leaders have gone in a few years from crawling to Suárez, investing him with the supremacy of a charismatic leader, to denouncing ever more openly his personal and intellectual limitations, his incompetence at governing, his abysmal qualities as a parliamentarian, his ignorance of democratic customs — which authorizes him to believe that he can keep governing as he did in his time as appointed Prime Minister, when he answered only to the King — his snubbing of the Cortes and the deputies of his party in the Cortes, his chaotic way of working, his pseudo-leftist populism and his fugitive’s isolation in Moncloa, where he lives sequestered by a drove of incompetent and disorganized acolytes. In April 1980 that is the reality which for Suárez then is only a suspicion: that all the leaders of all the ranks of his party despise him, as do many of his seconds, and all of them feel they could replace him and do a better job.

This private feeling among the UCD leaders soon finds public confirmation, and Suárez’s suspicion becomes a certainty. Knocked out by Felipe González’s devastating rhetorical skill during the debate triggered by the no-confidence motion tabled by the Socialists in May, Suárez embarrasses the deputies of his party by shying away from dialectical combat and allowing his ministers to be the ones to defend the government from the rostrum while the deputy leader of the Socialists, Alfonso Guerra, hurls an open secret at the Prime Minister. ‘Half the UCD deputies get excited when they hear Felipe González speak,’ Guerra proclaims in the Cortes. ‘And the other half get excited when they hear Manuel Fraga.’ Suárez survives the no-confidence vote by the skin of his teeth, but he does so knowing that Guerra’s sentence is not a mere rhetorical thrust of parliamentary squabble, that his political prestige borders on nil, that his party is threatening to disintegrate and that if he wants to avoid an end to his government and recover control of the UCD he must immediately take the initiative. So, as soon as he can, he summons all the Party chiefs together at a country estate belonging to the Ministry of Public Works, in Manzanares el Real, not far from Madrid. The conclave lasts three days and amounts to the worst humiliation he’s suffered so far in his political life; in fact, it’s easy to imagine that, barely has the debate begun, when his colleagues’ eyes reveal the truth to Suárez, and in them Suárez reads words like Falangist, nonentity, upstart, sycophant, ignoramus, card sharp, huckster, rogue, populist, inept. But he doesn’t have to imagine anything, because the reality is that during those three days the Party bosses of the UCD tell Suárez to his face what they’ve been saying behind his back for months, and if they don’t finish him off once and for all it’s because they have no viable replacement yet — none of them can count on the support of the others, and the rank and file of the Party is still with the Prime Minister — and because Suárez turns this to his advantage: after resisting as well as he can the criticisms they inflict on him from every angle, Suárez promises to mend his sorry prime ministerial ways and most of all makes a pledge to share power with them, to such an extent that from that moment on he is no longer in practice the head of the Party and government but has become a primus inter pares. Once the meeting ends, Suárez tries to fulfil the promise immediately; also the pledge, and at the end of August he designs with a few of his faithful a strategy that means reshuffling the Cabinet for the second time in a few months, giving important ministries to the UCD Party bosses. The arrangement is not short of counterweights damaging to his future — worst of all: it perhaps hastens the departure from the government of the Deputy Prime Minister Abril Martorell, a long-standing friend who in recent times has served as his shield as well as right-hand man — but convinces Suárez that he can smother the uprising with it and prolong his dying premiership and be compensated for the affronts received by proving to his critics that they’re mistaken. The one who’s mistaken, however, is him, because he doesn’t know or can’t understand that once respect for someone is lost it cannot be recovered, and inside his party the rebellion is unstoppable.

On 17 September, his new government recently constituted, Suárez, who appears at times to be waking from his lethargy, comfortably wins a confidence vote in the Cortes; since this should allow him to govern without problems in the upcoming months, it confirms for a few hours the optimism of his predictions. The next day, however, a riot breaks out. Miguel Herrero de Miñón — one of the leaders of the Christian Democrat sector of the Party — publishes an article in El País that pretends to be a reasoned clarification of the confidence motion but is in reality a frontal attack on his Prime Minister’s way of practising politics. A few days later the UCD deputies elect Herrero de Miñón to the post of Party spokesman in the Cortes; given that Herrero de Miñón had run on a platform of being an antidote to Suárez’s outrages and negligences, and given that he had sponsored a candidate who was defeated, this election represents a severe setback for the Prime Minister, who only then intuits that his summer promises and concessions have not dissolved the mounting rejection of him, but rather increased it. The intuition is now accurate, but belated: by this stage the powerful Christian Democrat sector of the UCD is publicly plotting to expel him from the premiership; the Liberals and Social Democrats and Blues have also begun to do so, and as autumn passes and winter begins even those most loyal to the Prime Minister secretly give up their loyalty and take positions in view of a future without him: pressured, wooed and backed up by journalists, businessmen, bankers, soldiers and clergymen, some aspire to form a new majority with Fraga; pressured, wooed and backed up by the Socialists’ youthful vigour, unbridled ambition and absolute faith in themselves, others aspire to form a new majority with González; all or almost all — Christian Democrats and Liberals and Social Democrats and Blues, long-standing anti-Suárists and bandwagon anti-Suárists — argue about how to replace Suárez without going to the polls and who to put in his place. In the early days of 1981, while the UCD prepares for its second conference, which will be held at the end of January in Palma de Mallorca, the Party’s confusion is total, and in these days a document demanding a greater degree of internal democracy, drawn up by the Prime Minister’s adversaries, has already been signed by more than five hundred centrist delegates, which amounts to a very serious threat to the control Suárez still has over the Party rank and file, his last stronghold. As in the Alianza Popular, as in the PSOE, as in the whole political village of Madrid, in the UCD there are also discussions of the idea that a military officer or a prestigious politician at the head of a coalition or interim or caretaker or unity government might be the best instrument to get Suárez out of government and overcome the crisis; certain heavyweight deputies indulge it — especially deputies from the Christian Democrat sector well connected to the military, and especially to Alfonso Armada, with whom some have personally discussed the idea — and in the middle of January the rumours that have been circulating with variable intensity since the summer proliferate, rumours of hard coups or soft and rumours of another motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister in the works, a motion probably presented by the PSOE but supported by a sector of the UCD if not organized from within it, which should guarantee its success and maybe the formation of the emergency government everyone’s talking about and for which everyone starting with Suárez himself knows that General Armada is putting himself forward. In reality the rumours about the no-confidence motion are much more than rumours — there is no doubt that the motion is seriously discussed within the Party — but in any case the UCD is, one month before 23 February, a seething mob of politicians tirelessly scheming against the Prime Minister of the government much more than the political party that sustains the government. The coup grows in the midst of this mob: this mob is not the whole placenta of the coup, but it is a substantial part of the placenta of the coup.

Chapter 8

All these things happen in Spain, where everyone and everything seems to be plotting against Adolfo Suárez (or where Adolfo Suárez feels everyone and everything is plotting against him). Outside Spain the situation is no more favourable for the Prime Minister; it was, but it isn’t any more, among other reasons because since he came to power Suárez has done the opposite of what the world has done: while he was trying desperately to shift to the left, the world calmly shifted to the right.

In July 1976, when the King hands Suárez the leadership of the government, Europe awaits the pacific change from dictatorship to democracy with sympathy tempered by scepticism; the United States, with sympathy tempered by apprehension: at the time its ideal for Spain — from the strategic point of view a key country in case of war with the Soviet Union — is a docile parliamentary monarchy and limited democracy that prevents the existence of a legal Communist Party and brings the country into NATO. At the outset the appointment of Suárez, described as a young lion of Francoism, pleases the United States much more than Europe, but soon the preferences are reversed: Suárez legalizes the Communist Party, propels the country towards a full democracy and, in spite of the constant pressures brought to bear on him — including the pressure of his fellow UCD members — indefinitely postpones the application to join the Atlantic Alliance; not only that: convinced that by remaining on one side of the division into blocs imposed by the cold war Spain can play a more efficient or more visible international role than by enrolling as a supernumerary in the bloc under the American thumb, during his last year in government Suárez receives the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Moncloa and sends an official observer to the Non-aligned Movement Summit. Four years earlier, these gestures of independence — which in Spain irritate the right and almost all the leaders within the Prime Minister’s party but not an overwhelmingly anti-American public opinion — would have caused a faint worry mixed with astonishment in Washington; combined with the country’s instability, in the autumn of 1980 they cause manifest alarm. Because in those four years things have changed radically, and not just for the United States: in October 1978 Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope of the Catholic Church; in May 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; in November 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. A conservative revolution spreads across the West and, with the aim of finishing off the Soviet Union by way of a ring of concentric pressure, Reagan relaunches the arms race and heats up the cold war. Given those circumstances, if there’s one thing Washington doesn’t want it’s upheavals in southern Europe: in September it successfully supported a military coup in Turkey, and now harbours fears that the fragility of a left-leaning Suárez hounded by political and economic crises and by an increasingly strong Socialist Party, will end up creating favourable conditions for a revolution similar to the one in Portugal in 1974. So when in the months before 23 February the US Embassy and CIA station in Madrid begin to receive news of the imminence of a surgical coup or a touch on the rudder of Spanish democracy, their reaction, more than favourable, is enthusiastic, in particular that of Ambassador Terence Todman, an extremely right-wing diplomat who in previous years fully supported Latin American dictatorships as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, who now manages to ensure that the only two Spanish politicians welcomed by President Reagan in the White House before the coup should be two significant Francoist politicians biding their time — Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora and Federico Silva Muñoz — and on 13 February meets with General Armada on an estate near Logroño. We do not know what was said at this meeting, but there are facts that demonstrate beyond doubt that the US government was informed of the coup before it took place: from 20 February the US military bases of Torrejón, Rota, Morón and Zaragoza were in a state of alert and ships from the VI Fleet were stationed in the vicinity of the Mediterranean coastline, and all through the evening and night of the 23rd an AWACS electronic intelligence plane belonging to the 86th Communications Squadron deployed from the German base of Ramstein overflew the peninsula with the object of monitoring Spanish airwaves. These details were not known until days or weeks or months later, but on the night of 23 February, when the US Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, sent a question about what was going on in Spain without a single word of condemnation of the assault on the Cortes or a word in favour of democracy — the attempted coup d’état did not go beyond ‘an internal matter’ as far as he was concerned — no one failed to understand the only thing there was to understand: that the United States approved of the coup and that, if it ended up succeeding, the US government would be the first to celebrate.

Chapter 9

So in the final days of 1980 and the first of 1981 reality itself seems to plot against Adolfo Suárez (or Adolfo Suárez feels that reality itself is plotting against him): journalists, businessmen, bankers, right-wing, left-wing and centrist politicians, Rome and Washington. Even some Communist leaders make public or private statements in favour of a government of national unity led by a military officer. Even the leaders of the main trade unions are doing so, talking about extreme situations, emergency situations, not of a crisis of government but of state. Even the King does so, trying in his way to be rid of Suárez and spurring on some of those against him.

All these materials went into the making of the coup: the political manoeuvring against Adolfo Suárez was the organic matter of the coup; all these materials went into the making of the placenta of the coup. That said, maybe the word conspiracy might seem inadequate to define the campaign of political harassment against Adolfo Suárez; in other words: in the months before the coup Suárez undoubtedly felt that all of reality was plotting against him, but was this not a simple feeling of a politically finished and personally broken man unsubstantiated by facts? Was not what was really happening in Spain during this time a simple confluence of political strategies, interests and legitimate ambitions directed at removing an inept prime minister from power? It was, but that is exactly what political plotting is: the alliance of a collection of people against whoever holds power. And that is exactly what occurred in Spain in the final days of 1980 and the first of 1981. I repeat that the content of this conspiracy was legitimate, but its form was not, and at least in Spanish politics of the time, after forty years of dictatorship and less than four of democracy, the form was the content: stretching the very fragile forms of democracy to their limit, raising a dense political dust cloud while turning to military officers permanently tempted to destroy the political system as a means of ending Suárez’s premiership, meant handing over to the enemies of democracy the instrument with which to finish off Suárez and the democracy. Only a few refused to participate in that suicidal gibberish; among them were General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo, two of the very few front-line politicians who did not join the siege of the Prime Minister and thus avoided the error common to a ruling class whose conspiratorial passion against Adolfo Suárez led it consciously or unconsciously to plot against democracy. As for Suárez himself, he was of course a pure politician, and as such, in spite of the fact that he was politically finished and personally broken, he continued in those months fighting to stay in power; he was fighting for himself, but in fighting for himself and fighting to stay in power he was also fighting to sustain the edifice he’d constructed over the years he had been in office: although from the beginning the coup-inclined military considered Suárez the embodiment of the democracy — and for that reason when they finally launched the coup for them it was a coup against Suárez more than a coup against democracy — maybe Suárez never really embodied democracy until the days before the coup, and maybe he never fully embodied it until the evening of 23 February, while the bullets whizzed around him as he sat on his Prime Minister’s bench in the Cortes, because never as much as in that moment did fighting for himself and to stay in power correspond with such precision to fighting for democracy.

Chapter 10

I have kept the principal plotter out of sight: the Army. The 23 February coup was a military coup against Adolfo Suárez and against democracy, but who was plotting in the Army during the autumn and winter of 1980? And with what aim were they plotting? Were the intelligence services, then part of the Army, also plotting? Was CESID, which was the organization that grouped together most of the intelligence services? And, if they were, were they plotting to get Adolfo Suárez out of power or were they plotting in favour of a coup? Did CESID participate in the 23 February coup? This last is one of the most controversial points about the coup and, for obvious reasons, undoubtedly the one that’s aroused the greatest number of speculations: exploring it also allows for exploration of the golpista manoeuvres that were being hatched within the Army during the months before the coup.

The trial of those involved on 23 February charged only two members of CESID: Major José Luis Cortina, head of AOME, the centre’s special operations unit, and Captain Vicente Gómez Iglesias, Cortina’s subordinate. The major was acquitted; the captain was found guilty: the legal truth of the 23 February coup therefore states that CESID as an institution did not participate in the coup, only one of its members did so and on his own initiative. Is the legal truth the actual truth? Naturally, those then responsible for the intelligence services — its commander, Marine Corps Colonel Narciso Carreras, and its director and strong man, Lieutenant Colonel Javier Calderón — have always denied not only that CESID participated in the coup, but having had the slightest hint that it was brewing, which in any case is as good as a recognition of a resounding failure, because one of the fundamental missions the government had assigned to the intelligence services — if not the fundamental mission — was to warn of the eventuality of a coup. Are Carreras and Calderón telling the truth? Did CESID really fail on 23 February? Or, on the contrary, did it not fail and did it know about the preparations under way for the coup and nevertheless not warn the government, because it was implicated in the rebellion? Two facts seem unquestionable from the outset: one is that, even supposing it didn’t know in advance the exact details of the coup — the who, the when, the how and the where — CESID had reliable news of a plot against Adolfo Suárez and of the military conspiracies that in one way or another would eventually culminate in the events of 23 February; the other is that it informed the government. This at least is what emerges from a report habitually attributed to CESID, dated November 1980 and titled ‘Panorama of Operations Under Way’, a report that according to a version accepted by those who years later have published it in various books was sent to the King, Adolfo Suárez, General Gutiérrez Mellado and the Minister of Defence, Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún.

It is perhaps the most useful document we have to understand the immediate background to the coup, because it contains a contemporary, detailed and largely true description of the political and military plots of the day and a quite exact announcement of what would happen on 23 February. The report is divided into a prologue and three parts; each of the parts examines a type of operation: the first examines the civilian operations; the second, the military operations; the third, a mixed civilian-military operation. The prologue just sets out an obvious fact and a caution: the obvious fact is that the common denominator of the operations set out in the report is the desire to overthrow Adolfo Suárez to end ‘the climate of anarchy and the current socio-political chaos’; the caution pointed out that, given the current anarchy and chaos, ‘there is no reason whatsoever to expect there are not more operations under way’, and rather ‘we fear that these could be almost infinite’. The first part of the report describes four civilian operations, that is four political operations, three of them formulated within the Prime Minister’s party and the fourth within the Socialist Party: the report minimizes the viability of the first ones, but stresses the interest of each one of their organizers — Christian Democrats, Liberals and UCD Blues — in the civilian-military operation; it grants much more importance to the Socialist operation. This would be put into practice in the months of January or February 1981 and would consist of the tabling of a motion of no confidence by the PSOE, after making a pact with a large dissident UCD group, as the result of which Suárez would be removed from power and a government of national unity would be formed under the leadership of a military officer of liberal disposition and in the Crown’s good books, which would neutralize the Army’s golpista temptations and, supposing that its proponents could count on a suitable and willing officer with the King’s approval, provide the project with ‘almost total credibility’. The profile of the suitable and willing officer was the profile of General Armada or the profile generally assumed by General Armada, who, as the author of the report undoubtedly knew, had just met with Socialist leaders in Lérida. In this section note is also taken of the PSOE’s interest in the civilian-military operation set out at the end, and which is no more than a variation of the Socialist operation.

The second part of the report examines three military operations: that of the lieutenant generals, that of the colonels and that of a group it calls ‘the impromptus’. Here the author’s information is especially copious and reliable. According to him, the three operations are autonomous although not lacking points of connection and at any moment could unite; furthermore all three are highly viable and dangerous. The lieutenant generals’ operation, whose civilian point of reference is Manuel Fraga, would consist of a collective pronouncement by the Captaincy Generals — the centres of the Army’s power in each of the military regions the country had been divided into — which, similar to what had happened two months before in Turkey, would grant the coup an institutional tone or appearance; the report omits the names of the lieutenant generals involved in the operation (and among them the most conspicuous: Jaime Milans del Bosch, Captain General of Valencia), but considers ‘more than likely’ that the coup will occur if the political deterioration continues. Like the previous one, the colonels’ operation is not yet entirely ripe; unlike the previous one, the colonels, who are ‘cold, rational and methodical,’ are planning theirs with care and therefore — and owing to ‘the human and professional quality’ of the organizers — once activated ‘would be unstoppable’; also unlike the previous one, this operation scorns the Crown: the colonels possess an ‘advanced’ social mentality, verging on a very nationalist and ‘un-Marxist socialism’ and their political ideal is not monarchy but a presidential republic. Again the report links the name of Manuel Fraga to this operation; again omits those of its proponents, perhaps one of whom might be Colonel José Ignacio San Martín, head of the main intelligence service of late Francoism and at this time chief of staff of the Brunete Armoured Division. As for the third operation, that of the so-called impromptus, according to the report this was the most dangerous: not only because it was the most violent and most imminent, but also because it lacked the slightest monarchical inclination. The impromptus considered that the only way to galvanize the Army around a coup was to launch a devastating attack against a key point in the country (‘not ruling out summary executions if they encountered resistance or refusals to step down’): the report does not mention the Cortes, but does mention Moncloa, critical ministries, communication centres; according to the impromptus’ predictions, once the sudden attack was perpetrated ‘the rest of the Armed Forces would join it or at least not use force to prevent it’ and, once the political class was ‘totally’ eliminated, the heads of the operation ‘would put themselves under the orders of the verified military commanders, who would give definitive form to the total military coup’. According to the report, the impromptus’ plan had a precedent in ‘the famous Operación Galaxia’, which is how the press had baptized the coup that Tejero had planned two years earlier but not managed to execute, the author’s way of pointing out the lieutenant colonel as the protagonist of this new attempt.

Those were the civilian and military operations under way; the report then went on to consider the mixed civilian-military operation. This turns out to be a soft coup aimed at averting the risk of the three hard coups just described; its proponents are a group of unaffiliated civilians with political experience and a group of serving generals, ‘with brilliant records and potential appeal’; the mechanism of implementation is formally constitutional, ‘although such formality went no further than covering the minimal legal appearances to avoid the classification as a coup’: it would consist of forcing Suárez’s resignation through a continuous series of pressures from different directions (political parties, financial, business, ecclesiastic, military and journalistic means) which would culminate with pressure from the King, who would immediately propose, with the support of the main parties, a general ‘with the backing of the rest of the military structure’ as Prime Minister, who would form a ‘caretaker government’ or a ‘government of national salvation’ at least fifty per cent of which would comprise independent civilians or nominations by the UCD, PSOE and Alianza Popular. As well as eliminating terrorism and reviving the economy, this government — whose mandate would end the legislature in principle — would reform the Constitution, do away with the autonomous governments, reduce the power of the parties and make the Communist and nationalist ones illegal. It did not aim in principle to destroy democracy: it aimed to trim or restrict or shrink it and turn it into a semi-democracy. According to the report, this mixed operation not only counted on the support of leaders in the UCD and the PSOE, who would have been convinced that it was the only alternative to a hard coup; it was also seeking the approval of the proponents of the military operations, assuring them that, if the mixed option failed, the field could be cleared for their attempt (‘in which they would find the same collaboration they’d lent to this one’). The report concluded with the claim: ‘The viability of this operation is very high’; a date was even ventured: ‘It is estimated that its period of implementation could culminate before the spring of 1981 (barring imponderables).’

This is a synopsis of the contents of the ‘Panorama of Operations Under Way’. In the end there were imponderables, but not too many: fundamentally the news the report offered was exact; its predictions as well: after all the 23 February coup turned out to be an improvised attempt to put into practice the civilian-military operation under the cover of the four civilian operations and with the support of the three military operations; or spelled out with all the names: a failed attempt to hand power to General Armada using the force of the military plotters — Milans del Bosch’s lieutenant generals, San Martín’s colonels and Tejero’s impromptus — to oblige the civilian plotters — the UCD, Alianza Popular and the PSOE — to accept this emergency solution. So, if it’s true that CESID prepared this report, there is no doubt — although not knowing exactly the who, the when, the how and the where of the coup — the intelligence service possessed in November 1980 information so reliable on the coup d’état conspiracies that it was able to predict without much margin of error what would end up happening on 23 February. It so happens, however, despite usually being attributed to CESID, the report is not the work of CESID: its author is Manuel Fernández-Monzón Altolaguirre, then a lieutenant colonel in the Army and head of the Ministry of Defence press office. Fernández-Monzón was a former member of the intelligence service who maintained many connections among his former colleagues and who for years sold politico-military reports to a select clientele of Madrid politicians, bankers and businessmen, as well as being at the time adviser to Luis María Anson in the news agency EFE. His report — which was sent to the Minister of Defence and indeed reached the King, the Prime Minister and his Deputy Prime Minister, and undoubtedly circulated around the political village of Madrid in the autumn and winter of 1980 — constitutes an apt summary of the seething swarm of plots on the eve of 23 February, especially the military plots. Although some of it was in the public domain, most of the news the report contained came from CESID, which demonstrates that the intelligence service knew the general design of operations under way, but did not know exactly, in the days before the attempted military coup, the who, the when, the how and the where of it. Did they know? Did CESID fail in its mission to inform and warn the government? Or did it not fail but not warn the government because it was on the side of the rebels? The most controversial question about 23 February still stands for the moment: did CESID participate in the coup d’état?

Chapter 11. 23 February

It was a Monday. A sunny day dawned in Madrid; towards half past one in the afternoon the sun stopped shining and gusts of winter wind swept the streets of the city centre; by half past six it was already getting dark. Just at that time — at twenty-three minutes past six to be more precise — Lieutenant Colonel Tejero entered the Cortes in command of an improvised troop made up of sixteen officers and a hundred and seventy NCOs and soldiers recruited from the Civil Guard Motor Pool, on Calle Príncipe de Vergara. It was the beginning of the coup. A coup whose elemental design did not correspond to the design of a hard coup but rather a soft coup, that is to the design of a bloodless coup that should only brandish the threat of weapons enough so that the King, the political class and the citizenry will bend to the will of the golpistas: after the Parliament was taken, the Captain General of Valencia, General Milans del Bosch, would declare martial law in his region and occupy its capital, Colonel San Martín and some officers of the Brunete Armoured Division would persuade their unit into rebellion and occupy Madrid, and General Armada would go to the Zarzuela and convince the King that, with the aim of solving the problem created by the rebellious military officers, he should allow him to go in his name to the Cortes to liberate the parliamentarian hostages and in exchange to form with the main political parties a coalition or caretaker or unity government under his premiership. Those four tactical movements corresponded to a certain extent to the four military operations announced in November by Fernández-Monzón’s report: the taking of the Cortes, which was the most complicated movement (and the trigger), corresponded to the operation of the impromptus; the taking of Valencia, which was the most well-prepared movement, corresponded to the lieutenant generals’ operation; the taking of Madrid, which was the most improvised movement, corresponded to the colonels’ operation; and the taking of the Zarzuela, which was the simplest (and most essential) movement, corresponded to the civilian-military operation. There was nevertheless an extremely important difference between the coup as Fernández-Monzón’s report predicted it and the coup as it happened in reality: while in the first case the civilian-military operation functioned as the political means with which to prevent the three military operations, in the second case the three military operations functioned as the means of force with which to impose the civilian-military operation. Furthermore, although the design of the coup might be simple, its execution was not or certain aspects of its execution were not, but on the morning of 23 February few golpistas harboured doubts about its success: all or almost all thought that not only the Army but the King, the political class and a large part of the public were predisposed to accept the victory of the coup; all or almost all thought the entire country would welcome the coup with more relief than resignation, if not with fervour. I put forward one piece of information: agents of CESID took part in two of the four movements of the coup; and another: at least in one of those movements its intervention was not trivial.

This is how it is: at five o’clock in the afternoon of that day at the Civil Guard Motor Pool, Major Cortina’s subordinate in CESID, Captain Gómez Iglesias, cleared away the final doubts of the officers who would accompany Lieutenant Colonel Tejero in the assault on the Cortes. Gómez Iglesias had been friends with the lieutenant colonel since they’d been stationed together years before in the San Sebastián Civil Guard headquarters, had possibly spent months keeping an eye on Tejero on Major Cortina’s orders, knew his friend’s plans to perfection and in the last days was helping to bring them to fruition. The help he lent him at that moment and in that place — an hour and a half before the assault on the Cortes and in the office of Colonel Miguel Manchado, commanding officer of the Motor Pool — was vital. Minutes before Gómez Iglesias’ arrival in Colonel Manchado’s office, the lieutenant colonel began trying incoherently to convince the officers gathered there to go with him to the Cortes to carry out a public-order operation of great national significance — that was the formula he used over and over again — an operation conducted on the orders of the King under the command of General Armada, who must be at the Zarzuela Palace by then, and General Milans del Bosch, who was going to declare a state of emergency in Valencia. None of the officers listening to him was unaware of the lieutenant colonel’s rebellious record and golpista proclivities; although most of them had been in on the secret of his project for days or hours and approved of it, those who weren’t expressed their doubts, especially Captain Abad, a very competent officer in command of a very competent and well-trained group of Civil Guards, which would be indispensable, once the Cortes was taken, for deploying outside to seal and control it; the entrance into the office of Gómez Iglesias, who was taking a short course at the Motor Pool at the time, changed everything: Abad’s reluctance and the scruples that some of the other officers might still have been harbouring disappeared as soon as the captain assured them with his incontestable authority as a CESID agent that what Tejero had told them was true, and everyone gathered there got down to work immediately, filling the six buses Colonel Manchado provided with troops and organizing the departure for the Cortes, where according to the lieutenant colonel’s plan the group should rendezvous with another bus that, at that very moment, on the other side of Madrid, Captain Jesús Muñecas Aguilar was filling with Civil Guards belonging to the Valdemoro Squadron of the First Mobile Command. That’s how the initial movement of the coup got started, and those were the men who conducted it. Many who have investigated 23 February, however, hold that, as well as Captain Gómez Iglesias, several CESID agents collaborated at this point with the golpista lieutenant colonel; according to them, Tejero’s column and Muñecas’ column were coordinated or linked by vehicles driven by Major Cortina’s men — Sergeant Miguel Sales, Corporals Rafael Monge and José Moya — provided with false number plates, low-frequency transmitters and walkie-talkies. To my mind, this can only be partly true: it’s almost impossible that the two columns were linked by CESID agents, among other reasons because the transmitters their agents used at the time had a range of barely a kilometre and the walkie-talkies five hundred metres (besides, if they’d been linked they would have arrived at the Cortes at the same time, as undoubtedly was their aim, instead of one column a long time after the other, as actually occurred); it’s possible on the other hand that some of the CESID vehicles were escorting the columns, not with the aim of leading them to the Cortes (which would be absurd: no resident of Madrid needs anyone to guide him there), but with that of clearing their route to prevent any obstacles from getting in their way.* Be that true or not — and we’ll have to return to it — there is one sure thing: at least one CESID agent subordinate to Major Cortina lent decisive help to Lieutenant Colonel Tejero so the assault on the Cortes would be a success.

The second movement of the coup was also a success: the occupation of Valencia. At half past five that afternoon, after an unusually hectic morning in the Captaincy General building, Milans del Bosch had called together in his office the generals under his command in the city and was informing them what was going to happen an hour later: he spoke of the assault on the Cortes, the occupation of Madrid by the Brunete Armoured Division, of the publication of an edict declaring martial law in the region of Valencia and that this was all with the King’s consent, who would be accompanied in the Zarzuela by General Armada, the ultimate authority of the operation and future leader of a government with his own promotion to President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top position in the Armed Forces. Seconded by his deputy chief of staff, Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, and by his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver, General Milans — one of the most prestigious military officers in the Spanish Army, one of the most fervently Francoist, one of the most openly monarchical — had been the soul or one of the souls of the conspiracy: the coup had been incubated in Valencia, there Tejero’s golpista compulsion had been given wings, there Milans had harmonized his plans with Armada’s, from there they had acquired for the coup the support or benevolent neutrality of five of the eleven Captaincy Generals into which the Spanish military geography was divided (the II, with headquarters in Seville; the V, with headquarters in Zaragoza; the VII, with headquarters in Valladolid; the VIII, with headquarters in La Coruña; the X, with headquarters in the Balearic Islands), from there on the previous day they’d set in motion the mutiny of the Brunete Armoured Division in Madrid, from there he’d set himself up as the military leader of the rebels. On the eve of the coup Milans endeavoured to look after the details: several days before he’d had sent to headquarters, from the Valencian delegation of CESID, two confidential notes — one, on a possible terrorist attack by ETA; the other, on possible violent acts by left-wing trade unionists — which, although described with a minimal indication of reliability and based on false information, must have served him as additional cover for confining units to barracks and the application of martial law planned by the edict Colonel Ibáñez Inglés drew up at his insistence on the morning of 23 February; he also endeavoured to look after details on the day of the coup: the two notes from CESID had been prepared by some member of the intelligence services, but Milans considered that organization not to be an ally but a potential enemy of the coup, and one of the first measures he adopted after declaring the state of emergency was to arrest the head of CESID in Valencia and prevent any action by the organization by sending a detachment composed of a major and several soldiers to its offices in the city. At least in his territory Milans had or believed he had all the elements necessary to keep the coup under control: that morning he’d sent the commanding officers of the region sealed orders that should be opened only once they’d received a password (‘Miguelete’) by teletype and, when at six in the evening he closed the meeting of generals he’d called at headquarters and sent them back to their command posts to begin operations, nothing in Valencia seemed to predict the failure of the coup.

Nothing predicted it in El Pardo either, a few kilometres from Madrid, where the headquarters of the Brunete Armoured Division were located, the most powerful, modern and battle-hardened unit of the Army, and also the closest to the capital. Nothing predicted it in any case until about five in the afternoon, at the moment when, almost at the same time that Lieutenant Colonel Tejero overcame with the help of Captain Gómez Iglesias the suspicions of the officers recruited to accompany him to the Cortes and that General Milans informed his subordinates of the imminence of the coup, an anomalous meeting was taking place in the office of the commander of the division, General José Juste. The meeting was anomalous for several reasons, the first of which is that it had been called in a great rush by a mere major, Ricardo Pardo Zancada, whom the previous day General Milans had put in charge of inciting the Brunete Division to join the rebellion and occupy the streets of Madrid. Pardo Zancada was then a prestigious commissioned officer who had participated in agitation against the government and was close to the colonels’ plot or kept close relations with some of them, especially with Colonel San Martín, his immediate superior and chief of staff of the division; his ideological and personal connection with Milans has also been close ever since the general commanded the Brunete Division in the second half of the 1970s. This explains how on Sunday morning Milans had summoned him urgently and that, without asking for clarifications or hesitating for an instant, after giving Colonel San Martín an account of that untimely phone call, Pardo Zancada jumps in his car and leaves for Valencia. Upon the major’s arrival in the city after an almost four-hour drive, Milans tells him the plan for the following day just as the following day he’ll tell his generals, and he entrusts him with the mission of inciting his unit to rebellion with the help of San Martín and Luis Torres Rojas, a general who had taken part in preparatory meetings for the coup and had held the command of Brunete before being removed from his post for a threat of rebellion and assigned to the military government of La Coruña; although he was confident that to incite the division to rebellion he’d need only the halo of an undefeated warrior that surrounded him and the insurrectional air they breathed there, as in almost all Army units, Milans also made Pardo Zancada listen to a telephone conversation with General Armada from which the major deduced that the King was informed of the coup. Pardo Zancada paid attention with all five senses and, in spite of the uncertainty he was plunged into by Milans’ words and the dialogue between Milans and Armada — the plan struck him as poor, disjointed and unripe — he enthusiastically accepted the assignment; his questions had not cleared when at midnight, back in Madrid, he informed San Martín, but his enthusiasm had not waned either: both had been waiting for this moment for years, and both agreed that the clumsiness and improvisation with which the coup seemed to have been prepared did not authorize them to back out and prevent the triumph they undoubtedly considered certain.

The following morning was the most frenetic of Major Pardo Zancada’s life: almost single-handedly, without the help of Torres Rojas — whom he tried to phone over and over again at his military government office in La Coruña — without the help of San Martín — who had left first thing for a training camp near Zaragoza to supervise tactical exercises in the company of General Juste — Pardo Zancada prepared the Brunete Armoured Division for a mission that he still didn’t know and sketched out a programme of operations that each of its units should carry out: seizing the radio and television stations, taking up advance positions in strategic locations in Madrid — in the Campo del Moro, the Retiro, the Casa de Campo and the Parque del Oeste — their subsequent deployment in the city. Mid-morning he finally managed to speak with Torres Rojas, who rushed to catch a regular flight to Madrid dressed in his combat uniform and tank-driver beret, ready to stir his former unit to rebellion with his reputation as a tough leader loyal to his officers built up during his recent years in command. Pardo Zancada picked up Torres Rojas at Barajas airport just after two in the afternoon, and shortly afterwards had lunch with him in the headquarters canteen in the company of other commanders and officers surprised by the unexpected visit by their former general, at the same time that, in the Santa María de la Huerta parador, where he was lunching with General Juste on their way to Zaragoza, Colonel San Martín received a prearranged warning from Pardo Zancada according to which everything in the division was ready for the coup. At this moment San Martín must have hesitated: to return with Juste to headquarters meant risking that the commander of the Brunete might abort the plot; not to return meant perhaps excluding himself from the glory and yields of the triumph: the ambition to enjoy those, allied to the arrogance of the once all-powerful head of the Francoist intelligence services and his knowledge of the difficulties inherent in moving a division if the one doing it is not its natural commander, he convinced himself he could handle Juste and that he should return to his command post at El Pardo, which would eventually turn out to be one of the causes of the failure of the coup. This is how at half past four in the afternoon Juste and San Martín make a surprise reappearance at headquarters and this is how a few minutes before five, after troops have been confined to barracks, Major Pardo Zancada finally takes the floor to address the commanders and officers of all ranks he himself has summoned to that anomalous meeting and who now pack Juste’s office. Pardo Zancada’s speech is brief: the major announces that in a matter of minutes an event of great significance will occur in Madrid; he explains that this event will be followed by the occupation of Valencia by General Milans; he also explains that Milans is counting on the Brunete Division to occupy the capital; also, that the operation is directed from the Zarzuela Palace by General Armada with the consent of the King. The reaction of the majority of the meeting to Pardo Zancada’s words wavers between repressed joy and expectant but not dissatisfied seriousness; the commanders and officers await the verdict of Juste, whom Torres Rojas and San Martín try to win over to the cause of the coup with calming words and appeals to the King, Armada and Milans, and whom San Martín convinces not to call his immediate superior, General Quintana Lacaci, Captain General of Madrid, who is not aware of anything. After a few minutes of anguished hesitation, during which the uprising of 1936 goes through Juste’s head and the possibility that, if he opposes the coup, his officers might wrest away his command of the division and execute him then and there, at ten past five in the afternoon the commander of the Brunete Armoured Division makes an anodyne gesture — some of those present interpret it as a frustrated attempt to adjust his tortoiseshell glasses or to smooth his meagre grey moustache, others as a gesture of consent or resignation — pulls his chair up to his desk and pronounces three words that seem to be the penultimate sign that the coup will triumph: ‘Well, carry on.’

At the very same time, barely five hundred metres from the Cortes, at Army General Headquarters in the Buenavista Palace, everything is ready for the final signal to occur. There, in his new office as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, General Alfonso Armada has just arrived from Alcalá de Henares, where that morning he had participated in a celebration commemorating the foundation of the Parachute Brigade, has changed out of his ceremonial uniform and into his everyday one and waits but not impatiently, without even turning on the radio to listen to the debate of investiture of the new Prime Minister, for some subordinate to burst in and tell him of the assault on the Cortes. But what Armada — perhaps the most monarchist military man in the Spanish Army, until four years ago the King’s secretary, for the last several months many people’s candidate in the political village of Madrid to lead a coalition or interim or unity government — is especially waiting for is the subsequent call from the King asking him to come to the Zarzuela and explain what’s going on in the Cortes. Armada has good reasons to expect it: not only because he’s sure that, after almost a decade and a half of being his most dependable confidant, the King trusts him more than anyone else or almost anyone, but also because after his painful exit from the Zarzuela the two had reconciled and in recent weeks he has warned the monarch on a great many occasions about the risk of a coup and insinuated that he knows its ins and outs and if it finally occurs he could control it. Then, once in the Zarzuela, Armada will take charge of the problem, just like he used to do in the old days: backed by the King, backed by the King’s Army, he will go to the Cortes and, without having to make too much of an effort to convince the political parties to accept a solution that in any case the majority of them already considered reasonable long before the military took to the streets, he’ll liberate the deputies, form a coalition or interim or unity government under his leadership and bring tranquillity back to the Army and the nation. That’s what Armada expects will happen and that’s what, according to the golpistas’ predictions, will inevitably end up happening.

So at six in the evening on 23 February the essential elements of the coup were all ready and in the places assigned by the golpistas: six buses full of Civil Guards under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero were about to leave the Motor Pool to head for the Cortes (and another under the command of Captain Muñecas was about to do so from Valdemoro); the military commanders of the region of Valencia had opened their sealed orders with Milans’ instructions and, once the units were stocked up with fuel and ammunition, the barracks prepared to open their gates; the brigade and regiment commanders of the Brunete were just leaving headquarters for their respective command posts with operational orders drawn up by Pardo Zancada and approved by Juste containing concrete instructions on their priority objectives, deployment zones and occupation and surveillance missions; though not in his office but in that of General Gabeiras — his immediate superior and Chief of the Army General Staff, who just summoned him to discuss a routine matter — General Armada waits at Army General Headquarters for the phone call from the Zarzuela. Half an hour later Lieutenant Colonel Tejero bursts into the Cortes and the coup is unleashed. The taking of the Cortes was perhaps an easier than expected success: neither the police who guarded the building nor the deputies’ bodyguards offered the least resistance to the attackers, and a few minutes after entering the chamber, when the interior as well as the exterior of the Cortes was under his control and the mood of his men was euphoric, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero telephoned Valencia euphorically to give the news to General Milans; it was an easy success, but not a complete success. Given that it was meant to be the gateway to a soft coup, Tejero’s orders were that the occupation of the Cortes should be bloodless and discreet: he was only to suspend the session of investiture of the new Prime Minister, to detain the parliamentarians and maintain order pending the Army now in revolt coming to relieve him and his Civil Guards and General Armada, giving the hostages a political exit; miraculously, Tejero managed to keep the occupation bloodless, but not discreet, and that was the first problem for the golpistas, because a hail of bullets in the Cortes broadcast live on radio to the whole country gave the scenery of a hard coup to what was meant to be a soft coup or meant to keep up the appearance of a soft coup and made it difficult for the King, the political class and the general public to willingly give in to it. It could have been much worse, of course; if, as at the beginning seemed inevitable to those who heard the shooting on the radio (not to mention those who suffered it in the chamber), as well as indiscreet the operation had been bloody, then everything would have been different: because there’s no turning back from deaths, the soft coup would have become a hard coup, and the bloodbath may have been inevitable. However, as things happened, in spite of the violence of the operation’s mise-en-scène nothing essential stood in the golpistas’ way ten minutes into the coup: after all a mise-en-scène is only a mise-en-scène and, although the shooting in the chamber would undoubtedly force certain adjustments to the plan, the reality is that the Cortes was hijacked, that General Milans had proclaimed martial law in his region and had sent forty tanks and one thousand eight hundred soldiers of the 3rd Maestrazgo Mechanized Division out onto the streets of Valencia, that the Brunete Armoured Division was in revolt and their AMX-30 tanks ready to leave the barracks and that in the Zarzuela the King was on the point of calling Army General Headquarters to speak to General Armada. If it’s true that the fate of a coup is decided in its first minutes, then it’s also true that, ten minutes after its start, the 23 February coup had triumphed.

* There are likewise indications that, along with the CESID agents, agents of the Civil Guard Information Service (SIGC) under the command of Colonel Andrés Cassinello participated in the seizure of the Cortes. According to a report by one member of that service published in the newspapers in 1991, at five o’clock on 23 February several officers and twenty Civil Guards of the Operations Group of the SIGC under the command of a lieutenant began to deploy in the Cortes and vicinity, and at five thirty had already combed the area to be sure that, when the moment came, the police in charge of the building’s security would not oppose the entry of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero and his Civil Guards. This information has never been refuted.