The Anatomy of a Moment

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The frozen image shows the deserted chamber of the Congress of Deputies. Or almost deserted: in the centre of the image, leaning slightly to the right, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desolation of empty benches, Adolfo Suárez remains seated on his blue prime minister’s bench. On his left, General Gutiérrez Mellado stands in the central semicircle, his arms hanging down at his sides, his back to the camera, looking at the six Civil Guards who shoot off their guns in silence, as if he wanted to prevent them from entering the chamber or as if he were trying to protect the body of his Prime Minister with his own body. Behind the old general, closer to the viewer, another two Civil Guards spray the chamber with submachine-gun fire while, pistol in hand, from the steps of the speakers’ rostrum, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero demands with gestures of alarm and inaudible shouted orders that his men stop the shooting that is pulverizing the instructions he has received. Above Prime Minister Suárez a few hands of hidden deputies appear between the uninterrupted red of the benches; in front of the Prime Minister, under and around a table covered with open books and a lit oil lamp, three stenographers and an usher curl up on the elaborate carpet of the central semicircle; closer, in the lower part of the image, almost blending in with the blue of the government benches, the crouching backs of a few ministers can be distinguished: a thread of crustacean shells. The whole scene is wrapped in a scant, watery, unreal light, as if it were going on inside an aquarium or as if the chamber’s only illumination came from the baroque cluster of spherical glass lampshades that hang from one wall, in the top right of the image; perhaps for this reason the whole scene also has a suggestion of a dance or a funereal family portrait and a hunger for meaning not satisfied by the elements that compose it or by the fiction of eternity that lends it its illusory stillness.

But if we unfreeze the image the stillness vanishes and reality regains its course. Slowly, while the shots grow more intermittent, General Gutiérrez Mellado turns, puts his hands on his hips, turning his back on the Civil Guards and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, observes the abandoned chamber, like a punctilious officer taking visual stock of the destruction when the battle has not yet entirely concluded; meanwhile, Prime Minister Suárez leans back in his seat, straightening up a little, and the lieutenant colonel finally manages to get the Guards to obey his orders and the chamber is overtaken by a silence exaggerated by the recent din, as dense as the silence that follows an earthquake or a plane crash. At this moment the angle changes; the image we now see shows the lieutenant colonel from the front, with his pistol held high, standing on the stairs to the speakers’ rostrum; on his left, the Secretary of the Congress, Víctor Carrascal — still with the papers on his lap with the list of deputies that only a few seconds ago he was reciting monotonously during the investiture vote — watches in panic, lying on the ground, as two Civil Guards point their weapons at General Gutiérrez Mellado, who watches them in turn with his hands on his hips. Then, noticing out of the blue that the old general is still there, standing defiantly, the lieutenant colonel rushes down the stairs, pounces on him from behind, grabs him by the neck and tries to force him to the ground before the eyes of two Civil Guards and Víctor Carrascal, who at this moment hides his face in his arms as if he lacks the courage to see what is going to happen or as if he feels an incalculable shame at not being able to prevent it.

The angle changes again. It is also a frontal view of the chamber, but wider: the deputies lie tucked under their benches and the heads of a few of them cautiously peek over to see what’s going on in the central semicircle, in front of the speakers’ rostrum, where the lieutenant colonel has not managed to fell General Gutiérrez Mellado, who has stayed on his feet holding on with all his might to the armrest in front of the ministers’ bench. Now he is surrounded by the lieutenant colonel and three Civil Guards, pointing their guns at him, and Prime Minister Suárez, barely a metre from the general, stands up from his seat and approaches him, also holding on to the armrest: for a moment the Civil Guards seem to be about to fire; for a moment, on the armrest in front of their bench, the hand of the young Prime Minister and the hand of the old general seem to seek each other, as if the two men wanted to face up to their destiny together. But the destiny does not arrive, the shots do not arrive, or not yet, although the Civil Guards close in round the general — no longer four but eight of them now — and, while one of them insults him and shouts the demand that he obey and lie down on the carpet of the central semicircle, the lieutenant-colonel approaches him from behind and trips him and this time almost manages to throw him down, but the general resists again, clinging to the armrest as to a life raft. Only then does the lieutenant colonel give up and he and his Guards walk away from the general while Prime Minister Suárez seeks his hand again, takes it for an instant before the general pulls away angrily, without taking his eyes off his aggressors; the Prime Minister, however, insists, tries to calm his rage with words, begs him to return to his seat and makes him see reason: taking him by the hand as if he were a child, pulls him towards him, stands up and lets him pass, and the old general — after unbuttoning his jacket with a gesture that reveals his white shirt, his grey waistcoat and his dark tie — finally sits down in his seat.

Chapter 1

There is a second translucent gesture here that perhaps like the first contains many gestures. Like Adolfo Suárez’s gesture of remaining seated on his bench while the bullets whizz around him in the chamber, General Gutiérrez Mellado’s gesture of furiously confronting the military golpistas is a courageous gesture, a graceful gesture, a rebellious gesture, a supreme gesture of liberty. Perhaps it might also be, in a manner of speaking, a posthumous gesture, the gesture of a man who knows he is going to die or that he’s already dead, because, with the exception of Adolfo Suárez, since the advent of democracy no one has stockpiled as much military hatred as General Gutiérrez Mellado, who as soon as the shooting started perhaps felt, like almost all of those present, that it could only end in a massacre and, supposing he were to survive it, the golpistas would not take long to get rid of him. I don’t believe it is, however, a histrionic gesture: although he’d been practising politics for the last five years, General Gutiérrez Mellado was never essentially a politician; he was always a soldier, and therefore, because he was always a soldier, his gesture that evening was above all a military gesture and therefore also in some way a logical, obligatory, almost fatal gesture: Gutiérrez Mellado was the only soldier present in the chamber and, like any soldier, he carried in his genes the imperative of discipline and could not tolerate soldiers’ insubordination. I’m not noting this fact to detract from the general in any way; I do so only to try to pin down the significance of his gesture. A significance that on the other hand we might not be able to pin down entirely if we don’t imagine that, while he is facing up to the golpistas, refusing to obey them or while shouting his demand that they leave the Cortes, the general could see himself in the Civil Guards defying his authority by shooting over the chamber, because forty-five years earlier he had disobeyed the genetic imperative of discipline and had rebelled against the civilian power embodied in a democratic government; or in other words: perhaps General Gutiérrez Mellado’s fury is not made only of a visible fury against some rebellious Civil Guards, but also of a secret fury against himself, and perhaps it wouldn’t be entirely illegitimate to understand his gesture of confronting the golpistas as an extreme gesture of contrition by a former golpista.

The general would not have accepted this interpretation, or he would not have accepted it publicly: he wouldn’t have accepted that forty-five years earlier he had been a rebellious officer who had supported a military coup against a political system fundamentally identical to the one he now represented in government. But no one escapes his biography, and the general’s biography would correct him: on 18 July 1936, when he was a barely twenty-four-year-old lieutenant just out of the Artillery Academy, a member of the Falange and assigned to a regiment stationed a few kilometres from Madrid, Gutiérrez Mellado helped to incite his unit to join the rebellion against the legitimate government of the Republic, and on the 19th, until the military insurrection was crushed in Madrid, spent the morning on the roof of his barracks shooting with a conventional machine gun at the Breguet XIX planes from the Getafe airfield that had been bombing the rebel positions since dawn. The general never denied these facts, but he would have denied the comparison between the democracy of 1936 and that of 1981 and between the golpistas of 18 July and those of 23 February: he never repented publicly of having mutinied in 1936, he would never have admitted that the political regime against which he’d rebelled in his youth was fundamentally identical to the one he’d contributed to creating in his old age and now represented, and he always asserted that General Franco’s coup d’état had been necessary because the democracy of 1936, which had allowed three hundred violent deaths in political incidents over a few months, was scandalously imperfect and unsustainable and had given up power to the streets, where the Army had simply picked it up. This or something very similar was the general’s argument (an argument shared by the substantial segment of the Spanish right that still has not broken its historical devotion to Francoism); its incoherence is glaring: did the golpistas of 1981 not invoke reasons resembling those of 1936? Did they not assert that the democracy of 1981 was scandalously imperfect? Did they not assert that power was in the street, ready for someone to come along and pick it up? And did they not have as many or almost as many reasons to say so as the golpistas of 1936 did? How many deaths need to be on the table before a democratic regime is no longer one or is unsustainable and ends up making military intervention necessary? Two hundred? Two hundred and fifty? Three hundred? Four hundred? Wouldn’t fewer be enough? In the week of 23 to 30 January 1977, when General Gutiérrez Mellado had been Deputy Prime Minister of Adolfo Suárez’s first government for four months, ten people were murdered for political motives in Spain, fifteen were seriously injured and there were two kidnappings of high-ranking figures of the regime (Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, president of the Council of State, and General Emilio Villaescusa, president of the Supreme Council of Military Justice); in 1980 alone there were more than four hundred and fifty terrorist attacks, more than four hundred wounded, more than a hundred and thirty deaths, the equivalent of more than one attack a day, more than one person wounded a day, almost one death every three days. Was that a sustainable situation? Was the democracy that allowed it a real democracy? Was military intervention necessary in 1977 or in 1981? One answer to these questions is obvious: if, as General Gutiérrez Mellado said towards the end of his life, the Republic in 1936 was an unsustainable regime, then the constitutional monarchy in February 1981 was as well and it wasn’t the general who was in the right but the Civil Guards who attacked the Cortes that evening.

But there is also another answer: a less logical but truer answer, and also more complex. The answer is that theory is one thing and practice quite another: in theory the general never renounced the 18 July uprising, and, like any other military man of his generation, perhaps he never even renounced Francisco Franco; in practice, however, and at least from the moment Adolfo Suárez brought him into politics and put him in charge of military affairs for his government, the general did nothing but renounce Francisco Franco and the uprising of 18 July.

Let me explain. A historiographical cliché has it that the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain was possible thanks to a pact of forgetting. It’s a lie; or, what amounts to the same thing, it’s a fragmentary truth, which only begins to be completed by a contrary cliché: the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain was possible thanks to a pact of remembering. Speaking in general, the transition — the historical period we know by that misleading name, which suggests the falsehood that democracy was an inevitable consequence of Francoism and not the result of a willed and improvised series of chances enabled by the decrepitude of the dictatorship — was a pact by which the vanquished of the Civil War agreed not to settle scores for what had happened during forty-three years of war and dictatorship, while, in compensation, after forty-three years of settling scores with the defeated, the victors accepted the creation of a political system that admitted both sides and was essentially identical to the system brought down by the war. That pact did not include forgetting the past: it included shelving it, avoiding it, setting it aside; it included agreeing not to use it politically, but it didn’t include forgetting it. From the point of view of justice, the pact contained an error, because it meant shelving, avoiding or setting aside the fact that those ultimately responsible for the war were those who won it, who provoked it with a coup d’état against a democratic regime, and because it also meant relinquishing any compensation for the victims and the prosecution of those responsible for an ignominious settling of scores that included a plan to exterminate the defeated; but, from the political point of view — even from the point of view of political ethics — the pact was a wise move, because its result was a political victory for the defeated, who restored a system essentially identical to that which they’d defended in the war (though one was called a republic and the other a monarchy, both were parliamentary democracies), and because maybe the moral error would have been to try to settle scores with those who had committed the error of settling scores, adding ignominy to ignominy: that is at least what the politicians who made the transition thought, as if they’d all read Max Weber and thought like him that there was nothing ethically more abject than to practise spurious ethics that seek only to be right, ethics that, ‘instead of being concerned with what the politician is interested in, the future and the responsibility towards that future, are concerned with politically sterile questions of past guilt’, and which, falling into this guilty indignity, ‘overlook the unavoidable falsification of the whole problem’, a falsification that is the result of the predatory interest of victors and vanquished in obtaining moral and material advantages and for others to confess their guilt. In any case, if the politicians of the transition were able to fulfil the pact that this involved, not making use of the past in political combat, it was not because they’d forgotten it, but because they remembered it very well: because they remembered and they decided that it was undignified and abject to settle scores with the past in order to be right at the risk of mutilating the future, perhaps of submerging the country in another civil war. During the transition few people in Spain forgot, and the memory of the war was more present than ever in the memory of the political class and the population in general; that is precisely one of the reasons why no one or hardly anyone opposed the 23 February coup: during those years everyone wanted to avoid at any price the risk of repeating the savage orgy of bloodletting that had happened forty years earlier, and everyone transmitted that desire to a political class that was only its reflection. It was not a heroic desire, anxious for justice (or apocalypse); it was just a brave and reasonable bourgeois desire, and the political class fulfilled it, bravely and reasonably: although in the autumn and winter of 1980 the political class behaved with an irresponsibility that verged on sending the country back to barbarism, between 1976 and 1980 it was much less incompetent than its last two centuries of history might have predicted. All this is valid, especially, for the generation that had fought the war and conspired for such a thing never to happen again. All this is valid, without doubt, for General Gutiérrez Mellado, who, no matter what he said in public, at least since his arrival in government always acted like someone who rejected in advance being right or having been in the right, that is he acted as if he knew the truth: that the democracy he was helping to construct was essentially identical to the one he’d helped to destroy forty years earlier, and that he was in his way responsible for the catastrophe of the war. From that point, as if the general were also a hero of the retreat — a professional of renunciation and demolition who abandons his positions undermining himself — all his political accomplishments were directed, not at arguing over or recognizing his guilt, but at atoning for it, assuming responsibility for preventing another 18 July and dismantling, to prevent it, the army that had provoked it: his own army, the Army of the Victory, Francisco Franco’s Army. And from there as well — besides a gesture of courage and grace and rebellion, besides a supreme gesture of liberty, a posthumous gesture and a military gesture — his gesture of confronting the rebel Civil Guards in the chamber of the Cortes can be understood not only as a way of gaining a definitive pardon for the sins of his youth, but also as a summary or emblem of his two main aims over the five years since Adolfo Suárez named him Deputy Prime Minister and put him in charge of his government’s defence policies: to subjugate military power to civilian power and to protect the Prime Minister from the fury of his comrades-in-arms.

Chapter 2

At the beginning of September 1976, when he was Chief of the Army General Staff and just a few days before Adolfo Suárez brought him into politics by naming him Deputy Prime Minister of his first government, General Gutiérrez Mellado was one of the military officers most respected by his comrades-in-arms; only a few months later he was one of the most hated. There was no lack of people who attributed this sudden change to the errors of Gutiérrez Mellado’s military policies; it’s quite probable that there were errors, but it’s beyond doubt that, had there not been, the result would have been the same: for the Army — for the majority in the Army, stonily entrenched in the mentality of Francoism — Gutiérrez Mellado’s error was his unconditional support for Adolfo Suárez’s democratic reforms and his role as the Prime Minister’s military lightning rod and guarantor. He paid dearly for both: Gutiérrez Mellado spent the last years of his life a shadow of the proud soldier he’d once been, despised by his comrades-in-arms, trying in vain to make sense of their collective defection, admired by people whose admiration flattered him but didn’t matter much to him and rejected by people whose affection he’d done nothing but seek. He loved the Army with a passion, and the hatred he sensed from its members destroyed him; it was also the cause of the drastic metamorphosis he underwent during his brief political career: at the beginning of the 1970s, when he found himself assigned to the High Command General Staff at the orders of General Manuel Díez Alegría — a liberal officer with enlightened touches of whom he considered himself a disciple from then on — Gutiérrez Mellado was a serious, cordial, calm and open-minded man; less than a decade later, when he left government after 23 February, he’d turned into a surly, nervous, distrustful and irritable man, reluctant to take an objection or criticism patiently. Politics crushed him: although in the 1970s he’d developed a strong vocation for politics — in part as a result of his contacts with military commanders from democratic countries, who had persuaded him of the Spanish Army’s inefficiency, of the third-world anachronism of the role of guardian it played in the country and of his own capacity to carry out a reform that could not be postponed — he was not prepared for politics; although the military reform he drove through meant the modernization of an antiquated, needy, archaic, outsized and inoperative army, the political reform, the intransigence of his comrades and his own errors ended up hiding it; although his main aim was to divorce the Army from politics (‘One is either in politics and leaves the military, or one is in the military and leaves politics,’ he said), he did not manage to get his comrades-in-arms to accept a separation he applied first of all to himself, requesting his transfer to the reserves and becoming a retired general, nor did he manage to keep them from accusing him of still being in the military while being in politics; although he had spent his life among soldiers, he didn’t seem to know the military mentality of his times, or maybe he resisted knowing it or admitting that he knew it: he never acknowledged the evidence that the majority of the Army did not accept democracy or only accepted it reluctantly; he never acknowledged the evidence that the majority of the Army resisted submitting to the civilian power embodied in the government and aspired to enjoy a broad degree of autonomy that would allow it, under the direct command of the King, to run itself in accordance with its own criteria and direct or guard the country’s course; perhaps because he’d barely exercised direct command of troops, he didn’t understand or had forgotten that in his relationship with his superiors a soldier does not want reasons, suggestions or exchanges of opinions, but orders, and that in the Army anything that is not an order runs the risk of being interpreted as a sign of weakness. These and other contradictions, that he could not avoid or reconcile — maybe because in the years he had to govern it was impossible to do so — left too many flanks open to the criticisms of those who from the start of the transition opposed the loss of the Army’s power as the guarantor of the continuity of Francoism, and in the end overwhelmed him, so before he noticed the idea had spread among his comrades that he had betrayed the Army and the nation for dirty political ambition and a desire for public prominence, and he lacked sufficient prestige and power to contradict it.

It was a Calvary that began on the afternoon of 21 September 1976, when General Gutiérrez Mellado took on the deputy premiership of Adolfo Suárez’s first government as a replacement for General Fernando de Santiago. That very morning de Santiago had threatened the Prime Minister that he’d resign if, as the Minister of Industrial Relations had announced, the left-wing trade unions were legalized; Suárez, who had inherited de Santiago from the government of his predecessor and knew that his unwavering Francoism would be an obstacle to his plans for reform, seized the opportunity and accepted his resignation (or imposed it), and as soon as de Santiago had left his office he phoned Gutiérrez Mellado and summoned him to offer him the post. He had spoken with him only on a couple of occasions, but he had no doubt that this was his man: everyone knew of his technical skill, his tolerant disposition and his modern military ideas and vocabulary, and more than a few people with influence over him — from the King to Díez Alegría himself — had recommended him as the general Suárez needed to renovate the Army. Besides, it was not the first time Suárez had offered him a ministry: when he formed his first government in July of that year the Prime Minister had proposed that he take the Internal Affairs portfolio, but Gutiérrez Mellado turned down the offer, claiming that he did not possess adequate knowledge to carry out the brief (which in itself gives the lie to the unbridled passion for power his enemies always reproached him for); now, however, he did not hesitate to accept: the Deputy Prime Minister’s office had vast powers in defence matters, and in this sphere the general did consider that he knew what had to be done and was prepared to do it. As for the political project he would carry out for the government of which he was going to be Deputy Prime Minister, it is no secret that Gutiérrez Mellado was a man of few political ideas and fundamental conservatism, so he most likely thought at that moment, as almost everyone thought, as perhaps Suárez himself thought, that the task of government would go no further than adapting the old structures of Francoism to the country’s new reality; for the same reason it’s likely that only as reality imposed its discipline and Suárez yielded to the discipline of reality that Gutiérrez Mellado finally came to understand — maybe with some confusion but when it was already too late, because he was too committed to Suárez and to what Suárez represented to go back — that the political system he was helping to construct was not essentially different from the one he’d helped to destroy half a century before, and that constructing it meant constructing a democratic army on top of Franco’s Army.

Appointing Gutiérrez Mellado Deputy Prime Minister was a brilliant move on Suárez’s part: the general’s then still intact prestige calmed the military and the far right, guaranteeing with his prominent presence in the government that the Army was controlling the reforms; it also calmed those who sought to liberalize the regime and the still illegal democratic opposition, guaranteeing with his reputation as someone who was open to change that the reforms were serious; and it calmed an immense majority of people in the country in whom the memory of the war instilled a dread of sudden shocks, guaranteeing that the reforms were going to happen in an orderly way and without violence. On the other hand, for Gutiérrez Mellado accepting Suárez’s appointment meant half-opening a breach in his military prestige, and he had barely taken up his post when the general realized that those who until then had admired or appreciated him would henceforth seize any opportunity to attack him. A gaffe by the government itself gave them the first, and the breach was open. A few days after Gutiérrez Mellado’s appointment, General de Santiago sent a communiqué to his comrades-in-arms in which he justified his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister by stating that he considered validating the legalization of the left-wing unions banned by Franco with his presence in the government to be incompatible with his soldierly honour; this declaration was applauded and supplemented by General Carlos Iniesta Cano in an article published in El Alcázar in which he deemed it dishonourable for any soldier to accept the post de Santiago had left, and accused the new Deputy Prime Minister of perjury. Determined to crush the slightest hint of military defiance, Suárez decided to punish both officers with their immediate relegation to the reserve list; the measure was fair and brave, but it was also illegal and, when the government noticed its mistake, it had no choice but to retract it, which did nothing to avert the first press campaign against the general in the far-right media, poisoning the barracks, denouncing Gutiérrez Mellado’s complicity with a government ready to bypass the law in order to humiliate the Army.

That was the first time they called him a traitor. The second happened seven months later, when his government legalized the Communist Party, but then it was no longer just a minority in the Army who resorted to the insult. For historians the episode is central in the change from dictatorship to democracy; for researchers interested in 23 February it is one of the remote origins of the coup; for General Gutiérrez Mellado it was something else: the crossing of a line with no turning back in his personal and political life. For forty years the Communist Party had been the bête-noire of Francoism; and also of the military, who felt that forty years before they’d defeated the Communists on the battlefield and were in no way prepared to permit their return to political life. It’s likely that, when he came to power in July 1976, Suárez had no intention of legalizing the Communists, but not that he was unaware that their legalization might constitute the touchstone of his reform, because the Communists had been the main and almost sole opposition to Francoism and because a democracy without Communists would be an abbreviated democracy, perhaps internationally acceptable, but nationally insufficient. That in any case is what Suárez gradually came to understand during his first months in government and, after overcoming many doubts, what convinced him that he should make the decision to legalize the Communist Party even in the face of military opposition. It was 9 April 1977 and it was a historic jolt. In the following days, while the country began to emerge from its incredulity, the Army was on the brink of a coup d’état: except for Gutiérrez Mellado, the military ministers of the government said they learned the news from the press, the Minister for the Navy, Admiral Pita Da Veiga, resigned from his post, and the Minister for the Army, General Álvarez Arenas, called a meeting of the Senior Army Council in which insults to the government were voiced and threats made to bring the troops out onto the street, and out of which came a tough communiqué condemning the governmental decision; all the rage of the military officers converged on the Prime Minister (and, by default, on his Deputy Prime Minister): the accusations of perjury and treason were repeated and amplified; they added the accusation that he had deceived them. None of the accusations were baseless: there is no doubt that, by legalizing the Communist Party, Suárez was violating the principles of the Movimiento he had sworn to defend; furthermore, it’s true that in a certain sense he had deceived the Armed Forces.

Eight months before, on 8 September 1976, Suárez had called a meeting of the top military commanders in the Prime Minister’s office to explain to them personally the nature and reach of the political changes he was planning. Present at the meeting were members of the High Command of the three branches of the Armed Forces — more than thirty generals and admirals in total, Gutiérrez Mellado among them — and, over three hours of uninterrupted talk, Suárez displayed all his dialectical skill and all his arts of seduction to convince those present that they had nothing to fear from reforms that, as he’d said months before in front of the Francoist Cortes, were going to be limited to ‘elevating to the political category of normal what at street level is simply normal’, and which, as those who listened to him understood (and Suárez did nothing to keep them from understanding), all in all were equivalent to a sophisticated reformulation of Francoism, or to its disguised prolongation. That was the crux of Suárez’s speech; but the crucial moment of the encounter (or the one that time ended up turning into the crucial moment of the encounter) didn’t happen while Suárez was speaking, but while lavishing jokes, embraces and smiles on the little groups that gathered once he’d finished doing so. In one of them someone asked him what would happen with the Communist Party; the Prime Minister’s answer was careful but categorical: as long as it had its current statutes, it would not be legalized. The meeting broke up a short time later amid the enthusiasm and cheers of the generals (‘Prime Minister, long live the mother who bore you!’ shouted General Mateo Prada Canillas), who left the Prime Minister’s office convinced that the Communist Party would not go back to being legal in Spain and that Adolfo Suárez was a blessing for the country. Eight months later reality showed them their error. It cannot be said, however, that Suárez lied to the military that morning: on the one hand, the proviso contained within his answer to the key question (‘as long as it had its current statutes’) was a way of protecting himself against the future, and it’s true that before legalizing the Party Suárez had the guile and prudence to accommodate it by getting the PCE to modify certain aspects of their statutes; on the other hand, Suárez didn’t yet know in September of 1976 if he would legalize the Communist Party: he didn’t know it in September, or in October, or in November, or in December, or even in January, because the transition was not a process designed in advance, but a continual improvisation that took Suárez into territories in which a few months earlier he could not even have imagined he’d set foot. But it can be said that Suárez tricked the military by letting them believe until the last moment that he wouldn’t legalize the Communist Party, although only by adding immediately that he tricked almost everybody, including the Communists themselves, probably including himself. Some military men and democratic politicians have frequently reproached Suárez for this way of proceeding: for them, if the Prime Minister had warned the military in time they would have complied with his decision without rows or threats of rebellion (and in consequence wouldn’t have begun the permanent plotting that culminated in the 23 February coup attempt); the argument seems flimsy to me, if not false: the proof is that convincing a solidly anti-Communist army of the legitimacy of the Communist Party ended up being a task that took years, incompatible in any case with the speed with which Suárez introduced his reforms that was definitely one of the fundamental reasons for their success. Be that as it may, whether or not it was necessary to trick the Army and with it almost everybody else, the fact is that as soon as they found out that Suárez had legalized their eternal enemy, ignoring or forgetting what they’d been promised or what they thought they’d been promised, the generals exchanged the enthusiasm and cheers with which they’d applauded him months earlier for the virtuous indignation of those who feel themselves to be victims of the misdeeds of a renegade.

They never trusted Suárez again. Neither Suárez nor General Gutiérrez Mellado, who not only complied with his Prime Minister’s decision but also, once the Communists were legalized and the first democratic elections held in June 1977, remained as the only military officer in Suárez’s government, and from that moment on became the favoured target of attacks that deep down were not aimed at him, but at Suárez. It was a ferocious and inflexible campaign that went on for years, that meant daily attacks in the press, personal insults, retrospective slander and periodic riots, and did not exclude from its unusual virulence those who worked either closely or distantly with him. Gutiérrez Mellado survived it as well as he could, but not all his collaborators had the same luck or the same fortitude: unable to hear himself called fucking traitor or destroyer of the Army any longer, shortly after the coup d’état General Marcelo Aramendi ended his life with a pistol shot in his office at Army General Headquarters. The aggression Gutiérrez Mellado coped with was no less cruel than that which broke General Aramendi, but it was incomparably more assiduous and more publicized. They accused him of cowardice and duplicity because he hadn’t made war on them face to face and because he’d spent a great deal of his career in the intelligence services, a double accusation perhaps predictable in an army like Franco’s, in which valour, more than a virtue, was barroom rhetoric, and in which the terrible reputation of the intelligence services had been established by a phrase attributed to Franco, a phrase by which, as Gutiérrez Mellado knew first-hand, Francoism endeavoured to abide: Spies get paid, not decorated; apart from predictable and stupid, the accusation was false: although it was true that almost from the beginning his military career had been linked to espionage, Gutiérrez Mellado had not only fought with a machine gun in his hand during the 18 July uprising, but also, converted later into one of the chiefs of the fifth column in Madrid, for three years he’d risked his life in the obscurity of the Republican rearguard much more often than the majority of the braggarts who were recriminating him for having gone through the war without firing a shot. They accused him of leading the UMD — the Unión Militar Democrática or Democratic Military Union, a tiny clandestine military association that in the fading years of Francoism tried to promote the creation of a democratic regime — when the reality is that, in spite of being personally and ideologically close to some officers incorporated in it, he fought unhesitatingly against it because in his judgement it was splitting the discipline of the Armed Forces and putting their unity at risk, and that, once its members were tried and expelled from the Army, he opposed allowing them to be readmitted to their posts, which did not prevent him from often interceding to stop the persecution his comrades unleashed against them (though not against the members of other also clandestine associations, such as the Unión Militar Patriótica or Patriotic Military Union, that advocated the prolongation of Francoism and at that time were perfectly at ease in the Army). They accused him of wanting to demilitarize the Civil Guard — something that started a campaign of newspaper articles, collections of signatures and public festivities in which Lieutenant Colonel Tejero took a spirited part — when the reality is that he was only trying to improve the corps’ efficiency, without stripping it of military allegiance, by putting its public order and security functions under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior. They accused him of wanting to pervert, revoke or crush Army ethics with his reform of Carlos III’s Royal Ordinances — the code that had ruled military morality since passed by the Earl of Aranda in 1787 — when the reality is that he was just trying to adapt the institution’s ultraconservative ethics to the ethics of the twentieth century, permeating them with the lay and liberal values of democratic society. They accused him of every despicable thing possible, and explored his biography with a microscope in search of fuel with which to rubbish his reputation: they dug up an incident that had happened forty years earlier, during the witch-hunt against Freemasonry unleashed by Francoist authorities at the end of the war, to maintain that he’d been involved in or committed or instigated a murder, that of Major Isaac Gabaldón, gunned down one night in July 1939 while, according to certain witnesses, carrying a file of documents accusing some of his colleagues in SIMP, Franco’s intelligence service, of belonging to the Freemasons; Gutiérrez Mellado was one of the members of SIMP and, although the judge hearing the case declared that the major had been murdered by Republican partisans and found Gutiérrez Mellado and the other members of SIMP not guilty of all the charges against them, the incident cast a shadow over the beginning of his military career and was used at the end to sow new doubts about his loyalty to the Army and his personal honesty.

Gutiérrez Mellado’s personal honesty and loyalty to the Army were, as far as we know, unquestionable; as far as we know, the general was a decent man, congenitally incapable of guile and deceit, and perhaps therefore not suited for the practice of politics, or at least for the practice of politics in convulsive times. This does not of course mean that all the accusations poured out against him can be qualified as false or unjust. Not everything about the general’s military policies was right; but, given the exceptional circumstances he had to fight against, many of the mistakes he committed would have been hard to avoid, if not actually unavoidable. His promotions policy, for example, was the best instrument the government had at its disposal to purge the Armed Forces of its leaden Francoist hindrance. Since a hierarchical promotion ladder was sacrosanct in the Army, in this matter as in almost everything Gutiérrez Mellado was almost always caught in the crossfire: he either respected seniority, allowing the radical old guard to monopolize the top command positions and threaten the course of democracy, or he bypassed protocol and promoted reliable officers and in return infuriated the passed-over officers and gave ammunition to those in favour of an uprising. Gutiérrez Mellado confronted this insoluble dilemma on more than a few occasions; the best known, the most illustrative as well, took place in May 1979, when the new Chief of the Army General Staff was named after the retirement of General De Liniers. The candidates to replace him were General Milans del Bosch, then Captain General of Valencia, and General González del Yerro, then Captain General of the Canary Islands; Gutiérrez Mellado did not consider either of them, but instead had named General Gabeiras — a soldier who lacked standing among his colleagues but enjoyed the Deputy Prime Minister’s full confidence — thereby finding it necessary not only to promote him in an artificial and hasty manner, but also to promote the generals above him in the pecking order to avoid accusations of cronyism and of completely ignoring military norms. The ruse was in vain, and the scandal in the barracks monumental, not to mention the indignation of Milans and González del Yerro. Could he have avoided both things by arranging the change of power at the top of the Army in a different way? Perhaps, but it’s not easy to imagine how; what is easy to imagine is what would have happened if on 23 February Milans had been in Madrid in command of the Army General Staff instead of being in Valencia in command of a secondary military region (the same or almost the same applies to González del Yerro, who during the 23 February coup adopted a dangerously equivocal attitude): almost certainly it would have been much more difficult for the coup to fail. On the other hand, on 23 February Gabeiras proved to be, if not the forceful chief a democratic army would have needed to confront the coup, at least a loyal soldier, and in any case the episode of his appointment was only one of many that embittered the relationship between the government and the Armed Forces and allowed the far right to keep the barracks on a continuous war footing against the government, propagating the rumour that Gutiérrez Mellado’s military policy was just one despotic arbitrariness after another with which democracy aimed to castigate the Army, demoralizing it and eliminating any trace of its former prestige.

But the military discontent that crucified Gutiérrez Mellado and led to the events of 23 February was not only fed by professional gripes, imaginary humiliations and political intransigence; the military golpistas were not within reason, but they had reasons, and some of them were very powerful. I’m not referring to the concern around 1980 with which they watched the deterioration of the political, social and economic situation, or to the undisguised disgust they felt — they, who had not only been charged by the Constitution of 1978 with the defence of the unity of Spain but felt bound to that command by an imperative buried in their DNA — at the proliferation of flags and nationalist claims and the decentralization propelled by the Estado de las Autonomías (State of Autonomies), a combination of words that for the immense majority of military men was simply a euphemism hiding or anticipating the controlled explosion of the fatherland; I’m referring to a much more wounding matter, definitely one of the direct causes of the coup d’état: terrorism, and in particular the terrorism of ETA, which at that time was viciously attacking the Army and the Civil Guard in the face of the indulgence of a left that had not yet divested the ETA militants of their aura of anti-Franco fighters. If it’s easy to understand this attitude of the left: simply recall the disastrous role the Army, the Civil Guard and the police played for forty years in supporting the dictatorship, not to mention the voluminous list of their atrocities, it’s impossible to justify: if the Armed Forces had to protect democratic society with all their resources against its enemies, then democratic society had to protect the Armed Forces with all its resources from the slaughter to which they were being subjected, or at least support its members. It did not, and the consequence of that error was that the Armed Forces felt abandoned by a considerable part of democratic society and that putting a stop to that slaughter became, in the eyes of a considerable part of the Armed Forces, an irresistible argument for putting a stop to democratic society.

Few people were as aware of this state of affairs as General Gutiérrez Mellado, few people made greater efforts to remedy it and few people suffered from it personally as much as he did, because it was he who the indignant military, spurred on by the far right, held responsible from the beginning for allowing the murders of their comrades-in-arms and the disdain with which part of the country viewed them. That indignation provoked repeated acts of insubordination against the general and public revolts, which in their way were announcements or foreshadowings of 23 February; terrorism was not always the cause or the excuse — they didn’t always happen during the heat of funerals for murdered soldiers, Civil Guards or policemen: they also happened at briefings of the High Command, on routine visits to barracks, even at formal ceremonies or drinks receptions — but it was always the cause or excuse of the most tumultuous and violent ones. Perhaps the most serious took place on the afternoon of 4 January 1979, at Army General Headquarters, during the funeral rites for the military governor of Madrid, Constantino Ortín, killed the night before in an ETA attack, and it must be said, like the majority of military disturbances of those years, not the spontaneous result of the emotion of the moment, but an act prepared by a previous alliance of officers pushing for a coup and far-right groups. The scene, which has been described on numerous occasions by numerous witnesses, could have happened like this:

Gutiérrez Mellado, personal friend of General Ortín and sole member of the government who attends the ceremony, presides over the funeral. The parade ground of the General Headquarters is heaving with a huge military crowd. Beneath an overcast winter sky, the ceremony goes on in an atmosphere of sorrow but also of induced tension, until at a certain moment, just after the band plays a prayer and the infantry hymn and as the undertaker’s employees pick up the coffin while the commanders, officers and NCOs lined up in front of the podium fall out, shouts against the government begin to break out here and there as well as insults against the Deputy Prime Minister, who is immediately accosted by several officers who jostle him violently, corner him against the south door of the parade ground, vilify and punch him. A few metres from where this is happening, another group of officers wrestle the coffin away from the undertaker’s employees and, after threatening the sentry guarding the premises that they’ll shoot the doors open, manage to leave with the coffin on their shoulders out on to Calle Alcalá, where a crowd shouting ‘Power to the Army!’ ecstatically greets the several hundred insurgent commanders and officers, merges with them and accompanies them for three kilometres through the centre of Madrid to La Almudena cemetery, while in an office in the Headquarters, far from the military uprising inundating the streets of the capital, a crestfallen Gutiérrez Mellado who’s lost his glasses tries to recover from the humiliation among the handful of comrades-in-arms who’ve just prevented his lynching.

That is the scene: in order to protect his battered self-esteem, and that of his army, Gutiérrez Mellado always denied having been the victim of that outrage, but two years later he could not repeat the denial, because on the evening of 23 February the television cameras filmed the kind of affront, with more or less attenuating variants, that he’d become very familiar with in the privacy of the barracks. In this sense, as well, his gesture of confronting the golpistas in the Cortes chamber was a summary or an emblem of his political career; for this reason, it was the final battle of a merciless war against his own comrades that left him exhausted, ready for the scrap heap: like Adolfo Suárez, on 23 February Gutiérrez Mellado was a man who was politically finished and personally broken, his morale at a low ebb and his nerves undone by five years of daily skirmishes. It’s possible, however, that on 23 February the general was at the same time a happy man: that evening Adolfo Suárez was giving up power, and with his fall he had promised to give up a political career that without Adolfo Suárez he might never have embarked on.

He kept his promise: he was not prevented from doing so by Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who upon taking Suárez’s place as Prime Minister proposed he should stay on in the government, nor by Suárez himself, who tried to recruit him for the party with which he returned to politics after 23 February, and Gutiérrez Mellado prepared to spend the rest of his days in retirement, with nothing else to do but preside over charitable foundations, play long games of cards with his wife and spend long summers in Cadaqués with his Catalan friends. During his five years of political work many of his comrades-in-arms had loathed him for trying in vain to put an end to Franco’s Army and for successfully planning the bases of the Army of democracy; his retirement did not attenuate that feeling: the first request of the senior commanders of the Army to the Minister of Defence after he left government was that the general not come near their units, and not long after Gutiérrez Mellado had left his position as Deputy Prime Minister he had to give up organizing an act of redress conceived to counteract a renewed press campaign against him for fear that the proposal would divide the Armed Forces. He never set foot in an Army barracks again, except for the day when the Academy where he had done his officer training paid him a last-minute homage and the general was able to experience — at least while listening without shedding a single tear to the five-minute standing ovation that day from the cadets who filled the auditorium — the fictitious and sentimental certainty that all the unpleasantries of his years in government were justified. He died a short time after that misleading day, on 15 December 1995, when the Opel Omega he was driving to Barcelona to deliver a speech skidded on the ice around a curve and went off the road. With him disappeared the most loyal politician Adolfo Suárez ever had at his side, the last Spanish soldier to occupy a seat in the Cortes, the last brass hat in the history of Spain. Those who used to see him in his final years remember a humble, diminished, quiet and slightly absent man, who never gave statements to the press, who never spoke of politics, who never mentioned 23 February. He didn’t like to recall that evening, undoubtedly because he didn’t consider his gesture of confronting the mutinous Civil Guards as a gesture of courage or grace or rebellion, or even as a sovereign gesture of liberty or as an extreme gesture of contrition or as an emblem of his career, but simply as the greatest failure of his life; but whenever anyone managed to get him to talk about it he dismissed it with the same words: ‘I did what they taught me at the Academy.’ I don’t know if he ever added that the man in charge of the Academy where they taught him that was General Francisco Franco.

Chapter 3

Returning to an image in the film: standing, with his arms hanging at his sides and defying the six Civil Guards riddling the Cortes chamber with bullets, General Gutiérrez Mellado — as much as if he wants to prevent the rebels from entering the premises as to subjugate military power to civilian power — seems to want to protect with his own body the body of Adolfo Suárez, sitting behind him in the solitude of his prime ministerial bench. That image is another summary or emblem: the emblem or summary of the relationship between those two men.

Gutiérrez Mellado’s loyalty to Adolfo Suárez was an unconditional loyalty from the beginning to the end of his political career. This can in part be attributed to the sense of gratitude and discipline of Gutiérrez Mellado, whom Suárez had turned into the highest-ranking military officer in the country after the King and the second most powerful man in the government; it’s likely that it was due to the total confidence that he placed in Suárez’s political wisdom and in his courage, his youth and his instinct. Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado were nevertheless, aside from the political task uniting them, two opposite men in almost every respect: both, it’s true, shared a rock-solid Catholic faith, both cultivated a certain dandyism, both were thin, frugal and hyperactive, both loved football and the cinema, both were good card players; but their affinities practically finished there: the first was an expert in the ruses of the Spanish card game mus and the second in the more aristocratic bridge, the first came from a provincial Republican family and the second was from pure Madrileño stock and a good monarchist family, the first was a disastrous student and the second got straight As, the first was always a professional of power and the second was always a military professional, the first possessed, in short, political intelligence, personal charm, a gift for handling people, the cheek of a neighbourhood posse leader that he used to practise the art of seduction with indiscriminate skill, while the technical intelligence and sobriety of character of the second tended to confine his social life to the circle of his family and a few friends. They were also separated by a more obvious and more important difference: Suárez was exactly twenty years younger than Gutiérrez Mellado; they could have been father and son, and it’s almost impossible to resist interpreting the relation that united them as a strange and unbalanced paternal-filial relationship in which the father acted as a father because he protected the son but he also acted as the son because he didn’t question the other’s orders or doubt the validity of his opinions.

Gutiérrez Mellado’s political devotion to Adolfo Suárez must have begun the first time they spoke, or at least that’s how the general liked to remember it. It’s likely their paths had crossed at some point towards the end of the 1960s, when Suárez was running Radiotelevisión Española and flattering the military with programmes about the Army broadcast during prime time and with bouquets of roses he sent to their wives with notes apologizing for taking up their husbands’ time in off-duty hours, but it wasn’t until the winter of 1975 that they were alone together for the first time. During that period, with Franco recently deceased, Suárez had just been named Minister Secretary-General of the Movimiento in the King’s first government; for his part, Gutiérrez Mellado had already been a major general for several months and the government’s delegate in Ceuta, and on one of his trips to the capital he requested a meeting with the new minister to talk to him about a sports centre to be built in the city. Suárez received him, and a meeting that should have been a mere formality went on for several hours, at the end of which the general left the office at 44 Calle Alcalá dazzled by the young minister’s irresistible charm, original language and clarity of ideas, so at the beginning of July, when Suárez was put in charge of forming a government to the distressed surprise of most of the country, Gutiérrez Mellado might have been surprised, but not distressed, because by then he was already convinced of the exceptional worth of the new Prime Minister. Just three months later, Suárez summoned him to his side to turn him into his bodyguard and right-hand man in one, and nothing would ever come between them again. Gutiérrez Mellado was the first Deputy Prime Minister and the only unchanging minister of the six governments Suárez formed, but the friendship Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado struck up was not just political. Not long after he joined the government, Gutiérrez Mellado moved with his family into one of the buildings that made up the Moncloa complex, where Suárez’s family home was already established; from then on, barely a day passed when they didn’t see each other: they worked next door to each other, and as time went on they began to share not only their workdays but also their leisure time, united by a respectful privacy that did not preclude confidences or long familiar silences, and only grew stronger during the months leading up to the coup while Suárez was every day losing, amid the ruins of his power and prestige, political allies, close collaborators and friendships that had lasted years. In those final moments of Suárez’s premiership and of Gutiérrez Mellado’s own political career he was, as well as politically finished and personally broken, a perplexed man: he didn’t understand the country’s ingratitude to the Prime Minister who had brought the dictatorship to an end and constructed the democracy; he understood the irresponsible frivolity of the political class even less — especially that of the members of the Prime Minister’s government — embroiled in the foolish struggle for power while democracy was crumbling around them. That’s why he was trying to pacify the internal rebellions of the UCD though no one paid him any attention, and that’s why at least on one occasion and with the very same result he took advantage of Suárez’s absence from a Cabinet meeting to shout angrily at its members and demand their loyalty to the man who had put them in their posts. Two anecdotes that speak for themselves date from that time. The first happened at five in the afternoon on 29 January 1981 in Moncloa, when, after Suárez announced his resignation to his ministers in a specially called Cabinet meeting, Gutiérrez Mellado stood up from his chair and improvised a very short speech that concluded with this request: ‘May God reward you, Prime Minister, sir, for the service you have done for Spain’; the sentence was sincere, if not eloquent: what is eloquent is that the meeting should have broken up immediately without any other minister pronouncing a single public word of consolation or support for the resigning Prime Minister. The second anecdote is without a precise date or location, but it almost certainly took place in Moncloa, perhaps in the two weeks previous to the first one; if that is the case, it must have taken place in a half-renovated office that Suárez began to use then in the back part of the residence, an enormous tumbledown hall with huge temporary windows through which the winter wind blew in and with loose wires hanging out of the walls that looked like the work of a decorator given the task of turning that space into a metaphor of the dilapidation of Adolfo Suárez’s final months in government. It could have been there and then, as I say, but it also might not have been: after all reality lacks the slightest decorative inclination. In any case it deserved to be there and then where, as Suárez himself recalled in public after the general’s death, he said to him at the end of a conversation or inventory of setbacks and desertions: ‘Tell me the truth, Prime Minister: apart from the King, you and me, is there anyone else on our side?’

Chapter 4

No. The answer is no: there is no one else on their side. Or that is at least the self-pitying answer that Adolfo Suárez undoubtedly gave to himself at that moment and the self-vindicating answer he was still giving years later, when he told the anecdote about his friend, now dead (and perhaps for that reason he was telling it). But, even if it was self-pitying and self-vindicating, the answer was not false.

The image of Adolfo Suárez sitting alone in the Cortes chamber during the evening of 23 February is also an emblem of something else: an emblem of his virtually absolute solitude in the months leading up to the coup. Curiously, a year and a half before that date a photographer caught a similar image in the same place: sitting on his Prime Minister’s bench, Suárez is dressed the same way he was on 23 February — dark jacket, dark tie, white shirt — and, although his posture is a little different from that which he adopted while the guns were firing on 23 February, to his right stretches the same desolation of empty seats. As in the image of 23 February, Suárez is posing; as in the image of 23 February, Suárez doesn’t appear to be posing (Suárez was always posing in public: that was his strength; he often posed in private: that was his weakness). The image was taken on 25 September 1979, but, if we ignore certain differences of colour and framing, it could be confused with that of 23 February 1981, as if, instead of photographing Suárez, the photographer had been photographing the future.

Although the secret was not made public until a year later, in September 1979, when he was at the height of his power and his prestige, Suárez was already privately finished as a politician. Earlier I

pointed out one reason for his sudden collapse: Suárez, who had known how to do the most difficult thing — dismantle Francoism and construct a democracy — was unable to do the easiest: administer the democracy he’d constructed. I’ll qualify that now: for Suárez the most difficult was the easiest and the easiest was the most difficult. It’s not just a play on words: although he hadn’t created Francoism, Suárez had grown up with it, he knew its rules inside out and managed them masterfully (that’s why he was able to finish Francoism off, pretending he was only changing its rules); whereas, although he had created this democracy and established its rules, Suárez had difficulty managing within it, because his habits, his talent and his temperament were not made for what he’d constructed, but for what he’d destroyed. That was at once his tragedy and his greatness: that of a man who consciously or unconsciously works not to strengthen his positions, but rather, to resort to Enzensberger’s term again, to undermine them. Since he didn’t know how to use the rules of democracy and only knew how to exercise power the way it’s exercised in a dictatorship, he ignored Parliament, ignored his ministers, ignored his party. In the new game he’d created his virtues rapidly turned into defects — his savoir-faire turned into ignorance, his daring to rashness, his assurance to coldness — and the result was that in a very short time Suárez was no longer the brilliant and resolute politician he had been during his first years in government — when everything in his head seemed to connect with everything else, as if he had a magnet inside him that attracted and ordered the most

insignificant fragments of reality and allowed him to operate without fear, because at each moment he had the certainty of knowing the most distant result of every action and the innermost cause of every effect — but became a clumsy, dull and hesitant politician, lost in a reality he didn’t understand and unfit to manage a crisis his bad governance did nothing but deepen. Together with the jealousy, bickering and greed for power of the ruling class, these deficiencies triggered the generalized plotting against him from the summer of 1980 onwards that ended up spurring on the coup; together with the exhaustion produced by four incredibly tough years as Prime Minister and a character more complex and more fragile than those who knew him only superficially suspected, they also triggered his personal collapse.

From the summer of 1980 onwards Suárez spent his time practically cloistered at Moncloa, protected by his family and by a meagre handful of collaborators. He seemed to be affected by a strange paralysis, or by a hazy kind of fear, or maybe it was vertigo, as if at some moment of masochistic lucidity he’d understood that he was no more than a fraud and intended to avoid any social contact at all costs for fear of being unmasked, and at the same time as if he feared that an obscure longing for sacrifice was driving him to put an end to the farce himself. He spent hours and hours shut up in his office reading reports relating to terrorism, the Army, economic or international politics, but then he was unable to make decisions about these matters or even to meet with the ministers who needed to make them. He didn’t attend Parliament, didn’t give interviews, was barely seen in public and more than once did not want or could not manage to preside from start to finish over Cabinet meetings; he could not even find the energy to attend the funerals of three Basque members of his party murdered by ETA, nor those of the forty-eight children and three adults who died at the end of October as the result of an accidental propane gas explosion in a school in the Basque Country. His physical health was not bad, but his mental health was. There is no doubt that around him he saw only an obscurity of ingratitude, betrayal and contempt, and that he interpreted any attack on his work as an attack on his person, something that might also be attributed to his difficulties in adapting to democracy. He never fully understood that in the politics of a democracy nothing’s personal, given that in a democracy politics is theatre and no one can act in a theatre without pretending to feel what they don’t feel; of course, he was a pure politician and, as such, a consummate actor, but his problem was that he pretended with such conviction that he ended up feeling what he was pretending, which led him to confuse reality with its representation and political criticisms with personal ones. It’s true that in the hunting party unleashed against him over the course of 1980 many of the criticisms he received were personal rather than political, but it’s no less true that when he arrived in government he had also been the object of personal criticisms, only then the Prime Minister was still protected by the privileges of an authoritarian system and his neophyte enthusiasm turned them into spurs to his will and his mental strength neutralized them, attributing them to failings of their authors — errors of judgement, frustrated ambitions, unsatisfied vanity, bitterness — now, instead, exposed by liberty, submitted to pressing demands and with his defences decimated by the high-interest loan of almost five years of a term of office in often extreme conditions, he felt those personal criticisms to be an instrument of daily martyrdom, undoubtedly because he repeated them to himself, and against oneself there is no possible protection. Like all pure politicians, Suárez also felt an urgent need to be admired and loved and, like everyone in the political village of Francoist Madrid, he’d forged his career to a great extent on the basis of adulation, spellbinding his interlocutors with his sympathy, his insatiable desire to please and his tree-like repertoire of anecdotes until they were convinced not only that he was an extraordinary being but also that they were even more extraordinary than he was, and therefore he was going to make them the object of all his trust, his attention and his affection. For a man like that, all outward appearance, whose self-esteem depended almost entirely on the approval of others, noticing that his conjuring tricks no longer worked must have been a devastating experience, that the country’s ruling class had taken his measure and the shine of his seduction had dimmed, that no one laughed at his jokes or was entranced by his opinions, that no one fell under the spell of his stories or felt privileged to be in his company, that no one believed his promises any more or accepted his declarations of eternal friendship, that those who had admired and flattered him looked down on him, that those who owed him their political careers and had pledged their loyalty betrayed him, that the best feeling he could now evoke among his equals was a mixture of weariness and mistrust and that, as the polls made sure to demonstrate to him daily starting in the summer of 1980, the whole country was fed up with him.

Politically alone and exhausted, personally lost in a labyrinth of self-pity, exasperation and disillusion, towards November 1980 Suárez began to think of resigning. If he didn’t do so it was because he was held back by inertia or the instinct for power and because he was a pure politician and a pure politician never gives up power: he gets thrown out; also, maybe, because in the moments of euphoria interspersed in his dejection a scrap of courage and pride persuaded him that, although nothing that he might do from then on could outdo what he’d already done, only he could fix what he himself had done wrong. In those days he sought relief and stimulation in trips abroad, where his standing as the maker of Spanish democracy still remained intact; in the course of one of them, after attending the inauguration of the Peruvian Prime Minister Belaúnde Terry in Lima, Suárez gave one of his last interviews as Prime Minister to the journalist Josefina Martínez, and the result of that interview was a text so dark, so bitter and so sincere — so full of laments about ingratitude, incomprehension and the personal offences and insults of which he felt himself the object — that his advisers prevented its publication. ‘I tend to say that I’m engaged in a boxing match in which I’m not willing to throw a single punch,’ Suárez said to the journalist that day. ‘I want to win the fight in the fifteenth round by exhausting the opponent. . So I must have great stamina!’ It’s false that he didn’t throw a single punch (he threw some, but he no longer had the strength to keep at it), but it’s true that he had great stamina, and it’s especially true that he saw himself like that many times in the autumn and winter of 1980: in the centre of the ring, staggering and blinded by blood, sweat and black eyes, with his arms hanging dead at his sides, breathing heavily under the shouts of the spectators and the heat of the lights, secretly longing for the final blow.

Chapter 5

The final blow was landed by the King. Maybe he was the only one who could have delivered it: the King had given power to Suárez so maybe only the King could take it away from him; he did: he took his power, or at least spared no effort in getting Suárez to hand it back. This means that, like the majority of the Spanish political class, in the autumn and winter of 1980 the King was also in his way plotting against the Prime Minister of his government; this means that Gutiérrez Mellado was mistaken: the King wasn’t on their side either.

The King had met Suárez in January 1969, during a vacation trip to Segovia in the company of a cortege that included his personal secretary and future leader of 23 February: General Armada. At the time Suárez was the civilian governor of the province and the King a precarious prince still a few months away from being sworn in by the Francoist Cortes as Franco’s successor, but whose future as King was not entirely clear even to Franco himself, because it hung from a delicately balanced web that might break after his death. The two men got along well from the start; from the start they sensed that each needed the other: Suárez was not a monarchist, but he immediately became a monarchist, undoubtedly because he knew that, in spite of the balancing acts and uncertainties, Spain’s most credible future was the monarchy and he didn’t want to miss the future for anything in the world; as for the King, harassed and ignored by very influential sectors of Francoism — starting with Franco’s own family — he urgently needed allies, and that young man only six years older than him, discreet, promising, diligent, obliging and talkative, must have seemed like a good ally at first sight. The first day Suárez just had lunch with the Royal Family in a restaurant in Segovia, but during the following months the King returned several times to an estate in the province, in the Guadarrama sierra, and there a weekend complicity was forged between the two men that possibly ended up convincing the future monarch that, if he knew how to use his eagerness to please, his ambition and his quick and practical intelligence, Suárez could come to be much more than amusing company for him. It’s unlikely they talked much about politics at the beginning, although it’s almost certain that the King understood very soon that Suárez’s brain was not fossilized by Francoism, that he knew how to lead and lacked elaborate political ideas; it’s also unlikely that he didn’t suspect that his main political idea consisted in prospering politically, and that his monarchism therefore depended exclusively on the Crown’s ability to satisfy his aspirations.

From that moment on the King did as much as he could to promote Suárez’s political career. In November of the same year he interceded to persuade Admiral Carrero Blanco to appoint him director general of Radiotelevisión Española, and Suárez didn’t waste any time at all in proving to the monarch he hadn’t been mistaken in betting on him. During the four years he ran the country’s only television station he orchestrated an image campaign that introduced the until then fleeting and vague figure of the Prince into every home: he did not fail to record a single one of his trips, or a single one of his official acts, or a single one of his public appearances; his recently acquired monarchist vocation (or his convert’s zeal) led him into confrontation on several occasions with his boss the Cabinet minister, especially when he refused to broadcast live and on the main channel the wedding of Franco’s granddaughter to Alfonso de Borbón, the Prince’s cousin, who also aspired to the throne, and whose matrimony raised hopes in the general’s innermost circle of seeing power perpetuated in Franco’s family. By that time, in the early 1970s, Suárez had already begun to put himself forward for a ministry, but he did not receive one until the death of Franco when the first government of the monarchy was formed and the King, who lacked sufficient strength to impose a prime minister to his taste and was obliged to inherit Arias Navarro — a hesitant mummy unable to settle up his Francoist debts — had enough to impose Suárez, to whom Arias Navarro assigned the key post of Minister Secretary General of the Movimiento after being convinced by Torcuato Fernández Miranda, then the King’s main political adviser and President of the Cortes and of the Council of the Kingdom, two of the dictatorship’s prime bastions of power. Only six months later the King managed to get rid of Arias Navarro and, after a series of intrigues by Fernández Miranda in the Council of the Kingdom — the body in charge of presenting the monarch with a trio of candidates for Prime Minister — chose Adolfo Suárez to head the government.

He wasn’t the only possible choice. There were much more obvious candidates, with better monarchist credentials, better intellectual training and more political experience; but the King (or the King advised by Fernández Miranda) calculated that at that time such virtues were actually defects: a government under, let’s say, José María de Areilza — a cultured, cosmopolitan man, eternally devoted to the Crown, well connected to the clandestine opposition and a favourite of many of the regime’s reformers — or Manuel Fraga — former minister under Franco and later leader of the right — would have been an Areilza government or a Fraga government, because Fraga and Areilza both had very strong personalities and their own political projects; a Suárez government, on the other hand, wouldn’t be a Suárez government, but the King’s government, because Suárez (or this at least was the King’s and Fernández Miranda’s belief) lacked any political project and was ready to carry out the one the King entrusted to him and in the way in which it was entrusted. The King’s project was democracy; more precisely: the King’s project was some form of democracy that would allow the monarchy to take root; still more precisely: the King’s project was some form of democracy not because he found Francoism repugnant or because he was impatient to give up the powers he’d inherited from Franco or because he believed in democracy as a universal panacea, but because he believed in the monarchy and because he thought that at that moment a democracy was the only way to root the monarchy in Spain. However, changing a dictatorship into a democracy without breaking the law was a very complex, perhaps unheard-of operation, and the King needed to monitor it closely, so he needed someone to manage it whose passion for power made him absolutely faithful and absolutely docile, a man of his age who wouldn’t feel the temptation to guide him or impose on him and with whom he could maintain a fluid relation. Suárez fulfilled these conditions from the outset; others as well. He knew the Francoist political class and the corridors of power off by heart, every last nook and cranny of the system that had to be demolished, he was young, clever, quick, fresh, realistic, flexible, efficient, charming and smooth enough to persuade the opposition that everything was going to change while persuading the Francoists that nothing was going to change although everything was changing. Finally, as well as the daring of ignorance and the fearlessness of those who have nothing to lose, he possessed an exorbitant self-confidence and an unshakeable desire to win that should enable him to carry out the job they were going to give him, withstanding the furious attacks from all sides without wavering and without getting completely burnt before his time was up.

But naturally he ended up getting burnt. By the time that happened, however, Suárez had already done his duty to the King: in order to get the monarchy to take root he’d installed democracy, maybe a more complete or more profound democracy than he and the King had imagined in the beginning. He’d done his work well. Only by 1980 he seemed intent on ruining it. Because in the King’s view as in that of almost the entire Spanish ruling class the problem was that, after constructing democracy, Suárez had thought himself able to run it, and his remaining in government did nothing but deepen a crisis of which he himself was the cause. The other problem was that the King proposed to solve this problem, and in order to do so lent a hand to the manoeuvring destined to replace Suárez that formed the placenta of the 23 February coup. He probably felt it was his obligation to do so. Like the entire political class, like Suárez himself, the King was trying out the rules of democracy for the first time, and hadn’t yet assumed his new role as an institutional or symbolic figure without effective political power (or hadn’t wanted to); as if he still retained the authority to install and remove prime ministers that he’d inherited from Franco and which he’d renounced by sanctioning the Constitution of 1978, he wanted to intervene in the politics of the country again beyond the limits imposed by the recent rules of the parliamentary monarchy. His error was not just the result of inexperience; it was also a result of habit and fear. During the idyll of his first years in government, Suárez had accustomed the King to being consulted on every step he took, having his wishes turned into commands; now, instead, full of his successes and Prime Minister not by virtue of the monarch’s will but by the citizens’ votes, Suárez abandoned his submissive ways and servile behaviour and began to disagree with the King and to make decisions not just regardless of his opinion, but against it (pressed by the United States, the King considered joining NATO urgent and Suárez did not; pressed by the military, the King considered removing Gutiérrez Mellado from government urgent and Suárez did not; in the months before 23 February they had serious arguments about matters that would be determining factors in the events of 23 February, especially about the appointment of General Armada as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, which the King considered necessary and Suárez dangerous); the King took Suárez’s insubordination or eagerness for independence badly, undoubtedly blaming him in part for the bad way the country was going, and this ended up poisoning the relationship between the two men: four years earlier, three years earlier, two years earlier, Suárez would show up unannounced at the Zarzuela Palace and the King would make surprise visits to Moncloa just to have a glass of whisky with his friend, they improvised meetings or communiqués, rustled up dinners together with their wives or films with their families; now that spirit of camaraderie had evaporated, replaced by an increasingly irritating bargaining that included, as well as differences of opinion, unreturned calls by the King to Moncloa or insolently delayed answers and annoyingly long waits for Suárez in the Zarzuela. It may be that jealousy between two men who were disputing the prestigious paternity of the new democracy within the borders of Spain and beyond was also a factor. Fear undoubtedly was. The King had been born in exile, and had only recovered the throne for himself and his family through the use of large doses of intelligence, luck, skill and sacrifice; now he was panicked about losing it and, as leading politicians kept repeating, as did Zarzuela courtiers — among them his father, at loggerheads with the Prime Minister for a long time by then — Suárez’s disrepute was not just contaminating democracy, but also the monarchy, if the two things could be separated at that moment: even though Suárez was no longer the King’s Prime Minister, as he had been when he’d been hand-picked in 1976, but that of the voters, who had twice elected him at the polls, the majority of citizens still identified the King with Suárez, so Suárez’s fall could bring down the monarchy with him. This alarming, specious and repeated argument must have contributed, straining his constitutionally compulsory neutrality, to the King asserting his duty and assuming the right to play a part in Suárez’s downfall. ‘Let’s see if you can get rid of that one for me,’ he was heard to say in the autumn and winter of 1980, referring to Suárez, by numerous visitors to the Zarzuela. ‘Because with that one we’re heading for disaster.’ The King didn’t just encourage the hounding of Suárez with the weight of his authority; he also discussed with quite a few people ways of replacing him, and it’s very likely that, given the country’s dismal situation, he may also have thought, as a large part of the ruling class did, that democracy had been brought in hastily, that perhaps a surgical coup with the aim of extracting abscesses and stitching up gashes was needed, and by that point perhaps a simple change of government might no longer be enough to straighten things out, but it was especially very likely that at some moment he looked kindly on or at least considered or allowed people to think he seriously considered the proposal of a coalition or caretaker or unity government chaired by a monarchist military officer — and there was no more monarchist military man than his former secretary Alfonso Armada, with whom he undoubtedly discussed the matter in the weeks before the coup — providing the proposal counted on the blessing of the political parties and was directed towards getting the country back on course with a touch on the rudder and keeping democracy, which five years earlier had been the instrument of the Crown’s survival, from turning into that of its demise.

Suárez knew it. He knew the King was no longer on his side. To put it a better way: he knew it but he didn’t want to admit that he knew it, or at least he didn’t want to admit it until he was left with no choice but to admit it. In the autumn of 1980 Suárez knew the King considered him to be mainly responsible for the crisis and that he harboured serious doubts about his ability to resolve it, but he didn’t know (or didn’t want to admit that he knew) that the King cursed him every time he spoke to a politician, a military officer or a businessman; Suárez also knew that his relationship with the King was bad, but he didn’t know (or didn’t want to admit that he knew) that the King had lost confidence in him and was exhorting his adversaries to throw him out of power. Finally on 24 December Suárez was left with no choice but to admit that he knew what he knew and in reality had known for several months. That night the King’s Christmas speech was shown on television; it had almost always been an ornamental speech, but on that occasion it was not (and, as if wanting to underline that it was not, the monarch appeared before the cameras alone and not accompanied by his family, as he’d done up till then). ‘Politics,’ said the King among other things that night, should be considered ‘a means to achieve an end and not an end in itself’. ‘Let us strive to protect and consolidate what is essential,’ he said, ‘if we do not want to risk being left without a base or occasion to exercise what is incidental.’ ‘Looking back today over our conduct,’ he said, ‘we should ask ourselves if we have truly done what we needed to do to make us feel proud.’ ‘It is urgent,’ he said, ‘that we examine our behaviour in the sphere of responsibility proper to each of us, without the evasion that always looks for someone else to blame.’ ‘I wish to invite those who have the government of the country in their hands to reflect,’ he emphasized. ‘They must put the defence of democracy and the common good above their limited and transitory personal interests, or those of their group or party.’ Those were some of the sentences the King pronounced in his speech, and it’s impossible that Suárez would not have felt they were directed at him; also, that he wouldn’t have interpreted them for what they probably were: an accusation of clinging to power as an end in itself, of protecting the incidental, which was his position as Prime Minister, above the essential, which was the monarchy; an accusation of behaving irresponsibly by looking for people to blame for his own faults and putting his transitory and limited interests above the common good; a public and confidential way, in short, of asking him to resign.

I do not know what Suárez’s immediate reaction to the King’s speech was. But I know that Suárez knew two things: one is that although the King had no legal right to ask for his resignation he did retain a moral right over him for having made him Prime Minister four years earlier; the other is that — having lost the support of the man on the street, of Parliament, of his party, of Rome and Washington, blind and staggering and sobbing in the centre of the ring amid the howling of the spectators and the heat of the lights — losing the King’s support entirely meant losing his last support and receiving the final blow. That same day Suárez must have understood that his only choice was to resign. This does not contradict the fact that, according to some sources, in a meeting held on 4 January in La Pleta, the royal residence in the mountains, in Lérida, the King hinted that he should resign, and Suárez refused to do so. It could well be: death throes are death throes, and some resist dying, although they know they’re already dead. The fact is that only three weeks after the high-noon Christmas warning from the monarch, Suárez told his closest allies that he was giving up the leadership of the government. On the 27th he told the King in his office in the Zarzuela. The King did not put on an act: he didn’t ask him to explain the reasons for his resignation, he didn’t make the slightest ceremonial pretence of refusing it or ceremonially ask if he’d considered his decision carefully, he didn’t have a word of thanks for the Prime Minister who had helped him preserve the Crown either; he just summoned his secretary, General Sabino Fernández Campo, and told him as soon as he entered the office, looking at him but pointing a pitiless finger at Suárez: He’s going.

Chapter 6

On 29 January 1981, twenty-five days before the coup, Adolfo Suárez announced his resignation as Prime Minister in a televised speech. The question is inevitable: how is it possible that the man who claimed the only way he’d leave Moncloa was if he lost an election or feet first was leaving Moncloa voluntarily? Was Suárez not a pure politician and is a pure politician not a politician who never gives up power unless thrown out? The answer is that Suárez did not give up power voluntarily, but was thrown out: the man on the street threw him out, Parliament threw him out, Rome and Washington threw him out, his own party threw him out, his own personal collapse threw him out and in the end the King threw him out. There is another answer, which is the same: since he was an absolutely pure politician, Suárez left before the sum of those adversaries threw him out and with the aim of justifying himself before the country, thus thwarting the alliance that had formed against him and preparing his return to power.

With the exception of the 23 February coup — of which it was actually a basic ingredient — no event in recent Spanish history had unleashed as much speculation as Adolfo Suárez’s resignation; however, of all the enigmas of 23 February maybe the least enigmatic might be Adolfo Suárez’s resignation. Although it’s impossible to exhaust the reasons that triggered it, it’s possible to rule out the most truculent and publicized of them. Suárez did not resign because the military forced him to and he did not resign to prevent a military coup: as Prime Minister he was prone to many faults, but cowardice was not one of them, and there is no doubt that, no matter how crushed he might have been, if the military had pointed a pistol at his chest Suárez would have immediately ordered them to stand to attention; there is no doubt either that had he known a coup was in the works he would have got ready to stop it. The most remembered phrase from his resignation speech seems to belie this last assertion: ‘As often happens in history,’ said Suárez, ‘the continuity of a project demands a change of personnel, and I don’t want the democratic system of coexistence to be, once again, a parenthesis in the history of Spain.’ This sacrificial declaration, suggesting that its author was sacrificing himself to save democracy that retrospectively seemed to become saturated with significance on 23 February, did not figure in the draft of the speech that Suárez sent to the Royal Household on the eve of his television appearance, but was added at the last minute and, in spite of at least one of the people who normally wrote and corrected his texts crossing it out of the speech, Suárez put it back in. It was perhaps a characteristic dramatic emphasis and of a piece with his particular resignation strategy, but not pretence. Although he didn’t know that the placenta of a coup against democracy was growing in the country, Suárez was not unaware that the intrigues against him were also dangerous to democracy, because they aimed to get him out of power without elections and straining to the maximum the mechanisms of a recently introduced game; he was not unaware (or at least he suspected) that a no-confidence motion was being prepared in order to unseat him; he was not unaware (or at least he suspected) that this motion might have the backing of a portion of his own party, and might therefore triumph; he was not unaware that many felt the motion should bring a general in to lead a coalition or caretaker or unity government; he was not unaware that the King approved or was seriously considering the manoeuvre, or at least was allowing some to believe he approved or was seriously considering it; he was not unaware that the most likely military man to carry it out was Alfonso Armada, and that in spite of his objections the King was doing everything possible to bring his former secretary to Madrid as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff. All this undoubtedly struck him as dangerous to his future, but — because it meant putting the brand-new mechanisms of the democratic game to the test by involving the Army in an operation that opened the doors of politics to a military reluctant to accept the system of liberties, if not impatient to destroy it — it also struck him as dangerous to the future of democracy: Suárez knew its rules and, although he didn’t work well within them, he’d invented the game or thought he’d invented the game and was not ready to allow it to fail, for the simple reason that he was its inventor. To avoid the risk of the game failing he resigned.

But, although he was politically finished and personally broken, he also resigned for the same reason any pure politician would have done: in order to be able to keep playing; that is: so as not to be expelled by force from the table and the game and find himself shown out of the casino through the false door and with no possibility of returning. In fact, it’s possible that Suárez, by announcing his resignation, intended to imitate a triumphant bluff by Felipe González, who in May of 1979 had quit the leadership of the PSOE, in dispute with the Party still defining itself as Marxist, and just four months later, when the PSOE hadn’t managed to replace him and had expunged the word Marxist from its statutes, returned to his post welcomed by a huge crowd.* It’s possible that Suárez was trying to provoke a similar reaction in his party; if he was, he was on the verge of achieving it. On 29 January, the very day Suárez announced his resignation from the premiership on television, the second UCD Party conference was due to begin in Palma de Mallorca; Suárez’s strategy perhaps consisted of a surprise announcement of his resignation during the first day and then waiting for the commotion this provoked to ignite a revolt among the rank and file of the organization against the leaders who would put him straight back into the leadership of the Party and the government or would do so within a few short months. Bad luck (perhaps combined with the cunning of some of his adversaries in the government) thwarted his plans: a strike of air traffic controllers forced the conference to be postponed for a few days right at the moment when Suárez had already communicated his intention to resign to several ministers and some of the rank and file leaders of his party, and the result of this setback was that, convinced that the scoop couldn’t be kept secret for so long, he had to make his resignation known before he’d planned, so when the conference was finally held in the first week of February the time gone by since the announcement of his withdrawal had dampened the impact of the news, which was not enough to recover his lost power but was enough to allow him to take control of the leadership of the UCD, to be the member with the most votes from his fellow Party members and for the conference to give him a long and warm standing ovation.

There might be still another reason why Suárez resigned, a reason perhaps more decisive than all the previous ones, because it constitutes their basis and gives them an additional and deeper meaning: Suárez resigned as Prime Minister of the government to give himself legitimacy as Prime Minister of the government. It’s a paradox, but Suárez is a paradoxical character, and the almost five years in which he remained in power were not for him in a certain sense anything but this: a permanent, agonizing and eventually futile fight to legitimize himself as Prime Minister. In July 1976, when the King put him in charge of the political reform, Suárez knew he was a legal prime minister, but he was not unaware — as he himself had said to a journalist who accosted him shortly after his appointment — that he was not a legitimate prime minister, because he wasn’t backed up by the votes of the citizens to carry out the reforms; in December 1976, when he won the referendum on the Law for Political Reform by a crushing majority — the legal instrument that allowed him to carry out the reforms — Suárez knew that victory legitimized him to effect the change from dictatorship to democracy or to some form of democracy, but he was not unaware that it did not give him legitimacy to act as Prime Minister, because he had been chosen by the King and a prime minister of the government was only legitimate after having been chosen by the citizens in free elections; in June 1977, when he won the first free elections, Suárez knew he was a democratic prime minister because he had the legitimacy of the citizens’ votes, but he was not unaware that he lacked the legitimacy of the law, because the laws of Francoism were still in force, and not those of democracy; in March 1979, when he won the first elections held after the passing of the Constitution, Suárez knew he had the full legitimacy of votes and laws, but that was when he realized he did not have moral legitimacy, because that was when the entire ruling class pounced to remind him — and perhaps he repeated it to himself, and against oneself there is no possible protection — that he’d never been anything but the King’s messenger boy, a mere little provincial Falangist, a Francoist upstart, a nonentity consumed by ambition and a rogue intellectually unfit to preside over the government who had never conceived of politics except as an instrument of personal prosperity, and whose foolish eagerness for power kept him tied to the premiership while the entire country fell to pieces around him. So, since the spring of 1979 Suárez knew he possessed all the political legitimacy he needed to govern, but only a year later discovered that he lacked the moral legitimacy (or he’d been divested of it): the only way he found to acquire it was to resign.

That in reality is the meaning of his resignation speech on television, a speech that contains an individual response to the King’s Christmas reproaches and a collective reproach to the ruling class that has denied him the longed-for legitimacy, but most of all contains a vindication of his political integrity, which, in a politician like Suárez, with no aptitude for distinguishing the personal from the political, also means a vindication of his personal integrity. Proudly, after all truthfully (although only after all), Suárez begins to explain to the country that he’s leaving of his own volition, ‘without anyone having asked me’, and that he’s doing so in order to demonstrate with his actions (‘because words seem not to be enough and we need to demonstrate with deeds what we are and what we want’) that the image of him that has been imposed as ‘a person clinging to his position’ is false. Suárez remembers his role in the change from dictatorship to democracy and states that he is not giving up the job of Prime Minister because his adversaries have defeated him or because he has been left without the strength to keep fighting them, which might not be true or not entirely true, but because he’s reached the conclusion that his giving up power might be more beneficial to the country than his remaining in it, which it indeed probably is: he wants his resignation to be ‘a moral salutary lesson’ able to banish ‘viscerality’, ‘the permanent discrediting of people’, ‘irrationally systematic attacks’ and ‘the useless wholesale discrediting’ for ever from the practice of democratic politics: all those aggressions of which he has been feeling victim for many months. ‘Something very important has to change in our attitudes and behaviour,’ he says. ‘And I want to contribute with my resignation so this change can be really immediate.’ Furthermore, Suárez does not say he’s retiring from politics — although he is giving up the leadership of his party; on the contrary: after declaring his optimism for the country’s future and for the UCD’s capacity to guide it, he maintains that politics ‘is going to carry on being my fundamental reason for living’. ‘I thank you all for your sacrifice, for your collaboration and for the repeated demonstrations of trust you’ve placed in me,’ he finishes. ‘I wanted to repay them with absolute devotion to my work and with dedication, self-denial and generosity. I promise that wherever I might be I shall remain identified with your aspirations. That I shall always be at your side and shall try, as long as I have the strength, to remain in the front line and with the same hard-working spirit. Thanks to every one of you and for everything.’

Let me repeat: the speech, including its good intentions and emotive rhetoric, means to be a moral as well as a political declaration. We have no reason to doubt his sincerity: by giving up the premiership Suárez intends to dignify democracy (and, in a certain sense, to protect it); but the ethical and political reasons are joined by reasons of personal strategy: for Suárez, resigning is also a way of protecting himself and dignifying himself to himself, recovering his self-esteem and his best self with the aim of preparing his return to power. That’s why I said before that resigning as Prime Minister was his final attempt to legitimize himself as Prime Minister. Let me correct myself now. It wasn’t his final attempt: it was the penultimate. The final one was on the evening of 23 February, when, sitting on his bench while the bullets whizzed around him in the Cortes chamber and words were no longer enough and he had to demonstrate with actions what he was and what he wanted, he told the political class and the whole country that, though he might have the dirtiest democratic pedigree in the great sewer of Madrid and had been a little provincial Falangist and Francoist upstart and an uneducated nonentity, he was indeed ready to risk his neck for democracy.

* Suárez contributed in his way to the success of González’s bluff, and his contribution demonstrates that at that moment as well democracy mattered more to him than power: once González had resigned, the Prime Minister had the opportunity to facilitate a leadership takeover of the PSOE by a group of Marxists — Enrique Tierno Galván, Luis Gómez Llorente, Francisco Bustelo — whom he probably would have easily defeated in elections; he didn’t do it: he facilitated González’s return because, although he knew he was a much more considerable electoral adversary, he thought a young social democrat like him was much more useful for the stability of democracy than his adversaries. This is another proof that above all Suárez wanted the game he’d invented to work.

Chapter 7

I have left one question pending, and now return to it: were the intelligence services plotting against the democratic system in the autumn and winter of 1980? Did the Higher Defence Intelligence Centre, CESID, participate in the coup d’état? The hypothesis is not only literarily irresistible, but historically plausible, and this is in part why it continues to be one of the most controversial points of 23 February. The hypothesis is plausible because it is not infrequent that in periods of political regime change the intelligence services — liberated from their old bosses and not yet entirely under the control of the new ones, or discontented with their old bosses for provoking the disappearance of the old regime — tend to operate autonomously and form focal points of resistance to change, organizing or participating in manoeuvres designed to make it fail. That’s what happened in 1991 for example in the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev. Did it also happen ten years earlier in the Spain of Adolfo Suárez? In 1981 was CESID a focal point of resistance to change? Did CESID organize the 23 February coup? Did they participate in it?

General Gutiérrez Mellado might have been more clearly aware than any other Spanish politician of the danger that disaffected intelligence services could pose for democracy, because he had spent most of his career in them and knew their ins and outs first-hand; and vice versa: few Spanish politicians must have been more clearly aware than Gutiérrez Mellado of the utility that an intelligence service loyal to its new rulers could have for democracy. So in June 1977, as soon as Adolfo Suárez formed the first democratic government after the first free elections, Gutiérrez Mellado rushed to try to provide the state with modern, efficient and trustworthy intelligence services. In order to do this for a start he wanted to fuse the numerous intelligence agencies of the dictatorship into a single one, CESID, but the clenched resistance his project met allowed him to unite only the two main ones: SECED and the third section of the High Command General Staff. They were very different services: both were military, but the third section of the High Command tended towards foreign espionage and was characteristically more technical than political, while SECED tended towards interior espionage and was much more political than technical, because it had been conceived in the mid-1960s by then Major San Martín — the golpista colonel of the Brunete Armoured Division on 23 February — like a sort of political police in charge of keeping watch over Francoist orthodoxy. The failure of Gutiérrez Mellado’s attempt to unify all the intelligence agencies happened again when he tried to modernize them: in 1981 CESID was still an insufficient and primitive, almost DIY intelligence service; its staff was skeletal and its structure rudimentary: made up of barely seven hundred people, it possessed fifteen or so delegations spread all over the country and was organized into four divisions (Interior, Exterior, Counterintelligence, and Communications and Statistics); in command of them was a director and a secretary general; alongside them — and supervised only by the Secretary General — was an elite unit: AOME, the special operations unit directed by Major Cortina. An unusual fact gives an idea of the difficulties Gutiérrez Mellado’s intelligence service faced: in spite of one of the principal missions with which the general entrusted it being the control of the various coup plots and in spite of the existence of a section dedicated to this within the Interior Division, the so-called involution section, CESID members were not officially authorized to enter the barracks and inform about what was going on or being planned inside them (this task was reserved for the information service of the Army’s Intelligence Division, the so-called Second B, which in practice blocked the news and fomented golpismo), so all that CESID knew about the Army it knew through unofficial channels, which did not prevent the Centre from breaking up, thanks to a tip-off, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s first attempt at a coup d’état in November 1978, the so-called Operation Galaxia. A no less unusual fact than the previous one gives an idea of the disorder that reigned in the intelligence service: by the time of 23 February, after little more than three years of existence, CESID had already had three directors, none of whom was an expert in espionage; all had been little short of compelled to accept the post and all considered it little short of despicable to investigate their comrades-in-arms. This means that, as well as insufficient and primitive, in 1981 CESID was also a chaotic and slapdash intelligence service. Does this also mean that it was untrustworthy?

After the fusion into CESID of the two principal espionage services of the dictatorship, the inheritance that predominated was that of SECED — the regime’s political police: the branch of intelligence most addicted to Francoism — but Gutiérrez Mellado endeavoured to always keep the command of the centre in the hands of men from the third section of the High Command who enjoyed his complete confidence. The person who was effectively directing CESID on 23 February was not Colonel Narciso Carreras, its director, but Lieutenant Colonel Javier Calderón, its Secretary General. Calderón’s trajectory is exceptional because it’s characteristic of a tiny minority of military officers who, like Gutiérrez Mellado, were trying to liberate themselves from the ideological dependency of Francoism and create a favourable atmosphere for political change: educated in the late 1940s in and around the Colegio Pinilla — a military prep school that encouraged a socially-concerned Falangism from which emerged some members of the future, tiny and illegal Democratic Military Union (Unión Militar Democrática, UMD) — at the beginning of the 1970s Calderón began to work in the counterintelligence service of the third section of the High Command; a little while later he acted as defence counsel for Captain Restituto Valero, one of the leaders of the UMD, and participated in GODSA, a think-tank or a nascent party that aspired to promote in late Francoism an opening up of the regime and bet on Manuel Fraga as the driver of reform until, displaced and overtaken by Suárez, the former transformed into the skimmed Francoism of the Alianza Popular; in 1977, with the creation of CESID, Calderón joined its Counterintelligence Division, and in 1979 Gutiérrez Mellado turned him into the Centre’s strongman. On 23 February Calderón’s conduct was impeccable: CESID was, under his command, one of the few military agencies that placed itself from the beginning and unequivocally on the side of legality, famously contributing to keeping the Brunete Armoured Division from coming out onto the streets of Madrid (something which turned out to be of prime importance in the golpistas’ defeat); his conduct after 23 February offers more doubts: CESID had notched up a resounding failure by not detecting the coup in advance and, in order not to squander all the Centre’s credit, in the days following the 23 February coup Calderón attempted to silence the rumours about the participation of some of his men in the attempted coup, but the fact is that he did order an investigation to be opened and in the end he expelled those who had been suspected of connivance with the golpistas, including Major Cortina. Calderón’s debatable way of proceeding after the coup cannot, however, hide the obvious, and that is that by 1981 the strongman of CESID was one of the few democratic military men in the Spanish Army, whose work in the intelligence service made it the opposite of a focal point of resistance to political change: that’s why the far-right military officers’ criticisms had CESID in their sights; that’s why Calderón’s name figured in all the lists of undesirable comrades-in-arms that were periodically published; that’s why he was an entirely safe man for Gutiérrez Mellado, with whom before 23 February he’d had a good friendship, which was consolidated after 23 February and which explains why in 1987, as a result of the drug-induced death of one of Calderón’s sons, the general created the Foundation to Help Fight Drug Addiction with his friend on the board of directors. No: Gutiérrez Mellado did not manage to set up powerful, unified, modern and efficient intelligence services, and the failure of CESID to predict the who, when, how and where of 23 February can be attributed to that failure; but the general did manage to set up trustworthy intelligence services: CESID as an agency contributed to the failure of the coup d’état, and there is no proof to the contrary that links it to its preparation or execution.

None except for the participation in the coup of some of its members. Because by this stage we already know several CESID agents — without doubt Captain Gómez Iglesias, possibly Sergeant Miguel Sales and Corporals Rafael Monge and José Moya — collaborated with Lieutenant Colonel Tejero on the day of the coup: the first, persuading certain indecisive officers stationed at the Civil Guard Motor Pool to back up the lieutenant colonel in his assault on the Cortes; the latter, escorting Tejero’s buses to their objective through the streets of Madrid. Those four agents belonged to AOME, Major Cortina’s elite unit. Were they acting autonomously? Were they acting under Cortina’s orders? Since neither Calderón nor CESID supported or organized the 23 February coup, did AOME support or organize it? Did Cortina support or organize it? That is the question still pending.

Chapter 8. 23 February

I don’t know if the success or failure of a coup d’état is settled in its first minutes; I do know that at twenty-five to seven that evening, ten minutes after it began, the coup d’état was a success: Lieutenant Colonel Tejero had taken the Cortes, General Milans del Bosch’s tanks were patrolling the streets of Valencia, the tanks of the Brunete Armoured Division were preparing to leave their barracks, General Armada was waiting for the King’s phone call in his office at Army General Headquarters; at twenty-five to seven that evening everything was going as the golpistas had anticipated, but at twenty to seven their plans had changed and the coup was beginning to fail. There were high stakes riding on those crucial five minutes in the Zarzuela Palace. It was the King’s hand to play.

Ever since the very day of 23 February there have been unceasing accusations that the King organized the 23 February coup, that he was somehow implicated in the coup, that in some way he had wanted it to triumph. It is an absurd accusation: if the King had organized the coup, if he’d been implicated in it or had wanted it to triumph, the coup would have triumphed without the slightest doubt. The truth is obvious: the King did not organize the coup but rather stopped it, for the simple reason that he was the only person who could stop it. Stating the above is not the same as stating that the King’s behaviour in relation to 23 February was irreproachable; it was not, just as that of the majority of the political class was not: as with the political class, many extenuating circumstances can be found for the King — his youth, immaturity, inexperience, fear — but the reality is that in the months before 23 February he did things he shouldn’t have done. He should not have abandoned the strict neutrality of his constitutional role as arbiter between institutions. He should not have encouraged the replacement of Suárez. He should not have encouraged or considered alternative solutions to Suárez. He should not have spoken to anyone or allowed anyone to speak to him about the possibility of replacing Suárez’s government with a coalition or caretaker or unity government headed by a soldier. He should not have submitted the government to the utmost pressure to have it accept General Armada as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, authorizing him to conceive and propagate the idea that he’d been brought to Madrid to be made Prime Minister of a coalition or caretaker or unity government. He should not have been ambiguous; he should have been emphatic: he should not have allowed any politician, any businessman, any journalist, any soldier — especially any soldier — to even imagine that he might support forcibly constitutional manoeuvres that were straining the recently installed hinges of democracy, pushing ajar its doors for an army eager to finish it off. Like almost the entire political class, in the months before 23 February the King behaved imprudently at the very least and — because for the military he was not only the head of state, but also the head of the Armed Forces and Franco’s heir — much more than that of the political class his own imprudence gave wings to the advocates of a coup. But on 23 February it was the King who clipped them.

It’s not easy to reconstruct what happened in the Zarzuela Palace during the first fifteen minutes of the coup; they were moments of enormous commotion: it’s not just that testimonies from the protagonists are scarce and contradict each other; the thing is that sometimes the protagonists contradict themselves. I am deliberately using the plural: the King is not the only protagonist; there is also — in a secondary but appreciable role — his secretary, Sabino Fernández Campo, in theory the third authority in the Royal Household, but in practice the first. Fernández Campo was by then a general with political experience, legal knowledge and wide-ranging military relations, who did not belong to the monarchist aristocracy and who four years earlier had replaced General Armada, with whom at first he maintained an excellent relationship that in the months before the coup had deteriorated, maybe because after a few years of distance from the Palace Armada had managed to get close to the King again and his shadow had begun to hover over the Zarzuela once again. It was Fernández Campo who on the evening of 23 February, after hearing the gunshots in the Cortes on the radio, sent word to the King, who was playing a game of squash with a friend and who, like his secretary, immediately understood they were facing a coup d’état. What happens next in the Zarzuela — what happens over the course of the night in the Zarzuela — happens in a few square metres, in the King’s office and in Fernández Campo’s, which was the outer office of the King’s outer office. When the King arrives, he finds out almost at the same time about the assault on the Cortes and that Milans del Bosch has just issued an edict proclaiming a state of emergency in Valencia and, given that Milans is a solidly monarchist soldier whose fidelity he has taken great pains to cultivate, calls him on the telephone; Milans calms him down or tries to calm the King down: there’s nothing to worry about, he is at his command as ever, has just assumed all the powers in the region to safeguard order until the hijacking of the Cortes is resolved. While the King is speaking to Milans, Fernández Campo manages to get in contact with Tejero thanks to a member of the Royal Guard who was attending the session of investiture of the new Prime Minister of the government in plain clothes and informs the royal secretary of what’s happened from a phone booth and gives him a telephone number: Fernández Campo speaks to Tejero, forbids him to invoke the King’s name, as he appears to have done when he burst into the Cortes, orders him to leave the Cortes immediately; before he finishes speaking, however, Tejero hangs up on him. That’s when Fernández Campo calls General Juste, commander of the Brunete Armoured Division. He does so because he knows the Brunete — the most powerful, modern and hardened unit of the Army, and the nearest to the capital — is crucial for the triumph or failure of a coup; he also does so because he and Juste have been friends for many years. After the unplanned gunfire in the Cortes, which has endowed what had been intended as a soft coup with the scenery of a hard coup, the dialogue between Juste and Fernández Campo constitutes the second setback for the golpistas and the first stage of the dismantling of the coup. At the beginning of the conversation neither of the two generals speaks openly, in part because neither knows on which side of the coup his interlocutor will position himself, but especially because in Juste’s office with him are General Torres Rojas and Colonel San Martín, who with Major Pardo Zancada are leading the uprising in the Brunete and who have convinced him to send his troops into Madrid with the argument that the operation has been ordered by Milans, enjoys the backing of the King and is being piloted from the Zarzuela Palace by Armada; Torres Rojas and San Martín listen carefully to the words Juste says to Fernández Campo, and they flow with difficulty down the telephone line, sinuous and plagued by guesswork, until the commander of Brunete mentions Armada’s name and everything seems suddenly to fall into place for him: Juste asks Fernández Campo if Armada is at the Zarzuela and Fernández Campo answers no; then Juste asks if they’re expecting Armada at the Zarzuela and Fernández Campo answers no again; then Juste says: Ah. That changes everything.

That’s how the countercoup begins. The conversation between Juste and Fernández Campo goes on for a few more minutes, by the end of which the commander of the Brunete Division has understood that Torres Rojas, San Martín and Pardo Zancada have deceived him and the King does not endorse the operation; Juste hangs up the phone, picks it up again and calls his immediate superior and the highest military authority of the region of Madrid, General Guillermo Quintana Lacaci. By then Quintana Lacaci has spoken fleetingly with the King; like all the Captains General, Quintana Lacaci is an unwavering Francoist, but, unlike what almost all the other Captains General will do over the hours that follow, he has put himself unwaveringly under the orders of the King for whatever the King orders him to do: stop the coup or bring out the tanks; the King has thanked him for his loyalty and ordered him not to move his troops, so when Quintana Lacaci receives Juste’s call announcing that the Brunete Division is ready to occupy Madrid on the orders of Milans, the Captain General flies into a rage: his subordinate has jumped the chain of command and has given an order with enormous implications without consulting him; he orders him to revoke it: he must confine the division to barracks and oblige those who have already taken to the streets or are preparing to do so to return to their units. Juste complies with the order and from that moment begins to put things into reverse, or tries to; he tries without much faith, without much energy, menaced by the mood of rebellion that has overtaken the Brunete headquarters and by the intimidating proximity of Torres Rojas and San Martín — who, on the other hand, paralysed by vertigo or fear, find neither sufficient energy nor faith to relieve him of his command of the unit and prevent him from putting the brakes on the coup — so it’s mainly Quintana Lacaci who initiates a violent telephonic struggle, bristling with shouts, threats, insults and calls to order, with the Brunete regiment commanders, who minutes before were euphorically obeying the order to take Madrid and are now refusing to obey the countermand or postponing as long as they can, by way of excuses, evasions and military hair-splitting, the moment of doing so, hoping the military uprising will overflow the barracks and flood the capital and then the entire country. That, however, is not going to happen, although throughout the whole evening and night of 23 February it seems about to happen, and if it doesn’t happen it’s not just because fifteen minutes after the assault on the Cortes Quintana Lacaci (or Juste and Quintana Lacaci, or Juste and Quintana Lacaci on the King’s orders) have set in motion the mechanism of the countercoup in Madrid, but also because at that very moment an even more important event is taking place, that entirely thwarts the golpistas’ plans: the King (or Fernández Campo, or the King and Fernández Campo) have refused General Armada permission to come to the Zarzuela Palace.

The King and Armada spoke by telephone just after the King spoke to Milans and to Quintana Lacaci, but it wasn’t Armada who phoned the King but rather the King who, just as the golpistas had anticipated (or just as Armada had anticipated), called Armada. That he should have done so, as he’d called Milans and Quintana Lacaci, is logical: Armada is at Army General Headquarters, in the Buenavista Palace, and the King calls there because he wants to keep the leadership of the military under control and find out any news they have there; although maybe that’s not the only reason he calls him, maybe he’s not just looking for power and information: since he’s alarmed, since he knows it’s a coup but doesn’t know if it’s with him or against him and perhaps cannot think of anything except preserving the Crown that had cost him years of effort to obtain, in those instants of panic and uncertainty the King is maybe also (or above all) seeking protection. Armada can provide all three of these things. Or at least it’s logical that the King might think they can be supplied by Armada, his former tutor, his secretary for so long, the man who spent years getting him out of so many tight spots and was at his side during the difficult time of the restoration of the monarchy, the man whom, giving way to Adolfo Suárez’s pressures, he’d expelled from his eternal post in the Royal Household less than five years ago and to whom, since he’s wanted to be rid of Adolfo Suárez, he’s begun to listen again, the man who so many times in recent months has warned him of the danger of a coup d’état whose threads he knows or perceives and can perhaps cut, and who so many times and with such vehemence has recommended a touch on the rudder to ward off that danger, the man he’d brought to Madrid against Adolfo Suárez’s will as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, to have him nearby and available and perhaps — or this is at least what Armada desires or imagines, as so many desire or imagine — so he could direct the touch on the rudder by presiding over a unity government and in any case so he could inform and advise and control the Armed Forces and pacify their discontent, and eventually so he could help him in a situation like this. So, not even fifteen minutes after the beginning of the coup, the King calls Army General Headquarters and, after speaking to the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Gabeiras, asks him to pass the phone to General Armada, who is sitting beside him. The dialogue between the King and Armada is brief. Just as Milans has done minutes ago, Armada tries to calm the King down: the situation is serious, he tells him, but not desperate; and he can explain it: I’ll just go up to my office, pick up a few papers and I’m on my way to the Zarzuela, Sire. The King is still listening to these words (or has just heard them and, wanting Armada to tell him what he knows, is about to say: Yes, come over here, Alfonso) when Fernández Campo walks into the office and questions the King in silence. It’s Armada, the King answers, covering the receiver with his hand. He wants to come over. At this moment Fernández Campo, who has just spoken to Juste and run into the King’s office to relay the conversation to him, must think two things at once: the first is that, if he lets him into the Zarzuela, Armada could take over the Palace, because in an emergency situation like that the King might prefer to trust his lifelong secretary, relegating him, who’s barely been in the post for four years, to the background; the second is that, if as Juste has just told him the rebels are sure that Armada is at the Zarzuela directing the operation with the King’s consent, that means that the former secretary is in on the coup or is somehow connected to the coup or has the intention of benefiting from the coup. Both thoughts convince Fernández Campo that he has to prevent Armada from coming to the Zarzuela, so he speaks to the King and then asks for the telephone. This is Sabino, Alfonso, he says to Armada. Fernández Campo does not ask Armada why Juste has mentioned his name, why the golpistas of the Brunete Division appeal to him, but Armada repeats what he’s just told the King: the situation is serious, but not desperate; and he can explain it: I’m just going up to my office to pick up a few papers and I’m on my way to the Zarzuela, Sabino. And this is when Fernández Campo pronounces the final phrase: No, Alfonso. Stay there. If we need you we’ll call you.

That was it: although Armada insisted that he must speak to the King in person, Fernández Campo’s reiterated refusal obliged him to remain at Army General Headquarters, so that the former secretary could not approach the monarch and the fundamental piece of the coup could not fall into place. However, what would have occurred if the opposite had happened? What would have happened if that piece had also fallen into place? Let’s imagine for a moment that it did. Let’s imagine for a moment what would have occurred if everything had happened just as the golpistas had planned it, or as Armada had planned or as Armada and some of the golpistas might have imagined it would happen. Let’s imagine for a moment that, for whatever reasons, Juste hadn’t mentioned Armada’s name in his conversation with Fernández Campo; or that, even though he’d mentioned it, Fernández Campo had not been suspicious of Armada or feared he’d oust him from his privileged position at the King’s side or that he was involved in the coup or wanted to benefit from the coup; or that, even though Juste had mentioned Armada’s name and Fernández Campo had been suspicious of him, the King had decided to trust his old lifelong secretary rather than his new secretary, or at least had decided he needed to know what it was his old secretary knew about the coup and how he proposed to confront it. Then the King would have said to Armada on the phone: Yes, Alfonso, come on over here, and Armada would have gone to the Zarzuela, where he undoubtedly would have explained to the King that what had happened was what he’d been predicting and fearing and warning him was going to happen for months, he would have explained that, in spite of the gunfire in the Cortes, he was certain that the rebels’ plans were good and monarchist and he was sure that he could channel that military effusion — ‘redirect’ is the verb he might perhaps have used — to the advantage of the country and of the Crown. Then, maybe, he would have provoked in the Zarzuela a small and silent and almost invisible palace coup and Fernández Campo’s authority and influence would have been substituted by Armada’s authority and influence, and then the King (or the King advised by Armada) would next perhaps have ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while waiting for the problem of the occupation of the Cortes to be solved and the parliamentarians freed, to assume all the powers of the government, and perhaps with the aim of keeping the peace in the streets and protecting democracy might also have ordered the Captains General to imitate Milans del Bosch and take control of their respective military regions, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Captains General would have obeyed without a second’s hesitation, not only because it was the head of the Armed Forces and head of state and Franco’s heir who was ordering it, but also because Franco’s heir and the head of the Armed Forces and of the state was ordering them to do what almost all of them had been wanting to do for a long time. Then, once the control of the institutions and order in the cities was secured, or at the same time as those two things were being secured, a unit of the Brunete Division might perhaps have relieved Lieutenant-Colonel Tejero’s Civil Guards and might have quietly set up a cordon around the occupied Cortes, might have cleared the surrounding area and held the Cabinet and the deputies in the least ostentatious and least humiliating way possible while awaiting the appearance of the King’s envoy. Then Armada would have appeared in the Cortes as the King’s envoy and with the backing of the whole Army, he would have met with the main political leaders, he would have agreed with them that this situation, this use of force was totally unacceptable and would have persuaded them that the only way to fix it, and especially to save the threatened democracy, was to form a coalition or caretaker or unity government headed by himself, in short the option they’d all been driving forward over recent months to get the nation away from the edge of the precipice on which they all knew it was teetering. And then, once the government and deputies were persuaded that this was the best or only possible solution to the emergency (a solution on which the King would look kindly or that the King would not refuse if the Cortes approved it), everyone would have been set free and that very evening or that very night or the next day, with the soldiers back in their barracks or still in the streets, the session of investiture interrupted by Lieutenant Colonel Tejero would have been resumed, except that the Prime Minister elected in it would not have been Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo but Alfonso Armada, who would immediately have formed his government, a coalition or caretaker or unity government, a strong, stable, broad government that would have efficiently confronted Spain’s great problems — terrorism, the disintegration of the state, the economic crisis, the loss of values — and that would not only have calmed down the military and the political class, the businessmen and bankers, Rome and Washington, but also the whole of the citizenry, who after a short time would have come out to demonstrate in all the regional capitals of Spain to celebrate the happy result of the coup and the continuation of democracy, and would have applauded the King’s judicious attitude as the driving force behind the new political era and would have reinforced their trust in the monarchy as an indispensable institution to get the country out of the morass it was stuck in owing to the errors and frightful irresponsibility of certain politicians.

That is more or less what might have happened if Armada had got inside the Zarzuela and had won over the King and the final piece of the coup had fallen into place. I mean: that’s more or less what Armada might have imagined would happen if his soft coup project triumphed; the rest of the golpistas, many of the rest of the golpistas, were imagining a hard coup — with elections proscribed, political parties proscribed, autonomous governments proscribed, democracy proscribed — but what the political ringleader of the coup was imagining or might have imagined was more or less that. Maybe it was a ludicrous thing to imagine. Maybe it was a ludicrous plan. Now, when we know that it failed, it’s easy to think it was; the truth is that it was an unpredictable plan — among other reasons because it is a universal rule that once you bring soldiers out of their barracks it’s not easy to get them back in, and because most likely, had it succeeded, the soft coup would just have been a prelude for a hard coup — but I’m not so sure it was ludicrous: after all, it wouldn’t have been the first time that a democratic parliament ceded to military blackmail, and Armada’s plan also had the virtue of disguising as a negotiated way out of the hijacking of the Cortes and a rescue of democracy operation what in reality was simply a coup against democracy. It didn’t work out, and it didn’t because in the first minutes of the coup, when its success or failure was settled, two unpredictable things happened: the first is that the taking of the Cortes was not carried out with the agreed discretion and degenerated into gunfire, which tarnished what was meant to be a soft coup with the aesthetics of a hard coup and made it difficult for the King to endorse, preventing him from tolerating in principle a political manoeuvre whose letter of introduction was an outrage as strident as that; the second is that Armada’s name came out of the golpistas’ mouths before the general had the opportunity to explain the nature of the coup to the King and propose his solution, and that the distrust that the mention of Armada caused the King and Fernández Campo, with the addition of the rivalry between Fernández Campo and Armada, made the two of them decide to keep the former secretary away from the Zarzuela. And that is how, fifteen minutes after having started, the coup ran aground.