The Anatomy of a Moment

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The image, frozen, shows the left wing of the chamber of the Congress of Deputies: on the right are the benches, completely occupied by parliamentarians; in the centre, the press gallery is packed with journalists; on the left the Congress table, in profile, with the speakers’ rostrum in the foreground. The image is the usual image of a plenary session of the Cortes in the first years of democracy; except for two details: first, the hands of the ministers and deputies are all visible on the armrests in front of their benches; the second one is the presence of a Civil Guard in the chamber: he’s stationed in the left corner of the central semicircle, facing the deputies with his finger on the trigger of his automatic assault rifle. These two details destroy any illusion of normality. It is thirty-two minutes past six on the evening of Monday 23 February and exactly nine minutes earlier Lieutenant Colonel Tejero had burst into the Cortes and the coup d’état had begun.

Nothing essential varies in the scene if we unfreeze the image: the Guard armed with the automatic weapon keeps watch to the left and right, taking little steps hushed by the carpet of the central semicircle; the parliamentarians seem petrified in their benches; a silence broken only by a murmur of coughing dominates the chamber. Now the angle changes and the image includes the central semicircle and the right wing of the chamber: in the central semicircle the stenographer and an usher stand up after having spent the last minutes lying on the carpet, and the Secretary of the Congress, Víctor Carrascal — who at the beginning of the coup had been caught by surprise directing the roll-call voting to confirm Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo as the new Prime Minister to replace Adolfo Suárez — stands stiffly under the speakers’ rostrum smoking; as for the right wing of the chamber, all the ministers and deputies remain there, sitting in their seats, the majority with their hands visible on the armrests, the majority of them still. Adolfo Suárez does not belong to this majority, and not only because his hands are not in sight, but because he does not stop moving in his seat; in reality, he has not stopped moving since the firing ceased and General Gutiérrez Mellado returned to sit beside him after his confrontation with the Civil Guards: restless, he’s been turning around to his left, to his right, looking behind him, he’s lit one cigarette after another, he’s crossed and recrossed his legs unceasingly; now he has his back to the chamber, looking at the group of Civil Guards controlling the entrance, as if he’s looking for someone, maybe Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. But if that’s who he’s looking for he doesn’t find him, and when he turns around again he sees, at a Civil Guard’s gesture, Víctor Carrascal is ceding his place under the podium to an usher and, with a cigarette in one hand and the list of deputies’ names in the other, he walks up the steps to the congressional platform, stands at the speakers’ rostrum, drops his suddenly useless papers on the lectern, raises his eyes and looks to his right and left with an expression halfway between confusion and entreaty, as if it suddenly struck him as absurd or ridiculous or dangerous to have climbed up there and he were begging for a place to hide, or as if in the expectant expressions of his comrades he had just read that they thought the golpistas had ordered him up there to say something or to resume the voting where it had been interrupted, and he was trying to correct the misunderstanding.

But the misunderstanding corrects itself. A minute after Víctor Carrascal goes up to the speakers’ rostrum, a captain of the Civil Guard takes his place to address some words to the whole chamber. The captain is called Jesús Muñecas and he is lieutenant colonel Tejero’s most trusted officer that evening, as well as having been one of his strongest supporters during the days before the coup. The lieutenant colonel has asked him to calm the deputies down and, after examining the chamber for a moment from the hall — just as a cautious orator might inspect the conditions of the setting in which he has to give a speech, to adapt it to them — with his automatic weapon in one hand and his tricorne in the other he walks up to the speakers’ rostrum. Nevertheless, as soon as the officer begins his speech someone disconnects voluntarily or involuntarily the camera that is showing it to us and, after offering a few nervous and fleeting shots of the captain, the image melts into blackness. Luckily there is another camera, situated in the left wing of the chamber, which is still functioning and which, before the captain finishes his address, shows him to us again, almost imperceptible, just a blurry uniformed profile on the extreme right of the image. What on the other hand is perceptible with absolute clarity are his words, which resound through the chamber in the midst of absolute silence. The captain’s words are precisely these: ‘Good evening. Nothing’s going to happen, but we’re going to wait a moment for a competent military authority to come to arrange. . what has to be done and what he himself. . will tell all of us. So stay calm. I don’t know if it’ll be a matter of a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, half an hour. . I imagine not longer. An authority who is competent, military of course, will be the one who determines what will take place. Of course nothing’s going to happen. So you can all calm down.’ Nothing more: the captain has spoken with a clear voice, accustomed to giving orders, though not without the odd vacillation or without two sequential stresses — his second mention of the word competent and the word military — betrayed the vigorously neutral tone of his speech’s coercive emphasis. Nothing more: the captain walks down the steps of the speakers’ rostrum and, while he blends into the group of Civil Guards who’ve been listening to him from the hall of the chamber, the image freezes again.

Chapter 1

Who was the competent authority? Who was the military man whose arrival the hijacked parliamentarians were awaiting in vain throughout the evening and night of 23 February? Ever since the day of the coup this has been one of the official enigmas of the coup; it has also been one of the most exploited deposits of the insatiable embellishments that surround it. In fact, there is hardly a politician of the era who has not proposed his hypothesis on the identity of the soldier, and there is no book on 23 February that has not devised its own: some claim it was General Torres Rojas, who — after relieving General Juste of his command of the Brunete Armoured Division and occupying Madrid — would lead his troops to the Cortes to relieve Lieutenant Colonel Tejero; others argue that it was General Milans, who would arrive in Madrid from Valencia in the name of the King and the rebel Captains General; others conjecture that it was General Fernando de Santiago, Gutiérrez Mellado’s predecessor in the post of Deputy Prime Minister and member of a group of generals in the reserves who had been plotting for some time in favour of a coup; others maintain it was the King himself, who would appear in the Cortes to address the deputies in his capacity as head of state and of the Armed Forces. Those four names do not exhaust the number of candidates; there are even those who increase the intrigue not by adding a candidate to the list but by omitting the name of theirs: in 1988 Adolfo Suárez claimed there were only two people who knew the identity of the military officer, and one of them was him. Naturally, there was no one more interested in feeding the mystery than the golpistas themselves. In this task Lieutenant Colonel Tejero excelled, declaring during the 23 February trial that at one of the meetings before the coup Major Cortina had identified the military authority who would come to the Cortes by a code name: the White Elephant; it’s very possible that Tejero’s testimony was just a fantasy designed to add confusion to the confusion of the first hearing, but some journalist mentioned it in his report and in this way managed to fill in the missing proper name with the energy of a symbol and prolong to this day the vitality of the enigma. An enigma that is no enigma, because the truth is once again obvious: the announced military man could only be General Armada, who in accordance with the golpistas’ plans would arrive at the Cortes from the Zarzuela and, with the King’s authorization and the backing of the mutinous Army, would liberate the parliamentarians in exchange for their acceptance of the formation of a coalition or caretaker or unity government under his leadership. That was what was anticipated and, if it’s true that the White Elephant was the code name of the announced soldier, Armada was the White Elephant.

Chapter 2

Armada was the White Elephant and the military officer announced in the Cortes and the leader of the operation, but those who executed it were General Milans and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. The three of them wove the plot of the coup. Was there a plot behind the plot? Also from the very day of the coup speculation began over the existence of a civilian plot hidden behind the military plot, a plot that seemed to involve a group of Franco’s former ministers, radical tycoons and journalists who had operated in the shadow of the military and inspired and financed them. The fact that the court that prosecuted those involved in 23 February tried only one civilian eventually turned this hidden plot into another of the official enigmas of the coup.

The speculation is not unfounded, but fundamentally it was false. There is a rule rarely broken: when about to embark on a coup d’état, the Army closes in on itself, because at the hour of truth soldiers trust only soldiers; in this case the rule did not prove baseless, and the enigma of the so-called civilian plot is no enigma either: with the exception of the involvement of the odd specific civilian like Juan García Carrés — head of the Francoist Syndicate of Diverse Activities and a personal friend of Tejero’s, who was the only civilian prosecuted in the trial for his role as liaison between the lieutenant colonel and General Milans in the months before the coup — behind the rebellious military there was no civilian plot at all: neither former ministers and leaders nor men from Francoist groups like José Antonio Girón de Velasco, nor Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, nor bankers like the Oriol y Urquijo family, nor journalists like Antonio Izquierdo — editor of El Alcázar — nor any of the rest of the members of the far right who’ve often been mentioned directly ran or inspired the coup, because Armada, Milans and Tejero didn’t need any civilian to inspire a military operation and because they wouldn’t allow any civilian to interfere in their plans in any more than an anecdotal way (they wouldn’t even allow García Carrés to participate in the main preparatory meeting for the coup: he attended, but Milans forced him to leave to avoid civilian interference); as for financing it, the 23 February coup was paid for with funds from the democratic state, which financed the Army.* It’s nevertheless true that conspicuous members of the far right — including some of those mentioned above — had magnificent relations with the golpistas and maybe knew in advance who was going to stage the coup and where and how and when they were going to stage it; it’s also true they’d spent years encouraging it and that, in spite of the often irreconcilable differences that separated them, had the harder version of the coup triumphed, they might have been called upon by the soldiers to administer it, and in any case they would have celebrated with enthusiasm. All this is true, but it’s not enough to implicate that group of civilians in the preparations for the coup, a strictly military operation, which, had it achieved its objectives, expected applause from more than just the minority circle of the far right and which, judging by the popular and institutional response to the coup and by the pure logic of things, would most probably have received it. It is said that when the judge presiding at the court martial of José Sanjurjo for the attempted coup d’état of August 1932 asked the general who backed his putsch the soldier’s reply was the following: ‘Had it triumphed, everyone. Starting with yourself, your honour.’ It’s best not to deceive ourselves: it is most likely that, had it triumphed, the 23 February coup would have been applauded by an appreciable part of the citizenry, including politicians, organizations and social sectors that condemned it once it failed; years after 23 February Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo put it like this: ‘What doubt can there be that if Tejero had triumphed and Armada’s coup had come to fruition, perhaps a million people wouldn’t have come out to demonstrate their support, as they did in Madrid on 27 February in support of democracy, maybe there would only have been eight hundred thousand shouting: “¡Viva Armada!”’ This is what the golpistas expected, and it was not an unfounded expectation; trusting in the approval of the civil society does not mean, however, I insist, that it was directed by civilians: although the far right was clamouring for a coup d’état, on 23 February there was no civilian plot behind the military plot or, if it did exist, it was woven not only by the far right, but also by a whole immature, reckless and bewildered ruling class that, in the midst of the apathy of a society disillusioned with democracy or with the operation of democracy after the hopes at the end of the dictatorship, created favourable conditions for the coup. But this civilian plot was not behind the military plot: it was behind and in front of and around the military plot. The civilian plot was not the civilian plot of the coup: it was the placenta of the coup.

* There is one qualification to be made here: the two and a half million pesetas with which Tejero bought six second-hand buses and a few dozen raincoats and anoraks for his Civil Guards to use in the assault on the Cortes — and which in the haste of the last moment were left unused. The origin of this money is unclear; the most credible version claims it was supplied by Juan García Carrés and came from his personal patrimony or from other contributions from associates of the reserve general Carlos Iniesta Cano.

Chapter 3

Armada, Milans and Tejero. They were the three protagonists of the coup; between the three of them they wove the plot: Armada was the political boss; Milans was the military boss; Tejero was the operational boss of the detonator for the coup, the assault on the Cortes. In spite of their similarities, they were three different men who embarked on the coup guided by disparate political and personal motivations; it may be that the latter are no less important than the former: although history is not governed by personal motivations, behind every historical event there are always personal motivations. The similarities between Armada, Milans and Tejero do not explain the coup; their differences don’t explain it either. But without understanding their similarities it’s impossible to understand why they organized the coup, and without understanding their differences it’s impossible to understand why it failed.

Armada was the most complex of the three, maybe because much more than a military man he was a courtier; an old-school courtier, I should add, like a member of the retinue of a medieval monarch portrayed with the customary anachronisms by a Romantic dramatist: scheming, elusive, haughty, ambitious and sanctimonious, apparently liberal and profoundly traditionalist, an expert on protocol, pretence and the tricks of Palace life endowed with the unctuous manners of a prelate and the countenance of a sad clown. Unlike the immense majority of the high command of the military at the time, the monarchy ran in Armada’s veins, because he belonged on all sides to a family of the monarchist aristocracy (his father, also a soldier, grew up with Alfonso XIII and had been tutor to his son Don Juan de Borbón, the King’s father); he was the godson of Queen María Cristina, Alfonso XIII’s mother, and held the title of the Marquis of Santa Cruz de Rivadulla. Like all the military high command of the era, Armada was Francoist to the core: he’d fought the three years of the Civil War with Franco, gone to the Russian front with the Blue Division, he’d made his military career in Franco’s Army and, thanks to an agreement between Franco and Don Juan de Borbón, in 1955 had become Prince Juan Carlos’ private tutor. From that moment on his relationship with the future King grew ever closer and more intense: in 1964 he was named chief adjutant of the Prince’s Household, in 1965 secretary of the Prince’s Household and in 1976 secretary of the King’s Household. Over the course of almost a decade and a half, during which Juan Carlos emerged from adolescence to become an adult and went from being Prince to King, Armada’s influence over him was enormous: as the first effective authority of the monarch’s milieu (the first theoretical authority was the Marquis of Mondéjar, head of the King’s Household), the general controlled his agenda, designed strategies, wrote speeches, screened visitors, organized trips, planned and directed campaigns and attempted to guide Juan Carlos’ political and personal life. He did manage to and the King developed a notable degree of dependence on and affection for him, and it’s very likely that the privilege of proximity to the monarch and the authority he exercised for a long time over the Palace, allied to his innate patrician arrogance and with the success of the proclamation of the monarchy after four decades of uncertainty, inculcated in Armada the certainty that his destiny was united to that of the King and that the Crown had a future in Spain only if he continued to protect it.

The first half of this certainty vanished in the summer of 1977, shortly after the first democratic elections. It was then that the King informed Armada he’d have to leave his post. The dismissal didn’t come into effect until the autumn, but according to an opinion shared by those who knew him the general took the news like a banishment order and privately attributed his fall from grace to Adolfo Suárez’s growing influence over the monarch. The attribution was fair: the King had named Suárez Prime Minister against the advice of Armada — who favoured keeping Arias Navarro in the premiership or replacing him with Manuel Fraga, and in any case a Francoist monarchy or a restricted democracy with broad powers reserved for the Crown — and, from the very moment of the new Prime Minister’s appointment, confrontations between the two of them were constant: they had acrimonious disagreements over the kidnappings of General Villaescusa and Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, which Suárez initially thought the work of the far right and Armada of the far left, over the legalization of the Communist Party, which Armada considered a betrayal of the Army and a surreptitious coup d’état, over letters sent by Armada on Palace letterhead canvassing for votes for Manuel Fraga’s party during the electoral campaign of 1977, over a projected divorce law, over just about everything. Suárez would not tolerate interference from the King’s secretary, whose legitimacy to argue with his decisions he did not recognize and whom he soon considered an obstacle to political reform; for this reason, when he felt his authority reinforced after his victory in the first democratic elections, the Prime Minister insistently requested the King replace his secretary, and taking advantage of the occasion to emancipate himself from the old tutor of his youth, the King eventually gave way. Armada never forgave Suárez. He had never had the slightest bit of respect for him and never imagined he’d turn into his rival and executioner: he’d had frequent contact with him since the days when Suárez ran Radiotelevisión Española, the national broadcasting corporation, and he’d resorted to his services to promote the Prince’s then precarious and vague public image, and his opinion of the future Prime Minister mustn’t have been very different from that of so many others who at the beginning of the 1970s considered him a servile and diligent nonentity and an unscrupulous commoner converted to the cause of the monarchy purely out of personal ambition; the fact that this upstart was the one to distance him from the King only helped to harden the hostility he felt for him from that moment on. Armada always denied it, but just leafing through his memoirs, published two years after the coup, one encounters venomous allusions to the Prime Minister at every turn; he writes of Arias Navarro, Suárez’s predecessor: ‘He cannot be blamed for the later problems, nor for the loss of the values that history and tradition tell us are the soul of Spain. It is others who have caused this situation’ (the italics are his); of Manuel Fraga, who according to him should have occupied Suárez’s place, he claims: ‘Life is like that and often sacrifices the best to give passage and positions of responsibility to insolent people with neither ideas nor scruples.’ One doesn’t need great deductive gifts to guess who this insolent one with neither ideas nor scruples who provoked the loss of Spain’s soul might be.

Armada didn’t resign himself to his exile from the Zarzuela. On leaving the Palace he went back to his military career with assiduous proclamations of enthusiasm, first as professor of tactics at the Army’s Higher Education College and later as director of general services at Headquarters, but he spent the following three years nursing his grudge against Adolfo Suárez as well as the idée fixe of recovering his place at the King’s side. The post of secretary had been filled by Sabino Fernández Campo — a personal friend who he hoped would facilitate his return to court, perhaps as master of the Royal Household — and, through him and friends who still remained in the Palace, he did his utmost to maintain contact with the Zarzuela, sending reports or messages to the King, sending personal greetings to members of the Royal Family on their birthdays, saints’ days and Christmas, and seeking a place at his audiences and public receptions, convinced that sooner or later the monarch would understand his error and summon him back to his side to re-establish a relationship on which the former secretary continued to think the future of the Crown in Spain depended. At the beginning of 1980 Armada was named military governor of Lérida and commander of the 4th Urgell Mountain Division; among his duties required by protocol was to pay respects to the Royal Family on their winter ski trips to the region, and that facilitated the renewal of relations between the general and the King: they saw each other once in the month of February, had dinner a couple of times in the spring. That reconciliation, that return to the confidence of former times came about at the moment when the King was losing confidence in Suárez and when his collapse and the country’s crisis seemed to confirm Armada’s predictions, and the former royal secretary’s political ambition and courtier’s mentality might have interpreted that coincidence as an omen that the time for revenge was nigh: Suárez had removed him from power and the fall of Suárez could mean his return to power. The year 1980 did nothing to correct this interpretation, and the months before the coup even less, when, as Suárez grew more and more distanced from the King, Armada drew closer — often meeting with him in private, discussing the political and military situation and the replacement of the Prime Minister, securing a prime posting for him in Madrid — almost as if he and Suárez were two royal favourites vying for the favour of the King who was seeking a way to replace one with the other. That’s probably what Armada thought on the eve of 23 February and that’s why the coup for him was not just a way to recover a restricted democracy or Francoist monarchy that had been his political ideal from the start, but also a way to finish off Adolfo Suárez and — entirely recovering the King’s favour — to recover and multiply the power Suárez had taken away from him.

For Milans the 23 February coup was something quite different, not because he was not moved by personal concerns, but because deep down Milans was a quite different kind of man from Armada. Not superficially: like Armada, Milans was a soldier with aristocratic roots; like Armada, Milans professed a double fidelity to Francoism and to the monarchy. But, unlike Armada, Milans was more Francoist than monarchist, and he was especially much more of a soldier. Son, grandson, great-grandson and great-great-grandson of eminent golpista soldiers — his father, his great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather all reached the rank of lieutenant general, his grandfather was the Captain General of Catalonia and commander of Alfonso XIII’s Military Chamber — and by 1981 Milans represented better than anyone, with his eventful profile of an old warrior and his considerable military curriculum, not just in Franco’s Army, but in the Army of the Victory. In 1936, as a cadet at the Infantry Academy, he entered the saints’ calendar of Francoist heroes by defending the Alcázar de Toledo for the two and a half months the Republican siege lasted: there he received his first war wound; in the six years that followed he received quite a few more, three of them fighting with the VII Battalion of the Spanish Legion in Madrid, on the Ebro and in Teruel, and the last with the Blue Division in Russia. He returned to Spain with the rank of captain and his chest covered in medals, among them the Army’s most coveted: a Laureate Cross of San Fernando, an individual military medal, two collective ones, five military crosses, three red crosses for military valour and a Nazi Iron Cross. No Spanish soldier of his generation could boast a similar campaign-service record, in spite of being the only one of them to obtain General Staff diplomas from all three branches of the Armed Forces, at the death of Franco nobody embodied better than Milans the prototype of the wind-and-weather military man idealized by Francoism, a man of succinct ideas, allergic to desk work and books, direct, efficient, visceral and without duplicity. In this sense Milans could not be further removed from the Palace deviousness of Armada; nor, of course, from the clumsiness or softness in the exercise of command, the technical mentality, intellectual curiosity and reflective and tolerant inclinations of Gutiérrez Mellado. I do not mention his name by chance: just as it is perhaps impossible to understand Armada’s actions on 23 February without understanding his bitterness towards Adolfo Suárez, it is perhaps impossible to understand Milans’ actions on that day without understanding his aversion to Gutiérrez Mellado.

Although Milans and Gutiérrez Mellado had known each other for a long time, Milans’ animosity did not have a remote origin; it was born when Gutiérrez Mellado agreed to join Suárez’s first government and grew as the general turned into the Prime Minister’s most loyal ally and designed and put into practice a plan whose objective consisted of terminating the privileges of power conceded to the Army by the dictatorship and turning it into an instrument of democracy: Milans not only felt personally passed over and humiliated by the promotion policies of Gutiérrez Mellado, who did everything he could to keep him away from the top command positions and thus spare him golpista temptations; sheltered in his ultraconservative ideas and devotion to Franco, he also suffered as an insult Gutiérrez Mellado’s aspiration to dismantle Franco’s victorious Army, which he considered the only legitimate guarantee of the legitimate ultraconservative state founded by Franco and in consequence the only institution qualified to prevent another war (like the far right, like the far left, Milans was allergic to the word reconciliation, to his mind a simple euphemism for the word treason: several members of his family had been murdered during the conflict, and Milans felt that a worthy present could not forget the past, but must be founded on its permanent remembrance and on the prolongation of the triumph of Francoism over the Republic, which for him equalled the triumph of civilization over barbarism). Milans found in these two personal offences argument enough to condemn Gutiérrez Mellado to the condition of an upstart prepared to violate his oath of loyalty to Franco in order to satisfy his filthy political ambitions; this explains why he encouraged with all the means within reach, including chairmanship of the founding board of El Alcázar, a savage press campaign that left not a single nook of Gutiérrez Mellado’s personal, political or military life unexplored in search of ignominy with which to persuade his comrades-in-arms that the man who was carrying out a treacherous purge of the Armed Forces lacked the slightest inkling of moral or professional integrity; and this explains also why, as soon as Gutiérrez Mellado entered the government, Milans came to embody the Army’s resistance to Gutiérrez Mellado’s military reforms and to the political reforms that allowed them: between the end of 1976 and beginning of 1981 the Army barely saw a protest against the government, a serious disciplinary incident or a whisper of conspiracy Milans was not mixed up in or in which Milans’ name was not invoked. He boasted of never having deceived anybody and of never hiding his intentions, and during those years — first as commander of the Brunete Armoured Division and then as Captain General of Valencia — frequently used the threat of a coup: he liked to joke about it (‘Your Majesty,’ he said to the King over drinks at the end of one of the monarch’s visits to Brunete. ‘One more rum and I’ll order the tanks out on to the streets!’); the first time he really did so was after a tumultuous meeting of the High Command of the Armed Forces held on 12 April 1977, three days after Adolfo Suárez legalized the PCE with the support of Gutiérrez Mellado and contrary to what he had himself promised the military or contrary to what the military believed he’d promised. ‘The Prime Minister gave his word of honour that he would not legalize the Communist Party,’ Milans said that day to his comrades-in-arms. ‘Spain cannot have a Prime Minister without honour: we should order our tanks out on to the streets.’ In the almost three years he was in command of the Captaincy General of Valencia similar expressions were frequently on his lips. ‘Don’t worry, Señora,’ he was heard to say more than once to the ladies who flattered him at receptions, urging him to become the saviour of the nation in danger. ‘I won’t retire without ordering the tanks out on to the street.’ He kept his word in the nick of time: on 23 February he was just four months away from being retired to the reserves; he also kept faith with his golpista and monarchist genes, given that, in spite of being a staunch Francoist, his coup did not aspire to be a coup against the monarchy, but rather with the monarchy. Like Armada, who was sure he’d be able to dominate the Zarzuela that day with his authority as the King’s former secretary, on 23 February Milans was guilty of pride: he considered himself the most prestigious officer in the Army and believed his illusory aspect of invincible general would be enough to drag the rest of the Captains General along on an uncertain adventure and to bring the Brunete to mutiny without having prepared them to do so. He achieved neither one thing nor the other, and that was one of the reasons why the 23 February coup did not end up being what Milans had anticipated: a way of getting even for the humiliations Gutiérrez Mellado had inflicted on him and on his Army and also a way — recovering under the King’s command the foundations of the state installed by Franco — of recovering for the Army of the Victory the power Gutiérrez Mellado had wrenched away.

The final protagonist of the coup was Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. He is the icon of the coup and it’s obvious that he had an icon’s vocation and that his appearance like that of a Civil Guard from a local vignette or from a Lorca poem or from a Berlanga film — robust body, bushy moustache, fervent look in his eye, nasal voice and Andalusian accent — contributed to his vocation as an icon; but it’s also obvious that he was not the impetuous mediocrity the cliché of 23 February wanted him to be and the whole country insisted on constructing after 23 February, as if a collective guilty conscience for the complete lack of opposition to the coup needed to demonstrate to itself that only a lunatic could assault the Cortes at gunpoint and therefore the coup was just a nonsense that didn’t need to be resisted because it was doomed to failure from the start. It’s not true: Tejero was absolutely not a fairground madman; he was something much more dangerous: he was an idealist prepared to bend reality to his ideals, prepared to maintain loyalty to those he considered his own at any price, prepared to impose good and eliminate evil by force; on 23 February Tejero also proved to be many other things, but only because he was first and foremost an idealist. That Tejero’s ideals strike us as perverse and anachronistic does not qualify the goodness or evil of his intentions, because evil is often concocted from good and perhaps good from evil; much less does it authorize us to attribute his misdemeanour to a picturesque derangement: if Tejero had been deranged he would not have prepared for months and carried out successfully a complex and dangerous operation like the assault on the Cortes, he would not have been able to keep the almost absolute control he kept over the hostage-taking for the seventeen and a half hours it lasted, he would not have known how to play his cards and would not have manoeuvred to achieve his objectives with the serene rationality with which he did so; if he had been deranged, if he’d taken his madness to its limit, perhaps the seizure of the Cortes would have ended in slaughter and not the negotiation with which it ended once he was certain the coup had failed. The reality is that Tejero was a technically competent officer who had been assigned to positions of maximum responsibility — like the command of the San Sebastián Civil Guard — and who, though his fiery and emotional idealism provoked the suspicion of his commanders and comrades, also inspired the devotion of his subordinates. It is unnecessary to add that he was a fanatic from having ingested tons of patriotic pabulum, a moralist blinded by the vanity of virtue and a megalomaniac with an indomitable yearning for prominence. By temperament and by mentality he was quite distant from Armada, but not from Milans. Like Milans, Tejero considered himself a man of action, and he was; the difference is that Milans had been one most of all during his youth in an open civil war while Tejero had been one most of all as an adult during an undercover war in the Basque Country. Like Milans, Tejero dreamt of a utopia of Spain as a barracks — a radiant place of order, brotherhood and harmony regulated by reveilles and taps under the radiant rule of God — the difference is that Milans accepted the gradual conquest of utopia while Tejero aspired to put the revolution into immediate effect. Like Milans, Tejero was a Francoist above all; the difference is that, precisely because he belonged to a later generation than Milans and hadn’t seen the war or known any Spain other than Franco’s Spain, Tejero was if possible even more Francoist than Milans: he idolized Franco, he was ruled by the triad in capital letters of God, Fatherland and the Military, his mortal enemy was Marxism, that is Communism, that is the Anti-Spain, that is the enemies of the utopia of Spain as barracks, who should be eradicated from the native soil before they managed to poison it. This last of course formed part of the far right’s rhetorical bible in the 1970s, but for Tejero’s literal sentimentalism it also constituted an exact description of reality and an ethical command: in Tejero it grew into a finished fusion between patriotism and religion and, as Sánchez Ferlosio says, ‘It’s when there is God that all is permitted; as there is no one more ferociously dangerous than the just, with right on their side.’ From there, as for the whole of the far right, for Tejero, Santiago Carrillo came to represent something like what Adolfo Suárez represented for Armada and Gutiérrez Mellado for Milans: the personification of all the misfortunes of the nation and, in the midst of his hysterical egocentrism that allowed him to feel himself to be the personification of the nation, the personification of all its misfortunes; and from there as well, because the fusion between patriotism and religion dehumanizes the adversary and turns him into evil, as soon as he glimpsed the return to Spain of the Anti-Spain his eschatological fanaticism imposed the duty to finish it off, and from then on he exchanged his military record for a record of rebellion.

The percussion cap for this string of insubordination was what Tejero considered the unmasked manifestation of the Anti-Spain: terrorism. During the 23 February trial his defence lawyer described an episode that happened after the murder at the hands of ETA of one of the Civil Guards under his command at the Guipúzcoa station; more than an event it was an image, a gruesome but not faked image: the image of the lieutenant colonel bending over the corpse destroyed by an explosion and standing up with his lips and uniform stained with the blood of his subordinate. It’s very probable that Tejero never knew how to or wanted to or could experience terrorism as anything but a savage intimate aggression, and there is no doubt that it was terrorism that turned him into a chronic rebel and saturated him with justification as long as the state showed itself incapable of putting a stop to it and part of society seemed indifferent to the ravages it caused among his comrades-in-arms. In January 1977, not long after the murder of one of his men, the lieutenant colonel was relieved of his command in Guipúzcoa and placed under a month’s arrest for sending a sarcastic telegram to the Minister of the Interior, who had just legalized the Basque flag while, as he repeated every time the incident was mentioned, the city of San Sebastián was filled with burning Spanish flags; in October of the same year he was relieved of his command in Málaga and again placed under arrest for another month after forbidding an authorized demonstration pistol in hand with the argument that ETA had just killed two Civil Guards and all of Spain should be in mourning; in August 1978, while the political parties discussed the projected Constitution, he was arrested for fourteen days for publishing in El Imparcial an open letter to the King in which he requested that he, as head of state and of the Armed Forces, prevent the approval of any text that did not include ‘some of the values for which we believe our lives are worth risking’, that he enact a law capable of ending the massacre of terrorism and finishing off ‘the apologists of this bloody farce, whether or not they might be parliamentarians and sit among the fathers of the nation’; in November 1978 he was arrested and tried for planning a coup that anticipated the 23 February coup — the so-called Operation Galaxia: the idea was to take the Cabinet hostage in the Moncloa Palace and, with the help of the rest of the Army, then oblige the King to form a government of national salvation — but less than a year later was released from prison in the middle of 1980 after the court sentenced him to an insignificant term which he’d already served, and which convinced him that he could try again without running any greater risk than to spend a short and comfortable time in jail, converted into a semi-secret hero of the Army and a resounding hero of the far right. That was when he acquired a passion for notoriety; that was when the obsession with a coup became lodged in his brain; that’s when he began to prepare 23 February. The idea was his: he gave birth to it and nursed it and raised it; Milans and Armada wanted to adopt it, subordinating it to their ends, but by that time the lieutenant colonel already felt himself to be its proprietor and when, on the night of 23 February, he came to realize that the two generals were pursuing the triumph of a different coup than the one he’d bred, Tejero preferred the failure of the coup over the triumph of a coup that wasn’t his, because he thought the triumph of Milans and Armada’s coup did not guarantee the immediate realization of his utopia of Spain as barracks and the liquidation of the Anti-Spain that no one personified better than Santiago Carrillo, or because for Tejero the coup d’état was more than anything a way to finish off Santiago Carrillo or what Santiago Carrillo personified and — recovering the radiant order of brotherhood and harmony regulated by reveilles under the radiant rule of God that had been abolished with the arrival of democracy — to recover what Santiago Carrillo, or what Santiago Carrillo personified to him, had wrenched away.

Tejero understood it quite well: it’s not just that the three protagonists of the coup were profoundly different and were acting on different political and personal motivations; it’s that each of them was pursuing a different coup and on the night of 23 February the two generals were trying to make use of the coup conceived by the lieutenant colonel in order to impose their own: Tejero was against democracy and against the monarchy and his coup was essentially meant to be a coup similar in content to the coup that in 1936 tried to overthrow the Republic and provoked the war and then Francoism; Milans was against democracy, but not against the monarchy, and his coup was essentially meant to be a coup similar in form and content to the coup that in 1923 overthrew the parliamentary monarchy and installed the monarchist dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, that is a military pronunciamiento to return to the King the powers he’d handed over by sanctioning the Constitution and, maybe after an intermediate phase, to lead to a military junta that would serve as a means of support to the Crown; finally, Armada was not against the monarchy nor (at least in a frontal or explicit way) against democracy, but only against the democracy of 1981 or against the democracy of Adolfo Suárez, and essentially his coup was meant to be a coup similar in form to the coup that led General de Gaulle to the presidency of the French Republic in 1958 and in content a sort of palace coup that should allow him to play with more authority than ever his role as the King’s right-hand man, turning him into the Prime Minister of a coalition or caretaker or unity government with the mission of reducing democracy to the point of turning it into a semi-democracy or a substitute for democracy. The 23 February coup was an extraordinary coup because it was a single coup and three different coups in one: before 23 February Armada, Milans and Tejero believed their coup was the same one, and this belief allowed the coup to happen; during the course of 23 February Armada, Milans and Tejero discovered that their coup was in reality three different coups, and this discovery provoked the failure of the coup. That’s what happened, at least from the political point of view; from the personal point of view what happened was even more extraordinary: Armada, Milans and Tejero staged in a single coup three different coups against three different men or against what three different men personified for them, and those three men — Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Carrillo: the three men who’d carried the weight of the transition, the three men who had staked the most on democracy, the three men who had most to lose if democracy were destroyed — were precisely the only three politicians present in the Cortes who showed themselves willing to risk their necks by facing up to the golpistas. This triple symmetry also forms a strange figure, maybe the strangest figure of all the strange figures of 23 February, and the most perfect, as if its form were suggesting a significance that we were incapable of grasping, but without which it’s impossible to grasp the significance of 23 February.

Chapter 4

They were three traitors; I mean: for those to whom they owed loyalty through family ties, social class, beliefs, ideas, vocation, history, common interest or simple gratitude, Adolfo Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo were three traitors. Not just to them; they were for many more people, and in a certain sense they are objectively: Santiago Carrillo betrayed the ideals of Communism by undermining its revolutionary ideology and placing it on the threshold of democratic socialism, and betrayed forty years of anti-Francoist struggle by declining to see justice done to those responsible for and complicit in Francoist injustice and forcing his party to make real, symbolic and sentimental concessions imposed by his pragmatism and by his lifelong pact with Adolfo Suárez; Gutiérrez Mellado betrayed Franco, betrayed Franco’s Army, betrayed the Army of the Victory and its radiant utopia of order, brotherhood and harmony regulated by reveilles under the radiant rule of God; Suárez was the worst, the total traitor, because his treason made possible the treason of the others: he betrayed the single fascist party in which he’d been raised and to which he owed all that he was, he betrayed the political principles he’d sworn to defend, he betrayed the Francoist leaders and barons who trusted him to prolong Francoism and he betrayed the military with his veiled promises to keep the Anti-Spain in check. In their way, Armada, Milans and Tejero could imagine themselves as classical heroes, champions of an ideal of triumph and conquest, paladins of loyalty to clear, immovable principles who aspired to reach fulfilment by imposing their positions; Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Carrillo gave up doing so from the moment they began their task of retreat and demolition and dismantling and sought fulfilment by abandoning their positions, undermining themselves unknowingly. The three of them committed political and personal errors during the course of their lives, but that brave renunciation defines them. Deep down Milans was right (as were the ultraright-wingers and ultraleft-wingers of the day): in the Spain of the 1970s the word reconciliation was a euphemism for the word treason, because there was no reconciliation without treason or at least without some betrayal. Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Carrillo betrayed more than anyone, and therefore were often called traitors. In a certain sense they were: they betrayed their loyalty to an error in order to construct their loyalty to a truth; they betrayed their own people in order not to betray themselves; they betrayed the past in order not to betray the present. Sometimes you can be loyal to the present only by betraying the past. Sometimes treason is more difficult than loyalty. Sometimes loyalty is a form of courage, but other times it is a form of cowardice. Sometimes loyalty is a form of betrayal and betrayal is a form of loyalty. Maybe we don’t know exactly what loyalty is or what betrayal is. We have an ethics of loyalty, but we don’t have an ethics of betrayal. We need an ethics of betrayal. The hero of retreat is a hero of betrayal.

Chapter 5

Let me recapitulate: the 23 February coup was an exclusively military coup, led by General Armada, plotted by General Armada himself, General Milans and by Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, encouraged by the Francoist far right and facilitated by a series of political manoeuvres through which a large part of the country’s ruling class intended to put an end to Adolfo Suárez’s premiership. All right then: when did it all begin? Where did it all begin? Who began it all? How did it all begin? There is no protagonist, witness or investigator of the coup who doesn’t have answers to these questions, but there are barely two identical answers. In spite of being contradictory, many of them are valid; or might be: segmenting history is an arbitrary exercise; strictly speaking, it’s impossible to pin down the exact origin of a historic event, just as it’s impossible to pin down its exact end: every event has its origins in a previous event, which originates in another previous event, which originates in another, and so on, because history is like matter and within it nothing is created or destroyed: it only transforms. General Gutiérrez Mellado said more than once that the 23 February coup originated in November 1975, at the same moment when, after being proclaimed King before the Francoist Cortes, the monarch declared that he intended to be King of all Spaniards, which meant that his aim was to bring to an end the irreconcilable two Spains that Francoism perpetuated. It is an opinion accepted by many that the coup began on 9 April 1977, when the Army felt that Suárez had deceived it by legalizing the Communist Party and had betrayed Spain by giving naturalization papers to the Anti-Spain. There are those who choose to situate the beginning of the plot in the Zarzuela Palace itself, some months later, the day when Armada found out he’d have to give up the secretariat of the Royal Household, or, better yet, some years later, when the monarch began to contribute to the political manoeuvres against Adolfo Suárez with his words and his silences and when he considered or let it be believed that he was considering the possibility of replacing the government led by Suárez with a coalition or caretaker or unity government led by a military man. Maybe the simplest or least inexact would be to go back a little bit further, just to the day at the end of the summer of 1978 when the front page of every newspaper handed Lieutenant Colonel Tejero the formula for the coup he’d been brooding on for some time by then and which would grow over the following months like a tapeworm in his brain: on 22 August that year, the Sandinista commander Edén Pastora launched an assault on the National Palace in Managua and, after holding hostage for several days more than a thousand politicians with links to the dictator Anastasio Somoza, managed to liberate a large group of Sandinista National Liberation Front political prisoners; the Nicaraguan guerrilla leader’s audacity dazzled the lieutenant colonel and, superimposed on the nineteenth-century memory of General Pavía’s Civil Guards dissolving the Parliament of the First Republic by force, catalyzed his golpista obsession and inspired first the so-called Operation Galaxia, which just a few weeks later he unsuccessfully tried to execute, and finally the 23 February coup. Perhaps with the exception of the first of them — too vague, too imprecise — any of the conjectures mentioned might serve as the origin of the coup, or at least as the starting point for explaining it. I dare to choose another, no less arbitrary but maybe more apt for what I propose to do in the pages that follow: describe the plot of the coup, an almost seamless fabric of private conversations, confidences and understandings that I can often only try to reconstruct from indirect testimonies, stretching the limits of the possible until they touch the probable and with the pattern of the plausible trying to outline the shape of the truth. Naturally, I cannot guarantee that everything I am about to tell is true; but I can guarantee that it is concocted with truth and especially that it is the closest I can get to the truth, or to imagining it.

Madrid, July 1980. At the beginning of this month two events took place in the capital that we can suppose were simultaneous or almost simultaneous: the first was a lunch Lieutenant Colonel Tejero had with an emissary of General Milans; the second was the arrival at the Zarzuela Palace of a report sent by General Armada. We know the context in which they occurred: in the summer of that year ETA was killing left, right and centre, the second oil crisis was laying waste to the Spanish economy and, after being swept aside in several regional elections and suffering a humiliating motion of no-confidence from the Socialists, Adolfo Suárez seemed to be refusing to govern as he rapidly lost the Parliament’s confidence, his party’s confidence, the King’s confidence and the confidence of a country, which in turn seemed also to be rapidly losing confidence in democracy or in the functioning of democracy. The coup plotters’ lunch was held at a restaurant in the centre of the capital and was attended, as well as by Tejero, by Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver, General Milans’ aide-de-camp, by Juan García Carrés, personal friend of Tejero’s and the link between the two, and perhaps by retired General Carlos Iniesta Cano. Although it was through an intermediary, it was the first contact between Milans and Tejero, and there was talk of politics but most of all the talk was of the project of assaulting the Cortes conceived by Tejero, and days or weeks later, at another similar lunch, again through his aide-de-camp Milans charged the lieutenant colonel with studying the idea and keeping him informed of progress; in spite of awaiting ratification from a military tribunal of the sentence handed down by a court martial in the month of May for his involvement in Operation Galaxia, and in spite of suspecting that he was being followed, Tejero immediately began preparations for the coup and during the following months, while keeping in contact with Milans through Mas Oliver, he took photographs of the Cortes building, found out about the security measures that protected it and rented an industrial warehouse in the city of Fuenlabrada where he stored clothing and six buses he’d bought with the intention of camouflaging and transporting his troops on the day of the coup.

Thus began the plot captained by Milans, a military operation that remained secret until it burst out on 23 February. The arrival at the Zarzuela Palace of the King’s former secretary’s report marked the beginning of a series of more or less public movements later baptized with the name Operación Armada (meaning ‘Armed Operation’ but also a play on the general’s name) and destined to lead Armada to the head of the government, a political operation initially independent of the previous one but over the course of time converging with it, which would turn Armada into the leader of both: the military operation ended up being the battering ram of the political operation and the political operation ended up being the military operation’s alibi. The text of the report received at the Zarzuela Palace had been handed by Armada to Sabino Fernández Campo, the King’s secretary, and it was the work of a law professor whose identity we do not know; it was just a few pages long, and in them, after a description of the deterioration the country was going through, its author proposed as a remedy to the political chaos that Adolfo Suárez should leave power by way of a no-confidence vote backed by the PSOE, by Manuel Fraga’s right wing and by dissident sectors of the UCD; the manoeuvre should conclude with the formation of a unity government led by an independent figure, perhaps from the military.

That was the content of the report. We don’t know if the King read it, although we do know that Fernández Campo read it and that no one at the Zarzuela Palace made any comment on it to Armada at the time, but in the following weeks, while the rumour went round that the PSOE was preparing a new no-confidence motion against Adolfo Suárez, the text circulated through offices, newspaper editorial rooms and news agencies, and in a very short time the hypothesis of a unity government led by a military man as a life raft against the sinking of the country had reached every corner of the Madrid political village. ‘I know the PSOE is weighing up the possibility of bringing a soldier in to be Prime Minister of the government,’ Suárez declared to the press at some point in July; and he added: ‘I think it’s crazy.’ But many didn’t consider it crazy; more than that: during the months of July, August and September the idea seemed to permeate Spanish political life like a ubiquitous murmur, transformed into a plausible option. A general was being sought: there was a unanimous accord that it should be a prestigious, liberal military officer, with political experience, on good terms with the King and able to bring together the approval of the parties of the right, of the centre and of the left and assemble them in a government that would spread optimism, impose order, tackle the economic crisis and put a stop to ETA and to the danger of a coup d’état; bets were placed: given the identikit portrait of the redeeming general appeared to fit his political and personal features, the name of Alfonso Armada figured on every list. It’s very possible that people close to him, like Antonio Cortina — brother of the head of AOME and distinguished member of Manuel Fraga’s Alianza Popular — promoted his candidacy, but it’s beyond doubt that no one did as much as Armada himself. Taking advantage of his frequent trips from Lérida to Madrid, where he still had his family home, and taking advantage especially of his summer holidays, Armada increased his presence at dinners and lunches with politicians, military officers, businessmen and bankers; in spite of the fact that since his departure from the Zarzuela his encounters with the monarch had been only sporadic, in those meetings Armada took on his former authority as royal secretary to present himself as interpreter not only of the King’s thinking, but also of his desires, in such a way that, in a toing and froing of double meanings, insinuations and half-spoken words that decades of courtly ruses had taught him to wield with dexterity, anyone who talked to Armada ended up convinced that it was the King who was talking through him and all that Armada was saying the King was also saying. Of course, it was false, but, like all good lies, it contained a part of the truth, because what Armada was saying (and what everyone thought the King was saying through Armada) was a wisely balanced combination of what the King was thinking and what Armada would have liked the King to think: Armada assured everyone that the King was very anxious, that the situation of the country had him very worried, that the Army’s permanent restlessness had him very worried, that his relations with Suárez were bad, that Suárez didn’t listen to him any more and his clumsiness, negligence, irresponsibility and foolish attachment to power were putting the country and the Crown at risk, and that he would look very kindly on a change of Prime Minister (which entailed exactly what the King was thinking at that moment); but Armada also said (and everyone thought the King was saying it through Armada) that these were exceptional circumstances that demanded exceptional solutions and that a government of national unity composed of leaders of the main political parties and led by a military officer was a good solution, and he let it be understood that he himself, Armada, was the best candidate possible to head it up (all of which entailed exactly what Armada would have liked the King to be thinking and maybe partly through Armada’s influence what he would come to think at some point, but not what he was thinking at that moment). Towards the middle or end of September, while the monarch’s former secretary was returning to his post in Lérida and his presence was dwindling in Madrid and the political year was getting under way again after the holidays, Operation Armada seemed to lose the wind from its sails in the gossip shops of the capital, as if it had just been an excuse to while away the idle hours of summer heat without news; but what actually happened was something else, and the thing is that, although in the gossip shops of the capital it got buried by the breakdown of the government and Suárez’s departure and by the avalanche of operations against the Prime Minister that were beginning to shape the placenta of the coup, Operation Armada remained very much alive in the mind of its protagonist and those around him who continued to consider it the ideal form for the touch on the rudder or surgical coup so many thought the country needed. Armada maintained good relations with politicians in the government, in the party that kept it in power and in the right-wing party — including its leader: Manuel Fraga — and during his summer encounters all had welcomed his promotional periphrases with sufficient interest to authorize him to trust that when the moment came all would accept him as a replacement for Suárez; Armada did not, however, know the Socialist leaders, whose agreement was necessary for his operation, and in the first weeks of the autumn the possibility arose of talking to them. He didn’t get to speak with Felipe González (as might have been his aim), but he did speak to Enrique Múgica, the number three of the PSOE who was in charge of military affairs within the party; a few pages ago I described their meeting: it was held on 22 October in Lérida and was a success for Armada, who came out of it with the certainty that the Socialists not only sympathized with the idea of a unity government led by a military officer, but also with the idea that the officer should be him. Nevertheless, like the constitutionalist’s report he’d sent to the Zarzuela in July and his summer propaganda campaign in the salons of the political village of Madrid, the meeting with the PSOE was for Armada a simple preparatory manoeuvre for the central manoeuvre: winning the King over to Operation Armada.

On 12 November the King and Armada met in La Pleta, a mountain cabin in the Arán Valley that the Royal Family used when they went skiing. The encounter formed part of the obligations or courtesies required by protocol of the military governor of Lérida, but the King and his former secretary had not seen each other for a long time — probably since the previous spring — and the conversation went on long past the bounds of protocol. The two men talked about politics: as by then he did with so many people, it’s very possible that the King may have ranted and raved against Suárez and expressed his alarm over the state of the country; as the unity government led by a military officer was a hypothesis that was in the streets and had arrived at the Zarzuela by various routes, it’s possible that the King and the general talked about it: in such a case, Armada would certainly have been in favour of the idea, although neither of the two would have mentioned his candidacy for the position; but what they undoubtedly talked most about was military discontent, which the King feared and Armada exaggerated, which might explain why the King would have asked the general to investigate it and inform him. This request was the reason or the excuse for Armada’s next move. Barely five days later the former royal secretary travelled to Valencia to meet with Milans, aware that there was no more discontented officer than Milans in the whole Army and that any golpista intrigue would start from or lead to Milans, or be adjacent to him. The two generals had known each other since the 1940s, when they’d both fought in Russia with the Blue Division; their friendship had never been a close one, but their long-standing monarchist adhesion distinguished them from their comrades-in-arms and represented an added connection that afternoon and once on their own — after a lunch at headquarters accompanied by their wives and Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver, Milans’ aide-de-camp, and Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, his deputy chief of staff — allowed them to expose their projects clearly to each other, or at least allowed Milans to do so. Both agreed on the diagnosis of the calamitous state of the country, a diagnosis shared by the media, political parties and social organizations entirely free of suspicion of far-right sympathies; they also agreed on the convenience of the Army intervening in the matter, although they disagreed on the way of doing so: with his customary frankness, Milans declared himself willing to head up a monarchist coup, he talked of distant meetings with generals in Játiva, or perhaps in Jávea, and of recent meetings in Madrid and Valencia, and it’s even probable that already during that first meeting he mentioned the operation being planned by Tejero, from whom he continued to receive news thanks to his aide-de-camp. For his part, Armada talked of his conversation with the King or invented several conversations with the King and an intimacy with the monarch that no longer existed or that didn’t exist as it once had — the King was anguished, he said; the King was fed up with Suárez, he said; the King thought it necessary to do something, he said — and he talked of his political soundings in the summer and autumn and of his project of forming a unity government under his leadership which would name him, Milans, President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he also told him that the King approved of this emergency measure, and reasoned that their two projects were complementary because his political project might need the help of a military push, and that in any case they were both pursuing common objectives and for the good of Spain and the Crown they should act in a coordinated way and maintain contact.

Convinced that Armada was speaking in the King’s name, eager to convince himself of it, Milans accepted the deal, and in this way Operación Armada gained a military battering ram: through Milans the former royal secretary subdued the military officers in favour of a coup and could wield the threat or reality of force at the moment most convenient to his aims. It was like cresting a hill. Until that moment Operation Armada was a purely political operation meant to impose itself through purely political means; from that moment on it was more than a political operation, since it was keeping in reserve the resource of a military coup in case of not being able to impose itself through purely political means. The difference was obvious, although Armada probably did not want to perceive it, at least not yet: he probably told himself that his meeting with Milans had been just his way of carrying out the task of finding out information for the King and cooling the Captain General’s golpista fervour in the meantime; furthermore, as if seeking to contribute to his voluntary blindness, the months of November and December filled with events that Armada perhaps read as omens of a non-violent triumph of the purely political operation: while the Army’s malaise was revealed by new scandals — on 5 December several hundred generals, commanders and other officers boycotted a ceremony at the General Staff Academy in protest at a government decision — and while murmurs circulated in Madrid that a group of Captains General had asked the King for Adolfo Suárez’s resignation and that another no-confidence motion against the Prime Minister was being drawn up, some leaders of political parties were flocking to the Zarzuela Palace to express their alarm at the deterioration of the situation and to champion the need for a strong government to put a stop to the unbearable weakness of Suárez’s government. These favourable signs or what Armada could interpret as favourable signs seemed to receive the Crown’s public endorsement when shortly before the end of the year, in his televised Christmas message, the King told anyone looking to understand it — and the first to understand it was Adolfo Suárez — that his support for the Prime Minister had come to an end.

Perhaps it was the gesture that Armada had been waiting for since his departure from the Zarzuela: his adversary fallen into disgrace, deprived of royal confidence and protection, for Armada’s pride and courtesan mentality it was the moment to recover and augment his place as the King’s favourite that Suárez had done all he could to steal, becoming head of his government in those times of difficulty for the Crown. This hunch encouraged him to tighten his siege of the monarch. During the Christmas holidays, Armada was with the King at least twice, once at the Zarzuela and again at La Pleta, where the Royal Family spent the first days of January. They spoke at length again, and in these conversations the former royal secretary was able to accumulate evidence that the King’s favour for which he’d been longing for almost five years was returning; not fictitious evidence: worried for the future of the monarchy, reluctant to accept the role of institutional arbiter without authentic power assigned him by the Constitution, the King sought resources with which to weather the crisis, and it’s absurd to imagine he’d refuse those offered or those he thought the man who’d helped him overcome so many obstacles in his youth might be able to offer. Although we have only Armada’s testimony about what was discussed in those conversations with the King, we can take a few things as certain or as very likely: it is certain or very likely that, as well as stressing both a gloomy opinion of Suárez and of the political moment, Armada talked of the rumours of a no-confidence motion against Suárez and of the rumours of a unity government, that he revealed himself to be in favour of it and in a more or less elliptical way proposed himself as a candidate to lead it, emphasizing that his monarchist and liberal profile corresponded to the profile of the leader designed by the media, social organizations and political parties, many of which (according to Armada again) had already given him their blessing or insinuated that they would; it’s certain or very likely that the King would have let Armada talk and wouldn’t have contradicted him and that, if he hadn’t done so before, would now have begun to consider seriously the proposal of a government of unity led by a soldier, whether or not it was Armada, as long as he could count on the approval of the Cortes and on a constitutional framework that Armada considered guaranteed; it’s certain that, while both stressed their gloomy opinion of the military moment, Armada was the more exasperated by it and would have talked of his visit to Milans, presenting himself as a brake on the Captain General of Valencia’s interventionist ardour, craftily doling out information about his projects or threats and without going into any details prejudicial to his own ends (it’s unlikely for example that he would have mentioned Tejero and his relationship with Milans); it is also certain that the King asked Armada to continue keeping him up to date on what was happening or being plotted in the barracks; also, that he promised to find him a posting in the capital. The reason for this promise must not be simple or singular: the King undoubtedly was thinking that having Armada posted far from Madrid was making his access to the most abundant and accurate news about the Army difficult; he undoubtedly thought that placing him in a central position within the military hierarchy could help to block the coup; he undoubtedly wanted to have him nearby in order to be able to turn to him in any contingency, including perhaps that of leading a coalition or caretaker or unity government. Maybe there were even more reasons. Whatever the case, the King hastened to fulfil this promise and, in spite of the drastic opposition of Suárez, who mistrusted more than ever the machinations of the former royal secretary, got the Minister of Defence to reserve for Armada the post of Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff. Supplied with this future appointment, with his many hours of proximity to the King and a concrete proposal, as soon as the Royal Family’s holidays in Lérida were over Armada went back to Valencia with his wife to see Milans again.

It happened on 10 January and was the last time the two 23 February leaders spoke face to face before the coup. What Armada said that day to Milans was that the King shared their point of view regarding the political situation and his own imminent return to Madrid as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff was the platform devised by the monarch from which to turn him into Prime Minister of a government of unity, the formation of which could only be a question of weeks, the time it would take for a victorious motion of no-confidence against Adolfo Suárez to crystallize; therefore, concluded Armada, this was the time to halt the military operations under way, subordinating them to the political operation: it was a question of bringing all the various coup plots together under a single command and a single project, to be able to deactivate them when the political operation triumphed or, if no other option remained because the political operation failed, to be able to reactivate them in order to triumph. This proposal defined by Armada and accepted by Milans was what dominated a meeting held eight days later in the Madrid home of the Captain General of Valencia’s aide-de-camp, on Calle General Cabrera; attending it, summoned by Milans himself, were several reserve generals — among them Iniesta Cano — several active generals — among them Torres Rojas — and several lieutenant colonels — among them Tejero — whereas, faithful to a strategy of never talking about the coup in the presence of more than one person and looking for alibis for any hypothetically compromising move (therefore always talking alone with Milans and always visiting Valencia accompanied by his wife and on the pretext of settling private matters), Armada gave a last-minute excuse and did not attend the conclave. Given that it was the most well attended by those preparing the coup, and the most important from the point of view of the military operation, what was discussed at it is well known: during the 23 February trial several of those who were present gave similar versions, and years later some who were there and who eluded prosecution at the time would do so as well. It was Milans who was firmly in command of the meeting. The Captain General of Valencia assumed control of the coup projects in various stages of germination in which those present were involved and explained Armada’s plan the way Armada had explained it to him, stressing it was all being done under the auspices of the King; likewise, after Tejero set out the technical details of his operation, Milans defined the basic mechanism they’d have to deploy at the chosen moment: Tejero would take the Cortes, he would take the region of Valencia, Torres Rojas would take Madrid with the Brunete Armoured Division and Armada would accompany the King at the Zarzuela Palace while the rest of the Captains General, whose complicity would have been previously secured, would join them by taking their respective regions and thus sealing the coup; it was, furthermore — as Milans repeated over and over again — a simple project, and its realization was not going to be necessary if, as he expected, Armada set in action his purely political project within a reasonable space of time; Milans even made clear what he understood as a reasonable space of time: thirty days.

Not even fifteen had gone by when the golpistas’ plans seemed to be pulverized. On 29 January Adolfo Suárez announced his resignation on television. Despite the fact that for many months the ruling class had been shouting their demand for it, the news surprised everyone, and it can be imagined that in the first instant Armada would have rightly thought that Suárez had resigned to abort the political operations directed against him, Operation Armada among them; but it can equally be imagined in the second instant the general would try to convince himself that, far from complicating things, Suárez’s resignation simplified them, since it saved the uncertain formality of the no-confidence motion and left his political future in the hands of the King, whom the Constitution granted the authority to propose a new Prime Minister after consulting with parliamentary leaders. It was at this moment that Armada decided to present his candidacy to the King without subterfuge and bring to bear all the pressure he could to make him accept it. He did so at a dinner alone with the monarch, a week after Suárez’s resignation. By then Armada felt that everything was conspiring in his favour, and the proof is that, undoubtedly on his advice, days earlier Milans had gathered his people again or some of his people on Calle General Cabrera to assure them that the coup was on ice until further notice because the fall of the Prime Minister and Armada’s immediate transfer to Madrid meant the coup was unnecessary and that Operation Armada was under way: on the morning after Suárez’s resignation the newspapers were full of hypotheses of coalition or caretaker or unity governments, the political parties were offering to participate in them or looking for support for them and Armada’s name was on everyone’s lips in the political village of Madrid, put forward by people in his circle like the journalist Emilio Romero, who on 31 January proposed the general as new Prime Minister in his column in ABC; three days later the King telephoned Armada and told him he’d just signed the decree of his appointment as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff and that he should pack his bags because he was coming back to Madrid. At this ideal juncture Armada had his dinner with the King, over the course of which the former secretary earnestly reiterated his reasoning: the need for a surgical coup or a touch on the rudder that would remove the danger of a coup d’état, the convenience of a government of unity led by a military officer and the constitutional nature of such a solution; he also offered to assume the leadership of the government and assured him or let him understand that he could count on the support of the main political parties. I don’t know how the King reacted to Armada’s words; there’s no reason to rule out that he might have had doubts, and one reason not to rule it out is that, although the UCD had already proposed Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo as Suárez’s successor, the King took another eleven days before presenting his candidacy to the Cortes: it’s very unlikely that in the obligatory rounds of consultations with the leaders of the political parties, before the presentation of the candidate, he would have even mentioned Armada’s name, but he would undoubtedly have talked about coalition or caretaker or unity governments; as well as this delay, another reason invites us not to rule out that the King might have had doubts: many people were advocating an exceptional way out and had been for a long time that, without violating the Constitution in theory, would not involve an automatic application of the Constitution, and he had absolute confidence in Armada and could think that a government led by the general and supported by all the political parties would calm the Army down, would help the country overcome the crisis and strengthen the Crown. We don’t have to rule out that he had doubts, but the truth is that, for whatever reasons — perhaps because he understood in time that straining the Constitution meant putting the Constitution in danger and putting the Constitution in danger meant putting democracy in danger and that putting democracy in danger meant putting the Crown in danger — the King decided to apply the Constitution to the letter and present to the Cortes the candidacy of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo on 10 February.

That was the end of Operation Armada, the end of the purely political operation; from that point on the possibility of the King’s former secretary attaining the leadership of a coalition or caretaker or unity government by parliamentary means was ruled out. Armada now had only two alternatives open to him: one consisted of forgetting his ambitions and convincing Milans to forget the military operation and of Milans convincing Tejero and the other plotters in turn to forget the military operation; the other consisted of thawing out the military operation and using it as a battering ram to impose by force a political recipe he hadn’t been able to impose by purely political means. Neither Armada nor any of the rest of the plotters even considered the first alternative; neither Armada nor any of the rest of the plotters abandoned the second at any moment, so it was the military alternative that ended up winning. It’s quite true that the circumstances of that month didn’t make victory a difficult one, because in the three weeks previous to 23 February the conspirators perhaps felt that reality was urgently demanding the coup, wielding a last arsenal of arguments to finally persuade them that only an uprising by the Army could prevent the extinction of the nation: on 4 February, the same day the Episcopal Conference published a very harsh document against the divorce law, a group of pro-ETA deputies interrupted the King’s first speech to the Basque Parliament with a chorus of patriotic chanting and songs; on the 6th the body of an engineer kidnapped by ETA from the Lemóniz nuclear power plant turned up; on the 13th the ETA militant Joseba Arregui died at the Carabanchel prison hospital, and over the following days political tension was rife: during a wild parliamentary session the opposition accused the government of tolerating torture, there were public confrontations between the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, there were resignations of functionaries and then immediately a police strike that included the resignation of its whole board; on the 21st, finally, ETA kidnapped the Uruguayan consul in Pamplona and the Austrian and Salvadorean consuls in Bilbao. During those convulsive days Armada saw the King twice, once on the 11th and again on the 13th, both times at the Zarzuela Palace: at the first, during the funeral of Queen Frederica of Greece, the King’s mother-in-law, he was barely able to speak to the monarch; at the second, during his mandatory presentation as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, he did so for an hour. Throughout the discussion Armada seemed nervous and irritated: he didn’t dare reproach the King for not having appointed him Prime Minister of the government, but he did tell him he was committing a very grave error in appointing Calvo Sotelo; according to Armada, he also told him of an imminent military move involving several Captains General, among them Milans, just as he told General Gutiérrez Mellado, to whom he also paid a visit required by protocol that morning after leaving the Zarzuela. This last warning strikes me as at best improbable: General Gutiérrez Mellado at least denied it before the judge. It is certain, however, that three days later Armada opened the floodgates of the coup: on 16 February he had a meeting in his brand-new office at Army General Headquarters with Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, Milans’ deputy chief of staff and habitual link between the two, and told him the political operation had failed; maybe he didn’t tell him anything else, but there was no need: it was enough for Milans to know that, unless he accepted that it had all been for naught, the military operation had to go ahead.

The coup was now irrevocable. Only forty-eight hours after the meeting between Armada and Ibáñez Inglés, on the very day the debate on Calvo Sotelo’s investiture as Prime Minister began in the Cortes, Tejero telephoned Ibáñez Inglés: he told him the space of time Milans had given for Operation Armada to triumph had run out, that it would be a long time before a better opportunity would present itself to carry out what they’d agreed than the sessions of the investiture debate, with the Cabinet and all the deputies together in the Cortes, assured him that he had a group of captains ready to join him, that the latest events — the offence to the King in the Basque Parliament, the murder of the Lemóniz engineer at the hands of ETA, the consequences of the death of the ETA militant Arregui — had exasperated them and he couldn’t hold them back any longer, and that, in short, he was going to take the Cortes with or without Milans; Tejero’s warning to Ibáñez Inglés dispelled any reservations the Captain General of Valencia was still harbouring: he couldn’t stop the lieutenant colonel, Armada’s political failure left him without options, he had implicated himself too far to back out at the last moment. Milans therefore gave Tejero the go-ahead, and that same day, the 18th, the lieutenant colonel organized a dinner with several trustworthy captains with whom he’d been talking vaguely of a coup d’état for a long time (he’d lied to Ibáñez Inglés: it wasn’t that he couldn’t hold the captains back any longer, but that he couldn’t hold himself back any longer); that night he was more specific: he told them his project, got them to commit themselves to helping him carry it out, discussed with them the possibility of assaulting the Cortes during the investiture vote two days later, put off the decision of the date of the assault to the next day. The next day was 19 February. In the morning Tejero realized that preparing his sudden attack was going to take him quite a bit longer than twenty-four hours and therefore he couldn’t do it on Friday, but someone — maybe one of his captains, maybe one of Milans’ adjutants — brought to his attention that the parliamentary majority Calvo Sotelo had was not enough to win his election in the first vote, and that the Speaker would have to call a second vote that could not possibly be held before Monday, which would grant them a minimum of four days for their preparations; no matter what day the Speaker chose, that was the chosen day: the day of the second investiture vote.

In this way the coup was convened, and at this point my narration splits in two. Up till now I’ve referred to events as they’ve occurred or as it seems to me they occurred; given that members of CESID took part in what follows, based on the data I’ve exposed so far about the intelligence services, I cannot yet choose between two versions of events that clash with each other. I’ll leave the choice for later on and set out both of them.

The first version is the official version; that is: the version that came out of the trial; it’s also the least problematic. From the 19th onwards Tejero and Milans — one in Madrid, the other in Valencia — are working on the preparations for the coup, but from the 20th, when the Speaker fixes the date and time of the second investiture vote and inadvertently furnishes the golpistas with the date and time of the coup — Monday the 23rd, not before six o’clock — the work accelerates. Tejero finalizes the details of his plan, looks for the resources with which to carry it out, speaks by telephone on several occasions with Milans’ adjutants (Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver and Colonel Ibáñez Inglés) and speaks in person with several officers of the Civil Guard, especially with his group of captains; there are at least four: Muñecas Aguilar, Gómez Iglesias, Sánchez Valiente and Bobis González. The first two are good friends of Tejero’s and we know them well: Muñecas is the captain who on the evening of 23 February addressed the parliamentary hostages from the podium in the Cortes to announce the arrival of a competent military authority; Gómez Iglesias is the captain attached to AOME — the special operations unit of CESID — who has possibly been put in charge of keeping an eye on Tejero by Major Cortina and who, according to this first version of events, on 23 February acted behind his commanding officer’s back, because unbeknownst to Cortina he helped the lieutenant colonel overcome the final reluctance of some of the officers who were going to accompany him on the evening of the coup and perhaps he also supplied AOME manpower and material to escort the buses to the Cortes. As for Milans, during those four days he organizes the uprising of Valencia with his two adjutants, obtains promises of support or neutrality from other Captains General, sets up at full speed the rebellion in the Brunete Armoured Division by way of Major Pardo Zancada (whom he summons to Valencia on the eve of the coup to receive instructions) and speaks by telephone on at least three occasions with Armada. The last conversation takes place on 22 February: from the office of the son of Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, Milans speaks to Armada in the presence of Ibáñez Inglés, Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver and Major Pardo Zancada, and he does so repeating out loud the words of his interlocutor so the men with him can hear them, as if he didn’t entirely trust Armada or as if he needed his subordinates to trust him entirely; both generals go over the plans: Tejero will take the Cortes, Milans will take Valencia, the Brunete Division will take Madrid and Armada will take the Zarzuela; fundamentally: all is being done on the King’s orders. When Milans hangs up it is half past five in the afternoon. Just over twenty-four hours later the coup was triggered.

That’s the first version; the second does not contradict it and only differs from it on one point: Major Cortina appears. It is a suspicious version because it is the version of the golpistas or, more specifically, Tejero’s version: keeping to the common line of defence employed by the accused during the 23 February trial, and based on a supposed complicity between Cortina and Armada and the King, Tejero tries to exonerate himself by accusing Cortina (and with Cortina the intelligence services), accusing Armada through Cortina (and with Armada the top brass of the Army) and through Cortina and Armada accusing the King (and with the King the central institution of the state); all this does not automatically, of course, make Tejero’s testimony false. In fact, during the trial’s first hearing the lieutenant colonel gave some very precise details that lent credence to his version; the court, however, didn’t believe him, because he erred on others and because Cortina had an impeccable alibi for each one of his accusations, obliging them to acquit him, though it hasn’t kept suspicion from hanging over him: Cortina is an expert in the fabrication of alibis and, as a journalist who covered the trial sessions wrote, you don’t have to be a reader of detective novels to know that an innocent man almost never has alibis, because he never even imagines he might need them one day. That in part is where the difficulty in choosing from the data I’ve laid out so far between the two versions of events comes from. Here is the second one:

On the evening of the 18th or the morning of the 19th, when Milans and Tejero make the decision to launch the coup, Captain Gómez Iglesias, who in effect has spent months keeping tabs on the lieutenant colonel under Cortina’s orders, reports the news to his commanding officer at AOME. Cortina does not inform his superiors, does not denounce the golpistas; instead, he gets in contact with Armada, who according to what Tejero has said to Gómez Iglesias is the leader of the coup or one of the leaders of the coup or is involved in the coup and acting on the orders of the King. Armada has known Cortina for a long time and, because he wants to use the major or because he has no alternative, he tells him what he knows; for his part, Cortina puts himself under Armada’s orders. Next, in agreement with Armada, maybe on Armada’s orders, Cortina asks Gómez Iglesias to arrange a meeting for him with Tejero: he seeks to find out the lieutenant colonel’s plans first-hand, remind him of the coup’s objectives and reinforce the chain of command among the conspirators. Tejero trusts Gómez Iglesias fully and thinks that it might be a good idea to have AOME manpower and material to assault the Cortes, so he agrees to the meeting, and on the same night, the 19th, the two officers get together at Cortina’s home, a flat on Calle Biarritz, in the Parque de Las Avenidas neighbourhood, where the major lives with his parents. Cortina presents himself to the lieutenant colonel as Armada’s right-hand man or spokesman; he instructs him: he emphasizes that the operation is being carried out on the King’s orders with the aim of saving the monarchy, establishes clearly that its political head is Armada although its military head is Milans, he repeats the general design of the coup and its predicted outcome (he talks of a government led by Armada, but not of a coalition or caretaker or unity government), he asks him technical questions about how he thinks he’ll carry out his part of the plan, assures him that he can count on men and means from AOME and insists that the assault should be bloodless and discreet and that his mission concludes the moment an Army unit relieves him and Armada takes charge of the occupied Cortes. That’s all: the two men part company at about three in the morning and until 23 February remain in contact through Gómez Iglesias, but the day after the meeting Tejero calls Valencia to make certain that Cortina is truly a component of the coup and, after a telephone conversation between Milans and Armada, he is told from Valencia that he can trust Cortina and to follow his instructions. Meanwhile, at some point on that same Friday, or perhaps on Saturday morning, Armada decides, following Cortina’s advice, that he too should meet with Tejero and, again through Gómez Iglesias, Cortina arranges for the night of Saturday the 21st a meeting of the two men so the general can meet the lieutenant colonel, to clarify the nature of the operation personally and give him his final orders. The meeting is held, and in it Armada gives Tejero the same instructions he received from Cortina two days earlier: the operation must be discreet and bloodless, the lieutenant colonel must enter the Cortes in the name of the King and of democracy and must leave as soon as the military authority who will take charge of everything arrives (Armada doesn’t think it necessary to clarify that he himself will be this military authority, but does say he’ll identify himself by using a password: ‘Duque de Ahumada’); it’s all being done on the orders of the King to save the monarchy and democracy by way of a government that he’ll lead, but the composition of which he does not spell out. According to Tejero’s statement to the court, the recurrence of the words monarchy and democracy in the general’s speech makes him wary (the fact that Armada is going to lead the government doesn’t make him wary: he’s known this for some time and takes it for granted that this will be a military government); Tejero, however, does not ask for explanations, much less protest: Armada is a general and he is only a lieutenant colonel and, although deep down Milans is still the leader of the coup to him because he is the commanding officer he admires and to whom he feels truly linked, the Captain General of Valencia has imposed Armada as political leader and Tejero accepts him; furthermore, he is not a monarchist but is resigned to the monarchy, and he’s sure that on Armada’s lips the word democracy is a hollow word, a mere screen behind which to hide the stark reality of the coup. The meeting is held in a secret flat that belongs to AOME or in a flat occasionally used by the head of AOME, a place located on Calle Pintor Juan Gris to which Cortina drives Tejero after arranging to meet him at the nearby Hotel Cuzco; Armada and Tejero talk alone, but while they do so Cortina remains in the foyer, and when they finish talking the major again accompanies the lieutenant colonel back to the entrance of the Hotel Cuzco, where they say goodnight. Cortina and Armada have never admitted that this episode happened, and at the trial Tejero could not prove it: Cortina’s alibi was perfect; on this occasion, Armada’s was too. According to Tejero, the meeting did not last long, no more than thirty minutes between half past eight and nine o’clock. Less than forty-eight hours later the coup began.

Chapter 6

These are the two versions of the immediate background to 23 February. Let’s imagine now that the second version is the true one; imagine that Tejero is not lying and that four or five days before the coup Cortina heard from Gómez Iglesias that the coup was going to happen and that Armada was its ringleader or one of its ringleaders, and that he decided to join the operation by putting himself under the general’s orders. If that’s what he did, maybe it wouldn’t be futile to wonder why he did it.

There is a theory that has enjoyed a certain renown, according to which Cortina intervened in the coup as a double agent: not with the aim of helping the coup to go well but to ensure that it should go badly, not with the aim of destroying democracy but of protecting it. The guardians of this theory maintain that Cortina found out the coup was going to happen when it was already too late to deactivate it; they maintain that he understood that it was an improvised and badly organized operation and that he decided to precipitate it so the golpistas would not have time to finish preparations and thus it would fail; they maintain that’s why he urged the coup on Tejero in their conversation on the 19th, fixing the date for the assault on the Cortes. Nice, but false. In the first place because Tejero didn’t need anyone to urge him to stage a coup he was already determined to stage, or anyone to fix a date he’d already fixed or that the phases of the debate over the investiture of Calvo Sotelo in the Cortes had fixed; and in the second place because, although he found out the coup was going to take place with only a few days’ notice, Cortina could perfectly well have deactivated it: he would have needed only to tell his superiors what he knew, those who in just a few hours would have been able to arrest the golpistas just as they’d done before with the golpistas of Operation Galaxia and just as they would do after 23 February with other golpistas.

My theory is more obvious, more prosaic and patchier. For a start I’ll recall that the relationship between Cortina and Armada was real: they’d known each other since 1975, when Cortina was a frequent visitor at the Zarzuela Palace; one of Cortina’s brothers, Antonio — closer than a brother, Cortina’s best friend — was a friend of Armada’s and a promoter of Armada’s candidacy for the head of a unity government; Cortina himself approved the idea of this government and maybe Armada’s candidacy. That said, my theory is that, if it’s true that he was involved in the coup, Cortina was in it to make it triumph and not so it would fail: because, like Armada and Milans, he was convinced the country was ripe for a coup and because he thought it was worth running the risk of using arms to impose a political solution they hadn’t been able to impose without arms; also because he thought that by joining the coup he’d be able to manage it or influence it and guide it in the most suitable direction; also because he thought that, shielded behind good alibis, the personal risk he was running was not big, and that if he acted intelligently he could benefit from the coup as much if it triumphed as if it failed (if the coup triumphed he would have been one of the architects of its triumph; if it failed he’d know how to manoeuvre in order to present himself as one of the architects of its failure); also because, although his connection to the King was not as close as the golpistas shouted after the coup — most likely it was no closer than that the monarch maintained with other classmates with whom he’d get together for fraternal lunches or dinners — Cortina was a firmly monarchist soldier and he thought that, whether it triumphed or failed, Armada’s soft coup could work as a decompression valve, easing a political and military life strained as far as it could be in those days, ventilating with its violent shake-up the foul atmosphere and turning into a prophylactic against the ever more pressing threat of a hard coup, anti-monarchist and well enough planned to be unstoppable, and because he definitely thought that, like him, the monarchy would come out of the coup a winner whether it triumphed or failed, just as if he’d read Machiavelli and remembered that advice according to which ‘a wise prince should, when he has the opportunity, astutely encourage some opposition in order that he might shine all the brighter once he has vanquished it’.

Like any of the rest of the conspirators, Cortina could argue on the eve of 23 February that there were only three ways the coup might fail: the first was a reaction by the people; the second was a reaction by the Army; the third was a reaction by the King. Like any of the rest of the conspirators, Cortina might have thought the first possibility remote (and, if he did, 23 February proved him right by a long way): in 1936 Franco’s coup had failed and provoked a war because the people had taken to the streets in support of the government, with weapons in hand to defend the Republic; with the government and deputies held hostage in the Cortes, intimidated by the memory of the war, disenchanted with democracy or the functioning of democracy, lethargic and unarmed, in 1981 people didn’t know whether to applaud the coup or resign themselves to it, at most they offered a weak minority resistance. Like any of the rest of the conspirators, Cortina might also have thought the second possibility equally remote (and, if he did, 23 February would again prove him right by a long way): in 1936 Franco’s coup had failed and provoked a war because part of the Army had remained under the orders of the government and had joined the people in the defence of the Republic; in 1981, on the other hand, the Army was almost uniformly Francoist and therefore those in the high command who opposed a coup d’état would be the exceptions, not to mention those who would oppose a coup d’état sponsored by the King. A third possibility remained: the King. It was, in fact, the only possibility, or at least the only possibility that Cortina or any of the rest of the conspirators might have considered feasible in advance: it could be imagined — in spite of the coup not being against the King but with the King, in spite of not being a hard coup but a soft coup, in spite of not aiming in theory to destroy democracy but to rectify it, in spite of the enormous pressure the rebel officers and a large part of the Army would bring to bear on him and even in spite of the fact that the government resulting from the coup should count on the approval of the Cortes and could be presented by Armada not as a triumph of the coup but as a solution to the coup — the King might decide not to sponsor the coup and make use of his position as Franco’s heir and symbolic chief of the Armed Forces to stop it, perhaps remembering the dissuasive example of his grandfather Alfonso XIII and of his brother-in-law Constantine of Greece, who accepted the help of the Army to keep themselves in power and less than a decade later were dethroned.* However, what would happen in the case of the King opposing the coup? It’s true that no one could predict it, because once the coup was under way almost anything was possible, including a coup with the King captained by the two most monarchist generals in the Army turning into a coup against the King that would end up taking down the monarchy; but it’s also true that, in the case of the King opposing the coup, the most likely result was that the coup would fail, because it was very unlikely that a monarchist coup would degenerate into an anti-monarchist coup, just as it’s true that, if the coup failed owing to the King’s intervention, he would become to all intents and purposes the saviour of democracy, which could only mean the reinforcement of the monarchy. I insist: I’m not saying that this was the only possible result of the coup for the monarchy if the King opposed it; what I’m saying is that, like any of the rest of the plotters, before joining the coup Cortina might have arrived at the conclusion that the risks the coup entailed for the monarchy were much fewer than the benefits it might bring in its wake, and that in consequence the coup was a good coup because it would triumph whether it triumphed or failed: the triumph of the coup would strengthen the Crown (that’s at least what Cortina might have thought and what Armada and Milans were thinking); its failure would likewise do so. Whether or not he’d read Machiavelli and whether or not he recalled his advice, that might have been Cortina’s reasoning; supposing that it was, 23 February also proved him right on this point, and proved him right by a long way.

* It is possible, however, that the monarchist golpistas might not have considered the example of Alfonso XIII and Constantine of Greece at all discouraging to the Crown; maybe their reasoning was the opposite of that of the King on 23 February: for them it was precisely the help of the Army that allowed the King’s grandfather and brother-in-law to extend their stay in power for a few years and, if they’d known how to administer it with intelligence, could have prevented the end of the monarchy in Spain and Greece.

Chapter 7

The preceding chapter is only conjecture: the main question — the main question about Cortina, the main question about the role of the intelligence services on 23 February — still stands, and that’s why on the basis of the information I’ve set out so far we cannot yet make up our minds about either of the two alternative versions of what happened in the days before the coup. We’re sure that Javier Calderón’s CESID did not participate as such in the coup, but we’re not sure that Cortina’s AOME did participate in the coup. We’re sure that a member of AOME, Captain Gómez Iglesias, collaborated with Tejero in the preparation and execution of the coup, but we’re not sure he did so on Cortina’s orders and not on his own initiative, out of solidarity or friendship with the lieutenant colonel; nor are we sure that other members of AOME — Sergeant Sales and Corporals Monge and Moya — participated in the coup by escorting Tejero’s buses to their target, and we don’t know whether, supposing that they had done, they did so on the orders of Gómez Iglesias, who, in spite of the rigorous control Cortina kept over his men, might have recruited them to the operation behind Cortina’s back, or whether they did so on the orders of Cortina, who might have joined the coup with his unit or with part of his unit because he considered it a good coup no matter if it triumphed or failed. On this main point we have conjectures and we have possibilities, but we don’t have certainties, we don’t even have probabilities; maybe we can approach them if we try to answer two still pending questions: what exactly did Cortina do on 23 February? What exactly happened at AOME on 23 February?

In spite of the hermetic character of AOME, we have numerous first-hand testimonies of what happened in the unit that night. They are often contradictory testimonies — sometimes, violently contradictory — but they allow some facts to be established. The first is that the behaviour of the commanding officer of AOME appeared to be irreproachable; the second is that this appearance shows cracks in light of the behaviour of certain members of AOME (and in light of the light this shines on certain areas of the behaviour of the commanding officer of AOME). At the moment of the assault on the Cortes, Cortina was at the AOME academy, situated in a house on Calle Miguel Aracil. He heard the gunfire on the radio and immediately went to another of the unit’s secret locations, the one on Avenida Cardenal Herrera Oria; his command post was there, the Plana Mayor, and from there, assisted by Captain García-Almenta, deputy head of AOME, he began to issue orders: given that he knew or assumed that the assault on the Cortes was the prelude to a coup d’état and might provoke tensions in the unit, Cortina ordered all his subordinates to remain at their posts and prohibited any comment in favour of or against the coup; then he ordered all the teams operating in the streets to be traced, organized the deployment of his men throughout Madrid on information-gathering missions and imposed special security measures at all their bases. Finally, around half past seven, he left for CESID central headquarters at 7 Paseo de la Castellana, where he remained until well into the early hours the coup was seen to have failed, always under Javier Calderón’s orders, always in contact with the staff of his unit and always offering his bosses information he was receiving from it and which would prove decisive in blocking the coup in the capital. Up to here — and I repeat: until well into the early hours — Cortina’s conduct seems to rule out his involvement in the coup, but doesn’t absolutely allow us to eliminate the possibility (in reality, collaborating in the countercoup was, as the night went on and the possibility that the coup might triumph grew more distant, the best way of shielding oneself against the failure of the coup, because it was a way of shielding oneself from the accusation of having supported it); much less does what we know of some of his subordinates’ conduct allow us to eliminate it. Especially that of one of them: Corporal Rafael Monge. Monge was the head of SEA (Sección Especial de Agentes, Special Agents’ Section), a secret unit within Cortina’s secret unit made up of men of his utmost confidence whose principal but not exclusive mission at that time consisted of preparing agents destined to go undercover and infiltrate groups of ETA sympathizers in the Basque Country; Sergeant Miguel Sales and Corporal José Moya also belonged to this unit.* On the evening of 23 February, after arriving at the AOME academy on Miguel Aracil around seven, Monge travelled with Captain Rubio Luengo to the house where the staff officers were stationed; excited and euphoric, Monge told Rubio Luengo the following: he told him he’d escorted Tejero’s buses to the Cortes, told him that he’d done so along with other members of AOME, told him he’d done so on García-Almenta’s orders (Rubio Luengo immediately related Monge’s triple confession to an order from García-Almenta received that very morning at the academy: they must hand over to Monge, Sales and Moya three vehicles with false number plates, walkie-talkies and low-frequency transmitters, undetectable even by the rest of the AOME teams). It was not the only time that evening Monge told of his intervention in the coup; he did so again a few minutes later, when, after talking at headquarters to García-Almenta, he ordered Sergeant Rando Parra to drive him to the vicinity of the Cortes, where the head of SEA had to pick up one of the unit’s cars; on the way, Monge told Rando Parra more or less the same thing he’d told Rubio Luengo — he’d escorted Tejero in his attack, not on his own, he’d been following García-Almenta’s orders — and he added that, after carrying out his mission, he’d left the car that they were now going to get on Calle Fernanflor, near the Cortes.

That night many things happened in AOME — there were frenetic comings and goings at all their sites, there was a constant flow of information supplied by the teams deployed in Madrid and the surrounding area, there were many men demonstrating their happiness about the coup and a few who kept their sadness quiet and at least two who went into the Cortes in the middle of the night and came out with fresh news, including that Armada was the real leader of the coup — but Monge’s repeated confession to Rubio Luengo and Rando Parra is decisive. Is it also totally reliable? Of course, after 23 February Monge retracted: he said it had all been a fantasy improvised before his comrades-in-arms to boast of an invented golpista exploit; the explanation is not completely incredible (according to his bosses and colleagues Monge was an adventurous and swaggering soldier, and there was no better day than 23 February for boasting of golpista exploits, and antigolpista exploits as well): the fact that Monge told the story not once but at least twice makes it less credible, not only in the heat of the first moment of the coup but also in the cold of the second, when he’d already been to the unit’s command post and had spoken to his superiors, at least to García-Almenta; the fact that Monge left the proof of his participation in the assault near the Cortes makes it definitively incredible.** However, if we accept that Monge’s on-the-spot testimony is true — and I don’t see how we can reject it — then the conduct of AOME on 23 February seems to become clearer, and Cortina’s as well: the three members of the unit — the three members of SEA: Monge, Sales and Moya — effectively collaborated in the assault on the Cortes, but they did not do so behind Cortina’s back on the orders of Gómez Iglesias, with whom they had not the slightest relationship — in those days, besides, Gómez Iglesias was on temporary leave from the unit, because he was taking an opportune driving course in the very barracks from which Tejero’s buses departed — but rather on the orders of García-Almenta, and it’s conceivable that Gómez Iglesias recruited men and acted in favour of the coup without an order from Cortina, but it’s inconceivable that García-Almenta would have done, who had no personal link with Tejero and could only have known about the coup in advance from Cortina. So, it’s highly likely that on 23 February the head of AOME ordered several members of his unit — at least Gómez Iglesias, García-Almenta and the three SEA members — to support the coup.*** This could explain why in the early morning of the 24th, when the failure of the attempt was already inevitable and he returned from CESID central headquarters to AOME central headquarters, Cortina met on two occasions, behind closed doors and for a long time, with Gómez Iglesias and García-Almenta, his two main accomplices, possibly to secure alibis and guard themselves against any suspicion; and it would also explain why on the 24th Cortina carried out a round of meetings in every AOME base with the aim of clearing up the rumours that were circulating in the unit — almost all proceeding from Monge’s breach of confidence — establishing an official and immaculate account of what had happened within it on the 23rd and freeing it from any responsibility in General Armada’s coup, whom Cortina had been praising to the skies on previous days, as if to prepare them for what should occur. Moreover, the very high probability that Cortina was in on the coup retroactively gives us other probabilities, forces us to be inclined towards one of the two versions of the immediate background to the coup and authorizes us to answer the main question about Cortina and about the role of the intelligence services on 23 February: it’s very likely that, when he found out from Gómez Iglesias that Tejero had launched a coup led by Armada, Cortina would have got in contact with the general (if the two men were not already in contact; in any case, Cortina admits having seen Armada one unspecified day of that week, according to him to congratulate him on his appointment as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff); it is very likely that, already under Armada’s orders, Cortina would have taken care of clarifying to Tejero personally or through Gómez Iglesias the nature, objectives and hierarchy of the coup and promised the help of his men in the assault on the Cortes; it’s very likely that, whether or not he arranged the meeting between Tejero and Armada and whether or not it was held, Cortina enabled Armada to transmit to Tejero the final instructions about the operation; it’s very likely, in short, that in the days before the coup Cortina turned into a sort of adjutant of Armada’s, into a sort of chief of staff to the coup leader. It’s very likely that’s what happened. That’s what I believe happened.

* Among the singularities of AOME was the fact that, although it was a military unit, rank had a very relative value in it: a lieutenant could give orders to a captain, a sergeant could command a lieutenant, a corporal could command a sergeant; the essential thing in AOME wasn’t the rank but the ability of each agent (or what Cortina judged to be the ability of each agent), which is how in SEA Sergeant Sales could be a subordinate of Corporal Monge’s. This anomaly provoked jealousy, grievances and rivalries among the agents that undoubtedly influenced the explosion of mutual accusations within the unit as a result of the coup d’état.

** In spite of everything, there are intelligence services officers from the time who still maintain that Monge’s story is invented or that the participation of the Corporal was trivial, casual and strictly individual; the latter is what Cortina himself maintains, for example. According to him, on the afternoon of 23 February Monge was working on the so-called Operación Mister, a mission organized by AOME and carried out by SEA to keep Vincent Shields, deputy chief of the CIA in Spain, under surveillance, as he was suspected of spying, according to information CESID had received, from his own house on Calle Carlos III with powerful recording equipment, on the King’s receptions at the Oriente Palace (the high risk of the operation — after all this was following a member of an allied espionage station — had obliged the use of unusual means such as low-frequency emitters); Monge had finished his surveillance work at about six in the evening and, when he was getting ready to return to the AOME base, he ran into Tejero’s buses by chance in Plaza Beata María Ana de Jesús and spontaneously joined them. As hard as one tries, it’s very difficult to believe this story, because it’s very difficult to imagine the occupants of a bus full of Civil Guards telling a stranger like Monge, in the centre of Madrid, that they were getting ready to assault the Cortes and stage a coup d’état; the scene is no longer one by Luis García Berlanga: it’s by Paco Martínez Soria (or Monty Python); the scene is no longer crazy: it’s impossible. Furthermore, this does not mean Cortina’s exonerating version doesn’t contain a part of the truth: Operación Mister existed, and SEA was keeping Shields’ house under surveillance for a while, but that was not the only mission SEA was involved in at the time — or even the main one — and its members never used it to carry out the exceptional measures they used that day. In short: it is reasonable to think that Operación Mister was used after 23 February as an alibi to hide AOME’s intervention in the coup.

*** According to one of the AOME members who denounced his golpista comrades after 23 February, Cortina had set up SEA months earlier precisely to prepare for the coup. But Cortina could not have known of the coup months ahead of time, but only days, so the hypothesis doesn’t make sense; however, once he decided to participate in the coup, it does make sense that Cortina should support the assault on the Cortes with SEA, a special isolated unit, or isolatable from the rest of AOME, and made up of some of the most trustworthy men he had at his disposal.

Chapter 8. 23 February

Towards nine in the evening — with the Cortes held hostage, the region of Valencia occupied, the Brunete Armoured Division and the Captains General still devoured by doubts and the entire country immersed in a passive, fearful and expectant silence — Milans’ and Armada’s coup seemed to be blocked by the King’s countercoup. The uncertainty was absolute: on one side the rebels convened, under the fraudulent shelter of the King, the Francoist heart and accumulated fury of the Army; on the other side the King, freed in principle of the temptation of accommodating the rebels — given that a hail of gunfire in the Cortes broadcast on the radio changed the façade of a soft coup with which there was the possibility of reaching a settlement into the façade of a hard coup it was obligatory to refuse — was summoning the Army’s discipline and its loyalty to Franco’s heir and to the head of state and of the Armed Forces. Any movement of troops, any confrontation with civilians, any incident could push the coup the golpistas’ way, but at that point the King, Armada and Milans were perhaps those with most power to decide its triumph or failure.

The three of them were acting as if they knew it. With the aim of subduing the rebels and returning them to their barracks, but also of making clear to the country his rejection of the assault on the Cortes and his defence of constitutional order, just before ten o’clock at night the King requested a mobile team from the television studios until then held by the golpistas to come and film his address to the Army and the citizens; with the aim of achieving the triumph of the coup although in a different way from originally planned, more or less at the same time Milans phoned Armada at Army General Headquarters. The conversation is important. It is the first between the two generals since the beginning of the coup, but it’s not a private conversation, or not entirely: Milans speaks from his office in the Captaincy General of Valencia, surrounded by the officials of his staff; in the absence of the chief of the Army General Staff, General Gabeiras (who at that moment is attending a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in another part of Madrid), Armada speaks from his superior’s office in the Buenavista Palace, and does so surrounded by the generals of Army General Headquarters. Milans proposes a solution to the coup to Armada that according to him has the approval of several Captains General; it is perhaps an inevitable solution for the golpistas, that Armada has probably already considered in secret and amounts to an almost obligatory variation of the original plan: given that this has failed and the King is reluctant to accept the coup and Armada has not been able to get into the Zarzuela Palace and come out with express authorization from the monarch to negotiate with the parliamentary hostages, the way to arrange things is for Armada — whose behaviour has already begun to awaken some suspicions but whose precise relation to the coup no one can yet imagine — to go to the occupied Cortes from Army General Headquarters, to speak to the deputies and form with them the anticipated government of unity under his leadership in exchange for Tejero setting them free, Milans revoking the state of emergency and normality returning to the country. Although it might be much more arduous and more unpredictable than the original, Milans’ improvised plan has notable advantages for Armada: if he achieves his objective and is named Prime Minister, the King’s former secretary could present the triumph of the coup as a failure of the coup and his government as a prudent negotiated way out of the situation provoked by the coup, like the urgent complication — temporary, perhaps unsatisfactory but imperious — of the return to constitutional order violated by the assault on the Cortes; but, if he didn’t achieve their objective, no one could accuse him of anything but having made an effort to liberate the parliamentarians by negotiating with the golpistas, which should dispel the suspicions that have gathered over him since the beginning of the coup. So Armada accepts Milans’ proposition, but, in order not to reveal his complicity with the rebel general before the generals who surround him at Army General Headquarters — to whom he has been repeating certain chosen phrases — publicly he rejects it at first: as if the ambition to be Prime Minister had never entered his mind and he’d never spoken of it with Milans, he displays surprise at the idea and rejects it noisily, gesticulating, posing almost insuperable objections and scruples; then, slowly, sinuously, he pretends to give in to Milans’ pressure, he pretends to find himself convinced by his arguments, he pretends to understand that there is no other acceptable way out for Milans and for Milans’ Captains General or that this was the best way out or the only way out, and finally he ends up declaring himself ready to make this sacrifice for the King and for Spain demanded of him at this momentous hour for the nation. When Armada hangs up all the generals who’ve been listening to the conversation (Mendívil, Lluch, Castro San Martín, Esquivias, Sáenz Larumbe, Rodríguez Ventosa, Arrazola, Pérez Íñigo, maybe another) know or imagine Milans’ proposal, but Armada repeats it to them. All the generals approve it, all agree with Armada that he should approach the Cortes with the consent of the King and, when someone wonders aloud if that formula is constitutional, Armada has a copy of the Constitution brought in, reads aloud the five points that make up article 99 and convinces his subordinates that, supposing he attains the support of a simple majority of the parliamentarians, the King can validate his appointment as Prime Minister without breaking the constitutional regulation.

Armada then telephones the Zarzuela Palace again, something he hasn’t done since the King (or the King by way of Fernández Campo) prevented his entry to the Palace fifteen minutes after the beginning of the coup. The general speaks first with the King; like the one he’s just had with Milans, the conversation is not entirely private either: several people listen to the monarch’s words in the Zarzuela; several people listen to Armada’s words at Army General Headquarters. Armada tells the King that the situation is more serious than he thinks, that things are getting worse at the Cortes with every minute that goes by, that Milans won’t withdraw his troops and several military regions are practically in revolt, that there is a risk of dividing the Army and a serious danger of armed confrontation, perhaps of civil war; then he says that Milans and several Captains General consider him the only person qualified to resolve the problem, and that they’ve made him a proposal that has the approval of the rest of the Captains General and also of the generals with him there at the Buenavista. What proposal? asks the King. Focused as intently on the generals listening to him as on the King, instead of answering the question Armada continues playing his role of self-sacrificing servant: the idea strikes him as extravagant, almost inappropriate, but, given that Milans, the Captains General and the rest of the Army assure him there’s no other solution, he is prepared to sacrifice himself for the good of the Crown and of Spain and take on the responsibility and personal costs this will entail. What proposal? repeats the King. Armada sets out the proposal; when he finishes the King still doesn’t know that his former secretary is the leader of the coup — probably doesn’t even suspect it — but does know that he’s trying to get with the coup what he couldn’t get without the coup. Perhaps because he distrusts the influence Armada still has over him, or because he doesn’t want him to remind him of conversations in which they’d discussed the possibility of him occupying the premiership of the government, or because he thinks his current secretary will know how to deal with it better than him, the King asks Armada to wait a moment and hands the phone to Fernández Campo. The two friends speak again, except that now they are more rivals than friends, and they both know it: Fernández Campo suspects Armada is trying to make the most of the coup; Armada knows Fernández Campo fears his ability to influence the King — that’s why he blames him for the fact that a few hours ago the monarch wouldn’t let him enter the Zarzuela — and he guesses how he’ll react when he tells him the only feasible way out of the coup is a government under his leadership. Armada’s guess is confirmed or he feels it’s confirmed: after talking about the risks again, the personal sacrifices and the good of the Crown and of Spain, Armada sets out Milans’ proposal to Fernández Campo and the King’s secretary interrupts him. It’s crazy, he says. I think so too, lies Armada. But if there’s no other option I’m prepared. . Fernández Campo interrupts him again, repeats that what he’s saying is crazy. How can you think the deputies are going to vote you in at gunpoint? he asks. How can you think the King could accept a Prime Minister elected by force? There’s no other solution, answers Armada. Besides, no one will elect me by force. Tejero obeys Milans, so when I get to the Cortes I’ll tell him Milans’ idea and he’ll take his men away and let me speak to the party leaders and make the proposal to them; they can accept it or not, no one’s going to force them to do anything, but I assure you they’ll accept, Sabino, including the Socialists: I’ve spoken to them. It’s all perfectly constitutional; and even if it weren’t: the important thing now is to get the deputies out of there and resolve the emergency; later there’ll be time to go into legal subtleties. One thing for sure is that what’s happening right now in the Cortes is not constitutional. Fernández Campo lets Armada talk, and when Armada finishes talking tells him that everything he’s saying is madness; Armada insists that it’s not madness, and Fernández Campo settles the argument by refusing him permission to go to the Cortes in the name of the King.

A few minutes later the argument is repeated. In the meantime news has arrived at Army General Headquarters that Tejero wants or agrees to speak to Armada, and in the Zarzuela voices rise in favour of allowing the former royal secretary’s move — if he fails, it’ll be him who’s failed; if he succeeds, at least the danger of a bloodbath will have passed — but what makes Armada speak to the Zarzuela again is the return to the Buenavista Palace of General Gabeiras, Chief of the Army General Staff. Armada sets out Milans’ plan to his immediate superior; convinced that it’s a good plan and that there’s nothing to lose by letting Armada try to carry it out, hoping to be more persuasive than his subordinate Gabeiras phones the Zarzuela again. He talks to the King and to Fernández Campo, and reiterates Armada’s reasons to both of them, but both reject them again; then Armada gets on the phone and speaks to Fernández Campo, who tells him again that what he’s proposing is crazy, and then to the King, who answers only by asking him if he’s gone mad. The dispute goes on, calls from Army General Headquarters to the Zarzuela come and go and Armada insists and Gabeiras insists and perhaps voices at the Zarzuela insist and undoubtedly Milans and the Captains General and the generals who support Armada and Gabeiras at the Buenavista insist, and finally, almost at the same moment the mobile television crew arrives at the Zarzuela to record the royal message, the King and Fernández Campo end up giving in. It’s madness, Fernández Campo tells Armada for the umpteenth time. But I can’t prevent you from going to the Cortes; if you want to do it, do it. It has to be clear that you’re going on your own account, absolutely, and only to free the government and deputies: do not invoke the King, whatever you’re proposing is proposed by you and not the King, the King has nothing to do with this. Is that clear?

That’s all Armada needs, and twenty minutes before midnight, accompanied only by his adjutant, Major Bonell, the general leaves the Buenavista and heads for the Cortes. Several generals, including Gabeiras, have offered to accompany him, but Armada has insisted on going alone: his double bluff allows no witnesses; he’s received permission from Gabeiras to offer Tejero, in exchange for the deputies’ liberty, a plane to fly to Portugal and money to finance a provisional exile; he has gone through the pantomime of asking Milans to ask Tejero for a password to allow him entrance to the Cortes (and Milans has given on Tejero’s behalf the same password that Armada probably gave Tejero two days earlier: ‘Duque de Ahumada’); he has gone through the pantomime of taking leave of the generals at Headquarters brandishing a copy of the Constitution (and the generals have seen him off in their turn with the certainty or hope that he’ll return as Prime Minister of the government). Army General Headquarters is located just a few hundred metres from Carrera de San Jerónimo, so barely a few minutes after leaving in an official car Armada arrives outside the Cortes, enters the Hotel Palace and speaks to the group of soldiers and civilians managing the cordon round Tejero, among them Generals Aramburu Topete and Sáenz de Santamaría and the civil governor of Madrid, Mariano Nicolás: Armada offers hazy explanations about his mission, but clarifies that he’s there in an individual, not institutional capacity; otherwise, the news he brings is so alarming — according to him, four Captains General are backing Milans — and his interlocutors’ confidence in his prestige is so great that they all urge him to go in right away and negotiate with Tejero, who has been demanding his presence for quite some time. So he does, and at half past twelve at night, while the news that he was about to make a pact with the golpistas to bring the hostage-taking to an end spreads through the crowds of military officers, journalists and onlookers swarming round the Hotel Palace and vicinity, Armada arrives at the gates of the Cortes accompanied only by Major Bonell.

What happens next is one of the central episodes of 23 February; also one of the most problematic and most debated. At the entrance to the Cortes General Armada gives the password to the Civil Guards defending it: ‘Duque de Ahumada’. It is a superfluous caution, because during the whole afternoon and evening numerous soldiers and civilians have gone in and out of the Cortes with almost total freedom, but the Guards advise Captain Abad and he advises Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, who immediately comes and stands to attention in front of the general, undoubtedly relieved at the arrival of the long-awaited military authority and political leader of the coup. Then, followed by Captain Abad and Major Bonell, the two men walk to the door of the old building of the Cortes, which leads to the entrance to the chamber where the deputies wait. According to Tejero, Armada apologizes for the delay, confirms that there have been certain problems that fortunately have now been resolved and, just as he’d explained on Saturday night, Tejero’s mission concludes at this point: now he’ll take charge of negotiating with the parliamentary leaders and get them to propose him as Prime Minister of a unity government. Tejero then asks what ministerial post General Milans will occupy in that government, and then Armada commits the biggest mistake of his life; instead of lying, instead of avoiding the question, allowing himself to be carried away by his natural arrogance and his instinct for command, he answers: None. Milans will be President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At this moment, on the verge of crossing the threshold of the old building, Tejero stops and grips Armada’s forearm. One moment, General, says the lieutenant colonel. We have to talk about this. For the next two or three minutes Armada and Tejero remain on the patio that separates the new building and the old building of the Cortes, talking, Tejero’s hand on Armada’s forearm the whole time, watched from a few metres’ distance by Major Bonell and Captain Abad, who don’t understand what’s going on. Bonell and Abad also don’t understand why, after the two or three minutes, Armada and Tejero don’t go into the old building, as they were about to do, but cross the patio and go into the new building and immediately appear behind the big windows of a first-floor office. Next the two men spend almost an hour shut up in there, arguing, but Bonell and Abad (and the officers and Civil Guards who observe the scene beside them from the patio) can only try to guess their words from their gestures, as if they were watching a silent film: no one can clearly distinguish the expression on their faces but they can all see them speaking, first naturally and later with emphasis, all see them get heated and gesticulate, all see them walk back and forth, at some point some of them think they see Armada taking a pair of reading glasses out of his jacket and later others think they see him take the telephone off the hook and speak into it for a few minutes before handing it to Tejero, who also speaks into the receiver and then hands it back to Armada, at least one Civil Guard remembers that towards the end he saw the two men standing still and in silence, a couple of metres apart, looking out of the windows as if they’d suddenly noticed they were being observed although actually with their gazes turned inwards, seeing nothing except their own fury and their own perplexity, like two fish gasping inside an empty fish tank. So neither Major Bonell nor Captain Abad nor any of the officials and Civil Guards watching the discussion between Armada and Tejero from the Cortes patio could pick up or deduce a single one of the words crossing between them, but they all knew that the negotiation had failed long before the two men reappeared on the patio and separated without saluting, without even looking at each other, and especially long before they heard Armada, as he passed them on his way towards Carrera de San Jerónimo and the Hotel Palace, pronounce a phrase that all who heard it would take a long time to forget: ‘That man is completely mad.’

He wasn’t. It’s possible to reconstruct with some exactitude what happened between Armada and Tejero in the new building of the Cortes, because we have the direct and contradictory testimony of both protagonists; we also have numerous indirect testimonies. As I reconstruct it or imagine it, what happened was the following:

As soon as the two men are alone in the office, Armada explains to the lieutenant colonel again what he’s just explained on the patio: his mission is complete and now he must let him in to talk with the deputies to offer them their liberty in exchange for the formation of a unity government under his premiership; he adds that, given that things haven’t come out exactly as they’d anticipated and the violence and racket of the assault on the Cortes have provoked a negative reaction at the Zarzuela, the most advisable thing is that when the deputies accept his conditions the lieutenant colonel and his men should leave for Portugal in a plane that’s already waiting for them at the Getafe airfield, with enough money to spend a while abroad until things calm down a little and they can return to Spain. The lieutenant colonel listens carefully; for the moment he overlooks the offer of money and exile, but not the mention of the unity government. In meetings before the coup it has been explained to him that the result of the coup would be a government of unity, but, loyal to his utopia of the nation as barracks, he has always taken as a given that this government would be a military government. He asks Armada what he means by a unity government; Armada explains: a government made up of independent public figures — military officers, businessmen, journalists — but most of all by members of all the political parties. Perplexed, Tejero asks what politicians would make up this government; Armada gets wind of the danger, digresses, tries not to answer, but ends up revealing that his government would include not only politicians from the right and the centre, but also Socialists and Communists. There are those who even claim that Armada carries a written list of his proposed government in order to be able to negotiate it with the party leaders and which, cornered by Tejero, he agrees to read to him.* Whatever the case, at this point the lieutenant colonel explodes: he has not assaulted the Cortes in order to hand the government over to Socialists and Communists, he has not staged a coup d’état so that the Anti-Spain could govern Spain, he is not going to get on a plane and flee like a fugitive while this ignominious scheme is organized at his expense, he will only accept a military junta headed by General Milans. Confronted with that threat of rebellion inside the rebellion, Armada tries to get the lieutenant colonel to listen to reason: a military junta is a fantasy and a mistake, the unity government is the best outcome of the coup and moreover the only one possible, Milans agrees and will not accept anything else, the King will not accept anything else, the Army will not accept anything else, the country will not accept anything else; circumstances are what they are, and Tejero must understand that the triumph of a soft coup is a thousand times better than the failure of a hard coup, because, although the forms might be different, the objectives of the hard coup are the same as those of the soft coup; he must also understand that the hard coup has no support and not the slightest possibility of triumphing and that, for him and his men, a short spell abroad as exiles living in luxury is a thousand times better than a long spell in prison as delinquents of democracy. Tejero answers that he does not even want to hear talk of exile, governments of unity and soft coups. He insists: I have not gone this far for that. Then (then or a little earlier, or a little later: impossible to place it precisely) Armada also explodes, and the two men exchange shouts, reproaches and accusations, until Armada appeals as a last resort to discipline and Tejero replies: I obey only General Milans’ orders. It is at this moment that Armada turns to Milans. Using the office telephone, tapped by the police several hours previously like all the rest of the telephones in the Cortes, Armada speaks to Milans, explains what’s going on, asks him to convince Tejero that his plan is a good one and hands the receiver to the lieutenant colonel. Milans repeats Armada’s arguments to Tejero: the only solution is a unity government for everyone and temporary exile for the lieutenant colonel and his men; Tejero repeats his own arguments to Milans: exile is a dishonourable way out, a government of Socialists and Communists is no solution, he’ll accept no solution other than a military junta headed by General Milans himself. Who said anything about a military junta? replies Milans. I’m no politician, and neither are you: what we’re doing here is putting things at His Majesty’s disposition, so that he and Armada should decide what to do; now they’ve decided, so mission accomplished: obey Armada and let him take charge of everything. That’s an order. I cannot obey that order, General, sir, answers Tejero. And you know it. Do not ask me to do what I cannot do. The conversation between the two men goes on for a few more minutes, but the coup’s chain of command is now broken and Milans does not manage to get Tejero to obey him; once Milans has failed, Armada makes one last attempt, also to no avail: not even the warning that a group from special operations is preparing to take the Cortes by storm manages to overcome the stubbornness of the lieutenant colonel, who threatens Armada before he leaves with a massacre if anyone tries to end the hostage-taking by force.

This is how the meeting between Tejero and Armada finishes, or that’s how I imagine it finishing. The general left the Cortes at exactly twenty-five past one in the morning; five minutes earlier the television had broadcast the message the King had recorded at the Zarzuela, a message that had been announced for several hours on various media and in which the King had proclaimed that he was on the side of the Constitution and democracy. The two events turned out to be deciding factors in the outcome of the coup, but the second was taken by most of the country as a sure sign that the coup had failed; it wasn’t true: the truth is that Armada’s failure in the Cortes and the broadcast of the King’s televised message meant only that the coup as originally conceived had failed: the coup could no longer be Milans and Armada’s coup, but it could still be Tejero’s coup (and Armada and Milans could still join it); the coup could no longer be a soft coup: it had to be a hard coup; the coup could no longer be with the King or using the King as a fraudulent alibi: it had to be a coup against the King. This of course turned it into a much more dangerous coup, because it could split the Army into two opposing halves, one loyal to the King and another in rebellion; but it absolutely didn’t turn it into an impossible coup, because it absolutely wasn’t impossible that, seeing that the King was not with them, the most hardened Francoist officers with most accrued fury might opt to follow Tejero’s example and take advantage of that perhaps unrepeatable opportunity to gather now without alibis around the coup for which they’d been calling for years. Milans and Armada’s coup had died in the office of the new building of the Cortes not because Tejero was mad, as Armada thought or pretended to think, but because, drunk with power, with egomania, with renown and idealism, ready to make a grand exit from the Cortes through triumph or failure (but only a grand exit), the lieutenant colonel broke a chain of command that was too weak and tried to impose his coup on Armada and Milans: not a coup that would result in a government of unity but a coup that would result in a military junta, not a coup with the monarchy against democracy but a coup against the monarchy and against democracy; Milans and Armada’s coup failed because in his talk with Armada in the Cortes Tejero gambled everything on everything and preferred the failure of the coup to the triumph of a coup different from his, but at half past one in the morning it was yet to be known how many soldiers would accept Tejero’s challenge, how many would share his exclusive idea of the coup and his utopia of the country as a barracks and how many would be ready to run a real risk to achieve it, embarking on a hard coup that would present the King with the option of accepting its result or giving up the Crown.

The King’s appearance on television and Armada’s failure in the Cortes did not therefore mark the end of the coup, but the start of a different phase of the coup: the last one. Both things happened at almost the very same time; this simultaneity inevitably sparked off conjecture. The most persistent was devised and spread by the golpistas facing trial for their actions on 23 February and claims that the Zarzuela held back the royal message until they heard the result of the talk between Armada and Tejero and only authorized the broadcast once they knew the general had failed; it also claims, if Armada had not failed, if Tejero had let the general negotiate with the deputies and they had agreed to form a unity government with him as a way out of the coup, the King would have accepted the agreement, his message would not have been broadcast and the coup would have triumphed with his blessing: all things considered, with the unity government led by Armada and backed by the Cortes the King would have achieved what he wanted when he put Armada in charge of the coup. It is a tricky conjecture — one more of the many served up during the 23 February trial to attempt to blame the King and exonerate the golpistas — because it starts from the falsehood that the King ordered the coup and because it mixes the verifiable with the unverifiable, but in a certain sense it’s not foolish. The verifiable part is false; it has been proven that the King did not wait to know the result of Armada’s move before allowing the television station to broadcast his message: leaving aside the unanimous testimony denying it by the television directors and technicians, who maintain they put it on screen as soon as it was in their hands, it’s a fact that Armada came out of the Cortes five minutes after the King’s words were broadcast, and could not advise the Zarzuela of his failure from inside the Cortes — he would have had to do so in the presence of Tejero, who would have had the most interest in making it public during the trial — and that, when he arrived at the Hotel Palace and found out from those in charge of the cordon around the attackers that the King had just spoken on television, the general seemed surprised and displeased, in theory because the intervention of the monarch could divide the Army and provoke an armed conflict, but in practice because he was not resigned to his failure (and undoubtedly because he was beginning to feel that he had calculated badly, that he’d exposed himself too much by negotiating with Tejero, that the suspicions that hovered over him were increasingly dense and that, if the golpistas were defeated, it wasn’t going to be as simple as he’d originally thought to hide his actual role in the coup behind the façade of a mere unsuccessful negotiator for the liberty of the hostaged parliamentarians). All this is verifiable; then comes the unverifiable: what would have happened if Armada had been able to negotiate the creation of a unity government with the parliamentarians? Would they have accepted it? Would the King have accepted it? Armada’s plan might seem implausible, and perhaps it was, but history abounds in implausibilities and, as Santiago Carrillo remembered that night as he remained locked in the clock room of the Cortes, it wouldn’t have been the first time a democratic Parliament gave in to blackmail by its own Army and presented a defeat as a victory or as a prudent negotiated way out — temporary, perhaps unsatisfactory but imperious — an extreme situation: Armada always kept in mind that, twenty years earlier, just before he moved to Paris as a student at the École de Guerre, General de Gaulle had reached the presidency of the French Republic in a similar way, and he undoubtedly thought on 23 February that he could adapt de Gaulle’s model to Spain to stage a veiled coup. As for the King, one might ask if he would have refused to sanction an agreement adopted by the representatives of popular sovereignty, or even if he could have. Whatever the answer one chooses to give to this question, one thing seems beyond doubt to me: had the parliamentary leaders accepted Armada’s conditions, the royal message would not have represented any obstacle to their being fulfilled, because not a single one of his phrases denied that the government led by Armada could turn into the circumstantial means for the return to the constitutional order violated by the assault on the Cortes or because the perimeter of the King’s words had enough expanse to take on board, had it been necessary, Armada’s solution. The message was a reworking of a telex sent from the Zarzuela Palace at half past ten that night to the Captains General and said exactly the following: ‘In addressing all the Spanish people, briefly and concisely, in the extraordinary circumstances we are experiencing at this moment, I ask everyone for the greatest calm and confidence and tell you that I have sent the following order to the Captains General of the military regions, maritime zones and aerial regions: “In the face of the situation created by the events unfolding in the Cortes and of any possible confusion, I confirm that I have ordered the civil authorities and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take all necessary measures to maintain constitutional order within existing legal frameworks. Any military measures that circumstances seem to require must have the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The Crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot in any way tolerate actions or attitudes by those who would seek to intervene by force in the democratic process outlined by the Constitution ratified by the Spanish people.’ These words — spoken by a monarch wearing his Captain General’s uniform and with his face transfigured by the most difficult hours of his forty-three years of life — are a clear declaration of constitutional loyalty, of support for democracy and rejection of the assault on the Cortes, and that’s how they were interpreted when the King spoke them and and how they’ve been interpreted since then; the interpretation strikes me as correct, but words have owners, and it’s obvious that, if Armada had managed to forge a pact with the political leaders to agree to form the government anticipated by the golpistas and present as the solution to the coup what in reality was the triumph of the coup, those same words would of course have continued to mean a condemnation of those who had assaulted the Cortes, but would have been able to come to mean a recognition of those, like Armada and the political leaders, who’d agreed to form part of his government, had managed to get the parliamentary hostages released and thus restore the shattered legality and constitutional order. In short: it’s not that the King’s speech was written anticipating or desiring Armada to come out of the Cortes triumphant; it’s that his words constitute a condemnation of Tejero’s coup, not necessarily a condemnation of Armada’s coup.

We’ll never know whether, had Armada come out of the Cortes triumphant, the King would have rejected his triumph by refusing to sanction a unity government extracted by means of blackmail, but we know that Armada’s failure shrank the perimeter of the words of the royal message until all the doors of the Zarzuela were closed to the golpistas and the monarch was publicly set with no turning back against Tejero’s coup, against Milans’ coup, against Armada’s coup, against all the coups of the coup. I repeat that this does not mean that at twenty-five past one in the morning the coup had failed; Milans and Armada’s soft coup had failed, but not Tejero’s hard coup: the lieutenant colonel was still occupying the Cortes, Milans was still occupying Valencia and part of the Army was still lying in wait, indifferent to the King’s message or irritated or disconcerted by it, awaiting the slightest troop movements to dispel their doubts, gathering the fury accumulated in their Francoist hearts to hand the victory to the supporters of the coup. And it was at that moment when the excuse appeared that so many had spent the evening waiting for, the tiny movement that could predict a rebel avalanche: at thirty-five minutes past one in the morning, ten minutes after the defeat of the former royal secretary had been consummated, a column sent by a major of the Brunete Armoured Division and made up of fourteen light vehicles and more than a hundred soldiers tried to break the balance of the coup by joining the several hundred Civil Guards who were holding the Cortes hostage. And in this way the coup began to enter its final phase.

* The existence of the list is not certain. It was made known ten years after the coup by the journalists Joaquín Prieto and José Luis Barbería. Prieto and Barbería’s source was Carmen Echave, a UCD member who worked on the staff of one of the congressional vice-presidents and who, as a physician, enjoyed freedom of movement that night to attend to the deputies; as a result, Echave apparently heard one of Tejero’s officers reciting Armada’s list. Whether it existed or not, whether or not Armada read it to Tejero, the list is substantially plausible: there were political leaders and journalists close to Armada, such as Manuel Fraga and Luis María Anson, military officers with certain democratic credentials, such as the generals Manuel Saavedra Palmeiro and José Antonio Sáenz de Santamaría, business leaders who had publicly called for a government of national unity, such as Carlos Ferrer Salat, together with many politicians of the right, the centre and the left who had also done so or with whom Armada had kept in contact over the months before the coup or those Armada considered likely, with or without reason, to accept a solution like the one he embodied, or simply those it would have suited him to have accept. Although there are those who claim to have had news of Armada’s possible plans for government in advance of 23 February, before the coup the majority of the people who figured on the list were completely unaware of it. The list is the following: Prime Minister: Alfonso Armada. Deputy Prime Minister for Political Affairs: Felipe González (Secretary General of the PSOE). Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs: José María López de Letona (former governor of the Bank of Spain). Minister of Foreign Affairs: José María de Areilza (Coalición Democrática deputy). Minister of Defence: Manuel Fraga (leader of Alianza Popular and Coalición Democrática deputy). Minister of Justice: Gregorio Peces Barba (PSOE deputy). Minister of the Treasury: Pío Cabanillas (UCD deputy). Minister of the Interior: General Manuel Saavedra Palmeiro. Minister of Public Works: José Luis Alvarez (Minister of Transport and Communications and UCD deputy). Minister of Education and Science: Miguel Herrero de Miñón (UCD deputy and spokesman of their parliamentary group). Minister of Employment: Jordi Solé Tura (PCE deputy). Minister of Industry: Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún (Minister of Defence and UCD deputy). Minister of Commerce: Carlos Ferrer Salat (president of CEOE, the Confederation of Spanish Business Organizations). Minister of the Economy: Ramón Tamames (PCE deputy). Minister of Transport and Communications: Javier Solana (PSOE deputy). Minister of Autonomías and Regions: General José Antonio Sáenz de Santamaría. Minister of Health: Enrique Múgia Herzog (PSOE deputy). Minister of Information: Luis María Anson (director of EFE news agency).