In 23-F. La conjura de los necios, pp. 190–191, Cernuda, Jáuregui and Menéndez give details of the meeting between Armada and Todman, according to them held at an estate belonging to Dr Ramón Castroviejo. There is reliable information about Todman and the American government and his relation to the coup in Calderón and Ruiz Platero, Algo más que el 23-F, pp. 203–209.
‘Even some Communist leaders [. .] Even the leaders of the main trade unions. .’ On the first — specifically, on Ramón Tamames — see Santiago Carrillo, Memorias, p. 710; on the second — specifically, on Marcelino Camacho and Nicolás Redondo — see Santiago Segura and Julio Merino, Las vísperas del 23-F, pp. 266–267.
‘Panorama of Operations Under Way’ can be found in Prieto and Barbería, El enigma del Elefante, pp. 280–293; in Cernuda, Jáuregui and Menéndez, 23-F. La conjura de los necios, pp. 295–308; or in Pardo Zancada, 23-F. La pieza que falta, pp. 403–417.
‘Many who have investigated 23 February. .’ See for example Fernández López, Diecisiete horas y media, pp. 214–218, and Prieto and Barbería, El enigma del Elefante, pp. 223–232. Footnote See Cernuda, Jáuregui and Menéndez, 23-F. La conjura de los necios, pp. 116–119.
‘. . The two notes from CESID. .’ can be found in Juan Blanco, 23-F. Crónica fiel. ., pp. 527 and 529; the edict published by Milans del Bosch in Urbano, Con la venia. ., pp. 360–364, or Pardo Zancada, 23-F. La pieza que falta, pp. 416–417.
General Juste’s quote can be found in Pardo Zancada, 23-F. La pieza que falta, p. 81, whose description of events at the Brunete Armoured Division I essentially follow.
Part Two. A Golpista Confronts the Coup
Gutiérrez Mellado’s opinion on Franco’s coup d’état can be found in Al servicio de la Corona. Palabras de un militar, Madrid, Ibérica Europea de Ediciones, 1981, p. 254.
‘A historiographical cliché. .’ On the question of the so-called ‘pact of forgetting’, exhaustively discussed in recent years, see two indispensable articles by Santos Juliá: ‘Echar al olvido. Memoria y amnistía en la transición’, Claves de Razón Práctica, no. 129, January — February 2003, pp. 14–24; and ‘El Francoismo: historia y memoria’, Claves de Razón Práctica, no. 159, January — February 2005, pp. 4–13. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a vocation’, Essays in Sociology, Ed. H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Oxford, Routledge, 1991, p. 118.
‘One is either in politics and leaves the military. .’ Gutiérrez Mellado expressed the same idea in various ways. See Puell de la Villa, Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, p. 160.
Carlos Iniesta Cano, ‘Una lección de honradez’, El Alcázar, 27.9.1976.
‘. . as long as it had its current statutes. .’ We don’t know what Suárez’s exact wording was, but this is, more or less, what he attributed to himself in the interview with Sol Alameda: see Santos Juliá et al, eds., Memoria de la transición, p. 452 (‘My answer was that with the current statutes of the PCE its legalization was impossible’); or also his statements to Nativel Preciado, quoted by Nicolás Sartorius and Alberto Sabio, El final de la dictadura, p. 743. In Alameda’s interview Suárez states that he did not speak of legalization of the PCE on his own initiative, as has been claimed on many occasions (see for example what his Deputy Prime Minister of the time, Alfonso Osorio, says in Victoria Prego, Así se hizo la transición, pp. 536–537), but rather in reply to the officers’ questions. One credible version of what might have happened at that decisive meeting is in Fernández López, Diecisiete horas y media, pp. 17–20, which is where General Prada Canillas’ quote comes from. The quote from Suárez’s speech in the Francoist Cortes is from Prego, Así se hizo la transición, p. 477.
‘Some military men and democratic politicians have frequently reproached Suárez for this way of proceeding. .’ Among them, for example, Alfonso Osorio (Trayectoria de un ministro de la Corona, p. 277), or Sabino Fernández Campo (Javier Fernández López, Sabino Fernández Campo. Un hombre de estado, Barcelona, Planeta, 2000, pp. 98–103). As for the time it took Suárez to decide to legalize the Communist Party, in December 1976 the Prime Minister assured Ramon Trias Fargas, a Catalan nationalist, leader of the then still illegal Esquerra Democràtica de Catalunya, that ‘he couldn’t put the democratization in danger for a detail like negotiating with a Communist’ (Jordi Amat, El laberint de la llibertat Vida de Ramon Trias Fargas, Barcelona, La Magrana, 2009, p. 317); in January 1977, when a commission of parties of the democratic opposition met with Suárez to tackle the legalization of the political parties, the Prime Minister refused to discuss that of the PCE (Sartorius and Sabio, El final de la dictadura, p. 765); and still in the middle of February, according to Salvador Sánchez-Terán — at that time the civil governor of Barcelona and a few months later adviser to the Prime Minister — ‘the unofficial thesis [. .] was that the legalization of the PCE could not be dealt with by the Suárez government and should be reserved for the first democratic Cortes; which implied that the PCE could not stand as such at the general elections’; see Sánchez-Terán, Memorias. De Franco a la Generalitat, Barcelona, Planeta, 1988, p. 248.