This is how it is: at five o’clock in the afternoon of that day at the Civil Guard Motor Pool, Major Cortina’s subordinate in CESID, Captain Gómez Iglesias, cleared away the final doubts of the officers who would accompany Lieutenant Colonel Tejero in the assault on the Cortes. Gómez Iglesias had been friends with the lieutenant colonel since they’d been stationed together years before in the San Sebastián Civil Guard headquarters, had possibly spent months keeping an eye on Tejero on Major Cortina’s orders, knew his friend’s plans to perfection and in the last days was helping to bring them to fruition. The help he lent him at that moment and in that place — an hour and a half before the assault on the Cortes and in the office of Colonel Miguel Manchado, commanding officer of the Motor Pool — was vital. Minutes before Gómez Iglesias’ arrival in Colonel Manchado’s office, the lieutenant colonel began trying incoherently to convince the officers gathered there to go with him to the Cortes to carry out a public-order operation of great national significance — that was the formula he used over and over again — an operation conducted on the orders of the King under the command of General Armada, who must be at the Zarzuela Palace by then, and General Milans del Bosch, who was going to declare a state of emergency in Valencia. None of the officers listening to him was unaware of the lieutenant colonel’s rebellious record and golpista proclivities; although most of them had been in on the secret of his project for days or hours and approved of it, those who weren’t expressed their doubts, especially Captain Abad, a very competent officer in command of a very competent and well-trained group of Civil Guards, which would be indispensable, once the Cortes was taken, for deploying outside to seal and control it; the entrance into the office of Gómez Iglesias, who was taking a short course at the Motor Pool at the time, changed everything: Abad’s reluctance and the scruples that some of the other officers might still have been harbouring disappeared as soon as the captain assured them with his incontestable authority as a CESID agent that what Tejero had told them was true, and everyone gathered there got down to work immediately, filling the six buses Colonel Manchado provided with troops and organizing the departure for the Cortes, where according to the lieutenant colonel’s plan the group should rendezvous with another bus that, at that very moment, on the other side of Madrid, Captain Jesús Muñecas Aguilar was filling with Civil Guards belonging to the Valdemoro Squadron of the First Mobile Command. That’s how the initial movement of the coup got started, and those were the men who conducted it. Many who have investigated 23 February, however, hold that, as well as Captain Gómez Iglesias, several CESID agents collaborated at this point with the golpista lieutenant colonel; according to them, Tejero’s column and Muñecas’ column were coordinated or linked by vehicles driven by Major Cortina’s men — Sergeant Miguel Sales, Corporals Rafael Monge and José Moya — provided with false number plates, low-frequency transmitters and walkie-talkies. To my mind, this can only be partly true: it’s almost impossible that the two columns were linked by CESID agents, among other reasons because the transmitters their agents used at the time had a range of barely a kilometre and the walkie-talkies five hundred metres (besides, if they’d been linked they would have arrived at the Cortes at the same time, as undoubtedly was their aim, instead of one column a long time after the other, as actually occurred); it’s possible on the other hand that some of the CESID vehicles were escorting the columns, not with the aim of leading them to the Cortes (which would be absurd: no resident of Madrid needs anyone to guide him there), but with that of clearing their route to prevent any obstacles from getting in their way.* Be that true or not — and we’ll have to return to it — there is one sure thing: at least one CESID agent subordinate to Major Cortina lent decisive help to Lieutenant Colonel Tejero so the assault on the Cortes would be a success.
The second movement of the coup was also a success: the occupation of Valencia. At half past five that afternoon, after an unusually hectic morning in the Captaincy General building, Milans del Bosch had called together in his office the generals under his command in the city and was informing them what was going to happen an hour later: he spoke of the assault on the Cortes, the occupation of Madrid by the Brunete Armoured Division, of the publication of an edict declaring martial law in the region of Valencia and that this was all with the King’s consent, who would be accompanied in the Zarzuela by General Armada, the ultimate authority of the operation and future leader of a government with his own promotion to President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top position in the Armed Forces. Seconded by his deputy chief of staff, Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, and by his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver, General Milans — one of the most prestigious military officers in the Spanish Army, one of the most fervently Francoist, one of the most openly monarchical — had been the soul or one of the souls of the conspiracy: the coup had been incubated in Valencia, there Tejero’s golpista compulsion had been given wings, there Milans had harmonized his plans with Armada’s, from there they had acquired for the coup the support or benevolent neutrality of five of the eleven Captaincy Generals into which the Spanish military geography was divided (the II, with headquarters in Seville; the V, with headquarters in Zaragoza; the VII, with headquarters in Valladolid; the VIII, with headquarters in La Coruña; the X, with headquarters in the Balearic Islands), from there on the previous day they’d set in motion the mutiny of the Brunete Armoured Division in Madrid, from there he’d set himself up as the military leader of the rebels. On the eve of the coup Milans endeavoured to look after the details: several days before he’d had sent to headquarters, from the Valencian delegation of CESID, two confidential notes — one, on a possible terrorist attack by ETA; the other, on possible violent acts by left-wing trade unionists — which, although described with a minimal indication of reliability and based on false information, must have served him as additional cover for confining units to barracks and the application of martial law planned by the edict Colonel Ibáñez Inglés drew up at his insistence on the morning of 23 February; he also endeavoured to look after details on the day of the coup: the two notes from CESID had been prepared by some member of the intelligence services, but Milans considered that organization not to be an ally but a potential enemy of the coup, and one of the first measures he adopted after declaring the state of emergency was to arrest the head of CESID in Valencia and prevent any action by the organization by sending a detachment composed of a major and several soldiers to its offices in the city. At least in his territory Milans had or believed he had all the elements necessary to keep the coup under controclass="underline" that morning he’d sent the commanding officers of the region sealed orders that should be opened only once they’d received a password (‘Miguelete’) by teletype and, when at six in the evening he closed the meeting of generals he’d called at headquarters and sent them back to their command posts to begin operations, nothing in Valencia seemed to predict the failure of the coup.