He didn’t see Adolfo Suárez again. Or at least that’s what Carrillo told me the only time I met him, one morning in the spring of 2007. The appointment was for noon at his home, a modest apartment in a building on Plaza de los Reyes Magos, in the Niño Jesús neighbourhood, very close to the Parque Retiro. By then Carrillo was in his nineties, but he looked the same as he did in his sixties; perhaps his body seemed a little smaller and his frame a little more fragile, his scalp a little balder, his mouth a little sunken, his nose a little softer, his eyes a little less sarcastic and friendlier behind his bifocals. While we were together he smoked a whole pack of cigarettes; he talked with neither bitterness nor pride, with an urge for precision assisted by an irreproachable memory. I asked him all about the years of political change, about the legalization of the PCE and about 23 February; he talked to me most of all about Adolfo Suárez (‘Having worked in a university you’ll have known lots of educated idiots, right?’ he asked me twice. ‘Well, Suárez was just the opposite’). The conversation lasted more than three hours during which we sat face to face in his study, a small room, every wall covered floor to ceiling in books; on his desk were more books, papers, a full ashtray; through a half-open window giving on to the street came the sound of children playing; behind my interlocutor, leaning on a shelf, a photo of 23 February dominated the room: the front-page photo from the New York Times in which Adolfo Suárez, young, brave and dishevelled, is leaving his bench to confront the Civil Guards who are jostling General Gutiérrez Mellado in the chamber of the Cortes.
Chapter 6
The question about the intelligence services is still pending, although now it’s another one. We know that CESID headed by Javier Calderón as such did not organize or participate in the coup, but rather opposed it, but we also know that several members of the elite CESID unit headed by Major José Luis Cortina, AOME, collaborated with Lieutenant Colonel Tejero in the attack on the Cortes (without doubt Captain Gómez Iglesias, who at the last moment persuaded certain indecisive officers to back up the lieutenant colonel; possibly Sergeant Miguel Sales and Corporals José Moya and Rafael Monge, who escorted Tejero’s buses to their target); the question therefore is: did AOME organize or support 23 February? Did Major Cortina organize or support 23 February? In reality, it’s impossible to answer these two questions without answering two prior questions: who was Major Cortina? What was AOME?
Outwardly, José Luis Cortina’s biography offers many similarities to that of Javier Calderón, with whom he began in the 1970s a friendship that endures to this day; but the similarities are only outward, because Cortina is a much more complex and more ambiguous character than the former Secretary General of CESID, someone described with admirable consistency by those who know him best as an authentic man of action and at the same time as a virtuoso of camouflage: a twelve-faced character, as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote after interviewing him. Like Calderón, Cortina was raised within the socially concerned Falangism of the Colegio Pinilla, except that Cortina’s political vocation was always much more solid than Calderón’s and led him in the 1960s to join little radical groups on the left wing of the Falange, like the Social Revolutionary Front, which aimed, without leaving the fold of the regime, to renovate or purify it with pro-Marxist injections and sympathy for the Cuba of Fidel Castro. This ideological hodgepodge, not infrequent among the politicized youth of the day, afforded him the odd run-in with the Army intelligence service and with the police, but also relations with members of the opposition to Francoism, in particular with the Communists. Having graduated from the Military Academy at the top of his class — the 14th, the same as the King’s — Cortina did not become part of the intelligence services until 1968, when, just turned thirty, he was co-opted by the High Command General Staff to organize the first special operations unit of the intelligence services, SOME (Sección Operativa de Medios Especiales), in which he worked until the mid-1970s. By then he’d tempered his pseudo-revolutionary impulses, like Calderón and like his brother Antonio, with whom he always shared ideas and political projects, he participated in GODSA, the think-tank or embryonic political party that linked up with Manuel Fraga in the search for a ruptureless reform of Francoism and then moved away from him (or many of its members did) as soon as it was clear that the monarchy was betting on Suárez’s reform with a rupture; like Calderón, at that time Cortina acted as defence lawyer for one of the anti-Franco military officers of the Democratic Military Union: Captain García Márquez. Finally, in the autumn of 1977, shortly after the creation of CESID after the first democratic elections, its first director charged him with setting up the special operations unit of the centre, AOME, which he led until a few weeks after 23 February when the judge had him arrested for his presumed participation in the coup. From the political point of view, towards the beginning of the 1980s Cortina was a faithfully monarchist military officer who, although four years earlier he’d unhesitatingly accepted the democratic system, now thought like a good part of the political class (and unlike Calderón, tied by loyalty to Gutiérrez Mellado) that Adolfo Suárez had made a bad job of democracy or had spoiled it, that the system had entered into a profound crisis that threatened the Crown, and that the best way of getting out of this crisis was the formation of a coalition or caretaker or unity government under the auspices of a soldier with the characteristics of General Armada, whom Cortina knew well and to whom he was also linked through his brother Antonio, who had a good friendship with the general and had continued his political career in the ranks of Manuel Fraga’s Alianza Popular; from the technical point of view, from the point of view of his espionage work, nothing defines Cortina better than the very nature of AOME.
Although it was part of CESID, AOME didn’t share its organizational chaos or its precariousness of resources; on the contrary: perhaps it was one of the few units of the Spanish intelligence services comparable to units of the Western intelligence services. The merit was entirely due to its founder: Cortina commanded AOME for four years, enjoying almost complete autonomy; his only hierarchical link to CESID was Calderón, who didn’t supervise the unit in practice but simply requested from it, on behalf of the various divisions of the centre, information the major would later obtain without answering to anybody about his manner of obtaining it. Like all those of similar characteristics in the Western intelligence services, AOME was a secret unit within the secret service itself, to a certain extent secret even to the secret service. Its structure was simple. It was made up of three operational groups subdivided into two subgroups which in turn were subdivided into three teams, each of which was made up of seven or eight people and allocated three or four vehicles and a personal transmitter with which to communicate with the rest of the members of the team and vehicles; each team was assigned a task and each agent had a speciality: photography, communications, locks, explosives, etc. As well as these three operational groups, AOME had its own academy from very early on, where every year it taught a course on intelligence techniques that allowed it to instruct students in sophisticated methods of information gathering and to choose those most suitable to carry out its missions, always the most exposed CESID jobs: tailings, phone tapping, clandestine entries into residences and offices, seizures. The nature of such activities explains why those who carried them out led semi-clandestine lives, including within CESID itself, the members of which did not know the identities of AOME agents or the location of the unit’s secret headquarters, four houses on the outskirts of Madrid known respectively as Paris, Berlin, Rome and Jaca. This inscrutability could perhaps only be maintained, furthermore, thanks to a sort of sect mentality; according to those who were under his orders during those years, Cortina managed to inspire this mentality in his two hundred or so men and managed to form them into a compact elite who imagined themselves as something like a chivalrous order disciplined and loyal to their chief and to a slogan shared with other Army units: ‘If it’s possible, it’s already done; if impossible, we’ll get right on it.’