That, broadly speaking, was Major José Luis Cortina; that, broadly speaking, was AOME. Given the major’s personal characteristics and given the organizational and operational characteristics of the unit he commanded, always on the border of legality or beyond, always operating covertly and without any external overseeing, there is no doubt that Cortina’s AOME could have supported the 23 February coup while Calderón’s CESID opposed it; given the internal cohesion with which Cortina endowed AOME, it’s very improbable that its members could have acted without the major’s authorization or knowledge. I’m not saying impossible (after all, the unit’s internal cohesion demonstrated that it was not entirely without cracks, because it was AOME members who, after 23 February, denounced the participation of their comrades and Cortina himself in the coup d’état; after all, although maybe Captain Gómez Iglesias had been put in charge of watching Tejero months before by Cortina, at the last moment he could have joined the coup without consulting Cortina, guided by his old friendship and the communion of ideas that united him to the lieutenant colonel); I’m saying it’s very improbable. Is that what happened? Did Major Cortina organize and support 23 February? And if he did, why did he? To back up Armada’s government with force? Or did he support the coup just enough to be on the winning side if the coup triumphed and fight it just enough to be on the winning side if the coup failed? Or did he support it as a double agent, or as an agent provocateur, joining the coup to control it from within and make it fail? All these hypotheses have been proposed at one time or another, but it’s impossible to try to answer these five questions without first trying to answer five prior questions: did Cortina know beforehand the who, the when, the how and the where of 23 February? Was Cortina in contact with Armada and the rest of the golpistas in the days before 23 February? What exactly did Cortina do the night before 23 February? What exactly did Cortina do on 23 February? What exactly happened in AOME on 23 February?
Chapter 7. 23 February
At twenty to seven in the evening, when fifteen minutes had passed since the assault on the Cortes and the King was preventing General Armada from coming to the Zarzuela, the coup d’état ran aground. That doesn’t mean that at this moment, with the Cabinet and parliamentarians held hostage, the region of Valencia in revolt and the Brunete Armoured Division threatening Madrid, the coup no longer had any outcome other than failure; it only means that, as well as the coup, at this moment the countercoup was already under way, and from then on and until shortly after nine the golpistas’ plans were put on hold, waiting for more military units to join the uprising.
The countercoup command post was located in the Zarzuela, in the King’s office, where he remained for the rest of the night in the company of his secretary, Sabino Fernández Campo, the Queen, his son Prince Felipe — then a thirteen-year-old boy — and an aide-de-camp, while the adjoining salons of the Palace were filling up with relatives, friends and members of the Royal Household who answered or made phone calls or discussed the events. Although according to the Constitution he was no more than symbolic head of the Armed Forces, whose effective command resided in the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence, in that exceptional situation the King acted as commander-in-chief of the Army and from the first moment began to issue orders to his comrades-in-arms to respect legality. At first, with the aim of having a stand-in for the sequestered government, the King approved a proposal according to which all executive powers would be placed in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest organ in the hierarchy of the Armed Forces, but hastened to withdraw his approval as soon as someone — perhaps Fernández Campo, perhaps the Queen herself — made him see that this measure meant relegating civilian power in favour of military power and in practice sanctioning the coup; this false step aborted in time made clear in the Zarzuela the need to constitute a covering civilian government, which was done before eight o’clock that night, calling together a group of secretaries of state and undersecretaries from the ministries under the leadership of the Director of State Security, Francisco Laína. By that time, however, the King’s main worry was not Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, who had the Cortes under his control, or General Milans, who had the region of Valencia in a state of rebellion, or the conspirators at the Brunete Armoured Division, who in spite of the countermands of their division commander and the Captain General of Madrid had not yet refused to join the coup, or even General Armada, around whom more and more suspicions converged as the golpistas put forward his name (Tejero referred to him, Milans referred to him, the conspirators at Brunete referred to him); the King was mainly worried about the Captains General.
These were almost a dozen generals who held a viceregal control over the eleven military regions into which the country was divided. All of them were Francoists: all had fought the war with Franco, almost all of them had fought on the Russian front with the Blue Division alongside Hitler’s troops, all were ideologically attached to the far right or had good relations with it, all had accepted democracy reluctantly and out of a sense of duty and by 1981 many considered the Army’s intervention in the country’s politics to be indispensable or advisable. In the days before 23 February Milans, operating from the headquarters of the III military region, had obtained explicit or implicit support for his cause from five of the Captains General (Merry Gordon, chief of the II region; Elícegui, of the V; Campano, of the VII; Fernández Posse, of the VIII; Delgado, of the IX), but when the coup was barely under way and the King and Fernández Campo began to telephone them one by one and they had to state their positions, none of them clearly seconded Milans. They did not, however, unhesitatingly respect the King’s authority either; they would have done if the King had ordered them to bring their troops out on to the streets, but, given that the order that came from the Zarzuela was exactly the opposite, all the Captains General except for two (Quintana Lacaci, in Madrid, and Luis Polanco, in Burgos) struggled with their doubts throughout the whole evening and night, urged from one side by Milans’ telephonic harangues and his appeals to military honour and the salvation of Spain and the commitment to duty, and on the other subject to the respect for the King and at times by reticence or by the prudence of their second-in-commands, maybe fascinated by the vertigo of reliving in old age the insurrectional epic of their youth as officers under Franco and aware that any one of them backing the coup could swing it in favour of the golpistas — decisive for the intervention of the rest of their comrades and compelling all together the King to freeze or suppress a political regime they all detested — but also aware that this very backing could ruin their service records, annul their pleasant retirement plans and condemn them to spend the rest of their days in a military prison. Those generals probably had high opinions of themselves, but, to judge by what happened on 23 February, barring exceptions they only showed themselves to be a handful of cowardly, dishonourable, swaggering and spoiled-rotten soldiers: if they had been honourable soldiers they would not have wavered for a second before putting themselves at the King’s orders to protect the legality they’d sworn to defend; if they hadn’t been honourable soldiers but had been brave they would have done what their ideals and their guts were telling them to do and would have ordered their tanks on to the streets. With few exceptions, they did neither one thing nor the other; with few exceptions, their behaviour fluctuated between the embarrassing and the grotesque: for example, General Merry Gordon, commander of the II region, who had promised to be on Milans’ side, spent the evening and the night in bed, laid out by an overdose of gin; or General Delgado, commander of the IX region, who set up an improvised headquarters in a restaurant on the outskirts of Granada where he remained shielded from the vicissitudes of the coup and without coming out in favour of it or against it until after midnight when he considered the situation was cleared up and returned to his office headquarters; or General Campano, commander of the VII region, who did not stop searching for strategies that would allow him to join the coup while protecting him from an eventual accusation of golpismo; or General González del Yerro, chief of the unified command of the Canary Islands (equivalent to the XI military region), who was willing to collaborate in the coup on the condition that it would not be Armada but he himself who would occupy the leadership of the resulting government. The anecdotes could be multiplied, but the category is always the same: except for Milans, no Captain General openly supported the coup, but, except for Quintana Lacaci and Polanco, no Captain General openly opposed it. In spite of that, and also in spite of the fact that throughout the whole evening and evening the pieces of news that arrived at the Zarzuela from the regional headquarters varied from one minute to the next and seemed to be or were frequently contradictory, it’s very possible that before nine that evening the King had a reasonable certainty that barring something unforeseen turning the situation around drastically the Captains General were not going to dare to disobey his orders for the moment.