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 alclass="underline" 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.