The first half of this certainty vanished in the summer of 1977, shortly after the first democratic elections. It was then that the King informed Armada he’d have to leave his post. The dismissal didn’t come into effect until the autumn, but according to an opinion shared by those who knew him the general took the news like a banishment order and privately attributed his fall from grace to Adolfo Suárez’s growing influence over the monarch. The attribution was fair: the King had named Suárez Prime Minister against the advice of Armada — who favoured keeping Arias Navarro in the premiership or replacing him with Manuel Fraga, and in any case a Francoist monarchy or a restricted democracy with broad powers reserved for the Crown — and, from the very moment of the new Prime Minister’s appointment, confrontations between the two of them were constant: they had acrimonious disagreements over the kidnappings of General Villaescusa and Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, which Suárez initially thought the work of the far right and Armada of the far left, over the legalization of the Communist Party, which Armada considered a betrayal of the Army and a surreptitious coup d’état, over letters sent by Armada on Palace letterhead canvassing for votes for Manuel Fraga’s party during the electoral campaign of 1977, over a projected divorce law, over just about everything. Suárez would not tolerate interference from the King’s secretary, whose legitimacy to argue with his decisions he did not recognize and whom he soon considered an obstacle to political reform; for this reason, when he felt his authority reinforced after his victory in the first democratic elections, the Prime Minister insistently requested the King replace his secretary, and taking advantage of the occasion to emancipate himself from the old tutor of his youth, the King eventually gave way. Armada never forgave Suárez. He had never had the slightest bit of respect for him and never imagined he’d turn into his rival and executioner: he’d had frequent contact with him since the days when Suárez ran Radiotelevisión Española, the national broadcasting corporation, and he’d resorted to his services to promote the Prince’s then precarious and vague public image, and his opinion of the future Prime Minister mustn’t have been very different from that of so many others who at the beginning of the 1970s considered him a servile and diligent nonentity and an unscrupulous commoner converted to the cause of the monarchy purely out of personal ambition; the fact that this upstart was the one to distance him from the King only helped to harden the hostility he felt for him from that moment on. Armada always denied it, but just leafing through his memoirs, published two years after the coup, one encounters venomous allusions to the Prime Minister at every turn; he writes of Arias Navarro, Suárez’s predecessor: ‘He cannot be blamed for the later problems, nor for the loss of the values that history and tradition tell us are the soul of Spain. It is others who have caused this situation’ (the italics are his); of Manuel Fraga, who according to him should have occupied Suárez’s place, he claims: ‘Life is like that and often sacrifices the best to give passage and positions of responsibility to insolent people with neither ideas nor scruples.’ One doesn’t need great deductive gifts to guess who this insolent one with neither ideas nor scruples who provoked the loss of Spain’s soul might be.
Armada didn’t resign himself to his exile from the Zarzuela. On leaving the Palace he went back to his military career with assiduous proclamations of enthusiasm, first as professor of tactics at the Army’s Higher Education College and later as director of general services at Headquarters, but he spent the following three years nursing his grudge against Adolfo Suárez as well as the idée fixe of recovering his place at the King’s side. The post of secretary had been filled by Sabino Fernández Campo — a personal friend who he hoped would facilitate his return to court, perhaps as master of the Royal Household — and, through him and friends who still remained in the Palace, he did his utmost to maintain contact with the Zarzuela, sending reports or messages to the King, sending personal greetings to members of the Royal Family on their birthdays, saints’ days and Christmas, and seeking a place at his audiences and public receptions, convinced that sooner or later the monarch would understand his error and summon him back to his side to re-establish a relationship on which the former secretary continued to think the future of the Crown in Spain depended. At the beginning of 1980 Armada was named military governor of Lérida and commander of the 4th Urgell Mountain Division; among his duties required by protocol was to pay respects to the Royal Family on their winter ski trips to the region, and that facilitated the renewal of relations between the general and the King: they saw each other once in the month of February, had dinner a couple of times in the spring. That reconciliation, that return to the confidence of former times came about at the moment when the King was losing confidence in Suárez and when his collapse and the country’s crisis seemed to confirm Armada’s predictions, and the former royal secretary’s political ambition and courtier’s mentality might have interpreted that coincidence as an omen that the time for revenge was nigh: Suárez had removed him from power and the fall of Suárez could mean his return to power. The year 1980 did nothing to correct this interpretation, and the months before the coup even less, when, as Suárez grew more and more distanced from the King, Armada drew closer — often meeting with him in private, discussing the political and military situation and the replacement of the Prime Minister, securing a prime posting for him in Madrid — almost as if he and Suárez were two royal favourites vying for the favour of the King who was seeking a way to replace one with the other. That’s probably what Armada thought on the eve of 23 February and that’s why the coup for him was not just a way to recover a restricted democracy or Francoist monarchy that had been his political ideal from the start, but also a way to finish off Adolfo Suárez and — entirely recovering the King’s favour — to recover and multiply the power Suárez had taken away from him.
For Milans the 23 February coup was something quite different, not because he was not moved by personal concerns, but because deep down Milans was a quite different kind of man from Armada. Not superficially: like Armada, Milans was a soldier with aristocratic roots; like Armada, Milans professed a double fidelity to Francoism and to the monarchy. But, unlike Armada, Milans was more Francoist than monarchist, and he was especially much more of a soldier. Son, grandson, great-grandson and great-great-grandson of eminent golpista soldiers — his father, his great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather all reached the rank of lieutenant general, his grandfather was the Captain General of Catalonia and commander of Alfonso XIII’s Military Chamber — and by 1981 Milans represented better than anyone, with his eventful profile of an old warrior and his considerable military curriculum, not just in Franco’s Army, but in the Army of the Victory. In 1936, as a cadet at the Infantry Academy, he entered the saints’ calendar of Francoist heroes by defending the Alcázar de Toledo for the two and a half months the Republican siege lasted: there he received his first war wound; in the six years that followed he received quite a few more, three of them fighting with the VII Battalion of the Spanish Legion in Madrid, on the Ebro and in Teruel, and the last with the Blue Division in Russia. He returned to Spain with the rank of captain and his chest covered in medals, among them the Army’s most coveted: a Laureate Cross of San Fernando, an individual military medal, two collective ones, five military crosses, three red crosses for military valour and a Nazi Iron Cross. No Spanish soldier of his generation could boast a similar campaign-service record, in spite of being the only one of them to obtain General Staff diplomas from all three branches of the Armed Forces, at the death of Franco nobody embodied better than Milans the prototype of the wind-and-weather military man idealized by Francoism, a man of succinct ideas, allergic to desk work and books, direct, efficient, visceral and without duplicity. In this sense Milans could not be further removed from the Palace deviousness of Armada; nor, of course, from the clumsiness or softness in the exercise of command, the technical mentality, intellectual curiosity and reflective and tolerant inclinations of Gutiérrez Mellado. I do not mention his name by chance: just as it is perhaps impossible to understand Armada’s actions on 23 February without understanding his bitterness towards Adolfo Suárez, it is perhaps impossible to understand Milans’ actions on that day without understanding his aversion to Gutiérrez Mellado.