Madrid, July 1980. At the beginning of this month two events took place in the capital that we can suppose were simultaneous or almost simultaneous: the first was a lunch Lieutenant Colonel Tejero had with an emissary of General Milans; the second was the arrival at the Zarzuela Palace of a report sent by General Armada. We know the context in which they occurred: in the summer of that year ETA was killing left, right and centre, the second oil crisis was laying waste to the Spanish economy and, after being swept aside in several regional elections and suffering a humiliating motion of no-confidence from the Socialists, Adolfo Suárez seemed to be refusing to govern as he rapidly lost the Parliament’s confidence, his party’s confidence, the King’s confidence and the confidence of a country, which in turn seemed also to be rapidly losing confidence in democracy or in the functioning of democracy. The coup plotters’ lunch was held at a restaurant in the centre of the capital and was attended, as well as by Tejero, by Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver, General Milans’ aide-de-camp, by Juan García Carrés, personal friend of Tejero’s and the link between the two, and perhaps by retired General Carlos Iniesta Cano. Although it was through an intermediary, it was the first contact between Milans and Tejero, and there was talk of politics but most of all the talk was of the project of assaulting the Cortes conceived by Tejero, and days or weeks later, at another similar lunch, again through his aide-de-camp Milans charged the lieutenant colonel with studying the idea and keeping him informed of progress; in spite of awaiting ratification from a military tribunal of the sentence handed down by a court martial in the month of May for his involvement in Operation Galaxia, and in spite of suspecting that he was being followed, Tejero immediately began preparations for the coup and during the following months, while keeping in contact with Milans through Mas Oliver, he took photographs of the Cortes building, found out about the security measures that protected it and rented an industrial warehouse in the city of Fuenlabrada where he stored clothing and six buses he’d bought with the intention of camouflaging and transporting his troops on the day of the coup.
Thus began the plot captained by Milans, a military operation that remained secret until it burst out on 23 February. The arrival at the Zarzuela Palace of the King’s former secretary’s report marked the beginning of a series of more or less public movements later baptized with the name Operación Armada (meaning ‘Armed Operation’ but also a play on the general’s name) and destined to lead Armada to the head of the government, a political operation initially independent of the previous one but over the course of time converging with it, which would turn Armada into the leader of both: the military operation ended up being the battering ram of the political operation and the political operation ended up being the military operation’s alibi. The text of the report received at the Zarzuela Palace had been handed by Armada to Sabino Fernández Campo, the King’s secretary, and it was the work of a law professor whose identity we do not know; it was just a few pages long, and in them, after a description of the deterioration the country was going through, its author proposed as a remedy to the political chaos that Adolfo Suárez should leave power by way of a no-confidence vote backed by the PSOE, by Manuel Fraga’s right wing and by dissident sectors of the UCD; the manoeuvre should conclude with the formation of a unity government led by an independent figure, perhaps from the military.
That was the content of the report. We don’t know if the King read it, although we do know that Fernández Campo read it and that no one at the Zarzuela Palace made any comment on it to Armada at the time, but in the following weeks, while the rumour went round that the PSOE was preparing a new no-confidence motion against Adolfo Suárez, the text circulated through offices, newspaper editorial rooms and news agencies, and in a very short time the hypothesis of a unity government led by a military man as a life raft against the sinking of the country had reached every corner of the Madrid political village. ‘I know the PSOE is weighing up the possibility of bringing a soldier in to be Prime Minister of the government,’ Suárez declared to the press at some point in July; and he added: ‘I think it’s crazy.’ But many didn’t consider it crazy; more than that: during the months of July, August and September the idea seemed to permeate Spanish political life like a ubiquitous murmur, transformed into a plausible option. A general was being sought: there was a unanimous accord that it should be a prestigious, liberal military officer, with political experience, on good terms with the King and able to bring together the approval of the parties of the right, of the centre and of the left and assemble them in a government that would spread optimism, impose order, tackle the economic crisis and put a stop to ETA and to the danger of a coup d’état; bets were placed: given the identikit portrait of the redeeming general appeared to fit his political and personal features, the name of Alfonso Armada figured on every list. It’s very possible that people close to him, like Antonio Cortina — brother of the head of AOME and distinguished member of Manuel Fraga’s Alianza Popular — promoted his candidacy, but it’s beyond doubt that no one did as much as Armada himself. Taking advantage of his frequent trips from Lérida to Madrid, where he still had his family home, and taking advantage especially of his summer holidays, Armada increased his presence at dinners and lunches with politicians, military officers, businessmen and bankers; in spite of the fact that since his departure from the Zarzuela his encounters with the monarch had been only sporadic, in those meetings Armada took on his former authority as royal secretary to present himself as interpreter not only of the King’s thinking, but also of his desires, in such a way that, in a toing and froing of double meanings, insinuations and half-spoken words that decades of courtly ruses had taught him to wield with dexterity, anyone who talked to Armada ended up convinced that it was the King who was talking through him and all that Armada was saying the King was also saying. Of course, it was false, but, like all good lies, it contained a part of the truth, because what Armada was saying (and what everyone thought the King was saying through Armada) was a wisely balanced combination of what the King was thinking and what Armada would have liked the King to think: Armada assured everyone that the King was very anxious, that the situation of the country had him very worried, that the Army’s permanent restlessness had him very worried, that his relations with Suárez were bad, that Suárez didn’t listen to him any more and his clumsiness, negligence, irresponsibility and foolish attachment to power were putting the country and the Crown at risk, and that he would look very kindly on a change of Prime Minister (which entailed exactly what the King was thinking at that moment); but Armada also said (and everyone thought the King was saying it through Armada) that these were exceptional circumstances that demanded exceptional solutions and that a government of national unity composed of leaders of the main political parties and led by a military officer was a good solution, and he let it be understood that he himself, Armada, was the best candidate possible to head it up (all of which entailed exactly what Armada would have liked the King to be thinking and maybe partly through Armada’s influence what he would come to think at some point, but not what he was thinking at that moment). Towards the middle or end of September, while the monarch’s former secretary was returning to his post in Lérida and his presence was dwindling in Madrid and the political year was getting under way again after the holidays, Operation Armada seemed to lose the wind from its sails in the gossip shops of the capital, as if it had just been an excuse to while away the idle hours of summer heat without news; but what actually happened was something else, and the thing is that, although in the gossip shops of the capital it got buried by the breakdown of the government and Suárez’s departure and by the avalanche of operations against the Prime Minister that were beginning to shape the placenta of the coup, Operation Armada remained very much alive in the mind of its protagonist and those around him who continued to consider it the ideal form for the touch on the rudder or surgical coup so many thought the country needed. Armada maintained good relations with politicians in the government, in the party that kept it in power and in the right-wing party — including its leader: Manuel Fraga — and during his summer encounters all had welcomed his promotional periphrases with sufficient interest to authorize him to trust that when the moment came all would accept him as a replacement for Suárez; Armada did not, however, know the Socialist leaders, whose agreement was necessary for his operation, and in the first weeks of the autumn the possibility arose of talking to them. He didn’t get to speak with Felipe González (as might have been his aim), but he did speak to Enrique Múgica, the number three of the PSOE who was in charge of military affairs within the party; a few pages ago I described their meeting: it was held on 22 October in Lérida and was a success for Armada, who came out of it with the certainty that the Socialists not only sympathized with the idea of a unity government led by a military officer, but also with the idea that the officer should be him. Nevertheless, like the constitutionalist’s report he’d sent to the Zarzuela in July and his summer propaganda campaign in the salons of the political village of Madrid, the meeting with the PSOE was for Armada a simple preparatory manoeuvre for the central manoeuvre: winning the King over to Operation Armada.