On 12 November the King and Armada met in La Pleta, a mountain cabin in the Arán Valley that the Royal Family used when they went skiing. The encounter formed part of the obligations or courtesies required by protocol of the military governor of Lérida, but the King and his former secretary had not seen each other for a long time — probably since the previous spring — and the conversation went on long past the bounds of protocol. The two men talked about politics: as by then he did with so many people, it’s very possible that the King may have ranted and raved against Suárez and expressed his alarm over the state of the country; as the unity government led by a military officer was a hypothesis that was in the streets and had arrived at the Zarzuela by various routes, it’s possible that the King and the general talked about it: in such a case, Armada would certainly have been in favour of the idea, although neither of the two would have mentioned his candidacy for the position; but what they undoubtedly talked most about was military discontent, which the King feared and Armada exaggerated, which might explain why the King would have asked the general to investigate it and inform him. This request was the reason or the excuse for Armada’s next move. Barely five days later the former royal secretary travelled to Valencia to meet with Milans, aware that there was no more discontented officer than Milans in the whole Army and that any golpista intrigue would start from or lead to Milans, or be adjacent to him. The two generals had known each other since the 1940s, when they’d both fought in Russia with the Blue Division; their friendship had never been a close one, but their long-standing monarchist adhesion distinguished them from their comrades-in-arms and represented an added connection that afternoon and once on their own — after a lunch at headquarters accompanied by their wives and Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver, Milans’ aide-de-camp, and Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, his deputy chief of staff — allowed them to expose their projects clearly to each other, or at least allowed Milans to do so. Both agreed on the diagnosis of the calamitous state of the country, a diagnosis shared by the media, political parties and social organizations entirely free of suspicion of far-right sympathies; they also agreed on the convenience of the Army intervening in the matter, although they disagreed on the way of doing so: with his customary frankness, Milans declared himself willing to head up a monarchist coup, he talked of distant meetings with generals in Játiva, or perhaps in Jávea, and of recent meetings in Madrid and Valencia, and it’s even probable that already during that first meeting he mentioned the operation being planned by Tejero, from whom he continued to receive news thanks to his aide-de-camp. For his part, Armada talked of his conversation with the King or invented several conversations with the King and an intimacy with the monarch that no longer existed or that didn’t exist as it once had — the King was anguished, he said; the King was fed up with Suárez, he said; the King thought it necessary to do something, he said — and he talked of his political soundings in the summer and autumn and of his project of forming a unity government under his leadership which would name him, Milans, President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he also told him that the King approved of this emergency measure, and reasoned that their two projects were complementary because his political project might need the help of a military push, and that in any case they were both pursuing common objectives and for the good of Spain and the Crown they should act in a coordinated way and maintain contact.
Convinced that Armada was speaking in the King’s name, eager to convince himself of it, Milans accepted the deal, and in this way Operación Armada gained a military battering ram: through Milans the former royal secretary subdued the military officers in favour of a coup and could wield the threat or reality of force at the moment most convenient to his aims. It was like cresting a hill. Until that moment Operation Armada was a purely political operation meant to impose itself through purely political means; from that moment on it was more than a political operation, since it was keeping in reserve the resource of a military coup in case of not being able to impose itself through purely political means. The difference was obvious, although Armada probably did not want to perceive it, at least not yet: he probably told himself that his meeting with Milans had been just his way of carrying out the task of finding out information for the King and cooling the Captain General’s golpista fervour in the meantime; furthermore, as if seeking to contribute to his voluntary blindness, the months of November and December filled with events that Armada perhaps read as omens of a non-violent triumph of the purely political operation: while the Army’s malaise was revealed by new scandals — on 5 December several hundred generals, commanders and other officers boycotted a ceremony at the General Staff Academy in protest at a government decision — and while murmurs circulated in Madrid that a group of Captains General had asked the King for Adolfo Suárez’s resignation and that another no-confidence motion against the Prime Minister was being drawn up, some leaders of political parties were flocking to the Zarzuela Palace to express their alarm at the deterioration of the situation and to champion the need for a strong government to put a stop to the unbearable weakness of Suárez’s government. These favourable signs or what Armada could interpret as favourable signs seemed to receive the Crown’s public endorsement when shortly before the end of the year, in his televised Christmas message, the King told anyone looking to understand it — and the first to understand it was Adolfo Suárez — that his support for the Prime Minister had come to an end.