Not even fifteen had gone by when the golpistas’ plans seemed to be pulverized. On 29 January Adolfo Suárez announced his resignation on television. Despite the fact that for many months the ruling class had been shouting their demand for it, the news surprised everyone, and it can be imagined that in the first instant Armada would have rightly thought that Suárez had resigned to abort the political operations directed against him, Operation Armada among them; but it can equally be imagined in the second instant the general would try to convince himself that, far from complicating things, Suárez’s resignation simplified them, since it saved the uncertain formality of the no-confidence motion and left his political future in the hands of the King, whom the Constitution granted the authority to propose a new Prime Minister after consulting with parliamentary leaders. It was at this moment that Armada decided to present his candidacy to the King without subterfuge and bring to bear all the pressure he could to make him accept it. He did so at a dinner alone with the monarch, a week after Suárez’s resignation. By then Armada felt that everything was conspiring in his favour, and the proof is that, undoubtedly on his advice, days earlier Milans had gathered his people again or some of his people on Calle General Cabrera to assure them that the coup was on ice until further notice because the fall of the Prime Minister and Armada’s immediate transfer to Madrid meant the coup was unnecessary and that Operation Armada was under way: on the morning after Suárez’s resignation the newspapers were full of hypotheses of coalition or caretaker or unity governments, the political parties were offering to participate in them or looking for support for them and Armada’s name was on everyone’s lips in the political village of Madrid, put forward by people in his circle like the journalist Emilio Romero, who on 31 January proposed the general as new Prime Minister in his column in ABC; three days later the King telephoned Armada and told him he’d just signed the decree of his appointment as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff and that he should pack his bags because he was coming back to Madrid. At this ideal juncture Armada had his dinner with the King, over the course of which the former secretary earnestly reiterated his reasoning: the need for a surgical coup or a touch on the rudder that would remove the danger of a coup d’état, the convenience of a government of unity led by a military officer and the constitutional nature of such a solution; he also offered to assume the leadership of the government and assured him or let him understand that he could count on the support of the main political parties. I don’t know how the King reacted to Armada’s words; there’s no reason to rule out that he might have had doubts, and one reason not to rule it out is that, although the UCD had already proposed Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo as Suárez’s successor, the King took another eleven days before presenting his candidacy to the Cortes: it’s very unlikely that in the obligatory rounds of consultations with the leaders of the political parties, before the presentation of the candidate, he would have even mentioned Armada’s name, but he would undoubtedly have talked about coalition or caretaker or unity governments; as well as this delay, another reason invites us not to rule out that the King might have had doubts: many people were advocating an exceptional way out and had been for a long time that, without violating the Constitution in theory, would not involve an automatic application of the Constitution, and he had absolute confidence in Armada and could think that a government led by the general and supported by all the political parties would calm the Army down, would help the country overcome the crisis and strengthen the Crown. We don’t have to rule out that he had doubts, but the truth is that, for whatever reasons — perhaps because he understood in time that straining the Constitution meant putting the Constitution in danger and putting the Constitution in danger meant putting democracy in danger and that putting democracy in danger meant putting the Crown in danger — the King decided to apply the Constitution to the letter and present to the Cortes the candidacy of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo on 10 February.
That was the end of Operation Armada, the end of the purely political operation; from that point on the possibility of the King’s former secretary attaining the leadership of a coalition or caretaker or unity government by parliamentary means was ruled out. Armada now had only two alternatives open to him: one consisted of forgetting his ambitions and convincing Milans to forget the military operation and of Milans convincing Tejero and the other plotters in turn to forget the military operation; the other consisted of thawing out the military operation and using it as a battering ram to impose by force a political recipe he hadn’t been able to impose by purely political means. Neither Armada nor any of the rest of the plotters even considered the first alternative; neither Armada nor any of the rest of the plotters abandoned the second at any moment, so it was the military alternative that ended up winning. It’s quite true that the circumstances of that month didn’t make victory a difficult one, because in the three weeks previous to 23 February the conspirators perhaps felt that reality was urgently demanding the coup, wielding a last arsenal of arguments to finally persuade them that only an uprising by the Army could prevent the extinction of the nation: on 4 February, the same day the Episcopal Conference published a very harsh document against the divorce law, a group of pro-ETA deputies interrupted the King’s first speech to the Basque Parliament with a chorus of patriotic chanting and songs; on the 6th the body of an engineer kidnapped by ETA from the Lemóniz nuclear power plant turned up; on the 13th the ETA militant Joseba Arregui died at the Carabanchel prison hospital, and over the following days political tension was rife: during a wild parliamentary session the opposition accused the government of tolerating torture, there were public confrontations between the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, there were resignations of functionaries and then immediately a police strike that included the resignation of its whole board; on the 21st, finally, ETA kidnapped the Uruguayan consul in Pamplona and the Austrian and Salvadorean consuls in Bilbao. During those convulsive days Armada saw the King twice, once on the 11th and again on the 13th, both times at the Zarzuela Palace: at the first, during the funeral of Queen Frederica of Greece, the King’s mother-in-law, he was barely able to speak to the monarch; at the second, during his mandatory presentation as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, he did so for an hour. Throughout the discussion Armada seemed nervous and irritated: he didn’t dare reproach the King for not having appointed him Prime Minister of the government, but he did tell him he was committing a very grave error in appointing Calvo Sotelo; according to Armada, he also told him of an imminent military move involving several Captains General, among them Milans, just as he told General Gutiérrez Mellado, to whom he also paid a visit required by protocol that morning after leaving the Zarzuela. This last warning strikes me as at best improbable: General Gutiérrez Mellado at least denied it before the judge. It is certain, however, that three days later Armada opened the floodgates of the coup: on 16 February he had a meeting in his brand-new office at Army General Headquarters with Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, Milans’ deputy chief of staff and habitual link between the two, and told him the political operation had failed; maybe he didn’t tell him anything else, but there was no need: it was enough for Milans to know that, unless he accepted that it had all been for naught, the military operation had to go ahead.