The coup was now irrevocable. Only forty-eight hours after the meeting between Armada and Ibáñez Inglés, on the very day the debate on Calvo Sotelo’s investiture as Prime Minister began in the Cortes, Tejero telephoned Ibáñez Inglés: he told him the space of time Milans had given for Operation Armada to triumph had run out, that it would be a long time before a better opportunity would present itself to carry out what they’d agreed than the sessions of the investiture debate, with the Cabinet and all the deputies together in the Cortes, assured him that he had a group of captains ready to join him, that the latest events — the offence to the King in the Basque Parliament, the murder of the Lemóniz engineer at the hands of ETA, the consequences of the death of the ETA militant Arregui — had exasperated them and he couldn’t hold them back any longer, and that, in short, he was going to take the Cortes with or without Milans; Tejero’s warning to Ibáñez Inglés dispelled any reservations the Captain General of Valencia was still harbouring: he couldn’t stop the lieutenant colonel, Armada’s political failure left him without options, he had implicated himself too far to back out at the last moment. Milans therefore gave Tejero the go-ahead, and that same day, the 18th, the lieutenant colonel organized a dinner with several trustworthy captains with whom he’d been talking vaguely of a coup d’état for a long time (he’d lied to Ibáñez Inglés: it wasn’t that he couldn’t hold the captains back any longer, but that he couldn’t hold himself back any longer); that night he was more specific: he told them his project, got them to commit themselves to helping him carry it out, discussed with them the possibility of assaulting the Cortes during the investiture vote two days later, put off the decision of the date of the assault to the next day. The next day was 19 February. In the morning Tejero realized that preparing his sudden attack was going to take him quite a bit longer than twenty-four hours and therefore he couldn’t do it on Friday, but someone — maybe one of his captains, maybe one of Milans’ adjutants — brought to his attention that the parliamentary majority Calvo Sotelo had was not enough to win his election in the first vote, and that the Speaker would have to call a second vote that could not possibly be held before Monday, which would grant them a minimum of four days for their preparations; no matter what day the Speaker chose, that was the chosen day: the day of the second investiture vote.
In this way the coup was convened, and at this point my narration splits in two. Up till now I’ve referred to events as they’ve occurred or as it seems to me they occurred; given that members of CESID took part in what follows, based on the data I’ve exposed so far about the intelligence services, I cannot yet choose between two versions of events that clash with each other. I’ll leave the choice for later on and set out both of them.
The first version is the official version; that is: the version that came out of the trial; it’s also the least problematic. From the 19th onwards Tejero and Milans — one in Madrid, the other in Valencia — are working on the preparations for the coup, but from the 20th, when the Speaker fixes the date and time of the second investiture vote and inadvertently furnishes the golpistas with the date and time of the coup — Monday the 23rd, not before six o’clock — the work accelerates. Tejero finalizes the details of his plan, looks for the resources with which to carry it out, speaks by telephone on several occasions with Milans’ adjutants (Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver and Colonel Ibáñez Inglés) and speaks in person with several officers of the Civil Guard, especially with his group of captains; there are at least four: Muñecas Aguilar, Gómez Iglesias, Sánchez Valiente and Bobis González. The first two are good friends of Tejero’s and we know them welclass="underline" Muñecas is the captain who on the evening of 23 February addressed the parliamentary hostages from the podium in the Cortes to announce the arrival of a competent military authority; Gómez Iglesias is the captain attached to AOME — the special operations unit of CESID — who has possibly been put in charge of keeping an eye on Tejero by Major Cortina and who, according to this first version of events, on 23 February acted behind his commanding officer’s back, because unbeknownst to Cortina he helped the lieutenant colonel overcome the final reluctance of some of the officers who were going to accompany him on the evening of the coup and perhaps he also supplied AOME manpower and material to escort the buses to the Cortes. As for Milans, during those four days he organizes the uprising of Valencia with his two adjutants, obtains promises of support or neutrality from other Captains General, sets up at full speed the rebellion in the Brunete Armoured Division by way of Major Pardo Zancada (whom he summons to Valencia on the eve of the coup to receive instructions) and speaks by telephone on at least three occasions with Armada. The last conversation takes place on 22 February: from the office of the son of Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, Milans speaks to Armada in the presence of Ibáñez Inglés, Lieutenant Colonel Mas Oliver and Major Pardo Zancada, and he does so repeating out loud the words of his interlocutor so the men with him can hear them, as if he didn’t entirely trust Armada or as if he needed his subordinates to trust him entirely; both generals go over the plans: Tejero will take the Cortes, Milans will take Valencia, the Brunete Division will take Madrid and Armada will take the Zarzuela; fundamentally: all is being done on the King’s orders. When Milans hangs up it is half past five in the afternoon. Just over twenty-four hours later the coup was triggered.
That’s the first version; the second does not contradict it and only differs from it on one point: Major Cortina appears. It is a suspicious version because it is the version of the golpistas or, more specifically, Tejero’s version: keeping to the common line of defence employed by the accused during the 23 February trial, and based on a supposed complicity between Cortina and Armada and the King, Tejero tries to exonerate himself by accusing Cortina (and with Cortina the intelligence services), accusing Armada through Cortina (and with Armada the top brass of the Army) and through Cortina and Armada accusing the King (and with the King the central institution of the state); all this does not automatically, of course, make Tejero’s testimony false. In fact, during the trial’s first hearing the lieutenant colonel gave some very precise details that lent credence to his version; the court, however, didn’t believe him, because he erred on others and because Cortina had an impeccable alibi for each one of his accusations, obliging them to acquit him, though it hasn’t kept suspicion from hanging over him: Cortina is an expert in the fabrication of alibis and, as a journalist who covered the trial sessions wrote, you don’t have to be a reader of detective novels to know that an innocent man almost never has alibis, because he never even imagines he might need them one day. That in part is where the difficulty in choosing from the data I’ve laid out so far between the two versions of events comes from. Here is the second one: