On the evening of the 18th or the morning of the 19th, when Milans and Tejero make the decision to launch the coup, Captain Gómez Iglesias, who in effect has spent months keeping tabs on the lieutenant colonel under Cortina’s orders, reports the news to his commanding officer at AOME. Cortina does not inform his superiors, does not denounce the golpistas; instead, he gets in contact with Armada, who according to what Tejero has said to Gómez Iglesias is the leader of the coup or one of the leaders of the coup or is involved in the coup and acting on the orders of the King. Armada has known Cortina for a long time and, because he wants to use the major or because he has no alternative, he tells him what he knows; for his part, Cortina puts himself under Armada’s orders. Next, in agreement with Armada, maybe on Armada’s orders, Cortina asks Gómez Iglesias to arrange a meeting for him with Tejero: he seeks to find out the lieutenant colonel’s plans first-hand, remind him of the coup’s objectives and reinforce the chain of command among the conspirators. Tejero trusts Gómez Iglesias fully and thinks that it might be a good idea to have AOME manpower and material to assault the Cortes, so he agrees to the meeting, and on the same night, the 19th, the two officers get together at Cortina’s home, a flat on Calle Biarritz, in the Parque de Las Avenidas neighbourhood, where the major lives with his parents. Cortina presents himself to the lieutenant colonel as Armada’s right-hand man or spokesman; he instructs him: he emphasizes that the operation is being carried out on the King’s orders with the aim of saving the monarchy, establishes clearly that its political head is Armada although its military head is Milans, he repeats the general design of the coup and its predicted outcome (he talks of a government led by Armada, but not of a coalition or caretaker or unity government), he asks him technical questions about how he thinks he’ll carry out his part of the plan, assures him that he can count on men and means from AOME and insists that the assault should be bloodless and discreet and that his mission concludes the moment an Army unit relieves him and Armada takes charge of the occupied Cortes. That’s alclass="underline" the two men part company at about three in the morning and until 23 February remain in contact through Gómez Iglesias, but the day after the meeting Tejero calls Valencia to make certain that Cortina is truly a component of the coup and, after a telephone conversation between Milans and Armada, he is told from Valencia that he can trust Cortina and to follow his instructions. Meanwhile, at some point on that same Friday, or perhaps on Saturday morning, Armada decides, following Cortina’s advice, that he too should meet with Tejero and, again through Gómez Iglesias, Cortina arranges for the night of Saturday the 21st a meeting of the two men so the general can meet the lieutenant colonel, to clarify the nature of the operation personally and give him his final orders. The meeting is held, and in it Armada gives Tejero the same instructions he received from Cortina two days earlier: the operation must be discreet and bloodless, the lieutenant colonel must enter the Cortes in the name of the King and of democracy and must leave as soon as the military authority who will take charge of everything arrives (Armada doesn’t think it necessary to clarify that he himself will be this military authority, but does say he’ll identify himself by using a password: ‘Duque de Ahumada’); it’s all being done on the orders of the King to save the monarchy and democracy by way of a government that he’ll lead, but the composition of which he does not spell out. According to Tejero’s statement to the court, the recurrence of the words monarchy and democracy in the general’s speech makes him wary (the fact that Armada is going to lead the government doesn’t make him wary: he’s known this for some time and takes it for granted that this will be a military government); Tejero, however, does not ask for explanations, much less protest: Armada is a general and he is only a lieutenant colonel and, although deep down Milans is still the leader of the coup to him because he is the commanding officer he admires and to whom he feels truly linked, the Captain General of Valencia has imposed Armada as political leader and Tejero accepts him; furthermore, he is not a monarchist but is resigned to the monarchy, and he’s sure that on Armada’s lips the word democracy is a hollow word, a mere screen behind which to hide the stark reality of the coup. The meeting is held in a secret flat that belongs to AOME or in a flat occasionally used by the head of AOME, a place located on Calle Pintor Juan Gris to which Cortina drives Tejero after arranging to meet him at the nearby Hotel Cuzco; Armada and Tejero talk alone, but while they do so Cortina remains in the foyer, and when they finish talking the major again accompanies the lieutenant colonel back to the entrance of the Hotel Cuzco, where they say goodnight. Cortina and Armada have never admitted that this episode happened, and at the trial Tejero could not prove it: Cortina’s alibi was perfect; on this occasion, Armada’s was too. According to Tejero, the meeting did not last long, no more than thirty minutes between half past eight and nine o’clock. Less than forty-eight hours later the coup began.
Chapter 6
These are the two versions of the immediate background to 23 February. Let’s imagine now that the second version is the true one; imagine that Tejero is not lying and that four or five days before the coup Cortina heard from Gómez Iglesias that the coup was going to happen and that Armada was its ringleader or one of its ringleaders, and that he decided to join the operation by putting himself under the general’s orders. If that’s what he did, maybe it wouldn’t be futile to wonder why he did it.
There is a theory that has enjoyed a certain renown, according to which Cortina intervened in the coup as a double agent: not with the aim of helping the coup to go well but to ensure that it should go badly, not with the aim of destroying democracy but of protecting it. The guardians of this theory maintain that Cortina found out the coup was going to happen when it was already too late to deactivate it; they maintain that he understood that it was an improvised and badly organized operation and that he decided to precipitate it so the golpistas would not have time to finish preparations and thus it would fail; they maintain that’s why he urged the coup on Tejero in their conversation on the 19th, fixing the date for the assault on the Cortes. Nice, but false. In the first place because Tejero didn’t need anyone to urge him to stage a coup he was already determined to stage, or anyone to fix a date he’d already fixed or that the phases of the debate over the investiture of Calvo Sotelo in the Cortes had fixed; and in the second place because, although he found out the coup was going to take place with only a few days’ notice, Cortina could perfectly well have deactivated it: he would have needed only to tell his superiors what he knew, those who in just a few hours would have been able to arrest the golpistas just as they’d done before with the golpistas of Operation Galaxia and just as they would do after 23 February with other golpistas.
My theory is more obvious, more prosaic and patchier. For a start I’ll recall that the relationship between Cortina and Armada was reaclass="underline" they’d known each other since 1975, when Cortina was a frequent visitor at the Zarzuela Palace; one of Cortina’s brothers, Antonio — closer than a brother, Cortina’s best friend — was a friend of Armada’s and a promoter of Armada’s candidacy for the head of a unity government; Cortina himself approved the idea of this government and maybe Armada’s candidacy. That said, my theory is that, if it’s true that he was involved in the coup, Cortina was in it to make it triumph and not so it would faiclass="underline" because, like Armada and Milans, he was convinced the country was ripe for a coup and because he thought it was worth running the risk of using arms to impose a political solution they hadn’t been able to impose without arms; also because he thought that by joining the coup he’d be able to manage it or influence it and guide it in the most suitable direction; also because he thought that, shielded behind good alibis, the personal risk he was running was not big, and that if he acted intelligently he could benefit from the coup as much if it triumphed as if it failed (if the coup triumphed he would have been one of the architects of its triumph; if it failed he’d know how to manoeuvre in order to present himself as one of the architects of its failure); also because, although his connection to the King was not as close as the golpistas shouted after the coup — most likely it was no closer than that the monarch maintained with other classmates with whom he’d get together for fraternal lunches or dinners — Cortina was a firmly monarchist soldier and he thought that, whether it triumphed or failed, Armada’s soft coup could work as a decompression valve, easing a political and military life strained as far as it could be in those days, ventilating with its violent shake-up the foul atmosphere and turning into a prophylactic against the ever more pressing threat of a hard coup, anti-monarchist and well enough planned to be unstoppable, and because he definitely thought that, like him, the monarchy would come out of the coup a winner whether it triumphed or failed, just as if he’d read Machiavelli and remembered that advice according to which ‘a wise prince should, when he has the opportunity, astutely encourage some opposition in order that he might shine all the brighter once he has vanquished it’.