In spite of the hermetic character of AOME, we have numerous first-hand testimonies of what happened in the unit that night. They are often contradictory testimonies — sometimes, violently contradictory — but they allow some facts to be established. The first is that the behaviour of the commanding officer of AOME appeared to be irreproachable; the second is that this appearance shows cracks in light of the behaviour of certain members of AOME (and in light of the light this shines on certain areas of the behaviour of the commanding officer of AOME). At the moment of the assault on the Cortes, Cortina was at the AOME academy, situated in a house on Calle Miguel Aracil. He heard the gunfire on the radio and immediately went to another of the unit’s secret locations, the one on Avenida Cardenal Herrera Oria; his command post was there, the Plana Mayor, and from there, assisted by Captain García-Almenta, deputy head of AOME, he began to issue orders: given that he knew or assumed that the assault on the Cortes was the prelude to a coup d’état and might provoke tensions in the unit, Cortina ordered all his subordinates to remain at their posts and prohibited any comment in favour of or against the coup; then he ordered all the teams operating in the streets to be traced, organized the deployment of his men throughout Madrid on information-gathering missions and imposed special security measures at all their bases. Finally, around half past seven, he left for CESID central headquarters at 7 Paseo de la Castellana, where he remained until well into the early hours the coup was seen to have failed, always under Javier Calderón’s orders, always in contact with the staff of his unit and always offering his bosses information he was receiving from it and which would prove decisive in blocking the coup in the capital. Up to here — and I repeat: until well into the early hours — Cortina’s conduct seems to rule out his involvement in the coup, but doesn’t absolutely allow us to eliminate the possibility (in reality, collaborating in the countercoup was, as the night went on and the possibility that the coup might triumph grew more distant, the best way of shielding oneself against the failure of the coup, because it was a way of shielding oneself from the accusation of having supported it); much less does what we know of some of his subordinates’ conduct allow us to eliminate it. Especially that of one of them: Corporal Rafael Monge. Monge was the head of SEA (Sección Especial de Agentes, Special Agents’ Section), a secret unit within Cortina’s secret unit made up of men of his utmost confidence whose principal but not exclusive mission at that time consisted of preparing agents destined to go undercover and infiltrate groups of ETA sympathizers in the Basque Country; Sergeant Miguel Sales and Corporal José Moya also belonged to this unit.* On the evening of 23 February, after arriving at the AOME academy on Miguel Aracil around seven, Monge travelled with Captain Rubio Luengo to the house where the staff officers were stationed; excited and euphoric, Monge told Rubio Luengo the following: he told him he’d escorted Tejero’s buses to the Cortes, told him that he’d done so along with other members of AOME, told him he’d done so on García-Almenta’s orders (Rubio Luengo immediately related Monge’s triple confession to an order from García-Almenta received that very morning at the academy: they must hand over to Monge, Sales and Moya three vehicles with false number plates, walkie-talkies and low-frequency transmitters, undetectable even by the rest of the AOME teams). It was not the only time that evening Monge told of his intervention in the coup; he did so again a few minutes later, when, after talking at headquarters to García-Almenta, he ordered Sergeant Rando Parra to drive him to the vicinity of the Cortes, where the head of SEA had to pick up one of the unit’s cars; on the way, Monge told Rando Parra more or less the same thing he’d told Rubio Luengo — he’d escorted Tejero in his attack, not on his own, he’d been following García-Almenta’s orders — and he added that, after carrying out his mission, he’d left the car that they were now going to get on Calle Fernanflor, near the Cortes.
That night many things happened in AOME — there were frenetic comings and goings at all their sites, there was a constant flow of information supplied by the teams deployed in Madrid and the surrounding area, there were many men demonstrating their happiness about the coup and a few who kept their sadness quiet and at least two who went into the Cortes in the middle of the night and came out with fresh news, including that Armada was the real leader of the coup — but Monge’s repeated confession to Rubio Luengo and Rando Parra is decisive. Is it also totally reliable? Of course, after 23 February Monge retracted: he said it had all been a fantasy improvised before his comrades-in-arms to boast of an invented golpista exploit; the explanation is not completely incredible (according to his bosses and colleagues Monge was an adventurous and swaggering soldier, and there was no better day than 23 February for boasting of golpista exploits, and antigolpista exploits as well): the fact that Monge told the story not once but at least twice makes it less credible, not only in the heat of the first moment of the coup but also in the cold of the second, when he’d already been to the unit’s command post and had spoken to his superiors, at least to García-Almenta; the fact that Monge left the proof of his participation in the assault near the Cortes makes it definitively incredible.** However, if we accept that Monge’s on-the-spot testimony is true — and I don’t see how we can reject it — then the conduct of AOME on 23 February seems to become clearer, and Cortina’s as welclass="underline" the three members of the unit — the three members of SEA: Monge, Sales and Moya — effectively collaborated in the assault on the Cortes, but they did not do so behind Cortina’s back on the orders of Gómez Iglesias, with whom they had not the slightest relationship — in those days, besides, Gómez Iglesias was on temporary leave from the unit, because he was taking an opportune driving course in the very barracks from which Tejero’s buses departed — but rather on the orders of García-Almenta, and it’s conceivable that Gómez Iglesias recruited men and acted in favour of the coup without an order from Cortina, but it’s inconceivable that García-Almenta would have done, who had no personal link with Tejero and could only have known about the coup in advance from Cortina. So, it’s highly likely that on 23 February the head of AOME ordered several members of his unit — at least Gómez Iglesias, García-Almenta and the three SEA members — to support the coup.*** This could explain why in the early morning of the 24th, when the failure of the attempt was already inevitable and he returned from CESID central headquarters to AOME central headquarters, Cortina met on two occasions, behind closed doors and for a long time, with Gómez Iglesias and García-Almenta, his two main accomplices, possibly to secure alibis and guard themselves against any suspicion; and it would also explain why on the 24th Cortina carried out a round of meetings in every AOME base with the aim of clearing up the rumours that were circulating in the unit — almost all proceeding from Monge’s breach of confidence — establishing an official and immaculate account of what had happened within it on the 23rd and freeing it from any responsibility in General Armada’s coup, whom Cortina had been praising to the skies on previous days, as if to prepare them for what should occur. Moreover, the very high probability that Cortina was in on the coup retroactively gives us other probabilities, forces us to be inclined towards one of the two versions of the immediate background to the coup and authorizes us to answer the main question about Cortina and about the role of the intelligence services on 23 February: it’s very likely that, when he found out from Gómez Iglesias that Tejero had launched a coup led by Armada, Cortina would have got in contact with the general (if the two men were not already in contact; in any case, Cortina admits having seen Armada one unspecified day of that week, according to him to congratulate him on his appointment as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff); it is very likely that, already under Armada’s orders, Cortina would have taken care of clarifying to Tejero personally or through Gómez Iglesias the nature, objectives and hierarchy of the coup and promised the help of his men in the assault on the Cortes; it’s very likely that, whether or not he arranged the meeting between Tejero and Armada and whether or not it was held, Cortina enabled Armada to transmit to Tejero the final instructions about the operation; it’s very likely, in short, that in the days before the coup Cortina turned into a sort of adjutant of Armada’s, into a sort of chief of staff to the coup leader. It’s very likely that’s what happened. That’s what I believe happened.