* Among the singularities of AOME was the fact that, although it was a military unit, rank had a very relative value in it: a lieutenant could give orders to a captain, a sergeant could command a lieutenant, a corporal could command a sergeant; the essential thing in AOME wasn’t the rank but the ability of each agent (or what Cortina judged to be the ability of each agent), which is how in SEA Sergeant Sales could be a subordinate of Corporal Monge’s. This anomaly provoked jealousy, grievances and rivalries among the agents that undoubtedly influenced the explosion of mutual accusations within the unit as a result of the coup d’état.
** In spite of everything, there are intelligence services officers from the time who still maintain that Monge’s story is invented or that the participation of the Corporal was trivial, casual and strictly individual; the latter is what Cortina himself maintains, for example. According to him, on the afternoon of 23 February Monge was working on the so-called Operación Mister, a mission organized by AOME and carried out by SEA to keep Vincent Shields, deputy chief of the CIA in Spain, under surveillance, as he was suspected of spying, according to information CESID had received, from his own house on Calle Carlos III with powerful recording equipment, on the King’s receptions at the Oriente Palace (the high risk of the operation — after all this was following a member of an allied espionage station — had obliged the use of unusual means such as low-frequency emitters); Monge had finished his surveillance work at about six in the evening and, when he was getting ready to return to the AOME base, he ran into Tejero’s buses by chance in Plaza Beata María Ana de Jesús and spontaneously joined them. As hard as one tries, it’s very difficult to believe this story, because it’s very difficult to imagine the occupants of a bus full of Civil Guards telling a stranger like Monge, in the centre of Madrid, that they were getting ready to assault the Cortes and stage a coup d’état; the scene is no longer one by Luis García Berlanga: it’s by Paco Martínez Soria (or Monty Python); the scene is no longer crazy: it’s impossible. Furthermore, this does not mean Cortina’s exonerating version doesn’t contain a part of the truth: Operación Mister existed, and SEA was keeping Shields’ house under surveillance for a while, but that was not the only mission SEA was involved in at the time — or even the main one — and its members never used it to carry out the exceptional measures they used that day. In short: it is reasonable to think that Operación Mister was used after 23 February as an alibi to hide AOME’s intervention in the coup.
*** According to one of the AOME members who denounced his golpista comrades after 23 February, Cortina had set up SEA months earlier precisely to prepare for the coup. But Cortina could not have known of the coup months ahead of time, but only days, so the hypothesis doesn’t make sense; however, once he decided to participate in the coup, it does make sense that Cortina should support the assault on the Cortes with SEA, a special isolated unit, or isolatable from the rest of AOME, and made up of some of the most trustworthy men he had at his disposal.
Chapter 8. 23 February
Towards nine in the evening — with the Cortes held hostage, the region of Valencia occupied, the Brunete Armoured Division and the Captains General still devoured by doubts and the entire country immersed in a passive, fearful and expectant silence — Milans’ and Armada’s coup seemed to be blocked by the King’s countercoup. The uncertainty was absolute: on one side the rebels convened, under the fraudulent shelter of the King, the Francoist heart and accumulated fury of the Army; on the other side the King, freed in principle of the temptation of accommodating the rebels — given that a hail of gunfire in the Cortes broadcast on the radio changed the façade of a soft coup with which there was the possibility of reaching a settlement into the façade of a hard coup it was obligatory to refuse — was summoning the Army’s discipline and its loyalty to Franco’s heir and to the head of state and of the Armed Forces. Any movement of troops, any confrontation with civilians, any incident could push the coup the golpistas’ way, but at that point the King, Armada and Milans were perhaps those with most power to decide its triumph or failure.
The three of them were acting as if they knew it. With the aim of subduing the rebels and returning them to their barracks, but also of making clear to the country his rejection of the assault on the Cortes and his defence of constitutional order, just before ten o’clock at night the King requested a mobile team from the television studios until then held by the golpistas to come and film his address to the Army and the citizens; with the aim of achieving the triumph of the coup although in a different way from originally planned, more or less at the same time Milans phoned Armada at Army General Headquarters. The conversation is important. It is the first between the two generals since the beginning of the coup, but it’s not a private conversation, or not entirely: Milans speaks from his office in the Captaincy General of Valencia, surrounded by the officials of his staff; in the absence of the chief of the Army General Staff, General Gabeiras (who at that moment is attending a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in another part of Madrid), Armada speaks from his superior’s office in the Buenavista Palace, and does so surrounded by the generals of Army General Headquarters. Milans proposes a solution to the coup to Armada that according to him has the approval of several Captains General; it is perhaps an inevitable solution for the golpistas, that Armada has probably already considered in secret and amounts to an almost obligatory variation of the original plan: given that this has failed and the King is reluctant to accept the coup and Armada has not been able to get into the Zarzuela Palace and come out with express authorization from the monarch to negotiate with the parliamentary hostages, the way to arrange things is for Armada — whose behaviour has already begun to awaken some suspicions but whose precise relation to the coup no one can yet imagine — to go to the occupied Cortes from Army General Headquarters, to speak to the deputies and form with them the anticipated government of unity under his leadership in exchange for Tejero setting them free, Milans revoking the state of emergency and normality returning to the country. Although it might be much more arduous and more unpredictable than the original, Milans’ improvised plan has notable advantages for Armada: if he achieves his objective and is named Prime Minister, the King’s former secretary could present the triumph of the coup as a failure of the coup and his government as a prudent negotiated way out of the situation provoked by the coup, like the urgent complication — temporary, perhaps unsatisfactory but imperious — of the return to constitutional order violated by the assault on the Cortes; but, if he didn’t achieve their objective, no one could accuse him of anything but having made an effort to liberate the parliamentarians by negotiating with the golpistas, which should dispel the suspicions that have gathered over him since the beginning of the coup. So Armada accepts Milans’ proposition, but, in order not to reveal his complicity with the rebel general before the generals who surround him at Army General Headquarters — to whom he has been repeating certain chosen phrases — publicly he rejects it at first: as if the ambition to be Prime Minister had never entered his mind and he’d never spoken of it with Milans, he displays surprise at the idea and rejects it noisily, gesticulating, posing almost insuperable objections and scruples; then, slowly, sinuously, he pretends to give in to Milans’ pressure, he pretends to find himself convinced by his arguments, he pretends to understand that there is no other acceptable way out for Milans and for Milans’ Captains General or that this was the best way out or the only way out, and finally he ends up declaring himself ready to make this sacrifice for the King and for Spain demanded of him at this momentous hour for the nation. When Armada hangs up all the generals who’ve been listening to the conversation (Mendívil, Lluch, Castro San Martín, Esquivias, Sáenz Larumbe, Rodríguez Ventosa, Arrazola, Pérez Íñigo, maybe another) know or imagine Milans’ proposal, but Armada repeats it to them. All the generals approve it, all agree with Armada that he should approach the Cortes with the consent of the King and, when someone wonders aloud if that formula is constitutional, Armada has a copy of the Constitution brought in, reads aloud the five points that make up article 99 and convinces his subordinates that, supposing he attains the support of a simple majority of the parliamentarians, the King can validate his appointment as Prime Minister without breaking the constitutional regulation.