During the hearing the principal protagonists of the coup behaved like what they were: Tejero, like a brutalized lout with a clear conscience; Milans, like a uniformed and defiant filibusterer; Armada, like a millionaire, double-dealing courtier: isolated, despised and insulted by almost all the others in the dock with him, who demanded he inform on the King or admit that he’d lied, Armada on the one hand refused to implicate the monarch, but on the other insinuated with his proclamations of loyalty to the Crown and even more with his silences, which suggested he was keeping quiet to protect the King; as for Major Cortina, he proved to be by far the most intelligent of the defendants: he dismantled all the accusations hanging over his head, dodged all the traps laid for him by the prosecutor and the defence attorneys and, according to Martín Prieto — court reporter for El País during the trial — subjected his interrogators to ‘greater suffering than humans are able to bear’. The final days were difficult for Armada, Cortina and Gómez Iglesias; although for months they had coexisted without too many problems with the rest of the accused in the Geographical Service’s quarters, as the time of the verdict approached and it was obvious that all or almost all of them were going to be found guilty, relations between the two groups became untenable, and the same day that Tejero tried to lay into Cortina at the end of the morning session the tribunal decided to confine the three dissidents to a separate wing of the quarters for their protection. Finally, on 3 June, the tribunal delivered its judgement: Tejero and Milans were condemned to thirty years in prison — the maximum sentence — but Armada received only six, as did Torres Rojas and Pardo Zancada, and all the rest of the commanders and officers got off with sentences of between one and five years; all except Cortina, who was acquitted, as were one Brunete captain and one of the captains and nine of the lieutenants who had accompanied Tejero into the Parliament. It was not just an indulgent sentence, but practically an invitation to repeat the coup, and the government appealed it before the civilian magistrates of the Supreme Court. Less than a year later the final court passed the definitive sentence; the majority of the accused saw their sentences at least doubled: Armada went from six years to thirty, Torres Rojas and Pardo Zancada from six to twelve, Ibáñez Inglés from five to ten, San Martín from three to ten, and so on, and even the lieutenants who stormed the Parliament and had been declared innocent by the first court were also found guilty. The government did not appeal Cortina’s acquittal or that of the two captains, and the Supreme Court simply confirmed the thirty years handed down to Milans and Tejero.
Perhaps the punishment was still benevolent, but there were no more courts to turn to and the golpistas began to leave prison shortly after their final sentences were handed down. Some were forced out of the Army, but almost all of them had the opportunity to remain, even of course the Civil Guards and NCOs who, in spite of having fired shots inside the chamber of the Cortes and roughed up General Gutiérrez Mellado, were not even tried. There were officers who had notable military careers after the coup: Manuel Boza — a lieutenant shown in the footage of the assault on the Cortes face to face with Adolfo Suárez, probably berating or insulting him — was reinstated in the Civil Guard after serving a twelve-month prison sentence, and in subsequent years received the following decorations for his exceptional merits and impeccable conduct: Civil Guard Cross of Merit with White Emblem, Royal Order of St Hermenegildo, Plaque of St Hermenegildo and Command of St Hermenegildo; Juan Pérez de la Lastra — a captain whose enthusiasm for the coup did not prevent him from leaving his men in the Cortes on the night of 23 February to go home for a few hours’ sleep and come back without anyone noticing his absence — also returned to the Civil Guard once he’d served his sentence, and in 1996 retired with the rank of colonel and with the following decorations granted since the coup: Cross of St Hermenegildo, Command of St Hermenegildo and Plaque of St Hermenegildo. The gratitude of the nation.
Those mainly responsible for 23 February took longer to get out of prison; some of them have died. The last to obtain his liberty was Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, who a year after the coup tried in vain to stand for election with an ephemeral party called Spanish Solidarity whose campaign slogan went: ‘Put Tejero in the Cortes with your vote’; like many of his comrades, during his years of imprisonment he led a comfortable life, guest of honour to some of the wardens of the jails where he served his sentence and converted into an icon of the far right, but when he left prison in 1996 he was no longer an icon of anything or he was just a pop icon, and his only known activities since then are painting pictures nobody buys and sending letters to newspaper editors that nobody reads, as well as celebrating the anniversary of his exploit every February. Milans died in July 1997 in Madrid; he was buried in the crypt of the Alcázar in Toledo, where he had begun his record as a Francoist war hero; like Tejero, he never repented of having organized 23 February, but after that date he abandoned his lifelong monarchism, and over the years he spent in prison spurred on or gave his blessing to almost every new attempted coup d’état, including the one on 2 June 1985 that planned to assassinate the upper echelons of the Army, the Prime Minister and the entire Royal Family during a military parade. Armada, on the other hand, did continue to be a monarchist, or at least he claims to be, even if in none of his numerous public declarations — or of course in his mellifluous and tricky memoirs — has he stopped nurturing the ambiguity about the King’s role in the coup; he was pardoned by a Socialist government at the end of 1988, and since then he has divided his time between his house in Madrid and his country estate in Santa Cruz de Rivadulla, in La Coruña, a baroque aristocratic mansion where until recently he personally looked after a nursery that produced a hundred thousand camellias. As for Cortina, what happened to him after the coup deserves a less succinct explanation.
In the early hours of 14 June 1982, just over a month after the sentence of the Court of Military Justice absolved the intelligence service major, four powerful explosive charges blew up four secret AOME headquarters. The bombs exploded almost at the same time, in a synchronized operation that produced no victims, and the next day the media attributed the attack to a new terrorist offensive on the part of ETA. This was false: ETA never claimed responsibility for the action, which had the Civil Guard’s signature written all over it and could only have been carried out with information from AOME members. Still under the effect of the tremendous military tension provoked by the mass court martial and the sentencing of some of the most prestigious leaders of the Army, there were those who interpreted the quadruple attack as a sign that a new military coup was under way and as a warning to CESID not to get in its organizers’ way this time; it was most likely a more personal warning: many in the military and the Civil Guard were furious with CESID for not having been on the side of the coup on 23 February and for having done everything possible to stop it, but they were even more furious with Cortina, who according to them had launched the golpistas on the adventure, left them in the lurch and then managed to come through the trial unscathed. This ominous precedent and certain coincidences of dates and locations explain the doubts aroused by an episode that happened a year later, 27 July 1983. That day, just months after the Supreme Court passed their definitive ruling at least doubling the length of the sentences of most of those found guilty of the 23 February coup, Cortina’s father burned to death in a fire at his home; the fact that the location was, according to Tejero, where his interview with the major had taken place in the days leading up to the coup, not to mention the circumstances of the calamity — at four o’clock in the afternoon while Cortina’s father was taking his siesta — reinforced the hypothesis of revenge. Cortina and the investigators attributed the fire to an electrical short-circuit; the explanation convinced almost no one, but the truth is not always convincing. Be that as it may, after the trial Cortina was reinstated in the Army; although he never returned to the intelligence services — all his assignments from then on were related to logistics — he did not manage to dispel the suspicions that hung over him, his equivocal reputation followed him everywhere and in recent years the Army has hardly had a single scandal not somehow associated with his name. In 1991, by then promoted to colonel, he was relieved of his command for facilitating a leak to the press of secret plans of military operations, but, in spite of being finally absolved of the accusation of negligence, by then he’d already requested a transfer to the reserves. Later, for a time, he served as adviser to a deputy prime minister in José María Aznar’s government, and at present he runs a logistics firm called I2V and participates in a family security business. As I complete this book he is an athletic old man, with sparse white hair, freckle-spattered scalp, gold-rimmed glasses and a boxer’s nose, an affable, ironic and cheerful man, who has an autographed portrait of the King in his office and for many years has not wanted to hear a word about 23 February.