On October 23, 1976, the first interview took place between the new leadership of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and the leadership of the Central Documentation Service (Seced), the intelligence service created by Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, a secret service at that time. service of President Adolfo Suárez. The PSOE was still an illegal party. The Political Reform law had not yet been approved.
In room number 4 on the fourth floor of the Meliá Princesa hotel in Madrid, Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Cassinello, head of Seced, and his second, Commander José Faura, met with Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra. Both soldiers placed their service weapons on a table to defuse the meeting. His mission was to take the pulse of the young Isidoro, socialist general secretary since the congress two years ago, in October 1974, in a municipality on the outskirts of Paris. According to the theses approved in Suresnes, the PSOE defended at that time the “right of self-determination of the nationalities that make up the Spanish State.”
Cassinello and Faura met a very pragmatic Felipe González who transmitted several messages to the deep state. He maintained that his main asset was youth, the combination of the old PSOE acronyms with a new leading group that had nothing to do with the Civil War. He did not want to have anything to do with the Communist Party, despite the moderation of Santiago Carrillo and the so-called Eurocommunism. He distrusted Catalan nationalism, which he saw as an instrument of the Catalan bourgeoisie. He offered full guarantees of respect for the unity of Spain. And he was sure of reaching 30% of the votes in the first elections that took place. (He got 29.3%).
A copy of Cassinello and Faura’s report is deposited in the archives of the Felipe González foundation. The 45-page report is stamped with a code name: JANO-3. Everything indicates that this was the name with which the Franco regime’s secret services referred to the general secretary of the PSOE. This key demonstrates the existence of the JANO archive, a name referring to the two-faced Greek god, who has been talked about many times and who would have disappeared during the transition. The Cesed would have prepared files on thousands of people of different conditions who could be of interest to the Franco regime in its final phase. On one occasion, commissioner José Manuel Villarejo threatened, in a ghostly manner, with revealing the files in the JANO archive.
[The mention of self-determination in Suresnes had been instrumental: the PSOE ran the risk of becoming ossified at the end of the seventies, it had to quickly connect with the new generations, who questioned Franco’s obsessive centralism. The PSOE was forced to compete with the nationalities discourse of the PCE-PSUC and had to attract the socialist groups with a federal vocation that had emerged in various regions with the idea of ??creating a more modern PS, apart from the old acronyms] .
There was a second meeting in February 1977. On this occasion, González expressed some complaints to Cassinello so that he could convey them to Suárez. He considered intolerable the alacrity with which the Government had legalized the PSOE (Historic), the group of those defeated in Suresnes. That testimonial party was headed by Rodolfo Llopis, the disciple of Indalecio Prieto who had held the general secretary between 1944 and 1974. The octogenarian Llopis considered that González was a dangerous leftist and the new leaders believed they had gotten rid of an old man. The PSOE (Historic) obtained 0.56% of the votes in the June 1977 elections. Llopis and González had, however, one thing in common: a staunch anti-communism. For this reason, González expressed to Cassinello his concern about the prominence acquired by the PCE after the massacre of the Atocha lawyers.
These notes serve to better interpret the synchronized swimming exercise offered these days by the two men who one autumn day calmed down the Seced. González, intelligent and fearsome, as always; Guerra, lost yesterday in a hair salon when leaving the Ateneo de Madrid. The last chapter of a biography is always the most difficult to write.
