Just like that, Francisco Franco cried that Saturday, December 22, 1973, when he offered his condolences to the widow of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, his most faithful collaborator and – like the dictator – a man of few words and a heavy hand. The first and last time that Franco cried in public for a deceased person, whom he had met in 1925 in the Moroccan campaign.
And yet, days later, enigmatic or vulgar – laconic dictators are disconcerting: simplicity or cunning? – Franco affirmed in his end-of-year speech in 1973, the penultimate of his life, that “It is the virtue of man.” political that of converting evils into goods. It is not in vain that the popular adage says ‘that there is no evil that does not come for good.’ He was referring, of course, to the disappearance of the only executor capable of prolonging Franco’s rule…
On December 20, 1973, ETA shocked the world by carrying out the fifth murder of a Spanish Prime Minister. And how!
In a sort of perfect bungling, an ETA commando who had been wandering around Madrid for a year detonated between 70 and 100 kilos of dynamite as the black and armored Dodge-Dart of Luis Carrero Blanco, president of the Government, passed by, as he was leaving nine o’clock mass. in the church of San Francisco de Borja in Madrid.
It was 9:38 a.m., in the middle of Claudio Coello Street. The stately Madrid. The car went into the air. Thirty-five meters – it is said quickly – until they fell into the courtyard of a Jesuit convent, where, in disbelief, six religious discovered that it was President Carrero Blanco, to whom they gave the extreme unction. Very close by, on Serrano Street, is the United States embassy, ??now calmer after Secretary of State Kissinger’s visit to Madrid the day before.
-Gas! Gas! An escape!
Argala and Kiskur ran screaming from the studio in the basement of Claudio Coello’s 104, two of the four ETA members who had built the tunnel since December 7, more laborious than expected. They had rented at a bargain price that ideal space to dig a tunnel and deposit the explosive cargo, stolen in Hernani, of dubious quality and transported in a second-hand car that almost left them stranded on the way to Madrid. ETA was not short of money thanks to the kidnapping in January of the Navarrese industrialist Huarte, whose family paid out 50 million pesetas.
The shouts of the ETA members tried to take advantage of the confusion caused by the bomb – one can imagine the dust – and gain, without arousing suspicion, the nearby point where the ETA member Atxulo was waiting for them. In a short time, they were safe in a safe house in Alcorcón, arranged by Eva Forest, the Tupamara, wife of the playwright Alfonso Sastre and a key figure for her support of the ETA members who passed through Madrid in those years (and close to the services of Cuban intelligence). She was the author of Operation Ogre, made into a film by Gillo Pontecorvo in 1980 and the origin of subsequent conspiracy theories, the most famous of which – and unfounded – suggests that the CIA remote-directed ETA.
Everything had gone to plan despite preparations full of surprises. ETA carried out its first and most famous coup outside the Basque Country although, curiously, that summer of 1973 the dictator had spent a few weeks on vacation in San Sebastián, where he received the new President of the Government Luis Carrero Blanco. Madrid was easier for them to evade the police…
The regime had eleven secret services and none of them knew how to abort the assassination of the first president of the Government who was not Franco himself (until 1973 he was head of State and president simultaneously).
In an atmosphere of the end of the regime and Christmas, Madrid tried to downplay the importance of the attack that erased from the future equation Franco’s only trusted man, his comrade in arms – although an admiral, Carrero had stood out in command of submarines -, originated in a 1941 report in which he advised Franco against Spain entering World War II.
PS.–The police services and the espionage body that Carrero Blanco himself founded and directed, the SECED, swore revenge against Argala, the head of the Txikia command. He was blown up – like Carrero Blanco – when a bomb placed in his Renault 5 exploded in the French town of Anglet, where he was hiding. Everything is also very Christmassy: December 21, 1978.
