The date of the meeting between Luis Carrero Blanco and Henry Kissinger, December 19, 1973—the day before ETA assassinated the then president of the Spanish government—was a coincidence. The North American Secretary of State had planned to go to Madrid on Friday the 21st. A setback changed his agenda.
The attack surprised the Secretary of State and shocked his security team, aware that they could have been blown up too. The surprise once again dismantles the theory that the CIA was behind that murder.
After being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the end of the Vietnam War, attending a NATO summit in Brussels and visiting Jerusalem, Cairo, Algiers, Beirut and Damascus, Kissinger had to participate on 18 December to the Middle East Peace Conference at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. On the 15th, however, differences between Jordan and Israel postponed the start until December 21.
“Kissinger suddenly found himself with a little extra time. His manic nature did not allow him to stay in Geneva or the Middle East just waiting, and that is how he squeezed his only visit to Portugal into his itinerary.” This is how Richard Valeriani, a reporter for North American television NBC News and a member of the group of journalists who accompanied Richard Nixon’s secretary of state around the world, summed up the situation.
Valeriani gathered anecdotes to illustrate the intra-history of these trips based on experiences and interviews with assistants and security agents in Kissinger’s entourage. In 1979 he published Travels with Henry. Upon reaching 400 pages, however, he decided to eliminate chapters.
Among more than a hundred discarded pages there were thirty pages entitled ‘Elsewhere in Europe’ of visits to Portugal, Brussels, Sweden and six pages from the stay in Spain in 1973. A copy of this unpublished material It ended up in the Henry Kissinger archive, today in the Yale University library, where this newspaper has discovered it.
Having visited Lisbon on December 17, the next afternoon the secretary of state arrived in Barajas. Just landing he gave a press conference with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laureano López Rodó. “Kissinger hoped to have a post-Franco Spain admitted to NATO,” Valeriani wrote.
In the midst of an important security deployment that same day the 18th, he met with Francisco Franco in El Pardo and with Prince Juan Carlos in La Zarzuela. Afterwards he met with López Rodó and later, and with maximum discretion, with the Chinese ambassador in Spain. In no coincidence, the North American delegation was staying at the Palace Hotel, where the Chinese diplomatic representation was also provisionally located.
The Americans did not publicize the meeting, which shows Kissinger’s persistent interest in China, but hotel sources leaked it to the Europa Press agency. According to Valeriani, Kissinger wanted to inform the Chinese of his diplomacy in the Middle East because, unlike Russia, they were not involved. The meeting was comical. The Chinese interpreter translated his ambassador into Spanish and the one from the United States, Horacio Rivero, did it into English. “Each sentence took about ten minutes.”
On Wednesday morning, the 19th, Kissinger met with President Luis Carrero Blanco for an hour, in the presence of López Rodó and Lieutenant General Manuel Díez Alegría, head of the High General Staff. After visiting the Prado museum he had lunch with the Foreign Minister. The secretary held a new press conference in Barajas highlighting his role, despite not always being on the same page, and left for Paris, accompanied by Valeriani and the rest of the North American journalists.
The next day at nine thirty in the morning, the terrorist organization ETA blew up Carrero Blanco’s vehicle. When informed, Kissinger expressed his condolences to López Rodó. “My dismay is still great after the pleasant and interesting interview I had yesterday.”
According to Valeriani, “the members of Kissinger’s team, and especially the security agents, were shocked by the report, not only by the death of the Spanish president, but also by the awareness that he could also have been the Secretary of State. ”. But “one blow past the initial shock, the black comedian that Kissinger had inside appeared. He told a couple of his agents: ‘Just make sure that when I explode, I go higher than five floors.’” And he added to other attendees, “we don’t have to leave this record to the Spanish.”
The witness located by La Vanguardia reinforces the thesis that the United States was not behind the attack, as the conspiracy theories claim, not supported by historians. The recordings of Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office, available in the North American National Archives, show that his administration, despite the differences with the admiral, preferred her to lead the end of the Franco regime and that her death could generate instability. Unwanted. Historians such as Javier Tusell, Charles Powell, Antonio Rivera, David Mota, Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla and Pablo García Varela have dismantled and explained the theories about the CIA’s participation in the assassination.
When Franco died in November 1975, a European correspondent in Washington referred to the “miracle” of the dictator’s transfer, for the time he had been kept alive. Upon hearing him, Henry Kissinger once again brought out his humor—according to Valeriani, the scriptwriter of NBC’s Saturday Night Live—and blurted out, “the miracle could be that he will return in a few days.”
