On October 23, 1976, a 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. secret service that at that time was at the service of President Adolfo Suárez. The PSOE was still an illegal party. The Political Reform law had not yet been approved.
In room number four on the fourth floor of the Meliá Princesa hotel in Madrid, Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Cassinello, head of Seced, and his second in command, Commander José Faura, met with Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra. The two military men placed their regular weapons on a table to defuse the meeting. His mission was to take the pulse of young Isidoro, socialist general secretary since the congress held two years ago, in October 1974, in a town on the outskirts of Paris. In accordance with the theses approved in Suresnes, the PSOE then defended the “right to self-determination of the nationalities that make up the Spanish State”.
Cassinello and Faura found a very pragmatic Felipe González who transmitted several messages to the Deep State. He claimed that his main card was youth, the combination of the old acronyms of the PSOE with a new ruling group that no longer had anything to do with the Civil War. I didn’t want to know anything about it, about 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. It offered full guarantees of respect for the unity of Spain. And he was convinced to get 30% of the votes in a first election. (He got 29.3%).
A copy of Cassinello and Faura’s report is deposited in the archives of the Felipe González foundation. It is a 45-page typed report codenamed JANO-3. Everything indicates that this was the name that Franco’s secret services used to refer to the general secretary of the PSOE. The report confirms the existence of the JANO file that would have disappeared during the transition, with thousands of files on citizens of all kinds, which the Franco regime, in its final phase, wanted to have under control. A few years ago, the commissioner José Manuel Villarejo threatened, in a ghostly way, to make known the files of the JANO archive.
[The defense of self-determination in Suresnes had been instrumental: the PSOE ran the risk of becoming completely rusty, it had to quickly connect with the new generations and Franco’s centralism was beginning to be very much questioned. 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 several regions with the idea of ??creating a more modern PS, apart from the old acronyms .]
There was a second meeting in February 1977. This time González expressed some grievances to Cassinello to pass on to Suárez. He considered the speed with which the government had legalized the PSOE (Historical), the group of those defeated in Suresnes, intolerable. This token party was headed by Rodolfo Llopis, the disciple of Indalecio Prieto who had held the general secretaryship between 1944 and 1974. The octogenarian Llopis considered González a dangerous leftist and the new leaders believed that they had gotten out of on a carcamal The PSOE (Historical) obtained 0.56% of the votes in the elections of June 15, 1977. Llopis and González had, however, one thing in common: a constant anti-communism. For this reason, González expressed to Cassinello his concern about the prominence that the PCE was having 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 the Seced. Gonzalez, intelligent and fearsome, as always; Guerra, lost yesterday in a hairdressing salon after leaving the Ateneo de Madrid. The last chapter of a biography is always the most difficult to write.
