The date of the meeting between Luis Carrero Blanco and Henry Kissinger, December 19, 1973 – the day before ETA assassinated the Prime Minister of Spain – was a coincidence. The US Secretary of State had planned to go to Madrid on Friday the 21st. A setback changed his schedule.
The attack surprised the Secretary of State and shocked his security team, aware that they too could have been blown up. The surprise dismantles once again the theory that the CIA was behind that murder.
After being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Vietnam War, attending a NATO summit in Brussels and visiting Jerusalem, Cairo, Algiers, Beirut and Damascus, Kissinger was to participate on December 18 in the peace conference on the Middle East at the headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva. On the 15th, however, differences between Jordan and Israel postponed the start until December 21st.
“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 this is how he fit into his itinerary his only visit to Portugal”. This is how Richard Valeriani, reporter for American television NBC News and member of the group of journalists who accompanied Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State around the world, summarized the situation.
Valeriani gathered anecdotes to illustrate the inner history of these trips based on experiences and interviews with the assistants and security agents of Kissinger’s entourage. In 1979 he published Travels with Henry. When it reached 400 pages, however, he decided to remove chapters.
Among more than a hundred discarded pages there were thirty entitled Elsewhere in Europe (In other parts of Europe) of visits to Portugal, Brussels, Sweden and six pages of the stay in Spain in 1973. A copy of this unpublished material ended up in Henry Kissinger’s archive, today in the Yale University library, where this newspaper discovered it.
Having visited Lisbon on December 17, the Secretary of State arrived in Barajas the following afternoon. As soon as he landed, he held a press conference with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laureano López Rodó. “Kissinger hoped to have a post-Franco Spain admitted to NATO,” wrote Valeriani.
In the midst of an important security deployment, that same day on the 18th he interviewed Francisco Franco at El Pardo and Prince Juan Carlos at the Zarzuela. Then he met with López Rodó. When they finished, he met, with utmost discretion, the Chinese ambassador in Spain. Not coincidentally, the American delegation was staying at the Palace Hotel, where the Chinese diplomatic representation was also staying temporarily.
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. “For each sentence they needed about ten minutes”.
On the morning of Wednesday the 19th, Kissinger had an hour-long interview with President Luis Carrero Blanco, in the presence of López Rodó and Lieutenant General Manuel Díez Alegría, chief of the General Staff. After visiting the Prado Museum, he had lunch with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The secretary held a new press conference in Barajas in which he highlighted the role of the minister, despite not always being in tune, and went to Paris, accompanied by Valeriani and the rest of the American journalists.
The following day, at half past ten in the morning, the terrorist organization ETA blew up Carrero Blanco’s vehicle. When informed, Kissinger expressed his condolences to López Rodó. “My consternation is still great after the pleasant and interesting interview I had there 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 it could also have been the secretary of State”. But “once the initial shock had passed, the black comedian that Kissinger carried inside appeared. He said to a couple of his agents, ‘Just make sure that when I explode, it goes higher than five stories.'” And he said to other attendees, “we must not 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 claimed by conspiracy theories, which historians do not support at all. Recordings of Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office, available in the US National Archives, show that his administration, despite differences with the admiral, preferred him to lead the end of the Franco regime and that his death could lead to a unwanted instability. Historians such as Javier Tusell, Charles Powell, Antonio Rivera, David Mota, Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla or Pablo García Varela have dismantled and explained the theories about the participation of the CIA in the mass murder.
When Franco died in November 1975, a European correspondent in Washington referred to the “miracle” of the dictator’s passing, for the time he had been kept alive. When he heard that, Henry Kissinger took out his humor once again – according to Valeriani, typical of the writers of Saturday Night Live of NBC – and let go, “the miracle could be that in a few days he will come back”.
