He has been a spy.
Intelligence service agent.
There will be secrets you won't trust me with.
No, for responsibility.
But tell me one that can.
Russian generals, if they drink, sing you popular Spanish songs.
And so?
Transmitted by Spanish republicans who dealt with the Soviet military.
Have you drunk with them?
Yes. They drink like Cossacks! "Let's break our glasses," they would tell me later: it's easy to sympathize with Russians if you're Spanish.
How do you see the Russian army today?
At odds with the KGB. They don't even look at each other during parades.
Does that happen here between our domes?
Our intelligence transcends successive governments in favor of the common good.
What is a spy?
Each of the women and men who work in silence and that no one values.
They work... in what?
In observing everything and obtaining information to indicate to the ruler where a bull could catch him.
And the ruler does not appreciate it.
It is that the ruler does not usually pay attention. Hitler, Roosevelt, Bush did not...
Is this being a spy vocational?
My vocation was to help the Spanish to live together and reconcile in a democracy. I entered the Zaragoza Military Academy with that mentality, that idea.
Where did that idea come from?
Of my family. And of Mr. Formes, a schoolteacher in Artesa de Segre, where I grew up: "The fault of the Civil War is ours, for not teaching dialogue and reaching agreements," he told us one day.
And that marked you?
Yes. It is perpetual learning. And we knew how to take a gigantic step with the transition.
Do you defend it tooth and nail?
I was born at the end of the Civil War, in 1939, and from a young age I understood: our future demanded a transition from that dictatorship to a democracy. And I contributed.
As?
Finished my military training, I was recruited by the intelligence service that was born. From there I studied the still clandestine political parties...
Spy, come on.
In order to prepare the transition: I gave talks to officers of our army, I carried a dodecahedron with me...
A geometric figure with twelve faces?
On each face I painted a different color or sign. This is how I taught that what was valuable was the polyhedron –Spain– above the different colors or signs of each face.
Good service.
Collective merit and of those political leaders of that time, of all!: they knew how to dialogue, agree and agree.
Now there is more antipolitics, huh?
The worst thing is to present yourself as a Moses who will take us to the promised land: it is dangerous, that usually ends in blood.
But during the transition, blood was shed: the murders of ETA, the GAL...
"Blood does not form roads, it forms puddles": we send these leaflets with phrases like this to ETA members and their families.
Oh really? And that worked?
ETA dynamited dialogue and democracy, and the police and judges were insufficient: we infiltrated terrorist commandos with the aim of encouraging the desertion of ETA members without blood crimes yet.
That's intelligence, of course!
And many ETA members took refuge in the Protected Exile program: we sent them abroad under a new identity.
A fleeing enemy, silver bridge!
Merit of our field agents infiltrated in ETA commandos... Thus we dismantled caches of weapons and money.
Good service, again: thank you!
Democracy deserved it. I thought of my father, an admirer of Ángel Pestaña, the anarchist of whom José Antonio one day said: "This guy is good."
Why was he thinking of his father?
He narrowly escaped being shot and was always silent. I needed to overcome that family trauma through collective dialogue.
And what did your father tell you when he found out that you wanted to be in the military?
He told me: "No one who handles a shotgun lives in this house." And I had to work to pay for my military studies.
Did your father understand you?
He attended an act in which I was distinguished and a captain congratulated him on my merits, and then he told me: "This being a soldier is important." My father had understood.
What had he understood?
That his son was not going to serve the country, that his son was going to serve his country, all Spaniards equally. And that was the important thing.
