The last government of General Franco considered the possibility of attacking Portugal after the revolution of April 25, 1974, a democratic feat that is now fifty years old.
The rebellion of the young Portuguese officers against the saddest hours of the Salazarist dictatorship set off all the alarms of the Franco apparatus and someone thought of sending the tanks of the Brunete armored division towards Lisbon. The carnation revolution was unusual and still easy to explain: the young Portuguese officers were fed up with the three colonial wars that bled their country in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. While the British and French had managed to maintain a remarkable share of influence in Africa after having granted independence to their colonies, not without great dramas such as that of Algeria, the veteran civilian dictator of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar , was determined to maintain the old empire. "If capitalism wins the cold war and we lose the colonies, Portugal will suffer", the dictator-accountant had said before he died in 1970. His successor, the discreet professor Marcelo Cateano, maintained the same policy. Compulsory military service lasted three years. A brutal nightmare, while the Beatles were playing in Europe.
A conspiracy of captains that had the support of some senior officers germinated and during the morning of April 25, 1974, several military units took key positions in the city of Lisbon. In less than twenty-four hours, the regime collapsed, without any bloodshed. The underground Armed Forces Movement, which the political police had failed to dismantle, was taking power to restore democracy and something else. Call elections, leave the colonies and apply urgent social reforms. Many of the leaders of the military revolt had acquired left-wing ideas and some of them, like Colonel Vasco Gonçalves, future prime minister, sympathized with the Communist Party.
Portugal was part of NATO since its foundation in 1949. Henry Kissinger's hair stood on end when he saw the soldiers with the carnations. The US Secretary of State read the unexpected Portuguese revolution as the Soviet response to the bloody US-sponsored military coup in Chile in September 1973. He was worried about Portugal and even more worried about the sudden decolonization of Angola and Mozambique, two large countries in Africa. Kissinger began to devise an armed confrontation between dissenting military units, since not all the April captains were leftists. The units stationed in the north of the country had more conservative commands. An internal conflict could justify an external military intervention.
In this context, Carlos Arias Navarro, the man who had replaced Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco as head of the government of Spain, had the idea of offering himself to the Americans to attack Portugal from behind. The Brunete armored division could be the spearhead of a counter-revolutionary offensive. He made it known to the number two of the American State Department in a meeting held in 1975, before the death of General Franco. “Spain would be ready to fight the anti-communist fight alone if necessary. It is a strong and prosperous country. He doesn't want to ask for help. But he trusts that he will have the cooperation and understanding of his friends, not only in the interest of Spain, but in the interest of all like-minded people," Robert Ingersoll wrote to Kissinger, according to declassified US diplomatic documents. . Arias wanted Spain to be immediately accepted into NATO and dreamed of being able to lead the post-Franco era with the eternal gratitude of the United States. It was an ephemeral plan.
The new American ambassador in Lisbon, Frank Carlucci, managed to stop Kissinger. Carlucci, a CIA man, considered it reckless to foment a civil war in a Western European country. We are not talking about a too soft type. Carlucci had collaborated in the plan to eliminate Congolese revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba, helped organize a revolt against Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and had overseen U.S. relations with Brazil's military junta after the 1964 coup.
The new ambassador asked Kissinger for a year to try to reorient the situation, with the following plan: maximum support for the socialist leader Mário Soares, winner of the first Portuguese democratic elections; to mobilize the conservative regions of the north against the commune of Lisbon; to capitalize on the discomfort of the returnees, the Portuguese damaged by the rapid decolonization, and to promote division in the MFA. In November 1975, Portugal was about to explode, but the Communist Party stopped it at the last moment. Civil war was avoided. In 1976, General António Ramalho Eanes, Chief of Staff, returned the military to the barracks, and in Spain, Carlos Arias Navarro handed over the position to Adolfo Suárez.
The one in 1975 was not the first Spanish plan to invade Portugal in the 20th century. There were three more. The first was launched by Alfonso XIII, as the writer Gabriel Magalhães recalls in the essay El país que nunca existió (Elba, 2023). Outraged by the proclamation of the Portuguese republic in 1910, the King of Spain tempted France and England to promote a military intervention that would restore the Bragança family to the throne. The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 stopped those intentions. As a preventive measure, the Portuguese Republic sided with France and England and sent troops to the European front.
When the Popular Front won in Spain, Salazar began to fear an invasion when he heard socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero calling for a Union of Iberian Socialist Republics. The Portuguese dictatorship gave immediate support to the military uprising of 1936, which did not prevent the Falangists from shouting: "Now to Portugal!" when the Civil War ended. The most serious invasion plan was that of Franco in 1940, dubbed Operation Felix by the General Staff. German and Spanish troops were to take Gibraltar, while 250,000 Spanish soldiers (ten infantry divisions and one cavalry division) invaded Portugal. Franco dreamed of Philip II, but he could not close an agreement with Hitler in Hendaye. The German invasion of Russia ate the invasion of Portugal. Operation Redbeard shelved Operation Felix. Franco's thesis to gain access to the generalate was entitled: How to invade and conquer Portugal in 72 hours.
