For each other, Francisco Franco cried that Saturday, December 22, 1973, when he gave his condolences to the widow of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, his most faithful collaborator and – like the dictator – man of few words and a hard hand. The first and last time that Franco mourned in public for a deceased, whom he had met in 1925 in the campaign in Morocco.
And yet, days later, enigmatic or squeamish - the laconic dictators bewilder: simplicity or cunning? -, Franco affirmed in his year-end speech of 1973, the penultimate of his life, that "it is virtue of the political man to turn evils into goods. It is not for nothing that the popular adage says that there is no harm that does not come with good”. He was clearly referring to the disappearance of the only executor capable of prolonging Francoism...
On December 20, 1973, ETA surprised the world by carrying out the fifth assassination of a Prime Minister of Spain. And in what way!
In a kind of perfect nyap, an Etarra commando who had been roaming Madrid for a year detonated between 70 and 100 kilos of dynamite in the path of the black and armored Dodge-Dart of Luis Carrero Blanco, president of the government, who was leaving mass again in the church of San Francisco de Borja in Madrid.
It was 9:38 a.m., in the middle of Calle Claudio Coello. Stately Madrid. The car sped away. Thirty-five meters – it is said soon – until falling in the courtyard of a Jesuit convent, where, in disbelief, six religious discovered that it was President Carrero Blanco, who was exterminated. Very close by, on Carrer Serrano, was the United States embassy, already calmer after Secretary of State Kissinger's visit to Madrid the previous day.
-Gas! Gas! A good one!
Screaming, Argala and Kiskur ran out of the studio in the basement of 104 Claudio Coello, two of the four men who had built the tunnel since December 7th, more laborious than expected. They had rented at a price of gold that ideal cabin to dig a tunnel and deposit the explosive charge, stolen from Hernani, of dubious quality and transported in a second-hand car that almost left them lying on the road to Madrid. ETA did not lack money, thanks to the kidnapping in January of Navarre industrialist Huarte, whose family paid out 50 million pesetas.
The shouts of the etarras tried to take advantage of the confusion caused by the bomb – you have to imagine the dustbin – and reach, without arousing suspicion, the nearby point where the Atxulo etarra was waiting for them. In a short time, they were out of danger in a free flat in Alcorcón, procured by Eva Forest, the Tupamara, wife of the playwright Alfonso Sastre and a key figure for her support of the etarras that passed through Madrid in those years (and close to the services of intel Cuban intelligence). She was the author of Operación ogro, brought to the cinema by Gillo Pontecorvo in 1980 and the origin of the subsequent conspiracy theories, the most famous – and unfounded – of which suggests that the CIA controlled ETA.
Everything had gone well despite preparations full of shocks. ETA gave its first and most famous coup outside the Basque Country, although, curiously, that summer of 1973 the dictator had spent a few weeks on vacation in San Sebastián, where he received the brand new president of the government Luis Carrero white Madrid was easier for them to evade the police...
The regime had eleven secret services and none of them knew how to abort the assassination of the first prime minister, who was not Franco himself (until 1973 he simultaneously led the State and the presidency).
In an atmosphere of the end of the regime and of Christmas, Madrid tried to play down the importance of the attack that erased from the equation of the future Franco's only trusted man, the comrade in arms - even though he was an admiral , Carrero had excelled in command of submarines –, originated in a 1941 report in which he advised Franco against Spain entering the Second World War.
PS.- The police services and the espionage body founded and directed by Carrero Blanco himself, Seced, swore revenge against Argala, the head of the Txikia commando. He left in a hurry - like Carrero Blanco - due to the explosion of a bomb placed in his Renault 5 in the French town of Anglet, where he was hiding. All very Christmasy too: December 21, 1978.
