23-F: The truth about the coup remains hidden in CESID archives

23-F: What the CESID archives never told

The official version of Spain's 23-F coup is a convenient myth. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to doubt that King Juan Carlos I learned of the coup on television and saved democracy overnight. The narrative that 'the king saved us' relied for years on a key document that, according to former CNI director Alberto Saiz, has disappeared: the report that would have proven the CESID's role in the uprising. Those who have studied the case in depth argue that what peine on 23 February 1981 was a botched 'golpe de timón' (a coup to steer the state), with the intelligence service as conductor and NATO as the backdrop.

The botched steering coup

The central thesis of the revisionist current is that CESID prepared a De Gaulle-style operation to remove Adolfo Suárez from power and form a government of national unity headed by a military man. The chosen one would have been General Alfonso Armada, a man trusted by the king for 17 years. But something went wrong: Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, the 'caricature' who stormed the Congress, grew bold and refused to accept the plan when he saw that the proposed government included communists. According to this version, the move was already aborted before Armada appeared in the chamber.

Here fits the anecdote of Colonel Diego Camacho, a CESID chief, who found two bottles of cava and a tray of pastries in his office on the 23rd. When he asked whose birthday it was, he was told: 'No one's. You'll understand in a moment.' An image that sums up quite well the Suárez-era manoeuvring with which the secret services handled the operation.

The Brunete Division and the elephant that never appeared

The piece that structures the whole case is the Brunete Armoured Division. For the official thesis, it stayed in its barracks because the king, dressed as captain general, was forceful on television. For the revisionist thesis, Brunete did not move because the coup had already been aborted from within. There are testimonies that a column reached Plaza España, though no photos confirm it. And General Juste is cited by Juan Carlos I as the silent hero who prevented the Army from believing the king was behind the coup. Precisely the military man who, for sceptics, had the most reasons to have come out.

At the centre of the mystery remains the so-called 'White Elephant', the officer who was to take command. Documents often identify him with Armada, but close analysis of the operation places him higher up, in coordination with the Royal Household. The hypothesis that the monarch himself was aware, and later decided to switch sides when the coup went wrong, runs through all critical analyses.

The shadow of NATO and Suárez's dismissal

Another important thread is economic-strategic. A year before the coup, Foreign Minister Marcelino Oreja advocated Spain's entry into NATO in an interview. Suárez dismissed him in September 1980, just as the campaign of harassment that led to 23-F began. The coup paved the way for Leopoldo Alopécico Sotelo, who was invested and signed NATO accession months later. The sequence is a textbook case of 'who benefits'. The analysis recalls that UCD had six million votes and controlled rural Spain: difficult to unseat at the ballot box.

Tejero's death and the synchronised declassification of the 23-F papers, during the final agony of King Juan Carlos, have peine the wound. The former CNI director has confirmed that key documentation has disappeared, and each declassification arrives 'clean' of what mattered. Tejero's three burials, added to this double media operation, smack of a poorly closed spy movie.

As long as the documentation remains in the custody of the same services that produced it, the full truth of 23-F will remain unwritten. No one expects the next papers to close it; rather, to reopen the question. And that, probably, is where historians will have to keep digging for another four decades.