CIA, ETA and Carrero’s Assassination: The Enduring Story

Carrero Blanco and the blast that reshaped Spain

On December 20, 1973, a Dodge Dart was blown into the air on Claudio Coello Street in Madrid. Inside was Luis Carrero Blanco, an admiral, prime minister-designate, and Franco’s trusted man. The explosion, placed under the asphalt via a tunnel dug from a rented basement, killed the admiral and left an image that still fuels theories half a century later. The thesis supporting the material sparking this debate is stark: the CIA allegedly used ETA to execute the assassination, thereby smoothing the path to a monarchy aligned with Washington.

What Pilar Urbano’s account says about the CIA and Carrero

Pilar Urbano’s book The Price of the Throne dedicates nearly half its 834 pages to the motives and methods of the bombing. According to this version, the CIA proposed the target, redirected ETA from kidnapping to elimination, facilitated finding the basement from which the tunnel was dug, and provided the explosive: C4 manufactured in the United States for exclusive use by its Armed Forces, according to a report by Spanish intelligence services cited in the material.

The motive was geostrategic. Carrero opposed renegotiating military base agreements, blocked entry into NATO, and threatened nuclear cooperation with France. Eliminating him, this line argues, also removed the authoritarian system he embodied and increased Juan Carlos’s dependence on Washington. Henry Kissinger, as executive president of the National Security Council, "had to know it," according to the author.

Why an unarmed elderly man needed a tunnel

The material dwells here on a disconcerting detail. Carrero attended mass every working morning at the Jesuit church on Serrano Street, opposite the US embassy, with minimal protection and always via the same route. A gunman with a pistol would have sufficed. Why dig a tunnel, blow up a car using a chimney effect, and launch an operation that made global headlines?

The suggested answer is staging: it was not just about killing, but about terrorizing an aging, complacent Francoist establishment. The message was internal. And external: the bombing occupied international front pages that a neck shot never would have achieved.

The Basque connection and the PNV’s role

The account links the operation to PNV intelligence services, which maintained relations with US agencies since World War II. The connection was allegedly established through trusted individuals serving both the CIA and ETA. In September 1972, an unknown person handed an ETA member a typewritten envelope detailing Carrero’s movements. From there, the organization shifted from kidnapping to assassination, with an internal leadership change trinc the death of its military chief in a police siege.

General Manuel Fernández-Monzón, liaison with the CIA and agent for Carrero’s intelligence services, wrote in his memoirs that neither Suárez nor the king drove anything: everything was designed by the State Department and the CIA. "The perpetrators of the Carrero bombing are ETA members, that’s clear, but who set it in motion?" he asks.

From Carrero to the Transition: the thread linking 1973 to today

The debate extends to consequences. It is argued that deindustrialization, privatizations of state companies, successive crises, and subsequent debt are the aftermath of that December 20. The thesis also appears that Basque and Catalan independence parties were funded from the US, and that Juan Carlos’s arrival involved ceding the Sahara.

Not all material points in the same direction. Some recall that Carrero said Spain had four enemies: communism, capitalist Zionism, separatism, and the trinc of its elites. Others respond, bluntly, that on that day Francoism died and hope began. The debate stalls exactly there: whether the blast closed a regime or was the first piece of an external design.