The death at the age of 95 of (Dos Barrios, Toledo, 1931) this Friday in Madrid takes with it some of the most important secrets of the political and military life of contemporary Spain of which he was the custodian. And this, for having first been general secretary and strong man of the Spanish Defense Information Center (Cesid), and, later, between 1996 and 2001, director of the institution during the first Government of José María Aznar. Calderón was also a good friend of Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, vice president of the Government with Adolfo Suárez.
This secret service, together with other previous organizations to which Calderón had belonged, collected, contrasted, documented and managed information of state interest for the Governments of Spain before, during and after the political transition from dictatorship to democracy. At that stage, the veil of secrecy wrapped, with legal protection, the state arcana with the endorsement of the Law of Official Secrets, promulgated by the Cortes in 1968, during the life of the dictator Francisco Franco, which was informed by the speaker Torcuato Fernández Miranda, future legal architect of the Transition and mentor of the future president Adolfo Suárez. The law, which, except for modifications ten years later and certain dissemination of some episodes last year, remains in force, had the peculiarity of not including deadlines for declassifying secrets concerning the secret and confidential activities of the State that those services carried out.
Javier Calderón was born in a rural town in Toledo where his father, a rural landowner, would be shot by Republican elements in the fall of 1936, at the dawn of the Civil War. The fourth child in a family of six children, his mother, after being widowed, moved to Madrid, where she would run a tobacconist’s shop by official concession, a common practice among the widows of people affected by the Franco regime. From his youth, he showed a vocation for weapons and for study, notably disciplines related to Psychology and Psychotechnics, as well as others linked to Pedagogy that, over time, would qualify his military record, as well as his careful physical culture through sports.
His military vocation led him to enter the General Military Academy, then the Infantry Academy in 1949, where, assigned to its VIII Promotion, he obtained the office of lieutenant in 1953. One of his first assignments was in a high mountain detachment quartered in the Huesca town of Jaca, at the foot of the Pyrenees, where, in a pioneering Special Operations course, he would receive instruction in guerrilla warfare at the hands of instructors called green berets, an elite American unit linked to the covert and counterinsurgency operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, the main American espionage organization. The agency wanted to transfer to Spain the original tactics of the guerrilla that harassed Napoleon’s troops, the experience of counter-guerrilla fighting that it had deployed for some years before with the Thai mountain community Thai, trained to fight against vietcong communist in the Vietnam War.
Special operations
Together with Javier Calderón they participated in those military Special Operations courses that, like himself, would rise to high positions in the military generalship and in the Intelligence services in the decade prior to the post-Franco transition. This was the case of Francisco Quintero, José Ignacio San Martín and José Luis Cortina Prieto, among others. There they learned basic techniques of infiltration, espionage, guerrilla warfare, counterintelligence and antiterrorism, with strict attention to the physical and sports training of those educated.
The links between American espionage and the Spanish Armed Forces dated back to and were included in the secret clauses signed by Franco in 1953 within the agreements signed then with the United States. Consecutive North American governments were very concerned about a hypothetical communistization of Western Europe even before the end of World War II.
All of which led Washington to consider that the Pyrenees were the most important orographic fence against an eventual Soviet military penetration along the extensive and prolonged European plain, which extends from the Urals in Russia to the Basque-French Atlantic coast. According to that criterion, Spain enjoyed an enviable strategic position as the natural rearguard of Western Europe, in addition to showing its three facies to two seas, controlling access to and exit from the Mediterranean in Gibraltar and the island platform of the Canary Islands.
That American and Spanish political-military collaboration, hegemonized by the United States, would later extend to the High General Staff and the SECED, an Intelligence service created by Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, some of whose members ensured for the United States a continuous flow of information and local informants from different military bodies, including the Civil Guard, whose lieutenant generals Carlos Iniesta Cano and Andrés Cassinello, received training in the United States, the latter at Fort Bragg.
Some of those pioneer cadets of the so-called anti-subversive struggle remained assigned to the military collective. Forging, a military association of Christian ideology composed of members who considered themselves “half monks, half soldiers.” They were inspired by texts by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jean Marie de Buck. In Forging Its co-founder, the Jesuit José María Llanos, would play a prominent role, who had initially belonged to Francisco Franco’s circle and, in a surprising ideological evolution, would end up two decades later integrated into the Communist Party of Spain and the clandestine union Comisiones Obreras. That group, governed by Luis Pinilla, future director of the Military Academy of Zaragoza, would include Javier Calderón, plus the future generals José Faura, Santiago Bastos, Juan María Peñaranda and Colonel José Ignacio San Martín, later involved in the attempted coup d’état of February 23, 1981. José Luis Cortina, Javier Calderón’s “heart and soul”, according to subordinates of both, also joined the group.
In their continued relationship with the US intelligence services, they were also participants in the creation of the so-called Guidance and Documentation Cabinet, Public Limited Company, GODSA, which together with the Falangist minister and diplomat Manuel Fraga Iribarne, would form the backbone of the Popular Alliance political party, the parent organization of the Popular Party.
Secret services in Spain adopted different configurations that evolved organically and in which Javier Calderón would perform different tasks: the National Countersubversive Organization, created in 1968 at the request of the Minister of Education, José Luis Villar Palasí to stop the anti-Franco “student subversion”; the Central Documentation Service of the Presidency, SECED, created by Carrero Blanco in 1972; the Higher Defense Information Center, Cesid in 1977. Within it, members such as Javier Calderón himself would progress, up to the generalship, who collaborated with them steadily during their promotions as lieutenant, captain, commander and lieutenant colonel of the Infantry Arm, specialist in intelligence and anti-subversive fighting.
When Calderón, already with the rank of lieutenant colonel, was promoted to the General Secretariat of the Cesid, under the formal command of Marine Infantry Colonel Narciso Carreras, but under his effective command, on February 23, 1981, the attempted coup d’état occurred, carried out with the armed kidnapping of the Congress of Deputies by the lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard Antonio Tejero and co-directed by the captain general of the III Military Region, Jaime Milans del Bosch, and the mentor and instructor of King Juan Carlos, General Alfonso Armada.
Several agents of that secret service were reported to Calderón by other agents, such as Captain Diego Camacho and non-commissioned officer Juan Rando Parra, members of the Special Missions Operational Group, AOME, attached to the Cesid. That group was coordinated by José Luis Cortina, appointed, subordinate and closely linked to Javier Calderón. Cortina had been responsible for the personal security of Admiral Carrero Blanco, for the SECED, when he was assassinated by ETA on November 20, 1973 in Madrid.
The presence of Cesid agents in the preparations for the coup of February 1981 was denounced for promoting tasks of real support to the coup plotters, with intentions that have not been completely clarified in the recent declassification of some, scarce, documents about those events. However, José Luis Cortina would be the only one of the alleged highest-ranking conspirators of that coup attempt who would be acquitted as his participation in the coup was not proven, as ruled by the military court that tried those involved. Unlike his colleagues Forging and Special Operations, he would not be promoted to the generalship, despite international pressure on the socialist Defense Minister, Narcís Serra, to promote him. Months later, Cortina’s father would die in a fire supposedly caused by thieves in his home in Madrid’s Parque de las Avenidas.
When he became the director of the Cesid in 1996, a promotion that was communicated to him by the King during the first presidential term of José María Aznar, leader of the Popular Party, Calderón, then in charge, on the eve of the reorganization of the service, subjected some 2,000 agents to a training test that would not be passed by 68 of them. Among those excluded were the three AOME agents, Camacho and Rando, who denounced the alleged participation of the Cesid in the coup of February 1981. Likewise, the archivist who, fourteen years after the coup, provided Calderón with the secret documents on those events would be excluded from that evidence. AOME sources indicate that Calderón received court instructions to dispose of documentation concerning the events of February 1981.
Lieutenant General Javier Calderón was the father of two sons and a daughter. His daughter Beatriz would follow in his footsteps in the secret service, assigned to missions in Central America. The deceased lieutenant general lived on Modesto Lafuente street and had a second residence, where he spent most of his time, in the La Berzosa urbanization, near Hoyo de Manzanares, where he was highly esteemed. A person of affable manner, very polite, “not a very good mus and domino player,” as his neighbors joked, he was a pleasant conversationalist on many topics, with the exception of those concerning his secret activities.
