Luis Carrero Blanco

Admiral-General Luis Carrero Blanco (4 March 1904 – 20 December 1973) was a Spanish Navy officer and politician.

A long-time confidant and right-hand man of dictator Francisco Franco, Carrero served as Spain's Premier.

Upon graduating from the naval academy Carrero Blanco participated in the Rif War, and later the Spanish Civil War, in which he supported the Rebel faction.

Luis Carrero Blanco was born on 4 March 1904 in the coastal town of Santoña, province of Santander, to Camilo Carrero Gutiérrez (1879–1936), a lieutenant colonel in the Army stationed in nearby Santander, and Ángeles Blanco Abascal (1885–1910) a local woman.

He had his early schooling at the Marqués de Manzanedo High School in Santoña and in 1918, at the age of 14, he followed the family military tradition by enlisting at the Spanish Naval Academy in San Fernando, Cádiz.

By 18, he had already achieved the rank of lieutenant, serving aboard the dreadnought Alfonso XIII and participated in the Rif War from 1924 to 1926.

In 1926, he decided to specialise in submarine warfare, and served as lieutenant commander on the B-2 and as commander on the B-5.

In 1929, he married María del Carmen Pichot y Villa (1909–1984) with whom he had five children.

At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Carrero Blanco was a naval instructor teaching Submarine Tactics at the Naval Warfare College in Madrid.

As a military man of conservative views he knew that he was marked; his brother José had already been detained and subsequently executed and his father died on the day of his arrest.

Like many nationalists, he sought refuge first in the Mexican embassy and later that of France, from where he was able to cross the border from San Sebastián into France and re-enter on the Nationalist side in June 1937.

Carrero Blanco then served in the Nationalist navy first as corvette captain aboard the destroyer Huesca and later the submarine General Sanjurjo.

Following the Nationalist victory and subsequent establishment of Generalísimo Franco as Caudillo of Spain, Carrero Blanco was appointed Chief of Naval Operations in August 1939.

He became one of the most prominent figures in the Francoist dictatorship's power structure and held throughout his career a number of high-ranking offices such as those of Undersecretary of the Presidency from 1941 to 1967 and Franco's deputy from 1967 to 1973.

In May 1941, Franco appointed Carrero (age 37) as Under-Secretary of the Presidency of the Government, replacing Valentín Galarza Morante.

Following the 1942 Begoña incident, Carrero advised Franco to remove Ramón Serrano Suñer from ministerial rank and from the post of president of the Political Junta of FET y de las JONS, and so Franco did.

Carrero was—as Joan Maria Thomàs puts it—"extremely faithful and submissive to El Caudillo", a polar opposite of Suñer, of whom the dictator had become weary (despite their family connection).

He also was the main drafter behind the 1947 Law of Succession to the Headship of the State.

"The execution in itself had an order and some clear objectives. From the beginning of 1951 Carrero Blanco practically occupied the government headquarters. Carrero Blanco symbolized better than anyone else the figure of "pure Francoism" and without totally linking himself to any of the Francoist tendencies, he covertly attempted to push Opus Dei into power. A man without scruples conscientiously mounted his own state within the State: he created a network of informers within the ministries, in the Army, in the Falange, and also in Opus Dei. His police managed to put themselves into all the Francoist apparatus. Thus he made himself the key element of the system and a fundamental piece of the oligarchy's political game. On the other hand, he came to be irreplaceable for his experience and capacity to manoeuvre and because nobody managed as he did to maintain the internal equilibrium of Francoism."

- Julen Agirre, Operation Ogro: The Execution of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco

The assassination enjoyed the tacit approval of many Spaniards, who joked about Carrero being Spain's first astronaut.

Carrero Blanco was made Vice-Admiral in 1963 and Admiral in 1966.

He was Deputy Prime Minister from 1967 to 1973.

By that time Franco, even if he was still then the Head of State and concurrent Prime Minister, had already delegated the day-to-day running of the government over to Carrero Blanco himself, owing to the former's old age and illness.

And the latter excelled in this regard, in terms of carrying Franco's policies and in directing the ministries towards that direction.

Upon the nomination of Juan Carlos of Bourbon as heir to Franco in the headship of State in 1969, it was believed that an authoritarian monarchy guided by Carrero would guarantee the continuation of Francoism without Franco, an idea underpinned by Franco's own words during the Bourbon's nominating speech: está atado y bien atado ('all is tied down and well tied down').

Franco handpicked him as his successor in the role of head of government, with Carrero thereby taking office in June 1973.

Shortly after he became prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid in a streetside bombing on 20 December 1973 by the Basque nationalist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) while he was returning from Mass in his car.

Carrero reached the peak of his political career on 8 June 1973, when Franco—as envisaged in the 1967 Organic Law of the State that separated the functions of head of government from those of head of state—appointed Carrero as Prime Minister.

The supporters of the aforementioned authoritarian monarchic continuation to the Francoist regime (the continuista solution) suffered two successive blows in the wake of the assassination of Carrero in 1973, and the overthrow of the neighbouring Portuguese regime in 1974.

Six months after being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated on 20 December 1973 in Madrid by four members of an ETA cell, who carried out a bombing near San Francisco de Borja Church on Calle de Serrano while he returned from daily mass in a Spanish Dodge 3700.

In a collective interview justifying the attack, the ETA bombers said:

In his first speech to the Cortes on 12 February 1974, Carrero Blanco's successor as prime minister, Carlos Arias Navarro, promised liberalizing reforms including the right to form political associations.

Though he was denounced by Falangists, the transition had begun.

One of the members of the cell who had assassinated Carrero Blanco was himself assassinated by a car bomb in southern France on 21 December 1978 by a special team organized within the Navy.

This group included a member of the Higher Centre of Defense Information secret service, another from the Naval Intelligence Service and the other belonged to the Defense High Command.

In addition, it received assistance from a number of right-wing paramilitary groups through Jean-Pierre Cherid (OAS), José María Boccardo (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) and Mario Ricci (Avanguardia Nazionale).

Argala, the codename by which the ETA member was known, was the only one who could identify the source who had handed Carrero Blanco's schedule and itinerary over to ETA.

According to Leonidas, a former member of the Spanish Army who participated in the bombing against Argala, "The explosives came from a US base. I don't remember exactly if it was from Torrejón or Rota, but I do know that the Americans did not know what they would be used for. It was a personal favour for Pedro el Marino" (Pedro Martínez) who provided the explosives.

Argala's assassination was claimed by the Spanish Basque Battalion.