The Zero Hour

A close call. He would have to be ever vigilant. The hulking man had called to mind another man, in another place; the resemblance was uncanny. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and was momentarily in an ice-cold hotel room in Madrid on a preposterously bright, impossibly hot afternoon.

The windows of the suite at the Ritz, Madrid, had been bulletproof, he remembered. Fresh fruit and flowers were brought in every day. The sitting room was oval; everything was painted, or wallpapered, or upholstered in shades of clotted cream.

The four young Basques came into the suite uncomfortably dressed in suits and ties: merely to enter the hotel in those days you had to wear a tie. Their leader was an enormous, bulky, awkward man with short-cropped hair. They seemed awed by Baumann, although they knew him by another name. Baumann, of course, wore a disguise and did not speak. They would never see his face. The only personal habit he allowed himself was a bit of disinformation: though he was not a smoker-that habit he developed only later, in prison-he made a point of smoking Ducados, the most popular Spanish cigarette. They would not be able to determine his nationality.

They knew nothing about him, but he had come highly recommended by a middleman, which was why they were offering a quarter of a million dollars for his services. For 1973, that was a good deal of money. They had gathered their pesetas for a long time, scrimped and saved, robbed banks.

In the privacy of the hotel suite, they told their story. They were Basque separatists-freedom fighters or militants or terrorists, depending upon your politics-and they belonged to an organization called ETA. In Basque, this stood for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Nation and Freedom.

They came from Iruña and Segovia, Palencia and Cartagena. They despised the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, which oppressed their people, forbade them to speak their own languages, had even executed Basque priests during the Spanish Civil War.

They wanted amnesty for the fifteen ETA members, students and workers, who had been jailed as political prisoners after the December 1970 Burgos trials. Franco was dying-he had been dying forever-and the only way to bring down his detested government was to assassinate his sole confidant, his number two, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. That was the only way to shatter the leadership’s aura of invincibility.

Carrero Blanco, they explained, was the prime minister and was believed to be Franco’s designated successor, the future of the regime. He embodied pure Francismo; he represented the post-Franco era. He was anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, ultrarightist. Because of his fiercely bushy eyebrows he was known by the nickname Ogro, the ogre.

ETA had made several bumbling attempts to eliminate both Franco and Carrero Blanco. These four young Basques had recently seen the film The Day of the Jackal, about a fictional plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, and were inspired to hire a professional, an outsider about whom nothing was known. In fact, they realized they had no choice if the job was to be done.

Hence, Operation Ogro.

Baumann never spoke with them-not once. He communicated with them by means of a child’s magic slate. Not once did they hear his voice. Not once were they successful in tailing him, though they tried.

Ten ETA volunteers were provided for his assistance, but all the logistical details were left to him. Baumann prepared carefully for the hit, researched thoroughly as he always did. He learned that every morning at nine o’clock, Carrero Blanco attended mass at a Jesuit church in the Barrio de Salamanca. He studied the route that Carrero Blanco’s chauffeur took, noted the license plate of his black Dodge Dart.

Baumann rented a basement apartment at 104 Calle Claudio Coello in the Barrio de Salamanca, along the route that Carrero Blanco took to church, located directly across the street from the church. The ETA volunteers dug a two-foot-high tunnel through the apartment wall to the middle of the street, twenty-one feet long, T-shaped. Dirt was carried out in plastic garbage bags; there was an enormous amount to dispose of. Digging the tunnel was brutally arduous labor. There was little oxygen to breathe, and the soil emitted a foul-smelling gas that gave them violent headaches. And there was always the fear that the stench of the gas would seep into the apartment building and alert the neighbors.