Who was the competent authority? Who was the military man whose arrival the hijacked parliamentarians were awaiting in vain throughout the evening and night of 23 February? Ever since the day of the coup this has been one of the official enigmas of the coup; it has also been one of the most exploited deposits of the insatiable embellishments that surround it. In fact, there is hardly a politician of the era who has not proposed his hypothesis on the identity of the soldier, and there is no book on 23 February that has not devised its own: some claim it was General Torres Rojas, who – after relieving General Juste of his command of the Brunete Armoured Division and occupying Madrid – would lead his troops to the Cortes to relieve Lieutenant Colonel Tejero; others argue that it was General Milans, who would arrive in Madrid from Valencia in the name of the King and the rebel Captains General; others conjecture that it was General Fernando de Santiago, Gutiérrez Mellado’s predecessor in the post of Deputy Prime Minister and member of a group of generals in the reserves who had been plotting for some time in favour of a coup; others maintain it was the King himself, who would appear in the Cortes to address the deputies in his capacity as head of state and of the Armed Forces. Those four names do not exhaust the number of candidates; there are even those who increase the intrigue not by adding a candidate to the list but by omitting the name of theirs: in 1988 Adolfo Suárez claimed there were only two people who knew the identity of the military officer, and one of them was him. Naturally, there was no one more interested in feeding the mystery than the golpistas themselves. In this task Lieutenant Colonel Tejero excelled, declaring during the 23 February trial that at one of the meetings before the coup Major Cortina had identified the military authority who would come to the Cortes by a code name: the White Elephant; it’s very possible that Tejero’s testimony was just a fantasy designed to add confusion to the confusion of the first hearing, but some journalist mentioned it in his report and in this way managed to fill in the missing proper name with the energy of a symbol and prolong to this day the vitality of the enigma. An enigma that is no enigma, because the truth is once again obvious: the announced military man could only be General Armada, who in accordance with the golpistas’ plans would arrive at the Cortes from the Zarzuela and, with the King’s authorization and the backing of the mutinous Army, would liberate the parliamentarians in exchange for their acceptance of the formation of a coalition or caretaker or unity government under his leadership. That was what was anticipated and, if it’s true that the White Elephant was the code name of the announced soldier, Armada was the White Elephant.