SPAIN: Murder of the Alter Ego

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A man of precise habits, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco had followed an almost unvarying schedule long before his inauguration last June as Spain's President and Prime Minister. Every morning about 9, his Dodge Dart would park in front of Madrid's San Francisco de Borja Church, only 300 yds. from his home, and Carrero Blanco, 70, would enter the church for Mass. Approximately 45 minutes later, he would leave for his office in the Paseo de la Castellana. In the seething Spain of 1973 such predictability is not always a virtue. Carrero Blanco last week fell victim to a bomb carefully timed to his departure from Mass. He was the first head of government in Western Europe to be killed since 1934, when Austria's Engelbert Dollfuss was shot in Vienna.

Carrero Blanco's assassins constructed an elaborate scheme. Posing as sculptors, two men rented a basement room near San Francisco de Borja eight weeks ago and tunneled to a place where the President's car passed every morning. When Carrero Blanco drove by the spot after Mass, the assassins detonated a massive explosive charge, possibly an antitank mine. The explosion was powerful enough not only to kill Carrero Blanco, his chauffeur and bodyguard but to blast a 35-ft. hole in the street and blow parts of the car over the top of the five-story church and onto a balcony on the other side. It also sent reverberations the length and breadth of Spain.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco, 81, immediately called the Cabinet into emergency session to consider counter-measures and appoint an interim President, Torcuato Fernandez-Miranda, the head of Spain's only legal party, the National Movement. Although the country remained calm, some arrests were reported, and police patrolled neighborhoods they suspected of harboring dissidents.

Carrero Blanco's assassination came as a severe shock to Franco, who for years had counted on him as his right-hand man. The Generalissimo had expected the dour admiral to keep Spain on a rightward course when he himself died and to make certain that his successor as chief of state, Prince Juan Carlos, did not fall prey to liberal ideas. But Carrero Blanco's rigid orthodoxy had made the possibility of violence as predictable as his timetable.

Ten Leftists. After 34 years of rule by El Caudillo (the leader), Spain is rife with discontent and disaffection. In the past year Franco's regime has been assaulted by dissident priests, workers, students and members of the Basque minority. Only minutes after the assassination, in fact, a trial was scheduled to begin in Madrid of ten leftists who were accused of fomenting strikes.