ABSTRACT
At the end of dictatorship one of the big changes made by former Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez was the legalisation of the Communist Party in April 1977. The Communist Party was the principal opponent to Franco, and with its legalisation, intelligence services lost one of their main targets. The change of regime led to an evident need to reorganise the intelligence services. Such reorganisation began with the creation of the Ministry of Defence2 by virtue of a Royal Decree of 1977. This Royal Decree also
created the Spanish intelligence service: the Centro Superior de Informaciön de la Defensa (CESID). The CESID is a military intelligence service under the direction of the Ministry of Defence and is the product of the merger of the Servicio Central de Informaciön (SECED) and the General Staff Intelligence Section: Servicio de inteligencia del Alto Estado Mayor (SIAEM). The CESID mandate was to gather, evaluate, interpret and provide the Ministry of Defence with defence information following the priorities of the Junta de Jefes de Estado Mayor? Nevertheless, CESID was not exempt from contradictions and its mandate was excessively vague. It was necessary to find a quick definition for the first institutionalisation of a Spanish intelligence service under the direction of a democratic government, and more important, without introducing radical changes that would disturb the army (Agüero, 1995). The CESID was composed of three divisions: internal intelligence (with the experience of the SECED4), counterintelligence (with the experience of the SIAEM) and external intelligence which was later developed because of the limited expertise of Spanish intelligence services in such area. The main issues in Spain during the period 1977-1985 were terrorism and internal threats to democracy. CESID did combat terrorism, however it was only after the failed Coup d ’etat of February 1981, that CESID was instructed to detect any threats to democracy. As a matter of fact, CESID did not detect coup plots such as Operacion Galaxia in 1978 and the events of February 1981 but was able to detect further conspiracies.
