HBO uncovers the last secrets of Juan Carlos I in 'Operation Save the King'

“If the Spaniards knew in whose hands we are!”.

The vedete Bárbara Rey explodes before the cameras on the other side of the window of her car.

And she threatens.

She says that she is desperate, that they have broken into her house, that she had microphones and cameras everywhere and that she is willing to blow everything up.

The revelations that appear in the three chapters of the

, from HBO Max, which opens on the platform this Friday, leave a feeling of some sadness.

With the less forgiving perspective of time, the achievements and the face of the coin of the long mandate of King Juan Carlos I to accept and settle this democratic stage in Spain add up to many integers, but the shadows were also many and were hidden for too long.

The docuseries rescues, orders and contextualizes them with the rigor of the great North American or BBC documentaries.

And it corroborates two of the obsessions that persecuted Juan Carlos I since his traumatic youth: to stop being alone and to amass assets so as not to experience financial difficulties again.

The monarch is naked, on top of the stern of a yacht, and six

they take turns in the hollow of a cliff to capture images of the scene.

They portray her.

One of them, Antonio Montero, confirms in the series the fears that assailed him from the first moment: either he would make gold or he would have problems.

There was no place.

Simply the images were never published in Spain and were relegated without visibility only in an Italian magazine.

Now they don't appear in the documentary either, despite the executive producers of Mandarina managing to have all of them for this HBO project and being one of the examples of how the image of the previous monarch was protected to the extreme in all the media, as some confess relevant journalists of the transition: Iñaki Gabilondo, Victoria Prego, Fernando Ónega, Pedro J. Ramírez, Pilar Urbano... HBO's legal departments and advisers did not support them.

Juan Carlos I, during his coronation speech.Keystone

The goal of the

is to explain with simple television language the importance of the reign of Juan Carlos I. To do this, he divides his mandate into three portions.

Each episode has a meaning, although the plot is intertwined with personal, intimate and professional aspects of his life, which end up shaping a way of being and a personality.

The first section reconstructs his childhood, the family exile in Estoril, those deficiencies and pressures, the monarchical environment of his father, Don Juan de Borbón and, above all, the determining fatal accident that ended the life of his brother, the infant " Don Alfonsito”, when he was 15 years old and playing with his older brother, Juan Carlos, with a gun in a basement in Villa Giralda.

The work tells how don Juan took his son aside and made him swear right there that there had been no purpose in that shot that pierced his brother's head.

The next day, without time for the funeral, he sent him to the Zaragoza Military Academy.

Juan Carlos I himself admits, in an interview that appears in the series, that in those years his family, despised by the Franco dictatorship, went through quite a few hardships.

Also included is the passage from that report by Selina Scott for ITV,

A

), in which the now emeritus shows serious doubts, in that tremendous 1992 for Spain, about his contribution to the tax system of the country he reigned.

But the most prescient frame is discovered in passing, on the day designated November 22, 1975 for his coronation in the Cortes, when among the many soldiers and authorities in gray suits who took over the Congress, the scarves or kufiyyas of several leaders of the Persian Gulf.

It was a market of friendships that Juan Carlos I took particular care of even before, when he attended and met Doña Sofía in Persepolis, during the five days of parties for 600 guests organized in October 1971 by Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi of Iran to celebrate the 2,500 years of the birth of the Persian Empire.

Juan Carlos I, with the British journalist, Selina Scott.EFE

Those privileged relations with the emirates were later perpetuated by some of Don Juan Carlos's business friends, such as Manuel Prado and Colón de Carvajal, the private administrator of many of his alleged businesses for decades, or Javier de la Rosa.

The document also includes a juicy interview with the former banker Mario Conde, who came so close to the monarch in those years to prosper, in which he reveals that he went to buy shares in the media

to counterattack the critical editorials of EL PAÍS against his speculative operations at the head of Banesto.

Conde also reveals the alleged gossip of the then head of the Royal House for 16 years, Sabino Fernández Campo, and his leaks to some media about the life and the most dissolute relations of the head of state to try to stop that drift in time.

He didn't get it.

Juan Carlos I dismissed him, without prior notice, at a meal to which he quoted him in a well-known inn in Madrid with his wife, Queen Sofía.

All those businessmen ended up spending time in jail.

In the documentary, the voice of Juan Carlos I is heard on several occasions in an unprecedented way in recorded talks with close friends.

And for the first time his long relationship with the photojournalist Queca Campillo, one of the journalistic icons of the Transition, who worked for many years in the

newspaper, is exposed .

Campillo goes so far as to tell, in a passage from an interview that was never broadcast, that she sometimes met the king in a van in the northern area of ​​Mount El Pardo, which leads to the palace of La Zarzuela.

The King left all kinds of messages on his answering machine for years and the photographer's daughter, who died of cancer in 2015, recalls how her mother worked, in addition to being the monarch's private confessor, also as a mediator and parapet on what was cooking in the media on his figure.

Juan Carlos I and Corinna Larsen greet each other in Barcelona in 2006. Carlos Alvarez (Getty Images)

The tapes of Juan Carlos I with Bárbara Rey are one of the recurrent secrets of the Transition still unknown.

The actress, maid of honor in pageants of misses, singer and ex-wife of the tamer Ángel Cristo has been threatening with this material for five years.

They met at her house and also at another one set up by Cesid (before the CNI) on Calle Sextante in Madrid with all her equipment.

The series reflects several talks in which the vedete asks Juan Carlos I about various topics of the highest current at the time.

In one of them, Barbara Rey expresses her bad opinion of the former popular president José María Aznar and she anticipates that she does not understand how many Spaniards voted for him.

The King concedes that he doesn't understand either.

And in another she exposes something similar before the last stage of Felipe González.

When she is interested in the situation of Luis Roldán,

Former director of the Civil Guard who escaped and was later imprisoned for corruption, Juan Carlos I comments that the Benemérita does not know anything about his whereabouts and adds that they tell him that "it would be better if he turned up dead".

He doesn't specify who.

The docuseries does not abound on the Noós case, which affected his daughter, the Infanta Cristina, and his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarín, because the producers considered that the sentence does not give the King any direct substantial role in that plot.

And about his dealings and conflicts with Corinna Larsen, he does not provide more news than those published in recent years.

The long bond with her "dear friend" from Mallorca Marta Gayá does illustrate very well the discomfort of governments and state apparatuses to overcome these tricky situations, especially when they affected official actions, something that did find parallels later after the breakup with the German businesswoman.

In the summer of 1992, Don Juan Carlos mysteriously disappeared from Spain for a few days.

He traveled to Switzerland.

It was said that for a medical review.

The Royal House then did not endorse that check and speculation was unleashed.

The serial shows that Gayá was there receiving treatment.

The president and the spokeswoman for that socialist executive, Rosa Conde, sent him several quite direct public messages that he should give explanations.

Don Juan Carlos took the plane, returned to Madrid for a few hours, dispatched with Felipe González, and returned to Switzerland.

Until next time.

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