Pedro Fernández Barbadillo (Bilbao, 1965) holds a PhD in Public Law from the Universidad San Pablo CEU and a Master’s degree in Journalism from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the newspaper El País. He works as a journalist for several Spanish media such as libertaddigital.com and gaceta.es. He was director of the news services of 7NN channel (2022-2023). He has written two humorous books about Basque nationalism and the socialist Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero, another about Spain under Franco’s regime (Eternamente Franco), a selection of characters and episodes of the Spanish Golden Age (Eso no estaba en mi libro de historia del Imperio español) and a history of the United States through its presidents, its Constitution and its electoral system (Los césares del imperio americano). He coordinated the book edited in 2020 by the ECR group of the European Parliament entitled Historical Memory: threat to peace in Europe.

In January 1968, Alexander Dubcek and other communist leaders of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic tried to establish ‘socialism with a human face’, which also received the name of the ‘Prague Spring’. They proposed to implement a series of reforms that would attract credits and investments from the West to develop the stagnant economy and allow certain freedoms, such as freedom of the press and freedom of movement, although the local CP would maintain its political hegemony.
This plan was of great concern to the communist oligarchies of Moscow and its satellites; apart from the propagandistic effects in the West, because of the diffusion it could have along the countries of the Warsaw Pact.
Since 1967, Spain was represented at the UN by the diplomat Jaime de Piniés, who in his career had successes such as the resolution in favor of the reintegration of Gibraltar to Spain and the presidency of the 40th General Assembly of the UN. And he was the one who warned the U.S. Government of Operation Danube, in which the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia with at least 500,000 soldiers from the USSR, Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Bulgaria. He recounted this in his memoirs entitled Episodes of a Diplomat.
On Tuesday, August 20, at six o’clock in the evening, Piniés received a call from a colleague in the Spanish Mission to tell him that the Soviet ambassador, the Armenian Viktor Issraelyan, wanted to see him as soon as possible at the UN.
When they were together, Issraelyan took out of his briefcase a sheaf of papers written in Russian and began to translate them into English. The communist regime in Moscow was informing the Spanish Government of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and justifying it as a defense against the imperialist plans of the capitalist West, a foretaste of the Brezhnev Doctrine. After thirty minutes of monologue, Issraelyan concluded and added that “it was a very urgent message for the Head of the Spanish State, General Franco”.
Issraelyan did not leave any memorandum and left because he had to communicate the same message to the representative of another country (later on, Piniés would learn that it was Panama). It was half past seven in the evening of a working day.
Piniés called the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid. In Spain it was half past one in the morning and the Government was on vacation. Generalissimo Francisco Franco was in San Sebastian, with part of the ministers. Piniés woke up his minister, Fernando María Castiella. Why had the Soviets communicated such a message to the Spaniards, when they were not in the habit of informing them of anything? Piniés conjectured the following:
“It occurs to me to think that they want to inform us that it is only a localized operation with which they are trying to warn us not to put into operation the mechanism for the use of the (Spanish-American) bases.”
Hours later, Castiella informed Piniés that the military bases had passed to Franco’s direct command.
Meanwhile, Piniés, who was alone with another Spanish diplomat, phoned the US Mission to the UN. The Spanish said he had to speak urgently with an official on duty.
In a few minutes, UN Deputy General for Assembly Affairs Bill Buffum called back, and to whom Piniés explained Issraelyan’s visit. The Ministries of Defense and State in Washington knew nothing about Operation Danube. After another few minutes, Buffum told Piniés that the USSR ambassador to the US, Anatoli Dobrynin, was on his way to the White House with an urgent message for President Lyndon B. Johnson.
In his memoirs, quoted Piniés, Dobrynin says that he was surprised that Johnson did not react to the news he had brought him. He already knew it thanks to the promptness of the Spanish.