CARETAKER AFTER FRANCO

INTIMATES of Spain's new Vice Premier often call him Facha --a Castilian expression implying "What a sight!" Though he is a dandy in his uniform, Agustin Munoz Grandes has never liked the pomp of his office as chief of Spain's General Staff, and has remained a relatively modest man. He regularly attends soccer games in Madrid dressed in sports clothes more suitable to a workman; he and his wife live in a small, unpretentious apartment, and he rolls his own small black cigarettes. Unlike other Cabinet ministers who tool around Madrid in chauffeur-driven Cadillacs and Mercedeses, Munoz Grandes favors a small black sedan. Once he drove along Madrid's streets stopping chauffeured military cars whose only passengers were army wives, politely asked them to get out and take taxis, and told the drivers to go back to the motor pool.

A small, greying, no-nonsense soldier, Munoz Grandes was born in Madrid in 1896, received his early military education at the military academy at Toledo, from which he graduated in 1915. For nearly 20 years, he served in Spanish Morocco, where he won a reputation as a fair, able officer. In 1925, while leading one of the Spanish army's Moorish battalions against the Berber uprising in Morocco, he suffered serious chest wounds. One of the leading planners for this campaign was Munoz Grandes' close associate,Colonel Francisco Franco.

The relationship begun in those broiling hot Moroccan military posts was tempered and strengthened through the Spanish Civil War. At its outbreak, Munoz Grandes was arrested by the Republicans and sentenced to death, but was released in a routine exchange of prisoners. He quickly joined Franco, was soon commanding a corps on the Pyrenees front. At the end of the war, Munoz Grandes, at Franco's behest, became secretary-general of the Fascist Falange, specifically to integrate the freewheeling Falangist militia into the Spanish army.

During World War 11, Munoz Grandes was the first commander of Spain's "Blue Division," which Franco sent to fight alongside the Germans on the Russian front; for bravery in action, Adolf Hitler personally awarded him the Iron Cross. After returning to Madrid, Munoz Grandes served in several army posts, played an important part in negotiating Spain's 1953 agreement to permit U.S. air bases on Spanish soil. In 1957 Franco promoted him to the rank of captain general (the Spanish equivalent of field marshal), the next year named him chief of the General Staff.

Munoz Grandes is one of the few Spaniards with enough authority to hold the country together, for a while, after the end of the Franco regime. Without question, he is a down-the-line Franco supporter. Recently, when the strikes in the Asturias coalfields were at their height, he was prevailed upon against his will to meet with a delegation of Italian journalists. The interview lasted a brief two sentences. "No, gentlemen, the Franco government is not going to fall," he said. "Good afternoon."

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