Paz Esteban, the first woman appointed as head of the Spanish secret services, admitted last week that the phones of Catalan independentists had been spied on by her services. The matter comes at a time when the Spanish government confirmed earlier this month that the official telephone number of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, had also been hacked, through the same espionage software.
The decision seems to have been made a few days ago. After the scandal caused by the revelation of the illegal wiretapping of the telephones of numerous Catalan independentists, the country’s Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, announced on Tuesday, May 10, the dismissal of the director of the Spanish intelligence services, Paz Esteban. The Secretary of State for Defense, Esperanza Casteleiro, will replace her in the post.
Esteban was the first woman appointed in 2020 to lead the Spanish National Intelligence Center (CNI).
On Thursday, May 5, he admitted that 18 Catalan independentistas had been spied on by his services, but “always with the green light of justice”, and therefore “legally”, as he defended.
Last week, the head of the intelligence services was questioned for almost four hours by the parliamentary committee on official secrets, which met behind closed doors.
According to Spanish media, the parliamentarians were able to consult the orders issued by a judge that authorized the surveillance of some of the independence activists. However, government sources, quoted by the media, assure that the Spanish Executive had not been informed.
The matter erupted last month after the publication of a lengthy investigation by the Canadian organization, Citizen Lab, specializing in espionage programs.
Citizen Lab claimed to have identified more than 60 people from the Catalan separatist movement – much more than the 18 mentioned by the intelligence chief – whose cell phones would have been hacked between 2017 and 2020 by the Pegasus software.
According to Esteban, the other 40 independence supporters could have been targeted by “a foreign government” or by Spanish security agencies “that exceeded legal limits.”
As a consequence of the scandal: a serious crisis between the Government and the Catalan separatists
The scandal has triggered a crisis between the government of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the Catalan separatists, who threatened to withdraw their support for him in Parliament.
The current Catalan regional president, Pere Aragonès, who is among those spied on, called last week for the resignation of the head of the intelligence services and demanded the immediate declassification of the documents that allowed the events.
The decision to dismiss Paz Esteban was taken relatively quickly by the Spanish government, which shows Sánchez’s willingness to close one of the most serious crises in the legislature as soon as possible.
The operation of mass espionage against the Catalan independence movement is an unjustifiable shame. An attack on fundamental rights and democracy extremely gray. An example of the repression against a peaceful and civic movement. We will arrive fins on calgui.
– Pere Aragonès i Garcia 🎗 (@perearagones) April 18, 2022
The pro-independence deputies also announced legal actions and showed their anger when they voted against the government’s economic aid plan, to deal with the inflation caused by the war in Ukraine. The text was narrowly approved thanks to the votes of leftist Basque independence supporters.
The Spanish right wing criticized the dismissal of the intelligence chief as a cession before the Catalan separatists.
One crisis added to another
But the events took on an even more serious dimension when the government announced in early May that Sánchez and his defense minister, Robles, had also been spied on a year ago with the same software, as well as the interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska. .
The Spanish government refused to precisely attribute the computer attacks and assured that they were “illicit and external” attacks, ruling out that they were committed by the Spanish intelligence services.
Madrid did not specify which intelligence service or country could be behind the attacks, but Moroccan intelligence is the main suspect in these high-level hacks; which also occurred at the time of the violent diplomatic crisis between Madrid and Rabat, on the issue of migrants.
On May 20, 2021, Rabat had relaxed its border controls with the Ceuta enclave, allowing more than 8,000 migrants to reach Spanish territory. Robles had described this influx as “an aggression against the Spanish borders, but also those of the European Union” and denounced the “blackmail” of Morocco, which he accused of “using minors”.
“Project Pegasus” investigations showed, in the summer of 2021, that Morocco had used Pegasus to attack lawyers, journalists or human rights activists in multiple countries, including Spain and France. Rabat, for its part, rejected these accusations.
Developed by the Israeli company, NSO Group, Pegasus is a very powerful and particularly intrusive piece of software. Once installed on a phone, it can collect all data stored on it, including messages exchanged through supposedly secure apps like WhatsApp or Signal.
According to Spanish authorities, around 2.7 gigabytes of data were extracted from Sánchez’s phone after it was hacked, and 9 megabytes from the phone of Defense Minister Robles.
These were their official phones, provided by the State, and not their private phones.
The government still does not know “the nature of the stolen information and its degree of sensitivity”, but the hacking of Sánchez’s phone is the first confirmed attack on an acting head of government.
It is worth mentioning that after this scandal, the effectiveness of the CNI is in all the conversations due to the security hole that allowed the Prime Minister’s phone to be spied on, but also because that happened months ago without the secret services noticing. And it is that, if it were not for the Citizen Lab investigation, the attack against Sánchez’s mobile would not have been analyzed.
AFP and local media
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