The president hands over Esteban’s head to try to placate ERC after making public the examination of all mobile phones of the Council of Ministers that proves a cybersecurity failure to contain the attack by an “external agent”
Events rush by. Pedro Sánchez has decided today to dismiss, according to government sources, the director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, to try to redirect the crisis unleashed with his partners as a result of the publication in ‘The New Yorker’ of a report by the group of experts from the University of Toronto Citizen Lab that confirmed the infection with the Pegasus ‘malware’, used by half the world’s secret services, of more than sixty phones belonging to politicians, activists, lawyers and pro-independence journalists.
Despite the fact that yesterday the spokesman for the PSOE, Felipe Sicilia, stated that there was “not a single reason for the director of the CNI to be in her position”, the Government had been encouraging the idea for days that it was willing to use the head of the spies as a scapegoat, once the internal investigation work launched was concluded and made public. His intention has always been, in fact, to try to encapsulate the assumption of responsibilities within the scope of the Spanish intelligence services.
This Tuesday, the Executive already put on the table the examination of the devices of all the members of the Council of Ministers ordered to the National Cryptologic Center, dependent on the CNI, shortly after the controversy broke out; the same one that allowed detecting the contamination, in May and June 2021, of the phones of the President of the Government himself and of the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, already brought to the attention of Justice, as announced by the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños , two weeks ago. That analysis concluded that the breach also allowed an unidentified “external agent” to access, among others, the telephone number of the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska.
Sánchez transmitted this Monday to the executive of his party that, with all the data on the table, “justified decisions” would be made, but he did not clarify which ones. The socialist spokesman later influenced the idea in public. “The CNI has to continue investigating what could have happened and we will have to see what conclusions are drawn from the internal control it is carrying out and from the work to improve cybersecurity in our country,” he said.
Judicial authorization
It remains to be seen whether the head of Esteban – who last Thursday accredited before the official secrets commission of Congress the espionage of 18 independentistas, among them that of the current president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, with judicial authorization – is enough to satisfy to CKD. Just yesterday, after his executive, the Republicans demanded “at least” the dismissal of Robles both for having allowed espionage, they alleged, and for the response he offered in the control session in parliament in which, in his opinion, ” justified» spying on secessionism. The leader of the formation, Oriol Junqueras, today lowered the tone a lot, however, in an interview in ‘El País’ in which he affirms “It is not my will to establish a specific person in charge”.
Sánchez’s intention, according to government sources, is to contact Aragonès to convey his decision. It is pending that both set the date of the meeting that the head of the Catalan government has been demanding since the crisis began and that the president promised to hold last week, when they met at the last meeting of the Cercle d’Economy. In addition, the Executive is considering declassifying the judicial authorizations that Esteban presented in Congress, as the Republican leader also claimed.
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