The CNI insists that the Kremlin attacks, which reached their peak during the ‘procés’, continue to be one of the “main threats” to “national security”
Spain could not, even if it wanted to, be neutral in the crisis between Russia and Ukraine. According to reports from the National Intelligence Center (CNI), the continuous “destabilization” maneuvers promoted by the Kremlin since 2014, and which reached their peak during the ‘procés’, have not only not ceased after the crisis in Catalonia during 2017 , but remain one of the “main threats” to the country’s interests.
The most recent reports sent to the Presidency of the Government for the preparation of the National Security Strategy approved by the Executive of Pedro Sánchez on December 28 continue to focus on Moscow when they literally warn of the “potential danger” of “foreign actors” of a “state” nature and its “disinformation strategies” that “develop propaganda devices with the intention of polarizing society and undermining its confidence in institutions.”
The National Security documents from the end of 2021 also insist on the “significant threat” that “classic intelligence activities” of “hostile intelligence services” continue to pose to Spain, but also “cyber espionage”, one of the specialties strongly promoted by the Government of Vladimir Putin in Spain since at least 2014.
“Traditional aggressiveness”
It was in May 2015 that the Department of Homeland Security intentionally and openly made its resentment with Russia public for the first time in unclassified documents. “The traditional aggressiveness of some of the intelligence services, whose activity in Spain is confirmed, has increased throughout 2014 as a result of the appearance or continuity of certain international crises and armed conflicts with a direct impact on their corresponding countries” , pointed out the Spanish counterespionage in those days when, as now, Russia was in full escalation with Ukraine.
In the autumn of 2017, the Government of Mariano Rajoy went so far as to make the interference of foreign services public in a veiled manner, in clear reference to the activities in Spain of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, of its propaganda agencies camouflaged from the media and their paid cyberactivists. Russia Today« (RT), the English-language news program financed exclusively by the Putin government, and the information agency »Sputnik», also 100% dependent on financing from Moscow, focused on the Catalan crisis.
Between August and early October there were 42 reports on the subject. The police charges of 1-O were the preferential object of treatment, but directly false news flooded their news later, forcing headlines based on supposed analysts. “Tanks in the streets of Barcelona: Spain and Catalonia on the verge of a final outcome” (October 28); “Why doesn’t NATO bomb Madrid?” (October 5th); «The new map of Europe: Who supports the independence of Catalonia? (October 11)», «A very authoritarian and anti-democratic country: criticism of Spain for the Catalan crisis intensifies» (November 9); These are some of the reports transmitted in the last month by Russia Today, determined to compare the situation in Catalonia with that of Kosovo or Crimea.
Agent in Catalonia
Two years after the Catalan crisis, in November 2019, relations became tense again after it became known that the General Information Commissioner (CGI) of the National Police was investigating the presence in Catalonia of members of the Directorate of Main Intelligence ( GU or GRU), the Russian military espionage services during the process. The suspicions of the Spanish agents focused on the presence in Catalonia of agents of one of the elite groups of espionage of the Kremlin, the so-called Unit 29155, whose name already appears linked to alleged destabilization maneuvers in various countries of the European Union. One of these agents of this Russian elite unit who would have worked in Spain during the ‘procés’ is Denís Serguéyev, alias Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov, who spent six days in Catalonia between November 5 and 11, 2016 and then ten days between on September 29 and October 9, 2017, at the height of the separatist attempt.
In October 2020, the Civil Guard concluded that some of the businessmen and former politicians arrested in the operation against the CDR were behind an alleged plan according to which Russia promised Carles Puigdemont 10,000 soldiers and paid all the debt of the Catalan community. if it declared independence in 2017 in order to create a kind of new Switzerland.
In 2017, the year of the “procés”, the counterintelligence services recorded 107 “hybrid operations” (physical or cyberattacks) by spies from non-allied states. Or, what is the same, almost all of the different Russian agencies. In 2018, once the “procés” was over, there were 100 operations, a number higher than the 95 in 2016 or the 96 espionage operations detected by the CNI in 2015.
“Adversaries”
And the situation has not improved. In recent months, the CNI has been unreservedly warning that “disinformation campaigns” and “manipulation” of “public opinion” by hostile countries persist in clear reference to Russia. One of the latest reports from the National Cryptologic Center (CCN), the technological heart of the secret services, has revealed that “those responsible for these attacks are usually governments and subnational groups that aim to erode and weaken the internal cohesion of a State or a group of states considered as adversaries and, in this way, redefine their geostrategic position».
Spanish espionage has definitely decided not to hide its suspicions. “Some countries already openly acknowledge that they are carrying out and undertaking this type of action in a systematic way.” And it is precisely Russia that is the country that has most developed the concept of “hybrid warfare” or, in the words of Russian military doctrine, “undeclared wars” or “non-linear wars”.
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