Villarejo in his final argument: «They applied the ‘red code’ to me; they were obsessed with my audios»

José Manuel Villarejo has closed his final defense argument on Tuesday in the first trial of the so-called ‘Tandem operation’, the macro-cause that is being followed in the National Court where the commissioner’s private businesses and parapolice support for his activities are investigated.

In his double capacity as accused – he faces a request from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor for 83 years in prison – and as a lawyer, Villarejo has focused his presentation on defending his role as an infiltrated agent serving the State. He has justified his business network to cover this task and has again pointed to the “arsonist, the crazy agitator” who decided to cut off his head for his allegations of corruption in the CNI: the former director of the intelligence center Félix Sanz Roldán.

Villarejo has recounted profusely the “funny origin” of a legal case that the Army general fabricated – today employed at Iberdrola as an international adviser to President Ignacio Sánchez Galán – to “silence him”. He did it, he said, with the alleged help of “conspiring” police and prosecutors, as a “revenge” for the complaints he had made about the “use and abuse of state institutions”, such as the Royal House with the matter of Corinna Larsen or the distraction of reserved funds in the payment of kidnappings of Spanish citizens by jihadist groups.

Villarejo, dressed in a toga and patch due to his eye disease, took the floor at Tuesday’s session to finish the report started the day before by his defense attorney, Antonio José García Cabrera, to reinforce the thesis that has dominated his strategy of defense throughout the almost 12 months that this oral hearing already adds up for three specific orders from VIP clients: the so-called ‘Iron’, ‘Land’ and ‘Pintor’ projects, which add up to 27 defendants.

“Eliminate one of their own”

“The Villarejo case is a red code,” the defendant began, referring to the movie “Some Good Men,” starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise, where “it was ordered to eliminate” one of them and, although “everyone denied it” because applying it was “illegal”, the plan was discovered in court. “There can be no more coincidences (…) Following the orders of the head of the CNI, they applied that ‘red code’ to one of their own because they believed that with their behavior they endangered the pacts and compromises with which the balance of State institutions”, Villarejo told the court chaired by Ángela Murillo.

Thus, he explained that the alleged hatred of “the general” towards him is due to the multiple complaints that he has been making against the CNI, the Internal Affairs Unit of the Police, anti-corruption prosecutors and others since the 1990s and until 2015. so many powerful” to warn about “the outrage” of “those who have allowed the use and abuse of state institutions.” For all these reasons, he himself has been described as “a daredevil”.

Apart from personal rivalries, the now-retired commissioner has pointed out that Sanz Roldán had another objective in mind: the “loot” of his “personal archive” of audios, those of the conversations that he has been recording for years of all those with whom that has met. “What mattered to him, what obsessed him, what worried him were the audios,” he stressed. What could come out of it?

In this “montage”, Villarejo has also included the rest of the state actors as “conspirators”, insisting in this sense that the “hoax” of the anonymous complaint from which the case started was never such because all of them would have known from the start principle that the person who sent it was a “CNI agent” named David Vidal.

The “special status”

Another central issue in Villarejo’s defense is to show that he worked as a police spy and collaborator with the CNI to justify his private activities. He recalled that since 1995 he had enjoyed a “special status” by which he could “act without anyone in his own body knowing” to obtain information of interest to the State using his Cenyt network as a cover. At this point, he has stated that all governments since then “employed his services for years and ordered him to act in numerous operations.” «Shall we open that melon?», He has challenged him.

Subsequently, he has gone into an extensive review of his professional sheet with which he has highlighted his intervention to prevent attacks, trips to the Middle East and in matters such as 11-M, 11-S or the GAL, as well as his alleged intermediation with the ex-lover of the King Emeritus Corinna Larsen.

Likewise, he wanted to draw attention to what he considers to be an obvious “political use” of his cause. In this sense, he has asked what will happen “when the PP governs” and the tables turn: “Will the PSOE commissions appear?” In this context, he has indicated that, despite the fact that prosecutors Miguel Serrano and César de Rivas have painted him as “an abominable subject and greedy for money” that Cenyt has used to line his pockets with private investigations using the police means to its scope, “everything is a lie.”

However, he has not hesitated to classify this cause as “general and prospective” because he has investigated “all his life, for more than 30 years, to see what can be found” under the alleged excuse of “causal findings” . A “deep brokenness” after which he says that “it will be difficult to restore a personal and professional reputation, which was irreproachable until Sanz Roldán decided to apply the ‘red code’.”