Last Wednesday, the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, presided over the tribute to the eight secret agents who, two decades ago, were gunned down in Iraq at the headquarters of the National Intelligence Center (CNI). The event was held behind closed doors, so that the cameras could not capture the faces of the Spanish spies and the victims’ relatives, marked by emotion.
On November 29, 2003, eight months after the United States invaded the country claiming non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Alberto Martínez, José Merino, José Lucas, Ignacio Zanón, Alfonso Vega, Carlos Baró and José Carlos Rodríguez fell into an ambush of the Iraqi insurgency in Latifiya, 30 kilometers south of Baghdad. Although they fought to the last bullet, their pistols were powerless against the longer-range Kalashnikovs of their attackers. José Manuel Sánchez, who escaped in search of help, was the only survivor.
A month and a half earlier, on October 9, another member of the CNI, José Antonio Bernal, had been murdered at the door of his house in Baghdad. The death of these eight agents constitutes the greatest tragedy in the history of the Spanish secret service, a page written with the heroism of its protagonists, but also with the accumulation of errors and betrayals that led to the fateful outcome.
In July 2007, more than three and a half years after the crime, the then director of the CNI, Alberto Saiz, commissioned “to review the center’s performance.” [de inteligencia] in Iraq” and “promote the investigation” of the murders of its agents. The result of that work was captured in a secret document, dated November of that year, to which the media had access for the first time. This is a critical judgment on the actions of the CNI in the months after the invasion of Iraq and an assessment of the investigations carried out until then into who was responsible for the attacks.
The conclusions of the document contain harsh self-criticism. “At the beginning of 2003, the organization of the center was in a phase of specifying tasks and delimiting responsibilities, which generated differences in criteria and dysfunctions,” he begins by admitting, and then specifies: “The organic structure of the center and the absence of a specific working group for Iraq caused overlaps and gaps.” That is, when the invasion concluded and Washington proclaimed military victory, the CNI dissolved its crisis cell and the agents on the ground were left under the normal functioning of the secret service, “without considering monitoring as the situation worsened.” exceptional […]Coordination between agencies and their execution capacity were considered sufficient[…]but it was not like that”.
As a consequence, he explains, “the case officer [responsable directo] “he carried out his tasks with a significant degree of ignorance of what was being developed and decided at other levels of command”; “the center always acted following the execution conditions set by the Defense General Staff, which changed these conditions on occasion, so it had to adapt on the fly”; while “the urgency of the implementation of the teams in the area meant that mission planning was not carried out in accordance with the challenges that were assumed.” These failures—lack of coordination, lack of planning, haste—prevented correctly interpreting the signs that warned of an accelerated deterioration in security and taking appropriate measures quickly, the report laments.
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The presence of Spanish spies in Baghdad dated back to January 1993, when the Spanish Embassy was closed and they were accredited directly to their Saddam Hussein counterparts. The relationship was so close that in October 2002 a high-level delegation from Iraqi intelligence visited the secret service headquarters in Madrid, which led to a complaint from the CIA. When the representative of the Iraqi secret service in Madrid was expelled, along with the rest of the diplomatic staff, he was sent away with a gift.
For their part, the two CNI representatives in Baghdad, who remained in Spain during the invasion, returned to Iraq in May, thinking that the danger had passed. Alberto Martínez and José Antonio Bernal occupied the same homes. Its drivers, guards and service personnel were the same ones that Iraqi intelligence had controlled for a long time.
“The permanence of V16 [equipo del CNI en la capital iraquí], with the same components, is considered one of the determining factors of the events that occurred later. So it was not considered a risk factor. [Sin embargo,] It is evident that the Iraqi intelligence services had positioned themselves against the international coalition and could believe that the CNI had betrayed their trust by Spain forming part of the coalition. Consequently, it was logical to think that CNI members would become targets,” the report states.
The Spanish spies “were fully identified as members of the CNI by their former interlocutors in the Iraqi service,” he insists, and the alarms must have gone off when, in August 2003, a chain of attacks occurred in Baghdad that seemed to have “support from the Saddam’s former intelligence services.
The CNI deployed agents with the Spanish troops deployed in Iraq, first in Diwaniya (July) and then in Najaf (August). Veteran Alberto Martínez was in charge of this second team, since he “was the only person capable of responding to such an urgent deployment.” This was, according to the report, a “critical” error, since Alberto maintained contact with Iraqi sources from his previous stage, “which allowed these services at all times to [secretos de Saddam] have it located [a él] and the rest of the CNI staff.” Furthermore, his “personal and professional situation was very deteriorated” after three years in Baghdad, he adds. “All of the above, which was known at the center, should have led to his immediate relief.” But it was only decided to bring forward his replacement, which never took place.
The murder of José Antonio Bernal was the last warning. On October 9, when the night watchman had left and his replacement had not arrived, three people knocked on his door. A man dressed as a clergyman, whom the agent must have known, entered inside. When he realized that they were trying to kidnap him, Bernal started to run, but fell to the ground 50 meters from his house and was shot in the head. The investigators ruled out that the murder responded to personal motivations or was the work of common criminals and came to the conclusion that it was “a terrorist attack, with it being more likely that its authorship came from former members of the Iraqi intelligence service.”
The commission that investigated the crime in the following weeks warned that “there was a concrete and real threat and that an attack against members of the center or Spanish interests could be repeated at any time” and made several recommendations. On November 26, three days before the ambush, some were accepted, such as the provision of armored cars for the CNI agents in Iraq (they never arrived, since the delivery time exceeded three months) or the improvement of the security equipment. communications. However, the 2007 report regrets, “no forceful measures were adopted such as the repatriation of personnel known to the” Iraqi secret services.
The translator arrested
Regarding the ambush that killed seven of its agents, the CNI investigation concluded that it was “prepared in advance, with precise information about the time and clear identification of the target.” The attackers, the report maintains, were “former agents of the Iraqi intelligence service,” who had “an agent who spoke Spanish, whom they had approached the Spanish to become their source.” He supposedly informed them of the route that the vehicles attacked in Lafitiya would follow.
The CNI suspected that the snitch was Flayeh Al Mayali, a Spanish professor at the University of Baghdad and translator of Alberto Martínez, who supposedly spoke with him the same morning he died. On March 22, 2004, when he went to the Spanish troops base in Diwaniya, he was detained. During the interrogations, he admitted, according to the CNI report, that he had worked for the Iraqi intelligence service, under threat of death, before the invasion; but he denied any involvement in the attack against Alberto Martínez and his companions. After three days of preventive arrest, he was handed over to American troops, who locked him up in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. But Washington was not interested in clarifying the death of the Spanish spies, but rather in defeating the Iraqi insurgency. Flayeh was released in February 2005 without ever being put on trial and claimed to have suffered mistreatment at the Spanish base, which the report denies. He was banned from entering European territory for ten years.
Beyond the alleged denunciation, the internal investigation concluded that “the events that occurred in Iraq were the result of a collective failure by the center. […] “Neither the structure nor the people who held positions of responsibility at different levels had the capacity to prevent, detect and neutralize the risk assumed by the agents carrying out their mission in Iraq as the situation in the area changed.” He did not propose to clarify responsibilities, but to take measures so that it would not happen again.
They resisted until the last cartridge
11/29/2003. 3:20 p.m. local time. The eight CNI agents return to Diwaniya from Baghdad in a Nissan Patrol and a Chevrolet. Near Latifiya, a white sedan comes at full speed from behind, shooting out the side windows with two AK-47 rifles. The shots kill Martínez, the driver of the Nissan, and wound Lucas, sitting in the back seat. The Nissan is left behind and the sedan overtakes on the left and shoots at the Chevrolet. He kills Vega and wounds Rodríguez in the head. The Chevrolet falls down an embankment and becomes trapped in the mud. Baró called Baghdad and the Spanish base on his Thuraya, without being able to get through. He speaks with the CNI officer in Madrid and asks for urgent helicopter support. When he goes to transmit his coordinates, they start shooting at them from some nearby houses and the communication is cut off. With the tires burst, Merino and Zanón approach in the Nissan and the sedan flees. They go down the embankment and join Baró, who asks Sánchez to pass him the chargers and leave in search of help. Baró puts himself on the ground and begins to fire shot after shot with his pistol at the assailants, but they are too far away and it cannot reach them. Merino and Zanón join Baró and also open fire. As he walks away, Sánchez listens to the first one. “They hit me in the arm!” Finally, he reaches the road, where a crowd cheers the attackers. The crowd surrounds him and tries to put him in a trunk, but then a religious man takes him by the arm and gives him a kiss. People change their attitude and let him go. When Sánchez finally returns, accompanied by US soldiers, “the bodies of the CNI members show numerous bullet holes, proof of the cruelty of the attackers and the resistance of the Spanish agents,” the report says.
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