The appearance of the director of Spain's National Intelligence Centre (CNI), Esperanza Casteleiro, in what is known as the Pegasus committee at the European Parliament this Tuesday, was a thumbing of the nose at the MEPs present and, by extension, at the general public too. Her recurring answers that the information is already provided to Spanish parliamentarians in the so-called Official Secrets committee of Spain's Congress and that they have the obligation to keep silent about what they are told there, leaves in absolute limbo not only the question of what the CNI might offer or know about the espionage carried out with Pegasus software on the Catalan pro-independence leaders, but also what kind of actions the official espionage services themselves have taken in the cases for which they received authorization from the Supreme Court.
The fog generated by the Spanish government to cover the dubious path it has passed along over Catalangate, the most serious known case of espionage under democracy in any European country, does nothing else but suggest the implication of the Socialists. Since the Spanish executive sacked Paz Esteban last May from the position of director general of the CNI, as a necessary sacrifice so that the can of worms opened did not soil the defence minister, Margarita Robles, and would help to calm the international rumblings, there have been absolutely no movements or developments to suggest that the Pedro Sánchez executive has any kind of interest in knowing any more than what has been revealed by Citizen Lab, the research centre at the University of Toronto that over several months investigated the hacking of different mobile phones. Among those it was able to certify were the telephones of the last four Catalan presidents - Pere Aragonès, Quim Torra, Carles Puigdemont (they couldn't get access) and Artur Mas - along with several dozen politicians, lawyers, journalists and even lawyers.
Despite the passage of time, legal complaints and political pressure, nothing has been found. Even Amnesty International has asked the European Union to adopt measures after it was confirmed that several dozen Catalan independence leaders were spied on, all without any result. The fact that it became known, after the publication of the Citizen Lab report, that Pedro Sánchez and his minister Robles had also been spied on with Pegasus, as they themselves denounced, might have been expected to raise hopes of finding out what happened, but it has only done the opposite. In the spying on Sánchez and Robles, there has been, at some point, the participation of the Moroccan spy services and the possibility that they have some kind of valuable information, which the Spanish executive has always denied.
At the point reached now, it matters little to the Spanish government that the appearance of the CNI director caused outrage in the European Parliament. Nor that an official mission by the Europpean Parliament to Spain over its use of Pegasus software has been vetoed. At the point reached now, in this, as in other cases related to Catalan independence, Spain has already discounted much of its international prestige by prioritizing territorial unity above everything else. In her video conference before the EU chamber, Esperanza Casteleiro, whom, by the way, the committee chair had to call to attention over her digressions, not only did not offer the slightest explanation, but did not even try. Before such an enormous silence, in case they still had any doubts, MEPs could only reach one conclusion: that the only interest of the Spanish state is and has been to hide from the European institutions the abuse that it has carried out in reagrd to Pegasus, espionage and the persecution of the Catalan independence movement.