The Spanish prime minister will have to do much more than announce that his cellphone, as well, has been infected with Pegasus, if he wants the version that he also has been spied on to be credible. Until that happens, the plot twist proposed by Pedro Sánchez has enough holes in it to make one suspect that the Spanish government's new explanation attempting to bury the Catalangate affair, putting himself at the forefront of the protest since he too has been spied on, may be a smokescreen. The sudden turn of the Spanish government, which has gone from brushing off the espionage against pro-independence figures, questioning the Citizen Lab research centre at the University of Toronto that did the work, discrediting The New Yorker magazine, and even justifying in parliament that, well, something had to be done to stop the Catalan independence movement, had a new and surprising chapter this Monday with the hurried summoning of journalists to the Moncloa palace to announce that an official report delivered to the government just hours before by the National Cryptology Centre had confirmed that Sánchez had been robbed of 2.6 gigabytes of information in a first attack and 120 megabytes in a second. Also, the minister of defence, Margarita Robles, had allegedly had 9 megas of data taken.
The hasty explanation of the Spanish government has at least three major gaps. The first, which verges on incompetence: is it credible that with the threats of espionage against Macron and Merkel, they have not until now checked if their phones had been infected with Pegasus, and they receive a report this weekend of an alleged espionage carried out a year ago? That is, first the CNI spy agency fails to find the ballot boxes for the 1st October independence referendum and now it leaves the prime minister's phone unprotected at a time when all leaders were carrying out checks. Would it not rather be, that, if we are to even believe this version, that the espionage was discovered in its day and has now been brought to light in the face of the international dimension of Catalangate and the political scandal that has grown around the largest case of espionage in Europe? It is time, in any case, to accept the incompetence and create a new intelligence service, as happened with the Cesid in 2002.
The second hole in the story has to do with the opacity of the CNI itself conducting the research through the Cryptology Centre. The information provided by an international and independent laboratory such as Citizen Lab is not the same as an internal task entrusted to subordinates. Pedro Sánchez and Margarita Robles have it very easy if they want to convince everyone of the latest version: an independent verification, outside the government, by a laboratory with international prestige. In the meantime, it is better to leave it in doubt than to perform an act of faith with a prime minister in whose hands the facts and the truth bear so little resemblance to each other. The third aspect has to do with the trail that the Spanish executive is beginning to leave pointing to Morocco as a possible country behind espionage. One could not be so incompetent as to give away the Sahara, abandoning its people to the fate that the Moroccans might want for them in order to ingratiate oneself with Mohammed VI and without having obtained anything in return - nothing publicly known, I mean - thus also opening a crisis with Algeria at a very critical moment for the question of gas, and then raise the bar of recklessness still higher by pointing a finger at the North African kingdom.
This, without even mentioning cases of collateral damage such as throwing its Unidas Podemos partners to the dogs, left without any information over a matter of extraordinary seriousness, including the ministers from this party, having to find out everything live, the same as journalists or the general public: a poor model of what a coalition government should be, of minimal loyalty. On the other hand, the sympathetic media that had bought the government version, some belittling the espionage and others justifying it, are now left with egg on their faces in either case, and as of today have to back a new version already in judicial process and on the way to the National Audience. It should be worth it as a lesson that the Spanish government has cared very little about their press credibility.
It will be necessary, as some of us have been arguing from the beginning, to open an independent commission of inquiry in Congress in order to illuminate the twilight in which the Spanish government has placed us. The official secrets committee is already a joke in bad taste after the confession of Sánchez. Obviously, European intervention will be needed in one way or another. As has been argued in the European courts - which is where the case of the preliminary questions of Llarena over the European Arrest Warrants is located, along with the immunity as MEPs of Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí - there is a systemic problem in Spain.
In Spain, the so-called sewers of the state continue to function. And in the places that the CNI cannot reach, they do; and they do not go there for free, but rather, are at the service of a greater cause, which can be identified as the deep state. And that's the point where we are at, with it all starting to bubble to the surface, all the excrement of illegal espionage against a national minority that put an entire state in check. Something that started with Mariano Rajoy and has continued with Pedro Sánchez and of which we only see the tip of the iceberg today. As the late Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba said, the state will pay whatever political cost is required to stop the Catalan independence movement. It is already paying for it. To the point that the government has been caught in its own trap.