Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has been unable to put out the fire of the CatalanGate scandal after conflicting information was published today in Spanish newspapers about the mass espionage against Catalan pro-independence politicians, activists and lawyers. On the one hand, Spain's National Intelligence Centre (CNI) has admitted that it used the Israeli program Pegasus, created by the company NSO, to spy on Catalan politicians between 2017 to 2020, and, especially, to arrest exiled Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, according to the newspaper El País. In the report, sources from the CNI spy agency, which is forbidden to make its actions public, denied the mass surveillance of Catalan pro-independence activists and their contacts and assured that everything that was done had judicial authorization. On the other hand, another Madrid-based media outlet - this one anti-PSOE - El Español, claimed that Supreme Court judges denied authorizing a mass espionage in Catalonia such as that documented by the Citizen Lab research centre. Finally, El Periódico asserts that a spying system similar to Pegasus was purchased in 2014 by Spain's so-called patriotic police under the PP government, the unit involving former police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, and that the use of this system has continued until the present. Arguments, all of them, without evidence - and they have not served to stop the spread of the blaze.
Nor did defence minister Margarita Robles achieve any results with the strategy she employed in her appearance in the Spanish Senate this Tuesday afternoon: taking a defiant tone, questioning the investigation of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab research group, and threatening Catalan pro-independence parties and supporters that "false police complaints are a crime." And meanwhile, prime minister Sánchez remains silent. In her speech, minister Robles accused independentist politicians of using this case of espionage in a "remote-controlled" way and invited them to take their claims to court, as “the judge is the only one who can determine what a crime is”. In fact, the complaint made by two leading ERC politicians, Roger Torrent and Ernest Maragall, two years ago in Barcelona - the first of the Catalan cases of hacking by Pegasus to come to light - is the first to be lodged in court and now most of those spied on are expected to follow suit - furthermore, they also have the evidence of the Canadian investigation and The New Yorker's extensive article (also denigrated by Robles today, who said "I don't know who this media is").
At the same time, the Catalan government has increased the strength of its demands for Sánchez to give explanations and clarify with convincing evidence that the CNI is not behind this indiscriminate pursuit of political opponents, and if it has been carried out with judicial authorization, for that to be shown. A new initiative is that the Catalan Parliament will itself lead the complaint that will be presented by the Catalan deputies affected by Pegasus. Initially, a complaint will be lodged with the court of first instance, which will probably mean the same Barcelona investigative court which since September 2020 has a case open due to the complaints by Torrent and Maragall. There are jurists who argue that the complaints of all those affected throughout Spain should be brought together in the Barcelona court which is already investigating the case. That investigation, however, has up till now produced few results, as the judicial request to obtain information from the Israeli company NSO, sent in October 2020, is still awaiting a response.
Volhov case
And in the face of the criticism from Robles, those affected can hold up the evidence of the so-called Volhov case against the pro-independence politicians, in which two of those investigated, former Convergència leader David Madí and former ERC minister Xavier Vendrell, were spied on not only by the Civil Guard with judicial permission, but also through Pegasus, without yet having found out who gave the order for this. There is also evidence of WhatsApp messages extracted from phones of those investigated in this case, authorised by the judge of Barcelona investigative court number 1, which have been found to have contained malicious viruses in 2020, and have been warned to have the devices tested by Citizen Lab. This is not old or repeat news, as Robles has hinted.
Who was spied on?
Thus, in an attempt to create a firewall against the propagation of CatalanGate, in an exceptional move today, it was published that the CNI has admitted that it used the Israeli espionage program Pegasus, which can only be acquired by governments, to spy on people in the Catalan pro-independence environment. However, the sources emphasized that this was always done on the basis of individual cases and with judicial authorization, according to El País. The Spanish intelligence service did not reveal to the newspaper who they spied on or when. The only detail given was that they hacked the mobile phone of one of Carles Puigdemont's companions in order to be able to arrest him in Germany to return him to Spain, without success. In addition, they question Citizen Lab's investigation that uncovered the alleged espionage of at least 65 pro-independence activists with Pegasus. They claim that many of those on the list were never spied on by the Spanish intelligence agency. Once again, though, no evidence is provided.
The information from El Español also seeks to be convincing and affirms that it comes from several judges of the Supreme Court who were in charge of the requests from the intelligence service to intervene communications or enter homes. "The CNI has never asked us for permission to intercept the communications of more than three or four people in the same request. There has never been a massive request," said one of the so-called CNI judges who has worked in this function for many years. Moreover, the judge contacted by the digital daily adds: "If we had received this request, we would not have authorized it."
There is massive spying in Spain
And there are still more contradictions. Massive and speculative investigation, and investigation against political dissent, do take place in Spain. Obvious proof of this is the investigation that has been open since 2017 conducted by judge Manuel Garcia Castellón, head of the central investigative court number 6 of the National Audience and a member of the conservative judicial body Asociación Profesional de la Magistratura. According to police sources, Garcia Castellón maintains an investigation against a large number of Catalan independence activists, and probably with telephone intervention involved (using the SITEL program) because it continues to be confidential, relating to what is described as the Catalan independence challenge and the great mobilizations of the Democratic Tsunami, especially those of El Prat airport and La Jonquera, in October 2019 against the Supreme Court's verdicts against Catalan leaders.
University of Barcelona
In addition to the judicial actions against CatalanGate, protests to express rejection of the massive espionage are also being held in Catalonia. The University of Barcelona has called an event this Friday, at 12 noon, to denounce the “aberrant violation of human rights” that the espionage with the Pegasus and Candiru programs between 2017 and 2021 involves. The event will include the participation of lawyers who will be presenting complaints against the CatalanGate espionage, as well as human rights advocacy bodies and legal associations.