The National Intelligence Center (CNI) spied on Aragonès because it considered him the leader of the CDR “in hiding.” This was the main reason given by the intelligence services before the Supreme Court – the body that is responsible for validating actions that may violate fundamental rights – to obtain authorization to infect the mobile phone of the then vice president of the Government of Quim with the Pegasus software. Torra.
This argument appears in three documents that the Government sent this Thursday to the Barcelona judge investigating the espionage of the current president. According to the partial content of the records to which La Vanguardia has had access, the CNI attributed the direction and coordination of the protests. “Aragonès has directed the actions of the CDR,” says an excerpt. In another, he highlights that “Aragonès, always outside his institutional role and in hiding, has continued to perform the functions of coordinator of the CDR.” And he justified the intrusion into his cell phone “not because of his status as vice president of the Generalitat but because of the work of directing and coordinating the activities of the Defense Committees of the Republic.”
Aragonès' phone was infected with Pegasus malware via a link attached in an SMS. That was the entry route to the device whose monitoring lasted between October 2019 and March 2020. According to sources familiar with the contents of the cars, the CNI suspected that the vice president used his personal phone to give instructions on how the operations should be carried out. protest actions. The secret services noted that in the midst of the wave of mobilizations after the ruling of the process, in a radio interview Aragonès called “not to let up.” The president who testified as a witness in the framework of the judicial case assured that on the dates on which he was spied on, ERC was engaged in relevant political negotiations, such as the negotiations for the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, Pedro's first investiture. Sánchez, the approval of the budgets and the constitution of the dialogue table between the executive and ERC.
All the information that appears in the Supreme Court records and that served to justify the espionage on Aragonès will form the line of defense that will be used this Friday by the former director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, who will appear as an investigator before the judge in Barcelona.
Esteban, who was dismissed after the outbreak of the Pegasus scandal, will stick to the content of the files and the suspicions about Aragonès' links with the CDR to justify the actions of the intelligence services that she directed. In fact, he already admitted in Congress that the CNI spied on twenty pro-independence politicians, including Aragonès, always with the approval of the Supreme Court judge, but he dissociated himself from the rest of the eavesdropping, up to 65, denounced by the independence movement.
This Thursday, the Government sent the files to the judge in Barcelona and he distributed them to the parties. The magistrate asked the Government to declassify documents – a demand in which he had the support of ERC, which also included the declassification in his negotiations with the PSOE – to find out the reason for the intrusion into the telephone of the then vice president, but the executive He only authorized to lift the secrecy of the cars that are not even complete and that are riddled with studs for security reasons.
The first of the judicial communications is dated July 2019. This first document gave permission to attack Aragonès' device with malicious software. Then came two more orders in which the espionage was extended for three more months.
The head of the 29th investigative court of Barcelona, Santiago García García, had requested not only the court orders but all the information that the CNI has regarding the purchase and use of the Israeli software Pegasus and about the “specific people” who They acted on behalf of this organization in the commissioning, acquisition and reception processes of the program. The Council of Ministers denied the judge access to this part of the information.
This Thursday night, Government sources stated that "it was this Government that has decided to collaborate with justice and declassify this information at the request of a judge, always within the limit of national security", which demonstrates, they say, " that now the rule of law works and acts with transparency. Nothing to do with the parallel police of the PP government.”
