Former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo was ahead of his time. Now that it has become known how phones have been infected to monitor pro-independence leaders with the Pegasus system – a very effective tool for fighting terrorism and criminal organizations – he already used it for his dealings almost a decade ago.
Villarejo, known for being one of the men from the State sewers, a policeman who rose to the top of the Police during the time of Jorge Fernández Díaz as Minister of the Interior and descended to prison hell, will have to explain how he managed to introduce a virus on the phone of his arch enemy police and recorded a conversation.
The ex-commissioner sits in the dock for the accused for this operation. The Prosecutor's Office asks him for four years in prison for a crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets. In the coming days it will be possible to listen to the former police leadership and Villarejo himself to clarify – if he wants – where he got this system from and what he wanted.
The story is full of edges and is somewhat convoluted, with many actors and interests involved: the police sewer, the CNI, little Nicolás, and several journalists involved. The events occurred in October 2014. The Internal Affairs Unit of the Police had received notice that a 20-year-old was posing as an adviser to the Vice President of the Government, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and a CNI agent.
This reached the ears of the highest levels of the Executive and they gave the order to stop the boy, named Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias. In a matter of fifteen days, he was arrested. The operation was led by the Internal Affairs Commissioner at the time, Marcelino Martín Blas.
After the arrest, he called a meeting with two CNI agents to keep abreast of the investigations. It was the business of the intelligence services because this young man was posing as one of them and that was somehow a problem for the Center. And it is that during the search they had located documents with the seals of the Vice Presidency of the Government – on which the CNI depended –, in addition to some suspicious information.
The meeting called by Martín Blas with two CNI agents was recorded and leaked to the press, which caused a security breach. Who could do such a thing? During the investigations, they discovered that during the meeting on the telephone of the head of Internal Affairs, a remote control call had been activated to an unknown mobile. Weeks before, Martín Blas had handed over his phone to the Deputy Operations Directorate (DAO) so that they could install an antivirus. It turned out, presumably, just the opposite. The remote call made by the mobile phone –already infected– of Martín Blas turned out to be to a journalist, Carlos Mier.
The knot was unraveling. Mier worked on a website called Sensitive Information, owned by Villarejo's wife, Gema Alcalá. Both are charged.
It turns out that this digital newspaper was the one that gave the exclusive on the arrest of Gómez Iglesias. What interest could Villarejo have in bursting this matter? As it appears in the prosecutor's brief, at that time he was assigned to the DAO, directed by Eugenio Pino, and due to his condition, he learned of the operation and the meeting in question.
When Martín Blas denounced the recording, there was very little data on viruses that infected phones and activated them to record conversations and obtain all kinds of data. This caused some newspapers related to Villarejo to say that it had been Martín Blas himself who had recorded it. Almost a decade later it is discovered that these systems already existed.
The recording in question ended up in the hands of little Nicolás who, after publication in various media, used it to request the annulment of the case. What appeared in various media was not the entire recording but a series of excerpts, which later became known as having been cut and pasted to give another meaning to the investigators' phrases. All to make it appear that an illegal investigation was being carried out against Gómez Iglesias. But it didn't go well.
This new bench for the accused that the former commissioner is facing is yet another of the judicial tangle in which he is involved. All eyes are on the first sentence that the National Court handed down on the Tandem case, focused on the dark business of the former police officer. Villarejo faces a tax request for 83 years in prison for bribery, discovery and disclosure of secrets or falsehood. And that only judged three pieces of the more than thirty that the judge who is investigating the Manuel García Castellón case keeps open.
But so far things have not gone too bad for the ex-commissioner who spent more than three years in pretrial detention, since the first time he sat on the bench he was acquitted of the crimes of insults and false denunciation of which he had been accused by the former director of the CNI Félix Sanz Roldán. The sentence of the trial that begins this week with the young swindler in the background could be known before the resolution of the National Court, so his situation of freedom could be altered.
Villarejo's interest in ending the cause of little Nicolás is not entirely known, although there are several suspicions. One of them could be –according to the researchers suspect– favoring some businessmen who could be involved in that matter. And another was to harm Martín Blas, with whom he had started a hidden war because he, as head of Internal Affairs, had singled out his son in a case against the Chinese mafia.
And the war that Villarejo has been waging for years with the former director of the CNI Félix Sánz Roldán and therefore with Sáenz de Santamaría, for being his supporter, cannot be ignored. However, sources familiar with this untimely relationship actually place the recording as the beginning of this tension.
According to these sources, the then head of the secret services never forgave Villarejo for endangering two of his agents by leaking a conversation from an investigation, which seemed to him one of the biggest betrayals. From then on, Villarejo was considered persona non grata by the head of the CNI
