The judicial investigation into the espionage on the phone of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and three ministers through the Pegasus program has ended in deadlock due to the lack of collaboration from the Israeli authorities, the country from which the program was sold. According to sources in the case to La Vanguardia, the case being followed by the judge of the National Court José Luis Calama has come to an end without being able to identify any alleged perpetrator.
After the State Attorney's Office denounced in May of last year that Sánchez's phones; the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles; from the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and from Agriculture, Luis Planas, had been infected, the magistrate has tried to find the perpetrators of the espionage, without any success.
Sources of the investigation have their suspicions about where the order to infect the phones of the chief executive and the other ministers could have come from to extract sensitive data from said mobile devices, although they acknowledge that no evidence could be found to be able to take criminal action against a concrete person.
The judge took a statement from both Robles and Grande-Marlaska and the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, for being the one who announced the complaint by the State Attorney at a press conference. None of them, who testified in writing and thus avoided physically going to the National Court, gave information that could determine the possible authorship of the espionage.
Once Calama did all the pertinent interrogations –including the then director of the National Intelligence Center, Paz Esteban, for whom this matter cost her her job– and requested all the necessary documentation, the last step she took was to go to the Israeli authorities.
The instructor intends to question representatives of the NSO group, the company that markets the Pegasus system and is based in Tel Aviv. However, Calama has not received a response for almost a year when he sent the first request. Throughout this time, he has forwarded the request for the rogatory commission to claim a series of data from the company. What the head of the central investigative court number 4 of the National Court is looking for is for NSO to tell who he sold the software that was used to spy on the Spanish president.
"Given the time that has elapsed since the issuance of the letters rogatory to the Israeli authorities [...], without having obtained any communication, it is appropriate to issue a reminder to said authorities seeking a response to the points contained in the expressed request for international legal cooperation ”, collects the last resolution of the magistrate. Sources in the case acknowledge that without these data the investigation has come to a standstill. In other words, it is in the hands of the Israelis that they can find out who is behind it.
For now Israel does not want to collaborate but it is not ruled out that for reasons of diplomatic strategy one day it might suddenly answer in the affirmative as happened in its day with Switzerland and the accounts of former Popular Party treasurer Luis Bárcenas. The magistrate investigates an alleged crime of disclosure of secrets and discovery that could affect the security of the State. Therefore, in the National Court the only thing left is to wait for a change of direction.
Given the suspicions of who could be behind it, a European Parliament report mentions that "the use of spyware in Spain cannot be attributed to a single actor or group of people (...) although it seems that third countries, many clues point to Morocco, they are plausible suspects.”
The investigators assume that in this matter there is not a great diplomatic interest in judicially finding out what happened due to the fear of a conflict between countries if the suspicions were to be corroborated.
In one of the records that appear in the case, Calama explains that "high-ranking agencies of the Nation and form of Government" are affected in this matter, which is precisely the fact that grounds the competence of the National Court.
The complaint from the State Attorney's Office was accompanied by a report from the National Cryptological Center – dependent on the CNI – with the analysis of the days of the exfiltration. The reports revealed that the analyzed Prime Minister's device "was infected by Pegasus on 2 occasions (on May 19 and May 31, 2021", coinciding with the diplomatic crisis between Spain and Morocco due to the entry of thousands of immigrants in Ceuta.
