The National Intelligence Center (CNI) spied on Pere Aragonès because it considered him the CDR leader "undercover". This was the main reason that the intelligence services presented to the Supreme Court - the body responsible for validating actions that may violate fundamental rights - to obtain authorization to infect the phone with the Pegasus software mobile phone of the then vice-president of Quim Torra's government.
The argument appears in three interlocutories that the Spanish Government sent yesterday to the judge in Barcelona who is investigating the espionage of the current president. According to the partial content of the documents to which La Vanguardia has had access, the CNI attributed to him the direction and coordination of the protests. "Aragonès has directed the actions of the CDRs", says a fragment. Another emphasizes that "Aragonès, always on the sidelines of his institutional role and in secret, has continued to exercise the functions of coordinator of the CDRs". And he justified the intrusion into his mobile phone, "not because of his position as vice-president of the Generalitat, but because of the task of directing and coordinating the activities of the Defense Committees of the Republic".
Aragonès' phone was infected with the Pegasus malware through a link attached to an SMS. This was the entry route to the device in which the monitoring lasted from October 2019 to March 2020. According to sources familiar with the content of the conversations, the CNI suspected that the vice president was using the phone staff to give the instructions on how the protest actions were to be carried out. The secret services noted that, in the midst of a wave of mobilizations after the judgment of the trial, in a radio interview, Aragonès called "not to relax". The president, who testified as a witness in the legal case, assured that, during the dates in which he was spied on, ERC was engaged in relevant political negotiations, such as those of the first investiture of Pedro Sánchez, the 'approval of budgets and the establishment of the dialogue table between the Executive and ERC.
All the information that appears in the Supreme Court hearings and that served to justify the spying on Aragonès will arm the line of defense that will be used today by the former director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, who will appear as an investigator before the judge of Barcelona
Esteban, who was dismissed after the outbreak of the Pegasus scandal, will stick to the content of the declassified documents to the suspicions about Aragonès' links with the CDR to justify the action of the intelligence services that she led . In fact, he already admitted to Congress that the CNI spied on twenty pro-independence politicians, among them Aragonès, always with the endorsement of the Supreme Court judge, but dissociated himself from the rest of the eavesdropping, up to 65, reported for independence.
The Central Government sent the interlocutory documents to the Barcelona judge yesterday and he distributed them to the parties. The magistrate asked the Executive to declassify documents - a demand in which he had the support of ERC, which also included them in the negotiations with the PSOE - in order to know the reason for the intrusion into the phone of the then vice-president, but the Spanish Executive only authorized to lift the secrecy of the judicial decisions, which are not even fulfilled.
The first of the judicial communications dates from July 2019. In this first document, permission was given to attack Aragonès' device with malicious software. Then came two more interlocutories in which the espionage was extended for another three months.
The head of the court of inquiry 29 in Barcelona, Santiago García García, had requested not only the judicial interlocutories but all the information that the CNI has regarding the purchase and use of the Israeli software Pegasus and about the "specific persons" who act on behalf of this body in the commissioning, acquisition and reception processes of the program. The Council of Ministers denied the judge access to this part of the information.
Last night, sources from the Spanish Government pointed out that "it was this Government that decided to collaborate with the justice system and declassify the information at the request of a judge, always within the limits of national security", which it shows, they say, "that the rule of law now works and acts with transparency. Nothing to do with the parallel police of the PP government".
