The Central Government will declassify secret information about the Pegasus infection of the mobile phone of the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, in the hands of the National Intelligence Center (CNI). According to government sources, it will be declassified in the coming weeks, so that the former director of the secret services, Paz Esteban, can defend - before the judge who charged her - that pro-independence leaders were spied on with the computer program with prior authorization from the Supreme Court.
It was planned that Esteban, who became the head of the Turk who was paid for the scandal, appeared tomorrow before the court of inquiry number 29 of Barcelona, but an appeal filed by the State Attorney's Office - which defends the former director of the CNI – has delayed the summons until the end of January. If the appearance had been kept, the explanations before the judge would have been null and void, since Esteban is obliged to keep secret everything she knows because of the old position. But if the Council of Ministers declassifies confidential information about the affair, the ex-director of the spies will indeed be able to answer the instructor's questioning.
The declassification, however, will be very limited. In May of last year, after the spying on more than half a hundred pro-independence leaders became public, Esteban appeared - for more than three hours - in front of what is known as the Official Secrets Commission to account for the paper of the CNI. Behind closed doors, he offered the deputies the court orders for the telephone interventions that had been made to 18 pro-independence leaders. The members of the commission had in their hands the reserved documents in which the owner of the intervened telephone, the corresponding judicial authorization and the justification were collected. With this, Esteban – who was dismissed a few days later – wanted to demonstrate to parliamentarians that the CNI acted scrupulously with the law and that espionage was never carried out on a massive scale or without judicial control.
It is the same operation that the former Secretary of State for Intelligence intends to deploy before the judge who accepted the complaint presented by Aragonès. In other words, what the Central Government will declassify, according to Defense sources, will be limited, in principle, to the information already provided to the parliamentary headquarters about the intervention of the president's mobile phone, which took place when he was vice-president of the Catalan Government.
According to Citizen Lab's research, his mobile phone was infected at the beginning of January 2020, when ERC was negotiating support for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. The judicial authorization, as published by La Vanguardia, is from the end of 2019 and the CNI will consider his request to consider him "coordinator of the CDRs".
And this is where the Central Government is willing to declassify to facilitate Esteban's statement, despite the fact that yesterday the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, assured the media that the Executive will declassify all the "documents that are requested by the competent authority and that it is understood to be appropriate and reasonable”. The judge, who maintains Aragonès' statement for tomorrow as a victim, asked to declassify much more information.
