As La Vanguardia announced in December, the Government has decided to “partially” declassify the information on espionage with the Pegasus program to the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, in 2020 when he was vice president, as confirmed this Tuesday by the Minister of Education and spokesperson for the Executive, Pilar Alegría.
The decision, requested in November by the Barcelona judge investigating the case following a complaint from Aragonès himself, was taken at the meeting of the Council of Ministers this Tuesday. The Executive spokesperson explained that the Government is “the most interested” in clarifying the facts and has announced “the maximum collaboration with justice.” “The Government, at the request of a judge, has carried out a partial declassification for this specific case,” Alegría announced, adding that this declassification “in no way affects national security.”
The declassification of documents, the scope of which remains to be seen, will allow the former director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Paz Esteban, who due to her former position is obliged to comply with the Official Secrets law, to respond to the questions from the investigating judge number 29 of Barcelona, ??Santiago García, that cover the documents declassified in the summons scheduled for next January 26 as investigated.
Aragonès’ complaint was directed against Esteban herself, who resigned from office precisely because of this charge, and against the Israeli group NSO that markets spyware. Esteban’s court appearance was scheduled for mid-December, but was postponed until the end of January after the State Attorney’s Office appealed his summons.
According to sources consulted in November by La Vanguardia, the information that the Government would declassify in principle is the same as what Paz was offering in the Official Secrets Commission, where he appeared behind closed doors for more than three hours in May of last year. There, he offered the deputies the judicial orders for the telephone interventions carried out by the CNI on 17 independence leaders.
The members of the Commission had in their hands confidential documents that included the owner of the stolen telephone, the corresponding judicial authorization, and the justification for it. With this, Esteban intended to demonstrate that the CNI acted scrupulously in accordance with the law, and that espionage had never been carried out on a massive scale and without judicial control.
The director of the CNI did not recognize in that appearance that the system used to carry out the espionage was the Israeli Pegasus virus, relying on the law itself that regulates the National Intelligence Center. This rule states that the Secrets Commission may have access to the materials, but not to the sources and means used.
