The director of the Center for National Intelligence (CNI), Esperanza Castellero, admitted before a judge that the former leaders of the Catalan National Assembly (ACN) Jordi Sánchez and Elisenda Paluzzi had been spied on with Pegasus between 2019 and 2020, with the endorsement of the Supreme Court, although the attacks confirmed by Mossos d’Esquadra in previous years that did not receive authorization from the Supreme Court were not clarified. The court.
Castillero, who replaced Paz Esteban as head of the National Intelligence Office in May 2022 after his resignation over the independence movement’s mass spying scandal, testified on Monday via video before the president of Barcelona’s 23rd Investigative Court, which is investigating Sánchez’s espionage, his successor in the ANC, Elisenda Paluzzi, and former member of the entity’s secretariat, Sonia Orbi.
The Mossos d’Esquadra group has confirmed the hacking, through Pegasus software, which is sold only to governments, into the phone numbers of former ANC leaders. Key to Castellero’s witness statement were the dates: Sanchez’s cell phone had been hacked, according to forensic analysis, with and without the Supreme Court’s permission, in an example of the Supreme Court’s lack of control over national intelligence activities.
Sanchez and Palozzi were among the names that former CNI director Paz Esteban admitted to spying on, with the approval of the Supreme Court, during her appearance before Congress over the Pegasus scandal in 2022. The spymaster admitted to only 18 names of those whom the CNI spied on, compared to the 65 names demanded by the independence movement.
In Sanchez’s case, the Mossos family confirmed that his mobile phone was infected with Pegasus on up to 19 occasions between 2015 and 2020. The majority of the attacks were between 2015 and 2017, when he led the ANC before going to prison in the operation. The most recent attack occurred in July 2020, when he was on one of his first prison passes.
The espionage coincides with the central executives of both the People’s Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party. Complete interception of Paluzie’s communications occurred on four occasions. In August and October 2019, coinciding with the preparations and issuance of rulings, and in May and August 2020, during the entity’s internal election campaign.
The judge agreed to summon Castillero, who served as Minister of State for Defense between 2020 and 2022, to testify as a witness, and to do so she asked the Cabinet to authorize her to disclose confidential information about the events, protected by the Secrets Act, and to declassify information about espionage by ANC leaders, EFE reported.
Last November, the Cabinet sent two orders to the investigating judge in which the Supreme Court judge responsible for CIA surveillance allowed the secret services to intercept the communications of Sanchez and Palozzi, at different periods between 2019 and 2020, and authorized Castillero to testify before the judge in this matter.
The records sent by the Council of Ministers – as happened in the case of the decisions sent to the investigating judge in the espionage case of former President Pere Aragonés – contain omitted parts, because they contain sensitive information.
During her testimony, the witness pointed to Supreme Court decisions that upheld espionage and ignored any question regarding the use or operation of Pegasus, hiding behind the fact that these issues fell outside the scope of classified information that the government allowed her to talk about.
This prevented us from clarifying a main question posed by the Special Prosecution regarding the use of the Pegasus program on Jordi Sanchez’s cell phone between 2015 and 2017, which the witness did not answer, under the pretext that it affected confidential information.
According to African National Congress sources, the judge asked the Council of Ministers whether they were aware of spying on the entity’s former presidents between 2015 and 2022, the period in which Mossos detected infections.
The Catalan police report indicates that the majority of Sánchez’s mobile phone intrusions occurred between September 2015 and October 13, 2017 – two days before he entered pretrial detention for the operation -, that is, during the period in which he headed the ANC, and therefore before he was subject to a judicial investigation by 1-O.
Castellero has already given testimony as a witness before the Barcelona judge investigating the spying of ERC MP Josep Maria Jovi and MEP Diana Ripa, and was summoned on December 18 to provide explanations about the Pegasus attacks on former Republican MEP Jordi Sulli and Andrew van den Eynde, Oriol Junqueras’s lawyer.
For the attacks with Pegasus, former CNI director Paz Esteban is being investigated in five different cases, as a result of complaints made by those affected by the case of mass espionage against the independence movement.