MADRID (Reuters) – The espionage scandal using Pegasus software currently rocking Spain led to the dismissal of intelligence chief Paz Esteban by the government of Pedro Sanchez on Tuesday.
The first woman appointed to head the National Intelligence Center (Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, CNI), the Spanish secret service which she had headed since 2020, Paz Esteban had been in the hot seat since revelations in April from a Canadian research institute claiming that the mobile phones of around 60 Catalan separatist activists had been hacked between 2017 and 2020 with Pegasus software, developed by the Israeli company NSO Group.
She admitted last week before a parliamentary committee behind closed doors the espionage of “18” Catalan separatists, but with the blank check of justice.
Paz Esteban was also to explain more recently the fact that the cell phones of the President of the Government himself, Pedro Sanchez, as well as of his Minister of Defense Margarita Robles were spied on by a foreign entity, not identified by Madrid, using the same software in 2021. The government said Tuesday that the phone of Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska had also been hacked.
In front of the press, to whom she announced the dismissal of Paz Esteban, Margarita Robles recognized “security breaches”. “Of course there have been and there will still be, because that’s one of the prices to be paid for technology,” she said.
The scandal led the Catalan independence party ERC to withdraw its parliamentary support for the government of Pedro Sanchez while waiting for Madrid to restore pledges of confidence and “assume its responsibilities”.
Reacting to the dismissal of Paz Esteban, the spokeswoman for the Catalan regional government, led by the ERC, considered the reshuffle at the head of the CNI insufficient to restore relations with the government.
Paz Esteban will be replaced by Esperanza Casteleiro, current Deputy Minister of Defence, who worked for forty years within the CNI.
(Inti Landauro report, with Emma Pinedo, French version Sophie Louet and Jean-Stéphane Brosse)