(Bloomberg) — Spain replaced the head of its intelligence agency in a bid to calm a furor sparked by the discovery that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and dozens of Catalan separatist leaders had their phones hacked with spyware.
Esperanza Casteleiro, who has spent most of her career at CNI, as the agency is called, will replace Paz Esteban, Defense Minister Margarita Robles said in a news conference Tuesday following a cabinet meeting.
The uproar over the use of the Pegasus spyware erupted last month following a report by The New Yorker magazine that more than 60 people linked to the Catalan separatist movement, including lawyers and lawmakers, had been targeted for surveillance between 2017 and 2020.
The revelations strained Sanchez’s relations with Esquerra Republicana, the Catalan secessionist party whose votes he has relied on to pass key legislation. The plot thickened on May 2 when the government announced that Sanchez and Robles had also been spied on between May and June 2021 with the same technology.
Not Clear
It’s still not clear who hacked the premier’s phone or why the intelligence agency, known as CNI, took more than a year to find out that it had happened.
Pegasus is developed by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, and is supposedly only sold to governments and state agencies. The European Union’s in-house privacy watchdog in February recommended its use be banned.
When queried in Parliament last month about the use of Pegasus to spy on Catalan secessionist leaders and activists, Robles said that any potential use made of the spyware was carried out legally. She also dismissed the importance of the New Yorker article, saying she’d never heard of the magazine.
After spending most of her career at the CNI, Casteleiro was named secretary of state for defense under Robles in 2020. Esteban, the sacked spy chief, had spent almost four decades at the agency before being named to the top job in 2020.
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