Spain has discreetly expelled at least two U.S. Embassy staff accused of bribing Spanish intelligence officers for secrets, El Pais newspaper reported on Thursday, citing government sources, as Reuters quotes.
El Pais called the recruiting of secret agents from a host nation to betray their own country “an openly hostile act done with enemy governments, but never with friends or allies”.
More than two U.S. “spies” may have been involved, the newspaper said, citing unidentified government sources.
UWI asked Nuño Rodríguez, Spanish political scientist and analyst, for his comment on the issue. Here’s what Rodríguez told us.
The relationship between the Spanish secret services and those of the United States is not new. Since the Madrid Pacts of 1953, with Franco’s dictatorship, there have been US military bases on national territory. Although this showed a rapprochement between the two countries, relations were tense in many matters. Allied countries always agree to share intelligence in some matters, but no country shares all its intelligence. For example, it is now public information that the CIA conspired to assassinate Carrero Blanco and put an end to Franco’s regime.
News has recently shown that some attachés to the US embassy had contacted agents of the Spanish intelligence service, CNI, and had been buying unshared, classified intelligence information from them. This is rather strange news, since U.S. infiltration of the Spanish administration and politics has been documented for many decades, even before Franco died. What information of interest can be leaked to a country that has direct influence in the presidencies of all Spanish governments?
The PSOE has a documented close relationship with U.S. power groups, with PSOE members who are prominent figures in NATO international diplomacy and pro-Atlantic organizations. Many consider the PSOE as a European affiliate of the U.S. Democratic Party.
With this PSOE government, the head of the CNI, who had legitimately and legally monitored the sentenced Catalan pro-independence leaders, has been replaced by a new director more in line with the political lines of the government. The first thing the new director has done is to put an end to the monitoring of subversive elements that endanger national security, and to make a change of intelligence agents that has upset the CNI. This political restructuring that the government has undergone at CNI cannot be left out of the analysis.
With this new, more politicized CNI, the situation of information leaks has arisen. The press linked to the PSOE, such as El País, has spread the information. It is assumed that the CNI’s internal security protocols have activated the alarm, and two intelligence agents are now in prison. Evidently, the secrecy is absolute, and any information that emerges is nothing more than lucubration impossible to contrast. American intelligence attachés have been expelled from Spain, but nothing clarifies what has happened. Is it a smear operation against the CNI? Is it a political purge operation within the CNI? Which political changes in CNI will be made due to this case? Does Spain have secrets with the country that has created the political party that now governs the country?