The Government downplays the WhatsApp message from a CNI agent to the chief of staff of the delegate in Ceuta in which he said that there were several Facebook groups with 180,000 people organizing for a possible jump. Sources from La Moncloa point out that this warning was not even passed on to the Government delegate because it did not have that level of urgency, and neither did the CNI agent formally escalate it to his superiors nor make a report, which shows that he did not give it much importance.
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“At no time did the CNI send a formal communication to its chain of command or to any member of the Executive. There were also no phone calls or requests for face-to-face meetings. An agency that believes a massive entry will occur the next day does not communicate it via instant messaging, it escalates it. That is its responsibility and competence,” sources from La Moncloa say.
The Executive points out that if it had been considered that there was a real risk of a massive entry like the one that came later, with 70,000 people, its commanders would have been warned and the information would have reached the Minister of Defense and from there to the President of the Government. None of that happened. “There was no report nor was the alert raised to the superiors,” they say. Therefore, La Moncloa interprets that it was a warning of movements on networks like many others that exist. “At no time did the CNI send a formal warning or alert to its chain of command or to any member of the Executive by any means,” La Moncloa argues.
“The CNI communications of July 29 never alerted to a massive arrival: they reported that a call was circulating in two Facebook groups to enter the city irregularly during the week of the Throne Festival. And they added that these groups totaled “a total of 180,000 followers” to illustrate “the reach of the dissemination,” something that was already known by other institutions and that in no way constituted or was interpreted as an indicator of scale or prospective probability. Proof of this is that the CNI itself did not issue any formal alert and limited itself to passing on that information by message and brief phone call to the Cabinet of the Government Delegation of Ceuta and to the UCE-3 of the Civil Guard,” La Moncloa concludes.
The president, Pedro Sánchez, had already pointed out last Thursday in Congress that these communications existed, and limited their importance. “On July 29, a few hours before the crisis, a communication took place via messaging between the Government Delegation of Ceuta and the Civil Guard, which was alerting to a social media call to try to cross to Ceuta the next day. That is where the famous figure of 180,000 people appears,” Sánchez explained. “Well, it is worth knowing that this figure was not a forecast of how many people were going to cross, made by the National Intelligence Center, it was simply the number of members of a Facebook group in which that call was circulating. Therefore, it is also worth knowing that this type of calls on networks are not exceptional, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, references to similar calls appear in three of the last seven reports prepared by the CNI during this last year,” the president concluded.
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