Four National Police officers, assigned to two different units of the Corps when the espionage operation against Luis Bárcenas and his circle was activated in 2013, have already testified in the Kitchen case trial that they coordinated or participated in the surveillance carried out on the wife of the former PP treasurer, Rosalía Iglesias. Their testimonies thus confirm the existence of the deployment without judicial control, and support much of the thesis of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the accusations. In addition, Chief Inspector Gonzalo Fraga, an Internal Affairs agent and the main investigator of the plot, focused on the fact that this operation had an objective “without legal coverage” (to remove “compromising” material from senior PP officials so that it would not come to light), as it was never reported to the agents, prosecutors, and Judge Pablo Ruz who were then investigating the popular accountant and the Gürtel case.
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Officer number 78,793, who served in the Central Operational Support Unit (UCAO), explained this Wednesday that Commissioner Enrique García Castaño, his then boss, ordered him to follow Rosalía Iglesias in the summer of 2013. At that time, Bárcenas was already in provisional prison. “He told me that the DAO told him to carry out the surveillance,” he added referring to Eugenio Pino, then deputy operational director of the National Police.
The agent added that, at that time, it was “public and notorious” that the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) was investigating Bárcenas for the Gürtel case and that, in a way, he thought they were supporting them. In fact, to justify the maneuver carried out from the UCAO, García Castaño told him they were after the “money” that the former PP treasurer could be hiding, as well as his “front men.” However, during the investigation phase, this commissioner admitted that the espionage operation actually had a very different objective: “To find out if Bárcenas had taken some hard drives from the PP headquarters in which the financing that the PP had received from donations, payments… appeared.”
“We were doing surveillance until October 2013, when Rosalía detected us,” specified officer 78,793, who detailed how they monitored the surroundings of Bárcenas’s home and his wife’s studio, where García Castaño himself entered without a court order looking for material that the former popular accountant might keep — according to what he admitted before the investigating judge Manuel García-Castellón—. Moreover, as the agent emphasized this Wednesday, in 2014 they went back at it and installed a video surveillance system in front of the building that housed the office of the then lawyer of the former treasurer. There, they photographed those who roamed the building and later created a “file” of images that they delivered to García Castaño, known in the Police by the alias El Gordo.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is clear about García Castaño’s involvement in the espionage plot and even requested 12 years and six months in prison for him. But the commissioner does not finally sit on the bench in this trial due to his poor health (he suffered a stroke in 2022). For Pino, the public ministry demands 15 years in prison. The same sentence is requested for Jorge Fernández Díaz, Interior Minister under Mariano Rajoy from 2011 to 2016, and for Francisco Martínez, former Secretary of State for Security, whom El Gordo pointed out as the person with whom he discussed Kitchen and to whom he delivered material stolen from the former treasurer. Martínez denies it.
Along those lines, agent 78,793 highlighted that he never had contact with the UDEF about the surveillance and that all the information collected was delivered to García Castaño. He “monopolized” it. “I don’t know to whom he gave it,” the officer insisted. Chief Inspector Gonzalo Fraga, the main investigator of Kitchen, stressed that none of that material reached the agents and the judge investigating Gürtel. Nor to the Prosecutor’s Office, he continued.
Commissioner Mariano Hervás also belonged to the UCAO. And, according to his testimony this Wednesday, he took “charge of the surveillance” at some point, when El Gordo told him that they had to follow Bárcenas’s wife by “direct order of the DAO.” Hervás stated that it was a “complex” operation and that, according to what they told him, its objective was to locate the “money” that Bárcenas might be looking for.
Parallel surveillances
But the surveillance deployed from the UCAO was not the only one. Two other agents assigned in 2013 to the Internal Affairs Unit, then headed by Commissioner Marcelino Martín Blas (who also sits on the bench), said on Tuesday that they also monitored Rosalía Iglesias in the summer of that year. Officer 18,693, now retired, illustrated the court with these words: “I received an order from my boss, Martín Blas, who gave it to me in his office, telling me that Rosalía Iglesias was in danger and that we had to proceed to protect her without being detected.” “She was watched from a distance.”
This retired officer narrated that they maintained their operation for “one or two weeks,” until they crossed paths with the UCAO personnel. He also expressed doubts about the sense of the reason his superior gave him to justify the deployment: “Come on, protection [from a distance] is impossible.” “They didn’t tell me anything about her being in danger,” noted another rank-and-file agent assigned to Internal Affairs at that time and who, as she admitted, participated in that surveillance: “She couldn’t detect us,” she repeated.
Ignacio Cosidó, who was then director general of the National Police, has cast doubts on the legality of all those surveillances by the UCAO and Internal Affairs. During his testimony as a witness before the court, the former PP deputy stated that Bárcenas and his circle never asked him to take measures to protect them. Furthermore, in his opinion, any surveillance operation should have been carried out under the supervision or knowledge of the UDEF and the magistrate investigating Gürtel.
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