Did Morocco spy on Pedro Sánchez?

BarcelonaBetween May 17 and 18, 2021, 10,000 people entered Ceuta from Morocco in the last major migration crisis—up to the present—in the autonomous city. Coinciding with those dates, the mobile phone of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, was infected with the Pegasus spyware. So were those of the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles; the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska; and the Minister of Agriculture and former Spanish ambassador to Morocco, Luis Planas. Who spied on them? As with the mass entry this summer in Ceuta, the Spanish government claims it has no certainty, but from the first minute, internal investigations (and common sense) have pointed to the Moroccan secret services. This Thursday, from Congress, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, took the opportunity to recall it: "What document or clue was on your phone for you to behave this way? Why are you afraid of Morocco? What does Morocco know about you?".

According to the conservatives, Sánchez is a "hostage" of the Moroccan government, even though the PP does not have any proof that it was the Alawite regime behind Pegasus. "When the right is in power, Morocco is an essential partner, an example to follow, and a friend, but when we socialists govern, they say that we are sold out and that they have I don't know what information about the Prime Minister that has us subjected to the Alawite crown," Sánchez ironized in response to Feijóo.

The Spanish government took a year to explain that Sánchez had been spied on: it did so in 2022, shortly after the Catalangate scandal broke, which uncovered the espionage of dozens of pro-independence politicians and activists, many of whom were monitored by the Spanish secret services. The Moncloa filed a complaint with the National Court to investigate the origin of the espionage, but it has been archived—twice—due to the lack of cooperation from NSO Group, the company that marketed Pegasus, and the State of Israel, where the firm originates. It has never been made public what information was stolen from Sánchez's phone and only the amount of stolen documentation, 2.7 GB, has been reported.

Espionage in France

The second dismissal of the case is relatively recent, from last February, when Judge José Luis Calama lamented the "investigative impotence" he felt. In 2023, after having dismissed it for the first time, he reopened the investigation to incorporate information provided by the French justice system, which is also investigating the espionage of journalists and politicians in the country, including the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. As in the Spanish case, in France the published journalistic reports point to the regime of Mohammed VI. Morocco has systematically denied having anything to do with it and, in fact, has denounced the media that have linked it to the espionage.

If there is no change on the part of the Israeli authorities, which Calama considers "unlikely", the judicial investigation will remain kept in a drawer and, despite the suspicions pointing basically to Rabat, Spain—which has also used Pegasus to spy on the Catalan independence movement—continues to consider Morocco an "essential" partner.