The former Interior Minister: "Soraya called me to tell me not to speak on the phone in Barcelona because the Mossos were spying on me"

«It was Saturday and I was at my house in Barcelona. From Monday to Friday I lived in Madrid and went there every weekend I could during my time as Minister of the Interior (2011-2015). I was reading in the small office I have, the phone rang and I saw that it was Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría », then vice president of the Government, responsible for the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and delegated by Mariano Rajoy to manage the political crisis in Catalonia.

-Look, Jorge, I'll call you to tell you to be careful. Be cautious where you speak and where you speak. Be very careful with your mobile, always use it with the security application you have installed and try not to use your home's landline in Barcelona.

It was a very short conversation that he later referred to several times when we met in person. Face to face he insisted that I not forget the recommendations he had given me that day by phone. For the information they had available, they had warned that the Generalitat and the Mossos d'Esquadra had dared to spy on the very person responsible for the State Security Forces and Bodies, which was a real scandal.

But it was not the only warning I received. On another occasion the static protection service that I had at my home had detected strange things, vehicles that were posted near my house that made me controls. An ad hoc team of the National Police moved from Madrid and could confirm that there had been inadequate follow-up by a van that, according to the Police, had telephone interception equipment inside.

The police saw a van following me; they dared with an entire interior minister active

Even as a former minister, my escort again identified a strange car at the door of my home that ran away when he tried to be identified. I spoke with the then government delegate Enric Millo and he confirmed that it was a car with a camouflaged license plate of the Presidency of the Generalitat. What vehicle is terrified when asked to identify itself if, as the Catalan Government said, it was carrying out another police operation in the surroundings?

In the midst of the scandal over the use of the so-called Catalan CNI to help the Defense Committees of the Republic (CDR) to carry out sabotage with explosives coinciding with the day when the procés sentence is made public, and when the Catalan crisis has passed the threshold of what the National Court already considers terrorism, Jorge Fernández Díaz publishes his memoir. It is titled Every day has its desire. A look at forty years of political vocation (Editorial Peninsula), will be presented next Thursday in Madrid by Mariano Rajoy and Chronicle advances exclusively some of his most outstanding passages.

The former popular high office, one of the men closest to the former president of the Government professionally and personally, reviews his extensive political career, including the deep religious conversion he experienced in a place "apparently as inappropriate as Las Vegas" , but in which, paraphrasing St. Paul, "sin abounded and God's grace overflowed."

At the same time, he gives the reply to the tough nationalist offensive, which, as he himself acknowledges, has placed him in recent years as the "number one public enemy of the Catalan independence workers."

«Since the process accelerated and, at the same time, cases and more cases of corruption began to appear in the nationalist ranks; I was a clear enemy for independence. Many people with whom until then, during my long political career, I had maintained a good relationship and, in some cases, even personal friendship, considered that as Minister of the Interior I had direct responsibility in the appearance of those cases. [...] The truth is that, as we all know, in life looking for a scapegoat or a scapegoat is easier and more sweetening of consciousness than doing self-criticism.

The 'Operation Catalonia' is a fallacy; they accuse me of what they did with the Generalitat

«With the accumulation of judicial proceedings and open cases [during his ministerial period, it should be remembered that the Security Forces uncovered the Pujol case and the 3% case, among others, that caused the imputation of the Catalan clan and the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC) for corruption] an appropriate scenario was formed for the executioner to become a victim or, what is the same, so that all those who were trying to use the police based on their own interests as spurious political police who investigated and spied on political adversaries, or those that did hinder investigations in relation to the commission of crimes, paradoxically became the victims ».

Hence, in the opinion of the former minister, «a complex strategy whose most striking fruit was the fallacy of the so-called Catalonia operation was built. I say fallacy because never before in the Ministry of the Interior did anyone hear about it. Simply because there was no such operation or anything like that. Fernández Díaz says, enigmatically, that "over time" he has come to "know all the details of how that happened and who moved the threads", and advances that "direct and indirect evidence" of what he calls " «Remote control campaign of harassment and demolition».

«For my detractors it should be credited that there was an operation in Catalonia whose purpose would be to denigrate and incriminate, or even charge, Catalan independence, from the so-called sewers of the State», where the figure of Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo is located, leading for decades of some of the sensitive operations of Interior and that participated in police investigations in Catalonia.

«It should be remembered that, of course, with a minister of the Interior they dispatch only a few senior positions and follow the regulatory channels. And in that small group there were the curators Marcelino Martín Blas or José Manuel Villarejo. With the first one, I never spoke. I was circumstantially greeted by Villarejo twice. The first in 2012. I left the Ministry and a person greeted me: "Mr. Minister, at your service, I am Commissioner Villarejo." We crossed a simple courtesy handshake and said goodbye.

Pujol told me that I should try independence even if I had little chance

«The second time I saw Villarejo was on June 2, 2016, the day on which, as DAO, Eugenio Pino was retiring [...]. As I greet all the attendees, I remember that Villarejo, dressed as a countryman, greeted me again in similar terms as the first time. Those were the only two occasions when I had some contact with him [...]. I was the tenth Interior Minister who had him under his command and while he was active he remained in the same position he was in. When I arrived I was assigned to the DAO and there it remained until the end. We never deal with any matter, but that did not prevent me from being accused without any basis of all kinds of complicity.

On the contrary, "they", in reference to the independence leaders, "were using the Mossos d'Esquadra inappropriately. I had been subject to political espionage. I was followed up, as were other leaders of the PP and other constitutionalist political forces. They tried to impute to others, and in a very special way to me, their own practices, probably because of what the best defense is a good attack.

Fernández Díaz seeks the explanation of the attacks coming from the independence movement in what he calls «the great Catalan nationalist felony», and places Jordi Pujol, with whom he has shared multiple episodes during his political career, as a key element of what is happening in these Moments in Catalonia.

«A man who wanted his party to be what he called the pal del paller (stick of the haystack) around which a political Catalan is built and sustained as a reflection and representation of a social Catalan that has disappeared and has been transmuted into a Xenophobic, supremacist and racist dye nationalism ».

I have only spoken to Villarejo twice in which he simply said: 'at your service, minister'

In this sense it reveals what happened "during an official visit of the president of Slovenia, then belonging to the now extinct Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, invited by Pujol himself" in the early 1990s, and the private conversation he had with the former President

“The speeches of both were pro-independence, which, although it was understandable in the case of the Slovenian president, in that of Jordi Pujol, who seemed to make common cause, seemed unacceptable. At that time I presided over the PP of Catalonia and was in charge of the parliamentary group in the Parliament of Catalonia. As such, I asked to see him in his office and asked him what was happening.

The former Interior Minister textually reproduces what Pujol argued: «I have to admit that, in fact, I would never have thought before that the borders that emerged from Yalta after World War II and consecrated in Helsinki in 1975, which divided Europe into a world Bipolar, they would disappear. Who would have thought that, without firing a single shot between the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union could fall and that the Baltic republics would become independent from the USSR? That was absolutely unthinkable. "I have to try at least," adds Fernández Díaz who stressed Pujol. «When the Constitution was approved, I did not think about the possibility of a Catalonia independent of Spain because, among other things, it was very clear that the borders in Europe had been sacralized and sculpted in stone. But we are seeing what is happening and, therefore, I know that I have few possibilities, but I have to try. It was, continues Fernández Díaz, of "a declaration of intent" that "confessed without blushing."

«Now we see that his successor, the ineffable Mr. Torra, affirms that he wants the Slovenian way to achieve the independence of Catalonia. Of course, after having spent two days in Montserrat in fasting solidarity with the political prisoners. The dead and the wounded must be assumed as the propitiatory victims for the cult of the goddess nation ».

THE KING BY WATER MOTORCYCLE

They were years of an extraordinary seizure in Catalonia and in which there was time to, as Fernández Díaz details, mistakenly stop King Mohamed VI of Morocco while sailing on a jet ski on the Strait, which sparked a first diplomatic crisis Order with the neighboring country. «He had gone out to sea and enjoyed one of his favorite hobbies. By those dates it had been detected that the drug traffickers used nautical motorcycles to transport drugs, the Civil Guard of Ceuta detected on the radar the signal of an unidentified jet ski and stopped him ».

The monarch immediately called the King of Spain and from the Moroccan Administration they reminded me that it was raining wet because, being Minister Pérez Rubalcaba, military helicopters that were refueling in the rock of Alhucemas flew over the Moroccan royal yacht, so it was necessary to travel to Morocco to present the apologies and satisfactions ».

Fernández Díaz also uses his book to address the fall of the Rajoy Government, in the midst of "a very curious synchrony for those who do not believe in coincidences." Just after 24 hours of having approved the state budgets, Gürtel's sentence is produced, and to top it off the application of article 155 in Catalonia is deactivated on the same day, half an hour apart, in which Pedro Sánchez promises the position » .

His opinion: «The PP was persecuted to stop governing. Second, that the PSOE was the one to call the next elections. And third, but no less important, that the situation in Catalonia will be relieved. Therefore, what prodest? Hence, it raises "to which people and interests benefited" his political demolition and his party. «It is appropriate to evoke the Medea de Seneca when he coined the old maxim of any investigation: He who benefited from the crime is the one who committed it».

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