Spain has arrested a former intelligence officer on charges he acted as a doubleagent, selling other agents' secret identities and counterintelligence data to a foreign government, the country's spy chief said on Tuesday.
The intelligence chief, Alberto Saiz, did not identify the country doing the buying, but Cadena Ser radio said it was Russia. Saiz said the alleged espionage occurred between the end of 2001 and early 2004.
Saiz identified the former agent as Roberto Florez Garcia and said he was arrested on Monday in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands.
revelation
If the country behind the scheme is indeed Russia, the revelation could become another point of contention between Western Europe and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is already locked in a dispute with Britain over the poisoning death in London of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
The Russian Embassy in Madrid and the Foreign Ministry in Moscow both declined to comment on the news report implicating Russia.
Saiz, the head of the National Intelligence Center, called the case unprecedented for the Spanish intelligence services. Even his news conference announcing the case was unprecedented, as Saiz and his predecessors had previously stayed behind the scenes.
civil guard
An official at the National Intelligence Center said Florez Garcia had been a midlevel officer in the Civil Guard, a paramilitary police force that answers to the Interior Ministry but also has intelligence units involved in such tasks as fighting Basque separatist violence and Islamic terrorism.
Florez Garcia quit the Civil Guard in March 2004, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of National Intelligence Center rules barring his name from being published.
Saiz said Florez Garcia sold classified information including the identities of agents and data on Spanish intelligence procedures, internal structures and counterintelligence activities.
He said that neither the national security of Spain nor that of NATO or the EU had been compromised. Florez Garcia had been under investigation since July 2005, Saiz said.
worked alone
The official at the intelligence center said the suspect approached a foreign government on his own and offered to sell classified information on Spanish intelligence.
Asked why a foreign government would want such information, the official said: "Spain is a country on the rise, being watched by many people. There are countries interested in knowing how we operate."
Under Spanish law, selling a foreign power classified information that could jeopardize Spanish national security is punishable by six to 12 years in prison.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a
RSS