Outside a white-stone building on the edge of Barcelona’s medieval Gothic Quarter, five young French tourists are enjoying a sunny spring afternoon, drinking wine and discussing whether it is hot enough to go to the beach. One of them wants to see the Sagrada Família basilica and eat tapas. Another wants to find a “coffee shop” to smoke some weed, then go sunbathing. They discuss their options languidly, in one of the great tourist capitals of the world.
Up in the building itself, Catalan police intelligence officer Jordi Cruz has different problems. He is afraid for his life. Cruz (not his real name) is in the same city, but he lives in another world. His is the other Barcelona, a land of espionage, warring political tribes and secret recordings, in which an underground battle is being waged over the future of Spain. For him, the city has become more reminiscent of the intelligence battlegrounds of cold-war Vienna than a 21st-century European metropolis.
Cruz is carrying a heavy-looking black pistol in the waistband of his jeans, covered by his dark hooded jumper. He is here to shine a light on a spying scandal that risks sending dozens in Catalonia to jail — from police officers to politicians. So he is nervous. “My [Catalan police] colleagues could kill me for talking to a journalist, seriously,” he says. “I am not sure what these guys are capable of.”
His fear of violent reprisals comes amid a profound political and social crisis in Catalonia that has turned one of the richest and most cosmopolitan parts of Europe into one of the most turbulent. In recent years, millions of Catalans have decided that they want their region to be independent from Spain.
This movement, while representing less than half of Catalonia’s 7.5 million population, has taken control of the regional government, and has been using it to push a radical pro-independence agenda. It controls areas such as the police and the education system.
The campaign reached boiling point last October when the regional government made a declaration of independence following a disputed referendum. Madrid took emergency measures, seizing direct control of the semi-autonomous region, sacking the government and calling a new election.
But the vote in December simply returned another radical pro-independence government, which took power earlier this month under Joaquim Torra. “We are living through the most serious political constitutional crisis in Spain since at least the end of the Franco regime,” says Oriol Bartomeus, political scientist at Autonomous University Barcelona.
Cruz says the reality of what has been happening in the region is even more shocking than the headlines. From at least 2014, he claims, the police force of Catalonia, which was controlled by the pro-independence regional government, started working on an extraordinary initiative: developing its own secret intelligence service to rival that of the Spanish state. Furthermore, he says, this force has been used to spy on lawyers, politicians, professors, journalists and civil-society groups deemed opponents of the independence process.
“They were creating a kind of secret Catalan spy service,” says Cruz, who is talking because he believes that the police should be “upholding the law” and not engaging in politics. He became aware of the service through friends who were on the inside. “This group, this spy service within the police were targeting those who had a different political ideology from the government . . . It’s as if the Scottish regional government started trying to create its own rival to MI5 [the UK’s domestic intelligence service] and were targeting people for their political ideology . . . It’s extraordinary, it’s simply unbelievable that this could happen.”
The Catalan police declined to comment. The Catalan interior ministry said it was “not aware” of such actions taking place and that it could not comment further as the allegations are subject to a judicial investigation that could end up in court. But these are not the wild claims of one policeman.
Four officers in the Catalan police force interviewed by the Financial Times, as well as people close to the Spanish intelligence services and the Spanish government, say that they believe attempts were made to set up a Catalan intelligence agency to further the cause of breaking up Spain.
Last October, the Spanish police intercepted a van filled with Catalan police documents being driven to the incinerator. The Catalan police said the disposal was routine. But Spanish officials think otherwise. A Spanish police report seen by the FT concludes that the documents showed the Catalan police had an “illegal espionage department” which performed “surveillance tasks, monitoring, as well as recordings of conversations and taking photographs of people from the political, journalistic, business and social spheres, that could be a threat to the sovereignty process”.
The alleged espionage in Barcelona does not end with the Catalan police force. Spanish intelligence services have been active in pursuing Catalan leaders who have fled abroad, according to one source close to the service. Four sources close to the Catalan police said that the Catalan police intelligence service was set up in part to counter what Catalan officials believed was a secret force within the Spanish police that for years had exactly the opposite agenda — to keep Catalonia part of Spain. A pro-independence group in the Catalan parliament last year called this a “political police brigade created to harm political rivals”.
This is a story about the struggle for Catalonia, a region where the last major conflict to grab such international attention was during the Spanish civil war. But this is also a story about Barcelona, a city that welcomed 14.5 million tourists last year, and how it has quietly become the heart of a modern fight for the future of Spain. It is a battle where — unlike former independence conflicts — information rather than violence is the chief weapon and the main battlegrounds are the restaurants and late-night bars beloved by tourists and locals alike.
To understand Barcelona’s current situation, you need to take a brief trip into Catalonia’s history. The region, originally part of the medieval kingdom of Aragon, has been part of Spain since the 15th century, but many Catalans have always considered it a nation apart with its own history, language and culture. There have been frequent attempts to win independence. But following Spain’s return to democracy in the 1970s after the rule of Franco, the desire for full independence was low and, by the mid-2000s, supported by just 15 to 20 per cent of the population, according to polls.
This all changed a decade ago, during Spain’s financial crisis, when support for independence started to climb sharply. By 2012, after the country’s ruling centre-right People’s Party began to impose tough austerity measures throughout Spain, it rose as high as 50 per cent (today it’s about 40 per cent). As a result, Catalonia’s government started pushing for full independence. In December 2012, the then leader Artur Mas said that most Catalans “want to build a new country” and he would fight for it. “We are now facing transcendental pages in our history . . . Our duty and responsibility is to leave for future generations a country that they can feel proud of.”
In Madrid, this was met with a mixture of anger, disbelief and fear. Spain’s then deputy prime minister, Soraya Saénz de Santamaría, quickly lashed out at the separatists, saying they were creating a “crisis” and “tremendous instability” for Spain. The open defiance by the Catalan government was the “greatest threat” to Spain since its return to democracy, she would later say.
Spain’s 1978 constitution says that the country is “indivisible”, so pursuing independence is unconstitutional. Success for the separatists would mean Spain not just losing one of the wealthiest regions— Catalonia has an economy the size of Portugal — but also the end of the country’s beloved constitution, put together after Franco’s death.
It was in this atmosphere that espionage became a common tool, according to people familiar with the subject. As far as the Catalan separatists are concerned, it was the Spanish government that started it. As early as 2012 the Spanish interior ministry launched something dubbed “Operation Catalonia”, according to the conclusions of a Catalan parliamentary investigation last year. The pro-independence lawmakers said this was a secret national task force of police officers used to wage a “dirty war” against the independence process, seeking to delegitimise the entire movement.
Separatists saw evidence of this plot in the negative stories about their leaders that regularly appeared in the Spanish press, which they said were dug up and then leaked by Spanish police. In 2016, the then deputy leader of the region Oriol Junqueras said that plots against the movement were “repugnant”, adding: “It makes me cringe.” Mas told Spain’s LaSexta TV channel: “The state sewer stinks.”
Many thought their worst fears were confirmed when news website Público published a secret recording in 2016 that appeared to show the then Spanish interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, asking for information from the head of Catalonia’s anti-fraud office to discredit the region’s pro-independence parties. Díaz said that the recording was taken out of context and denied wrongdoing.
Francisco Marco, head of one of Spain’s best-known private investigation firms, says he did some work for “Operation Catalonia”. He even wrote a book about it. He tells me that from 2012 there were about 40 police officers in Catalonia with one mission: “They investigated anyone who was involved with the independence movement, looking for any dirt to use against them”. Speaking from his office in Barcelona, filled with modern art and leather sofas, the 46-year-old says: “They followed people, they tapped their phone . . . They had no judicial oversight for what they were doing.”
The Spanish government has long denied that “Operation Catalonia” ever existed, and no wrongdoing has ever been proved in the courts. People close to the former interior ministry explain that at the time the Spanish police were pursuing some Catalan politicians for corruption, but for good reason. It was revealed in 2014, for example, that Jordi Pujol, who led the region from 1989 to 2003, had kept millions of euros in overseas tax havens. Pujol admitted to concealing large sums in secret foreign bank accounts over a period of more than 30 years.
They investigated anyone who was involved with the independence movement, looking for any dirt to use against them
Regardless of whether “Operation Catalonia” existed, the belief that it did acted as a catalyst, say people familiar with the situation in Barcelona. Separatists believed there was a shadowy plot to dig up information about them. It was against this backdrop, say the same people, that at least some pro-independence officials decided that they were engaged in a no-holds-barred dirty war with Spain — and that they needed their own intelligence operatives. “You have to understand that we have been fighting the monster that is Spain,” one pro-independence member of parliament from Barcelona told me recently. “They have been willing to use every dirty trick in the book to discredit us, to humiliate us. Do you expect us not to fight back?”
Anti-independence activist Josep Ramon Bosch believes he is one of the innocent civilian victims of this clandestine fight. A big man in his forties, with short greying hair and a well-kept beard, he grew up in Santpedor, a little town in the pro-independence heartlands of Catalonia. Among the roughly 8,000 inhabitants, Catalan is spoken rather than Spanish and for most it is an article of faith that “Catalonia will one day be free from the yoke of Spanish oppression and will have a glorious future”, says Bosch.
A history teacher, from a mostly pro-independence family, he was one of a handful of people in the town who not only supported Spain’s People’s Party — which is generally loathed throughout Catalonia — but was also in favour of Spanish unity. “My politics was always a little controversial where I am from,” he says over coffee. “I never thought it would have such severe consequences . . . I never thought it would make me an espionage target by my own [regional] government.”
Around 2012, when the Catalan government decided to push for independence, Bosch started campaigning against it. In 2013 he started a pro-unity civil-society group called Somatemps. At the first meeting, he says, the Catalan police — known as the Mossos d’Esquadra — scoped out the little restaurant they were meeting in before anyone arrived. “The owner told me the Mossos had been in, asking about us . . . then, later, my friends in the local police told me they had been outside as well, taking photos of us all. It was all very strange.”
I was shocked. I am a free citizen. It is like the worst kind of Stalinist organisation
At the time, he wrote it off. “I forgot about it. I thought it could be an isolated incident . . . I never thought it was really true that the police could be following me.” But over the years, as Bosch became a leading figure in the Societat Civil Catalana (SCC), a bigger anti-independence group, he started feeling he was being followed. “People in the national police warned me that my phone was tapped,” he says. Then one day in 2015, pro-independence lawmakers in Catalonia accused Bosch of having links to the extreme right, using information that Bosch says he suspects came from the Mossos. Bosch denies he has any such links, but the subsequent negative press coverage threatened his day job and caused him to quit the SCC.
While the exact actions of the Mossos are still unclear, all Bosch’s suspicions were given more credibility last year by the capture of the van full of documents on the way to the incinerator outside Barcelona. According to the Spanish police, the papers revealed a number of surveillance operations by the Catalan police — including against Bosch. Some of this has been leaked in the local press, and Bosch has read those extracts and filed a civil complaint. “I was shocked [when I read the report]. For me, it is unbelievable that the police would follow me. I am a citizen of Catalonia. I pay my taxes. I am a free citizen. It is terrible to be targeted for political reasons. It is like the worst kind of Stalinist organisation.”
Bosch was not the only one who came under the watchful gaze of the Catalan authorities, according to the same police report seen by the Financial Times. Of all the documents describing Mossos surveillance operations on ordinary Catalan citizens, one of the most detailed was against José María Fuster-Fabra, a prominent lawyer who made his name defending victims of the Basque terrorist group Eta as well as Catalan police officers and their families. He is not heavily involved in politics, except that in his free time he has campaigned against independence.
Something earned him surveillance, however. One particularly detailed report described how, last June, Fuster-Fabra had lunch at PorSant restaurant in central Barcelona at exactly 1pm with “three women and a man”. At 1.55pm he left lunch and walked to a nearby bar with another colleague. Later on, he left his office at 7.17pm, when he met a group of politicians at the Gallery Hotel. He went home at 9.12pm.
The 60-year old, with a clear voice and a penetrating gaze, says he is hurt by the idea he was under surveillance because he always thought of himself as a friend of the Catalan police. “I have spent years defending the police force,” he says, pointing to a side table in his Barcelona office filled with awards given in thanks. He proudly adds that he represented in court the family of the only Mossos officer killed by Eta. “I was very surprised to find out I was under surveillance, and I don’t really know why . . . All I can think of is that I campaigned publicly for the unity of Spain.”
I was very surprised to find out I was under surveillance, and I don’t really know why
Others who appear to have been watched are also distressed, saying that it has shaken their faith in the national politic. Sergio Santamaría, a former parliamentarian with the PP party who supports Spanish unity, says that he was used to being a political outsider where he lived in a pro-independence part of Catalonia. “On the street, people give me nasty looks, they insult me. People threaten me . . . That’s just the way it is.”
But Santamaría, who has launched a civil claim against the Catalan police, says he was “not prepared” for how he felt when he read extracts of the police report which suggested that the instruments of the state were being used against him. “I thought that everything in my life was sure. I lived well. I was a politician. I thought I could express myself freely. When I found out what had been happening I felt very bad. I believe in democracy and human rights. And this is a violation of my rights.”
The police documents tell a host of other extraordinary stories. One concerns an apparent mole in the Spanish national police who was willing to pass information to the Catalan police. Another suggests that the Catalan police were watching units of the Spanish national force in Catalonia. Senior national Spanish politicians, such as Saénz de Santamaría, also appear to have had their movements tracked, according to the documents. Many of the files are partial, and provide only tantalising snapshots into a complex secret world.
People close to the situation say they are not sure if the espionage unit is still operating. Some say it was disbanded after Spain seized control of the Catalan administration last October. Others say its members had been keeping a low profile until the new Catalan government was in place.
And it is unclear if anything illegal has been done by the Catalan police or the local politicians they answer to. Surveillance by law enforcement is allowed under Spanish law as long as there is a good reason, such as a threat to public safety. The evidence collected by the Spanish police has been sent to the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña, which will decide whether to press charges in the coming months. There is already a separate case ongoing against senior figures in the Catalan police for tacitly supporting the independence process in September and October, in spite of a court order telling them to prevent it.
In 1936 and 1937, the early years of the Spanish civil war, Barcelona was a hub of espionage as communist and anarchist groups battled over the future of the left. The city also became a focus for some allied and pro-axis intelligence operations in the second world war, becoming a point of arrival and transit for escaping prisoners of war. But since then, the city has been relatively quiet. “During the later years of Franco, and in the aftermath of the dictatorship, the real internal conflict in Spain was in the Basque country, with intelligence focused against the Eta terrorist group,” says Jimmy Burns, author of Papa Spy, a book about Spanish espionage. “Barcelona was not much in the picture.”
Not any more. While Eta has disbanded, the whole of Catalonia has been plunged into social and political turmoil. Millions there remain committed separatists and there are no signs of the conflict — or the espionage — dying down. In March, the Spanish CNI intelligence service had a dozen-strong team tracking the former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, who was a fugitive from Spanish justice, through Europe, ensuring he was arrested in Germany.
Just before that, comments from Lluís Salvadó, a prominent pro-independence Catalan politician, were leaked to the press, in which he talked about the breasts of a female colleague. While apologising, he complained that this was the “umpteenth conversation with family and friends” that had been recorded and leaked to damage him.
I believe in democracy and human rights. And this is a violation of my rights
Earlier this month, the Socialist Pedro Sánchez became the new prime minister of Spain following a vote of no-confidence against the previous government in the wake of a corruption scandal. Sánchez has said he will try and build better relations between Madrid and the Catalan government. Some are optimistic. “There is a chance for progress on the Catalan question,” says Jordi Alberich, director of Barcelona think-tank Círculo de Economía.
But others are less hopeful. “There is certainly no end in sight to the problems in Catalonia,” says Carlos Cuesta, a journalist with news website OKdiario. “The game of spies in Catalonia will continue as long as the tensions last.”
As Cruz, the intelligence officer, leaves, he tells me that the people in the spying unit of the Mossos are still around, “keeping their heads down” and worried about potential legal cases against them. He does not know what these officers plan to do, with the Catalan police now under the authority of the hardline separatist Joaquim Torra, but he is worried about them catching up with him personally after talking to me. Outside, we have to blink to adjust to the bright sun and lively atmosphere. We are surrounded by cafés serving snacks of beer, patatas bravas and pimientos de Padrón to happy locals and tourists alike. Cruz looks left and right furtively. “I need to be careful,” he says.
Michael Stothard is the FT’s Madrid correspondent
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