Continuity was the word most pronounced by the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles; the new director of the CNI, Esperanza Casteleiro, and the new Secretary of State for Defense, Amparo Valcarce, during the inauguration of the director of the CNI at the head of the Spanish intelligence services, in which there was not a single reference to the case Pegasus and the espionage suffered by the President of the Government and the Ministers of Defense and Interior, which has cost the former director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, her job.
Esteban attended the inauguration of his successor, accompanied by the head of the National Cryptologic Center, Luis Jiménez Muñoz, and towards whom the Minister of Defense had words of affection. “Peace, dear Peace,” he told her at the beginning of the act in which the minister arrived just to be present at the promise of the charges, and left as soon as it was over, leaving the new director of the CNI with the guests, the new secretary of state, and undersecretary, who also took office today.
But although the Pegasus case was not mentioned, what happened with the espionage flew over the speeches of all the new high positions, all women. The phrase of the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, that “those who attack Spain are going to meet the CNI”, was read as a guarantee that the CNI is not going to stop doing the work it has been entrusted with for what happened.
“Nothing is going to change” proclaimed the Minister of Defense, in another sentence with which she paid for the determination that the strategy of the Ministry of Defense and the CNI, to deal with existing threats and vulnerabilities, although she later said that “many things they are going to change”, but in reference not to the strategy to be followed, but to the fact that by continuing with the work carried out during these four years, many things will be changed, which is what the Armed Forces and the National Intelligence Center are pursuing.
Robles alluded to Ukraine to underline that “the world is full of threats and vulnerabilities, that cruelty exists, and that what is happening undermines any international law.” One way of highlighting the role of the CNI, in an act in which the minister herself stressed that it did not offer anything new, because the continuity, and the return of the new director of the CNI to the Center, from which she left to hold positions in the Ministries, They guarantee that everything will remain the same.
What the minister did do was highlight and pay tribute to the 120,000 soldiers who make up the Army, and the 3,000 men and women who make up the CNI “who are the real protagonists” and of whom she stressed that they are “mere public servants who They work for Spain and for Spain”. On them she highlighted the weight that falls so that the celebration of the NATO summits and the presidency of the European Union are a success.
The Director of the CNI, Esperanza Casteleiro, until now Secretary of State for Security, also underlined the idea of continuity, as the main axis of her mandate, in which she will return to what has been her career “to which I have dedicated almost the entire my life and to which if I were born again” he would dedicate himself again, because he is an agent of the CNI.
Casteleiro highlighted as objectives of the center “threats to peace and democratic coexistence” which, in his opinion, “require new guidance from the Intelligence Service to provide the necessary protection and security for communications.” But above all, he paid tribute to his colleagues at the CNI: “We are at the service of a greater good,” he said, while thanking Margarita Robles, with whom he has been working for four years at the Ministry, for that time and the way in which They have shared work. “The best of teachers, from whom I have learned so much and with whom I have shared so much.”
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