Among the more than 200 kilos of paper he wrote Emilio Alonso Manglano for his own memory and conscience while he was director of CESID, today CNI, there is 18 diaries. In them he wrote down his day to day life as he lived it from 1981 to 1999. There are calls, contacts and relevant data of the multiple quotes from a detail-oriented and meticulous soldier turned actor and observer of a crucial moment in the recent history of Spain. From the end of the transition to the entire socialist path of Philip Gonzalez. Scandals included. Along with folders and notebooks, the general accumulated enough experiences to fill nine black plastic containers with a capacity of 50 liters each, with copies of typed pages and handwritten pages. can be read from the confidences of Juan Carlos I to his lack of empathy with Jose Maria Aznar. From the moments of glory to the swampy moments of illegal wiretapping that led him to trial, conviction and acquittal. Juan Fernandez Miranda and Javier Chicote they tell it in ‘The boss of the spies’ (Roca Editorial, 2021).
Shortly after taking office, Manglano opened the door of the intelligence services to women. Possibility that Paz Esteban López (Madrid, 1958) took advantage of.
The first works of the current director of the CNI were reports on NATO for the 1986 referendum. The one that served socialism to go from the “initially no” to plunge into one Atlantic Alliance of which he came to hold the general secretariat in the person of Xavier Solana.
And so, that graduate in philosophy and letters who aspired to be an archivist specialized in foreign intelligence although he never acted as a field agent. Probably because he did not want to go through the experience of many colleagues and even few colleagues who could not tell anyone, not even their partners, how they spent their free time, why they traveled so much, how they justified their salary and how many personalities they could accumulate in just one. narrates it Pilar Cernuda in ‘You don’t know anything about me’ (Sphere of books, 2019). A journey through the lives of the Spanish spies that the journalist was able to investigate thanks to the facilities given by Paz Esteban before accessing the maximum reserved charge. The one who has put it these days at the feet of the winged horse by sleepless eavesdropping like the ones that cost General Alonso Manglano his prestige. With much more sophisticated means, of course, but as then, to get hold of details not always justifiable. Those who have led the lawyer Gonzalo Boye to present 19 lawsuits in which he states that the information obtained was received by the Israeli company that, after selling the method, controlled the action, deciphered it and sent what was discovered to its clients.
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The ‘president’ Aragonès, for his part, asks that his file be declassified after Mrs. Esteban admitted on Thursday that he was on the shortened list that the CNI spied on with a court order.
And so he has seen the almost 40 years of stealthy experience in La Casa crumble, who as a specialist in ancient history followed the advice of the legendary Sun Tzu in ‘The Art of War’: it is impossible to know the situation of the enemy without espionage. But he forgot that technology does not cancel risk.