Héctor Gambini
06/23/2020 - 11:45
- Clarín.com
- Politics
They are a dozen and for years the justice did not know what exactly they did that day. It is now known that they spoke on the phone to each other dozens of times for 11 hours , from the time the prosecutors of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman arrived in Puerto Madero to start their work routine until a locksmith opened a door that had not been locked inside and the country went into shock. They are not the intelligence chiefs, who also spoke to each other. They are the operating groups that were working on the street , talking minute by minute, on a rainy Sunday in January.
These plant agents from the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI, the former SIDE) spoke to each other, but they also received calls from their superiors and, most importantly, reported to them throughout the day. Something was going on. Something that never happened before and would not happen later, because the calls never crossed again like that on a Sunday.
Although the frenzy of the calls had begun on the morning of that Sunday, January 18, 2015, what happened was known after ten o'clock at night: Nisman, the prosecutor who four days earlier had denounced President Cristina Kirchner for covering up to those accused of having flown AMIA, he was dead.
Five and a half years later, those intelligence agents will be summoned to testify for the first time , judicial sources told Clarín . The summons will come from the special team that investigates the death of Nisman, in charge of the prosecutor Eduardo Taiano, as soon as the judicial activity after the quarantine is enabled and cover "between 10 and 15 people, at least".
Along with the spies, the man with whom Diego Lagomarsino spoke the most will be summoned, also as a witness, the day he said he went to deliver the gun to Nisman. A man named Orestes Jorge Ardissone, of striking contacts with the surroundings of Lázaro Báez : Ardissone was a business partner of Jorge Chueco, Báez's lawyer imprisoned together with his representative for the cause of the laundering of millions in what was known as La ruta del K money .
The agents who will call to testify were members of operational intelligence groups that were working on the street. What mission did they have that day? At least one of these groups was moving around the Puerto Madero area - where the Nisman department was - and downtown Buenos Aires. A boss received the reports in an area of Beiro Avenue and one of those who reported to him spoke from Martínez. As Clarín anticipated last January, it was registered by an antenna that was just one block from the house where Diego Lagomarsino lives , the man who said that the previous day he had brought a pistol to Nisman's house. The same pistol that appeared in the bathroom, next to the body, under the left shoulder.
Prosecutor Nisman's body as found, according to a digital recreation.
The agents were the operative force that supported with their communications the crossed calls of the leaders who already knew each other. Now it is known that not only the heads of the former SIDE Juan Martín Mena (at that time second to Oscar Parrilli at the intelligence center and current Deputy Minister of Justice of the Nation ), Alberto Mazzino, Fernando Pocino and Antonio Stiuso spoke with each other with other chiefs such as César Milani (chief of the Army and parallel intelligence) or Hugo Matzkin (chief of the Buenos Aires Police), but also active cells that were on the street.
Only the agent who spoke from the Lagomarsino neighborhood contacted his superiors 27 times that Sunday. The last one, minutes before Nisman was found dead in his apartment.
This mapping of calls (around 500 communications between the operative groups with their bosses) was completed during this quarantine, after a compilation that had been delivered months ago by a team of the Federal Police that has been working on the crossovers since the case passed to Federal Justice, at the end of 2016. With these new data on the number and destination of calls, plus the location of those active teams, the prosecution will now advance looking for details that were never on the record.
The declaration of the spies as witnesses is legally possible by decree 176/16 of President Macri, which ordered the lifting of the information secrecy of the AFI intelligence agents and of all the security forces when the information was required by the investigators of the Nisman cause.
An internal AFI resolution of the same year 2016 (number 25 ) relieved the agents of the obligation to keep secret when it comes to this case . It was while the cause was still in the hands of the investigating judge Fabiana Palmaghini.
The calls of the agents who will now be called to testify happened during a weekend full of strange curiosities.
On Saturday when Lagomarsino took the gun to Nisman (January 17, a day before his body was found in the department's bathroom), equipment had been set on fire in an office at the Casa Rosada where all the income files were kept and expenses to the government building. Nisman's custody had left him alone between 8 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. Sunday, just the span of 15 hours when a shot from Lagomarsino's pistol struck him in the head. A bullet that was neither behind the ear nor in the temple, but relatively far from both sides: 3 centimeters above the right ear and 7 millimeters forward . According to forensics, a strange and uncomfortable place to self-trigger.
Along with the operational AFI agents, Fernando Pocino, the head of the Interior Meeting area of the body that directed several of them that day, would also be summoned . The entire group used a fleet of Nextel phones identified by the acronym COM. Pocino was Cristina's most trusted man among former SIDE career cadres after Antonio Stiuso had been displaced.
Unlike Stiuso (he maintained that the prosecutor was murdered), Pocino never testified in the Nisman case. His testimony is not only important because he received information from the boxes below: he also passed it up. One of its main interlocutors that Sunday was its boss Juan Martín Mena, current vice-minister of Justice appointed there by vice-president Cristina Kirchner.
According to the data in the case, while Martínez's spy reported from the Lagomarsino neighborhood, Pocino called Mena 11 times. Several of those contacts have a very short duration, of 7 or 8 seconds. But in others they have longer conversations. At 12.00 they talk almost 15 minutes ; at 3:48 pm, five minutes and at 4:16 pm, 37 seconds. All calls are from Pocino to Mena and while the custodians of Nisman had not yet come up to knock on the door of the dead prosecutor. That is, while the body had not yet been found.
Antonio Stiuso was one of the few spies who had already testified in the case.
Following the testimonies of the spies, the investigation could move towards determining where Mena was that day and whether she had contact with former President Cristina Kirchner, who said she had learned of Nisman's death by a call from her former Security Minister, Cecilia Rodríguez. . Rodríguez's former second-in-command and current Buenos Aires Minister of Security, Sergio Berni, said, however, that he was the one who notified the then president of Nisman's death.
In addition to the curious incident of the fire in the Casa Rosada on Saturday, that same weekend, several cameras stopped recording the income to the Quinta de Olivos.
Mena is currently being prosecuted along with the former president for the cause of the pact with Iran that Nisman investigated, as well as the current head of state lawyers, Carlos Zannini.
Ardissone, Lagomarsino's friend who will be called to testify, will do so a second time. Lagomarsino said she spoke to him multiple times that Saturday because the man was installing a security system in his home and needed technology guidance.
That clue was always there, until the investigation advanced a little further: Ardissone's son was the one who introduced Lagomarsino to the intelligence agent of the Airport Security Police Moro Rodríguez, and the latter who introduced him to the environment of Nisman.
Ardissone had been director for Latin America of the firm Check Point System where Lagomarsino worked before meeting Nisman. When he testified, in October 2015, he said that he had developed with Lagomarsino "a relationship of great trust, both personally and professionally . "
Prior to that, a former airport security police official said that Lagomarsino had been introduced to him as a secret agent who may have information on the drug trade. That official was Marcelo Saín, current Minister of Security of the province of Santa Fe.
Ardissone has another curious peculiarity. At another electrical maintenance company ( Tecnología y Medio Ambiente SA ) he was a partner of Jorge Chueco , who was a lawyer for Lázaro Báez and has now been released from prison for the cause of the K money route.
The court had rejected his request for release because Chueco still has an account of more than $ 800,000 abroad and the judges maintained that he could escape, but the Court of Cassation allowed him to continue the trial with an electronic anklet, in home prison.
In 2016, after ordering his capture, Chueco had fled to Paraguay.
Meanwhile, the prosecution of Eduardo Taiano is still waiting for the discs that were lost in the AFI with eavesdropping ordered by the Justice among several spies who were investigating their inmates in parallel spy agencies. The last thing they answered at the intelligence center was that they were looking for them.
As the investigation progresses at the pace of telephone crossings, the Cassation Chamber authorized the prosecution to search Lagomarsino's computers, phones, and cameras and all of Nisman's custodians, a process that was paralyzed because Lagomarsino's defense he opposed it.
In other elements reviewed to Lagomarsino a compact disc was found that had two reports related to Nisman's complaint against Cristina for the pact with Iran. Those files - which were in Lagomarsino's house - had been executed two days before Nisman filed the complaint. And on Lagomarsino's cell phone, photos of a UFI AMIA blackboard , led by Nisman, appeared, showing lines of investigation into the cover-up of the attack.
The Lagomarsino lawyer who had asked to delay the revision of the new elements is from the study of Maximiliano Rusconi, who was also a lawyer for Lázaro Báez and Julio De Vido.