Paz Esteban, the director dismissed for the 'Pegasus case', requests voluntary resignation from the CNI

Paz Esteban, at her inauguration as director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), in February 2020. Emilio Naranjo (EFE)

Paz Esteban López, the director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) who was fired last May as a result of the Pegasus scandal, has requested voluntary discharge from the secret service, sources close to her have confirmed to EL PAÍS.

Esteban joined the espionage agency in 1983, when it was called Cesid (Higher Center for Defense Information), so he was only a year away from serving four decades at the center.

At 64 years old, she was nearing retirement and, as a former Secretary of State, she is entitled to severance pay equal to 80% of her salary for up to two years.

In the months since her resignation, she has worked at the secret service headquarters in Madrid, close to her successor and old acquaintance, Esperanza Casteleiro.

The until then head of the intelligence center was dismissed on May 10, only five days after her appearance behind closed doors at the Official Secrets Commission of Congress, where she acknowledged that 18 pro-independence leaders —including the president of the Catalan Generalitat , Pere Aragonès— had been spied on by the CNI.

They had been her, she emphasized, with scrupulous respect for legality.

Esteban gave the deputies the judicial orders that authorized the wiretapping, signed by the magistrate of the Supreme Court that controls the activities of the CNI.

On the other hand, he denied that the body had ordered massive or indiscriminate wiretapping and disassociated himself from the cases of 48 other independentistas whose motives, according to the laboratory of the University of Toronto (Canada) Citizen Lab,

The Government defended the legality of the wiretapping at all times, although it claimed to be unaware of its existence, but, instead, implicitly blamed the director of the CNI for the "enormous security breach" that led to discovering that the cell phones of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the ministers of Defense, Interior and Agriculture had also been infected with the Pegasus program

in June and July 2021, at the height of the crisis with Morocco.

Estaban refused to present his resignation, considering that doing so meant admitting that the wiretapping of the independence leaders was illegal or that the CNI was responsible for the security of the cell phone of Pedro Sánchez and his ministers, a task that corresponded to the Presidency of the Government .

Finally, Sánchez opted to dismiss her, although the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, presented the dismissal as a "substitution" and, to guarantee continuity in the center, put her Chief of Staff, Esperanza Casteleiro, in charge of it, with a profile very similar to that of her predecessor: both had been general secretaries of the CNI, a center where they entered together when there were hardly any women and where they were companions for more than three decades.

Graduated in Philosophy and Letters from the Complutense University of Madrid and foreign intelligence analyst, Esteban was head of the cabinet of the then director, General Félix Sanz Roldán, between 2010 and 2017, when he rose to the position of general secretary, equivalent to

from the center.

In July 2019, after completing his second five-year term, Sanz left the post and Esteban replaced him temporarily, since the Government was in office and could not fill the vacancy.

In February 2020, once the coalition Executive between PSOE and Podemos was formed after the general elections of November 2019, the Council of Ministers, at the proposal of the Minister of Defense, ratified her as director of the CNI, becoming the first woman at the head of the Spanish secret service since the creation of the Cesid, in 1977. In May 2002 it was refounded as the National Intelligence Center.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of this event, a solemn act presided over by the King was scheduled to be held last May, but the crisis in the

and the termination of its director forced to cancel it.

Since leaving the direction of the secret service, Esteban has maintained the same discretion as when he was in charge of it.

His only public appearance took place on September 29, when he received the gold medal from the Dignity and Justice association, chaired by Daniel Portero, son of the prosecutor of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia Luis Portero, assassinated by ETA in Granada in October 2000. At the event, Esteban vindicated the constant and silent work carried out over the years by CNI agents in the fight against terrorism and expressed his pride in belonging to an institution “that does not have and should not have a political color.

An institution to which I will always belong”, he added, although he no longer belongs to it from an administrative point of view.

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