Visible man

A spec­tre is haunt­ing Spain - that of a 70 year old man whose mask, dark glasses and peren­nial beret would make him look a bit like Claude Rains in the 1933 pro­duc­tion of ‘The In­vis­i­ble Man’, if he didn’t have such chubby cheeks. His name is José Manuel Vil­larejo and from 1973 to 1975 he was a po­lice­man sta­tioned in the Basque Coun­try work­ing on anti-ter­ror­ist - mean­ing anti-ETA - op­er­a­tions; in 1983 he was moved to the Cit­i­zens’ Se­cu­rity di­vi­sion of the cen­tral po­lice sta­tion in Madrid, after which he stepped into the pri­vate sec­tor for 10 years, run­ning a total of 46 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies - in­clud­ing a de­tec­tive agency which had both pub­lic and pri­vate con­tracts – and pock­et­ing about 16 mil­lion euros. In 1993, he reen­listed in the Span­ish po­lice and was also re­cruited by Span­ish in­tel­li­gence (CNI in its Span­ish acronym), after which he car­ried out un­der­cover work under the aus­pices of 11 dif­fer­ent Min­is­ters of the In­te­rior. Con­sid­ered un­touch­able for many years, in 2017 he made the mis­take of pub­licly ac­cus­ing Félix Sanz Roldán - the chief of the CNI at the time (now re­tired) - of hav­ing made death threats against Corinna Larsen, the lover of the for­mer King (Juan Car­los), to con­vince her to make her­self scarce after ac­com­pa­ny­ing His Royal High­ness on his dis­as­trous ele­phant hunt in Botswana (an ex­pen­sive out­ing made at the height of the eco­nomic cri­sis, only re­vealed to the pub­lic at large be­cause His Majesty broke a leg when on sa­fari). Six months after Vil­larejo’s ac­cu­sa­tion, he was ar­rested and im­pris­oned with­out bail on charges of money laun­der­ing and crim­i­nal con­spir­acy.

Feel­ing be­trayed by the state which he had served so de­vot­edly - and al­most cer­tainly on oc­ca­sion un­der­hand­edly - Vil­larejo, dur­ing his trial (which started a year ago) started to sing like a nightin­gale about var­i­ous dis­taste­ful ac­tiv­i­ties he’d been in­volved in at the tax­payer’s ex­pense, such as using pros­ti­tutes to glean intel from lead­ing politi­cians and busi­ness­men (‘vagi­nal in­for­ma­tion’, as he chose to put it in a 2009 chat – re­leased to the pub­lic - with the cur­rent state pros­e­cu­tor Do­lores Del­gado).

But what has caused the most out­rage, at least in Cat­alo­nia, have been his re­cent rev­e­la­tions about the ter­ror­ist at­tacks in Barcelona (and the sea­side town of Cam­brils) in Au­gust of 2017. It had al­ready been con­firmed that the ap­par­ent mas­ter­mind be­hind the at­tacks, the Mo­roc­can-born imam Ab­del­baki Es Satty, was a CNI asset whose con­trollers cut off all con­tact with him the day be­fore they took place; and that the mo­biles of Es Satty’s group of young fol­low­ers in the town of Ripoll had been tapped by the self-same CNI. Vil­larejo added the fol­low­ing in­for­ma­tion: the CNI had wanted to give ‘a small shock’ to Cat­alo­nia a few months be­fore the Oc­to­ber 2017 ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence, in the form of an ex­plo­sion of bu­tane can­is­ters hoarded in a garage by Es Satty on an aban­doned es­tate in a town at the other end of Cat­alo­nia. This shock - al­beit vic­tim­less - would have raised the se­cu­rity level in Cat­alo­nia from 4 to 5, thus ne­ces­si­tat­ing a mil­i­tary pres­ence which would have made the ref­er­en­dum im­pos­si­ble. But when Es Satty was ac­ci­den­tally killed in the ex­plo­sion, his dis­ci­ples in Ripoll - far more rad­i­calised than the CNI re­alised - de­cided to im­pro­vise, killing 15 peo­ple by run­ning them over or stab­bing them to death. The lawyer of the fa­ther of the youngest vic­tim (a three year old boy) re­calls that when Vil­larejo re­vealed this in­for­ma­tion, nei­ther the pros­e­cu­tors nor the judges bat­ted an eye­lid. De­spite re­peated de­mands from three lawyers’ as­so­ci­a­tions and the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment that an in­ves­ti­ga­tion be opened into what looks very much like a botched in­tel­li­gence op­er­a­tion with lethal con­se­quences, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment has re­fused, its of­fi­cial rea­son – as voiced by the state’s del­e­gate to Cat­alo­nia, Teresa Cu­nillera - being that Vil­larejo is an un­trust­wor­thy and pos­si­bly un­bal­anced wit­ness. But if Vil­larejo re­ally were so un­re­li­able, what harm could a lit­tle in­ves­ti­gat­ing pos­si­bly do to the Span­ish state? We’ll never know: 24 hours after writ­ing off Vil­larejo as a cred­i­ble wit­ness, Ms Cu­nillera handed in her res­ig­na­tion and flew the coop.