Owner of company that spied on Assange for the CIA was collaborating with Spain’s secret service

David Morales, director of the Spanish security company UC Global SL that spied on Julian Assange for the CIA during his stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was also a collaborator of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI), according to emails found on the electronic devices seized by the police after his arrest in southern Spain in September 2019.

In addition to this documentary evidence, to which EL PAÍS has had access, three sources with ties to the Spanish intelligence services and collaborators of Morales have confirmed that the former military man worked on different operations for the Spanish intelligence services. “Relax, I am with God, with the one here (CNI) and the one there (CIA),” he confessed to a person he trusted who warned him of the risks of this activity. An official spokesperson for the CNI declined to answer questions from this newspaper.

The evidence linking the former marine to the CNI has appeared in new dumps of his mobile phones, and was not included in the first copy that the police gave to the judge who has been investigating the case for five years. Morales’ relationship with the Spanish intelligence service, and the evidence that suggests that information about the Wikileaks founder’s meetings with his lawyers was given to the CIA, add a new dimension to a case that has escalated to a New York court, where victims of the espionage have sued former CIA director Mike Pompeo. Assange, now free, spent 12 years in prison for leaking more than 250,000 classified documents from the U.S. State Department in November 2010. EL PAÍS was one of the media outlets that participated in the concerted effort to publish these documents.

Sole contact point

On June 27, 2016, Morales sent an internal message to his employees from his corporate email. The subject line said “Contact with intelligence agency” and the message read: “I am contacting you in order to inform you that we have learned of the interest on the part of Spanish intelligence units (CNI) in knowing or receiving information related to our actions, missions or work. We have even been contacted and received a request for collaboration (transfer of information) by the agents and operations that are assigned to these different missions.”

The director of UC Global SL, whose agency was already in charge of security at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, explained to his workers that his company’s activities were “easily monitored” and added that in the event that their missions should prove to be of “national interest and do not affect the interests of our clients, there is no problem in establishing an appropriate collaboration and with a single channel of transmission, that is, through me.” And he warned employees that if any agent or collaborator of any national or foreign intelligence service ever contacted them, they should be told that “the procedure is to communicate with me.” The warning was accompanied by a threat: any employee who failed to follow this rule would be fired. “It would be hard for me to have to let go of any of you due to breaches of trust,” he added.

A few months earlier, in March 2016, one of the collaborators of UC Global SL had written to Morales informing him that “the CNI wants to count on us for some courses at a shooting range” in the barracks of the Marine Infantry Regiment in San Fernando (in Cádiz province).

Report on a former CNI director

Other emails from Morales dated three years later, between February and March 2019, show his participation in the preparations for a meeting between the company Advanced Security Business Group SL, owned by the former CNI director José Alberto Saiz Cortés, and a collaborator of Indra, a large Spanish IT and defense systems company.

The former military officer wrote to the latter and sent him a report on Advanced Security Business Group SL, a consultancy firm specializing in national and international security, according to its website. “I am attaching a brief report on the company with which you will be in contact tomorrow so that you can get a sense of it, although I think you already have an idea knowing the background of the person in charge,” says one of the emails, alluding to the former head of the Spanish secret service.

The former CNI director, appointed by the Spanish defense minister in 2004, was dismissed from his post after the newspaper El Mundo published information about the use of secret service funds for trips and personal hobbies. Saiz continues to head his own security company. This newspaper has not been able to obtain his version of events.

Morales was arrested two months after an EL PAÍS investigation released audios and videos that his employees recorded of the Australian activist in meetings with his lawyers, doctors and visitors inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. This material was presented as evidence in a complaint filed by Assange, and Spain’s Audiencia Nacional court is investigating Morales for violating client-attorney privileges, misappropriation and money laundering.

The lawsuit filed in New York by several victims of espionage, known as Kunstler v. Central Intelligence Agency, forced CIA Director William J. Burns to testify. The head of the intelligence service invoked the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 to avoid providing the New York judge with any information because it could cause “serious — and in some cases, exceptionally grave — damage to the national security of the United States.”

Following his lengthy imprisonment, Assange, 52, was released on June 25 after signing an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in which he pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act and accepted a five-year prison sentence already served in London's Belmarsh prison.

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