Former Spanish military man who spied on Assange for CIA falsified evidence in his own defense

David Morales, the former Spanish military man who spied on Julian Assange during the latter’s stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, falsified official documents and provided false evidence to the judge who is investigating him for having recorded the WikiLeaks founder’s conversations with his lawyers, which Morales then relayed to the CIA. Spain’s central tribunal Audiencia Nacional is asking the Madrid courts to investigate Morales for allegedly falsifying official documents and committing procedural fraud, according to a court document to which EL PAÍS has had access.

After denying any connection with the events, Morales — who is the owner of UC Global S.L., the company that was in charge of security at the Ecuadorian embassy in London — asked to testify in January 2020 before Judge José de la Mata, and claimed that it was the former Ecuadorian ambassador in London, Carlos Abad, who had ordered him to secretly record the Australian cyber activist’s conversations. This confession came a few weeks after the diplomat’s death.

Morales presented as evidence an alleged email from former ambassador Abad, dated January 27, 2018, in which he asked Morales to place a microphone in the embassy’s meeting room. He claimed that it was placed for a test and then removed. But police reports and expert reports presented by Assange’s legal representation have shown that the alleged email and other official documents provided by Morales were falsified.

Lawyers for Assange and several other individuals who were spied on asked Judge Santiago Pedraz, the judge currently in charge of the case, to expunge this email and other falsified documents from the proceedings.

Traces of manipulation

A police document has confirmed that the emails allegedly exchanged between former ambassador Abad and Morales are not in the email inbox of the owner of UC Global S.L. The former military man’s computer was seized after his arrest in September 2019, shortly after an investigation by EL PAÍS revealed the audios and videos recorded secretly over the course of several months. The evidence provided by this newspaper supported the complaint filed by the activist against the owner of UC Global S.L. The experts’ reports now conclude that “there are clear signs of manipulation.”

Morales also presented in his defense an alleged document from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which seven Ecuadorian officials serving at the time, including two former ministers, have described as false. This document has also been excluded from the investigation.

The alleged falsifications by Morales of official documents and even of the ambassador’s signature are not new. In 2018, Abad filed a complaint against the former military officer and his lawyer for falsifying his emails and signature in the context of a labor law trial in Spain against a UC Global S.L. employee. The diplomat reproached Morales for his actions with a message: “I take this opportunity to tell you that in 27 years I had never seen something so poorly done; even amateur hackers are better at phishing [sending emails impersonating someone’s identity]. Once again, Mr. David, I fail to understand what you are trying to achieve with such crude and nefarious falsifications as those you or your employees are carrying out.”

Among those who were spied on by the audio and video cameras installed by Morales’s workers at the embassy was the former ambassador himself, who according to Morales’ false email was the one who ordered him to record the conversations. The diplomat was dismissed by the government of Lenin Moreno and later died of lung cancer in Quito.

Fidel Narváez, the first secretary of the embassy at the time, recalls the clashes that Abad had with the employees of the Spanish security company. “The ambassador always suspected that they were overstepping the professional line,” he says.

Morales’ contradictions in this case reached their climax when he presented a USB memory stick with several recordings from the hidden microphone in the embassy meeting room, a device whose existence he had consistently denied.

Since his arrest in 2019, Morales has been released pending trial and is being investigated by the Audiencia Nacional for alleged crimes against privacy, violation of attorney-client privilege, misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.

Following his expulsion from the Ecuadorian embassy and imprisonment, Assange, 52, was released on June 25 of this year after reaching a deal with the United States Department of Justice in which he pleaded guilty to a violation of the Espionage Act and accepted a five-year prison sentence that he had already served in London’s Belmarsh prison.

investigación@elpais.es

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