Inside An Illegal Government Spy Ring in Argentina

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - In March 2018, Luis Tagliapietra went to a court hearing in the southern Argentine city of Caleta Olivia. Before heading inside, he made sure to switch his phone off, in line with the court’s protocols. 

When he switched his phone back on at around 5pm, it started to buzz with notifications from Google. His account had been accessed several times from unknown devices, connecting from IPs in Malaysia and other countries.

“I showed [the prosecutor] and we went straight to his office, which was next to the federal court, and that’s when I reported illegal spying for the first time,” he told VICE World News.

Tagliapietra was right: he was being spied on. But he wasn’t a terror suspect or a crime boss. He was the father of Alejandro, a 27-year-old officer who was onboard the navy submarine ARA San Juan when it disappeared in the Southern Atlantic ocean in 2017. The hearing that day in March 2018 was part of an investigation to determine the vessel’s fate.

At first, the prosecutor recorded it as a case of mail tampering. But since then, a series of investigations and audits have gradually revealed that Tagliapietra was just one of the victims of an immense network of illegal espionage at the hands of Argentina’s Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) during the presidency of Mauricio Macri, from 2015-2019. 

In April, a congressional commission presented a report calling on lawmakers to set up an investigation into the role that “a handful” of public prosecutors and judges may have had in the spy ring. The report accuses the judiciary, the intelligence services and sympathetic media outlets of collaborating to create coordinated smear campaigns using illegally-obtained information.

The commission said that the spying ring was a clear example of “lawfare,” a concept which has been gathering steam in South American politics in recent years. It refers to the practice of abusing the judicial system to persecute political opponents. 

Just how many people might have been affected by the entire operation in Argentina is still unclear. However, the report found that agents illegally spied on around 170 political, social and professional organizations and at least 307 individuals, as well as attempting to influence at least 43 court cases through activities such as witness extortion, in the first 12 months of Macri’s presidency alone.

Victims included politicians such as ex-president and now Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Buenos Aires city governor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, and former Buenos Aires province governor María Eugenia Vidal. Dossiers were also compiled on over 400 journalists.

The families of the ARA San Juan crew already suspected that something was amiss before Tagliapietra’s Google account was hacked. Their phones would throw up weird errors: photos disappeared and they would reboot for no apparent reason. At one point, Tagliapietra’s WhatsApp chat history with his son vanished. 

“At the time, I looked at the chat pretty often because it was my last contact with him,” he said. “Maybe it seems silly, but it was my way of connecting with him, reading the last things we’d talked about. Then one day I went to look and it wasn’t there anymore.” He was able to recover the chat from a backup, but other families weren’t so lucky. 

The wreck of the submarine was eventually found in November 2018, but questions over what happened to the vessel, and the government’s treatment of the crew’s families, continue to this day.

To date, several people have been prosecuted for illicit intelligence activity in a series of ongoing court cases, including AFI’s Macri-era director, Gustavo Arribas, and sub-director, Silvia Majdalani.

One of the social movements the Argentine government spied on was Barrios de Pie, which runs projects such as soup kitchens, community healthcare work, and popular education. On one occasion, an agent attempted to set up hidden cameras in order to record a meeting in Isidro Casanova, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, about the apparent theft of food aid. But as he attempted to position the cameras, he trod on a plastic panel, which broke under his weight. He fell seven meters to the ground below and broke his pelvis.

His case is among many listed by Judge Alejo Ramos Padilla in a court document detailing the prosecution of AFI lawyer Pablo Pinamonti for allegedly coordinating a series of spying operations in Greater Buenos Aires ahead of the 2017 mid-term elections.

Now, the question for many observers is where the buck stops. Patricia Bullrich, who was Minister of Security at the time, said during a TV interview that the surveillance of journalists amounted to background checks that were part of the “necessary protocols” around large international events, and that the activity was permitted under Argentine intelligence law. 

But privacy advocates say the intelligence gathered went far beyond basic security procedures. “Many journalists had things in their profiles that were nothing to do with their job as journalists accredited to cover this kind of event,” said Beatriz Busaniche, director of the human rights and technology NGO Vía Libre Foundation. Busaniche herself was a victim of the spying ahead of the 2017 World Trade Organization meeting in Buenos Aires. After the surveillance came to light, she was sent a copy of her dossier and found that it contained information about her mother and her neighbours.

Macri’s government launched an investigation into Ramos Padilla, the judge investigating the allegations, after he presented his findings about the spying to a congressional commission. He had accused the spy Marcelo D’Alessio of planting evidence and using hidden cameras to extort his victims into making confessions that would later be used in court. The judge suggested that D’Alessio had links to Bullrich and several lawmakers. Human Rights Watch’s Americas director, José Miguel Vivanco, said at the time that the government appeared “to be retaliating against a judge who is pursuing an uncomfortable investigation.”

“The Macri-era AFI authorities [...] don’t deny the spying. What they say is that the agents acted of their own accord,” said Luciana Bertoia, a human rights journalist who has closely followed the case.

Supporters of left-wing leaders linked with the region’s “pink tide”, including Fernández de Kirchner and the former president of Brazil, Inácio Lula da Silva, argue that lawfare is a form of attacking governments whose policies go against the elite, often under the pretense of fighting corruption. 

The term is often used to describe the legal proceedings against Lula, who was convicted of corruption offences and jailed in 2018. He was freed in late 2019 after the judge was revealed to be colluding with the prosecution to prevent Lula’s party from winning the 2018 elections.

But some commentators have argued that the real problem is that judicial systems across the region aren’t independent from whoever is in power, an issue that has effectively brought down major corruption probes such as Brazil’s immense “car wash” scandal.

Proponents of the concept of lawfare allege that the collusion of “hegemonic” media outlets ideologically aligned with traditional political and economic elites plays an important role in manipulating public opinion, for instance by creating a widespread perception that the accused party is guilty before the trial has even started. 

In one example quoted in the commission’s report, intelligence services tapped the phone of Oscar Parrilli, a top-level government aide during Fernández de Kirchner’s presidency, for 209 days, purportedly because he was suspected of a crime. But his calls with Fernández de Kirchner were recorded, sent to the media, and then broadcast on prime time television. 

On another occasion, federal judge Claudio Bonadio called on Daniel Santoro, a journalist who has extensively covered corruption charges against Fernández de Kirchner, and his sources to give evidence to strengthen a corruption case - but the journalist’s source was revealed to be the spy D’Alessio. Bonadio, who died in February 2020, had worked on several prominent and controversial court cases.

Revelations that some confessions, plea bargains and other developments in major corruption cases had actually been obtained by the intelligence services engaging in illegal activity such as extortion raises concerns about fake news. The commission’s report also stated that fake news was sometimes used as a means of blackmailing victims with the threat of reputational damage.

Busaniche said that it is key to strike a balance between guaranteeing press freedom and the publishing of material obtained illegally. “The problem in these cases is always when the judicial power does things that it shouldn’t,” she said. “Because that is the only guarantee you have. Journalistic investigations should not be criminalized under any circumstances and journalists should not be forced to reveal their sources. [...] However, those guarantees should not be taken as a carte blanche for journalists to commit crimes.”

Illegal spying isn’t new in Argentina. The country’s last dictatorship, from 1976-1983, was notorious for using surveillance as part of its campaign of state terror.

Busaniche believes that part of the problem is that the AFI didn’t stick to its remit of gathering intelligence on major threats to the nation, such as terrorism and COVID. “We need more PhDs and postdocs specialising in subjects such as international trade and communication technology, rather than people who’ve been dismissed from the security forces,” she said.

“Political spying against politicians, we Argentines are pretty used to that. And is that bad? It’s terrible,” said Bertoia. “But spying against families who are looking for their loved ones, and on social organizations like soup kitchens, that’s incomprehensible.”