The ‘Water Polo’ scandal

Last Tuesday the director of DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad) - the national intelligence agency that reports to the presidency- María del Pilar Hurtado, was in a meeting with her top officials when she received an urgent call from one of her advisors. “Senator Gustavo Petro is showing a memorandum from the DAS ordering his surveillance on live television at this moment”, she was told.

Disconcerted at what her employee told her, the first thing she managed to respond was that it wasn’t possible and that it must be a false accusation because she never gave such an order. She hung up and unworried continued with her meeting. Minutes later she received a new call in which she was informed that Petro was now showing a second memorandum and was reading the contents of some documents that ordered his surveillance and the gathering of information about members of his opposition party, the Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA).

Only then, Hurtado began to worry. The matter seemed very delicate. She ordered her subordinates to immediately verify Petro’s accusation. Not much time passed before she had in her hands the documents that the senator had shown on television. When she read them, she knew that her hours as director of the DAS were numbered.

The orders shown by Petro were not fabrications and had indeed been issued by DAS. Hurtado went to the media and publicly said that neither she nor the President had given the order and that she would open an investigation. The two internal memos that ordered information gathering to prove links between the senator and the PDA with illegal groups and with anti-government witnesses were requested by the coordinator of political and social intelligence, Jaime Fernando Ovalle, a very respected career official with 14 years at the DAS.

According to DAS director, the whole affair originated with an overzealous oficial- Ovalle-, who without anyone ordering it signed the two requests to the 27 DAS units. The first, which investigated only Petro’s movements and contacts, was issued on August 29th. The second, which expanded the scope of the investigation to the entire PDA, was dated September 16. Both orders were to be undertaken immediately.

While DAS and top government officials tried to minimize the scandal by saying that it was about a mid-level official who made a mistake, for many it is difficult to believe that Ovalle had acted on his own accord. Why would a man, hardened in intelligence matters, risk his future and his career to make such a sensitive decision? Could it be that Ovalle, who managed the political area at the DAS, did not gauge the consequences of his actions, especially taking into account the accusations of the Supreme Court and of the opposition who had repeatedly said that they were being watched by DAS? Could it be that Ovalle did not attend meetings in which the same director had instructed her subordinates to expressly abstain from monitoring judges and members of the political opposition? Why did Ovalle violate the internal instructions of DAS that for the past two years expressly said that the leadership of the institution would be the only ones permitted to give orders to officials at the national level?

To date, Ovalle has not wanted to respond to those questions, which could raise suspicion that he was only being used as a sacrificial lamb. Petro has said that he does not believe that President Álvaro Uribe gave the order, but does say that he believes that “there are other more powerful forces behind those orders.” It is not difficult to deduce that the senator is thinking of high government officials. In fact, he suggests that the memorandum is intimately linked to the president’s statements from August 12 during a long press conference in which he accused of Petro, together with Senator Piedad Córdoba of the Liberal Party, as fabricating false witnesses against the government.

Petro’s hypothesis could be interpreted as a simple statement by a political opponent with a grudge against the government if it were not because it coincides with recent events that involve officials of the presidential palace in the same way. DAS is a security and intelligence agency that receives direct orders from the presidency and it would not be the first time that executive branch officials used DAS to further their unethical activities.

The most recent example of this type of collaboration was the messy episode of paramilitary alias “Job”, as revealed by SEMANA, when some emissaries of former paramilitary head “Don Berna” were received in the Casa de Nariño (presidential palace) because they offered to deliver information to high government officials that presumably would compromise Supreme Court members.

At that time, officials from the palace called the DAS director to undertake some illegal wiretappings of Supreme Court judges, something that Hurtado refused to do. Since that moment she was seen by the president’s inner circle as someone who was not very helpful to the administration. Something similar happened to the former DAS director Andrés Peñate, according to various sources. After – successfully undertaking structural reform without scandals – he resented that some high officials from the presidency saw the DAS more as a political police of the government than as an intelligence service in a state that needs to defend itself against powerful threats.

The president did not even receive the DAS director Hurtado when she brought him her resignation letter last Wednesday night. That in six years the Uribe government has already had three heads of the DAS reveals the difficulties the administration has had in managing such a strategic entity for its democratic security policies.

What is even more paradoxical is the fact that while Peñate and Hurtado, who tried hard to reform the entity, give it a strategic focus, gain international respect and put clear limits on its intelligence functions, left under the indifferent eyes of the president. In contrast, Uribe vehemently defended the former director of the DAS Jorge Noguera, who is being investigated by the Fiscalía (prosecutor general’s office) for allegedly having put the DAS at the service of paramilitaries.

Facing this new scandal at the DAS, that could end up tarnishing the Casa de Nariño yet again, the president decided to distance himself from it. “The departure of the director of the DAS gives me great sadness”, he said last Friday. He later said: “I think that there was a trap there. To whom would it occur that an agent with intelligence experience would send a memorandum to investigate a political party? What is behind that? The desire to cause damage to the Government. This morning I spoke with a colleague here in the presidency and told him, ‘look, with all this perversion they are circulating false accusations that you gave that order to the DAS’. He was outraged”, said the president. This was a clear allusion to an unconfirmed version, that presidential advisor José Obdulio Gaviria had given instructions to the DAS employee which ordered the monitoring of and search for information against Petro and the Polo.

A few hours before Uribe’s statement, Gaviria, anticipating those rumors which linked him with the scandal, spoke to radio station W Radio. During the interview he said, “Petro is lying and those who say that I have something to do with the DAS are lying. Both personally and professionally I don’t know the person who gave the order, which I would call a silly thing”.

The president and José Obdulio are clearly looking to avoid that the Petro spy scandal arrives at the presidential palace. In reality, until now, there is no evidence that would lead to that. But with recent events there is a bad aftertaste and a lot of suspicion. For now the Procuraduría General, the entity that investigates the conduct of government officials, has announced the opening of an investigation to establish who gave the order of intelligence gathering against Petro and the Polo. The prosecutor general’s office may do the same.

Times of change

Until the results of those investigations are known, the DAS has again been called into question. This reopens the debate about what the function of that entity should be in a democratic state. It is a reversal with respect to what previous DAS administrations have achieved.

But it is necessary to recognize that profound changes at the DAS need to be made. Neither Peñate nor Hurtado had the support of the executive branch to prevent that entity from becoming an offshoot of the presidency. Those familiar with the matter told SEMANA that, ironically, the least interested in the department evolving seems to be the government itself. “Nobody is really interested in serious reforms because that would prevent that any palace official would be able to give orders to anyone at the DAS to do whatever they want, as is happening now,” said a former intelligence head of that agency.

The scandal is without a doubt an opportune moment to have a serious debate about the
DAS. But before that, it is necessary that the country learn who was behind this spy episode against Senator Petro and the PDA. For now, neither the theory of the overzealous official nor that of the mudslinging conspiracy is very credible.

In any country in the world, to be caught spying on the political opposition evokes the memory of Watergate, the 70s scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency, because they tried to cover it up. In this case, it all comes down to a question: who gave the order?