Cristina Caamano said in an investigation that the AFI data leak “has not endangered the security of the Nation”.

Cristina Caamaño, Controller of the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI), testified before the judge Maria servini, blamed in a judicial inquiry opened in 2020, when dozens of sensitive data from the state spy system was disclosed, including the identities of spies and former spies.

Caamaño, assisted by the official defender Hernan Silva, declared via Zoom from noon to Servini and the prosecutor Eduardo Taiano. According to relatives of the former investigating prosecutor, his statement was to define the responsibilities of the data leak. In addition to submitting a brief, Caamaño answered questions from the prosecution and the court.

On September 28, 2020, four former AFI members denounced Caamaño, following the leak of dozens of identities of people who work or have worked as agents after a court document was made public that joined the illegal espionage case that was being processed in federal court de Lomas de Zamora and forwarded to the federal tribunal court responsible for Marcelo Martinez De Giorgi, located in the Comodoro Py 2002 building.

The names of dozens of agents and former AFI agents were released after a document was released which was added to the case then under investigation in Lomas de Zamora and what the 80 parties who have access to the court file on illegal espionage could read. The document is a scan of the pages of the AFI Resolution Protocol Book where all administrative decisions taken between December 2015 and January 2019 have been annulled.

This complaint which led to the Caamaño investigation was filed after Infobae published that the names of dozens of agents and former AFI agents had been exposed from the release of a document that was added to the case in which illegal espionage was investigated in Lomas de Zamora and that they could read all 80 parts with drop access.

The former agents had named Caamano as the person responsible for the leak. The identities of people who had worked as spies in other countries and some who had done so here but hid it from their families have been revealed. In several media, the minutes were released without testing and the full document was even posted on a website. This made the list of agents and former agents accessible to everyone.

The document which had leaked is the digitization of the resolution book and allows to know the identity of the agents of the whole of the AFI scale whose names were registered there because they were part of procedures requiring an administrative decision. In this book, there was no data on how intelligence operations were conducted. Neither on the follow-ups nor on the tasks that secret agents perform when they are on the streets. There were no details of the investigations or the operations. The minutes do not reveal anything about the espionage activities of the ex-SIDE.

During the circulation of this document, names of agents and former agents belonging to different administrations were exposed. From the data included in the document, the names of the agents who entered the AFI during the Macrista government and also those who left the spy post and entered during Kirchnerism have been revealed. Among the names on this list are those who formalized the retirement procedures and who joined ex-SIDE in previous negotiations. And also the identities of those who were important as AFI delegates abroad.

After this first complaint, the AFI worker lodged another complaint for the same fact in which she did not blame anyone directly. Caamano had requested an investigation into the situation which arose once the copy of the decision book reached the Lomas de Zamora prosecutor’s office and the file was made available to the parties in the forensic computer system. Caamano had indicated in his complaint that when he sent the sensitive material to Lomas de Zamora’s prosecution, he had it accompanied by an official letter requesting that the confidentiality of its content be taken into account. Prosecutors in the Lomas de Zamora case where the AFI leadership was investigated – before the case was passed on to Comodoro Py – during the macrismo for illegal espionage are Cecilia Incardona and Santiago Eyherabide. For this case they were prosecuted Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani, who led the AFI during the government of Mauricio Macri.

In his writing to which Infobae accessed by relatives in Caamaño, the speaker underlined: “AFI during the transmission of information has taken all necessary precautions to protect its content In accordance with the requirements that the regulations impose on the filing of classified documents and, in addition, the requesting judicial authority has received clear guidelines for action which, if observed, prevented any type of filtration”.

And he added: “It is clear to this part that the treatment accorded by those responsible for Lomas de Zamora it was openly deviating from the strict and clear precautions that were detailed in the declassification resolution itselfIn this way, he named Lomas de Zamora prosecutors as those responsible for the leak.

In addition, in his letter, he stressed that there had been no consequences of the leak and in particular referred to what had happened with the agents and former agents who were stationed abroad and who appeared as agents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the embassies of the countries to which they were destined. as spies. “I must clarify,” Caamaño wrote, “that the disclosure of the information under investigation here has in no way endangered the security of the nation. what is the legal right which protects s. 223 of the Criminal Code calls for its configuration. Indeed, the content of this copy of the minutes book was of a purely administrative or bureaucratic nature since it did not contain the body of each of the resolutions mentioned, but a very brief indication of the subject to which they referred, and did not include not matters of nature: operations related to national security or relations with foreign agencies; but – as I said previously – purely administrative questions which have absolutely nothing to do with the type of secrets the violation of which claims the indicated criminal standard. And the proof of this is that almost a year after this information was leaked (for reasons which are totally foreign to me) and for this reason it has come to the knowledge of many people who they should not have known if they had followed the safety precautions recorded both in the official letter to the prosecution and in the Declassification Resolution, strictly speaking, there was no such damage. Indeed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has already sent an official letter to this judiciary in which it is known that in terms of international relations there has been no type of complaint for the disclosure of this information, and at the national level, as the Agency’s controller, the leakage of this information – beyond the alleged damage that could have caused the complainants in their entourage – in no way endangers national security.

Servini summoned Caamano for an investigation, considering her responsible for the leak. The speaker – who has not yet succeeded in having Congress approve her specifications to be confirmed in her position at the head of the espionage station – declared herself and defended herself. The judge will probably settle the procedural situation of the heads of the secret agents after the court lounge.

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