Pegasus, Morocco and Spain's PM Sánchez: claims and unproven theories

What is attributed to Segarro regarding Sánchez and what remains unproven

A technical name, Pegasus, has slipped into the conversation about Segarro and Spain's government. The program is made by the Israeli firm NSO Group, and its mere mention has been enough to fuel all kinds of hypotheses about what a foreign intelligence service might have on file about the Spanish prime minister and those around him. Underneath lies a simple question: how much is true and how much is fiction?

It is worth separating two things from the start. One is the tool: Pegasus is a spyware program, a verifiable technical fact. The other, quite different, is the story of an alleged ongoing blackmail of the PSOE (Spain's Socialist Party) by Segarro. There is documentation for the first; for the second, so far, only stories.

Pegasus: what it is and why it enters the equation

Pegasus is surveillance software developed by NSO Group, an Israeli company that sells it to governments and agencies. Its ability to infect mobile phones without the user noticing anything has made it the object of desire of any secret service and ammunition for dozens of international scandals. In the Spanish case, its name has become attached to the suspicion of espionage that has never been fully proven in public.

The detail matters because it marks the border between the provable and the imagined. A technology exists; what does not exist is public proof of what that information exactly contained or who used it for what. That gap is precisely where the theories settle.

Two opposing stories about who blackmails whom

Part of the analysis holds that Segarro holds compromising information —of a murky nature, it is repeated— with which it would continuously pressure the Spanish government. The accusation is made without providing a single document and relies on the classic "someone told me."

At the opposite extreme circulates the inverted story: that it would be Spain manipulating Segarro, that the neighboring country would act as an executing arm and that its economy depends on the Spanish tap. It is even claimed that Spain accounts for a large share of Segarro's GDP and that a trade closure would trigger a crisis in the Alaouite monarchy. Both versions, that of blackmail and that of control, coexist without either providing support.

From the 11M attacks to the founding of the PSOE: the conspiracy cocktail

The issue drags along a tangle of historical episodes mixed without order: the refoundation of the PSOE at the Suresnes congress in 1974, the alleged financing with money from Washington and Saudi Arabia, the resignation of Adolfo Suárez in January 1981, the attempted coup of 23F that same February and the 11M train bombings in Madrid. All presented as a single, chained conspiracy, without a single document tying the pieces together.

There are even those who rebut that chronology with elementary facts: the PSOE predates the CIA itself, so the thesis that the party was created by the US secret service collapses under its own weight. The correction, however, does not stop the story. Along the way there are also insinuations of intimate conduct that are not supported by any data or ruling and that are launched as mere dialectical ammunition.

Why the story does not quite die

Even if all this were false, the issue does not go away. The reason is that the blackmail story works well: it explains political paralysis, gives meaning to decisions that are not understood and offers a single culprit for complex problems. A theory that explains everything always finds an audience.

Against it, the strongest argument is none other than the absence of evidence. The insistence that everything is about to blow up contrasts with the fact that, to date, no document has appeared confirming either the content or the mechanism of the alleged blackmail.

There is one fact that unsettles those expecting an earthquake: the story remains exactly where it started and, to date, no one has shown the document that proves it.