The director of the Strategic Intelligence Secretariat, Álvaro Garcé, presented to the Prosecutor’s Office a document of the 2022 Intelligence Plan that differs from the one he had taken to Parliament. However, the hierarch declared before the prosecutor Gilberto Rodríguez that the version that he handed over to him coincided with the one that he had presented before the bicameral commission that is tasked with controlling and supervising the National State Intelligence System.
Although the content of the two documents is the same, the versions have differences in wording, number of pages and format.
The text that Garcé presented in the Prosecutor’s Office has 15 pages, while the one that the legislators agreed to has one less. Both are foliated.
The document that Garcé handed over to the prosecutor has his full name, his titles and his position (“Prof. Dr. Álvaro Garcé García y Santos / Director of the State Strategic Intelligence Secretariat”) at the bottom of pages 3, 13 and 15. In the document that was distributed to the legislators, the name of the head of the secretariat does not appear.
The differences between the version presented in the Prosecutor’s Office and in Parliament
The version that García took to the Prosecutor’s Office indicates on page 4 to whom it was distributed: one copy was for the deputy secretary of the Presidency of the Republic, Rodrigo Ferrés, and a second copy was for the archive of the Secretariat for Strategic Intelligence. That page does not appear in the one that was delivered in Parliament.
The differences between the version presented in the Prosecutor’s Office and in Parliament
Thirdly, there are wording differences both in the way in which the name of the laws of the regulatory framework referred to are developed and in the development of the acronyms when speaking of the CARP and the CARU. One document speaks of “radiological material”, while the other refers only to “radiological” weapons. Finally, the most significant difference in terms of wording is in “point B” of the Agesic activities that appear in the collection plan (Annex I).
The fact that they were dissimilar documents was pointed out by the lawyer who defends the legislators of the Broad Front, Homero Guerrero, who said on Thursday that there were “some differences” between the document that Garcé took to the Prosecutor’s Office and the one that the legislators received in the Parlament.
“The prosecutor showed the legislators the document that Mr. Garcé presented at the time of appearing in the Prosecutor’s Office. He asked them the comparison with what was delivered to the legislators and it was a memory thing. They understand that the structure can be, but it would be necessary to check whether it is the same. In reality, it has some differences, which may be in the letter or format, ”he said at a press conference after the prosecutor took statements from the legislators involved.
The bureaucratic path of the plan: step by step
In a statement lasting almost an hour, Garcé reconstructed the bureaucratic journey that the document had under the hypothesis that it could have had two “escape routes”: the Presidency of the Republic and Parliament, sources familiar with the investigation told El Observador.
As he has said publicly, the director of intelligence assured Rodríguez that the document could not have been leaked from the agencies because they had “previous versions” and with a trace (a mark) that allows them to be identified.
The signature of the ministers of Defense, Interior, Foreign Ministry and Economy for the decree was collected on August 26 and published on October 20.
The day he had to appear before Parliament, October 24, Garcé arrived at the session at 3:15 p.m. because he had arrived from a trip. He went to his office in the Executive Tower to look for the document that was in his safe, according to what he said. His secretary took it out and they made seven copies, one for each bench.
Garcé narrated that he gave the seven equal copies to Senator Raúl Lozano, who chairs the commission. Five copies were distributed at the meeting and two were kept for the Independent Party and the Intransigent Radical Ecologist Party that were not in the room.
The journalist Eduardo Preve spread some of the contents of the plan on his Twitter account on October 27 and, from then on, Garcé reported the leak to the Prosecutor’s Office.
The government and Garcé have publicly pointed to Parliament as the place from which the document was leaked. They argue that the leaked version coincides with the one he brought to the commission.
Given that Garcé told the Prosecutor’s Office that the document he delivered at the time of making the statement was the same one he had brought to Parliament, The Observer published on Thursday that the version that was leaked was not a coincidence with the one that the legislators had. However, those versions agree. The documents that have differences are the one that Garcé took to the Prosecutor’s Office and the one that he took to Parliament.
