Inquiry ordered after Semana magazine reports cyberspies monitored government team negotiating with Farc rebels
Colombian officials said on Tuesday that they were ordering an investigation into a report by the country's leading news magazine that elite army cyberspies monitored the digital communications of members of the government team negotiating peace with Farc rebels.
Interior minister Aurelio Iragorri said in a radio interview that the government of President Juan Manuel Santos did not authorise the espionage, which Semana magazine said lasted more than a year.
Defence minister Juan Carlos Pinzon tweeted that he was ordering an investigation.
Iragorri said he hoped the peace talks that began in Havana in November 2012 to end a half-century conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, would not be hurt.
"This is a situation that affects us, too," he told Caracol radio. "We are victims."
Semana magazine posted a story online late on Monday saying the cyberspies, assisted by young civilian hackers they recruited, collected emails as well as text and BlackBerry messages from, among other targets, government negotiators in the Havana peace talks.
It said they operated for 15 months ending in October from a clandestine storefront in western Bogota that sold cheap lunches and also billed itself as offering website design and cybersecurity classes.
The eavesdroppers did not intercept voice communications but were ordered to break into email accounts and intercept messages from the popular WhatsApp service as well as obtain the BlackBerry PINs of targets, the magazine said.
Their targets included chief government negotiator Humberto de la Calle and peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo as well as politicians not directly involved in the negotiations including leftist congressman Ivan Cepeda and former Sen. Piedad Cordoba, a key go-between with the Farc, Semana reported.
The eavesdroppers were also engaged in spying on urban rebels, the magazine said.
De la Calle and Jaramillo were not apt to mention sensitive issues in their email, Semana noted, mindful that Cuban and other intelligence agencies may be monitoring it.
The magazine offered copious details on how the eavesdroppers, under the code name Andromeda, operated. It said they recruited young hackers at the city's annual Campus Party hacking fest.
Semana said an army captain, not named for security reasons, ran the operation. It identified him as a member of the army's Technical Intelligence Battalion No 1, known as BITEC-1.
The magazine said the battalion is a backbone of DINTE, the military's intelligence arm.
The operation was halted when the eavesdroppers feared they had been found out, said the magazine, adding that it had investigated the operation for 15 months and consulted with multiple high-level sources including US intelligence officials, who have long assisted the Bogota government in its war against the Farc.
Semana has broken news on domestic spying before. In 2009, it uncovered a scandal that eventually led to the dismantling of the DAS domestic intelligence agency.
The investigation determined that DAS agents were illegally intercepting the telephone communications of leading politicians, journalists and supreme court justices. The scandal led to the imprisonment of several top DAS officials and badly tainted the administration of thenpresident Alvaro Uribe.
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