The U.S. Bought Pegasus for Colombia With $11 Million in Cash. Now Colombians Are Asking Why
The White House has refused to disclose how much data it gathered in partnership with the country's intelligence agencies
In recent months, Colombia has been rocked by revelations that its government deployed Pegasus, a controversial Israeli hacking platform. Now, details about how Bogotá acquired the spyware—and the U.S. government’s role—are coming to light.
In a meeting on Oct. 8 with Daniel García-Peña, Colombia’s ambassador to Washington, Biden administration officials confirmed that the U.S. government helped facilitate the acquisition of Pegasus to use in Colombia. According to the ambassador’s statements to the press following the meeting, $11 million in cash from the U.S. government was used to purchase the software to target drug cartel leaders in Colombia in 2021 and 2022.
The U.S.’ apparent role in Colombia’s use of Pegasus remains murky. Under the arrangement, the U.S. government retained control of Pegasus, but worked with the Colombians to select targets, the Biden administration told García-Peña. Use of the spyware in Colombia ended in 2022, the officials told the ambassador, adding that it had not been used against political opponents of Ivan Duque, Colombia’s then-president.
The Biden administration “assured us that the software was never given to the Colombian authorities,” the ambassador said. Rather, it was the Colombian authorities that decided who the “targets of the interceptions” would be, with additional “supervision by North American authorities” to purportedly ensure they were directed at leaders of drug-trafficking groups. Colombian newspaper El Tiempo first reported on the U.S. government's role in the purchase.
García-Peña’s revelations come two months after Colombian President Gustavo Petro delivered a televised speech in which he revealed some of the details of the all-cash, $11-million purchase, including that it has been split across two installments, flown from Bogotá and deposited into the Tel Aviv bank account belonging to NSO Group, the company that owns Pegasus. Soon after the speech, Colombia’s attorney general opened an investigation into the purchase and use of Pegasus. In October, Petro accused the director of the NSO Group of money laundering, due to the tremendous amount of cash he transported on the flights.
The timeline of the purchase and use of Pegasus overlaps with a particularly turbulent time in Colombia. A social movement had begun protesting against Duque, while in the countryside, Colombia’s security forces were killing or arresting major guerrilla and cartel leaders. At the time, Petro, the first left-wing president in the country’s recent history, was campaigning for the presidency.
In Colombia, there’s a long legacy of state intelligence agencies surveilling political opposition leaders. With the news that the U.S. secretly helped acquire and deploy powerful espionage software in their country, the government is furious at the gross violation of their sovereignty. They fear that Colombia’s history of politically motivated surveillance, backed by the U.S. government, lives on to this day.
Many questions remain about the Pegasus deal, including why the U.S. brokered the Pegasus acquisition, why it was paid for in cash, which U.S. and Colombian agencies used it, and the specific operations in which the technology was used. In addition, Duque was not informed of the U.S.’s involvement in the purchase, García-Peña said. Duque did not respond to a request for comment from Drop Site. “We were vehement in demanding total transparency and the release of information that could have been gathered in the 15 or 18 months during which the software was being used,” García-Peña said after the meeting.
“If the president did not know, and U.S. government and lower-level Colombian officials did not think the president had to know, then who controls that?” Colombian Senator Clara Lopez told Drop Site News. “It’s a problem of sovereignty. But it’s also a very grave problem regarding how security decisions are made in our country.”
A product of the Israeli tech firm NSO Group, Pegasus is a nearly undetectable hacking program capable of monitoring phone calls, messages, and microphone and camera activity, as well as a user’s location. While NSO Group billed Pegasus as a tool to fight “serious crimes and terrorism,” reporting has revealed that governments around the world have used it to spy on human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and political dissidents. Recent revelations from an ongoing lawsuit show that Pegasus, the program itself, extracts information from hacked phones after users—typically state actors—input the phone number they want targeted.
In 2021, two months after the Pegasus purchase was finalized, the Biden administration placed the company on an “entity list” after determining it had supplied spyware to foreign governments used to “maliciously target” the phones of dissidents, human rights activists, and journalists, limiting the company’s ability to do business with American firms. In 2023, President Biden signed an executive order restricting the use of “commercial spyware,” including Pegasus, by U.S. government agencies. The White House’s National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the purchase. NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
“The arrangement”
The U.S. facilitated the Pegasus acquisition during the waning days of the first Trump administration in 2020, before finalizing it under President Biden’s administration in 2021, El Tiempo reported.
At the time, Colombia was reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic. Protesters and social activists took to the streets to demonstrate against the austerity measures and corruption of Duque’s right-wing government. At the same time Colombian and U.S. officials were working together to combat criminal and dissident groups.
“The arrangement would be that the police intelligence picks out targets, people’s whose phones will get hacked, and then the United States would run the software for them. We think that’s what it is,” said Adam Isaacson, the director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America.
In March, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, reported that the purchase had been funded via assets confiscated during counter narcotics operations. Because the purchase involved a massive influx of cash into the NSO Group’s bank account, it had to be approved by the Israeli Defense Ministry, the newspaper reported. “I find it absolutely suspicious and irregular that those payments were made in cash,” García-Peña said. (According to Haaretz, the total amount used for the purchase was $13 million, but Colombian journalists reported that the $2 million difference was for chartering the private flights to transport the cash.)
In the following months, Colombian journalists began piecing together how Bogota had acquired Pegasus.
In his September speech, Petro revealed the contents of a confidential letter he had received from Israeli officials in August, who had flagged the multi-million-dollar cash deliveries. He said Colombia’s Police Intelligence Directorate (DIPOL), which works closely with U.S.-trained units, provided the money to the NSO Group to purchase Pegasus. Petro also accused DIPOL, under the Duque administration, of using Pegasus to monitor political opponents, including members of his own presidential campaign.
“If the president did not know, and U.S. government and lower-level Colombian officials did not think the president had to know, then who controls that?”
In late September, Duque shared a statement signed by his cabinet-level officials stating that “from the Republic’s Presidency, there was never an order given to acquire the software called ‘Pegasus’ by the Colombian state.”
In October, Revista Raya, a Colombian magazine, tracked the two flights from Tel Aviv, to Bogotá, and back, and identified the pilots and passengers on board. The reporting revealed a group of Israelis, including former military officials, private technology company representatives, and representatives of NSO Group, were on those flights.
Later that week, Petro addressed the nation again, this time revealing the names of the passengers, including the director of NSO Group. “In Colombia, no citizen, nor national, nor foreigner, should carry cash of a quantity like $5 million. That’s called money laundering. The representative, the owner of Pegasus, has laundered money in Colombia. This will be a task that the attorney general of Colombia will classify, and will investigate,” Petro said.
“Are those the guys who had their phones hacked?”
While it is unclear how Colombian authorities used Pegasus, its security agencies have long relied on warrantless surveillance and phone intercepts.
In 2009, Semana, a magazine in Colombia, revealed that an intelligence unit that reported directly to the far-right president Alvaro Uribe had surveilled and harassed journalists, human rights defenders, and left-wing opposition politicians, including Petro, then a senator. Four years later, the Colombian government passed a landmark law prohibiting warrantless surveillance or intercepts. Yet only a year later, Semana once again revealed the military was spying on government and guerrilla officials involved in peace negotiations.
In 2015, Privacy International, a UK-based advocacy organization, published a report detailing the Colombian state’s surveillance apparatus, focusing in part on the government’s use of phone interceptions supported by U.S. government agencies. Colombia’s intelligence agencies were “conducting mass interception of communications without explicit lawful authority,” the report alleged.
In 2020, Colombian journalists again revealed that government intelligence units were surveilling journalists, human rights defenders, politicians, journalists, and possible military whistleblowers. One of the people surveilled was the New York Times’ Andes bureau chief Nicholas Casey.
While the individuals in Colombia targeted by Pegasus in 2021 and 2022 remain unknown, prominent opposition figures have accused the Colombian government of spying on them during this period.
In the run-up to Colombia’s presidential elections in the spring and summer of 2022, journalists with Semana magazine obtained 11-months-worth of leaked videos of private meetings held by Petro’s campaign. “These recordings were done from outside and to accomplish that, important technological capabilities are needed,” a furious Petro said, batting down accusations that the leak had come from within his campaign. “I hope the current government is not involved in this operation, because it would be terrible.”
In January 2023, Colombian journalists reported that DIPOL had been digitally spying on Petro’s campaign, citing internal DIPOL records. There is no evidence that these efforts involved the use of Pegasus.
The timeframe in which Colombia used Pegasus also overlaps with the country’s targeting of high-profile dissident groups, guerrilla commanders, and cartel leaders. Various prominent attacks and arrests took place during this period, although there is no evidence that Pegasus was used to target those specific dissident, guerrilla, or cartel leaders.
“Are those the guys who had their phones hacked? Who knows,” Isaacson said. “That would be certainly a lot less controversial than if it was human rights defenders and opposition politicians. But if DIPOL—or whoever in the Colombian intelligence agencies—was choosing the targets, they have not always been known for being careful in who they choose.”
“Contrary to democracy”
Security ties between Washington and Bogotá were forged through years of joint anti-drug trafficking operations and the decades-long conflict between Colombia’s U.S.-backed government and various guerrilla groups, including the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the left-wing movement that later became one of the biggest drug trafficking groups in the country.
After the 2016 peace deal with the government, the FARC splintered, giving rise to dissident guerrilla groups that have engaged in clashes with government and rival criminal groups. (In late 2021, the U.S. government removed the FARC from their terrorist list and added two new FARC dissident groups to the list.) Meanwhile, other Colombian drug cartels continued to work with their Mexican counterparts to traffic cocaine.
U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), operate in Colombia to help combat organized crime groups. These agencies train and vet specialized, selective units of Colombian agents who assist in sensitive U.S.-led operations. The DEA, HSI, and FBI have vetted and U.S.-trained units in the Colombian army, navy, National Police, and Attorney General’s Office.
The DEA did not respond to requests from Drop Site on whether the agency supervised the use of Pegasus, worked with its vetted Colombian units to use the software, or even knew of its use by Colombian authorities. The FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees HSI, did not respond to requests for comment.
Relations between Washington and Bogota remain strong, García-Peña said. But Colombia’s decision to break diplomatic ties with Israel over the ongoing genocide in Gaza has stymied efforts to obtain information on the nature of the Pegasus acquisition, according to a recent interview by Luz Adriana Camargo, Colombia’s attorney general.
The dynamic is unlikely to improve with Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Marco Rubio, his nominee to lead the State Department, vehemently opposes Petro. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. tried to pressure Colombia to combat drug trafficking with a heavier hand. The left-leaning Petro, who has advanced further peace talks with guerrilla groups and has attempted to normalize relations with Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, may clash with the incoming Trump administration’s pressure.
But the Colombian government remains determined to understand the full truth of the Pegasus acquisition. “We were very clear in demanding ‘full disclosure,’ the complete revelation of the information that was gathered during the months that Pegasus was operating,” García-Peña said. “We know what happened in many parts of the world—where that tool was used with motives contrary to democracy.”
“What Pegasus has revealed in Colombia, is there is an internal structure in the country that is acting outside of institutionality, within institutions, and under the cover of the legitimacy of institutions,” Senator Lopez said. “And we need to remedy that.”
"there is an internal structure in the country that is acting outside of institutionality, within institutions, and under the cover of the legitimacy of institutions"
People using Pegasus for surveillance are almost never good guys. Senator Lopez succinctly describes 'infiltration' of the Colombian Government under the cover of legitimate institutions, but somehow operating outside laws. One empire agency creates exactly that sort of havoc everywhere, now even using the same impunity against its own citizens. DEA has probably always been their tool.
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