While France was considering buying Pegasus, Morocco was spying on its ministers

Around the turn of 2020, the DGSI and Directorate of Military Intelligence were noted as possible Pegasus clients, according to documents Forbidden Stories reviewed. The spyware also caught the attention of the Ministry of Justice, which considered its potential as a tool in investigations related to drug trafficking or terrorism. “Several government agencies were pushing for Pegasus, including the Ministry of Justice,” confirmed a member of French intelligence. There is no indication that the software’s intended uses in France were illegal.

Some have explicitly expressed their enthusiasm for such technology. Take Jean-Dominique Nollet, a graduate of the Special Military School of Saint-Cyr, who spent his career first in the army and then in the Gendarmerie. A man with thin-framed glasses, he met with NSO in Prague “around 2016 to 2017” and later at the company’s headquarters while he was on secondment to Europol, the European Union’s criminal police agency.

At Europol, “we were all extremely impressed by the tool’s performance, both in terms of deployment and data collection. … By providing the phone number, NSO could infect the phone in about 20 seconds,” said Nollet — who is now employed by TotalEnergies — during his interview with investigators. In Herzliya, he could hardly contain his fascination with “a room of about 15 square meters filled with every type of iOS and Android phone on the planet, which were continuously subjected to tests for infection and malware deployment.”