The Madeira Case exposed internal weaknesses, precipitated declines in SIS leadership and opened a decisive debate on oversight, transparency and democratic limits. In this third episode, Celso Paiva Sol follows a decade of conflicts, scarcity of resources and reforms that helped shape the information service of Portuguese democracy. Listen to the podcast here that tells the story of the Information Service
Ramiro Ladeiro Monteiro could not resist the words of the Public Prosecutor for the Autonomous Region of Madeira, when he complained about unjustified invasions of privacy by the SIS. And on that day, even if very slowly, the direction of the Service also began to change, first with the entry of magistrate Daniel Sanches, and then with the penalist Rui Pereira.
In this episode, the two former SIS directors recall a decade of growing pains, a notorious lack of interest and investment on the part of successive governments, the obstacles created by the remaining security system, and, despite everything, the ideas they managed to implement.
Daniel Sanches says he found “a parish service, built with many family connections”and with “a tremendous image problem, because everything bad that happened in the country was to blame for the SIS”.
Three years later, chosen by the first socialist government to have the responsibility of managing the SIRP, Rui Pereira had to face the same “Franciscan poverty, with a single computer connected to the Internet”and the same fractures in society, which he decided to combat by “opening the Service to the outside, starting to explain what it was and what it was for”. It was during Rui Carlos Pereira’s mandate that the SIS had its first symbol, a motto and an institutional website.
But in this 3rd episode, we also take a first approach to monitoring the system, both the policy that is the responsibility of Parliament, and the technique that is carried out by the Attorney General’s Office.
In the first case, Paulo Mota Pinto describes the work of the Supervisory Board of the Assembly of the Republic as the difficult “reconciliation between the natural secrecy of the SIS mission, with the need to control its activity”.
On the technical side, Assistant Prosecutor José Santos Pais recalls a journey made up of “pedagogy and mutual learning”, during which the Services and their supervisors sought “the point where everyone was comfortable”.
Listen to the 3rd episode of SIS: 40 Years of Secrets at the top of this page.
“SIS: 40 years of secrets” tells the story of the Security Intelligence Service. It marks the opening of doors in February 1986, but begins to be counted from April 1974 – when the extinction of the DGS paved the way for the creation of the first civil and democratic information service.
Through the voice of those who designed, installed and directed it, it is explained in an unprecedented way how the training and supervision aspects work and how they evolved.
A journalistic investigation by Celso Paiva Sol, told in six episodes, with sound treatment from the studios and cover by Tiago Pereira Santos.
