70,000 Agents, One Telegram Post: Morocco Writes Its Own Chapter in the History of Spy-Service Shame

Spy services live on invisibility. The good ones bury a name for decades. The great ones die without anyone learning the name at all. Morocco’s interior machine just took another route. It put tens of thousands of them on Telegram.

On 24 August 2026 a channel calling itself Jabaroot posted what it billed as the identities of about 70,000 people tied to the DGST, the domestic intelligence service, and the DGSN, the national police. The files, as described by Le Monde and Spanish outlets, carry names, birth dates, ID numbers, service numbers, recruitment years and, for a smaller slice of about 1,400 entries, ranks and bank details. Abdellatif Hammouchi, who runs both agencies and is often sold as the king’s super-cop, is on the list. His date of birth had never been published. That is not tradecraft. That is a staff directory with worse password hygiene.

Jabaroot did not dress this up as a privacy story. It called the dump a gift to Europe, and to Spain in particular, after the 30 July rush into Ceuta, when tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave. The group said Moroccan services had spent years in Europe on the dirtiest work, bugging, bribery, political pressure, and that migration toward Spain was official policy. It also said it held mission orders for officers sent to Fnideq, the Moroccan town facing Ceuta, and promised a second list of those who orchestrated and coordinated the crossing.

That second file would be the serious one. A payroll is humiliation. An order sheet would be evidence. The order sheet has been promised. It has not been independently verified in public. Even without it, the first drop is already a museum piece: if this is a secret service, the secret part did not get the memo.

Three stories about one spreadsheet

Rabat’s answer was the oldest move in the book. Nothing was breached. The systems are fortress-grade. The names came from old insurance and social-security files. Some photos and papers were fakes, wrong uniforms, invented ranks, bad French. Prosecutors would hunt whoever assembled the package.

That defence has a problem. If the most sensitive men in the kingdom can be reconstructed from an insurance company, the security pole is not a vault. It is a filing cabinet with a sticker that says vault.

Spain was less theatrical and more interested. The CNI and police intelligence are checking the names one by one. They do not treat the whole list as genuine. They have already found invented identities. Some entries look like collaborators rather than career officers. A handful of names have been tied to real people, including staff at Morocco’s embassy in Madrid. Enough of it landed to make professionals sit up. Not enough of it is clean to call the entire dump a gospel.

A third version sits in the middle. Le Monde reported that the 24 August release was the work of five former DGST officers now in Europe, four officers and a commissioner, who broke with the service and want Hammouchi removed. Former Moroccan officers told El Confidencial that parts of the lists look real. If that account holds, this is not even a foreign masterstroke. It is an inside job by men who used to own the building. In the history of intelligence humiliations, the own-goal has always been the ugliest kind.

So the facts that travel: a large personnel-style dump exists; some names check out; the source and meaning are contested; Morocco denies a core-system hack. A payroll is not a trafficking dossier. It is still an embarrassment that other services will study for years, the way they study blown networks and leftover briefcases.

Ceuta is why they wanted the drama

Jabaroot timed the leak to Ceuta because Ceuta is where Morocco’s security state likes to look formidable and Europe likes to look surprised.

What is not in dispute: at the end of July a huge irregular crossing hit the enclave; people died; Spain called it an attack on territorial integrity; Moroccan control looked, at least at first, unusually loose; rumours and smugglers were part of the mix. Spain’s own 2026 defence outlook had already treated the May 2021 Ceuta episode, about 9,000 crossings, including many minors, as migration used as pressure over Western Sahara.

What is disputed is whether July 2026 was a planned intelligence operation. Madrid and Rabat publicly blamed smugglers and viral lies. The New York Times reported that experts saw no proof a state had masterminded that particular surge. Other Spanish reporting, Guardia Civil sources and Jabaroot claim Moroccan officers were in the crowd, or that royal adviser Fouad Ali El Himma and Hammouchi eased the border after a mid-July European investigation into Pegasus targeting of Spanish officials. Those are serious allegations. They are not a verdict.

Here is the comic timing. A service accused of running Europe like a chessboard cannot keep its own roster off a public channel. You cannot sell yourself as the invisible hand of the western Mediterranean and then appear, alphabetised, with account numbers. If they opened Ceuta on purpose, they did it with the subtlety of a stadium announcement. If they did not, they still look like the agency that lost control of a border and then lost control of a hard drive.

The tunnels are real. This leak did not build them.

Hashish from Morocco through Ceuta into Spain and on toward the Netherlands is not a rumour. Spanish police have found smuggling tunnels under the border, seized multi-tonne loads, arrested organisers on both sides, and charged Spanish officers for selling cover to traffickers. In one case investigators talked about industrial volumes, estimates around two tonnes a week through a single underground system. Moroccan help on the Spanish side of those cases has been described as thin.

That is crime and corruption. It is not proof that the DGST or DGED ran the tunnels. A passage under a militarised border still asks the same rude question: who was watching, and who was paid not to. Those answers live in court files. They are not in Jabaroot’s spreadsheet, no matter how loudly the channel talks about dirty missions.

Irregular movement into Europe via Ceuta and Melilla mixes asylum seekers, economic migrants, unaccompanied minors and people moved by paid smugglers. Europe has long treated Morocco as both a counter-terror partner and a government that can open or close a tap when it wants something on Western Sahara, fishing or recognition. Jabaroot’s charge is cruder: that the services ran Europe-wide dirty work and that the migration itself is policy. The separate Pegasus reporting from July 2026, a former DGST insider, targeting of Spanish ministers, alleged monitoring of Guardia Civil trainers, is a file about espionage. It is not a confession that Rabat ran drug corridors or trafficking rings across the continent.

A personnel leak can still help those investigations later. If authentic, it maps who sat in border units, who held embassy cover, who has a bank trail. That is useful. It is not a smoking gun. It is a phone book left on the pavement.

What this writes into the record

Intelligence history is a catalogue of shame as much as triumph. Cambridge had its traitors. The CIA had its blown networks. East Germany had files so fat they outlived the state. Morocco has now contributed a more modern exhibit: tens of thousands of possible officers and police, dumped in a week, argued over in the press, denied as old insurance data, and still radioactive enough that Madrid’s services are reading the names.

The security brand is damaged either way. If the lists are partly real, officers and families are exposed and African partners who share intelligence with Rabat have a problem. If they are stitched from social-security and insurance records, the kingdom still looks unable to stop a leak campaign that has run since the 2025 CNSS breach. In both versions, the professionals look sloppy. In one version they look penetrated. In the other they look like men who never separated the secret work from the HR department.

Spain cannot pretend the relationship is only essential cooperation. The CNI is reading a list that includes embassy names while Madrid is still managing Ceuta. That is politics even if half the spreadsheet is junk. A partner that cannot keep its own people unnamed is a partner that will be handled with gloves.

The trafficking and drug stories will not be settled on Telegram. They will be settled, if at all, by Spanish and European case files and by any operational papers that come next, not by treating a hacker channel as a prosecutor. The next drop is the test. Seventy thousand possible employees are a shock. Orders sending named officers to Castillejos to open a crossing would be an accusation Europe would have to answer.

Until those documents exist in a form journalists and courts can test, the ending some want, that this leak has already exposed Morocco’s hand in Ceuta, drugs and human trafficking across Europe, is written before the evidence arrives. What has already arrived is smaller and crueller. A service that markets itself as Europe’s indispensable shadow just became a headline. Not because a rival outplayed it in the dark. Because someone hit publish.

That is how Morocco wrote its own chapter in the history of spy-service shame. Not with a brilliant sting. With a Telegram post.