Analysis: An Economic Security Role for European Spy Agencies?

Economic spying

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Last February, Spain’s intelligence service began investigating alleged suspicious efforts by foreign financial speculators to destabilize the Spanish economy. According to newspaper El País, the Spanish government asked the country’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI) to probe links between speculative moves in world financial markets and a series of damaging editorials “in the Anglo-Saxon media”. There are indications that the National Intelligence Service of Greece (EYP) is following in the CNI’s footsteps. In February, when Athens and Brussels began to realize the magnitude of the financial crisis threatening the European common currency, several news outlets suggested that the EYP was cooperating with Spanish, Irish and Portuguese intelligence services in investigating a series of coordinated speculative attacks on money markets, most of which allegedly originated from London and Washington. It is clear that one European government after another is resorting to its intelligence apparatus to combat what increasingly resembles a sustained financial war on the eurozone. Moreover, the new, more aggressive functions of European intelligence agencies, which are already apparent in countries like Holland, Belgium and Germany, among others, include a very definite economic parameter. On the website of the Research Institute for European and American Studies, I explain the growing connection between intelligence gathering and economics in Europe and beyond. Read article →