The European Union's Intelligence Service, page 1

Unsure of if this is the right place for this thread, and if not I apologize in advance.

Shadows, by Alex Hunter

Following the murder of a young investigative journalist in France, Luc Hansen, an ex-Legionnaire now working for the elite but shadowy DER, the European Union’s security and intelligence directorate, uncovers a massive fraud within the European Commission in Brussels. But his investigation is endangered and the life of his partner, Joanna Donnelly, threatened by the existence of a ‘mole’ high inside the DER itself.

As he tracks the money flow from Brussels through London to Prague, he discovers it is being used to send guns to the Sunni militias fighting the US forces in Iraq and to the Kurdish separatists. Still unable to prove exactly who is involved, Luc travels to Iraq where the militia captures him. In a daring escape, he makes his way north to the Kurdish area in the Zagros Mountains and assists them in destroying the power of the militia in the area.

Back in Belgium, Luc embarks on a new strategy to force his opponents into the open in a desperate race to close down the arms route and arrest those involved. Luc and his team find themselves in extreme danger culminating in a fierce gun battle deep in the Belgian countryside, the outcome of which hangs in the balance.

This, DER, is a fictional European Union Intelligence Agency, but as mentioned in the short documentary video from Youtube after the book's blurb, the real existence or lack thereof, of such an organization is a subject of some debate. If you think about it, however, it makes sense that the EU would have such an organization. After all, it has a de-facto foreign ministry, a de-facto president, even a de-facto police organization, so why not an intelligence organization? National intelligence organizations are nation-centric, and therefor could not effectively help the EU where an EU-centric intelligence agency would be needed.

Bluntly speaking, I think we can safely establish that such an organization does in fact exist.

It is my belief - though I am not 100 percent about this - that the organization referred to in the book Shadows, by Alex Hunter, as DER, is referring to in fact, at least in part, the very real EU intelligence organization known as the Joint Situation Centre, after the Lisbon Treaty reorganized and renamed the European Union Intelligence Analysis Centre, or EU INTCEN for short.

As of 2010, the Situation Centre is divided into three units:

- The Civilian intelligence Cell (CIC), comprising civilian intelligence analysts working on political and counter-terrorism assessment
- The General Operations Unit (GOU), providing 24-hour operational support, research and non-intelligence analysis
- The Communications Unit, handling communications security issues and running the council's communications centre.

Staff amounts to a hundred people, based in Brussels in the Justus Lipsius building and in the Cortenberg, where the European Union Military Staff is located. It cooperates with EU Military Staff and the Council to operated the European Union Satellite Centre, which provides satellite imagery and analysis.

Until today when I became interested in this subject I did not know of INTCEN's existence. One thing that strikes me is this. If this is indeed the EU intelligence service that Alex Hunter refers to in his book under the name DER, then a hundred people is not a very large staff for Europe's self-proclaimed CIA. Of course, as we all know, intelligence agencies aren't exactly open with the nubmer of people they employ, and if this is truly Europe's CIA, then no doubt what we see and read about it on Wikipedia shows only a fraction of its true size and organization.

What does ATS think of this?

edit on 24-9-2012 by Gauss because: (no reason given)