EUobserver ha pubblicato ieri un’interessante intervista ad Alain Winants, segretario generale della Sûreté de l’Etat, il Servizio di sicurezza belga. Oggetto dell’intervista le attività di intelligence nella capitale fiamminga. Tra le città al mondo più frequentate dalle spie, a parere di Winants:

[…]In Brussels we have seen an evolution going from classic Cold War espionage, which was roughly in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s – in fact, until the fall of the Berlin wall. We saw in Belgium in the 1980s some terrorists like the CCCs [Communist Combatant Cells]. Then we had also during a certain period an export from Irish terrorism to the mainland, between the 1980s and 1990s. The last evolution in this trend is now, of course, the threat of Islamic terrorism, which is an item which occupies, I think, all services around the world and we see for the moment from the 1990s that this is the item on which a great a deal of the services are focusing. This being said, it does not mean that classic espionage has been wiped out. I have said several times, and we are very well placed here in Belgium and particularly here in Brussels to say it, that the level of espionage is the same if not even higher than in the days of the Cold War. Some services thought that with the coming down of the Berlin wall the Cold War was over and espionage was somethig of the past. But we can state that in Belgium, espionage, Russian espionage and from other countries, like the Chinese, but also others, we are at the same level as the Cold War, which is not surprising given where we are. We are a country with an enormous concentration of diplomats, businessmen, international institutions, Nato, European institutions. So for an intelligence officer, for a spy, this is a kindergarten. It’s the place to be. You have people here who have commercial and political information, people whom you can try to recruit, people you can try to influence. You have governments where you can try to lobby. And the border between allowed lobbying and not-allowed interference – influence and espionage – is sometimes very hard to identify. Given the special context we have here, I think you can safely say that Brussels is one of the big spy capitals of the world.[…]