Ever since Washington withheld battlefield intelligence from Kyiv in 2025, European intelligence agencies have been pulling back from their American counterparts and drawing closer to one another. In the first open admission of its kind, intelligence chiefs in the Netherlands recently described withholding information from the Americans. While this is a sensible hedge against the political and structural factors undermining American intelligence, it leaves the deeper vulnerabilities in Europe’s security architecture untouched.
Foreign intelligence networks in the EU
It is an open secret that foreign intelligence networks operate widely in the EU, exfiltrating valuable information and distorting the workings of democratic institutions. The scale borders on absurdity: Belgian security officials estimate that some embassies are one-fifth intelligence. For years, “[i]ntelligence agencies have been sounding the alarm that authoritarian networks are using espionage tactics to gain political, military and diplomatic advantages across Europe” — an assessment borne out by a succession of scandals that have left deep, unaddressed wounds in Europe’s democratic institutions.
From cash-for-influence scandals to brazen espionage rings to operations against critical infrastructure, foreign interference has become a fact of European life. This is the direct result of a structural flaw that Europe has refused to correct: the lack of a purpose-built central capacity to defend the EU against hostile intelligence work.
To be clear, Europe’s problem is not a lack of intelligence agencies; France alone has six, but they all have a mandate to protect national institutions, not EU ones. While Belgium technically has jurisdiction, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) immunity is blocking the country’s floundering efforts to police the hemicycle. It is hard enough to enforce the rules against home-grown corruption, but foreign-directed subversion requires dedicated counterintelligence capabilities that Europe simply does not possess. European counterintelligence rests on weak structures which lack operational or enforcement powers; the European Union Intelligence and Situation Centre (EU-INTCEN) has been described as “merely a mixing bowl of liaison officers.”
Scandals and limitations
The limitations of Europe’s fragmented intelligence architecture were laid bare during the terrorist attacks of the 2010s, most notoriously the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015 — the deadliest in Europe that decade. The missteps were legion. Before the attack, various agencies in France knew the attackers had been radicalized but failed to communicate amongst themselves; meanwhile, Belgian failures to share information with EU partners allowed the ringleader to evade Greek authorities before the attack and for the only surviving attacker to flee France in the aftermath.
Europe’s spy agencies have even come perilously close to the worst-case scenario, as seen in the incredible story of Russia’s infiltration — verging on takeover — of Austria’s domestic intelligence agency. The penetration was so complete, and its failures of such magnitude, that the agency was disbanded.
In a testament to how long Europe allowed its heartland to become a staging ground for Moscow, Russia’s operations in Austria are now so well-known that they merit a dedicated Wikipedia entry. The same counterintelligence fight extends throughout the rest of Europe, with similar high-level intelligence agency breaches from Germany to Moldova.
This permeability is being thoroughly exploited, but the public is only beginning to understand how deeply European institutions have been compromised. The outrageous case of Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka, exposed in January 2024 by The Insider as a Russian Federal Security Service asset, poses two questions: why would such a revelation come from investigative journalists, not European security services, and how is it possible that Ždanoka was allegedly reporting to Moscow for two full decades before being discovered?
But what truly showed the frailty of the system is the fact that Ždanoka remained an active MEP for six months after the allegations became public, facing only a nominal fine of €1,750, or five days’ parliamentary allowance. This scandal was closely followed by another related to Russian influence in Parliament (revolving around the now-sanctioned Voice of Europe network) that further illustrated how corruption is eroding European democracy.
These are not isolated incidents. In 2024, an advisor to Maximilian Krah, far-right MEP of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and vice chairman of the China-EU Friendship Group, was arrested on charges of spying for China as part of a wide-ranging espionage operation. The AfD’s troubles did not begin or end with Krah; in the same month, it emerged that another AfD candidate, Petr Bystron, was accused of accepting €20,000 to spread Kremlin propaganda. The prior year, Krah’s involvement in a “lobbying network” for China had already been revealed, and he had been questioned “over alleged payments from sources close to the Kremlin.” At the time of this publication, both Maximilian Krah and Petr Bystron remain active MEPs.
But none of these scandals is as well-known as Qatargate, which uncovered that MEPs (including the then-Vice President) and their staff had accepted cash bribes from Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania. Qatargate exposed both blatant corruption and the paralysis of Europe’s defenses: nearly three years on, no one implicated in the case is behind bars, and the more recent Huaweigate may be headed down a similar path. The stagnant, opaque response speaks to the need for an EU-level counterintelligence service nearly as much as the scandals themselves.
Internal divisions and the EU’s security crisis
Why, when faced with such overwhelming evidence, can the EU not form a coherent policy response? One answer is that internal threats have compromised unity. Some Member States have deployed advanced spyware against political opponents, including EU officials, while others have degraded the collective security of Europe by tolerating the operation of hostile intelligence services on their soil. Traces of Pegasus, Candiru and Predator spyware have been found on MEPs’ devices, which may have originated from both EU and non-EU governments. The Hungarian national intelligence service has also allegedly wiretapped and hacked EU officials, cementing Budapest’s role as pre-eminent spoiler under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Europe now faces a dual crisis of vulnerability and mistrust. The Niinistö report brought this debate into the open, but like the EU reports on Foreign Electoral Interference and Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, it has been followed by resounding inaction. Clearly, Europe does not need more reports; it needs actual capacity — in this case, a purpose-built counterintelligence institution with a proactive mandate and enforcement capabilities.
Critics warn that former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö’s vision of a more integrated European intelligence structure threatens national sovereignty. But nothing erodes sovereignty faster than letting foreign powers buy, blackmail or infiltrate their way into Europe’s political process. The risks surrounding American intelligence cooperation are real, but they have become a convenient distraction from the harder work Europe must do at home.
Freezing out the United States is a defensive gesture, not a strategic solution. What Europe truly needs is a joint counterintelligence body with the authority to investigate malign activity across borders and initiate arrests, giving Europe the moral authority to raise concerns of compromise with intelligence partners when necessary.
Most will say that political realities make such reform impossible, but those political realities have been engineered by the very infiltration and exploitation that reform would combat. To resist change now is to concede the success of a subversion project still in progress. The question is whether action will come in time to prevent not only the next catastrophic breach, but the complete loss of faith in the European system of governance.
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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