BELGIUMS INTELLIGENCE CHIEF SAYS E.U. SPY CAPITAL,SAYS IRAN CULPRIT  Intelligence chief: EU capital is 'spy capital'
The head of Belgium's intelligence service has said Brussels is home to more spies than almost any other city. "I stopped meeting him for lunch because all he did was ask questions and he never said anything about himself," a diplomat on the EU Council's working group for post-Soviet countries once told this website about his friend from the Russian embassy.For many in the age of foreign policy "resets" and "win-win" talks, espionage sounds like a thing of the past.But for Alain Winants, the head of Belgium's state security service, the VSSE, the EU capital currently has more spy activity than almost any other city in the world.Winants told EUobserver in a rare interview with international media that "we are not speaking in the dozens, we are speaking in the hundreds, several hundreds" of foreign intelligence officers and agents in Brussels "In Belgium, espionage, Russian espionage and from other countries, like the Chinese, but also others, [is] at the same level as the Cold War ... 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."He also named Iran as a culprit.When asked if EU-friendly countries, such as Israel or the US, do it, he said: "It would be naive to think that only countries like Russia, China, Iran are spying."He added: "There is one field where the difference between neutral, friendly and unfriendly services tends to disappear and that's when you are talking about the protection of economic and scientific potential. In this case, I think every service is in competition with the others."It is a joke in intelligence circles that Iranian spies mostly spy on their own ambassadors.But Chinese and Russian intelligence is out to get EU information with commercial or political value just as much as "classic" defence secrets.With the EU recently opening a price-fixing investigation against Russia's Gazprom, Winants noted: "One of the things that other countries' intelligence services are interested in is the energy policy of the EU institutions."He said spies usually pretend to be diplomats, journalists, lobbyists, businessmen or students.
Apart from intelligence-gathering, they try to influence decisions made by senior EU or Nato staff.
They make friends with officials at seminars or social events in the EU capital. EU security staff use an acronym for the kind of people they target: Mice (money, ideology, compromise, ego) - people who are greedy or in debt, who have radical ideas, who have guilty secrets or who want to be James Bond.In some cases, spies initiate contact in Brussels but wait until the target gets a new post in their home country before trying to recruit them.They don't do it in EU buildingsThe VSSE, Belgium's equivalent of the UK's MI5, is mainly responsible for counter-terrorism. But part of its job is to protect the international institutions on its turf.It works with internal EU and Nato security staff, EU countries' intelligence services, the Belgian federal police and Belgium's military intelligence, the ADIV, to hunt out spooks.""A Chinese diplomat, who declined to speak on the record, said the kind of vague accusations made by Winants causeB "indignation" in Beijing.

[ED NOTES:IM JUST CITING FEW PARAGRAPHS,THE WHOLE PIECE IS ENGINEERED TO MALIGN CHINA,RUSSIA,IRAN,AND PROMOTE NATO,ISRAEL,US AND THE COLD WAR ERA SCARE TACTICS THAT JUSTIFY MORE DRACONIAN SECURITY MEASURES..INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH THIS FRAUD IS STATING THIS PRO NATO ANTI RUSSIA,IRAN,CHINA SPYING BUSINESS SAME DAY THIS COMES OUT.... Fresh report into 2003 EU spy scandal points to Israel     THEN OF COURSE NOT ONE MENTION OF NEOCONOPTICON NeoConOpticon - The EU Security-Industrial Complex - Statewatch  ...NOTICE HE LEFT THIS OUT EU Spying Scandal of 2003 Points to Mossad « Kawther Salam ALSO SEE.. Profile: Alain Winants
Alain Winants was a participant or observer in the following events: February 29, 2008: Arrested Leader of Moroccan Militant Group Revealed to Be Belgian Informant with Possible CIA Links The Belgian media reports that Abdelkader Belliraj, a dual Belgian-Moroccan citizen arrested in Morocco earlier in the month, is actually a long-time informant for Belgium’s internal security service, State Security. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, 2/29/2008; LOS ANGELES TIMES, 8/24/2008] The Belgian government initially denies the charges but soon tacitly admits them when the head of State Security, Alain Winants, complains about the leak of the “highly classified” status of Belliraj several days later. Agence France-Presse reports that although the “accusations were at first met with scepticism in Belgium, authorities now consider them credible.”   One anonymous Belgian police official speculates: “How could he travel freely since the 1980s from Belgium to various terrorist hot-beds around the world? There are two possibilities: either he worked for a secret service or else the State Security is full of idiots.” [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, 3/11/2008] Belgian newspaper claims that at the same time he was a paid Belgian informant since 2000, “It’s almost certain that at the same time he worked for another foreign secret service, possibly the French DGSE or American CIA.” [HET LAATSTE NEWS, 3/4/2008] Another major Belgian newspaper, De Morgen, claims that Belliraj had both French and US intelligence links while working with Belgium too. [MAGHREB ARABE PRESSE, 3/4/2008] It is worth noting that Alain Winants, director of SV/SE, attempted to put an end to the revelations by filing an official complaint against the newspaper and the TV station, citing potential damage to Belgian national security.  http://intelnews.org/2009/07/29/01-198/#more-2382