Brussels becomes a den of Russian spies and the secret services are put on alert

Brussels is a nest of Russian spies and Belgian state security (internal intelligence, civilians) now believes that the Russian embassy in the community’s capital is a spy center and the interception of communications because no one else in Europe has so many satellite communication antennas on its roofs, up to 17.

In addition to these satellite dishes, the embassy, ​​located in the bourgeois district of Uccle, also has other types of dishes that can be used to intercept satellite communications.

the flamenco newspaper De Tijdmaking use of State Security sources, he explains that the number of antennas is excessive for the ordinary and official work of the embassy and that among the devices present on the roofs of the diplomatic palace there are some specially designed to intercept aviation, maritime and military communications.

De Tijd He says Belgian security services communications have been encrypted since 2011, but says Belgian agents don’t rule out that Russia has the technology to intercept those encrypted communications as well.

The presence in Brussels of most of the institutions of the European Union and of the main headquarters of NATO has transformed the city for decades into the one with the highest concentration of foreign spies from all over Europe, above others known as Geneva, London or Berlin.

strategic center

Brussels is also home to hundreds of multinationals and companies of extraordinary strategic value such as Swift, which ensures international wire transfers from practically all over the planet (Russian banks were expelled from that network after the start of the war).

Belgium is one of the nations that has expelled the most Russian agents in recent months, precisely because it is one of the countries where these are most numerous. In July 2022, an investigation found that some of the Russian embassy workers who had been expelled from Belgium were actually agents of the GRU (Russia’s military secret service) or the SVR, the foreign intelligence service.

Many of these people had experience and training in handling satellite communications equipment. Many of those expelled had not been trained as diplomats but had gone through academies and organizations dedicated to training military intelligence experts. In that report it was estimated that half of the nearly 100 people who work at the Embassy were agents of some secret service.

The Belgian authorities, bill De TijdThey know that the telecommunications listening equipment at the Russian embassy is excessive and surprising, but the Minister of Justice, Vincent Van Quickenborne, explained to the newspaper that the Belgian authorities must respect the inviolability of the embassy, ​​so do not they can enter the building.

If Russian military aggression against Ukraine has focused on Russian agents abroad, Brussels’ espionage problem doesn’t end with the Russians. Documents known as “Cryptoleaks” show that the CIA and German intelligence services have spent at least three decades spying on Belgian diplomats.

Between 1952 and 1980 the Belgian Foreign Ministry used an encryption method to communicate with its ambassadors abroad. The process was performed with machines manufactured by the Swiss company Crypto AG.

What appeared to be a neutral company from a neutral country turned out to be a company owned somewhere between the CIA and West German intelligence services.

Victims of espionage paid for the technology used to spy on them. Crypto was a business and its machines were sold to other European countries, the Vatican and even the Argentine military junta. So up to 120 countries. Crypto AG was dissolved in 2018.