Atlantic Council

From Andrew Rettman, the EUobserver:  EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton has hired a Polish secret service agent to be the main architect of internal security in the European External Action Service (EEAS).

The agent, whose name is being kept under wraps, was parachuted into Brussels from Warsaw to begin work on 1 June and is expected to stay in the EU capital until the end of the year.

His job is to chair a new "working group" that will design security protocols for the diplomatic corps, concentrating on physical security of EEAS buildings in Brussels and communications systems with the EU's 136 foreign delegations.

The group, which meets once a week, also includes "15 or so" delegates from the commission, the EU Council, the Belgian EU presidency, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. ...

China and Russia are both security threats in Brussels. But the exposure this week of 11 alleged Russian spies in the US, and the earlier case of Herman Simm, an Estonian official who passed EU and Nato papers to Moscow, have highlighted Russia's post-Cold-War spy effort.

Former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar, who helped organise a clean-out of KGB elements in Estonia's security structures in his two periods in office in the 1990s, said the US arrests and the Simm case are wake-up calls for Europe.

"We must learn that this is a reality. This is what Russia is for," he told EUobserver in an interview.

"You don't need big [counter-intelligence] services. Effective services can be quite small. But they must be clean themselves," he added, on the potential value of experts from ex-Iron-Curtain countries.  (photo: Getty)