Ashton huurt Poolse agent voor interne veiligheid (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU i 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 in to 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.
"They are mostly diplomats, but not all of them," a contact in the EU institutions said. "They come from those member states i who are the most interested in security. In setting this up, you need expertise and experience."
The EEAS, which is expected to start work in October or November, will handle classified documents, such as reports from the EU Council's "CP931" working party on terrorism or the EU states' "SitCen" intelligence-sharing bureau.
The Council i and commission i already have detailed security protocols, but these are not water-tight. EU diplomats are fond of telling the anecdote of how a Russian diplomat once had to be escorted out of a meeting of the Political and Security Committee in the Council after wandering in "by mistake."
The Ashton appointment is a mini-coup for Warsaw.
Some Polish politicians, such as centre-right MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, complain that "old" member states, such as France, Germany and the UK, have too much power in the fledgling EEAS. But the Polish administration has kept quiet about its new EEAS security role because it wants to be seen as a "reliable partner" by its EU peers.
Post-Communist and post-Soviet EU countries also see themselves as experts on security matters due to their experience in the Cold War.
China and Russia are both considered security threats in Brussels today. But the exposure earlier this week of 11 alleged Russian spies in the US, as well as the earlier case of Herman Simm, an Estonian official who passed EU and Nato documents to Moscow, have highlighted Russia's post-Cold-War espionage efforts in the West.
Former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar, who helped organise a clean-out of old KGB elements in Estonia's security structures in his two periods in office in 1992 and 1999, said the US arrests and the Simm case should act as a wake-up call to 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 for EU security of experts from post-Communist and post-Soviet countries.