ZAGREB — Twenty-three European countries formally agreed Wednesday to launch a new spy forum for the Continent on intelligence gathering and sharing.
The new Intelligence College in Europe (ICE) is not intended to be an intelligence-sharing platform, but rather a space for the intelligence community to compare notes on crosscutting intelligence-related issues like Islamist and far-right terrorism, European jihadists in Syria, and cyber and data security.
It’s also meant to provide a place to explain “the stakes of intelligence to some policymakers, like high-level civil servants in the EU Commission, MEPs, etc.,” who may not be familiar with intelligence work, said an official from France’s National Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Coordination Center.
The ICE, set to start up in March and meet two to three times a year, is not an EU body and won’t have a set physical location. Instead, participating countries will — among other things — volunteer to host seminars bringing together academics, business leaders, sectoral experts and national intelligence agency workers to exchange experiences that could feed into decision-making across the Continent.
Participants, who signed a letter of intent at an event in Zagreb Wednesday, include the U.K. as well as most EU members. Countries like Poland and Greece are also expected to join once they sort out some bureaucratic issues, said one official. Overall, seven other countries are either expected to join soon or have joined the initiative in a more flexible partner status, including Switzerland.
The EU’s diplomatic arm has a unit in the European Union Military Staff, which offers expertise on military intelligence
The idea for the ICE was first mentioned by French President Emmanuel Macron in his 2017 Sorbonne speech on the future of Europe as a way to bolster the Continent’s security infrastructure and become more self-sufficient in intelligence gathering.
“If we don’t want to depend tomorrow on information gathered by the U.S., China or Russia,” Europeans must join forces, Macron said in a speech last year introducing the ICE initiative — though he also denied the aim was to create a European version of the CIA.
The French intelligence official said the issue of jihadist fighters returning from Syria is one example of why such a forum is needed.
“We’ve all had to deal with the question of the return of jihadist combatants from Syria, at the beginning each country was working on its own, in its own corner. It’s when we started sharing and communicating about the issue among ourselves that we found a way forward,” the official said.
While the EU does not have its own intelligence agency, the bloc’s diplomatic arm does have a unit in the European Union Military Staff, which offers expertise on military intelligence. There’s also Intcen, which provides intel to all EU institutions, but it collects this information from whatever dossiers member countries decide to share, which EU officials say is often very little.
Part of the reason why the bloc doesn’t have a central intelligence body is that trust is a key pillar of information gathering, and this risks being compromised if too many countries are involved.
“The best operational cooperation is bilateral, as soon as you have three services on an operation it gets more difficult,” Daniel Markić, the head of the Croatian intelligence agency, told POLITICO.
“We are not going to exchange intel but we want to talk about many strategic questions,” like sharing information on new 5G mobile networks, said Markić, who has also worked as a diplomat in Brussels.
But members of the intelligence community say that the growing importance of technology in intelligence gathering is making it even more important for smaller countries to team up with others because of the costs of going it alone.
“You can help us a lot in making the right choices,” said Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković in his opening speech.
Despite Brexit, the U.K. is “very eager” to join the initiative, according to an intelligence official who took part in the event in Zagreb. “They are afraid of being isolated with the Americans.”
The U.K. is even set to be one of the first countries to hold a one-year rotating “presidency” that will lead the ICE. Croatia is expected to hold the presidency during the first year, followed by the U.K. and Italy.