Intel failure

Why Intelligence is Missed

Compared to the French, the Belgian security service, Sûreté de l'État, which falls under the Ministry of Justice, is small and had only 600 personnel to keep tabs on 900 “persons of interest”, many of them potential jihadis who have travelled to Syria and Iraq. Many of these targets required 24-hour surveillance, which is no small task and requires extensive manpower, vehicles and technical support. As the echoes of the Paris bombs still rang in the air, the Belgian service increased its budget a modest 20 per cent to €50 million.

The other Belgian service of note, the General Intelligence and Security Service (GISS), known in Belgium as the Service Général du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (SGR) and falling under the direction of the Ministry of Defense, is equally lacking in manpower and money. Following the Paris attacks last November, it became apparent that the real intelligence failure had not been French but Belgian. Perhaps due in part to their limited intelligence collection capabilities, the Belgian people have suffered as a result. Simply, the Belgians don’t have the people or the infrastructure to properly investigate and monitor hundreds of individuals (440 as of last count out of a Muslim population of over 650,000) suspected of terror links. The Belgians are the weak link in the EU -- and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.