14 September 2026 , 16:17
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For decades, Europe’s intelligence services were defined as much by what they couldn’t do as by what they could. In Germany, the Nordics and much of Eastern Europe, postwar trauma, the legacy of authoritarian regimes and a burgeoning commitment to civil liberties placed strict limits on the reach of national spy agencies.
Now, as Russia escalates its campaign of hybrid sabotage against critical infrastructure and Chinese espionage intensifies, Europe’s largely dormant intelligence operations are being given new powers to protect national interests. The shift has gained added urgency in the past 18 months amid fears that the U.S. may be a less dependable intel partner for Europe during President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Each nation must respond to its own mix of intelligence structures, history and geography, but there has been a similar shift toward granting additional powers — sometimes at the expense of privacy — for governments to take a greater role in ensuring their own security.
In recent weeks alone, several key European countries have given their agencies greater authority to disrupt hostile operations, conduct offensive cyberattacks and share intelligence with private companies.
“Intelligence communities have to be able to give governments situational awareness of what is actually going on and then try and produce an explanation,” said David Omand, the former head of the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Is this Russian-backed criminal activity or is this something entirely different? And that puts difficult demands on the intelligence community, to work as a community, so that the technical intelligence, digital intelligence and human intelligence are all brought together.”
The latest move comes from Sweden, where the government is staffing up a new Foreign Intelligence Service ahead of its planned launch in January. Stockholm announced two senior appointments late last month: Andreas von Beckerath as director general and Annika Brändström as his deputy, with both set to take up their posts when the agency begins operations.
The Swedish government says separating civilian foreign intelligence from military intelligence will clarify responsibilities and improve the country’s ability to assess a range of security threats. The overhaul comes as Sweden continues to reshape its security architecture following its accession to NATO, which was largely prompted by the renewed threat from Moscow after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the cabinet on Aug. 28 opened a consultation on a proposed national-security law that would expand the powers of both its General Intelligence and Security Service and its Defence Intelligence and Security Service, allowing them to disrupt Russian hackers, Chinese spies and Iranian operatives without prior permission, and share more intelligence with companies and the military.
Austria, long seen as the spy capital of the world, is also making significant changes to its legislation. Under current law, foreign agents can generally operate with impunity unless they are caught spying on Austria itself. The government is now working to tighten that loophole, potentially making life harder for the estimated 7,000 spies believed to be operating in Vienna.
Germany is perhaps undergoing the starkest recalibration, having long treaded carefully with its secret services after the dark histories of both the Nazis and the East German Stasi police. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government now wants to give the country’s intelligence services greater latitude to counter threats from adversaries. Under proposed reforms expected to take effect in January, operatives working for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, could carry out acts of sabotage and conduct offensive operations.
“It should have happened a long time ago,” said an EU official who was granted anonymity to speak on the topic. “We never thought [the threat] would reach us. This is in response to the new threats we face.”
Classic case
Until now, the BND has largely been restricted to gathering intelligence — a reflection of deliberate postwar limits designed to prevent a recurrence of the abuses carried out by the Nazi-era security apparatus. But this has also meant Germany has been “remarkably ineffective” in the digital realm over the past 15 years, said Omand, in part because it lacked the legal powers needed to access certain forms of communications data.
In March, Germany’s data-protection authority warned it could not properly protect citizens from surveillance by the country’s intelligence services, after a court rejected the commissioner’s request for information about espionage activities.
“Germany is the classic case here,” said Omand. “They have to rethink their traditional attitude, balancing privacy considerations with national security ones.”
Sweden has faced its own constraints under liberal governments, including questions around access to cable traffic. Its signals-intelligence agency, the FRA, can access cross-border communications only within a tightly regulated framework. But since joining NATO — and recognizing the potential threat Russia could pose in five or 10 years — Sweden has moved rapidly to strengthen its intelligence capabilities.
Germany and Sweden are both being pushed to reconsider how to give intelligence agencies enough power to confront modern threats without allowing them to operate beyond democratic control.
The push for deeper intelligence cooperation among European partners accelerated sharply after the Trump administration abruptly halted military and battlefield intelligence sharing with Kyiv in March 2025. The U.S. president has also been accused of appointing loyalists with limited intelligence experience to lead some agencies, prompting concern among European officials that Washington may become less willing to share intelligence that conflicts with the administration’s political positions.
Ferdinand Gehringer, a senior analyst of hybrid threats at FTI Consulting, said the shift reflected both a growing perception of the threats facing Europe and the changing methods of Russian intelligence services, which increasingly use low-level agents to carry out sabotage.
“Public opinion is getting more and more convinced when it comes to being more proactive and not just reacting to these things,” he said. “It’s time to think about red lines. And then, once these red lines are crossed, to also answer and counter them.”
Head of Investigations