The Club de Berne: a black box of growing intelligence cooperation

 

A black box since the 80s, the elusive Club de Berne has been influencing European and other states’ intelligence activities with little public knowledge or consent for decades. The once informal organisation bringing together heads of EU security services is morphing into a proper institution. Operating transnationally, the Club evades the few legal and regulatory frameworks that exist on international intelligence cooperation.

In November 2019, the Austrian Newspaper “Oesterreich” published an internal document of the Club de Berne (CdB), thus giving the ominous secret service club the biggest leak in its history. Until then, the little official information about the CdB was always the same; it was described as an “informal club” that brings together the heads of the secret services of the EU states, as well as Switzerland and Norway. However, as recent research proved, the Club is much more than that. An as yet unpublished document shows that at least in 2011, the FBI, the CIA, and the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad, among others, were involved in exchanges of information within the CdB.

The active involvement of non-European services in the CdB stands in sharp contrast with the publicly portrayed image of an inner-European exchange between intelligence services. Even though the CdB has grown significantly over the past years, it acts outside any democratic control – not in Switzerland and not in the other nations that have their services participate in the CdB. It has never been embedded into an institutional framework despite constantly acquiring new areas of responsibility. Due to the growing area of executive activity that is out of reach for the public, i.e. independent oversight and effective remedy, the Club de Berne is not tenable, for it equips government actors with unchallenged power. This must change.

Swiss historian Aviva Guttmann has intensively studied the founding phase of the Club de Berne as part of her research work on Swiss counter-terrorism. Her research shows that the Club exchanged information beyond Europe already shortly after its foundation in 1969. At that time, nine Western European secret services shared information about Palestinian terrorists and their supporters with the Israeli domestic and foreign secret services Shin Beth and Mossad, as well as the American FBI. The exchange took place via an encrypted telegram system called Kilowatt. From 1974 onwards, a second telegram system called Megaton existed, which concerned non-Palestinian terrorism.

“To date, neither the public, nor Parliament, nor other departments have been informed of the existence, let alone the extent, of the practices of this secret service exchange”, Guttmann notes. Her research work in the Swiss Federal Archives however, does not go beyond the 1980s, as more recent files are subject to the usual 30- to 50-year retention period for documents held by federal authorities. Since then, the CdB has largely been a black box.  (more...)

The Club de Berne: a black box of growing intelligence cooperation