Huge intelligence agency scandal rocks Denmark and puts its “deep state” on trial

by RON RIDENOUR

Lars Findsen, head of Denmark’s Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE), the country’s Defense Intelligence Service, poses outside the agency headquarters. (March 3, 2017) PHOTO/Sara Skytte/FE press photo]

Four leading Defense Intelligence Service personnel were suspended on Monday, August 24, pending an independent investigation into serious charges of illegalities—amounting to what Danish daily Politiken is calling the greatest “life scandal in its history.”

Lars Findsen, the current director of Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE), the Danish Defense Intelligence agency, and his predecessor, Thomas Ahrenkiel, plus two other current intelligence officers, are temporarily suspended. Ahrenkiel, former FE chief from 2010 to 2015, is awaiting his new post as Denmark’s new ambassador to Germany.

FE is the equivalent to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. While the FE jurisdiction also covers military intelligence, they must not spy on Danish people—only foreigners and those in other countries. The Police Intelligence Service (PET) surveils Danes, as the FBI surveils people within the U.S. Director Findsen came to the FE from PET where he had been its head. Two decades ago, PET’s illegal spying on the political leftwing was exposed.

The information on long-standing illegalities in the Defense Intelligence Service, which the Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee (TET) presented on Monday, includes:

  1. Withholding “key and crucial information to government authorities” and the oversight committee between 2014 and today;
  2. Illegal activities even before 2014;
  3. Telling “lies” to policymakers;
  4. Illegal surveillance on Danish citizens, including a member of the oversight committee. (Some of this illegal spying had been shared with unnamed sources [perhaps the U.S.?]);
  5. Unauthorized activities have been shelved and;
  6. The FE failed to follow up on indications of espionage within areas of the Ministry of Defense.

TET was created in 2014 with five civilian members, experts in the rule of law, chief judges and professors. It has eight employees and a budget of only $1.3 million. TET told the media February 24 that, in November 2019, it received from unnamed whistleblowers four thick ring binders of classified material showing FE illegalities. When TET delivered its report to the government recently, it asked Parliament to create a whistleblower scheme for the FE.

In an editorial on August 25, Politiken called the material “historically dramatic and [a] highly politically explosive analysis of [the] FE … quite worrisome for the rule of law.”

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