BRATISLAVA, June 27, (WEBNOVINY) — Slovakia will most likely only have one military intelligence service instead of the current two. The Cabinet on Wednesday approved the draft amendment to the law on military intelligence from the workroom of the Defense Ministry, according to which on January 1, 2013, the Military Counterintelligence Service and the Military Intelligence Service will merge into one, called Military Intelligence.
The new service should ensure both the country’s internal and external intelligence protection. The Military Intelligence Service is currently focused on gathering intelligence from abroad, and the role of the Counterintelligence Service is to eliminate activities of foreign intelligence services in Slovakia. Based on the new draft bill, the intelligence and counterintelligence services would be subordinated to one director, similarly as in the civilian Slovak intelligence service SIS.
Former defense minister and current opposition deputy Martin Fedor does not think that the government draft to merge two military intelligence services into one is a solution. He said that first of all, duplicities have to be removed in tasks of intelligence services. “Now everybody does everything. Their tasks and competencies are almost absolutely identical. Tasks have to be reassigned,” he said. According to Fedor, the military intelligence service should exclusively concentrate on activities of Slovak armed forces and thus its jurisdiction should be narrowed only to activities of the armed forces not only within the state but also in missions, during intelligence protection of our soldiers. Fedor also proposes a core organizational change involving subordinating the military intelligence service to the Armed Forces General Staff again. „It used to be so in the past. Subordination to the minister dates back to the 1950s based on advices of Soviet consultants,“ said Fedor. Defense Minister Martin Glvac considers Fedor’s proposal to be absurd.
SITA