{"id":518543,"date":"2025-10-22T02:47:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T02:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/518543\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T02:47:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T02:47:15","slug":"europes-spies-are-learning-to-trust-each-other-thanks-to-trump-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/518543\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe\u2019s spies are learning to trust each other \u2014 thanks to Trump \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Club de Berne<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike tight-knit spy alliances like the Five Eyes, European Union member countries have long struggled to forge strong partnerships on intelligence sharing. National security remains firmly in the hands of national capitals, with Brussels playing only a coordinating role. <\/p>\n

One way European services have communicated traditionally is through a secretive network known as the Club de Berne, created nearly 50 years ago in the Swiss city it is named after. The club has no headquarters, no secretariat and meets only twice a year.<\/p>\n

In recent years, the group has coordinated its meetings to roughly align with the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union.\u00a0But the Club is hardly a mirror image of the EU. Malta has never joined, Bulgaria only recently signed on, and Austria was suspended for a time over concerns it was too soft on Moscow before being readmitted in 2022. Non-EU countries such as Switzerland, Norway and the U.K. are also members.<\/p>\n

\"\"Donald Trump “deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the services of Europe together,\u201d said one Western intelligence official, who was granted anonymity to disclose details of how they cooperated with American counterparts. | Anna Moneymaker\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cClub de Berne is an information sharing architecture a bit like Europol. It’s designed to share a certain kind of information for a particular function,\u201d said Philip Davies, director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies in London. \u201cBut it\u2019s fairly bounded and the information that’s being shared is potentially quite anodyne because you’re not plugging into secure systems and [there are] national caveats.\u201d<\/p>\n

Major European Union intelligence players \u2014 France, the Netherlands, Germany, and until 2019, the U.K. \u2014 saw little value in sharing sensitive information with all EU countries, fearing it could fall into the wrong hands.<\/p>\n

Eastern European services, like Bulgaria’s, were believed to be filled with Russian moles, said Missiroli. One Bulgarian security official argued that was no longer the case, with the old guard largely retired.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Club de Berne Unlike tight-knit spy alliances like the Five Eyes, European Union member countries have long struggled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[168902,13489,6215,4601,2814,473,32,2002,2000,299,5187,1699,805,36,1824,2190,123262,2817,2818,2596,2597,140669,168903,7965,332,2823,93674,811,2322,2600,53,3053,11587,657,15,49,1220,771],"class_list":{"0":"post-518543","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-antonio-missiroli","9":"tag-bulgaria","10":"tag-cooperation","11":"tag-cyber-espionage","12":"tag-data","13":"tag-defense","14":"tag-donald-trump","15":"tag-espionage","16":"tag-eu","17":"tag-europe","18":"tag-european","19":"tag-european-union","20":"tag-foreign-policy","21":"tag-france","22":"tag-germany","23":"tag-hungary","24":"tag-impeachment","25":"tag-intelligence","26":"tag-intelligence-services","27":"tag-kaja-kallas","28":"tag-military","29":"tag-oliver-varhelyi","30":"tag-philip-davies","31":"tag-platforms","32":"tag-russia","33":"tag-satellites","34":"tag-sauli-niinisto","35":"tag-security","36":"tag-surveillance","37":"tag-switzerland","38":"tag-technology","39":"tag-the-netherlands","40":"tag-transparency","41":"tag-ukraine","42":"tag-united-kingdom","43":"tag-united-states","44":"tag-ursula-von-der-leyen","45":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}