Top 10 Intelligence Agencies in the world – Part III/IV

Top 10 Intelligence Agencies in the world – Part III

5. MSS – China

Ministry of State Security is the security agency of the People’s Republic of China. It is also probably the Chinese government’s largest and most active foreign intelligence agency, though it is also involved in domestic security matters.

Article 4 of the Criminal Procedure Law gives the MSS the same authority to arrest or detain people as regular police for crimes involving state security with identical supervision by the procuratorates and the courts. It is headquartered near the Ministry
of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

According to Liu Fuzhi, Secretary-General of the Commission for Politics and Law under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Minister of Public Security, the mission of the MSS is to ensure “the security of the state through effective
measures against enemy agents, spies, and counter-revolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China’s socialist system.”  One of the primary missions of the MSS is undoubtedly to gather foreign intelligence from targets in various countries
overseas.

Many MSS agents are said to have operated in the Greater China region (Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) and to have integrated themselves into the world’s numerous overseas Chinese communities. At one point, nearly 120 agents who had been operating under non-official
cover in the U.S., Canada, Western and Northern Europe, and Japan as businessmen, bankers, scholars, and journalists were recalled to China, a fact that demonstrates the broad geographical scope of MSS agent coverage.

6. BND – Germany

The Bundesnachrichtendienst is the foreign intelligence agency of the German government, under the control of the Chancellor’s Office. The BND acts as an early warning system to alert the German government to threats to German interests from abroad. It depends
heavily on wiretapping and electronic surveillance of international communications.

It collects and evaluates information on a variety of areas such as international terrorism, WMD proliferation and illegal transfer of technology, organized crime, weapons and drug trafficking, money laundering, illegal migration and information warfare.
As Germany’s only overseas intelligence service, the BND gathers both military and civil intelligence.

Posted by Fahad Zafar on Dec 12 2011. Filed under Opinion, Pakistan, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry