Office for Foreign Relations and Information 

The Czech Republic has three intelligence services - the Military Intelligence Service, Security Intelligence Service, which is the Czech Republic's domestic intelligence service, and the Office for Foreign Relations and Information. In some states the domestic and foreign intelligence services are united, but usually they are separate.

The Czech domestic and foreign intelligence services are responsible to the government. The government, its members, the parliament and other state bodies are entitled to task and control the services in accordance with their scope of powers defined by the relevant legislation. Intelligence services have to be apolitical. Unlike the police, which are to act after commission of a crime, the intelligence services' main role is preventive. They search for, describe and evaluate possible risks and dangers in fields that are stipulated by the law.

The domestic and foreign intelligence services

The UZSI's spokesman Bohumil Srajer explains differences between the UZSI, the foreign intelligence service, and the BIS, the domestic intelligence service: "At first sight, the most significant difference between them is the geographical area in which they operate. The BIS mainly operates within the territory of the Czech Republic, while the UZSI's main area of activity is abroad. Thus the UZSI area of activity is much larger and comprises a wider variety of issues," he says. "Our task is to identify and describe potential risks before they grow into an imminent threat to our state. It is logical that the nature of the work of the foreign intelligence services (UZSI) is more preventive and offensive than the nature of the work of the domestic intelligence service (BIS)."

Another difference is in criteria for selecting employees. "Due to the fact that our work is mainly done abroad, we require excellent command of foreign languages, ability and willingness to work in foreign environments and ability to work under stress."

Czech version of James Bond's MI6

The Czech foreign intelligence service is younger and certainly less famous than its American counterpart CIA or the British foreign intelligence service MI6, the employer of the most famous agent James Bond. "Our service is not directly comparable to these services. The CIA's and MI6's scope of law enforcement powers is much larger. For instance, we are not entitled to detain or arrest people. Our main activity is to collect and evaluate information," Srajer explains. "Our objective is to provide the state with timely information concerning security, foreign political interests of the Czech Republic and economics. And we obtain this information abroad," the UZSI's spokesman tries to describe the activity of the service to laymen.

He adds right away that it is difficult to describe the UZSI's work, as no concrete examples can be given due to the classification of this information. He explains that the service cannot publish information about its achievements or explain its failures. "This is our great disadvantage. The reason is simple: we could cause failure of current or future operations and put our information sources in danger," Bohumil Srajer explains. In more general terms, I can confirm that the Czech civil foreign intelligence service's concrete intelligence has recently contributed to the investigation of concrete terrorist attacks," he adds.

A stone in the mosaic

Bohumil Srajer adds that foreign intelligence services closely cooperate with each other. "In the international context, not every service has all information it needs, for various reasons. I will give a hypothetical example. The French service is investigating a big case and needs a stone that we have to complete the mosaic. We provide them with the information, which can help them to see the case in a completely different context. The cooperation between services of course depends on the level of relations between individual countries and security services. There is a difference between the cooperation with services within NATO and services outside this organization."

Declassified StB files

At the beginning of October the civil foreign intelligence service opened a new public archive, where the people who are interested can study documents concerning the intelligence department of the former communist security service, the so-called 1st Directorate of the Security Service.

"Our main aim was to enable the public to have an access to information about the work of one of the pillars of the communist repression. The fact is that the public is more informed about the collaborators of all parts of communist secret services than about the way these services worked," Bohumil Srajer says. UZSI wanted to offer user-friendly access to the documents and thus they are available in a digital form. "We want the documents to be accessible to everyone, not only to a small group of historians." According to Srajer, the number of people who are interested to study the documents not for professional reasons but for private reasons increases.