Brussels

Brussels (Bruxelles/Brussel) is the capital of Belgium and the most important international city in continental Europe after Paris, serving as the de facto capital of the European Union and the headquarters of NATO since 1967. The city of Brussels proper has a population of approximately 175,000, while the Brussels Capital Region has approximately 1.2 million residents.¹

NATO Headquarters

NATO's headquarters, known as SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), relocated from Paris to Brussels in 1967 when French President Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command and expelled NATO forces from French soil. NATO's political headquarters (the North Atlantic Council) subsequently moved from Paris to a purpose-built facility in Evere, northeast of Brussels. The move made Brussels the de facto capital of the Western alliance's military and political coordination infrastructure.¹

NATO's presence in Brussels meant the city also hosted the intelligence liaison offices of all NATO member states' intelligence services, including CIA Europe operations, MI6, the BND, and the services of smaller member states. This concentration of intelligence officers in a relatively small city created an intensive intelligence environment. Belgium's own intelligence service, the Surete de l'Etat (state security), maintained its headquarters in Brussels with liaison responsibilities to the allied services.²

European Union

The European Commission, European Parliament (which alternates with Strasbourg), and the Council of the European Union are all headquartered in Brussels. The EU's intelligence coordination body, the IntCen (Intelligence Analysis Centre), which aggregates open-source and liaison intelligence for EU decision-makers, is also based in Brussels. The EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy coordination infrastructure, relevant to several of this vault's subjects, is administered from Brussels.¹

Gladio and Belgian Intelligence

Belgium's Gladio stay-behind network - known as SDRA8 within military intelligence - was administered through Brussels-based military intelligence structures. The Gladio network's weapons caches were distributed across Belgium. Following the October 1990 Italian disclosure of Gladio's existence, Belgian parliamentary investigations revealed that the Belgian network had possible connections to the Brabant massacres of 1983-1985, which killed 28 people in supermarket attacks that investigators believed exceeded any rational criminal purpose.²

Brussels was also the city from which the Belgian political and judicial establishments operated - the same establishments implicated in the X-Dossier testimonies collected during the Marc Dutroux investigation. While the abuse events described by witnesses occurred primarily in Knokke-Heist and other locations, the political and judicial figures named were based in the Brussels governmental world.