Blind Spots: How Europe's Fragmented Intelligence Culture Leaves It Exposed

In the weeks before Russia's tanks crossed the Ukrainian border, the intelligence picture was there. Satellite imagery, signals intercepts, human sources - assembled across the files of services throughout Europe. The Baltic states had reached a confident conclusion months earlier. Others were still recalibrating when the first columns moved on 24 February 2022.

This was not an intelligence failure. The information existed. What did not exist - not in any coherent, shared, actionable form - was a European assessment. Europe had twenty-seven national pictures. It had no shared strategic one.

That gap is the subject of this book.

BLIND SPOTS traces the structural, cultural, and professional roots of European intelligence fragmentation through five case studies - drawn entirely from open sources - by Brian Iselin, founder of the European Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers.

THE RUSSIAN MISCALCULATION. The Baltic states and Poland saw it clearly. Germany's BND produced assessments more alarming than the public posture of the German government. France counselled caution. The result was twenty-seven national assessments, running from near-certainty to deep reluctance, with no mechanism to synthesise them into a European strategic picture.

THE PATIENT ACQUISITION. China's Made in China 2025 was a publicly declared roadmap for acquiring the technologies on which European sovereignty rests. Each national service saw its own piece. No European architecture existed to assemble the cross-border mosaic.

OPERATIONS IN THE SEAMS. Hybrid warfare works because it falls below national response thresholds. Each incident looks discrete from within a single national mandate. Only a European synthesis layer could see the coordinated campaign. The seams in European intelligence cooperation are not incidental vulnerabilities - they are operational terrain.

THE JIHADIST CORRIDOR. The 2015-17 attack wave across Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Nice, and London was not a collection failure. The attackers were known to multiple services. The architecture could not connect the picture across borders in time to act.

FOLLOWING THE MONEY. Fifteen successive sanctions packages - the most ambitious economic coercion in European history - persistently undermined by evasion networks operating across exactly the jurisdictional boundaries European cooperation was not built to cover.

In each case, the pattern is the same. The information was present in the European system. The synthesis was not.

The prescription is not a European CIA - legally impossible, politically toxic, and conceptually wrong. It is a professional community: shared standards, shared ethics, a European intelligence profession built in the same tradition as medicine, law, and aviation safety.

Europe's intelligence fragmentation is not permanent, not natural, and not the inevitable product of national sovereignty. It is the product of choices. Choices that can be made differently.