The head of the Austrian counterintelligence agency said that Brussels has now replaced Vienna as the European capital of spies.
In the 2009, the German newspaper Die Welt explained that Vienna had "the highest density of foreign intelligence agents in the world". The reasons for this are partly historical: during the Cold War, the center of Vienna was less than an hour's drive from the Iron Curtain, making it a central location for East-West espionage intrigues. Furthermore, Austria boasted and today boasts an efficient transport network linking it to Western and Eastern Europe.
In addition, Vienna hosts the headquarters of several major international agencies, including the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This gives dozens of countries the opportunity to place a large number of diplomats in Vienna, as well as those who host their embassies. As a result, it is estimated that today the Austrian capital hosts about 20.000 foreign diplomats, a considerable number for such a small country with a permanent population of less than 9 million. Experts believe that about half of these foreign diplomats are actually connected to a foreign intelligence agency.
But in a rare public appearance Thursday, Peter Gridling, head of Austria's leading counter-intelligence agency, said Vienna is no longer at the top of the list of favorite destinations for spies in the world. Gridling is the head of the Vienna-based Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism, known as the BVT. Speaking during the official presentation of the BVT's Annual Constitutional Protection Report for 2017, held at the Ministry of the Interior, Gridling told reporters that the number of foreign intelligence agents pretending to be diplomats in the Austrian capital remained significant, and that Austria as a whole is still "a privileged area of operations" by the world's intelligence agencies. However, he said that Vienna has been overtaken by the Belgian capital Brussels, in fact, according to his agency's calculations, there is a greater density of spies in Brussels than in any other European capital.
Gridling therefore seems to agree with many experts and intelligence professionals, including Alain Winants, director of the Belgian State Security Service (SV / SE), who from the 2009 argues that Brussels is home to more spies than any other city in the world . When asked to specify the number of foreign intelligence agents who are active in Vienna, Gridling said that it is "hundreds of people, but certainly less than 1.000". The head of the Austrian counterintelligence declined the requests to provide further clarification on the matter.