Photo: Vima
The Greek Prosecutor's Office launched criminal proceedings against a senior official of the Third office at the Greek State Security, which is responsible for the security services. The employee who is removed temporarily from work in the period 2005-2006was Director of the OLAF group for the use of special tools in the fight against organized crime, terrorism and espionage. He is accused of spying on behalf of the British services as confidential files and electronic messages he sent to the British services were found in his personal computer.
A few months ago, two police officers, who were sent to the Greek National Security and were under his command, signaled that the officer was sending suspicious e-mails abroad, especially to Britain. A special group of police officers took the case and really caught the trail of suspicious correspondence. The employee, who studied in Britain, argues that it is a routine correspondence and blames the police on aggressive suspiciousness.
"This is an extremely serious case of information leakage from the state security," said an anonymous source from the Greek secret service, quoted by Vima and Ta Nea newspapers. A year ago, another employee of the secret service was caught to have secret files in his laptop, but the accusation against him sank in the folders of justice. The same anonymous source talks about a "relentless war" among the secret agents in the country.
OLAF is the informal group of the local branch of the European Anti-Fraud service. It was established 7 years ago with European Union funds. It has very modern monitoring equipment like small cameras, bugging devices, night vision equipment, which it uses to track the suspects in corruption, organized crime and terrorism. It also has a mobile station in the size of a business briefcase for phone tapping.
There were doubts in the past that the informal group was involved in the bugging scandal, which flared up in Greece in 2005. It turned out then that the mobile phones of many politicians, including the Prime Minister at that time Costas Karamanlis were tapped during the Olympics in 2004. There are doubts that the briefcase has served businessmen and gave them information about the contents of telephone calls of their business partners and rivals. So far, none of these accusations has been proven in black and white.