Directorate-General for External Security 3.08

The General Directorate for External Security is France's external intelligence agency. The French equivalent to the United Kingdom's MI6 and the United States' CIA, the DGSE operates under the direction of the French Ministry of Defence and works alongside its domestic counterpart, the DGSI, in providing intelligence and safeguarding national security, notably by performing paramilitary and counterintelligence operations abroad. As with most other intelligence agencies, details of its operations and organization are not made public.The DGSE's head office is in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. The DGSE — like the intelligence services of other nations — has a record of both failures and accomplishments. It engages in a significant amount of economic espionage.HistoryOriginsThe DGSE can trace its roots back to 1947, when a central external intelligence agency, known as the SDECE, was founded to combine under one head a variety of separate agencies – some, such as the Deuxième Bureau, dating from the time of Napoleon III and some, such as the BCRA, from the Free France of World War II. It remained independent until the mid-1960s, when the SDECE was discovered to have been involved in the kidnapping and presumed murder of Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan revolutionary living in Paris. Following this scandal, the agency was placed under the control of the French ministry of defence. It was restructured in 1981, eventually acquiring its current name (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) in April 1982.