Nearly every country in the world has an intelligence agency that is charged with espionage in order to protect its own interests in all aspects, including economic, political and military interests. While some of these agencies have agreements to share information with others for greater impact, others are very secretive and make it a point to share with no one. It is widely known that many countries have spies in other areas of the world for the purpose of gathering intelligence data. Who these spies are and exactly how they operate is more secretive in nature.

The Mossad known in full as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations is the national intelligence agency of Israel. “Mossad” is a Hebrew word for institute or institution.

The Mossad is responsible for intelligence collection and covert operations including paramilitary activities. It is one of the main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Aman (military intelligence) and Shin Bet (internal security), but its director reports directly to the Prime Minister.

The “Mossad Le’aliyah Bet” was a small, unorthodox Zionist organization whose mission in 1938 was to bring Jews to the British mandate of Palestine. This was done to subvert the British quotas on Jewish immigration. The Mossad’s modes of operation, its ideology, and politics resulted in the creation of the intelligence agency for the Israeli government once it was established in 1948. The agency consisted of several of the existing members who had worked to establish Israel as a Jewish state.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service, BND) is the foreign intelligence agency of the German government, under the control of the Chancellor’s Office. Its headquarters are in Pullach near Munich, and Berlin (planned to be centralised in Berlin by 2011). The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries. In 2005, the BND employed around 6,050 people, 10% of them Bundeswehr soldiers; those are officially employed by the “Amt für Militärkunde” (Office for Military Sciences). The annual budget of the BND for 2009 was € 460,000,000.

The BND acts as an early warning system to alert the German government to threats to German interests from abroad. It depends heavily on wiretapping and electronic surveillance of international communications. It collects and evaluates information on a variety of areas such as international terrorism, WMD proliferation and illegal transfer of technology, organized crime, weapons and drug trafficking, money laundering, illegal migration and information warfare. As Germany’s only overseas intelligence service, the BND gathers both military and civil intelligence. However, the Kommando Strategische Aufklärung (Strategic Reconnaissance Command) of the German Armed Forces also fulfills this mission, but is not an intelligence service. There is close cooperation between the BND and the Kommando Strategische Aufklärung.

The domestic secret service counterparts of the BND are the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, BfV) and 16 counterparts at the state level Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz or State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution); there is also a separate military intelligence organisation, the Militärischer Abschirmdienst (lit. military screening service, MAD).

The General Directorate for External Security (French: Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, or DGSE) is France’s external intelligence agency. Operating under the direction of the French ministry of defence, the agency works alongside the DCRI (the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence) in providing intelligence and 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 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 French 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.

In 1992, most of the defence responsibilities of the DGSE, no longer suitable to the post-Cold War context, were transferred to the Military Intelligence Directorate (DRM), a new military agency. Combining the skills and knowledge of five military groups, the DRM was created to close the intelligence gaps of the 1991 Gulf War.

The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. It is frequently referred to in the mass media and popular parlance by the name MI6, a name used as a flag of convenience during the Second World War when it was known by many names. Alongside the internal Security Service (MI5), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).

SIS is referred to colloquially within the Civil Service as Box 850, after its old MI6 post office box number. Its existence, or indeed that of its sister organisations, was not officially acknowledged in public until 1994. Its headquarters, since 1995, is at Vauxhall Cross on the South Bank of the Thames.

The Service is derived from the Secret Service Bureau, which was founded in 1909.[1] It was a joint initiative of the Admiralty and the War Office to control secret intelligence operations in the UK and overseas, particularly concentrating on the activities of the Imperial German government. The Bureau was split into naval and army sections which, over time, specialised in foreign espionage and internal counter-espionage activities respectively. This specialisation was because the Admiralty wanted to know the maritime strength of the Imperial German Navy. This specialisation was formalised before 1914. When the First World War started, the two sections underwent administrative changes so that the foreign section became the Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 6 (MI6), the name by which it is frequently known in popular culture today. Its first director was Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who often dropped the Smith in routine communication. He typically signed correspondence with his initial C in green ink. This usage evolved as a code name, and has been adhered to by all subsequent directors of SIS when signing documents to retain anonymity.

GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (formerly the Red Army General Staff of the Soviet Union). GRU is the English transliteration of the Russian acronym GRU, which meaning Main Intelligence Directorate. The official full name translation is II Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Other name, GRU GSh (GRU Generalnovo Shtaba, i.e. “GRU of the General Staff”).

The GRU is Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency . It deploys six times as many agents in foreign countries as the SVR, which is the KGB intelligence successor. It also commanded 25,000 Spetsnaz troops in 1997.

The current GRU Director is Lieutenant General Alexander Shlyakhturov.

According to the Federation of American Scientists: “…Though sometimes compared to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, [the GRU's] activities encompass those performed by nearly all joint US military intelligence agencies as well as other national US organizations. The GRU gathers human intelligence through military attaches and foreign agents. It also maintains significant signals intelligence and imagery reconnaissance and satellite imagery capabilities.” GRU Space Intelligence Directorate had put more than 130 SIGINT satellites into orbit. GRU and KGB SIGINT network employed about 350,000 specialists.

The United States of America’s intelligence community is made up of sixteen different agencies. Most notable and recognizable on that list are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While in the past these agencies operated in mostly isolated states, the sharing of intelligence information has increased considerably since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The CIA is the largest of the intelligence agencies and is responsible for gathering data from other countries that could impact U.S. policy. The NSA is the country’s intelligence agency responsible for intercepting and deciphering foreign signals while protecting the information systems of the United States. The DIA gathers intelligence information that is pertinent to military operations around the world while the FBI is the link between the intelligence and law enforcement communities in the country.

The CIA’s primary function is to collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and to advise public policymakers. The agency conducts covert operations and paramilitary actions, and exerts foreign political influence through its Special Activities Division. The CIA and its responsibilities changed markedly in 2004. Before December 2004, the CIA was the main intelligence organization of the US government; it coordinated and oversaw not only its own activities but also the activities of the US Intelligence Community (IC) as a whole. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 created the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which took over some of the government and IC-wide functions.

The Ministry of State Security (MSS) is the security agency of the People’s Republic of China. It is also probably the Chinese government’s largest and most active foreign intelligence agency, though it is also involved in domestic security matters.

Article 4 of the Criminal Procedure Law gives the MSS the same authority to arrest or detain people as regular police for crimes involving state security with identical supervision by the procuratorates and the courts. It is headquartered near the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

According to Liu Fuzhi, Secretary-General of the Commission for Politics and Law under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Minister of Public Security, the mission of the MSS is to ensure “the security of the state through effective measures against enemy agents, spies, and counter-revolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China’s socialist system.” One of the primary missions of the MSS is undoubtedly to gather foreign intelligence from targets in various countries overseas. Many MSS agents are said to have operated in the Greater China region (Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) and to have integrated themselves into the world’s numerous overseas Chinese communities. At one point, nearly 120 agents who had been operating under non-official cover in the U.S., Canada, Western and Northern Europe, and Japan as businessmen, bankers, scholars, and journalists were recalled to China, a fact that demonstrates the broad geographical scope of MSS agent coverage.