Spies do not get days off. Even if the records show that they took days off, the agents have kept on doing their job. 20 years since the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Mr. Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu speaks about the reform of Romania’s espionage structure and discloses a few things from behind the scenes of the operations that the Service conducts overseas, including in Afghanistan.

Reporter: Where did the Romanian espionage start 20 years ago and where is it now?

Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu: It started from chaos and came to a perfect institutional organization. The current Service is, in fact, a formula that has emerged as a comfortable combination of past experience, or better said past mistakes, today’s requirements and future demands.

Reporter: Since you have mentioned the mistakes, can you tell us some failures as well as victories over the years?

Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu: The essential victory is the way in which the institution has rebuilt itself after 2003. The SIE was able to reach the level of the most successful services of its kind in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It belongs to an extremely vast partnership network: there are more than 120 espionage, intelligence and internal security services that we cooperate with.

Reporter: Which is the hottest spot where the SIE operates today?

Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu: The SIE is not a service that operates anywhere on the globe, but rather there where the interests of its country require it: our presence in hot spots, war theatres – this does not mean just Iraq and Afghanistan – there are a lot of places were we have our Romanians in uniforms and their presence there is most needed and effective.