BRATISLAVA, December 1, (WEBNOVINY) — Both Military Counterintelligence Service (VOS) head Pavol Brychta and Defense Minister Lubomir Galko, who installed Brychta into the office, were incompetent regarding intelligence issues, claims Chairman of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers of Slovakia (ABSD) Igor Cibula. He says he therefore was not surprised at all by the scandal with wiretapping newspaper reporters.
Cibula considers automatically installing new senior chiefs into state offices and institutions with every change of government to be a great problem of this country. “Criteria of any professional capabilities are not decisive in these cases,” comments former intelligence officer Cibula on Slovakia’s intelligence services. According to him, a similar case occurred in mid-2010 when Iveta Radicova became Prime Minister. “Pavol Brychta who in fact had no experience of a professional intelligence officer became the director of the Military Counterintelligence Service. He had worked with human resources, worked in many other sections, but he was not an intelligence operative,” added Cibula at Thursday’s ABSD press conference. According to him, former Defense Minister Lubomir Galko disrupted continuity in the intelligence service. “A chief of a supermarket or a chain of supermarkets, is unable to assess who is a good intelligence officer. Just as I would not interfere into his business as a merchant, he should not interfere into these issues,” says Cibula. He on one hand considers Galko to be an honest man of principles, yet according to him, former minister’s opinions on secret services are ones of someone who watches James Bond movies of and Czech TV series with Major Zeman. “Therefore, what happened in VOS was no surprise,” said Cibula.
Prime Minister Iveta Radicova recently informed she plans to remove VOS head Brychta from office, keeping him in state service. “He will immediately be released from his vow of confidentiality to be able to cooperate with authorities investigating the wiretapping case,” informed the prime minister. Galko’s authorization to lead the MoD was already revoked due to the wiretapping scandal.
SITA