Directorate-General For External Security

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. DGSE claims to have prevented more than 15 terrorist attacks in France since 9/11.

Famous quotes containing the words external and/or security:

    The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.
    Norman O. Brown (b. 1913)

    The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,—1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)