But a scandal caused by the bureau's forging of military plans against Holland and Germany, in what was intended as an active measure against the Flemish independence movement, exposed by the Dutch press, led to the suppression of the service and the transfer of its tasks to the civilian intelligence agency in 1929.

In January 1940, the service acquired the Luftwaffe's instructions to Fall Gelb, the German invasion of France, Holland and Belgium, as the plane carrying the courier crash landed on Belgian soil.

[3] After the war the service was renamed Direction Supérieure du Renseignement et de l'Historique (but its acronym was S.D.R.H., inversing the first two letters to confuse foreign spies).

It occupied itself with the pursuit of collaborators, and a top-secret section, Services spéciaux, conducted espionage and covert action in Soviet-controlled Germany.

When the Belgian General Staff was reformed in 1964 the SDRH, renamed Service Général du Renseignement, was restructured and consisted of a division for intelligence (SDRI), security (SDRA), finance (SDRC) and the Army archive (CDH).

The coming to Belgium of NATO in 1968, which coincided with the growing importance of the European Community, drastically changed the intelligence and security outlook of the country.

Anglo-American concerns about the services’ ability to cope with the expanded portfolio had to be alleviated with an increase in their resources, some of which would be paid for with American money.

Belgian military personnel as well as officials from the other ministries now had easy access to the international organizations, which made them a primary target for Warsaw Pact spies.

In 1974 the SGR was involved in the establishment of the Public Information Office (PIO), a PR organisation by which the defence ministry sought to address the criticisms directed at the military by mainly pacifist and communist movements.

Symptomatic of the SGR's obsession with the left, the service involved its associates in the right-wing private intelligence entities and other shady anti-communist organisations, which took over the PIO when the ministry abolished it in 1979.

The first response of the government to put in place a new security framework was the creation of a joint anti-terrorism group (AGG, forerunner of the current Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis CUTA/OCAD/) in 1984 consisting of the police and intelligence services.

[5] In 1989, a year after the SGR had caught a Belgian colonel who had been spying for the Russians, the General Staff was reorganised again which included changes to the intelligence section, which was given the name of Algemene Dienst Inlichtingen en Veiligheid (ADIV).

In the mid-nineties a number of claims appeared in the press that placed ADIV under scrutiny, about the service's SIGINT capabilities being used on citizens, about the provincial outposts of the service again raising suspicions about spying on its own citizens, while yet another article reported on a leaked text about a new Belgian defence concept that had questionable suggestions for intelligence reminiscent of the shadowy Stay Behind past.