Nominally under jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior, PIDE was in fact a secret police force controlled directly by Portuguese prime-minister António de Oliveira Salazar.

In 1968, under Salazar's successor Marcello Caetano, PIDE was renamed the Direcção Geral de Segurança (DGS, Directorate General of Security) and underwent some reform.

Following a coup by the Portuguese military in 1974 the agency was immediately abolished due to the abhorrence felt for the PIDE/DGS as a tool of the authoritarian regime.

Because of the memory of the abuses of the PIDE/DGS in supporting the regime the establishment of a new civilian intelligence agency was delayed for more than a decade.

However, following a terrorist attack on the Embassy of Turkey in 1983, the assassination of a Palestine Liberation Organization representative at a Socialist International conference also in 1983, and a number of domestic terrorist attacks, the Portuguese government became convinced of the need for a new intelligence agency.