Intelligence gathering happened only internally: spying abroad was considered a potential breach of the country's neutrality which was imposed by the other European states as a condition for Belgian independence.
After peace with the Netherlands, the service focused on subversive elements, successfully thwarting an attempted republican coup d'état instigated by Karl Marx in 1848.
Other successes include the formation of an impromptu foreign intelligence service during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to support the Belgian Army, which was standing guard for a potential invasion of Belgium.
The military intelligence service had been given the counterespionage mission, but after it was suspended in 1923 because of a scandal involving the Belgian occupation of the Rhineland, the Public Safety had to take over again.
The government, unwilling to trust the military intelligence service because of their loyalty to their commander-in-chief made prisoner of war, favoured the State Security.
As a convenient transit country, Belgium would often feature in terrorist activity, giving the State Security a key role in many successful counterterrorism operations.
Whereas the CCC was effectively neutralized within a year, the Brabant killers would continue their bloody activities before disappearing in November 1985 after their most violent raid on a supermarket that claimed 28 fatalities.
Revelations about the ties between certain intelligence officers and right-wing organisations coincided with hints that the Brabant killers were actually linked to the NATO-led Stay Behind operation, known in Italy as Gladio, and which were coordinated in the participating nations by their secret services.
[7] When in 1998 the Intelligence Services Act came in effect, the State Security finally had a legal framework that determined its remit and competences to fulfill its missions.
Until then, the Belgian police had superior capabilities, having been allowed to use wiretapping and technical surveillance methods in 2003 (it had been the intention to provide the intelligence services with similar competences, but this work was left unfinished until 2009).
Naturally, this caused a good deal of discontent with the State Security, which had to cede its place as the international preferred Belgian partner for counterterrorism.
Fearing competition and even potential obsolescence, State Security chief Koenraad Dassen actively attempted to harm the establishment of the Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis (CUTA).
[8] Substantial reorganisation was needed when the service was finally allowed to conduct technical surveillance operations, requiring not only the equipment to do so, but also the right mindset to meet the demands for proper justification of the use of the methods granted by the 2010 BIM-law.
The CUTA and VSSE were the first security services to warn about the threat of foreign fighters returning to their country in the early days of the Syrian conflict.
As the number of foreign fighters, grew the service quickly became overwhelmed, and requests for additional financial support were not met by the government even after the VSSE provided the information that foiled a terrorist cell in the border town of Verviers planning an attack shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
The 13-14 November 2015 attack on Paris revealed Belgium to be the centre of terrorist activity, a connection given bloody confirmation on 22 March 2016, with the bombing of the Belgian national airport and a metro carriage in the European quarter.
[3] The circumstances that led to the failure to prevent the attacks were investigated by a parliamentary commission that recommended a substantial increase in the security services' manpower and budgets and a better integration of the different actors, as well as improvements of information management and sharing.
To further support public understanding of the work of the intelligence service, the VSSE celebrated the 20th anniversary of its legal framework by launching its website and publishing, for the first time in seven years, an activity report.