DRSD (Direction du renseignement et de la sécurité de la défense)

Functions

According to the defence ministry’s 2017 fact sheet, the DRSD is an intelligence service at the disposal of the Minister of Defence whose mission is counter-interference intelligence: protecting sensitive people, information, equipment and sites. Its motto, “Renseigner pour protéger” (“Providing intelligence to protect”), reflects its dual role of gathering information and turning it into security.¹

The DRSD belongs to the first circle of the intelligence community, is recognised by NATO as the national military counterintelligence agency, and works with some 4,000 defence-related companies.¹

Legal basis and status

According to the DRSD, the Defence Code (Article D3126) defines it as the service at the disposal of the Minister of the Armed Forces, reporting directly to the minister. As a first-circle service, it may use the intelligence techniques regulated by the Intelligence Act of July 2015.²

Areas of work

The DRSD distinguishes: counter-interference against hostile actions below the threshold of armed confrontation, analysed using the TESSCo grid (terrorism, espionage, sabotage, subversion and organised crime), with cyber threats added; force counter-interference – protecting personnel, units and sites at home and abroad; economic counter-interference – protecting the defence industry and research institutes against, among other things, takeovers and theft of know-how; and cyber counter-interference.²

The DRSD checks compliance with the rules on protecting secrets, assesses companies’ ability to hold classified information, and carries out administrative investigations before security clearances (habilitations) are granted, issuing an opinion to the authority that awards them.²

For comparison

In Poland, the law entrusts protection against internal threats to defence, the protection of classified information in the military and the protection of research and development work for the military to the SKW (Art. 1 and Art. 5(1)); in Germany, military counterintelligence is the task of the MAD.^3,4