The building, gray and functional, could house any office business. Placed in a business district of The Hague (Netherlands), far from the typical alleys of the city center, Europol HQ is an armored hive, full of surveillance cameras. On the menu of briefings punctuating the days of the European police organization, sensitive cases.
This article is taken from “Special Edition Le Monde: Mafias, how organized crime threatens the world” 2022. This special issue is on sale in kiosks or on the Internet by visiting the website of our shop.
Behind closed doors is the fight against crime – the one that crosses borders. More than a thousand people, including fifty French, work today within this organization created in 1999, willingly opaque and cultivating secrecy about its investigative techniques. Under the direction of Catherine De Bolle, from the Belgian police, some 150 analysts take the pulse of criminal organizations.
The police cooperation agency of the European Union (EU) is called in to support the investigations as soon as two States are working on a joint investigation. The data is stored, cross-referenced and then used by the analysts in charge of the operational part. According to Guardianthe volume of information held by Europol represents “at least 4 petabytes, equivalent to 3 million CDs or one-fifth of the entire contents of the US Library of Congress”. A gigantic resource that recently made the European Data Protection Supervisor wince, who ordered the agency to delete data received from member states on people six months after receipt, if no link with a criminal organization had not been established.
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Once the data has been analyzed, it is during the action daysthem “D-days” where the national police project themselves on their targets, that the painstaking work of the investigators comes out of the shadows. This was the case, for example, in October 2021, during an operation called “DarkHunTOR” which resulted in the arrest of 150 people in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, suspected of being involved in the trade of drugs on the dark net. Several million euros in cash and bitcoins, as well as drugs and weapons, had been seized. The 27 member states of Europol have liaison officers in The Hague, whether police, gendarmes or customs officers. Among the non-European members, but decisive for international investigations, are some thirty American representatives (from the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA]FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [ATF]…), but also a Colombian liaison office with two police officers. Officially, it is the police of the Member States who carry out the arrests. Europol appears in support, as a form of discreet co-production.
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