‘Maître chez soi’ ? La Deuxième Section et le renseignement militaire en Belgique occupée, 1914-1918

(eng) During the Great War, the Belgian ‘Second Section’ concentrated its espionage efforts on national occupied soil, operating 38 intelligence networks, and covering almost 700 agents. These networks were mainly managed from the towns of Flushing and Maastricht, in neutral Netherlands. The Belgian secret service did not coordinate its operation on occupied territory with its French and British counterparts. They even experienced a bitter concurrency with the latter. Its first but limited successes of 1914-1915 were followed by a series of disasters the following year. At the end of summer 1916, most of the resistance groups working for the ‘Second Section’ were dismantled. Subsequently, the Belgian secret service never achieved to recover its presence on national occupied soil before the end of the war.