"The agency is sitting in a staggered position, everyone is listening, thinking about what their future will be, instead of doing their job. Not to mention that when things get like this, much more ambitious colleagues start looking for political connections and climbing the hierarchy. It doesn't matter if they have the necessary knowledge and skills. When the power in the agency is shaken, this always happens".
This is how former interior minister Tsvetlin Yovchev, who was also the head of the state agency, analyzed the situation in and around DANS. He declared himself in favor of maintaining the balance between the authorities in determining the head of counterintelligence.
"When people who are neither professionally prepared nor have a sufficiently strong moral image to be able to withstand external pressure are placed in positions, then the results are not good", he added in an interview for the program "120 Minutes" on bTV.
"By law, it should be ensured that DANS works only on crimes against the state, then it will no longer be able to be assigned everything. A counterintelligence service should not check commodity exchanges and markets or whether there is a cartel in fuel or electricity", Yovchev is categorical.
"Only two services have the right to monitor - DANS and DATO, for the most part this is done with the permission of the court, as required by law. And there are technical means to limit this to a minimum, as the expert said. For example, the information obtained from wiretapping should be encrypted, not printed on paper, etc. But there are external structures that deal with illegal wiretapping outside the services, he pointed out. That is where the temptations to provide information in an unregulated way come from.
Probably in time, the former head of DANS Plamen Tonchev will speak," he admitted. Yovchev himself had a period of silence, he personally has no idea why he was sent to the files committee.
"Tonchev is a very capable person who managed to calm the agency, impose control and start building things," Tsvetlin Yovchev assessed him.
"If we don't transform the services to the level of the 21st century, we will suffer a lot. "New technologies provide opportunities not only to those who commit crimes, but also to the services, and if a service does not have these resources, it cannot cope. Indicators of illegal activity can no longer be achieved using traffic data, analysis and wiretapping alone; a new resource is needed, including information about transactions," the expert is convinced.
He called the seizure of the NSO cars from the presidency childish, because this administration needs official cars to perform its duties. And those who care about the president's security need to work with familiar cars and drivers.
But Rumen Radev's reaction is also childish - to go in his own car, Yovchev believes. Part of society may say "Bravo", but what is the assessment of Bulgaria from the outside, he asked.