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1 August 2026

On the Figure We Are Not Allowed to Know

The British know that MI5 has 5,259 employees. The Germans know the BND has around 6,500. The Romanian is not allowed to know how many people are guarding him from himself.

Budgets can be discussed, because budgets are public. People cannot be discussed, because their number is classified. And this is not a footnote: it is the heart of the whole matter.

In a democracy the citizen pays and, paying, asks. The Briton knows how many people MI5 has — the figure appears in the reports. The German knows how many the BND has and what each of the federal services costs, because their budgets are published in open parliamentary documents. Neither of them appears, on that account, any less safe than we are.

Here we do not know how many are employed, how many collaborators are paid, how many informers are maintained out of “operational expenses”, what those expenses amount to, or within how many days the documents justifying them are burned. Nor do we know how many undercover men work in the press, in the courts, in the universities and in the state companies — although a director of the service publicly acknowledged that he was aware of “the problems generated by certain former officers positioned either behind all manner of people or orbiting the state-owned companies”.

I am not asking for anybody’s name. I am asking for a figure. The same figure that any British or German taxpayer learns without the world collapsing.

As long as the answer remains “an official secret”, any discussion of reform is a conversation between deaf men.