By: Miro Petek
Let us recall: in 2007, former Prime Minister Anton Rop claimed that Janez Janša and Ivo Sanader had coordinated incidents in the Bay of Piran ahead of the 2004 elections, supposedly to benefit the Slovenian Democratic Party. During Janša’s first government, I served on the parliamentary Commission for the Oversight of Intelligence and Security Services, which went to the headquarters of SOVA to verify the accuracy of Rop’s statements. We listened to recorded conversations, and in the end the commission concluded, a finding later confirmed by the National Assembly in plenary, that there had been no coordination of incidents, only an ordinary discussion about the situation in the Bay of Piran at the time.
The opposition at the time brought this fabrication to the forefront because it wanted to divert attention from the scandal involving the hijacked SOVA, directing accusations toward Janša while a special government commission was uncovering numerous irregularities within the agency. It emerged that SOVA possessed a vehicle equipped with devices for intercepting phone communications, that alongside its official secret fund there was also a substantial off‑the‑books fund used even by politicians, and that a covert SOVA location on Mali trg in Ljubljana housed surveillance equipment and served as a meeting point for agents and paid informants. At Bavarski dvor in Ljubljana, the German intelligence service BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) was operating, monitoring telephone traffic from the Western Balkans in an effort to track down war criminals from the region. After the media exposed the location, the German service withdrew.
This was the period of the SOVA affair involving unlawful surveillance of Slovenian citizens and illegal activities by our intelligence service, a topic I also wrote about in my book In the Owl’s Nest. Today we see history repeating itself. The latest developments surrounding SOVA suggest that the institution remains in the grip of the post‑communist political elite, and the story practically writes itself under the title In Golob’s Nest.
A brief aside: a striking example of the abuse of intelligence and security structures was the Watergate affair in the United States, where the political instrumentalization of security agencies escalated into a constitutional crisis and ultimately forced President Richard Nixon to resign. The scandal demonstrated that the misuse of the repressive apparatus for electoral or party‑political purposes constitutes a direct attack on democratic order.
We cannot expect such accountability here, of course. But it is clear that in recent years SOVA has once again become a captured institution, one that has operated, and continues to speak, from within Golob’s nest and on behalf of Golob’s nest. SOVA can no longer be regarded as a professional intelligence and security service whose primary mission is to protect the Republic of Slovenia. Instead, it functions as an instrument for preserving political power, shaping public discourse, and managing political opponents. One of its “nests” was even established in an apartment opposite the headquarters of the SDS party. And when the service is used to gather politically useful information, to selectively leak data to the media or to paid NGOs, or to discredit certain individuals, we are witnessing a serious erosion of the democratic legitimacy of those in power.
In recent days we have been flooded with claims that the presence of the private Israeli intelligence agency Black Cube supposedly posed a threat to the state, to our sovereignty, and other such clichés repeated by superficial politicians and journalists. The Israelis did not hide, they arrived by plane and paid their bills with a credit card. To this day, we do not know whether they committed any criminal offence, nor do we know whether law‑enforcement authorities are investigating the individuals who were caught on the recordings and who, without realising it, exposed their own wrongdoing and the wrongdoing of their political circle.
There is no doubt about the real danger: it is SOVA, which serves a particular ideological bloc instead of the state, monitors political opponents, selectively feeds information to the media, and manufactures scandals to protect its political patrons.