Central Bureau of Intelligence and Information
The Central Bureau of Intelligence and Information (CBII) is a Patrajan foreign protection and espionage directory, whose stated purpose is to "protect Patraja from foreign, insurgent, and domestic espionage and proto-military threats." The CBII has been under direct command of the President of Patraja since 2024, but was previously a subcommittee of the Confederated People's Congress of Patraja. The CBII replaced its predecessor, the Patrajan Federal Agency of External Affairs, after criticism of the PFAEA's weak jurisdiction, lack of funding, and minimal support from the new confederal government. In contrast, the current CBII operates with relative impunity and looseness, being monitored in a "legally-averse and governmentally-loosened manner," according to critic of the bureau, Professor Laritin Rekan.
| Kentralna Ministrana Intelligentia et Informacijta | |
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| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | January 11th, 1998 |
| Preceding Agency |
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| Jurisdiction | Foreign Intelligence Center of Patraja |
| Headquarters | Karneja, Province of Karneja |
| Motto | Quis Novit in Aeternitate Sua Succedet |
| Employees | 3298 |
| Annual budget | 173,560,000 Vitaes |
| Minister responsible |
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| Agency executive |
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History
Founding
The Central Bureau of Intelligence and Information was formally created and replaced the previous Federal Agency of External Affairs on January 11th, 1998, roughly three years after the formation of the confederated republic. It had a deliberation period of several months, but was essentially being worked on as a successor agency to the FAEA since the founding of the Confederated Republic. It was introduced to the Congress and voted on, reaching a majority vote of 87-12-1 in the Senatorium and 412-55-23 in the Assembly, with a final approval from Patrajan President Barcht a day later. The first Director of the CBII was appointed by the Congress, and was former PFAEA Commander Jonatin Shenah. He served as Director from the founding of the Bureau, in 1998, to his resignation due to internal investigations against his directorially-formed CBII units in early 2005.
Transition from the PFAEA to the CBII
In general, the early days of the CBII were noted for essentially being a "name change" and absorption of the FAEA in all but the legal mechanism. However, transitions from the previous organization to the allowances and flexibility of the new started almost immediately. Staff and administration reshuffling was inevitable, and extensive, with the CBII shrinking from about about 1000 employees to only a little over 200 at the peak of reshuffling and cuts to certain areas. This minor era of reshuffling ended a few months after the inheritance of Patraja's foreign intelligence agency to the new Director, and hiring began almost instantly after, focusing on quality and deep experience in intelligence work. Primarily, previously-experienced agents were recruited from foreign countries, semi-retired agents, along with handpicked selections from local, provincial, and confederal police forces, along with the Patrajan Military. On September 17th, 1998, the CBII and the Patrajan 17th Intelligence Division, in coordination with the Patrajan Chief of Army Affairs and the General Staff of the Military, organized the merger of the 17th Intelligence Division into the CBII as a joint cooperation program to bolster the CBII's ranks, as well as its experience in foreign and domestic military regards. On May 11th, 2004, this agreement was revoked, but only really in name; by the time the Intelligence Division was recalled from the CBII, few of its original members were in it at that point, either retiring or transferring out to the CBII itself. The 17th Intelligence Division was shortly dissolved thereafter, sometime in late 2004, with its remaining forces and resources reallocated to other areas of the army. The period from 1998 to 2004 is generally known as the "early days" of the CBII.
Investigation into Director Shenah
On April 17th, 2004, the first Director of the CBII, Jonatin Shenah, was officially placed under investigation by the now-defunct Ministry of Internal Military Affairs, after allegations of professional abuse of his power in the creation of the 3rd and 4th Investigation Teams, two sets of covert operative sets that were noted for answering directly up the bureaucracy to the Director, rather than through the typical channels. Finding this suspicious, Bureau Analyst Adam Anski investigated into the matter and found potential evidence of covered-up actions by the Director. Though the details of the actions are believed to have been discovered, the exact details of what they were is unknown to this day due to both redactions and missing, or destroyed, tapes, files, and other inventory items. The damage and destruction to these items was found only in 2010, after those items were declassified by the MIMA. This failure of the MIMA to thoroughly copy and document investigative matters is one of the key points that eventually got them dissolved and many of their functions, ironically, merged with the CBII. Despite the redactions and discoveries, Director Shenah resigned resigned on January 11th, 2005, and the case was de-facto closed. The Congress recognized Deputy-Director Valerij Krasnin as his successor, and promoted him from acting Director to full-time Director on January 15th, 2005.
Early 2000s
In 2007, the CBII uncovered a previously-unknown plot stretching back to the early 1990s by several members in the then-Federal Government of Patraja. This plot, if carried through by its planned date of November 11th, 1994, would have essentially launched an internal coup within the Federal Government and replaced it with a pseudo-Marxist shadow regime. The details of the operations and mechanisms of how this regime would function are redacted, and the reason for the cancellation of the plan was unknown, but evidence was gathered from early in the year and for about 4 months. Later in the year, the evidence was brought to the National Court in private, and across one day, the remaining politicians involved in the scheme, retired and still-occupied, were arrested in a matter of two days. One of those politicians, former Member of Parliament and member of the defunct Communist Party of the Federation, was shot after attempting to assault an interdiction officer. In early 2008, all men were convicted of grand conspiracy against a legitimate government of the nation, and a vital precedent of both conspiracy and anti-governmental law was set; even actions against previous governments and constitutions were still to be counted as constitutional or conspiratorial crimes.
The CBII generally remained stable under Director Krasnin throughout the rest of the early 2000s, notable for its powerful and preserved in-house culture, as well as its reserved and private nature. By the end of the Directors slow transformation of the CBII into a nearly-autonomous entity, the Bureau was essentially a black box within Patraja's budget. Money came in, and, occasionally, some vital results came out. Other than that, little was known to both the public and the non-committee relevant members of Congress that wasn't severely redacted. Notably, the biyearly review of the Bureau in 2010 lasted a total of twenty minutes, with the Congressional Committee on Foreign Intelligence dismissing Krasnin after only half an hour of actual, in-person attendance.
Modern Era
Director Krasnin resigned in December 4th, 2011 after nearly seven years of service in the Bureau, and left behind a publicly-spotless record, despite many conspiratorial claims about the shut-in and secretive "Krasnin Era" of the CBII. On December 6th, 2011, after the confirmation of former CBII agent and then-instructor Mikail Qerenov as Director, the current seal of the CBII was approved by the director. Before this point, the identification of the CBII was kept, intentionally or not, either blank, or defaulted to the far-outdated PFAEA "sword-and-shield" sigil. Much of the previous design was carried over by Qerenov, including a sword and shield-like pendant, but a new black-and-white color scheme was adopted to "match a more modern CBII approach," as stated by the new director.
The Bureau once more coasted smoothly along, until 2013, when Director Qerenov was brought to court during the Dissolution of the Ministry of Internal Military Affairs, and questioned on the extent of cooperation between the CBII and the dissolving MIMA. Answering with a record of several interactions, the CBII was determined as a "contaminant" from the source of the MIMA, and was ordered to essentially find all former MIMA officers and to question them for both competence and "moral aptitude." This extensive and internally-painful investigation led to the largest layoff wave in the CBII since its founding, as well as several resignations from both investigative matters as well as in protest. By the time the investigations were completed in about mid-2014, the Deputy Director, the Director of Finance and Budgeting, the Director of Recruitment, and the Director of Waste Management, including several other bureaucratic positions, had been either laid off or resigned on their own accord.
In 2015, another terrorist threat was barely stopped by the CBII, wherein a truck suspected of ownership by suspicious groups was stopped at a bridge near Karneja and searched. In it were found nearly a ton of chemical and biological weapons, all headed for the capital. The group, a radical Islamist organization, was essentially dismantled from this seizure of their weapons and from interviews done on the two men in the truck. The name of the group, the identities of those involved, along with any other details have all been virtually completely-redacted, with only the Director's approval and the date of the stop-and-seizure revealed to the public.
In 2018, Director Qerenov was found dead in his apartment from apparent suicide. Conspiracy theorists have since believed this to be an internal coup in the CBII, but such reports were discredited. However, in the panic of the intermediate week or so of the death of Qerenov, when the investigation into it had not yet turned up suicide as a cause, President Analli promised the people a better oversight of the CBII to prevent any unfortunate mistakes from ever happening again, including the then-possibility of the murder of a Director. To this end, the Deputy-President of the Confederal Peoples Congress was awarded the additional responsibility of, according to the 2018 Bill to Supervise CBII Command Structure in Democratic means, "managing and overseeing the responsibilities of the CBII Directorate in a manner consistent to the respect of the Director as the general head of the CBII and the Deputy-President as an overseeing guest." In essence, though overseeing and advising the CBII Director, was not in command of either him or the Bureau, or of any real areas in the Bureau. This was, in essence, a method of backchanneling around the Confederated Peoples Congressional Committee on Foreign Intelligence between the President and the Director. The reason for this occurring mere days after the death of the previous Director, or why this was seen as a necessity, is unknown.
Three days after confirmation of suicide as Director Qerenov's death, the Congress decided not to promote the Deputy Director Markov to his position, but to elect former Navy Intelligence Commander Cason Polotov to be the new Director. He took office in early 2019, and serves as the current and, thus far, longest-lasting Director of the CBII.
In 2022, after the election of former Deputy-President Marija Torenvoa as the President of Patraja, a Presidential Order was taken abolishing the Deputy-President's role of communication between the CBII and the President. This was the first instance of a Presidential Order outright superseding a Congressionally voted-upon law after the fact of its institution. In 2024, a month after the Confederal Peoples Congressional Committee on Foreign Intelligence was disbanded due to accusations of political corruption and bribery of several of its officers, the Congress voted 92-8 in the Senatorium and 335-150-15 in the Assembly to transfer the responsibility of command and Directorial appointment to the President of Patraja. Shortly after this, the President ordered an increase of the CBII's budget from about 80,000,000 Vitae to 90,000,000 Vitae. Since then, nearly-yearly increases in the CBII's budget have occured.
Controversies and Rumors
The South Karnejan Affair
Early in the creation of the CBII, the agency was accused by several anonymous whistleblowers of hiring, kidnapping, and experimenting on prostitutes from South Karneja's red light district. This program, which holds no official name as of yet but was simply referred to as "the South Karnejan Affair," was apparently a holdover from the PFAEA and was continued from the founding of the CBII in 1998 to late 2003, shortly before the investigation into Director Shenah and his resignation. No details, evidence, or names, including of the whistleblowers, have come out of the story since its initial publishing in the National Patrajan Weekly.
In 2019, a rumor was spread on the internet of a supposed "victim tape" of prostitutes that had allegedly survived and been released from experiments being interviewed by, first, CBII agents on their experience, and then by the whistleblowers months after. This tape was supposedly sent to the government, instead of the National Patrajan Weekly, but no evidence has ever come out to substantiate either the existence of the tape or its arrival to the government. The South Karnejan Affair "blew up" in the mainstream internet in 2024 once more after the CBII's Directorial appointment power was given to the President, and demands of new investigations were pushed.
Director Shenah's Public Disappearance
Unlike other rumors and controversies, this is a legitimate case and mystery that the CBII and law enforcement are investigating to this day. For months after his resignation in 2005, the former Director of the CBII Jonatin Shenah was on a tour of presentations and conferences around Patraja to discuss intelligence issues as a key speaker. However, about four months after this pattern started, the former director seemed to blip out of the public sphere. As an unmarried man with no children, no one reported the strange lack of the man's presence anywhere until 2007. Though not operating on rumor and hearsay, the CBII sent a small common-clothes team to check the man's known addresses, and found that each was abandoned, seemingly left as-is for months. Since that point, no news or clues have been found on Shenah's disappearance, which was officially marked as one and a federal police and CBII case in 2008. The case file remains open on it.
Accusations of Internal Coups and Revolts
Ever since its initial ethos and pattern of more independent acts from the government was established, particularly in the Krasnin Era, various conspiracies of internal politics at the CBII have been abound. The main, and most popular theory, is that essentially every change of Directorship and staff at the CBII is generally from the cause of an internal coup. An example of this is the mentioning of the suicide of Director Qerenov, used as evidence for a cover-up within the CBII to strengthen the Presidency's role in the covert agency through the appointment of a "puppet Director." None of these claims have ever yielded particular substance.
Accusations of War Crimes
The CBII has been accused of war crimes in both foreign and domestic areas of conflict and investigation by multiple parties, including foreign embassies. The League of Nations has investigated these claims only once in 2016, and had found the CBII innocent of any wrongdoing in the event. What the event was, when it took place, or who was involved was mutually-redacted by the League and CBII.