A widespread view in Bulgaria, keenly supported by politicians, is that the work of the secret services should be hidden from the public eye so that the services can do their job to their utmost. This notion applies equally to secret services’ success and failures.

I think the time has now come for the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to break with tradition and come out and say what it has achieved in the two years since its formation.

I want to know what the super agency - as many newspaper reports call it – has achieved with the 109 million leva it gets from taxpayers every year. How many organised crime groups have been busted?

How many of these investigations have survived in court and served as the basis for court sentences? These are simple questions. After all, when SANS was created, it was described as the answer to all evils in the country, starting with top level corruption and organised crime.

It is time to see how well this agency has done and, most of all, whether it has the capacity and the will to continue. Because what we have been hearing, especially over the past year, is current and former SANS employees accusing each other of everything under the sun. Classified information has been leaking in all directions from the agency. And people who during the 1990s were reputedly associated with the underworld suddenly appeared as advisers to the head of SANS - to everyone’s dismay.

We have one such person, who left the agency after the new Government came to power, suddenly walking around with a classified report on top level corruption that allegedly includes former cabinet ministers’ names.

We also have the SANS former spokesperson, someone who was very good at saying what could and could not be said to the media, suddenly becoming the head of a new newspaper carrying the name of a controversial previous SANS investigation into journalists’ phone records.

If we go back a year, there was the scandal of SANS’ former deputy head who was first dismissed over allegations of corruption regarding his brother and was later reinstated by a court that obviously found no legal grounds for his dismissal.

In other words, for the first two-and-a-half years of its existence, the only signals emanating from SANS were about internal scandals, struggles and political squabbles, creating the impression that the agency has become (according to some, this was its design) a way to fight everything except organised crime.

Hence the new Prime Minister and the new head of SANS must prove that the agency serves a need. Because the sad truth right now is that SANS is far from following the goals set out by law, which are to protect Bulgarian lives and maintain security.