MI6 and the United Kingdom top a new L'Express ranking of European intelligence services, with Estonia placed eighth on 27 points. The survey was published last week and asked intelligence professionals to score their peers, turning reputation into a rare public comparison.
The table put France second, the Netherlands third, Ukraine fourth and Germany fifth. Estonia's result sits below that leading group, while Lithuania finished 18th and Latvia 21st; Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia received zero points and were left out of the table entirely.
Meelis Oidsalu and the sample
Meelis Oidsalu said the ranking was unprecedented because intelligence professionals were evaluating each other's work with numerical scores. He also warned that the panel of 60 people was small enough for random distortions to slip in, even though the evaluators were former or current intelligence officials from 25 countries.
That method matters because each jury member picked five top intelligence services and awarded points from one to five. The result is closer to a peer reputation survey than a direct audit of operations, which means it captures how services are viewed by colleagues rather than a formal measurement of missions completed or intelligence failures avoided.
Estonia's open-data profile
The ranking gave Estonia credit for cyber capabilities and intelligence based on open data, and it praised the Foreign Intelligence Service's annual assessments of Russia. Oidsalu said that reputation is not always fully justified, but he still called the study useful for transparency in the security field.
He also tied the result to resources. The British intelligence community's budget is around five billion euros per financial year, while the Baltic states have to manage with a few tens of millions per agency. Estonia's analytical capability is valued, but Oidsalu said the question for Baltic intelligence services is how much information they can collect themselves, especially as think tanks and commercial satellite intelligence have expanded.
What the ranking leaves open
The ranking now gives readers a concrete hierarchy, but it also leaves the harder comparison untouched: how services outside the top five and Estonia separated from one another inside the full table. For Estonia, the practical reading is that cyber work and open-source analysis can earn peer respect even in a field where funding gaps remain large.
What comes next is debate over the ranking's value, its small sample and whether a reputation survey can tell readers more than a snapshot of professional prestige. That argument now sits beside the numbers themselves, and the numbers already put MI6 and the United Kingdom at the top.
