National intelligence services are institutions which have traditionally avoided public scrutiny and whose activities have been clothed in some mistery. This study investigates the home page of three national intelligence services: the Turkish, the Italian and the Australian. The analysis examines two aspects of the institutional discourse of the services: the verbal and the visual. The verbal analysis centers on the institutional mission statement/motto and the visual analysis focuses on images and layout of the pages as a whole. The verbal analysis is based on Halliday's functional grammar (1994) and critical discourse analysis. The verbal analysis draws on Kress and van Leeuwen's theory of multimodality (1996). The results suggest that, although the presence of national intelligence services on the internet may seem to be a step forward toward a more transparent relationship with the general public, very little is actually said about specific principles, objectives and modus operandi these institutions guide themselves.