On 28 March 2009 the Telegraaf published an article that claimed the Dutch Intelligence Service (AIVD) had failed to correctly inform the ruling cabinet in 2002-2003 about the threat from Iraq. The article said that the Service had simply passed on intelligence it had received mainly from MI6 (which MI6 was simply passing on from the Americans)without checking it in any way. As a result, declared the Telegraaf, the WMD claim was fed unfiltered into the Dutch decision-making process. 

The article caused a lot of unrest at the AIVD itself, because it was clearly based on a leak. A secret self-assessment of the Service’s involvement in the Iraq affair had been passed to the journalist Jolande van der Graaf. An investigation followed (involving the phone-tapping of the paper’s editorial staff and the surveillance of the journalist), leading to the arrest of an employee and her ex-employee partner on 18 June and van der Graaf’s house being searched. The paper fought back, getting a court injunction against phone-tapping and against the Service using any of the material they had gathered through their surveillance. But as the case continued, the focus turned to Minister of the Interior Guus ter Horst, who was the one responsible for allowing the surveillance in the first place. And that could only be allowed if state security was at stake, which it wasn’t, because it was all about Iraq in 2003. So far, though, Telegraaf-Gate hasn’t forced her resignation.

There is plenty of smoke and mirrors in this case, as one would expect with an intelligence agency being involved. It remains unclear why a member of the AIVD would leak a report that would bring the Service into disrepute, as the Telegraaf article did. And as the (effectively illegal) surveillance of the journalist showed, she continued to stay in touch with her AIVD contacts, so they can’t have been upset by the way their information was used. The internal report that was leaked was prepared exactly for the upcoming Davids committee investigation that was just getting moving in March 2009. Was the idea to get the information into the public domain quickly, to influence the investigation? Or just to make sure it did get into the public domain? But then why, if it was so negative?   

The Davids report did after all deliver a somber judgement on the role of the Dutch civil and military intelligence services in 2002-2003. Lacking sources themselves, they had little choice but to work with the material comin gin from MI6. But Davids records clearly that this material was not accepted at face value by either AIVD or the military’s MIVD. There was in fact much scepticism of the claims being made about Iraqi WMD capabilities and supposed links with AlQaeda. In other words, the Dutch services could sense that there was some serious political spin going on in the UK and the US, and they were not falling into line behind it. But their advice was ignored by the political leadership.

On the one hand this might be understandable because the Dutch services were dependant on others for sources of information, But on the other hand it displayed a total unwillingness on the part of prime minister Balkenende or the Foreign Ministry to address the fact that their own services were pointing out the political manipulation of sensitive material. If they acknowledged that, they would have had to abandon their support for the US-UK offensive. And that was out of the question.

However, it went further than this. The British ambassador at the time was deliberately passing information directly to premier Balkenende, cutting the Dutch intelligence services out of the loop. There are strong signs that the Brits did this because they knew of the scepticism amongst the Dutch, so they simply ‘stovepiped’ the necessary messages straight into Balkenende’s office. And the Brits were not the only one doing this either. Which leads to the conclusion of one analyst in the wake of the Davids report – why bother having intelligence services at all if this is what the result is?

But it even goes further than that. Analyst Peter Wieringa has pointed out that some of the information in the infamous Telegraaf article comes not from the AIVD but from the military sister service, the MIVD. And the only place where information from both services is collected is the Ministry of General Affairs – literally, the Ministry that supports the prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende. Adding yet more smoke and an extra mirror to the affair, Wieringa is clearly speculating – and the emphasis here is definitely on speculating – that the Ministry was behind the leak in order to direct critical attention towards the intelligence services and away from the prime minister and his entourage. A remarkable claim, but Wieringa seems to know what he is talking about.

The Holland Bureau will be tracking any further revelations in this curious affair.