The case against Telegraaf journalist Jolande van der Graaf was dropped last week, and within a day or two she took her opportunity to go public with her version of events in an interview with the Volkskrant on Monday. Van der Graaf was in the dock for running two articles last year based on leaks from the security service (AIVD), covering its role in the build-up to the Iraq war and problems with the security of the Dalai Lama. It seems that the case has been dropped because the Minister responsible for overseeing the service, Guus ter Horst, has recognised that it misused its powers of surveillance in pursuing the journalist during the first half of 2009. Ter Horst stated in June last year, shortly after van der Graaf’s house had been searched for incriminating documents, that journalists should refuse sensitive material related to state security if they were offered it. According to van der Graaf, ter Horst had also stated that the journalist was active in attempting to establish herself via contacts in the security service as an outlet for further leaks. This claim was obviously geared to justifying the surveillance and subsequent prosecution. In December the Advisory Commission on the Security Service declared that the phone tapping had been justified – but only after the publication of the second article based on a leak, not the first. The service had over-reacted. The ending of the case last week looks unmistakenly like a big a u-turn.

On 18 June 2009 Van der Graaf answered the door to her house and found ten men from the AIVD on the doorstep, warrant in hand. What followed was a six and a half hour ’fine tooth-comb’ search through everything, down to the contents of her son’s Donald Duck comics. It was also clear that her car had been fitted with a tracking device. Although willing to pass the details of this ordeal to the Volkskrant, van der Graaf couldn’t use the occasion to give anything away concerning her links with the AIVD or the story behind the leaks. The service’s employee and her partner remain under prosecution and their case will continue later this year.

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.

Incident Retreived. DVD, Edited CCTV. 7 min.

No, not the CIA and Abstract Expressionism. An intriguing tale of collusion between an artist and an agency that is definitely more 21st century than Cold War.

In the Spring of 2004 the Dutch Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) was preparing to move to larger  premises, the result of a recruitment drive following 9/11 and the fear of Islamic extremism.  Dutch law states that if government money is used for such an investment, a percentage of the total budget must be spent on an onsite artwork. The search for a suitable candidate to fulfil this task ended with the selection of American artist Jill Magid, whose recent work has been based around surveillance cameras and their presence in society. The Service naturally expected that the commission would lead to an artwork that could be placed conveniently in one or other hallway. Magid, intrigued by secrecy, power, and organisations, instead set out to become part of the Service itself. In early 2005 she presented her plan – she would become the Service’s Head of Personal Data, recording the personal details of its employees during clandestine meetings at locations of their choosing. Also intrigued, the Service agreed, so long as aliases were used and the ensuing report presented a positive image of its role in society.

Magid records this tale in her novel, Becoming Tarden, the result of her project, named after the main character in Kosinski’s Cockpit. Its written in a voyeuristic style and its obvious that Magid is playing seductress in the heart of the secret state, coming on strong with temptation and desire. The Dutch spooks – male and female – apparently fell for it. Only, they hadn’t reckoned on a novel. 

To close the assignment, Magid held an exhibition at the Article 12 gallery in The Hague in 2008 based on her investigations, and handed over her notebooks. The message came back that around a quarter of the content will be censored. Magid let drop that she can deal with this but that she will continue writing. Writing? The message has the desired effect. The order comes from on high that the exhibition is to be closed down, that she must stop writing, and certainly not publish anything. Non compliance would mean her computer hard drive being wiped and a probable visit to the inside of a court room. But she’s playing with them all the time. Called to account for overstepping the line, Magid uses the stand-off that occurs between legal advisors across a table to add spice to her book’s epilogue: ”This is business, Jill. This is not art.”

But they are sucked in completely now, part of a trip that they didn’t commission. They counter with a proposal – the book and the notebooks will be placed in a vitrine, in the Service’s building, as a permanent exhibit. A piece of sculpture. Magid is not sure. For once – on the final pages of the book – she seems wrong-footed. But the event she has been staging for the previous three years is not yet over. She hands over the book, and it is returned in August 2008, heavily redacted. But she still has the original. So she sets up a challenge – she will exhibit the only copy of the full, uncensored book under glass at Tate Modern in London. The exhibit was called Authority to Remove - if the Service was so determined to control the contents, they could come and collect it at the end of the exhibition.

Which they duly did, two weeks ago. But its a strange tale. In the name of Art, Magid could literally record eveything going on within the walls and the minds of the Dutch secret state, and then test the limits of disclosure. On first account it looks like the Service has been fully taken for a ride. But maybe it did come out with a better social image. The long-running suspicion that the CIA funded – through various cut-outs – the promotion of Abstract Expressionism is all based on the assumption of behind-the-scenes manoeuvering by East Coast elites. But maybe the best way to use art for cultural diplomacy is to become part of the art itself. Maybe the AIVD were on to something which they weren’t aware of. Magid certainly gave them some front-page headlines and a sexiness that counter-terrorism never will.

Commissie Davids (ANP)

The Davids Commission delivered its report today on the involvement of the Netherlands in the build-up to and actual invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The reactions so far have been revealing for their focus on premier Jan Peter Balkenende, who has never shown any interest or inclination to dig into the Iraq past. The report partly explained why.

Three principal conclusions have been drawn out from the forty-nine listed at the end:

1) There was disagreement among civil servants within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over the legality of the Iraq invasion without a specific UN mandate.

This has been known for sure since the NRC Handelsblad published  in January 2009 Memorandum DJZ/IR/2003/158 from 29 April 2003, in which clear as day was stated that there were serious doubts within the Foreign Ministry’s legal division over the political (never mind military) support given by The Hague for the invasion. The top civil servant who sent this critical legal advice to the archive instead of to the Minister, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, was Frank Majoor - now Dutch representative to NATO. You have to appreciate the significance here of Dutch legal advisors saying that ‘if the Netherlands ended up in a procedure at the International Court of Justice, it would lose’. In The Hague, the ‘capital of international law’, these were not idle words. The Davids report is clear: ‘The Security Council resolutions from the 1990s [1441 in particular] did not provide a mandate for the American-British invasion in 2003.’ And for the Americans, the difference between political and military support wasn’t that clear anyway.

2) Premier Balkenende was absent (as was Minister of Defence Korthals) from the deliberations within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that led to confirming Dutch support for the invasion. Balkenende only came on the scene in early 2003, but by the then the cast had been set. This means that Foreign Minister de Hoop Scheffer (and his ministerial advisors) effectively set out the government’s policy between August and December 2002. 

Balkenende tried to brush this away in his post-report press conference this afternoon. Ah, he had been fully occupied with the following year’s budget, and oh yes, he’d been away at the major sustainable development conference in South Africa. So he was doing a spot of maths and some tree-hugging while the most serious crisis to hit the post-Cold War era was playing out across the globe? This is beyond parody.

3) The Dutch military and civilian intelligence services were cautious in their assessments of Iraq and its possession of weapons of mass destruction, but were unable to make this information have an impact within the government. 

Once again, here is the proof that intelligence lost out to politics. Useful tit-bits have been taken out of context, manipulated, and served up to parliament and public as justification for war. What is more – although the Dutch services were cautious, they were still completely reliant on Anglo-American intelligence as their main source of information. In these circumstances there was nowhere to go.

As expected, the report caused plenty of knee-jerk reactions from the opposition parties as they lined up to take a dig at Balkenende, still in power seven years (and counting) since these events took place. Above all, the premier’s assumption that he can simply respect the report but disagree with its main conclusions - and then walk away regardless – has gone down badly, none more so than with his erstwhile cabinet colleagues in the Labour party. Labour has been itching to regain a grip on the Balkenende/Hoop Scheffer/Iraq issue since it was forced to drop it in 2006 as the price for joining the current cabinet. Unless Balkenende turns up tomorrow wearing sackloth and ashes, the Labourites are not going to be satisfied.

What next? The Davids report flatly denies that Dutch military forces participated in either the preparations for or the actual invasion of Iraq, despite hard rumours and some unforgettable anomalies – such as Jan Bot standing amongst the Coalition of the Willing at a Tommy Franks press conference on 22 March 2003.

Jan Blom, far right, behind Franks. Coalition of the Willing?

Its highly likely that these suspicions won’t go away, and more revelations may come. It also looks quite likely at the moment, considering the mood amongst all the parties except the Christian Democrats, that a parliamentary enquiry will be established, which would have a more stringent mandate than Davids – something Balkenende would not be able to walk away from. 

But perhaps the most important reflection on the path the Dutch took in wandering into the Iraq fiasco come in conclusion points 14 and 16. The decision to support the invasion was based on international political considerations, and ‘in the first place these were scarcely explicitly mentioned [but ever-present] considerations for Atlantic solidarity.’ These came at a cost – this ‘Atlantic reflex’ prevaled over a more European outlook that may have enabled The Hague to play a negotiating role between Washington and London on the one hand and Paris and Berlin on the other.

Is this Atlantic reflex still in place in 2010? For some such as Minister of Foreign Affairs Verhagen with his human rights agenda – absolutely. For others – notably State Secretary for Europe Frans Timmermans –  it should be abandoned for a more flexible, rational foreign policy that recognises the common ground but that allows room for manoeuvre. Surely if Davids shows anything, its that Timmermans is right?

(ABC News/Handout/SaharaReporters.Com)

In the Washington Post on 10 January terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted the core features of AlQaeda’s latest strategy. Number three was “create divisions within the global alliance arrayed against it by targeting key coalition partners,” and he used the attacks in Madrid 2004 and London 2005 as examples. The Madrid attack of 11 March was certainly  remarkable in its timing and its effects, allegedly contributing to the swing against Aznar’s ruling Partido Popular in the general election three days later. Hoffman then went on to say that “within the last two years serious terrorist plots orchestrated by al-Qaeda’s allies in Pakistan, meant to punish Spain and the Netherlands for participating in the war on terrorism, were thwarted in Barcelona and Amsterdam.”

This was news to the Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD), the Dutch intelligence and security service, which issued a brief repost a day later denying that there had been any thwarted attacks during that period. So is the Netherlands a sea of calm in an otherwise threatened West?

The AIVD’s website already gives some indication of the answer to this question. In December last year the service issued two reports, one claiming the impact of salafi Islam was declining in the Netherlands, mainly due to its rejection by muslims themselves, and the other indicating that the threat from local jihadi networks had also declined. Since the demise of the so-called Hofstad group in 2004, which allegedly sought to attack political targets, radical elements now seek jihad abroad instead, as illustrated by the group from The Hague who turned up near the Kenya-Somali border ‘on holiday’ in July 2009. Why this success? Firstly, the upgrading of the counter-terrorist infrastructure. AIVD recruitment went through the roof in the early 200s as terrorism became a major growth industry, and while the creation of the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism initially caused quite a lot of bureaucratic in-fighting, it does seem to have galvanised the relevant parts of government to work together. It is quite true that communications surveillance by these bodies in the Netherlands is remarkably extensive and, as a result, very effective. But this is only the first reason. The second reason is that a vast majority of Dutch muslims have no interest in jihad, and local leaders have been effective in monitoring their communities and reducing the impact of radical teachings. So while there might at times be social unrest and difficult relations with the police among some Turks and Moroccans, it is related more to second and third generation integration problems than radical religion.      

So far so good. But the AIVD reports are not the whole story, because while the locals are covered, there are others coming in. In March 2008 the Pakistani student Aqueel Ur Rahman Abassi was arrested in Breda due to information that linked him with radical Islamic groups in Barcelona. According to Spanish police Abassi was on his way to becoming a suicide bomber, destination Frankfurt. His time as a student in the Netherlands was purely part of the cover.

Abassi’s case caused deep concern because he illustrated a whole new category of threat. As a student he could enter the Netherlands fairly easily. Many like him obtain an education visa and then disappear, making use of the loophole. Following his arrest, all known Pakistani students were screened and it has become very difficult for applicants from that country to obtain visas to study at a Dutch university. Like Abdulmutallab, Abassi was apparently using the Netherlands as no more than a transit country on the way to his eventual intended target. But with the Afghanistan debate going to heat up here in the coming months, one does wonder if it will stay that way.