Peer Henrik Hansen is a Ph.D. in intelligence history and works as a historian at the Cold War Museum at Fortress Langeland. The English version of his dissertation on Danish-US intelligence relations in the Cold War will be published in 2010.

Behind closed doors…

The continuing disputes over the war in Iraq, as shown by the Davids report in the Netherlands and the ongoing Chilcott committee investigations in Britain, have generated a lot of criticism about the paths that were taken in 2002-2003.

 But perhaps it is worth comparing this situation with the motives for similarly controversial forms of cooperation that were present during the Cold War.

 In 1946 a secret deal was made between the Danish and American intelligence services about cooperating against the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain. Already in the fall of 1945 an American intelligence officer had presented an idea and a plan for US intelligence work in Eastern Europe, where Denmark was to function as a US base and the Danes would take care of the practical work. In fact, the two intelligence services (the Security and Intelligence Service  (PET) and the Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS)) and started to strengthen Denmark’s signals intelligence capability, and the Danish service began to send its own agents into Eastern Europe, mainly Poland.

 The Danish-US deal was rather controversial since it in effect placed Denmark firmly on the side of the West, which conversely made it the enemy of the Soviet Union at a time when official policy stated that Denmark was neutral. It wasn’t until the end of the Cold War that the deal was made public.

 The two Danish intelligence services competed with each other to establish the closest working relations with their American counterparts (foremost the CIA). To be the official liaison service of the CIA meant prestige and power. Danish intelligence officers went so far in their attempt to develop relations with the Americans that they compromised Danish security and basically broke Danish law by providing the US service with hundreds of Danish intelligence reports and copies from the intelligence archives.

 But Danish politicians also held secret talks with the Americans. In the course of 1945-47 the leader of the Danish Social Democrats, Hans Hedtoft, regularly informed the US embassy about developments in Danish politics. Greenland had been an important location for the American military during World War II, and the Danish-owned island became even more important as the Cold War got colder and colder.

 Therefore the Danish and US government negotiated the terms upon which the Americans could use Greenland and expand their airbase at Thule. Hans Hedtoft in particular saw that Greenland was an important trump-card in Danish-US relations, and during his meetings with the Americans he stressed that a future government led by him would would ratify an agreement guaranteeing long-term access to Thule, provided that US troops remained in Germany. Like most Europeans – including the French – the Danes wanted US forces to stay in their continent as part of their security guarantee.

 The main reasons for this Denmark-US relationship are of course the mutual interests involved in opposing the Soviet threat. The Danish government did not let the Americans stay in Greenland as a friendly gesture, and the Americans did not offer security guarantees to Denmark because they felt sorry for this small country. The two nations made these agreements because they both had something to gain from it.

 It might seem obvious, but many Europeans seem to have forgotten that countries like Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark did not get involved in Iraq and Afghanistan because they were asked nicely by their American alliesto do so. They did so because the governments in these countries had something to gain from taking that path. Sometimes international power politics is just that simple.

The Netherlands – that oft-mentioned and much-loved but rarely analysed key player in international affairs – came in for quite some attention last Monday at an intriguing one-day seminar held at the Systems Planning Corporation, Washington DC, entitled ‘US-Dutch Relations: Shared history, Shared Future?’ Hosts were the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, and the CIA’s Office of European Analysis. Boring? No.

Lots of people sat around a table describing themselves as ‘political analyst’. Two presentations on history, followed by two presentations on security, one on Dutch politics, and one on identity. The history goes way back – 1609 was the first physical contact between Dutch (still vassals in the Hapsburg empire) and North America (although the joke is that the captain of that voyage of the Halve Maen was an Englishman, Henry Hudson). The settlements never developed beyond a network of trading posts, and the Brits eventually took over in 1674. But the Dutch had their revenge, printing the Declaration of Independence and funding the rebels in the 1770s. Since then traces of Dutchness have remained, and there have been recent efforts to claim ‘tolerance’ as one of the virtues the Dutch passed to the Americans. After WW II, of course, relations became more dense as the Dutch actively engaged in all manner of political, intelligence, security, economic, and cultural networks spanning the Atlantic. “We don’t have a foreign policy,” one Dutch foreign ministry official is meant to have said in 1969, “we have only NATO.”

This stuff seemed to go down well with the CIA, who dig the longue durée perspective. The questions came in: What was the Dutch reaction to 9/11? How is the issue of climate change affecting bilateral relations? But the big issue was this: Is it holding together in the 21^st century? Are there not signs that this long-running unity of US-NL interests is starting to come apart (read: Afghanistan)? The security speakers were divided on this point. One, during an otherwise excellent overview of Dutch counter-terrorism policy, emphasised that the Guantanamo situation was shared by all – Europe should take on former Gitmo internees and bear the burden. Hmmmm. Not sure about that.

The other speaker raised the intriguing point that recent energy deals with the Russians (read: Shell) seem to have had an impact on the public orientation of Dutch foreign policy. Putin expelled Shell from the big money Sakhalin-2 oil project in 2006, but then invited them back in to operate in the Yamal peninsular last June. This occurred just around the time of the opening of the Hermitage in Amsterdam (nice combination of cultural and carbon diplomacy). What is more, the Netherlands and its Gasunie will become a key distribution center for Gazprom’s NordStream gas pipeline across the Baltic. And to cap it all, the Dutch seem to have shifted away from their original position in supporting NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. This is quite a cocktail.

Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, as Atlanticist as they come, has recently been avoiding outspoken pro-NATO statements in speeches, instead talking up the role of the EU. Now, with Lisbon about a month old, this kind of makes sense. But surely we are still in an era of Euro-US partnership, not substituting one for the other? Would there be a connection between Russian oil and gas, and a shift in the public outlook of the Dutch government? With Afghanistan still to be decided? To say the least, it’s a radical claim – not least, its something that might drive your average economic determinist into fits of euphoria.

If anything, though, the Dutch are good at playing both sides. They’ve done that for years with their double-sided orientation towards European integration and Atlantic cooperation. While Verhagen and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs talk up the EU, they remain died-in-the-wool fans of NATO, something that they share with their colleagues in the Ministry of Defence. There have been chinks in this armour. State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Frans Timmermans has been saying consistently that while the Netherlands shares many important factors with the Americans (openness, entrepreneurship, democracy, and social-religious diversity), the days of a knee-jerk support for US foreign policy are over. Interests have to be weighed, and sober conclusions drawn. Yet Verhagen’s back-pedalling on NATO pronouncements is probably more closely related to the cabinet’s clamp-down on Afghanistan-related statements before they have reached an agreement on what to do with Uruzgan. After all, the Foreign Minister’s previous excessive proclamations pretty much triggered the parliamentary motion to end all further involvement in ISAF as of end 2010. Instead, word on the street has it that a deal is probably going to be struck which involves 1) Dutch forces active in another part of Afghanistan, and/or 2) a scaled-down presence continuing in Uruzgan itself.

The big question is whether the Labour party will cause the cabinet to fall on this point, when they are riding so low in the polls. As you can imagine, the hosts were keen to test this one out on their visitors. The consensus amongst the Dutch present was that the key player in the immediate future – certainly going into the next election – would be Democrats 66 (D 66), a rather non-ideological footloose party that voters often flock to if the standard options are in complete flux. D 66 leader Alex Pechtold recently picked up the ‘political leader of the year’ award from the nation’s youth (i.e. those who don’t bother to vote), and wider polls suggest his party will do well. What this means for policy, however, is totally unclear. In 2005 D 66 tried to block the original Uruzgan mission and failed. What will they do if they have a bigger number of MPs?

The seminar ended with State and the CIA  – and the Dutch – looking well pleased with the day’s deliberations. They do many of these kinds of fact-finding sessions, the hosts said, but rarely were they as high quality or as in-depth as this one on the Netherlands. Clearly, even a one-day seminar like this can go a long way to re-affirm the ‘special relationship’.