Last Sunday and Monday Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal visited Tripoli, making some positive noises about releasing $2bn of frozen Libyan funds (earlier declarations of releasing $3.5bn have so far produced nothing). Dutch involvement in Operation Unified Protector was limited to enforcing the no-fly zone, leaving the serious stuff to others. But last week the most intriguing event in the whole Libyan escapade – the failed Sirte evacuation mission of Sunday 27 February – once more saw the light of day.

A short recap. A representative (who we know as ‘NN’) of infrastructure/engineering giant Royal Haskoning needed to be evacuated. The frigate Hr.Ms.Tromp, stationed just off the coast, sent a helicopter to rescue him. The location chosen was, remarkably, Sirte - home town of Gaddafi himself. The helicopter, which entered Libyan airspace without authorisation, and its three crew were held by pro-Gaddafi forces soon after landing. After plenty of behind-the-scenes negotiations, the crew were released after a week and a half.

On 1 November the Advisory Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD) made public its report on the role of the MIVD and AIVD in the evacuation mission. The results were not very startling. Coordination between the two intelligence services was lacking. The MIVD only informed the AIVD of the situation on 3 March. The AIVD then approached foreign intelligence services without informing the Foreign Ministry. Back in March the big joke had been that Military Intelligence didn’t work on Sunday and so failed to respond to the Tromp’s request for information that afternoon – an accusation that drew a furious response from the MIVD’s supporters. The CTIVD now largely exonerates the MIVD from any failure to respond.

But the CTIVD’s mandate for this report was very narrow – only look at the intelligence services. The decision to go ahead with the mission came from the very top - the Ministerial Core Group for Special Operations (MKSO), consisting of the Minister-President (Mark Rutte), Vice Minister-President (Maxime Verhagen), Minister of Defence (Hans Hillen), and Minister of Foreign Affairs (Uri Rosenthal). Under the MKSO’s responsibility lay “the evacuation of citizens from life-threatening situations.” As former MIVD boss Joop van Reijn said, the service had been unable to respond properly at the time because it had been deliberately excluded from the planning of the operation.

For the whole month of March both media and opposition MPs went after Defence Minister Hans Hillen and the MIVD. 124 parliamentary questions were tabled. Hillen survived, but many remained unconvinced.

Inevitably, the more interesting rumours circulated for a while in the outer reaches of the Dutch blogcloud. The origin seems to have been Klokkenluider.nl, who posted a remarkable alternate version of events already on 5 March. Other sites picked it up, but the mainstream media, as far as I am aware, never went near it apart from one or two passing references. Which is a pity – and in itself also says a lot.

It goes something like this. The official story is that the helicopter was sent to pick up a Dutch engineer and a woman with a Swedish passport who had somehow heard about the evacuation. Even though this ’Swedish woman’ was actually interviewed by the Dutch media in late March, this was a put-up job. The woman in Libya was in fact Princess Mabel of Oranje Nassau, Mabel Wisse Smit, wife of Prince Friso, who was in Libya to arrange a mutually acceptable solution for Gaddafi’s economic interests in the Netherlands. Gaddafi held a substantial stake in Fortis-ABN and this needed to be taken care of. The helicopter was not on a rescue mission but a hostage mission – the crew were to remain in Libya until the transaction was secure and Wisse Smit was out of the country – official reports state that the two ‘evacuees’ left the country on 2 March. Why Wisse Smit? A long-time executive in George Soros’s Open Society Institute and closely involved in Balkans affairs, she knew prominent son Saif Gaddafi through the World Economic Forum’s Global Young Leaders network, and was well-connected with both financial and governmental leaders on both sides. The Gaddafi assets were apparently transferred to Ageas, a successor enterprise to Fortis. Gaddafi’s economic interests in the Netherlands went far beyond the $3.5bn of frozen financial assets. There was plenty of private equity interest in the substantial funds available from the Libyan Sovereign Wealth Fund. Tamoil, the Libyan national oil company, has a base in Riddekerk from where it runs around 160 filling stations in the Netherlands. Verenex Energy, the Libyan oil and gas prospector, is based in the same location. From GeenNieuws came the nice extra detail: Wisse Smit’s Twitter timeline stopped on 24 February and restarted on 2 March, when she claimed to be in Ethiopia.

Elite / Conspiracy nonsense? Or simply a cover-up for a business transaction that almost cost the Defence Minister his job? Nothing more has come out on this that I know of. But the bottom line is that its just about believable. And its a great story.

The Defence Ministry’s eavesdropping dishes at Burum in Friesland (nothern Netherlands) [Source of photo here]

Interesting recent developments in the world of security, parliamentary regulation and politics in the Netherlands. On 6 April the lower chamber of parliament passed a motion demanding that the current Minister for Home Affairs, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, make public the statistics concerning telephone tapping by the security services. At this moment only the figures from the investigative departments of the police are released.

But those figures alone have themselves raised questions in parliament: 2200 numbers a day being tapped, of which 80% mobile numbers, and this is on the rise. The civilian and military intelligence and security services (AIVD and MIVD) do not fall within this category because they don’t need to receive sanction from a judge. Previous arguments have been raised that releasing these figures will damage the operating methods of the services and so undermine security. But this is no longer satisfying several members of parliament, notably from the Socialist party.

But three days later minister Hirsch Ballin responded with a whole different suggestion. In a letter to parliament he proposed bringing an end to the rule that the AIVD must inform citizens afterwards that their telephone traffic has been tapped. The argument was that this regulation cost the service a lot of time, effort, and of course money, since many of those who have come under the surveillance spotlight are not exactly easy to trace to a residential address (even for the AIVD). The minister’s position is supported by the principal supervisory body, the Review Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD), because citizens have sufficient other opportunities to discover if they are being tracked, for instance with a straight-up request to the AIVD itself.

According to those who want to end this regulation, the AIVD’s effort to notify those it listens in on is not backed up by either the European Convention on Human Rights or the European Court of Human Rights. In other words, the service is already going beyond the call of duty in doing so. And in the current period of looming public spending cuts, it is duly being  targeted.

This has goaded several Socialist MPs into action. Not renowned as the AIVD’s most avid supporters, SP’ers such as Ronald van Raak have hit back by complaining that the AIVD has first failed in its efforts to notify citizens of its activities and will now be rewarded for its failure with the regulation’s removal. In retaliation van Raak calls on all Dutch citizens to enquire whether they have been tapped or not: “I call on all Dutch citizens to phone the AIVD.” Unmoved, the ministry retorted that van Raak was turning the issue into “a caricature”.

But what is the value of all this tapping, and the mountains of information that it produces? Does it enhance security? On a slightly different but related tack, the Davids report and the fall-out from Iraq continue to pop up. Most notably on 11 April, when the former head of the MIVD, Joop van Reijn, went public on the radio programme Argos concerning his view of how things went in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Thanks to the Davids report, van Reijn could now speak openly about those matters, but it is definitely the case that he would not do so unless provoked. And provoked he has certainly been. 

The trigger for van Reijn’s interview on Argos was former Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s declaration in the Volkskrant some weeks ago that he could not recall receiving opinion from the MIVD that was critical of the information coming in from the UK on Iraqi WMD. Van Reijn countered that this was untrue - criticism of the ’45 minute’ claim was offered, and on 15 October 2002 there was an inter-ministerial meeting where this critique was once again brought forward. The advice was ignored. Van Reijn could accept this, because politics is politics – but then don’t blame the intelligence services afterwards if things don’t turn out as you want them to. That is a cheap shot, and it brought van Reijn into the studio to defend his service. Van Reijn’s conclusion went further – if you allow yourself to be led by ‘intelligence’ from another nation, as Balkenende and de Hoop Scheffer were effectively doing, that is “a fairly serious business.” Amen.

A small victory for openness. The editor of OnJo, the online portal for investigative journalists working with Argos, Zembla, and KRO’s Reporter, has won a court case in The Hague determining that the AIVD and MIVD should release material concerning Iraq. Up to this point the services had refused to release the requested material because they claimed it would damage the status of the Davids Commission, undermining the official investigative body on the Iraq issue.

The OnJo editor, Wil van der Schans, originally requested material on the Iraq invasion in December 2008. With the coming of the Davids Commission in March 2009, the matter was shelved by the authorities.

Yet the CTIVD ruled already in June 2009 that there was no reason why the ongoing Davids investigation should block the release of material “appropriate for the public realm” (“voor de openbaarheid geschikte”). And now the court in The Hague has ruled that even if there would be an issue of bypassing Davids, the requirement of openness, in the public interest, came first.

It is an interesting decision. OnJo represents the corner of Dutch journalism (NRC excepted) that has been most active in trying to uncover the truth behind the Dutch role in the Iraq affair. The attitude of the intelligence services was clearly that the request did not need to be taken seriously, and the coming of the Davids Commission was a useful cover. But both the CTIVD and the court say that the issue should not begin and end with the official investigation carried out by Davids. If other institutions demand openness, they should also be allowed to play their role in the public debate.  

This minor victory for investigative journalism comes at a time when exactly these institutions are under pressure to justify their existence. Public broadcasting is facing cuts as the government moves slowly towards drastic moves to reduce the budget deficit. And these commercially-orientated times, as we see everywhere in the media, the first to go is costly investigative journalism, which requires the most investment for the shortest air time. Both the radio programme Argos and the tv series Reporter are under threat. Less money, unfriendly broadcasting slots….and more commercial junk to replace them. Progress.

The Netherlands, a stable parliamentary democracy, happens to be one of the most surveilled societies, in terms of the extent to which police and security services monitor private communications. In May 2008 the Ministry of Justice released figures that stated the number of telephone taps in the second half of 2007 reached 12491 in total. That is 1681 per day. 84% of this tapping concerned mobile phones. Compare this with the news that there were 2208 taps in the United States in the whole of 2007. And the Dutch figures concerned only the police – the security services fall outside of this assessment.

Remarkably, apart from long-running demands for openness from the Left, this activity is largely accepted in Dutch politics. But recently pressure has been building to make a breach in the secrecy wall surrounding the security services. The 2009 revelations of the AIVD tapping the phones of journalists at the Telegraaf [see 'Reflections on Davids: An Intelligence Affair,' The Holland Bureau, 31 January 2010 and thereafter] brought it into the public domain in a blaze of publicity. On 27 January 2010 three members of parliament submitted a motion demanding details on the extent of telephone and internet tapping by the Security and Intelligence Service (AIVD) and its military cousin, the MIVD. The response on 18 February was like seeing the tip of an iceberg – Minister for Home Affairs Guusje ter Horst, responsible for the security services, announced that the activities of the AIVD and the MIVD only represent a fraction of the total number of taps that are sanctioned by the Ministry of Justice. She also stated that while she indeed must declare information relevant for explaining certain policies, this could be refused should it damage the interests of the state.

Needless to say, giving away the details of telephone and internet taps by the security services would give away too much on their methods, and therefore falls squarely under the heading ‘national security’.

As a result, the parliament should trust in the workings of the respective oversight bodies, the Commission for the Intelligence and Security Services (CIVD) and the Review Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD). The CIVD is the parliamentary oversight committee for the services, which consists only of the respective leaders of the parties in parliament and is of course restricted in the information it can make public. As of 2010 the CIVD receives a review of security service activities every three months. The CTIVD (which has an English website) is an independent body established in 2002 to ensure that the activities of the security services fall within the bounds of European law (specifically to do with the protection of human rights). The Services can overcome European legal restrictions if they argue successfully to the CTIVD that they must do so in the interests of national security.

Of course, ter Horst insisted that questions of such a sensitive nature as tapping should be dealt with by these established channels and not announced for everyone to hear in parliament.

But information on security service activities can reach the public realm by a variety of channels, especially when their activities necessarily touch on the legitimate activities of businesses and other relevant parties. At the beginning of March the the National Management Organisation for Internet Providers (NBIP) released figures for 2009 that showed the AIVD and the Ministry of Justice tapped 335 times an internet or VoIP (Voice over internet Protocol) connection, involving in total more than 1.5 million end-users.  These 335 taps stretched for a total of 8920 ‘tap-days’ in 2009. This information was released via Webwereld.

NBIP was set up in 2002 in order to spread the costs of investments required for internet surveillance across participating Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The state requires that ISPs fulfill this task, and its costly. NBIP currently offers its services to 79 ISPs, among them Tele2 and BBeyond.

NBIP itself was involved in the tapping of 59 internet providers. But it can’t go any further than this – releasing details of which providers were tapped, or what the AIVD was after, would cross the line of state secrecy. But NBIP’s figures already give quite an insight into what is going on. Since the Organisation represents less than 10% of the landline and mobile provider market, these numbers can be multiplied by a factor of ten for a (very conservative) estimate of the national situation. That means a total of 3350 internet taps, stretching for 90,450 ‘tap-days’.

And these figures are on the rise. 2006 saw 69 taps on internet connections, covering 1.5 million end-users. From 69 to 335 in four years is a rise of 385%.

The Ministry of Justice announced in November 2009 that the national police corps will keep a record of all internet taps from 1 january 2010 onwards, and this information will be periodically released, as now occurs with details of telephone tapping. The first official report on internet tapping will be published this autumn. Once again, no details of AIVD or MIVD activity in this field will be made available.

Does all this surveillance lead to a reduction in criminality or subversive activities? The Ministry of Justice obviously thinks so. But ever-increasing surveillance also means ever-increasing amounts of information to be monitored. What is more interesting here is that, in a period when the German Constitutional Court ruled against a law that demands the retention of all telephone and email traffic for 6 months, and the European Parliament once again showed concerns about the transfer of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data for air passengers to the US and Australia, surveillance in the Netherlands carries on largely undisturbed. In a time when trust in the state is meant to be at an all-time low, this particular field of activity is yet to be fully challenged.