The AIVD – via its forerunners the BNV (1945-46), CV (1946-49), BVD (1949-2002) and IDB/BID (1946-94) – celebrates its 65th birthday this year. The AIVD was formed to provide intelligence and security functions both domestically and internationally: investigating threats to the state, checking those who enter positions of responsibility, protecting business and state from espionage, gathering intelligence abroad, and producing risk analyses. Yesterday it issued its report for 2009. How does it see the world?

The director, Gerard Bouman, is largely optimistic. The service has expanded rapidly since 2002 in response to the perceived terrorist threat. Bouman emphasised in his presentation that radicalism within the Netherlands has declined, but the threat from abroad remains active. This is either from Dutch citizens going abroad to training camps, or other nationalities using the Netherlands as transit point or ‘sleeper’ location. Examples in 2009 were the four from The Hague who turned up on the Kenya-Somalia border as ‘tourists’, and the Christmas ‘underpants’ bomber on the Amsterdam-Detroit flight. Other notable incidents included the prevention of five American men, suspected of following a jihadi training course, from travelling from Somalia via the Netherlands to the US. Nevertheless, the report notes that “in 2009 the AIVD had no indication of a concrete threat to the Netherlands from outside” (p. 13). This opinion led to the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism to lower its terrorist threat level from ‘substantial’ to ‘limited’ at the end of last year.

With the terrorist threat declining and local jihadi radicals at least ‘disengaging’ (if not de-radicalising), the AIVD has started to look elsewhere - right- and left-extremists, and animal rights activists – but it is difficult to produce a picture of these incoherent groups that poses a threat to the state beyond what the police can deal with. More important are developing threats from foreign organisations: the report refers explicitly to Chinese interest in the defence and technical industries, a Russian focus on ”Dutch individuals who (will) play a role in policy and decision-making processes that realte to Russian interests,” and Iranian intelligence operations against dissident groups. ‘Cyber security’ is a growing concern.

What does this add up to? The focus of the AIVD is shifting from domestic to international activities. There’s not much to do at home any more. There is now talk of ‘forward defence’ – the gathering of information and intelligence beyond outside Dutch borders to ensure awareness of developing threats before they reach north-western Europe. This also involved the service being called in to provide ‘quick-response’ analyses on foreign situations at the request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since 2008 much of this activity has been focused on nuclear proliferation, with special attention on Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Syria.

The one development that has fuelled this more than anything is the Davids report on Iraq, mentioned briefly on page 53 but present in spirit throughout this report. The AIVD states boldly that both they and the MIVD were more cautious in their reporting on Iraqi WMD than “the then political leaders in the information they provided to the parliament.” Neither service possessed sufficient sources abroad themselves and this left them unable to counter the more alarming information being provided by the US and the UK. The message from Davids, taken up by the cabinet in February, was – get your own house in order and don’t be dependent on others for such vital information. Even if they are supposed to be your closest allies. This 2009 report emphasises cooperation – the AIVD has ‘relations’ with no less than 180 other services (p. 61) – but it also expresses a determination to answer that call. The added element to this, of course, is the wish to be more of a major player in the intelligence field, a nation to be taken seriously.

The AIVD cannot call on new funds for this global expansion – its current budget of 175 million Euro will more or less remain the same. But the service is looking – not surprisingly, given the ‘go global’ message – to expand its staff, and this will be interesting in a time of government cut-backs. Where are these extra foreign agents going to come from? Let us expect a “we can’t fulfil our mandate without extra funds” call in the not so distant future.

When Bos took over as leader of the Labour party in 2002, he inherited a party in disarray. Pim Fortuyn had wreaked havoc on the patrician presumptiousness of Ad Melkert, and Labour, which had been coasting under two Wim Kok-led cabinets from 1994-2002, suddenly collapsed into a heap of false assumptions about being the new centre of Dutch politics. (curious aside – Melkert exited the Netherlands and has forged a new career at the World Bank, UNDP, and since mid-2009 as UNDP Special Representative in Iraq. A recent interview suggests that he still hasn´t taken in what happened eight years ago, and his Iraq post has brought mixed reactions).

But back to Bos. Unlike Kok - former union leader – and Melkert – party apparatchik – Bos was a relative outsider, moving as he did from several years at Shell (Rotterdam, London, Hong Kong, Bucharest) to join the party in parliament  in 1998. His corporate experience showed – by 2000 he was already State Secretary for Finance, the number two at the Ministry. And he came out of a rock-solid Protestant – Labour family, his father being a diplomat and activist for the cause of international development. 

Bos came in as leader after the fall of Balkenende´s first cabinet in late 2002. Labour had fallen from 45 to 23 seats in the May 2002 elections, and it was a party lost to a wave of Fortuyn-inspired populism that rejected the arrogance of power apparently expressed by the established parties.  

The eletions in early 2003 produced a wonderful moment, albeit for the wrong reasons. Bos declared that he did not want to be premier himself should Labour win, and instead, just before the elections, he announced Job Cohen as candidate for future prime minister. It was a heavy gamble, and it missed its mark – just. Labour recovered to 42 seats, but couldn´t overcome the Christian Democrats who came away with 44. With the results coming in live on tv, the cameras at the Labour HQ caught Bos meeting an arriving Cohen surrounded by supporters. It was a poignant moment - so near and yet so far. It would also prove prophetic for what was to come. 

Bos´s main problem as Labour leader was his inability to get around the stubborn power of the Christian Democrats (CDA) at the centre of Dutch politics. In 2003, with the levers of power in the hands of Balkenende, it was inevitable that the CDA would not easily allow Labour back in to the ranks of power, and endless negotiations between the two ultimately led nowhere. Likewise personal relations between the two leaders were lousy from then on. Interestingly enough they both come from strong Protestant backgrounds (and both studied at the Free University in Amsterdam), but whereas Bos reflects the pragmatism of a can-do business approach, Balkenende is all high-blown principled moralism. And the two didn´t mix.

Bos´s pragmatism didn´t always work with party members or supporters either. Riding a wave of popular support in 2004-2005, which peaked with remarkable results in the local elections of 2006, it looked as if the tide was turning and Labour could once again claim the key middle ground of Dutch politics. But much of this support - beyond the usual rejection of the incumbent parties – was focused on Bos himself as charismatic leader. This was ok for a while, but it needed back-up with a coherent party programme. And when he entered that field in 2006, it was clear that he was prepared to take on some of the sacred cows in Dutch politics: linking pensions to income, reducing student travel concessions, and less tax relief for mortgage-holders among them. Criticism from within the party caused the pension plans in particular to be watered down. 

Out of that period came two things: the Labour party was effectively Bos himself, and Bos was prepared to think in public and change his mind. For the CDA this provided the opportunity, and all ammunition was focused on Bos as someone who could not be relied upon. The 2006 elections caused yet more bad blood between Bos and Balkenende as the CDA portrayed the Labour leader as, in American terms, someone who ‘flip-flopped’ and didn’t stick to his word. The accusations stuck, and Labour came out of the elections with 33 seats, trailing, once again, the CDA. 

Both Bos’s strengths and weaknesses had therefore been exposed during his time in opposition. From 2007-2010 he grapsed the poisened chalice of a Labour-CDA-Christian Union coalition and tried to get something out of it all as Minister of Finance. Should he have chosen to stay on the oppossition benches? The compromises were difficult: Labour gained money for inner cities and eduation, and a halt to liberalising rented housing,but had to give up on the mortgage tax relief and – a big issue – the demand for an inquiry into Dutch policy on the Iraq war. 

With his experience, it can’t be denied that Bos was the right person for the job when the credit crisis hit in late 2008. Following the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, Bos rescued the Dutch operations of Fortis bank, including ABN AMRO, with 16.8 billion of state money in October. Several billions more followed for struggling ING bank. For his competence in adversity Bos was named politician of the year for 2008 by both politicians and media.

But the damage left by the credit crisis has been more than expected. The hole in state finances left by ABN AMRO has increased as the actual extent of its debts gradually emerged. Looking for sources of income tofill thee hole, Bos supported a plan to raise the pension age from 65 to 67. It was once again pragmatism over dogma, but it didn’t go down so well with Labour supporters seeing it as an unnecessary and unjust move. Bos spoke out earlier this year in his den Uyl Lecture against the way neoliberal market forces had been allowed to go solong unchecked. Social democracy is still on the back foot trying to judge what to fight for and what to give way on when it comes to market forces. Bos tried to find a way through, but discovered that being flexible could make him vulnerable tofriend and foe alike.  

It was foreign affairs that blew everything open in early 2010: The Davids report in January and Uruzgan in February. But the writing was on the wall already. Bos was an able politician, but he was unable to translate high levels of support between elections into actual election victory. 2003 was a great result in the circumstances, but 2006 was a major disappointment.

To his credit Bos analysed the outcome in public via The Wouter Tapes, a remarkably honest tv documentary following Labour leader and advisors through the election campaign of 2006 and its aftermath. Of all sources, this is probably the best for giving an insight into Bos’s character. It fits with his reaction to both the Davids report and the NATO-Uruzgan connection – he does not like backroom deals or decisions taken behind the scenes. It fits with his own sense that his leadership was heading in the right direction – at least for a while.

The entry of Job Cohen as Labour leader to replace Bos has certainly avoided an otherwise tired Bos-Balkenende battle this coming June. Even Wilder knows he may have met his match with the former mayor of Amsterdam. Will Dutch politics miss Bos, the leader who never was? Possibly. His experience highlights how difficult it has been to keep Labour on course in the 2000s, true to its values but able to bend when needed.

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.

Now that the Dutch cabinet has officially responded to the Davids report, and the parliamentary debate looms this week, former NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has decided to come out with his response to the report and the recent political chaos surrounding it.

In his first interview since the presentation of the report (Volkskrant, Saturday), the Christian Democrat top man dismissed several of the report’s conclusions in unreserved terms. Before this time he had only briefly referred to the report and its implications [see 'De Hoop Scheffer: NL Must Stay In Uruzgan' The Holland Bureau, 26 January].

Firstly, he denies that the report should be treated as the one and only truth. Supporting Balkenende’s initial view that it represented an opinion, de Hoop Scheffer considers everything that it produced to be open for debate.

Secondly, he denies that there is any reason to have a different opinion on the international law dimension. According to him, there is no new information that undermines the position taken in 2002-2003 (that Resolution 1441 provided sufficient foundation for an invasion).

Thirdly, he finds the description of the infamous 45-minute meeting in August 2002, which is meant to have had a major impact on the direction of Dutch foreign policy thereafter, a ‘caricature’. He claims to have explained the wider context to the committee, but ‘clearly they didn’t believe me. A pity.’

Fourthly, he denes that Balkenende’s leadership was absent during the crucial months of late 2002, and that the parliament was insufficiently informed.

In short, this is a damning critique of the report’s findings from one of the principal actors in the whole affair. And others have joined the fight as well.

In Saturday’s NRC, Professor of International Relations (and Leiden colleague) Fred van Staden raised several issues to do with why international law is hardly a perfect system.

He questions the clarity of the ‘self-defence’ principal in the context of prevention / pre-emption theory and practice in recent years. But he goes most strongly into the fact that international law is always a political football kicked around within the UN Security Council. Votes are ‘bought’, and there is never a pure process of decision.

He then raises the ‘what if’ questions that are always wheeled out: What if the invasion had gone well? What if the second resolution justifying an invasion had been passed, but the aftermath of the invasion had still gone badly?

Now, I am in no position to question van Staden’s understanding of international law. He is of course right that it is hardly a perfect system, and it is wide open to abuse. But I think this misses the point that its all we have. And if by implication the UN Security Council is a political game-show, does that reduce all of its resolutions to nothing more than a sordid business of vote-trading?

Van Staden’s mention of the NATO bombing of Kosovo / Serbia, also without a UN resolution, raises the much broader issue of to what extent Kosovo and Iraq point towards a new system of international law no longer based solely on the UN. Van Staden doesn’t go this far in his article, but one wonders if he is not pointing in that direction. The idea that a Community or Council of Democracies can provide a new form of legitimacy outside of the now-defunct (always-defunct?) UN, which is crippled by the nationalist-authoritarian designs of Russia and China (and the anti-Americanism of the French), has been doing the rounds for several years now.

The other issue at hand here – and I think the most pertinent – is that fact that arguing about international law kind of conveniently avoids the whole issue of how and why intelligence was totally distorted by politicians in order to convince others that the Iraq threat was much bigger than it actually was. That surely is the crime here. Aside from the US-UK examples which were crucial in forcing the issue, the Davids report has been crystal clear on this point for the netherlands as well – the views of the intelligence services were ignored and bypassed by the political leadership because they did not fit the demand that Iraq be an obvious imminent threat. Both the Dutch and the British enquiries have seen plenty of spleen being vented by intelligence personnel who felt their opinions on the defence of the realm were being swept aside for highly dubious reasons.

This for me is the bigger issue, and the one that lessons should be drawn from. No, foreign policy should not be decided solely by international law, but the UN is all we have got, and pushing it aside means that some other form of international legitimacy is required. I have yet to see it. 

But the final word can go to the remarkable response within Leiden university itself. The university paper Mare published several letters last week from both faculty and students questioning de Hoop Scheffer’s position as the holder of the Kooijmans Chair at the university. Leiden is hardly a hotbed of radicalism, least of all when it comes to critique of a pro-US foreign policy. I recall hearing that the student associations held a victory party when Nixon got re-elected in ’72. The university obviously and rightly declined to bring his position into discussion. But it gives an insight into how far some feelings go on the Iraq issue, even from the most unexpected of quarters.

The Bureau is currently on assignment in Madrid, but in the meantime here is a comment posted by Martin Broek in reaction to the speculation made about Belgian politics in Reflections on Davids III [The Holland Bureau, 19 January]:

“It was not my own analysis [that claimed] transport routes changed because of Belgian political uncertainties. See the following citation from the Stars and Stripes:

“But the movement coincided with local elections in Belgium, and top military officials told planners to leave Antwerp out of their equation for a while. That forced the Army to send everything to Rotterdam.
‘When they threw us the political curveball, we had to reduce rail movements and move units with wheeled vehicles to [river] barges’ to travel to Rotterdam, Hiburn [of the 1st Transportation Movement Agency that coordinated the 1st AD’s move from Kaizerslautern] said. ‘That didn’t throw a major kink in the plan, it just forced us to be more creative.’”

This change in logistics is neglected by Davids, stating that other countries, like Belgium and Germany, did do the same as the Netherlands. But Rotterdam was used more because of the Belgian political row on the transports.

Source: Manpower moves the 1st AD’s machines, By Rick Scavetta, Stars and Stripes, European edition, Monday, April 21, 2003.

Davids has invested a lot but not everything.`

I have asked Martin if he would develop this comment into a post but so far he has unfortunately declined to do so. I think he is being unfair on the Davids Committee – it wasn´t their task to investigate Belgian politics. The fact that Martin refers to a ´Belgian political row´ is fascinating. The issue of whether to allow US military transports through the port of Antwerp became a political issue at the local level, taking on a significance in local elections.  Surely there can´t be a better  contrast between Dutch and Belgian politics than this. Frank Gerits´ comment that Belgium has no Atlantic reflex takes on a deeper meaning.

Why do I get the feeling that a lot of Dutch commentators are avoiding the key issue about the Davids report: Was the Iraq case an isolated event to be dismissed after this report, or a landmark event raising questions for the future?  

Martin runs a good blog on the Volkskrant site covering weapons development – weapons trade issues and anything else that comes along (sounds familiar….)

The Dutch have long considered themselves to be a builder of bridges between Europe and Washington. Europe is important but NATO is still fundamental on the Dutch strategic horizon. The current Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxime Verhagen stated in 2008 that “a strong Atlantic relationship directly serves Dutch interests” [Internationale Specator, 62 (Oct 2008)] When confronted with certain issues Dutch diplomats, contrary to the Belgians, thus still have a choice to make: going Atlantic or going European.

The European project is for the Dutch and its politicians a multilateral project, a far cry from the federal utopia the Belgians are pushing for. This cooperation among states can be expanded when needed, but the independent Dutch want to keep their options open. The plebiscite about the European constitution of the first of June 2005 was a more recent example of how the Dutch are rather cool lovers of a federal Europe.

From this comparative perspective, the claim that Dutch foreign policy is guided by a dogmatic Atlantic reflex must be tempered. It is correct that the Belgians made the right decision to condemn the Iraq War, but they did not explore all options. The Dutch, by contrast, thought about their options and believed that supporting the Americans would pay off and chose the Atlantic option. In hindsight it was a wrong choice, but calling that behavior dogmatic is overstated when we compare it with the Belgian decision-making process. The spirit that guided the Dutch decision was not the Atlantic Reflex, but the lack of a European reflex. If the Dutch government had convincingly promoted the Atlantic alliance, with the vigor that characterizes Belgian adherence to European integration, than one could speak about a genuine reflex.

However what rises up out of the five hundred pages of the Davids Report is the enormous difficulty that accompanied the decision of the Dutch government. Conversely, the Belgian decision to condemn a possible invasion was a cake walk. Consequently the Dutch decision-making process in itself – isolated from its outcome – can be interpreted differently. Compared to Belgium, the Dutch thoroughly evaluated all options, and then made the wrong decision. The decision of the Dutch government was not a consequence of too much dogmatism, but too little of it. Especially when we take into account the very flexible way that international law – an idea launched by a Dutchman named Hugo Grotius and embodied by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court in The Hague – was interpreted.  

Although Belgium made the right decision, it is hard to say if the European reflex will pay off in the future. Nevertheless in a new world where new powers and new economies claim their rightful place at the table, a European reflex, or even a more modest European twitch, seems to be the more successful spasm that small countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium can possess.

The rumour mill is working overtime at the moment surrounding the leaked draft letter outling the cabinet’s response to the Davids report. Yesterday their were signals that the official final version of the letter would be presented later today. Now the latest news from both Wouter Bos and Andre Rouvoet is that any form of accord is still a long way off.

Meanwhile – in contrast - an accord seems to have been successfully arranged on the extension for keeping Dutch forces in Afghanistan beyond the end-of-2010 deadline, as reported by Elsevier:

 http://www.elsevier.nl/web/Nieuws/Politiek/257515/Kabinet-bereikt-compromis-over-verblijf-in-Afghanistan.htm#sluiten

The aim is to reduce the number of troops and fall into line with Obama’s plan for winding down force levels from summer 2011 onwards. But while the Labour party’s Ministers, Bos and Koenders, back the accord, the parliamentary party remains opposed. 

The contrast between the continuing rumbles in the cabinet surrounding Iraq and the relative ease with which an Afghan agreement has been arranged, are more than striking. Is the Labour party leadership prepared to deal on Afghanistan in exchange for still forcing admissions from the Christian Democrats on Iraq? And is the Labour rank and file in parliament exactly doing the opposite – abandoning the Davids report in favour of still blocking the Afghan mission?

Following on from her interview in the Volkskrant last Monday, Telegraaf journalist Jolande van der Graaf has now told her story in more detail to weekly HP/De Tijd. The ending of the case against her last week by the state prosecutor (Openbare Ministerie), for presumed possession of state secrets leaked from the security service, has opened up the opportunity for a major publicity counter-offensive against the Dutch state and government, and she is grasping the opportunity. Since she was facing a potential sentence of between six to fifteen years had the case gone against her, her current attitude is not so surprising.

Van der Graaf’s interview again revolves around what it means to have the law turn up at your door with the power to search your house and impund any possessions they see fit, but there are more details this time. The journalist points to the fact that two and a half months passed between the publication of her infamous critical article on 28 March 2009 on the role of the Dutch secret service in the Iraq affair and the arrival of the team with the search warrant. True, the state wanted to know who had provided the leak, hence the bugging that followed that article. They then moved in after the publication of the second article on 4 June, on concerns over the security of the Dalai Lama on a visit to the Netherlands. The implication being that by then they thought they had a ‘serial leaker’ inside the service, and it was time to act.

As a reporter on the crime section of her paper, she knows what it is to deal with sensitive information, and she knew full well that keeping anything at her house would be a mistake. So the search obviously turned up nothing. But it wasn’t meant to: “It was about one thing – intimidation.”

The fact that van der Graaf was provided twice with inside information by someone within the  AIVD was enough concern for the state to respond. But the subsequent accusation that she was actively searching for more information inside the service – that she was literally looking to develop informers and create more leaks – took the affair onto another more dangerous level. The message from the state was loud and clear – we will harrass and arrest anyone who breaches the wall of official secrets, even if it becomes debatable if the material in question is officially a ‘state secret’.

Van der Graaf has come out of this situation surprisingly well. She has moved from little-known reporter to cause celebre, with the state backing down three times – she had no state secrets in her possession, her telephone was illegally tapped, and now her case has been dropped.   

But the most interesting part of her interview comes at the end. Asked if she thinks the article over the AIVD last year was worth all the trouble, she defends it as something of public importance. The key though was the article appeared exactly in the period when the mandate of the Davids Committee was being negotiated. Van der Graaf claims that her article, by exposing the way that the Dutch government blindly followed the Americans and British into Iraq, contributed to the Committee being given wider powers of investigation. That is a contentious and somewhat problematic claim – would one newspaper article shift the debate to such an extent? Doubtful. But what she totally avoids, still, is the question of why the information was delivered to her in the first place. She says only that the AIVD officer and her partner are still under arrest, and that their decision to leak information will probably have much more severe consequences.

Which leaves us with a vivid image of what happened last year. Clearly the impending arrival of the Davids Committee was causing some unrest in the service, and there will have been those who, in the name of limiting the potential damage and protecting its good name, will have wanted to avoid too much disclosure. There were also those who saw this as exactly avoiding the hard lessons that the Iraq affair has dealt out in the US and in the UK. That is where the leak came from. Why shouldn’t the same hard lessons be faced in the Netherlands? Why should the pretense continue that everything turned out fine?

The defendants still have to pay the price for forcing the issue last year. The letter to parliament leaked yesterday [see previous post] shows that the current cabinet is determined to overcome its deep divisions on the Iraq issue. It also shows that it accepts the criticism from within the intelligence services that their advice was more or less fully ignored during the deliberations on Iraq. Davids ultimately may not have a profound impact on Dutch foreign policy. But it has at least raised questions that won’t easily go away. Will this be enough to dampen the wrath of the state prosecutor when it comes down to assessing the leaking of AIVD material later this year? Probably not.

The draft version of the letter that the ruling Dutch cabinet will send to parliament shortly, outlining its official response to the Davids report, has been leaked to the Dutch media broadcaster KRO Reporter, which has duly placed it on its website:

http://reporter.kro.nl/dossiers/irak/irak_feb2010.aspx

The letter, which dates from 20-21 January and covers 26 pages, states that the Davids report offers ‘guidance’ (leidend) but that not all of its content is acceptable for the cabinet. It disagrees with the criticism that Balkenende didn’t give sufficient leadership on the issue and that he came to the dossier long after it had effectively already been decided.

The letter also makes an interesting comment on the role of the civil and military intelligence services, the AIVD and the MIVD. According to the cabinet, there was a ‘tension’ (spanning) between the determinations of the Foreign Minister, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, concerning the threat level from Iraq, and the positions taken by the two services. De Hoop Scheffer has denied that there was any difference of opinion on this crucial question. The letter therefore seems to distance the cabinet from his position.

However, it does back him up by disagreeing that he decided Dutch foreign policy on his own. The letter denies that Dutch foreign policy was effectively decided in a 45-minute meeting at the Foreign Ministry in August 2002, and that from that point on there was no intention of deviating from support for the US-UK line. The Davids report claimed that after the 45 minute meeting, de Hoop Scheffer sent a letter to parliament on 4 September 2002, without discussion with the rest of the ruling cabinet, outlining the Dutch position towards Iraq and WMD. The current draft letter states that due to parliament’s demand for an explanation and an imminent trip to Washington on the 6th, de Hoop Scheffer simply didn’t have enough time to do otherwise. In contrast to the question of the intelligence services, this is evidently a full defence of his position.

In an interview on the radio a week ago De Hoop Scheffer [see 'De Hoop Scheffer: NL must stay in Uruzgan,' The Holland Bureau, 26 January] stated that he would respond to Davids when he felt the time is right. If this letter is delivered to parliament in its current form, this may well be the moment for his response.

It questions the criticism of Davids that the cabinet in 2003 should have informed the parliament earlier about the Host Nation Support agreement, concerning the transport of US military hardware and personnel through Rotterdam and Schiphol airport [see 'Reflections on Davids: III,' The Holland Bureau, 18 January], or the US request for Dutch military assistance on 15 November 2002. Security issues prevented this. 

The KRO press release announcing the draft letter finishes with an interesting conclusion. The letter begins with a note about collective ministerial responsibility. The cabinet seems to be facing the repercussions of Davids and Iraq now as a collective unit, and not as an entity split by party divisions still fighting out the battles of 2002-2003. In terms of the longevity of the current cabinet, this speaks volumes. It has all the markings of a statement of intent to hit back at the opposition’s gloating over an apparently falling cabinet, and to keep going all the way to the end of its mandate in Spring 2011.

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.