In 2010 the post-9/11 counter-terrorism apparatus in the US came under scrutiny from the Washington Post, when a team of journalists set out to calculate and locate all the institutions involved. The resulting report, Top Secret America, indicated that the apparatus included at least 1271 government units and 1931 private organisations, with around 845,000 people – 0.7% of the total population – working in the intelligence and security field. The Post‘s image of a world out of control – where government and business have merged to form a security-industry-complex – was palpable.

Today the Dutch security and intelligence service, the AIVD, issued its annual report for 2010. In some ways it was a tough year for the service. The Post‘s revelations did trigger a critical assessment of the apparatus in the Netherlands, in particular from Bob de Graaff, who severely questioned counter-terrorist working methods that effectively made every citizen suspect before proven otherwise and required the collection and storage of more and more personal details. Two cases exemplified the AIVD’s presence in Dutch public life in 2010. One was the dropped case against Telegraaf journalist Jolande van der Graaf and two AIVD officers for leaking classified information. The other was the disastrous arrest of twelve Somaliers on 24 December under the assumption that they were about to launch a rocket attack against Apache helicopters at Gilze-Rijen air base.

The Somali incident gets a paragraph in the report, on page 8, which states that the service had indications that the Al Shabaab network were planning an imminent attack, and took the threat seriously enough to issue a direct warning that led to the arrests. This is hardly a fair assessment of the facts. While initial media reports went along with the official account, it soon emerged that the AIVD based their assessment on only one unreliable source, another Somali, who was apparently blackmailing the others by spreading false information. The result was a series of strong-arm night-time raids (Operation Achilles) on 24 December by the DSI (Special Intervention Service), including coming through the ceiling (shades of the movie Brazil here, in more ways than one) of a cellphone shop in Rotterdam. Nine of the arrested twelve were soon released without charge, complete with sizeable financial compensation (how much was never disclosed). By 20 February the remaining three were also free. The picture that emerges from this is of a very jittery AIVD that is unable to separate circumstantial evidence and petty criminality from international terrorist subterfuge. 

Not good. Neither is the Telegraaf incident, which has been revived now that one of the accused, former AIVD’er Heleen ‘de Waal’ (known as ‘Heleen S.’ up till now), will publish her book Halve Lucht tomorrow about her 12 years of working in the service and her experience of 2010. One issue in its pages that has immediately been taken up by the press is ‘de Waal’s’ account of how the AIVD made a serious mistake in misjudging the threat to Theo van Gogh’s life in 2004. The AIVD officer responsible for the van Gogh dossier was inexperienced and unable to judge the situation correctly, even though there were enough facts available that pointed to an acute danger. ’De Waal’ is embittered enough to suggest in an interview with the NRC today that incriminating documents were planted in her home by the AIVD to undermine her credibility and strengthen the accusation that she was the source of the leaked material to the Telegraaf.

In January the Home Affairs Minister Piet Hein Donner presented the AIVD’s outlook for 2011 to parliament. The two principal interlocking concerns it focused on were the highly dynamic and unforeseeable internationalisation of (terrorist) threats and the rapid development of digital technologies and services by both friend and foe. The result was that “the AIVD must be innovative, it must strengthen its intelligence-gathering capabilities (both internationally and technologically), and it must develop its (international, technological) counter-strategies….Therefore I conclude that it is necessary for the service to strengthen its (technological and IT) capacity and effectiveness.” Things may occasionally get rough, but it looks like there will be one corner of government thats going to escape the public spending cuts.

[The court in Haarlem]

The state prosecutor opened the case against former AIVD officers Helene S. and Hans H. yesterday by demanding that they serve three and two years in prison respectively for leaking state secrets to the Telegraaf. The two are supposed to have been the source for the infamous Telegraaf article ‘AIVD faalde rond Irak’ that was published on 28 March 2009, since one of the journalists responsible for the article, Jolande van der Graaf, had visited them at home prior to that date. While a subsequent search of de Graaf’s home did not produce any suspect materials, a search of the home of Helene S. did, namely five documents, but none of them were related to the Iraq-Telegraaf case.

Testifying as a defendent, Helene S. claimed that she did not know how those documents came to be in her house. When questioned, the journalists didn’t offer any further information and refused to answer about their source(s). Speaking for the defendants, lawyer Inez Weski spoke out that the state prosecutor’s office had decided very quickly that the leak had come from these individuals. To prove the point that there was actually nothing in the article that could not have been found from material already in the public domain, she handed the prosecutor two boxes full of possible sources that the journalists could have used.

The case has all the markings of ‘making an example’. The prosecutor admitted that the leaked information wasn’t exactly “world news,” but it was more a matter of principle – “The leaking of state secrets is indeed extraordinarily serious.” He also escalated the proceedings by stating that if such leaks occur, the AIVD will lose important contacts because they will fear that their information can potentially end up “on the street.” The very ability of the service itself was therefore being brought into question. A minor case is therefore being expanded into a major breach of security.

Where this will go depends a lot on how far Weski is able to shift attention to other possible sources of the leak – such as the Ministry for General Affairs. Without this the lack of a water-tight defence could prove a problem. We will have to wait and see if she succeeds in hauling Minister-President Balkenende into the courtroom.

Lawyer Inez Weski: The Davids Report II? 

Not much to say on the coalition talks.

After the end of the first round, the signals are that Job Cohen is trying to block a right-leaning cabinet by refusing to share power with the Christian Democrats, as a result forcing the VVD to either go for broke with Wilders and the PVV or take a centre-left coalition seriously. The CDA almost unconsciously seems to go along with this by insisting that their heavy defeat at the polls means they can’t take a leading role in any discussions. “Ons past bescheidenheid” – we need to be humble – is their new, attractive party slogan.

Cohen has also suggested that another attempt should be made to form a right-wing dream cabinet VVD-CDA-PVV. While this might be awfully decent of him in terms of democratic principle, one wonders if he’s not playing games with CDA and VVD supporters and their willingness to support such a move. Cohen is after all pretty good with some sharp moves – just take a look at this.

But with the regular media already searching for something new to say on the negotiations, there is little point in this blog doing the same. So lets switch topic and go back to one of the more interesting curiosity items of news in 2009, the Telegraaf-AIVD case [An Intelligence Affair, 31 January 2010, and subsequent reports]. The reason that the case has re-appeared on the media radar screen is that the court case against AIVD officer Heleen S. and her partner, for allegedly leaking an internal report and other information to Telegraaf reporter Jolande van der Graaf, begins in Haarlem next Monday. Van de Graaf, who made good capital out of being bugged and harrassed by the Dutch state last year, has since fallen totally from any position of respect thanks to her highly inappropriate move to gain an interview with the 9 year old survivor of the Tripoli plane crash last month. But the case has since moved way beyond the ethics (or not) of journalism.

In an interview with Vrij Nederland, S.’s lawyer Inez Weski has stated that she intends to call Jan Peter Balkenende as a witness for the defence. The reason is that she suspects the leaked information – which was critical of the AIVD’s role in assessing intelligence on the Iraqi threat in 2003 – came not from the AIVD itself but from the Ministry of General Affairs, the administrative apparatus behind the Minister President. Why? As the Davids report showed, Balkenende, via the Secretary General of the Ministry R.K. Visser, in late 2002 received two British intelligence reports which were not to be circulated elsewhere. The usual channel for this exchange of information would be via the AIVD itself to allow the Dutch service to assess the material. Both the AIVD and MIVD leadership were offended at being bypassed in this way. In the interview Weski referred to Balkenende running a “private secret service”.

The relevance of this is that the coming court case could take an interesting turn. The Telegraaf article exactly claimed that the AIVD had failed to correctly assess Iraqi possession of WMD. Weski is suggesting that the Ministry of General Affairs is the source of the article because it was exactly the Ministry that swallowed the faulty British intelligence whole, not the Dutch intelligence services. Weski: “That Telegraaf article therefore looks like it served as a lightning rod to attract attention away from the failure of the private secret service of Balkenende.”

This is no small matter. In an article on the Davids report back in April, intelligence expert Bob de Graaff pointed out that up till now the Ministry for General Affairs had largely been ignored in the whole Iraq story, with most attention going to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Foreign Affairs. The for-your-eyes-only documents were not the only ones that passed from London via Visser to Balkenende, and all these items – which were not disclosed to the Davids committee – were of crucial importance for setting out Dutch policy. De Graaff’s conclusion is that “a small club of civil servants without legal justification played intelligence analysts under the protection of the Minister President.” Not good.

The possibility now is that even if Balkenende doesn’t testify, the case will break open this aspect of the Iraq story a little more. Weski’s move could bring some late justice for the misused and abused intelligence services. But what looks certain is that Balkenende began his first premiership back in 2002 with the Iraq storm-clouds looming, and he’s going to end his last premiership with those same clouds still chasing him.

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.