Personnel                    57%

Activities                    31%

Infrastructure              12%

AIVD Expenditure 2010: Annual Report

On 29 May 2002 the Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst and the Militaire Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst were both created out of their Cold War forerunners, the BVD and the MID. The AIVD’s task was expanded with the removal of the division between foreign intelligence and dometic security – from then on it would be doing both. The time was right for expansion. Al Qaeda were meant to be everywhere and Pim Fortuyn had been gunned down only 23 days before by someone from the Green radical underground.

From 2002 to 2005 the AIVD grew from around 850 to 1100 employees and its budget mushroomed from 68m to 112m Euro. By 2010 it had expanded further to a staff of around 1400 full time equivalent and a budget of 191m Euro. The early 2010 talk of cutting every government department by 20% obviously led the AIVD to remind everyone that cutting back on national security was a risky business. The Ministry of Defence can lose its tanks, but the Ministry of Home Affairs can’t lose its surveillance and listening gear. The activities of foreign intelligence – particularly for economic espionage – were increasingly a threat. The political capital to be gained from cutting the AIVD’s budget - outside of the consistent criticisms of AIVD phone tapping and dodgy relations with journalists from parliament’s leftist ranks – remained pretty much at nil. And the AIVD instead showed in its annual report for 2009 an ambition to introduce ‘forward defence’ – a greater presence in trouble spots around the world.  With few threats at home, they had to go out and look for them elsewhere.    

This could now be changing. There were rumblings within the CDA’s 2010 election manifesto to merge the AIVD and MIVD, although no reason was given other than the need to ‘harmonise’ the security apparatus. In the CITVD’s report on the February Sirte mission released on 1 November, the principal accusation was that the AIVD and MIVD failed to work together in any coherent way and that if the mission told anything is was that better coordination was needed. The need for better coordination has been a repetitive complaint for several years. Last week a new chief of the AIVD was appointed, and to everyone’s surprise it was a military man: Lieutenant-General Robert Bertholee, the former commandant of the army and someone with no particular experience in the world of intelligence. As former MIVD boss Pieter Cobelens stated to the NRC yesterday, Bertholee had even opposed making intelligence a separate professional unit within the army.

With incredulity from his military colleagues marking his appointment, it could be that Bertholee’s arrival is no more than a move to ensure smoother relations between the two services. But with extra government cuts of around 5bn Euro looming, it could genuinely be a move to keep options open on the AIVD-MIVD front after a decade of intelligence-and-security growth. And both Defence and Internal Affairs are in the hands of CDA ministers. 

How would the PVV react to any such move? Tomorrow night part two of the documentary series on ‘The Wilders Process’, tracking the story of how Wilders ended up in court, will make the claim that in 2007 Maxime Verhagen (then Minister of Foreign Affairs) wanted the AIVD to find out more about the content and release date of the film Fitna. Both his ministerial colleague Guusje ter Horst (Internal Affairs) and the National Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism chief Tjibbe Joustra confirm that they rejected this move. Wilders has so far not responded. One wonders if it will have any impact on his opposition to further spending cuts.

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.

Interesting case in De Pers today about a former contact of both the MIVD and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs who is taking the government to court for 5 million Euro damages, the highest ever claim by a former agent. Referred to as ‘I.A.,’ the individual in question was a former policeman turned businessman who ran a major construction conglomerate in Afghanistan, with contracts including an order for 10,000 houses. In 2006 I.A. was asked by the Dutch embassy in Kabul to make contact with insurgent groups in Uruzgan prior to the arrival of the Dutch military mission on 1 August. This involved escorting leaders of the very groups the Dutch military were facing in the province onto the terrain of the Dutch embassy for secret talks, an activity explicitly contrary to the official attitude of the Foreign Ministry about not dealing with the taliban. Dutch ambassadors Mariko Peters and Hans Blankenberg have since confirmed that such meetings took place.

Until policy suddenly changed, and I.A., having built up a level of trust, suddenly heard from the embassy that all future meetings were cancelled, bringing him into serious danger. Here the story gets murky – instead of quitting the country, I.A. apparently was re-hired by the Ministry to build a ‘guest house’ for the embassy as compensation, only to discover that he was actually meant to building an MIVD safe house. Drawn into the world of MIVD operations, I.A. was given the codename ‘Windhond’ and by 2007 was providing untraceable (illegal) weapons for MIVD undercover operations in the north of Afghanistan – so not Uruzgan or other southern provinces, the only areas which fell under the parliamentary mandate for Dutch military operations.

Then the link with MIVD gets fouled up, because his MIVD ‘controller’ was suddenly made ’non-active’ due to accusations of financial embezzlement (the MIVD was later criticised for their handling of this case, since at the time the two agents involved were in the middle of an infiltration mission run out of Amman into terrorist financing). Told to break all contacts, I.A. faced the problem of running 12 informants for the service, requiring a total fee of  $40-50,000 a month. He continued paying this himself for two years, faced with the only alternative of abandoning his business interests and leaving the country. I.A. continued to receive valuable information, in particular about two IED factories in Uruzgan, but the suspension of his controller meant that this information was not passed on or acted upon.

Eventually the suspicion that he was working for the Dutch government made his position impossible and he left Afghanistan in 2009, narrowly escaping a kidnapping attempt. Placed under protective residence in a barracks in Soesterberg for his own safety, I.A. is now sueing both the MIVD and the Ministry for 2.5 million Euro each for their collective blunders in wrecking his business operations. His story does not come at a good time for the MIVD, still smarting from the accusations of slackness regarding the mistaken helicopter mission to rescue ‘Paul’ from the Sirte seafront. 

And taking on the state is never easy – least of all the secret state. Signs are that the case will be lost in a solid wall of denial.

Back to Basics for the Dutch military?

The Dutch involvement in the Libyan rebellion has been one crazy escapade, from the still bizarre attempted rescue mission of a Royal Haskoning engineer (who will be forever known as ‘Paul’)  on 27 February, to the departure of six F-16s from Leeuwarden Air Base to join the NATO operation on 24 March, to this week’s long-feared announcement on drastic cuts in the defence budget (with around 10,000 jobs to be sliced). There is a strong sense that the Dutch intent in foreign affairs – returning to NATO’s war in Afghanistan with a police training mission in Kunduz, contributing to NATO’s other war in the Mediterranean, all in the name of a strong transatlantic alliance, its interests and values - is rapidly going to come apart at the seams. Because of stringent cuts by a right-wing government that pledges itself to the Atlantic alliance. Square pegs and round holes, anyone?

The rescue mission to Sirte – Gaddafi’s home town – on 27 February remains obscure and stinks of cover-up. HB covered it when the story broke (‘In Gaddafi’s Den’, 7 March) and thereafter it probably generated the most parliamentary activity in March as a whole. ‘Paul’ still remains incognito so we lack his version (despite the best efforts of the Jakhalzen to track him down), but we’ve had his boss Eric Oostwegel (“as far as I know we have no spies at Haskoning”), and we’ve had the Swedish teacher Rose Eriksson who suddenly turned up to be evacuated as well (“coordinated via the EU”), and we’ve had the desperate attempts by both Defence Minister Hans Hillen and Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal to explain themselves to a rampantly curious parliament. 124 questions were tabled, and Hillen and Rosenthal blamed each other in a show of true political back-stabbing. In the end the three captured Dutch naval officers were released on 11 March not thanks to presumed backdoor arbitration through Mabel Wisse Smit (member, along with Gaddafi’s son Saif – he of LSE fame – of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum) or even Queen Beatrix (why did she finally go to Oman and Qatar at such an inopportune moment? Apparently to sell some naval vessels), but thanks to the input of Greek diplomatic troubleshooter Dimitris Dollis.

But the questions kept coming: why was a helicopter mission to get ‘Paul’ out, very risky because unauthorised by the Libyans, actually pushed through? In the end Hillen and Rosenthal got out of jail not by answering this obvious question (no way!) but first by directing attention toawards a scapegoat, the MIVD (military intelligence). The MIVD had not responded to a request for a swift analysis of the situation in Sirte, causing the mission to go ahead without it. Slack intelligence services! They screwed up on Iraq, and they are still useless! Only they didn’t screw up on Iraq, and the attempt again to blame the intel crowd for not doing there job drew a furious rejoinder from the MIVD’s former boss Joop van Reijn - if Defence had been following correct procedure for such an operation, the MIVD would have been fully involved in providing what was necessary when it was required. No scapegoats here, thank you.

Instead another escape hatch was quickly found – a civilised government does not leave its citizens in distress. As Rosenthal collapsed into absurdity (parliamentary debate on 29 March, referring to Sirte: “It is a terrible pity that afterwards it appeared that one of Gaddafi’s palaces was just up the road.” Wha..? Can Rosenthal pronounce ‘intelligence service’?), Rutte came to save Hillen’s bacon by turning the whole affair into a populist triumph. The government didn’t have to do this, but it was obliged to seize the opportunity and try. Nice. Unless, of course, you happen to be the family of Dutch passport holder Zahra Bahrami, who certainly did not receive the combined efforts of Defence and Foreign Affairs to try and secure her release from a death sentence in Tehran, a point well made by independent journalist Herman Vuijsje. So either ’Paul’ has very important friends (highly likely), or Royal Haskoning is more than just an engineering firm (possibly), or the government made a real mess of the whole business (definitely).

Which eventually brought the Netherlands to the main issue at hand – the debate over NATO involvement in enforcing UN resolution 1973, and what the Dutch might do about it. Predictably, a swift decision was taken to join in, and Operation Unified Protector got underway. But the domestic political circumstances for this mission could not be much worse. Hillen’s impending cuts will prevent the Dutch military from being able to conduct anything like an Uruzgan-scale mission in the future. The minesweeper Haarlem has been sent to the Med – but all minesweepers are slated for the scrap. A report from last November suggested that two-thirds of the 87 F-16s in the Dutch air force were grounded due to a lack of spare parts and repair, suggesting that the six aircraft sent to the Med may not be far off the maximum that could be allowed. And 10,000 of Defence’s 69,000 workforce (military and civilian) could be out of a job within a year or so. The bleak facts will become clear on Friday, which Hillen has already described as “a heavy day for Defence.” If this could be incorporated into the kindsof re-evaluation of Dutch foreign affairs that Ben Knapen has been carrying out, then there could be some value to the whole exercise. But the Sirte fiasco and the token gesture of the six F-16s suggests the opposite: more of the same, only less effective, and more pointless.

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.

Cüneyt Ciftci and the German Taliban

Recently growing attention has been given to US citizens who have joined the jihad in Pakistan. But the phenomenon is not limited to Americans. The story of the men from The Hague who turned up as ‘tourists’ on the Kenya-Somalia border in July 2009 is well known. Now stories are emerging of Dutch involvement in military action against NATO forces in Afghanistan.

 The Telegraaf today includes an article on a 21-year-old Dutch-German citizen, Danny R., who has recently been killed in Pakistan. The paper is quoting Der Spiegel, which itself received the information from the German BVD. Danny had chosen the path of radical Islam in Berlin and together with a group from the city travelled to Pakistan last September. So far six known Germans have been killed in fighting in the region, and there has been a lot of attention given to the online exploits of (presumed killed) Eric Breininger / Abdulgaffar El Almani. As the Telegraaf notes, Westerners are ideal not just as reinforcements but as propaganda material for online video clips, proof that the holy war is supported by the very same nationalities as the enemy NATO forces themselves. As yet, no Dutch citizens have appeared, but it may only be a matter of time.

The Telegraaf quotes an AIVD source that there are around 15 known Dutch jihadis in the region. Alongside this and the Kenya-Somalia case, there have been two Dutch killed in fighting in Kashmir and the arrest of Wesam al-D by US forces for his involvement in IED operations. In total, several tens of Dutch citizens are involved in jihadi activities in various locations. The chosen route for going abroad appears to be via Morocco, and from their to Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, or Pakistan. Others go to attend a madrassa in Egypt.

The concern of the security services is often not just related to what these individuals do in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Following training, they can as Dutch citizens return to the Netherlands, ready to answer the call for further action. However, the AIVD source claims that these Dutch jihadis cannot easily return to the Netherlands because “they have been away too long and on return will be immediately arrested or put under permanent surveillance.”

This last comment is of course the most interesting, because it suggests an all-knowing intelligence and security service that has already identified the right suspects. It is above all a good confidence-building measure to show that the threat is completely covered and will be dealt with should that be necessary. The recent declarations that the AIVD needs to expand its operations abroad to track developments that may affect Dutch national security is not entirely at odds with this comment, but it does come close. For if the service is already so effective in tracking the main threats, it does raise a question why there is a need to expand its operations.

In this context it is interesting to read the AIVD’s report for 2009 next to the equivalent report from the Military Intelligence and Security Service, the MIVD. As well as support for Dutch military operations abroad, the MIVD also produces threat analyses and “investigates potential threats and the military forces from nations that could form a threat to the security of the Netherlands and the NATO area” (p. 11). In terms of the kind of war that is going on in South Asia, where the distinction between military and civilian forces ranged against NATO is not very clear, and the international range of these forces (from training camp to terrorist) is proven, it looks as if the MIVD already presents itself as the best prepared for tracking these developments. Whereas the AIVD report talks of cooperation with around 180 other services abroad, and close cooperation with around 30 of them, the MIVD report chronicles the activities of the service across all regions of the world, including Yemen and Somalia. In his recent critique of the AIVD’s intention to expand its presence abroad, Bob de Graaff commented that competition between services can be useful for keeping each “sharp” and “services don’t always have a monopoly in knowledge.” Of course, the resources of the AIVD outstrip the MIVD. But one does end up wondering where one service might end and the other might begin.

Villa Maarheeze, the former home of the Inlichtingen Dienst Buitenland (1946-94) [Photo from here]

The 2009 annual report of the Dutch Intelligence and Security Service has caused quite some reaction in the press [see 'AIVD: Go forth and discover', 21 April, below]. The general response was positive, mixed with cynicism from some quarters. Liaison with other intelligence services abroad is vital, says Edwin Bakker of Clingendael. But you can’t liaise unless you’ve got info to trade, said Beatrice de Graaf of Leiden University, so get the agents out there. But there are limits. Liaison is one thing, running secret operations something else entirely. But even the the CIA is moving in the same direction.

Meanwhile one area of the AIVD’s domestic activities has come under increasing scrutiny. Under pressure from parliamentary questions, the Ministry for Home Affairs sent a letter to parliament on 19 April outlining that the AIVD conducted 1078 taps (telephones, internet, and hidden microphones) in 2009. The military intelligence MIVD conducted only 53. Considering the previously released figures of tapping undertaken by the police, these figures seem low. And they also involve fewer people than the figures suggest, because some people are obviously using more than one number and being surveilled in more than one way.

All the more reason to send the intelligence boys overseas to find out whats going on abroad, since the Netherlands is relatively quiet these days. But its not so simple. Bob de Graaff, Prof. in Intelligence and National Security in Utrecht, has pointed out a major flaw. The AIVD is intelligence (foreign) and security (domestic) merged into one organisation. The two parts of the service operate according to different codes: domestic security according to the rules of the democratic state, foreign intelligence according to….well, according to whatever may be necessary, says de Graaff. The two don’t necessarily fit.

The AIVD was formed in 2002 with an emphasis on domestic security. The threat of islamic radicalism at the time seemed to justify this. The Inlichtingen Diesnt Buitenland, the forerunner for foreign intelligence, had been dissolved in 1994 and was hardly resuscitated in the AIVD structure. Until last month.

De Graaff is not happy with the AIVD’s new turn. The term ‘forward defense’ used by AIVD chief Gerard Bouman to describe the greater activity of the AIVD abroad suggests to de Graaff that no thought is being given to the difference in the codes  of behaviour for domestic and intelligence operations. They are just being collapsed into one, and its offensive, not defensive. Its also way too ambitious. 

De Graaff wonders why the AIVD comes with this shift in emphasis now, and speculates that it might well have to do with concerns over government cutbacks. I agree. Producing reports that say the AIVD has contributed to the neutralising of domestic threats also raises questions as to why the service, which has greatly expanded in personnel in recent years, should hang on to that position. Re-directing its attention to the great boundless abroad is a good solution, and all in the name of national security. The 9/11 Commission said that the world is a US domestic security issue. It looks like the AIVD is trying to play that game too. But as de Graaff concludes – this isn’t for the service to decide alone, its for the politicians. Yet in a time when The Hague seems to be going provincial, the AIVD is going global.

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.

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.