C. Wiebes - Intelligence en de oorlog in Bosnië 1992-1995. De rol van de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten - Engels

113three tasks: looking for indications and warnings, following the tactical and strategic developments, anddrawing up threat analyses. The greatest problem encountered by this military information cell was thelack of Order of Battle information and tactical information regarding the warring factions in theregion. An additional problem was the limited opportunity for reconnaissance. With respect to theirinformation sources, Humint proved to be the best (and almost exclusive) source of intelligence.Contacts with representatives of the warring factions, the population, their own liaison officers and anetwork of local informants delivered the best information, alongside humanitarian organizations andNGOs. In order to gather additional intelligence, Canbat (in Visoko) had a series of OPs on both sidesof the confrontation line. 524The Scandinavian soldiers also engaged in intelligence gathering. Five people worked in theintelligence sector at the Nordic battalion (Nordbat) in Tuzla. Their performance is said to have beenextremely professional. Moreover, the British also devoted much attention to intelligence work. Theyhad six two-man teams that worked for the British sector commander of Sector South West. TheSupport Command intelligence officer stationed in Lukavac from July to November 1994, couldtherefore reach no other conclusion than that the Dutch operations, compared with those of otherEuropean countries, were relatively unprofessional and totally uncoordinated. 525To summarize the information position of the MIS and that of Dutchbat, it can be stated thatthe MIS/Army and the MIS/CO had no unique military-tactical intelligence as a result of a lack of theirown sources and own intelligence gathering facilities. This position was not improved by the fact thatDutchbat hardly generated any intelligence. Sometimes Dutchbat intelligence got ‘stuck’ at theNetherlands Army Crisis Staff and did not even reach the MIS/Army. MIS/Army analysts had to‘make do’ with intelligence from the UN line, from partners and from open sources.Bringing about an improvement in this position through Sigint was not an option for theNetherlands because of a lack of language capacity, and technical and personnel problems. In this area,the MIS/Army was still completely caught up in Cold War thinking. It is also striking that, because ofthe uncooperative attitude of senior MIS/Army officials and senior Royal Netherlands Army officers,Dutchbat was not allowed to engage in improving its own information position.It emerged from many interviews that there was a dominant attitude that UNPROFOR did notand ought not to gather intelligence. Given such a situation, it might be expected that, although theMIS/CO and MIS/Army each served a different master (Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Netherlands Army respectively), they would join forces in order to improve theirown information position, but nothing was further from the truth.6. The collaboration between MIS/CO and MIS/ArmyThe MIS/CO was quick to observe that, when it came to intelligence work, the Intelligence andSecurity Departments of the three Armed Forces remained hierarchically subordinate to their ownCommanders-in-Chief. On the shop floor there was a healthy relationship between the staff of theMIS/CO and the staff of the MIS/Army and the MIS/Air Force, but it faltered at the higher levels.What collaboration there was (to put it mildly) was not very good. Senior officials of the MISs at thebranches of the Armed Forces obstructed collaboration, and this was particularly true of theMIS/Army leadership. There was a predominantly parochial attitude among senior officials of the threeMISs. As a result the MIS/CO always lagged behind the MIS/Army, where intelligence regularly‘stranded’. This sometimes led to totally different analyses of the same subject. The various opinions tobe found in the MIS/Army camp can be broken down into three categories. 526524 Captain Daniel Villeneuve, ‘Intelligence and the UN: Lessons From Bosnia - A Canadian Experience’, in: Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, No. 4 (October-December 1996). Thispublication can be found at: www.fas/org/irp /agency/army.525 MoD , Archive 101 MI S/ Cie , Van Jawad to Hakort, Debriefing report 101 MI S/Cie, 23/12/95.526 Confidential interview (26).