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

199A second disadvantage of Sigint, besides the extreme secrecy and limited distribution, is theinhibition regarding its use. During the 1950s and 60s each American Comint report started with thefollowing standard sentence: ‘No action is to be taken on information herein reported, regardless oftemporary advantage, if such action might have the effect of revealing the existence and nature of thesource.’ This initial sentence is probably still used today. This limitation has led to extremely bizarresituations. To give one example, it is claimed that in October 1995 the Australian Sigint agency, theDefence Signals Directorate (DSD), intercepted Indonesian military messages which indicated thatthere were plans to execute five Australian journalists who had been arrested in East Timor. Theservice decided not to pass on this information to the Australian Prime Minister, because it was fearedthat he would then act on the basis of these intercepted messages, or would even publicize them. This,it was reasoned, could reveal the ability of the Defence Signals Directorate to eavesdrop on Indonesianmilitary traffic. Following this decision, all five journalists were murdered by Indonesian SpecialForces. 1056A third disadvantage was that Sigint was often not valued properly or sometimes not evenbelieved. During the Cold War, for instance, Sigint was not regarded as a sufficiently reliable source. Asearly as the Korean War, the top commanders of the US Armed Forces attached no value to Comintregarding the true strength of Mao’s Red Army. During the war in Indochina, French commandersrefused to heed intercepts of enemy communications traffic because these did not fit into their ownanalysis of the military situation. 1057 A further disadvantage was to be found in the converse possibility,namely that during the Cold War many countries were too dependent on Sigint. In 1978 the USintelligence community had become so dependent on it that President Jimmy Carter issued a clearwarning: ‘Recently (...) I have been concerned that the trend that was established about 15 years ago toget intelligence from electronic means might have been overemphasized.’ 1058 Equally, the Soviet militaryleadership became fully dependent on Sigint when it came to early warning of a nuclear or conventionalattack. This had very unpleasant consequences, as became apparent in the autumn of 1983. A seriousnuclear crisis threatened then, as a result of misunderstandings: Soviet and Warsaw Pact groundstations interpreted a NATO exercise totally wrongly. On the basis of Sigint they thought that asurprise attack by US Pershing missiles was imminent. 1059 And in May 1998 a false interpretation ofintercepts by the Sigint service of the Indian Army almost led to a nuclear confrontation between Indiaand Pakistan. 1060This relates to the fifth disadvantage: blind faith in Sigint can lead to a sort of ‘sigint snobbery’.During and after the Cold War ever greater importance was attached to Sigint. In particular theintroduction of spy satellites and the U-2 spy plane led to a neglect of Humint. A sort of intelligenceelitism arose, also known as the ‘Green Door syndrome’: the notion that only Sigint (and to a certainextent Imint) could still be trusted. Humint was then frequently dismissed as unreliable. The ‘BrixMis’espionage missions in the GDR suffered from this, for example, because their mission reportssometimes diverged from the Sigint reports on the same subject. Then it was usually the Sigint that wasbelieved, simply because reports from GCHQ were classified much higher (‘secret’ or ‘Top Secret’),while the same intelligence in the BrixMis report was only classified as ‘UK Confidential’. 1061Excessive faith in Sigint can also bring another risk, listed here as the sixth disadvantage: thisintelligence product must often be viewed together with Humint and Imint. If Sigint is the soleintelligence product then it provides a sure foundation only in special cases. Sigint often provides onlypart of the puzzle and not the entire puzzle, as such intelligence is often fragmentary and indirect. This1056 Marian Wilkinson, ‘Our Spies Knew Balibo Five at Risk’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13/07/00.1057 For the latter see: Roger Faligot, ‘France, Sigint and the Cold War’, in: Aid & Wiebes (eds.), Secrets, pp. 177-208.1058 Godson (ed.), Intelligence, 1982, p. 118.1059 Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 270-273.1060 Matthew Aid & Cees Wiebes, ‘Introduction on the importance of SIGINT in the Cold War’, in: Aid & Wiebes (eds.),Secrets, pp. 15-16.1061 Geraghty, BRIXMIS, pp. 282-285.