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

201All efforts can of course also be negated by espionage or betrayal. Soviet spies such as WilliamWeisband, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell caused enormous damage to American attemptsto acquire Comint. Mistakes by the American president can have the same effect. In 1969, for instance,President Richard M. Nixon revealed during a press conference that the NSA was able to read thecommunications traffic of the Soviet Union and North Korea. Following this statement Moscow andPyongyang changed their cryptographic systems and the NSA was immediately rendered ‘deaf’. TheNSA needed months to repair the damage caused by Nixon’s slip-up.A tenth disadvantage is that Sigint, due to its limited distribution, can also be used for personalpolitical ends. Henry Kissinger did this when he was national security advisor to Nixon: certainsensitive intercepts were not shared with the State Department and Pentagon. 1066 And in 1986 the NSAeven refused to share Sigint about the Iran-Contra affair with the Minister of Defence, CasperWeinberger: the reasoning used was that the Pentagon did not have a ‘need-to-know’. 1067 An eleventhadvantage often cited is the lack of coordinated intelligence gathering activities. During the Cold Warthe various Sigint units of the three branches of the US Armed Forces and of the various intelligenceservices were often engaged in the same tasks. This led to an enormous multiplication of Comint. Thiseven occurred after the Cold War, for instance during the hunt for the drugs king Pablo Escobar in1992-1993. The NSA and Sigint units of the CIA and the Armed Forces all operated totallyindependently of each other, in an attempt to show that their staff and equipment were ‘better’ thanthose of the other organizations. In the Soviet Union too the KGB and GRU often worked separately,and this phenomenon was not confined to the superpowers. In Germany the Bundesnachrichtendienst(BND) and Military Intelligence Service spent more than 20 years in a mutual struggle for authorityover Sigint. 1068 In Chapter 3 it has already been noted that in the Netherlands too there were threeseparate military organizations for Sigint, and there was virtually no cooperation or serious effort toachieve integration. It was only in 1996 that these three services were merged to form one SignalsIntelligence Department (AVI).As twelfth factor, technical obstacles can also hinder Sigint. Such factors as atmosphericdisturbance, static, poor reception and the occasional ‘drop-out’ of signals can prevent a good intercept.Built-up areas, or mountains and valleys too, can often make good long-distance interception1069impossible. Finally, serious disruptions can also be caused by industrial activities.To summarize, Sigint is an important, safe, fast, permanently deployable, valuable, productiveand highly reliable method of gathering intelligence in the form of Comint. It also has a number ofdisadvantages, however, the most important of which are the avalanche of intercepted information, thelack of sufficient analysis capacity, the limited possibilities for interception due to cryptographicallyprotected signals via landlines, the nature of the topography and human habitation, and atmosphericconditions. Before considering which of these factors were important during the war in Bosnia, thefocus first turns to the history of the most important Sigint organizations.3. The most important western Signals Intelligence organizationsSigint organizations do not need to be physically close to the land or region being monitored: this ispossible from considerable distances, although the interception of specific types of communicationstraffic does require that monitoring posts be in the vicinity. If the region is very mountainous, then1066 Hersh, Price, p. 207.1067 Weinberger did not know that this took place on the orders of the White House. See: Walsh, Iran-Contra, pp. 13 and 207and Stephen Engelberg, ‘3 Agencies Said to Have Received Data About Iran Money Transfers’, The New York Times,27/11/86.1068 Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, ‘The Bundesnachrichtendienst, the Bundeswehr and Sigint in the Cold War and After’, in: Aid& Wiebes (eds.), Secrets, pp. 129-176.1069 Matthew Aid & Cees Wiebes, ‘Introduction on the importance of SIGINT in the Cold War’, in: Aid & Wiebes (eds.),Secrets, pp. 17-21.