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

209happened during the Gulf War, where the command structure was almost ideal. In Bosnia, Russian andUkrainian troops also formed part of UNPROFOR and thus the chance was very small that Londonwould pass on valuable intelligence. If intelligence was passed on, then this was ‘sanitized to the pointof near-uselessness’. 1108The officer on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) chiefly responsible for Bosnia wasCaptain Jonathan Cooke. He had an excellent perspective on the results of the Sigint. According to himMI6, the GCHQ and also the DIS had various teething troubles, and intelligence gathering only slowlygot off the ground. GCHQ ‘had to start from scratch in Bosnia’ regarding the frequencies that neededto be monitored. At the outbreak of the war in the Balkans, the service apparently had only a fewspecialists in the field of Serbo-Croat who really spoke the language fluently. In fact everything had tobe built up; Bosnia was actually terra incognita for the GCHQ. 1109It is remarkable, and actually hard to understand, that an area in which the United Kingdom hadshown such interest in the past, especially during the Second World War and the Cold War, shouldsuddenly be totally unknown territory for a service such as the GCHQ or SIS. The website of theGCHQ, for instance, did not actively advertise for Serbo-Croat linguists. On the other hand the NSAhad initial problems with the availability of sufficient Serbo-Croat translators as well. According toCooke another problem was that the flow of Comint and Humint to the Balkan Current IntelligenceGroup in Whitehall was often sufficient to give ministers good general briefings, but ‘the usual rules onthe dissemination of sensitive reports further limited what was given to troops serving in-theatre’.British commanders in UNPROFOR noted this lack of intelligence and often had to fall back on Osintto get a better picture. 1110The German Signals intelligence serviceIn Germany the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service, BND) is responsible for gatheringSigint. This service, which reports to the Federal Chancellor, was set up on 1 April 1956. Theforerunner to the BND, the Organisation Gehlen (Gehlen Organization) was based in Pullach nearMunich and the BND was established there too. 1111 The main responsibility for all Sigint was given tothe BND. The German Military Intelligence Service, the Amt für Nachrichtenwesen der Bundeswehr(Intelligence Office of the Federal Armed Forces) in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, did have its own Sigintcapabilities through its three Armed Forces, but intercepted messages were supplied directly to theBND for processing. It was not until 1978 that the Amt für Nachrichtenwesen der Bundeswehr, followingconsiderable resistance from the Bundesnachrichtendienst, was given its own military Sigint analysis andprocessing centre. 1112The Amt für Nachrichtenwesen der Bundeswehr remained however fully dependent on the materialsupplied for analysis, because the ultimate responsibility for selecting targets and for the analysisremained with the BND. The Amt für Nachrichtenwesen der Bundeswehr, with its 620 employees, was in thisrespect more a consumer of intelligence than a producer. Over all these years there was a continualstruggle between the BND and the Ministry of Defence with regard to the authority over Sigint, andnowadays this struggle seems to have turned to the disadvantage of the BND. During the war inYugoslavia the Bundeswehr (German Army) started its own Sigint operations (independently of theBND) by making use of its own tracking and monitoring stations in Germany. 11131108 Urban, UK Eyes, pp. 213-215.1109 Urban, UK Eyes, pp. 215-216. A senior British intelligence official confirmed this to the author: Confidential interview(79).1110 Urban, UK Eyes, p. 217.1111 For the creation of the BND: Zolling & Höhne, Pullach intern, , pp. 95-247. For the relationship between Gehlen and theCIA: Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen, passim.1112 Schmidt-Eenboom, Schnüffler, p. 236.1113 Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, ‘The Bundesnachrichtendienst, the Bundeswehr and Sigint in the Cold War’, in: Aid & Wiebes(eds.), Secrets, pp. 129-176.