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

213Despite this reservation there is a long history of Sigint cooperation between the Westernintelligence services. 1128 The intensive collaboration in this field dates from the Second World War,when the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated closely to break the German andJapanese codes. This endeavour proved highly successful and the cooperation was formalized after thewar had finished. On 5 March 1946 the British-United States Comint Agreement was signed, openingthe way for cooperation in the field of Comint. In June 1948 this was superseded by the UKUSAComint Agreement. 1129During the Cold War the relationship between the NSA and the other Sigint partners, such asGCHQ and CSE, gradually developed to the disadvantage of the non-American services. AfterUKUSA increasingly started to deliver more Sigint, on an almost industrial basis, the Sigint services hadto work ever more efficiently to process the avalanche of intercepted signals. This was made possibleby a new division of tasks, the use of US technology and better and faster computers. This was noticedin the rest of Europe, and the interest in joining this collaboration thus grew steadily. Various Europeancountries, such as the Scandinavian states, had started giving priority to Sigint from 1950 onwards.Other countries invested chiefly in Humint. The Bundesnachrichtendienst, for instance, spent most of itsbudget on Humint at the expense of Sigint.In April 1968 the famous founder and Head of the BND, Richard Gehlen, ended his tenure.This was followed by a shift from Humint to Sigint. The German Military Intelligence Service alsodrastically increased its investments in Sigint from the start of the 1970s onwards. The FrenchIntelligence Service was another organization that initially showed little interest in Sigint. The Dutchsituation was different: from 1945 onwards major investments were made in Sigint although there wasconstant dispute about the budget and which ministry should ‘cough up’ for it. 1130Declassified American government documents show that from the mid-1950s onwards theUnited States and the United Kingdom concluded a series of bilateral agreements with Norway,Austria, West Germany, Italy, Greece and Turkey. These countries are known as the Third Parties, andwere ideally located gathering Sigint on the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The NSA exchangednot only intercepts with these countries, but also information regarding cryptography and cryptanalysis.Moreover, major investments were made to equip certain countries with the required antennas,monitoring equipment and computers. The Netherlands was not among the Third Parties.However, according to some publications, there was a ‘price tag’ attached to this cooperation.The independence of the Third Parties, and also of the non-American UKUSA countries (Canada,Australia and New Zealand) decreased further with regard to Sigint, and their dependence on the NSAbecame ever greater. The NSA asked for and received practically all intercepts gathered by the UKUSApartners. A former Sigint analyst of the US Air Force expressed the lopsided relationship between theUS and Third Party countries as follows: ‘they received absolutely no material from us, while we getanything they have, although generally it’s of pretty low quality.’ 1131 However, this was an observationfrom 1972. Has much changed?According to some authors, around 1985 the GCHQ was nothing more than an extension ofthe NSA. An internal GCHQ document stated the following, for instance: ‘This may entail on occasion1132the applying of UK [Sigint] resources to the meeting of US requirements’. A senior US intelligenceofficial added that this observation was true, ‘as it should be between partners in a global intelligenceeffort’. In return, he observed that US resources were routinely committed to meet purely UKrequirements. Classic example is the routine commitment of British HF intercept capabilities to meet1128 For this section much use has been made of: Matthew Aid & Cees Wiebes, ‘Conclusions’, in: Aid & Wiebes (eds.),Secrets, pp. 314-332.1129 Andrew, President’s Eyes, p. 163 and Hager, Secret Power, pp. 61-62.1130 Cees Wiebes, ‘Dutch Sigint during the Cold War, 1945-1994, in: Aid & Wiebes (eds.), Secrets, pp. 243-284.1131 ‘US Electronic Espionage: A Memoir’, Ramparts, August 1972, p. 45.1132 Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘GCHQ’s Service to US ‘Crucial’, The Guardian, 17/05/94.