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

223jar’, said an US intelligence official. Intercepts apparently showed that Belgrade was involved in the‘loan’ of military equipment to the VRS. 1185Intercepting Serb communications traffic in practiceIt is established that conversations between Karadzic and Mladic were intercepted. According tointelligence officials who had access to these UKUSA intercepts, these conversations were sometimesentertaining to read: the two gentlemen did not like each other and constantly shouted at each other onthe telephone. Sometimes they swore at each other too. However, the intercepts of such conversationscan also lead to confusion. Mladic once shouted down the telephone at a local commander, telling himthat he should take tough action and should put an end to ‘the damned trouble’. Otherwise Mladicwould intervene personally and remove the commander’s head in the process. When this call wasintercepted an alarm was immediately sounded (by a ‘critic’) at the NSA in Fort Meade. Was this takento mean that the VRS was about to attack an ABiH position? US officials in the region were alerted.They in turn contacted UNPROFOR, but the force was unable to detect any heightened state ofreadiness or any preparations for an attack. Following long and intensive investigation, it was revealedthat Mladic had ordered that an end should be put to the political unrest in the local commander’sunit. 1186 Comint operations were certainly not a simple matter, as members of US, Canadian andEuropean Sigint organizations all emphasized. Interception by the ‘vacuum cleaner’ method wasconducted by means of satellites, ships, aircraft and from the ground. The most common method ofmonitoring Comint was by satellite and special AWACS flights, conducted from Hungary. The VRSand the Yugoslav Army were aware of these flights, however, and usually all electronic equipment wasthen turned off. An US intelligence official admitted that there was no good Sigint coverage of theeastern enclaves, even though Sigint satellites do cover eastern Bosnia from a fixed geostationary orbit22,000 miles over the Earth. These satellites targeted in particular the high-level command-controlcommunications,which used very extensively the microwave radio relay/telephone network. Vortexand other spy satellites in orbit at the time were designed specifically to collect this kind of microwavetraffic. 1187If interception did succeed, then a further problem was that really everything was intercepted,from conversations between Mladic and Karadzic to a music channel. Hundreds of thousands ofsignals were intercepted on all possible frequencies. Sigint organizations thus needed to conduct highlyfocussed searches for ‘a needle in a haystack’. One important thing that these agencies needed to know,for instance, is what HF frequency Mladic’s communications equipment was using. But even then, forinstance, a pilot of a scheduled KLM flight, could contact Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on preciselythe same HF frequency, in which case this call would be recorded too. The services thus had to refinetheir ‘search key’ more and more, and to note call times in order to discover whether, for instance,there was a regular pattern in the conversations conducted by Mladic. The calls finally selected werethen screened for key words by computers. In most cases this still resulted in more than a hundredsimultaneous conversations. These were then analysed on content and usefulness, and that required alot of time. Ultimately only a few relevant intercepts landed on the desks of the policymakers. 1188Something else that made interception much more difficult was that the majority of the mostimportant communications traffic took place via landlines or couriers, in order to prevent intelligenceservices from listening in. Moreover, there were no monitoring stations close to Belgrade or Pale.Another factor was that if the Serb forces were withdrawn far into the hinterland, they were outside the1185 Karsten Prager, ‘Message from Serbia’, Time, 17/07/95 and Tim Sebastian, ‘The Secret Deal: Why Justice Won’t BeDone’, The Sunday Times, 25/02/96.1186 Confidential interview (47).1187 Confidential interview (13) and E-mail Matthew Aid to the author, 17/12/02.1188 Confidential interview (47).