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

233have been part of a Bosnian government operation. 1239 The UNPROFOR headquarters was probablyalso monitored from the site itself. Under both General Rose and Smith the UNPROFOR compound,which accommodated the headquarters of the British generals, also always hosted three interconnectedcontainers. A forest of antennas projected from this installation, 1240 and only American officers wereallowed to enter the containers; no other nationalities were allowed access. The only exception wasoccasionally made for the Head of the Bosnian Intelligence Service, General Taljan Hajrulahovic. Theservice that these Americans worked for and the precise nature of their tasks was shrouded in secrecy:no one knew and no questions were asked. It was suspected that this Special Collection Service unitwas engaged in ‘vacuuming up’ all the communications traffic in and around Sarajevo. 1241 In this waynot only UNPROFOR was monitored, but also the activities of the Mujahideen fighters in Bosnia. 1242Another example of the animosity between the Americans and the British was that the NSAintercepted the calls made by General Rose to the Forward Air Controllers in Gorazde. This was donebecause the Americans had a certain distrust of the British political line in the region. They viewedRose as pro-Serb because, according to the Americans, he constantly cited instances that the ABiH andthe Croatian Army were also guilty of breaking cease-fires and other misdemeanours. In the view ofWashington, Rose simply had ‘the wrong agenda’; according to the American services General Rosewas ‘fucking up the script’. They did not trust Rose and suspected that he did not sufficiently encouragehis Forward Air Controllers to promptly report Serb violations of the Gorazde Safe Area, and to keep aclose watch on the intentions of the VRS. Cooke of the UK Defence Intelligence Staff told Urban this:‘We certainly believed the Americans tapped into communications of that sort(…) the Americans interpreted the threshold for air strikes differently to us.They could use those sorts of interceptions to say the UN knew the Serbs weredoing something and didn’t react’. 1243Another example that seems to indicate major distrust was that the CIA Directorate of Operations hada special cell of about twenty employees whose most important task was to analyse British intelligencereports. The aim here was to establish which agents MI6 or the DIS had recruited in the formerYugoslavia and which other sources the British services had in Bosnia. It should be said that the CIAdismissed this report as absolute nonsense. 1244 It was only in the summer of 1995 that the transatlanticrelations were to improve again, but the Americans persisted in not passing all their intelligence on tothe British.The Electronic Intelligence war: the (Bosnian) Serb air defenceIt can thus be seen that the cooperation within NATO in the field of Sigint, and above all the sharingof high-level Comint, was not, to put it mildly, all it could have been due to the considerable Americandistrust of London (and Paris). Things were very different when it came to Elint: here mostly relevantto the interception of radar signals. American operational collection platforms, supplemented by otherSigint equipment, were not only intended to intercept communications traffic. Elint and also ForeignInstrumentation Sigint (Fisint) enabled the NSA to chart the VJ and the VRS air defence systems indetail. It is no surprise that the cooperation in this field was good, in view of the participation of the USAir Force and Navy in operations over Bosnia. American aircraft mostly collaborated closely withaircraft of other NATO allies, so there was a direct interest in sharing Elint. Furthermore, Elint was1239 Stankovic, Trusted Mole, p. 292.1240 Interview with A.P.P.M. van Baal, 01/11/01.1241 Stankovic, Trusted Mole, pp. 251-252 and confidential interview (6).1242 James Risen, ‘Iran gave Bosnia leader $ 500.000’, Los Angeles Times, 31/12/96.1243 Urban, UK Eyes, p. 241 and Mark Urban, ‘The Magnum Force’, The Sunday Telegraph, 01/09/96.1244 Confidential interview (79). See also: Urban, UK Eyes, p. 241.