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

312situational awareness, which is always superior to a remote control system, and it yields far betterimagery. One must conclude again, like in the precious chapters, that the Dutch shortfall in intelligencewas recognized at the policy level, but that action was not properly taken. Dutch political and militaryleadership never took the courage to order the 306 th Squadron of the Royal Dutch Airforce to fly overSrebrenica in order to support DutchBat.The Dutch had assets at their command, which in many ways were superior to any othersavailable. Perhaps the Dutch political and military structure deserve, according to an US intelligenceofficial, far more blame regarding Imint than they do under the Sigint category. Perhaps they did notunderstand the value of their own Imint system, and the incredible utility it can provide. Experts whoworked with TACRECCE systems and Imint collections systems of every stripe claimed that in atactical situation, where the targets are troops on the ground (or prisoners for that matter), in a knownarea of limited dimensions, there is no other system that even comes close to TACRECCE. The DutchRF-16 pod system in this respect was considered to be one of the very best in the world. And it wasunder the exclusive control of the Dutch. One American intelligence official posed these questions tothe author: where was it when all this was going on? What was the higher priority that they sought tosatisfy somewhere else with that precious Dutch Imint system and was that was more important thanDutchBat? They knew they wanted information, they had the assets, and they did nothing to get theinformation. Instead, the ‘voice from the sofa’ vilifies, according to this official, the US intelligenceeffort. 1719 Despite this critique it remains a serious fact that on the basis of the above and the releasedImint it has to be concluded that photos were available which were taken by US spy satellites, U-2s andUAVs of the events before, during and after the fall of the enclave. However, this Imint was not madereadily available to the Dutch.1719 Confidential information (80).