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

49strategic systems were revamped to ensure operational utilization by theatre users, in Europe andelsewhere around the world. For instance, an American National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)official, who was responsible for Imagery Intelligence (Imint) from satellites, espionage aircraft andunmanned aircraft, confirmed this. He complained that the fall of the Wall had not made the work anysimpler: ‘There are probably more areas today, in a broader sense, than we had to worry about duringthe Cold War. There are a lot more places that are volatile...’ 193Furthermore, the terrain in which the conflict was being fought was completely different fromthat of the ‘old’ threat: woods and mountains severely limited the field of vision of the internationalintelligence community. This was less true of the Austrian, Italian and Swiss services, which, because ofthe high altitude of their mountain-top monitoring stations, sometimes did succeed in interceptingmessage traffic. Many a Western intelligence service was completely unprepared for the outbreak offighting in the former Yugoslavia. General Michael Hayden, in 1995 EUCOM and later commander ofthe Air Intelligence Agency at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas, admitted that prior to the war in Yugoslaviathere was not a real need for as much experience in that area. His organization was not manned insome of those fields as he would like to be. 194 The intelligence resources and methodology were, asstated, still focused on the enemy in the East, and especially on the timely detection and analysis oflarge military units operating in a mainly open and flat area. The services were prepared for symmetricalwarfare (two equally large armed forces against each other) and the military and economic objectiveswere reasonably familiar. The armed forces of the Red Army and the Warsaw Pact no longer existed inthe same form after the fall of the Berlin Wall, however.Some intelligence services had paid relatively little attention to Yugoslavia until the outbreak ofthe war in Bosnia. For instance, only one analyst of the Royal Netherlands Army worked on Yugoslaviaat the Intelligence Department of the Military Intelligence Service. He was concerned with the militaryorder of battle, which could also be considered to be something of a subsidiary activity, because hisprimary focus was on a different subject. His service concentrated especially on Poland and the GDR,and this analyst confirmed that other Western intelligence services in general paid little attention toYugoslavia, which in a certain sense put him in a unique bartering position.195 The same perceptionsexisted in the British counterpart. They had ‘a bit of trouble getting up to speed. It wasn’t a prioritythey could quickly get good at. SIS [Secret Intelligence Service or MI-6] and GCHQ [GovernmentCommunications Headquarters] needed to improve their expertise in the language.’ 196Within intelligence services there were sometimes only a handful of political analysts who wereoccupied with Yugoslavia. After all, the country was counted among the ‘friendly’ communist powers;the expectation was that in the event of an outbreak of an international crisis, the country would takethe side of the West. In this respect, Yugoslavia had long been considered to be within the Westernsphere of influence, as was demonstrated in the attack on Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Yugoslaviawas given backdoor guarantees by NATO. 197When the conflict in Bosnia finally broke out, the shortage of ‘trained personnel’ often meantthat people would be plucked from anywhere. Analysts who until then had worked mainly on theSoviet Union or Eastern Europe and were therefore new to the job, now had to deal with Bosnia.There was also a lack of staff who spoke Serbo-Croat and who were able to translate large quantities ofinformation. In 1993, the American electronic eavesdropping service, the National Security Agency(NSA), appeared to have a lack of translators and analysts with a command of Serbo-Croat. Thisoriginally affected the capacity to read intercepted Yugoslav message traffic. The service thought that193 Confidential information (80) and Robert Dreyfuss, ‘TECHINT: The NSA, the NRO, and NIMA’, Graig Eisendrath,National Insecurity, p. 156.194 Deedee Doke, ‘U.S. to beef up long-term air intelligence in Balkans’, European Stars & Stripes, 18/07/96.195 Confidential interview (37).196 Urban, UK Eyes, p. 215.197 Cees Wiebes & Bert Zeeman, ‘"I don’t need your handkerchiefs": Holland’s experience of crisis consultation in NATO’,International Affairs, Vol. 66 (1990) 1, pp. 91-113.