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

63American and German services ended up via this German-Croatian route in Belgrade. 276 However,former BND officials strongly denied that this ever took place. 277This close American-German collaboration did not exist in the American relationship with otherWestern services, including between the British and the Americans, in spite of their special relationship.There was no question of an optimum sharing with the British by the Americans, according to anemployee of the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS). In early 1995 the Americans had become ‘prettyanti-Serb’, and had abandoned their balanced view. This brought them into conflict with the Britishservices, which still had a balanced view of the conflict. This led to the American services adopting anincreasingly unfriendly attitude towards the British. The difference of opinion led to a curtailment ofAmerican intelligence input to the Defence Intelligence Staff. 278 As the then CIA director Woolseyremarked, such a balanced view amounted to ‘swimming against the stream’ in the American politicalcontext. According to a senior US intelligence official there were actually two streams. Those whoidealized the Bosnian Muslims and those who blamed them equally with the Serbs. The CIA swamagainst both. 279American domestic politics were furthermore strongly influenced by the excellent mediacampaign in the United States by the Bosnian Muslims, who had hired the prominent New York PRfirms Hill & Knowlton and Rudner Finn. Sray, who in 1994 was head of the intelligence section inSarajevo, even stated that this was a pure disinformation campaign. He pointed out that the first firmwas responsible for the Kuwaiti government’s public relations campaign during the Gulf War, and hadsuccessfully spread the outrageous lie that Iraqi troops had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of theirincubators. The management of Rudner Finn would later boast that it had succeeded in marshalling asignificant part of the American Jewish community behind the Bosnian Muslims, in spite of the factthat the Bosnian Muslims had brought many Islamic fundamentalists into Bosnia who were vehementlyanti-Israel. 280The approach of the intelligence services to the crisis in BosniaThere were different levels of activities within the Military Information Office (MIO) at UNPROFORin Zagreb. Firstly there was the MIO, as intended by the UN in New York, whose opportunities andresources were limited. This resulted in a second level of activities: the links with the nationalintelligence services and their contributions. A third level was based on liaison relationships withinNATO, which mainly meant contributions from networks that had long been in existence. The mostimportant levels were the second and third. 281 In Chapter 1 extensive attention was paid to the MIO inZagreb. Below we will focus attention on the second level: the role of the various national services, andon the third level, the relationships within NATO.Various troop-contributing nations soon realized that for gathering intelligence in the formerYugoslavia they should not count on intelligence contributions from the UN or the MIO. Because thesecountries considered it to be absurd ‘to send troops to a sensitive area without the capability to analyse thesituation properly’ this quickly led to the establishment of well-organized national intelligence structures.Although these units were formally under UN command, in reality they were controlled by their nationalgovernments. There was a danger attached to this: this national control greatly influenced the policyconducted with respect to the conflict, which officially remained UN policy. UN intelligence needs werenot always in agreement with those of the individual troop-contributing nations, which could also interpret276 Marko Milivojevic, ‘Croatia’s Intelligence Services’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Vol. 6, No. 9, pp. 404-410. See also: Hagman,UN-NATO, p. 63.277 Confidential interviews (98) and (99).278 Confidential interview (8). For this, see also Chapter 5 on ‘sigint’.279 Confidential interview (97).280 John Sray, ‘selling the Bosnian Myth’, Foreign Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, October 1995.281 See Chapter 1 of this study.