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

83Bosnia. This raises the question of the extent to which this was also true in the various services thatsupplied the information concerned.2. The Netherlands Foreign Intelligence ServiceIn its initial form, the Netherlands foreign intelligence service was founded in 1946 as the BuitenlandseInlichtingendienst (BID) and, by Royal Decree, was replaced by the Inlichtingendienst Buitenland (IDB) on 5August 1972. Significant information on the history, terms of reference and working method of theIDB only became available in 1998. 386 The most important task of the IDB was the gathering ofinformation on foreign countries that was of potential interest to the government.The IDB was disbanded in 1994 after an often turbulent existence. In this period, the servicesuffered from a number of recurring problems for which no solutions were found. For instance, it proveddifficult to find a balance between gathering and processing intelligence. The distribution of ‘raw’intelligence, without analysis, hindered the acceptance within the government departments of theintelligence gathered. The ministries were at a complete loss to know how to deal with unprocessed datafrom agents and informants. When the messages were processed, it often led to bureaucratic argumentsand competence disputes, especially between the IDB and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which saw thisinformation as a threat to its own diplomatic reporting.The IDB was poorly informed of the needs of its users. Even when in 1982, after many years aNational Intelligence Requirements Plan (Nationaal Inlichtingen Behoeften Plan) was finally formulated, thedocument was so comprehensive and demanding that even an intelligence service of a major power wouldhave had trouble satisfying the wishes it expressed, let alone the IDB, which had always been kept small.The budget that was available for the service, approximately 4.8 million Dutch guilders, indeedonly permitted a limited ambition. For example, there were insufficient resources for establishing pseudocompaniesor to ‘build up’ agents over many successive years, so that they could operate at ever higherlevels. It was repeatedly decided not to incorporate the IDB within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, becausethe leaders of this department did not want to burn their fingers on any incidents that might have arisenfrom secret operations. Therefore, for reasons of principle, the service was ‘suspended’ within the primeminister’s department, the Ministry of General Affairs.Between 1970 and 1972, by way of experiment, the service was brought under the Ministry ofDefence, but this was not a success. Although one may perhaps expect otherwise of an elite departmentsuch as that of the prime minister, the political and civil service control of the IDB by senior Ministry ofGeneral Affairs officials left much to be desired. The IDB did not know what the government actuallyexpected from it. Direct exchanges of views between the prime minister, who had political responsibilityfor the service, and IDB leading officials were at best ‘only sporadic’.387Of course, it would be doing the IDB an injustice to refer only to its failures. It must be stated thatto the extent that the service succeeded, this was largely determined by external factors, such as the Sigint(intercepted message traffic) that was supplied by the MIS. The IDB analysts were able to use thisinformation to produce reports that were rated relatively highly by their users. For instance, in 1973 theIDB was able to give the government a timely warning of the planned oil embargo by the Arab world. TheIDB’s performance was moreover favourably influenced by the reports of a limited number of friendlyforeign services. Although different ideas existed within the service about the material supplied and theassessments of reports by the American CIA, the British SIS and the German BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst)were sometimes far from favourable, the information - obtained on the basis of exchange and liaison -certainly had a positive effect on the service’s performance.A study of the history of the IDB between 1946 and 1994 shows that there were major internalproblems within the service from the outset. There was an element of a sort of ‘crisis cycle’, with a386 De Graaff and Wiebes, Villa Maarheeze, passim.387 Engelen, Inlichtingendienst Buitenland, p. 51.