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

86intelligence. 394 Until that time, the BVD’s experience had been that its foreign counterparts had little orno intelligence on Bosnia. Only the French national security service had an effective counterintelligencesystem. The German security service was poorly informed, and the Americans (the CIA) asked manyquestions but supplied little intelligence themselves. Dutch intelligence officers state that liaison withthe US services has always been difficult. Intelligence liaison was seen especially by Americans as ameans of reinforcing or maintaining their position in every respect - including economically. In thisrespect, the Dutch services can be reproached for a degree of naivety, because the Americans hadalways adopted that attitude. It was simply a fact of life that the Americans seldom gave awayintelligence, and when they did it was often almost exclusively to serve their own interests. They did nothave a strongly developed awareness of other people’s interests. The BVD subsequently complained tothe CIA that matters could not continue as they were, after which the CIA became somewhat moreobliging. The first American Chief of Station in Sarajevo subsequently paid a visit to the BVD. TheBVD could not expect much from the British services either. The security service, MI-5, gave absolutepriority to its own military apparatus and UK national security. The BVD was able to obtain most fromthe Eastern European services.Team Adriaan also pursued closer collaboration with the larger regional police forces, forvarious networks of Yugoslav criminals were active in the Netherlands. At the time, the National PoliceServices (Korps Landelijke Politiediensten, KLPD) had no coordinated approach to Yugoslav organizedcrime. Each regional force muddled through, and departments within a regional force would oftenknow nothing of each other’s operations. A joint operation in Amsterdam, for example, did not go395ahead because the leaders of the police did not recognize its usefulness.The work on Yugoslavia therefore had a domestic and a foreign component. The former wasmainly concerned with monitoring the events in Yugoslavia from the Netherlands and assessing theprobability of negative consequences on the Yugoslav community in the Netherlands. Particularattention was paid to possible conflicts between different factions and to the physical threat to theconsultation between the various Yugoslav leaders in The Hague at the time of the Dutch ECpresidency. In addition, the service paid attention to activities related to the civil war, such as pressganging,arms purchases and the raising of funds in Yugoslav circles in the Netherlands. What is more,the fact that soldiers were located in Bosnia could also have consequences for state security and thedemocratic rule of law. For example, secret services of the warring factions could attempt to carry outoperations or to raise funds in the Netherlands, or send arms and ammunition to the region. 396In 1992, the BVD concluded that the warring factions in Yugoslavia were receiving increasingsupport from ‘larger powers in the background’. For instance, the Islamic world had positioned itselfbehind the persecuted Muslims in what had developed into a conflict against ‘a strange association ofEast European conservative (ex-communist) forces’. The BVD expected terrorist activities mainly fromthe Serbian side. In mid 1992, the First Secretary for Consular Affairs at the Yugoslav embassy in TheHague, Radoslav Jankovic, was asked to leave. According to the BVD, he had been identified as anofficer of an intelligence service of his own country. He was said to be carrying out activities that wereincompatible with his diplomatic status (including manipulative relations with Dutch governmentofficials). The BVD wanted to declare him persona non grata, but this was opposed by the Ministry ofForeign Affairs, which was always extremely reserved in such matters. Jankovic had to leave anyway on17 June 1992, because of the UN resolution that prescribed the freezing of diplomatic relations withSerbia. The embassy counsellor Milorad Sredojevic suffered the same fate in September 1992 and alsohad to leave. 397 The two positions remained vacant and no attempt was ever subsequently made from394 Confidential interview (15).395 Confidential interview s (15 ) and ( 16) .396 Minister of the Interior, BVD annual report 1991, p. 25. See also: ‘Van den Broek zou doelwit zijn van Servische terreur’ (‘Van den Broek alleged to be target of Serbian terror’), in: Trouw,12/12/91.397 Minister of the Interior, BVD annual report 1992, p. 20 and confidential information (12). See also: Frank Vermeulen, ‘Joegoslavische consul uitgewezen wegens spionage’ (‘Yugoslav consulexpelled because of espionage’), in: NRC Handelsblad, 07/07/92 and ‘Jankovic heeft niets illegaals gedaan’ (‘Jankovic has done nothing illegal’), in: NRC Handelsblad, 08/07/92.