Dutch spies become more active abroad

Lacking domestic threats, the Dutch intelligence agency is expanding its foreign operations.

The Dutch secret service, the AIVD, has announced a shift in strategy that will take it further into the realm of James Bond.

At the presentation of its annual report on Tuesday, chief officer Gerard Bouman said his agency had been spending less time conducting domestic operations. Instead, more and more Dutch secret agents are being deployed abroad: in Yemen, Somalia, and the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the future, their number “will only increase,” Bouman said. He even introduced a catchy term to describe the agency’s new strategy: “forward defence”.

According to the AIVD chief, his service needs better intelligence on foreign terrorist groups to “prevent attacks from taking place in the Netherlands”. The AIVD, the national intelligence agency, has a wide-ranging set of responsibilities. For one, it keeps tabs on organisations and individuals that pose a threat to the democratic rule of law in the Netherlands, such as young Muslim radicals and neo-fascists.

Domestic enemies took precedence

In recent history, the intelligence agency focused most of its attention on domestic threats. The attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005) proved that Europe harboured a home-grown version of Islamic terrorism. After the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in Amsterdam in November 2004, autonomous terrorist networks became the AIVD’s top priority. The agency was expanded to combat home-grown terrorism.

In the mid 1990s, the AIVD’s main predecessor employed only a few hundred people. At last count, the service had 1,495 employees. But as the AIVD expanded, the domestic terror threat all but disappeared.

As recently as 2006, the AIVD reported the existence of 10 to 15 radical networks within the Netherlands, incorporating some 200 extremist Muslims. Last year, terrorism experts working for the service admitted they assumed these networks no longer posed any real threat. AIVD analysts have since become absorbed by a ‘new’ threat: foreign terrorism. The arrest of Akeel Abbasi in 2008 in the Netherlands, a suspected member of a Spanish terrorist cell, may have gotten little attention in Dutch media, but terrorism fighters say his arrest is ominous evidence that the newest threats would be foreign rather than domestic.

A new foreign threat

Intelligence chief Bouman explicitly tried to claim the reduced domestic threat as an AIVD success. “I do believe we have contributed to it,” he said Tuesday. He also pointed out the growing foreign threat, mentioning last Christmas’ failed attack on a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit by the young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The AIVD’s annual report contains a few others, such as the arrest of a Somali at a centre for asylum seekers, and the detention at Schiphol airport of five American youths returning from a jihadist training camp in Somalia.

In the future, the AIVD hopes to apprehend terrorists before they even arrive in the Netherlands. “The ultimate goal would be to stop a terrorist before he boards a plane in Nairobi,” Bouman said, referring to the case of the Detroit bomber. But the AIVD’s increased foreign scope extends beyond terrorism. By stationing people in countries like Iran and Syria, the agency hopes to fight the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Earlier this month, acting on a tip from intelligence agencies, Dutch authorities arrested four people who worked for a turbine manufacturer on suspicion of delivering military supplies to Iran.

Espionage by foreign powers like China and Russia, another foreign threat that seems to be back in the picture, has been the focus of the AIVD for some time now. The service recently published an analysis of vulnerabilities to foreign intelligence gathering, pointing out the threat posed by internet-based ‘cyberespionage’.

In response to questions, Bouman said that while the AIVD could reduce costs, he thought his agency did not have any trouble proving its worth. He cited a recent government report regarding the run-up to the Iraq war that stated the Dutch government leaned heavily on American and British intelligences services for information regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. This proved the Netherlands needed its own source of intelligence, Bouman said.

According to Bouman, the agency has a hard enough time satisfying the government’s insatiable appetite for information as it is. “High expectations demand a service able to meet them,” he said.