Tough week for the AIVD. Every service has to endure the fact that while its successes are hardly ever disclosed to protect the sources, its failures often reach the outside world quite easily. So it was this time. After several reports in the press concerning blunders and questionable work practices at the service, Andre Elissen and Marcial Hernandez of the PVV tabled seven questions to Rutte and Minister of the Interior Ivo Opstelten yesterday, writes Giles Scot-Smith of the Holland Bureau.

The bad news began on Friday 13th (of course), with the news that an AIVD officer had been expelled from their post in Ankara by the Turkish government in 2011. A case of ‘forward defence’ gone wrong. The reasons behind this are unclear and there is an information black-out on the incident from both The Hague and Ankara, but not enough to prevent it from eventually reaching the press. The officer had fulfilled a liaison function with the Turkish service and was tracking muslin extremist groups, among others Hizbollah, which is meant to possess networks in the Netherlands and Germany. They have now been transferred to another embassy in the Middle Eastern. Apparently only around twelve embassies around the world have such an official AIVD liaison position to work with the local services, which indicates how important the position in Turkey was.
Easy-going
Dutch-Turkish relations are not at there best these days. According to Ankara the Netherlands is too easy-going on the PKK, and Dutch financial support for a human rights organisation operating in South-East Turkey was seen as support for the Kurdish cause (as well as the charge that the finance could have found its way to the militants). Another thorn in the bilateral side is the PVV itself. Geert Wilders has not hidden his feelings about the Turkish government of Recep Erdogan and his AK [Justice and Development] party. On 23 December PVV’ers Wilders, Hernandez, and Wim Kortenoeven questioned whether Turkish membership of NATO should be reconsidered due to the unilateral ending of military cooperation with Israel and France earlier in the year, stating that the Turkish government was now “an untrustworthy islamic ally.” Then there is the issue of 380,000 Dutch inhabitants of Turkish origin, a not insignificant fact of Dutch social life. Interesting times for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to celebrate 400 years of Dutch-Turkish diplomatic relations, 1612-2012.
Lack of knowledge
But back to the AIVD. The next report was from Bart Olmer in De Telegraaf last Saturday and concerned the case of Outman ben Amar, hired by the service to act as an Arabic translator but who in 2007 received four years in prison for leaking information to the ‘Hofstadgroep’ cell. The story painfully illustrates what can happen if a lack of knowledge in a specific sector is too hastily filled. Ben Amar’s application procedure is meant to have included enough suspicious signs – unexplained gaps in his CV, unclear motivation for the job – for the selection committee to give a negative advice to the AIVD. Remarkably these concerns were overruled due to the rapid need for Arabic-speaking personnel. The article was accompanied by another in the Telegraaf that covered the tragic suicide of an AIVD officer five years after the death of Theo van Gogh. This event has apparently caused others in the service to release information to the press about AIVD blunders, among others the den Amar case.
PVV to the rescue?
The result of the Telegraaf article(s) was the list of PVV questions, which focused on the trivialities of AIVD routine work (is it true that the staff operating the safes for secret information knock off at 4pm?) and whether the service possessed a sufficient ‘whistle-blower’ mechanism to deal with discontent lower down the ranks. The PVV to the rescue of a disillusioned service? More like a classic move by the Wilders’ gang – blame the elites for being lax and undermining national security as a result