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Netherlands: Secret service leaks, journalist's observations and murky police practices

01 May 2006

After a secret service scandal recently revealed that Germany's foreign intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) unlawfully spied on journalists to ascertain the identity of their sources (see Statewatch Vol. 16 no 2), similar stories from Holland have revealed that this appears to be internal secret service (AIVD) practice in the Netherlands as well. But whereas in Germany, the scandal opened up a debate that questioned the adequacy of parliamentary control over the intelligence services, in the Netherlands the interior minister defended the surveillance of journalists, pointing out they are not protected by law against secret service eavesdropping. Furthermore, the two journalists concerned were interrogated and are now threatened with being charged with disclosing official secrets. The Dutch National Union of Journalists (Nederlandse Vereniging van Journalisten - NVJ) argues that both the interception and the criminalisation of the men not only violate their right to privacy, but also threaten the foundations of the democratic state and its principle of freedom of press and the protection of journalistic sources.

Joost de Haas and Bart Mos, two journalists working for De Telegraaf, Holland's biggest newspaper (which could be described as right-wing populist, favouring the coverage of sensational crime stories), were researching the case of the criminal Mink Kok, who was imprisoned in 1999 when police discovered an arsenal in his house. During his prosecution, Mink Kok collaborated with the public prosecutor Fred Teeven, who was hoping to receive information for his investigation into long-standing allegations of police corruption in the fight against serious crime. The allegations centred around police "controlled deliveries" of drugs, which were used to gain access to drug smuggling rings; the practice was uncovered when a special Amsterdam and Utrecht police unit was dissolved, leading to the so-called IRT affair, which in turn led to various inquiries and finally a parliamentary investigation in 1994 (the Van Traa Commission). Mink Kok was implicated in illegal arms trading and provided sensitive information to Teeven under the strict condition that this was to be confidential, to prevent possible reprisals from his former colleagues in the criminal underworld. It seems that Kok also passed on information to the Dutch secret service AIVD. Kok consequently received an unusually short sentence and was to be released in the summer of 2005, before he was rearrested in his prison cell in August 2005 on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Alkmaar drug dealer Jaap van der Heiden.

The Telegraaf journalists provided in-depth coverage of the Mink Kok case, using information that appeared to have been leaked by an AIVD employee. It showed that the AIVD's forerunner, the BVD, had carried out an investigation in the late 1990s into the alleged police corruption. The AIVD was further embarrassed by a series of stories the newspaper ran in January this year, claiming that top secret BVD files on Kok had been sold by one of their employees to the drugs mafia. On 4 May, Paul H, a former BVD employee, was arrested and accused of selling secret information to top criminals. Four more people were arrested a few weeks later. But on 9 May, the two journalists were charged with "violating State secrecy" and interrogated for several hours; the accused made use of their right to silence. De Haas and Mos were fingerprinted and forced to provide DNA samples. On 20 May this year, the Telegraaf disclosed that the AIVD had intercepted the telephone conversations of the journalists and put them under observation for four months, acting on information from "trustworthy sources in The Haag". This triggered a minor scandal, with the Dutch Union of Journalists as well as the Association of Chief Newspaper Editors (Nederlands Genootschap van Hoofdredacteuren) condemning the intelligence ser