Andy-Kraag-Faces-Of-NPS-Articles

First Dutch student to attend the Naval Postgraduate School. Major in the Royal Netherlands Maritime Special Operations Forces. Head of the Netherlands’ National Criminal Investigations Division. The man behind each of these titles – Andy Kraag – can now add “director of one of the most significant police operations ever” to his list of accolades. In a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) with French authorities, Kraag and his team recently compromised an encrypted network known as EncroChat, capturing 25 million messages and creating a shockwave of arrests in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and other countries throughout Europe. Prior to the operation, the network was a safe haven for criminals, enabling drug trafficking, murder, and other heavy crimes, while preserving criminals’ anonymity via untraceable messages. Now, it’s a very different story. Beginning in April 2020, Kraag and his team began intercepting EncroChat messages and monitoring them in real-time, allowing them to ‘see’ live criminal activity and anticipate criminals’ every move. “It was as if we were constantly looking over the shoulders of tens of thousands of criminals,” Kraag said. In the Netherlands alone, the data is connected to more than 350 heavy crime cases and is already providing evidence on more than 100 of those cases. And in the United Kingdom, those numbers are exponentially larger. “The criminal community is in distress, they know they are going to get caught. We now know the key leaders and the key networks and how they relate to each other, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Kraag says. “The hundreds of arrests from the past few weeks – those are just the quick wins. What is more valuable now is all the data we have access to. We can do an in-depth investigation of that and take out all of those criminal networks. We now have a blueprint of the underworld.” But it’s a blueprint that is scattered amongst millions of messages, requiring significant time and expertise to effectively parse through – not to mention the added urgency of saving innocent lives and preventing violence. “You can imagine, it’s pretty stressful for me as the director because if a murder were to happen and the details were in the messages and we did not intervene on time, it would be on our account,” Kraag says. “It’s a big responsibility.” Kraag is quick to credit his team members and French counterparts when discussing the success of the operation. “It’s a team effort,” he says. “There are many men and women working day and night on these investigations.” As Kraag and his team continue analyzing the data, they are relying heavily on a crypto analysis team. Hundreds of analysts, with the help of artificial intelligence capabilities, are sifting through the millions of messages to not only catch criminals in the immediate future, but also anticipate and prevent crimes for generations to come. “We are going to benefit from this for years on out,” says Kraag. “This truly was the biggest investigative operation that we’ve run.” Beyond the sheer magnitude and value of the data, the EncroChat hack has been a novel operation on several accounts. Typically, investigations begin by discovering and building evidence to support a case. The EncroChat hack has flipped that on its head. Kraag and his team already have all of the evidence, and instead need to look for the cases that are connected to that evidence. It’s a different way of investigating, and what Kraag calls, a “mind change” on the investigative side. While Kraag emphasizes that there were many players in the success of this operation, his leadership and intelligence undoubtedly played a key role. He says much of how he operates and leads in his current position relates back to his 14-year military career, including the lessons he learned both on the field and in the classroom at NPS. Kraag still uses an approach he learned in the special forces, which was also the focus of his master’s thesis at NPS – a concept known as ‘the commander’s intent.’ “You need to have a focus, a mission. Don’t tell people what they should do, but give them an intention of what they should focus on.” This approach has helped him in both his military career and now in his position leading criminal investigations. “My thesis at NPS was all about the fact that if you don’t have your focus aligned, if people are not on board, you can give something a lot of energy but it will not succeed.” Overall, Kraag says his time at NPS was an important time to “pause and reflect.” When he arrived in Monterey, he had just returned from his fifth tour, this time from Afghanistan. He says it was a welcomed break from the purely operational side of things. “In Europe, we don’t have a university that gives scientific degrees in special operations, so for special ops guys NPS is a cherished experience. We dig into that time to reflect on the bigger meaning of what we do and how to move it into a strategic level of analysis.” During that time of strategic analysis at NPS, he says he realized that in military special operations and criminal investigations – including the latest EncroChat operation – success doesn’t happen instantaneously. “I’ve learned the biggest successes are in baby steps,” he says. “As long as you have your focus right, baby steps are fine. You will move forward.” Kraag and his team, along with the French authorities, were preparing for the EncroChat operation many months before they compromised the criminal network. Indeed, it required lots of baby steps to lead to the eventual interception of millions of criminal messages and hundreds of arrests. With millions more messages left to analyze, the work is not done. Kraag and his team will continue taking those incremental steps to create a safer future for residents of the Netherlands and other countries across Europe. “I believe this operation will help us solve cases we never could have solved without this data,” Kraag says. “It’s a game changer.” .

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