Newsweek: CIA Nixed Financing for Serbian Insiders' Plot To Overthrow Milosevic
NEW YORK, April 4 /PRNewswire/ -- CIA operatives in the Balkans alerted their bosses in the early '90s about an opportunity to help Slobodan Milosevic's inner circle overthrow the Serbian strongman -- but were turned down, Newsweek reports in the current issue.
(Photo: newscom.com )
The Balkans operatives secretly brought the lead conspirator, a political adviser to Milosevic, to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The adviser made his pitch in the clandestine Central Europe Division: he and a handful of other Serbian government insiders were prepared to overthrow Milosevic -- with the backing of key Yugoslav Army and Air Force generals. Milosevic's inner circle considered him unpredictable and possibly unstable. The military feared that Milosevic's long-term designs on Kosovo and Montenegro would touch off a confrontation with the West. The plotters wanted financing for the coup and a pledge from Washington to lift economic sanctions and speed approval of loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank if it succeeded, reports Washington Correspondent Gregory Vistica in Newsweek's April 12, 1999 cover package, '''We're Trapped' -- Horror and Hostages: How America Stumbled Into a No-Win War'' (on newsstands Monday, April 5).
''They were going to do this with assurances of support afterwards,'' one source who was present at the meeting told Newsweek. But nothing came of it: Langley declined the deal, and since then Milosevic has repeatedly purged his inner circle to guard against such treachery. In hindsight, several former CIA officials say they may have missed a chance to head off the current crisis in Kosovo. They speculate that John Deutch, then the CIA director, who they say was briefed on the coup plot, may have withheld U.S. support partly because he was skeptical about covert operations in general. And some U.S. officials considered Milosevic, an elected head of state, indispensable to negotiations then underway to end the bloodletting in Bosnia. Deutch didn't return phone calls, and CIA spokesman Bill Harlow says he was not aware of any such plot. ''If I was, I couldn't talk about it,'' he added.
At the time, the CIA had deeply penetrated Milosevic's regime, according to former CIA officers. ''We were doing all kinds of dicey things at the time, covertly,'' says one agency veteran. In the run-up to the 1995 Balkans peace agreement reached in Dayton, Ohio, ''we knew what was going on, when it was going to happen, and we told everybody who needed to know,'' says a former CIA official. ''We had the place [Belgrade] wired.'' Dayton may have been the pinnacle of the CIA's access -- the agency bugged rooms in the Air Force barracks where the meetings were held, with the knowledge of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the chief negotiator, and senior U.S. officials, CIA sources said. Holbrook refused to comment.
SOURCE: Newsweek
Posted for discussion and educational purposes only. Not for commercial use.
biz.yahoo.com
|
