Spies battle for skies over Belgrade : chemical war now ?
Another war is being waged in the Balkans alongside the daily air
attacks
By Richard Norton-Taylor, Ian Traynor in Bonn and Nicholas Watt
Wednesday April 28, 1999
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>
"After enduring weeks of bombardment by Nato pilots, Slobodan
Milosevic summoned his military brass to a meeting in Belgrade this month to
inform them of a blood-curdling plan. If the allies dared to launch a ground
invasion, he declared, Yugoslavia would unleash some of its deadly supplies
of sarin toxin.
Members of the Yugoslav army general staff knew the warning was not
aimed at their ears: Milosevic hoped his threat would be picked up by the
array of allied electronic eavesdroppers circling Belgrade.
His gamble paid dividends. Within days, Washington newspapers were
reporting of the chemical threat and President Bill Clinton warned of a
'swift and overwhelming' response to such an attack.
The quick reaction served as a graphic illustration of the huge
spying war being waged in the Balkans alongside the daily air attacks on
Yugoslavia.
From the sky, US and French satellites, U2 spy planes and drone
aircraft monitor troop movements in Kosovo and throughout Serbia. American
satellites provide high-resolution pictures which are forwarded instantly
for analysis.
US Hunter drones photograph terrain using 180-degree cameras.
Computerised images of the ground are constantly updated.
The German Luftwaffe is also providing crucial intelligence,
although it has lost four of 21 drones, at a cost of £3.5m.
Sophisticated electronic equipment is being deployed to eavesdrop on
the Belgrade regime. The US national security agency, based at Fort Meade in
Maryland, runs a web of communications monitoring stations worldwide that
pick up phone, fax, telex and email traffic.
On the ground allied troops, possibly including the SAS, are
believed to have been sent into Kosovo on covert operations to help direct
allied pilots to 'designated' targets. Britain never confirms SAS
deployments, but General Sir Charles Guthrie, the chief of the defence staff
and a former SAS commander, has admitted the allies are receiving
intelligence 'from the ground'.
SAS and special forces teams from other Nato countries forged strong
links with the Kosovo Liberation Army when they were placed in the
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitoring teams
stationed in Kosovo before the bombings. The KLA passes information to the
allies by radio, cellular and satellite telephones given to the guerrillas
by the Osce teams. Britain has described the KLA as Nato's 'eyes and ears'
on the ground.
Robin Cook gave a clear indication yesterday that Nato has agents on
the ground, or is successfully intercepting military communications, when he
said hundreds of Yugoslav forces were deserting every week. 'The response of
the reserves to mobilisation has been so poor that the special police are
now going from door to door as press gangs,' the foreign secretary said.
Expensive spying operations are not just confined to the allies. A
German defence analyst alleges that Moscow has scores of lorries crammed
with eavesdropping equipment monitoring communications posts across the US.
Up to 1,000 Russian agents already work at the Lourdes listening
station on Cuba, which can monitor all American satellite communications. It
is widely suspected that Kremlin agents are stationed at Nato headquarters
in Brussels.
Russia has 80 satellites in space dedicated to gathering electronic
intelligence and a fleet of 60 espionage ships, one of which, the Liman, has
been sent to the Mediterranean.
Some of this information is believed to have been passed to
Yugoslavia by the Russian intelligence agency, GRU. Boris Yeltsin is
reported to have told Vladislav Shertyuk, the head of Fapsi, the Russian
equivalent of Britain's GCHQ, to pass some of his material to Mr Milosevic.
The Russian newspaper, Kommersant, reported that Moscow's radar and
satellite reconnaissance systems had provided the Serbs with detailed
intelligence about Nato air operations, including the number and types of
planes taking off from Italian bases. This may explain why the Serbs have
not needed to use their radar and air-defence systems as much as Nato
expected.
Independent sources in Serbia say the extensive precautions taken by
Tito to withstand attacks from Nato or the Warsaw Pact may explain the
defence of the Serbs' air-defence system. Tito placed the system in secure
bunkers, many of which were built to withstand nuclear strikes. Radar
systems have been placed on trains and trucks which move around or are
hidden in tunnels and forests.
The Yugoslavs, whose intelligence officers are highly rated by some
western analysts, appear to have picked up another useful tactic from Iraq,
whose officials have advised Belgrade on their nine-year conflict with the
west. The Serbs are understood to have assembled thousands of fake missiles
that are indistinguishable from the air. The wooden fakes are moved around
the country, and many have reportedly been hit by Nato bombs.
While Yugoslavia is making good use of Russian help, Nato has been
well served by intelligence from the CIA, British intelligence which is
using the listening post at the Akrotiri air base in Cyprus and the French
and Germans.
Many Nato strikes have been of pinpoint accuracy. Barely a leaf was
disturbed on the trees outside the Yugoslav interior ministry when the
building was destroyed this month, indicating the allies had good
intelligence on their target.
But some areas of western in telligence have been dangerously
flawed. The failure of satellites to produce 'real-time' intelligence
prompted Nato to send in the drones. Satellites cannot see through cloud and
while they can identify static targets they are far less reliable in
tracking moving ones.
Political intelligence has been woefully inadequate, which has led
to a series of miscalculations by the allies. Before the strikes began, the
CIA provided confusing and hopelessly inaccurate assessments of how Mr
Milosevic would react. 'After enough of a defence to sustain his honour and
assuage his backers, he will quickly sue for peace,' it told Mr Clinton in
January.
When Mr Milosevic agreed in October to withdraw troops and special
police drafted into Kosovo in 1998, a US national intelligence estimate
boasted that the allies had forced him to crack. The deal, it said,
'indicates that Milosevic is susceptible to outside pressure. He will
eventually accept a number of outcomes, from autonomy to provisional status
with final resolution to be determined, as long as he remains the undisputed
leader in Belgrade.'
Such assessments may explain the prediction at the start of the air
campaign by Javier Solana, the Nato secretary general, who said the conflict
would be over by the alliance's 50th anniversary celebrations last weekend.
Tony Blair also seemed to fall for this assessment when he spoke in January
of 'smacking' Mr Milosevic.
In one devastating incident General Wesley Clark, the Nato supreme
commander in day-to-day charge of the war, apparently missed a vital clue
about Mr Milosevic's plans for the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. At the end of
a day of painful negotiations in Belgrade's presidential palace in the runup
to October's agreement, the Yugoslav chief of staff, General Momcilo
Perisic, dismissed his guards, turned up the volume on a television set and
told Gen Clark and General Klaus Naumann of Ger many that he had something
serious to pass on.
'He said the army was the last democratic institution in the country
and that it would be a disaster if his forces were ever destroyed in a
conflict with Nato,' Gen Naumann recalled. 'He gave the impression that for
purely patriotic reasons he wanted to save the army at all costs.'
Weeks later Gen Perisic was fired in a purge of independently minded
officers. Nato intelligence analysts initially dismissed the general's
remarks as part of a personality clash within the Yugoslav military
hierarchy, but they now believe he was trying to send a signal about Mr
Milosevic's plans for clearing Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population.
Mr Milosevic and his inner circle then started to lay plans for
forced expulsions and killings in Kosovo, codenamed Operation Horseshoe.
Again the allies appear to have misread the significance of this plan,
believed to have been passed to Nato by Austrian intelligence after
Christmas.
The Austrians reported that the Serbs would unleash a spring
offensive in Kosovo and other intelligence assessments reported that
Belgrade would launch the operation in mid-March or April. Madeleine
Albright, the US secretary of state, clearly had such reports in mind when
she greeted news of the Recak massacre in January when 45 ethnic Albanians
were killed by Serb forces with the acid remark: 'Spring has come early to
Kosovo.'
The conflicting assessments have provoked a fierce battle in
Washington. Pentagon analysts have distanced themselves from the CIA reports
and insisted that they warned the White House Mr Milosevic would strike at
ethnic Albanians as soon as Nato threatened military action and that he
would use the period of negotiations in Rambouillet to prepare his campaign.
Paul Beaver, the chief spokesman for the Jane's Defence Group, said
the Balkans conflict had highlighted weaknesses in western intelligence.
'The CIA believe that because their technology is so superior their analysis
is always right,' he said. 'In Europe we have good intelligence analysts,
but we do not have the same level of technology as the US.
'This means that the CIA often do not listen to Europeans and they
are forever getting things wrong. They didn't get the date of the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait in 1990 even though we at Jane's could tell what was
happening before Saddam invaded.'
The CIA certainly appears not to have heeded intelligence from
Britain's MI6 about Mr Milosevic's tactics in the runup to the strikes. MI6
is understood to have warned that bombing would accelerate ethnic cleansing.
Some of the allies also complain that Washington is reluctant to
pool intelligence. British sources say weaknesses in intelligence highlight
wider difficulties in coordinating the allied effort among Nato's 19
countries. Intensive work to keep everyone on side, damned by British
ministers as waging 'war by committee', forced Nato to show its hand by
denying there would be no ground assault on Kosovo.
Ministry of defence sources point to two aphorisms learnt by the
greenest of military planners. The first, they said, is that 'no plan
survives the first contact with the enemy'. The second is 'never do what the
enemy expects you to do'. Both appear to have been ignored in the Kosovo
crisis, with grave consequences."
(source: The Guardian (UK), April 28, 1999)
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