World Report 7/6/98
Hunting war criminals
The first account of secret U.S. missions in Bosnia

BY RICHARD J. NEWMAN

An unusual shipment arrived at the U.S. base in Tuzla, Bosnia, early last December. Inside the hull of a C-17 cargo jet were several 8-foot-high metal containers--modern-day Trojan horses filled with a total of about 65 commandos from the Navy's premier counterterrorism unit, SEAL Team 6. Handlers whisked the human payload into a nearby hangar to avoid notice by Russian, Polish, and other little-trusted allied troops on the base. Once the SEALs had been unpacked in secrecy and joined by others who drove in from Germany, they headed to CIA-run safe houses in the surrounding countryside. Their mission: to apprehend five PIFWCs (pronounced PIF-wix), an acronym for "persons indicted for war crimes," in northern Bosnia.

For a year and a half following the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in December 1995, U.S. leaders insisted that arresting people indicted for war crimes in Bosnia was not the responsibility of the allied peacekeeping forces there. That stance began to shift last summer, when NATO troops made their first arrests of suspected war criminals. Now, U.S. News has learned that for at least the past year, a U.S. special operations task force has been conducting one of the broadest covert operations since the Vietnam War, gathering intelligence on PIFWCs and helping to seize them in a series of raids. The group reports directly to Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's top military official, and operates outside of normal NATO channels in Bosnia. Only a few NATO commanders there, American or otherwise, know of its existence.

The task force is so large for a special operations project--involving 300 people or more--that one participant says its leaders "are violating their own doctrine," which is to keep operations as small as possible and do them quickly. So far, the cost of the effort is at least $50 million, according to the participant.

The results, however, have been very limited, because the secret operations have been stymied by security problems, distrust among allies, a lack of useful intelligence, and disagreements among senior officials over how much to risk in the attempt to nab PIFWCs. For instance, after the SEAL Team 6 members had been dispersed to their hideouts last December, General Clark held a videoconference with Gen. Eric Shinseki, the commander of all peacekeeping troops in Bosnia. Shinseki argued there was not enough "actionable," or specific, intelligence to guarantee the success of their planned raid. He asked for further details on the principal target--a high-ranking Bosnian Serb official named Blagoje Simic, who oversaw a Bosnian Serb police squad that allegedly murdered one man and beat and abused several others in 1992. Shinseki wanted to know how many Serbian special police lived in Simic's apartment building and might fight to defend him. How many dogs lived there? What were the staircases made of? One intelligence official thought the requests were so excessive that he walked out of the room in frustration, according to a source familiar with the conference.

Pulling the plug. Shinseki ultimately gave the intelligence staffers 72 hours to come up with the information. But the next day, a hard-line Bosnian Serb official told a U.S. soldier that he knew special operations forces were planning a raid. When word reached Shinseki, he canceled the mission, fearing its security had been blown. The SEALs flew home. Despite an investigation, the mission's leaders never determined how the Serbs learned of their plan.

Even though that raid never went forward, the presence of dozens of U.S. commandos in Bosnia reflects the intense interest among some of America's top decision makers in rounding up the people responsible for the Bosnian war's most gruesome events, including mass executions, systematic rapes, organized sniping at civilians, torture of prisoners, and establishment of concentration camps. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is well known as an advocate of aggressive efforts to arrest PIFWCs. General Clark also "is passionate about getting these guys," says a NATO staffer--"either seeing them killed or [delivered to] the Hague," where an international tribunal has publicly charged 74 people with war crimes. (Others have been secretly charged in sealed indictments.) One factor motivating Clark, says the source, is the feeling that he has been personally betrayed by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. Clark helped negotiate the Dayton agreement to end the war. Milosevic was a key signer of that agreement but has since backed away from many of his promises, including turning over indicted war criminals. Clark declined an interview request.

The formation of a U.S.-dominated task force to track down PIFWCs gained momentum after Clark took over the top NATO military job from Gen. George Joulwan last July. The centerpiece--code-named Amber Star--has been a secret cooperative effort involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands aimed at all PIFWCs in Bosnia. But a much more sensitive part of the operation was a U.S.-only effort code-named Green Light, focusing exclusively on Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb political leader. He is wanted for his alleged role in the deaths of thousands of Bosnian civilians, many shot in mass executions. Karadzic resides principally in the part of the country under the control of French troops, who U.S. officials believe are sympathetic toward Karadzic and unwilling to apprehend him.

Green Light was designed as a way to monitor Karadzic without having to rely on French input. The main intelligence-gathering effort, code-named Buckeye, involved a mix of snoopers from the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department, along with operatives from a supersecret U.S. Army unit known as Torn Victor who are trained as high-risk intelligence gatherers. Analysts in Sarajevo and elsewhere monitored Karadzic's phones and tried to track him using other technical tools, while human spies worked on the ground in Pale, Karadzic's base of operations. The French were not informed of the program.

Detachment Delta. In September of last year, more than 100 people involved in the overall effort to arrest PIFWCs met at Fort Bragg, N.C., to begin drawing up plans for seizing Karadzic and others. Senior leaders gave the Army's secretive Detachment Delta responsibility for the Karadzic mission. But they decided they did not have enough intelligence to predict where he would be on any given day--a key component of a successful raid.

At about the same time, Karadzic went underground--he stopped appearing in public and making phone calls on unsecure lines, which Western spy agencies were able to monitor. French and U.S. officials launched a cooperative effort to track him down. In two separate operations, eight U.S. troops belonging to the U.S. Army's Delta and Torn Victor units put on French uniforms and traveled to Pale, hoping to conduct surveillance on Karadzic while his guard was down.

Over time, U.S. forces have gathered information on allies as well as on Karadzic. An official involved with the task force told U.S. News that for two weeks last year, U.S. operatives monitored Italian communications in Pale and Sarajevo because of suspicions that the Italians were leaking information to Karadzic. Nothing incriminating was found.

A source also says that last fall, top U.S. commanders suspected a female French officer of having unauthorized conversations with Bosnian Serb officials in Pale. U.S. operatives placed a "beacon" on her car, enabling them to follow her movements. Her phone was tapped, and she was overheard arranging a meeting with associates of Karadzic. U.S. planners hoped the beacon on her car would let their spies monitor where she went. But she took a different car, and the observers lost track of her. They never confirmed whether the meeting took place. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said that senior Defense Department officials have no knowledge of this episode. He declined to comment on any other operation detailed in this article.

The climate of mistrust among NATO allies appears to have bogged down attempts to haul in PIFWCs. Earlier this year, U.S. officials publicly accused a French Army major of providing key details of PIFWC arrest plans to Karadzic in a series of clandestine meetings last summer. The French acknowledged the breach but insisted that the officer acted on his own. U.S. officials, however, still refuse to share sensitive intelligence with French, Italian, Russian, Polish, and other allied troops, even when it applies to the sectors of Bosnia they patrol. That creates a need for multiple layers of bureaucracy--some that include allies, for instance, and some that do not--and affects the ability of the task force to act quickly.

Casualties expected. That may be one reason why, according to U.S. officials, there has not been a clear-cut opportunity to seize Karadzic since monitoring efforts began to intensify last year. Even if there were, other factors would make a snatch operation inherently risky. Although published reports suggest that Karadzic's security detail has shrunk recently as his power base has started to slip, he is still surrounded by 60 to 70 well-trained and well-armed bodyguards who would very likely inflict casualties on any attackers. U.S. commanders also worry that success in seizing PIFWCs could provoke violence against their troops. And some analysts suspect that members of Karadzic's security detail may have orders to kill their charge instead of letting him be taken alive in a raid, to ensure that he does not implicate political superiors such as Milosevic in war crimes. "Killing him--that would be bad," says a senior Western official in Sarajevo. It is critical, he says, that Karadzic's Bosnian Serb supporters see him as the subject of a methodical judicial process, and not as the victim of Western vigilantism.

Attempts to haul in other PIFWCs have been more successful. British troops seized one PIFWC and killed another in a shootout last July, and got two more this April. Dutch commandos apprehended another two last December, shooting one of the suspects three times after he fired at them. Sources say U.S. forces were heavily involved in planning that raid and even provided guides and drivers for the Dutch forces.

Results the second time. The United States has had some successes it can call its own, too. A few weeks after the SEAL raid was canceled in December, U.S. commanders sent intelligence staffers out to gather the additional information that General Shinseki had asked for during the videoconference with General Clark. The information came in, and the SEALs returned to Bosnia. This time, they got results. Western officials reported that in two separate events, three PIFWCs "surrendered." But a source involved with those events says, "These were apprehensions pure and simple." One suspect named Miroslav Tadic was physically tackled by SEALs. Two other high-priority subjects--including Blagoje Simic, the target of the aborted December ambush--proved elusive. They are still at large.

Since the first British raid last July, 23 PIFWCs have been taken into custody or surrendered. But most of them have been relatively low-level soldiers, police, and paramilitary troopers whose crimes, if they are found guilty, were in following orders, not formulating them. Three were even cleared for lack of evidence. Senior U.S. officials in Washington acknowledge frustration that more high-ranking PIFWCs directly responsible for mass murder and genocide have not been taken into custody. But they also argue that the slow but steady pace of progress is putting pressure on Karadzic and other "icon PIFWCs." "We're inculcating into people's minds that these guys must be turned in," says a senior Pentagon official. "That strategy is working." If it doesn't, there are always the commandos to fall back on.