http://balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/17102/
INTERVIEW- Stanisic Case 'A Classic Espionage Tale'
| 03 March 2009 | by Branka Trivic
Journalist Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times speaks to Balkan Insight
about the “classic espionage tale” of how the trusted chief of Slobodan
Milosevic's intelligence service, Jovica Stanisic, was in fact working
with the CIA in the 1990s.
Miller’s story in the LA Times made headlines in Serbia and the Balkans.
He got a lead into the story from intelligence sources in Washington,
who told him that the CIA submitted confidential documents in Stanisic's
war crimes trial in The Hague listing Stanisic's contributions and
attesting to his “helpful role”
Miller says that the CIA got involved not because they want the charges
against Stanisic dropped, but because they “are interested in having a
fuller account of Stanisic’s role presented, because they regard the
case against him at ICTY not necessarily as inaccurate but as incomplete.”
“As I said in the story, they did not see Stanisic as a choirboy,”
Miller told Balkan Insight.
“When you talk to people who work in espionage, this is often the case.
Because of the nature of that job, of that assignment, they are working
with people who don’t have unblemished records, it would be difficult
for them to be effective if they only worked with people who had
unblemished records.”
“People in Belgrade who have been following the career of Jovica
Stanisic would say that this was a guy who was an expert in his field;
he was a highly trained and highly effective spy,” Miller said. “I think
his motivation may have been that he wanted to know what the United
States was up to, he didn’t believe that Milosevic was taking the
country in the right direction – so he wanted to influence events. I
think he saw himself as an important guy who could pull strings behind
the scenes to make things happen in Belgrade.”
Miller said that “in 1993, at CIA prodding”, Stanisic “pressured Ratko
Mladic to briefly stop the shelling of Sarajevo. He later went on to
work with the CIA trying to locate and help rescue NATO troops in Bosnia
who had been taken hostage in 1995. He was trying to influence the
people inside the Milosevic regime. He became something of a conduit to
the United States, which obviously did not have good relationships with
the government in Belgrade. At times they would make their case to
Stanisic, they would issue warnings to him, they would say: if your
government continued to do this, then this is how we are going to
respond. And he would work inside the government in Belgrade to try to
make sure that it didn’t happen. He became, as somebody put it to me, a
sort of an action agent – somebody who was willing to listen to the
warnings of the West and work inside his own government to try to
influence the outcome, so that the crisis could be contained.”
Miller said Stanisic “was providing information about what was happening
inside the government there at the time when the United States was
desperate for that information” but had also “established certain
boundaries.”
“He was never what you would call a CIA asset, he was never a paid agent
of the CIA He never accepted assignments from the CIA. He was involved
in sharing information with the Agency, but he kept it on his terms. I
think it’s safe to say that he was not in agreement with Milosevic and
that there was always conflict between these two people, but at the same
time he was a loyal Serb. I don’t think he wanted ever to betray his
country or his government.”
His case was very complicated, and everything was in shades of gray,
Miller added.
“That’s sort of a classic tale of espionage.”
Miller said retired CIA operatives had on occasion visited Stanisic in
hospital in The Hague “but it’s not like…they are communicating with him
every day or even every week”, but rather more of a relationship with
“somebody from their past that they keep in touch with.”
“He was never completely an agent for them, he was never a paid asset,
so the idea that they (CIA) would somehow tried to give him a new
identity and whisked him to safety may not have occurred to them,”
Miller said. “And I don’t know whether they anticipated that he was
going to find himself in this much trouble. I mean it was five years
after he was fired by Milosevic before he was finally indicted and sent
to the Hague, so I am not sure that they thought that this would ever
happen. I don’t know that Jovica Stanisic thought that this was going to
happen to him“
Serbian News Network - SNN
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http://www.antic.org/
