THE LATE President Milosevic’s secret police chief and organiser of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States’ top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92.
The claim that from 1992 until the end of the decade, Jovica Stanisic, head of Serbia’s murderous DB Secret Police, was regularly informing his CIA handlers of the thinking in Milosevic’s inner circle has shocked the region.
Stanisic is said to have loyally served his two masters for eight years. He is facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
In the terrifying years of Yugoslavia’s internecine wars, he acted as the willing “muscle” behind Milosevic’s genocidal campaigns in Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia, including Sebrenica.
According to the charges he faces, Stanisic was “part of a joint criminal enterprise that included former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian politicians”.
Dermot Groome, The Hague’s chief prosecutor, has specifically accused him of sending in the Serb Scorpion and Red Beret death squads into the states seeking independence from Belgrade. Stanisic has pleaded not guilty.
Like in a Cold War spy thriller, Serbia’s secret police chief met his CIA handlers in safe houses, parks and boats on the river Sava to betray his master’s action plans. He provided, it is claimed, information on the whereabouts of Nato hostages, aided CIA operatives in their search for Muslim mass graves and helped the US set up secret bases in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace accord.
