The hidden hand in Yugoslav war
By Gary Wilson
The following is excerpted from a chapter in the
soon-to-be-released book "Hidden Agenda," published by the
International Action Center. The book will be available online
from Leftbooks.com.
On June 25, 2001, U.S. KFOR forces in Macedonia were
surrounded by angry workers and farmers trying to block several
busloads of mercenaries who had been terrorizing the region.
The terrorist force of the so-called National Liberation Army
had been defeated and was about to be captured--or killed if
any resisted capture.
The U.S. forces were on a rescue mission, not to rescue the
Macedonian workers and farmers who had been terrorized, but to
rescue the defeated National Liberation Army mercenaries.
The U.S. government's "Radio Free Europe" described the
confrontation the next day. "Angry crowds blocked the convoy
and forced it to split up into at least three sections," RFE
reported.
The convoy "did not make it to the intended goal, the
village of Lipkovo in the northern border zone. A group of
around 10 buses was held up" by 1,000 angry civilians in the
village of Umin Do. 1
Why were U.S. military paratroopers rescuing a band of
mercenary terrorists? Col. David H. Hackworth, a retired U.S.
Army officer and syndicated columnist, says the operation was
undertaken because the 17 lead officers of the mercenary force
were all former U.S. military officers working under contract
to the Pentagon.2
Hackworth is a supporter of George W. Bush, who he says is
simply cleaning up a mess created by Bill Clinton and his
administration.
While the Clinton administration was certainly up to its
eyeballs in intrigue and worse in the Balkans, the covert
operations had begun during the previous Republican
administration of the first George Bush.
Since the successful Yugoslav socialist revolution following
World War II, both Democratic and Republican administrations
have shared an obsession with the Balkans not unlike their
obsession with Cuba.
This obsession has involved both open and hidden operations
against both Yugoslavia and Cuba, including military attacks
using mercenary forces recruited from the exile communities in
the U.S. The obsession had nothing to do with any alleged
threat from the Balkans or from Cuba. It came from Washington's
fear and hatred of the successful socialist revolutions in both
places.
In March 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower secretly approved
a CIA plan to invade Cuba. The idea was to use U.S.-trained
Cuban mercenaries as a cover for the invasion. Once the attack
began, U.S. military planes would arrive to "help" the
mercenaries, who were called Cuban liberation fighters in the
U.S. media. The Cuban revolutionary leaders soon knew of the
plan. They publicly warned the people that an invasion was
coming. The people of Cuba rallied together and put down the
CIA-planned mercenary invasion. While the Bay of Pigs invasion
failed, something similar played out in the Balkans, but with a
very different ending. Yugoslavia was targeted for the 1990s
version of the Bay of Pigs, including a mercenary army
recruited from exiles in the United States. In the war on
Yugoslavia, the so-called Atlantic Brigade was a special
U.S.-trained mercenary force.3
The operation went into high gear with the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. A detailed account of the key role the
NATO powers played in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s
can be found in the book NATO in the Balkans, published
by the International Action Center.4
The Balkans version of the Bay of Pigs came with the
U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign in 1999 that was justified in
the media by claims that it was supporting Albanian freedom
fighters, the Kosovo Liberation Army. This KLA is also the core
of the National Liberation Army that was rescued by U.S. forces
in Macedonia. What is left out of almost all the media stories
is the role of the CIA in building up the KLA, just as it built
up the Cuban counter-revolutionary mercenary force for the Bay
of Pigs invasion.
The buildup to the U.S.-NATO war began almost a decade
before, however. The bombing was launched because of Yugoslav
resistance to a takeover by the capitalist powers, particularly
the United States and Germany.
During much of the Cold War, Washington's policy toward
Yugoslavia was aimed at trying to prevent any Yugoslav alliance
with the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries. With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, this policy ended.
Washington's new agenda was the destruction of socialist
Yugoslavia.
The leaders of Yugoslavia immediately saw when this shift in
policy began, but the League of Communists, Yugoslavia's
communist party, was not prepared for the change in
Washington's policy. The Yugoslav leadership had become soft in
the years when Washington was showering Yugoslavia with
favors.
But the League of Communists had a revolutionary history and
had led the partisan victory over the Nazi invasion during
World War II. It also had the allegiance of the workers in all
the republics that made up Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav party had never abandoned its socialist goals
and when Washington's policy shifted, a new political
leadership emerged that was prepared to defend the
revolutionary gains made in Yugoslavia.
On Jan. 25, 1991, a remarkable document was read to military
units all across Yugoslavia. It has become known as the
"Generals' Manifesto" because the authors were leading generals
in the Yugoslav military.5
The manifesto was an assessment of the world situation and
an exposure of the expected attacks by the NATO powers. It was
a call for unity in Yugoslavia and for preparations to fight to
defend the socialist revolution.
It began with a statement that a new period had begun, and
an assessment of the developments in the Soviet Union. As long
as the USSR remained, the manifesto stated, the Western powers'
ability to act against Yugoslavia was limited. But the Soviet
Union was in turmoil and its future was uncertain at that
time.
The manifesto continued: "In Yugoslavia, socialism has not
yet been finished off, brought to its knees. Yugoslavia has
managed to withstand, albeit at a high cost, the first attack
and wave of anti-communist hysteria. Real prospects of
maintaining the country as a federative and socialist community
have been preserved." At that time, most of the socialist
states in Eastern Europe had fallen.
"The West has realized that the Yugoslav idea and socialist
option have much deeper roots than they had envisaged, so that
the overthrow of socialism in Yugoslavia is not the same thing
as in other countries. This is why we can expect that they will
modify the method of their action and move to an even stronger
attack. It would be very important for them to achieve complete
success in Yugoslavia. For they would be cutting into a country
where revolution had been authentic."
The manifesto assessed the multiple fronts of attack that
were developing. It noted the CIA's declaration that
"Yugoslavia will fall apart in 18 months." This declaration,
the manifesto said, revealed the CIA's intentions.
"The same is true of the State Department declaration of
Dec. 25, 1990"--that the U.S. would intervene to support the
"democratic processes," code words that mean the U.S. was
preparing to openly intervene to overturn the government. "The
essence of the message is quite clear: they will overthrow
socialism in Yugoslavia even at the price of its
disintegration," the manifesto stated.
There have been many accounts that have revealed the role of
the NATO powers in the subsequent breakup of Yugoslavia,
particularly by U.S. and German operations. In the end it took
a full-scale war, a massive bombardment of Yugoslavia
reminiscent of the Nazi bombardment during World War II. Only a
full-scale war had the possibility of crushing socialism in
Yugoslavia.
To justify that war, however, the NATO powers could not
openly declare that their goal was to kill the last kernel of a
socialist state in Europe. Like many aggressors in the past,
the United States presented a humanitarian pretext for
launching the war. In this case, it was to protect the Kosovo
Liberation Army, presented as the defenders of Albanian
national rights.
In the U.S. and Western European media the Kosovo Liberation
Army was painted in the most glowing terms. They were the new
freedom fighters defending the Albanian people from oppression.
The African National Congress and its guerrilla military,
Umkhonto we Sizwe, never received such favorable coverage in
all its years of fighting apartheid in South Africa. That's
because the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe really were revolutionary
freedom fighters.
The KLA was like the right-wing Cuban "freedom fighters"
acting on behalf of the CIA. The core of the KLA was the
so-called Atlantic Brigade, mercenaries recruited mostly from
the anti-Communist Albanian exile community in the United
States. It was trained and armed by the CIA.
The CIA's role began at least a year before NATO's bombing
of Serbia and Kosovo, and probably as early as 1996.
The Intelligence Newsletter reported shortly after
the NATO bombing began on March 24, 1999:
"Sources close to the German intelligence agencies say the
CIA and BND [Germany's spy organization, the Federal
Information Service] are both working to provide support for
the Kosovo Liberation Army through a series of front companies
located mainly in Germany. The companies are used to pump money
into accounts in Switzerland held by Albanian sympathizers.
"In the field, KLA guerrillas are armed chiefly with light
weapons that the CIA has drawn from stocks accumulated covertly
in Albania."6
The Scotsman newspaper was more specific about the
covert role of the U.S. government:
"The rag-tag Kosovar Albanian rebels were taken in hand by
the Virginia-based company of professional soldiers, Military
Professional Resources Inc. An outfit of former U.S. marines,
helicopter pilots and special forces teams, MPRI's missions for
the U.S. government have run from flying Colombian helicopter
gunships to supplying weapons to the Croatian
army."7
In 1995, MPRI armed and trained the Croatian army for
"Operation Storm," a brutal campaign that forced over 200,000
Serbs out of their long-time homes in the Krajina region of
Croatia. The Scotsman says that following Operation
Storm (and well before the U.S.-NATO war), the MPRI was arming
and training the KLA: "MPRI subcontracted some of the training
program to two British security companies, ensuring that
between 1998 and June 1999 the KLA was being armed, trained and
assisted in Italy, Turkey, Kosovo and Germany by the Americans,
the German external intelligence service and former and serving
members of Britain's 22 SAS Regiment."
Colonel Hackworth reported in his column that the 17
military commanders rescued in Macedonia in June 2001 were all
from MPRI and that 70 percent of the equipment used by the
mercenaries was U.S.-made. Here is how Hackworth describes the
role of MPRI:
"[The 17 were] members of a high-ticket Rent-a-Soldier
outfit called MPRI--Military Professional Resources
Incorporated--that operates in the shadow of the Pentagon and
has been hired by the CIA and our State Department for ops in
ex-Yugoslavia. The company, headed up by former U.S. Army Chief
of Staff Gen. Carl E. Vuono, is filled with former U.S. Army
personnel, from generals to senior sergeants, all of whom draw
handsome wages on top of their Army retired salaries. ...
"This is the same outfit that in the early 1990s trained
Croatian soldiers for Operation Storm--which resulted in the
brutal ethnic cleansing of 200,000 unarmed Serb civilians--as
well as bringing Croatian Gen. Agim Ceku up to speed. Ceku, who
played a central role in the slaughter, is alleged to have
killed thousands of other Serb civilians before joining the KLA
in 1999, where he again received training and assistance from
CIA and State Department contractors operating overtly and
covertly throughout ex-Yugoslavia and around the
globe."8
In another report in The Scotsman headlined "CIA
Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army," the opening sentence declares
that "American intelligence agents have admitted they helped
train the Kosovo Liberation Army before NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia."9 In fact, the
so-called cease-fire monitors from the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) headed by U.S.
Ambassador William Walker were really a front for a CIA support
operation for the KLA, The Scotsman reports:
"Central Intelligence Agency officers were cease-fire
monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the
KLA and giving American military training manuals and field
advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police. ...
American policy made air strikes inevitable. ... Some European
diplomats in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, concluded from
[William] Walker's background that he was inextricably linked
with the CIA."
The report adds a quote from a CIA source: "[The OSCE
monitors were] a CIA front, gathering intelligence on the KLA's
arms and leadership. ... [They would advise the KLA on] which
hill to avoid, which wood to go behind, that sort of
thing."
The Scotsman report says that the CIA's role in
building up the KLA actually began in 1996, the first year of
KLA operations in Kosovo.
Another report, this one in the Ottawa Citizen,
published in Canada's capital, also details how the "CIA
trained Kosovo rebels."10 This
report says U.S. intelligence agents have admitted that they
trained the KLA well before NATO's bombing. The report also
identifies the OSCE's observer team headed by William Walker as
a CIA front.
It also reports that when the OSCE monitors left Kosovo a
week before air strikes began, "many of its satellite
telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed
to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in
touch with NATO and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the
mobile phone number of Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO
commander."
1 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
broadcast transcript, June 26, 2001, www.rferl.org.
2 July 9, 2001, column by Col.
David Hackworth, King Syndicate, www.hackworth.com.
3 See the Philadelphia Inquirer's
"Crisis in Kosovo" report for a description of the arrival of
the Atlantic Brigade;
www.philly.com/specials/99/kosovo/Raw/KLA0418.asp.
4 "NATO in the Balkans: Voices of
Opposition," International Action Center, New York,
www.iacenter.org.
5 "The General's Manifesto" was
reprinted in newspapers across Yugoslavia. An English
translation of excerpts from the version printed in the Zagreb,
Croatia, newspaper Vjesnik on Jan. 31, 1991, appears in "The
Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas, Verso, 1993.
6 Intelligence Newsletter, April
18, 1999, www.indigo-net.com.
7 "Private U.S. firm training
both sides in Balkans," The Scotsman, March 2, 2001,
www.scottsman.com.
8 Hackworth, op. cit.
9 "CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla
army," The Scotsman, March 12, 2000, www.scottsman.com.
10 "CIA trained Kosovo rebels,"
The Ottawa Citizen, March 12, 2000, www.ottawacitizen.com.
Reprinted from the Feb. 14, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
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