Sunday, April 18, 1999

Policy, Continued from page 1

The National Intelligence Estimate issued in November concluded that "the October agreement 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."

Still, the estimate said, Milosevic would accept a new status for Kosovo "only when he believes his power is endangered" by "insurgents driving up the economic and military costs of holding onto the province, or the West threatening to use sustained and decisive military power against his forces."

U.S. intelligence reported almost immediately that the KLA intended to draw NATO into its fight for independence by provoking Serb forces into further atrocities. Warnings to the rebel leaders from Washington restrained them somewhat, but they assassinated a small-town Serb mayor near Pristina and were believed responsible for the slaying of six Serb youths at the Panda Cafe in Pec on Dec. 14. That served, one U.S. official said, as "the sort of antipode" to Serb violence: "Pec was 'bad Albanians.' And one of our difficulties, particularly with the Europeans . . . was getting them to accept the proposition that the root of the problem is Belgrade."

Yugoslav and irregular Serb forces, meanwhile, began violating their numerical limits almost immediately. But Clinton's advisers saw no benefit, one said at the time, "in making a big fuss about their presence. ... You're not going to get people to bomb over the specific number of troops."

Unarmed European peace monitors reporting to U.S. Ambassador William Walker, meanwhile, were getting the worst of encounters with the Serbs. "We were having our people pulled out of cars and in certain instances being beaten, with a certain brazenness," Walker said in a mobile telephone interview from Macedonia. The Yugoslav army and Interior Ministry Police no longer bothered to invent "a lame excuse" when observers came upon a smoldering village or dead Albanian, he said.

Throughout the late fall and winter, as Clinton moved to the brink and back of bombing Iraq, mid-level policymakers were debating how to save Holbrooke's October deal.

U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, who served as special negotiator for Kosovo, proposed to beef up Walker's observers with helicopters and bodyguards, and to begin training Albanian police and planning an election to which Milosevic had not yet agreed. But "a lot of these required tacit consent from Belgrade," said a NATO diplomat in Brussels at the time.

These proposals culminated in the Status Quo Plus proposal that remained the highest common denominator among Berger, Cohen, Albright and their colleagues. "Our fundamental strategic objectives remain unchanged: promote regional stability and protect our investment in Bosnia; prevent resumption of hostilities in Kosovo and renewed humanitarian crisis; preserve U.S. and NATO credibility," the classified strategy paper said, summarizing the state of play on Jan. 15.

Massacre at Racak

"I wished we had moved faster; all of us."

The first corpse they ran across, beneath a bloody blanket, was headless. More bodies lay scattered singly up the hill, "almost all old men, obviously in their work clothes, bullet holes in the eye, bullet holes in the cranium," Walker said. Then came "a pile of bodies," all in a heap. Helena Ranta, a Finnish forensic doctor, later reported that there were 22 bodies in that pile, 45 dead in all. "There were no indications," she wrote, "of the people being other than unarmed civilians."

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Phillips, Walker's chief of staff, dialed the State Department's Operations Center from the scene and began dictating a grisly report. From there the report moved to the White House Situation Room, which passed it before dawn to Berger. Albright recalled in the interview that she first got word of the massacre around 4:30 a.m. Saturday when her bedside clock radio snapped on with the headlines on WTOP radio news.

Austrian intelligence had recently passed NATO its discovery that Belgrade planned a major spring offensive, code-named Operation Horseshoe. Subsequent intelligence alerts gave various estimates, from mid-March to early April. When Albright learned of the Racak massacre, she called Berger. "Spring," she said sourly, "has come early to Kosovo."

"I wished we had moved faster, all of us," she said in the interview Friday. "I thought, 'These were the kinds of things we were trying to avoid.'‚"

James Steinberg, Berger's deputy at the White House, got his wake-up call directly from Racak at 6 a.m. on Jan. 16, Washington time. Walker "called me at home and gave me his firsthand account, just a very kind of graphic, 'You need to know about this.' My first reaction is this is precisely what we feared. My second was, that's why we wanted the KVM [observer force] in there, because it was going to be harder for them to cover this up."

Albright had other conclusions. According to confidants, she realized that the galvanizing force of the atrocity would not last long. "Whatever threat of force you don't get in the next two weeks you're never getting," one adviser told her, "at least until the next Racak."

When the Principals Committee met again on the evening of Jan. 19, shortly before Clinton gave his State of the Union address, Albright said it was time to discuss the elements of an ultimatum with the allies. And it was also time, she said, for the United States to stop equivocating on whether it would participate in an implementing ground force if a Kosovo peace deal were reached.

Cohen, according to a participant, said talk of ground troops – even those invited by Belgrade – was premature. But neither he nor Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held that view much longer.

Clinton's team swiftly coalesced around several elements of a plan, according to one of those who took part: "One was to make a credible threat of military force. The other was to demand the attendance of the parties at a meeting at which the principal demands would be decided in advance by the Contact Group, including Russia. The basic principles were nonnegotiable, including a NATO implementing force."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to back the U.S. plan for action in Kosovo. (Reuters)

Berger brought the new consensus to Clinton. On Jan. 21, the president outlined it to Britain's Blair in a call from the Oval Office. "If we do military action without a political plan, we will have a problem," Clinton told his friend in London, according to an official government account.

Clinton knew that his NATO allies believed the Albanian guerrillas of the KLA were driving the violence as much as Belgrade. He told Blair: "One thing is to go to [the KLA] and say, 'Look, if you want us to do any more, you have to help too.' They probably have as many violations of cease-fires as Milosevic, though his are more egregious."

Blair agreed: "One of the dangers is if we go smack Milosevic and find the KLA moving on people who don't agree with them."

Albright spent the last week of January orchestrating the trigger for NATO's threat. In the red velvet anteroom of the president's box at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, over champagne and caviar between acts of Verdi's "La Traviata," Albright looked for some common ground with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Would he not agree, she asked, that an ultimatum to Belgrade might help lead Milosevic to a deal?

Ivanov expressed understanding, though not agreement. Then Albright called the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy – the remaining members of the Contact Group – and said she would not agree to another meeting unless they were prepared to commit ahead of time to the ultimatum.

The Die Is Cast

"I hope we don't have to bomb."

On Feb. 1, Clinton met his foreign policy team and the die was cast. According to notes taken at the meeting, described as a paraphrase of Clinton's remarks, the president said he understood from the CIA that Kosovo was more central to Milosevic than Bosnia had been and "he may be sorely tempted to take the first round of airstrikes. I hope we don't have to bomb, but we may need to."

No one spoke of what would happen if the bombing didn't work. "Governments make the decisions that are necessary to make and they leave for another day decisions that are very hard, for eventualities that everybody hopes will never occur," said one official.

Blair's use of the word "smack" and Clinton's "first round" suggested an atmosphere in which the decision-makers anticipated nothing so serious as today's ongoing war. In the final run-up, Albright asked policy planning director Morton Halperin and others to look for unpleasant scenarios that had not been fully considered. They came back with a five-page memo titled, "Surprises." Among the fears: that the Albanians would renege on the agreement; that they would launch military operations; that Milosevic would combine a false peace offensive with continued low-level fighting; that NATO would balk in the end at launching the air campaign; that Russia would mount much more vigorous opposition, perhaps including military aid to Belgrade.

The "hardest one," said one official involved, "was what happened, which was a massive offensive by the Serbs" touched off by the start of NATO bombing. That would leave the administration "vulnerable to the criticism" that it had caused the suffering it sought to prevent. The only answer, the official said, was "to try to get the military resources" to win the war – "as quickly as we could."

By March 16, the CIA sent an alert to senior decision-makers: "Kosovo – Serb Offensive At Hand." Two days later, Kosovo's Albanians finally signed the proposed accord. The same day, by intelligence reckoning, marked the start of Operation Horseshoe.

Holbrooke made a last fruitless trip to Belgrade on March 22. Brig. Gen. George Casey, of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, showed Yugoslav Chief of Staff Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic the next morning that NATO knew the names and locations of all his major units. "If we begin to bomb," Casey said, "you'll be known as the guy who let 50 years of Yugoslav military independence be destroyed."

In a speech at the Brookings Institution in April, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned that NATO must be ready for an extended fight. (AP)

After 23 days of bombing, Albright looked confident and serene in nearly an hour-long interview Friday, convinced, as one confidant put it, that this is "simply the most important thing we have done in the world."

"I think we have shown that this kind of thing cannot stand, that you cannot in 1999 have this kind of barbaric ethnic cleansing," Albright said, face hardening and slashing the air with a hand. "It is ultimately better that the democracies stand up against this kind of evil."