AMERICAN intelligence agents have admitted they
helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's
bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some
European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves
for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs
and Albanians.
Central Intelligence Agency officers
were ceasefire 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.
When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation
in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring,
left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago,
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 General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.
European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim
it was betrayed by an American policy that made
airstrikes inevitable. Some have questioned the motives
and loyalties of William Walker, the American OSCE head
of mission.
"The American agenda consisted of their diplomatic
observers, aka the CIA, operating on completely different
terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE," said a
European envoy.
Several Americans who were directly involved in
CIA activities or close to them have spoken to the
makers of Moral Combat, a documentary to be broadcast
on BBC2 tonight, and to The Sunday Times about their
clandestine roles. Walker dismissed suggestions that
he had wanted war in Kosovo, but admitted the CIA was
almost certainly involved in the countdown to airstrikes.
Initially some "diplomatic observers" arrived,
followed in October by a much larger group that was
eventually swallowed up into the OSCE's "Kosovo
Verification Mission".
Walker said: "Overnight we went from having a
handful of people to 130 or more. Could the agency
have put them in at that point? Sure they could. It's
their job. But nobody told me."
Walker, who was
nominated by Madeleine Albright, the American secretary
of state, was intensely disliked by Belgrade. He had
worked briefly for the United Nations in Croatia.
Ten years earlier he was the American ambassador to
El Salvador when Washington was helping the government
there to suppress leftist rebels while supporting the
contra guerrillas against the Sandinista government
in Nicaragua.
Some European diplomats in Pristina,
Kosovo's capital, concluded from Walker's background
that he was inextricably linked with the CIA.
The picture was muddied by the continued separation
of American "diplomatic observers" from the mission.
The CIA sources who have now broken their silence
say the diplomatic observers were more closely
connected to the agency.
"It was a CIA front, gathering intelligence
on the KLA's arms and leadership," said one.
Another agent, who said he felt he had been
"suckered in" by an organisation that has run
amok in post-war Kosovo, said: "I'd tell them
which hill to avoid, which wood to go behind, that
sort of thing."
The KLA has admitted its long-standing links
with American and European intelligence organisations.
Shaban Shala, a KLA commander now involved in
attempts to destabilise majority Albanian villages
beyond Kosovo's border in Serbia proper, claimed
he had met British, American and Swiss agents in
northern Albania in 1996.
Belgrade has alleged the CIA also helped
to arm the KLA, but this was denied by the
guerrillas and agency sources.
"It was purely the Albanian diaspora helping
their brothers," said Florin Krasniqi, a New York
builder and one of the KLA's biggest financiers.
He described how sniper rifles were exported from
America using a loophole in federal law that allowed
them to be shipped to "hunting clubs".
Armour-piercing Barratt rifles made their way
to the KLA's "hunting club" in Albania.
Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter
stages of the conflict, had established American
contacts through his work in the Croatian army,
which had been modernised with the help of Military
Professional Resources Inc, an American company
specialising in military training and procurement.
This company's personnel were in Kosovo, along
with others from a similar company, Dyncorps,
that helped in the American-backed programme
for the Bosnian army.