CONSIDERATIONS IN ADDITION TO THE BOMBING
Beyond the obvious damage that was being caused by NATO’s air attacks and the equally obvious fact that NATO could have continued bombing indefinitely and with virtual impunity, another likely factor behind Milosevic’s capitulation was the fact that the sheer depravity of Serbia’s conduct in Kosovo had stripped it of any remaining vestige of international support—including, in the end, from its principal backers in Moscow. Although Milosevic’s loss of Russian support may not have been the determining factor behind his capitulation, it was, without question, a contributing factor. A high-level official in the Clinton administration who was directly involved in setting policies for Operation Allied Force later commented that with respect to the numerous ongoing diplomatic efforts to backstop the coercive bombing, Russia was “a key arrow in the quiver.”[6] That became most clearly apparent when Russian President Boris Yeltsin called Clinton on April 25, the last the day of the NATO summit, and, in an unprecedentedly long 75-minute conversation, expressed his concerns over the escalating air war and offered to send former Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin as his personal envoy to help find a negotiated solution. Once Milosevic came face to face with the realization that Russia had joined the West in pressing for a settlement of the Kosovo standoff, he knew that he had lost any remaining trace of international backing.
On top of that was the sense of walls closing in that Milosevic must have had when he was indicted as a war criminal by a UN tribunal only a week before his loss of Moscow’s support. On May 27, that tribunal charged Milosevic and four of his senior aides—including General Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Yugoslav army chief, and Vlajko Stojilkovic, the interior minister responsible for the MUP—with crimes against humanity for having deported more than 700,000 ethnic Albanians and having allegedly murdered 340 innocents, mostly young men. Even if that indictment did not give Milosevic pause in and of itself, it almost surely closed the door on any remaining chance that Russia might change course and resume its support for him.
Yet a third factor, this one a direct second-order result of the bombing, may have been mounting elite pressure behind the scenes. As the air attacks encroached more on Belgrade proper, Secretary Cohen reported that senior VJ leaders had begun sending their families out of Yugoslavia, following a similar action earlier by members of the Yugoslav political elite and reflecting possible concern among top-echelon commanders that Milosevic had led them down a blind alley in choosing to take on the United States and NATO.[7] U.S. officials indicated that during the last week of the air war, VJ leaders had swung from supporting Milosevic on Kosovo to openly rebelling and pressuring the Serb dictator to agree to NATO’s terms. Cohen’s report of increasing demoralization among the VJ’s most senior leaders as they helplessly watched the escalating destruction all around them gave rise to hopes within the Clinton administration that Milosevic might be looking for a face-saving way out.[8] The fact that the bombing effort caused more infrastructure damage during its last week than during its entire first two months was thought by some to have reawakened old tensions between Milosevic and an army leadership that was said to have never fully trusted him.
A related factor may have been mounting heat from Milosevic’s cronies among the Yugoslav civilian oligarchy, prompted by the continued bombing of military-related industries, utilities, and other infrastructure targets in and around Belgrade in which they had an economic stake and whose destruction increasingly threatened to bankrupt them.[9] On that point, administration officials remarked that among other things, the dropping of bridges throughout Serbia by NATO air attacks had hindered the activities of smugglers who represented a key source of income for those cronies. Moreover, CIA and other allied intelligence organizations were said to have been gathering information on the bank accounts and business interests of Milosevic and his closest partners, the latter of whom were starting to pressure him to call it quits.[10]
Finally, U.S. psychological operations could have been a contributing factor, although the evidence for that remains both spotty and less than convincing. One report to that effect suggested that Milosevic’s wife was becoming “increasingly hysterical” as the bombing intensified and that Milosevic himself was finally pushed over the edge after the United States, via a “friendly intermediary,” shipped him a videotape showing what a fuel-air explosive could do to his forces—at roughly the same time as the KLA’s counteroffensive in Kosovo forced VJ troops into the open and exposed them to NATO fire.[11] Apart from the fact that fuel-air explosives are not currently maintained in the U.S. munitions inventory, this claim presumed that the VJ’s troops were a particularly valued asset for Milosevic, which, by all indications, they were not.
THE PROSPECT OF A GROUND INVASION
Among the many considerations that converged to produce Milosevic’s eventual capitulation, the most discomfiting to him over the long run—apart from the bombing itself—may well have been what he perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be the prospect of an eventual NATO ground intervention. Whatever NATO’s declared stance on the ground-war issue may have been, its actions as the air war progressed spoke louder than its words.
To begin with, Operation Allied Harbor, set in motion as early as April 8, aimed at putting some 8,000 NATO ground troops into Macedonia to help with refugee aid efforts. More significantly, a 32,000-person NATO Stabilization Force (soon to number 50,000) patrolling Bosnia-Herzegovina, and 7,500 additional NATO troops in Albania deployed to perform humanitarian work there made for an undeniable signal that a NATO ground presence was forming in the theater. That presence included 2,400 combat-ready U.S. Marines aboard three warships in the Adriatic to provide force protection for the Marine F/A-18s that were operating out of the former Warsaw Pact air base at Taszar. In addition, some 5,000 U.S. Army troops, with a substantial artillery and armor complement, accompanied the 24 AH-64 Apache helicopters that were sent to Albania in late April. There is every reason to believe that this deployment, along with NATO’s subsequent decision to enlarge the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) to as many as 50,000 troops, was assessed by Milosevic as an indication that a NATO ground option was at least being kept open.
Taking advantage of a covert relationship between the CIA and the KLA, NATO also had begun probing the capability and extent of the VJ’s ground defenses, an inquiry that most likely did not escape Milosevic’s attention. In a related development, NATO engineers on May 31 began widening and reinforcing a key access road from Durres to Kukes on the Kosovo-Albanian border so that it could support the weight of a main battle tank. Earlier, Clark had authorized the engineers to strengthen the road to handle refugee traffic only, but they made it strong enough to support the Bradley armored fighting vehicle (AFV). This time, only three days before Milosevic finally called it quits, Washington gave Clark permission to send in another engineering battalion to make the road capable of supporting M1A2 Abrams tanks and artillery.[12]
Beyond that, Milosevic may have gotten wind of a secret NATO plan for a massive ground invasion code-named Plan B-minus, which was slated to be launched the first week of September if approved by NATO’s political leaders. In support of this plan, Britain had agreed to contribute the largest single national component up to that time (50,000 troops) to an envisaged 170,000-man contingent; the United States would have contributed at least 100,000 more. Developed by a secret planning team at NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, Plan B-minus relied heavily on previous plans going back to June 12, 1998, which featured six land-attack options, including a full invasion of Serbia itself (Plan Bravo, with 300,000 NATO troops). The chief of Britain’s defense staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie, later confirmed the outlines of this plan.[13] Milosevic was said by a well-placed NATO source to have been at least broadly informed of NATO thinking with respect to it. Indeed, as the UK Ministry of Defense’s director of operations in Allied Force, RAF Air Marshal Sir John Day, later commented, “the decision to increase KFOR was militarily right in itself, but it was also a form of heavy breathing on Milosevic and a subtle way of moving to B-minus while keeping the coalition together. The move also had the effect of shortening our timelines for B-minus. It is true that the forces that were being prepared for KFOR-plus were the core elements of what would then have become B-minus, the full ground invasion.”[14]
6
This official, in an interview with RAND staff members in Washington on June 11, 2000, further claimed that the White House was not surprised when Milosevic accepted the deal on June 3, since the administration was confident that once Chernomyrdin had agreed to NATO’s terms, it was merely a matter of time before a successful denouement would be reached, considering that Chernomyrdin knew Milosevic’s bottom line and would not have signed up for any arrangement that he knew Milosevic would not accept. What
7
Daniel Williams and Bradley Graham, “Milosevic Admits to Losses of Personnel,”
8
Interview with Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, “Milosevic Is Far Weaker Now,”
9
Paul Richter, “Officials Say NATO Pounded Milosevic into Submission,”
10
Doyle McManus, “Clinton’s Massive Ground Invasion That Almost Was,”
11
Tom Walker, “Bomb Video Took Fight out of Milosevic,”
13
Patrick Wintour and Peter Beaumont, “Revealed: The Secret Plan to Invade Kosovo,”
14
Peter Beaumont and Patrick Wintour, “Leaks in NATO—and Plan Bravo Minus,”