“How did you end up working for them? It seems a curious leap from your country’s army to an international tribunal.”
“I was planning to retire anyway. I’d been in the service for more than two decades.”
“But still. Please.”
Middleton decided that cooperation was the only way that would let him leave anytime soon. With the time difference he still had a chance to get into D.C. in time for a late supper at the Ritz Carlton with his daughter and son-in-law.
He explained to the inspector briefly that he had been a military intelligence officer with the 7,000 U.S. troops sent to Kosovo in the summer of 1999 as part of the peacekeeping force when the country was engaged in the last of the Yugoslavian wars. Middleton was based at Camp Broadsteel in the southeast of the country, the sector America oversaw. The largely rural area, dominated by Mount Duke which rose like Fuji over the rugged hills, was an ethnically Albanian area, as was most of Kosovo, and had been the site of many incursions by Serbs — both from other parts of Kosovo and from Milosevic’s Serbia, which Kosovo had been part of. The fighting was largely over — the tens of thousands of ironically dubbed “humanitarian” bombing strikes had had their desired effect — but the peacekeepers on the ground were still on high alert to stop clashes between the infamous Serb guerillas and the equally ruthless Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army forces.
Padlo took this information in, nodding as he lit another cigarette.
“Not long after I was deployed there, the base commander got a call from a general in the British sector, near Pristina, the capital. He’d found something interesting and had been calling all the international peacekeepers to see if anyone had a background in art collecting.”
“And why was that?” Padlo stared at the Sobieski hidden below eye-level.
The smell was not as terrible as Middleton had expected but the office was filling with smoke. His eyes stung. “Let me give you some background. It goes back to World War Two.”
“Please, tell me.”
“Well, many Albanians from Kosovo fought with an SS unit — the Twenty-First Waffen Mountain Division. Their main goal was eliminating partisan guerillas, but it also gave them the chance to ethnically cleanse the Serbs, who had been their enemies for years.”
A grimace appeared on the inspector’s heavily lined face. “Ah, it’s always the same story wherever you look. Poles versus the Russians. Arabs versus the Jews. Americans versus”—a smile “—everyone.”
Middleton ignored him. “The Twenty-First supposedly had another job too. With the fall of Italy and an Allied invasion a sure thing, Himmler and Goering and other Nazis who’d been looting art from Eastern Europe wanted secure places to hide it — so that even if Germany fell, the Allies couldn’t find it. The Twenty-First reportedly brought truckloads to Kosovo. Made sense. A small, little populated, out-of-the-mainstream country. Who’d think to look there for a missing Cezanne or Manet?
“What the British general had found was an old Eastern Orthodox church. It was abandoned years ago and being used as a dormitory for displaced Serbs by a U.N. relief organization. In the basement his soldiers unearthed 50 or 60 boxes of rare books, paintings and music folios.”
“My, that many?”
“Oh, yes. A lot was damaged, some beyond repair, but other items were virtually untouched. I didn’t know much about the paintings or the books, but I’d studied music history in college and I’ve collected recordings and manuscripts for years. I got the okay to fly up and take a look.”
“And what did you find?”
“Oh, it was astonishing. Original pieces by Bach and his sons, Mozart, Handel, sketches by Wagner — some of them had never been seen before. I was speechless.”
“Valuable?”
“Well, you can’t really put a dollar value on a find like that. It’s the cultural benefit, not the financial.”
“But still, worth millions?”
“I suppose.”
“What happened then?”
“I reported what I’d found to the British and to my general, and he cleared it with Washington for me to stay there for a few days and catalog what I could. Good press, you know.”
“True in police work too.” The cigarette got crushed out forcefully under a yellow thumb, as if Padlo were quitting forever.
Middleton explained that that night he took all the manuscripts and folios that he could carry back to British quarters in Pristina and worked for hours cataloging and examining what he’d found.
“The next morning I was very excited, wondering what else I’d find. I got up early to return…”
The American stared at a limp yellow file folder on the inspector’s desktop, the one with three faded checkmarks on it. He looked up and heard Padlo say, “The church was St. Sophia.”
“You know about it?” Middleton was surprised. The incident had made the news but by then — with the world focusing on the millennium and the Y2K crisis, the Balkans had become simply a footnote to fading history.
“Yes, I do. I didn’t realize you were involved.”
Middleton remembered walking to the church and thinking, I must’ve gotten up pretty damn early if none of the refugees were awake yet, especially with all the youngsters living there. Then he paused, wondering where the British guards were. Two had been stationed outside the church the day before. Just at that moment he saw a window open on the second floor and a teenage girl look out, her long hair obscuring half her face. She was calling, “Green shirt, green shirt…Please…Green shirt.”
He hadn’t understood. But then it came to him. She was referring to his fatigues and was calling for his help.
“What was it like?” Padlo asked softly.
Middleton merely shook his head.
The inspector didn’t press him for details. He asked, “And Rugova was the man responsible?”
He was even more surprised that the inspector knew about the former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Agim Rugova. That fact was not learned until later, long after Rugova and his men had fled from Pristina, and the story of St. Sophia had grown stone cold.
“Your change in career is making sense now, Mr. Middleton. After the war you became an investigator to track him down.”
“That’s it in a nutshell.” He smiled as if that could flick away the cached memories, clear as computer jpegs, of that morning.
Middleton had returned to Camp Broadsteel and served out his rotation, spending most of his free time running intelligence reports on Rugova and the many other war criminals the torn region had spawned. Back at the Pentagon, he’d done the same. But it wasn’t the U.S. military’s job to catch them and bring them to trial, and he made no headway.
So when he retired, he set up an operation in a small Northern Virginia office park. He called it “War Criminal Watch” and spent his days on the phone and computer, tracking Rugova and others. He made contacts at the ICTY and worked with them regularly but they and the UN’s tactical operation were busy with bigger fish — like Ratko Mladic, Naser Oric and others involved in the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, and Milosevic himself. Middleton would come up with a lead and it would founder. Still he couldn’t get St. Sophia out of his mind.
Green shirt, green shirt…Please…
He decided that he couldn’t be effective working from America nor working alone. So after some months of searching he found people who’d help: two American soldiers who’d been in Kosovo and helped him in the investigation at St. Sophia and a woman humanitarian worker from Belgrade he’d met in Pristina.
The overworked ICTY was glad to accept them as independent contractors, working with the Prosecutor’s Office. They became known in the ICTY as “The Volunteers.”