The Devil's Garden: A War Crimes Investigator's Story

2. Bosnia

15 2 z Bosnia I woke as the sun began to peek above the horizon on my first morning in Sarajevo, a Bohemian-looking city of about 300,000. From the window of my apartment I could see minarets and hear the muezzin call the Muslim faithful to prayer. The echoing calls sound spiritual to some people, mystical to others. The sound grabbed me in an eerie, hypnotic way. I thought that Sarajevo had probably been very much like this on that deadly St. Vitus Day in 1914, when, under Serbia’s Black Hand, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. That murder sparked World War I and, to a great extent, began a chain of events that ultimately led me to this smoky patch more than three-quarters of a century later. In the city with me were Van Hecke, Catherine Driguet from the French National Police, and colleagues from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Portuguese police. We spent the first couple of days becoming acclimated to Sarajevo, obtaining UN driver’s licenses, and receiving briefings on land mines and areas with active hostilities and security checkpoints. Next, I went to the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Commingled with the thousands upon thousands of grave markers of the war victims, I could see the tattered image of the five Olympic rings that had once made Sarajevans so proud. Most were Muslim victims, but there were many Bosnian-Croats and Bosnian-Serbs who had died together with their Muslim neighbors while defending their homes and neighborhoods from the Serb forces who had held them under siege. With these images in my mind, I passed through the NATO-run security checkpoints on our way to Mostar. 16 / THE DEVIL’S GARDEN Over the next two years, I would come to take the winding roads from Sarajevo to Mostar many times. On one particular occasion, we couldn’t get through the vehicle checkpoint, despite our diplomatic documents . I decided to switch tactics and take a different approach. I exited the marked UN vehicle and approached the noncommissioned officer (NCO) in charge of the security detail. Within a couple of minutes, the sergeant presented me with a sharp salute, and we were on our way. Being a U.S. federal agent often had its advantages. From the moment I first set foot in Bosnia, I was under constant surveillance . My training and experience in counterintelligence for the U.S. government helped me to pick up on this straightaway, and my background as a police investigator allowed me to work confidently in this shadowy atmosphere . Van Hecke’s experience in Belgium’s gritty underworld and Driguet’s years of streetwise know-how, acquired as she worked her way up the ranks to commandant (major) of a serious crimes unit in Paris, made us a team that wouldn’t easily be taken by surprise. We knew that appearances were deceptive and that anyone could be a double agent playing both sides of the street. In Mostar, the first order of business was to meet with case officers of the Bosnian Agency for Information and Documentation (AID). This was the Bosnian national intelligence agency that was charged, among other things, with gathering evidence of war crimes. The operatives were there to assist us in any way they could. They also kept a watchful eye on us. Sometimes they provided security, keeping us safe from war criminals, organized crime, and even other intelligence agencies, some of which had previously been affiliated with the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB). At other times, AID was there to spy on us. We couldn’t fully trust them, but then again, we couldn’t afford to trust anyone. Too much was at stake. Our local AID point-of-contact was Ahmet (I’ve purposely omitted his last name). When he was introduced to me, I noticed he reacted slightly when he heard my surname. “Govorite li Bosanski?” he asked me. “I beg your pardon?” “Do you speak Bosnian?” my interpreter translated. I had understood what Ahmet had said on my own, but I didn’t want to let on. Some of the words from my boyhood had stuck with me, despite my youthful attempts to ignore them. The Bosnian language was essentially the same as Croatian and Serbian. Bosnia / 17 “No. I am sorry, but I don’t.” A Muslim, Ahmet was about my age, forty...