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

Preface

xvii PREFACE In 1945, with the close of World War II, man’s inhumanity to man was to have come to an end. Atrocities such as those committed by the Third Reich were never to happen again. But they did. Almost fifty years later, in Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, tortured , forcibly transferred, or otherwise persecuted. These people didn’t suffer as the direct or collateral consequences of warfare. They were victims of an international criminal conspiracy masterminded by Slobodan Milošević, then the president of Serbia and later the president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The crimes that were perpetrated as part of this conspiracy, or as a direct consequence of the overall plan to form a “Greater Serbia,” were so horrendous and widespread that they rose to the level of crimes against all humanity. In the aftermath of the bloody Yugoslav war of the 1990s came one of the largest international criminal investigations ever undertaken. It differed substantially from the World War II war crimes investigations and subsequent trials, including those at Nuremberg. This time criminal investigators ensured the rights of suspects were respected and used modern criminal investigative techniques to bring the accused to justice . This time teams of international war crimes investigators assembled from national police agencies from around the world undertook the investigations. It was a job for experienced criminal investigators, not soldiers and army legal officers, as had been the case five decades earlier. This is the inside story of what went on behind the scenes of the investigations into some of the world’s worst crimes—mass murders, serial rapes, torture, extermination, and persecution almost beyond human comprehension. This answers the questions, so often asked, about how xviii / PREFACE the investigators put the cases together, protected witnesses, and tracked down mercenaries, assassins, and other killers around the world. As the senior American investigator at The Hague–based United Nations war crimes tribunal and the lead investigator on the case against Milošević and fifteen high-level coperpetrators, I want to tell a story that goes beyond the crimes alleged to have been committed throughout Croatia. I want readers to see what it takes to investigate international war crimes. I want to show the political influences that affected the case each day. And I want readers to know how we formulated the prosecution theory that ultimately brought Milošević to The Hague—an approach that would have an impact on almost every subsequent major international criminal indictment for crimes ranging from war crimes to international terrorism. Nowhere in this book will I disclose protected or confidential information . In fact, at various points in my story I make it plain that I am intentionally omitting confidential, classified, or otherwise protected facts. In many instances I have changed the tribunal-assigned pseudonyms for protected witnesses, thus providing a double measure of protection. Sometimes I have created new aliases for witnesses who testified openly. Unless noted otherwise, all relevant dialogue, biographies of suspects and accused persons, descriptions of the crimes, and related information came directly from transcripts, indictments, trial judgments, appellate proceedings, and other public and open sources. Some locations, dates, and names, including official code names, have been changed to ensure that the work of the war crimes tribunal is not compromised and to maintain the safety of all concerned. In most instances , the names and identities of war crimes investigation team members have not been included, save again for those who have already been disclosed publicly. It also should be noted that I identify only those war crimes suspects who have been publicly identified, indicted, or named as unindicted coperpetrators by the tribunal. Even then, every individual named in the book is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Throughout this book, I have tried to explain the complexities of writing about inside sources and protected witnesses, secret intelligence services such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and elite special operations units such as the Preface / xix British Special Air Service (SAS), Delta Force, and U.S. Navy SEALs. I have documented the events at the heart of my story through my personal experiences investigating these crimes, my own research, and my travels to Europe, where I gained intimate knowledge of people and events from long before the Yugoslav war broke out. To be sure, this is a war crimes investigator...