Sloba played with Franjo and Alija: Serbian spies enabled the Serbs' victory in Dayton

The State Security Service enabled the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, to secure the best possible deal for the Serbs in Dayton because the Serbian services knew in advance the limits to which the Serbs could go in those peace negotiations.

This secret is revealed by Vojislav Tufegdžić in his book “See You in the Obituary 20 Years Later,” reports the Patria news agency.

In the territorial bargaining, with the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina before him, only Slobodan Milošević knew in advance what the maximum gain could be. From the very first day of the negotiations, held in 1995, members of the Croatian and Bosnian delegations were outraged because only the President of Serbia was greeted at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton with the words "Welcome President Milošević"!

It is illusory to look for written traces of the operation carried out by the Serbian State Security on the eve of the peace conference held at the American military base near Dayton at the end of 1995, where peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina was concluded. It is highly likely that they do not exist, just as there are few witnesses familiar with the circumstances that preceded the signing of the agreement that ended the war, adds Tufegdžić.

The public expected that Serbia, largely labeled by the international community as the main culprit for the wars in the former SFRY, would be in the worst position at the negotiating table. In other words, that the representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia would manage to achieve most of their demands. However, after the conclusion of the negotiations, the Serbian side was the most satisfied with what was achieved…

However, in the territorial bargaining with the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina before him, only the President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, knew in advance what the maximum gain could be. The demands of the Serbian side that exceeded that were simply a diplomatic game and a concealment of the knowledge of what he would ultimately manage to achieve.

Details from the 2013 trial of Radovan Karadžić, indicted before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, are an excellent illustration of the circumstances of the Dayton agreement.

Testifying before the Tribunal in The Hague, American professor Ronald Hatchett stated that Karadžić, a year before the peace agreement, had proposed a similar plan for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the US authorities. Hatchett said that Karadžić personally handed him his peace plan in September 1994 while he was visiting Pale.

Professor Hatchett then forwarded it to then-US President Bill Clinton, but the plan was rejected by the State Department.

- The peace solutions agreed upon in November 1995 in Dayton were very similar to those Karadžić had proposed a year earlier. The territorial division of Bosnia and Herzegovina into entities was identical – Hatchett said during his testimony.

Twenty years have passed since Dayton. The political success achieved then has largely been forgotten. Although the outcome of the negotiations was surprising to many, the circumstances under which the then representatives of the Serbs, above all Slobodan Milošević, managed to secure the fulfillment of a greater number of demands than the other participants in the conference were never explained.

And this despite the fact that the Serbs were presented before Dayton as the main culprits for the war.

The answer to the enormous discrepancy between real expectations and the final outcome is essentially simple. Not political, but intelligence – the State Security of Serbia managed to intercept electronic communications between the authorities in Sarajevo and Washington before the conference.

One of the few State Security officials who were thoroughly informed about this operation assured me that it was the last significant operation of the State Security before, as he defined it, „the service began to destroy itself.“

Solely thanks to the data obtained by the secret police through „intercepting“ communications between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the USA, the strategy and tactics of the Serbian negotiators in Dayton were devised.

- The chances that after that we would fail to get the maximum were almost non-existent - my interlocutor claimed, says Tufegdžić.