Compared to U.N. Troop Pullout Plan, Pilot’s Rescue Appears Simple : Balkans: NATO polishes strategy for pulling peacekeepers out of Bosnia. But the prospect is daunting and perilous.

The dramatic rescue of downed American pilot Scott F. O’Grady last week demanded intricate planning, timing and coordination. But the next rabbit that NATO may have to extract from the Bosnian lair could be monumentally tougher to get out.

Multiply one pilot by 50,000 United Nations peacekeepers in the Balkans.

Amid rapidly deteriorating conditions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Atlantic Treaty Organization planners here and at Atlantic Alliance headquarters in Brussels are polishing a detailed emergency withdrawal plan for the hard-pressed peacekeepers.

Rescuing O’Grady required a relative handful of aircraft and Marines. If the United Nations decides to abandon Bosnia, NATO planners say withdrawal would require up to 65,000 troops--including 25,000 Americans--and would take months to complete.

So daunting is the prospect--so fraught is it with peril--that, after working six months to develop the evacuation plan, the most fond hope of NATO strategists is that it will never be needed.

“This is the option at the bottom of everybody’s deck,” said one officer based here at the headquarters of NATO’s Southern Command, which would have principal responsibility for the operation. “It’s horrible to think about having to do it.”

The size of the task is enormous, the logistics staggering, the potential for disaster awesome. NATO planners describe it as the most complicated job they have faced since the end of the Cold War.

“Extremely complex and very dangerous,” summed up one planner.

Indeed, the prospect of shepherding peacekeepers out of the Bosnian caldron is so intimidating that it has played an important role in galvanizing support among NATO members to keep the U.N. force in place against the odds.

Realities: Any rescue would mean having to build up roads, bridges, ports and airports to levels never seen in Bosnia. Rescue forces would have to protect the routes, the peacekeepers and themselves as the withdrawal proceeds. Along the way, they may well have to cope with a panicked civilian population and huge numbers of refugees.

Forget Dunkirk too: No one has ever attempted an evacuation in such conditions on such a scale, planners say.

In a recent interview, one NATO official in Brussels pointed to a row of filing cabinets in his office, noting they contained detailed, but now-obsolete, strategies for repelling a Soviet attack into the heart of Central Europe.

“We worked on these for 40 years, always updating, refining, fine-tuning them, but the basic job was always the same--stopping a Soviet land invasion,” the official said. “Now we plan for Bosnia, and we’ve started from zero.”

Details of the planned U.N. rescue mission are contained in a 2,000-page document known as Plan 40401. It consists of a main “op-plan” and 24 separate sections dealing with specific political, military and logistics issues related to the mission.

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According to officers familiar with the planning, the document looks at options, including a rescue of all 49,000 U.N. peacekeepers and civilian staff from the former Yugoslavia, a separate rescue focused only on the 20,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia and even a “partial rescue” of some U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia.

The difficulty and time required to get U.N. forces out of the region would depend on several factors, including the weather and the time of year. Also, local forces, most likely Bosnian Serbs, might try to block the withdrawal militarily. On balance, NATO officials believe that it would take between three and six months to complete a full rescue.

NATO officials in Brussels, who initially said a maximum of 50,000 troops would be needed, now put the number at between 60,000 and 65,000. They would be supported by 200 helicopters, 200 aircraft, 100 tanks and a dozen naval ships.

Besides the U.S. forces pledged by President Clinton, France is said to have offered 8,000 and Spain 4,000.

The contributions of other NATO countries are not publicly known, although Germany is said to have offered 2,000 troops in a move that is highly controversial, both domestically and in the Balkans. This would mark the first European deployment of German forces outside a NATO area since World War II. The Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia was especially brutal and one-sided against the Serbs.

Permanent representatives of NATO’s 16 member states got their first full look at the rescue plan this week in Brussels. They are expected to give it formal endorsement at a June 28 meeting.

“This isn’t a deadline set in stone, but there is a sense of urgency,” a senior NATO official said. He noted that, because the plan would be updated to fit rapidly changing conditions, it would be approved only provisionally by the representatives.

“Full approval would come only if it is set into action,” the official said.

The NATO rescue plan would be triggered by a formal request to NATO from U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali or by a Security Council resolution.

NATO analysts now believe that withdrawal may become necessary by late summer if the new rapid-reaction force is unable to slake passions among Serbs and Muslims and re-establish the United Nations as a viable player in a search for peace.

Cost of the operation is estimated at about $2 billion, and the question of who would pay remains one of the plan’s main unresolved issues.

Other issues still under discussion include the politically delicate and militarily crucial question of just how and when command of the peacekeepers would transfer from the United Nations to NATO.

The two organizations have clashed often over tactics in Bosnia, and relations between them are strained.

NATO agreed to undertake planning for the rescue only on the condition that it would have complete command over everyone involved, including the peacekeepers.

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While the United Nations has reportedly agreed in the case of Bosnia, the world body is apparently having second thoughts about relinquishing control over 24,000 peacekeepers in Croatia and elsewhere outside of Bosnia.

France, which has the most peacekeepers on the ground in Bosnia and withdrew from NATO’s military arm in the 1960s, is also said to have questions about the exact command structure. The rescue operation is expected to be led by the commander of NATO’s southern flank, Naples-based Adm. Leighton Smith.

A NATO official in Brussels said the current U.N. commander in Bosnia, French Gen. Bernard Janvier, would become Smith’s deputy.

NATO now conducts Operation Deny Flight, the air embargo patrols over Bosnia--O’Grady was shot down on one of them--and has attacked ground targets at the United Nations’ request.

Peacekeeping commanders on the ground, in contrast, report to the United Nations, although they themselves and many of their troops come from NATO countries.

The new rapid-reaction force led by France and Britain is designed to shore up peacekeeping capabilities and will also be under U.N. command, although some of its components could assume a direct NATO role if the withdrawal is implemented.

Another unresolved issue is how the NATO rescue plan would deal with peacekeepers from non-NATO countries--troops that make up about half the U.N. force in the former Yugoslavia.

One official said Argentina, for example, indicated that it would want its peacekeepers included in any NATO rescue; a company of Lithuanian troops attached to a Danish unit would also probably want to be part of it.

Although technically still in the late planning stages, some elements of the rescue plan are already in place, officers say.

A team of 80 communications experts have arrived in Pleso, near Zagreb, Croatia, while a force of 1,600 mainly U.S. and British troops is on standby in Italy for immediate deployment in the region to set up traffic controls and logistics, and to check the quality of roads and bridges for heavy armor.

Besides security problems, NATO officials also worry about the humanitarian costs and the television images that such an operation would convey to the outside world--images that could portray the stark reality of the world community abandoning helpless civilians to their fate.

“Refugees will want to come out. What about them?” asked one NATO officer here. “What happens if women and children throw themselves in front of departing tanks?”

Montalbano reported from Naples and Marshall from Brussels.