U.S. Formed Plan to Nab Serb Suspect

The U.S. Army’s Special Forces and the CIA have prepared a secret plan to capture indicted Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, a response to increasing Clinton administration concerns that Karadzic is a major threat to long-term peace in the region, U.S. intelligence sources say.

President Clinton has not formally approved the plan, officials said, and instead appears to be hoping that increasing diplomatic pressure will prompt the Bosnian Serb government to surrender Karadzic peacefully.

But the administration has steadily increased the intensity of its rhetorical attacks on Karadzic in recent weeks, calling him a cancer that needs to be removed if Bosnia-Herzegovina’s peace process is to succeed.

And sources said top officials in the White House and the State Department have shown serious interest in the option of a military operation to capture Karadzic if diplomatic efforts fail.

Planning between Special Forces and the CIA’s clandestine Directorate of Operations began last year on a high-risk operation to grab Karadzic and transport him out of the Bosnian Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, the sources said.

Under the plan instituted last year, Karadzic was to be taken to The Hague to stand trial before the international tribunal investigating and prosecuting war crimes committed in the republics of the former Yugoslav federation.

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Karadzic’s capture would carry enormous political risks, however, because it would be certain to inflame Bosnian Serbs, possibly threatening the U.S.-backed peace process in Bosnia and putting the U.S.-led NATO peacekeeping force there at risk of reprisals.

Still, both Pentagon and State Department officials now agree that the former Bosnian Serb president presents a unique problem--not only is he an indicted war crimes suspect, but he also continues to wield broad influence in the Bosnian Serbs’ Republika Srpska.

With U.S. troops scheduled to be withdrawn from Bosnia next June, the drumbeat within the U.S. government to remove Karadzic from his stronghold while the United States still has a large military presence in the region has been growing louder in recent weeks.

Under provisions of the 1995 Dayton, Ohio, peace accords that ended the Bosnian war, the Bosnian Serbs were to turn over Karadzic and other leaders indicted on war crimes charges. The continuing freedom of Karadzic and his former military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, is a “huge obstacle” to the peace process, said one senior administration official. “They represent Serb aggression and the discredited notion of a Greater Serbia. They are cancerous and need to be removed.”

David Johnson, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Saturday that the U.S. continues to explore ways to bring Karadzic and other war crimes suspects to justice, but he refused to comment on any specific plans to do so.

One senior White House official said that “there is a lot of discussion among the [Western] allies” on how to remove high-profile war crimes suspects from Bosnia.

Despite the contingency planning, both Pentagon and CIA officials have been reluctant to launch an operation to arrest Karadzic, sources said. One source said the contingency plans, initially ordered up under then-CIA Director John M. Deutch, raised concerns even among those involved in the planning because of the risks involved.

One worry stemmed from the difficulty of keeping the U.S. role in such a mission secret, because Karadzic was to be placed on public trial for his alleged war crimes.

In fact, Pentagon and CIA resistance is one reason a mission to grab Karadzic has not occurred. Defense officials have made it clear ever since U.S. troops were sent to Bosnia 18 months ago that they are wary of mounting any operation that might prompt Bosnian Serb reprisals against U.S. or other NATO peacekeeping forces.

One European diplomat who recently met with Pentagon officials was told that while the U.S. military was conducting planning exercises for catching high-profile war crimes suspects, it was doing so very reluctantly. The peacekeeping mission in Bosnia has retained public support in the United States at least in part because the military has avoided combat, terrorist attacks and casualties. The Pentagon wants to keep it that way.

Defense officials stressed that there is now a consensus within the Clinton administration that the current peacekeeping force will not be used to go after war crimes suspects on behalf of the international tribunal. One senior Defense Department official refused to comment, however, when asked whether the U.S. might consider a covert operation that was not conducted by peacekeeping units.

Pentagon and other administration officials have in the past dismissed reports of plans to go after Karadzic. “I have not seen any story that got it right,” said one senior defense official.

Administration officials stressed that, before considering options like a military operation, they first want to see whether they succeed in current efforts to use economic pressure to force the former warring factions to hand over war crimes suspects. The Clinton administration, for example, has held up a $30-million World Bank loan to Croatia in an attempt to pressure the government to allow Croatian Serb refugees to return to their homes and to force Croatia to hand over indicted war crimes suspects.

While the U.S. has offered relatively little economic aid to Republika Srpska, Washington hopes that the prospect of watching Muslims and Croats gaining more Western assistance will eventually bring Bosnian Serb leaders around.

Pentagon officials who want to pursue economic and diplomatic pressure before moving to options like a military operation added that there is now “no daylight” between Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on how to handle the war crimes issue, despite reports of a State-Pentagon debate over U.S. policy in Bosnia. Those reports have been fueled by Albright’s flair for using blunt rhetoric to step up the public pressure on regional leaders to turn over their war crimes suspects.

Yet despite Albright’s tough talk, the rules of engagement for the peacekeeping force in Bosnia have not changed: The troops can take war criminals into custody if they confront them, but they are not under orders to go look for them.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces have been positioned between the warring factions to keep them apart, and U.S. and other Western commanders are opposed to taking on offensive missions. Earlier this year, the United States proposed creating a special allied force to capture a number of war criminals but received a lukewarm response from European partners.

More than 18 months after the Dayton accords were signed, the credibility of the war crimes tribunal at The Hague has been seriously damaged by the continuing freedom of most accused criminals. Of the 74 Serbian, Croatian and Muslim suspects indicted by the tribunal, only a handful have been caught, and most of them have been low-level figures.

The tribunal’s own investigators finally made their first arrest last month, when they caught one war crimes suspect in Eastern Slavonia, a disputed region of Croatia under U.N. administration.

Capturing high-profile suspects like Karadzic in hostile Republika Srpska would be far more dangerous. Karadzic lives in a villa on the edge of Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters, and Bosnian Serb police reportedly stepped up patrols around his home in recent months to protect him from being seized.

Officially out of office since last year, Karadzic is currently engaged in a high-stakes power struggle with his successor, Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, that has served to underscore the degree to which he remains a force to be reckoned with in the Serb-held portion of Bosnia.

Karadzic loyalists in the Bosnian Serb parliament were moving this weekend to try to oust Plavsic.

The Bosnian Serb political battle has a direct impact on Clinton’s Bosnia policy, because Plavsic has supported some cooperation with the Dayton process in hopes of Western economic aid, while Karadzic has refused to cooperate with a peace process that officially requires his arrest and prosecution. A Karadzic triumph over Plavsic could make it more difficult for U.S. and NATO troops to withdraw next year without fears of a new round of fighting.

Times Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus contributed to this report.