3 U.S. Soldiers Possibly Captured Along Border

Three U.S. Army soldiers patrolling the rugged terrain of Macedonia’s border with Yugoslavia were reported missing late Wednesday after they radioed fellow soldiers that they were surrounded and under fire, NATO and Pentagon officials said.

The reconnaissance team had been traveling in a Humvee northwest of the Kumanovo area, about 15 miles from Skopje, the Macedonian capital, and about three miles south of the Yugoslav border.

The search for the missing soldiers continued as it neared dawn, with Macedonia’s police and military participating as well as allied forces, according to British Maj. David Pashen, the NATO spokesman in Skojpe. Italian and French helicopters and U.S. C-130 aircraft searched today, and British helicopters were expected to join in when the air missions started up again this morning, Pashen said.

President Clinton was informed of their disappearance, a White House spokesman said.

A Pentagon official said the soldiers may have been abducted by Serbian soldiers, Serbian secret police or even Serbian radicals in Macedonia.

The soldiers, whose names were not made public, are members of a unit deployed as possible peacekeepers if a deal is reached in Kosovo, the war-torn Serbian province. They were part of a convoy and became separated from other patrols.

As NATO’s campaign against Yugoslavia entered its second week, bombers struck for the first time near the heart of Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital, Russia ordered warships steaming toward the conflict and Serbian forces continued an unrestrained rampage across Kosovo.

Even before the soldiers disappeared, U.S. and NATO officials grew increasingly defensive Wednesday about the military operation’s progress. They fended off pressure to send troops into ground combat, but Clinton’s spokesman said the White House might consider such a course if the allies recommend it.

In other developments Wednesday:

* Pentagon officials expressed concern that the Air Force and Navy were depleting their supply of cruise missiles more rapidly than some planners preferred. They have fired more than 100. All told, the military campaign is costing the Pentagon an estimated several hundred million dollars a week.

* A United Nations court said it has secretly indicted Zeljko Raznatovic, a notorious Serbian paramilitary leader known as “Arkan,” in September 1997 on allegations of committing war crimes during the Bosnian civil war in the mid-1990s. He has been seen in Belgrade in recent days.

* The Clinton administration said it was setting aside $50 million to help provide food and shelter for the more than 580,000 people of Kosovo that the State Department estimates have been uprooted.

* At least 7,000 men, women and children were marched to the train station in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. No independent witnesses were allowed to see what happened to them next, but a Serbian journalist said they were being taken south to the Macedonian border.

* The Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, was heading to Belgrade today with a personal appeal for peace from Pope John Paul II.

* The United States closed Yugoslavia’s embassy in Washington.

The soldiers who disappeared Wednesday are members of the 1st Infantry Division based in Wuerzburg, Germany, who had arrived in early March to relieve another contingent. They were part of a convoy that had split up for rough terrain training, the Pentagon said.

The Pentagon did not make their names public pending notification of relatives.

The soldiers are part of Task Force Able Sentry, which had been in Macedonia for years to stabilize the region but was supplanted by a NATO force called Allied Rapid Reaction Corps., whose original goal was to enforce a Kosovo peace accord.

But a Kosovo peace looks distant. Allied officials refused to be pinned down Wednesday on how long the campaign against Yugoslavia will last. Their use of the phrase “day by day, week by week” to describe the pace they are ready to follow to achieve their goals--stripping away Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s military might and making Kosovo safe for its ethnic Albanians--suggested an open-ended battle.

“This mission will be defined by reaching those objectives, not the calendar,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said.

Allied officials in Washington and Brussels took pains to portray Yugoslavia, where fuel rationing was reportedly in effect, as a nation suffering under the relentless bombardment.

Bearing Down on Milosevic

“He’s hurting,” Air Commodore David Wilby, a NATO spokesman said of Milosevic. “We know that he is running short of fuel. We’re now starting to hit him very hard on the ground. You will start to see the resolve starting to crack very quickly.”

After the Atlantic Alliance agreed Tuesday night to broaden the targets of the B-1B and B-52 bombers and other allied aircraft, the Pentagon said a Serbian secret police unit, the Special Unit Corps, was struck near downtown Belgrade.

NATO officials said the expanded list of targets means that allied warplanes are free to strike at the heart of the Serb security apparatus. The defense and interior ministries and other government and political installations could thus become targets.

During the first week of the conflict, NATO pilots were limited to striking air-defense installations and Serb territory south of the 44th parallel, which roughly bisects the country east to west.

In detailing the latest Serbian offensive, a NATO spokesman said that in Kosovo’s Pagarusa Valley, about 30 miles southwest of Pristina, Serbian armored and special-police units surrounded and attacked a “large number of refugees” and guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The Serbian authorities were also said by NATO to be destroying all official records of Kosovo’s Albanian majority: birth records, property documents and financial papers. The apparent intent was to make it nearly impossible for refugees to claim their property--and their past--if they return.

The secret-police unit hit Wednesday was the first target of the bombers flying expanded missions had been been carrying out reconnaissance missions as part of the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, Pentagon officials said. They declined to say whether there were casualties from the night strike.

The goal of the attacks on government buildings in Belgrade is not only to destroy specific elements of repression but to bring the war closer to home for the Yugoslav leadership. Milosevic’s ties to the secret police hierarchy are closer than those to the army.

“We are moving, I’d say, almost daily, to a broader set of targets,” said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon.

He said officials were still considering whether to bolster the NATO forces in the region with an aircraft carrier and associated ships. The carrier Theodore Roosevelt is due to reach the Mediterranean Sea from Virginia in the next few days, but it is still scheduled to steam on to the Persian Gulf without taking part in the Kosovo action.

Five U.S. surface ships and a submarine are taking part in the campaign.

Best Bet Is Still Sustained Air Power

Bacon sought to dampen speculation that the Pentagon would give its troops a primary role in assisting the approximately 100,000 ethnic Albanian refugees who have either fled or been expelled from Kosovo in the past week.

“There are international relief organizations that are extremely good at this,” Bacon said. “What they need is support.”

Senior administration officials left little doubt they remained convinced, at least outwardly, that NATO air power remained the best option to restrain Milosevic.

But the unexpected intensity of the Serbian offensive sweeping the ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo, by burning their villages and threatening to kill the residents, has revolted senior administration officials. The airstrikes’ failure to halt the terror has unnerved them.

There were indications the United States and its key NATO allies have discussed other options, including the possible use of ground troops or actively supporting the main ethnic Albanian guerrilla movement, the KLA. But such discussions have apparently been conducted more to rule them out as immediate options than to pursue them seriously at this stage.

However, among military and political analysts outside the government, including some with long government experience, a consensus was emerging that Milosevic cannot be stopped without Western troops on the ground. A group of five former senior U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary and National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci, told reporters Wednesday that the step may prove to be inevitable.

“We’re in a war, and we need . . . to allow our military to do what is necessary to prevail in that conflict,” Carlucci said. “If it means troops on the ground, then so be it, even recognizing that this is an extraordinarily difficult place to fight a land war and that it would take time to get troops in.”

He acknowledged that it would be politically difficult for Clinton to reverse course and deploy the troops. But, he said, “politically it is difficult for a president to lose a war. Air power alone is not enough.”

And in France, a poll released Tuesday by the Paris-based opinion survey group IFOP showed a majority of those questioned favored the deployment of NATO ground forces if necessary. Fifty-eight percent favored the use of ground forces “if air strikes are insufficient to stop the massacres in Kosovo,” while 54% said they would back such an intervention “if the conflict spread to other countries in the region.”

Russia’s potentially ominous anouncement that it planned to send seven ships from its Black Sea fleet to the conflict zone was seen by White House officials not so much as a military threat but as a signal of Russia’s political interest in the region.

On Tuesday, a mediation effort in Belgrade by Russia’s prime minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, ended without success.

White House officials said they took at face value the declarations by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin--and those of other senior Russian officials conveyed privately to Washington--that Russia would not get involved militarily. Indeed, they were uncertain how many vessels would be sent toward the region, if any, because they said Russia had merely sought the approval of the United Nations, the controlling authority, to send ships through the Bosporus.

But Russian Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev said “there are plans for the sailing of seven ships. . . . The Defense Ministry is also considering more decisive actions that will be recommended to the leadership if the situation changes.” He did not elaborate.

Sergeyev said the first ship, a reconnaissance vessel, would sail for the Mediterranean on Friday “because of the growing intensity of the hostilities in the conflict zone.”

The Clinton administration’s primary concern was that Milosevic would mistake Russia’s willingness to deploy its vessels as a demonstration of more than political support.

“The only thing to make of it is the Russians are showing they are interested in the region,” said Michael Hammer, a White House spokesman.

Alliance officials took umbrage at suggestions NATO had not been accomplishing its military goals.

That, said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, was “like saying to Elliot Ness because he hasn’t apprehended Al Capone after the first week of operations he should retire.”

Yugoslavia’s forces, Shea said in Brussels, “are destroying the archives of the Kosovar people. Property deeds, marriage licenses, birth certificates, financial and other records, public records, are being systematically destroyed.”

“This is a kind of Orwellian scenario of attempting to deprive a people and a culture of the sense of past, of the sense of community on which it depends,” he said.

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Gerstenzang reported from Washington, Shogren from Skopje. Times staff writers Robyn Dixon in Moscow, John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels, and Paul Richter, Tyler Marshall, Norman Kempster and Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.

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More on the Crisis

* HELPING HAND: Relief agencies scramble to aid refugees. A21

* REACTION: Few in Western Europe protest airstrikes. A22

* REBEL TIES: Experts see risks to alliance with rebel force. A23

* NEW FOES: NATO’s newest members incur wrath of Serbs. A24