How an Uneasy Alliance Prevailed

As its air campaign against Yugoslavia dragged on, NATO looked less like the military alliance that won the Cold War than like a dysfunctional family, its members smiling for the camera but kicking each other under the table.

The British were ready to force their way into Kosovo with a massive ground attack. The Greeks, just an artillery shell away from the Serbian province, wanted no part of any kind of war. The American president was hearing conflicting messages from his own divided advisors. The Germans would fight in the air but not on the ground.

And in its search for a diplomatic solution, the allies reached out to a country (Russia) that fancied itself a great power but in fact was all but bankrupt, one that was uniquely suspicious of NATO’s expansion on its western flank.

No wonder Slobodan Milosevic, the poker-faced Yugoslav dictator, thought he could outlast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the battlefield. Surely, this unruly 19-nation coalition would eventually splinter.

Milosevic guessed wrong, but so did NATO.

When the airstrikes started in March, the prevailing opinion at alliance headquarters in Brussels was that the strongest military alliance on the planet would bring Milosevic to his knees in a week or two--at most.

The allies underestimated Milosevic’s capacity to endure months of “precision” bombing. No one predicted that a war designed to stop the Serbs’ campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo would instead push Milosevic to order an even greater humanitarian disaster.

Or that the alliance’s credibility would be stained by television images of streaming refugees and civilian victims of NATO bombs.

Or that America’s vital relationship with the world’s most populous country would be jeopardized by its mistaken attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Yet for all NATO’s miscalculations, the ultimate--and apparently fatal--error of judgment was made not in Brussels but in Belgrade.

Milosevic bet that he could turn public opinion in NATO countries against their leaders, that Western governments would falter before he would.

That proved to be the most costly miscalculation, the one that left Milosevic’s little empire a shambles and his army in retreat.

The effort to hold NATO together through more than 70 agonizing days is the story of pleading and cajoling and hand-holding by the leaders of the world’s strongest nations, of a determination to put an optimistic public face on even the most disastrous events, of a willingness to compromise on matters of vital self-interest.

In the end, NATO’s quest for unity proved to be the pivotal struggle of the conflict over Kosovo.

CHAPTER ONE: Close Call at NATO Gala

NATO had long planned its birthday bash for the last weekend in April, a double-barreled celebration of its first 50 years of existence and its first new members (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) from the vanquished communist bloc.

Nobody had reckoned that NATO would be at war.

On April 20, four weeks into that war, the celebration’s American hosts were worried. The gala event, with President Clinton in the midst of the largest meeting of heads of state and government that Washington had ever witnessed, was in danger of turning into a divisive war council to debate the way forward in Kosovo, the rugged southern province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia.

Washington’s sultry spring air was heavy with a sense of frustration at the lack of progress achieved by the air campaign. While each day’s sorties struck an array of air-defense systems, oil depots, bridges and airfields, and allied casualties remained stunningly low, Milosevic steadfastly refused to yield. Clinton was under growing pressure to consider more draconian alternatives. British Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted to prepare to invade Kosovo by land.

“We were worried whether we were going to be able to get through this,” recalled one senior European diplomat in an interview. “One thing we didn’t want was a discussion on ground troops that would explode into acrimony, because people weren’t clear where they wanted to go.”

To head off such an outcome, the White House hoped to make public a decision made that week by alliance ambassadors in Brussels to “dust off” an array of existing contingency plans for the use of NATO ground forces in Kosovo. Clinton could then point out that the matter was being reviewed in Brussels--keeping the controversy off the table in Washington.

But with the summit’s opening session on Kosovo barely 48 hours away, a problem arose: France balked at making it publicly known that the review on ground forces was taking place. Frantic to get the news out, the White House decided to leak the decision.

In a city where leaking information to the press is part of doing business, the White House managed to come off looking like the Little Engine That Couldn’t.

The White House, unwilling to appear to be the source of the leak, arranged for NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana to slip advance word of the ground force review into a transatlantic phone conversation with Washington Post reporter Nora Boustany. The conversation occurred, but if Solana mentioned that NATO was going to review ground force options, he was so opaque that the veteran reporter told her colleagues that she learned little that was new in the interview.

So the White House tried linking Post reporter Thomas W. Lippman with Alexander Vershbow, U.S. ambassador to NATO, in Brussels. The two went through Boustany’s notes before Vershbow said in exasperation, “Don’t you see what Solana’s trying to tell you? The reassessment is underway.” Although it was past 1 a.m. in Brussels, Vershbow gave Lippman the secretary-general’s home telephone number with the comment, “He’s waiting for your call.”

Lippman called, and editions of the Post the day before the summit opened carried the news that Solana had ordered alliance commanders “to revise and update plans for a possible ground invasion of Kosovo.”

However messy, the leak served its purpose. Public expectations for an airing of the invasion option were satisfied. The only session at the Washington summit set aside specifically for the alliance leaders to discuss the war in Kosovo barely touched on the deployment of ground forces.

The issue that could easily have torn NATO apart hardly came up.

The image of unity was preserved.

CHAPTER TWO: Belgrade Stokes Dissent

Slobodan Milosevic was not about to sit back and wait for NATO to fragment on its own. From the very beginning of the air war, the Yugoslav president intended to do everything in his power to sow dissension in the allied ranks.

Serbian state television frequently portrayed Milosevic as genial and relaxed as he greeted visitors. Those soundless images, beamed around the world, were meant to convey the image of a cool, determined leader in no mood to capitulate--even after NATO sent a cruise missile into one of his homes.

Among his first wartime visitors, in early April, were representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church and Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican’s foreign minister. The meetings produced appeals by the Greek church and Pope John Paul II for an Easter truce, extending from Western observances of Easter, April 4, through the Orthodox observance a week later.

The Easter initiative was an unsuccessful bid to sway Italy and Greece, the NATO members most leery of the bombing.

On April 8, Milosevic tried another tack. Asserting boldly that “peace has been restored in Kosovo,” he said his military offensive against the Kosovo Liberation Army was over. He urged all Kosovo refugees to return home and said he was negotiating a deal with Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate Kosovo Albanian leader, to return some autonomy to the province .

In fact, his army was still fighting reduced KLA forces, but the announcement was meant to depict Yugoslavia as a reasonable country that had found ways to resolve its internal disputes without having to be bombed into submission. On the same day, Milosevic met with the speaker of the Cypriot parliament, Spyros Kyprianou, who had been lured to Belgrade in the belief that he would leave with three American soldiers who had been captured near the Yugoslav-Macedonian border March 31.

Amid rising hopes for the prisoners’ release, Kyprianou was led on a tour of civilian neighborhoods in towns hit by NATO bombs. Then he was sent home empty-handed. For Milosevic, the Kyprianou visit made two points: NATO was targeting civilians, and NATO was to blame for the soldiers’ imprisonment because it would not stop bombing during his visit.

As the aerial assault dragged into a second month, some of Milosevic’s cronies began urging him to start thinking about concessions that could lead to a face-saving deal. Among them was Bogoljub Karic, a wealthy government minister worried about the survival of his own business empire.

Milosevic sent a signal through Karic to U.S. Rep. Rod R. Blagojevich (D-Ill.) that he was ready to free the three U.S. servicemen. The Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived in Belgrade at the end of April and met with the POWs. Television showed Milosevic clasping Jackson’s hand and bowing his head in prayer.

The American civil rights leader left with the prisoners May 2, also taking a letter to Clinton in which Milosevic called for a face-to-face meeting to resolve the crisis. Treading cautiously, Jackson made the point Milosevic wanted: He called for a bombing halt and asked Clinton and NATO “to give peace and reconciliation a chance.”

With his gambit with Jackson and the soldiers, Milosevic was able to appeal directly to the NATO nations’ publics, who were becoming more critical of the air war.

To the same end, he exploited NATO’s increasingly frequent bombing errors. Before the campaign ended, alliance aircraft inadvertently hit refugee columns, two hospitals, a passenger train and a rest home, and fired stray missiles into neighboring Albania and even a suburb of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.

Compelling photos and television footage from the scenes of these mistakes fed public disillusionment with NATO’s first war. As Clinton and other alliance leaders refused to consider alternative strategies, opinion polls in alliance countries charted an ominous drop in support for the air campaign.

Those charged with explaining NATO tactics became testy.

“There’s a misperception at the success of this campaign, on a lot of fronts,” U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Wald told reporters at a Pentagon briefing a week after NATO’s gravest targeting error: a deadly strike on the Chinese Embassy. “I think the pilots I’ve talked to are frustrated that people don’t understand how well it is going.”

At a breakfast with American reporters in Washington a few days later, British Foreign Secretary Cook echoed Wald’s remarks.

“I can understand that when things go wrong, they get reported, but out of the thousands of occasions of dropping bombs, the number of times things go wrong is in single digits,” he complained. “The big picture is that the air campaign is hitting the right targets.”

But Yugoslavia pounced on each embarrassing NATO misfire. It eased travel restrictions on foreign journalists to allow them to reach the scenes of civilian carnage, where they often found senior government ministers spinning NATO’s latest mistake for maximum propaganda advantage.

By early May, Yugoslav officials said they were confident they had put NATO on the defensive, forcing the alliance to confront the divisive option of a ground war. Yugoslav army commanders began saying publicly that they were well prepared for such an invasion.

“It is very hard for NATO to stay unified when it is conducting this kind of campaign,” Nebojsa Vujovic, the deputy foreign minister, said at the time. “We look forward to growing moral support from European countries and calls from their publics for the aggression to stop so serious peace talks can start.”

The Chinese Embassy bombing in particular had the potential of splitting the alliance, Milosevic sensed, so he moved quickly to capitalize on the tragedy. His government on May 10 announced the start of a partial withdrawal of his forces from Kosovo--one that had begun without fanfare the previous week--and demanded a bombing halt in return.

But the embassy bombing also brought bad news to Belgrade. It delayed Chernomyrdin’s arrival for a new round of peace talks that were to have been held the following day.

Instead, the Russian envoy flew to Beijing and then to Moscow for talks with Chinese and American leaders. Yugoslav officials began to express annoyance, saying they suspected he was more a tool of NATO than a mediator who could help Milosevic find an honorable way out.

“Frankly speaking, I don’t look forward to his visits,” Goran Matic, a Yugoslav minister without portfolio, said in an interview May 12. “Whenever he comes, the bombing gets worse. . . . Every NATO bomb that drops on Yugoslavia has a Russian stamp on it.”

When Chernomyrdin next showed up in Belgrade on May 21, he brought a Russian peace plan that Milosevic seized upon: He agreed to accept armed peacekeeping forces from allied countries that had not bombed Yugoslavia; those troops could be part of NATO’s command structure as long as they flew the U.N. flag and the top officer came from a neutral country.

Western officials dismissed that offer even before seeing it. Yugoslav officials began to realize that NATO was in no mood to negotiate anything with Milosevic when his indictment by the U.N. war crimes tribunal was announced May 27.

Constantine Mitsotakis, a former Greek prime minister, met with Milosevic that day and told him how well he looked for a leader whose country was being pounded by the most powerful military alliance on Earth.

“At difficult moments you have to be well,” he remembered Milosevic as replying, “so as to be capable of making the right decisions.”

CHAPTER THREE: The U.S.-British Divide

Nowhere in NATO were the strains of the air campaign more visible than in one of the closest and most important of all alliance relationships: between the American president and the British prime minister.

From the outset of their shared time in power, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair had not only gotten along well personally but agreed politically. They professed a moderate philosophy of the political left known as “the Third Way”: capitalism with the rough edges smoothed over. Blair stood firmly with Clinton throughout the president’s impeachment ordeal.

Kosovo was different.

For Clinton, the conflict was a test for the alliance, a humanitarian nightmare that needed to be stopped. But it was also a beckoning quagmire, one filled with dangers that threatened to destroy NATO and damage his legacy and the Democrats’ 2000 presidential campaign.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright placed 272 calls to foreign leaders during the course of the campaign to make sure all were “on message.” But within Clinton’s own national security team, that message was unclear. Albright, other senior figures at the State Department and some voices at the Pentagon urged an aggressive strategy of stepped-up military pressure and urgent planning for a worst-case scenario: deploying a ground force into Kosovo without a peace agreement.

Others took a more cautious tack. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry H. Shelton favored sticking with the air campaign. In the war’s early days, Shelton told Congress that planning for ground forces could be counterproductive, triggering friction within NATO and heightening false expectations.

Conspicuously, Vice President Al Gore, historically a hawk on the Balkans but now also a presidential candidate, issued a swift and firm stiff-arm to talk of a possible ground operation if the air campaign should fail.

“We are not going to put any ground troops into a combat situation. Neither are our allies,” he told reporters during a late March campaign swing through New Hampshire. Some outsiders speculated that Gore’s stance was linked to the brief absence of his national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, who had suffered a mild heart attack the night the bombing began, leaving the vice president in the hands of his more cautious domestic advisors. Senior White House officials close to Gore rejected that idea.

Clinton seemed personally torn. His rhetoric was strong and uncompromising, but his body language--and his actions--signaled ambivalence. Reacting to public pressures to do more militarily at the height of the refugee exodus that forced more than 1 million from their homes, he approved the deployment of Apache ground attack helicopters--but never ordered them into combat. Above all, he was wary of voices that called for a massing of ground forces.

During the entire war, Clinton met only once with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that was on the day Milosevic accepted NATO’s demands.

Blair, by contrast, labored under no such doubts. For him, the crisis in Kosovo was far more than a test of the Atlantic alliance with potential domestic fallout. It was a test of the new Europe, the fortysomething generation he represents and its willingness to fight for the values so often professed by its democratic leaders. At a more personal level, Blair was sorely offended by the horrors Milosevic had unleashed. He nurtured a deep moral commitment to reverse the Serbian campaign of “ethnic cleansing” at all cost.

During a tour through ethnic Albanian refugee camps in Macedonia, Blair’s wife, Cherie, broke down amid the scenes of misery. The emotions of Britain’s first couple seemed genuine.

“I know it’s hard to believe in this cynical age, but the prime minister’s commitment to this cause is deep and it is very personal,” noted a senior British official. “He believes what he is saying.”

For Blair, defeating Milosevic quickly was as important as getting the job done at all. “It’s not only vital that NATO’s objectives are achieved but that they are achieved before the first snows of the Balkans winter in October,” he told the House of Commons in mid-May.

As the White House continued to block formal planning for a possible combat-ready ground force, Blair announced that Britain would boost its contribution to a prospective peacekeeping force, from 7,000 to 20,000 of the 50,000 expected to be needed.

Despite their differences, aides to both leaders insisted the friendship, and the mutual respect, held throughout the conflict--through a 2 1/2-hour meeting two days before the NATO summit and through countless telephone conversations, including a 90-minute transatlantic chat during which Clinton complained bitterly about British media accounts that cast him as tentative and weak.

Officials from both countries went to great lengths to preserve the image of unity between two of the alliance’s dominant players. Two days before British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s mid-May trip to Washington, U.S. and British officials carefully agreed to a set of mutually acceptable sound bites. Appearing together on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Cook and Albright were able to underscore the image of unity--and to keep an eye on each other.

CHAPTER FOUR: Embassy Bombing Fallout

The bad news arrived early on a Friday evening in Washington. In the West Wing of the White House, the president’s national security staff were lighting candles on a cake to mark Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg’s birthday.

“I just remember the initial reaction was, ‘God, I hope it’s not true,’ ” Steinberg recalled.

A few miles away, Susan Shirk, the State Department’s resident China specialist, was in her car, headed home for the weekend, when her cell phone rang.

“I had a general sense of disbelief,” she recalled. “I felt like I was living in a simulation, a role-playing experiment--you know, one of those things that academics do, to give people some completely unlikely situation and see how they’ll react.”

But the awful truth gradually became clear: An American B-2 bomber had indeed fired three precision-guided weapons at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and effectively destroyed it, killing three Chinese journalists and injuring 20 other people.

That was just the beginning of the damage. The attack wreaked political and diplomatic havoc, shaking sensitive efforts to negotiate an end to the war and upending America’s delicate relationship with the world’s most populous country. It also handed Milosevic a grand propaganda windfall and the beleaguered residents of Belgrade a brief respite: NATO immediately suspended attacks on the Yugoslav capital.

No less important, the misdirected bombs shook the alliance to its core. More than any other single event of the 10-week conflict, it tested NATO’s collective will to press forward with an air campaign that seemed to be bearing little political result.

Of the dozen errors committed by NATO aircraft during more than 32,000 sorties flown over Yugoslavia--mistakes caused mainly by weapons that malfunctioned or pilots who were confused in the fast-forward, split-second world of supersonic aerial warfare--none was so politically costly as the Chinese Embassy bombing. And as it turned out, none could have more easily been avoided.

The disaster was caused not by a high-tech failure but by sloppy intelligence. CIA officials had selected their target from maps drawn before China moved its embassy a few years earlier.

Intelligence analysts compounded their mistake by misreading the map, assuming they were targeting the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement, a building in the same general area but several hundred yards from the embassy. The target was selected in late April, then went through a routine vetting process in which the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, the U.S. European Command Headquarters in Germany and NATO officials in Brussels all signed off.

It was a process meant to catch any mistakes. It didn’t.

“Clearly lots of things went wrong,” a U.S. official commented dryly.

As the enormity of the mistake began to sink in, alliance capitals worked closely together to limit the damage. In many ways, the incident was merely a more dramatic illustration of the larger mood within NATO--a sense of gravity that the stakes for all member nations were so high that, in the heat of the moment, they had no choice but to pull together. Recriminations were for later.

At the State Department, Albright tried to reach China’s foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, by phone. Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering expressed regret to China’s envoy in Washington, Li Zhaoxing. As reports began filtering in early Saturday of major demonstrations outside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Albright spoke by telephone with Ambassador James R. Sasser, who provided gripping firsthand accounts of what had become a siege.

As conditions deteriorated, Albright left her home shortly before midnight to call on Li, both to express her regret and to discuss the safety of America’s diplomats in China. Meanwhile, the U.S. consulted with other allied capitals on the wording of a formal apology that would be carried to Beijing by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, about to leave for China on a previously arranged trip.

Schroeder and Clinton conferred by telephone on the content of the letter, agreeing that it would not only emphasize that the bombing was unintentional but also promise an immediate investigation and an explanation to the Chinese hierarchy on exactly how the mistake occurred.

Because of the bombing, Schroeder’s originally scheduled three-day trip had been shortened to just one day, but his ability to convey the apology in person helped lower the explosive political temperature. After completing his trip to Beijing, the German leader flew immediately to Brussels to confer with NATO military commanders.

As the dust gradually settled, U.S. officials believed China would not use the incident as an excuse to block U.N. approval of a NATO-led international peace force for Kosovo.

“The real damage of the embassy bombing was likely to be long-term and extremely hard to assess,” commented a senior White House official a few days before Milosevic capitulated. “As far as Kosovo goes, I think it is over.”

CHAPTER FIVE: Final Push for Peace

If NATO’s aerial campaign against Yugoslavia was a messy offensive doomed to become an example of how not to fight a war, the diplomacy that eventually rescued the alliance from the brink of disaster was little short of brilliant. It was also blessed with a lot of luck and an unlikely trio of negotiators--one Russian, one American and one Finn--who eventually finalized the formula that brought peace.

A German diplomat who watched key moments of the diplomatic process unfold at the Petersberg government guest house, which is perched in the hills near Bonn overlooking the Rhine, could only marvel at the work of a man who was hardly a household name outside his own country, Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. Ahtisaari managed to coax his Russian counterpart, former Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, to accompany him to Belgrade last Wednesday to present a detailed peace plan to Milosevic.

“It was a piece of miraculous work to get Chernomyrdin on board,” the diplomat said. “I have no idea how he did it.”

The third member of the trio, Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, worked closely with both men, assuring the sanctity of NATO’s key conditions for Kosovo: all Serbian forces out, a well-armed NATO-led peacekeeping force in, and all Kosovo refugees back.

The fact that all three already knew, respected and trusted each other was a stroke of good fortune that, in the end, proved crucial.

Skittish of extending military pressure beyond an intensified air campaign, the Clinton administration and other NATO allies from the beginning invested enormous energy and more than a little hope in a diplomatic solution.

From the beginning, NATO viewed Russia’s involvement in any Kosovo settlement as highly desirable. Russians, like Serbs, are ethnic Slavs, and if Russia felt frozen out of the outcome in Kosovo, it could make trouble in a part of the world where it takes little to endanger stability.

Although deeply opposed to NATO’s armed intervention into a sovereign nation, Russia could prove that it was still a major actor on the world stage if it could become part of any eventual peace accord. And with an annual defense budget of $3.8 billion, a little more than 1% of America’s, Russia had little option other than diplomacy.

The first breakthrough on the road to peace came April 14, three weeks into the air campaign, when a sick and ailing Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin appointed his onetime prime minister Chernomyrdin as his special envoy for Kosovo.

In part, Chernomyrdin’s appointment was part of Yeltsin’s campaign to outflank political opponents who sought his impeachment. But the choice of Chernomydrin, a man known, liked and respected in the West, also signaled that Russia was serious about solving the Kosovo crisis.

To quell any doubts in the West, Chernomyrdin quickly traveled to Tbilisi, Baku and Kiev, meeting with the presidents of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine--all of whom, as participants in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, were preparing to travel to Washington for the alliance’s 50th anniversary celebration.

He asked them to deliver a message to the alliance leaders assembled in Washington: Chernomyrdin was now Russia’s main man on Kosovo, and he was prepared to be flexible in his search for a settlement.

The day after Chernomyrdin’s appointment, Schroeder presented a six-point plan to the European Parliament that for the first time called for a peace force authorized by the United Nations.

The plan, drawn up by Schroeder’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, was a beginning. By bringing in the United Nations, it immediately attracted Russian interest and provided an avenue of retreat for Milosevic, who had said he would accept a U.N. but not a NATO presence in Kosovo. At the same time, U.N. Security Council approval of a NATO-led peace force could be done in a way that did not compromise alliance control over the force.

The plan would become the basis for a de facto NATO-Russian agreement three weeks later in Bonn. The setting, a meeting of the G-8 foreign ministers, was carefully chosen. It enabled Moscow to meet with key NATO countries but in the benign framework of an institution that usually deals with economic matters.

While the wording of the general principles for ending the conflict was exceptionally vague and masked major differences that persisted between Russia and NATO, it was nevertheless an important step forward. For the first time since the bombing began, Moscow had aligned with the six NATO countries that were also in the G-8. The message was not lost on Belgrade.

The isolation of Milosevic had started.

After Chernomyrdin shuttled to Belgrade and won minor concessions from Milosevic, including acceptance of the principle of an international peacekeeping force, Talbott traveled to Moscow to explain the logic of NATO’s detailed conditions. Gradually, the key issues dividing Moscow and NATO narrowed to two:

* NATO insisted that all Serbian forces must leave Kosovo, although a few might be permitted back to perform ceremonial duties or guard religious shrines. Moscow wanted some Serbian forces to remain.

* NATO insisted that only a robust, alliance-led peace force would give the refugees the confidence required for them to return home. Russia favored a force heavily drawn from former Soviet countries operating under U.N. command.

On Sunday, May 2, Yeltsin telephoned Clinton to ask if he could send his envoy to Washington for talks.

The following day, Chernomydrin was greeted at the White House by an old political friend, Gore. For five full years while Chernomyrdin was prime minister, the two had co-chaired a U.S.-Russian Commission that worked on an array of social, scientific and economic issues.

The day ended with Chernomyrdin, Gore, Talbott, Berger and Fuerth, Gore’s national security aide, around the dinner table at the vice president’s residence.

Through the evening and again at a hastily arranged breakfast the following morning also attended by Albright, the Americans drove home a simple point: NATO could not compromise on its main conditions.

The Russian listened carefully and, before departing, made a suggestion.

“He said there are things the Russian Federation can support and argue for and other things that it can’t,” recalled one of those present.

“It can support the G-8 principles, but it can’t support a total withdrawal [of Serbian forces]. It can support an international security force; it can’t support a NATO force. So why don’t you team me up with somebody from a non-NATO country, someone with international prestige?”

The choice was Ahtisaari. Chernomyrdin knew the Finnish president well and had been grateful that he had not taken his country into NATO. Ahtisaari was also known to the Americans, having hosted a successful U.S.-Russian summit in March 1997.

Talbott’s brother-in-law, Derek Shearer, a former ambassador to Finland who teaches international affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles, had brought Ahtisaari together with Talbott informally during the summer of 1995. The two had hit it off instantly and remained in touch since.

The trio completed their work last week at the Petersburg guest house near Bonn when Ahtisaari managed to persuade his Russian partner to travel with him to Belgrade to present Milosevic with a 10-point plan containing all NATO’s essential conditions.

They arrived in Belgrade late Wednesday, sleeping fitfully through the sounds of air raid sirens and explosions from NATO airstrikes before meeting with the Yugoslav president Thursday morning.

During the meeting, according to an authoritative account, Milosevic tried several times to open it to negotiations. Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari would have none of that.

“We have no authority whatever to change one line,” they said.

Milosevic turned to Chernomyrdin and asked, “Is this what I have to do to get the bombing stopped?”

Chernomyrdin said it was.

Milosevic then turned to Ahtisaari and asked: “Is this what I have to do to get the bombing stopped?”

Ahtisaari replied as Chernomyrdin had and then added: “This is the best you can get. It’s only going to get worse for you.”

The two visitors--one Russian, one Finn--looked Milosevic in the eye and waited for a response.

“Clearly,” Milosevic finally said, “I accept this position.”

Marshall reported from Washington and Boudreaux from Belgrade. Times staff writers Richard C. Paddock in Moscow, Jim Mann, Doyle McManus and Paul Richter in Washington, and David Holley in Podgorica, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.

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Key Players in Balkan Crisis

Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari

Leader of a small, neutral nation that owes its survival to its ability to get along with Russia, its giant neighbor. . .Spent 13 years in successfully negotiating Namibia’s independence from South Africa. . .Achieved success on his first trip to Belgrade when Milosevic accepted NATO’s conditions for ending the bombing.

German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder

A Socialist who opposed deployment in Germany of American Pershing missilies in the 1980s. . .Established himself as an unexpected hawk on Kosovo, within Germany’s constitutional constraints against deploying ground forces.

Russian diplomat Viktor S. Chernomyrdin

A former prime minister under President Boris N. Yeltsin. . .Asked by Yeltsin to mediate between NATO and Russia’s Slavic brothers in Serbia. . .Sought a deal to rescue his boss and bolster Russian prestige.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott

A former Oxford University roommate of President Clinton and journalist who developed an expertise on Russia. . .Persuaded Russian envoys that NATO was unwilling to negotiate with Milosvic over the terms of an end to the bombing campaign. . .Negotiated with Moscow over terms for Russian participation in peacekeeping force.

NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana

A solid-state physicist at the helm of NATO. . .Had opposed Spain’s entry into the military alliance. . .Led the alliance in the first war of its 50-year history.

Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou

Berkeley-educated sonof the late Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. . .Supported the air war when the Greek public was 96% opposed. . .Pressed for a mini-Marshall Plan for all the Balkans upon the war’s end.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer

A leader of the original Green Party delegation to parliament. . .Once opposed deploying U.S. nuclear missiles in Germany and supported pulling Germany out of NATO. . . Drafted first Kosovo peace plan, with uncompromising stance against Milosevic.

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Clinton and Blair

President Clinton

A onetime Vietnam War protester now in the role of commander in chief. . .Enthusiastically pressed NATO to undertake the air war. . .Remained dead set against introducing ground troops.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair

Former rock band singer. . .As the most hawkish NATO leader, delivered passionate condemnations of “ethnic cleansing” in Europe. . .Supported sending ground troops to Kosovo to stop Milosevic.

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Key Moments in the NATO Campaign

March 24: Bombing campaign starts.

Late March: The enormity of “ethnic cleansing” campaign becomes apparent.

March 27: First NATO plane--an American F-117--shot down over Serbia; pilot is rescued.

March 31: Three U.S. soldiers captured.

April 14: NATO makes first of several targeting errors, hits refugee column, killing many and giving Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic major propaganda boost.

April 23-25: NATO summit in Washington. Alliance sidesteps discussion of ground troops.

April 29-May 1: The Rev. Jesse Jackson travels to Belgrade, prays with Milosevic, wins release of U.S. soldiers.

May 6: G-8 agrees on set of principles for ending the war. Although vague, wording effectively bring Russia and NATO together for the first time on the diplomatic track.

May 8: Chinese Embassy in Belgrade hit by NATO airstrikes.

May 12: Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari joins the diplomatic process as shuttle diplomacy involving the U.S. and the European Union attempts to bring Moscow closer to NATO’s position on details.

Late May: Final push of diplomatic efforts generate enough unity for Russian envoy Viktor S. Chernom;yrdin and Ahtisaari to travel to Belgrade.

June 3: Milosevic recommends accord to Serbian parliament. Parliament accepts.

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Milosevic

Yugoslav Pres. Slobodan Milosvic

Rabid Serbian nationalist. . .Came to power by championing the rights of the Serbian minority in Kosovo under the banner of a Greater Serbia. . .Accused of directing “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo Albanians.