U.S. Stages Daring Operation Near Belgrade

U.S. forces staged a stunning rescue of a downed American pilot early today, six hours after his F-117A Stealth fighter crashed during NATO airstrikes over Yugoslavia, the Pentagon said.

“I am happy to report the pilot has been rescued and is safe at an allied base,” Defense Department spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said at the Pentagon. “He and the combat search-and-rescue team that picked him up are all safe.”

Bacon declined to identify the pilot or provide any details of the rescue effort, saying that to do so might compromise future rescue attempts. Although Yugoslav officials claimed that the radar-evading aircraft was shot down by Serbian air defenses, Bacon said the cause of the crash remained uncertain.

“That’s something we’ll learn when we interview him,” Bacon said of the pilot. “This plane was reported missing at about 3 p.m. [EST]. From that time until the moment we learned the pilot was safe, we concentrated on nothing but rescuing the pilot. It is premature to speculate now on what made the plane crash.”

President Clinton, in a statement released Saturday night, said he was “tremendously proud of the skills of the pilot and the courageous individuals who participated in the recovery.” He added that the NATO operation would “go forward as planned.”

While the rescue of the pilot provided an unexpectedly upbeat ending to an otherwise unsettling day for the allies, the loss of an aircraft that embodies some of the world’s most advanced military hardware not only tarnishes the image of NATO invincibility, it could jeopardize highly secret U.S. defense technology.

The crash of the Stealth fighter came only hours after NATO announced that it will broaden and intensify its air campaign against Yugoslavia. It further darkened an already gloom-filled day dominated by sketchy but chilling accounts that Serbian security forces might have embarked on a rampage of “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo Albanian civilians. A yearlong civil war in the separatist Serbian province has left thousands dead, mostly civilians.

In other developments Saturday:

* Clinton, in his weekly radio address to the nation, said the reports of continued Serbian attacks on Albanian civilians should only stiffen America’s commitment to end the killing in Kosovo. “That is all the more reason for us to stay the course,” Clinton said. “We must, and we will, continue until Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, accepts peace or we have seriously damaged his capacity to make war.”

* A senior State Department official in Washington suggested that the turmoil in Kosovo could eventually generate as many as 500,000 refugees, or roughly one-fourth of the province’s population. Speaking on CNN, Assistant Secretary of State Julia Taft noted that the refugee flow has been delayed in part by the fear experienced by ethnic Albanians who are too terrified to set out from their homes and villages.

* The White House denied knowledge of a published report of a “forced march” in which a refugee column consisting of 15,000 to 20,000 ethnic Albanians was proceeding through central Kosovo under the control of Serbian security forces. “We had no confirmation of this yesterday, and we still have no confirmation of such a development today,” administration spokesman David Leavy said.

* In Brussels, military sources reported that despite bad weather, NATO aircraft flew 249 sorties in the 24 hours ending late Friday, focusing mainly on targets in Kosovo and the Serbian cities of Nis and Belgrade.

* Yugoslavia’s air forces violated the “no-fly” zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina for a second day running, sending a helicopter across the border into territory patrolled by U.S. troops with the international Stabilization Force, or SFOR, spokesman Cmdr. David Scanlon said in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “It retreated to [Yugoslav] airspace before it could be intercepted,” Scanlon said, noting that SFOR has reminded the Belgrade government and armed forces that the peacekeeping forces in Bosnia “remain ready and capable of addressing any threat to peace in this country.”

* Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sent a letter of support to Milosevic, while popular anger about NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia continued to boil in Russia. In an emergency session of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, Russian deputies made heated calls to send arms to Yugoslavia, and throughout the day several thousand people demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy.

Wreckage of Stealth Jet Shown on Serbian TV

But one of the most dramatic stories of the day was the crash of the U.S. jet. According to eyewitnesses, the Stealth fighter landed in flames about 10 p.m. local time near the village of Budanovci, about 30 miles west of Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, to the official Tanjug news agency reported. They also claimed to have shot down other aircraft and to have captured two pilots, one of whom they identified as a German national. But they provided no evidence to back up the statement, and Germany denied that any of its planes had been shot down.

Serbian TV footage showed the burning wreckage of the F-117A. The pictures revealed U.S. Air Force markings, an insignia bearing the words “Air Combat Command” and an identification number, AF-806. The number indicated that the plane was from the 8th Fighter Squadron based at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Pentagon spokesman Bacon said Clinton was informed by National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger shortly after the plane went down that an F-117A Nighthawk was missing. The president was updated on the situation several times before the rescue, Bacon said.

A defense official, speaking anonymously, told Associated Press that the rescued pilot was in good condition.

Earlier in the day, the decision to escalate the airstrikes came after Clinton conferred with European leaders amid deepening concern that the mission launched four days before to force Milosevic to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo might be having exactly the opposite effect.

In a written statement issued late Saturday, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said he had ordered alliance forces “to initiate a broader range of air operations” in Yugoslavia.

“I have taken this decision with the support of all allied governments, which are determined to bring a halt to violence in Kosovo and to prevent further humanitarian catastrophe,” Solana said.

Allied Unity on Expanding the Battle

In Washington, Leavy said Clinton met early in the day with his national security team at the White House. He then talked by telephone with French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Italian Premier Massimo D’Alema and British Prime Minister Tony Blair before the decision was made to expand the campaign.

“There was total allied unity that in the face of continued aggression, that we needed to expand the range of targets, including troops in the field,” Leavy said.

The decision to go after smaller military targets heightens the risk to NATO pilots. But alliance officials indicated that the additional risk is necessary in light of the disturbing reports coming out of Kosovo during the previous 48 hours.

“There are clear signs now that an all-out Serbian offensive against the Kosovar Albanian people has started,” British Defense Secretary George Robertson said at a news conference in London. “Violence is widespread. The Serbs are bombarding villages to the point of obliteration. We have heard that some villages do not exist.”

Shortly after NATO announced it was expanding the campaign, witnesses counted several combat aircraft taking off from Aviano Air Base in northern Italy for a fourth round of nighttime bombing. In the previous round, bad weather hampered alliance aircraft, and several planes were forced to abandon their targets because of poor visibility.

In interviews before the crash of the Stealth fighter Saturday, several pilots at the air base said that the routine had become too easy and that they had expected stiffer resistance from Milosevic’s air defenses.

“In all our briefings, we make sure that everybody going out on these missions realizes that despite the fact that last night they may not have seen a lot of defenses put up, that doesn’t mean they won’t see any danger tonight,” said a U.S. Navy pilot who identified himself as Bigfoot.

On Saturday, Bosnian authorities expressed fears that Milosevic might seek to spread the war into Bosnia by provoking retaliation by the 30,000-strong international deployment that has kept a tense but stable peace there for three years. The former Yugoslav republic earlier suffered the same ethnic cleansing and atrocities now being committed against the Kosovo Albanians.

On Friday, NATO aircraft shot down two MIG-29 jets that had penetrated northeastern Bosnia, just north of the scene of the helicopter sortie. SFOR troops found the wreckage of one of the downed MIGs on Saturday and confirmed it was armed with air-to-air missiles that posed a risk to NATO aircraft, SFOR spokesman Scanlon said.

Downed Yugoslav Pilots Aided in Bosnia

Civilian reports from the area suggested that both Yugoslav pilots had ejected safely and been helped back across the border into Yugoslavia by sympathetic locals in the Bosnian Serb-held community.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, in Brussels, said the expanded air campaign would be aimed mainly at tanks, other heavy weapons and command posts used by Serbian security forces in an effort to reduce the reported killing in Kosovo.

“We are trying to have an immediate impact on the campaign against ethnic Albanian civilians,” Shea said.

Referring to “mounting reports” of “killing, looting, harassing and the intimidation of ethnic Albanians inside Kosovo,” Shea said: “I stress these are reports only. We don’t yet have evidence, though we are obviously seeking to get as much evidence as we can. But nonetheless, the concordance of different reports is enough to alarm us. . . . Let’s be careful. Let’s wait. But at the same time, let’s register indications that dark things are happening, even if we are not able to quantify those for the time being.”

Shea said alliance headquarters had received reports from international monitors of large numbers of ethnic Albanian women and children being herded by Serbian paramilitary units across Kosovo’s southwestern border into Albania in the days since the airstrikes began.

“Very ominously, without any men,” Shea said. “I don’t have a figure, but it is a significant number of people, which suggests that an ethnic-cleansing operation is underway.”

He noted accounts of armed Serbian civilians blocking access to the Kosovo capital, Pristina, and of Serbian forces initiating a roundup of ethnic Albanian men.

“We have reports . . . that in that city, there have been door-to-door operations in which men have been separated from their families and taken away to undisclosed destinations,” Shea said.

NATO May Be Facing an Agonizing Dilemma

Such reports, coupled with the loss of the first U.S. warplane in the allied operation, place enormous pressure on Western decision-makers, including those in the Clinton White House, who now watch as the plan they set in motion to end the persecution of an entire population shows signs of disintegrating into a nightmare.

Indeed, events of the last four days appear to have presented the NATO allies with an agonizing dilemma: On the one hand, it is virtually impossible for air power alone to stop armed Serbian security units on the ground from terrorizing and killing civilians on a large scale. Conversely, there is virtually no popular support within NATO member countries to follow airstrikes with a deployment of ground troops into a combat situation in Kosovo.

In his radio address, Clinton praised the bravery of America’s armed forces and referred to what he called “the courage of the Kosovar people.”

“We cannot let them down now,” the president said.

At least publicly, Clinton and his advisors hung grimly to their conviction that bombing alone would be enough either to force Milosevic to accept a NATO-led peacekeeping force for Kosovo or significantly diminish his capacity to attack ethnic Albanians in the province.

“The whole core of our policy is to reduce this kind of brutal activity,” Leavy said. “Our goal is to end the repression. It is still our strong judgment we can accomplish our objective through air power.”

Marshall reported from Washington and Dahlburg from Brussels. Times staff writers Carol J. Williams in Sarajevo, Richard Boudreaux in Aviano, Italy, and Robyn Dixon in Moscow contributed to this report.

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F-117A Nighthawk

Primary Function: Fighter / attack

Contractor: Lockheed Martin

Length: 65 ft., 11 inches.

Wingspan: 43 ft, 4 inches.

Speed: Subsonic

Crew: One

Cost: $45 million