Hague Witnesses Address Serbian Security Officials’ CIA Links

Two defence witnesses at the retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague this week offered differing interpretations of the links between the Serbian State Security Service, SDB and the US Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990s.

Ivor Roberts, who was Britain's ambassador to Belgrade in the mid-1990s, has previously alleged in his book entitled 'Conversations with Milosevic' that Stanisic was a secretly an agent of the CIA.

However, Roberts told the court on Tuesday that he could not give any more information about this allegation.

"The instructions I have are not to discuss this, and they are very recent instructions, reminding me that I am bound by the British Official Secrets Act even though I left British government service 13 years ago," he said.

When the prosecutor asked him if the information in his book can be considered reliable, Roberts answered: "I would certainly rely on anything I said in my book."

Vlado Dragicevic, a former Serbian intelligence official in charge of relations with foreign intelligence services, then denied that either he or Stanisic had been a CIA agent.

"I swear that I never signed any document that would concern cooperation with the CIA," Dragicevic told the Hague court on Wednesday.

"No. In short, no. I can swear that neither myself nor Mr. Stanisic were ever agents of the CIA," he said.

Former SDB chief Stanisic and Simatovic, the former commander of the SDB-run Special Operations Unit, are charged with having been protagonists in a joint criminal enterprise led by then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, aimed at permanently and forcibly removing Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and...