The Americans Said Arresting War Criminals Was Too Risky. The SAS Did Two Before Lunch.
The American assessment of the risk presented by ICTY arrest operations in Republica Serpska had been formally reviewed twice in the 18 months preceding the 10th of July 1997 and both reviews had reached the same conclusion. The operational environment made such operations unacceptably dangerous. The political consequences of failure were too severe to accept and the capability of the SFOR force to conduct arrests without producing American casualties in a contested environment was not sufficient to justify the attempt. The
assessments had been produced by serious professionals who understood the Balkans, who had studied the specific security environment of each municipality where indicted war criminals were known to reside, and who had weighed the operational risks against the political and legal benefits with the analytical rigor that the American military intelligence community brought to complex assessments.
Both reviews had been thorough. Both had been wrong. not in their analysis of the risks of large force operations in Republic of Serpska, but in their failure to assess the risk profile of the specific type of operation the British were planning. The operation the Americans had been assessing was not the operation the British conducted.
The operation the British conducted was not the operation anyone had assessed. Simo Diljaka’s daily schedule in the summer of 1,997 had been mapped with a precision that the SAS surveillance effort had refined over weeks of patient collection. He was a creature of habit which most people are regardless of the political climate in which they operate because habit is the default mode of human existence and the awareness that someone might be watching does not easily override the comfort of established routine. He drove
the same car on the same roads at the same times most mornings. He fished at the Gratina Reservoir on summer weekday mornings when his schedule allowed it, bringing his teenage son and a nephew who accompanied him as an informal protection. The nephew was broad-shouldered and watchful in the way that informal security often is attentive enough to serve the social function of protection without being formally trained in the disciplined observation that professional close protection requires.
The surveillance product on Drilljaka’s reservoir mornings had been confirmed on multiple occasions before July 10. The pattern was [music] solid. The team that went to the reservoir on that morning went with the specific confidence of people who have prepared for a scenario thoroughly enough that its execution is a confirmation of what they already know rather than an encounter with the unknown.
Milan Kovasevich’s morning routine at Pier Hospital was equally well mapped and equally predictable. He arrived between 063 0 and 0645 most working mornings, entered through the main entrance, moved directly to the staircase serving the administrative wing, and reached his second floor office without deviation. The hospital’s morning was busy enough by that hour to absorb a small group of visitors without making them anomalous, [music] and the administrative wing’s second floor was quiet enough that movement to the director’s office would not be
complicated by heavy foot traffic. The team designated for the hospital arrest had rehearsed the approach, the entry sequence, and the contact drill at a facility that replicated the critical dimensions of the hospital’s layout. The rehearsal had not been conducted once. It had been conducted until the sequence was physically automatic until the movement from the entrance to the second floor to the office door was a practiced physical routine rather than a consciously navigated set of decisions.
That quality of preparation was what allowed the team to move through a functioning hospital in plain clothes on a July morning without producing the kind of visible uncertainty that [music] causes people in corridors to look twice. The decision to run both arrests simultaneously rather than sequentially was the planning decision that made the whole operation possible.
Durjaka and Kvasovich were not in communication during the morning hours in question. There was no evidence from the surveillance product that they had any routine early morning contact, but the operational risk of a sequential approach was clear. If the first arrest was completed and the second had not yet begun, there was a possibility that information about the first would reach the second target through the informal networks that connected the prejer political and security community.
The networks were real, even if they were not formal. The solution was simultaneity. Both operations would begin at the same time, ensuring that neither target had the opportunity to receive information about the other before both were in custody. The planning mathematics required that both teams be in position, ready to execute at the same moment with communications architecture that allowed the central command element to confirm simultaneous approach without the communications creating a signature that could be detected by any monitoring
effort. the local security network might maintain the contact at the reservoir did not go according to the precise script of the plan because Daljaka drew a weapon and fired it. This was [music] one of the outcomes the planning had identified as possible and for which the team had prepared.
The outcome of a target drawing a weapon at close range against an SAS team was not an uncertain one. It was an outcome that the team’s training had prepared them for with a specificity and a repetition that made the response automatic. Drojaka fired and hit one of the operators in the leg. The wound was significant, assessed at the scene as serious, but not immediately life-threatening.
He fired again. He was dead before his second round had found a target. The son and the nephew were detained and then released. The wounded operator was moved off the line, given initial trauma care by the team’s medical element, and prepared for evacuation. The scene was cleared. The team departed at Prejudor Hospital.
The second team was completing its arrest of Kovacovic in the 6-minute window that the plan had allocated. Both operations were complete before 0730. The American morning briefing at Eagle Base in Tusla would not begin for another hour and a half. The two most prominent war criminals in Prejudor municipality were in British custody before the day’s first formal assessment of the security situation had been delivered to the American command.
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Stories YouTube won’t allow. Now, let’s get into it. The planning for Operation Tango had been conducted in the specific institutional environment of the British SFOR contingent under the authority of the British sector commander and the SFOR command structure that gave him the legal framework to proceed.
The planning cell that developed the operational concept was drawing on the regiment’s accumulated experience [music] of close target reconnaissance, arrest operations, and civilian cover direct action across a career history that included Northern Ireland, the Faullands, the Gulf War, and the various other deployments that had produced the operational tradition the regiment brought to the Balkans.
the specific challenges of the Bosnia environment, the postconlict [music] political sensitivity, the locally embedded intelligence networks, the specific social geography of Republica Serpska municipalities [music] were challenges that the planning cell addressed by building the operational concept from the target environment outward [music] rather than from the standard operational template inward.
The question was not how to apply the standard direct action approach to the project targets. The question was what operational approach the prideater targets specific environment and routines made possible. That question produced a different answer from the standard template and the different answer was the specific innovation that operation tango represented.
Simo Diljaka had been the police chief of priador municipality from 1,992 through the post-war years. The Omar detention camp, which he had been instrumental in establishing and administering, had processed prisoners from May through August of 1,992 [music] in conditions that the ICTY’s subsequent investigation documented with forensic and testimonial precision.
The names of the prisoners held at Omar, the Bosnjak and Croat men of Priador municipality who had been concentrated there in the months when the ethnic cleansing campaign was at its most intense were documented in the ICTY investigation files and in the records of the human rights organizations that had been collecting survivor testimonies since the war’s earliest months.
The specific acts committed at the camp, the interrogations, the beatings, the killings, the conditions of starvation and exposure were documented in depositions taken from survivors in the years following the war’s end. Drilljaca’s role in establishing and running the camp was documented through multiple corroborating sources.
The indictment that the ICTY had prepared against him was built on an evidentiary foundation that was by the tribunal standards unusually solid. He had been at Omar. He had run the police force that staffed it. He had been present when the decisions about what happened there were made. The indictment had been ready since March 1997.
The warrant had been issued. The difficulty had been reaching him. Operation Tango reached him. The risk assessment that had prevented the American forces from conducting the Bosnia arrests had been produced within an institutional framework that processed risk in specific ways. The American military’s approach to operational risk management is built on a tradition of comprehensive planning, thorough assessment of threat environments, and the application of force superiority at the point of decision.
The tradition produces planning processes that identify every possible negative outcome and develop responses to each of them. The tradition also produces planning processes that can become conservative in ways that mistake the comprehensiveness of the risk catalog for an accurate picture of the probability that any specific risk will materialize.
The Bosnia arrest risk catalog had been comprehensive. It had identified every way the operations could go wrong. It had not accurately assessed the probability that any of those things would go wrong given the specific operational concept the British were planning. The probability assessment was embedded in the risk catalog’s comprehensiveness and the comprehensiveness had given the catalog a weight that the actual probabilities did not justify.
The British assessed the probabilities differently because they were building the operational concept from the target environment specific characteristics rather than from the standard template. The specific concept was lower risk than the standard template. [music] The risk assessment that applied to the standard template was not the right risk assessment for the specific concept.
The British had used the right assessment. The arrests succeeded. The intelligence product that had made Operation Tango possible was not exclusively British in its origins. The American collection effort in Bosnia, the Delta Force surveillance teams, the CIA’s human intelligence network, the NSA’s signals collection in the region had contributed substantially to the understanding of the Prejour indictes environments and routines. The specific detail of Dr.
Jaca’s reservoir visits had been documented in American targeting files for a year and a half. The pattern of Kovacvix’s hospital schedule had been confirmed through American source reporting. The British planning cells targeting product drew on the American collection product which was available through the joint intelligence architecture of the SFOR command.
The Americans had collected it. The British had used it. [music] The specific distinction between the collection side and the operational execution side of the Tango product was a [music] distinction created by the policy rather than by the intelligence architecture. The policy had said the Americans could not do the operation.
It had not said the Americans could not provide the intelligence the British needed to do it. The intelligence flowed. The policy held. The British took the product and the authority it supported and produced an outcome that the Americans had been prevented from producing themselves. Chapter 2.
The SFOR morning briefing at Banjaluca on the 10th of July 1997 included items on overnight patrol activity on the status of local political developments and on the road and weather conditions affecting movement in the British and French sectors. It also included a brief from the British sector covering the completion of two simultaneous arrest operations [music] against ICTY indicted war criminals, the status of the two detainees, [music] the condition of the wounded operator, and the current security assessment of the operational area following the operations. The
briefing was received by a multinational command that included American, French, [music] German, Dutch, and other national representatives. The American contingent reaction has been characterized by those present as measured in its formal expression and considerably less measured in its private one.
The British had done two arrests before lunch. The Americans had spent 18 months determining that the arrests were too risky to attempt. The operational record that the SFO morning brief created was the first formal documentation of what the day would produce in larger quantity. the evidence that the American risk assessment had been wrong about the specific type of operation the British had conducted.
The assessment had been right about large force cordon operations. It had been right that a 200 person military convoy moving through Pjidor would be reported before it reached its objective. It had not assessed the alternative because the alternative, a fiveperson team in civilian clothes with precise intelligence and a plan built around the targets existing routine, had not been the subject of the formal review.
The review had assessed what it had been asked to assess. It had not been asked to assess an operation it had not conceived. That gap between the operation the Americans had conceived and reviewed and the operation the British had planned and executed was the specific space in which the entire outcome of July 10 existed. The risk had been low because the operation had been different.
The Americans had assessed the wrong operation. The wounded SAS operator was evacuated to a British military medical facility and subsequently to more advanced care. His injury required surgical intervention. He received it. He returned to service. The operational record documents his wound in the language that the regiment’s culture requires for all operational injuries.
The specific fact of the wound, [music] its treatment, its outcome. The personal dimension of having been shot at close range by a man he had come to arrest is not part of the operational record because it is not the operational record’s purpose to capture personal dimensions. What the personal dimension was and what the operator made of the fact that the man who shot him was dead while he was recovering is preserved in the institutional memory of the regiment in the way that such things are preserved in the culture of people who have been
through the work and who do not need documents to remember what the work was like. The forensic investigation of Djaka’s role in the 1992 Prejudor ethnic cleansing campaign had been the most extensive component of the ICTY’s Prejudor related investigation before his death. He had been the police chief who had organized and commanded the police force that operated Omar and Keratm and Tranopole, the three detention camps where the Priodor Bosnjak and Croat male population had been concentrated in. the summer of
1,992. The investigation had documented his role through survivor testimony, through records recovered from the Prejor police files, and through the accounts of individuals who had served under his command. The indictment that had been prepared against him and that he died before facing charged him with genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of [music] war.
The charges were never tested in a court because Duljaka chose to fire a pistol at an SAS team [music] by a reservoir rather than be arrested. The legal verdict that the ICTY would have delivered was never delivered. The operational verdict of the 10th of July 1997 was the Americans who had produced the risk assessments that had concluded the arrests were too dangerous reviewed those assessments in the aftermath of Operation Tango with the analytical rigor that the American intelligence community applied to failures of
analytical judgment. The review was thorough. It identified the specific failure. The assessments had focused on the risks of large force operations without assessing the risks of the small team civilian cover operations that the British had developed as an alternative. The failure was an institutional failure rather than an individual one.
The product of an analytical framework that had not been asked to consider the full range of operational options and that had therefore assessed a narrower set of options than the actual operational space contained. [music] The corrective was applied to the analytical framework. The subsequent reviews of arrest operation feasibility for the remaining ICTY indictes on the Republic of Serpska target list included explicit assessment of small team civilian cover approaches.
The corrected framework produced different conclusions from the original one. The different conclusions supported the changed authorization. The changed authorization supported the joint operations that followed. The two arrests that the British conducted before the SFO morning briefing on the 10th of July 1997 were not the most operationally complex operations that the SAS conducted in Bosnia.
They were conducted against targets who were accessible, whose routines were mapped, and whose defensive arrangements were limited by civilian context. The operational difficulty was not in the violence of the contact which for one arrest was zero and for the other was brief. The operational difficulty was in the planning in the patient intelligence development, the simultaneous timing, the civilian cover execution, the management of the wounded operator while completing the clearance of the reservoir contact scene.
These were demands that the regiment’s training and culture were specifically designed to meet. Meeting them on July 10 produced an outcome that the American Risk Assessment had said would not be achieved. The Americans had said the arrests were too risky. The British had done two before the American morning briefing began.
The formal American reaction to Operation Tango was contained within the official statement that SFOR issued acknowledging the arrests and noting that they had been conducted in accordance with SFOR’s legal authority under the Dayton agreement and UN Security Council resolution 131. The statement did not identify the national force that had conducted the operations, did not describe the operational methodology, and did not comment on the relationship between the British decision to proceed and the American decision that had preceded it
not to. The statement was the kind of statement that multinational command structures produce when one national contingent has done something significant that the command as a whole needs to acknowledge without publicly attributing it. in a way that would embarrass the contingents that chose not to participate.
The statement’s careful neutrality was itself informative. The SFOR command was managing a specific institutional sensitivity. The operations had been unilaterally British. The statement was formally multilateral. The gap between the two was the gap the statement had been drafted to bridge. The two detainees who were transferred to ICTY custody produced the formal judicial outcomes that their cases required.
Kovacic died in detention in August 1998, 13 months after his arrest of a ruptured aortic aneurysm. His trial was never held. The charges that had been developed against him over years of investigation and that his arrest had been executed to answer remained in the investigative file rather than in a court verdict.
Drilljaka was dead at the reservoir. His case had been resolved on the path beside the lake at Gradina rather than in a courtroom in the Hague, not because the British had intended to kill him, but because he had drawn a weapon and fired it at an SAS operator. and the operational response to that action had been lethal before the outcome of his resistance could be different.
The legal process for both men had been permanently closed before it could fully run for different reasons with different immediate causes, but with the same final result. Neither of the two most prominent war criminals of Prejudor Municipality. The two men whose indictments Operation Tango had been executed to serve ever faced [music] a formal verdict from the court that had charged them.
The arrest program had reached them. [music] The legal process had not completed. The completions that did occur in the subsequent arrests carried the weight of the accumulating institutional demonstration that the program was working. Each individual who arrived at the UN detention unit at Chevingan was evidence that the program could produce defendants.
Each individual who went through the initial appearance, the charge confirmation, the disclosure process, [music] the pre-trial hearings, and eventually the trial itself was evidence that the program could produce the proceedings that accountability required. The Tango arrests were the beginning of that accumulation.
The two men they had produced had not become verdicts. The program they had initiated had the SAS had done two before lunch on the 10th of July 1997. What they had started took [music] years to complete and the completion was the work of lawyers and judges and international institutions [music] rather than of special operations forces.
The special operations forces had created the conditions in which the completion was possible. Two arrests before the SFO morning briefing. The risk that two years of American policy had said was too high. The risk that six minutes in a hospital corridor and 90 seconds by a reservoir had demonstrated was manageable.
The international legal architecture that underpinned the SFO arrest operations had been constructed through years of negotiation and incremental development that preceded the Dayton agreement and continued after it. The ICTY had been established by the Security Council in May 1993 as an ad hoc tribunal with jurisdiction over the former Yugoslavia, the first international criminal tribunal since [music] Nuremberg and Tokyo.
Its establishment had been controversial from the beginning with questions about its legitimacy, its practical effectiveness, and its relationship to the peace process that would eventually end the war. The tribunals’s advocates argued that accountability and peace were complimentary rather than contradictory, that prosecuting the architects of ethnic cleansing was a condition of sustainable peace rather than an obstacle to it.
The tribunals’s critics argued that the pursuit of accountability at the [music] cost of the peace process was a false exchange, that prosecuting war criminals would harden the nationalist positions of the parties whose cooperation the peace process required. The debate was conducted in academic journals, in diplomatic cables, and in the security council debates that had produced the tribunal’s mandate.
It was also conducted in more direct terms in the SFOR planning cells where the question was not theoretical but operational. Was the risk of arrest operations justified by the legal and political benefit they produced? Operation Tango answered that question by executing it rather than debating it.
The debate had produced two years of inaction. The operation produced two arrests. The subsequent arrest program produced dozens more. The debate’s conclusion that arrests were too risky and would destabilize the peace was tested against the operational record and found to be wrong. The peace survived. The arrests succeeded. The specific fears that had produced the policy of restraint had been assessed at a level of probability that the operational record did not support.
The ICTY’s work sustained through the arrest program that Tango had initiated produced the trials that the debate had suggested were not worth the cost of the operations needed to produce them. The trials produced verdicts. The verdicts produced the legal accountability that the tribunal had been established to deliver.
Not in every case Kvasovich died, Drojaka died, Kurajic was not arrested until 2008, but in enough cases to constitute a genuine record of international humanitarian law enforcement that had not existed before the SFO arrest program began. The British decision to proceed with the arrests despite the American policy of restraint was a decision that operated at the intersection of alliance politics, national policy authority, and operational judgment.
The British SFO contingent had the legal authority to conduct the arrests, [music] the same authority the American contingent had and had chosen not to exercise. The British government had reached a different policy [music] conclusion from the American government about the balance of risks. The British military command had developed a different operational concept from the one that the American planning process had assessed.
The British teams had executed the concept they had developed. The result was an operational outcome that changed the policy landscape for both countries. The Americans revised their authorization. The alliance established the joint arrest framework and the Balkans accountability program moved into its operational phase. The British had moved first.
The Americans had followed the specific dynamic between the two one ally proceeding where another had declined. The preceding ally demonstrating feasibility. The declining ally [music] revising its policy was a dynamic that reflected the specific character of the alliance relationship in its [music] most direct form.
Respect without dependence, independence without isolation. The broader institutional effect of the SFO arrest program on the post [music] Dayton political environment of Republica Serpska was slow to become visible but real [music] in its eventual expression. The nationalist political establishment that had governed Republica Serpska since the war’s end under the leadership of Karajic and the structures he had created was [music] sustained partly by the evident impunity of its wartime leadership. cadre by the fact that the
individuals most closely associated with the crimes of the war continued to occupy prominent public positions without facing the legal accountability that the ICTY had been established to deliver. Each arrest that Operation Tango and its successors produced removed one element of that impunity architecture.
The political environment that had sustained the impunity did not change immediately or dramatically with each arrest. It changed incrementally as the accumulation of successful arrests eroded the confidence that impunity was permanent and as the international pressure that accompanied the arrest program was applied through the economic and political levers that the postdaton international engagement with Bosnia provided.
The ICT wise work and the arrest program that delivered defendants to it were tools in a broader international effort to create the conditions in which accountability could be institutionalized. The SAS arrests were one element of a much larger process. They were the element that made the process start moving. the specific operational skills that the Bosnia arrest experience developed in the British special operations community.
The civilian cover arrest methodology, the pattern of life intelligence approach adapted to postconlict civilian environments. The specific legal and procedural knowledge required for operations in the context of international tribunal warrants were skills that proved directly applicable in subsequent operational contexts.
The decade that followed the Bosnia operations produced multiple environments in which the pursuit of individuals who were subjects of international legal processes moving in civilian environments with some degree of protective awareness required exactly the combination of intelligence, precision, operational patience, and civilian cover execution that the Bosnia operations had developed.
The specific experience of having conducted those operations against real targets in a real environment was the foundation on which the subsequent applications were built. The foundation had been constructed in prejor municipality in the summer of 1,997 by teams that had trained for exactly this kind of work and had been given after two years of waiting the authority to do it.
The specific institutional documentation practices that each special operations community employed in processing its operational experiences shaped the form in which those experiences were preserved and transmitted through the organization. The American military’s documentation culture, which valued comprehensive, standardized, and widely distributable operational records, produced a body of documentation about the alliance’s special operations in this period that was extensive, detailed, and accessible to future planners and analysts [music]
through the formal archiving and distribution systems that the American military maintained. The culture produced afteraction reports, lessons learned documents, doctrinal publications, [music] and training materials that captured the operational experience in a form that could be systematically applied to future planning and preparation.
The British special operations community’s documentation culture, which valued brevity, operational precision, and the protection of methods and sources, produced a body of documentation that was significantly smaller, [music] but that reflected the regiment’s institutional conviction that the knowledge most worth preserving was the operational knowledge held by the people who had done the work, and that the most effective transmission mechanism for that knowledge was the operational culture. and the people who carried it
rather than the documents they produced. The two cultures produced different documentary records of the same operational experiences. The American record was more extensive, [music] more standardized, and more institutionally accessible. The British record was more concentrated, more operationally precise, and more directly connected to the specific individuals and teams whose work it documented.
Neither record was complete without the other. The American documentation captured the strategic and institutional dimensions of operations that the British documentation did not attempt. The British documentation preserved the operational truth of the operations in a form that did not require the analytical apparatus the American system employed to extract it.
The researchers and historians who have attempted to reconstruct the operational history of this period have found both documentation traditions essential and have found that the specific gaps in each are filled by the other. The American documentation explains what the British operations meant for the alliance.
The British documentation and the accounts of British veterans who have described their experiences to journalists and researchers over the years explains what the British operations actually looked like from the inside. Both dimensions are necessary for an accurate historical account. The ratio between them which consistently favored the American side in terms of volume was a precise description of two very different institutional approaches to the question of what the written record is for.
The pattern of joint operations between British and Australian special operations forces and their American allies in this period established a model of bilateral and multilateral special operations engagement that [music] proved durable through the subsequent decade. The model was built on the specific foundation of operational trust.
[music] The trust that one force extends to another when it has observed that force perform under real operational conditions and has concluded that the performance was reliable and that the judgment the force exercised was sound. That trust is not established through policy commitments or formal alliance structures. It is established through the specific experience of watching another force operate and concluding that the performance was consistent with what the trust relationship requires.
the American forces that developed that trust with the SASR in Afghanistan, with the SAS in Bosnia and Iraq, and with the various other elements of the British and Australian special operations communities that they worked alongside in this period developed it through exactly this process. They watched, they operated, [music] they assessed, they extended the trust that the assessment supported.
The assessment was the product of what they had seen. What they had seen was the work. The work had been done in the specific conditions and environments and against the specific targets and threats that the campaigns of the period had produced. The trust was the product of the work and the work was the product of the training, the selection and the institutional cultures that had produced the forces that did
