Over the course of the 1990s, Yugoslavia fragmented in a
decade-long orgy of bloodletting that became known as the Balkans conflict. The
disintegration began as part of the cascading breakup of the Soviet Union and
its satellites and erupted into a murderous ethnic war in 1992, after Bosnia’s
Muslim and Croat majority voted to secede from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav
federation. For several years the United States stood aside, hoping that Europe
would find a way to stop the hemorrhage. Diplomatic overtures and arm-twisting
by NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) failed, while the killing of
250,000 of Bosnia’s population of three million proceeded apace.
The so-called ethnic cleansing was essentially complete by
the time of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. The attempt to enforce the
accords and prevent further killing fell to the Dayton Implementation Force
(IFOR), composed of 60,000 NATO-led troops.
The U.S. special operations component of IFOR was led by
Col. Geoffrey Lambert with Lt. Col. Charlie Cleveland as his deputy. Lambert
had commanded the 10th Special Forces Group, which is assigned to operate in
Europe, since the fall of 1994, and Cleveland was its executive officer. The two
men had served together in 7th Group in Panama in operations Just Cause and
Promote Liberty in 1989–90. Those who knew Lambert knew that the former Ranger
was not the type to command from the rear. The towering redhead was going to be
in the thick of the action.
A native of Kansas, Lambert had been commissioned as a
second lieutenant in 1973 and had then hopped back and forth between the
Rangers and the Special Forces. In his early years, he had led a long-range
reconnaissance patrol platoon, a rifle platoon, and a detachment in the
Rangers, commanded a Special Forces ODA, returned to the Rangers for three more
assignments, and then rejoined the Special Forces in time for Just Cause.
Lambert and Cleveland flew into Sarajevo from Italy on
December 8, 1995, six days before the formal signing of the Dayton accords in
Paris. In Bosnia, acceptance of the accords was far from universal. Operation
Joint Endeavor was the largest mission NATO had ever undertaken, and it was a
muscular peace-enforcement, not merely a peace-keeping attempt. As part of the
advance party, Lambert and Cleveland’s job was to pave the way for the rest of
the IFOR and its British commander, who would arrive shortly. Special Forces
teams were to fan out all over the country as liaisons among the member
countries to provide a common communications network. Later, the teams became
observers and, with their experience and language skills, waded into the
ravaged and deeply divided communities to develop contacts, gauge the public
mood, and identify the various power brokers, from priests to hoodlums, and
persons of influence. Once they had constructed a map of the society they
worked those channels to resolve problems at local, regional, and national
levels.
The people of Sarajevo began begging the world for help when
their picturesque and ancient city came under siege in 1992. Ultra-nationalist
Serbs had taken over the surrounding mountains and relentlessly shelled the
city, which had been a vibrant, multiethnic cultural center since the Middle
Ages. It had hosted the winter Olympics in 1984 and charmed the world with its
attractions, but that did not bring international help when the bombardment and
slow destruction of the city began. The Serbs’ heavy artillery reduced many
buildings to husks, damaged power plants, and left the city dependent on
generators and more sporadic fuel supplies.
Senad Pecanin was the editor of Sarajevo’s newsweekly, the
most balanced and trenchant publication in the country. A Muslim who cherished
his city and its secular, tolerant tradition, he had dared to publish accounts
of Muslim atrocities as well as Serbs’. After his parents’ apartment was
riddled with bullets, he and his wife Belma, a stunning brunette with the looks
and grace of a 1940s movie star, decided to send their parents abroad. As the
death toll mounted Senad persuaded her to take their newborn son and leave too.
He might not be able to save his city, but he could keep putting out the
magazine, if he could only keep the generator for the printing press running.
Thugs broke into his office and held a gun to his head to demand that he stop
publishing. The U.S. embassy tried to ward off attacks by publicly voicing its
support for the magazine.
Senad, a gentle giant in his mid-thirties, began losing his
hair from the tremendous stress. He could not stop the country’s descent into
barbarism, but he vowed that he would always walk, and never run, through the
infamous avenue in the city called Sniper Alley, the deadly shooting gallery
where so many Sarajevans bled to death. Snipers in the mountains would take aim
at ordinary people crossing this exposed stretch of city blocks. It was the
only route to the dwindling supplies of water. Terrified men, women, and
children would dodge, weave, and dash, and try all sorts of stratagems to run
the gauntlet unscathed. Senad always walked. He and his magazine had become a
symbol, and this was one way he could give his countrymen heart. He was a huge
target, a bear of a man, but he would never give the Serb snipers the
satisfaction of seeing him run.
The sniper problem was breaking the spirit of the
Sarajevans. It had become emblematic of the Serbs’ utter disregard for the
conventional laws of land warfare. Snipers would sit in their nests high in the
hills and cold-bloodedly pick off civilians, not caring that the world’s
television cameras broadcast their atrocities.
The special operations compound in the Serb quarter of
Sarajevo was also targeted; it had been sniped at twenty-four times. The gunmen
fired rifle grenades at it and its vehicles day and night. The peacekeepers
blacked out their building at night and ringed it with trucks, to no avail. The
sniping went on. One soldier was shot through the hand, another one grazed on
the neck. The snipers also shot holes into military planes as they landed at
the airfield.
Under the Dayton accord, all the parties had agreed to stop
shooting. Long-barreled rifles were explicitly banned, yet the Serbian snipers
kept on. Colonel Lambert came up with an idea and explained it to his
counterparts from the British and French special forces, who were working
together in Europe’s first-ever combined joint special operations task force,
led by a British general with Lambert as the deputy. The task force decided to
give Lambert’s plan a try. He arranged for a Q–36 radar to be brought to the
airfield. Although made for homing in on artillery rounds, it could also spot
much smaller rifle rounds. Every time the planes landed, the radar locked on to
the muzzle flashes to fix the snipers’ location. Lambert also handed out
night-vision goggles to British sentries on rooftop observation posts. French
special operators stole out with night-capable cameras and took pictures of the
muzzle flashes of the snipers in the hills and used the photos to pinpoint the coordinates
of the sniper nests. They were now ready for the next Serb shooter.
One night, the French special operators shot the man who was
sniping at the airfield, riddling his body with thirty-seven bullets. The
corpse was then taken to the Serbian police station. British soldiers were
assigned to this sector, so they delivered the body and the message. They
pointed out that the Serbs had agreed to abide by the terms of the accord,
which included no more shooting and no long-barreled guns. The Serbs were furious.
The Serbs claimed that the dead man was a guard at a factory, but the soldiers
showed them the photographic and radar evidence they had gathered, and then
calmly presented their ultimatum.
It was the Serbs’ duty as policemen to protect this sector of
Sarajevo, yet there were Serb snipers ringing the city and shooting at people
daily. The peacekeepers asked that policemen assume their responsibility to
address this matter. The British expressed regret for the killing of the
sniper, but they said that more of them could be killed if the sniping did not
stop. They said they had the imagery and the coordinates for all the sniper
nests in the mountains and the high-rise buildings around Sarajevo. “We’re
going to let you handle this, because we know you can,” the British commander
told the Serbs.
The plan worked. The peacekeepers did not have to kill one
more Serb sniper, but there still were disgruntled Serbs. Whether an act of
retribution or another random and senseless act, Lambert’s caravan was hit soon
after this showdown. He was not riding in the same vehicle he normally used,
however, but in the car in front. His radio telephone operator was in the seat
usually occupied by Lambert, but was shorter than Lambert and so the bullet
just grazed him as it passed through the car’s windshield. For his trouble, he
received a Purple Heart for being wounded in action, and his commander’s
gratitude for having taken a bullet meant for him.
At the same time that the counter-sniping campaign was
unfolding, Lambert launched Operation Teddy Bear. The British thought both the
name and the concept were most unsoldierly and refused to have anything to do
with it. Someone had donated 1,000 stuffed teddy bears to IFOR, so Lambert
decided to hand them out to all the Serbian children in the neighborhood. He
put Lt. Col. Charlie Cleveland in charge of it. Special Forces soldiers walked
the streets with teddy bears, giving them out to any children they saw. They
went without helmets or body armor to show solidarity with the civilians, who
of course had no such protection either. They wanted to show hostile Serbs
that, while they would not tolerate the sniping, they had no animus toward the
population. Stopping the violence was only half the job; they had to find a way
to get these people to live together again.
Senad Pecanin now had some allies willing to walk the
streets and try to revive hope in his beleaguered and beloved city. The Special
Forces teams rented houses and lived among the population in the country’s
principal cities and towns. They met with church leaders, businessmen,
political and militia leaders, and even crime bosses. They fed all the
information into their database, and each time the fragile peace was disrupted
by a killing, a violent mob, an unfounded rumor, or a misstep by the
peacekeepers, they would work their contacts to try to calm the situation and
persuade the influential locals to step up to remedy the problem. These
networks also yielded valuable information about the war’s atrocities and who
had committed them. In a separate operation, secret units of Special Forces and
others were tasked in mid-1997 with hunting down the PIFWCs, as the
seventy-four “persons indicted for war crimes” were known, to be brought before
the international war crimes tribunal that was eventually convened by the UN
Security Council at the Hague.11
Lambert remained engaged with the Balkans’ for the rest of
the decade. After leading the special operations element of IFOR, he commanded
all U.S. special operations forces in Europe. That job came with a promotion to
brigadier general and his first general’s star. Cleveland spent the next four
years coming and going from the Balkans as well. In 1996, he served
simultaneously as deputy commander of the combined joint special operations
task force and 10th Group. In 1997–98, he headed the Joint Commission of
Observers in Bosnia. Tenth Group’s 3rd Battalion, which he commanded, supplied
most of the commission’s observers. Other Special Forces groups also
contributed some of the 22 total ODAs to assist the non-European peacekeeping
troops: 1st Group teamed up with Malaysians and 5th Group with Pakistani and
Arab contingents.
Cleveland’s Alpha Company commander, Major Ken Tovo, was in
charge of the American sector observers. From the American base in Tuzla,
Bosnia, called Task Force Eagle, he helped his teams navigate some of Bosnia’s
most neuralgic hotspots. Brcko was the center of a major tug of war between the
ethnic factions: as arbitrators agonized over its fate, ODA 076 lived in the
city to monitor and manage its constantly brewing strife. The triumphs were few
and hard-won and sometimes laced with bitterness, as in Srebrenica, the city
whose massacre epitomized the conflict’s brutality. There, as an elected Muslim
city council gingerly moved to take office, they and peacekeepers were attacked
and a helicopter crashed. The ODA there functioned as a quick-reaction and
first aid force, as well as the best pipeline of information going out to Tovo
and the rest of the peacekeeping commanders. Tovo came back for another tour as
aide to the conventional American commander in 1998–99, as Bosnia gained a
semblance of stability while Kosovo took its place as the new killing ground.
As the head of all the observer teams in Bosnia, Cleveland
frequently visited them in their respective cities or towns while his staff at
the battalion headquarters in Sarajevo analyzed and updated the massive
databases that the teams collected. Out driving one day, Cleveland thought
about how far they, and the country, had come. He recalled his first outing in
the war-torn land in December 1995. He and a few staff soldiers had found
themselves in a mountain tunnel blocked with vehicles. It was a dark, cold
winter night and none of the locals had any idea who they were. His logistics
officer had blanched when Cleveland asked if he had a rifle, afraid that his
boss planned to go up against several hundred people. The handful of Croatian
soldiers they had encountered let them pass without a fight, however. The
logistician would not have been comforted had he known that, a few years
before, Cleveland had blithely jumped into a van and driven, alone, to a camp
of Panamanian insurgents to talk them into surrendering.
Even two years later, Bosnia’s peace was still an uneasy
one, to be sure. One of the observer team’s houses had been attacked during a riot
in Brcko in the summer of 1997, and one of the teams had been stoned recently
when they rescued some Croats from a Serbian mob in Derventa. But despite
occasional flare-ups, the Special Forces network did succeed in deterring
violence, heading off confrontations, and working out disputes before they
erupted into fights. This low-key, low-visibility job was tailor-made for
Special Forces. They had the training and the confidence to circulate in the
communities that few other soldiers had. The observers wore uniforms but no
rank insignia and tucked pistols under their jerseys, rather than walking
around bristling with weapons that would scare the civilians. They had to gain
the trust of the locals to do their job; exposing themselves to some risk was
part of the bargain.
The Balkans taught the Special Forces a lot of lessons about
how to build credibility, defuse a deliberately orchestrated demonstration, and
win the confidence of the clergy. This environment was neither war nor peace:
the methods of the regular soldier wouldn’t work, and civilians tended to lack
the necessary influence. The Special Forces could work in these gray situations
to try to jumpstart the society’s own governing structures. For Cleveland it
was something of a deja-vu experience; he had sent teams into remote towns in
the months after the Panama intervention to mend the factionalized country,
which had been a peaceful democracy for the past eight years. Like many success
stories, it had gone largely unheralded. In the Balkans he and his men greatly
refined this basic approach by applying social science tools. They constructed
matrices identifying persons of influence in eight different spheres ranging
from politics to business to religion and even crime, cross-categorized with
the regional and ethnic scope of his reach. They developed a very precise and
useful map of a most complex society.
Lt. Col. Cleveland’s former comrade from the Panama days,
Kevin Higgins, was not surprised that his friend managed to juggle all these
jobs in the middle of the festering Balkans mess, the longest-lasting crisis of
the 1990s and one of the largest Special Forces deployments in terms of numbers
of personnel deployed. Higgins had watched Cleveland dream up plans and
organizations from scratch in Panama and Bolivia. Higgins compared him to the
type of individual profiled in historian Daniel Boorstin’s book The Creators,
someone who is endowed with the fresh perception and imagination that is the
artist’s hallmark. “Many SF men could follow along and execute an already
established mission quite well,” said Higgins, “but Charlie would be the guy
most likely to have thought of it in the first place. When we were staring at a
blank piece of paper, he would figure out what to do.” After leaving the
Balkans, Cleveland went to a mandatory joint assignment at the Pentagon
overseeing Special Forces personnel matters. Chris Conner worked with him and
recalled him being there at eight or nine o’clock at night, trying to find the
right man for the slot. He never wanted to assign a man to a job he didn’t want
or wasn’t suited for. After a year at the army war college, Cleveland was
promoted to full colonel and, on a high-mountain summer day in 2001, he took
command of 10th Group at Fort Carson. The Balkans’ ever-brewing troubles still
were not over.
The Dayton Accords had ended the fighting but also
essentially rewarded the aggressors by permitting them to keep territory they
had “cleansed” of unwanted ethnic groups. The political will had been lacking
in the American and European capitals to enforce a return to the status quo
ante. That lesson was not lost on the Serbian leadership, which wagered that
the same methods could be used to clear ethnic Albanians out of the province of
Kosovo, even though they comprised 90 percent of its population.
