192 AMERICAN SPYHaving worked with all of the factions and ethnic groups fighting one
another in the former Yugoslavia—Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Alba-
nians—I came to realize they share more similarities than differences. All
were warm and hospitable toward me, an unbiased American, but all did
their best to convince me of the righteousness of their cause. All viewed
themselves as victims to one extent or another as well. They all smoked the
same foul-smelling cigarettes and even told the same dark jokes.
One favorite wartime joke, told on both sides of the front lines by both
Serbs and Croats about Bosnians, involved three imaginary Bosnians: Mujo
(pronounced Muyo), his wife Fata, and Mujo’s best friend, Haso. For gen-
erations of Yugoslavs, this trio symbolized the supposedly less sophisticated
Bosnian people, who were often the butt of jokes. After the war started
in Bosnia, the joke goes, Mujo disappeared, so Fata went looking for his
corpse at the soccer stadium in Tuzla. (Unidentified or unclaimed corpses
were typically brought to soccer stadiums for later identification by family
members.) Haso accompanied his friend’s distraught wife to the stadium.
The soccer pitch was covered with the bodies of those who had been killed
that day. Fata tread carefully through the bodies and lifted the sheets off
several men’s faces, but none of them were Mujo. Many of the corpses
had no heads, or the faces were too disfigured to be identified. Haso told
Fata the only way to identify Mujo would be to pull down the pants of
the faceless corpses and examine their private parts. Fata was embarrassed
but began to do so. After pulling down the pants of one victim, she cried,
“No!” in horror and turned away. She did this several more times, saying
each time, “It’s not him.” Approaching one final possible match, she pulled
down the corpse’s pants, carefully examined his private parts, then turned
to Haso and said, “This guy isn’t even from Tuzla.”
As revealed in chapter 1, in the summer of 1995, I TDY’d to war-ravaged
Sarajevo to establish the CIA’s first official relationship with the Bosnian
security service, much as I had done a few years earlier with the new Croa-
tian security service. Before I was betrayed to the Iranian intelligence chief