CHAPTER 21
LIFE IMITATES ART IMITATES LIFE—
HUNTING BOSNIAN WAR CRIMINALS
W
ithin two years of my final Balkans TDY to Sarajevo, I resigned
from the CIA and settled in California with my daughters. After
resigning, I formed a private business intelligence firm, which I operated
like an overseas station. The CIA way of life was in my blood and was all I
knew. Contrary to what the CIA recruiter had told me during law school,
offering my services to the Mafia was not my only fallback option. I con-
tinued to recruit and run foreign agents and provide secret intelligence
reports in response to specific requirements, but now the requirements
came from private instead of US government clients. As a private citizen, I
also continued to support the US government’s overseas mission on an as-
needed basis. The geographic focus of my private intelligence network was
the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. As
a corporate spy who no longer enjoyed the many benefits of traveling the
world as a government spy on an official passport under Cold War rules, I
adopted and adhered to a very clear company policy: I’d agree to take on a
new case only if odds were I’d spend less than a week in jail if caught, and
would suffer no more than a light to moderate beating.
In 2001, I began to write a realistic historical fiction book entitled
“Balkan Justice,” based in part on my own wartime CIA experience in
Sarajevo. Chapter 3 of American Spy was initially written as a prologue to
“Balkan Justice.” The opening line of the novel’s synopsis read, “Vowing
to avenge the horrific death of his lover and agent, a former CIA officer
returns to his Bosnian nightmare in pursuit of the real ‘Butcher of the
Balkans,’ Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić.” The US government was
in fact offering five million dollars in reward money for either Mladić or his195