206 AMERICAN SPYLooking back, I am grateful I stuck with my plan, even though the
venture required me to survive more obstacles, challenges, and close calls
than ever before. Babylon Inc.’s performance has exceeded everyone’s
expectations (including mine) both in terms of business success and tactical
intelligence collection.
Hindsight is of course twenty-twenty, so it’s no surprise I harbor no
regrets over taking the chance when I did. But what on earth possessed
me to borrow money to finance a speculative business venture in war-torn
Iraq when all of my experience to date had been in the Balkans and Latin
America? For starters, I needed to bring in more income, and my market-
able skills were somewhat narrowly focused. I decided to make the most of
the talents I had, which boiled down to knowing how to develop and lead
a team of trusted agents to get results in foreign lands. What follows is the
first part of the story of how and why I thought it was a good idea to infil-
trate Iraq in the back seat of a Sunni tribal chief’s American-made SUV.
Before Iraq, there was Kosovo. Until the late 1990s, the odd, little Yugo-
slav autonomous province of Kosovo was reminiscent of South Africa
during apartheid; in this case, the minority were the Serbs who persecuted
the majority ethnic Albanians. A similar thing occurred in Iraq, where the
minority Sunnis, led by Saddam Hussein, oppressed the Shi’ite majority. In
both Kosovo and Iraq, it was just a matter of time before the natural balance
was restored, with the help of American firepower, for better or worse.
During my many long-term TDYs to the former Yugoslavia, I often
traveled to the disputed region of Kosovo, since it was one of the former
Yugoslavia’s most volatile hot spots. (As you have probably deduced by now,
CIA officers have a soft spot for hot spots.) One of my last and most memo-
rable TDYs to Pristina, Kosovo’s dreary capital, began on August 29, 1990.
On that pivotal day in Kosovo’s history, Senator Bob Dole and six other
US senators arrived in Kosovo to meet with Albanian democratic oppo-
sition leaders and the future first president of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova.
Because of my Serbian language ability and experience in Kosovo, I was
sent down to the restive province to help coordinate the historic meeting
between the Dole congressional delegation and Rugova. Another Amer-