THE ROAD TO BABYLON 209After my heart stopped racing, about the same time we were safely pulling
up to the bustling entrance to the Grand Hotel, I replayed the entire conversa-
tion with the specialac in my head. What exactly had I said, and how exactly
did the cop respond? Things obviously went well, we had survived, but still,
something didn’t add up. Mentally re-creating the conversation, I realized that
although I had indeed coolly and calmly explained the situation to the Serb
specialac, every word I uttered was not in Serbian but in perfect Spanish.
Funny what a gun to the temple will do to a guy. It was no wonder the
cop looked at me as if somewhere a village must be missing an idiot.
Fast-forward almost nine years. In the spring of 1999, after the launch
of the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, Serbs began the barbaric
and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of the Kosovo region. Reminiscent of
Nazi Germany, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were rounded
up by the Serbs, packed onto trains, or hounded through the countryside
to neighboring Macedonia, where survivors were eventually housed in
sprawling refugee camps. After having their asses handed to them in Slo-
venia, Croatia, and Bosnia, this was the Serbs’ last chance to rid mythical
Kosovo of the despised Shiptars and create a rump “Greater Serbia.” Their
campaign was characteristically savage. A Catholic Albanian village called
Meja was the site of the war’s worst, Srebrenica-like massacre. Serb spe-
cialci pulled nearly four hundred men and boys from refugee columns and
shot them to death. Their missing bodies were discovered years later in a
mass grave on a specialci training camp near Belgrade.^1
By this time, I had resigned from the CIA and was working privately.
A wealthy American client of mine was growing anxious watching nightly
news reports from Kosovo. His ancestors had fled Nazi Germany, and he
was understandably disturbed by the unimaginable horror taking place,
once again, in Europe. He knew I was an old “Yugoslav hand” and asked
if there was anything he could do to help. I thought about it and then con-
vinced him to finance a one-year donation of his company’s goods and ser-
vices, which would provide much-needed short-term relief to the refugees.
I told him I would travel to Macedonia to manage the project. All I needed
was financing. He agreed.