210 AMERICAN SPYI immediately traveled across the world to Stenkovec, the largest of the
refugee camps in Macedonia, to make it happen. Shortly after my arrival
in the hot, dusty camp, still jet-lagged, I was invited to spend an hour inside
a UN Refugee Agency tent with First Lady Hillary Clinton.
I’ll explain. She had just arrived by military helicopter to check on
conditions inside the teeming camp and to give a talk to assembled govern-
ment, military, and nongovernmental representatives. CNN’s Christiane
Amanpour, a veteran war correspondent, was there to cover the event.
Clinton immediately grasped the historic gravity of the situation and com-
mented that the scenes reminded her of Nazi war movies like Schindler’s List
or Sophie’s Choice.^2
As hungry, thirsty refugees continued to stream into the camp, I visited
a displaced family inside their suffocating tent. I spoke in Serbian with an
ethnic Albanian mother and her children who had fled Kosovo on foot,
spending several days fleeing through the woods, without food or water.
The children were safe now, but they did not know where their father was
or if he was still alive. Barely subsisting in dirty, prisonlike conditions, all
were distraught and uncertain of their future. There was not much I could
do for them, other than wish them luck and move forward with my project.
Once the project was up and running, in coordination with the Interna-
tional Organization of Migration (IOM), I returned to my easy life in the
United States.
Fortunately for those who survived, the ethnic Albanian exodus was
relatively short-lived. At war’s end, hundreds of thousands of desperate
refugees returned to their homes (or what was left of them) in Kosovo. By
then, an estimated eleven thousand ethnic Albanians from Kosovo had
been killed or went missing.^3 I returned once again to the still-volatile war
zone, ignoring the US embassy-in-exile’s demand that I not enter Kosovo
before they had received country clearance to go in themselves. Transfer-
ring the donation from IOM control to the International Rescue Com-
mittee (IRC), we moved the humanitarian project from Macedonia to
Kosovo’s capital of Pristina, where it became an integral part of Kosovo’s
reconstruction. (Neither the IOM nor IRC was aware of my CIA back-
ground, and the CIA had nothing to do with this purely private humani-
tarian project.)
Getting into and out of war-ravaged Kosovo via Skopje, Macedonia’s