The Later Years 413
inviting Tito to visit the United States for the third time. On that occasion
he changed his stance completely, promising to take severe measures against
the extremist émigrés and guaranteeing all his support for the independence,
territorial integrity, and unity of Yugoslavia.^103 The discussion between the two
presidents was quite frank. At one point Carter asked Tito to explain why the
Russians hated the Americans so much. The latter replied bluntly: “Because
you have encircled them with your military bases and are trying to ruin them
economically, endangering them with a neutron bomb and compelling them to
engage in an arms race.”^104 This frankness impressed Carter’s national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, very much and moved him to declare later that,
together with the United States and the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia was “the only
protagonist in the global arena.”^105 The resumption of weapons deliveries by
the American army to Yugoslavia was one of Tito’s few foreign policy successes
during his final years.^106
In spite of the Soviet press’s repeated affirmations that Moscow had noth-
ing to do with the subversive activity against Yugoslavia and that these were
“slanders of Western circles,” 1975 concluded with new arguments about the
Cominformists, against whom the Belgrade authorities did not hesitate to take
unorthodox measures.^107 On 26 December they gave notice of the trial of Vlado
Dapčević, which had been held behind closed doors after he had disappeared
from his Bucharest hotel under mysterious circumstances on the night of 8–9
August 1975. He had gone to the Romanian capital trusting in his Soviet patrons,
but without taking into account the excellent relations between Tito and the
“conducator,” Nicolae Ceaușescu, and between the UDBA and the local Securi-
tate. After a daring kidnapping he was transported to Belgrade, where he was
sentenced to death—a penalty changed later to twenty years in jail—for having
illegally crossed the border and having acted against the country by supporting
the secession of Kosovo and Macedonia and attempting to unite them with
Albania. Pravda declared these accusations to be groundless, but no one in
Yugoslavia believed these Soviet reassurances.^108
In order to improve the efficiency of the secret services, Tito gave them
unknown “specific tasks,” which did not bode well: the threat of a crackdown
was growing. In the entire country a state of “vigilance” was building that de-
veloped into paranoia.^109 The campaign against domestic and foreign enemies,
murder not excluded, reached such dimensions in the mid-seventies that the
German magazine Der Spiegel wrote about a “political mafia” in the Balkans.
The mysterious death of two Yugoslav émigrés in Paris and Nice led the French
president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, to postpone his planned visit with Tito.
When, in August 1976, the Belgrade authorities accused an American tourist
of Yugoslav origins of being a spy and arrested him, apparently without due