Trusted Mole

"He has a very interesting personal story. Shortly after the British arrived in Bosnia, which was at the end of 1992 or maybe early 1993, I met a British officer identified as Captain Mike Stanley of the Parachute Regiment. Now he spoke very good Serbian and it was very obvious that he wasn’t really called Mike Stanley. His real name was Milos Stankovic, but they gave him this nom de guerre to protect him from accusations of bias, because his mother and father were Serbian refugees. He was a very good officer and spent more time in Bosnia than any other British soldier. He was used not just to interpret but as liaison. Stankovic and another officer were the UN liaison officers to Pale, the headquarters of the Bosnian Serbs. There he liaised with Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic and reported back on their actions and feelings and so on. He did it with great distinction and was awarded an MBE. Two years after he came out he was at the Joint Services Staff College in Bracknell [in the UK] and was arrested by the Ministry of Defence police on suspicion of spying for the Serbs. Somebody didn’t like it that the British commanders of the UN force were getting information from a source the Americans didn’t have information from. He fell under suspicion quite falsely. He spent years trying to clear his name. His name was cleared, he was absolutely blameless. He was a British hero. But of course he had to leave the army and while he was under investigation he wrote this extraordinary book Trusted Mole . It’s very idiosyncratic. I think it’s the best book to come out on the Bosnian war, including my own. It’s a sort of “heart of darkness” book. When he went over to the Bosnian Serb side he called it “going to the dark side”. If you want to understand how wars develop, how the UN tries to cope with things that are beyond its mandate, it’s absolutely the perfect read and really gripping. It’s more episode by episode. A lot of it is a dialogue with his then girlfriend. They are the most vivid accounts of the changeover of command between General Rose and General Smith, both British commanders of UNPROFOR. There is a fantastic account of how General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, visited Ratko Mladic, and Mladic persuades Clark to exchange hats. So there is this famous photograph of this American general wearing the Serbian general’s hat. This caused huge outcry. Stankovic is marvellous at explaining how the Serb mind works, about how clever they were. It isn’t a pro-Serb book or an anti-Serb book, it’s just a fascinating individual account of one soldier’s adventures in a war he understood better than the rest of us. Yes, I think so. I think we have to understand much better what we are getting into. You have to understand the culture of the people. Why are they fighting? How can they be persuaded to stop fighting? Remember all this happened at a time when the doctrines of the British army were still geared to the Cold War. Well, if you’re dealing with a mixed military operating group at a roadblock in Bosnia, the lessons of the Cold War aren’t going to apply. I used to lecture at the Army Staff College and was astonished at how slow they were to adjust and how little of their time they spent in what they called “operations other than war”. For the most part, Bosnia was an “operation other than war” – it’s also called peacekeeping. In those days they didn’t study very much the Geneva Convention. They certainly do now and they work much more closely with the NGOs and charities and so on. So everything is changing. But we’re talking about nearly 20 years ago when the army was slow to adjust."