ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

Part of the reason that we didn’t have a smoking gun was this incredibly strange way that
he operated. I mentioned earlier how there was never a staff one could see in his offices
in Belgrade. I visited dozens of times and never saw any infrastructure there. It was like
sitting in a deserted building. This was even the case later during my tour when Bob
Frasure, the Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for Yugoslavia, started coming to
Belgrade, and to a large degree also when Holbrooke started coming. Bob Frasure and I
often discussed how bizarre this was. In one instance, Milosevic invited Frasure and me
to a country house outside of Belgrade for discussions. We put together a draft list of
some points and wanted to make a copy. We asked if there was a copying machine we
could use. Milosevic answered “I don’t have a copying machine here.” This was in the
country residence of the President. There was no staff and he claimed there wasn’t a
copier. He said, “I have a FAX” and in the end we made a copy of it by faxing it to
ourselves. When Bob and I were leaving, we commented to each other on how incredible
this was. This was the President of the country in one of his residences, and there was not
a copying machine in the house. This again shows why it was difficult later to find a
smoking gun. Milosevic greatly limited the number of people he kept around himself, and
he really avoided paper. He did not like paper. He always claimed he did things by phone
or that he talked to people, that he talked to Mladic or something like that. At least in our
presence you never saw any paper that he had on his desk or anywhere.
And of course participation in meetings with him was very restricted. When Bob Frasure
made visits, Milosevic would at most have three other people in the room: his assistant
Goran Milinovic, whom I mentioned; his Foreign Minister Milan Milutinovic, and then
for a while this strange person Chris Spiro. He was a Greek American. He was an activist
in the Democratic Party from New Hampshire who had at one time served in the New
Hampshire state legislature. He was somehow engaged by Milosevic as an advisor. I
always assumed it was part of Milosevic’s effort to try to find ways to relate to the
Americans better, and he thought that having an American citizen on his side would help
him achieve this.
Q: What was purpose of these meetings?
PERINA: I have to give a little background here. It started when Holbrooke became the
Assistant Secretary for Europe and recognized that our policy of isolating Milosevic and
just delivering threatening demarches to him was not working. A decision was made to
send out Bob Frasure to engage with Milosevic as an envoy from Washington and to try
to elicit his help in ending the conflict. Initially, there was not a specific agenda to these
meetings. They were exploratory and designed to show Milosevic that the U.S. might
engage with him in a more positive way if he really proved helpful on Bosnia. We did,
with Bob, eventually work out a set of broad principles on how to end the conflict, which
in fact became the basis of the Dayton Agreement. These principles were very broad
initially and primarily designed to draw Milosevic into a process and get him engaged.
Q: This was still a period when the Europeans were trying to play a role in resolving the
conflict. What were they doing?
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