March 12 2000 EUROPE © Ready for war: the KLA was given covert assistance by
the CIA before Nato began its bombing campaign in Kosovo Photograph: Laszlo
Balogh CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty AMERICAN
intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation
Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some
European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political
solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians.

Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in
1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military
training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian
police.

When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which
co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a
year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems
were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could
stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile
phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander. European diplomats
then working for the OSCE claim it was betrayed by an American policy that
made airstrikes inevitable. Some have questioned the motives and loyalties
of William Walker, the American OSCE head of mission.

"The American agenda consisted of their diplomatic observers, aka the CIA,
operating on completely different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE,"
said a European envoy.

Several Americans who were directly involved in CIA activities or close to
them have spoken to the makers of Moral Combat, a documentary to be
broadcast on BBC2 tonight, and to The Sunday Times about their clandestine
roles. Walker dismissed suggestions that he had wanted war in Kosovo, but
admitted the CIA was almost certainly involved in the countdown to
airstrikes.

Initially some "diplomatic observers" arrived, followed in October by a much
larger group that was eventually swallowed up into the OSCE's "Kosovo
Verification Mission". Walker said: "Overnight we went from having a handful
of people to 130 or more. Could the agency have put them in at that point?
Sure they could. It's their job. But nobody told me."

Walker, who was nominated by Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of
state, was intensely disliked by Belgrade. He had worked briefly for the
United Nations in Croatia. Ten years earlier he was the American ambassador
to El Salvador when Washington was helping the government there to suppress
leftist rebels while supporting the contra guerrillas against the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua.

Some European diplomats in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, concluded from
Walker's background that he was inextricably linked with the CIA. The
picture was muddied by the continued separation of American "diplomatic
observers" from the mission. The CIA sources who have now broken their
silence say the diplomatic observers were more closely connected to the
agency.

"It was a CIA front, gathering intelligence on the KLA's arms and
leadership," said one.

Another agent, who said he felt he had been "suckered in" by an organisation
that has run amok in post-war Kosovo, said: "I'd tell them which hill to
avoid, which wood to go behind, that sort of thing." The KLA has admitted
its long-standing links with American and European intelligence
organisations. Shaban Shala, a KLA commander now involved in attempts to
destabilise majority Albanian villages beyond Kosovo's border in Serbia
proper, claimed he had met British, American and Swiss agents in northern
Albania in 1996.

Belgrade has alleged the CIA also helped to arm the KLA, but this was denied
by the guerrillas and agency sources.

"It was purely the Albanian diaspora helping their brothers," said Florin
Krasniqi, a New York builder and one of the KLA's biggest financiers. He
described how sniper rifles were exported from America using a loophole in
federal law that allowed them to be shipped to "hunting clubs".
Armour-piercing Barratt rifles made their way to the KLA's "hunting club" in
Albania.

Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter stages of the conflict, had
established American contacts through his work in the Croatian army, which
had been modernised with the help of Military Professional Resources Inc, an
American company specialising in military training and procurement. This
company's personnel were in Kosovo, along with others from a similar
company, Dyncorps, that helped in the American-backed programme for the
Bosnian army.

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