ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, May 13, 1996 TAG: 9605130136
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
Smuggling arms to Bosnia and Croatia was larger and more complex than the shipments from Iran and Turkey recently acknowledged by the Clinton administration, and involved such U.S. allies as Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Argentina, according to U.S. and Bosnian officials.
U.S. officials learned in 1992 than Iran had opened a smuggling route to Bosnia with the assistance of Turkey two years before a decision by President Clinton to give Croatia a diplomatic ``green light'' for the shipments, national security adviser Anthony Lake said Friday.
Bosnian government officials said that by 1993, arms or funds to buy arms also were being supplied through the Turkish pipeline by Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Brunei and Pakistan, and that other weapon shipments came from Hungary and Argentina.
U.S. officials knew of most of the shipments but took no action, despite Clinton's public support for a United Nations-sponsored arms embargo against Bosnia, Croatia and the other nations of the former Yugoslavia. That lack of action marked a break with the Bush administration, which strongly protested when an Iranian plane flew into Zagreb in September 1992 with 4,000 assault weapons, prompting Croatia to impound the cargo.
Administration officials have said that no covert action was taken to support the weapon smuggling, and that U.S. actions amounted to turning a blind eye to the shipments. But several congressional committees, including a House select committee appointed Friday, are investigating the smuggling and Clinton's decision in April 1994 to have U.S. envoys tell Croatian President Franjo Tudjman that the United States did not object to the shipments.
Republicans have accused the administration of letting Iran gain a foothold in the Balkans by not opposing the shipments and plan to investigate whether U.S. officials encouraged or helped in the smuggling.
Bosnian officials said the Balkan smuggling pipeline took shape in fall 1992, six months after war erupted in Bosnia between the Muslim-led government and rebel Serbs, who were backed by forces and supplies from neighboring Serbia. During a visit by Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic to Iran in late October, Bosnian sources said, an agreement was worked out to open a weapon supply route to the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo through neighboring Croatia.
Croatia, which normalized relations with Iran on April 18, 1992, sent a Muslim Croat, Osman Muftic, to be its first ambassador. It was Muftic, officials said, who worked out the details of the weapon pipeline along with Omer Behmen, Bosnia's ambassador to Iran, and Hasan Cengic, a Bosnian Muslim arms dealer who now serves as Bosnia's deputy minister of defense. For a while, Cengic based himself in Tehran, Iran's capital, as he traveled the Middle East and Asia searching for other contributions for Bosnia's vulnerable army. The Bosnian forces then were losing ground on almost every front to the formidably armed Bosnian Serbs.
Bosnian officials said that in spite of the Tehran agreement, cooperation with the Croatian government was spotty from the beginning. Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia's former prime minister and a key player in the weapon negotiations, recalled one incident in February 1993 when a convoy carrying thousands of Milan antitank rockets, destined for outgunned Muslim troops in eastern Bosnia, was confiscated by Croat militia, thereby ending in his mind any chances for the Muslims to push back the Serb land grab in that part of the country. A Bosnian government source said those weapons came from Malaysia and were bought with money from Brunei.
Cooperation between the two sides deteriorated further in 1993 when Bosnian Croats launched their own war against the Sarajevo government and its mostly Muslim army, sparking Bosnia's second war. Still, however, weapons flowed into the region from Islamic countries, and some found their way to the Muslims.
A State Department spokesman said that throughout this time the administration was aware that Croatia and Bosnia were obtaining arms from Iran and other countries, including Argentina, Hungary and other sources in the former Soviet Bloc. Washington never raised the issue, however. ``In fact,'' a State Department official remarked, ``1993 was a bit of a banner year.''
``The American decision to turn a blind eye goes back to 1993,'' said Dan Nelson, an arms-control specialist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. Nelson was in the region in 1993 and 1994 studying the issue.
Gojko Susak, Croatia's defense minister, corroborated that view last week. ``The Americans never protested,'' he said. ``When they asked, we would say that our original weapons were simply hatching babies.''
Susak added that the Croatian government did not ask for a U.S. view on the smuggling in 1992 and 1993 because the United States had yet to involve itself diplomatically in solving the conflict.
The United States did become more important to Croatia after March 1994, however, when the Clinton administration brokered an agreement between the Bosnian government and Bosnian Croats to end their conflict and open the way for a renewed alliance against the Serbs. The agreement also made possible an intensification of weapon deliveries to Bosnia and Croatia.
On April 26, a little more than a month after the Washington deal was clinched, President Tudjman asked Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith whether the United States had any objections to Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia via Croatia. Two days later, Galbraith and Charles Redman, Clinton's special envoy to the region, told Tudjman they had ``no instructions'' from Washington, meaning that the Clinton administration did not object to the deal.
On May 4 that year, an Iranian cargo plane with 60 tons of ammunition and machinery for making arms landed in Zagreb for shipment to Bosnia. When asked at the time by The Washington Post if the plane contained arms, a State Department official who monitored weapon smuggling denied it. However, when Croat militia units blocked the weapons from moving into the Muslim-held parts of Bosnia, the Bosnians called U.S. officials in Vienna and Zagreb and asked them to press the Croats to allow the materiel through, sources said.
An internal investigation by the Intelligence Oversight Board at the White House's request concluded this year that Galbraith had not taken action in response to the Bosnian request but that Redman probably had contacted Croatian officials to get the convoy cleared.
The main airport and staging center for the Iranian arms was the Croatian island of Krk, near the northern Adriatic port of Rijeka. U.S. officials said helicopters piloted by Croatians would land at Krk the afternoon before Turkish or Iranian 747-B cargo planes were expected, then fly the arms and ammunition out during the night. Defense Minister Susak recollected that most of the planes were Turkish.
As the supply operation grew, both Croatia and Bosnia cultivated closer ties with Iran. While some Iranian fighters joined the Bosnian Muslim army, Croatia developed relations with Iran in areas such as oil and banking.
According to U.S. and Bosnian sources, Croatia took 30 percent of Iranian-provided arms arriving in the region. And in October 1994, Zagreb signed a $120 million barter deal with Iran to build four cargo ships at its nearly bankrupt shipyards in Split and Pula in return for Iranian oil.
In Zagreb, Iranians involved in weapon smuggling and fighting in Bosnia were so numerous that the U.S. Embassy was thrown ``into a panic,'' one official said. Security officials at the embassy discovered that Iranians had been frequenting the library operated by the United States Information Service, directly under Galbraith's office. The officials were particularly concerned because at the time there was a worldwide alert to all U.S. embassies for a possible terrorist attack. A new security policy was instituted prohibiting use of the library without identification cards, and the Iranians disappeared.
It was at this point, in late summer and fall 1994, that CIA personnel in Croatia grew suspicious that perhaps a U.S. covert action to supply arms to Bosnia was under way. According to the Oversight Board, a U.S. Embassy official in Croatia asked a CIA official there whether $250 million in arms would be enough to save the Muslims. The board also said a State Department official, working for Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, was preparing a plan to provide arms to the Bosnians by soliciting help from other countries.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher and national security adviser Lake stopped the initiative, and U.S. officials say no effort to organize arms supplies ever took place.
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