BALKAN INFERNO

Betrayal, War and Intervention 1990-2005

by Wes Johnson

ISBN#978-1-929631-63-6 • Paperback Publication Winter 2007

$ 26.00

AN EYEWITNESS VIEW OF BLOODY CONFLICT IN THE HEART OF EUROPE.

“One explanation was given to me at an Athens cocktail party. It was the fall of 2003. I was talking to an engaging young officer from the US embassy and I said that I had covered the Balkans as a journalist. Of course, I also mentioned that I had served at the embassy as my last post. He went on to say that his first assignment, in 1993-4, had been Tirana, and allowed how much he had enjoyed it. ‘It was just great!’ he said. ‘We could do anything we wanted. In fact, they would like to be our fifty-first state.’ When I commented how ‘we’ (the US) had really ‘gotten in bed’ with the KLA, he became effusive with enthusiasm. ‘Yeah’, he blurted out, ‘All the stuff was coming in right out at the international airport.’ The ‘stuff’ he was referring to, I knew, was shorthand for military equipment. Then, he quickly moved to another subject while I took in the breathtaking implications of his remarks. It meant that long before Kosovo had gotten out of hand, and had broken into armed conflict, that the US was fomenting and actively supporting revolt in the province - that the US bears major responsibility for much of what followed, including the war and its unending tragic aftermath.” [From the final chapter]

Wes Johnson grew up in Minnesota and was a USAF aircrew member during the Korean War. After graduating from university, he entered the CIA's junior officer program in 1962. During the 1980s, he was assigned to Jerusalem, Kabul, and Athens. Leaving the agency in 1990, he covered the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia and ongoing tensions between Greece-Cyprus and Turkey as an accredited journalist for Inter Press Service and Middle East International. He perceptively places the US-led NATO intervention into southeastern Europe in a larger context extending over to the oil and gas of Central Asia. He also explains why Europe's "back door" is now wide open to drug trafficking and the threat of Islamic radicalism.