BELGRADE, 25 September 2003 — The arrest this week of a Belgrade army colonel accused of spying for Russia is just another in a series of espionage scandals in Serbia and Montenegro, but for many it symbolizes the Balkan country’s drift westward.
However, the affair does differ from the others because the colonel, Dragoljub Zivkovic, was accused of spying for Moscow, not the United States or other NATO countries. The Zivkovic scandal is the latest in a long series, with most dismissed as the wartime, anti-Western propaganda of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, which fell following federal presidential and parliamentary polls held three years ago yesterday. But in March last year, Momcilo Perisic, then a Serbian deputy premier and a former chief of the army’s General Staff, was caught red-handed as he was passing confidential documents to a US diplomat, reportedly an official of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Perisic, who at the time also headed a federal committee in charge of civil control over the military, and the diplomat, identified by local media as John David Neighbor, were arrested in a spectacular, videotaped action in a roadhouse outside Belgrade.
Neighbor’s arrest and 15-hour incommunicado treatment briefly strained improving relations between Belgrade and Washington, but he quietly left the country shortly afterward and that side of the issue was apparently swept under the carpet.
Perisic got away with resignation as deputy premier, at least as long as he remains protected by a parliamentary deputy’s immunity and even remained active in the ruling Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition.
In the latest spy-bust, however, at least one colonel was arrested. Military justice officials denied media reports that other high-ranking officers were also caught.
The military also refused to say whom Zivkovic allegedly spied for, but all sources either said, or clearly indicated that it was Russia, traditionally perceived by Serbs as a crucial ally. Looking for background, local analysts have placed the Perisic arrest in the context of an internal power struggle. Now some have placed the Zivkovic affair in the context of Belgrade’s approach to NATO, feeding rumors that the CIA itself pointed a finger to Russian moles.
“US and NATO want to eliminate the Russian intelligence network embedded in the military, ministries and police,” one analyst, Tomislav Kresovic, told yesterday’s edition of the daily Blic.
At the US Embassy, an official told the paper: “It is total nonsense”, but a Serbian military analyst noted that the west at least “may be satisfied”. “The capture of spies ... is a certain signal to the other side that the turn (to Russia) is reversed,” wrote Ljubodrag Stojadinovic, a former military officer in charge of public relations, now a columnist with the daily Politika.
Describing Zivkovic’s “somewhat comical” methods as something collected from films and books, Stojadinovic in yesterday’s column estimated that he could not provide anything very valuable.
