Staging a Trial

To prove the accusations against the counter intelligence service (KOS) and meet Branko Kostic’s promises of "the greatest of spy scandals" evidence had to be created. When sentencing innocent people when no crime has been committed and no evidence exists, witnesses are brought in but some cause has to be found.

First, a draft plan for the Opera group was used which included some psychological activities in Macedonia (including causing clashes). The Opera council rejected it but the draft was kept in the safe of Radenko Radojicic where it was found. The charge of terrorism, based on that document, was raised against Colonel Radojicic, the head of security in the air force, but it was rejected as absurd and unproved. Someone liked terrorism and that charge was constantly in the game whether to raise the state’s reputation abroad or because of some inter-state agreement, we don’t know. In any case, everything revolved around Opera and General Aleksandar Vasiljevic, head of the security department, persistently opposed the persecution of the group. Something else had to be found and this is where we should go back to the dramatic events of August and September 1991.

In that situation it’s logical not to think about activating a network in temporarily occupied territory (TOT). Which networks exist in the detailed TOT concept and under whose control since every service had its own is not know except in two cases: Opera and Labrador.

Sometime after midnight on August 18, 1991, two explosive devices shook Zagreb: one exploded in front of the Jewish community building and the other at the Jewish cemetery. That terrorist act came a highly embarrassing time for "the young Croatian democracy": that was the time when President Franjo Tudjman made statements about the Jews which he would bitterly regret later on and is still apologizing to Israel for ("Thank God, my wife is neither Jewish nor Serb," for example); anti-Semitism among ruling HDZ right-wingers and extreme nationalist parties and para-military formations was loud and clear then as it is today. In that context the bombings had an understandable effect: a series of very loud protests against the rising anti-Semitism in Croatia. The perpetrator is still unknown to both the Yugoslav and Croatian judiciary. That’s not very strange in acts like these; what is strange is that one man, Radneko Radojicic of the Opera group, was sentenced twice for that bombing and acquitted twice in Belgrade and Zagreb. How is it that the whole thing ended up in Radojicic’s lap when the Croatian authorities didn’t blame the KOS for the explosions although it was their favorite scapegoat for 450 other incidents?

Something that doesn’t usually happen in intelligence affairs happened: the Croatians, left completely in the dark over the while thing, read in the Yugoslav press in April 1992 that a campaign was underway against the KOS with accusations being made over the bombings of the Jewish cemetery and building. A lengthy feature in Pobjeda (seven installments by Dragan Boskovic, a close relative of General Nedeljko Boskovic) and in Politika Ekspres (11 installments by Colonel Petar Knezevic and Milovan Drecun) made serious accusations against the military counter intelligence service, detailing their methods, plans and activities. That included an accusation that Radojicic organized and Opera committed the terrorist attacks in Zagreb with details of bags of explosives being taken to Croatia.

How did those details get to the "patriotic" regime press in Belgrade? It seems that General Boskovic handed them to a select few journalists and media which were prepared to publish them as part of his campaign against his predecessor in the service. That campaign revealed information which compromised the methods, plans and services used by the service and its field agents.

When service chiefs and the other accused in the staged trial were acquitted in February 1993, Boskovic officially received Jakov Capa Binenfeld, a Belgrade Jew who lives in Zagreb an was in charge of protecting the Jewish community in Croatia, and another Israeli citizen. They discussed the explosions in Zagreb. Boskovic claimed that he had documents proving that the terrorist act was the responsibility of General Vasiljevic and his deputy General Tumanov. On February 5, Zagreb weekly Globus published a very detailed and well documented article on the case. The main argument in the article were statements by Captain Ceda Knezevic (in the spring of 1992) made during the investigation against Opera which are a state secret. There is reason to suspect that Knezevic made the statements under pressure after spending three weeks in General Boskovic’s jail in Zemun.

That private jail (several people spent from five to 38 days in it with no documents filed) was Boskovic’s main tool in fabricating evidence and staging trials. JNA security officers and their associates underwent illegal arrest, blackmail, pressure, threats and physical abuse in an effort to force them to cooperate against the service chiefs.

Of the 15 or so people that went through that jail, two groups were defined: most, about 10, refused to cooperate and were persecuted later on; five submitted to pressure and agreed to cooperate.