Tearing Down Milosevic

By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

The CIA, to put it charitably, has a spotty record on overthrowing foreign governments. The times it has succeeded--in Guatemala, Iran and Chile, for example--it replaced fairly moderate governments with far more brutal regimes. And when dictators deserved the boot, the agency has been rather inept at toppling them. The CIA has been trying to oust Saddam Hussein ever since the Gulf War ended eight years ago, but he is more firmly entrenched than ever.

Now another American President has put his faith in the spooks from Langley to get rid of an unsavory leader, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. As NATO warplanes roared over Serbia this spring, Bill Clinton signed a secret presidential "finding" giving the CIA the green light to try to topple Milosevic's regime. The agency's covert operation, sources tell TIME, is part of a wide-ranging plan Clinton has approved to oust the Serbian strongman. On the record, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright says, "We are making it quite clear that we don't see Milosevic in the future."

The CIA's covert action plan has its exotic aspects. Agency computer hackers will try to disrupt Milosevic's private financial transactions and electronically drain his overseas bank accounts. (Intelligence officials suspect he has money socked away in Switzerland, Cyprus, Greece, Russia and China.) The CIA also hopes to funnel cash secretly to opposition groups inside Yugoslavia as well as recruit dissidents within the Belgrade government and the Yugoslav military. Last month roads in four Serbian towns and villages were blocked by young reservists protesting the army's failure to pay them for two months.

Though Milosevic still commands the loyalty of his generals, a Pentagon intelligence officer says many of the colonels and junior officers who convoyed out of Kosovo are grumbling, "Why did we do this?"--particularly after they saw the destruction back home. There's no guarantee, of course, that a military coup would produce a more liberal government. Once tanks roll in Belgrade, power could fall into the hands of even more nationalist, anti-NATO hard-liners.

Far more of the Clinton plan will be carried out overtly by diplomats, bankers and even disk jockeys. To compete with Milosevic's formidable propaganda machine, the U.S. Information Agency plans to ring Serbia's border with six radio transmitters that will beam Western news programs into the country 24 hours a day. Last month Robert Gelbard, U.S. special envoy to the Balkans, flew to Serbia's rebellious republic of Montenegro to meet with some 20 Serbian opposition leaders and plead with them to join forces against the regime.

Albright met with the German, French, British and Italian foreign ministers in New York City last week to plot how each country might exploit its ties with dissident elements in Serbia. She asked Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini, for example, to place a phone call to the Vatican. The Serbian Orthodox Church last month demanded that Milosevic step down and instructed its priests to preach from the pulpit this past Sunday that Serbian forces are responsible for the atrocities in Kosovo. Washington wants Pope John Paul II, who helped engineer the toppling of Poland's communist regime, to join in taking a crack at Milosevic.

Money may be the most important weapon against Milosevic. The State Department is hatching a scheme much like the one a President uses to reward Congressmembers with federal pork when they vote his way. Clinton has told the Serbs that as long as they keep Milosevic in power, they won't get "one red cent" of the billions of dollars the West plans in economic reconstruction aid for the Balkans. But Washington has left open the possibility of sending some humanitarian aid to Serbia. The catch: Serbian municipal governments run by Milosevic's opponents, such as those in Cacak and Novi Sad, would get extra money for their local economies.

Nifty ideas, but will dollars and diplomatic maneuvers and CIA dirty tricks be enough to topple Milosevic? Serbia isn't a totalitarian state like Iraq, where Saddam puts a bullet into anyone who so much as whispers a complaint. Though Milosevic is a thug, he still has to keep the masses happy. And at the moment they're not. NATO warplanes caused almost $30 billion worth of damage in Serbia and left a quarter of a million people jobless. Last week some 10,000 Serbs in Cacak and Novi Sad staged anti-Milosevic rallies that security forces did little to curb. The regime "destroyed us," Cacak's mayor, Velimir Ilic, shouted to the crowd from a podium in his city's main square. "They humiliated us. We are ashamed to say we are Serbs."

Albright believes that Milosevic "was shaken" by the war-crimes indictment issued by the Hague and the $5 million bounty the U.S. offered for his capture. Some Milosevic backers in Belgrade's business community and even in his own Socialist Party have begun making private inquiries with intermediaries in Washington to explore what kind of deal the U.S. government might make for his graceful exit. Senior U.S. officials, for now, refuse to consider any comfortable retirement.

That hard line may change as Washington discovers Milosevic isn't a pushover. The CIA is having trouble just finding his bank accounts to tamper with, because most are under pseudonyms. The Serbian Orthodox Church is influential but not as powerful as the Roman Catholic Church was in Poland's revolution; most Serbs don't attend Sunday services. The U.S. radio transmissions are still being drowned out by regime-controlled media outlets, which flood the country with video and print propaganda.

Milosevic's biggest ally may end up being the opposition groups. "They call themselves zajedno, which in Serbian means 'together,' but they're not," Albright maintains. Instead, the coalition of some two dozen opposition parties is led by warring chieftains whose egos, says Serb Democratic Party vice president Slobodan Vuksanovic, have so far got in the way of mounting a credible political challenge. Gelbard left his Montenegro meeting with opposition leaders frustrated because their squabbling was squandering their best chance of unseating Milosevic. "They're all fighting over who will be President of Yugoslavia and not realizing that they're dealing with an extremely clever and ruthless adversary," says a senior U.S. diplomat.

Milosevic is an adversary who has faced worse odds and survived. More than two years ago, after hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Belgrade, Milosevic skillfully co-opted their leaders or intimidated the activists into submission. "He's an expert at dividing the opposition," says NATO's commander, General Wesley Clark. If his enemies again give him enough time to regroup, Milosevic could join Saddam, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Cuba's Fidel Castro on the growing list of dictators the CIA just can't seem to overthrow.

--With reporting by Gillian Sandford/Belgrade

With reporting by Gillian Sandford/Belgrade