BOSNIA - HERZEGOVINA COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS David E. Mark 1954-1957 Yugoslavia Desk Officer, Washington, DC Stephen E. Palmer Jr. 1954-1957 Political Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia 1957-1959 Political Officer, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia Nicholas G. Andrews 1959-1961 Consular Officer, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia 1962-1965 Yugoslavia Desk Officer, Washington, DC James G. Lowenstein 1962-1964 Political Officer, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia Charles Stuart Kennedy 1962-1967 Consular Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Thomas M. T. Niles 1963-1965 Political Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Thomas P.H. Dunlop 1963-1965 Political/Consular Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia 1969-1972 Consular Officer, Zagreb, Yugoslavia 1978-1982 Political Counselor, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Harry A. Cahill 1965-1968 Economic Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman 1965-1968 Press/Political Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia 1989-1992 Ambassador, Yugoslavia Wallace W. Littell 1970-1974 Public Affairs Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Donald C. Tice 1970-1972 Yugoslavia Desk Officer, Washington, DC 1972-1975 Political Counselor, Belgrade, Yugoslavia William A. Weingarten 1971-1974 Economic Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Douglas G. Hartley 1972-1974 Commercial Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Lawrence P. Taylor 1974-1976 Economic Officer, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Edward C. McBride 1974-1978 Cultural Attaché, USIS, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Terrance Catherman 1974-1980 Country Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Yugoslavia Mark Palmer 1975-1978 Political Counselor Belgrade, Yugoslavia Wade Matthews 1987-1992 Inspection Corps, State Department, Washington, DC Margaret D. Tutwiler 1989 Spokesperson, State Department, Washington, DC Robert Rackmales 1989-1993 Deputy Chief of Mission, Belgrade, Yugoslavia James K. Bishop Jr. 1991-1993 Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, State Department, Washington, DC Robert M. Beecroft 1991-1994 U.S. Mission to NATO, Brussels, Belgium George Kenney 1992 Yugoslavian Desk, Bureau of European Affairs, Washington, DC Marshall Freeman Harris 1992 CSCE Monitor, Macedonia 1993 Political Officer, Bosnia Desk, Washington, DC J.D. Bindenagel 1992-1994 Office Director- Central Europe, State Department, Washington, DC Frank G. Wisner 1992-1994 Under-Secretary of State for International Security Affairs, State Department, Washington, DC George F. Ward Jr. 1992-1996 Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary- International Organizations, State Department, Washington, DC David R. Adams 1993-1995 Office of the Undersecretary of State, Washington, DC Rudolf V. Perina 1993-1996 Chargé d’Affaires, Belgrade, Yugoslavia Carl F. Inderfurth 1993-1997 U.S. Representative for Special Political Affairs/Deputy U.S. Representative on U.N. Security Council, United Nations, New York Molly Raiser 1993-1997 Chief of Protocol, White House, Washington, DC Henry Allen Holmes 1993-1999 Assistant Secretary, Department of Defense, Arlington, VA Jon David Glassman 1994 Bosnia Training and Equipment Program Bilha Bryant 1994 Yugoslavia Desk Officer, Washington, DC Josiah Beeman 1994-1999 Ambassador, New Zealand Robert M. Beecroft 1996-1997 Special Envoy, Sarajevo, Bosnia Federation Robert William Farrand 1997-2000 International Administrator, Brčko, Bosnia Robert L. Barry 1998-2001 Administrator, OSCE Mission, Bosnia & Herzegovina Marshall P. Adair 2002-2003 Political Advisor to the U.S. Forces, Tuzla Robert M. Beecroft 2000-2001 Special Advisor for Bosnian Affairs, Washington, DC 2001-2004 Ambassador, OSCE Mission, Bosnia & Herzegovina DAVID E. MARK Yugoslavia Desk Officer Washington, DC (1954-1957) Ambassador David E. Mark graduated from Columbia University in 1943. Shortly after completing a year of law school, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Near the end of World War II, Ambassador Mark joined the Foreign Service. He served in Korea, Romania, Switzerland, Burundi, and Washington, DC. He was interviewed by Henry Precht on July 28, 1989. Q: And this is your first assignment to Washington? MARK: First assignment to Washington. And, of course, it was a time in which I learned a great deal, and particularly because the Yugoslav desk was one of the most active in the Department at the time. And that was because John Foster Dulles, as Secretary, envisaged Tito as the soft underbelly of the Soviet empire in Europe, envisaged Tito as a means for corrupting and getting Western influence into the East European camp. Of course, Tito had defected from Stalin, so to speak, in '48, '49. It had taken us several years to accept the fact that he was a genuine defector, and then to begin the process of establishing relations with him, of using him for our purposes, but at the same time providing him with the support that he needed to keep going--economic support and military support. We got heavily into supplying Tito with aircraft and with military technology and so forth. But there was a lot of opposition to our policy of supporting Tito, before I arrived in Washington, and this opposition, particularly in '53, had been promoted in a way by Clare Boothe Luce, who was our Ambassador to Italy at the time and who was backing Italy in a very difficult struggle over ownership of the Trieste territory. I mean, this was almost a "casus belli" between Italy and Yugoslavia. We were doing our best to negotiate some sort of solution, and we ultimately succeeded, but we had to browbeat Tito, and naturally, it didn't sit well with Mrs. Luce and others that we were supporting Tito at the same time, even on the military side. At that point, Yugoslavia was still a fairly classical communist regime, and Tito had a cult of personality a mile long. But nonetheless, our strategic interest in using him and John Foster Dulles' vision of how he might prove valuable to us was predominant in our policy. The policy not only didn't have unanimous support in the Congress or in the country, it didn't have all that much support in the State Department, either. I would say that among the people between Mr. Dulles as the Secretary and me as the lowly desk officer--and there were a lot of people and layers between us--there was almost no support. Under Secretary Robert Murphy at the time had an understanding for what Dulles was trying to do, but his own innate anti-communist feelings were so strong that he wasn't all that sympathetic to the effort. He was just understanding of it and ready to follow the Secretary's orders. The Assistant Secretary for European affairs and his deputies were not understanding at all. In any event, matters-- Q: Did Dulles then stand alone with you against-- MARK: Well, that's what it came to by 1955. The situation deteriorated--that is, in terms of U.S. policy--because Tito, who had by now established pretty clearly that he was going it alone and was able to do so, didn't want the tension that had existed with Stalin to be continued. So he began making overtures to the new Soviet leader, Khrushchev, first to Malenkov and then to Khrushchev. This culminated sometime in mid-'55 in a Khrushchev visit to Belgrade, and, of course, Khrushchev said all kinds of things to try to entice Tito back into the fold, or at least to act in friendly fashion, and the more that Khrushchev talked, the worse it looked for our policy of using Tito as a fifth column within the Soviet camp, and the more that opposition developed to the whole approach. This meant that the lack of support in the State Department itself became more important. As the support diminished in the government and in the Congress, I felt that implementation of Dulles' policy was becoming weaker and weaker, and that something drastic had to be done to reverse the trend. This was, oh, sort of late spring, summer of 1955. Something drastic had to be done to redeem the relationship, and I felt that we had to send some very high-level person to Yugoslavia. So I wrote--it was in May or June, I think--a memo to Dulles, through the proper channels of course, urging that a mission be launched and urging also that it be the Army Chief of Staff, General Lawton Collins, I believe at the time, to do it. Q: Why did you prefer a military representative? MARK: I thought that he was someone to whom Tito would listen, since he had that background in European affairs. It would impress Tito with our seriousness. Also military supply was one of the key issues, i.e., whether we were going to keep up our military supply, given the charges that Tito was now headed back toward Moscow's camp. Q: But was there a military threat that we were dealing with, or was this just reassurance for Yugoslav independence from the Soviet Union? MARK: Well, I think--you mean the reassurance-- Q: I mean the military supply was a symbolic gesture on our part, wasn't it? MARK: Oh, no. It was important. I mean the Soviet armies were poised. There's something known to defenders of Western Europe, and particularly northern Italy, as the Ljubljana Gap, Ljubljana being the capital of the Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. And this is apparently a fairly level area that has been the path of invasions many times. The Soviets were in a position to overrun it fairly readily, so that our building up Yugoslav forces, and tanks were involved, as well as artillery, was not a gesture. It was serious business. Anyway, it was a critical time. I had seen Dulles before. I had been at meetings in his office on Yugoslav affairs. With this memo, he took to dealing with me fairly often on a direct basis. He would just phone down and ask me up or ask for something. I remember once being called up there and his brother, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, was also present, and we were soon discussing the issues. Q: That was rather extraordinary, wasn't it? MARK: It was pretty heady stuff.