Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness

I’m staring out at the sea again. It’s getting dark there. Winter’s definitely on its way. It’s dark, cold and lonely out there. Ian’s asking me a whole load of practical questions: sleep patterns, dreams, panic attacks? Alcohol intake, diet? How’s your libido? Sex life? Steady relationship? I answer him as best I can, but I don’t take my eyes off the sea. My answers are automatic. I know myself so well by now, I don’t even have to think about the answers.

‘If we’re to do any meaningful work we need some sort of structure to work from. When did you last see me?’ He sounds quite businesslike now.

I’m still looking at the sea. ‘November ’93 after my first year there.’

‘That’s right. I’ve got the notes somewhere, but I think it would help if you took me through it … from the beginning …’

‘The beginning?’ The beginning? When was that? Where did it begin? This century? Last century? When I was born? The recruiting office in Plymouth? It began all over the place. Where to start? Kuwait in the desert, that’s as good a place as any.

‘Milos?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did it start? What was it like?’ What was it like?

I tear my eyes from the sea and stare at Ian. I don’t really see him. What was it like?

I’m speaking slowly now, more measured. ‘It started in Kuwait and turned into a living nightmare. It was a completely upside down world – Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass – warped, weird, back-to-front. I can’t begin to explain what it was like.’

‘Well, why don’t you just tell me about the job? Start there.’

‘Job? Interpreter?’ I pause for a moment. Was that it? Just that? ‘Only for a short while, Ian, just at the beginning.’ I’d hated interpreting. It had given me hideous headaches and in any case I just didn’t have that computer-like brain that the job requires.

‘Well, what was your job then?’ What was it? How do you describe it? It doesn’t exist in any job description that the Army has ever heard of. What was it … in a nutshell? I’m thinking hard now and it comes, absurd though it sounds.

‘Ian, I was a fixer.’

‘A fixer?’

‘Yeah, that’s right – a fixer, a sort of go-between … for the UN, for Rose and Smith … you know “go-and-wave-your-magic-wand” stuff.’

‘That’s the job they gave you?’ He sounds incredulous.

‘No, not really. It sort of just happened by accident. It evolved I guess … by accident.’

‘Okay then, but what exactly did it involve?’ I can see he’s not getting it.

‘Involve? Just about everything. As I’ve just said: “go and wave your magic wand at the Serbs … fix this … sort that problem out … get ’em to see it this way … get the hostages released …” on and on and on. There was no job description, just sort of made it up as I went along.’

‘How?’

‘History, that’s how. By prostituting myself, not my body … but my history, my family history … I was a sort of historical prostitute. I prostituted my background and my soul to get close to those people.’

‘Which people?’

‘The Serbs. Just them. Hid it from the others, the Muslims and Croats. They’d have killed me had they found out. They tried to kill Nick Abbott. This is serious shit, Ian. You don’t fuck around with these people.’

‘Did it work? I mean, this prostitution.’

‘Did it work? Did it! Why do you think I spent two years out there? It worked all right … worked a treat. It was a sort of Barclaycard, y’know, gets you in anywhere. Gets you into their mentality and into their minds. Problem is, once you’re in you end up playing mind games with them.’

‘Mind games?’

‘That’s right. Three-D mental chess. Trouble is, once you’re in their minds, they’re in yours too … they’re still there, that lot … and you engage in this bizarre struggle of wills. Did it work? Too bloody well. It worked too well and that’s the problem. It just never ends.’

‘How do you mean too well?’

‘Too well means that you become a sort of useful tool and everyone wants a bit of you. As I said, it’s never over. It never ends.’

‘But you’ve been back a while now, Milos. Surely it’s over.’

‘It’s never over. You know, you come back. No one bothers to debrief you. No one grabs you and tells you it’s over. So, you drift along never really sure whether you’re going back or not. No one tells you a thing. You just don’t know.’

‘But surely you’d started a new job, done your courses. Surely that’s enough?’ This is getting exasperating. He’s just not getting it.

‘No it isn’t. Listen,’ I can feel the anger rising again, ‘I come back and guess what? Two months later I’m at this wedding. Mark Etherington’s marrying Chelsea Renton, the MP’s daughter. I’m at this wedding, this is mid-June 1995, and General Mike Jackson comes up to me, he’s the bloke I delivered all those parcels for, on behalf of his au pair …’

‘What parcels?’

‘I was Postman Pat out there, but I’ll tell you about that later. I even fixed up a meeting for him with Mladic once, but anyway, so he comes up to me at the wedding and slaps me on the back and says, “Ah, Milos, well done, good to see you back ... done more than anyone could have asked of you … no need for you to go back … got a good career to crack on with … get yourself to Staff College etc etc etc …” and then what?’

‘Go on.’

‘Six and a half months later, on 2 January 1996, on the day that I’ve taken over command of A Company 1 PARA in Aldershot, I get this phone call. It’s Will Buckley, the Regimental Adjutant, and he says to me, “General Jackson’s been pinged to be the IFOR Commander Multinational Division South West in Bosnia and has asked for you to go out with him.” Can you believe it? One minute it’s one thing and the next it’s quite another. So, you see, it’s never really over. You just don’t know … ’

‘Why didn’t you go back out?’

‘Simple. The Muslims would have killed me. Jackson’s not the only one. Three months after that we get a new second-in-command in 1 PARA – Paul, who has just come from a staff job in the MoD and he tells me that, at the same time Jackson was asking for me, his boss, who is also pinged to deploy his HQ into Sarajevo also asks for me – “let’s get Stanley out. He’ll give us the inside track on the Serbs.” See what I mean …’ I’m shouting at him again, ‘… which is it? I mean, what do these people want? One minute they give you an MBE for your work out there. The next they arrest you as a spy! Who’s mad here? Me or them?’ I lapse into silence, exhausted.

We stare at each other. ‘No, Ian – that’s the way we did that. Historical prostitute … funny if it wasn’t so tragic, being a prostitute.’

Ian’s picked up his board again. He doesn’t bother writing while I’m raving at him. He’s talking softly now, ‘Let’s forget about Bosnia for a moment. Why don’t you tell me about your family? Let’s start with that, shall we. That seems to be the root of all this.’ His voice is very soothing, compelling, almost narcotic.

‘My family! Have you got all night? There’s more history here than anyone can cope with. Sure you’re up to it?’

‘Only if you are.’

‘We’ve been at it for most of the century. All over the place. Even the Army can’t figure out what I’m supposed to be. On my PAMPUS computer record they’ve got me down as “BRIT NAT/FOREIGN” for my nationality at birth and current nationality. What’s that supposed to mean? “FOREIGN”?’

Ian just shrugs. There’s no answer to that sort of question.

‘I suppose it’s their way of labelling someone if they can’t work out where they’re really from. You’ve got to sympathise with them to a certain extent. It’s a nightmare trying to work out what’s what in our family this century.’

‘So, tell me about it.’

‘Okay. Best place to start is with my maternal grandmother, Jessie Constance Millar Rowan. A Scot. I suppose that’s what the Army means by “FOREIGN”. She was from a wealthy Ayrshire family who were shipping-line owners in the last century. Of course, she had the best schooling – Paris and Cheltenham Ladies – and pretty much did nothing other than look after a menagerie at home and drive around Scotland. She was somewhat eccentric, though. She had no brothers, so in a peculiar sort of way became the son her father never had. She’d sit there with him after dinner, at the age of fifteen, smoking cigars and drinking port. She also wore a monocle for some reason. When the Great War broke out she nursed with the VADs in France and then in Malta during the Gallipoli campaign. After that she had a brief but disastrous driving job in London with the War Office from which she was sacked for being rude to an American general whom she’d accused of coming into the war three years too late. That wasn’t the end of her driving career, though. She ended up as a Scottish Women’s Hospital ambulance driver on the Salonika front in the Balkans where the British, French and Serbs were holding the line in the Macedonian mountains. There she met her future husband, a Serbian officer called Vladimir Ilija Dusmanic.

‘He was from a grand Belgrade family. His father had been Minister for Education in Nikola Pasic’s government in Serbia. Both Vladimir and his younger brother, Branko, were educated at the Pazhovski Institute in Russia. He went on to study law in Moscow but was recalled to Serbia in 1911 when the Balkan war against the Turks broke out. Branko never returned from Russia. He was at one of the Tzar’s cadet academies and disappeared in the Revolution, no doubt eliminated by the Bolsheviks. My grandmother met Vladimir Dusmanic on the Salonika front. He was close friends with Prince Alexander, who later became King of Yugoslavia. He was in uniform for the best part of eight years, by the end of which he’d been decorated with the Milos Obilic Gold medal for Valour, the VC equivalent. Nice, but his education had been blown to bits by all these wars.