Verified: On the Ground with the Kosovo Verification Mission

In March 1999, NATO began an air campaign over the skies of Serbia and Montenegro, bombing Yugoslav military and government targets in order to stop the "ethnic cleansing" and violence in Kosovo. Touted as a successful example of "humanitarian intervention" meant to stop "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide," NATO's campaign over Kosovo has set an international precedent for the use of military force to intervene in the internal conflicts of sovereign nations. The author, a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer, was on the ground with the 2000-person Kosovo Verification Mission as an intelligence contractor between October 1998 and March 1999. Every day during the five months leading up to the NATO offensive, he assessed and analyzed raw information reported by hundreds of "unarmed observer teams" operating throughout Kosovo. What he saw did not match what was being reported by Western diplomats and the international press. Although Kosovo was locked in a violent insurgency, ethnic cleansing and genocide were not part of the equation during the 1998 Kosovo Crisis and the months leading up to the 1999 air campaign. General Wesley Clark, world leaders, and "experts" all assumed that the air campaign would end in a matter of days with the capitulation of Yugoslavia's then president, Milosevic. However, NATO's intervention immediately resulted in an increase in the violence, death and destruction in Kosovo with the loss of thousands of lives and an exodus of nearly one million refugees into neighboring countries, while its aircraft flew overhead for seventy-eight days unable to stop it. Ironically, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo did not occur until NATO's campaign began. When it had ended, Kosovo's non-Albanian minorities fled the region, many into small enclaves that still today, some twenty-five years later, must rely on NATO troops for protection from the ethnic-Albanian majority. "Verified" is an accurate account of events on the ground in Kosovo during the period that led to the unprecedented actions of a consortium of nations intervening in the internal conflict of a sovereign nation and attaining a result diametrically opposed to what they had intended.