The documents discuss the attack on Banja and Serbia’s movements along the border with Kosovo.
Below, gazeta10 presents a portion of the secret documents discussing developments in Kosovo before and after the attack in Banja:
On the afternoon of September 27th, a Balkans expert in the White House received a concerning phone call from a US intelligence agency. Serbian forces were amassing along their country’s border with Kosovo, where NATO has maintained an uneasy peace since the bloody conflict of secession in 1999. Three days earlier, more than two dozen armed Serbs had killed a Kosovo police officer in an attack. Now Serbia was deploying heavy weaponry and troops. “We were very concerned that Serbia might be preparing to launch a military invasion,” says a National Security Council (NSC) official.
The question was what to do about it. Months of escalating tensions in a distant corner of Southeast Europe had not received much media attention. Diplomatic efforts by Great Britain, Italy, and other countries with troops on the ground in Kosovo had not succeeded in calming the situation. In Washington, attention was focused on chaos in Congress; in most of Europe, the top priority was continued support for Ukraine. So, as part of an effort to pressure Serbia to withdraw, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan approved a request from his team in Europe to declassify elements of the Serbian buildup for publication, Time magazine writes.
The NSC Intelligence Directorate edited the classified details of the buildup to obscure sources and methods beyond intelligence. It then sent the request to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in Northern Virginia via classified email. On September 29th, after a two-day struggle to clear declassification, NSC spokesperson John Kirby called an unplanned Zoom call with White House press corps members. Kirby provided new information on the September 24th attack on the Kosovo police officer and broke the news of the recent Serbian deployment, revealing that it included advanced artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry units. As coverage grew, European countries joined the US in exercising renewed diplomatic pressure on the Serbs, and Great Britain announced additional troop deployments to Kosovo. Within days, Serbian forces were withdrawing.
“Declassifying and releasing Serbian troop movements is an example of a new approach by the White House to use intelligence that has been heightened by the US response to the war in Ukraine. Starting in the fall of 2021, as American spies became convinced that Russia was preparing to invade, Sullivan worked with Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns to ‘declassify’ Moscow’s classified movement details. ‘We were alarmed by this information,’ says Maher Bitar, NSC coordinator for intelligence and defense policy, ‘and we needed to act before the Russians did,'” the documents published in Time state.
More than two years later, the White House has developed an extensive program for disclosing secrets when serving strategic purposes. About once a week, White House officials review intelligence they want to make public and seek approval from Sullivan to do so, say more than a dozen current and former White House and national security officials to TIME. NSC intelligence officials send requests to ODNI, which processes them, agreeing on clean language with those who created the secrets in the first place.
“The final decision on whether to light up green or red a certain part of the information depends on professionals in the intelligence community,” says Sullivan.
