World

NATO Denies Kosovo Spy Report

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 9, 2000 / 5:51 AM EST / CBS

NATO said on Thursday it had no evidence that a spy in the alliance provided the Serbs with top secret details of the alliance's bombing raids against Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict last year.

The alliance was replying to a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper, which cited unidentified high-level U.S. sources as saying a spy had given Belgrade details of targets to be hit and precise flight paths.

The Guardian said an internal classified report drawn up for senior U.S. defense officials concluded the Serbs had access to NATO's daily orders for air raids and reconnaissance flights during the first two weeks of the bombing campaign which began last March.

It quoted the report as saying that by the end of the second week of the campaign, NATO started to change the way the orders about bombing raids were distributed.

The effect on what the Serbs appeared to know about NATO's bombing plans was immediate, the report said.

The Guardian quoted a senior NATO source as saying the alliance's supreme commander, General Wesley Clark, suspected early in the bombing campaign that Belgrade had a spy in the organization's Brussels headquarters.

"I know I've got a spy, I want to find him," Clark was quoted as telling colleagues.

But NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the fact that Yugoslavia had managed to bring down only two NATO aircraft during a 78-day bombing campaign suggested that the Serbs did not have access to secret information.

"There is absolutely no evidence that Yugoslavia had any kind of information to allow them to be more effective in shooting our planes down," Shea said.

"This is a rumor," he told BBC television. "There is no beef."

Shea said that if the United States really did have evidence of a spy within NATO during the bombing campaign that ended nearly a year ago, the alliance would have heard about it by now.

NATO was not actively looking for a spy because there was no evidence that one existed. "We don't have anything to go on."

Shea said there was no evidence the alliance's operational planning had been compromised.

"NATO took extreme measures to make sure that its operational planning remained secret. Every couple of weeks the procedures were reviewed, we tightened up the distribution list ... to make sure that only those who really had a need to know were in the picture. We took great care."

The Guardian said the classified U.S. report would feature in a BBC television program to be broadcast on Sunday.