Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Document of the Week: State Deparment Cable on Ante Gotovina's Capture

Again, I was late with the Document of the Week. This week's Document of the Week is a 12/08/05 cable from the US embassy in Zagreb to Foggy Bottom providing the details of how Ante Gotovina was captured. Citing sources within Croatian intelligence and (probably) the ICTY, (1)  the US Embassy writes that Spanish intelligence, the Croatian Intelligence Agency (IA) and the Croatian Counter Intelligence Agency (POA), and select ICTY officials tracked him for months.The cable also noted that Gotovina's arrest "marked a major step forward for Croatian law enforcement, as no word of this effort had leaked to the public during the multi-month operation."

(1) Given the cable redacts the name of the informant, there is no way to know for sure at this time. Given the cable is not sent to the American embassy in Madrid, this leads to me to believe that the cable's named source is not from the Spanish government. Nothing more than a hunch leads me to conclude that the source if from the ICTY instead of Croatian.

(2) This cable was photocopied in an effort to cover up some food stains. It failed. Even worse the photocopy of the cable was shrunk. To make it more readable and to reduce its size, I axed a lot of white space.