Product Description

The powerful, disturbing and highly acclaimed account of a British officer in the Parachute Regiment, of part Yugoslav origin, painfully caught up in the savage maelstrom of the Bosnian war. Milos Stankovic worked as an interpreter and liaison officer for senior British commanders and two British UN generals -- Mike Rose and Rupert Smith. Armed with the pseudonym 'Mike Stanley' he was propelled from one nerve-racking crisis to another as he helped negotiate ceasefires between rival warlords, secured the release of UN hostages and organised the escape from Sarajevo of stricken families. Yet his close contacts with the Bosnian Serb leadership of Dr Karadzic and General Mladic bred suspicion and paranoia on all sides -- not just in the Bosnian Muslim and Serb ranks (who thought he might be a British spy -- General Rose's 'trusted mole') but in the minds of the Americans as well. In a final, horrific twist, the author was arrested by the British authorities on suspicion of being a Serb spy -- two and a half years after returning from Bosnia.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #208367 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

About the Author
Milos Stankovic was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1962 -- a British citizen with Scottish and Royalist Yugoslav parents, themselves refugees from Yugoslavia. Educated in England, he enlisted in the Parachute Regiment in 1981; the Army sent him to university where he studied Russian at Manchester and in Minsk in the Soviet Union. He has served with the British Army in Belize, Northern Ireland and Africa, and with the UN in post-war Kuwait and Iraq, and two long tours in Bosnia between December 1992 and April 1995. Prior to his arrest at Staff College in October 1997, Major Stankovic served as a company commander with the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment.

Customer Reviews

From an Officer who served in Bosnia with Stankovic
The very fact that you are reading this suggests that you are considering buying this book.

Whatever your interest in the subject matter, be it in a specific area of the conflict, Bosnia or perhaps the wider Balkans,or be it just a desire to acquire a damn good read that contains action, suspense, drama, irony etc. etc. then deliberate no more. Buy this book.

Even if you have no interest in the subject matter at all and happened upon this title by some quirk of fate, buy it anyway.

As a Royal Marines captain I served in Sarajevo as a UN Military Observer at the same time as the author in 1993, our paths crossed on one or two occassions. Reading Stankovic's book has given me sleepless nights for the first time in years as he re-awakened some of the now buried memories of that astonishing period of my life.

This is as good and as real as it gets.

Gobsmacked...
I have read most of the first hand accounts coming from late 20th century British Soldiers of all ranks from all theatres, but i have to say this is one of the best. I knew little of the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia prior to reading this book, and Milos writes in a style that is honest, easy for the layman to follow, yet detailed enough in a Conflict of such complicated issues and is one small window into the soul of late 20th Century European War....shocking?? Yes.....educational?? Definitely....One of the best Soldier accounts i have ever read

Powerful personal story of the Bosnian war.
There are few books that will hold me rivetted from beginning to end. There are even fewer that will do this for my wife. But 'Trusted Mole' has held us both spellbound. This is Milos Stankovic's extraordinary story of the insanity of the Bosnian war, and his own entanglement in that insanity. The madness that faced this British Army officer - a Brit of Serbian and Celtic grandparentage - followed Stankovic home to the UK and... well, you had better read his story to find out. If it weren't true I would dismiss it all as Walter Mitty tosh, or at best as a conspiracy theory dreamt up by someone deeply warped by the paranoia of Bosnia mind games. The story begins with Stankovic's arrest in October 1997 by the British MOD police, the start of a sorry sage that even now is not over. Accused - but never charged- with giving information to the Serbs, Stankovic used the following 2.5 years to explore in book form the background to his expulsion from the British Joint Services Command and Staff College and the collapse of what promised to be a glittering military career. The product - Trusted Mole- is an answer to his accusers. Let's hope they have the wherewithal to understand it. Profoundly honest, Stankovic's tale is one of great power which informs simultaneously on moral, physical and political planes. Like Conrad's Kurtz, Stankovic went on a journey to man's heart of darkness and was recoiled by the horror of his discovery: unlike Kurtz, however, Stankovic retained the balance of his mind and comes back from his journey a better-and stronger - man. Politically, the book reveals in fascinating detail just how decisions were made during the Balkan war - by all sides - and how preconceived ignorance dominated Western particularly American) approaches to the conflict. Indeed it appears that it was the Americans, long the bed-fellows of the Bosnian Muslims, who arranged for Stankovic to be arrested in the first place. In the black and white, good guy versus bad guy myopia of the American strategic perspective, the Muslims were the cowboys and the Serbs were the Indians. The story does not appear to be over with the final page, however. More of this story needs to be told. Why was he arrested? It certainly can't have been worth a ruined career, the public opprobrium (a la Tomlinson and Shayler)of being accused of betraying national security, and the apparent overturning of the right- in the UK at least -to be considered innocent until proven guilty. An absorbing story, a rivetting read and another installment in the offing, I hope. Shed a tear or two in the reading of it for Stankovic: few books will let you do this unashamedly.