Avenger

*(Abbas was captured by American special forces on April 14, 2003.)

The Italian defence minister resigned in disgust. The premier at the time was Bettino Craxi. He later died in exile, also in Tunis, wanted for massive embezzlement while in office.

Reagan's response to this perfidy was the Omnibus Act, nicknamed the "Never Again" Act. It was not finally the bright kid from Wisconsin but the veteran FBI terrorist hunter, Oliver "Buck" Revell, in retirement, who took a good di

Even then it was not thought that for Zilic a "rendition" would ever be needed. Post-Milosevic Yugoslavia was keen to return to the community of civilised nations. She needed large loans from the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere to rebuild her infrastructure after seventy-eight days of NATO bombing. Her new president, Kostunica, would surely regard it as a bagatelle to have Zilic arrested and extradited to the United States. That certainly, was the request Senator Lucas intended to proffer to Colin Powell and John Ashcroft. If worse came to worst, he would ask for a covert rendition to be authorised.

He had his writer team prepare from the full 1995 report of the Tracker a onepage synopsis to explain everything from Ricky Colenso's departure to Bosnia to try and help pitiful refugees to his presence in a lonely valley on May 15, 1995.

What happened in the valley that morning, as described by Milan Rajak, was compressed into two pages, the most distressing passages heavily highlighted. Fronted by a personal letter from Lucas, the file was edged and bound for easy reading.

That was something else Capitol Hill had taught him. The higher the office, the shorter the brief should be. In late April, he got his face-to-face with both Cabinet secretaries.

Each listened with grave visage and pledged to read the brief and pass it to the appropriate department within their departments. And they did.

The United States has thirteen major intelligence-gathering agencies. Among them they probably garner 90 percent of all the intelligence, licit and illicit, on the entire planet in any twenty-four-hour period.

The sheer volume makes absorption, analysis, filtration, collation, storage, and retrieval a problem of industrial proportions. Another problem is that they do not talk to each other.

American intelligence chiefs have been heard to mutter in a late-night bar that they would give their pensions for something like the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).

The JIC meets weekly in London under the chairmanship of a veteran and trusted bureaucrat to bring together the smaller country's four agencies: the Secret Intelligence Service MI-6 (foreign), the Security Service MI-5 (home), the Government Communications Headquarters (SIGINT satellites, the listeners), and Scotland Yard's Special Branch.

Sharing intelligence and progress can prevent duplication and waste, but its main aim is to see if fragments of information learned in different places by different people could form the jigsaw puzzle that makes up the picture everyone is looking for.

Senator Lucas's report went to six of the agencies, and each obediently scoured their archives to see what, if anything, they had learned and filed about a Yugoslav gangster called Zoran Zilic.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, known as ATF, had nothing. He had never operated in the United States and ATF rarely if ever goes abroad.

The other five were the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), which has an interest in any arms dealer; the National Security Agency (NSA), the biggest of them all, working out of their "Black Chamber" at Fort Meade, Maryland, listening to trillions of words a day, spoken, emailed or faxed, with technology almost beyond science fiction; the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has an interest in anyone who has ever trafficked narcotics anywhere in the world; the FBI (of course); and the CIA. Both the latter spearhead the permanent search for knowledge about terrorists, killers, warlords, hostile regimes, whatever. It took a week or more, and April slipped into May. But because the order came right from the top, the searches were thorough.

The people at Defence, Drugs, and Fort Meade all came up With fat files. In various capacities they had known about Zoran Zilic for years. Most of their entries concerned his activities since he became a major player on the Belgrade scene as enforcer to Milosevic, racketeer in drugs and arms, profiteer, and general lowlife.

That he had murdered an American boy during the Bosnian war they had not known, and they took it seriously. They would have helped if they could, but their files all had one thing in common; they ran out fifteen months before the senator's enquiry. Zilic had vanished, vaporised, disappeared. Sorry.

At the CIA, enveloped in summer foliage just off the Beltway, the director passed the query on to the deputy director of operations. He consulted downward to five subdivisions: Balkans, Terrorism, Special Ops, and Arms Dealing were four. He even asked, more as a formality than anything else, the small and obsessively secret office formed less than a year earlier after the massacre of the seventeen sailors on the USS *Cole* in Aden Harbour, known as ÔPeregrineÕ.

But the answer was the same. Sure we have files; but nothing after fifteen months ago. We agree with all our colleagues. He is no longer in Yugoslavia, but where he is, we do not know. He has not come to our attention for two years, so there has been no reason to expend time and treasure.

The other major hope would have been the FBI. Surely, somewhere in the huge Hoover Building at Pe

Dir. Robert Mueller, recently appointed successor to Louis Freeh, passed the file and request downward with his "Action Without Delay" tag, and it found the desk of Assistant Director Colin Fleming.

Fleming was a lifelong Bureau man who could never remember the time, even as a boy, when he did not want to be a G-Man. He came from Scottish Presbyterian stock, and his faith was as unflinching as his concept of law, order, and justice. On the work of the Bureau, he was a fundamentalist. Compromise, accommodation, concession-in the ma

He came from the granite hills of New Hampshire where the boast is that the rocks and the men vie for toughness. He was a staunch Republican, and Peter Lucas was his senator. Indeed, he had campaigned locally for Lucas and had made his acquaintance.

After reading the skimpy report, he rang the senator's office to ask if he might read the full report by the Tracker and the complete confession of Milan Rajak. A copy was messengered over to him that same afternoon. He read the files with growing anger. He, too, had a son to be proud of, a navy flier, and the thought of what had happened to Ricky Colenso filled him with righteous wrath. The Bureau had to be the instrument of bringing Zilic to justice either via extradition or a rendition. As the man heading the desk covering all terrorism from overseas sources, he would personally authorise the rendition team to go and get the killer.

But the Bureau could not because the Bureau was in the same position as the rest. Even though his gangsterdom, drugs, and arms dealing had brought him to the attention of the Bureau as a man to watch, he had never been caught in an act of anti-American terrorism or support thereof; so when he had vanished, the Bureau had not pursued it. Its file had run out fifteen months before. It was with the deepest personal regret that Fleming had to join the others in the intelligence community in admitting they did not know where Zoran Zilic was.