From the moment it opened in Budapest in August 2000, the Office of Yugoslav Affairs - effectively the exiled American Embassy in Belgrade - had no contacts with Milosevic's government, only with the opposition. The office was headed by William Montgomery. . . . Here he was charged with a clear mandate: a month before the Office of Yugoslav Affairs opened, both Time and Newsweek reported that President Bill Clinton had authorized the CIA to start working toward toppling Milosevic. Making the West's overt and covert push for change in Serbia easier to justify, Milosevic had been charged with war crimes by the Internatinal Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.

With Montgomery's arrival, Budapest became a hive of revolutionary activity. A stream of Serb dissidents was invited to the OYA's non-descript offices to brief the American diplomats and agents and to receive money and advice from their American patrons. "In Budapest back then, you could see people from every corner of Serbia. You had to go there to access bank accounts and to meet with foreigners and NGOs, said dissident Belgrade radio station B92 manager Sasha Mirkovic.

Perhaps the most difficult task for the Office of Yugoslav Affairs was to unite Serbia's fractious opposition around a single person, a crucial step if Serbian voters were to be convinced that they really had an alternative to Milosevic. In October 1999, diplomats from the mission, together with the NDI the National Democratic Institute, international wing of the US Democratic Party organized a highly secret meeting of twenty opposition figures at which they were shown an in-depth opinion poll conducted by the American firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (the same group that would later conduct the controversial exit poll that showed Hugo Chavez had in fact sic lost the recall referendum in Venezuela. . . .)

Doug Schoen, the pollster who ran the seminar at the Budapest Marriott . . . offered an alternative: a mild-mannered lawyer named Vojislav Kostunica, who was considered a moderate nationalist and no friend of the United States. Such a candidate miught be more palatable to Serbian voters still bitter over the NATO bombing campaign. Schoen's numbers showed that Kostunica was well known and that he elicited few negative emotions among voters - a trait that distinguished him from the other presidential aspirants Milosevic, Zoran Dindic and Vuk Draskovic.

In December 1999, while leaders of the world's richest nations were gathered in Berlin for a G8 summit, Dindic and Draskovic were summoned to the InterCont hotel, on Budapestr Strasse in the German capital. There, in a small, windowless room, they were given their marching orders by a stern-faced team of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister. Kostunica, they were told, would be the sole opposition candidate in the coming elections. They were to gracefully bow out and throw their support behind him.

Neither Dindic nor Draskovic, both proud politicians, was thrilled with the decision, but Dindic - by far the more influential of the two on the streets at that time - agreed and joined the emerging coalition, known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, that would back Kostunica. Draskovic didn't join DOS but did agree not to run against it.

From that point on, the money was handed out in gobs, with the Serbian student group Otpor "Resistance" the leading recipient. Through the USAID United States Agency for International Development-funded grant-giving groups such as NED National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, NDI and especially IRI the International Republican Institute, international wing of the United States Republican Party, American taxpayers gave a combined $2.5 million to the student group. IRI led the way, paying directly for some five thousand more cans of spray paint that were used to emblazon Belgrade's walls with the group's clenched-fist logo and "gotov je," Serbian for "he's finished," the ubiquitous catch-phrase of the group's anti-Milosevic campaign.

Srda Popovic (a biology graduate who was one of Otpor's founders and informal leaders) and Dindic were invited by Bill Clinton to the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., in February 2000. The act was meant as a deliberate snub of Milosevic, and Popovic says that representatives of American organizations like NED, IRI, and Freedom House agreed to give Otpor everything he asked them for. "It was easy to raise money," he recalled as we sat in a trendy outdoor cafe on Belgrade's Republic Square, the site of many of Otpor's rallies. "I just convinced them that it was all for the cost of one day's bombing."

Freedom House paid for the establishment of several regional offices for Otpor outside Belgrade. NED directly contributed $137,390 to Otpor in order "to educate and encourage citizens to take an active role in the political process," according to the organization's 2000 annual report. NED also paid $150,000 for B92's Rock the Vote concert series, modelled on Slovakia's successful MTV-inspired campaign two years earlier. It would see top Serbian acts tour the country encouraging young Serbs to vote - and not for Milosevic.

. . . .

. . . . "These trainers and donors knew very well what the preconditions for a revolution were," B92's Mirkovic reflected. "They knew you need strong NGOs, you need an organization like Otpor, you need an opposition united around one leader and at least one independent television or radio station." In the fall of 2000, this model for revolution was ready for its first test. . . .

Inside Belgrade, word went around that the American government, postwar, was now keen to fund "election projects" targeted at deposing Milosevic through the coming presidential and parliamentary polls. . . "For the Americans, it's part of their global strategy to spread their values around the world," Otpor member Milos Malenkovic shrugged. . . "Unfortunately, there was no one locally who could put up the money - author's brackets during the Milosevic regime."

On the day Serbs were to vote, September 24, international financier George Soros was attending a joint conference of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Prague. Asked by reporters there what he thought of the voting in Yugoslavia that was just getting underway, Soros predicted that Serbs would take to the streets if Milosevic tried to deny Kostunica the victory that Western-backed polls were by then predicting. "We will all be surprised by the mobilization of society," the billionaire said. He spoke with the confidence of a man who knew exactly what was going to happen next.

- Mark MacKinnon, "The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union," pp. 47-52.