Nailing him down

SLOBODAN LAZAREVIC has spent his life in the darkest shadows. A Serb born in Belgrade, capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia, he joined the Yugoslav Army's intelligence service in 1968, spying on anti-communist students and émigrés. As communist Yugoslavia crumbled, he believed “with all my heart” in the credo of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who held on to power after communism fizzled by espousing Serb nationalism. In 1992, Mr Lazarevic was assigned to the Krajina, a tinderbox part of Croatia bordering Serbia with a large Serb population, whose extreme nationalists declared a separate new Serb Republic of Krajina. Serving both as a spy and as a liaison officer with foreign forces, Mr Lazarevic says he was a fly on the wall as Mr Milosevic's war machine rampaged through Croatia and Bosnia, the two most ethnically mixed bits of fragmenting Yugoslavia.