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Former state security official Jovica Stanisic in court in The Hague in June 2017. Photo: EPA/Michael Kooren/REUTERS POOL.

Two defence witnesses at the retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague this week offered differing interpretations of the links between the Serbian State Security Service, SDB and the US Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990s.

Ivor Roberts, who was Britain’s ambassador to Belgrade in the mid-1990s, has previously alleged in his book entitled ‘Conversations with Milosevic’ that Stanisic was a secretly an agent of the CIA.

However, Roberts told the court on Tuesday that he could not give any more information about this allegation.

“The instructions I have are not to discuss this, and they are very recent instructions, reminding me that I am bound by the British Official Secrets Act even though I left British government service 13 years ago,” he said.

When the prosecutor asked him if the information in his book can be considered reliable, Roberts answered: “I would certainly rely on anything I said in my book.”

Vlado Dragicevic, a former Serbian intelligence official in charge of relations with foreign intelligence services, then denied that either he or Stanisic had been a CIA agent.

“I swear that I never signed any document that would concern cooperation with the CIA,” Dragicevic told the Hague court on Wednesday.

“No. In short, no. I can swear that neither myself nor Mr. Stanisic were ever agents of the CIA,” he said.

Former SDB chief Stanisic and Simatovic, the former commander of the SDB-run Special Operations Unit, are charged with having been protagonists in a joint criminal enterprise led by then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, aimed at permanently and forcibly removing Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to achieve Serb domination.

They pleaded not guilty in December 2015 after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia overturned their acquittal in their first trial.

The appeals chamber ruled that there were serious legal and factual errors when they were initially acquitted of war crimes in 2013, and ordered the case to be retried and all the evidence and witnesses reheard in full by new judges.

Defence witness Dragicevic explained that the SDB’s contacts with the CIA in 1991 and 1992 were through two people who worked in the US embassy in Belgrade.

He said that one day in 1991, the first contact stopped showing up for meetings and then the second contact made himself known by simply showing up at the SDB, saying he was from the CIA and requesting a meeting.

“At the outset of this exchange, the gentleman told me openly that it was the only way he had to make contact with me because there were no other channels through the US embassy or the then Foreign Ministry of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” said Dragicevic.

The second CIA contact left Belgrade in 1993, but prior to that, he developed close relations with Stanisic, the witness said.

“I can say that their relationship was rather unusual from the start. The two established the kind of contact which indicated that they understand each other completely well professionally and as human beings,” Dragicevic told the court.

“We managed to do a lot in a short time and it was of mutual benefit for both services,” he added.