Yugoslav Army General Convicted of Spying for US

Momcilo Perisic in court at the Hague Tribunal in February 2013. Photo: EPA/KOEN VAN WEEL/POOL

Belgrade Higher Court on Friday sentenced Momcilo Perisic, the former chief of staff of the Yugoslav Army and a former deputy prime minister of Serbia, to three years in prison time for passing state secrets to the United States in 2002.

Two other men indicted alongside Perisic, lieutenant-colonel Miodrag Sekulic and civilian Vladan Vlajkovic, were also convicted and sentenced to one-and-a-half years in prison each.

Belgrade Higher Court said in press release that Perisic was convicted of the criminal act of espionage, while Sekulic and Vlajkovic were convicted of revealing a military secret.

The trial started in 2016 and has been closed to the public after the prosecution said the defence ministry and the Serbian Army wanted the documents that were allegedly passed to the US to remain confidential.

Perisic pleaded not guilty.

He was arrested in March 2002 in a hotel near Belgrade while he was meeting US diplomat John David Neighbor, according to the official account of the case. Perisic gave Neighbor military documents about the army’s participation in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

Both were arrested, but Neighbor was quickly released because he had diplomatic immunity, and the US immediately denied that any secret data had been handed over.

At that time, Perisic was a head of the parliamentary committee for security of the Yugoslav Federal Assembly and member of government committee for state security control.

He was also the leader of a political party, Movement for a Democratic Serbia, one of 18 members of the governing coalition at the time, which was called the Democratic Opposition of Serbia.

The espionage case was overseen by the Belgrade military court until 2005, when it was transferred to a regular court in the Serbian capital.

But proceedings were then suspended when Perisic was sent to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague to stand trial for offences he allegedly committed during wartime, while he was chief of the general staff of the Yugoslav Army.

In 2013, the appeals chamber of the Hague Tribunal ruled that Perisic was not responsible for the wartime crimes committed by the Bosnian Serb Army in Sarajevo and Srebrenica because it was not under the command of the Yugoslav Army.

The appeals chamber also found him not guilty of failing to punish his subordinates who participated in the shelling of the Croatian capital Zagreb during the war.

The Hague Tribunal prosecution asked in 2014 for the verdict in the Perisic case to be reconsidered, but the court rejected it.