In the second week of February, after the brutal shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace by Bosnian Serbs had killed dozens of innocent people, NATO finally voted, with the approval of the UN secretarygeneral, to bomb the Serbs if they didn’t move their heavy guns more than a dozen miles away from the city. It was long overdue, but still not a vote without risk for the Canadians, whose forces in Srebrenica were surrounded by the Serbs, or for the French, British, Spanish, and Dutch, who also had relatively small, and vulnerable, numbers of troops on the ground.
Soon afterward, the heavy weapons were removed or put under UN control. Senator Dole was still pushing for a unilateral lifting of the arms embargo, but for the moment I was willing to stick with it, because we had finally gotten a green light for the NATO air strikes, and because I didn’t want others to use our unilateral abandonment of the Bosnian embargo as an excuse to disregard the embargoes we supported in Haiti, Libya, and Iraq.
In the middle of the month, Hillary and Chelsea left for Lillehammer, Norway, to represent America at the Winter Olympics, and I flew down to Hot Springs for a day to see Dick Kelley. It had been five weeks since Mother’s funeral, and I wanted to check on him. Dick was lonely in their little house, where Mother’s presence was still strong in every room, but the old navy veteran was getting his sea legs back and thinking about how to get on with his life.
I spent the next two weeks plugging health-care reform and the crime bill in different venues across the country, and dealing with foreign policy. We got a piece of good news when Saudi Arabia agreed to buy
$6 billion worth of American planes, after intense efforts by Ron Brown, Mickey Kantor, and Transportation Secretary Federico Peña.
We also got a shock when the FBI arrested thirty-one-year veteran CIA agent Aldrich Ames and his wife, breaking one of the biggest espionage cases in American history. For nine years, Ames had made a fortune giving up information that led to the deaths of more than ten of our sources inside Russia, and had done severe damage to our intelligence capability. After years of trying to catch a spy they knew was there, the FBI, with CIA cooperation, finally nailed him. The Ames case called into question both the vulnerability of our intelligence apparatus and our policy toward Russia: if they were spying on us, shouldn’t we cancel or suspend aid to them? In a bipartisan congressional meeting and in responses to press questions, I argued against suspending aid. Russia was engaged in an internal struggle between yesterday and tomorrow; yesterday’s Russia was spying on us, but our aid was being used to support tomorrow’s Russia, by strengthening democracy and economic reform, and securing and destroying its nuclear weapons. Besides, the Russians weren’t the only ones with spies. Toward the end of the month, a militant Israeli settler, outraged at the prospect of turning the West Bank back to the Palestinians, gunned down several worshippers at the Mosque of Abraham in Hebron. The murderer had struck during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, at a site sacred to both Muslims and Jews because it is thought to be the burial site of Abraham and his wife, Sarah. It seemed clear that his intention was to spark a violent reaction that would derail the peace process. To head that off, I asked Warren Christopher to contact Rabin and Arafat and invite them to send negotiators to Washington as soon as possible and have them stay until they had settled on concrete actions to implement their agreement.
