‘Motivated to believe the worst’

‘Motivated to believe the worst’

Flushed with victory after 78 days of air strikes finally led President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, Mr Cohen was still in combative mood as he visited US units around the Adriatic.

Yet, as new details about the war emerge, Mr Cohen’s “untold story” reveals the opposite of what he predicted. The reality of what was going on in Kosovo was less, not more, appalling than Nato claimed.

The International Criminal Tribunal’s disclosure that the final toll of bodies dug up in Kosovo would be under 3,000 contrasts starkly with the estimates of mass murder given by Nato while the bombs were falling. Mr Cohen told a CBS interviewer in May that 100,000 men of military age were missing, and “may have been murdered”.