The powerful, disturbing and highly acclaimed account of a British officer in the Parachute Regiment, of part Yugoslav origin, painfully caught up in the savage maelstrom of the Bosnian war.

Milos Stankovic worked as an interpreter and liaison officer for senior British commanders and two British UN generals – Mike Rose and Rupert Smith. Armed with the pseudonym ‘Mike Stanley’ he was propelled from one nerve-racking crisis to another as he helped negotiate ceasefires between rival warlords, secured the release of UN hostages and organised the escape from Sarajevo of stricken families.

Yet his close contacts with the Bosnian Serb leadership of Dr Karadzic and General Mladic bred suspicion and paranoia on all sides – not just in the Bosnian Muslim and Serb ranks (who thought he might be a British spy – General Rose’s ‘trusted mole’) but in the minds of the Americans as well. In a final, horrific twist, the author was arrested by the British authorities on suspicion of being a Serb spy – two and a half years after returning from Bosnia.

Milos Stankovic was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1962 – a British citizen with Scottish and Royalist Yugoslav parents, themselves refugees from Yugoslavia. Educated in England, he enlisted in the Parachute Regiment in 1981; the Army sent him to university where he studied Russian at Manchester and in Minsk in the Soviet Union. He has served with the British Army in Belize, Northern Ireland and Africa, and with the UN in post-war Kuwait and Iraq, and two long tours in Bosnia between December 1992 and April 1995.

Prior to his arrest at Staff College in October 1997, Major Stankovic served as a company commander with the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment.