Black Hats All Round

SARAJEVO: U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke received a big bit of leverage for his weekend meeting in Rome with Balkan presidents with the discovery of what NATO officials call a terrorist camp near Sarajevo. Less than 48 hours before the Rome conference to boost compliance with the Dayton peace agreement was scheduled to begin, French soldiers raided a former ski chalet 20 miles west of Sarajevo and found nine men, including at least three Iranians, sitting atop an extensive arsenal of grenades, submachine guns, explosives and boobytrapped toys. The Iranians were in direct violation of the Dayton agreement, which said all foreign forces were to have left Bosnia by January 19. But what has the U.S. most worried were allegations that Bosnia's Muslim government had links to the Iranians. "No one can escape the obvious, that terrorist training activity was going on in this building and it has direct association with people in the government," U.S. Admiral Leighton Smith said Friday after an inspection of the chalet. TIME's Alexandra Stiglmayer reports that there may be a political motivation behind the NATO raid. "As the Holbrooke meeting approaches, NATO officials may have had wanted to arrest bad guys on the Muslim side to balance the Serb officers extradited to The Hague Monday for war crimes."