'A risky endeavor.' How WPAFB set the stage for historic accords 30 years ago

Yahoo

05-05-2025

May 5—On a dreary November evening in 1995, Richard Holbrooke, then an assistant U.S. secretary of state, had had enough.
It was time to leave Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and end the attempt to hammer out peace accords between warring nations in the former Yugoslavia, Holbrooke had decided in frustration.
Or at least, it was time to make it look that way.
Holbrooke ordered his American delegation partners to pack their bags and place those bags outside the doors of their rooms at the Hope Hotel at Wright-Patterson, recalled John McCance, owner of McCance Consulting Group.
McCance, then a spokesman for the 445th Airlift Wing at Wright-Patterson, worked during the talks as an Air Force liaison to Nicholas Burns, a State Department spokesman.
McCance had access to much of Wright-Patterson's Hope Hotel and the visiting officers quarters (VOQ), which had been transformed into diplomatic suites, home to the attempt to end a war between Croatia, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.
"The negotiations had broken down," McCance recalled. "It was a cold, wet, dreary November day. It was very disheartening to everybody — the base personnel, the State Department personnel, the news media."
"Everybody was very invested in getting a solution," he said.
But Holbrooke was a "master of theater," said Fran Leskovar, project manager for the Dayton Peace Accords Oral History project.
Leskovar recalled how Holbrooke, an experienced diplomat, visited Belgrade during a NATO bombing campaign to show he wasn't afraid. He took steps intentionally, with an eye on how negotiators could be affected.
"He was very good at controlling and producing a theater," he said. "That's who Richard Holbrooke was ... everything was just a theater setting."
"It was very intentional," McCance said. "It was a tool to put pressure on the delegations."
"They were told to pack their bags and put their bags outside the door," he added. "And then I went to meet with Nick (Burns) in the American delegation building, and there they were — all the bags were outside the doors of their rooms."
The move had an impact. By Nov. 21, 1995, a draft agreement was finalized. It was signed less than a month later in Paris.
Celebrating the talks and marking their approaching 30th anniversary are among the reasons the NATO Parliamentary Assembly's spring session will be held in downtown Dayton May 23 to 26.
"As the birthplace of the Dayton Peace Accords, our city holds a special connection to Bosnia and the cause of lasting peace in the Balkans," U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, said in March.
Turner, who was mayor of Dayton during the talks, is a former president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and serves as vice-chairman of the Defense and Security Committee of the assembly.
'A risky endeavor'
Kevin Rusnak, chief historian for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright-Patterson, said the base offered distinct strengths as a place to try to craft an agreement.
"They thought that by isolating everyone and keeping the media, as it were, out of the negotiations, that would help the process," Rusnak said.
Given the "relatively expeditious manner in which they reached an agreement, that part seemed to work pretty well," he said.
Holbrooke wanted negotiations to happen in the United States.
The base's physical environment provided what the State Department wanted. Wright-Patterson was secure, quiet, relatively isolated, yet rich with symbols of American power wherever delegates turned.
Rusnak said other host site possibilities initially jostled for attention. The Camp David presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland were one option, but that site was perhaps most associated with the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. Rusnak said talks organizers wanted to avoid "historical muddying" of different moments.
Paris, New York City, San Francisco or Washington, D.C. might have offered too many distractions. A relatively "austere" environment was felt to be right, Rusnak said.
"Physical sequestration of the parties was really critical," he said, adding moments later: "It worked, right?"
Holbrooke and others wanted a location about an hour's flight from Washington, Rusnak said. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. was on the list of possible sites. Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, was seen as a front-runner, at one point.
But Wright-Patterson emerged as the top choice. Presidential aircraft operated out of Wright-Patt. It was a quick flight from D.C.
Advance teams checked sites in early October. On Oct. 13, an advance team visited Wright-Patt — and about five days later, the base was announced as the choice.
Specifically, the Hope Hotel on Wright-Patterson's Area A — a "sort of off-base, but on-base" site, as Rusnak put it — would host the talks, just a short walk from the base VOQ, where dignitaries and support staff could relax and sleep.
There was some surprise that the accords were to be held in Dayton at all. Serbian President Slobodan Milošević reportedly reacted to the choice by saying: "I am not a monk. You can't confine me to a military base."
"The Europeans, used to negotiations in more opulent settings, literally had no idea where Dayton was, and expressed open unhappiness," Holbrooke wrote in his 1999 book on the talks, To End a War.
There was skepticism, particularly among some of the Serbian and Bosnian leaders, said Fran Leskovar, project manager for the Dayton Peace Accords Oral History Project, which is collecting oral memories from retired and former diplomats who took part in those negotiations and implemented its terms. Leskovar and his colleagues plan to be in Dayton for the NATO parliamentary session.
"Everybody expected it would happen in Geneva or Paris, and I think probably, I would argue, the Europeans were also not happy," Leskovar said of the peace talks. "So it was a risky endeavor."
But the base was not an impediment. On the contrary, he said.
"It was a strategic move to have it in Dayton," Leskovar said. "First of all, the base had capacity. All those buildings were easily available, and a lot of work was not required to convert them into a diplomatic headquarters."
'An American product'
One message in holding the talks at an American military base was unmistakable, Leskovar said.
"This is an American product," he said. "It has to happen here. We're involved. ... We're going to complete it."
The ability to create "a base within a base" was "our biggest advantage there," Rusnak said.
The base met the moment, he said. At a basic level, leaders wanted to fence off a secure area without making it seem that participants were imprisoned.
Fences were raised. Sidewalks were built. Communications infrastructure in the VOQ and the Hope Hotel, for secure calls to D.C. and overseas, was provided, with participants gaining access to cell phones, typewriters, computer systems and more.
"They could wander around," Rusnak said. "They could get to and from the negotiation facilities, which were primarily the Hope Hotel, and their own quarters, without interacting with anybody from the outside, whether that was people who work on base or the news media or the general public."
Rusnak put the total cost of hosting the talks about $1.8 million. The talks spent $8,000 a day in food. Involved were 43 vehicles, with 84 drivers, many of them base employees, who volunteered to drive participants about.
Some 450 hotel rooms were occupied, between the Hope Hotel and the VOQ. About 570 accredited journalists from 20 different nations covered the event.
There were no security incidents.
"We did the best that we could within those two weeks," before talks began, Rusnak said.
The hard work paid off, advocates believe.
"It was a success story," Leskovar said. "It provided diplomats with a setting they weren't able to get anywhere else."
"We were committed," he added. "It was happening. We were going to get it to the end."
"Ideally we wanted an area we could seal off from the press and all other outsiders, close enough to Washington so that senior administration officials could visit, yet sufficiently remote," Holbrooke later wrote.
"The hard work, superior performance and cheerful enthusiasm which you and your colleagues brought to this effort were key elements in the successful conclusion of the talks," Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote to the commander of the 88th Air Base Wing.
"It was another kind of feather in our cap," Rusnak said.