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MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: In the summer of 1999, war crimes investigators entered Kosovo as Serbian forces pulled out. They found widespread evidence of atrocities committed by the Serbs against ethnic Albanians. Piles of corpses moldering in fields and villages, bodies stuffed down wells, and scores of mass grave sites. But the evidence didn't add up. Thousands of Albanians were still missing.

DUSKO (INTERPRETED): You'll never know the exact number because those bodies have been completely destroyed.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Dusko was a member of the Serbian state security forces in Kosovo. He and six other Serbian fighters interviewed for this report took part in a grisly campaign to destroy war crimes evidence in Kosovo.

BRONCO (INTERPRETED): I think our people understood that sooner or later, some of these Western organizations, like the Hague Tribunal, might come into Kosovo, and we needed a good way to destroy the evidence.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Bronco also served in an elite secret police unit that coordinated the removal and destruction of Albanian corpses in Kosovo, a job one commander called garbage disposal.

BRONCO: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: The point was not to hide the bodies in graves but to totally destroy them. It would be as if these people never existed.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Bronco and the others spoke to us only after we agreed not to reveal their identities. Worried for their security, the men insisted on meeting us in Montenegro and only in public places such as noisy cafes. To avoid drawing attention, our microphone was hidden in a bag, so their voices can be difficult to hear on the radio.

Their stories provide a detailed picture of an operation that is one of the most closely held secrets in Serbia, how the Serbian Secret Police, under orders from Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's senior Commanders, systematically destroyed the bodies of dead Albanians to obliterate evidence of mass killings. Many of the corpses were secretly destroyed at a single location.

Trepca is a huge mining and industrial complex in Northern Kosovo just outside the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica. Soon after the war, news reports cited refugees who said Serbian forces dumped hundreds of Albanian corpses down Trepca's labyrinth of mine shafts. War crimes investigators searched the mines but found nothing. According to Serbian sources we spoke to for this report, the investigators looked in the wrong place.

MILAN: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: Trepca is one of the biggest mining complexes in Europe. It had all kinds of processing plants and furnaces.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Milan served in a special police unit ordered to collect bodies of Albanians from grave sites and truck them to Trepca. There the corpses were incinerated in the blast furnace of Trepca's Zvecan lead refinery.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MILAN (INTERPRETED): Those furnaces burned at thousands of degrees. I was told that it was enough heat to destroy everything, every trace of the stuff they called DNA. I didn't even know what DNA was.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Milan gave us a detailed description of the process, even drawing diagrams of how the bodies got hauled from the trucks to the furnace.

MILAN: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: OK, here's the tall smokestack, here are the conveyors, and over here was the coke. Do you know what coke is? The workers at Trepca told me it was a kind of heavy, dense coal. So on the conveyor you have the coke and the ore, and it all burns at a high temperature in the furnace. That's where we put the bodies.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Bronco was a driver in a secret police unit. He said he made more than a dozen trips delivering truckloads of corpses to Trepca.

BRONCO: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: The blast furnace was high up, maybe 50 meters high or more. As I recall, only one of the furnaces was operating, but there were one or two others. They burned at extremely high heat and that's where the bodies got destroyed.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: If UN prosecutors can prove that the Milosevic regime destroyed bodies to cover up war crimes, that could be a crucial part of the Tribunal's case against Slobodan Milosevic.

Turn back the calendar to spring of 1999 during Serbia's war against ethnic Albanians and NATO's air war against Serbia. On a grim March morning, villagers in an Albanian Hamlet called Izbica buried their dead. Some 120 ethnic Albanians had been executed by Serbian forces. The survivors were desperate to show the world what happened in their village so they made a home video of themselves identifying the dead, then burying them in long rows of graves.

SPEAKER 1: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: The camera zooms in on each face. Some are horribly disfigured by machine gun fire. The name of each victim is spoken.

SPEAKER 2: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: The graves at Izbica would not go undisturbed for long. A spy satellite hundreds of miles overhead also captured images of the freshly dug graves. The UN war crimes tribunal used the reconnaissance photos, the home video, and stories told by Izbica survivors to prepare an indictment against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

To bolster support for the air campaign, NATO released the reconnaissance photos of Izbica's graves in mid April. NATO Commanders wanted the public to see evidence of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo. Retired General Wesley Clark commanded the NATO air war. He knew Belgrade would also get the picture.

WESLEY CLARK: I knew always that Milosevic was watching CNN. And his lieutenants were also fluent in English, I had to assume they watched our briefings. There was always the chance that the Serbs could have reacted, but they could have reacted in one of two ways, they could have been deterred from doing more of this, or they could have reacted in some other way.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: The world might be watching, but Slobodan Milosevic was not deterred, the killings and deportations continued. And about the same time the Izbica photos appeared on television, mid April of 1999, Milosevic's senior generals ordered an intensive clean up operation in Kosovo.

SPEAKER 3: Arrest warrants have been issued and every UN member nation now has the obligation to bring Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to justice. Today's historic--

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: On May 27, the UN announced its indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. Izbica was one of the atrocity sites specified in the indictment. According to eyewitnesses and human rights investigators, within days, Serbian units descended on Izbica with digging equipment. Soon after, satellite photos showed a long swath of bulldozed earth. To NATO General Wesley Clark, the pictures showed that the graves had been emptied. Intelligence services also reported Serbian truck movements near Trepca.

WESLEY CLARK: Not only had the Serbs killed civilians and were trying to hide them, but there was a system behind this in which they were responding to discoveries. And so for us, this was an important finding. It deepened the recognition that the Serb high command in some way was involved in this.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: But the mystery of exactly what happened to the missing bodies from Izbica and other known atrocity sites still bedevils war crimes investigators. They speculate privately that Serbian forces used industrial sites to destroy bodies. Until now, no one could confirm it.

[SHOUTING]

We went to the Trepca lead refinery twice to verify the details of the story Serbian fighters told us about burning corpses.

NICK BOROM: OK, now the coke is actually here for the blast furnace.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: A UN administrator named Nick Borom showed us around the refinery. The plant used high heat and strong chemicals to draw lead from raw ore. The UN took over Trepca last summer and shut it down because the plant was disgorging massive amounts of pollution. Borom and his team knew nothing about the clandestine work done at Trepca during the war.

The lead refinery is a series of huge buildings, gantries, and pipes, capped by a soaring red and white smokestack. Rusting equipment and heaps of industrial waste give the place a derelict menacing look. As we toured the plant, details of the facility's layout and operations closely matched the descriptions from the Serbian fighters, especially the conveyor system used to lift fuel and ore to the blast furnace. But then Stephen Smith and I retraced the route the bodies supposedly took on the conveyors.

STEPHEN SMITH: Walking along the track that leads from where the coke is loaded onto the conveyor directly into the blast furnace. In some places, there appear to be obstructions, but in others, perhaps not.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: There were a number of obstructions, in fact. At intervals along the conveyor line to the blast furnace, the space is clearly too small for a body to fit through. This was a major discrepancy. Could we be looking in the wrong place? Were the stories reliable? So we interviewed some of the Serbs again. Without prompting, Milan explained how they solved the problem of getting bodies up to the furnace.

MILAN (INTERPRETED): At first we tried using the tracks that lead directly to the furnace, but it didn't work, at least for the bodies that were intact. Most of those bodies were too big to ride on the conveyor. But when ore is being prepared for processing, it has to be ground up and sort of cooked, something like that. So if you put the bodies into the grinder, it's easy.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: With no background in metallurgy, Milan accurately described the process that ore goes through at Trepca to become raw lead. As the UN's Nick Borom confirmed, the ore goes through the grinder, through the center plant where it gets roasted, and then on to the blast furnace and beyond.

NICK BOROM: --center plant is there, the blast furnace is there.

STEPHEN SMITH: These large piles here that sort of looks like almost gravel is?

NICK BOROM: Right, this is actually the slag and the dross from the blast furnace.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: The Serbs dumped waste from the blast furnace called slag into piles on the ground. The slag is a coarse, dull, gray material. This is where investigators might look for evidence of the burned bodies. But forensic scientists told us it would be virtually impossible to find traces of biological material burned in such a furnace. So in this regard, the Serbian effort to destroy evidence probably worked.

But just a few yards away from where the bodies were unloaded from the trucks, in a pile of metal scrap, we saw discarded clothing, a shirt, a jacket, an assortment of dress shoes, including women's shoes, not the kind of things typically found in an industrial site.

BRONCO (INTERPRETED): It was mainly men of fighting age who were being incinerated, but also women and children. It was important to dispose of women and children, the civilian casualties, even if they weren't intentional targets.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Bronco says many fighters were disgusted by the work at Trepca.

BRONCO (INTERPRETED): There are scenes that stick with you because you can't believe it happened, especially in such numbers. Maybe you can imagine destroying a few bodies here or there, but this was a horrible scene because there were so many, like a factory assembly line, but with bodies.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: In all likelihood, this assembly line is where the corpses from the Izbica graves ended up. Some 1,200 to 1,500 bodies were destroyed at Trepca according to the Serbian fighters who worked there and according to a well-placed Serbian intelligence officer. That figure represents around half the number of Albanians officially registered as missing in Kosovo. Bronco, one of the men who took part in the operation, met us at an outdoor cafe in Montenegro. He said that with Western spy satellites and NATO jets prowling above, the clean up operation required stealth.

BRONCO (INTERPRETED): It was organized using refrigerator trucks, the smaller ones used for milk and ice cream. You had to be mindful of being photographed by NATO, so we did it at night even if that meant working more slowly.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: To make sure the civilian trucks pass swiftly through military and police checkpoints, an elite heavily armed secret police division called the Unit for Special Operations escorted the deliveries. Dusko took part in several of these operations.

DUSKO: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: When our Jeeps came along, no one would dare stop us and check what was in the trucks. That was important so we could move quickly and so ordinary Serbs wouldn't find out.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: The fact that the cover up was conducted by an elite Serbian secret police squad could be powerful evidence against Slobodan Milosevic and four other Serbian officials indicted for crimes against humanity. Phil Caine, the Hague tribunal's chief investigator in Kosovo, says the more bodies that prosecutors can prove were moved or destroyed, the better the case in court.

PHIL CAINE: That would tend to show that these acts were not committed just on a local basis by the local police chief, it's something that was coordinated on a much wider scale, and therefore, links directly to Belgrade.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Milosevic is directly linked to the special ops unit. This unit is also known as the Frankies for the name of its first commander, Franco Simatovic, a powerful secret police official. Dejan Anastasijevic is a Serbian journalist in Belgrade who has written extensively on Yugoslav security forces. He says the special ops unit was run by Milosevic's closest associates as a kind of secret army.

DEJAN ANASTASIJEVIC: They were not just an ordinary SWAT team or a special forces anti-terrorist unit, because Yugoslavia and Serbia already had such units. These people are killers, essentially, and they were Milosevic's personal Praetorian Guard.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Since Milosevic fell from power last October, Serbia's new leaders have refused to enforce an international arrest warrant and extradite the former leader to the war crimes tribunal. Serbian officials say, however, Milosevic will soon face justice in Serbia for alleged involvement in electoral fraud and political assassinations of Serbs.

But that still leaves in place many of Milosevic's senior police and military commanders. These are the very men who organized the burning of Albanian bodies at Trepca according to Serbian intelligence and secret police sources, and the special ops unit is still actively deployed in Serbia. Members of the special ops unit say the evidence destruction in Kosovo involved more than just digging up bodies. They also had a system to go into villages soon after an attack to haul away fresh corpses. In some cases, surviving families never got the chance to bury their dead. This is what apparently happened in a Western Kosovo village called Zagorje where 17 men were executed.

SPEAKER 4: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: They took them away that night. Since then, we don't know anything about them, nor about their graves nor their bones.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: After the execution, 67-year-old [? Faiza ?] [? Hyseni ?] glimpsed his son lying in the heap of bodies before Serbian units hauled them away in trucks, but he couldn't tell if the young man was dead. [? Hyseni ?] and other survivors in Zagorje are tormented by the uncertainty.

SPEAKER 4: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: Were they killed? Were they just drugged? One rumor says they were drugged and taken alive to Serbia. Someone else says they took them and burned them in Serbia.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: As part of the secret police's special ops unit, Bronco said he would often be ordered to a village within hours of an attack.

BRONCO: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: The trucks usually held 20 or 30 bodies. There were some villages where it was fewer, maybe 10 or 15. If the place was nearby Trepca, we could do two runs in an evening and deliver 50 or 60.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: The investigations commander for the Hague tribunal, Dennis Milner, says that in many incidents such as the empty graves at Izbica, the Serbian effort to get rid of evidence was sloppy.

DENNIS MILNER: Although most of the bodies had been removed, there was still substantial evidence at the site. We found body parts, we found bits of clothing, we found artifacts, and we found shell casings, et cetera.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Serbian secret police and Yugoslav army members who took part in the evidence destruction say it was difficult to be thorough because the men doing the work often lacked enthusiasm. Serbian fighters were typically paid thousands of dollars in bonuses for combat operations in addition to a share of stolen Albanian property. As one member of the special ops unit told us, getting rid of the bodies was a lot less lucrative than killing.

Late last year the UN war crimes tribunal concluded its exhumations in Kosovo. Since the war's end, investigators have unearthed the remains of some 4,000 bodies and examined hundreds of grave sites, but thousands more people remain officially listed as missing, including Serbs and Gypsies. Among the missing Albanians, possibly 1,500 bodies burned in the blast furnace at the Trepca lead refinery. The families of the 17 Albanian men executed in Zagorje are desperate to find their loved one's remains. [? Faiza ?] [? Hyseni ?] who lost his 31-year-old son in the massacre says he'd feel at peace if the killers were brought to justice, but he'd settle for information.

SPEAKER 4: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: I will always suffer with this wound. If I could only know where the bones of my son are, maybe I would be able to forgive many things. If they agree to tell me where my son is, dead or alive, I'd ask for nothing more.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Several of the Serbian fighters who took part in the evidence destruction, including Dusko, expressed no remorse for killing Albanians and destroying their bodies, not even women and children. In fact, Dusko wishes he could have done more.

DUSKO: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

INTERPRETER: Had it not been for the NATO bombing, I guarantee you we would have driven out all 2 million Albanians from Kosovo. You got to know Albanians are stupid. They are a dirty people. And this hatred has been around for 600 years.

MICHAEL MONTGOMERY: Dusko and the other Serbian fighters we interviewed believe this hatred will never go away. They say that when NATO troops finally leave Kosovo, Serbs and Albanians will start fighting again. For NPR News, this is Michael Montgomery, American RadioWorks.