Trump’s Montenegro Moment

Posted: June 3rd, 2017

By Steven L. Hall

Steven L. Hall retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2015 after 30 years of running and managing intelligence operations in Eurasia and Latin America. Mr. Hall served as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, the small cadre of officers who are the senior-most leaders of the CIA's Clandestine Service. Most of Mr. Hall's career was spent abroad, overseeing intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact.

Dusko Markovic. Not a household name. Neither is Montenegro, the small, stunningly beautiful Balkan country with an Adriatic coastline, where Mr. Markovic is Prime Minister. Despite having visited a number of times, I still have to squint sometimes when I look at a map to find it. Montenegrins like to joke that their tiny country is actually quite large, if you laid it out flat and got rid of all the mountains.

I know Prime Minister Markovic personally. Like many Montenegrins, he is tall, and he cuts an impressive figure with a thick shock of silver hair. A lifelong politician, Dusko nevertheless comes across as genuine and even self-deprecating. Perhaps this is due to the fact that his country is small, once having been a region of Yugoslavia, which dissolved in the early 1990s; since that time, many of the parts of what used to be Yugoslavia have been making slow, often painful progress towards becoming democracies. They are all young states, and have had their share of bad times and less-than-democratic moments.

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