Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

by Gerry Docherty

  Apis’s organisation was prepared. It had infiltrated a revolutionary group, Mlada Bosna (the Young Bosnians), and equipped and trained them to carry out the Sarajevo assassination. The Young Bosnians held high ideals, far more intellectual than the narrow chauvinism of the Black Hand. They wanted to go beyond independence from Austria-Hungary to change the primitive nature of Bosnian society. They challenged the authority of existing institutions of state, church, school and family, and believed in socialist concepts: egalitarianism and the emancipation of women. The Young Bosnians stood for modernism, intellectualism and a brave new world.11 They were spurred by revolution, not narrow nationalism.

  Apis knew just the man to organise and lead an assassination team of Young Bosnians, Danilo Ilić. He had worked as a schoolteacher and as a bank worker, but in 1913 and 1914 he lived with his mother, helping her run a small boarding house in Sarajevo. Ilić was leader of the Serbian Black Hand terrorist cell in Sarajevo, and as such was known to Colonel Apis personally.12 Ilić was also a close friend of Gavrilo Princip, the student destined to fire the fatal shot.

  Apis used three trusted Serb associates in planning the assassination. His right-hand man, Major Vojislav Tankosić, was in charge of guerrilla training and brought the would-be assassins to a secret location in Serbia where his specific role was to ensure that the Young Bosnians knew how to handle guns and bombs effectively. He was tasked to teach them the art of the assassin and get them back over the border and into Sarajevo safely. The second, Rade Malobabić, was the chief undercover operative for Serbian military intelligence. His name appeared in Serbian documents captured by Austria-Hungary during the war that describe the running of arms, munitions and agents from Serbia into Austria-Hungary under his direction.13 His assessment was that the Young Bosnians were capable of the task. The third Black Hand conspirator was Milan Ciganovic. He supplied the assassination team with four revolvers and six bombs from the Serbian army’s arsenal. Crucially, each of the assassins was given a vial of cyanide to take after they had murdered the archduke. Their suicides would ensure that the trail could not be traced back to Apis and Hartwig.

  Ciganovic played another equally important role. He was a trusted confidant of the Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pasic, and was ultimately protected by him from the volcanic fallout after Sarajevo. Critically, Ciganovic’s involvement meant that members of the Serbian government knew in advance about the proposed assassination and had time to consider the consequences.14

  Everything appeared to be running smoothly, but Serbian intrigues hit political turbulence at precisely the wrong moment. The unity of Serbia’s political, military and royal leaders, nestling behind the muscle of their Russian minders, had been a feature of Serbian success in the Balkan Wars. Prime Minister Pasic, Colonel Apis and King Petar were all supported by Ambassador Hartwig towards the ambitions of a Greater Serbia. But suddenly, just days before the planned assassination, a power struggle erupted for control of the country. Apis attempted to organise a coup to dismiss Pasic, allegedly over a minor detail of precedence, but found that his power base in the Serbian military had shrunk. Many of his senior colleagues who had been involved with him since the first regicides in 1903 had died naturally or been killed in the Balkan Wars. The old order inexorably changes. Even his closest friends baulked at unleashing military force against the civilian authorities.15 Many Serbs expected Apis to win outright victory in this power struggle, but his foray into civil politics diluted the aura that had been associated with his leadership of the Black Hand. The Serbian cabinet drafted stringent measures against Black Hand membership, retiring highly placed officials and transferring others to the anonymity of remote Serbian outposts.16

  But the killer blow to Colonel Apis’s aspirations came from two external powers. Russia, more accurately the Sazonov/Isvolsky axis, would not countenance the removal of Prime Minister Pasic and his cabinet. Hartwig slapped down any notion of resignations. At the same time, Poincaré let it be known that a Serbian opposition regime could not count on financial backing from Paris.17 The king, caught between old loyalties and Russian pressure, withdrew from political life. He transferred his powers to Prince Alexander, who resented Apis’s authority in Serbian military circles.

  Look again at these events. With the assassination just days away, the last thing that Sazonov/Isvolsky, Poincaré and the Secret Elite would have entertained in June 1914 was a change of government in Serbia that did not owe its very existence to their power and money. Apis, the ultra nationalist, was not a man to take orders. He had desperately wanted to attack Bulgaria in 1913, but Pasic (no doubt under instruction from Hartwig) had refused to sanction the order.18 Apis was neither deferential to Prince Alexander nor under Hartwig’s thumb. He knew that Pasic was weak and subservient to Russia. It was as if metaphorical scales had suddenly dropped from his eyes and he understood for the first time that the Russians were exploiting him and his beloved Serbia for their own purposes.

  Apis may also have had second thoughts about the assassination based on his own prospects for survival. He had clearly shaken the ruling cabal in Serbia. Prime Minister Pasic knew about the intended assassination, and in consequence the cabinet allegedly closed the borders to known or suspected assassins. If true, was this self-preservation on their part an attempt to make it look like the Serbian government had nothing to do with the shooting? Hartwig too knew details of the plans but never imagined they could be traced back to him. Crucially, he did not know that the Austrians were well aware of his intrigues because they had possession of decoded diplomatic correspondence between Russia and Serbia.19

  Apis ordered a trusted agent to go to Sarajevo and instruct the Young Bosnians to abort the mission. It was all too late. They were safely ensconced in Sarajevo, ready for the appointed day and ill-disposed to accept any postponement. The Young Bosnians had slipped out of Belgrade on 28 May and been secretly routed across the border by sympathetic frontier guards. Ciganovic had ensured they had weapons and cash. The senior officer on the border guard at the time, a member of the Black Hand, had been placed there on special assignment by Apis’s intelligence department.

  Yet the archduke need not have been killed. Warnings about the perilous nature of his safety abounded. Despite this, the governor of Bosnia, General Potiorek, was determined that the visit would go ahead. Desperate pleas from the chief of police, who believed that the Archduke was in grave danger, were ignored. The very date of the visit, 28 June, was particularly provocative. It was St Vitus’ Day, historically and emotionally significant to the Serbs, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Poyle (1389), the victory that unified the Serbian nation against the Turkish invader.

  That alone should have been a warning. The police chief’s fears were dismissed by the governor and ridiculed by Sarajevo’s military committee when he requested a cordon of soldiers to line the streets as a precaution. He pleaded with them not to publish the route of the archduke’s cavalcade through the city, but was ignored. Newspapers carried detailed notice of the time and place to view the archduke’s entourage.20 A request that additional police officers be brought in from the country was rejected because it would cost too much. Security measures were left in the hands of providence.

  The conspirators, and there were seven in the Young Bosnian team, stood at intervals along the avenue called Appel Quay – or the ‘Avenue of Assassins’ as the archbishop of Sarajevo would later dub it – and mingled freely with the crowds for an hour and a half before the archduke’s arrival. Though Bosnia could boast a first-class political intelligence, no one – no police officer, no undercover police agent, no vigilant citizen – questioned them.21

  The events of what might safely be deemed the world’s most devastating assassination have been well documented. A botched bomb-throwing left the archduke shaken but physically unmarked. Officials in the following car were not so lucky. His cavalcade stopped briefly before continuing to the town hall. Strained speeches made pretence that all was well. Desp
ite the shameful outrage, troops were not called in from the barracks, nor additional police summoned for protection. Franz Ferdinand demanded to go to the hospital to see for himself how one of the governor’s assistants, wounded by the bomb blast, was faring.22 Incredibly, the cavalcade returned along the same ‘Avenue of Assassins’ on which the first bomb had been thrown but turned into the wrong street. Potiorek ordered the driver to stop and reverse. In doing so, he placed the archduke directly in front of young Princip, who promptly shot both him and his unfortunate wife, Sophie. The police arrested Princip on the spot before he could attempt suicide.

  And on a chance wrong turn we are expected to believe that the world went to war.

  Governor Potiorek’s behaviour was astonishing. The entourage was on its way to the hospital, but Potiorek ordered the driver to proceed to the governor’s residence instead. Confused? We should be. A meticulously planned assassination succeeded, despite the amateurism of the conspirators, only because the victim was more or less served up on a plate. Had Potiorek acted in shock, or did he know it was already too late? It was suggested at the time that Austria had set up the assassination deliberately in order to provoke a war. In the bitter rage of accusation and counterclaim that followed after 1914, all sides made allegations against one another. In the 1920s, and over the decades since, much evidence has come to light from documents that had been ‘lost’ or removed ‘unofficially’. There is now a huge body of diplomatic evidence that links Russia and Serbia to the assassination,23 but none that supports the suggestion that the low-security visit of Archduke Ferdinand to Sarajevo was in some way organised with the intention of exposing him to the risk of assassination.

  Had the great crime gone to plan, all the Young Bosnians would have committed suicide. They were expendable. Dead Bosnians tell no tales. The links in the chain of responsibility would have been broken. The headline they sought was of a noble death-pact assassination that would leave the authorities completely bewildered and the coffee houses of Europe abuzz with revolutionary admiration. Cabrinovic, who threw the first bomb, immediately swallowed his cyanide and leapt 15 feet into the shallow River Miljacka. Police officers hauled him out of the mudflat, vomiting uncontrollably. The cyanide failed to be effective for any of the Young Bosnians. There was to be no self-directed martyrdom.

  With suspicious ease, the Austro-Hungarian authorities arrested all but one of the Sarajevo assassins, together with the agents and peasants who had assisted them on their way. How they managed to track all of the alleged conspirators so quickly begs the question of how much they knew in advance. The major charge against the Young Bosnians was conspiracy to commit high treason, which carried a maximum sentence of death. Within a few days of the assassination, the Austrians had set up a judicial investigation. They were convinced that the Young Bosnians had been equipped from Belgrade and that the plot had originated from there. What the Austrians desperately needed to know was the extent to which Pasic’s government was directly involved.24 The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry sent its top legal counsellor, Dr Freidrich von Wiesner, as official investigator to Sarajevo.

  On 13 July 1914, he forwarded an interim report to Vienna containing three major points:

  The Greater Serbia movement aimed to sever the southern Slav region from Austria by revolutionary violence. He pointed an accusatory finger at Narodna Odbrana, yet another Serbian nationalist movement, possibly confusing it with the Black Hand, stating that the Belgrade government let it have an absolutely free hand.

  He named Major Tankosić and ‘the Serbian official Ciganovic’ for training and supplying the assassins with weapons, and both the frontier authorities and the customs officers for smuggling them into Bosnia. These facts he deemed ‘demonstrable and virtually unassailable’.25

  He concluded by stating cautiously that there was no conclusive proof at that time of the Serbian government having any knowledge of the assassination or having cooperated in planning it.

  Dr von Wiesner’s oral report, delivered some two days later, was more comprehensive. By then he had unearthed more evidence of Serbian complicity, but his telegrammed report of 13 July was destined to be hijacked and later grossly misrepresented by the American delegation at the War Guilt Commission in 1919. Their two most senior delegates, Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Counsellor James Scott Brown, deliberately extracted a 31-word ‘soundbite’ from von Wiesner’s brief report, which they claimed ‘proved’ that Austria had no evidence against Serbia that justified war.26 It was a deliberate misrepresentation that gave the impression that Dr von Wiesner believed that Serbia was ‘utterly innocent’ in 1914.27 Such a falsification suited their cause. It was used as part of the post-war onslaught against Germany and Austria to lay the blame for war entirely on their shoulders. The Americans, Lansing and Brown, now stand accused of deliberately falsifying history in a desperate attempt to malign Austria and Germany.

  By October, when the Young Bosnians were brought to trial, the Austrian authorities had overwhelming evidence of Serbian complicity. Despite this, the conspirators insisted in deflecting blame from Serbia. Under cross-examination, Princip was defiant: ‘I believe in unification of all South Slavs in whatever form of state and that it be free of Austria.’ Asked how he intended to realise his goal, he responded: ‘By means of terror.’28

  Although they had been trained in Serbia, the Young Bosnians had no knowledge of the influences that had been exerted further up the chain of command. Indeed, few if any within that chain knew who was empowering the next link. Princip and his group genuinely believed that they were striking a blow for freedom and emancipation, and could not bring themselves to accept that they had been duped into firing someone else’s bullets.

  The Austrian court did not accept their attempts to hold Serbia blameless.29 The verdict was decisive. The court ignored Princip’s claims and stated bluntly that the military commanders in charge of the Serbian espionage service collaborated in the outrage. Four of the Young Bosnians were executed by hanging in February 1915, but the younger members, like Princip, were given prison sentences. He died in prison in 1918 from tuberculosis exacerbated by a botched amputation.30 Crucially, the trail of culpability had not been covered over.

  Above all else, the Secret Elite had to ensure that no links could be traced back to Russia. Evidence of her complicity in the archduke’s death would have altered the balance of credibility for the entente cause. All links to Sazonov in particular had to be airbrushed. That in turn meant that the web of intrigue between Serbia and Russia had to be cleansed. The outbreak of war in August slowed down this process but only delayed the outcome.

  The Russian ambassador died in very strange circumstances. On a routine visit to Baron von Gieslingen, Austrian ambassador at Belgrade, on 10 July 1914, Hartwig collapsed and died from a massive ‘heart attack’. The Serbian press immediately published several inflammatory articles accusing the Austrians of poisoning Hartwig while he was a guest at their legation. The Austrians, of course, knew from decoded diplomatic telegrams that Hartwig was at the centre of intrigues against Austria-Hungary.31 Was this the old-fashioned style of retribution, or were the Secret Elite simply very fortunate that the 57-year-old diplomat dropped dead in the Austrian legation?

  Denials echoed around Europe, nowhere more vehemently than in Britain, where the Secret Elite had to vilify any suggestion that Russia was involved with internal Bosnian or Austro-Hungarian politics. The Times led the outcry:

  The latest suggestion made in one of the Serbian newspapers is that M de Hartwig’s sudden death in the Austro-Hungarian Legation at Belgrade the other day was due to poison. Ravings of that kind move the contempt as well as the disgust of cultivated people, whatever their political sympathies may be.32

  Ravings indeed. The Times, and those it represented, clearly wanted to quash such speculation. It was far too close to the truth. If the idea that Hartwig had been murdered because he was involved in the archduke’s assassination gained credence, B
ritish public opinion would turn even further against Russia. At the request of the Serbian government, Hartwig was buried in Belgrade in what was virtually a state funeral. Every notable Serbian, including the prime minister, attended. Officially, Hartwig suffered death by natural causes. Unofficially, a very important link in the chain of culpability was buried along with his corpse.

  Some three years later, with the tide of war turned violently against Serbia, the Austrians demanded the immediate arrest and trial of Colonel Apis and the officers loyal to him. They were indicted on various false charges unrelated to Sarajevo at a Serbian court martial held on the frontier at Salonika. On 23 May 1917, Apis and eight of his associates were sentenced to death; two others were sentenced to fifteen years in prison. One defendant died during the trial and the charges against him were dropped. The Serbian High Court reduced the number of death sentences to seven. Regent Alexander commuted four others, leaving three to face the firing squad.33

  Colonel Apis effectively signed his own death warrant when he confessed to the Salonika court that ‘in agreement with Artamonov [sic], the Russian military attaché, I hired Malobabić to organise Ferdinand’s murder upon his arrival in Sarajevo’.34 The explosive part of that statement was the opening phrase ‘in agreement with Artamonov’. His revelation of Russian involvement had to be silenced. Much to his own despair, for Colonel Apis truly believed right up to the moment of death that his contacts in England, France and Russia would intervene on his behalf,35 he was executed on 26 June 1917 by firing squad. In reality, Apis was silenced: put to death by order of a Serbian government that desperately needed to permanently bury its complicity with Russia in the Sarajevo assassination.36 It was judicial murder.