Vladimir Velebit

Born in Zadar, Austria-Hungary to Serbian father Ljubomir Velebit and Slovenian-Croatian mother Olga Šeme, Vladimir's family had a long military tradition.

Following the end of the war in 1918 and the final break-up of Austria-Hungary, the family moved to Zagreb which was now part of the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Due to his father's (who was now in the Royal Yugoslav Army) job, the family then moved to Čakovec and later to Varaždin, which is where Vladimir graduated high school in 1925.

Velebit then became the chief of County Court in Kičevo, and later got transferred to Šid where he established contact with more KPJ members among whom was Herta Haas (at the time a student at Economics High School in Zagreb, later to become Josip Broz Tito's wife).

Due to his education and knowledge of foreign languages, along with Koča Popović and Milovan Đilas, Velebit was part of the Partisan delegation in Gornji Vakuf and Zagreb at the controversial March 1943 German-Partisan negotiations while the Battle of Neretva raged several hundred kilometers to the south.

Following the Teheran Conference where the Allies agreed on backing the Partisan resistance exclusively over the Chetnik one, Velebit was sent to the Near East with lieutenant-colonel Miloje Milojević for negotiations over the details and scope of the support.

Once there, Velebit had meetings with British envoys Fitzroy Maclean and William Deakin over the formal recognition of the People's Liberation Front as a new state entity.

In the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia's provisionary government that got formed on the basis of British-brokered Treaty of Vis and later the Belgrade Agreement, he was the deputy to the Foreign Affairs Minister.

After returning home to the country that was in the meantime re-constituted as a Stalinist communist state called Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, he became deputy to Foreign Affairs Minister Stanoje Simić.

In March 1948, after Soviet accusation that he was a British spy, Velebit was forced into resigning his post at the Yugoslav Foreign Affairs Ministry and got moved to the Tourist and Service Industry Committee.

During retirement he wrote two books 1983's Sećanja (Memories) and 2002's Tajne i zamke Drugog svetskog rata (World War II's Secrets and Traps).

Vladimir Velebit is mentioned in the 2009 book A Rat Hole to be Watched by American historian Coleman Armstrong Mehta as the point of contact between Frank Wisner (head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Plans) and Yugoslav communist government during the early 1950s.

The agreement enabled the Americans to get their hands on recently developed and deployed MiG-15 Soviet fighter plane, which was delivered to them by the Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav government in 1951.