Radovan Karadzic's disguise was elaborate, but he didn't spend the past 13 years hiding from the Serbian authorities. They knew where he was all along. Only 10 days after the government changed, the police plucked him off the bus that he rode to work every day and started the process of extraditing him to The Hague to face the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

So why was Karadzic in disguise, then? Because he was a compulsive showman who always sought the limelight, and hiding in obscurity was driving him crazy. The disguise, the false name, the whole different persona were a way for him to resume a public life (as an alternative medicine "healer"), not a way of hiding from the state security and intelligence services. They were actually protecting him from the agents of the international court, because that was usually what the Serbian government wanted.

It was certainly what Slobodan Milosevic, the main author of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, wanted. Until he was overthrown by a bloodless revolution in 2000, all the ultra-nationalists who had set out to "cleanse" non-Serbs from the Serbian-inhabited parts of former Yugoslavia were safe from the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, including Karadzic and his chief collaborator in the murder of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Gen. Ratko Mladic.