When Marti Ahtisaari, Finland's poker-faced negotiator, walked up the imposing staircase of the Augustusburg palace in Cologne last Thursday evening, fresh from triumph in a Belgrade mission to halt the war in Kosovo, he had more than peace on his mind. His chief concern was football.
The heads of government of 15 European countries, gathered for dinner in the baroque building, stood to applaud the Finn. 'A great day for Europe,' intoned Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany, the EU summit host, contemplating the course of a conflict that could have brought down his young government.
Ahtisaari accepted the praise of the European elite and made a beeline for Ireland's Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. 'You'll never believe this,' the Irish leader reflected a few hours later. What the Finn wanted to know was: 'What's going on with this football match?'
Yugoslavia were due to play the Irish Republic in Dublin yesterday in a European Championship qualifier. But the Irish incurred the wrath of UEFA by refusing visas to the Yugoslav squad, and President Slobodan Milosevic was less than pleased.
Immersed in make-or-break talks in Belgrade last Wednesday evening, Milosevic had several points to raise about the two pages of surrender terms presented to him by Ahtisaari and Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia's redoubtable Balkan troubleshooter.
'My role was to answer questions on this document and there were plenty of them,' said Ahtisaari.
And the first point, Ahtisaari told Ahern, was the Dublin fixture. Milosevic wanted to know whether his capitulation to Nato would be rewarded by a green light for the match in Dublin. The Finn could not provide a satisfactory answer.
If the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution formally authorising a de facto Nato occupation of Kosovo - a move expected in the next 48 hours - 'the Irish government would do all it could to facilitate the game,' the Taoiseach reassured the Finn.
To drive the point home, Schroder, as the current EU president, phoned UEFA headquarters in Geneva and put pressure on them to have yesterday's game formally postponed. The wrangle over the Dublin fixture adds a new piquancy to the late Bill Shankly's quip that football 'is not a matter of life and death, it's much more important than that'.
The transformation that last Wednesday's events in Belgrade achieved was truly astonishing. Only two weeks ago one of the participants at the historic meeting, Victor Chernomyrdin, penned an apocalyptic article in the Washington Post warning that Russia was on the verge of pulling out of its role as mediator between Nato, determined to continue its bloody campaign to reverse the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and the Serbian leader. The Nato position was unsustainable and would lead eventually to a third world war, he warned.
Strobe Talbott, the US Deputy secretary of State and a former Time magazine Bureau Chief in Moscow, found the Chernomyrdin piece appalling. A fluent Russian linguist, Talbott was an old friend of Bill Clinton and had been personally picked out by the President as a man the Russians could do business with.
Talbott jokingly criticised the punctuation in the article. But in fact he was hugely disturbed by its threatening underlying message. The Russians, after weeks of negotiations, were still nowhere close to the Nato position on the shape of a possible settlement, in particular the deployment of a peacekeeping force in Kosovo following a Serbian withdrawal.
Their Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, wanted to confine Nato's most potent peacekeeping troops to the Albanian and Macedonia border regions, while neutral nations and Russian forces maintained order in central Kosovo.
Similarly Chernomyrdin suggested Serbs be allowed to protect sites of religous or historical significance, claiming 8,000 such sites existed requiring 24,000 troops, or three per site.
At a crucial meeting in Moscow last Monday Cherno-Myrdin finally got the message. Without sharing liberal values, the 61-year-old former premier and multi-millionaire has always been friendly towards the West on the economic and political level, and has never indulged in the pan-Slavic tub-thumping of some nationalists.
An experienced enough persuader, Chernomyrdin - avuncular and inarticulate in public, notoriously foul-mouthed in private - realised the 19-nation Nato alliance, despite the strains, was not going to crack.
For the first time the Russians accepted the principle of Nato troops in Kosovo.
Chernomyrdin accepted, crucially, that he had made no headway in persuading Nato to exclude the US and Britain from the peacekeeping force, and left those talks a chastened man, preparing to make another visit to Belgrade nine days ago.
'There were two options: either to stop the war by political methods or to fight, to put on our greatcoats and march ahead. I didn't think that this latter way suits the Russian people today.'
In nine hours of talks between Chernomyrdin and Milosevic in Belgrade, the fifth such meeting between the two men, Milosevic also finally got the message - he was losing Russian support.
The country's great historic ally, its saviour in the Bosnian war, was deserting him. By some accounts, the meeting was difficult. Milosevic accused Russia of abandoning its fellow Slavs and surrendering simply to win cash from the IMF to bail out the rouble.
The meeting ended with Milosevic issuing a typically opaque statement, saying he had accepted the principles of the statement by the G8 back on 8 May. Within Belgrade the peace faction claimed Milosevic had crossed a psychological barrier. He realised Nato troops, albeit under UN command, would be required to enter Kosovo.
Innately suspicious of any Milosevic concession, the West was slow to see the marathon Belgrade meeting as a turning point. In the British Foreign Office there was deep scepticism that Friday evening and Saturday morning. Diplomats thought it suspicious Chernomyrdin had not held a press conference on his departure. If he had, he would have been forced to admit Milosevic still wanted 10,000 Serb troops to be allowed to remain in Kosovo.
It appears, according to US officials, that over the past week Russia's ailing President Yeltsin finally intervened. Fearing the failure of Russian diplomacy, he convened a meeting last Sunday in Moscow with Chernomyrdin, Prime Minister Sergei Stephasin and his increasingly disenchanted Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.
Yeltsin ordered them to prepare for new concessions. Stepashin, newly appointed by Yeltsin, agreed. 'People are dying out there. An entire state is being destroyed. Those who so easily criticise concessions should go there and see the destroyed Belgrade without water, light and gas.'
Over the same weekend Nato ambassadors meeting with Nato Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark resolved to step up the bombing campaign as much as possible in the hope that a final military drive would force Milosevic to accept a diplomatic defeat.
It was a dramatic change of tactics by Nato last week, claiming thousands of Serbian soldiers' lives, which finally swayed Belgrade's military planners towards accepting Nato's terms. Until that point, much had gone wrong with Nato's campaign to dislodge the Serbs from Kosovo since it was launched on 24 March.
There had been a series of massively damaging blunders with the alliance's much-vaunted precision guided weaponry, which had claimed targets in neighbouring countries, neutral embassies and civilian convoys.
The raids had been too slow to build up: fewer than 30 were launched on the opening nights. The oil embargo, announced with fanfare at the Nato Washington summit five weeks ago, had never been implemented. Above all the Serb forces in Kosovo had been invisible to Nato bombers flying at 15,000 feet.
But by last weekend a new opportunity had arisen. Close to 4,000 KLA guerrillas had finally launched their first offensive for a year by driving into Kosovo from two points across the south-west Albanian border in the hope of capturing control of the highway which links Prizren and Pec.
A mass build-up of Yugoslav forces was provoked for the first time, around Mount Pastrik, to block the KLA advance, providing what General Walter Jertz, a spokesman at Nato headquarters in Brussels, described last week as a 'target-rich environment'.
Wave after wave of Nato planes - first Spanish, then French, then Canadian, then American - hurled their bombs down against Yugoslav artillery, tanks and earthworks. Last Tuesday alone 197 strike sorties destroyed 84 pieces of military equipment including tanks, 32 artillery pieces, eight multiple rocket launchers and nine armoured personnel carriers.
The pounding led to the recall of Serb generals to Belgrade, and according to US sources, the first serious signs of internal dissent in senior ranks.
Nato was also benefiting in the final weeks from a breakthrough in military technology. Light unmanned drones had started to circle over Kosovo, acting as electronic scouts, filming elusive targets, especially Serbian troops hidden in bunkers or woods.
Those images were then being sent at great speed via GCHQ in England to fighter jets overhead. Programmed to fly as low as 1,000 feet, the surveillance planes captured on camera what they saw on the ground and the pictures were passed to forward aircraft like A-10 and F-16s, whose pilots called in strikers to bomb the targets.
Twenty-one drones were shot down by Serb air defences, but not before vital intelligence had been related.
Last Wednesday, Nato released the news that it had killed, or severely injured, as many as 10,000 Serb soldiers, a quarter of the Serb forces inside Kosoovo. This human carnage was on top of the destruction of factories, jobs, oil refineries and nearly every important highway or railway bridge.
With the bombing now proceeding 24 hours a day, and Serb air defences shattered, there was no sign of respite. Still worse for Milosevic, it was also clear that the US administration, under pressure from Nato's resident hawk Tony Blair, was now thinking hard about sending a ground invasion force to secure the return of refugees by winter.
Milosevic was indirectly informed by Nato that plans for the invasion were being laid. His sources told him small convoys of tanks, howitzers and mounted guns were daily making the 145-mile, 12-hour crawl from Durres to Kukes, near the Kosovo border with Albania.
C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft that can carry troops and hardware were making runs between Tirana and the border since an airstrip had been built in Kukes by the United Arab Emirates two weeks ago. Italian troops were also at work widening and resurfacing the Durres-to-Kukes road, ostensibly to make aid deliveries easier, but also to smooth the path for a ground troop invasion.
All this meant that barring an unforeseen reversal of Western public opinion, the military balance was going to continue to get worse for Milosevic. Blair's spokesman Alastair Campbell put it brutally yesterday: 'He finally got the message - we were not going to go away.'
With the carnage raging in Kosovo, Chernomyrdin travelled last Tuesday to a German government guest-house outside Bonn to meet Talbott and Ahtisaari again. Ahtisaari joked to journalists that each knew the others' positions so well that 'we only had to say half a word to be understood'.
But Chernomyrdin was also accompanied by a group of Russian generals, including Leonid G. Ivashov, the head of the Defense Ministry's department for international military cooperation, deeply opposed to capitulation.
As the Russian delegation arrived, Germany, which holds the six-month Presidency of the EU, received another ambiguous letter from Belgrade in which Milosevic said he was ready to withdraw forces from Kosovo and accept a 'United Nations presence' in the Serbian province.
The wording left open the possibility of a large Serb force still inside Kosovo, and the exclusion of mainstream Nato troops from the peacekeeping force. At that point, Western diplomats did not see surrender close at hand. Indeed Cook privately likened Belgrade's position at that point to an avalanche: 'It is sitting precariously on the edge of a precipice. It is going to fall, but it's impossible to tell if it will be two days or two months.'
The Russian-speaking Talbott rapidly found the Tuesday guest-house meeting deeply frustrating as the Russian delegation seemed to be speaking with two voices. But gradually, as Chernomyrdin surrendered on point after point, the text of a two-page document to put to Belgrade began to be formulated.
All Serb forces would have to leave and a small group restricted to 'hundreds, not thousands' would return to guard Serb monasteries and other cultural and religious sites in the province.
They would only return after the deployment of K-for, the 50,000-strong international peacekeeping force. The force would act under UN authority. Kosovo's long-term political status was left unclear.
But then the talks dragged on until 3.45am, and last Wednesday morning it still looked as if the Russians and the Finn would travel that day to Belgrade to table the two-page document.
At 11.25am, five minutes before Cook was due to go downstairs to the press conference, his private office rang with news that the trip was delayed, possibly cancelled. Cook rang Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Secretary to get confirmation.
The Russians were still demanding an independent role in the peacekeeping force and their own sector. It could look suspiciously like the de facto partition of Kosovo.
Talbott would not concede. In Bosnia, between 1992 and 1995, a so-called 'dual-key' system under which both Nato commanders and senior UN officials had to approve any military action proved unwieldy, ineffective and sometimes disastrous.
Chernomrydin, unable to contact Yeltsin, decided to agree to differ with Talbott. The peace document to be put to Milosevic would contain a footnote spelling out the Russian and Nato differences. He left the Bonn meeting last Wednesday afternoon for Belgrade insisting 'Nato will command the Nato forces, Russia the Russian forces.
Relations between the two contingents will be governed by separate agreements.' Talbott, after speaking to Washington, agreed to differ. Reflecting the tensions, Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin flew separately to Belgrade, landing to the sound of air-raid warnings and sonic booms.
At this point, the 72nd day of bombing, Ahtisaari, like the rest of the diplomatic community, had no inkling the decisive breakthrough was imminent. He was mentally prepared for the first of many trips. But at the Presidential Palace, he faced an extraordinary confrontation.
Ahtisaari, Chernomyrdin to his side, was sat directly across the table to Milosevic. There were about nine officials on either side. A career diplomat who had been elected as President of Finland to bring his country out of neutrality, Ahtisaari knew the faces across the table in Belgrade from his previous work as an EU representative in Bosnia in the Nineties.
He prefaced his remarks by saying the two-sided paper could not be the subject of negotiation. He underlined the point by reading it out in full and then said his role was to answer any questions, of which he said there were plenty.
The most pointed was whether this was Nato's last best offer, and he said yes. What force would be the K-for be entitled to use? Milosevic had been informed of the contents of the documents by the Russians before the meeting began, but to make a political point he won assurances that the force would be acting under UN authority and Serbia would remain sovereign over Kosovo.
No voices were raised and Belgrade made no reference to the indictment of Milosevic. At the end of the session Milosevic then offered them dinner, but Ahtissari told the accused war criminal his time might be better spent discussing the contents of the plan with his political colleagues. He returned to the hotel.
Later that evening he received a phone call from Milosevic, saying he would be discussing the plans with the Serbian parliament in the morning.
This news was then relayed to EU officials that night gathering in Cologne for their twice-yearly summit. The mood among the EU diplomats lifted. 'Milosevic does not convene his parliament unless he is looking for political cover,' said one. British officials went to bed that night wondering whether the avalanche was finally moving.
Early last Thursday morning, Milosevic met Ahtisaari again and blasted him with further factual questions, including whether the earlier peace accord agreed at Rambouillet, France, was still valid.
Milsoevic then met party leaders to tell them he had no choice but to bow to the united Russian-Nato front. He urged them to vote for it in parliament that day. In the end, 136 deputies in the 250-strong parliament voted for the plan, 74 voted against, three formally abstained and one did not vote. Thirty-six were absent. The peace was secured.
Just after midday, Milosevic had a final 30-minute meeting to convey the result to Ahtisaari. Minutes later Reuters flashed the news across the world.
The Foreign Office immediately rang the mobiles of Kim Darroch, the Foreign Office head of news, and Alistair Campbell, Blair's press secretary. The politicians were just heading off for an EU family photo session. Blair took the news calmly but, a naturally suspicious character, he refused to celebrate. 'That's fine,' he said, 'but now let's pin him down.'
It was agreed that Cook should quickly hit the big network TV channels to get over the Nato spin on the deal, in particular the insistence that it did not represent a de facto partition of Kosovo with the Russians running the mineral-rich northern sector.
As other Ministers had a formal lunch, Cook launched into 90 minutes of back-to-back interviews. 'There are going to be no more Berlin walls in Europe and certainly not in Kosovo,' Cook told CNN.
Many politicians believed the EU had finally come of age as an international force. Earlier in the day they had agreed the first steps towards a common EU defence policy capable of lifting the burden from the US.
It addressed the US criticism that more than half a century after the defeat of Hitler and more than a decade after the Cold War, US troops should not be expected to help extinguish every local European conflict.
Cook, with Fischer, Lamberto Dini, the Italian Foreign Minister, and Hubert Vedrine, retired to make a private phone call to Albright. This quintet had spent most evenings talking together, discussing the crisis, testing the cohesion of the alliance and swapping insights.
Fischer, a bon viveur, rooted out a bottle of champagne. Cook diluted his bubbles with orange juice, saying he would only drink champagne neat when he saw the first Kosovar refugee heading back over the border.
But on Friday night, the peace deal remained an uneasy one, with Talbott still publicly maintaining the hard line and insisting that 'this story is not over' and that 'trust does not belong in the vocabulary'.
This came after Talbott was reportedly taken aback by a sudden departure for Moscow by Chernomyrdin, inexplicably cancelling a planned meeting with Talbott and Ahtisaari. Chernomyrdin was ordered to stay in Russia to defend the deal to the military establishment
There were also further disagreements over Nato military activity which continued into the early hours of yesterday, with KLA advances appearing to lure Yugoslav troops into the open during border clashes, making them vulnerable to bombardments.
It will be still some days before Cook can start taking his champagne neat.