Stevan Dedijer

Book excerpt: Stevan Dedijer (19112004) was born as a Serb in Bosnia-Her�egovina by politically active parents. After a childhood marked by the assassination of Arch-duke Frans Ferdinand in June 1914 and the catastrophe of the First World War, Stevan entered a life-long strange odyssey through the ideas and institutions of a turbulent century. As an immigrant in the U.S. during the Great Depression, Stevan joined the Communist Party. With party consent he was recruited by the secret U.S. intelligence service OSS and was trained for sabotage mission in the Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Purged from the OSS, he volunteered for the Army, and was assigned to the 101st airborne as a bodyguard for the divisional commander general Maxwell Taylor. Arriving too late for the Normandy landing, he parachuted over Arnhem in the failed Operation Market Garden. Still under party orders, he bailed out yelling, 'Long live Stalin!'. After seeing extensive combat around Bastogne, in the Battle of the Bulge, Stevan was transferred from the US Army to the Tito Partisan movement that he had wanted to join since the beginning of the war. Together with his elder brother Vladimir, Stevan made a lightning career in post-war Yugoslavia, including posts as editor-in-chief of the party newspaper Borba and the directorship of the Yugoslav Atomic Energy Institute, the latter assignment given to him he had studied physics at Princeton in the mid-1930s. After Tito's break with Moscow and the violent crackdown on dissidents in the 1950s, Stevan as several others in the new communist elite became increasingly critical of Tito's dictatorship and the lack of freedom. Purged and put in internal exile, Stevan finally managed to escape Yugoslavia through an invitation to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, arranged by the Swedish professor of nuclear physics Torsten Gustafson in Lund. With his assistance and contacts, Stevan was granted political asylum in Sweden and was able to establish himself at Lund University, where he founded what was to become the Research Policy Institute. Leaving nuclear physics behind, Stevan now moved into the field of information and knowledge production, formulating the concept of a coming information explosion decades before it became common knowledge. Formulating a theory of Social Intelligence, Stevan foresaw the coming of an age where individuals and organisations alike would become dependent on their ability to collect, process and use information. Stevan Dedijers work in the field of social intelligence made him one of the pioneers and inspirers of the development of business intelligence, relying on the increased information from open sources. His life-span made a full circle as he after the fall of communism returned to Yugoslavia and the city of Dubrovnik, not far from where his father had been born more than a century earlier. As a twist of fate, Stevan was to experience the third war of his life, My most horrible war' as he writes in this breathtaking, humorous and self-reflecting account of a human life shaped by the horrors and promises of twentieth century history, and a personality characterised by determination, curiosity and an astonishing absence of self-pity.