Martin Špegelj  Martin Špegelj (11 November 1927 – 11 May 2014) was the second Defense Minister of Croatia and, later, the chief of staff of the newborn Croatian army and inspector-general of the army. His efforts to organize and equip the army from scratch were seen as instrumental in helping Croatia survive the first year of the Croatian War of Independence. Partly due to disagreements with president Franjo Tuđman, he retired in 1992, after the war froze with the permanent ceasefire at the end of 1991. Martin Spegelj was born 11 November 1927 in Stari Gradac, Pitomača. He was a partisan soldier during World War II. Eventually, he rose to become General of the 5th Yugoslav Army (JNA) Army District based in Zagreb, Croatia. After the first free elections in Croatia, he was second Defence Minister. Špegelj was one of the few in the top leadership of Croatia who saw the impending war as unavoidable. Together with the Slovenian command, Špegelj formulated a joint defence plan in case either country was attacked by the JNA. At the same time he was smuggling weapons into Yugoslavia, arming paramilitary troops and organizing them for attacks on legitimate JNA forces. At the onset of the war in Croatia in mid-1990, the Croatian Serbs orchestrated an armed rebellion (known as the "Log Revolution"), refusing to accept Croatian government authority. As they were supported by the JNA (first covertly, then openly), Croatian forces were poorly armed, so Špegelj undertook a campaign of acquiring arms through the black market community, importing weapons from former Warsaw Pact countries like Hungary and Romania. He was caught on tape in October 1990 talking to an assistant who was actually an undercover KOS operative. At the time, war in Croatia had not started yet. In the conversations, Špegelj talks of arming Croatians in preparation for secession of Croatia and the impending civil war. The so-called Špegelj tapes were turned into a documentary film by Zastava military film center, and aired in January 1991 to the larger Yugoslav public. They were made public in order to bolster the attack of the Belgrade government against the newly elected Croatian government. The Croatian leadership, including the main "actors" themselves, initially quickly dismissed the tapes as fake, claiming that the presumably innocuous videotaped conversations were subsequently dubbed. Their authenticity, however, was later confirmed by Stipe Mesić, the president of Croatia, was one of the first on Croatian side who admitted that the tapes are authentic, although he claimed some of the sentences were taken out of context.