In 2012, a man named Bishop Franjo Komarica from Bosnia – the uncle of a former student – called me. The Bishop wanted my help “as a communications expert” in preventing what he believed was a pending war in the Balkans.

I said I knew little about the Balkans. He said I didn’t need to – because he did.

I told him I’d help if I could. He was in Boston the next day.

He told me he wanted to sponsor a Summit in Bosnia and have parliamentary presidents from each country in the region as well major Catholic, Muslim, Orthodox and Jewish leaders attend and create a dialogue for peace not war.

I found he needed much more than communications help. He needed an acceptable sponsor, funding for the summit, a moderator, an inviter, security, and an organizer and conference designer. In short, he needed everything.

Yet, this was a man who possessed an aura to which one didn’t say “no.”

So, I agreed to help, enlisted his nephew Drazen in partnership, and set out to create the Peace and Reconciliation Summit of 2013.

No government sponsor was trusted, and Harvard doesn’t do such things, so we created a fake entity in tax free Wyoming called the Zrinski Institute as sponsor. We then secured funding from the US Catholic Conference of Bishops. The Parliamentary leader in Banja Luka agreed to host the leaders and provide security. I would be the Summit’s moderator, and Drazen and I became the organizers and designers of the conference.

To get the political leaders to come, we played one off the other using their collective lack of trust to get them all to commit. When I informed the US State Department what I was doing, they said I was crazy. They said if someone wanted to disrupt the region, they’d blow up the summit site – with the leaders in it.

In the end, no one blew up the site. The leaders all showed. A dialogue was started. The religious leaders broke bread and the Summit was a success.

I’m still not sure how.