Mr William Walker and his Kosovo peace monitors seem to have survived the latest crisis in this war-torn province, but the long-term prospects for what many are calling "Mission Impossible" are grim.
Mr Walker and his Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) arrived in October to form the glue holding together a deal between US envoy, Mr Richard Holbrooke, and President Slobodan Milosevic. Under that agreement Belgrade agreed to stop fighting in the province.
The KVM was to see that Yugoslavia kept its promises - with Mr Holbrooke, President Clinton and other NATO leaders warning at the time that jets would remain ready, under an activation order, to strike if the deal was broken.
Under the threat of strikes, Yugoslav forces were expected to pull back, allowing a period of calm in which foreign envoys could persuade Serbs and ethnic Albanians to begin peace talks.
But straight away Mr Walker hit a problem: the peace agreement covers Yugoslavs, but makes no mention of their enemies, the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, who were not invited to the talks.
The ethnic Albanian KLA was thus tempted to attack the Serbled Yugoslav forces, hoping that a Yugoslav response would in turn trigger NATO bombing. This was only one of Mr Walker's problems. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation, which took responsibility for the KVM, rapidly lost interest and last month declared that it would not, after all, deploy 2,000 monitors but probably 1,200.
Even these monitors have been late arriving. Three months after their deployment was announced, only 800 are in the country.
This week Mr Walker's deputy, French official Mr Gabriel Keller, gave an unauthorised briefing saying there are "doubts" about whether the Racak massacre was fabricated.
Mr Keller's statement, carried by Paris newspapers and Britain's Guardian was not backed up by evidence, but has helped to cloud the issue, weakening NATO's desire to launch air strikes.
It has also undermined Mr Walker, who had declared days before that he had no doubts at all that Yugoslav security forces were to blame for Racak.
Under the weight of Yugoslav criticism, Mr Walker this week announced a subtle change in his mission, saying at an off-the-record briefing with journalists on Wednesday that in fact the guerrillas had also signed the October ceasefire.
This is an important difference because it allows the KVM to escape its original mission - as whistle-blowers for NATO - into a newer and vaguer role as peace monitors.
The trouble is, that is not true. OSCE spokesman, Mr Jorgen Grunnet, was yesterday unable to produce any document agreed between his mission and the KLA in which the guerrillas signed on to a ceasefire. "I am sure the KLA agree to this ceasefire," he said. "It was in the newspapers."
This is a farce born of desperation. Policing a ceasefire signed by only one of the protagonists, the Yugoslavs, is an impossible task.
Yet Western officials have been rebuffed when they tried to get the KLA on board.
This week Mr Milosevic has called the KVM's bluff. The verification teams rushed from battle to battle sending a stream of reports back to NATO. Under the view of these officials and Western TV cameras, Serb artillery, tanks and anti-aircraft guns pounded the hills round Racak. But NATO announced that it no longer wanted to consider air strikes.
The message is now clear: the mission's officials have done some brave work and have brokered several local truces in past weeks, probably saving dozens of lives. But Racak has shown that their reports will not, as was threatened, trigger NATO air strikes.