Danilo Ilić was a Bosnian Orthodox Serb. He had worked as a school teacher and as a bank worker but in 1913 and 1914 he lived with, and outwardly off, his mother, who operated a small boarding house in Sarajevo. Secretly, Ilić was the leader of the Serbian-irredentist Black Hand cell in Sarajevo. In late 1913, Danilo Ilić came to the Serbian listening post at Užice to speak to the officer in charge, Serbian Colonel C. A. Popović, who was a captain at the time and a member of the Black Hand. Ilić recommended an end to the period of revolutionary organization building and a move to direct action against Austria-Hungary. Popović passed Danilo Ilić on to Belgrade to discuss this matter with Chief of Serbian Military Intelligence Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, known more commonly as Apis. By 1913, Apis and his fellow military conspirators (drawn heavily from the ranks of the May 1903 coup) had come to dominate what was left of the Black Hand.