Implausible denial

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Apr 16 23:40:08 PDT 2000


[Well, at least they finally mentioned the Observer/Politiken article. I wonder if it's because they got even more e-cards and letters this time around complaining about their head in the sand posture? Because in essence their position is no different than their response to Enrique last fall.]

Michael

April 17, 2000

Chinese Embassy Bombing: A Wide Net of Blame

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

W ASHINGTON, April 16 -- In the weeks before the bombing of the

Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last May, NATO was under tremendous

pressure to escalate its war against Yugoslavia. The alliance's

supreme commander demanded 2,000 targets in Serbia -- a number some

aides considered arbitrary and too high for a country the size of

Ohio.

Having begun the war for Kosovo with too few targets and the

unrealistic hope of a quick victory, NATO had to scramble for new

targets. According to a NATO official, the pressure was so intense

that a cook and a motor pool worker with sufficiently high security

clearances were drafted into NATO's targeting office in Mons,

Belgium, to help with paperwork on potential missions.

In this atmosphere the Central Intelligence Agency submitted its

first targeting proposal of the war. It was selected by its

Counter-Proliferation Division, which had no particular expertise

either in the Balkans or in picking bombing targets. The target was

accepted, officials said, without further vetting by the military.

In fact, it was the Chinese Embassy. It was described in a secret

document given to President Clinton for his approval as a warehouse

that was the headquarters of Yugoslav Army procurement. The

document, provided to The New York Times by a military officer,

included a satellite photograph, a casualty estimate and a

description of the site.

The only thing that turned out to be accurate was the casualty

estimate. The description of the target's relevance to the war was

misleading and, one senior intelligence official said, it should

have been apparent to any imagery expert that the building shown

did not look remotely like a warehouse or any Serbian government

building.

Ever since the bombing, Chinese officials have angrily accused the

United States of a deliberate attack, while American officials have

insisted that it was an error.

In an attempt to unravel what really happened, spurred in part by

articles in two European newspapers suggesting that the bombing had

been deliberate, The New York Times interviewed more than 30

officials in Washington and in Europe.

While the investigation produced no evidence that the bombing of

the embassy had been a deliberate act, it provided a detailed

account of a broader set of missteps than the United States or NATO

have acknowledged, and a wider circle of blame than the

government's explanation of a simple error of judgment by a few

people at the C.I.A.

None of the people interviewed at the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the

State Department and the military mapping agency, or at NATO

offices in Brussels, Mons, Vicenza, Italy and Paris said they had

ever seen any document discussing targeting of the embassy, nor any

approval given to do so. No one asserted that he or she knew that

such an order had been given.

The bombing resulted from error piled upon incompetence piled upon

bad judgment in a variety of places -- from a frantic rush to

approve targets to questionable reliance on inexpert officers to an

inexplicable failure to consult the people who might have averted

disaster, according to the officials.

In retrospect, they said, the bombing, if not intended, could have

been avoided at several points along the way.

Last week, 11 months after the fact, the director of central

intelligence, George J. Tenet, dismissed a midlevel officer who put

the X on what turned out to be the embassy.

He also disciplined six other employees, saying that agency

officers "at all levels of responsibility" contributed to the

bombing.

The Pentagon has not conducted its own review but administration

officials say the matter is now closed. China rejected Mr. Tenet's

discipline as inadequate.

American officials have tried to explain how such a bizarre chain

of missteps could have taken place in intelligence and military

organizations that pride themselves on technological prowess.

"This was an error compounded by errors," said Under Secretary of

State Thomas R. Pickering, who had the job of explaining the attack

to the Chinese last year.

Even some NATO and American officials acknowledge that they cannot

explain how or why so many mistakes occurred.

Chinese officials have been particularly suspicious since the

attack actually hit the defense attaché's office and the embassy's

intelligence cell. But what neither they nor American officials

have disclosed is that the bombs, Pentagon officials said, were

actually targeted throughout the building. At least one and maybe

two of the bombs did not explode, the officials said.

Had the strike gone as planned, the embassy would have been

demolished, and the death and destruction far worse.

Even some of those who accept the American assurances that the

bombing was accidental say they believe that blame has not yet been

shared by all of those who contributed to the mission.

"It was a systemic problem," said Representative Porter J. Goss,

the Republican from Florida who is chairman of the House's

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "It was not a problem

just at the C.I.A. The fact of the matter is that, at least at the

Pentagon, somebody should stand up and say it isn't just the

agency's fault. To fire one person and let off all the other

agencies -- including the White House -- isn't doing justice to

justice."

The Rush to Target: A Chaotic Scramble to Meet the Demand

N ATO's initial plan was to bomb Yugoslavia for two nights, with

daytime pauses to allow President Slobodan Milosevic to agree to

NATO's demands that he withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo. "You

show them some lead -- boom! boom! -- and they'll fold. That was

definitely the prevailing opinion," a NATO officer in Belgium said.

American officials said they had always been prepared for a longer

war, but when the bombing began on March 24, NATO had only 219

targets for all of Serbia, focused on air defenses and military

communications.

On the first night, 51 of those targets were struck; by the third

night, NATO had exhausted nearly half the original targets, even as

Serbian forces began expelling Kosovo's Albanians en masse.

"We woke up to the fact that Milosevic wasn't going to come out on

the front lawn with a white flag," the NATO officer said.

That realization touched off a scramble to find more targets. While

diplomats wrestled over whether to begin bombing more politically

sensitive targets, including those in Belgrade, NATO's military

commanders, who for four decades had planned for war against the

Soviet Union, found themselves grossly unprepared for the task of

choosing targets for this kind of air campaign, the officials said.

The alliance had only two targeting centers, at the Joint Analysis

Center in Britain and at the Air Force's European headquarters in

Germany, both run by Americans.

Only Britain also contributed fully developed targeting proposals,

and there were only two dozen of those, NATO officials said.

As the war continued, the American targeters were producing 10 to

12 new targets a day, while allied pilots were striking at twice

that rate.

By early April, Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, the alliance's air

commander, kept raising the problem during NATO commanders' morning

video conferences. "I'm running out of targets," he barked one

morning, according to an officer who was there.

Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's supreme commander, asked why he did

not have 4,000 targets on his desk, a NATO officer said. By

mid-April, General Clark halved his demand, and the Air Force's

intelligence director for Europe, Brig. Gen. Neal T. Robinson,

agreed.

According to several officials, the goal became an obsession --

derided by targeting officials as "T2K." Each morning, General

Robinson briefed commanders on progress toward the goal. A month

into the campaign, they still had only 400 fixed targets, not

counting tanks and other weapons pilots were trying to hit in

Kosovo.

General Clark declined to be interviewed for this article.

Picking targets is normally a painstaking process, involving reams

of intelligence reports checked and rechecked against satellite

photographs. By mid-April, NATO reached out to any military command

with targeting expertise.

At that point, General Clark began to expand the scope of targets

to include electrical grids and commercial facilities like tobacco

warehouses and the Yugo automobile car factory. "You've destroyed

virtually every military target of significance," an aide to

General Clark said. "Now what do you do? You start looking for

other targets."

Even so, by the end of the war, NATO had produced only 1,021 fixed

targets. Of those, they bombed roughly 650.

Some senior officials played down the rush for targets, saying that

as chaotic as the process was, there were ultimately very few

errors in targeting. But officials in Europe and Washington

maintained that as the pressure for targets intensified, proposals

were not as thoroughly reviewed as they could -- or should -- have

been.

Among those was the one received by fax from the C.I.A.

Justifying the Target: No Goal in This War, But Still a Priority

T he C.I.A. had provided information on scores of targets

throughout the war, but it had not previously been asked to propose

its own, Mr. Pickering and other officials said. Its history of

picking targets has been checkered. During the Persian Gulf war, it

sent bombers after a supposed intelligence bunker that proved to be

an air raid shelter filled with women and children.

The agency has its own targeting cell, but it was the

Counter-Proliferation Division, a small office whose focus was the

spread of missiles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,

that proposed this target.

Officers there saw the war as an opportunity to destroy the

headquarters of the Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement,

long a concern because of its suspected involvement in smuggling

missile parts to places like Libya and Iraq, intelligence officials

said.

The directorate is an arm of Yugoimport, an ostensibly private

corporation but one that like most industry in Yugoslavia is

closely linked to the ruling elite around Mr. Milosevic. Several

officials conceded that it had only a tangential relation to the

war's objectives; the targeting document showed experts estimated

only civilian casualties inside, not military casualties.

"It had nothing to do with the war in the Balkans," an official

said. "They were thinking, 'While we're bombing anyway, here's a

target that should have a great benefit to the nation and what

we're doing.' "

Other officials disputed that, citing intercepted radio

transmissions and agents' reports that the directorate was

organizing truckloads of spare surface-to-air missile parts, as

well as artillery and mortar shells, for the Serbian forces.

Even so, when agency officials talked about the proposed target in

at least three meetings, they spent more time discussing whether

they could legally justify the attack under the international rules

of war than they did about the location of the headquarters itself.

The division's officers had no specific expertise in targeting or

the Balkans, the officials said. None of those involved have been

identified, but officials said the officer who has received the

most blame -- and was dismissed by Mr. Tenet -- was a retired Army

officer who had been contracted to work in the division.

He had been told to locate the directorate's headquarters and set

to work, according to a person familiar with his task. On April 9,

he called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in suburban

Washington requesting a map of Belgrade. Using it and two tourist

maps, the officer tried to pinpoint the headquarters, equipped only

with its address.

A senior defense official said the address -- 2 Bulevar Umetnosti

in New Belgrade -- came from a letter intercepted by intelligence

officials, though the address was easily available, including from

the directorate's internet site.

The NIMA map, produced in 1997, shows major buildings and

geographic features. It does not specify street addresses, but it

identifies major landmarks. It was designed, a senior intelligence

official said, for ground operations, like the evacuation of

personnel from the American Embassy.

One of the landmarks on the map is the headquarters of Mr.

Milosevic's Socialist Party, which is on a parallel street,

Milentija Popovica, and which NATO bombed during the war. Knowing

that address and the address of other buildings on that same

street, the officer used a technique called "resection and

intersection" to locate what he thought was the headquarters.

The method involves finding addresses on parallel streets and

drawing lines to the targeted street on the presumption that

numbering schemes are uniform. It is used for generally locating

landmarks in a city for such things as search and rescue missions.

"To target based on that is incomprehensible," one official said.

Having chosen what he thought was the directorate, the officer

called NIMA on April 12 or 13 and asked for satellite images of the

site, which he received on the 14th, officials said. At that point

a NIMA analyst assigned the building a number -- 0251WA0017 -- from

the military's "bombing encyclopedia," a worldwide compendium of

potential targets and other landmarks.

According to the officials interviewed, the satellite images did

not raise concerns. When Mr. Pickering, the under secretary of

state, briefed the Chinese about the bombing last summer, he said

there were no seals or flags that would identify it as a diplomatic

compound. An incredulous Chinese official asked why America's

satellites did not see it was an embassy. "Didn't you see the green

tiles on the roof?," the official asked, according to an American

who was there.

In fact, a senior intelligence official said, satellite images

contained clues that should at least have prompted questions -- not

necessarily that it was the embassy, but rather about whether it

was the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency.

"It doesn't look like an office building," the official said. "It

looks like a hotel. It's too nice a place. Given all the space

around it, I didn't see external fencing that I would expect from a

government facility."

The Review: An Immense Error, Perfectly Packaged

C ompounding the mistake, according to the officials, was the

initiative taken by the officer who located the target. He produced

what one official called a "superficially perfect" proposal by

downloading from the military's secure intranet a targeting form

and filling it out -- complete with the "bombing encyclopedia"

number, as well as eight-digit longitudinal and latitudinal

figures.

Impressively packaged, the proposal prompted no questions. The

C.I.A.'s assistant director of intelligence for military support,

Brig. Gen. Roderick J. Isler, ultimately approved it, and it

arrived at the European Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff

appearing to be a more advanced proposal than it was, the officials

said.

"This target came with an aura of authority because it came from

the C.I.A.," said John J. Hamre, who recently stepped down as

deputy secretary of defense.

Mr. Hamre said the Joint Chiefs never conducted a thorough review

of the target. The reasons are not clear. Instead the joint chiefs

received two proposals for the same target, one from the C.I.A. and

another from European Command, which did not note that it

originally came from the agency, and approved it. "They got false

confirmation," an intelligence official said.

Agency officials said their officers had never intended the target

to be viewed by the Pentagon as a complete proposal, but simply as

a nomination. Instead, as one NATO officer put it, "it went through

like a cog on an assembly line."

By April 28, 10 days before the bombing, planners in Europe had

assigned the target, like every one in the war, a sequential

number. It was No. 493, and the essential information about the

target was boiled down to a single document to be presented to

President Clinton and other NATO leaders.

This document identified the target as "Belgrade Warehouse 1," but

under a heading called "linkage" called it the "HQ for the Federal

Directorate Supply and Procurement." The objective was to "destroy

warehouse and contents," which it went on to say would undercut the

ability of Serbian forces to receive new supplies.

It also classified the possibility for collateral damage as "tier 3

high," which an official said referred to the likelihood of the

impact of the bombs sending shards of glass flying considerable

distances. That indicated analysts were able to distinguish the

embassy's marble and glass structure. The directorate's

headquarters was made of white stone.

Three red triangles on the image depict the points at which the

bombs were to strike. The document also estimated that casualties

would range from three to seven civilians, presumably those working

inside, while the estimate for unintended civilian casualties,

which also included those who might happen by at the time, ranged

from 25 to 50.

The bombing, in fact, killed three and wounded at least 20.

Mr. Tenet has said that the C.I.A. proposed only one target during

the war. Actually, the agency proposed two or three more, but after

the embassy bombing, Pentagon officials refused to strike them.

In the end, despite its supposed value, NATO never did attack the

intended target.

Allied Concerns: An American Goal: Keeping Secrets

A s with most of attacks during the war, especially the strikes in

Belgrade, planning and execution were done by Americans. In raids

involving the stealthy B-2's and F-117 fighters, many details about

the attacks were classified as "U.S. only," mainly for fear of

revealing secrets about those aircraft.

After the war, some allies questioned the practice. The French

Ministry of Defense's report on the war last November complained of

military operations "conducted by the United States outside the

strict NATO framework and procedures."

A senior NATO diplomat said the United States attacked 75 to 80

targets in this way. The Chinese Embassy was one of them.

The control of information limited the number of allied officers

who might have been able to notice the targeting error.

Gen. Jean-Pierre Kelche, who as chief of the defense staff is

France's top military officer, said that in spite of the

restrictions on the military operations, all of the specific

targets were reviewed by the political and military leaders of the

major allies, including Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France and

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

"It was supposed to be an arms storage facility," General Kelche

said in an interview in Paris. "It's clear the nature of that

target did not create any problems for me."

He said the unilateral American operations were a political

problem, but not an operational one. He added, however, that the

militaries of each country were responsible for reviewing those

targets its forces were scheduled to strike.

Error Almost Caught? American's Doubts Reached NATO

W hen Mr. Tenet dismissed the officer blamed for targeting and

disciplined six others, he singled out another for praise. That

officer, also not identified, raised questions about the target,

Mr. Tenet said. In the days before the bombing, he called analysts

at NIMA and at the NATO headquarters in Naples to express doubts,

Mr. Tenet said.

Memories of his objections vary, and other intelligence officials

raised questions about them. The officer, who once worked in the

same proliferation office involved in targeting the embassy, now

works in the Technical Management Office, an operation involved in

highly classified operations, officials said.

He had no authority to review targets, or even know what they were,

but heard informally that the directorate was being targeted,

officials said, adding that he then called the imagery analyst at

NIMA. On that day, April 29, nine days before the bombing, he told

the analyst that he had recently spoken to a source who confirmed

the directorate's actual location, about 1,000 yards south of the

embassy.

At that point, a senior intelligence official said, the NIMA

analyst could have withdrawn the target's "bombing encyclopedia"

number or alerted more senior officials. Instead, he promised to

call the officer who had identified the target in the first place.

The NIMA analyst tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting between

the two agency officers, who did not know each other, officials

said. On May 3, the analyst produced six more images of the

building and its surroundings, which confirmed to the skeptical

officer that the target was not the directorate, the officials

said.

At that point, he raised his concerns with military officers in

Naples, but he did not make his questions official or sound grave

enough to remove the target from the list, the officials said.

Then, he left work for three days to attend a training session.

When he returned, on May 7, he learned -- again informally -- that

the target was on that night's list. He called Naples a second

time, through back channels, but spoke to a different officer, who

informed him that the B-2 was already on its way from its base in

Missouri, according to officials.

"It didn't really raise the panic you think it would have," a

defense official said.

While Mr. Tenet commended the officer's efforts, another senior

agency official was critical of the fact that the officer --

perhaps out of fear that he was acting beyond his responsibilities

-- had never voiced doubts to the assistant director of

intelligence for military support, who was in a position to have

put a hold instantly on the target.

The Questions: No Indications of a Sinister Plot

L ast year, The Observer of London, in conjunction with Politiken,

a Danish newspaper, published articles suggesting that the bombing

had been deliberate. Their stories said that the strike had been

intended to silence transmitters at the embassy being used for

rebroadcasting communications for the Yugoslav armed forces or,

later, by the Serbian paramilitary leader known as Arkan.

All of the officials interviewed by the Times said they knew of no

evidence to support the assertion, and none has been produced. They

said there was also no evidence that the Chinese had in any way

aided the Serbian war effort, though one NATO diplomat said it was

impossible to rule out the possibility that the Chinese had shared

information with the Serbs.

Officials rejected the idea that the Chinese Embassy was being used

for rebroadcasting and said they did not suspect during the war

that it was doing that. General Kelche said photographs taken after

the strike showed ordinary antenna on its roof, not microwave

dishes that would have been used in military communications.

The officials said that after the bombing they did learn a great

deal about the embassy's intelligence operations, including the

background of the three Chinese journalists who were killed and who

American officials say were in fact intelligence agents.

"It is -- or was -- considered the major collection platform for

Europe," a senior defense official said. "One could say it was a

silver lining to the bombing, but it was not deliberate."

The European newspapers also said there had been a list of targets

ruled off limits for air strikes that included the Chinese Embassy,

at its actual address, not the mistaken one and that the embassy at

some point had been removed from the list.

According to the officials interviewed by The Times, American

commanders in Europe did maintain such a list of buildings, like

hospitals, churches and embassies. The Chinese Embassy was on that

list, officials said, but at its old address and was not removed.

They said the embassy was also listed at the wrong address on a

similar list in Britain.

Roy W. Krieger, a lawyer who represents one of the supervisors who

was reprimanded by Mr. Tenet, said neither his client nor any of

the others had intended to bomb the embassy. "No sinister

conspiracy exists, only a systemic failure masquerading as a

conspiracy," he said.

He criticized the punishment of the C.I.A. officials alone, even

though the NIMA map contained a critical error and none of the

Pentagon's databases included information on the embassy's actual

location.

"The C.I.A.'s action is even more troubling in the face of the

refusal of the Department of Defense to even acknowledge its

failures contributing to this tragic event," he said.

After the bombing, Mr. Hamre and the vice chairman of the Joint

Chiefs of Staff at the time, Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, conducted the

Pentagon's review of the targeting, but it was never made public.

Officials from the Joint Chiefs refused repeated requests to be

interviewed, as did Air Force commanders, on orders from the chief

of staff, Gen. Michael E. Ryan, according to a spokesman.

Mr. Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said

members of Congress had intensely questioned officials. In the end,

he said he was confident in their assurances that it had not been a

deliberate strike.

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company



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