[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