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Nato bombed Chinese deliberately
Nato hit embassy on purpose
Kosovo: special report
John Sweeney and Jens Holsoe in Copenhagen and Ed Vulliamy in Washington
Sunday October 17, 1999
The Observer
Nato deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications. According to senior military and intelligence sources in Europe and the US the Chinese embassy was removed from a prohibited targets list after Nato electronic intelligence (Elint) detected it sending army signals to Milosevic's forces. The story is confirmed in detail by three other Nato officers - a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior headquarters officer in Brussels. They all confirm that they knew in April that the Chinese embassy was acting as a 'rebro' [rebroadcast] station for the Yugoslav army (VJ) after alliance jets had successfully silenced Milosevic's own transmitters. The Chinese were also suspected of monitoring the cruise missile attacks on Belgrade, with a view to developing effective counter-measures against US missiles. The intelligence officer, who was based in Macedonia during the bombing, said: 'Nato had been hunting the radio transmitters in Belgrade. When the President's [Milosevic's] residence was bombed on 23 April, the signals disappeared for 24 hours. When they came on the air again, we discovered they came from the embassy compound.' The success of previous strikes had forced the VJ to use Milosevic's residence as a rebroadcast station. After that was knocked out, it was moved to the Chinese embassy. The air controller said: 'The Chinese embassy had an electronic profile, which Nato located and pinpointed.' The Observer investigation, carried out jointly with Politiken newspaper in Denmark, will cause embarrassment for Nato and for the British government. On Tuesday, the Queen and the Prime Minister will host a state visit by the President of China, Jiang Zemin. He is to stay at Buckingham Palace. Jiang Zemin is still said to be outraged at the 7 May attack, which came close to splitting the alliance.The official Nato line, as expressed by President Bill Clinton and CIA director George Tenet, was that the attack on the Chinese Embassy was a mistake. Defence Secretary William Cohen said: 'One of our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map.' Later, a source in the US National Imagery and Mapping Agency said that the 'wrong map' story was 'a damned lie'. Tenet apologised last July, saying: 'The President of the United States has expressed our sincere regret at the loss of life in this tragic incident and has offered our condolences to the Chinese people and especially to the families of those who lost their lives in this mistaken attack. Nato's apology was predicated on the excuse that the three missiles which landed in one corner of the embassy block were meant to be targeted at the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, the FDSP. But inquiries have revealed there never was a VJ directorate of supply and procurement at the site named by Tenet. The VJ office for supplies - which Tenet calls FDSP - is some 500 metres down the street from the address he gave. It was bombed later. Moreover the CIA and other Nato intelligence agencies, such as Britain's MI6 and the code-breakers at GCHQ, would have listened in to communication traffic from the Chinese embassy as a matter of course since it moved to the site in 1996. A Nato flight control officer in Naples also confirmed to us that a map of 'non-targets': churches, hospitals and embassies, including the Chinese, did exist. On this 'don't hit' map, the Chinese embassy was correctly located at its current site, and not where it had been until 1996 - as claimed by the US and NATO. Why the Chinese were prepared to help Milosevic is a more murky question. One possible explanation is that the Chinese lack Stealth technology, and the Yugoslavs, having shot down a Stealth fighter in the early days of the air campaign, were in a good position to trade. The Chinese may have calculated that Nato would not dare strike its embassy, but the five-storey building was emptied every night of personnel. Only three people died in the attack, two of whom were, reportedly, not journalists - the official Chinese version - but intelligence officers. The Chinese military attache, Ven Bo Koy, who was seriously wounded in the attack and is now in hospital in China, told Dusan Janjic, the respected president of Forum for Ethnic Relations in Belgrade, only hours before the attack, that the embassy was monitoring incoming cruise missiles in order to develop counter-measures. Nato spokesman Lee McClenny yesterday stood by the official version. 'It was a terrible mistake,' he said, 'and we have apologised.' A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in London said yesterday: 'We do not believe that the embassy was bombed because of a mistake with an out-of-date map.'
I'm so glad.
The Chinese Embassy was considered a "safe house" where Milosevic could spend the night knowing it wouldn't get bombed. The CIA incorrectly thought that Milosevic was sleeping in the embassy and we could kill him. The map mistake is very flimsy.
This article is notably lacking in named sources. The report certaintly makes sense, but is the publication a reliable one?
Thanks a lot, but this might not be news to a lot of FREEPERS!!
There are plenty of sources. The B-2 flew the 26-hour mission from Missouri and the guided bombs hit the exact spot that they had targeted. With 100% air superiority, this is a classic case of overkill.
Why am I not surprised?
Reuters is reporting this too.
Jiang Zemin is still said to be outraged at the 7 May attack,.....
Is it possible he didn't know? Would the military, considering the various competing factions in the Chinese ruling class, tell Jiang of such a small military detail? It turned out to be a large diplomatic "detail" but from a military point of view it was sort of an everyday decision.
Let's see if we got this right, the Chinese are accused of spying on the U.S. to steal the secrets of micro-nukes, or should I say bought the secrets from Clinton. China was not bombed for that yet this was a heck of a lot more serious than eavesdropping to acquire technology that is inferior to that which they had previously acquired. Another unusual aspect of this new embassy story is that it's a lot better than the bad map excuse yet they did not use this so-called truth at the time..why not ? May I submit that we still aren't dealing with the truth about this matter and that this new twist is just another trial run to see how it blows over with the public. If they expected us to believe the bad map story they must not think that the public is very smart at all.
bump
Bump!
Die Presse Picked it up! (Vienna Austria)
Frankly, I hope this story is true.
I feel a lot more reassured to think that our side had such good intelligence and such admirable resolve that they were willing and able to surgically strike a legitimate military target and take it out -- even though that target was inside the embassy of a huge and dangerous potential adversary.
I am also reassured to think that, after having taken such a high-risk action, our side's diplomatic corps was savvy enough to smooth over the resulting outrage and maintain stable relations with a nation we certainly do not want unstable relations with.
So if this story is true, it seems to me that we did exactly the right thing (the Chinese have no business using the protection of an embassy to assist the military objectives of our enemies; they had to be stopped -- and strongly warned.)
That scenerio is a lot more acceptable to me than the original "explanation," which is that our intelligence was so poor and our planning so incompetant that we accidently hit (three times) the innocent diplomatic headquarters of what has to be perceived as one of our most formidable potential enemies.
For the first time since this event happened, I'm starting to think that -- instead of being impossibly stupid -- we're actually pretty smart.
Antiwar GOP does well with this post: wish more Republicans would have stood up to this and all the other phony wars...THIMMESCH !!!
"For the first time since this event happened, I'm starting to think that -- instead of being impossibly stupid -- we're actually pretty smart."
Yeah, smart. But ethically and morally corrupt. I guess when you're killing thousands of innocent people, lying about the intentional murder of a few more isn't a big deal, hm?
I am also reassured to think that, after having taken such a high-risk action, our side's diplomatic corps was savvy enough to smooth over the resulting outrage and maintain stable relations with a nation we certainly do not want unstable relations with.
I guess that means that Bin Laden was also guilty of a lack of savvy after he bombed the U.S. embassy in Africa. Don't you wonder how many nations world-wide are host to a U.S. embassy that doubles up as an intelligence gathering agency.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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