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The Chinese embassy bombing
Truth behind America's raid on Belgrade
The US claimed
it was a tragic blunder. But the pinpoint accuracy of the attack
was in fact a deadly signal to Milosevic: seek outside help in
Kosovo at
your peril
Sunday November
28, 1999
The Observer
On May 7 this
year the B2 - at $44 billion the world's most expensive plane -
took off from Whiteman air force base in Missouri, its sleek
black belly loaded with missiles,
destined for Belgrade. It flew high across the Atlantic and
Western Europe before opening its bomb doors over the Adriatic
and releasing the most accurate air-drop
munitions in the world - the JDAM flying bomb.
The JDAM uses
four adjustable fins to control its position, continually checked
and re-checked by fixes from seven satellites. It is so precise a
weapon it is accurate to a
range of less than two metres.
The bombs
carried on that B2 rained down over the Serb capital and rocketed
towards their target - the southern end of the Chinese Embassy -
demolishing the office of the
military attache and killing three `journalists'. But the
midnight strike was so precise the embassy's north end was
untouched, leaving the marble and glass of the front
entrance and the ambassador's Mercedes and four flower pots
unscathed.
The CIA, US
State Department and British Foreign Office claimed the strike
had hit the wrong building. It was, they regretted, a terrible
mistake. Though America's
trillion-dollar arsenal had been deployed, the target had been
selected by an intelligence analyst using out-of-date maps. The
strike on the Chinese Embassy came at a
bad time for Nato's campaign against Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic. Mistaken attacks on convoys of defenceless Albanian
refugees had dented Western public
opinion's belief in the rightness of the war; now the US war
machine had hit the most diplomatically sensitive target possible
- by mistake.
But as mobs
stormed the US and British Embassies in Beijing, and Chinese
President Jiang Zemin refused to take President Bill Cliton's
phone calls, an entirely different
story was being revealed on the other side of the world.
At the Combined
Air Operations Centre (CAOC) in Vincenza in northern Italy,
British, Canadian and French air targeteers rounded on an
American colonel on the morning
of 8 May. Angrily they denounced the `cock-up'. The US colonel
was relaxed. 'Bullshit,' he replied to the complaints. `That was
great targeting ... we put two JDAMs down
into the attache's office and took out the exact room we wanted
... they (the Chinese) won't be using that place for rebro (re-broadcasting
radio transmissions) any more,
and it will have given that bastard Arkan a headache.'
Last month The
Observer raised the first serious challange to the official
version of events and claimed the embassy was targeted directly.
US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright described it as `balderdash'. Since then, as this paper's
journalists have continued to pursue the story, more witnesses
have come forward.
The true story -
though it is being denied by everyone from Albright, Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook and CIA director George Tenet down - is that
the Americans knew
exactly what they are doing. The Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was
deliberately targeted by the most precise weapons in the US
arsenal because it was being used by
Zeljko Raznatovic, the indicted war criminal better known as
Arkan, to transmit messages to his `Tigers' - Serb death squads -
in Kosovo.
In the immediate
aftermath of the attack there were some among non-US staff who
were suspicious. On 8 May they tapped into the Nato target
computer and checked out
the satellite co-ordinates for the Chinese Embassy. The co-ordinates
were in the computer and they were correct. While the world was
being told the CIA had used
out-of-date maps, Nato's officers were looking at evidence that
the CIA was bang on target.
Five weeks ago
The Observer reported evidence gathered from sources within Nato
- serving military officers who would be instantly sacked if
named. Our account was
denied by the CIA, by Albright and by Cook, who said there was
not a `shred of evidence to support this rather wild story'.
The Observer has
gone back to its original sources, and also spoken to other
serving officers, from Nato colonels to intelligence officers to
a military officer with the rank of
a general. All are in agreement. The Chinese Embassy was
deliberately bombed.
According to one
of these sources, it was the fact that the embassy was being used
to rebroadcast signals for Arkan and his White Tigers that swung
the argument to hit
the embassy. `The fact that it was an operating base for Arkan,
an indicted war criminal, was something that convinced the
Americans to strike. Had it just been a
transmitter for the VJ (the Yugoslav Army), they might have held
off.'
Arkan's spectre
had come to loom large over the conflict in Kosovo. Indicted for
his role in organising death squads in the war in Bosnia, his
precise role in Kosovo is still
not clear. But investigators working for the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague had good
reason to suspect that Arkan's death squads
were playing a murderous role in Operation Horseshoe, Milosevic's
plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of its majority Albanian
population.
But whether the
signals intercepted were those of Arkan and his thugs or simply
the Yugoslav army and police - both also implicated in atrocities
in Kosovo - one thing now
is clear. Nato was convinced that some of the radio broadcasts
they were picking up were coming from within the Chinese Embassy
itself.
The subject of
intense speculation at the time, it is only now that The Observer
has been able to confirm this. Confirmation of the Chinese
Embassy's assistance to the
Yugoslav war effort came in Paris last week. A senior French
Defence Ministry official said bluntly that the building attacked
on 7 May had been targeted precisely because
it had been rebroadcasting Yugoslav signals - although the French
insist they were never told the building was the Chinese Embassy.
`Not one of us
had ever imagined this target could have been the embassy. We had
been told simply that it was a military target that had been
monitored transmitting
signals to the Yugoslav army from its basement. It had been
described to us as a communications target that would be taken
out.' The French, however, are increasingly
suspicious of what the Americans really knew. The same source
continues: `What the Americans really knew, I wouldn't like to
say.'
It is not only
The Observer's Nato witnesses who have blown a hole in the CIA's
original story - as rehearsed by Albright and Cook Ð that the
embassy was bombed by
mistake because the agency used old maps of Belgrade to work out
its target list. This is a cover story which nearly all experts,
including one's of America's most eminent
China hands, Ezra Vogel, have judged not credible. The US's own
National Imagery and Mapping Agency describes the wrong map story
as `a damned lie'.
The claims made
by the CIA's director George Tenet to the Congressional Select
Committee on Intelligence on 22 July have come under renewed
scrutiny - and been found
wanting. Tenet told the US Congressmen there were no visible
signs that the building was an embassy, no flags and no insignia.
But photographs taken in the immediate
afermath of the attack show a different story. These pictures
show the Red Flag at the main gate and two hoardings covered in
Chinese script on the side of the building.
The embassy was clearly marked by a sign in Serb saying `Ambasada
Narodne Republike Kine' (Embassy of the People's Republic of
China) - stark evidence that the CIA
chief was not telling the whole truth.
Equally compelling is the fact that the location of the Chinese Embassy in soulless new Belgrade was hardly a state secret.
Opposite the
Park of Peace and Friendship, the Chinese Embassy at Number 3
Cherry Blossom Boulevard stands mangled by missiles at one end;
almost untouched at
the other. The sheets that were knotted together to form
makeshift escape routes for the diplomats, journalists, spies and
other employees trapped inside still hang from
the holes that were once the embassy's smoked glass windows,
trailing between the white blinds and straggly blue-green
curtains that still flap in the wind.
The reception
room is still there, laid open to the elements by the bomb that
sliced away its outer wall on the building's south side. Its
reproduction Louis XIV sofa set
stands under a row of gilded chandeliers and faces a hole the
size of a crater in the adjacent building that was once the
Chinese ambassador's home. That room and those
sofas were familiar to Belgrade's diplomatic corps, who regularly
met US diplomats at receptions in the building.
Officially the
CIA's expla nation for hitting a building, well known to its
diplomatic corps, is this: it used a flawed technique for
locating the building they were supposed to
bomb - an arms agency headquarters.
It is a version
of events that no longer appears to stand up to scrutiny. For not
only were the embassy co-ordinates in the Nato computer, as the
air targeters discovered,
but the Chinese Embassy, as has been confirmed to The Observer,
had long been a prime target for Western intelligence, and would
therefore have been extremely well
identified.
The reason for
the scrutiny was that for years the Chinese Communist regime has
been co-operating with the Serbs in building up its military
capability. The eyes and ears
of the Western world - the US's National Security Agency and
Britain's own GCHQ - were watching and listening.
And there was
another issue, as a Nato air controller involved in the campaign
made clear. `The Chinese Embassy had an electronic profile, which
Nato had located and
pinpointed.' According to this source, that data was forwarded to
the joint intelligence operational centre at Mons, the
headquarters of Nato in Europe. While initial scrutiny
by US military and civilian officials showed that the area was
part of a park owned by a Yugoslav army officers' fund, more
recent maps provided by the Europeans showed
the clear location of the embassy. It was on the banned list,
according to a senior officer, and needed approval from the US
Commander-in-Chief, Bill Clinton, to have it
removed from that list and designated as a target.
It is this issue
that has become the most contentious one between the US and its
European Nato allies, especially France: that America was
ordering missions outside of
Nato's joint command structure that it kept from its fellow
combatants. This month this issue surfaced in a bitter exchange
between the two countries: France accusing
America of running missions behind its back while America accused
the French government of putting Nato pilots' lives at risk by
vetoing targets. French officials in the
United States - at the UN and in Washington - say privately that
their government was `wary in the extreme' at the way targets
were chosen by Nato during the Kosovo
conflict.
`US Air Force
and intelligence services had a direct hot line to the Nato
planners in Brussels, but they were making their own selections,
irrespective of the joint
consultative process,' complained a French diplomat at the UN
mission in New York.
Another was more
forthright, stating that there was still `very great scepticism'
among French diplomats at the CIA's explanation of an erroneous
attack: `We still have an
open mind,' said one official, `and there is still reason for us
to believe that China's role and position in the Balkans could
have led to an attack.'
Asked what could
have been the motives for a deliberate attack, the official
replied: `The possibility that the Chinese were helping the
Yugoslavs in a number of ways,
including militarily, and concern among American intelligence
that China was indulged in a wholesale espionage against America.'
What is clear,
however, from The Observer's sources is that the Combined Air
Operations Centre at Vincenza was not informed of the targeting
plan for the embassy
because `all operations with stealth aircraft and other special
systems were kept strictly close to the chest by the Americans
... they only told us after the event.'
The question now
remains why America might have risked such a controversial attack.
`The aim was to send a clear message to Milosevic that he should
not use outside
help in the shape of the Chinese,' said a Nato intelligence
officer.
One source, a
senior Nato air force officer, said: `I would lay money that the
Chinese civilians killed by the bombing were intelligence
officers. The Americans knew exactly
what to hit and how to do it ... far from not knowing the target
was an embassy, they must have been given architect's drawings.'
An intelligence expert told The Observer: `If it was the wrong building, why did they use the most precise weapons on Earth to hit the right end of that `wrong building'?'