THE CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING
By far the most consequential instance of unintended bomb damage in Allied Force occurred on May 7, when three JDAMs intended for the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency were dropped instead with unerring accuracy by a B-2 on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. That colossal blunder was reminiscent of the ill-fated attack on the Al Firdos bunker by an F-117 during Desert Storm, which accidentally killed more than a hundred Iraqi women and children who, unbeknown to U.S. target planners, had been sleeping inside in the false belief that it offered them shelter. The inadvertent bombing of the Chinese embassy, which killed four occupants who happened to be in the targeted portion and sent 26 more embassy staffers to the hospital, became the latest of more than a dozen strikes in Allied Force that had gone awry by that time. Not only did the bombing cause a huge international uproar, it dramatized yet again how seemingly “tactical” errors can have immensely disproportionate strategic consequences. Among other things, the event triggered a diplomatic crisis of the first order between Washington and Beijing, disrupted moves to negotiate an end to the Kosovo conflict, and prompted a politically directed halt to any further bombing of targets in Belgrade for two weeks thereafter.[100]
At least two failures seem to have accounted for the inadvertent bombing. First, CIA officials who nominated the intended target wrongly deduced where it was located in Belgrade. Second, those same officials were unaware that the actual targeted building was the Chinese embassy, which had been moved there from another site four years before. During Desert Storm, target planners almost always had knowledge of all off-limits buildings in and around Baghdad, including foreign embassies, and they put red circles around those buildings on planning maps to ensure that they would not be inadvertently struck. Gulf War planners were also more proactive in updating the no-strike list, to include having U.S. officials contact foreign governments directly whenever there was any doubt about the location of their embassies.[111] In this case, although the target development process most definitely included the creation and continual updating of a “no-strike” list of facilities, locations, and assorted other entities that was duly vetted throughout the intelligence community, U.S. officials admitted afterward that they had relied on an outdated map of Belgrade. Some laid the blame on a budget-cutting decision by the Clinton administration in 1996 to fold the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) into the Defense Department’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which had prompted many of NPIC’s most experienced analysts to quit in protest.
In the immediate aftermath of the blunder, Secretary Cohen said: “Clearly, faulty information led to a mistake in the initial targeting of this facility. In addition, the extensive process in place used to select and validate targets did not correct this original error.”[112] Cohen added that the bombing had resulted not from a mechanical or human mistake but from “an institutional error.”[113] It was later determined that the error had occurred in considerable part because of the intense pressure that was being applied at the time by General Clark for planners to come up with 2,000 suggested targets in Yugoslavia, prompted by the scramble for targets that had commenced once the air war’s first few disappointing nights made it clear that Milosevic was not about to fold quickly as had originally been hoped. It was in this forced atmosphere of trying to find and justify 2,000 plausible targets at any cost that the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division, which had no particular expertise with respect either to Yugoslavia or to targeting, was led to submit the CIA’s first target nomination in Allied Force.
As it turned out, U.S. intelligence had the correct street address for the intended target, which was a Yugoslav weapons-producing agency called the Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement.
Yet when overhead imagery was examined to match up the address with the intended target, responsible individuals at CIA selected the wrong building. The actual target turned out to have been on the same street, only a block away to the south. The map used had been created in 1992 and updated in 1997. It did not, however, show the Chinese embassy at its current location, to which it had moved in 1996. No one in the planning loop had thought to check the matchup of the target address with its presumed location, because no one had any reason to believe that there might be a problem in the making. One midlevel CIA analyst who was familiar with the intended target reportedly “was concerned, raised some questions, and they did not get resolved.” Doubts about the target’s validity also were aired at the working level at USEUCOM, but those concerns were never passed up to more senior levels before the strike.[114] Afterward, in a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse had escaped, NATO officials cited a new “iron-clad requirement” that targets be reviewed by people who had first-hand knowledge of them.[115] Yet despite that belated measure, on the first day after NATO’s bombing of Belgrade resumed two weeks later, attacking aircraft inadvertently damaged the residences of the Swedish, Spanish, and Norwegian ambassadors, the Libyan embassy, and a hospital in which four civilians were killed.[116]
Perhaps predictably when viewed in hindsight, more than a few people around the world came to conclude in the early wake of the Chinese embassy bombing that notwithstanding the U.S. government’s insistent claims to the contrary, the bombing had, in fact, been not only far from accidental, but planned with calculated intent from the very start. Much of the apparent strength of this conspiracy theory stemmed from the fact that the three JDAMs that were dropped by the B-2 had, all too conveniently, landed squarely on that part of the embassy that housed the office of the defense attaché and the embassy’s intelligence cell, the latter of which was widely believed in informed circles to be the single largest Chinese collection center in all of Europe.[117]
One can readily understand how that curious coincidence might have helped energize Chinese allegations, which continue to this day, that the bombing of the embassy was intentional. Yet as much as one might wish to savor the thought that U.S. planners may have been just clever enough to contrive to take out a Chinese SIGINT site that was suspected of providing aid and comfort to the enemy while maintaining a reliable basis for plausible denial, it defies credibility to believe that those responsible for implementing Allied Force, at whatever level such putative machinations may have occurred, attacked the offending part of the embassy with premeditation. Although truth is indeed stranger than fiction on occasion, no coalition of democratic partners—least of all one led by an official Washington that, since Watergate, has become famously reputed for leaking like a sieve at even the slightest hint of high-level impropriety—could have pulled off such a stratagem without it being exposed. Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon perhaps best clinched this point when they wrote that the strongest proof of the groundlessness of the conspiracy theory was that “the attack’s predictable damage—not only to U.S.-PRC relations but even to NATO solidarity—was far too great to justify the military benefit of silencing any Chinese military or intelligence assistance to Serbia that could theoretically have been provided from that building.”[118]
100
The error was also reminiscent of earlier damage to the French embassy in Tripoli, Libya, in 1986 during the joint U.S. Air Force–U.S. Navy Operation El Dorado Canyon against Libya’s ruler, Moammar Khaddafi, caused when the bomb fragmentation pattern from a preceding F-111 forced the trailing pilot to shift course, inadvertently sending his bombs into the embassy. That, however, was an operational error occasioned by the heat of battle, not a planning error committed by target nominators.
101
David A. Fulghum and Robert Wall, “Intel Mistakes Trigger Chinese Embassy Bombing,”
102
Eric Schmitt, “Aim, Not Arms, at the Root of Mistaken Strike on Embassy,”
103
Paul Richter and Doyle McManus, “Pentagon to Tighten Targeting Procedures,”
104
Vernon Loeb and Steven Mufson, “CIA Analyst Raised Alert on China’s Embassy,”
105
Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Admits Its Maps of Belgrade Are Out of Date,”
106
Steven Pearlstein, “NATO Bomb Said to Hit Belgrade Hospital,”
107
Steven Lee Myers, “Chinese Embassy Bombing: A Wide Net of Blame,”
108
Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon,