On April 17, the New York Times published the results of its investigationinto the May 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The article, which reveals many new details about the bombing, should be viewed by media activists as a welcome development in the effort to shed journalistic light on the incident.
Last October, and again in February, FAIR issued action alerts asking readers to urge U.S. newspapers– the New York Times in particular– to follow up on reporting by the London Observer and the Danish newspaper Politiken. NATO military sources quoted in those papers had alleged that the U.S. deliberately bombed theChinese embassy after learning that it was transmitting Yugoslav army radio signals. Dozens of readers contacted the Times, calling for an investigation into the bombing.
The Times‘ new article appears to be the product of a serious investigative effort; reporter Steven Lee Myers spent over a month in Europe conducting interviews with NATO and other officials. The piece recounts what Myers’sources characterize as a series of mistakes that ultimately led to the embassy strike. The investigation, Myers writes, “produced no evidence thatthe bombing of the embassy had been a deliberate act.”
At the same time, Myers acknowledges that the story his U.S. sources tell is an unlikely one, characterizing their chronology as a “bizarre chain of missteps” leading to what they call a mistaken attack. Myers ends his report on a note of skepticism, citing a Republican member of Congress who had been briefed by Pentagon and CIA officials: “In the end, he said he was confident in their assurances it had not been a deliberate strike. He paused, then added, ‘unless some people are lying to me.'”
In an interview with FAIR, Times foreign editor Andrew Rosenthal said it was understandable that the Chinese would think the bombing was deliberate, since the CIA’s explanation is, in his words, “bizarre.”
According to the Times‘ account, although the CIA has its own targeting unit, it was instead the agency’s Counter-Proliferation Division (CPD), “a small office whose focus [is] the spread of missiles and nuclear, chemical,and biological weapons,” that proposed the embassy target. The CPD has no experience or expertise in targeting or in the Balkans. It nominated the target on its own initiative, apparently without being solicited by NATO or the Pentagon.
Although the Times does not mention it, the CPD is a covert operations unit, located within the CIA’s Directorate of Operations rather than its Directorate of Intelligence. In a 1997 report to Congress, CIA counter-proliferation analysts singled out China as “the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction-related goods and technology to foreign countries.” Counter-proliferation officials have been embroiled for years in a fight with the Clinton administration over its policy of “engagement” with China.
The Times‘ sources say that the CPD’s intended target, located near the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, was the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement (FDSP). The targeting was done by a CPD analyst using an unclassified 1997 map of Belgrade provided by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). The map, which was not intended to be used for aerial targeting, did not identify street address numbers.
The Times‘ sources claim that the analyst misidentified the embassy as the FDSP when he attempted to pinpoint the FDSP’s address on the map by extrapolating from addresses on parallel streets. “To target based on that is incomprehensible,” an official told the Times.
While the Times‘ sources say the aerial photographs of the site provided by a NIMA official– which showed the Chinese embassy– raised no questions at the CIA, a senior intelligence official told the Times that “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.”
On his own initiative, the analyst then downloaded a targeting form from a secure Pentagon computer, filled it out and sent it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff “appearing to be a more advanced proposal than it was,” according to Myers. The Joint Chiefs never conducted a thorough review of the target; “the reasons are not clear,” Myers writes. All of the Joint Chiefs refused interviews with Myers, who is the Times‘ Pentagon correspondent.
Eight days before the embassy was struck, another CIA analyst tried to prevent the bombing from taking place. He had no authority to review targets– “or even to know what they were”– but he called the NIMA official, telling him he had “heard informally” that the FDSP’s actual location was 1,000 yards south of the targeted embassy building. The NIMA official tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting between the two officers.
A few days later, NIMA provided the skeptical CIA officer with six additional images of the building, which confirmed to him that the building was not the FDSP. At that point, the CIA officer raised his concerns with military officials in Naples. According to those officers, he “did not make his questions…sound grave enough to remove the target from the list.”
In the end, despite its supposed value as a target, the FDSP was never bombed.
As FAIR reported in a previous action alert, the Observer and Politiken investigation alleging that the strike had been deliberate was based on the testimony of several unnamed– mostly European– NATO military officers. Last November, FAIR criticized a Washington Post investigation that concluded the strike was accidental, because the reporter, William Arkin, had interviewed only U.S. air staff– ignoring the fact that theObserver/Politiken story was based on European officials pointing accusingfingers at the U.S. military.
According to the Times, “more than 30 officials in Washington and in Europe” were interviewed for Myers’ article. Interviews in Europe were conducted “at NATO offices in Brussels, Mons, Vincenza, Italy and Paris.” Times foreign editor Andrew Rosenthal declined to provide FAIR with an estimate of how many of those NATO officers were Americans and how many came from European countries.
None of the unnamed officials quoted by the Times was identified in the article as being European, although Gen. Jean-Pierre Kelche, France’s chief of defense staff, was quoted by name saying he had not objected to the bombing because he had been told the target was an arms storage facility. According to the Observer and Politken, all their European sources insisted on anonymity since they would have been “instantly” fired if named.
