-Caveat Lector-
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
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bombing instructions were based on an outdated map.'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.'
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