January 29, 2011
Asia Times
The tearful origins of China's stealth
By Peter Lee
The recent test flight of China's J-20 stealth fighter has occasioned
certain uproar in international security circles, as well as paroxysms of joy
among China's more nationalistic netizens.
Despite no hard information on its stealthiness or its capabilities beyond
the fact that it was able to take off, fly for 15 minutes, and land, the
J-20 is already serving as justification for heightened concern and its
inevitable adjunct, higher military spending, in the United States, South
Korea
and Japan.
>From a psychological standpoint, an interesting sidebar to the J-20 furor
has been the reporting on allegations that China used industrial and
military espionage to develop its stealth
capabilities, perhaps with the implication that China's reactive and
decadent communist system would be incapable of such innovations on its own.
On January 24, an Indian-American engineer who had worked on the B-2
stealth program, Noshir Gowadia, was sentenced to 32 years in prison for
selling
secret military aviation technology to China. The New York Times
characterized the technology, apparently incorrectly, as "stealth missile
technology"; according to the Times of India, the technology in question was
nozzle
technology meant to reduce vulnerability to heat-seeking missiles, rather
than the radar-related cloak of invisibility usually associated with
"stealth".
It is not difficult to view the timing of Gowadia's sentencing (which was
reportedly originally supposed to occur in November 2010 after five years of
imprisonment and a trial that concluded in August 2010 with a guilty
verdict) as an effort to emphasize the tainted character of China's stealth
achievement. [1]
News reports also addressed the possibility that China had successfully
exploited the wreckage of a US stealth fighter to develop its own
capabilities.
During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) campaign against
Serbia in 1999, an American F-117A stealth fighter was shot down. Some wreckage
undoubtedly made it into Chinese hands. Slobodan Lekic and Dusan Stojanovic
of the Associated Press (AP) reported on January 23:
"At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents
crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the
plane
from local farmers," says Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia's military
chief of staff during the Kosovo war.
"We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into
secret stealth technologies ... and to reverse-engineer them," Domazet-Loso
said
in a telephone interview.
A senior Serbian military official confirmed that pieces of the wreckage
were removed by souvenir collectors, and that some ended up "in the hands of
foreign military attaches". [2]
The idea that the United States had not taken adequate steps to secure the
F-117A wreckage and useful technology may have thereby found its way into
enemy hands is apparently rather irksome to the Pentagon.
Elizabeth Bumiller transmitted the US official pushback in the January 26
New York Times article titled "US Doubts '99 Jet Debris Gave China Stealth
Edge":
[I]t's hard to imagine that a great deal of applicable and useful
information could have been culled from the site," said an Air Force official,
who
asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about
military intelligence. [3]
Careful readers will note the conditional remark that little useful
information "could have been culled from the site". There is the issue of what
useful information could have been extracted from wreckage removed from the
site.
There is a link between Serbia in 1999 and the flight of the J-20 in 2011
that is undeniable: the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on
May 7,1999. And the wreckage of the F-117A may have been the crucial
precipitating factor.
It is safe to say that almost no one in China believes that the 1999
embassy bombing was accidental. When the incident is referenced in Chinese
media, the term "mistaken bombing" (wuzha) is often enclosed in quotation
marks,
as in "alleged mistaken bombing".
The official US story has done little to dispel suspicion.
George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), testified
before the US Congress that the US intended to bomb Yugoslavia's Federal
Directorate for Supply and Procurement aka a warehouse suspected of "arms
proliferation activity", but the wrong coordinates were provided to the
bomber, causing five 2,000-pound (909 kilograms) MK-84 JDAM GPS-guided smart
bombs to slam into the Chinese Embassy instead, killing three (identified by
the Chinese as journalists), injuring 20, and gutting the structure.
Amazingly, of the 900 target packages executed during the Kosovo war, it
transpired that the "mistaken bombing" was the only mission developed by the
CIA.
Although the air war was nominally under NATO direction, the embassy
mission (as well as several others) was flown as a strictly US operation using
equipment based in the United States. [4]
A European defense publication reported:
It should be noted that, in an interview with the author, NATO spokesman
Lee McClenny confirmed that the targeting information did not go through JTF
NOBLE ANVIL, or any other NATO structure, in contrast to Tennet's [sic]
official public statements. Instead, the co-ordinates were passed directly
from the CIA to Whiteman Air Force Base, the home of the 509th Bomb Wing,
where it was programmed into the JDAMs. Mr McClenny asserted that the entire
process had remained 'Stateside', hence the failure of NATO staff to 'scrub'
the target to check its accuracy, authenticity and location.
When asked, the CIA again asserted that the story given by Tennet [sic] to
the House Committee was true, but claimed that the targeting information
went from the CIA to the Pentagon to be processed. The Pentagon was only
prepared to say that "some of the F-117 and B-2 missions were used as
'national assets' and therefore did not pass through NATO command structures",
despite the requirement under the NATO charter to clear all missions carried
out under NATO auspices with the NATO general council ... [Previously reported
in Venik's Aviation web site, citing a May 2000 report in Air Forces
Monthly; link no longer valid.]
A joint investigation by the British newspaper The Observer and Denmark's
Politiken made the explosive allegation that the Chinese Embassy had been
intentionally targeted to remove a key rebroadcast station directing the
military activities of Slobodan Milosevic's forces in their struggle to resist
NATO forces.
According to The Observer, a US officer airily dismissed the handwringing
of his NATO associates:
British, Canadian and French air targeteers rounded on an American colonel
on the morning of May 8. Angrily they denounced the "cock-up". The US
colonel was relaxed. "Bullshit," he replied to the complaints. "That was great
targeting ... we put three JDAMs down into the [military] attache's office
and took out the exact room we wanted ... [5]
The story was largely ignored by the US media.
When FAIR, the organization for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, pushed
the New York Times to address the allegations, the paper, as it would do
again in 2011 on the stealth story, obliged the Pentagon by pushing back.
Today, post-Internet, post-Iraq War, post-Judith Miller, the Times'
self-satisfied complacency in dismissing the story has the quaint air of a
different era.
In an October 22, 1999 article, FAIR wrote:
So far, the reaction in the mainstream US media has been a deafening
silence. To date, none of America's three major network evening news programs
has mentioned the Observer's findings. Neither has the New York Times or USA
Today, even though the story was covered by AP, Reuters and other major
wires.
The Washington Post relegated the story to a 90-word news brief in its
"World Briefing" (10/18/99), under the headline "NATO Denies Story on Embassy
Bombing. "By contrast, the story appeared in England not only in the
Observer and its sister paper, the Guardian (10/17/99), but also in their
leading
rival, the Times of London, which ran a follow-up article on the official
reaction the next day (10/18/99). The Globe and Mail, Canada's most
prestigious paper, ran the full Reuters account prominently in its
international
section (10/18/99). So did the Times of India, the Sydney Morning Herald and
the Irish Times (all 10/18/99). The prominent Danish daily Politiken,
which collaborated with the Observer on the investigation, was on strike, but
ran the story on its website. [6]
FAIR and its supporters rattled a few media cages, and got dismissive
replies from the New York Times and USA Today. The Times' Andrew Rosenthal
characterized The Observer article as "not terribly well sourced". In its
rebuttal, FAIR stated:
FAIR contacted journalists at both The Observer and Politiken. According
to The Observer's US correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, its foreign editor, Peter
Beaumont, and Politiken reporter Jens Holsoe, their sources included the
following:
A European NATO military officer serving in an operational capacity at the
four-star level - a source at the highest possible level within NATO -
confirmed three things: (1) That NATO targeted the Chinese Embassy
deliberately; (2) That the embassy was emitting Yugoslav military radio
signals; and
(3) That the target was not approved through the normal NATO channels but
through a second, "American-only" track. A European NATO staff officer at the
two-star level in the Defense Intelligence office confirmed the same
story. Two US sources: A very high-ranking former senior American intelligence
official connected to the Balkans - "about as high as you can get",
according to one reporter - confirmed that the embassy was deliberately
targeted. A
mid-ranking current US military official, also connected to the Balkans,
confirmed elements of the story and pointedly refused to deny that the
embassy had been bombed deliberately. A NATO flight controller based in
Naples
and a NATO intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav radio broadcasts from
Macedonia each confirmed that NATO's signals intelligence located Yugoslav
military radio signals coming from the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. When
they informed their superiors, they were told that the matter would be handled
further up in the chain of command. Two weeks later, the embassy was
bombed. An official at the US National Imagery and Mapping Agency told the
reporters that NATO's official explanation, which involves a faulty map of
Belgrade, is a "damned lie". [7]
Finally, the Times, still coasting on its Pentagon Papers reputation,
replied to one correspondent:
"There is nothing in the distinguished history of the Times - where
reporters have risked their lives, been threatened with jail and indeed gone
to
jail to protect the public's right to know things the government does not
want to get out - to suggest that we would withhold such a story."
The case that the US bombed the Chinese Embassy may still be stamped "Not
Proved", but the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong.
As to why the US might have wanted to bomb the embassy, the theories are
legion.
They all center on the indisputable fact that China was sympathetic to
Serbia and had dispatched a team of intelligence specialists under the
direction of a senior military attache, Ren Bokai (identified in many news
reports
as "Ven Bo Koy"), to get a first-hand look at US technology, capabilities
and doctrine.
One of the JDAMs, as The Observer reported, indeed went right into the
window of the Chinese intelligence directorate, seriously injuring Ren (who was
evacuated on a special plane to China for medical treatment).
It is variously speculated that:
The Chinese Embassy was intercepting NATO radio traffic. China was
monitoring the performance of US cruise missiles (which is what Ren reportedly
said was the case). China was abusing its embassy immunity privileges to
operate a radio retransmission station that on behalf of a Serbian
paramilitary
bad guy. China was testing a new kind of stealth-detecting radar in the
embassy and passing information to the Serbian military. The raid was an
attempt to assassinate Slobidan Milosevic during a visit to the embassy. The
raid was an effort to punish and intimidate China for its support of Serbia.
The most interesting theory is that the US attacked the embassy
to destroy wreckage of the USF-117A that China was planning to ship back
to China.
The F117A had been shot down a few weeks prior to the embassy bombing, on
March 27, 1999, by a Serbian anti-aircraft battery.
Apparently, the F-117A was designed to be stealthy to modern, high
frequency radar but was at least partially visible to the antiquated long-wave
Czech radar operated by the Serbs.
The F-117A crashed in a field outside Belgrade and wreckage was all over
the place. The loss of the plane caused extreme anxiety in the United
States.
A RAND study indicated that the only thing that kept the US from bombing
the wreckage to flinders was the presence of a crowd of government
officials, diplomats, journalists and gawkers at the crash site:
Heated arguments arose in Washington and elsewhere in the immediate
aftermath of the shootdown over whether USEUCOM had erred in not aggressively
having sought to destroy the wreckage of the downed F 117 in order to keep its
valuable stealth technology out of unfriendly hands and eliminate its
propaganda value ... Said a former commander of Tactical Air Command
"I'm surprised we didn't bomb it because the standard operating procedure
has always been that when you lose something of real or perceived value -
in this case, real technology, stealth - you destroy it." ... Reports
indicated that military officials had at first considered destroying the
wreckage
but opted in the end not to follow through with the attempt because they
could not have located it quickly enough to attack it before it was
surrounded by civilians and the media. [8]
[Unless the president happens to be named Obama and an advanced stealth
drone lands, intact, in Iran and despite military requests -as close to
demands as it is possible for ranking officers to make to a president- and he
decides to hand over an entire suite of high tech, free of charge, so that
Islamic sensitivities won't be irritated That is, Obama is a traitor.
BR comment]
As noted above, the Chinese reportedly bought some pieces from farmers;
some found its way to a military museum in Belgrade, where it can be viewed
today (at one time it was reportedly possible to buy souvenir fragments at
the museum gift shop); but much of the wreckage was apparently acquired by
the Serbian government, which distributed - or possibly sold - chunks to its
allies as reward/payment for their support.
In 2001, the Russians confirmed that they had received pieces of the
F-117A and used it to improve the stealth detection capabilities of their
anti-aircraft missiles.
It is not unreasonable to assume that the Chinese got some pieces as well
- despite the efforts of a "Pentagon analyst" to make the case that China's
technological backwardness would disqualify them from any interest in
owning some stealth wreckage.
An article in the September 27, 1999, issue of Aviation Week and Space
Technology reported, "A Russian official said that some parts had made their
way to Moscow, but that the bulk of the airframe was shipped to China," a
claim that "Pentagon analysts" dismissed "because "China ... doesn't have the
industrial capability to benefit from either the design or the systems."
In this context, it is suggestive that the F-117A was rather abruptly
retired in favor of the F-22A Raptor, perhaps because the Serbian shootdown
demonstrated a rather embarrassing lack of stealthiness, and/or access to the
wreckage enabled more effective anti-stealth measures by Russia and China
(it was reported that plans to deploy the F-117A in South Korea were redrawn
after the 1999 incident raised concerns about its vulnerability).
Chinese rumor-mongering on the Internet also tried to fill in the blanks,
and link the F-117A wreckage to the attack on the embassy.
According to an Internet account of "a private encounter with a Chinese
naval officer who was slightly tipsy" (now deleted), the Yugoslavian
government had recovered the wreckage of the shot down F-117 and sold key
pieces of
it to China. The navigation system, fuselage fragments with the Stealth
coating, and high temperature nozzle components of the engine were spirited
into the basement of the Chinese Embassy. Unfortunately, according to this
story, there was a locator beacon inside the INU powered by a battery and,
before the Chinese could discover and disable it, the US military was
alerted to the location of the F-117 fragments and executed the bombing.
It would not be out of the question that the Bill Clinton administration
would bomb the Chinese Embassy to deflect criticism for its handling of the
F-117A wreckage debacle, demonstrate its national security muscularity, and
score some Team America points by pummeling some tangentially-related
Third World asset.
Indeed, this is what happened the next year, in 2000, when an al-Qaeda
attack seriously damaged the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 seamen; the US
cruise-missiled a seemingly innocent pharmaceutical plant in Sudan - then an
al-Qaeda stronghold - in apparent retaliation.
In a memoir published in 2006, China's ambassador to Serbia, Pan Zhanlin,
rather coyly intimated something very important had been extracted from the
embassy in the chaotic aftermath of the attack:
The two comrades in charge of the embassy's important assets were Little
Wang and Little Zheng. One slept in the duty office on the fifth floor, one
slept in the dormitory on the fourth floor. Little Wang pierced through the
dust and smoke and by the light of the flames descended from the fifth
floor to the fourth floor.
At this time, Little Zheng emerged from the bedroom. Little Wang grabbed
hold of Little Zheng and ran back upstairs. Little Zheng had already been
injured and his face was flecked with blood. People who ran into them
urgently asked: "Why are you going back up?" Little Wang replied: "There is
something that needs doing. This is our job."
They picked up four cases of national important assets and battled through
smoke and pierced through flames to get downstairs. The stairwell was cut
off, they stumbled down to the third floor. Ahead of time, the embassy had
made various preparations for an emergency, so these four cases of important
things had already been prepared. If any untoward event had occurred, they
could be picked up and moved immediately. They knew, these things were
more important than life. [9]
"Something more important than life". Stealth wreckage? Pan isn't saying.
Regardless of the motives or mistakes behind the US bombing of the
Belgrade embassy, however, the consequences were significant. Viewed in
retrospect, the bombing can be considered, albeit on a smaller scale, a 9/11
moment
for China.
Pan Zhanlin's description of the attack awakens dark memories of our own.
He conveys the shock and fear as the embassy explodes into flames, "the
loudest sound I ever heard". Survivors found the stairwells blocked by rubble
and fire and desperately improvised escapes down the exterior of the
building using knotted drapes. Pan saw his friends and colleagues stagger from
the ruins of the embassy dazed and bloody, crying out for help.
Amid the chaos everybody ducked in fear of a follow-up attack as NATO
bombers thundered overhead (May 7 was one of the busiest nights for aerial
bombing). Then came the frantic ad hoc attempts to rally the survivors,
account
for the living, and search for the missing.
First responders were initially unable to enter the compound because the
electric gate was disabled when the bombing cut the power; ambulances raced
up to the shattered structure with sirens howling to rush away the injured
willy-nilly; embassy staffers mounted a frantic search through local
hospitals for the injured.
Finally, there was the extraction of the dead; consoling of the wounded;
the grieving; and a defiant patriotic oration.
One JDAM failed to explode and buried itself in the ground near the
embassy foundations; the building was abandoned and the expensive and
dangerous
job of removing the bomb was only accomplished five years later.
Again viewed through a post-9/11 lens, Pan's account also paints a picture
of a privileged Chinese elite that has been stripped of the illusion that
it is immune to attack, and realizing with anger, shame and disgust that at
that moment it is helpless, vulnerable and unable to retaliate.
Reports of the bombing triggered an outpouring of populist and official
Chinese anger that signaled a break from the pre-democracy/pro-US popular
Chinese outlook prevalent during the democracy movement period, and a shift to
the nationalist tone that dominates Chinese opinion today.
Chinese opinion was not mollified by the US apology, accompanied by
Western insistence that the incident was a simple, regrettable mistake.
It should also be noted in passing that Pan's memoir debunks the canard,
spread at the time by Western news reports seemingly anxious to minimize the
destructiveness of the attack, that at night the embassy was empty
(presumably excluding Chinese spooks huddled over their equipment in the
intelligence directory).
In fact, at night the embassy was filled with staffers and their families,
who believed that it was safer to stay at the embassy - whose coordinates
were registered with NATO - than spend the night at their homes as NATO
bombing operations against Belgrade were at their height.
One Chinese legend has a Chinese plane returning dozens of coffins -
instead of the officially acknowledged three - to the motherland. The stealth
wreckage, according to this story, returned to China on the same plane.
In the reported words of the tipsy naval officer ("who spoke with tears in
his eyes"):
"Although some of our people sacrificed their lives, we gained no less
than ten years in the development of our stealth materials. We purchased this
progress with our blood and international mortification."
Premier Zhu Rongji - not given to sentimental public displays - reportedly
wept when he met the plane carrying the victims. Another Internet poster
wrote:
Now we know, and it causes us to appreciate even more profoundly that a
nation, when it is poor and weak, is without recourse and pitiful (How
helpless and evoking bitterness in people's hearts were the tears of Premier
Zhu
Rongji as he wept at the airfield when the remains of the martyrs were
transported back to China).
Whether it was a matter of stealth technology - or the conviction that
China must strive for military parity with the United States in order to secure
its security and render it impervious to insults and intimidation - it is
safe to say that, to a certain extent, the J-20 was Made in America ... via
Belgrade.
Notes
1. _Indian-American gets 32 yrs for selling US secrets_
(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indian-American-gets-32-yrs-for-selling-secrets/artic
leshow/7364862.cms) , Times of India, Jan 26, 2011.
2. _China's new stealth fighter may use US technology_
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110123/ap_on_re_eu/eu_us_stealth_technology_china)
, Yahoo, Jan
23, 2011.
3. _USDoubts '99 Jet Debris Gave China Stealth Edge_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/world/asia/26stealth.html?_r=1&ref=world) ,
New York Times,
Jan 25, 2011.
4. _USMilitary Acted Outside NATO Framework During Kosovo Conflict,
France Says_
(http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/11/world/us-military-acted-outside-nato-framework-during-kosovo-conflict-france-says.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm)
,
New York Times, Nov 11, 1999.
5. _Nato bombed Chinese deliberately_
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/oct/17/balkans) , Guardian, Oct 17, 1999.
6. _USMedia Overlook Expose on Chinese Embassy Bombing_
(http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1766) , FAIR, Oct 22, 1999.
7. _Chinese Embassy Bombing - Media Reply_
(http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1764) , FAIR Responds, FAIR, Nov 3, 1999.
8. _Friction and operational problems_
(http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1365/MR1365.ch6.pdf) , RAND.
9. Click _here_ (http://book.qq.com/s/book/0/4/4990/index.shtml) for text
(in Chinese).
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection
with US foreign policy.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.
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