- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

News

Refugees protest treatment by Macedonians
Kosovar Albanians are clashing with police as refugee camps reach their saturation point.
By Rob Mank
[05/12/99]

Miami's vice
Crack cocaine is almost dead in many cities, but immigrants, suburbanites and teenagers have kept it alive in South Florida.
By Art Levine
[05/11/99]

Cracked up
How did a drug whose addictive properties were once compared to potato chips become the scourge of America?
By Maia Szalavitz
[05/11/99]

Fixin' under Nixon
A new book examines Richard Nixon's progressive drug policies and the deevolution of the war on drugs.
By Lori Leibovich
[05/11/99]

Beijing journal
An American student watches the not-so-spontaneous uprising against NATO and the U.S.
By S.H.
[05/10/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The mistake flabbergasted many intelligence veterans.

"My God!" said one retired intelligence hand. "In my time," he said, "we were required to go out and take pictures of the Chinese embassy. We didn’t rely on maps."

But Frank Anderson, a retired senior CIA official who helped quarterback Washington’s proxy war against Russian troops in Afghanistan, said the absence of Belgrade experts on the CIA’s targeting team was not only possible, but "likely."

The CIA's targeting team is "assuming the people who walk the streets of Belgrade are already there or otherwise engaged" in making the final targeting decision, he said in a telephone interview. "They think they don’t need it [in the room]."

"I would guess on most things like that they’re going to assume that the basic intelligence is right there in their data base" Anderson said. That would be fine, he added, "if all their data was current, which it wasn’t."

Meanwhile other analysts are poking holes in the official explanation of the mistake.

"According to old maps of Belgrade and numerous sources inside and outside Yugoslavia, four years ago the current site of the Chinese Embassy was a vacant lot in a residential area," reported Stratfor, a commercial Web site offering independent military analysis.

"Now the NATO statement that there was no pilot error and the admission that an old map was being used are completely incompatible. If we are to believe both these claims, then we must assume that the [intended] target was a vacant lot."

But satellite photos would have shown pilots that the lot was not now empty, the Stratfor analysts said.

"They would probably have noticed that the empty lot now had a large building on it" before dropping their laser-guided bombs, Stratfor reported. "The old map theory is preposterous."

Late Tuesday, a senior intelligence official began changing the official story, telling the Associated Press that satellite data had indeed contributed to the mistake. Photos showed the targeted Yugoslavia arms agency and the Chinese embassy looking remarkably similar through lenses parked in space.

Defense Secretary William Cohen also told reporters late Tuesday that steps would be taken to avoid repeating the mistake, the second of its kind recently. U.S. Marine pilots in Italy blamed old maps for causing them to hit a ski cable in 1997.

"First, the State Department will report to the intelligence community whenever foreign embassies move or when new embassies are built," he said. "Second, the intelligence community will strengthen the internal mechanisms and the procedures for developing target information. This will include new procedures for updating maps. Third, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency will establish new rapid response procedures for updating critical databases for no-strike targets."

There was no word whether intelligence agents or others with recent Belgrade experience would be included in the process.
salon.com | May 12, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon