The US mistakenly bombed China's Embassy in Belgrade.

• China Spurns U.S. Report On Bombing Blunder - By Andrew Browne, BEIJING (Reuters)

• "The old map theory is perposterous." - Stratfor

• Why the Chinese Embassy was Bombed - Jeff Stein covers criminal justice and national defense issues for Salon News. May 12, 1999  

Why the Chinese Embassy was Bombed - Jeff Stein covers criminal justice and national defense issues for Salon News. May 12, 1999

As NATO and the United States continue to deal with diplomatic fallout from Friday's Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Salon News that the CIA team in charge of choosing Yugoslav targets does not include any agents or experts with recent on-the-ground experience in Belgrade.

Speaking on condition of anonymity Tuesday, the official said that no CIA officer with an up-to-date, walking familiarity with the Yugoslav capital was on the targeting team when China's embassy was mistakenly bombed Friday, killing three occupants and injuring 20 more. Nor, apparently, does the CIA haveclandestine spotters in Belgrade helping verify targets picked from maps and satellite photos.

The issue has taken on added gravity because the CIA has admitted it used a partially updated 4-year-old street map and "educated guesses" to select the target, which was thought to be a Yugoslav arms agency. In this case, the maps did not show that China had vacated its old property and built a new embassy elsewhere in 1996, even though American officials, from the U.S. ambassador to the semi-public chief of the CIA mission, frequented the embassy for events. The U.S. embassy in Belgrade was closed and its staff evacuated March 24.

As the primary intelligence agency among U.S. civilian and military information-gathering organizations, the CIA takes the lead role in supplying targets to NATO planners. In response to aquestion Monday, a senior CIA official said the CIA alone had selected the mistaken target.

The bombing tragedy, along with recent espionage revelations, has severely strained U.S. relations with China. It has also threatened to derail a possible solution to the Kosovo conflict proposed last week by the G8 nations.

Asked whether any CIA personnel with recent Belgrade experience were consulted on the bombing, the official, who often explains the spy agency's policies to reporters, told Salon News, "In connection with this particular decision targeting that building, I would not make that assumption -- no."

"In this case," he added in a second conversation seeking clarification, "it did not include someone who had been in Belgrade very recently."

Neither the CIA's recent chief of operations in Belgrade, nor any of its Belgrade-based spy handlers, who have walked the capital's streets and frequented its offices, art galleries and cafes, as well as its embassies, were assigned to go over the selected targets, he said. No one at the CIA with an eyeball familiarity with Belgrade is working on the target list.

"In this instance the answer is no," the official repeated on condition of anonymity. "This was a case where the people who identified that target had not recently been to Belgrade."

Asked whether the CIA would change the composition of its targeting team as a result of the mistake, the spokesman declined to answer.

It could not be learned whether other U.S. military and intelligence agencies excluded Yugoslav experts from their targeting teams. But other agencies involved in the targeting review process, from the Pentagon to NATO, failed to catch the CIA's initial error, the official pointed out.

"It was a team effort in the sense that there were a number of opportunities to correct this error and it didn't happen," he said. "There have been a number of suggestions laying the blame squarely at the CIA. There's a pretty elaborate review process between target selection and hitting the target, and it can be fogged at any stage of the process.

"The bottom line is that there's plenty of blame to spread around," he said.

    "The old map theory is perposterous."

"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."

    China Spurns U.S. Report On Bombing Blunder - By Andrew Browne, BEIJING (Reuters)

China rejected Thursday U.S. envoy Thomas Pickering's explanation that the bombing of Beijing's embassy in Belgrade was a tragic mistake caused by a series of intelligence blunders.

"The Chinese side refuted this report and so far the explanations by the U.S. side are not convincing," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said in a statement.

She repeated a demand for punishment of those responsible for the May 7 bombing, which killed three Chinese journalists and sparked nationwide anti-U.S. protests, and said Beijing wanted compensation.

Pickering was sent by President Clinton to try to shake the Chinese of their conviction that the bombing was deliberate, and try to patch up shattered relations.

But he was rebuffed by Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan in an all-day meeting Wednesday.

The White House Thursday said it hoped Beijing would eventually understand the bombing was an accident.

"It's our hope that once China has had a chance to review and absorb the information that they'll understand that this was a tragic accident," White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, in Paris with Clinton, said.

China has specifically linked its willingness to resume negotiations on its entry to the World Trade Organization to the outcome of Pickering's mission.

It broke off WTO talks, and froze military exchanges and a human rights dialogue, after the bombing.

But Chinese Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng made clear that China did not intend to reopen talks.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted Shi as saying it was "not the proper time now to resume the WTO talks with either the United States or the European Union."

"Only after the U.S.-led NATO has made a response satisfactory to China and a good atmosphere is reinstated can the talks be resumed," he told visiting British trade minister Stephen Byers.

Xinhua said Pickering explained there were three basic errors which led to the embassy becoming a target in NATO's air war against Yugoslavia.

The intended target was a Yugoslav military procurement office, but two Yugoslav and one American map misplaced the Chinese embassy, it quoted Pickering as saying.

U.S. military databases had not been updated with the mission's location and the target review system failed to turn up the error, he said.

Pickering stopped short of promising punishment, Xinhua said, but did not rule it out.

He said the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department were still interviewing people involved and "it will be determined whether any disciplinary action will be taken."

Xinhua also detailed China's rebuttal.

It said China believed it was "impossible" for NATO not to know where Beijing's mission was and that the precision with which the embassy was destroyed proved "the U.S. side had a very detailed knowledge of the building structure."

Analysts were divided on whether China's rebuff dealt a fatal blow to its chances of entering the WTO this year. Some said vital momentum had been lost, while others said China would back down and reopen talks because it was in its own best interests.

Failure to gain membership before a new global round of trade talks begins in November could mean a delay to Chinese membership of several years.

Pickering, in a statement before heading back to Washington, gave no insight into his meetings, but he said: "We look forward to further productive discussions with China in the mutual interests of the two countries."

Xinhua's story of Pickering's meetings was broadly in line with an account offered by a State Department official to selected U.S. reporters.

"It may be in the end that we have to essentially agree to disagree," the U.S. official was quoted as saying. But, the United States was "hopeful that after a period of time, we will get back more or less to normal relations with China."

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang said the ball was in the U.S. court.

"It is up to the one who ties the knot to untie it. Whoever started the trouble should end it," she said.

The embassy bombing sparked three days of violent protests outside the U.S. and British missions in Beijing. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of other major cities. The U.S. consul's residence in Chengdu was torched.

Diplomats had predicted Beijing would reject any explanation of the bombing as an error, partly because public opinion would not allow it.

However, one Western diplomat said China's rebuff to Pickering did not necessarily mean that ties with the United States would remain in the deep freeze.

"They don't want the relationship to fall to bits, that's been clear from what's being said," the diplomat said.

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