from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Spy vs. Spy CIA Fires Officer Blamed for China Embassy Bombing Sure it was a mistake. Sure. WASHINGTON, April 8 -- The Central Intelligence Agency has dismissed a mid-level officer whose targeting error was blamed for the American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during NATO's air war against Yugoslavia last year, an agency official and a lawyer said today. Six other agency employees, including a senior official and four supervisors, also received administrative punishments from the director of Central Intelligence, George J. Tenet, for their roles in approving the target, which officials have said was intended to be a Yugoslav military supply headquarters, the agency official said. In punishing the employees, the agency acknowledged that blame for the bombing fell on a range of people and spanned several levels of responsibility. Within hours of the attack on the night of May 7, officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. insisted that it was an accident -- the result of simple human error. The attack badly derailed relations between the United States and China, provoking stone-throwing mobs to swarm the American Embassy in Beijing and producing diplomatic strains that still lingers. But it was only on Thursday, 11 months after the bombing, that the agency began to punish those held responsible, dismissing the officer blamed for the targeting. The bombing of the embassy occurred during NATO's 78-day air war. The attack, which killed 3 Chinese and wounded 20 others sleeping in the basement for protection, exposed deep doubts in the alliance over the wisdom of its strategy and the susceptibility of even the most advanced American military weaponry to human error. A senior Chinese general visiting Washington in late January demanded to know when those responsible would be punished. Today, Under Secretary of State Thomas R. Pickering met at the State Department with China's ambassador, Li Zhao Xing, to inform him of the dismissal and other punishments. Agency officials informed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on Friday. "The Chinese side has been informed of this decision, but at this point we don't have any information on what kind of response the Chinese are going to make, and any kind of response would have to be made in Beijing," a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy said today. A spokesman for the C.I.A., Bill Harlow, issued an unusual public statement today -- and at the unusual time of a quiet Saturday -- announcing that Mr. Tenet had taken "a number of actions" as a result of an internal review of the events that lead to the bombing. The statement did not mention what actions Mr. Tenet had taken, though an agency official and the lawyer for one of the employees later described them generally. Mr. Harlow declined to identify those punished, citing privacy and security concerns. Although only one officer was dismissed, the statement attributed wide blame for what it said were a series of procedural errors in approving a target that turned out to be fundamentally wrong. "Numerous C.I.A. officers at all levels of responsibility failed to ensure that the intended bombing target -- the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement headquarters -- had been properly identified and precisely located before C.I.A. passed a target nomination package to the U.S. military for action," the statement said. Roy W. Krieger, a lawyer representing one of the supervisors who received a letter of reprimand, said it was "manifestly unjust" to assign blame to individuals when "the failure was systemic." "It's shameful that the C.I.A. caved in to political pressure to provide scapegoats," Mr. Krieger said tonight. "The agency has already publicly admitted that the map provided to the officers contained errors absent which the Chinese Embassy would not have been mistakenly targeted. These officers were asked to improvise and did their best with the tools provided to them." According to administration, defense and intelligence officials, the bombing was caused by a fundamentally flawed process for trying to locate the directorate's headquarters in the New Belgrade section of the Yugoslav capital. Armed with only an address, 2 Bulevar Umetnosti, the officer who was dismissed used an unclassified military map to try to pinpoint the building's location, based on a limited knowledge of addresses on a parallel street. The officer, who wrongly assumed Belgrade's street addresses were numbered as uniformly as, say, Manhattan's, ended up targeting the Chinese Embassy, which is on a frontage road nearly 1,000 feet from the supply directorate that was the intended target, the officials said. On the map, which the National Imagery and Mapping Agency produced in 1997, the building that turned out to be the embassy was not identified. Instead, the map showed the embassy in its former location in central Belgrade. After a location was identified, the target was discussed during at least three meetings among C.I.A.officials, none of whom, evidently, questioned the identification process, the officials said. The target was then turned over to Pentagon officials, who, also without questioning it, put it on a list of targets to bomb in Belgrade. It was the first and last target the C.I.A. selected during the war, Mr. Tenet testified last year. Today's statement said the agency "lacked formal procedures for preparing and forwarding target nomination packages" to the American military. It said several steps had been taken to address "organizational problems that contributed to the accidental bombing," but then declined to discuss them, saying they were secret. It was not clear why the agency waited 11 months to punish those it held responsible for the bombing. The agency's inspector general completed an investigation of the targeting process in July. Mr. Harlow would say only that Mr. Tenet acted after a long review was completed. Because none of those punished were identified, it was not possible to reach the dismissed officer or any of the others for comment. The six who retained their jobs -- some of whom operate under aliases because they are involved in covert activities -- received administrative punishments that varied from an oral admonishment to a letter of reprimand that includes a one-year prohibition on promotions, raises or other special recognitions. The agency official said Mr. Tenet had singled out one individual for praise: another mid-level officer who raised concerns about the targeting in the week before the strike. That officer called others at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and the NATO task force in Naples responsible for orchestrating the bombing runs. But his concerns were never brought to the attention of senior officials who might have been able to call off the strike. The New York Times, April 8, 2000 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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