Is That Why We Bombed the Chinese Embassy?

As soon as I read the news that the new Chinese stealth fighter might have been reverse-engineered from an F-117 Nighthawk shot down during the NATO bombing of Serbia, I wondered the same thing implied (though not explicitly stated) in this Fox News piece: did we bomb the Chinese embassy because they were actively collecting parts and information on the plane?

Western diplomats have said China maintained an intelligence post in its Belgrade embassy during the Kosovo war. The building was mistakenly struck by U.S. bombers that May, killing three people inside.

“What that means is that the Serbs and Chinese would have been sharing their intelligence,” said Alexander Neill, head of the Asia security program at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank in London. “It’s very likely that they shared the technology they recovered from the F-117, and it’s very plausible that elements of the F-117 got to China.”

The Nighthawk was shot down on March 27, 1999, and the embassy was “accidentally” bombed on May 7, 1999.

The US government explained away the bombing, partly, by saying the CIA had done the targeting (starting in March), which was not something they normally did at this level.

I think it is useful to note that this episode is unusual because the CIA does not normally assemble, on its own, target nomination packages containing the coordinates of specific installations or buildings. The targeting support typically provided by CIA is usually at the strategic and planning level, such as analytical judgments on the kinds of targets that are the most important, commentary or specific information concerning targets selected by the military or others, and information that assists the military in identifying future targets.

[snip]

Second, within CIA there were no procedural guidelines for the officers involved in targeting to follow, and there was little senior management involvement in guiding the targeting process. Although our military support organization had been involved in targeting matters, they had not previously been involved in the approval of target nomination packages unilaterally proposed and wholly assembled at CIA. This occasion was precedent-setting.

Though that doesn’t explain why the CIA would have been involved at all, particularly against Yugolavia’s Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, the purported target.

Now, obviously, I don’t know the answer to this question. Though David Axe notes that the military retired the F-117 program long before it has retired similar programs and takes from that the military may have known the plane’s technology had been compromised.

It’s possible the U.S. defense establishment knew that China had cracked the F-117’s secrets. Perhaps accepting that the cat was out of the bag, the Americans reportedly made no effort to retrieve the stealth artifacts from that Belgrade museum. “A lot of delegations visited us in the past, including the Chinese, Russians and Americans … but no one showed any interest in taking any part of the jet,” Zoran Milicevic, deputy director of the museum, told the AP.

And in a move that surprised many observers, in 2008 the Air Force formally retired the entire F-117 fleet, then roughly 40 strong. (A few F-117s are secretly still flying, apparently for tests.) Officially, the F-117 was obsolete. “I mean it’s a 30-year-old concept now,” F-117 pilot Lt. Col. Chris Knehans said, ignoring the fact that almost all U.S. combat aircraft designs are at least that old. It could be that the F-117 had to go because every potential rival knew its secrets.

If Axe is right, it at least reflects some awareness of what China was up to, though that could have come much later. If the bombing had anything to do with the downed Nighthawk, was it successful in achieving its mission (that is, could China’s exploitation of the technology have been even worse)? Or was it a diplomatic failure and a strategic one?

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  1. MadDog says:

    …Though that doesn’t explain why the CIA would have been involved at all, particularly against Yugolavia’s Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, the purported target…

    You’ve got that right!

    The conduct of war planning is a military responsibility. I can’t imagine the military deferring to “target nomination packages unilaterally proposed and wholly assembled at CIA.”

    Not without some heavy-handed politico usurping the military’s responsibility for political purposes as was done by the LBJ White House during the Vietnam war.

    That somehow “target nomination packages unilaterally proposed and wholly assembled at CIA” took place speaks volumes to other than “military” purposes.

  2. MadDog says:

    OT – And EW, if you haven’t already, this Obama administration retooling piece over at the New York Magazine is worth a read:

    The West Wing, Season II

    …After spending much of October talking to people both on and off-campus about what was and wasn’t working, [Rouse] concluded that the White House’s troubles fell into three baskets — the first of them labeled insularity.

    Few perceptions were more widely shared or loudly voiced around Washington than that the Obamans were huffing their own fumes…

  3. BoxTurtle says:

    I don’t think the events are related. On a high level, the only things really classified about the F117 were the materials, the sensor suite, and the software. One small chunk of the leading egde of the wing would give them the materials, and the software has a very thorough autodestruct that I’m pretty sure worked.

    If they had recovered the sensor pod, they would have got that out of the country at once. If it was still there on the date of the bombing, there must have been a bidding war between the Russians and the Chinese for the pod.

    The sensor pod is common amongst almost all active combat aircraft. If there was a weakness compromised, we’d have had to change everything.

    Boxturtle (Not the first embassy we’ve bombed and claimed accident. We’re just a bunch of screwups)

  4. Arbusto says:

    Slightly OT. It is reported the US is very concerned about an increase in Chinese military expenditures. Of course through 2009 China spent 7% of the world total defense spending while we spent 47%. Be afraid, very afraid.

    • onitgoes says:

      See my comment to al75… as you know, it’s great to scare the “small people” into agreeing to fork over loads of US taxpayer dollahs to the gaping maw of the MIC. Morlock is never satisfied! More money please, or you “small people” might be “threatened” by them thar Chinese…

  5. al75 says:

    Nearly all of the USSR’s military technology -from the original atom bomb, metallurgy for fighter jet engines, MIRV warheads – was stolen from western weapons designers.

    Similarly, the advanced nuclear weapons models developed by US designers were stolen by the Chinese.

    The amount of $ we have spent to arm our enemies, and to re-arm ourselves after our successive innovations are copied – is staggering.

    • onitgoes says:

      I hear you, but I also hear that resounding: CHA-CHING!!!! Lotsa money in them thar weapons & military hardware & technology. Who cares who pays for it. Money talks… yadda yadda….

    • RonD says:

      The B-29, too.
      The effectiveness of Soviet/Russian spying against the US is really difficult to overstate. They have been incredibly successful, over the long-term, while US covert action against Russia has consistently been ham-fisted, short-sighted, myopic, brutal, and only occasionally successful even in the short-term.
      Sad. Sometimes the only way to win is to not play.

    • canadianbeaver says:

      People fail to understand technology when they wave the flag. Most US technology, was not made by Americans but people working with Americans. Same can be said for almost any invention ever. Just as the Americans really did not create the atomic weapon (was German scientists). No one nation has ever really developed anything. It’s always bits and pieces from everyone everywhere. Heck the US claims they invented the telephone. Canadians claim it was a Canadian. Truth is he was both.

  6. eCAHNomics says:

    Verrry interesting.

    I have no idea if this is the link, but I never believed that bombing the Chinese embassy was an accident.

  7. mzchief says:

    I recall that event and I thought that blowing up the Chinese government embassy was *not* a mistake. Hard for me to say at this moment *what* the Axis-of-Skeksis was squabbling about among themselves.

  8. papau says:

    My dealings with the CIA/NSA suggest to me that while national security is on the priority list – it is not at the top.

    Corporation protection has been number one since Ike and the Dulles brothers – and today based on last years experiences, I believe it to be still the number one priority.

    So any CIA bombing had a commercial side, most likely. And these folks play rough. Reagan gave the detailed plans (under his watch it went missing and re-appeared in a Chinese tech journal discussion of the improvements being made to the design) of the suitcase atom bomb in 1983 – per Congressional testimony/confession in 1991 about the 1987 Chinese publication. A lot of money depends on continued tension.

    One can see this in the refusal of Obama to push Israel once Hillary had the needed Palestinian agreements in place. The only reason I can find that makes sense of the Obama refusal is the need by the MIC to kept the area in a state of turmoil so as to maximize profit.

  9. eCAHNomics says:

    I also think I remember that the Chinese response was muted, making me wonder what they were up to.

  10. historypunk says:

    This train of thought also explains why NATO bombed the Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian embassies as well. However it fails to explain why NATO bombed the embassies of Hungary, Switzerland, Spain, and Sweden, though given Sweden’s competition with American weapons makers, I can see why they have become a target.

    http://www.cdi.org/adm/1248/transcript.html

  11. RonD says:

    Hi Marcy-
    I don’t think they are more than casually related. I cannot reference this, but the story I got at the time was that the Chinese Embassy was bombed because it was being used as a broadcast facility for the Serbs, and the Chinese refused to shut it down.
    So we shut it down for them.

    • RonD says:

      Okay…here’s a link after all:

      NATO Deliberately Bombed Chinese Embassy

      This, in fact, does link it to the F-117, but in a different way. In this, it is suggested that the Chinese allowed their embassy to be used as a broadcast station as a trade for Serb knowledge of how to fight the F-117, and the Embassy was bombed for this use as a broadcast station.

        • RonD says:

          The cell-phone tech is key, I think. The “huge exploitable flaw” in the F-117 was a vulnerability to a detection method using modified telecom technology that is cheap and available worldwide. As soon as it worked, the F-117 was instantly obsolete, which is why it also made sense to redirect the funding to the F-22, which is a vastly superior aircraft in every respect. Whether the F-22, which was designed before the cell-phone window was discovered, is also vulnerable to this technology is unknown, and I’m sure highly classified.

    • emptywheel says:

      Right.

      But if there was a reason why China was protecting them, it would make it all the more interesting.

      Serbia had something China wanted, badly. China did something that made it a belligerent. Why, is the question.

  12. RonD says:

    Some other information I remember from the time: the technology that knocked down that F-117 was not based on normal radar at all, but used an improvised network of cell-phone towers and signals that enabled the ground crew to track the plane, and hit it with a SAM. In a way, then, the F-117 is a victim of the telecommunications revolution. Unexpected consequences, and all…

  13. lexington50 says:

    It seems improbable that having a piece of an F-117 would compromise the aircraft’s stealth capabilities. It might be useful in giving the Chinese some insight into the technology, which could be used to replicate it and perhaps also to develop countermeasures, but unless the design had some huge exploitable flaw that the Chinese were previously unaware of I don’t see how it could have led directly to the decision to retire the aircraft.

    The official reason for the retirement of the F-117 was to free up funds to purchase more F-22 Raptors, which supposedly incorporates superior stealth technology.

  14. maineindependent says:

    This was an interesting case. Someone I met who worked on military software told me that they thought that the “stealth” fighter had been tracked by Serb radar for about 8 minutes, leaving me to think that the whole “stealth” concept might be……..flawed. I recently learned that in reality, the Serbs were using spotters outside NATO bases (I believe in Italy) and when the stealth fighter took off, they cell phoned it in. Very low tech–very effective.

  15. kurish says:

    @RonD: All due and sincere respect, but your example of why the “effectiveness of Soviet/Russian spying against the US is really difficult to overstate” is the B-29? That’s a seventy+ year-old propeller aircraft that’s been out of service since 1960. The Soviets copied the design not through ace spying, but after appropriating three planes that made emergency landings in the USSR in 1944.

    Also, can anyone provide a credible, sourced citation on the alleged cell-phone tower network/F-117 take down? My searches bring up a lot of conjecture and conflicting rumors, but nothing remotely authoritative. The closest I’ve found is a 2001 Daily Telegraph article–“Mobile telephone masts ‘can detect stealth bombers’“:

    According to military sources, a rough version of a similar system might have been used in Serbia to shoot down an American F117 stealth fighter 40 miles west of Belgrade during the Kosovo campaign.

    A lot of uncertainty in that sentence. The innovation discussed in that article might explain why the F-117 was phased out generally, but I question the cell phone tower saturation of Serbia in 1999, among other things. FWIW, according to Wikipedia, which cites an unavailable Jane’s source:

    According to NATO Commander Wesley Clark and other NATO generals, Yugoslav air defenses detected F-117s by operating their radars on unusually long wavelengths, making the aircraft visible to radar for brief periods. It is also possible that the aircraft was visible due to a disruption of its radar signature caused by open bomb-bay doors. This was the justification given by Colonel Dani in a 2007 interview.

    Cheers.

    • RonD says:

      My B-29 example was just an example of a technology the Soviets reverse-engineered. They were acquired as you say…
      The spying on the Manhattan Project, the long-term penetration of some of the highest levels of American intelligence and government, the KGB officers who went through Gehlen’s organization into NATO and the CIA, Orlov, Ames, the Ohio submarine propellor, and on and on…examples are legion. Imo, the Soviet/Russian intelligence agencies have been far more effective against the US than the American agencies have been against the Russian/Soviet government, apart from an exceptional period in the 90’s.

      Cheers to you as well!

  16. robspierre says:

    This is a clever association–I’d all but forgotten about the embassy bombing. I wouldn’t rule it out just on that basis. However, I think it is unwise to underestimate the high-tech military’s ability to screw up. I also suspect that the retirement of the F-117 also had much to do with the nature of the technology and with Pentagon budgeteering.

    None of our military technology is as clever as the Pentagon and service PR flacks make out in their hoopla-heavy after-action press releases. You have to look in the technical press months later to see what really happened. Laser-guided bombs are amazingly accurate–under ideal conditions. But with a haze or some weird reflections, they can go wildly off target. Or the guy aiming the laser designator may simply be confused and lase the wrong target. Radar or IR targeting displays may work really well with a well-defined target on a test range. But later, in real time, one big square building looks like another. Etc.

    Moreover, I suspect that the military industrial complex is crazy about so-called stealth in large part because the technology has an inherently short shelf life. The F-117 used a faceted designed that scatterd then-standard radar signals by reflecting them away from the radar receiver. Serbian air defense experts realized that skilled operators working together with older, supposedly obsolete radars might be able to track an F-117, at least intermittently. The technique worked well enough to shoot down the F-117. At that point, the F-117 aircraft and its underlying technology were obsolete–and ready for replacement by the next big-budget giveaway to the defense industry.

    While our F-16s and F-15s are 40+ year-old designs, they are still equal to state-of-the-art opponents because they do lots of things: they can fly fast, maneuver hard, and carry heavy loads of newer and newer missiles and bombs under their wings. They can be fitted with new engines, new wings, and new weapons because they are inherently versatile. F-117s can only carry two 1000-lb laser guided bombs of a few particular models, aren’t fast, and can’t maneuver. They sacrificed versatility in favor of an integrated design that was stealthy. Once they weren’t stealthy, they weren’t anything.

    From the Air Force/defense industry point of view, this is as it should be. Rapid obsolescence–real or claimed–means frequent replacement, more business, ever higher profits. The F-117 was indeed retired quickly. But getting it our of the way justified the Air Force F-22 and F-35, plus the now defunct A-12 for the Navy. Proposal that would have enlarged the F-117’s bomb bay to accommodate a more versatile range of new weapons, given it a longer range, or adapted it to Navy needs were furiously rejected by the defense establishment because they threatened these favored, new programs.

    Finally, the supposed US monopoly on stealth has consistently been one of the arguments used to justify its cost, its short service life, and its maintenance problems. So the near simultaneous appearance of Russian (Sukhoi PAK-FA) and Chinese (Shenyang J-20) stealth airplanes HAS to be explained as something that THEY stole from US, by which I mean the services and their favored contractors.

    So, overall, I’m skeptical of any connection between the bombing and the J-20 because I’m skeptical of the claim that it owes more than the general idea to us.

  17. kurish says:

    @RonD (don’t know “reply” isn’t working for me): Misread you on the B-29–my fault but thanks for the clarification.

    Re: Russian v. US spies, I can’t help but wonder how much we don’t know about American espionage successes. But of course that’s just speculation.

    I’ve had some interest in the F-117 shootdown in the past, but never realized how many conflicting or at least incomplete stories are out there (I count 3 or 4 different versions). Prof Foland’s links (above) even raise the possibility that “Chinese radar and materials specialists … assist[ed] the Yugoslavian government in using multi-location radar to detect Stealth aircraft.” Curious. Who knows which of the stories is disinformation, and which is truth…

    • robspierre says:

      I don’t think that there is any great mystery to stealth techniques. Most have been known, in principle, since at least WW2, because they derive from known physical principles. Only the implementation is hard–and expensive. Working approaches take a lot of time and money, but have a short life span. Any technique that works against one set of wavelengths and processing techniques fails against slight variations.

      At present at least, it thus appears that the effort/cost required to achieve stealth is greater than the effort required to defeat it: however it was done, the Serbs managed, in mere weeks, to defeat a technology developed over 20 years by the major super power. So the deployers of stealth techniques face diminishing returns with each new generation of the technology.

      The problem is that stealth technology is inflexible and fragile, not that foreigners are stealing secrets. I don’t think the Serbs had-Chinese help. But I don’t think they needed it either.

  18. sundog says:

    The Chinese wouldn’t have received much stealth tech from the shot down F-117. Knowing the materials used is one thing. Being able to manufacture them is another. Not to mention, the F-117 was 1970’s stealth tech. We have advanced greatly since then; though they’ve probably already stolen that tech through their hacking.

    As for the F-117 shoot down and the embassy bombing, it is my understanding that the Chinese supposedly helped the Serbians with bistatic RADAR technology to shoot down the F-117. One of the many methods stealth aircraft use is to be stealthy is to redirect the RADAR energy away from the aircraft in such a way that it does not reflect back toward the emitter. However, by placing the emitters and receivers at different locations you could triangulate a stealth aircraft’s position; At least one of F-117 era stealth tech. But it depends on the locations of the emitters and receivers wrt the aircraft.

    We made this easy for them to figure out, because the USAF became so comfortable with their supremacy, they didn’t bother changing the routes the F-117 was flying, so it’s flight path became predictable. So that, combined with bistatic RADAR tech, made the shoot down possible. It was my understanding that we then “accidentally” bombed the Chinese Embassy as a result of their aid to Serbia with this technology.

    As for the J-20, their new “stealth” fighter, we’re still not sure if it is a prototype or just a demonstrator. The next few months will reveal that answer. However, it isn’t as stealthy as the F-22, but that is most likely by design/due to requirements.