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| THE WRONG TARGET | |
 May 10, 1999 
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President Clinton apologized for NATO's accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, an act that has provoked violent protests outside the U.S. embassy in Beijing. After a report on the bombing's impact, Phil Ponce talks with Newsweek's national security correspondent John Barry about the bombing.
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: Then this afternoon White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said things at the American embassy were less chaotic.
REPORTER: The ambassador is not trapped at the embassy? JOE LOCKHART: No. The ambassador has chosen at this point to stay because there's important work to do there. |
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| China calls for a formal apology. | ||||||||||||||
 BETTY
ANN BOWSER: The Chinese government said it was suspending talks with the
United States in two key areas: human rights and arms control. Officials
also demanded a formal apology for the bombing, and in Washington, President
Clinton gave the second one in two days.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: But the Chinese people aren't being told about the
apologies. Instead, state-run television showed pictures of the inside
of the Late this afternoon in Washington, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced results of a preliminary investigation into the incident. WILLIAM COHEN, Secretary of Defense: NATO had not intention of hitting
the Chinese embassy. This tragedy happened because a number of systems
designed to produce and to verify accurate data failed. What happened?
While our initial investigation is still very preliminary in nature,
in simple terms, one of our planes attacked the wrong target because
the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map. The correct
target was a federal directorate for supply and procurement, a key part
of Yugoslavia's military machine. There were several mistakes made in
identifying and locating this target. First, they failed to correctly locate the target on their maps. The procurement directorate was near the building they had targeted. Second, the building that they did target turned out to be the Chinese embassy, but their maps inaccurately located the embassy in a different part of Belgrade. This is important because if the map had correctly depicted the location of the Chinese embassy, two things would have happened: We would have known that we had improperly located the procurement directorate and NATO would have disapproved the target because embassies are on a list of "no strike" targets. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Meanwhile, Russian Balkan envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin arrived in Beijing this evening. China and Russia both have veto power on the United Nations Security Council. |
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| Out-of-date database, maps to blame. | ||||||||||||||
| JIM LEHRER: More on the US explanation of the Chinese embassy
bombing now and to Phil Ponce.
PHIL PONCE: And for that, we're joined by John Barry, national security correspondent for Newsweek magazine.
JOHN BARRY: It was a 1992 base map, but they'd updated it in 1997, and it seems to have gone through some sort of revisions in 1998. But what the two senior intelligence officials who briefed on background after Secretary Cohen said was what it's possible to exaggerate the importance of the map. What was really important was the database, which had the details of the addresses of all the targets and all the off limits places like embassies and hospitals and so on in Belgrade, and that problem was that the database, itself, was inaccurate, so when they fed the database onto the map, they had the Chinese embassy at the wrong address. PHIL PONCE: So, the -- again, clarify -- the connection between the database and the map?
PHIL PONCE: And why was it that the database was not current, and why was it that the map was not current? JOHN BARRY: Two separate questions. The database wasn't current for reasons we don't quite know. It seems from Secretary Cohen's statement that among the review actions he's called for, he's actually had the State Department inform the intelligence community every time a foreign embassy moves in any foreign capital. It seems as if there isn't or wasn't any sort of hard and fast rule about who is meant to tell the intelligence community about changes of address by embassies. That's point one. Point two is that when you come to why the -- why the target -- that is, the Yugoslav arms supply agency, the federal directorate, was misidentified on the city map in the first place, the answer appears to be very simple, which is that they had the correct address for the arms agency, but when they came to apply that address to the overhead map they had of Belgrade block by block they just got the wrong address; they just got the wrong block. They were triangulating it from other known blocks with known addresses, and they just appear to have done a wrong piece of, you know, go left here two blocks, go right here, they just got it wrong, that was all. |
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| Responsibility spread amongst multiple agencies. | ||||||||||||||
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JOHN BARRY: That belongs to two people. It belongs to the two institutions: one is the CIA, and the other is a relatively new body called the National Imagery & Mapping Agency, NIMA, which was formed in 1996, by putting together various other imaging agencies, including the CIA's imagery section. PHIL PONCE: And when the secretary talked about systems that failed, what kind of systems was he talking about, systems that would what, double-check what the CIA did and what this NIMA did? JOHN BARRY: It's very unclear, and we tried to explore that with the
two intelligence officials after the Cohen briefing. It's very unclear
what the checks were. It is clear that once the -- it is clear that
the first step was to assign -- find the city block where the target
is and to derive from that very precise geographical coordinates for
what the target was. It's then clear that there's a serious of review
steps which look at other really sensitive targets like hospitals, the
embassies very close by, or what about the collateral damage, all those
questions. And all those systems appear to have failed, except that
it isn't clear that anybody ever goes back PHIL PONCE: So it's unclear whether or not there's actually somebody on the ground who, what, eyeballs a potential target? JOHN BARRY: No, that's a different question. It's clear that there isn't and there wasn't in this particular case somebody on the ground who eyeballs. They acknowledge that, and indeed, the civilian senior intelligence officials said that from now on he thought that would be a pretty ironclad requirement, that is, that they would actually get someone who is a sort of recent expert on Belgrade to say does it look to be the right city block, but they haven't done it up till now. PHIL PONCE: And you alluded to the corrective steps? What are the kinds of corrective steps that the - that NATO is going to take? JOHN BARRY: Well, it went to NATO because all this targeting was done by US resources, because only the US has the overhead resources to basically draw up these map.
JOHN BARRY: Yes. NATO had no independent input at all. This was an entirely US intelligence-run operation, and among the other corrective steps that the Secretary mentioned, apart from having the State Department tell the intelligence community, he mentioned having the Intelligence community somehow improve its procedure for trying to find out about drastic changes, but it wasn't clear how they're going to do that. And he also talked about having the Intelligence community set up what he called some fast reaction team. But, again, it was quite unclear what he means by that. My sense is that they, themselves, don't quite know yet what to do, because, as the later intelligence officials' briefing said, it's only 48 hours since this disaster, and they themselves haven't yet sorted out precisely what the cause of the problem was. Afterwards, in the corridor, one official I was speaking to, said that
one of the problems - said that there were two other problems - one
was that the target list that NATO is hitting has been much expanded
over the course of his air campaign. It started with a hundred PHIL PONCE: John Barry, thank you very much. |
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BETTY
ANN BOWSER: For the third day thousands of angry demonstrators in Beijing
protested the accidental NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
Friday night. They threw rocks, paint, and eggs at the American embassy,
while Ambassador James Sasser and other diplomatic personnel were trapped
inside. At one point the 
Americans
burned documents fearing demonstrators would break in. Protesters dragged
and kicked a life-sized dummy of an American soldier with the US flag
on its chest and set it on fire. In Washington, Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright said the Chinese government seemed to approve of the protests.
MADELEINE
ALBRIGHT, Secretary of State: In terms of the support the vice president
of China made a statement of in which he in fact said that the demonstrations
could be carried on within legal means. That is definitely an indication
of their support for what is going on. But at the same time he said
that they -- our facilities would be protected, as well as our diplomats.
JOE
LOCKHART, White House Spokesman: I think at this point it's considerably
calmer than it was yesterday. The embassy personnel, both in Beijing
and around the country, are able to move in and out of the embassy again.
We've received assurances, both in Beijing and from local governments
around China, that they will work with us, as they have, in providing
the necessary security.
PRESIDENT
CLINTON: I have already expressed our apology and our condolences to
President Jiang and to the Chinese people. And I have reaffirmed my
commitment to strengthen our relationship with China. But I think its
very important to remember that this was an isolated tragic event, while
the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, which has led to the killing of thousands
of people and the relocation of hundreds of thousands is a deliberate
and systematic crime. Until NATO's simple conditions are met, therefore,
the military campaign will continue.
embassy
where three Chinese journalists died and at least 20 others were wounded.
And it showed the father of one of the female victims weeping over her
casket. 
John,
you were at Secretary Cohen's news conference, and you were also at
a background briefing. The Secretary said that it was an outdated map.
How old of a map was it?
JOHN
BARRY: The database contains the addresses of all of one, the targets,
the interesting places in Belgrade you want to hit, and secondly contains
the addresses of people you don't want to hit. And for some reason,
the Chinese embassy, the move of the Chinese embassy, which came in
1996, did not turn up on the database.
PHIL
PONCE: Whose responsibility is it to gather this basic information,
whether it's for the map, or whether it's for the database?
PHIL
PONCE: So everything NATO was relying on came from the United States?
targets; now we're at two hundred and seventy targets; and that this
particular target was putting in a hurry as part of the expansion of
the target base. And the second problem is that there has been really
very significant personnel upheaval in NIMA and among the photo intelligence
and photo analyst people as a result of organizational changes, and
they've simply found themselves very, very stretched in personnel terms.