July 23, 1999

In a Fatal Error, C.I.A. Picked a Bombing Target Only Once: The Chinese Embassy

By ERIC SCHMITT

ASHINGTON -- The director of the CIA disclosed Thursday that the agency had selected just one target in the 11-week air war over Yugoslavia, and its decision led to the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in May.

"It was the only target we nominated," the director, George Tenet, said at a rare public hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.

After the strike on May 7, which killed three Chinese and wounded at least 20 others, the CIA decided it better go back to its usual business of spying, a U.S. official said Thursday. Reeling from its error, the agency almost immediately suspended other preparations it was making to forward additional targets to help NATO.

Tenet also acknowledged publicly that the CIA had employees and maps that could have told military planners the correct location of the embassy. But they were not consulted, he said.

While Tenet and the deputy defense secretary, John Hamre, recapped a now-familiar litany of bureaucratic errors the administration says caused the accident -- including outdated maps, faulty computer databases and a lack of safeguards -- it was the director's remarks on the agency's selection of targets that offered new insights into an accident that has dealt a stinging setback to relations with China.

From battle tanks to electrical power plants, deciding what to hit in the air war was left largely to military experts in Washington and Europe. But as the air campaign failed to achieve quick success and dragged on longer than expected, the Pentagon feared it would run out of top-notch targets and sought suggestions from the CIA. "We were very much looking for additional targets," Hamre said.

At the CIA, analysts had long suspected the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency was financing the Yugoslav military by selling advanced technology to rogue nations, and jumped at the chance to destroy a stubborn nemesis.

"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," Tenet said.

The inexperience was clear from the start. The CIA team used a flawed technique for locating the arms agency headquarters, Tenet said. It had the correct street address for the arms agency, Bulevar Umetnosti 2. But to pinpoint that location, the analysts used a technique of comparing the number sequence on parallel streets. Tenet said this practice offered only "an approximate location" and was "inappropriate" for selecting aerial targets.

The analysts compounded that mistake by using three maps to locate the arms agency: two Yugoslav commercial maps from 1989 and 1996, and a U.S. government map produced in 1997. None showed the location of the Chinese embassy, which was built in 1996.

Only after the disaster did the CIA turn up in its files two maps that accurately placed the embassy: one was a map handed out by a Belgrade bank that showed a branch office near the embassy; the other listed the embassy and its grid coordinates in its index but did not mark the building on the map itself, an American official said.

Since this was the agency's first time developing a "target package," there was no procedure in place for senior officials to review the work, Tenet said. "This initial misidentification took on the mantle of fact," he said. "There was no cautionary language associated with it."

Military planners never caught the mistake, partly because they assumed the location had already been verified, Hamre said. A final backup also failed when several computerized databases of sites that were off limits to bombing, including embassies, hospital and churches, did not have the current location of the Chinese embassy.

"Database maintenance is one of the basic elements of our intelligence effort, but it is also one that has suffered in recent years as our workforce has been spread thin," Tenet said.

The administration has taken several steps to avoid a recurrence, including a system to update the databases. When bombing cities, Tenet said, a new policy requires that government officials familiar with the location be consulted, and "sign off on what a satellite picture says a site is or isn't."