1999 bombing of a diplomatic mission
On May 7, 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Operation Allied Force), five U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munition guided bombs hit the People's Republic of China embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists of state-owned media and outraging the Chinese public. According to the U.S. government, the intention had been to bomb the nearby Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (FDSP). President Bill Clinton apologized for the bombing, stating it was an accident. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet testified before a congressional committee that the bombing was the only one in the campaign organized and directed by his agency, and that the CIA had identified the wrong coordinates for a Yugoslav military target on the same street. The Chinese government issued a statement on the day of the bombing, calling it a "barbarian act".
In October 1999, five months after the bombing, "The Observer" of London along with "Politiken" of Copenhagen, published the results of an investigation citing anonymous sources which said that the bombing had actually been deliberate as the embassy was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications. The governments of both the U.S. and the U.K. emphatically denied it was deliberate, with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calling the story "balderdash" and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook saying there was "not a single shred of evidence" to support it. In April 2000, "The New York Times" published the results of its own investigation for which, "the investigation produced no evidence that the bombing of the embassy had been a deliberate act."
Right after the bombing, most Chinese believed it was deliberate, and many continue to believe that it was deliberate. On the other hand, according to structured interviews conducted in 2002 of the 57% of Chinese relations experts who believed that the bombing was deliberate, 87.5% did not suspect President Clinton's involvement.
In August 1999, the United States agreed to compensate the victims of the bombing and their families. In December 1999, the United States agreed to pay China for the damage to the embassy, and China agreed to compensate the United States for damage to U.S. property that occurred during the resulting demonstrations in China.
In May 2000, a major U.S.-China trade bill passed the United States House of Representatives which became the United States–China Relations Act of 2000 integrating with China's entry into the World Trade Organization. By June 2000, during a visit to China by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, both sides said that relations between them had improved.
Sequence of events.
In the days before the bombing, an attack folder labelled "Belgrade Warehouse 1" was circulated for command approval. The folder originated within the CIA and described the target as a warehouse for a Yugoslav government agency suspected of arms proliferation activities. In this form, the strike was approved by President Clinton.
It is unclear whether other NATO leaders approved the strike. A report by the French Ministry of Defense after the war said that "part of the military operations were conducted by the United States outside the strict framework of NATO" and that a dual-track command structure existed. NATO had no authority to use any B-2 stealth bomber, which was used to carry out the strike. That the United States was running missions outside of NATO's joint command structure was a source of some contention between the U.S. and other members of NATO, especially France.
According to officials interviewed by "The New York Times", the target was checked against a "no-strike" database of locations such as hospitals, churches, and embassies, but this raised no alarm as the embassy was listed at its old address. Officials said a similar list in the U.K. also had the same error. However, the joint "Observer"/"Politiken" investigation reported that a NATO flight controller in Naples said that on this "don't hit" map, the Chinese embassy was listed at its correct location. The investigation also reported that the coordinates of the Chinese embassy were correctly listed in a NATO computer.
On the night of May 7–8, the strike was carried out by a single B-2 bomber with a crew of two of the United States Air Force's 509th Bomb Wing flying directly out of Whiteman AFB, Missouri. The bomber was armed with JDAM GPS-guided precision bombs accurate to . However, the geographic coordinates provided by the CIA and programmed into the bombs were those of the Chinese embassy away. At around midnight local time, five bombs landed at different points on the embassy complex. The embassy had taken precautionary measures in view of the ongoing bombing campaign, sending staff home and housing others in the basement, but the attack still resulted in three fatalities: Shao Yunhuan (邵云环) who worked for the Xinhua News Agency, Xu Xinghu (许杏虎) and his wife Zhu Ying (朱颖) who worked for "Guangming Daily", both Chinese state media, in addition to at least 20 people being injured. American officials said that some or all of the three who were killed were actually intelligence agents, but the Chinese denied the claim.
Chinese reaction.
The raid caused a dramatic rise in tension between China and the United States. An official statement on Chinese television denounced what it called a "barbaric attack and a gross violation of Chinese sovereignty". China's ambassador to the UN described what he called "NATO's barbarian act" as "a gross violation of the United Nations charter, international law and the norms governing international relations" and "a violation of the Geneva convention". On May 12, 1999, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong passed the "Condemnation of NATO" motion in a rare 54–0 bipartisan vote.
Large demonstrations erupted at consular offices of the United States and other NATO countries in China in reaction to news of the bombing. On May 9, 1999, then-Vice President Hu Jintao delivered a national televised speech calling the act both "criminal" and "barbaric" and that it "has greatly infuriated the Chinese people." He said the unauthorized demonstrations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Shenyang reflected the anger and patriotism of the Chinese people, and which the Chinese government fully supported, but urged against extreme and illegal conduct.
On May 12, 1999, in his first public statement since the embassy bombing, Premier of China Zhu Rongji called NATO 'hypocrites' and stated that the "idea of safeguarding human rights and democracy, as well as opposing ethnic cleansing which they [NATO] are chanting loudly, is only a fig leaf." He also called on the United States and NATO "to make an open and official apology to the Chinese government and the Chinese people."
The protests continued for several days, during which tens of thousands of rock-throwing protesters kept U.S. Ambassador James Sasser and other staff trapped in the Beijing embassy. The residence of the U.S. Consul in Chengdu was damaged by fire and protestors tried to burn the consulate in Guangzhou. There were no reported injuries.
President Clinton's apologies and those of the U.S. State Department were not initially broadcast by Chinese state-run media outlets. The demonstrations continued for four days before the Chinese government called a halt, eventually broadcasting President Clinton's apology on television and ordering the police to restrain the demonstrators.
For a week, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Jiang Zemin declined phone calls from President Bill Clinton, eventually accepting a 30-minute apology call on May 14, in which Clinton expressed "regret" over the incident. Jiang had chosen to leave U.S.-China leadership communications channels unused as he waited for the Politburo Standing Committee to reach a consensus. The time it took for the Politburo to gather necessary information and reach a decision about China's responses motivated Party leadership to revisit a proposal to establish a centralized National Security Commission, although this was ultimately not implemented at the time.
In the aftermath of the American bombing, the Chinese government ordered media outlets not to criticize the American president further and the Communist Party directed to the media to report on the United States in a less hostile manner.39 Generally, these limitations frustrated Chinese journalists.39
Settlement.
By the end of 1999, relations began to gradually improve. In August, the U.S. government made a "voluntary humanitarian payment" of $4.5 million to the families of the three Chinese nationals who were killed and to those who were injured. On December 16, 1999, the two governments reached a settlement under which the United States agreed to pay $28 million in compensation for damage to the Chinese Embassy facility, and China agreed to pay $2.87 million in compensation for damage inflicted to the U.S. Embassy and other diplomatic facilities in China.
Technically, although the $4.5 million paid to the victims and their families came from Department of Defense discretionary funds, the $28 million for the damage to the embassy needed to be appropriated by the United States Congress; China would receive $28m in compensation from the US for the bombing, but had to give back close to $3m for the damage to US diplomatic property in Beijing and elsewhere. The US paid another $4.5m to the families of the dead and injured.
Official investigation and reporting in the aftermath.
Late on May 8, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen and George Tenet issued a joint press release stating neither the aircrew involved nor the equipment were to blame for the incident. The first attempt to explain the bombing came on May 10. William Cohen told reporters "In simple terms, one of our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map". The statement made no mention of the CIA. It was subsequently revealed that the CIA possessed maps showing the embassy.
While U.S. officials then began, on the record, to deflect questions pending the outcome of further enquiries, they continued to brief journalists off the record. For example, also on May 10, Eric Schmitt published an account with most of the elements that were to feature in Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Tenet's later admissions. Schmitt reported that from the grainy aerial photographs that were used the two buildings looked very similar in terms of size, shape and height, and that the distance between them is about .
Media criticism focused on the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) which made an announcement stating that "recent news reports regarding the accuracy of NIMA maps have been inaccurate or incomplete" and that "a hard-copy map is neither intended, nor used, as the sole source for target identification and approval." CIA Director George Tenet later acknowledged that the map used should never have been used for aerial bombing target selection.
Official State Department account.
In June, Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering led a delegation to China to present the U.S. version of events.
According to the official account, CIA analysts knew the address of the Yugoimport office to be Bulevar Umetnosti 2 (2 Boulevard of the Arts). Using this information, they attempted to pinpoint its geographic location by using the known locations and addresses of other buildings on parallel streets as reference points. ("The New York Times" reported that some referred to what was done as "resection and intersection" although Pickering did not use those terms in the statement.)
Parallel lines were drawn from known addresses and locations on a parallel street. With this information it was attempted to reconstruct the pattern of street addresses on Bulevar Umetnosti, which was information unknown to the targeteers. The pattern of street addresses on Bulevar Umetnosti was not as expected, and the targeteer erroneously pinpointed the embassy "located on a small side street at some distance on Bulevar Umetnosti" from the intended target.
Multiple checks designed to prevent attacks on sensitive targets each failed as the location of the embassy had not been updated since the embassy moved to New Belgrade three years earlier. As a result, the bombers took to the air with the coordinates of the Chinese embassy programmed into the bombs on board.
Pickering said that they found no evidence that the embassy was being used to assist Serbian forces, and said that it is not conceivable that any rogue group within the U.S. would have done such a thing. He said that, "Science has taught us that a direct explanation, backed up by full knowledge of facts obtained through a careful investigation, is always preferable to speculation and far fetched, convoluted or contrived theories with little or no factual backing."
George Tenet's statement.
On July 22, George Tenet made