China Embassy Reportedly Hit Despite Analyst

A mid-level intelligence officer assigned to the CIA persistently questioned the targeting of a building that turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, but his concerns went unheeded inside the spy agency and at the U.S. military’s European Command, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday.

“I’m not sure that’s the right building,” the senior official quoted the analyst as saying.

Although NATO war planners say they meant to strike the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement, American B-2 bombers instead destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 8, killing three Chinese civilians, wounding more than 20 others and causing strains in U.S.-Chinese relations that still have not been repaired.

Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering traveled to Beijing last week and gave the Chinese government a formal, detailed explanation of how the building was mistakenly targeted. But Chinese officials, who have suggested that the United States deliberately bombed the embassy, called aspects of Pickering’s explanation “not logical” and the failure to detect errors “inconceivable.”

The analyst’s warnings are noted in a classified internal report by the CIA’s inspector general, which has not been made public but has been given to some members of Congress.

According to a high-ranking State Department official, an intelligence officer got the correct address of the Yugoslav arms procurement agency from the Internet but then used the numbering of buildings on parallel streets to mistakenly identify a spot on a map of Belgrade. He took that map to an expert in aerial photography who determined coordinates for the building. The bombs accurately hit those coordinates, which turned out to be the Chinese Embassy. A cross-check of various databases listing sensitive sites, such as schools, hospitals and embassies, failed to catch the error because the data had not been updated after the Chinese Embassy moved in 1996.