Tuesday, April 3, 2001 4:32 p.m. EDT
Hackworth: Navy Brass Ordered Spy Plane Not to
Ditch, ChiComs Didn't Get Secrets
The pilot of the Navy reconnaissance plane downed after a collision
with a Chinese jet fighter on Sunday was ordered to land on the
Chinese Island of Hainan by the Navy's Pacific Command,
according to military expert Col. David Hackworth.
"The pilot of that aircraft would have, by the time he landed at that
base, been talking to the four-star admiral, [Dennis C.] Blair, the
commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific," Hackworth told WABC
Radio's Sean Hannity late Tuesday.
"He got his instructions from the top guy."
Hackworth said sources inside the military have told him the Navy
pilot "was talking to Pacific Command and he was told to land
there."
The former military consultant for CBS News and Newsweek
explained why the pilot might not have been able to ditch his plane
even if he'd wanted to.
"A lot of folks who are experts on this particular airplane tell me it is
so loaded, it's so heavy with all kinds of gear - spy gear, if you will -
that if it came down it would break apart and the 24 people who
were on the reconaissance mission wouldn't have been able to bail
out."
"Some people say they probably didn't have parachutes anyway,"
Hackworth told Hannity.
Citing "intelligence operators who have flown this airplane and
others like it," Hackworth said that the crew would have destroyed
most if not all of the high-tech hardware on board.
"Standard procedure for when something like this happens and you
have to make an emergency landing is to ditch it in the sea," the
highly decorated Vietnam veteran said.
"While you're coming down, you go through the procedure of
shredding every document, taking the hard drives out of computers
- they're given little axes to break them up."
How likely is it that the crew, under stress, might have failed to
destroy their top secret spy tools? Not very, Hackworth contended.
"There was one officer on the aircraft, a United States Marine - and
you can believe me, he would do his duty as the security officer
responsible for damaging, destroying, breaking up, shredding all of
this high-tech gear."
"The intelligence is not in the equipment that's been destroyed,"
Hackworth added. "It's in the heads of the crew members."
Citing the recent bombing of the USS Cole, the ramming of a
Japanese fishing boat by the USS Greenville and "six other major
accidents," Hackworth said the U.S. military is in a "serious
meltdown."
"And you can track that back to the last eight years of what Clinton
did to our military |
