I wish I had caught that PBS special. On a different topic, here's a report obtained by Jane's under the Freedom of Info Act. No real news here, but if memory serves, this particular plane had just received a full tech update. I hope we've been able to do something in the interim to obviate what the Chinese learned from it.
Top Stories - Reuters
Report: China Probably Saw U.S. Spy Plane Secrets
Thu Sep 11,11:53 PM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!
BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. investigators have concluded that China almost certainly gained access to classified information as a result of a mid-air collision between a Chinese fighter and a U.S. spy plane, Jane's Defense Weekly says in its next edition.
An official U.S. report, obtained by Jane's last week under the Freedom of Information Act, blamed the Chinese F-8 fighter for the April 2001 collision over the South China Sea off China's southern island province of Hainan.
The U.S. report contradicted China's version of the accident which Beijing said was the EP-3E spy plane's fault. The collision killed the fighter pilot, Wang Wei, and soured Sino-U.S. relations just after George W. Bush had become president.
China held the 24 crew members of the spy plane for 11 days and released them only after Washington said it was "very sorry" for the death of the Chinese pilot and the spy plane's landing on Hainan island without permission.
China returned the plane in July 2001.
The report said the spy plane crew had been unable to destroy all classified "materiel" on board in time before making their emergency landing.
"Compromise by the People's Republic of China of undestroyed classified materiel...is highly probable and cannot be ruled out," the report said.
Reuters obtained Friday an advance copy of the Jane's story, which did not say what classified materiel was compromised.
The crew had jettisoned some materiel from the starboard hatch, smashed equipment with an axe and other hard objects and upon landing, hand-shredded classified papers, the report said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry (news - web sites) had no immediate comment.
Bilateral relations have since normalized and China has backed the U.S.-led global war on terror. |
