ABCnews.com 2 April 2001
'The Crown Jewels?' - U.S. Surveillance Aircraft Could Be Intelligence Coup for Chinese
By David RuppeNEW YORK, April 2 - Experts say the U.S. Navy aircraft forced to land on a Chinese island could give China access to some of America's most important and heavily classified technologies for gathering information on potential foreign military adversaries.
The EP-3E Aries II aircraft, which flew out of Okinawa, Japan, is believed to be one of 11 in operation around the world. Contained in two squadrons, they monitor foreign electronic and communications emissions in peacetime and wartime. Crucial information on foreign radars is collected, as is, likely, intercepted transmissions by foreign militaries, possibly giving insight into foreign force positioning and activities.
Some analysis is believed to be performed on board. Large quantities of information are passed on to the Navy fleets and to other military intelligence organizations for decryption, translation and analysis.
The squadrons, known as VQ-1 located in the Pacific region and VQ-2 in the Atlantic, provided combat reconnaissance for operations throughout the 1990s, from Desert Storm to the conflict over Kosovo.
"I would suspect it's probably just about as highly classified as anything we have in the intelligence," says Kenneth Sherman, editor of the Journal of Electronic Defense and a former Navy commander. "The inside is just full of electronic gear for receiving, recording, analyzing, whatever emissions they're looking for. Even the model numbers are classified."
"They're the crown jewels," says Martin Streetly, editor of Jane's Electronic Mission Aircraft. "There's only one thing more classified than this, and those are the satellites."
But just how much knowledge the Chinese can mine from the plane, experts say, could depend to a great degree on whether the crew was able to destroy intelligence data and programs in the computers on the aircraft before the crew was apparently forced off.
China Could Learn U.S. Secrets
Flying out of Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa, the plane was working its way along the coast of China near the island of Hainan. The U.S. crew is reportedly no longer on the aircraft and U.S. officials are now concerned the Chinese will take a long and close look at the systems on board.
The greatest, immediate damage that can be done, experts say, is for the Chinese to learn what America's current capabilities are, and how much Washington knows about Chinese activities in the region.
"You don't want a potential adversary to know how much you know about them. Once they do, they can adjust what they're doing to either change it or to take advantage of what we think we know," says Sherman.
Historians say the United States won the battle of Midway in part because it had secretly cracked Japanese codes.
The equipment on the aircraft is so classified, notes Sherman, that when one of the planes crash-landed at its base in Europe in 1997, the scene was immediately sealed off with armed guards. The plane was taken apart, and the fuselage was loaded into a C-5 transport aircraft without anyone being allowed into it. The entire fuselage of the reconnaissance aircraft was flown to an undisclosed location.
The State Department has declared the aircraft sovereign U.S. territory and three Navy destroyers that had stopped in Hong Kong on Saturday en route to the U.S. West Coast from the Persian Gulf have been ordered to stay in the region.
Crew May Have Tried to Destroy Equipment
But just how much China could learn about U.S. intelligence-gathering priorities and capabilities depends greatly on whether the crew destroyed certain items on the aircraft - specifically, the cassettes that were recording intelligence information during the flight, and the special applications software on the plane's computers, used to manage that information.
"The data tapes of what they collected would be extraordinarily interesting because they would disclose collection priorities, what we're interested in, and collection capabilities, because it would show what we actually picked up," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.
The software, he says, could give China an understanding of U.S. capabilities for locating and identifying multiple targets.
But he says the cassettes and software, while potentially most valuable, were probably the easiest items on the aircraft for the crew to destroy.
"The airplane certainly had an established procedure for destroying the tapes and drives. The crew had certainly practiced that procedure," says Pike.
"There must be some provision for, you know, you press the red button and the entire C-drive goes," says Streetly. It's also likely the crew depressurized the aircraft and chucked code books out the windows over the ocean.
What's left would be the hardware, the machinery, including the EP-3E's sensitive antennas, and that could tell the Chinese a good deal. But it would probably take some time, says James Lilly, former U.S. ambassador to China and also once CIA station chief in Beijing.
"I think in terms of really understanding our full capabilities, it would take them months of unraveling the machinery."
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