The Dallas Morning News April 4, 2001, Wednesday
Bush warns China of damaging ties
He says crew is well, fast release vitalBy Richard Whittle
WASHINGTON - President Bush warned Beijing on Tuesday that its failure to release a Navy surveillance plane and its crew could leave a mark on U.S.-China relations.
"This accident has the potential of undermining our hopes for a fruitful and productive relationship between our two countries," Mr. Bush said in a statement from the White House Rose Garden. "To keep that from happening, our servicemen and women need to come home."
China let U.S. officials meet with the crew. But the fate of the 24 Americans and the aircraft's secret surveillance gear remained unclear.
"They are in good health, they suffered no injuries, and they have not been mistreated," the president said of the crew after talking by phone with Army Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, the U.S. Embassy defense attache in Beijing who met with them.
But Mr. Bush expressed frustration with China's refusal so far to free the U.S. military personnel and their EP-3E reconnaissance plane. The Navy plane made an emergency landing Sunday on Hainan island after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet that had been shadowing it.
"We have allowed the Chinese government time to do the right thing," Mr. Bush said. "But now it is time for our servicemen and women to return home, and it is time for the Chinese government to return our plane."
Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said military officials were worried that the Chinese might be exploiting the opportunity to study the EP-3E's computers and electronic eavesdropping devices.
"It is, indeed, sensitive," Rear Adm. Quigley said. "It [has] capabilities and limitations that we would not like to share with others. So yes, we're concerned."
The U.S. ambassador to Beijing, Joseph Prueher, said on ABC-TV's Good Morning America, "We have every reason to think the Chinese have been all over the airplane."
Under standard procedures, Rear Adm. Quigley said, the crew should have used the 20 minutes or so between the collision and their emergency landing on foreign soil to destroy as much of the plane's equipment as possible. But he said it was unclear whether they were able to do so.
"We don't have knowledge of the activity on board the aircraft," Rear Adm. Quigley said. "The aircraft commander's principal motivation after the collision was safely landing the plane."
If the plane's flight condition allowed it, he said, the rest of the crew would be expected to erase computer tapes and hard drives, shred classified documents and "actually smash equipment" as called for by standard "emergency destruction procedures."
"These are practiced on a regular basis" for all military aircraft and vessels, Rear Adm. Quigley said.
"You do an inventory of the equipment you have on board your vessel or your aircraft to ascertain which pieces of equipment would be most valuable to a foreign government in learning about our capabilities and limitations," he said. "You then try to devise a plan" for destroying it in an emergency.
John Pike, director of the defense policy group GlobalSecurity.org, said the precise equipment aboard the EP-3E is secret but includes high-speed tape recorders that record onto computer-tape cassettes, special signal processors and computers at 19 consoles where crew members work.
Mr. Pike said it was a fair assumption that even with only 20 minutes to work in flight and a few minutes while the plane taxied to a halt, the crew had time to destroy the most valuable items the Chinese might want to see.
"The most important stuff would be the cassette tapes with the recorded intelligence and the hard drives on the computers," Mr. Pike said. "That would also be the easiest to destroy. I assume that they probably erased a big chunk of it, if not all of it."
"For the tapes and the hard drives, all you're talking about is just running a big bar magnet across them," he added.
Rear Adm. Quigley said he could not confirm reports that the Chinese already had taken equipment off the airplane. "There is no shortage of rumors on what has happened around that plane for the last three days," he said.
The crew of the aircraft includes 22 Navy personnel, one Marine sergeant and one Air Force airman. Eight of the crew are cryptologists - specialists who decode and analyze signals the plane's antennas intercept.
Mr. Bush said that in their meeting with U.S. officials, the crew members "said they are looking forward to coming home, and we are looking forward to bringing them home."
The crew members were being held in pairs in guest quarters but were not given an opportunity to contact their families. Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking at a news conference in Key West, Fla., said he hoped the meeting with the crew granted by the Chinese was "the beginning of an end to this incident."
But China's Communist government offered no indication of that, and on Wednesday, Chinese President Jiang Zemin demanded that the United States apologize for the collision.
Mr. Jiang also said the United States "should bear all responsibilities for the collision incident," the Xinhua News Agency said.
"The responsibility fully lies with the American side," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao quoted Mr. Jiang as saying.
Rear Adm. Quigley said it was unclear what caused the collision with the Chinese F-8 fighter jet, which crashed into the sea. The fighter pilot was missing.
Immediately after the incident, which occurred Saturday night Dallas time, U.S. officials said the EP-3E had suffered damage to its left wing and that the fault must lie with the more nimble Chinese fighter plane. The EP-3E is a lumbering turboprop plane the size of an airliner.
China also maintains that the U.S. plane was in Chinese airspace. U.S. officials insist the Navy aircraft was in international airspace on a routine surveillance mission.
Ambassador Prueher, a retired Navy admiral, said on CBS-TV's The Early Show that the United States should offer no apology.
"I've been a Navy pilot for 35 years, and I think the assertions they [Chinese officials] described for the collision are extremely unlikely, including where the fault lies," Mr. Prueher said.
Asked whether he would have a problem with apologizing to Beijing, the ambassador said, "As a matter of fact, I do have a problem with it, and I think our government would have a problem with it as well."
Navy Capt. William Marriott, commander of the EP-3E's home squadron at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state, said: "I don't see where an apology is necessary."
"Those of you who have seen the aircraft flying around here realize it is something akin to a flying pig," Capt. Marriott said, suggesting that the Chinese fighter jet caused the collision. The EP-3E "does not maneuver well."
Mr. Powell said he hoped the incident would not "affect the overall relationship" between the United States and China. He also said it would have no effect on an upcoming Bush administration decision on what to include in an annual arms sale to Taiwan.
U.S.-China relations already were under strain because of Chinese fears Mr.
Bush will approve the sale to Taiwan of warships equipped with sophisticated
radar.
Copyright 2001 The Dallas Morning News
