Knight Ridder April 5, 2001
Bush administration expresses regret for death of Chinese pilot but standoff continues
By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. LandayWASHINGTON _ The Bush administration sought Wednesday to break the impasse over China's detention of a U.S. spy plane and its crew, expressing regret for the apparent death of a Chinese pilot in a mid-air collision but rejecting Beijing's demands for an apology.
"We regret that the Chinese plane did not get down safely, and we regret the loss of life of that Chinese pilot," Secretary of State Colin Powell said. "But now we need to move on."
Powell, in a letter to Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen, proposed "ways of trying to resolve this crisis," a senior State Department official said Wednesday evening. The letter offered a forum in which both sides could discuss their conflicting explanations of what happened during and after the collision, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He declined to be more specific.
The letter, which again expressed U.S. regret over the Chinese pilot and concern over the detained American crew, was delivered to Chinese Ambassador Yang Jiechi. Yang met at the State Department for a half-hour with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who, in the middle of the meeting, walked him down the hall to meet Powell, where the letter was handed over, the senior official said.
There was no immediate response from China. Earlier Wednesday in Beijing, China appeared to take a harder line as President Jiang Zemin demanded a U.S. apology and left on a 12-day trip to Latin America.
Other U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador to China, expressed regret after Sunday's collision between the U.S. Navy's EP-3E surveillance plane and a Chinese F-8 jetfighter. But expressions of regret on Wednesday by Powell, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and others appeared to be part of an attempt by the White House to offer China's leaders a way out of the standoff before more damage is done to relations between the two countries.
In diplomacy, an apology means accepting responsibility. Expressing regret does not. Fleischer said the United States "doesn't understand the reason for an apology" because the plane was in international air space and did nothing wrong.
The detention of the plane's 24 crew members has angered members of Congress and may make it politically harder for Bush to keep the incident from influencing other issues in relations with China. They include a decision he was expected to make April 24 on whether to sell a package of advanced weaponry, including four destroyers, to Taiwan, the democratically ruled island that China considers its territory.
Releasing the crew is the "bright line" China must cross, said a top Powell aide, speaking on condition of anonymity. If the standoff is not resolved soon, "then it just keeps getting worse . . . you're into 'Day 41 of the airplane crew saga'."
China's Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan met in Beijing earlier Wednesday with U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher. Tang said the United States has "taken a stance of rule by force, used lame arguments, confounded right and wrong and made groundless accusations against China."
But Tang also gave the first sign that China was ready to make a move.
"China attaches importance to China-U.S. relations and hopes the plane collision incident can be quickly and appropriately resolved," Tang said, according to Chinese state-run news media.
Prueher urged Beijing to act quickly, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. The ambassador also pressed for the crew's release; regular access by American consular officials in the meantime; and the return of the aircraft.
The EP-3E was forced to make an emergency landing at a Chinese military base on Hainan island after sustaining considerable damage in a collision with one of two F-8s dispatched to shadow it as it flew in international airspace opposite China's southern coast.
The United States contended that the plane, which broadcast a "Mayday" international distress call, enjoys territorial sovereignty that bars boarding and inspection by foreign officials. China says the plane's pilot violated international law and that it has a right to inspect the aircraft.
The Pentagon tried to bolster the U.S. claim that the EP-3E was sovereign territory. It said that in 1974 a Russian spy plane was allowed to land at a U.S. air base in Alaska, was refueled and allowed to leave without Americans boarding it.
In 1993, a Chinese civilian airplane made an emergency landing at another military air base in Alaska and the United States provided medical care for injured passengers before they were flown out on another Chinese plane.
U.S. officials said Chinese technicians were continuing to examine the top-secret technology aboard the EP-3E, a propeller-driven plane that can eavesdrop on radio, telephone, radar, cellular telephone, fax signals and other electronic emissions hundreds of miles away.
Although White House officials insisted the United States was still pressing for the return of the plane, "what I'm hearing more of, is more talk about the crew and less talk about the plane, " said a military official who asked not to be identified. "That gives people some sense of relief from a feeling that we have been too compelled about going after that airplane."
U.S. officials may be downplaying the return of the plane because in a meeting Tuesday in Hainan, EP-3E crew members indicated to U.S. diplomats that they were able to destroy the most sensitive material before landing.
"The team was able to discern that the crew felt they had successfully completed destruction," said one defense official. "But until individual crew members have been debriefed, we won't be able to confirm whether that was the case."
The EP-3E crew's procedures for destroying classified materials would have involved erasing data and software from computer hard drives and smashing CD-ROMs, floppy disks and key pieces of equipment, including cryptographic systems that encode the electronic signals gathered by the aircraft.
The EP-3E did not have a paper shredder, so the crew would have used acid to destroy top-secret documents, books and charts, Pentagon officials said.
The destruction procedures would have required the crew, which under a 1994 CIA directive must rehearse them before each mission, to then toss as much of the material as possible out of the aircraft.
Defense officials and some experts said the Chinese could gain important technological and military knowledge from the aircraft's "Big Look" radar, its powerful antennae and other hardware used to sweep up radar, telephone, radio, fax and missile guidance signals.
For instance, Chinese experts could gain insights into U.S. computer chip technology, composite materials and advanced metals, experts said. By examining the antennae, they could discern the frequencies that the United States monitors in China, and then change them, the experts said.
But "the most sensitive and important part is the software" that decrypts, processes and analyzes the electronic emissions monitored by the plane, said John Pike a defense expert with Global Security.com, a Virginia-based firm. "It's basically the difference between a live witness and doing an autopsy on a corpse."
Furthermore, China has U.S.-trained experts who already can operate the kind of equipment aboard the EP-3E, said Wayne Madsen, a former intelligence officer with the National Security Agency, the super-secret U.S. agency that monitors foreign communications.
These Chinese experts, trained at a CIA-run facility in San Francisco, eavesdrop on Russia and Central Asia from two U.S.-built listening posts in western China, and share the data with the United States, said Madsen.
The Chinese military appeared to be driving the Chinese government's response, the Powell aide said. "It's completely out of U.S. ability to influence," he said. Chinese military officers "don't care about WTO (World Trade Organization) membership or anything else."
Supporters of close U.S.-China ties expressed growing concern that the crisis could inflame other points of friction, including trade relations and U.S. weapon sales to Taiwan.
"If it goes on, if the PRC (People's
Republic of China) can't deal with it a bit more reasonably, it will have an
impact, and I'm sorry to see that," said Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
subcommittee on Asia. The Chinese have
"a lot at risk here."
Copyright 2001 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
