Washington Post Friday, April 20, 2001; Page A23
Back Channels : The Intelligence Community
DISPUTED IMAGE
By Vernon Loeb
Government officials are still at odds with outside analysts over what to make of a commercial satellite image taken on April 9 of the damaged Navy EP-3 forced to land at a Chinese air base after a collision with a Chinese fighter. The image appeared to show that a large portion of the right rear fuselage had been disassembled.
Since later images produced by both U.S. spy satellites and Space Imaging Inc.'s Ikonos satellite show the fuselage intact, one government official speculated publicly that Space Imaging may have mistakenly manipulated the photo to produce an illusion that a chunk of the fuselage was gone.
John Pike, a defense and intelligence analyst who is director of Global Security.org, doesn't believe that Space Imaging monkeyed around with the picture. The missing "chunk" of the fuselage might have been an "optical illusion," or possibly a tarp draped over that part of the plane.
But whatever the explanation, Pike said, Space Imaging's ability to produce a series of four pictures of the plane in a denied area represents "a significant turning point in the history of news gathering -- that you would have this independent source of information for an event like this."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
