Per The Intercept:
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/10/snowden-documents-reveal-scope-of-secrets-exposed-to-china-in-2001-spy-plane-incident/"Burn After Reading"
(For those wanting to read the actual NSA document assessing the impact of the Hainan Island Incident can read the report here:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3546567-10th-Anniversary-Edition-EP-3-Damage-Assessment.html#document/p1 )WHEN CHINA boldly seized a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea last December and initially refused to give it back, the incident ignited a weeklong political standoff and conjured memories of a similar event more than 15 years ago.
In April 2001, just months before the 9/11 attacks gripped the nation, a U.S. Navy spy plane flying a routine reconnaissance mission over the South China Sea was struck by a People’s Liberation Army fighter jet that veered aggressively close. The mid-air collision killed the Chinese pilot, crippled the Navy plane, and forced it to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airfield, touching off a tense international showdown for nearly two weeks while China refused to release the two-dozen American crew members and damaged aircraft.
The sea drone captured in December was a research vessel, not a spy craft, according to the Pentagon, so its seizure didn’t risk compromising secret military technology. That wasn’t the case with the spy plane, which carried a trove of surveillance equipment and classified signals intelligence data.
For more than a decade, U.S. officials have refused to say what secrets China might have gleaned from the plane. Two years after the incident, journalists saw a redacted U.S. military report, which revealed that although crew members had jettisoned documents out an emergency hatch as they flew over the sea and had managed to destroy some signals-collection equipment before the plane fell into the hands of the Chinese, it was “highly probable” China had still obtained classified information from the plane. Attempts by journalists and academics to learn more over the years have been unsuccessful.
But now, a comprehensive Navy-NSA report completed three months after the collision, and included among documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, finally reveals extensive details about the incident, the actions crew members took to destroy equipment and data, and the secrets that were exposed to China — which turned out to be substantial though not catastrophic.
The unredacted Navy report, supplemented by a 2001 Congressional Research Service summary of the incident, as well as The Intercept’s interviews with two crew members on board during the collision, presents the most detailed picture yet of the P-3 incident, a critical moment in U.S.-China military relations.
Although the Navy report cites a number of problems with what turned out to be ineffective efforts to destroy classified information, it vindicates the crew as well as pilot and mission commander, Navy Lt. Shane Osborn, who was hounded by critics for years — in and out of the military — who thought he should have ditched the plane and its sensitive equipment in the sea rather than land it in enemy territory. Osborn was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for showing “superb airmanship and courage” in stabilizing and landing the damaged aircraft, but in 2014 when he made a failed bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska, former military personnel popped up in the press again to revive the criticism against him.
“He was flying one of the crown jewels of the reconnaissance force,” Capt. Jan van Tol, a retired Navy officer and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told the Omaha World-Herald. “I think the right answer is he should have ditched it at sea, or taken it anyplace but China.”
Asked whether he stood by that comment today, van Tol told The Intercept that he’s hesitant to question the judgment of a pilot who was on the scene and understood the conditions better than he does, but he still feels Osborn had an obligation to better safeguard the aircraft’s secrets.
“I think there may have been another option [to land in Vietnam],” he said, trying to recall the events in 2001. “It would have been better to go to Vietnam than China.”
The collision occurred about 70 miles southeast of Hainan Island, where Osborn landed the plane; Vietnam was about 180 miles away. Although the latter wasn’t a great distance, it would have been the less attractive option to the crew, according to Osborn, given the shaky condition of the aircraft and their loss of critical flight instruments and altitude from the collision.
But the investigators who produced the Navy-NSA report didn’t fault the crew for the most part. In their assessment, they praised Osborn and his flight crew for saving the lives of everyone on board as well as the $80 million aircraft. And although they found fault with the crew’s demolition efforts and with supervisors onboard who failed to effectively coordinate and communicate with crew members during the incident, they mostly blamed the military for failing to properly prepare officers and crew for such an event.
The 117-page report, prepared by a team of investigators from the Navy and NSA, is based on interviews conducted with the crew right after their release from China and on physical re-enactments of their destruction methods — in some cases recreated with scientific precision — to determine how effective the methods might have been in preventing the Chinese from gleaning secrets.
The report describes the crew’s haphazard and jury-rigged efforts to destroy equipment without proper tools and the woefully inadequate training they received for dealing with a scenario the Navy should have considered inevitable. Even though several close encounters with Chinese fighter jets had occurred in the region before, procedures for dealing with such a situation were insufficient, and the crew never underwent emergency destruction drills. As a result, they were left scrambling in the heat of the moment to determine what needed to be destroyed and how to do it. Although the crew had about 40 minutes between the moment of collision and the landing in China — plenty of time to jettison or destroy all sensitive material, investigators concluded — there “were no readily available means or standard procedures for timely destruction of computers, electronic media, and hardcopy material.” This deficiency, along with the lack of training, investigators wrote, “was the primary cause of the compromise of classified material.”
Another stumbling block? The crew hadn’t maintained a comprehensive inventory of classified material on the plane. This made it difficult for them to ensure that everything got destroyed, and it meant that investigators had to rely on the recollections of crew members about what they had carried on the plane to determine what the Chinese might have seen.
Jeffrey Richelson, author of a number of books on the intelligence community and a senior fellow with the National Security Archive, is one person who has sought for years to uncover more information about the incident. He told The Intercept that the report adds important context and understanding to the historical record around it, adding that although the aerial confrontation may not have been a seismic event in terms of intelligence losses, it was a significant geopolitical moment in the history of U.S.-China relations. A key part of understanding this “is [knowing] what was lost and the damage assessment.” To that end, he said, the report is a “valuable document.”
