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Crack cocaine is almost dead in many cities, but immigrants, suburbanites and teenagers have kept it alive in South Florida.
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[05/10/99]

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Speaking on condition of anonymity Tuesday, the official said that no CIA officer with an up-to-date, walking familiarity with the Yugoslav capital was on the targeting team when China's embassy was mistakenly bombed Friday, killing three occupants and injuring 20 more. Nor, apparently, does the CIA have clandestine spotters in Belgrade helping verify targets picked from maps and satellite photos.

The issue has taken on added gravity because the CIA has admitted it used a partially updated 4-year-old street map and "educated guesses" to select the target, which was thought to be a Yugoslav arms agency. In this case, the maps did not show that China had vacated its old property and built a new embassy elsewhere in 1996, even though American officials, from the U.S. ambassador to the semi-public chief of the CIA mission, frequented the embassy for events. The U.S. embassy in Belgrade was closed and its staff evacuated March 24.

As the primary intelligence agency among U.S. civilian and military information-gathering organizations, the CIA takes the lead role in supplying targets to NATO planners. In response to a question Monday, a senior CIA official said the CIA alone had selected the mistaken target.

The bombing tragedy, along with recent espionage revelations, has severely strained U.S. relations with China. It has also threatened to derail a possible solution to the Kosovo conflict proposed last week by the G8 nations.

Asked whether any CIA personnel with recent Belgrade experience were consulted on the bombing, the official, who often explains the spy agency's policies to reporters, told Salon News, "In connection with this particular decision targeting that building, I would not make that assumption -- no."

"In this case," he added in a second conversation seeking clarification, "it did not include someone who had been in Belgrade very recently."

Neither the CIA's recent chief of operations in Belgrade, nor any of its Belgrade-based spy handlers, who have walked the capital's streets and frequented its offices, art galleries and cafes, as well as its embassies, were assigned to go over the selected targets, he said. No one at the CIA with an eyeball familiarity with Belgrade is working on the target list.

"In this instance the answer is no," the official repeated on condition of anonymity. "This was a case where the people who identified that target had not recently been to Belgrade."

Asked whether the CIA would change the composition of its targeting team as a result of the mistake, the spokesman declined to answer.

It could not be learned whether other U.S. military and intelligence agencies excluded Yugoslav experts from their targeting teams. But other agencies involved in the targeting review process, from the Pentagon to NATO, failed to catch the CIA's initial error, the official pointed out.

"It was a team effort in the sense that there were a number of opportunities to correct this error and it didn't happen," he said. "There have been a number of suggestions laying the blame squarely at the CIA. There's a pretty elaborate review process between target selection and hitting the target, and it can be fogged at any stage of the process.

"The bottom line is that there's plenty of blame to spread around," he said.

Photograph by AP/Wide World

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