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Spying on China Is Not New
AP(Associated Press) released an article Wednewsday about a pilotless U.S. spy plane shot down by Chinese forces on Hainan Island in 1970.
The article said references to the Feb. 10, 1970 incident were contained in a State Department memorandum that was declassified last year.
The article says:
The history of American aerial surveillance of southern China goes back decades and includes a 1970 incident in which a pilotless U.S. spy plane was shot down by Chinese forces on Hainan Island ¡ª the same island where a Navy spy plane landed on Sunday.
References to the Feb. 10, 1970 incident are contained in a State Department memorandum that was declassified last year.It is among several formerly secret documents related to U.S. aerial surveillance of China made available to news organizations Wednesday by the private National Security Archive.
The documents contain few details about the 1970 shootdown. They make clear that senior U.S. officials feared the incident could have unwanted diplomatic consequences. Then, as now, apologies were at issue.
A memo from Harry Thayer of the State Department's bureau of East Asian and Pacific affairs nine days after the shootdown by air defense forces on Hainan, in the South China Sea, discussed how U.S. officials should respond if Chinese officials raised the issue during the next round of U.S-China talks in Warsaw, Poland.
``As far as I know, we have never apologized to the Chinese in the past for aerial reconnaissance incidents,'' Thayer wrote.
``If we apologize in this case, we are putting ourselves in the position both of having to explain past cases and, more importantly, of having to apologize in future cases.'' He went on to say that if it were certain that any future overflight of Chinese territory would be accidental, then an apology might be appropriate.
``But future overflights might not be accidental,'' he wrote.
Although the U.S. government has declassified little about intentional spy flights over Chinese territory, Air Force veterans who flew such missions along the Chinese coast have said they sometimes flew over Chinese territory.
A Jan. 9, 1970 memo from U. Alexis Johnson, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, to Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard said the CIA had been advised to put off a planned U-2 spy flight from Taiwan until after the next meeting in Warsaw on establishing U.S.-China relations.
Johnson also suggested that ``special precautions'' be taken with U.S. Air Force and Navy operations ``that could give rise to incidents.'' In reply, Packard agreed and said that surveillance aircraft should stick to the existing rule of flying no closer than 50 miles to Chinese-claimed territory.
An Oct. 6, 1969 State Department memo said U.S. spy planes were coming no closer than 75 miles to the Chinese mainland.
The Navy EP-3E Aries II electronic surveillance plane that made an emergency landing on Hainan Island on Sunday was about 60 miles from the island when it collided with a Chinese fighter jet.
China has not yet agreed to release the crew of 24 Americans or the damaged plane. On Wednesday, President Jiang Zemin demanded a U.S. apology; U.S. officials expressed regret but did not apologize.
In his Feb. 19, 1970 memo about whether to apologize for the U.S. drone spy plane's overflight of Hainan, Thayer wrote that an apology might ``lead the Chinese to press us to take the next step of foreswearing such acts for the future.''
``An apology would not alter the Chinese view of the drone's presence as a hostile act, and the Chinese in any event would consider the apology to be a hypocritical gesture having nothing to do with the basic U.S. attitude regarding reconnaissance''
As it turned out, Chinese officials did not bring up the incident at the Warsaw talks.
Another of the declassified documents provided by the National Security Archive reveals that after North Korea shot down a U.S. EC-121 electronic surveillance plane over the Sea of Japan in April 1969, President Richard Nixon temporarily halted spy flights in the region.
A May 29, 1969 State Department memo, marked ``top secret,'' said Nixon had directed that reconnaissance flights along the coast of China be resumed.
``We have warned the intelligence community that although we think it unlikely that the ChiComs (Chinese Communists) would shoot down one of our planes, they might, in view of their present very hostile attitude'' and the example of North Korea's success in shooting down the EC-121 a month earlier, it added.
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