Photos show China removed equipment from plane

[Jeremy Compton]

http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=173748

Photos show China removed equipment from plane

Tuesday, 3 April 2001 12:53 (ET)

Photos show China removed equipment from plane
By PAMELA HESS

WASHINGTON, April 3 (UPI) -- Chinese officials have removed equipment from
a U.S. Navy spy plane that made an emergency landing at a Chinese base after
a mid-air collision with a fighter jet March 31, a former intelligence
official who has seen classified satellite photos of the base told United
Press International Tuesday.

The source also echoed the fears of many Pentagon officials that the
Chinese are unlikely to ever return the plane.

"The chances of getting this airplane back are pretty close to nil," he
said.

The official said he had seen four images from two KH-11 "Keyhole"
satellites, which are clear enough to see details -- including racks of the
plane's equipment sitting on the tarmac around the aircraft and damage to
the EP-3's propeller, engine and wing.

The EP-3 was forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island after a
Chinese fighter sent out to intercept the aircraft instead collided with it.
The Chinese fighter and its pilot are still missing. China has blamed the
United States for the incident, saying the aircraft violated its airspace.

The sun-synchronous KH-11s pass over the Earth at an altitude of around
500 miles twice a day, taking high-resolution snap shots. The
electro-optical pictures have better than one-meter resolution and are
beamed to a U.S. ground station in near-real time.

The EP-3 is an electronic signals surveillance aircraft and is loaded with
sophisticated equipment used to collect intelligence on an adversary's
weapons, command and control capabilities and operations. The equipment is
mounted on metal racks inside the shell of the 100-foot long plane, which
carries a crew of 24.

The EP-3 could not have landed in a better place for China or a worse one
for U.S. military intelligence. Hainan island is host to one of China's
largest electronic-signals-intelligence complexes and is manned by experts
who can glean critical information on the aircraft's capabilities if they
gain access to the Navy's EP-3, also a "SIGINT" collector, Pentagon sources
said. Hainan is also home to a major Chinese satellite-communications
intercept facility.

The United States claims that the aircraft, because it made an emergency
landing, should be considered sovereign territory like a U.S. embassy and is
therefore off limits to the Chinese.

President Bush Monday warned China against "further" tampering with or
damage to the aircraft.

"The airplane itself, military aircraft of all countries in situations
like this, have sovereign immunity. That is, no other country can go aboard
them or keep them," said U.S. Pacific Command chief Adm. Dennis Blair said
Sunday in a press conference.

However, the Navy presumes Chinese boarded the plane shortly after it
landed on a military base on Hainan Island. The last radio message from the
crew said it was being ordered to shut down its operation.

In the event of just such a landing, the crew was trained to destroy
classified paperwork and wipe clean computer memories, and may have even
physically destroyed some of the equipment.

"If I were them I would have been pitching stuff out the back," said a
U.S. intelligence official.

The Chinese military is well-known for its ability to reverse engineer
sophisticated equipment -- that is, deconstruct a finished product to
discern how it works, its capabilities and recreate it for their own use,
the official said.

Pentagon officials say they are concerned the aircraft will never be
returned. They speculate that China will say it is holding it as evidence of
U.S. violation of international law.

They made clear Tuesday that even if the Chinese strip and dismantle the
aircraft in order to reverse engineer it, the U.S. would still -- for
political reasons -- demand its return.



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