Welcome to mission implausible. So if you call this week, Chinese Premier g was in Belgrade, Serbia, and one of the things that was part of the visit was a visit to the Chinese embassy where in nineteen ninety nine, during the Kosovol War, the United States bombed the Chinese embassy, killing three journalists and injuring a number of Chinese diplomats.
And this was when President Clinton was the president. There was ethnic cleansing in Albania and the Serbs were trying to take back Kosovo, and Melosovich was there, and so we started bombing Serbia to try to get Serbian troops out of Kosovo, and as part of that process, we by mistake, bombed the Chinese embassy, and pretty quickly the White House and Director Tenant in the CIA said this was a mistake. We misidentified the embassy and it was
a complete mistake. However, subsequent to that, a number of journalistic outlets and the Chinese government said specifically that they believe it's not true. It was a deliberate act because the Chinese were providing intelligence two Serbian forces in Yugoslavia that we decided to hit the Chinese embassy, were they So yes. Even in the CIA IS we've talked about a little bit on this podcast, as there's different fiefdoms
or warlords or whatever. There's a big analytic cadre, there's a science and technology cadre, and then there's the clandestine service where Jerry and I worked the spy side of the cool guys. So in this case, the Clinton administration was bombing the Yugoslav Army and trying to get Yugoslavs to pull out of Kosovo, and essentially the Department of Defense and the Navy and the army and therefore hit all the targets that they expected to, hoping to get
Mosovich to surrender and pull out, and they didn't. So they went around to all the different agencies and the government said, we need new targets, more targets to hit. And in that process, some clever analysts in the counterproliferation shop sent a target over to the Defense Department to hit inside Belgrade. And the target he sent was a business, a Serbian or Yugoslav business that was providing support to
the Libyan missile program. They decided that would be clever to use this opportunity to bomb that in Central Belgrade. But unfortunately those people in the analytics side of the CIA didn't decide to ask us. So I was in Serbia. I'd been in Serbia for years, and never once did they come to us and say, Hey, we're going to give this target at this spot. Because if I had seen that target, I would have said, that's the Chinese embassy. I've been there for diplomatic events. You can't hit the
Chinese embassy. But what they did is they they just took old maps, and in Serbia, the street numbers don't work like they do at least in the United States or West. So they knew that the address of this place that they were trying to hit, and so they assumed that on the street where they had the address, the number would be in the same spot as it wasn't, And they ended up striking the Chinese embassy and creating a huge diplomatic thing that would turned the Chinese against this,
huge demonstrations in Beijing and against the US embassy. They turned over cars.
That was huge. I happened to go to China not long after that, and it was a palpable shift.
Yeah, you can say that was the big shift in the way that China's US relations were.
But that's true. That there's just some guy who like that's kind of upsetting that this person could be.
Such a bureaucratic faux pad that even when the CIA did a after action report to try to figure out where they had made mistakes, even then they failed to go come talk to the spy side of the house.
It reminds me of being a reporter in the field and your editor in New York or DC is telling you you got to go report this, and I'm like, no, no, that's not a thing. And I remember covering the tsunami in Indonesia. There was some rumor that the UN had not provided food to some people. I'm like, no, I'm literally here, I'm seeing it. There's food. Well we have this report and I was like, oh, I'm literally here, I see the food. So you're reminding me of something
I experienced that I have realized. I don't think I've brought up with you guys, because I was afraid it would hurt your failings to insult the CIA in this way. So I only embedded for twenty four hours. When I was in Iraq, I was mostly just a guy living in Iraq, but I embedded with a light infantry troop and I went on a raid and I was in a humvy with a bunch of soldiers heading to get somebody.
And one of the guys asked the officer who gave us the tip, and the officer said CIA, And everyone in the humbdy was like, ah, man, they're always wrong, And I said, really is that true? He said, well, maybe seventy percent of the time. And there's a similar thing in Iraq where the way house numbers work. It's like there's a block number and then your house is a number in that, so it's not a sequential like
two is next to four is next to six. Now, these soldiers had been in Iraq for many months and still hadn't clued into that the number they got didn't exist, Like there was no house with that number, and so they rated all the houses that had a two in them, but no one in the None of the soldiers knew the Iraqi you know, even though we call our number system the Arabic numerals, Arabs use a different numeral system. No one who had been in Iraq for months had learned.
It takes like twenty minutes to learn how Arabs write numbers, so no one could read the numbers. It was the craziest thing. And then we're in a site neighborhood in Iraq and we're looking for a guy named Ali, which is literally like yeah, yeah, they went to two houses that didn't have Ali's. I was like, I did not think that was possible to find two houses without Ali's in a shared neighborhood in Iraq.
Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
And we're back.
Can I ask, so, like John, with your story, is that bureaucratic ineptitude? Is it politics or is it just it's harri ol. You got to make a phone call. People are busy.
I think that even in large organizations, clicks develop. People who trust the people they know. You know, it's a large organization that has different parts, and it's easier just to sort of talk amongst your group or coordinate amongst your group. Of things are faster than say, well, you know, we could go to the do guys that do overseas stuff, and then someone says, oh my god, that's going to
slow down. You know, the White House wants something right away, and so someone makes a decision, which is a poor decison, it ends up in something like this. I just said.
This is something that's deeply human. It happens in like every business, every large organization. It's happened throughout history, you know, looking back in history, you know wars that happened over fuck ups. And of course, as everybody knows, the War of Jenkins Ear obviously.
The eighteen je Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, in the seventeen thirties, Britain and Spain went to war for nine years over chopping off the ear of this guy named Jenkins, a British sea captain, and it turns out the Spanish didn't even chop the guy's ear off. In parliament, they demanded that the mummified ear be sent to them as proof, and they couldn't prove it. So yeah, there was a fuck up basically, and poor Jenkins turns out he had two ears and they went to war over a fuck up for nine years. So
something deeply well there was. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a fuck up, right. They turned into a conspiracy because nobody wanted to say that it was a fuck up. Sinking of the main the Spanish American War was premised on fuck up. So we've got all these fuck ups, so that I think the Iraq War, the Iraq.
War, Iraq War, I really committed to that one.
I'm just saying the strike on the mistake and it was an accident. The strike on the Chinese embassy was in a long and illustrious line of fuck ups.
I do want to have on the record that I know you guys are part of the deep state. You're lying, you're covering up for all. I just want people to know I know that when you say this was a mess up, this was a fuck up, I know the truth.
So I was in Belgrade, was Belgrade twice and I was the deputy. I was the case officer there on the street, handling most of the cases at the time. I knew every street, every back alley. I was out all the time. I was like working all the time. And they're doing this thing and they're trying to threaten most of it. They are going to go to war.
And the thing is they weren't coordinating any of that stuff really with the rest of the government very well, because they never actually came to us and said, you know, what are some things you should hit and stuff like, you know, we could have prepared all kinds of stuff. If you wanted to hit key things in Belgrade that would have surprize them and had an impact. We could
have done an amazing job. And they never did it, and all of a sudden, it's like we're going to war and they're like, uh, okay, what are you supposed to hit? And it was it was very sloppy all the way through it. It was because Holbrook was making threats that essentially he wasn't coordinating with the former defense and intelligence agencies.
So I was on the coast of our side a little bit afterwards, so that we bomb Serbia. People don't remember, you know, they were ethnic cleansing of Albanians and an Albanian you know, ninety percent Albanian area. There was this guy called a v load of slav Sheeschel, remember him. He was a politician, right, but he was saying, for Serbian honor, I am willing to carve out the eyes of Albanian children with a rusty spoon. And we always like, why does the spoon have to be rusty?
I mean, I know.
What was up with the Serbs that it was ugly.
I do want to say like that the part of the whole conspiracy theory thing.
Is.
What you're making me realize is this is every company I deal with. You know, I consult with various companies of different sizes. This issue of different departments not talking to each other, and whether it's out of malice or politics, it's such a standard thing, you know, and it's it's a reminder that the things we want conspiracy theory explanations for are a part of the human experience. Like we're
just we're human beings. We're a bunch of idiots. Some are trying the best they can, some aren't even doing that, but all of us are making a ton of mistakes.
There's an anthropological explanation to this as well. We've been around for two hundred thousand years, you know, one hundred and ninety six thousand of those years, we've been going around in bands of like twenty to thirty people. We've evolved to trust twenty or thirty people in our group, and everyone else is an other right you have. They
have to earn your trust. So you take a big organization with thousands of people in it, we're sort of evolutionary programmed only to trust our group, our twenty to thirty and it's hard to reach out from there. We're not wired to do that.
You know, there's another thing in this in the Yugas level was interesting to me that one the other away is so we mean in the US. Apparently at one point it was right across from our embassy bombed the Serbian intelligence service, and the Serbs afterwards said, you guys also hit a children's hospital and some children were hurt
in the thing. And immediately all of the US media and everybody's going like, oh, this is the typical dictators lying and trying to say something, and when in fact the children's hospital was next door and I didn't smash all the windows in the children's hospital.
You know, we talk about this war and the violence thing is a It was successful. The Serbs eventually did pull out. We didn't have to really put boots on the ground, and we saved several million people who were being attacked by the Serbs simply because of their religion. And it was all based on a conspiracy theory basically that Kosovo belonged to Serbia even though it was ninety
five percent Albanian. I think there were like a million and a half people that they were either going to murder or drive out of Kosovo, and we stopped that.
And eventually got rid of Melosavich.
Yeah, we saved a lot of lives, all.
Right, Thank you Adam, Thank you Jerry, and come visit us next time on mission implausible.
Great to talk to you guys,