Inside Pine Gap by David Rosenberg

Author:David Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO010000, book
ISBN: 9781742736488
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Smoke billows from the World Trade Center, 11 September 2001

7: George W Bush

(2001–08)

China; Afghanistan and the War on

Terror; Iraq; North Korea

Throughout the presidential transition in 2001, new threats continued to emerge that required monitoring by many resources in the intelligence community. Russia had recovered from the political transition from communism to democracy and the pace of its weapons testing had accelerated as the millennium came to a close. China had experienced a huge surge in technical capability through various means and was developing more reliable and more accurate weapon systems, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and SAMs.

Iraq remained under constant surveillance as well, with antiaircraft systems always a threat, albeit a minor one, to allied aircraft that patrolled over the no-fly zones. The United States was also concerned that Saddam Hussein might resurrect his WMD program and didn’t want to miss any developments with this or the L29, an aircraft that could be either piloted or flown as an unmanned aerodynamic vehicle (UAV). This aircraft had been assessed as a possible chemical– biological weapons delivery platform.1

Libya also continued testing its short-range ballistic missiles from the Al Qaryat launch complex while Iran began testing a plethora of missiles based on Chinese and North Korean models with help from those countries’ missile experts.2 Iran had accelerated its testing of cruise missiles, SAMs, battlefield rockets and a host of ballistic missiles as it strived to develop longer-range missiles.

The list of potential threats was extensive, but perhaps the greatest threat to US forces came from North Korea, a secretive country with a reclusive leader and 1.2 million armed soldiers, making it the fourth-largest standing army on Earth and the world’s most militarised country.3 North Korea was also actively developing cruise and ballistic missiles that posed a real threat to the region. The threats confronting President Bush were assessed by policy planners to be very real, and these developments were just some of the concerns facing the intelligence community that would have to be addressed throughout the Bush presidency.

The first foreign policy crisis facing President Bush occurred on 1 April 2001 when a United States Navy EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided in midair with a Chinese J-8II interceptor fighter jet. The badly damaged EP-3E was forced to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island, but the collision between the two aircraft resulted in the death of the Chinese pilot, Lt Cdr Wang Wei. His body reportedly was never recovered.4 The intelligence community immediately mobilised to discover the fate of the twenty-four crew members and the EP-3E. The EP-3E contained sensitive intelligence-gathering and cryptologic equipment that would need to be destroyed quickly by the crew before landing and while on the ground at Hainan. █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ one reason why the grounded aircraft was dismantled, remaining in China until 3 July. In order to help defuse the situation and return the crew to the United States, President Bush issued China with what was called the ‘Letter of the Two Sorries’, stating that the United States was

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