Wednesday, April 4, 2001

By Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The flights can be deadly boring, with little but the crackle of intercepted radar signals hour after hour or the routine chatter of foreign military officers who the U.S. crews will never meet.

Then, as the 24-member crew of a Navy EP-3 eavesdropping plane discovered last weekend, the dull routine can be shattered by sheer terror.

The encounter between the U.S. electronic surveillance plane and a Chinese jet fighter opened a rare window on the sometimes productive — but also dangerous and often provocative — practice of flying airborne snoopers close to, and sometimes over, enemy territory in peacetime as well as wartime.

The targets: the streams of electronic signals given off by a real or potential adversary’s radars, missile test flights and military communications. That data, if put to use in combat, could save U.S. lives by pinpointing the location and purpose of radars used to track and shoot down American combat aircraft, among other benefits.

Since the flights began at the dawn of the Cold War, 200 American airmen have lost their lives on these missions, according to James Bamford, an authority on the eavesdropping National Security Agency (NSA) and author of "Body of Secrets," a forthcoming book on the secretive NSA’s Cold War history.

Between 1945 and 1977 alone, 40 U.S. reconnaissance planes were shot down, according to the NSA. The United States covered up many of the incidents until much later.

Being aboard one of those planes "can be boring, or it can be really terrifying," said one retired senior intelligence official, a veteran of such flights, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A U.S. electronic reconnaissance flight — with a different plane and a different purpose than the EP-3 now grounded on China’s Hainan Island — may have played an indirect role in the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Airlines flight 007.

In the hours before Soviet fighters blasted the KAL airliner out of the sky near the Soviet Union’s Pacific coast, an Air Force plane that was monitoring Soviet ballistic missile tests had flown through the same airspace.

According to one account, the Soviets, their suspicions already high, initially mistook the civilian plane for a military one, or believed it to be a spy plane in disguise, although Soviet pilots saw the distinctive Boeing 747 before they fired at it.

The senior intelligence official, while acknowledging that he did not know the specifics of the EP-3’s mission, questioned whether U.S. military planners should have been more careful in light of increased Sino-American tensions and the Chinese air force’s more aggressive intercepting of U.S. surveillance planes recently.

"You always wonder, What’s the reason for this? Is this useful? Was it routine ops (operations)?" he said. "What’s that important that we should be flying off the coastline of a country like that? Is it habit?"

The Navy plane’s mission has not been disclosed, although U.S. military intelligence has been watching with concern China’s missile buildup on its coast across from Taiwan.

According to the official and other veterans of Cold War electronic surveillance missions, the EP-3’s crew would have been divided into two intelligence disciplines, reporting to different commanders.

Half of the crew would have been practitioners of ELINT (Electronic Intelligence). Using sensitive high-frequency radio receivers, they would listen for and record the telltale "signatures" of China’s military radar and other electronic pulses. The equipment allows specialists to determine radar location and type.

They also would be able to monitor the electronic beam that some types of radar use to send an anti-aircraft missile toward enemy jets. That would allow U.S. jets to evade or jam enemy radar in case of hostilities.

Navy ELINT specialists report to the U.S. naval fleet commander in the region.

The second half of the crew are COMINT (Communications Intelligence) specialists. Their job is to intercept, decode and translate verbal communications, such as a Chinese military officer issuing orders to his units. The EP-3 might have been listening in on a Chinese air defense or naval exercise, speculated another former intelligence official, who also requested anonymity.

The EP-3’s COMINT specialists work for the Navy’s elite eavesdropping service, the Naval Security Group. Its work goes to the NSA.

Fusing both types of data, officials said, would give the snoopers a highly accurate portrait of how China’s defenses work.

The enlisted personnel aboard surveillance flights are mostly young, in their early 20s, with basic training and perhaps a year of military language school under their belts, officials said.

Nonetheless, the dangers they face can be great. In 1969, North Korea shot down a Navy EC-121 "Willie Victor" in international airspace, killing more than 20 people aboard.

Outside the NSA’s fortress-like campus in Fort Meade, Md., stands a replica of an Air Force C-130 aircraft downed by Soviet fighter jets in September 1958 after it inadvertently penetrated protected airspace over Soviet Armenia. All 17 aboard were killed.

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