Friday, April 13, 2001

By Lisa Burgess, Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — Beijing has released the 24 crewmembers of the U.S. Navy EP-3E Aries II surveillance plane from their involuntary detention, but the crippled aircraft, stuffed with some of the best electronic surveillance equipment in the Pentagon arsenal, still sits on the Chinese airfield on Hainan Island.

As the crisis unfolded, U.S. officials and politicians downplayed the importance of the aircraft’s electronic secrets for fear of jeopardizing delicate repatriation negotiations.

With the crew back on U.S. soil, however, the focus is now on how the EP-3E’s effective capture might damage U.S. intelligence capabilities.

"Getting our servicemembers home is good news," U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., said Wednesday. "But we’ve only accomplished half our goal. China still has our plane, and holding it is an illegal act."

Reports differ on the fate of the aircraft.

Early reports indicate that Chinese officials quickly forced the crew off the aircraft after its emergency landing, and technicians swarmed the interior. Over the past several days, commercial satellite photos have shown trucks parked near the aircraft, suggesting China is stripping the EP-3E.

What is virtually certain is that the Chinese military is not wasting the opportunity to inspect the aircraft.

The Chinese operate a major electronics intelligence-gathering facility within Lingshui air base, where the EP-3E is currently grounded, according to a recent report from Jane’s Information Group. If that is correct, the EP-3E could not have landed at a worse spot.

"There’s no chance that [the Chinese are] not pulling anything and everything of value" from the aircraft, a U.S. naval military intelligence analyst said.

The U.S. government says that the EP-3E is sovereign U.S. territory, just as a U.S. Embassy is sovereign on international soil. Beijing says that since the aircraft landed without permission, it is Chinese property.

The fate of the $36 million aircraft will be discussed on April 18, when representatives from both governments meet.

In the meantime, politicians and U.S. officials can argue legalities, but the fact remains that "possession is nine-tenths of the law," said the analyst. "We would be doing exactly the same thing if the situation was reversed."

Over the past week, Navy officials have minimized the EP-3E’s possible value to the Chinese military, stating that once the aircraft’s crew realized that an emergency landing was imminent, they would have immediately begun a classified destruction plan.

Whatever electronics are left are likely to undergo "reverse engineering," in which Chinese technicians will take apart the guts of the aircraft’s computer systems, then study and re-assemble them to build a new computer with the same function.

Ralph Peters, a highly respected military analyst and former Army intelligence officer, said the EP-3E team probably "was fully able to implement their destruction plan," and even though some of the computer hardware remained, the systems will not be useful to the Chinese military.

"In general terms, the aircraft is essentially a microphone," Peters said. "The ‘recording studio’ — the place where all that data is interpreted — remains on the ground."

That won’t stop the Chinese military from trying to reverse-engineer whatever they can before they relinquish the aircraft, military analysts said.

"They’ll send the aircraft back all right," the naval intelligence analyst said. "In about 100 little boxes. Gift-wrapped."

Even if the information the Chinese seize from the EP-3E is minimal, it will have an impact on the U.S. intelligence gathering community, Peters agreed.

"Of course it matters, and what really matters is the degree to which the crew was able to implement the destruct plan," Peters said. Still, "I don’t think this is a catastrophic loss for the military community."

Whatever effect the EP-3E’s loss has on the military intelligence community, similar problems are likely to arise in the future, analysts agreed.

The more electronics a single weapon contains, the more information an enemy can glean from its capture.

Protecting high-value, electronics-packed platforms from falling into the hands of competitors is "a very difficult question to address," said Gen. John Handy, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff.

"You can’t worry so much about whether someone shoots [such an aircraft] down and reverse-engineers the parts," Handy said during a breakfast with reporters in Washington on Thursday. "I would rather focus on creating a platform that is vastly superior to the known threat … so that the other guy is wondering about us shooting down all his assets."

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