Speaker 1: Welcome to mission implausible. So if you call this week,
Speaker 1: Chinese Premier g was in Belgrade, Serbia, and one of
Speaker 1: the things that was part of the visit was a
Speaker 1: visit to the Chinese embassy where in nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: during the Kosovol War, the United States bombed the Chinese embassy,
Speaker 1: killing three journalists and injuring a number of Chinese diplomats.
Speaker 1: And this was when President Clinton was the president. There
Speaker 1: was ethnic cleansing in Albania and the Serbs were trying
Speaker 1: to take back Kosovo, and Melosovich was there, and so
Speaker 1: we started bombing Serbia to try to get Serbian troops
Speaker 1: out of Kosovo, and as part of that process, we
Speaker 1: by mistake, bombed the Chinese embassy, and pretty quickly the
Speaker 1: White House and Director Tenant in the CIA said this
Speaker 1: was a mistake. We misidentified the embassy and it was
Speaker 1: a complete mistake. However, subsequent to that, a number of
Speaker 1: journalistic outlets and the Chinese government said specifically that they
Speaker 1: believe it's not true. It was a deliberate act because
Speaker 1: the Chinese were providing intelligence two Serbian forces in Yugoslavia
Speaker 1: that we decided to hit the Chinese embassy, were they
Speaker 1: So yes. Even in the CIA IS we've talked about
Speaker 1: a little bit on this podcast, as there's different fiefdoms
Speaker 1: or warlords or whatever. There's a big analytic cadre, there's
Speaker 1: a science and technology cadre, and then there's the clandestine
Speaker 1: service where Jerry and I worked the spy side of
Speaker 1: the cool guys. So in this case, the Clinton administration
Speaker 1: was bombing the Yugoslav Army and trying to get Yugoslavs
Speaker 1: to pull out of Kosovo, and essentially the Department of
Speaker 1: Defense and the Navy and the army and therefore hit
Speaker 1: all the targets that they expected to, hoping to get
Speaker 1: Mosovich to surrender and pull out, and they didn't. So
Speaker 1: they went around to all the different agencies and the
Speaker 1: government said, we need new targets, more targets to hit.
Speaker 1: And in that process, some clever analysts in the counterproliferation
Speaker 1: shop sent a target over to the Defense Department to
Speaker 1: hit inside Belgrade. And the target he sent was a business,
Speaker 1: a Serbian or Yugoslav business that was providing support to
Speaker 1: the Libyan missile program. They decided that would be clever
Speaker 1: to use this opportunity to bomb that in Central Belgrade.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately those people in the analytics side of the
Speaker 1: CIA didn't decide to ask us. So I was in Serbia.
Speaker 1: I'd been in Serbia for years, and never once did
Speaker 1: they come to us and say, Hey, we're going to
Speaker 1: give this target at this spot. Because if I had
Speaker 1: seen that target, I would have said, that's the Chinese embassy.
Speaker 1: I've been there for diplomatic events. You can't hit the
Speaker 1: Chinese embassy. But what they did is they they just
Speaker 1: took old maps, and in Serbia, the street numbers don't
Speaker 1: work like they do at least in the United States
Speaker 1: or West. So they knew that the address of this
Speaker 1: place that they were trying to hit, and so they
Speaker 1: assumed that on the street where they had the address,
Speaker 1: the number would be in the same spot as it wasn't,
Speaker 1: And they ended up striking the Chinese embassy and creating
Speaker 1: a huge diplomatic thing that would turned the Chinese against this,
Speaker 1: huge demonstrations in Beijing and against the US embassy. They
Speaker 1: turned over cars.
Speaker 2: That was huge. I happened to go to China not
Speaker 2: long after that, and it was a palpable shift.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can say that was the big shift in
Speaker 1: the way that China's US relations were.
Speaker 2: But that's true. That there's just some guy who like
Speaker 2: that's kind of upsetting that this person could be.
Speaker 1: Such a bureaucratic faux pad that even when the CIA
Speaker 1: did a after action report to try to figure out
Speaker 1: where they had made mistakes, even then they failed to
Speaker 1: go come talk to the spy side of the house.
Speaker 2: It reminds me of being a reporter in the field
Speaker 2: and your editor in New York or DC is telling
Speaker 2: you you got to go report this, and I'm like, no, no,
Speaker 2: that's not a thing. And I remember covering the tsunami
Speaker 2: in Indonesia. There was some rumor that the UN had
Speaker 2: not provided food to some people. I'm like, no, I'm
Speaker 2: literally here, I'm seeing it. There's food. Well we have
Speaker 2: this report and I was like, oh, I'm literally here,
Speaker 2: I see the food. So you're reminding me of something
Speaker 2: I experienced that I have realized. I don't think I've
Speaker 2: brought up with you guys, because I was afraid it
Speaker 2: would hurt your failings to insult the CIA in this way.
Speaker 2: So I only embedded for twenty four hours. When I
Speaker 2: was in Iraq, I was mostly just a guy living
Speaker 2: in Iraq, but I embedded with a light infantry troop
Speaker 2: and I went on a raid and I was in
Speaker 2: a humvy with a bunch of soldiers heading to get somebody.
Speaker 2: And one of the guys asked the officer who gave
Speaker 2: us the tip, and the officer said CIA, And everyone
Speaker 2: in the humbdy was like, ah, man, they're always wrong,
Speaker 2: And I said, really is that true? He said, well,
Speaker 2: maybe seventy percent of the time. And there's a similar
Speaker 2: thing in Iraq where the way house numbers work. It's
Speaker 2: like there's a block number and then your house is
Speaker 2: a number in that, so it's not a sequential like
Speaker 2: two is next to four is next to six. Now,
Speaker 2: these soldiers had been in Iraq for many months and
Speaker 2: still hadn't clued into that the number they got didn't exist,
Speaker 2: Like there was no house with that number, and so
Speaker 2: they rated all the houses that had a two in them,
Speaker 2: but no one in the None of the soldiers knew
Speaker 2: the Iraqi you know, even though we call our number
Speaker 2: system the Arabic numerals, Arabs use a different numeral system.
Speaker 2: No one who had been in Iraq for months had learned.
Speaker 2: It takes like twenty minutes to learn how Arabs write numbers,
Speaker 2: so no one could read the numbers. It was the
Speaker 2: craziest thing. And then we're in a site neighborhood in
Speaker 2: Iraq and we're looking for a guy named Ali, which
Speaker 2: is literally like yeah, yeah, they went to two houses
Speaker 2: that didn't have Ali's. I was like, I did not
Speaker 2: think that was possible to find two houses without Ali's
Speaker 2: in a shared neighborhood in Iraq.
Speaker 1: Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 2: Can I ask, so, like John, with your story, is
Speaker 2: that bureaucratic ineptitude? Is it politics or is it just
Speaker 2: it's harri ol. You got to make a phone call.
Speaker 2: People are busy.
Speaker 1: I think that even in large organizations, clicks develop. People
Speaker 1: who trust the people they know. You know, it's a
Speaker 1: large organization that has different parts, and it's easier just
Speaker 1: to sort of talk amongst your group or coordinate amongst
Speaker 1: your group. Of things are faster than say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we could go to the do guys that do overseas stuff,
Speaker 1: and then someone says, oh my god, that's going to
Speaker 1: slow down. You know, the White House wants something right away,
Speaker 1: and so someone makes a decision, which is a poor decison,
Speaker 1: it ends up in something like this. I just said.
Speaker 3: This is something that's deeply human. It happens in like
Speaker 3: every business, every large organization. It's happened throughout history, you know,
Speaker 3: looking back in history, you know wars that happened over
Speaker 3: fuck ups. And of course, as everybody knows, the War
Speaker 3: of Jenkins Ear obviously.
Speaker 2: The eighteen je Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, in the seventeen thirties, Britain and Spain went
Speaker 3: to war for nine years over chopping off the ear
Speaker 3: of this guy named Jenkins, a British sea captain, and
Speaker 3: it turns out the Spanish didn't even chop the guy's
Speaker 3: ear off. In parliament, they demanded that the mummified ear
Speaker 3: be sent to them as proof, and they couldn't prove it.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there was a fuck up basically, and poor
Speaker 3: Jenkins turns out he had two ears and they went
Speaker 3: to war over a fuck up for nine years. So
Speaker 3: something deeply well there was. The Gulf of Tonkin incident
Speaker 3: was a fuck up, right. They turned into a conspiracy
Speaker 3: because nobody wanted to say that it was a fuck up.
Speaker 3: Sinking of the main the Spanish American War was premised
Speaker 3: on fuck up. So we've got all these fuck ups,
Speaker 3: so that I think the Iraq War, the Iraq.
Speaker 2: War, Iraq War, I really committed to that one.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying the strike on the mistake and it
Speaker 3: was an accident. The strike on the Chinese embassy was
Speaker 3: in a long and illustrious line of fuck ups.
Speaker 2: I do want to have on the record that I
Speaker 2: know you guys are part of the deep state. You're lying,
Speaker 2: you're covering up for all. I just want people to
Speaker 2: know I know that when you say this was a
Speaker 2: mess up, this was a fuck up, I know the truth.
Speaker 1: So I was in Belgrade, was Belgrade twice and I
Speaker 1: was the deputy. I was the case officer there on
Speaker 1: the street, handling most of the cases at the time.
Speaker 1: I knew every street, every back alley. I was out
Speaker 1: all the time. I was like working all the time.
Speaker 1: And they're doing this thing and they're trying to threaten
Speaker 1: most of it. They are going to go to war.
Speaker 1: And the thing is they weren't coordinating any of that
Speaker 1: stuff really with the rest of the government very well,
Speaker 1: because they never actually came to us and said, you know,
Speaker 1: what are some things you should hit and stuff like,
Speaker 1: you know, we could have prepared all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to hit key things in Belgrade that
Speaker 1: would have surprize them and had an impact. We could
Speaker 1: have done an amazing job. And they never did it,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, it's like we're going to
Speaker 1: war and they're like, uh, okay, what are you supposed
Speaker 1: to hit? And it was it was very sloppy all
Speaker 1: the way through it. It was because Holbrook was making
Speaker 1: threats that essentially he wasn't coordinating with the former defense
Speaker 1: and intelligence agencies.
Speaker 3: So I was on the coast of our side a
Speaker 3: little bit afterwards, so that we bomb Serbia. People don't remember,
Speaker 3: you know, they were ethnic cleansing of Albanians and an
Speaker 3: Albanian you know, ninety percent Albanian area. There was this
Speaker 3: guy called a v load of slav Sheeschel, remember him.
Speaker 3: He was a politician, right, but he was saying, for
Speaker 3: Serbian honor, I am willing to carve out the eyes
Speaker 3: of Albanian children with a rusty spoon. And we always like,
Speaker 3: why does the spoon have to be rusty?
Speaker 1: I mean, I know.
Speaker 3: What was up with the Serbs that it was ugly.
Speaker 2: I do want to say like that the part of
Speaker 2: the whole conspiracy theory thing.
Speaker 1: Is.
Speaker 2: What you're making me realize is this is every company
Speaker 2: I deal with. You know, I consult with various companies
Speaker 2: of different sizes. This issue of different departments not talking
Speaker 2: to each other, and whether it's out of malice or politics,
Speaker 2: it's such a standard thing, you know, and it's it's
Speaker 2: a reminder that the things we want conspiracy theory explanations
Speaker 2: for are a part of the human experience. Like we're
Speaker 2: just we're human beings. We're a bunch of idiots. Some
Speaker 2: are trying the best they can, some aren't even doing that,
Speaker 2: but all of us are making a ton of mistakes.
Speaker 3: There's an anthropological explanation to this as well. We've been
Speaker 3: around for two hundred thousand years, you know, one hundred
Speaker 3: and ninety six thousand of those years, we've been going
Speaker 3: around in bands of like twenty to thirty people. We've
Speaker 3: evolved to trust twenty or thirty people in our group,
Speaker 3: and everyone else is an other right you have. They
Speaker 3: have to earn your trust. So you take a big
Speaker 3: organization with thousands of people in it, we're sort of
Speaker 3: evolutionary programmed only to trust our group, our twenty to
Speaker 3: thirty and it's hard to reach out from there. We're
Speaker 3: not wired to do that.
Speaker 1: You know, there's another thing in this in the Yugas
Speaker 1: level was interesting to me that one the other away
Speaker 1: is so we mean in the US. Apparently at one
Speaker 1: point it was right across from our embassy bombed the
Speaker 1: Serbian intelligence service, and the Serbs afterwards said, you guys
Speaker 1: also hit a children's hospital and some children were hurt
Speaker 1: in the thing. And immediately all of the US media
Speaker 1: and everybody's going like, oh, this is the typical dictators
Speaker 1: lying and trying to say something, and when in fact
Speaker 1: the children's hospital was next door and I didn't smash
Speaker 1: all the windows in the children's hospital.
Speaker 3: You know, we talk about this war and the violence
Speaker 3: thing is a It was successful. The Serbs eventually did
Speaker 3: pull out. We didn't have to really put boots on
Speaker 3: the ground, and we saved several million people who were
Speaker 3: being attacked by the Serbs simply because of their religion.
Speaker 3: And it was all based on a conspiracy theory basically
Speaker 3: that Kosovo belonged to Serbia even though it was ninety
Speaker 3: five percent Albanian. I think there were like a million
Speaker 3: and a half people that they were either going to
Speaker 3: murder or drive out of Kosovo, and we stopped that.
Speaker 1: And eventually got rid of Melosavich.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we saved a lot of lives, all.
Speaker 1: Right, Thank you Adam, Thank you Jerry, and come visit
Speaker 1: us next time on mission implausible.
Speaker 2: Great to talk to you guys,