"Orval Fairbairn" wrote in message
news
In article ,
"Dave Kearton" wrote:
"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
...
In message , Dave Kearton
writes
IMHO Lt Osborn made all the right decisions under very trying
circumstances. He kept the plane aloft, long enough for all the
sensitive
gear to be destroyed, he KEPT HIS CREW ALIVE and what was left of the
plane was flown back to the US after the Chinese were done with it.
If you think worst-case, ditching or baling out offers the Chinese a
nasty
option. "We picked up nine of the crew, here they are. Mission
Supervisor
Snuffy, who knows all about what the aircraft can do and what its
mission
was? No, haven't found a trace of him, but we're still searching..."
And
who's to know different? Once the crew lose sight of each other,
there's
no way to know whether Supervisor Snuffy died during the bailout,
drowned
in the ocean, is on a slow fishing boat with no comms on his way to
port,
or is being forcibly persuaded to be detailed and explicit about EP-3
capabilities in a Beijing basement.
Once the hard discs, memory cards, crypto modules, whatever have been
dealt with, the EP-3 is an elderly turboprop with a lot of radio
receivers
feeding to dead systems. Not a lot of genuine intel value the it's
an
ELINT platform, gee whiz, who knew?
The crew are the real prize which could compromise the capability:
keeping
them together, alive, and getting them all home protects the most
important asset.
Who cares what the Chinese would see on the plane, they would get that
hardware via other means anyway.
A cynical part of me wonders how much of the hardware is "Made in
China"
anyway. Radio receivers aren't exactly new or secret, it's what they
feed,
what you can achieve with them and what you were sent to get that
matter.
--
He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.
Paul J. Adam
Just parenthetical to all of this, I showed up in Beijing the day after
the
incident.
My trip was booked for weeks beforehand, but my engineer and I showed up
at
the airport, on 28-day tourist visas with bags full of electronics to
work
at the Australian Embassy.
It's a lot more pedestrian than it sounds, but we sailed through customs
and
immigration at the airport. During our routine briefing, the security
officer at the embassy told us that the Chinese _knew_ we were spooks.
(NO -
we weren't, but that didn't matter) The Chinese didn't care, as
long
as they knew what we were up to and what we found out while we were
there.
It's only if there is some doubt on this last part that we'd be detained
at
the airport - at the end of our 28 days - by the guy with the rubber
gloves.
It was a time of slightly elevated tension between the US and China and
the
internal security crowd were working overtime on 'visitors' who pretended
to
be tourists. We were followed, tailed, politely questioned by locals
and my hotel room was bugged.
Apart from all that, China's a lovely country and we got lots of work
done.....
This reminds me of a story of a married couple of friends who fly for a
major international airline (Both are pilots). He was also an AF Reserve
BG.
We liked to play the board game Risk together, so thy bought an
electronic version to play on layovers. They had a layover in Beijing
and played Risk in the hotel room. I can just hear, "I just captured
Japan" -- "I just took Great Britain", etc. Of course, the room HAD to
be bugged!
Anyway, they took a guided tour of Beijing the next morning. She
remarked to us that they were the only people on the bus and got a
personal guided tour.
I can just imaging the conversation in Chinese Intel: "What's an
American BG doing in Beijing, masquerading as an airline pilot?"
***********
Another friend visited Beijing about 25 years ago, as a member of a
scientific exchange team. At that time, there were two kinds of cars
the green (military) and black (government). They were moved through
Customs and sent to a black car, with Chinese driver, to go to their
quarters and told that the drivers did not speak English. As they were
going down the road, a pig crossed in front of them. Ben,always the
joker, exclaimed, "There goes dinner!" The driver giggled -- they had
another driver the next morning and did not get the original one back.
Two stories - that happened to me ...
My hotel room - in the Great Wall Sheraton
My hotel room had hidden cameras, I found at least two. One covered
the bedroom area, from an air-conditioning grille and just gets an overall
view.
The other ???? You know when you have a shower and the bathroom
mirror fogs up ? When I took a shower, the mirror fogged up -
with the exception of a brick-sized space that remained clear.
There are only three things in a hotel bathroom; a bath/shower, a hand basin
and the toilet. If there was a camera hidden in that space, it
wouldn't see the shower, it might see the edge of the hand basin area,
try not to form a mental image it would see the back of your head when
you were sitting on the porcelain.
I don't know how much they were paying the poor guy who had to watch that
video of me on the can - but it certainly wasn't enough.
Rocky & Bullwinkle
Can't say a lot about what we were up to at the embassy - it's not a
secret, just bad manners to talk about other customers' premises.
What I can say is we were servicing CCTV cameras. To make the job
easier, we took a couple of handheld CB radios (hoping the CB band in China
was the same as ours). I'd be up on a ladder, tweaking a camera
lens and Peter, my engineer would be at the monitor telling me how the
picture looked.
After several hours of this tedium, I clicked on the mike and said "OK
Boris, first we do cameras, then we kill Moose and Squirrel"
As it happened, the Embassy's head of security was in the security room
with Peter, when all this happened. Frank ***** was a year away
from retirement, a chain smoker and nothing ever bothered him anymore.
He casually wandered over to where I was up a ladder, cuddling the camera,
lit up a nail and took a drag.
Then in the most laconic voice he could be bothered to muster, he said "
you know Dave, big exhale the Chinese secret police never watched Rocky
and Bullwinkle when they were kids, big drag with drawback unless you
want to spend 12 hours at the airport with the guy with the long rubber
glove, you might not want to muck about on the radio"
(well he didn't say 'muck' about, but it was close)
--
Cheers
Dave Kearton