Bennett murder link to bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade is a red herring
When NBC-4 in Washington, DC was fed a story from an "intelligence source" that CIA officer William Bennett's brutal bludgeoning murder on March 22 may have been linked to his work for the CIA that resulted in the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the station was being misled with a red herring. Our Chinese sources report that the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy on May 7, 1999, was no mistake and it was targeted as a result of a decision by then-director of the National Security Agency (NSA) General Michael Hayden to target the facility because its communications center was sending burst transmissions to Yugoslav army units in Kosovo from the Yugoslav military high command in Belgrade.
The use of the Chinese embassy's communications system by Yugoslavia was reported at the time by the United Kingdom's Observer and Denmark's Politiken newspapers.
The Chinese discovered that Hayden's decision to bomb their embassy was done without the prior approval of either President Bill Clinton or his National Security Adviser Sandy Berger.
Moreover, Hayden, an Air Force general, had another reason to strike the embassy. The embassy was also transmitting television signals that were being used as part of a passive detection system used to track U.S. Air Force stealth aircraft over Yugoslavia. On March 27, 1999, the Yugoslav army, with the assistance of the Chinese long wavelength detection system, was able to spot a stealth F-117 and shoot it down.
The Pentagon gave China an ultimatum to return the F-117's cloaking system that was recovered by Yugoslavian military units from the wreckage and turned it over to the Chinese. The Chinese Foreign Ministry, like the Clinton White House, was reportedly kept out of the loop on the serious military confrontation between the Pentagon and the Chinese People's Liberation Army and intelligence services.
There was a leak to the media by a CIA officer or officers out of the NATO base in Vicenza, Italy concerning the targeting of the Chinese embassy and it just so happens that Bennett was stationed at the base during the Yugoslav campaign. The leak stated that Hayden and his NSA conducted the military operation against the Chinese embassy in Belgrade using B2s from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)/British MI-6 spotter team in Belgrade that used lasers to guide the B-2 precision-guided bombs on to their target: the military communications office in the Chinese embassy compound. This operation was reportedly done without the knowledge of either the White House or the State Department.
According to Japanese intelligence sources, after the bombs hit their target, the KLA/MI-6 team was seen by witnesses combing through the rubble with powerful flashlights and a video camera. It was only after the team departed the embassy grounds that a fire broke out.
CIA and congressional intelligence oversight committee members insisted the attack on the Chinese embassy was a mistake and that story continues to this day as U.S. intelligence doctrine.
China today sees the entire Belgrade fiasco as the outcome of then-President Jiang Zemin's bravado and the Chinese have learned since that it is best to keep a low profile in such conflicts. President Hu Jintao, who met with President Barack Obama at the G20 summit in London, would rather forget the 1999 Belgrade embassy flap. For an "intelligence source" to contend that Bennett's murder was in some way linked to his work in Vicenza during the Kosovo war is a clear attempt at disinformation.
While there is likely an intelligence service involved with the brutal dispatch of Bennett and the attack on his wife, it is not Chinese. The heart of the radar system used by Yugoslavia against American stealth aircraft was a Czech system paid for by Beijing but procured from the Czech Republic by the Israeli Mossad. The intelligence road to Bennett's murder does not lead to China but to Israel, according to our sources in Beijing and Hong Kong.
The Chinese sources are corroborated by sources this editor spoke to in Tel Aviv in 1995. An Israeli government source told the editor that Israel had shared, in violation of an agreement between Israel and the United States, sensitive U.S. military technology with Yugoslavia in its war against Croatia. When the editor contacted a top-level Croatian security service official in Zagreb, he responded that Croatia was aware that the Israelis were providing Belgrade with U.S. weapons and technology banned by Washington from export to third parties. The technology transfer involved permitted Yugoslavia to accurately target with ground-to-ground missiles Croatian military and government facilities in Zagreb and its suburbs.
If Bennett possessed more detailed knowledge of Israeli transfer of sensitive U.S. military and intelligence technology to third parties, it would go a long way into explaining the "hit" on him while on his morning walk with his wife on an early Sunday morning.
