May 13, 1999

Re: Chinese Embassy bombing

"We find it unnerving that...offensive capabilities
are under the control of an agency...which
operates unchecked by our elected representatives
and beyond all traditional restraints."

- Edward Eskelson and Tom Bernard,former military
Communications Technicians quoted by the Denver Post
regarding the still not entirely explained circumstances
surrounding how a Korean airliner came to be shot down
in Northeast Asia in 1983.

There's only one organization on earth that has
the ability to:

1. Identify the apartments of specific
individuals within a foreign embassy

2. Insert the coordinates of those locations into
a Pentagon pilot's "hit list" without being questioned

3. Remain completely and irrevocably anonymous while
the President, the Pentagon, NATO, and the CIA
take the heat for the "mistake" and possibly
remain genuinely bewildered and/or misled as to
how it happened

US military people have long complained
(privately) of being used by the NSA
as "taxi drivers" i.e. being directed to
carry out NSA business that is disguised
as a Pentagon-managed operation. For
example, when an NSA operative is aboard
a Navy ship, it is the operative - regardless
of his visible rank - not the captain, who calls
the shots. He does so by controlling the flow of
encrypted communications to and from the ship.

Some public facts about the NSA:

* Signed into being by presidential order by
Harry Truman in November 1952, his last
major act as president.
* The text of the order remains classified
over 40 years later
* Employs more people than "the rest of
the intelligence community put together"
source: James Bamford ("The Puzzle Palace")
* In 1959, the organization received an
additional layer of security through
Section 6 of Public Law 86-36: "Nothing
in this Act or any other law...shall be
construed to require the disclosure of the
organization of any function of the National
Security Agency, or any information with
respect to the activities therof, or the
names, title, salaries of number of persons
employed by the Agency."

In other words, we don't know what they do,
how they do it, who they do it to, why they
do it and how many people and resources they've
got to do it with - and we may never know.

Which explains why the process and personnel behind
the targeting of the Chinese embassy,like so many other
mysteries of post War US history, may never be credibly
disclosed (though bright minds are hard at work at
a plausible cover story as we speak. No doubt we'll
soon be shown a pseudo-technical explanatory diagram
in the New York Times that "explains everything.")

*If* this was an NSA orchestrated hit, why?
I can think of a dozen or more motives, but
they'd just be guesses. But if you find the
tracks of an elephant in your backyard...

In any event, the peace process, such as it was,
has been derailed; NATO immediately increased its already
obscene level of general bombardment and civilian
targeting; and China and Russia have been shown
that the US is capable of using reckless violence
against them as well as Yugoslavia, like
the preferred tactic of the Joe Pesci character
in the movie "Goodfellas." Recall that just a few
weeks ago, NATO's "supreme commander" was publicly
advocating the bombing Russian ships. The actual,
"accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy is the
next logical step up from that level of madness.

The official line is the Chinese are *supposed* to
believe the bombing was an accident. Anything else is
just "whacky" according to one of the US papers best
known for being co-opted by US intelligence. Sayeth
the Washington Post:

"Conspiracy theories have always had great currency in
Chinese society, in part because of people's restricted
access to information. But the conspiracy theories stemming
from the embassy attack border on the wacky."

Techniques used so far by the Pentagon news service
(CNN, the New York Times, AP etc.) to discredit The
Chinese and other skeptics:

#3 characterze the charges as "wild rumors", #5 call the
skeptics "conspiracy theorists", #6 impugn motives,
#7 invoke authority, #9 come half clean, and
#13 change the subject. *Anything* but report the
facts and address the issues. For more on this see
"13 Techniques of Truth Supression" by David Martin.
http://www.brasscheck.com/martin.html

Further information about the NSA, its strategy, tactics,
and operations (such as they can be discerned):

* "The Puzzle Palace" by James Bamford
Boston: Houghton Mifflinm 1982
* "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn
London: Widenfield and Nicolson, 1967
* "The Pueblo Surrender: A Covert Action by
the National Security Agency" * by Robert A. Liston
New York: Bantam Books, 1988

* Most useful for gaining insight into the
NSA's ability to manipulate the military
and its willingness to engage in dangerous
brinkmanship in dealings with China and
Russia.

Covert Action Quarterly also occasionally publishes
information on the activities of this little-known and
immensely powerful agency.
http://www.caq.com