175. How China Downed a US Spy Plane (Ep 1)

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0:24Gordon:What happens when a Chinese fighter jet crashes into a US spy plane? The result is death, hostages, and a major crisis with lessons for what could spark a war today. Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

0:39David:And I'm Gordon Carrera.

0:41Gordon:And in this thrilling two-part series, Gordon, that we're starting, we are going to look at an incredibly dramatic incident that happened 25 years ago over the South China Sea. But it is an incident that I think has real lessons for the very tense world that we're living in today, not just with China, but also with Russia. And it shows the risks of how really accidents that come out of nowhere can spark major crises.

1:16David:That's right. This is known as the Hainan Incident. We'll come to why shortly. And it happened 25 years ago at the start of a new presidency, that of George W. Bush, spring 2001. And it involves an accident, a crash of two aircraft, one of which was a US spy plane. The other was a Chinese fighter jet. And we're going to look in, I think, quite a lot of detail about that incident, about the accident, which in itself leads effectively to a hostage situation for US aircrew, which needed to be resolved diplomatically, but certainly also does have lessons for today.

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3:06Gordon:So what I think is so relevant about this today is that the incident we're going to discuss, it comes out of a practice of fighter jets intercepting or buzzing other airplanes, including spy planes. And that is a practice that is very much still happening today. It's happening today over the skies of Europe between NATO jets and Russian planes. It's still happening around China. And there is a lot of tension in this practice. The stakes are really high, as we'll see. And the spiral from one of these accidents to a much more significant, wider conflict is not a very long spiral, is it?

3:50David:No, not at all. And I think that those risks are there and are very real. I think it gets us into a really interesting area about spy planes and some of the history of these spy planes and some of the incidents and the dramatic incidents around them. We'll be talking a bit about that in this series, but also a bit more in our new off-air segment, which will be in our Rest is Classified newsletter. So do sign up for that, or you can scan the QR code on the video if you're watching the video. But yeah, it is interesting because I think if war were to break out today, it could spring from exactly the kind of incidents we're talking about, where you have an accident of two planes or maybe even two boats at the moment, two ships in the South China Sea getting too close, and a mistake, a collision, and then a crisis.

4:42Gordon:So it's probably worth setting up the mission that we're going to talk about, which of course occurs, as we said, in 2001. The setting for this is the South China Sea. This was then and still is one of the kind of flashpoints in global geopolitics. You have multiple countries in this space who have overlapping contradictory territorial claims. It's rich, I think you could say, with boundary disputes. There's something called the Nine Dash Line, which is a line on maps that are produced by China that show a line quite literally with nine dashes that encircles the South China Sea. And it is through this line, the Chinese claim that they have maritime rights over about 90 % of the sea and its shipping routes and its mineral reserves.

5:42Gordon:And that claim overlaps with the claims of a lot of other countries in the region, such as Vietnam, such as Indonesia, the Philippines. China claims that some of the islands, the Paracel Islands, for example, belong to China. And therefore, the airspace above it, the sea lanes around it are theirs. And it's not, this is really important. This is not international airspace or international waters. This is Chinese territorial waters. And therefore, part of China, the US, as many of these other Southeast Asian countries do, maintains that this is not the case. And so there are these freedom of navigation missions, ships often, that really go through these waters to demonstrate that point, that this is not Chinese territory.

6:34Gordon:But there's also, this relates very specifically to the story we're telling today, there are also spy planes that fly in and around this region in what we consider to be international airspace, but the Chinese consider to be their own.

6:48David:That's right. And one of these spy planes back in 2001 is something called an EP-3. It's a spy plane, but a pretty unusual one. I think in your head you might be thinking something incredibly high-tech. But that's not it. It's a big, slow aircraft, isn't it? About the size of a Boeing 737. It's actually a four-engine prop, a propeller airliner, which is flying, therefore slow. heavy but inside it's got spy gear and i guess it's worth explaining isn't it why why people fly these spy planes and what they're for i mean it's a form of signals intelligence collection it's a platform to collect signals intelligence isn't it david yeah it is it is a

7:40Gordon:slow-moving vacuum for signals intelligence collection. And that's looking for radar signals, getting an idea of what coverage the Chinese have in the region, how the Chinese operate, you know, the EP3 or any sort of aerial platform for signals intelligence collection. When they're conducting these kind of missions, they're basically soaking up, you know, all of the radio transmissions, the air defense signatures from the ground, lots of things that you actually, you know, you think in our sort of interconnected world, oh, can't you do a lot of this from space via satellite? No, the geographic proximity matters.

8:23Gordon:You can't do a lot of this via satellite. You certainly couldn't do it in 2001. And because it has so many different sensors and collection platforms on it. It's got, and this is also a very important element of the story, it's not just a couple pilots. It's a really big crew that is about 24 people, six of them are the air crew, and then there's 18 people who are the signals intelligence collectors, the technical specialists who are collecting all this information on behalf of the NSA, the National Security Agency.

8:57David:That's right. And on this mission we're going to talk about, April 1st, 2001. It's being led by US Navy Lieutenant, Lieutenant, if you're American, Shane Osborne. Shane Osborne's just started as a commander of these missions, spring 2001. He's only 26 years old. And many of the crew on board are only 19 or 20. So they're really young. You interviewed him, right? Yeah, I interviewed Shane a couple of years ago. I mean, he can still, and what we'll hear about this incident, some of it comes from other accounts, but a lot comes from his memory. Because if you were commanding an incident like this, He can still vividly, you know, 20, 25 years later, remember exactly what happened that day on April the 1st.

9:37David:But it didn't come out of the blue, it's worth saying, because there'd been some back and forth with China at that time. The US had stepped up the number of missions it's flying off China, so in international airspace. And then China has stepped up its intercepts. So that's when it sends out its fighter jets to meet these planes. And we should say this is something which happens today. It happens all the time, doesn't it, where fighter jets are scrambled. They go up to basically escort a company, take a look at the aircraft, track them. Usually they come out, they intercept, track it for a bit, break away, and then leave.

10:13David:It's kind of making a point, isn't it?

10:15Gordon:There is a long and rich historical precedent for these kind of flights, right? This is, go back to the early days of the Cold War, and you have dozens, if not hundreds of examples of these. And normally, nothing happens, right? Normally, it's business as usual. But in this case, sometimes, for example, Chinese planes would call US air crews on international frequencies and they would, for example, tell them, you're in Chinese airspace, get out. And then the US crews would say, nope, we're in international airspace. We're still going. And there's kind of this fruitless back and forth that's been going on between the two countries because of the territorial dispute.

10:58David:But it had been getting a bit more tense in the run up. And they'd seen some of these Chinese planes come up from a base, which is on Hainan Island, which juts out into the South China Seas. And planes from that base had been coming up and doing something called flat hatting, which is getting close to one of these spy planes and buzzing it and almost buffeting it. So creating turbulence around it to shake it.

11:23Gordon:Which I think does beg the question, given the risk, why is the US doing this? Is it just to prove the point on the territorial boundary? Or what's the value that the signals intelligence collection on this plane can deliver?

11:42David:There's a lot you can get from this. I mean, understanding how Chinese radar operates, how they scramble their planes, what signatures they use, what encrypted communications do they use when the Chinese pilots are communicating with their base. All of that is really useful. Military intelligence, particularly if you ever were to come into conflict with China, that's the kind of stuff you want to do. You want to know the air defense signatures, don't you? You want to know what frequencies they work on. You want to know how they lock onto you to some extent. All of that kind of activity, the emissions which are coming from different Chinese military assets, collecting, scooping all that up in that giant vacuum cleaner, as you put it, that's really, really helpful.

12:30David:I mean, you might also be looking for submarines, which might be operating in the South China Seas, looking for their emissions. So you're trying to understand how does the Chinese military operate? How does it respond to you? How does it spot you? How quickly does it spot you? All of that is really useful intelligence.

12:47Gordon:And so then on April 1st, 2001, the EP-3, that flying vacuum cleaner that Shane Osborne is piloting, is coming to the end of one of these missions. And they're based, we should say, out of Okinawa and Japan. So they're preparing, they've done the mission, they've scooped up what they need to scoop up. And they're getting ready for the two-hour flight back home. They're flying at about 22 ,000 feet. The autopilot is on. And this seems like just another day in the office.

13:17David:Yeah. And they've done some missions previous days where they've been incepted and the Chinese pilots had come pretty close. I mean, so close that the Chinese pilot and Shane Osborne can actually see each other. And there is this sense that the Chinese pilots are becoming more aggressive. And Osborne knows that these Chinese naval pilots, and they're naval pilots rather than air force pilots from China, didn't train in formation flying. So they would come out and they would stay a bit off his wings, but they have quite a hard time because, of course, the fighter jets fly much faster than the prop planes.

13:51David:So actually, it takes a bit of skill to stay off the wing of a prop plane long enough to make them know you're there. And on this day, Shane sees the Chinese pilot coming towards him. He calls up the navigator on the EP3 to confirm they're still in international airspace. They want to make sure they've not wandered into what's considered by them Chinese airspace. They don't have a GPS or anything, so it's not very sophisticated. But he's told, yes, you're in international airspace. And now this Chinese pilot is coming at him. But what's really interesting is we can actually have a look at the Chinese side and understand a little bit about that.

14:28Yeah, so who is the Chinese pilot?

14:31Gordon:And what's the view on these American missions as seen from Beijing?

14:37David:Yeah, because the view from Beijing is that they've seen the US flights get more frequent. They think they're getting closer to what really are Chinese territorial waters. So these planes tend to skirt the edge of someone's territorial waters or airspace. That's the point. You want to get as close as you can without crossing over it. China had said to the US, you know, this is please stop this reconnaissance activity. So they're getting frustrated as well. But actually, this is really about one particular pilot. So on April the 1st, an alert siren goes off at the Lingshui Air Base on Hainan Island.

15:13David:Hainan, as I said, is a big island in South China Seas, home to the military, also signals intelligence base. Two pilots scramble. One of them is called the Wang Wei. Now, he and the other pilot, his wingman, head from the duty room to board their two J-ET fighter jets. Now, these are not particularly sophisticated fighter jets at the time. They're kind of copies of Russian MiG-21 jets. Now, Wang is 33 years old and a top Navy pilot. He'd come from a working class background in China, always wanted to be a pilot. Joined initially without his parents' permission. Not a rich family. the first new clothes he owned, it said, were his military uniform.

15:52David:Previously, he just had secondhand clothes. He's got a wife and young son back home, and he takes a bicycle to get from home to the base that day. But he was a top pilot. But what I think is interesting is that he is the Chinese equivalent of a Top Gun pilot. And I think he's got that maverick Top Gun attitude. You're a Top Gun fan, David? Oh, yeah.

16:16Gordon:I like to reenact the shirtless volleyball match on an annual basis after watching the movie. It's a McCloskey family summer tradition. Yeah, of course I love... Who doesn't love Top Gun, Gordon? It's practically un-American to not love Top Gun, I think. So I'm glad you share a similar patriotic taste. I've always considered you the goose to my maverick, Gordon. What? I hope it ends better for you and for us on the podcast.

16:46David:But Wang is a Top Gun pilot, and he's got that maverick. He's got the hot dog pilot attitude. He likes to push the boundaries. He likes to do barrel rolls, things to show off. Can be a bit impatient, a bit hot-headed. Doesn't want to be a senior officer, just wants to fly the best planes. Just like Maverick. That's just like Maverick. He's a maverick. Yeah, he's just like Maverick. He's a Chinese version of Maverick. So he's really known as the hot dog pilot. I mean, he'd even done this thing where he'd put his email address in the window of his cockpit at one point and flown by an EP3 and shown it to them, basically saying, you know, you can get in touch.

17:21David:So he and his wingman, these two Chinese planes are flying out towards Shane Osborne's EP3. And then this is where the Chinese accounts, the American accounts are going to differ as to what happens next. But the result will be disaster.

17:36Gordon:Well, maybe there, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how what could have been a routine day in the air turns into death, catastrophe, and an international hostage crisis. We'll see you after the break.

17:55Gordon:well welcome back it's the spring of 2001 and we are over the south china sea and a chinese fighter jet piloted by wang wei is approaching the us ep3 spy plane and he's coming up on that plane from the rear left.