176. The True Story of the Spies Held Hostage by China (Ep 2)

17:57David:It makes him jumpy and stressed, although he's had a hard time sleeping all his life. So he kind of is used to it, he says. And crucially, they want him as the pilot to admit wrongdoing and admit that he swerved into Wang's plane. So they want him to admit that it's his fault. That is what they're pushing on the interrogation. But they also want him to admit and explain what the plane was doing, in other words, spying. And they want him to take responsibility for that. So it's repetition of the same questions. And then accusing him, accusing Shane of saying, you know, you're a spy, you're a murderer, you're going to prison for all your life.

18:39David:And he's just sitting there going, I just need to say as little as possible.

18:43Gordon:Do they hit him? Is there a physical aspect to this as well?

18:46David:No, but he says they threatened to start hitting him. But he decides that's actually unlikely because, you know, I think he thinks despite the anger that's there, they're still going to respect some of the limits. And so he's defiant and says, you know, do whatever you want. They don't hit him. So at that point, I think he knows that there's a limit to what they're going to do. It's interesting because he says the interrogators are in civilian clothes, but he's sure that they're actually military officers who'd been to school in the US. and military school or university or college, but still use translators.

19:23David:But you can tell they can actually speak quite good English, because sometimes these officers correct the translators who don't speak as good English as the officers. But they're obviously trying to do it by the book, using translators perhaps as intermediaries.

19:34Gordon:So it wasn't the MSS, the Ministry of State Security, who was leading the interrogations. It was the military.

19:43David:Yeah, PLA, it sounds like. And at one point, the rest of the crew are brought into the room to watch him being interrogated. And most of them have not been interrogated in nearly the same way. So he looks around and he can see some of these. We talked last time about some of the crew are like 19 or 20 years old. They're not very old. And they look pretty scared because they haven't seen this kind of interrogation going ahead. But he's doing what he can to avoid giving them any real detail.

20:10Gordon:It's also interesting that he uses slang to his advantage. So, you know, he's, Shane's asked about the airplane, goes into great detail about stuff that doesn't really matter to the Chinese. He's throwing military jargon back at them. You can see how the interrogators who are probably having a hard time sorting out what's good detail, what's valid, what's useful from all the other stuff. I mean, the fact that you're then throwing highly technical terminology into this conversation that's already happening in part through translators feels like it would be a really frustrating process for the Chinese.

20:51Gordon:I mean, you're missing stuff. It's hard for you to latch on to what's just been said. You can see how he kind of danced around for a bit and was able to delay them getting any real insight about what they were collecting and its importance.

21:06David:And then Neil Seelock gets down, eventually gets access to Shane and the team. And Shane only at that point can report back to Seelock that the crew had destroyed most of the kit. There's going to be six meetings over the coming days, only 40 minutes each time. And again, Seelock and Shane Osborne speaking kind of jargon to try and confuse those listening. Interestingly enough, Neil Seelock's father had run a jungle survival school. See, that's what he's doing. Shane also realizes this is suddenly a big deal because he's being shown a China Daily newspaper, which says the US had invaded China by landing the EP3 there.

21:44David:So I think that's a sign.

21:46Gordon:This is maybe a big deal diplomatically. One of the big problems, though, which is unresolved at this point in time, is the fate of Wang Wei, the missing, the downed Chinese pilot. So maybe there, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see what happened to Wang after he ejected over the South China Sea.

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23:31Gordon:Welcome back. At this point in the crisis, the Chinese are still searching for their downed pilot, Wang Wei, who we last saw, or the air crew on the EP3 last saw, him actually floating down toward the ocean, having ejected a parachute lifts out. But what's happened to him? Have the Chinese found him at this point?

23:55David:No, and that's the problem. And it's monsoon season. There's four or six winds. There's three meter high waves. And China is going to send boats and planes to look for him with thousands of people, they say, are involved in this search, which is going to go on for days and days and days. The US offers to help with the search and the Chinese say no way. There's a lot of publicity around it. It's interesting because they're probably also looking for some of the spy gear, which the crew threw out. So they're looking for Wang, but they're also thinking, we wonder if we can recover some of the kit that got thrown out by the crew.

24:28David:although that's in metal cases which must be at the bottom of the south china seas by then and hard to find but after two weeks they're going to give up on wang and on april the 14th he's given you know they give up hope he's declared a revolutionary martyr in a big ceremony at the great hall of the the people chinese leader zhang zemin attends and it's interesting because there's a lot of anger about it in china through the search because the story that's going around is he was killed by the Americans. It was an American plane which swerved and hit him. And so he was killed by Shane Osborne and his crew.

25:07David:And there's this nationalist upswing in feeling in China. And so one of the questions I think they're trying to understand in Washington is, is the Chinese state fueling that nationalism, that anger?

25:20Gordon:There is a fight, isn't there, inside Beijing over who will handle the negotiation? Is it going to be the military or will it be the civilian ministry of foreign affairs? And I guess, you know, maybe it's a little cartoonish, but you kind of think there's this, maybe this conflict inside the government over whether you use this incident to kind of stir up nationalist fervor, or whether you want to dial it down. And there's no consensus right away. And imagine that's also a feature of these kinds of incidents, isn't it? Is it an opportunity to be used or is it a crisis to be diffused?

26:06David:Yeah. And it's interesting because even with that tension between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the People's Liberation Army, the military guys in China, it seems as if they're not on the same page. Because at one point, the US diplomats explain how it would be impossible for the US plane, which is so slow moving, to have veered into the Chinese fighter jet from the angle at which it happened. And when they do this, the US diplomats can see the Chinese foreign ministry guys look surprised because they've clearly been told by the military that it was definitely the Americans' fault. So the negotiations are ongoing and that China is making these demands.

26:44David:The US has to apologise for the event, promise it won't happen again pay compensation the americans are refusing to do this and you know uh the only thing they're willing to do is pay the cost of the room and board for the crew stay in hainan and the cost of dissembling it but it's interesting because if you go back there's some accounts from that wire article as well about how the cia was watching the chinese media to try and understand that point you made about are they dialing it up or not and there'd been a couple years earlier, the US, in what is still a very odd incident, had mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the war with Serbia, the bombing campaign against Serbia.

27:26David:And there'd been absolute outrage in China at that time. And people have posted messages about, let's go out and attack US embassies and consulates in China to get revenge. But this time, the CIA analysts can see that when people are expressing outrage about the Hainan incident, this new incident, the censors are taking those messages down. So that's a pretty good sign, isn't it, that what the intent is, is to try and resolve this in some way.

27:55Gordon:And it's probably worth stating, if it's not blindingly obvious, that the situation that the Chinese state was in 25 years ago is very different from the one it finds itself in today. Because at that point in time, Shang Tsing-wen wants to get China into the World Trade Organization, the WTO. That's not done yet. And the Chinese are hoping to host the 2008 Olympics. And I don't think, had the location been confirmed as Beijing at that point? So there's some real incentive on the part of the Chinese leadership to just dial this thing down. And the CIA analysts are saying to the White House, don't antagonize them, right?

28:39Gordon:Because if you get into an argument about who's at fault, it's going to go nowhere. And this thing can actually get settled. But I think this is the interesting thing is how do you settle this? Because the Chinese demand an apology, a public apology. The US doesn't want to give it because Washington says, look, we have nothing to apologize for. You guys caused this incident. Your fighter jet caused this incident. And so what ends up happening, I think, is it's a very clever, essentially, formulation of words in a statement, which I think is known as the letter of two sorries. I'd like to get a letter like this from you at some point, Gordon.

29:20David:The letter of the two sorries. A general apology.

29:23Gordon:And importantly, it allows both sides to kind of interpret it and spin it however they want.

29:29David:Yeah, I think it's a really interesting example of how diplomacy can be very effective at resolving a crisis. You could see actually how the CIA analysis about what's going on in China can then support that diplomacy. But then the diplomacy is coming up with a form of words in which the US writes a letter saying it was sorry for the death of the pilot and for the loss of the aircraft and sorry that China had not been able to approve the entry of the EP3 into Chinese airspace and had landed on their territory without permission. permission. So what they're saying is we're sorry for what happened, but it's not a formal apology or admission of responsibility saying we were at fault and it was our fault.

30:14David:And also they have the letter signed not by President Bush or by Carolyn Powell, but by the ambassador in Beijing, so also at a lower level. So it's just a clever formulation in which Beijing can go around claiming, well, we got an apology from the Americans, while the US can say, well, it's really just an expression of regret about what had happened. So it's classic diplomacy, isn't it? That's what the diplomats are for.

30:39Gordon:Well, it allows both sides to save face, doesn't it? I mean, because you can walk away and spin it however you want, and it effectively ends the crisis. The air crew come back home in a few days, the now disassembled aircraft. I'm sure the Chinese just left all the SIGINT equipment inside, Gordon. I'm sure they returned all of it, all of it inventoried and sent back to the NSA. The aircraft comes home a few months later after the Chinese have exploited all of the comms. The crisis had lasted 10 days. Shane Osborne is awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and President George W. Bush also writes to the widow of Wang Wei, the Chinese pilot.

31:22Gordon:And what I think is, that's a very classy move by the former president. Yeah.

31:26David:And it's interesting as the US decides it's not going to stand down the flight. So they stop for a couple of months and then they start again. They still want to collect the intelligence. You're not going to stop. But they now have US fighter jets nearby. And they also say that Chinese are much more disciplined afterwards about approaching and getting too close. you raise the snowden leaks point because it is interesting because we do get a sense of the damage from those snowden leaks 10 years after the incident and they say despite the best effort to the crew there were some compromises in the way for instance the way us encrypted its communications there were some details of how they process communications collected signals of pla submarines some of the computers on board their their signals processing software was compromised but actually the view overall though the kind of damage assessment is that it wasn't catastrophic damage it's rated medium to low in severity of damage in terms of the compromise so it could have been a lot worse is that a formal scale yeah i think there is yeah so i guess it's not catastrophic it's medium to low which is still not great but it could have been a lot worse And of course, the US definitely starts training people better on how to deal with that kind of incident.

32:45Gordon:I guess this brings us to the big question facing us today, which is, what if something like this happened in 2026? I mean, surely, Gordon, surely the Russians would never provoke NATO jets over the Baltic, right? And obviously, the Chinese have, you know, everything's calm in the South China Sea. So it seems like there's little prospect for this to happen, right?

33:13David:Yeah, unfortunately, this kind of stuff is still happening. It's interesting. I started looking into the incidents. If you take the South China Sea first, the US 2023 put out a public warning listing a load of incidents which had just happened. So it said June 2022, a Chinese J-16 fighter jet, assume that's twice as good as a J-8, cuts across the nose of an Australian P-8A Poseidon aircraft that was operating in, once again, international airspace over the South China Sea. The Chinese jet released surround of chaff, which is this material used to confuse radar, which then gets ingested into the Australian aircraft's engine.

33:56David:December 2022, a Chinese Navy J-11 pilot, not quite as good as a J-16, flew 20 feet from the nose of a US Air Force RC-135, which had to manoeuvre away to avoid a collision. May 2023, Chinese J-16 performs what was described as an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver during an intercept of another US RC-135. The PRC pilot, the Chinese pilot, flew directly in front of the nose of the US plane, forcing the US aircraft to fly through its wake turbulence, US officials said.

34:35Gordon:That is exactly what Wang Wei was attempting to do before he clipped the B-3.

34:39David:So the same kind of stuff is happening. I think the interesting question is, on that US-China side, if there was an incident today, what do you think would be the consequences if you had a similar incident in which two planes collide, Chinese pilot killed, US plane lands on China?

34:59Gordon:One of the things that I found remarkable as we were getting the story ready is how few of these incidents actually lead to conflict. The risk is there, certainly, but there seems to be the dynamics of the crisis seem to lend themselves toward crisis management, conflict resolution, something that, and both sides walk away with ill will, of course, but there's like a desire to kind of, you know, bring the intensity level down and deescalate because this is all happening in this spy world of signals intelligence collection. And nobody wants that to erupt into open war. I could see an incident like the 2001 spy plane crash kind of going in a similar direction although you do have to wonder you know if if the chinese state would i mean would they hold would they hold the hostages for longer would they try to extract the higher price because the relative power differential has closed in the 20 into the past 25 years so could the chinese they're more confident could they get more um more than kind of a you know an apology could

36:16David:they get concessions on something else yeah it's interesting because neil sealock the defense attache at the time has been involved in contact with China ever since. I mean, he's been doing what's called Track Two, which is parallel diplomacy, non-official contacts. And one of the things he worries about, I think, is that there's less military to military contact now than there was at that period. Actually, at that time, you had quite a few officers who'd go to military schools or do exchanges on each side, whereas there's much less official contact now. And when we've seen some incidents, the hotlines, famously those Chinese spy balloons flew over America.

37:02David:And it wasn't a big crisis, but the kind of military to military contacts didn't seem to be working very well. People were picking up the hotlines, which is what you need. And then I think the issue is whether the nationalist fervor on each side would kick into gear and whether you'd have the US and the Chinese governments be willing to defuse or whether they'd want to play to their domestic publics. I think that's where maybe you'd worry about it.

37:37Gordon:Well, what about Europe? Because that's the other theater where this type of incident has been happening with a lot of regularity.

37:46David:And that's where I think perhaps some of the greater risks are, which is Russian jets, particularly flying into NATO airspace sometimes over the Baltics, skirting it, getting close, doing intercepts. I mean, I've been to a NATO base in Estonia where some of the Italian jets actually I saw had gone up and had to fly alongside Russian jets, which were coming into or towards NATO airspace. And there'd been a couple of really worrying incidents. Just a few months ago, you had, just in May of this year, you had a UK spy plane flying close to Russia's eastern flank, so doing a bit like the EP-3, skirting in international airspace, but close to Russia.

38:33David:And two Russian warplanes repeatedly and dangerously, according to Britain's Ministry of Defence, intercept this unarmed RAF spy plane that's over the Black Sea. And a Russian Su-35 fighter jet approaches this RAF, British Rivet Joint Surveillance Aircraft, gets close enough to trigger its emergency systems, disabling its autopilot. And an Su-27 Russian jet carries out six passes in front of the RAF plane, getting as close as six metres. I mean, that's 20 feet away. So it's not quite as close as Wang was, but pretty close. And there was one other incident, which I think was really significant.

39:14David:Back in 2022, a Russian pilot actually tried to shoot down a British RAF spy plane after believing he had permission to fire. So the RAF plane was doing it, which has a crew of about 30, so pretty similar to the EP-3. And it was flying a surveillance mission over the Black Sea in international airspace when two Russian Su-27 fighter jets appear, the communications from those fighter jets show that one of the pilots thought he'd actually been given permission to target the British aircraft following an ambiguous command from a Russian ground station. No, it's not great. And the second Russian pilot doesn't think that.

39:56David:And he actually, you know, the two have an argument, you know, after the first pilot fires his first missiles and he fires two missiles and one missile misses and the other one... malfunction so i mean that is i mean that's not an accident that was nearly well it would have been an accident but you know a shoot down you got missiles fired at some of these spy planes so in a way it's the baltics which and and the black sea and the russian flank which i think almost is more worrying today because you could imagine if that happens if you get a shoot down the way things are between Europe and Russia, that could escalate, I think, and turn nasty pretty quickly.

40:39Gordon:Yeah, maybe with so much of the tension over Ukraine kind of in the water, the, I think, historically reflexive desire to kind of settle these, you know, when accidents happen, to settle them, to negotiate, maybe isn't there. I do think there is – I went back and took a little look at some of these past incidents. For example, even in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a U-2 shootout that occurred. And President Kennedy is thinking, well, do I have to destroy surface-to-air missile sites in Cuba in retaliation for the shootout? And he, in the midst of that crisis, decides to de-escalate.

41:26Gordon:There's another interesting example of, remember back in, I think it was 2015, when the Turks shot down a Russian fighter jet and tension spiked like crazy. But eventually, it kind of goes into this tit for tat of sanctions, diplomatic freeze. Eventually, it's resolved over time between Moscow and Ankara. So I think the pattern for a lot of these incidents is usually de-escalation. But I think that from my end, the Russia dynamic today that we've been talking about around the Baltics, one of the concerns I would have is if the Russians almost deliberately provoke to start an incident that allows them to justify whatever, a move on the Baltics, on one of the Baltics, a slice of one of the – So it's almost like an incident, a supposed accident or a provocation that then turns into an accident where you end up with potentially a shot down Russian aircraft could be exactly the kind of trigger, if you're Putin, that you'd want to use for further provocations.

42:38David:Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, these intercepts are inherently dangerous when they're going that close. So there is certainly a risk of accident, but you could also stage one to become a provocation for an incident. So I think it is possible something could happen in the South China Seas again. There's a lot of naval activity there as well with boats from the Philippines and China getting close, but also this air activity over Europe. So I think that's why this story of Hainan is so interesting, because it shows what can go wrong and it shows how difficult it is then to defuse it. and in this case it was successful and the letter of two sorries worked but I'm not sure Putin would be writing or accepting the letter of two sorries.

43:21David:So the letter, yeah,

43:23Gordon:I think if you look at his writings on Ukraine, he's not a man given to writing two sorries in a letter, much less one. So there won't be any, there'll be no sorries from Vladimir Putin. Well, Gordon, I think maybe that's the spot to end this fun two-parter we've done on the Haidon spy plane incident from 2001. As a reminder, if you haven't already, do go to therestisclassified.com and join the Declassified Club where you'll get early access to series, bonus episodes, early access to live show tickets, a whole bunch of other goodies. A reminder that we do have a live show coming up in September.

44:06Gordon:Gordon and I will be on stage The South Bank Theatre in London will also be on stage with none other than the Mooch, Anthony Scaramucci, who's going to attempt to, I think, beat me in some kind of debate over America's role on the global stage. Gordon will be attempting to moderate that. Do check that out at therestisclassified.com.

44:29David:Yes, and of course, Declassified Club members are getting a really interesting bonus this week, which is with Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of MI6, who's also a China specialist. We'll be talking about some of these issues to do with the US and UK's relationship with China and how it's changed over the 25 years since Hainan. So if you're not a member, do sign up because it's a really interesting interview. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Thank you.