When China boldly seized a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea last December and initially refused to give it back, the incident ignited a weeklong political standoff and conjured memories of a similar event more than 15 years ago.
In April 2001, just months before the 9/11 attacks gripped the nation, a U.S. Navy spy plane flying a routine reconnaissance mission over the South China Sea was struck by a People’s Liberation Army fighter jet that veered aggressively close. The mid-air collision killed the Chinese pilot, crippled the Navy plane, and forced it to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airfield, touching off a tense international showdown for nearly two weeks while China refused to release the two-dozen American crew members and damaged aircraft.
The sea drone captured in December was a research vessel, not a spy craft, according to the Pentagon, so its seizure didn’t risk compromising secret military technology. That wasn’t the case with the spy plane, which carried a trove of surveillance equipment and classified signals intelligence data.
For more than a decade, U.S. officials have refused to say what secrets China might have gleaned from the plane. Two years after the incident, journalists saw a redacted U.S. military report, which revealed that although crew members had jettisoned documents out an emergency hatch as they flew over the sea and had managed to destroy some signals-collection equipment before the plane fell into the hands of the Chinese, it was “highly probable” China had still obtained classified information from the plane. Attempts by journalists and academics to learn more over the years have been unsuccessful.
But now, a comprehensive Navy-NSA report completed three months after the collision, and included among documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, finally reveals extensive details about the incident, the actions crew members took to destroy equipment and data, and the secrets that were exposed to China — which turned out to be substantial though not catastrophic.
The unredacted Navy report, supplemented by a 2001 Congressional Research Service summary of the incident, as well as The Intercept’s interviews with two crew members on board during the collision, presents the most detailed picture yet of the P-3 incident, a critical moment in U.S.-China military relations.
Although the Navy report cites a number of problems with what turned out to be ineffective efforts to destroy classified information, it vindicates the crew as well as pilot and mission commander, Navy Lt. Shane Osborn, who was hounded by critics for years — in and out of the military — who thought he should have ditched the plane and its sensitive equipment in the sea rather than land it in enemy territory. Osborn was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for showing “superb airmanship and courage” in stabilizing and landing the damaged aircraft, but in 2014 when he made a failed bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska, former military personnel popped up in the press again to revive the criticism against him.
“He was flying one of the crown jewels of the reconnaissance force,” Capt. Jan van Tol, a retired Navy officer and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told the Omaha World-Herald. “I think the right answer is he should have ditched it at sea, or taken it anyplace but China.”
Asked whether he stood by that comment today, van Tol told The Intercept that he’s hesitant to question the judgment of a pilot who was on the scene and understood the conditions better than he does, but he still feels Osborn had an obligation to better safeguard the aircraft’s secrets.
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