NATO Bombing

Sure, the CIA may have the most expensive and sophisticated intelligence operation in the world. But that doesn’t mean it has the right maps. After a U.S. B-2 bomber struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade last month, mistaking it for a Serbian military-supply building, State Department and Pentagon officials placed discreet phone calls to foreign missions in Washington. Could you please provide us, they asked, with the address of your embassy in the Yugoslav capital? The embassies were only too happy to supply the info. Some of the more wary foreign capitals, in fact, had phoned in the addresses to NATO immediately after the attack.

–By Douglas Waller/Washington