From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Sat Apr 27 2002 - 23:22:34 MDT
This is completely unsurprising. Unbeknownst to most people in the world,
there are very active covert battlefields between nations, which only rarely
spill over into anything that would show up in your evening news. In some
ways this is very good, as it bleeds off steam between nations and generally
keeps things out of sight and out of mind of the national consciousness (no
need to get the populace in an uproar which may cause a politically driven
incident). Perhaps more strangely, some long-running covert battles are
between countries that are not normally considered to be enemies (e.g. US
and France, which have been trading covert blows for a couple decades now).
It is worth noting that these covert battles aren't just spy versus spy type
stuff; the US loses a few dozen people every year in these games, though we
probably give more than we take in most cases.
Back to China, one of the big problems with China is that they are
extraordinarily clumsy at these below-the-radar international games. They
have neither the savvy and style of the Russians nor the tireless discipline
of the French, so whenever they try to play the game they tend to make a
public mess of it, which ruins it for everyone. There is supposed to be
some "honor among thieves" in the world of covert ops, but the Chinese are
famous for lacking this quality.
My guess: the Chinese thought they were going to do something clever that
breaks the "rules" of the game, and so the US government is airing
foreknowledge of it in public to discourage the Chinese from doing it.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
On 4/27/02 9:32 PM, "Olga Bourlin" <fauxever@sprynet.com> wrote:
>
> In case you haven't read...
> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-042502china.story
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