Key Points and Summary – In May 1999, during NATO’s Kosovo air campaign, a U.S. Air Force B-2A Spirit stealth bomber dropped GPS-guided JDAMs on what planners believed was a Yugoslav military facility in Belgrade.
-It was the Chinese Embassy.
A 2nd Air Refueling Squadron KC-10 Extender from Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., prepares to refuel a B-2 Spirit, during a training exercise near Kansas, Nov. 10, 2016. The KC-10 Extender is an Air Mobility Command advanced tanker and cargo aircraft designed to provide increased global mobility for U.S. armed forces. Although the KC-l0’s primary mission is aerial refueling, it can combine the tasks of a tanker and cargo aircraft by refueling fighters and simultaneously carry the fighter support personnel and equipment on overseas deployments. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Keith James/Released)
A B-2 Spirit assigned to the 509th Bomb Wing flies overhead at RAF Fairford, England, Aug. 25, 2021. The B-2 flyover was part of a Bomber Task Force mission in which aircraft conduct theater and flight training across Europe and Africa. The BTF missions, which have been occurring since 2018, provide theater familiarization for aircrew members and opportunities for U.S. integration with NATO allies and regional partners. The bomber missions enhance readiness and provide the training necessary to respond to any potential crisis or challenge across the globe. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Eugene Oliver)
-Three Chinese journalists were killed and more than twenty people were wounded, triggering an explosion of anger in China and one of the ugliest crises in U.S.–China relations since Tiananmen.
-Investigations later pointed to CIA targeting errors, outdated maps, and a breakdown in “no-strike” safeguards. The B-2 did exactly what it was told to do. Humans told it to hit the wrong building.
The Night a B-2A Stealth Bomber Hit the Wrong Building
Late on May 7, 1999, a single B-2A Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and disappeared into the night. You can’t begin to understand the power of these bombers unless you see them, but I was lucky to see a B-2A up close in July, as an early model is on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. And, in fact, you can see some of the pictures I took in this article.
B-2 Stealth Bomber July 2025 National Security Journal Photo.
It was one of the most advanced aircraft on earth: a flying wing designed to slip through dense air defenses, carrying GPS-guided JDAM bombs that were supposed to put warheads within meters of their aim point. The target that night was listed as the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms importer in Belgrade — a legitimate military node in NATO’s campaign against Slobodan Milošević.
Hours later, five 2,000-pound bombs slammed into the Chinese Embassy instead.
Three Chinese journalists were killed. More than twenty Chinese diplomats and staff were injured. Television cameras showed flames engulfing a diplomatic mission, not a Yugoslav command node. In Beijing, the strike would be remembered simply as the “May 8 Incident.”
The B-2 worked perfectly. The target system did not.
How the Targeting Chain Broke
For Washington, the immediate problem was explaining how one of its most precise strike platforms could hit the wrong building in the middle of a European capital.
The official U.S. account — laid out in State Department briefings and a later CIA investigation — came down to this: the wrong coordinates went in at the very beginning, and every safeguard that should have caught that mistake failed.
B-2 Bomber from U.S. Air Force Display. Image Credit: Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal.
B-2 Stealth Bomber at USAF Museum July 19 2025. Image Credit: Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal.
The strike was unusual in one key respect. Unlike most targets in Operation Allied Force, which were nominated and vetted through standard Defense Department channels, this one was developed by the CIA as part of an effort to hit Yugoslav military logistics. Intelligence officers identified what they believed was the Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (Yugoimport), a key node for weapons and equipment, using address data and maps.
Those maps, it turned out, were wrong.
Investigations later found that the CIA targeting team relied on outdated cartographic products and mislocated the Yugoimport facility on their working map.
The coordinates they generated corresponded not to the intended building several hundred meters away, but to the Chinese Embassy on the same street.
From there, the error propagated.
Target folders, imagery analysis, and the broader NATO command structure did not flag the site as a diplomatic mission. The embassy was on various “no-strike” lists, but the databases used by the CIA team and the bomber planners did not correctly link those lists to the coordinates they were approving. Analysts saw a building with the right general footprint in the right neighborhood and assumed it matched the military facility they wanted.
Once the coordinates were loaded into the B-2’s mission plan and the JDAM guidance packages, the rest was physics. The Spirit flew halfway around the world, opened its bomb bays at the pre-programmed release point, and let gravity and GPS guidance do their work.
The weapons were accurate. They were aimed at the wrong place.
Beijing’s Fury and the Streets on Fire
In Beijing, there was nothing abstract about any of this.
Chinese state media woke up to footage of their embassy in Belgrade smoking and broken. Three Chinese journalists — Shao Yunhuan of Xinhua, Xu Xinghu, and his wife Zhu Ying of Guangming Daily — were dead. This was not some anonymous warehouse in Kosovo; this was a sovereign diplomatic mission hit by a U.S. stealth bomber in the middle of a war China had loudly criticized from the start.
B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber At USAF Museum. Image Credit: Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal.
B-2 Bomber At U.S. Air Force Museum. Image Credit: National Security Journal.
The official response was immediate and furious. Chinese statements condemned what they called a “barbaric attack” and a “gross violation of Chinese sovereignty,” language that deliberately reached for the strongest possible terms under international law.
China’s ambassador to the United Nations denounced the strike as a violation of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. Senior leaders in Beijing held emergency meetings. The tone was not technocratic; it was personal and emotional.
On the streets, anger boiled over.
Within hours, protests erupted outside U.S. and other NATO embassies across China — in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang, and beyond. Students hurled rocks and paint. Windows were smashed. The U.S. ambassador in Beijing was effectively besieged inside his compound for days by crowds chanting anti-American slogans and waving Chinese flags. Other Western missions were also targeted.
For many Chinese, the official U.S. explanation — that this was a tragic accident caused by a bad map and flawed procedures — sounded insulting. How could a country that prided itself on satellite imagery and precision strikes not know where an embassy was located in a European capital? Polling and academic work afterward showed that large numbers of Chinese did not believe the American story. Suspicion that the strike was deliberate has lingered in Chinese discourse ever since, regardless of what declassified U.S. documents say.
A B-2 Spirit, assigned to the 509th Bomb Wing, Whiteman Air Force Base, taxis on the flightline Jan. 8, 2018, at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. Approximately 200 Airmen and three B-2 Spirits from Whiteman Air Force Base (AFB), Missouri, deployed to Andersen AFB in support of U.S. Pacific Command’s (PACOM) Bomber Assurance and Deterrence mission. U.S. Strategic Command bombers regularly rotate through the Indo-Pacific region to conduct U.S. PACOM-led air operations, providing leaders with deterrent options to maintain regional stability. During this short-term deployment, the B-2s will conduct local and regional training sorties and will integrate capabilities with key regional partners, ensuring bomber crews maintain a high state of readiness and crew proficiency (Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Joshua Smoot) .
A B-2 Spirit bomber deployed from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, is parked on the flightline at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, Jan. 10, 2019. Three B-2 bombers and more than 200 Airmen deployed here in support of U.S. Strategic Command’s (USSTRATCOM) bomber task force mission. Bomber aircraft regularly rotate through the Indo-Pacific region to integrate capabilities with key regional partners and maintain a high state of aircrew proficiency. (U.S. Air Force photo by 2nd Lt. Allen Palmer)
In Washington, President Bill Clinton went on television to apologize, publicly calling the bombing a mistake and expressing “regret and sorrow.” The United States sent high-level envoys to Beijing, including Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering, to walk Chinese officials through the targeting error step by step and insist there had been no intent to attack a diplomatic mission. Compensation was eventually paid to the families of the dead and to the Chinese government for damage to the embassy.
But damage to trust is not something you can pay for like a broken window.
A Scar on U.S.–China Relations
In the United States, the Belgrade embassy strike tends to show up as a brief, embarrassing aside in histories of the Kosovo war. In China, it occupies a very different place in national memory.
Chinese commentators and scholars often point to 1999 as one of the defining shocks in modern U.S.–China relations, a moment that crystallized suspicions about American intentions. Some have compared its impact on Chinese public opinion to the way Tiananmen in 1989 shaped American views of the Chinese Communist Party. It is a story parents still tell their children when they talk about why they do not fully trust Washington’s rhetoric about “rules-based order.”
On the American side, official investigations did force real changes.
The CIA’s own director, George Tenet, testified that the embassy bombing was the only strike in the entire Kosovo campaign that his agency had directly organized, and that multiple layers of target identification and review had broken down. One CIA officer was dismissed; others were disciplined. The Pentagon and intelligence community overhauled their “no-strike” lists, mapping databases, and targeting validation procedures to make it harder for a single bad coordinate to slip through.
But those fixes did nothing to erase how the episode looked from Beijing — or from the streets of Shanghai and Chengdu.
Years later, Chinese officers still brought it up in conversations with their American counterparts. After a separate NATO strike killed Pakistani soldiers in 2011, a senior Chinese general reportedly quipped to U.S. officials, “Were you using the wrong maps again?” That line only makes sense if you understand how deeply the Belgrade trauma runs in the Chinese system.
When Precision Meets Human Error
The B-2A Spirit did not fail over Belgrade. It executed the mission it was given with the precision it was designed for. The JDAMs did what their guidance packages told them to do.
The failure was human: the bad map, the mis-located target, the breakdown in cross-checking embassy locations against potential aim points, the lack of skepticism somewhere in the chain when a building housing a major foreign mission was approved as a valid target.
That is the uncomfortable reality of modern warfare. We talk about precision weapons, stealth bombers, and real-time ISR as if they remove the fog of war. They don’t. They move it upstream. The more precise your weapons are, the more catastrophic a single bad decision or data point can be.
In Kosovo, that meant turning a high-tech bomber and five smart bombs into an accidental strike on a Chinese embassy.
The lessons are not just historical trivia. In a future crisis involving China — over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or something we have not even thought of yet — the margin for error will be thinner, the mistrust deeper, and the stakes much higher. A single mis-targeted missile or bomb could ignite outrage that makes 1999’s protests look tame.
That is why the Belgrade embassy bombing is worth remembering, especially when we talk about “surgical” air strikes and the clean abstractions of “effects-based” operations.
Even the most advanced aircraft in the world is still flown, tasked, and fed data by humans. And humans, under pressure, make mistakes. The B-2A Spirit proved what stealth bombers can do in places like Kosovo and, more recently, in combat against hardened targets in the Middle East.
But it also carries a quieter warning in its logbook from that night over Belgrade: if you get the target wrong, the technology only makes the consequences sharper.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) is Editor-In-Chief and President of National Security Journal. He was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
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