Three Dead in Belgrade and Al Gore's Climate Gambit

By Harlan Pryce · September 17, 2026

After a B-2 bomber killed three journalists in Belgrade, the U.S. used environmental science to bypass a diplomatic freeze that lasted years.

Three journalists died in the wreckage of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Twenty-seven others were maimed by five satellite-guided bombs dropped by a B-2 Spirit on May 7, 1999. The cost of the mistake was a total collapse of trust between the world's two largest powers, a freeze in bilateral cooperation, and a diplomatic void that took years to fill.

What survives of this specific record is a curated archival description rather than the full pages of the correspondence. The record focuses on a letter dated June 22, 1999, from Vice President Al Gore to Premier Zhu Rongji, who served as the head of government in China from 1998 to 2003 and sat on the Politburo Standing Committee for a decade. The goal of the letter was specific: Gore was "attempting to get climate change cooperation back on track" following the bombing in Belgrade, the Serbian capital situated at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers.

June 17 and the Formal Report

The path to Gore's letter began with a failure. On June 17, 1999, a high-level State Department delegation flew to Beijing to deliver the U.S. government’s formal report on the embassy bombing. The report insisted the strike was "unintentional," claiming the target had actually been the headquarters of Yugoimport, a Yugoslav weapons importer located 440 meters south of the embassy on the same street.

The response from the PRC was immediate and scathing. The record shows the PRC called the U.S. explanation "by no means acceptable." In retaliation, the Chinese government proceeded to freeze virtually all bilateral activities on the environment.

This is where the connection between military error and diplomatic desperation becomes visible. The State Department attempted to resolve a lethal targeting failure with a technical report, and that report failed to satisfy the victim. When the PRC froze environmental cooperation, they were not just protesting a bombing; they were removing the few remaining functional bridges between Washington and Beijing. The U.S. government found itself in a position where it had killed foreign nationals in a diplomatic mission and had no remaining currency to buy back the relationship.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Leon Fuerth Bridge

With the State Department's formal channel dead in the water, the administration shifted the operation to the Office of the Vice President. This was not a standard diplomatic rotation; it was an escalation.

On June 21, the day before Gore's letter, Leon Fuerth, the national security adviser to Vice President Gore who later became a professor of international affairs at George Washington University, contacted the Chinese science and technology minister. Fuerth was not a State Department envoy; he was Gore's direct line.

The sequence is tight: June 17 (failure of the formal report), June 21 (Fuerth's precursor), June 22 (Gore's formal letter). The pattern suggests that standard diplomatic protocols had completely failed to contain the crisis. The administration had to bypass the State Department's failed report and move the conversation to the Vice President's office to prevent a permanent rupture. By using Fuerth to prime the pump, Gore ensured that his letter would not be dismissed as another "unacceptable" explanation, but as a high-level appeal for a new starting point.

July 8 and the EPA Technical Team

terminated cooperation did not stay terminated for long. While the record notes that distrust would plague the relationship for years, the immediate freeze was broken with surprising speed.

Just over two weeks after Gore's letter, a State Department cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing confirms that an EPA technical team visited China from July 8 to July 15. The Environmental Protection Agency, the agency tasked with regulating pollution and protecting human health, was suddenly the vanguard of the recovery.

The irony here is thick. In May, a U.S. bomber had destroyed a Chinese embassy. By July, the U.S. was sending environmental technicians back into the country. This rapid transition from a total freeze of activities to a technical visit suggests that the environmental beat was a pre-selected "safe channel." Climate change was not the primary concern of the administration in June 1999; it was the lubricant. It provided a low-friction proxy for diplomatic normalization because it allowed both sides to resume contact without requiring the PRC to accept the U.S. government's account of the bombing.

The Sanitized Account

The gap in this record is the content of the "formal report" delivered on June 17. We are told the report claimed the bombing was unintentional and that the PRC found this explanation unacceptable. We are not shown the evidence the U.S. provided to support the "accident" theory, nor are we shown why the PRC viewed the evidence as a lie.

The desk's reading is that the formal report was a sanitized political document rather than a transparent technical accounting of the targeting failure. If the report had contained a rigorous, honest disclosure of the intelligence failure or the technical glitch that led a B-2 to hit an embassy, the PRC would have had a factual basis to either accept it or debunk it. Instead, they called it unacceptable. This phrasing points to a document that offered excuses rather than evidence.

Furthermore, the pattern of communication reveals a deliberate decoupling. The sequence of events—from the State Department report to Fuerth's outreach to Gore's letter—is entirely devoid of the intelligence community or military command. There are no generals or CIA directors in this repair chain. The administration treated the bombing as a diplomatic problem to be managed rather than a military catastrophe to be investigated. By keeping the DoD and the IC out of the recovery process, the government ensured that no one with actual knowledge of the targeting error could accidentally undermine the political narrative of the "accident."

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the move to climate cooperation was a calculated diversion. The administration recognized that the security and military channels were paralyzed by the blood in Belgrade. They couldn't fix the bombing, so they pivoted to the atmosphere. They used the EPA as a diplomatic shield to maintain a baseline of contact while the military failure remained buried in the classified depths of the Air Force's records.

What the still-withheld pages are protecting is the distance between the "formal report" and the truth. The desk's reading is that the U.S. government traded a technical confession for a technical visit, using Al Gore's environmental interests to buy a way out of a diplomatic dead end. The cost of that trade was a lasting distrust that the record admits took years to overcome, and a truth about the Belgrade strike that remains, to this day, redacted.

Three Dead in Belgrade and Al Gore's Climate Gambit

June 17 and the Formal Report

The Leon Fuerth Bridge

July 8 and the EPA Technical Team

The Sanitized Account

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