The air in Belgrade was thick with the smell of burning rubber and cordite. For weeks, the night sky had been lit by the flashes of NATO airstrikes targeting Serbian positions. In the early hours of May 7, a single sound cut through the relative quiet: the incoming whistle, then the concussive blast that shook the ground.
The building at 3 Novo Belgrade’s Bulevar Umetnosti was not a military bunker. It was a yellow, reinforced-concrete office and residential compound, its windows lit. Inside, journalists Shao Yunhuan, Xu Xinghu, and Zhu Ying were working. The five-story structure took a direct hit from a Joint Direct Attack Munition, a satellite-guided bomb. Concrete dust billowed, mixing with the scent of spilled fuel and shattered wiring. In the dark, confused shouts in Mandarin and Serbian gave way to the groans of the wounded and the frantic scraping of rescuers digging through rubble.
The immediate assumption was intentional. Protesters would soon surround the U.S. embassy in Beijing, hurling stones and bottles. But the truth, uncovered later, was banal and devastating. The CIA officers who provided the target coordinates used an outdated, paper map from 1992. They intended to strike the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement, a building several blocks away. On their map, the two sites shared the same coordinates. The weapon’s guidance system did not question the input; it simply flew the coordinates it was given. The strike was a product of institutional failure, a chain of small, unchecked assumptions that terminated in a flash of light and three lives extinguished.