Washington — Despite China's fury about listening devices it said were found on its leader's new jet, President Bush was still planning to visit Beijing next month, U.S. officials said Saturday.
The Bush administration maintained a stiff upper lip posture amid charges by Chinese officials that the lavishly furnished Boeing 767 jet delivered to Beijing in August was loaded with more than two dozen listening devices allegations outside experts said were almost certainly valid.
"Of course they're true," a retired CIA intelligence analyst told the New York Daily News. "The Chinese wouldn't have dared bring it up if they weren't especially just before meeting with Bush."
Government officials said Bush would arrive in Beijing, as scheduled, on Feb. 21 as part of a trip to Japan and South Korea that was postponed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"There's no sense that the trip is in any jeopardy as a result of this," one U.S. official said. "The visit is as important to them as it is to us."
Even so, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who has been using another aircraft since the bugs allegedly were discovered, reportedly was furious. At least 20 Chinese officials were taken in for questioning, according to the Financial Times in London.
In Washington, government officials maintained a stony silence.
"We never discuss these kinds of allegations," White House spokesman Taylor Gross said.
State Department and CIA spokesmen also declined to comment. The Financial Times reported Chinese government sources as saying the tiny bugs were designed to be activated by satellite and were detected after the Boeing jet emitted a strange whine during test flights in September. One of the devices reportedly was found in a lavatory and another in the headboard of Jiang's bed.
A Boeing spokeswoman said the plane was sold to the Chinese in the summer of 2000. During a year of retrofitting in San Antonio, Tex., it was decked out with leather chairs that converted into beds. Jiang's private suite included a bedroom, shower and sitting area with a 48-inch, flat-screen TV.
The incident was a reminder that espionage remains a growth industry despite the end of the Cold War.
"We all do it even when we're friends," a retired U.S. agent said.
In 1995, for instance, the State Department complained about a sentence in the draft of former Secretary of State James Baker's memoirs where Baker wrote he had declined to use a certain Beijing conference room, "assuming it was bugged."
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