In 1969 the US ambassador to Poland, Walter Stoessel, was making overtures to his Chinese counterpart, hoping to start the normalisation of relations between Washington and Beijing, a process that was brought to a conclusion by the US switching its formal recognition from Taiwan to China in 1978.
"I suggest that during this period special precautions be taken with regard to naval and air force operations that could give rise to incidents," the under-secretary of state, Alexis Johnson, wrote to his defence counterpart, David Packard, in January 1970. Pity someone in Beijing had not written such a memo more recently.
For those involved in managing the up-and-down relationship between the US and China, the events of the past week must have brought back memories of the Cold War with its constant tentative testing of the limits to which each side would go.
"We seem to be conducting something we cannot control very well," President Eisenhower told his chief of staff in 1952 following the loss of a surveillance plane and its 16 crew over the East China Sea. Its pilot had reported Chinese fighters closing fast.
Eisenhower was sanguine. "If planes were flying 20 to 50 miles from our shores we would be very likely to shoot them down if they came in closer whether through error or not."
The episode was recalled by James Bamford in the New York Times, reflecting on the heavy and perhaps now unnecessary toll taken by such spying activities - a black granite wall in Operations Building 2B of the ultra-secretive National Security Agency. It pays tribute to 152 military and civilian cryptologists and analysts most of whom died on eavesdropping missions on planes and ships similar to that of the EP-3. "They served in silence," a plaque records.
The truth is that during the Cold War the US sent planes regularly into Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean airspace and the governments of each tried to shoot them down and shot at planes outside their airspace.
And, as Bamford points out, sometimes they went close to plunging into war. In 1956 the US sent six eavesdropping planes in formation into Siberia. There was no way the Russians could have known they were not bombers but the US gambled on gaps in the radar screen and got away with it.
In 1967 US planes were scrambled for a major retaliatory attack after the Israelis attacked a spy ship, Liberty, in international waters killing 34 of its crew and wounding 171. They were called back only after desperate Israeli messages to the US that the raid had been carried out in error.
In 1968 the North Koreans seized the spy ship Pueblo, killing one and holding the crew for a year. President Lyndon Johnston considered going to war.
A year later the North Koreans shot down a US navy EC121 eavesdropping plane in international waters killing 31. US planes were put on nuclear alert. And the US considered, according to National Security Archive papers released this week, a major military escalation in the region by putting fighters on Taiwan to provide combat cover for the spy planes.
"We must assume that this will be seen by Peking as a significant escalation of the US base use in Taiwan, something we have been trying to avoid," a State Department Bureau of East Asian Affairs official, Mr Winthrop Brown, wrote to Mr Johnson.
Not that the US is by any means alone in testing the waters of regional security. China has repeatedly engaged in threatening exercises aimed at reminding the Taiwanese of the mainland's claim to jurisdiction.
In 1999 and last year, according to the Japanese Defence Agency, 31 Chinese military ships and dozens of so-called scientific vessels were sighted in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone - up from one or two annual incidents.
Yet, if such regional muscleflexing is inevitable if undesirable, today provocative spying missions are almost entirely redundant. Satellite technology and the hugely powerful land-based listening posts in Japan and South Korea as well as elsewhere, make the spy flights increasingly irrelevant.
"The US now has intelligence satellites that can eavesdrop on conversations almost anywhere in the world," Bamford argues. "They can automatically create `orders of battle' lists of the locations and technical details of foreign radar stations. And land-based listening posts in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere are equipped with giant antenna farms focused on Chinese military, naval and diplomatic communications."
If, as he argues, the purpose of intelligence gathering is to reduce tensions, why then continue to use provocative missions like that which has caused so much grief this week? He has a point.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
