Yes, but why was the US EP3 spying on China? What did it hope to achieve? After all, China is no more a threat to the continental United States than is Laois. True, unlike Laois, it has the odd nuclear missile or two, and it has some satellites, and it has the vast Red Army, but none of these constitutes a menace to the US, half a world away. China knows that its use of a missile against the US would cause the latter to despatch it back to the Palaeozoic, that probably all its satellites can do is forecast the weather, which the Chinese could just as easily do by turning on Sky television, and that apart from clobbering uppity civilians, the Red Army is nothing but a target, as it discovered in Korea.
National policy
When did secretly acquired intelligence ever affect national policy in peacetime? To be sure, in war, it's nice to know where to bomb, and if Hitler is going to push his forces through the Ardennes, separate the British and the US armies, seize the Channel ports and end the war in the west, it's probably as well to be warned in advance. What is really interesting about intelligence is how little it changes the outcome of events, either because it is too vulnerable to compromise, too late, too inadequate, or too much.
As it happens, the Americans and the British didn't know about the forthcoming Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, and they still won. British code-breakers knew about the planned German operations in Crete and North Africa, but the British were unable to prevent German victories there - partly because too much pre-emptive activity would tell the Germans their codes were being broken; partly because just because you know something's going to happen, doesn't mean you can prevent it happening; and partly because for a secret to stay a secret, some people who should know it, don't.
War is a vector force; peace is scalar. Peace sends countries in no single, certain direction. Covertly discovering about China's shortage of hens' feet might be interesting for chicken-flesh brokers, but does it really affect US policy? One eavesdropped conversation might tell you something. With one million, you no longer know everything: that much information tells you nothing.
But you might find out that Mrs Li isn't talking to Mrs Lo any more, not after Mrs Lo got the last pair of hens' feet in the market right under Mrs Li's nose, and it was Mr Li's birthday, and he loves hens' feet, and of course, that Mrs Lo knew that, the cow, but did I ever tell you about the time she. . ?
Life expectancy Even if the information gained is usable, it doesn't mean you can guide policy with it. Knowledge of who is next going to massacre whom doesn't enable you to prevent it, especially if you have created a military, as President Clinton has, which was dedicated to the proposition that membership of the armed forces should actually prolong your life expectancy. An army which sees risk as a matter for litigation, and which regards its primary role as providing a social experiment in applied feminism is hardly a useful instrument of foreign policy in Somalia or Liberia.
It comes down to this. Intelligence gathering is the ultimate measure of a country's sense of self-esteem. The US does not spy on China because it absolutely needs to know the billions of bytes of intelligence it gathers, but because it is a statement of strength and status: it is the peacock preening, the lion roaring, the skylark singing, the Zulu strutting, the gorilla beating its chest. We spy because we can: we gather the most intelligence, therefore we are the most powerful - not because intelligence shapes our policy, but merely because we have it. Intelligence is the gold bullion of national self-esteem: in practical terms, largely worthless, yet possession of it is everything.
Which merely shows that anthropology is as good a guide to the behaviour of people or states as Plato or Freud. No American president would be re-elected if he said: Look, I know what sort of junk our vast intelligence apparatus tells us - Luxemburg's candle output, Vietnamese bicycle production, the numbers of lesbians in Katmandu, the kinds of tree being planted in Senegal, how many brothels there are in Tralee - and it's a great big waste of time. Sure, let's keep our satellite surveillance, some of our electronic stuff, but otherwise, let's read newspapers to remind ourselves that there is a place called abroad, while we just mind our own business and save our billions.
Public prestige
Such a stated policy would be the shortcut to the golf course and memoir-writing about How I Blew It The Second Time Around, not because it endangers national security, but because it is a public abandonment of prestige. That is why the US mounts these huge operations around the world, and its EP3s daily cruise on the outskirts of Chinese airspace, as yawning, air-bored linguists hear about the shortage of left-handed spanners in Red Army Group South, and the continuing differences between the Lis and the Los.
Whether or not the world would be a more dangerous place if the US stopped doing this, I frankly don't know. But I'm sure that there'll be a special place in the hearts of American scholars of spoken Chinese for any president who spares them another goddamned word about that scheming Mrs Lo and her nefarious doings. She did what? She never did. . .