U.S. military downs Chinese balloon over Atlantic Ocean
The airship, which Pentagon officials characterized as an attempt by Beijing to collect intelligence on the U.S. military, was shot down off the South Carolina coast
By Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, Dan Lamothe and Rosalind S. Helderman
Updated February 4, 2023 at 7:19 p.m. EST|Published February 4, 2023 at 2:09 p.m. EST
The discovery of this military spy balloon and others — the presence of a second craft loitering over Latin America was disclosed on Friday, and officials say there is likely a third operating elsewhere — is highly embarrassing to the Chinese.
A second official, said that Beijing was “freaked” by the incident. “They’re in a very tough place,” this person said. “And they have very few cards to play right now.”
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A senior defense official portrayed the delay in downing in the craft as an intelligence coup for the United States. “This actually provided us with a number of days to analyze this balloon, and through a number of means … to learn a lot about what this balloon was doing, how it was doing it, why the PRC may be using balloons like this,” the official said, declining to offer specifics. PRC stands for the People’s Republic of China.
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The balloon presence in the mainland United States was disclosed to the public on Thursday after appearing over Montana, where it loitered for a time near Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to several nuclear missile silos. It’s path from there took it over several U.S. military installations, officials disclosed Saturday. Without elaborating, officials said that the administration had taken steps to thwart the craft’s ability to collect information that would undermine U.S. national security.
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China’s foreign ministry claimed on Friday that the balloon was merely collecting weather data when it was blown off course. U.S. officials said Saturday that such an explanation “lacked any credibility.”
Two officials told The Washington Post that the balloons are part of an extensive Chinese military surveillance program that has been running for years and relies on technology from a Chinese company that supplies the People’s Liberation Army, said two officials.
The airship contains “sophisticated communications gear,” said one official. “But what it actually does we don’t know.”
Before Saturday’s takedown, U.S. officials said they believed that the balloon, outfitted with propellers on the bottom, was able to drift with air currents and be directed. It has changed course on a number of occasions, they said. The balloon’s payload or bay, which contained suspected surveillance equipment, is roughly the size of three large buses, they said.
But there is still much the United States does not know. “We know that these are military intelligence systems,” the second official said. “We don’t know how capable they are. We don’t know what they are tracking, and we don’t know how they’re getting the information back [to the PLA].”
The Chinese government reacted apologetically initially, saying it “regrets the unintended entry” of what Beijing insisted was an unmanned weather balloon used for civilian research. By Friday evening, after the announcement that Blinken would postpone his trip, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs took a more combative tone, saying China had no intention to violate American airspace or sovereignty while accusing “some politicians and media in the U.S.” of having “hyped” the incident to “attack and smear China.”
The spokesperson called for maintaining “a coolheaded and prudent” approach to the incident, noting that Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in November agreed that maintaining contact and communications was an important goal.
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The incident has put Beijing on its back foot, officials said.
“The Chinese don’t want to make this a crisis,” one official said. But as more surveillance platforms emerge, “that’s going to become increasingly hard.”
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The Pentagon has not explained why it did not bring down the balloon in the earliest days, when it drifted over the Aleutian Islands and other remote areas where it posed little to no hazard. Once it reached mainland Alaska and Canada, officials said, there were no opportunities to do so without risk of harming civilians.
The debris field would have covered an estimated 7-mile radius, they said.
A senior defense official said there have been four previous Chinese balloon incursions over the continental United States, including one early in the Biden administration and three during the Trump administration. Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, speaking to CNN on Friday, said that he did not ever recall the issue coming up. “I would remember that for sure,” said Esper, a Trump appointee. “My focus was on implementing the national defense strategy to take on the Chinese as the greatest strategic threat facing our country.”
Chinese surveillance balloons have previously been spotted over five continents, the official said, and the United States is briefing allies and partners about the practice.
Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... hoot-down/