The Biden administration came under renewed fire Monday for its decision to allow a suspected Chinese spy balloon to travel across the entire continental U.S. in the face of reporting that the craft gathered sensitive intelligence from American military sites and sent that information instantly to Communist Party leaders in Beijing.
The balloon was able to pick up signals intelligence such as communications from several U.S. military installations as it flew across the American homeland in late January and early February. The sophisticated surveillance balloon traveled over some of the locations multiple times while transmitting data to Beijing in real time, NBC News reported, citing senior U.S. officials.
Republicans said the revelations underscore unanswered questions about President Biden’s handling of an incident that worsened U.S.-Chinese relations.
“We have consistently learned more from press reports about the Chinese surveillance balloon than we have from administration officials,” Sen. Roger F. Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “These revelations clearly demonstrate that the administration made an unacceptable mistake.
“It is critical that Congress also explore the capability and protocol improvements at the Department of Defense that are necessary to prevent something like this failure from ever happening again,” Mr. Wicker said.
The balloon entered American airspace over Alaska in late January, crossed into Canada and reentered American airspace before drifting across the country. Military fighter jets shot down the balloon off the South Carolina coast on Feb. 4.
At the time, Mr. Biden and top Pentagon officials argued that downing the balloon over land could endanger American citizens and that the balloon offered few capabilities beyond what Chinese intelligence agencies already had collected from satellites in low Earth orbit.
Pentagon officials reiterated that explanation on Monday and said the military shielded sensitive information at sites across the country after discovering the balloon.
“We took steps to protect our own military installations from foreign intelligence collection,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters.
Questions still linger about why China would use such a balloon — which seemingly could be discovered and shot down relatively easily — if the craft offered no new surveillance capabilities. The most recent reports seem to suggest that, rightly or wrongly, Beijing believed the balloon could gather information that its satellites could not.
Republicans said the latest information shows the extent of a potential threat to national security and the foolishness of allowing the balloon to fly over America for days.
“Reports now indicate that the Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence from several sensitive military sites during its journey across the United States. But Joe Biden waited until it flew across the ENTIRE COUNTRY before doing anything,” House Judiciary
Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, said in a Twitter post.
China maintains that the balloon was on a civilian mission to collect weather data and blew off course accidentally. The Biden administration said its trip across sensitive sites in the American heartland was a spy mission.
The FBI is analyzing debris from the craft that was recovered in the ocean.
During the furor over the balloon’s voyage, Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly canceled a trip to Beijing to address rising tensions in the bilateral relationship. The trip has not been rescheduled.
China said the downing of the balloon was an unjustified overreaction.
‘The behavior of an adversary’
At the Pentagon, Ms. Singh was pressed on the specifics, including which military installations had the most exposure to the balloon.
“We do know the balloon was able to be maneuvered and purposefully driven along its track, but [I’m] not going to get into specific sites it was able to hover over,” she said.
On one specific claim in the NBC News article, Ms. Singh said it is “not confirmed” that the balloon was able to transmit data directly to Beijing in real time.
“We’re still doing an assessment of what exactly the intelligence was that China was able to gather,” she said.
Ms. Singh insisted again that because officials were able to predict the path of the balloon, they were able to shield sensitive information from its view. She said the administration is “confident in the measures we did put in place” to limit China’s suspected surveillance efforts.
Those comments echo Mr. Biden’s in the days after the craft was shot down.
The U.S. “tracked it closely, we analyzed its capabilities, and we learned more about how it operates,” the president said on Feb. 16. “And because we knew its path, we were able to protect sensitive sites against collection.”
At the time, it seemed Mr. Biden was implying that the balloon gathered no new sensitive information at all. The most recent reports call that into question.
Meanwhile, some foreign policy analysts say the U.S.-Chinese relationship now constitutes a cold war. They contend that the spy balloon was merely the latest in a series of aggressive actions that show why China should be considered a full-blown adversary, not simply a 21st-century economic rival.
China “lays claim to the entire South China Sea — and with it some of the world’s most important sea lanes of trade — where it has militarized new artificial islands and deployed a maritime militia to bully its neighbors. It has harassed U.S. military aircraft and naval vessels operating legally in international waters in an ongoing series of dangerous encounters,” researchers with the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote in a recent comprehensive report on how to counter China. “And, most recently, a Chinese spy balloon penetrated American airspace and crossed over sensitive military installations as it traversed the continental U.S.
“These are not imagined sleights. This is the behavior of an adversary, not a competitor,” they wrote. “A course correction is long overdue. To date, the U.S. government’s response has been inadequate.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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