The alleged Chinese spy balloon that flew over the U.S. was capable of collecting communications signals and was part of a broader People’s Liberation Army intelligence-gathering effort that spanned more than 40 countries, a State Department official said Thursday.
High-resolution imagery provided by U-2 spy planes that flew past the balloon revealed an array of surveillance equipment that was inconsistent with Beijing’s claim that the balloon was a weather device blown off course, the official said in a statement provided on condition of anonymity.
The statement, released before State and Defense Department officials were set to testify in hearings and briefings to Congress on Thursday, marks the fullest accounting yet for the Biden administration’s insistence over the course of a week-long drama that the balloon was meant to spy on the U.S.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in an interview with CBS News that the Pentagon acted to limit what the balloon could learn about U.S. nuclear capabilities. Austin said Chinese balloons flew over parts of the US in previous years, passing over Texas and Florida.
“Certainly all of our strategic assets, we made sure were buttoned down and movement was limited and communications were limited so that we didn’t expose any capability unnecessarily,” Austin said.
The U.S. is now trying to expose and counter broader Chinese spying efforts alongside allies, the official said. It’s also looking at taking action against Chinese entities linked to the intelligence-gathering effort in U.S. airspace after identifying a Chinese balloon manufacturer that sells products to the Chinese military.
The new details released on Thursday, including that this device was part of a broader military-directed fleet, will add to the strain on U.S.-China relations.
The disclosure of the balloon last week led to the postponement of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s long-planned trip to China as part of an effort to normalize ties between the world’s two largest economies. The balloon was shot down by an F-22 fighter off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.
“The United States was not the only target of this broader program, which has violated the sovereignty of countries across five continents,” Blinken said at a briefing alongside NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday.
As U.S. efforts continue to unveil the sheer size of the Chinese surveillance-gathering effort, with a separate balloon found drifting over Central and South America at the same time, Beijing may also find countries more suspicious of its foreign and economic policies.
U.S. officials have said they took measures to nullify the intelligence-gathering efforts of the balloon as it traversed the continental U.S., but the new revelations that it was capable of actively gathering sensitive communications could fuel further Republican criticism that the Biden administration should have acted sooner to shoot down the balloon instead of waiting for it to cross the country so that it could be downed over water.
After an administration briefing for House members, Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said, “They answered all the questions that we had. And I think that the administration made the right decision about shooting it down and when they chose to shoot it down. I think it would have posed a real risk to people on the ground.”
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(With assistance from Emily Wilkins.)
