U.S. fighter jets shot down an object flying at 40,000 feet over Alaska after officials determined it “posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight,” according to National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.
The White House said Friday the unidentified object, which didn’t have the ability to maneuver, “posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.”
The nature of the craft was unknown, though Kirby said it was far smaller than the alleged spy balloon that traversed the U.S. last week before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina. The Pentagon hopes to recover the object because it fell onto ice.
News of the shooting comes as the U.S. is poised to blacklist Chinese companies over what the Biden administration claims are links to a global balloon espionage program, people familiar with the matter said, as tension continued to mount over an episode that has plunged relations between Washington and Beijing to a new low.
The White House was expected to announce sanctions on the Chinese entities as soon as Friday afternoon, making good on promises made by several officials to target companies linked to what they argue is a spying campaign by China that’s targeted at least 40 countries.
It’s all part of a U.S. effort to shine a light on what the administration says is increasingly aggressive Chinese surveillance and persuade other nations of the threat. Chinese officials have insisted the balloon that was shot down last week was a weather-monitoring device that blew off course.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning saying Friday that the balloon was a civilian craft and its transit across the U.S. last week was an “isolated, unexpected incident.”
Biden has said the alleged espionage incident didn’t seriously hurt U.S.-China relations, but that it was a violation of U.S. sovereignty and that the U.S. would stand up for its national security against such threats. At the same time, he’s come under fire from Republican lawmakers who said the balloon should have never been allowed to traverse the continental U.S. for a week before it was shot down.
As the U.S. and China kept up their spat and the domestic fight raged, search crews scoured the ocean off the coast of South Carolina for electronic components of the Chinese balloon. ABC News reported Friday that the balloon’s main undercarriage has been located underwater and is largely intact. The report, which cited U.S. officials who weren’t identified, said the equipment had yet to be retrieved.
“There’s an ongoing operation to recover the balloon’s components,” State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said Friday. “We’re analyzing them to learn more about the surveillance program.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released photographs that showed agents examining the balloon’s white canopy and helping direct vessels across the water in search of new material. On a call Thursday, FBI officials told reporters the bureau had yet to access the balloon’s main payload.
In a series of briefings and hearings with lawmakers, U.S. officials argued there was no doubt that the balloon was a surveillance device used under a program run by China’s People’s Liberation Army. They said it was carrying equipment with sensors designed to pick up communications signals and pointed to the fact that it had hovered over sensitive U.S. military sites during its transit across the U.S.
The Biden administration said the manufacturer of the device, which it didn’t name, had a direct relationship with the People’s Liberation Army.
Attention was also shifting to how China sourced the parts that went into the balloon’s payload, as lawmakers questioned whether President Joe Biden ought to have done more to limit the export of sensitive technology to China. People familiar with the matter said lawmakers were told Thursday that the balloon had Western-made components with English-language writing on them.
China’s chargé d’affaires in Washington, Xu Xueyuan, told a virtual conference hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council on Wednesday that the two nations “shouldn’t let this incident offset efforts made to stabilize ties.”
(With assistance from Courtney McBride, Jordan Fabian and Justin Sink.)
