A recovery operation is underway after a US Air Force fighter jet shot down a high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February.
President Joe Biden’s administration and senior military officials revealed that similar crafts had flown above the US in previous years, including at least three times during former president Donald Trump’s administration, as part of what national security officials have described as a years-long Chinese global surveillance programme.
”It is something that they’ve been working on for many years, and that they have tried to improve … in terms of capability, range [and] communication,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters in a phone briefing on 6 February.
At least three similar balloons were above the US at some points during the Trump administration, which began in January 2017 and ended in January 2021, according to the White House and military officials.
Mr Kirby said that those balloons were likely in the US for shorter periods of time compared to the recent balloon incident.
Those previous flights were “brief” and “nothing like we saw last week,” he said.
But the duration of the latest flight and its potential track near sensitive military sites have raised alarms about the scale and scope of China’s intelligence operations, though it remains unclear what the motive is and what information the balloons have collected, and whether it is any different from what Chinese authorities have already acquired through satellites or other equipment.
Analysts also have suggested that the large-scale balloons, easily seen from above, sought to test what a US response would be – and how the nation’s own partisan battles could play out – after that kind of provocation.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has “reached out to key officials from the previous administration and offered them briefings on the forensics we did” on those previous Chinese operations, according to Mr Kirby.
“We did this in good faith,” Mr Kirby added. “I can’t speak to what awareness there was in the previous administration … I can tell you that we discovered these flights after we came into office.”
Where did the balloons travel?
The Pentagon issued a statement about tracking the balloon above Montana on 3 February, but it was first detected over US airspace in Alaska days earlier on 28 January before passing into Canadian airspace.
As it traveled from Idaho to Montana in the days that followed, military officials and the White House discussed whether to shoot it down, though the administration waited to do so when it was over water and no longer in danger of hitting people and structures below.
Previous balloons were discovered near Florida, Guam, Hawaii and Texas, according to the US Department of Defense, which briefed members of Congress about the earlier flights in the wake of the latest incident. Several of those sightings occurred during the Trump administration.
According to a report from the US Air Force dated April 2022 – “People’s Republic of China High-Altitude Balloon” – military intelligence found that a Chinese spy balloon “circumnavigated the globe” in 2019 at an altitude of roughly 65,000 feet, and “drifted past Hawaii and across Florida before continuing its journey”.
How did the Biden administration discover them?
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Biden administration was able to retroactively identify the presence of Chinese balloons in US airspace during Trump’s term after the US enhanced its “surveillance of our territorial airspace,” he said in remarks at an event hosted by the US Global Leadership Coalition, according to the Associated Press.
“We enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect,” he said.
Mr Sullivan said officials reviewed “historical patterns” to uncover “multiple instances” during the Trump administration in which similar balloons traveled through American airspace.
Why weren’t they discovered sooner?
Earlier balloon incidents were not discovered by military officials until forensic investigations under the current administration, according to Glen David VanHerck, US Air Force general and commander of the United States Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command
“We did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” he told reporters on 6 February.
“Day to day we do not have the authority to collect intelligence within the [US],” he added. “In this case, specific authorities were granted to collect intelligence against the balloon specifically, and we utilize specific capabilities to do that.”
What did the Trump administration know?
Mr Trump and former Trump-era officials, meanwhile, have rejected claims about such flights from the Biden administration, while the former president has called the claims “disinformation”.
John Ratliffe, Mr Trump’s former director of national intelligence, told Fox News that the Biden administration’s claims are “spin” to deflect from what he called the president’s “dithering inaction”, echoing right-wing commentators and Republican officials who attacked Mr Biden for, initially, not shooting down the balloon immediately, and later, not shooting it down fast enough to their liking.
He asked whether the Pentagon deliberately withheld information from Mr Trump while he was in office “for whatever reason” or believed that Mr Trump would be “too provocative and too aggressive” with that information.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, however, told CNN on 3 February that he was “surprised” by statements that similar incidents occurred during the Trump administration.
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” he said.
Robert O’Brien, who served as Mr Trump’s final national security adviser, also told The Wall Street Journal that he did not have any knowledge “of any incursions into US airspace” prior to or during his time in office. He also said he was not briefed on “any China issues like this”.
GOP officials, meanwhile, have roundly condemned the Biden administration as a “failure” for the latest incident, rolled into a larger right-wing political talking point aimed at the president’s relationship with China.
“This administration didn’t just fail here. They failed to prepare after the first time this happened during this administration,” according to Republican-led House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner, speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration and intelligence officials are “prepared” to meet with “key” officials from the Trump administration about China’s surveillance programme.
“We are willing to have that conversation,” she told reporters on 6 February.
How did China respond?
China’s Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng has lodged a formal complaint with the US embassy, accusing the White House of an overreaction to the surveillance balloon incident “caused by force majeure”.
“The facts are clear … but the United States turned a deaf ear and insisted on indiscriminate use of force against the civilian airship that was about to leave the United States airspace. It obviously overreacted and seriously violated the spirit of international law and international practice,” Xie said in a statement on 5 February.
The day after that statement, Chinese authorities took ownership of an unmanned aircraft spotted above Latin America by the Colombian Air Force and Costa Rica’s Civil Aviation Authority.
“Due to the impact of weather and limited self-steering ability, this aircraft seriously deviated from its scheduled course,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said during a press conference on 6 February.
When asked why China had been unable to keep track of its balloons, Mao said she is “not an expert” and added that “this is not the first time that control was lost of balloons used for scientific purposes by the international community.”
