China’s alleged spy balloon had only limited benefit to its surveillance efforts, the Biden administration said, as officials sought to dial back warnings about the threat to US national security.
(Bloomberg) — China’s alleged spy balloon had only limited benefit to its surveillance efforts, the Biden administration said, as officials sought to dial back warnings about the threat to US national security.
The remarks from National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday served as a counterpoint to the harsh rhetoric in recent days — fanned by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle — that the balloon was a serious concern. In a further sign that the US may be trying to move on from the crisis, people familiar with the matter said the US and China are exploring a meeting of their top diplomats in Germany next week.
“We assess at this time these balloons have provided limited additive capabilities to the PRC’s other intelligence platforms used over the United States,” Kirby said Monday at a White House briefing, using China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China. “But in the future, if the PRC continues to advance this technology, it certainly could become more valuable to them.”
Any final assessment about the extent of the intelligence gained by China will have to wait until the US recovers the equipment carried by the balloon, which was shot down in waters off South Carolina on Feb. 4. US officials say the balloon’s payload has been located and retrieval efforts are underway, though bad weather has impeded those efforts. China maintains that it was simply a weather balloon that had gone astray.
The US is also still searching for three other objects that US fighter jets downed in as many days, in northeast Alaska, northern Canada and over Lake Huron in Michigan. Those objects were far smaller than the Chinese balloon and lacked the ability to maneuver, and no evidence has been cited that they were linked to a Chinese program.
The latest comments suggested a shift in tone after more than a week of fevered speculation about the Chinese balloon’s capabilities and the possible origin of the three smaller objects that were brought down after it. After days of criticizing President Joe Biden for not shooting down the Chinese balloon sooner, some members of Congress have shifted their emphasis to the future, saying the focus now needs to be on bolstering US defenses.
‘Be Trigger-Happy’
“I would prefer them to be trigger-happy than to be permissive,” Republican Representative Michael Turner of Ohio said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “What I think this shows, which is probably more important to our policy discussion here, is that we really have to declare that we’re going to defend our airspace.”
In a further sign that the US was trying to ease tensions, two people familiar with the matter said Secretary of State Antony Blinken was weighing a meeting with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, which begins at the end of the week.
The meeting hasn’t been settled, but it would indicate a resumption in dialogue after Blinken postponed a trip to Beijing set for last week as its balloon was moving across the US.
Pentagon officials also hinted that there had been movement in their efforts to reach Chinese officials after they said last week that China’s defense minister rebuffed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s request to speak by phone.
“There have been contacts made with the PRC on the high-altitude balloons,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Melissa Dalton told reporters Sunday night.
Even as indications emerged that the US may be moving on from the balloon incident, China kept up its sharper rhetoric. On Monday, the Foreign Ministry asserted that 10 US balloons illegitimately flew over China since the start of 2022, without providing evidence for the claim. US officials dismissed that as false.
–With assistance from Jennifer Jacobs.
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