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According to a media report citing informed officials, the suspected Chinese spy balloon that was shot down by a US F-22 fighter jet on February 4 was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites despite the administration’s efforts to prevent it from doing so.
“China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time,” quoting the officials, the NBC report said on Monday.
“The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images.”
The suspected spy balloon, which was first tracked by US defense officials on February 2, was shot down two days later.
Before shooting down the “strange object,” officials waited until it was safely over water.
On February 5, the balloon was recovered off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
According to the officials, China could have gathered much more intelligence from sensitive sites if the administration had not moved around potential targets and obscured the balloon’s ability to pick up their electronic signals by preventing them from broadcasting or emitting signals.
At his daily press briefing on Monday, National Security Council spokesperson Kirby John declined to comment on what kind of electronic signals or communications the balloon could have accessed.
“Knowing it was going to enter US airspace we took action to limit the ability of this balloon to garner anything of additive or especially useful content,” said Kirby.
“So again, I won’t get ahead of what we’re learning off this thing.”
The discovery of the balloon triggered a diplomatic crisis, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceling a planned trip to China — the first such high-level meeting between the two countries in years.
China, on the other hand, acknowledged ownership of the balloon, claiming it was used for flight tests and had “seriously deviated” from its flight path “by mistake.”
According to the BBC, Department of Defense spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters on Monday that the FBI was still investigating the balloon debris.
“We do know that the balloon was able to be manoeuvred and purposely driven along its track,” Singh said but declined to give details of which military installations the balloon was able to hover over.
“We’re still doing an assessment of what the intel was that China was able to gather but we do know that the steps that we took provided little additive value to what they’ve been able to collect on from satellites before,” she added.
Source:IANS
