“Before it was noticed publicly, the idea was to study it and let it pass us by and never tell anyone about it,” says a former senior US official.
According to an NBC News report, the Biden administration tried to hide the Chinese spy balloon that crossed the continental United States from the public last January.
Joe Biden and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley knew the Chinese surveillance balloon had flown into Alaska on January 28, but kept it hidden from the public until a newspaper spotted it over Montana a week later.
“Before it was noticed publicly, the idea was to study it and let it pass and never tell anyone about it,” said a former senior US official briefed on the balloon incident. told NBC News.
U.S. intelligence officials even began tracking the CCP balloon long before it entered U.S. airspace, CBS reported last February.
Biden administration officials pushed back, claiming that any efforts to conceal the Chinese spy balloon were to protect its intelligence-gathering methods.
“To the extent this was kept quiet at all, it was largely to protect information assets related to finding and tracking,” a senior Biden official told NBC News, referring to intelligence gathering on the balloon. “There was no intention at any time to withhold this from Congress.”
But members of the House Homeland Security Committee alleged that Biden also kept them in the dark about the Chinese spy balloon as it flew through the continental US.
“We were never informed of this. It’s a tremendous shame when the chairman of Homeland Security discovers that there’s a Chinese spy balloon flying over the United States, it’s just – it’s really unconscionable,” committee chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said last February.
“They recognize that this is weakness on the world stage. But they seem to think that’s for the best. Don’t poke Xi Jinping, we don’t want to make Xi Jinping angry with us. Look, that man has a spy balloon above our country. This is not acceptable. And I don’t really understand why this thing was allowed to enter United States airspace.”
The Chinese spy balloon was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive US military sites as it traveled across the country before the Biden administration shot it down over the South Carolina coast.
NORAD Commander Gen. Glen VanHerck warned that China’s spy balloon program is still operational and that U.S. countermeasures were inadequate.
“It has exposed significant gaps, long-range gaps, so we can see potential threats to the homeland.” VanHerck told NBC News. “I think this has opened a lot of people’s eyes.”
“Time is the opportunity to create deterrence options or, if necessary, defeat options,” he said, adding that the US is still “not where we need to be.”