China's brazen global spying operation uncovered

The Chinese spy balloon shot down by a US fighter jet was bristling with antennae designed for intelligence surveillance, the state department in Washington has revealed. The huge balloon which flew over the US at 62,000ft was one of a fleet of similar surveillance platforms sent by China to spy on more than 40 countries across five continents. All were capable of collecting communications signals over sensitive military sites, the state department said. A senior US defence source told The Times that an urgent investigation of past Chinese balloon missions had uncovered evidence of ten previous spying operations from similar platforms over North, South and Central America over recent years. Three of them, all during the Trump administration, had penetrated US air space but had not been detected, the source said. Firm evidence that the latest balloon was not a weather-monitoring platform blown off course, as claimed by Beijing, came from two US Air Force U-2S Dragon Lady spy planes which flew more than 8,000ft above it. High-resolution imagery collected by the U-2S cameras determined the surveillance capabilities of the balloon, the state department said in a written statement. The U-2S Cold War spy planes had taken off from Beale air force base in California as soon as the balloon was detected by the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) in Colorado. The revelations from the state department raised a series of urgent questions about why the US hesitated to bring down the balloon before it reached sensitive sites which included the intercontinental ballistic missile base in Montana. The US defence source said NORAD had determined that the spy balloon was “not weaponised” and that, therefore, it posed no military hostile intent. However, once NORAD had detected the balloon entering US air space, secret jamming systems were used to prevent the Chinese platform from sending back data to China, especially when it was flying over the nuclear bases. The source said the jamming systems were classified. The balloon had taken off on January 21 from a military base in Hainan in southern China but it was not initially detected either by America’s satellites or by radar stations. The source said this was a real concern . The problem was that NORAD was focused on potential nuclear ballistic missile and bomber threats from the north, west and east. However, China, the source said, had “brazenly” flown the balloon in from the south and had proved there was a gap in US detection capabilities. None of the previous ten spy balloon missions had been detected by NORAD, the source said. “Not shooting down this latest balloon as soon as it was detected was a serious error of judgment, “ the source said. The balloon was allowed to pass over the Aleutian Islands on January 28 and then enter northern Canada, traversing to Idaho while violating US air space on January 31. The source said the rules of engagement for shooting down a spy balloon, even if it was determined to be non-hostile, needed to be changed. “An unauthorised penetration of Canadian/US air space to collect information is in itself a hostile act and should not be tolerated,” the source said. Even if the data from the spy balloon was successfully jammed, China would have gleaned which approaches to the US were more vulnerable than others. This awareness of US national security weaknesses had been underlined in 2021 when China sent a nuclear-weapon-capable hypersonic glide vehicle into space and then diverted it into the Earth’s atmosphere around the globe to its target. It took the US and allies by surprise. It was found to be difficult to detect because of its acute manoeuvrability. China’s use of undetected spy balloons has added to US concerns that China is engaged in a highly secret programme to test America’s defences. The spy balloon spent about a week travelling over the US before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina. Wreckage was collected from a wide area in shallow water in a US Navy salvage operation. While it flew across the US NORAD and the two U-2S spy planes flying above the balloon were able to gather valuable intelligence about the balloon’s surveillance capabilities.