THE CHINESE BALLOON STORY IS EVEN BIGGER THAN IT SEEMS. The Chinese spy balloon matter has become far more serious in recent hours — and it was serious enough to begin with.
Of course, there are lots of questions in the aftermath of the U.S. Air Force shootdown of the balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday. Questions such as what, specifically, was it spying on? What information had it gathered? When was the United States aware of its existence? Will experts be able to secure enough of the wreckage from the ocean floor to answer those and other questions?
But there are perhaps more troubling questions raised by the conduct of top Biden administration officials. First, they sought political cover by claiming that Chinese spy balloons had overflown the U.S. three times during the Trump administration, and nobody did anything about them at the time. Then, when a chorus of high-ranking officials of the Trump years said with one voice that simply did not happen, the Biden team responded with an explanation that strains credulity. That’s where we are now.
As the balloon drifted across the U.S., starting in Alaska, then into Canada, then from Idaho all the way to South Carolina, with the Biden administration refusing to take it down, Republicans were appalled at the White House’s tepid response to such a blatant violation of American airspace and sovereignty. Shoot the damn thing down, many of them urged President Joe Biden.
Biden tried to make himself look tough by saying he had ordered the balloon shot down but that military officials argued doing so would be too dangerous for people on the ground. That argument made little sense when the balloon was over empty areas of the U.S. in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. Yet Biden deferred to his military commanders, and the balloon was allowed to fly across the entire continental U.S., possibly sending back intelligence to the Chinese the whole way. (Biden officials suggested they had somehow neutralized the balloon’s intelligence-gathering capabilities but did not offer details.)
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Meanwhile, Biden administration defense officials, along with top military officers, began to tell the press that the balloon affair was nothing new, that it had in fact happened not one, not two, but three times during the Trump administration, and that President Donald Trump did not shoot down any of those balloons. “[Chinese] government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration,” a senior defense official told reporters at an on-background briefing Saturday. A Pentagon publication, DOD News, reported the same thing, apparently quoting the same unnamed official.
Given that, three incursions during the Trump years that nobody got too worked up about, why are people so upset about this particular Chinese balloon taking the grand tour across the U.S., from the mountains of Montana to the beaches of South Carolina?
But a big question lingered: Was the Biden account actually true? Former Trump official after former Trump official quickly said wait a minute, this did not happen. In a phone conversation, Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, said, “I unequivocally can tell you I was not made aware of any flights over U.S. territory, nor was my staff, including those who were at the National Security Council all four years of the Trump administration.” Then, John Bolton, O’Brien’s predecessor, told Fox News, “I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018. I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left, either. I can say with 100% certainty, not during my tenure.”
Other top officials said the same thing. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said it did not happen. So did former acting DNI Richard Grenell. So did former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. So did former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. And former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller. And former vice presidential national security adviser Keith Kellogg. And Trump himself.
Some of the former officials called each other to compare notes. “Am I missing something?” one asked another. “Do you remember anything like this?” Nobody had any knowledge of it happening.
It seemed amazing. After all, the Chinese spy balloon shot down on Saturday was very large. People saw it from the ground. Airline pilots noticed it. In fact, it first came to public knowledge when a member of the public spotted it over Montana, and the local paper published a photo. Did the Biden administration mean to say that had happened three times during the Trump years and nobody noticed?
As it turned out, yes. On Sunday, administration sources began to tell reporters that, yes, the Chinese incursions had happened during the Trump years but that nobody knew about them. And not just nobody in the sense of the public. Nobody in the government’s vast military intelligence and surveillance apparatus noticed them, either. They all missed the giant Chinese balloons.
“Those previous balloon flights were much shorter in duration, possibly explaining why some went undetected at the time,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing “senior administration officials.” “One official said that much of the information on the flights was pieced together later.”
“They went undetected,” a senior administration official told Fox News. “This information was discovered after the [Trump] administration left.” Only then, the official said, did the Biden administration piece it all together and realize that the Chinese had been sending massive balloons over the U.S., and nobody, citizen or military intelligence, noticed.
A slightly different story emerged in the Washington Post, which reported that the Pentagon knew of “past Chinese surveillance balloons near Florida and Texas.” Wait a minute: Near Florida and Texas? What does near mean? Were the balloons over those states? Were they offshore but over U.S. territorial waters? The Washington Post suggested the Pentagon was not being entirely clear. “The Defense Department was not specific about where in each state the previous incursions occurred,” the paper reported, citing Rep. Michael Waltz, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. “[Waltz] added that officials did not say whether the balloons made it into U.S. airspace, which extends 12 nautical miles from the shore, or over U.S. territory, too.” That’s an important distinction, isn’t it? Were the previously undiscovered balloons over U.S. territory or not?
At this point, nothing is clear. In a text exchange, one Capitol Hill Republican, eager to question the administration on events, saw three possible explanations. One, the Defense Department is “conflating wildly different incidents, that is, balloons around Hawaii or Key West vs. crossing middle America,” a conflation he called “partisan spin.” Two, the Pentagon really did only figure out that the Chinese were flying over the continental U.S. after the fact, which he called “a huge military intelligence failure.” Or three, the military actually tracked the flights at the time but failed to inform civilian leadership of what was happening, which he called “a huge civilian-military scandal if so.”
The answers are urgently needed. Allowing a large, highly visible airship presumably packed with intelligence equipment from a foreign adversary to saunter across the U.S. is a big, big deal. It doesn’t matter that Biden’s State of the Union address is scheduled for Tuesday and the White House would like to downplay attention to the balloon matter. Answers are needed now.
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