WASHINGTON – China used U.S. technology in its spy balloon that spied on U.S. military bases earlier this 12 months, a federal investigation analyzing the power’s stays found.
Preliminary findings of a probe conducted by defense and intelligence agencies and the FBI and reported by Wall Street Journal On Thursday, it was alleged that the balloon was carrying industrial products – some available online – in what President Biden described last week as “two wagons stuffed with spy equipment.”
American equipment was mixed with “more specialized Chinese sensors and other equipment” to take pictures and record videos and other information for transmission to Beijing, according to the journal.
Fortunately for the US, officials told the paper that they didn’t imagine the balloon would give you the chance to successfully transfer the collected data back to Beijing. Although the cause was not stated within the report, it can have been due to U.S. military efforts to thwart the aircraft’s transmission capability with electromagnetic interference, previously described by top management.
The revelation comes almost five months after the military recovered the stays of the cargo from the Atlantic Ocean after the Air Force shot down a spy device off the coast of South Carolina on February 4. The balloon had spent the previous eight days in US airspace from Alaska to the East Coast, hovering over critical defenses along the way in which.
![Lindsay McDonald holds a photo of what she took of a sphere over central Montana that is believed to be a Chinese spy balloon, February 7, 2023.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/AP23039022643190.jpg?w=1024)
Although China claimed the balloon was intended to monitor the weather, officials told the Wall Street Journal that the photo and data-collection payload confirmed U.S. suspicions that the item was indeed a spy balloon.
The debris collected includes scraps of a satellite-like object with sensors, solar panels that powered the ship, a propeller that allowed it to maneuver and circle over sensitive areas for long periods of time, and a mixture of other off-the-shelf and purpose-built image and radar capture devices. It wasn’t clear until Thursday afternoon which specific items were made in America.
The news comes after a committee of the House of Representatives of the Communist Party of China raised the alarm about China’s use of US products to spy on the US.
![A U.S. Air Force U-2 pilot looking down at a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovers over the mid-continental United States of America, February 3, 2023.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/20230223_new_z03_031.jpg?w=1024)
In a June 21 letter, committee chairman, Congressman Mike Gallagher (Vistula Republic) asked US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo what they knew about Beijing using US technology to spy on the US from a spy post in Cuba.
Six days later, the committee wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging him not to renew the US-China S&T Cooperation Agreement, which they said Beijing had used in a nefarious manner by exploiting advances against the US that had been made with the assistance of US.
“In 2018, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) organized a project with the China Meteorological Administration – under the STA – to launch instrumented balloons to study the atmosphere,” the letter reads. “As you understand, just a few years later, the PRC used similar balloon technology to observe US military facilities on US soil – a transparent violation of our sovereignty.”
Asked in regards to the preliminary findings on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning reiterated Beijing’s position that the ship was not sent to observe the US, adding that she was “not aware of the sources of the report.”
![FBI Special Agents assigned to the Evidence Response Team process material recovered from a high-altitude balloon excavated off the coast of South Carolina, February 9, 2023, at an FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/spy-balloon-china-us-20.jpg?w=1024)
“As China has repeatedly stated, the Chinese civilian unmanned aerial vehicle drifting over the USA was a very unexpected force majeure accident,” she said. “The Americans calling it a ‘spy balloon’ is nothing but slandering China.”
Beijing’s insistence on its narrative may explain why China has expressed concern over the potential for the US making the investigation report public. Because the Biden administration demands to rebuild tarnished Washington-Beijing relations, Chinese officials have threatened that declassifying the report could provoke a harsh response from their government, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But some elements of the Pentagon, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, reportedly want to show the balloon debris to the general public. The Department of Defense has taken the same course up to now with Iranian weapons it seized after Tehran used them in Yemen and the Persian Gulf.
Up to now, the White House has not advocated releasing the report’s findings, although some Republicans in Congress, akin to Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), pressured President Biden to release the data moderately than bow to Beijing’s demands .
“Your administration has yet to provide the American individuals with a full account of how this spy platform was able to traverse U.S. sovereign territory, what the balloon carried, and what it collected during its mission,” lawmakers wrote to the White House earlier that month.
The investigation continues, although its initial findings have been circulating amongst intelligence and defense agencies since late March, according to the Wall Street Journal. The goal was to inform analysts of the balloon’s capabilities as soon as possible in order that they’d be prepared when and if one other such aircraft invaded US airspace.