NewsRescue
According to a new NBC News report, officials in US President Joe Biden’s administration initially intended to keep the Chinese balloon incident earlier this year hidden from the public and even Congress. There were fears that it would provoke a public outcry and harm relations with China.
In early February, the United States shot down what it called a suspected Chinese’spy balloon’ off the coast of South Carolina, claiming that Beijing was using it to “surveil strategic sites” in the country. However, the Pentagon later revealed that the warship had not been gathering intelligence.
The balloon was identified by China as a “civilian airship” that wandered into US airspace owing to force majeure. The occurrence caused a tremendous strain at the time.
According to an NBC report from Friday, General Glen VanHerck, the Air Force commander in charge of American airspace, informed Biden’s senior military adviser, General Mark Milley, on January 27 that they had been watching a mystery object travelling over the Asia-Pacific for about 10 days. VanHerck stated in an unrecorded phone call that the Pentagon planned to dispatch US military jets to inspect the item.
Biden was not briefed on the balloon until January 31, according to NBC. He then directed the military to devise a strategy for dealing with it.
When the balloon was flying over the United States on February 1, NBC News requested the White House for reaction, and only then did officials organise a briefing for senators.
“Before it was spotted publicly, there was the intention to study it and let it pass over and not ever tell anyone about it,” a former senior US official briefed on the incident told NBC.
The outlet also said that White House officials privately complained that the political reaction over the balloon was disproportionate to the threat it posed to national security, arguing that the subsequent damage the scandal caused to relations with Beijing was a far greater threat than the balloon itself.
The recent publication sparked an outcry from both the public and lawmakers, raising questions over US intelligence capabilities and the way the incident was handled.
“As if the Chinese spy balloon flying over Montana’s nuclear missile fields wasn’t enough, we now learn that the administration intended to conceal it from Congress and the American people.” “The Biden administration must be held accountable,” Senator Steve Daines stated on Saturday in an X (previously Twitter) post.
A top Biden administration official rejected any attempt to conceal the balloon’s existence.
“To the extent that any of this was kept quiet at all, it was largely to protect intelligence equities related to finding and tracking,” the official explained, referring to intelligence collecting on the balloon. “There was no intention to keep this from Congress at any point.”
