Senate Republicans Demand Answers on Handling of Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon - WSJ
By: Nancy A. Youssef and Warren P. Strobel (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON—Leading Senate Republicans demanded the Biden administration provide more information about its handling of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, as administration officials prepared to give the Senate a closed-door briefing about the episode.
In a letter Wednesday to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the lawmakers particularly asked about Pentagon and White House decision-making in the days after the balloon was detected and why the military and spy agencies weren't better prepared given previous incursions.
The administration has begun briefing allies and partners about the recent balloon incursion and what is known about past intrusions and China’s broader balloon-surveillance program, according to European officials. They said they expect more in-depth briefings as the U.S. finds out more about the program from combing through the balloon’s wreckage, the officials said.
The U.S. is looking to pair what it has learned from “the balloon itself, with what we’ve learned based on our careful observation of the system when it was in our airspace,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday speaking alongside Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Since an Air Force F-22 jet fighter shot down the balloon Saturday as it crossed the South Carolina coast, critics on Capitol Hill have said the administration needs to explain why it didn’t shoot the craft down sooner and how at least four suspected Chinese balloons had previously entered U.S. airspace.
“This incident is only the latest in a series of increasingly brazen violations of our nation’s sovereignty by the Chinese Communist Party,” the Republican lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees wrote in their letter to Mr. Austin and Ms. Haines.
In their letter—signed by Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), the top Republicans on those committees—the legislators focused on the period between Jan. 28, when the balloon was traveling north of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, and Jan. 31, when it entered the continental U.S. , congressional officials said.
“That period is really a black box for us. We haven’t received any clear answers from the administration,” a Republican congressional aide said. “When did this get to the president?”
The letter comes ahead of a closed-door classified briefing for all senators scheduled for Thursday. Those giving the briefing include Defense Undersecretary for Policy, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Gen. Glen VanHerck, who is in charge of Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, which tracked the Chinese balloon.
The senators’ letter aimed questions at the Pentagon leadership, asking when Mr. Austin and Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew of the balloon’s trajectory and when the military began crafting options for the White House. The senators also asked how the U.S. plans to better secure its airspace. At least three prior incidents occurred during the Trump administration, and one other during the Biden administration, the Pentagon has said.
The Pentagon declined to comment about the letter.
President Biden, asked if the balloon episode has been a blow to U.S.-China relations , said “no.”
“The idea of shooting down a balloon that’s gathering information over America and that makes relations worse?,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with PBS NewsHour. “Look, I made it real clear to (Chinese leader) Xi Jinping that we’re going to compete fully with China but we’re not looking for conflict. And that’s been the case so far.”
The senators’ letter cited reports that the most recent balloon may have tried to surveil U.S. nuclear weapons sites and referred to a new Pentagon finding, reported by The Wall Street Journal this week, that China has more intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the U.S.
It is “hard to separate Beijing’s intent to conduct new forms of reconnaissance over our most important nuclear weapons sites from the recent news,” the letter said.
The Pentagon has said that previous Chinese balloon incursions went undetected at the time and that information about the flights—which were shorter in duration—were only pieced together after the fact.
Gen. VanHerck, the Norad commander, said earlier this week that the U.S. military hadn’t detected the earlier intrusions, calling the failure “a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”
U.S. officials have described the Chinese balloons that have crossed U.S. territory at high-altitude as part of a global-surveillance campaign by Beijing that has involved balloons transiting five continents.
The U.S. military is in the process of retrieving the wreckage of the balloon shot down last weekend to better understand Chinese surveillance technology. Beijing says the balloon was a weather-monitoring device that went off course, and denounced the shootdown.
Efforts continued for a fifth day Wednesday to recover debris from the balloon from the coastal waters off South Carolina, with crews retrieving pieces of the equipment the balloon carried. The Navy narrowed its search to two debris fields and is assessing whether some of the debris retrieved by divers belongs to the balloon, a U.S. Defense official said.
In an interview with CBS News that aired Wednesday, Mr. Austin said the U.S. had recovered the majority of the balloon and the search would be completed in days.
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