Jake Sullivan: US will ‘exploit’ spy balloon wreckage for intelligence gains
Joel Gehrke
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China’s downed spy balloon offers U.S. intelligence officials new insight into Chinese Communist surveillance capabilities, according to President Joe Biden’s top national security aide.
“There are vessels from both the Navy and the Coast Guard on station, working, as we speak, to recover it so that we can then exploit what we recover and learn even more than we have learned,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday. “But we have already been able to learn a fair amount about the capabilities and the tradecraft of this balloon because we were able to monitor it through multiple different means as it traversed the United States.”
Biden’s decision to shoot down the unwelcome balloon drew a complaint from Beijing. As the violation of U.S. airspace prompted the last-minute cancellation of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing last week, the downing of the balloon, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “seriously impacted and damaged” the diplomatic process set in place following Biden’s most recent meeting with Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping.
“The Chinese side has, after verification, repeatedly informed the U.S. side of the civilian nature of the airship and conveyed that its entry into the U.S. due to force majeure was totally unexpected,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Monday. “Under such circumstances, the U.S. use of force is a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice. China will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the company concerned, and reserves the right to make further responses if necessary.”
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Sullivan’s account, with his emphasis on the intelligence advantages of allowing the vessel to remain aloft between Thursday and Sunday, functioned as a rebuttal of Republican criticisms that Biden should have ordered the balloon to be downed immediately upon detection.
“The military recommended to him that … they wait until the balloon was over water in U.S. territorial airspace and take it down there because they could better control potential falling debris, metal debris, and ensure that none of it would fall on to American citizens,” Sullivan said during a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition event. “The intelligence community and the military used every asset at their disposal to collect against the balloon, to determine what it was carrying, to learn more about its tradecraft and its capabilities. And we were able to do that over the time that the balloon was flying.”
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) agreed that “we will have learned more from this than the Chinese will,” but he downplayed the significance of the incident.
“I think it’s more important, symbolically, in terms of what message the Chinese were trying to send us by deploying, over the mainland of the United States, a spy balloon that we would inevitably detect — and, I think, inevitably intercept — at a moment when they were just launching a charm offensive that was more offensive than charming in its execution,” said Coons, who hosted the event.
That assessment provided an implicit contrast with Sullivan’s claim that the detection of the balloon demonstrated the superior “vigilance” of the U.S. intelligence community under Biden in comparison to his predecessor, President Donald Trump.
“We enhanced our surveillance of our territorial airspace, we enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect,” Sullivan said. “And we were also able to go back and look at the historical patterns. And that led us to come to understand that, during the Trump administration, as you said, there were multiple instances where the surveillance balloons traversed American airspace and American territory.”
Former Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) likewise questioned the idea that China has violated U.S. airspace undetected in previous incidents.
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“With regard to whether the Trump administration knew about it or not — I’m told they did not know about it, so there was no opportunity to take action, because somehow it didn’t filter its way up to the decision-makers,” said Portman, an Ohio Republican who appeared alongside Coons. “So that’s something we have to look into, you know, why was that true? … Perhaps it’s because we have better monitoring, now, than we did then, [but] my daughter-in-law was in South Carolina and could see the balloon. So, I don’t know how sophisticated we needed to be in terms of monitoring.”