China tracking more11/25/2023 Senior Trump administration officials including former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, as well as ex- national security adviser John Bolton have all said they were not notified that Chinese balloons entered US airspace under the last administration.Ī broader understanding of the Chinese fleet The revelation that the intelligence community only within the last year developed a reliable way to track China’s balloon fleet – which officials now say has flown dozens of missions worldwide – helps explain why Trump administration officials have stridently claimed to have had no knowledge of the three alleged flights over US territory during the former president’s time in office. “And that led us to come to understand that during the Trump administration, there were multiple instances where the surveillance balloons traversed American airspace and American territory.” “We were able to go back and look at the historical patterns” of the balloons,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said this week. One Defense Department official described the process by which the US was able to identify past instances of these so-called high-altitude balloons – what the Pentagon now refers to as HABs – as “piecing together” different clues from different sources of intelligence. Officials emphasized that the balloon’s signals were an important key to discovering a tracking method, but not the only piece of the puzzle. Here's what we knowīut the new method is important because the balloons are extremely difficult to track without it – they are slow-moving and can fly extremely high, in some cases as high as much as 60 miles up, and can evade the more traditional radars that are oriented toward detecting fast-moving missiles and counterterrorism threats, a lawmaker familiar with the intelligence told CNN. US officials disclosed new details about the balloon's capabilities. ![]() Officials declined to say how the signals were collected, and it is not clear how long it took the intelligence community to develop the new method, which was first used in 2022.įBI Underwater Search Evidence Response Team (USERT) Members ready equipment to recover material from the ocean floor. Officials were also able to use the information collected from the earlier balloon alongside other sources to discover that similar surveillance balloons had transited US territory undetected at least three times under the Trump administration. The existence of this method could further inflame criticism from Republican lawmakers that the administration didn’t act quickly enough to prevent the balloon from entering US airspace last week. The findings have allowed the US to develop a consistent technical method for the first time that they have used to track the balloons in near-real time across the globe, the sources said. Afterwards, the intelligence community ran some of the balloon’s signals through the US’ intelligence holdings and other data to see where and when they may have popped up in the past. ![]() The US intelligence community has developed a method to track China’s fleet of surveillance balloons that was only discovered within the last year, six people familiar with the matter tell CNN.Īfter President Joe Biden took office in 2021, a Chinese spy balloon briefly transited the continental United States, as administration officials have acknowledged.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |