Chinese Balloon Used American Tech to Spy on Americans

That analysis found the balloon was crammed with commercially available U.S. gear, some of it for sale online, and interspersed with more specialized Chinese sensors and other equipment to collect photos, video and other information to transmit to China, the officials said. Those findings, they said, support a conclusion that the craft was intended for spying, not weather monitoring as Beijing has said.

The officials described the Chinese balloon, with its mix of off-the-shelf and specialized equipment, as an inventive attempt by Beijing at surveillance.

While the balloon took in data during its eight-day passage over Alaska, Canada and a swath of contiguous U.S. states, the craft didn’t appear to send that information back to China, the officials said. The officials declined to say whether the craft malfunctioned, though the Pentagon has said the U.S. military employed countermeasures to prevent information collection by the balloon.

The balloon’s detection and shootdown derailed a fledgling effort at rapprochement between Washington and Beijing, leading to recriminations and compounding distrust and tensions between the two powers. Only in recent weeks have the Biden administration and the Communist leadership begun a fragile reset, with both suggesting they want to consign the balloon to the past. 

President Biden earlier this month called the balloon “more embarrassing than it was intentional” for the Chinese leadership. So long as it doesn’t happen again, “that chapter should be closed,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told broadcaster NBC last week during a visit to Beijing rescheduled after he postponed a February trip over the balloon. 

Meanwhile, Chinese officials have expressed concern that should the U.S. investigators’ report on the balloon become public, Beijing will be forced into a strong reaction, potentially derailing high-level engagement. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to travel to Beijing early next month, following a course set by Blinken, and both governments are trying to engineer a meeting between Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping later this year. 

The White House and the agencies involved in the investigation declined to comment.

Parts of the U.S. military, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, wanted to put on public display parts of the balloon’s debris, the officials said. The Defense Department did something similar in 2017 with Iranian weapons it said were used in Yemen and the Persian Gulf to show what the Pentagon described as Tehran’s malign activity in the Middle East. 

So far, the administration has decided to not publicly share its findings on the balloon, one of the officials said. 

Members of Congress have been pressuring the administration for what it knows about the balloon’s capabilities and why it permitted the craft to pass over bases for intercontinental ballistic missiles and other potentially sensitive military facilities. Some have criticized the administration for delaying release of a report to avoid another blow to U.S.-China relations.  

“Your administration has yet to provide the American people a full accounting of how this spy platform was allowed to traverse across sovereign U.S. territory, what the balloon carried, and what it collected during its mission,” Republican Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Marco Rubio of Florida wrote to Biden this month, following up on a similar request from February. 

After the Air Force shot down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, the FBI initially led the examination of the recovered debris. The Defense Intelligence Agency, among others, also got involved for expertise on military-related equipment, the officials said.

The DIA declined to comment, saying “the investigation is still ongoing.” The FBI declined to comment. The State Department and U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in North America and detected and tracked the balloon, referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment. 

Preliminary findings of the investigation, however, have been circulated within intelligence and defense agencies beginning in the second half of March, the officials said. The intent, they said, was to get the latest information about the craft’s capabilities as soon as assessments were made in case another balloon appeared over U.S. airspace. 

Suspended from the balloon, the officials said, was a satellite-like device with sensors, solar panels for power and other devices to scoop up photos, take videos and capture radar data. With a propeller, the craft could maneuver and loiter over a site for long periods, depending on weather, the officials said. Biden has described the balloon as carrying “two boxcars full of spy equipment.”

A further scouring of the debris gave the U.S. information about how the balloon worked, how it was controlled and supposed to transmit data and the sensors on it, the officials said. Investigators also traced purchase orders for some of the equipment and the purchasers’ relationship to the Chinese government, the officials said. 

The Pentagon has said the balloon was part of a global surveillance program by China, with balloons being detected over Europe, Asia and Latin America, as well as the U.S. One official called the program sophisticated for conducting surveillance in airspace above 60,000 feet. Airspace just above that height and below 330,000 feet—the boundary of outer space, where satellites operate—is sometimes described as “near space,” and activities in that band aren’t governed by international law.  

China’s Foreign Ministry has accused the U.S. of hyping the balloon. A ministry spokeswoman last week reiterated the line Beijing has taken since February that the balloon was a civilian craft that was blown off course.

While the findings from the investigation conclude the balloon was intended for surveillance, one of the officials and others in the Biden administration agree that the vessel likely traveled on a course operators didn’t originally intend.

 “They took advantage of the path they found themselves on,” one of the officials said.

Biden said as much in remarks last week that mostly drew attention for his referring to Xi, China’s leader, as a dictator. 

“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two boxcars full of spy equipment in it is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden said at a fundraiser in California. “It was blown off course up through Alaska and then down through the United States. And he didn’t know about it. When it got shot down, he was very embarrassed.”

—Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.

Write to Nancy A. Youssef at [email protected]