Image of the artifact this past Wednesday over Montana /
The Air Force and the Pentagon are monitoring the device, which flies over Montana after having crossed Alaska and Canada, but they rule out that it poses a “threat”
The world returns to the old scenario of the Cold War, with a confrontation between the East-West blocs and a warlike confrontation in the middle, that of Ukraine, which has reawakened the old ghosts of nuclear weapons. To this typical passage of John Le Carre’s literary wisdom, an element of enormous weight in the classic history of Intelligence has just been added: a spy balloon. The Pentagon has denounced this Friday the monitoring of a device that responds to these characteristics flying over Montana and that it would have been launched by China after having entered United States territory after crossing the Aleutian Islands (Alaska) and Canada. If the intention of the Xi Jinping government is confirmed, the planned visit of the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to Beijing next week could be clouded or even spoiled the first meeting of the head of American diplomacy with the Chinese president in the last six years .
The balloon was detected on Wednesday. The large white sphere reverberating under the sun gives it away in view of the long-range cameras. But before the radars of Canada and the US discovered it. It is the size of “three buses”. It does not go unnoticed. The US military considers that it is collecting information “right now” in Montana because there are several nuclear silos where the Minuteman IIIs are kept. China has a keen interest in this intercontinental missile, a jewel of the United States’ nuclear deterrent. It has 450 units in custody at the Malmstrom (Montana), FE Warren (Wyoming) and Minot (North Dakota) military bases. Proof of the delicate balance represented by this weaponry is that the White House postponed a test of its rocket last August to prevent it from coinciding with the visit of the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan and China would interpret it as a challenge to his military might.
The Pentagon affirms that the “added value” of the balloon “is limited”, since it apparently lacks more advanced technology than that of spy-satellites and, furthermore, it does not go unnoticed either. In fact, the Air Force and the Pentagon have been monitoring his journey since he entered the country on Wednesday, so they can anticipate his every move. “We know exactly where it is, where it’s going, and we’re doing things to be vigilant and mitigate any risk from foreign intelligence,” Pentagon spokesman Patick Ryder said. The Canadian authorities do not rule out that a second device will also remain hovering over its territory, but without major consequences for national security.
And for what?
The singular finding raises a question: Why does the government of Xi Jinping want to show its espionage activities in such an open way when it has satellites that do it better and more discreetly? In 2021, the Chinese aerospace industry launched the Beijing-3 into space. It is a satellite that took 42 seconds of orbital flight to photograph 3,800 square kilometers of San Francisco Bay in a single pass with the necessary definition to discern which vehicles were circulating on the streets; essential information in times of war to locate armored vehicles or tanks. The ship is capable of selecting five hundred targets on the Earth’s surface and visiting them one hundred times each day.
What can a humble balloon do in the face of such a technological display? Little thing. Its main value lies in the fact that it is cheaper, it does not require control systems typical of the space race -a geolocator is almost enough-, it can x-ray an area for more hours (although with lower quality) when flying slowly and at low altitude and avoids lasers and other systems that intelligence services use to obstruct the vision of satellites. Aerostats have remained in the catalog of international espionage since their invention in the American Civil War. Then it was a huge bag with a basket in which two lookouts traveled. The next evolution came with the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union filled the skies with small spy balloons equipped with cameras. In recent years, and armed with more sophisticated tools, Washington has intercepted some in Hawaii and the eastern Pacific island of Guam.
The device detected over Montana flies at a “height well above commercial air traffic” – it can travel in a corridor between 24,000 and 37,000 meters high – and the Pentagon has considered the possibility of shooting it down. However, and after consulting with President Joe Biden, such an option has been ruled out. General Mark A. Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned of the risk of his remains falling on populated areas and causing damage. That does not mean that in the end it will be decided to destroy it when it reaches an uninhabited area, or even to capture it to analyze the extent to which the Chinese industry has sophisticated its espionage devices.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) also does not attach great importance to the balloon, beyond its geopolitical repercussions. He keeps you permanently on his radar. It is constantly monitored by fighters and “does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground,” the spokesman says. NORAD is convinced that its owner is China, although the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Mao Ning, has responded that “until the facts are clarified, speculation and commotion will not help to properly solve this matter.”
El maizal de Dakota
What does the government of Xi Jinping expect from this altercation? Washington is considering the hypothesis that Beijing wants to make it clear that it does not let its guard down when monitoring its potential opponents, in addition to revealing its ability to place an espionage system on US soil. And maybe something has achieved. There is a storm in Washington. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy, has stressed that the meddling reveals the government’s fissures to protect US airspace and has pointed out that the president, Joe Biden, “cannot remain silent.”
For their part, the leaders of the House Chinese affairs committee, the conservative Mike Gallagher and the Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi, have released a statement warning that “the Chinese Communist Party should not have on-demand access to US airspace.” The threat from the Asian giant “is not limited to distant shores, it is here at home and we must act to counter it,” he adds.
In part, it rains it pours. The possible purchase by a business consortium based in the Chinese city of Shandong of 20 hectares of land in Grand Forks (North Dakota) to install a corn mill has set off alarm bells for the Air Force, since less than Twenty kilometers away is one of the main military facilities for space technology and experimentation with drones. The Army has warned that the business project coincides with the canons of the economic covers built by Chinese espionage and does not rule out that it was used to capture sensitive communications from the base.
The controversy also comes at a delicate moment for the Biden government. The president and Xi Jinping met last November in Bali and both decided to strengthen the relationship between their respective countries. The scheduled visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken next week to meet his Qin Gang counterpart and possibly Xi himself is the first result of this apparent relaxation. However, everything seems to indicate the opposite. In the Pentagon it is not ruled out that the sending of the spy balloon was intentional to tense the meeting. If we add to this that the Secretary of State, Lloyd Austin, signed an agreement on Thursday to increase the US military presence in the Philippines to a level not seen since the 1990s in order to strengthen the defense in Southeast Asia, Blinken’s visit seems hardly intended for hugs.