U.S. believes Chinese balloon may have gathered intelligence information

The Chinese balloon that flew over the United States in late January and was shot down over Atlantic waters on February 4. may have gathered intelligence information but Washington noted Monday that precautions taken prevented it from being valuable data. “The measures we put in place certainly limited what China was able to collect,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told the media.

The Chinese “spy” balloon flew over several areas of the country for days.The Chinese “spy” balloon flew for days over several areas of the country, such as the state of Montana (northwest), where one of the three nuclear missile silo fields in the United States is located.

Singh noted that they know the balloon “could be maneuvered and steered” but did not go into detail about the areas it passed through. “What we did was to take precautionary measures to limit the value of what it could collect.“, he maintained. The deputy press secretary insisted that action was taken to protect the country’s military installations and stressed that it is still being evaluated what kind of information China could have collected with this tool.

“But we know that with the steps we took it provided little additional value to what they may have collected with satellites before“, he said. The deputy press secretary recalled that they began monitoring that balloon on January 27 and that by then they had already found out that it was linked to China and preventive measures were applied. She added that she could not confirm whether there was any real-time data relay from the balloon to China.

The finding triggered a bilateral crisis between the two countries. Peking admitted that the balloon belonged to it, but said in its defense that it had gone astray and was used for meteorological purposes, not espionage.