A bit of closure from the
i. Seems it wasn't spying after all.
Remember the furore seven months ago when what was described as a Chinese spy balloon passed over the United States until it was finally shot down by US fighters on 4 February over the Atlantic, from which its wreckage was later dredged up by the US navy. The US-China confrontation escalated significantly as Republicans criticised the White House for failing to shoot it down earlier.
But last weekend, the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said that the alleged spy balloon was not, in point of fact, spying, having most probably been blown off course by the wind when approaching Hawaii.
In contrast to the previous uproar, American politicians and media scarcely reacted when Milley told CBS News last Sunday that the balloon was not spying. “The intelligence community, their assessment – and it’s a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon,” he said.
What was the balloon doing over the US, having got there by way of Alaska and Canada? Milley had a prosaic explanation, saying that it had been heading towards Hawaii at 60,000 feet when it was diverted by the wind. “Those winds are very high,” he said. “The particular motor on that aircraft can’t go against those winds at that altitude.”
When the errant balloon was examined by American experts they discovered that its sensors had never been switched on. Milley still described it as a spy balloon, though he added that “we know with a high degree of certainty that it got no intelligence, and didn’t transmit any intelligence back to China”.