Exclusive: US intel assessment documents China’s spy balloon incident under Trump

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CNN —

A US military intelligence report from last year focused on China’s use of high-altitude balloons cited sightings in Hawaii and Florida during the Trump presidency, according to an excerpt of the report reviewed by CNN.

The April 2022 report, titled “People’s Republic of China High-Altitude Balloon,” found a Chinese spy balloon “circled the world” in 2019 – while Donald Trump was president – ​​at an altitude of about 65,000 feet, and “drifted over Hawaii and across Florida before continuing its journey,” the US Air Force document said.

The Air Force intelligence report is the first indication that the US military knew about the Chinese spy balloons before the latest incident.

However, it is not clear from the documents when US officials first became aware of the Chinese flights or what they assessed about their purpose.

An Air Force assessment obtained by CNN states that a spy balloon was “launched and controlled” by China in 2019, showing that the country has the ability to navigate a high-altitude balloon around the world until the administration Trump.

China has “deployed many HABs [high altitude balloons] which can operate at 65,000ft – 328,000 ft and for months at a time,” the assessment added.

The news comes as Trump administration officials have questioned in recent days how Chinese spy balloons could have crossed the US without their knowledge, as the Biden administration and senior defense officials have said.

In the early days of the Biden administration, a Chinese spy balloon briefly moved over the continental United States, as acknowledged by US officials.

CNN previously reported that three suspected Chinese surveillance balloons drifted over the continental US during Trump’s time in office.

The American military had a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other balloons to move undetected, the Pentagon general responsible for providing air and missile defense in North America said Monday.

“Every day as a NORAD commander, it is my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not see those threats,” said Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command when asked about the three other balloons.

“And that’s a domain awareness gap that we need to figure out, but I don’t want to go into too much detail.”

VanHerck added that the intelligence community after the fact gathered intelligence “from additional methods that alerted us to those wolves that were previously approaching North America or moving into North America.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan also said Monday that the previous surveillance balloons were discovered early in the Biden administration because Biden ordered the intelligence community “to increase our surveillance and the assets that we deploy to detect Chinese efforts to spy against the United States.”

“Because the intelligence community has made this a priority at the direction of President Biden, we’ve improved our surveillance of our territorial airspace, we’ve improved our capacity to detect things that the Trump administration hasn’t detected,” Sullivan said.

“And also went back and looked at historical patterns. And that led us to understand that during the Trump administration, as you said, there were many instances where surveillance balloons crossed American airspace and American territory,” he added.

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