The Biden administration reportedly planned on not telling the public or the U.S. Congress that a Chinese spy balloon had crossed into U.S. airspace earlier this year.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, alerted Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the existence of the balloon and the U.S.’ efforts to track it for more than a week.
By this point, the balloon had already crossed over U.S. airspace when it flew over Alaska, NBC News reported. The news set off panic in the Biden administration, which scrambled for more than a week to figure out what they were going to do in response.
The report said that Biden officials were privately “complain[ing]” about “the political outcry over the balloon” because they did not view a balloon that was designed to collect intelligence on sensitive U.S. military sites as being a serious “threat” to U.S. national security, the report said.
Biden officials were worried about the damage that was done to U.S.-China relations because they believed that China was “angered and humiliated,” which they believed was “a far graver threat to the U.S. than the balloon itself.”
The report said that the administration “hoped to conceal the balloon’s existence from the public, and from Congress, according to multiple former and current administration and congressional officials.”
A Biden official, who would not go on the record, claimed to NBC News that they did not intend to hide the balloon from Congress.
The spy balloon stopped transmitting data back to communist China after its existence became publicly known, U.S. officials said. They said that China then intended to self-destruct the balloon and would not bring it back to China. Just a few days later, the U.S. finally shot down the balloon once it had flown over the continental U.S. and was just off the coast of South Carolina.
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VanHerck said that the incident “exposed significant gaps, long range gaps, for us to be able to see potential threats to the homeland. I think that opened the eyes of a lot of people.”
He said that the U.S. needed to develop better abilities to be able to spot these types of threats long before they ever make it anywhere near U.S. interests so that officials can “create deterrence options or, if required, defeat options.”
Despite the incident and the massive public outcry that followed, the Biden administration still does not have the U.S. where it needs to be to defeat the threat, he said.
“I’m confident in our ability to see that over our homeland,” he said. “I would like to see it over the horizon before it approaches our homeland.”