Newly released images from the U.S. Navy show sailors retrieving the remains of a suspected Chinese spy balloon one day after the U.S. military shot it down off the Carolina coast.
The Navy is working to clean up the debris from the balloon, a 200-foot aerial object that was seen hovering over sensitive military facilities in Montana last week. A device roughly the size of a regional jet was affixed to the balloon, according to U.S. Northern Command head General Glen VanHerck.
While the U.S. is working to recover debris from the balloon, Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), a member of the Gang of Eight that is briefed on highly classified intelligence matters, warned Sunday that officials are unlikely to recover significant intelligence from the remains.
“The Chinese sort of suspected that this might happen,” Rubio said on ABC’s This Week. “They flew this thing across the middle of the United States. So I imagine whoever designed this thing and put it up there realized . . . at some point the Americans may get their hands on this. It’s quite possible that it was designed in such a way where there wouldn’t be much value to us in that regard.”
Republican lawmakers have criticized the administration for its lack of transparency about the balloon and its delayed response.
The Pentagon first became aware of the balloon on January 28, when it entered U.S. airspace in Alaska. The Biden administration kept the discovery under wraps so as not to jeopardize Secretary of State Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing, Bloomberg reported. Blinken postponed the trip on Friday just hours before he was set to depart. Blinken and President Biden decided it was best to postpone the trip in light of the unfolding situation with the balloon, officials told the Associated Press.
While several Republican lawmakers called on the U.S. to shoot down the balloon earlier this week, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Ryan Zinke of Montana, the military waited to take down the balloon until it was over water off the coast of South Carolina due to concerns from the Pentagon that the action could cause civilian casualties if carried out elsewhere on the balloon’s flight path.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner (R., Ohio) on Sunday said waiting until Saturday to shoot down the balloon was like “tackling the quarterback after the game is over.”
“The satellite had completed its mission,” Turner said. “It should never have been allowed to enter the United States and it never should have been allowed to complete its mission.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) similarly said the balloon should have been taken down sooner.
“I want to start by doing something that I don’t do very often, which is commending Joe Biden for actually having the guts to shoot this down,” Cruz said during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation. “That was the right thing to do. That is absolutely what the president should have done. Unfortunately, he didn’t do that until a week after it entered U.S. airspace.”
“He allowed a full week for the Chinese to conduct spying operations over the United States, over sensitive military installations, exposing not just photographs but the potential of intercepted communications,” he added.