Feds: 3 downed objects not tied to spying

The Biden administration suspects three unidentified objects downed since last Friday served commercial purposes and weren’t used for spying, a judgment that may help ease anxiety over a Chinese balloon that traversed the U.S. before being shot down.

The intelligence community believes the objects — unlike the giant airship shot down Feb. 4 — “could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday.

“We don’t see anything that points right now to these being part of the PRC spy balloon program or in fact, intelligence collection against the United States of any kind,” Kirby said, using the abbreviation of China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China.

That determination will ease concerns that the U.S. has become subject to an intensive and broad-based surveillance program orchestrated by the Chinese military.

Those fears were stoked by the series of shootdowns over Alaska, Canada and Michigan starting Friday and raised pressure on the Biden administration to explain the nature of the high-altitude craft, their origins and whether they posed threats to national security.

Signs are emerging that both the U.S. and China are trying to figure out a way past the balloon dispute. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who canceled a trip to Beijing after the Chinese balloon was identified, is considering a meeting with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in Germany this week, people familiar with the matter said.

All along, China has insisted the balloon shot down off South Carolina was a weather-monitoring device that blew off course, and accused the U.S. of hyping the issue.

The administration has scrambled to keep the uproar around the balloon under control, amid criticism from Republicans that Biden was wrong to let it traverse the U.S. before shooting it down. Officials provided senators a classified briefing to senators Tuesday to lay out their latest findings.

Lawmakers from both parties expressed frustration with the dearth of concrete information and called on the White House to provide more details.

“The American people need to know more so they’ll have more confidence in our national security,” said Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. “Our adversaries often know what we know.

Any future determination about the extent of the Chinese surveillance program and the threat posed by it will depend on the recovery of the payload of the balloon that was shot down off South Carolina. On Monday, the U.S. Northern Command said U.S. Navy salvage operations have recovered “significant debris” from the balloon.

Crews are still trying to recover the three other objects that were shot down, said General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Milley also provided new details of the circumstances under which the last object was shot down over Michigan. He said a first missile fired at it missed and fell “harmlessly” into Lake Huron, while a second hit the target.