The fleet of balloons operates under the direction of the People’s Liberation Army and is used specifically for spying, outfitted with high-tech equipment designed to collect sensitive information from targets across the globe, the U.S. said. Similar balloons have floated over five continents, the U.S. said.
The statement from a senior State Department official offered the most detail to date linking China’s People’s Liberation Army to the balloon that traversed the U.S. before being shot down Saturday over the Atlantic Ocean. The public details are meant to refute China’s persistent denials that the balloon was used for spying, including a claim Thursday that U.S. accusations about the balloon amount to “information warfare.”
In Beijing, before the U.S. offered new information, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning repeated her nation’s insistence that the large unmanned balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that had blown off course and that the U.S. had “overreacted” by shooting it down.
“It is irresponsible,” Mao said, adding that the accusations “may be part of the U.S. side’s information warfare against China.”
China’s defense minister refused to take a phone call from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to discuss the balloon issue Saturday, the Pentagon said. China has not answered questions as to what government department or company the balloon belonged to or how it planned to follow up on a pledge to take further action over the matter.
The U.S. official said images of the balloon collected by American U-2 spy planes as it crossed the country showed that it was “capable of conducting signals intelligence collection” with multiple antennas and other equipment designed to upload sensitive information, with solar panels to power them.
The official said an analysis of the balloon debris was “inconsistent” with China’s explanation that it was a weather balloon. The U.S. is reaching out to countries that have also been targeted, the official said, to discuss the scope of the Chinese surveillance program.
The official provided details to reporters by email on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter, which had already forced the cancellation of a planned visit to China earlier this week by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
The official said the U.S. is confident that the manufacturer of the balloon has “a direct relationship with China’s military and is an approved vendor” of the army. The official cited information from an official PLA procurement portal as evidence for the connection between the company and the military.
This is not the first time the U.S. government has publicly called out alleged activities of the People’s Liberation Army. In a first-of-its-kind prosecution in 2014, the Obama administration indicted five accused PLA hackers on charges of breaking into the computer networks of major American corporations in an effort to steal trade secrets.
Alleged hackers with the PLA were also charged in 2020 with stealing the personal data of tens of millions of Americans in a breach of the credit-reporting agency Equifax.