Pentagon Reacts To Media Report On Chinese Spy Balloon's Surveillance Of US Military Sites

US officials are assessing the intelligence China obtained from its February spy balloon flight over American military sites.

Following a media report claiming that a Chinese spy balloon had collected electronic signals intelligence from certain US military sites, the Pentagon issued comments on the matter.

At a news conference in Washington, Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh informed reporters that they are currently assessing the type of intelligence that China obtained.

“As of right now, we’re still doing an assessment of what exactly the intel was that China was able to gather but we do know that the steps that we took provided little additive value for what they’ve been able to collect from satellites before,” she said.

The balloon crossed from Alaska into the US on 28 January and passed over multiple sensitive military sites, including Montana's nuclear storage, before being downed in the Atlantic on 4 February.

China was able to control a balloon and extract real-time information from sensitive sites, as per two current senior US officials and one former senior administration official cited by NBC News. The balloon flew figure eight formations and sent the collected data back to Beijing.

According to officials, China's gathered intelligence consisted mainly of electronic signals such as communication from personnel and weapons system signals rather than images, as per NBC report.

The FBI is evaluating the recovered balloon parts, according to Sabrina Singh.

“As we mentioned early on when we first started tracking the balloon, we do know that the balloon was able to be manoeuvred and purposely driven along its track but not going to get into specific sites it was able to hover over,” Singh said.

“But what we did do is take precautionary steps to limit the intelligence value that it would be able to collect and we took steps to protect our military installations from foreign intelligence collection,” she added.

Reporters were informed by the White House that the spy balloon had limited intelligence gathering capabilities.

Senator Roger Wicker, who serves as the ranking member of Senate Armed Services, stated that the recent news reports make it evident that the administration has made an "unacceptable mistake."

“I will not abandon my oversight efforts to discover the full range of information related to this event, and I intend to hold this administration accountable. It is critical that Congress also explores the capability and protocol improvements at the Department of Defense that are necessary to prevent something like this failure from ever happening again,” Wicker said, reported The Indian Express.