The main efforts on both sides are aimed at answering the two most difficult questions:
What are the intentions of leaders in the rival nation?
And what military and technological capabilities do they command?
In risky hunt for secrets, U.S. and China expand global spy operations
WASHINGTON –
As China’s spy balloon drifted across the continental United States in February, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Chinese President Xi Jinping had become enraged with senior Chinese military generals.
The spy agencies had been trying to understand what Xi knew and what actions he would take as the balloon, originally aimed at U.S. military bases in Guam and Hawaii, was blown off course.
Xi was not opposed to risky spying operations against the United States, but U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the People’s Liberation Army had kept Xi in the dark until the balloon was over the United States.
U.S. officials would not discuss how spy agencies gleaned this information. But in details reported here for the first time, they discovered that when Xi learned of the balloon’s trajectory and realized it was derailing planned talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he berated senior generals for failing to tell him that the balloon had gone astray, according to U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence.
The episode threw a spotlight on the expanding and highly secretive spy-versus-spy contest between the United States and China. The balloon crisis, a small part of a much larger Chinese espionage effort, reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the United States as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China.
For Washington, the espionage efforts are a critical part of President Joe Biden’s strategy to constrain the military and technological rise of China, in line with his thinking that the country poses the greatest long-term challenge to American power.
For Beijing, the new tolerance for bold action among Chinese spy agencies is driven by Xi, who has led his military to engage in aggressive moves along the nation’s borders and pushed his foreign intelligence agency to become more active in farther-flung locales.
The spy agencies had been trying to understand what Xi knew and what actions he would take as the balloon, originally aimed at U.S. military bases in Guam and Hawaii, was blown off course.
Xi was not opposed to risky spying operations against the United States, but U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the People’s Liberation Army had kept Xi in the dark until the balloon was over the United States.
U.S. officials would not discuss how spy agencies gleaned this information. But in details reported here for the first time, they discovered that when Xi learned of the balloon’s trajectory and realized it was derailing planned talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he berated senior generals for failing to tell him that the balloon had gone astray, according to U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence.
The episode threw a spotlight on the expanding and highly secretive spy-versus-spy contest between the United States and China. The balloon crisis, a small part of a much larger Chinese espionage effort, reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the United States as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China.
For Washington, the espionage efforts are a critical part of President Joe Biden’s strategy to constrain the military and technological rise of China, in line with his thinking that the country poses the greatest long-term challenge to American power.
For Beijing, the new tolerance for bold action among Chinese spy agencies is driven by Xi, who has led his military to engage in aggressive moves along the nation’s borders and pushed his foreign intelligence agency to become more active in farther-flung locales.
A U.S. Air Force U-2 pilot looks down at a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovers over the central continental United States in February before later being shot down. | U.S. AIR FORCE / U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE / VIA REUTERS
The main efforts on both sides are aimed at answering the two most difficult questions: What are the intentions of leaders in the rival nation? And what military and technological capabilities do they command?
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