Balloon crisis highlighted split in China’s leadership, says Pentagon official

WASHINGTON – A top Pentagon official said on Friday that China’s leader Xi Jinping was likely unaware of the alleged Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States until the controversy erupted, underscoring a split between the country’s top civilian and military leadership.

Dr Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defence for policy, said President Xi probably knew about his country’s broader high-altitude surveillance balloon programme, but not the specific spy balloon until it captured widespread attention by floating over the US.

“I suspect he asked his military about it, and his military started to backpedal and to make excuses,” Dr Kahl said at a meeting with The New York Times editorial board in New York.

“There is a major civil-military divide inside the PRC system,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “Xi Jinping does not trust his military. He doesn’t.”

Dr Kahl’s assertion that he believes Mr Xi is suspicious of his military commanders is perhaps the strongest such public comment by a senior Biden administration official.

Mr Xi has moulded his identity and image around the idea that he is an heir of the Communist Party’s original revolutionary zeal and its strong affinity with the Chinese military.

Like his predecessors, Mr Xi is chairman of the Central Military Commission, but many analysts have said they believe he is closer to military leaders than any party chief since Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong.

US President Joe Biden on Thursday sought to reassure Americans that three other aerial objects shot down were not tied to Beijing and said that he planned to speak with Mr Xi to keep lines of communication open.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken may speak to Mr Wang Yi, Beijing’s top foreign policy official, at a security conference in Munich on Saturday.

Dr Kahl said on Friday that both sides were looking to put the episode behind them. “I think they are thoroughly embarrassed by this entire situation. They want to put things back on track.”

He added that the US also had “an interest in getting things into a place where we can have mature conversations”.

In a discussion at Columbia University on Friday, Ms Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said that communicating with China during times of crisis was far more difficult than it was to talk to Soviet leaders in the Cold War.

“One challenge with China is that they tend to clamp down in a crisis and not talk,” she said.

Chinese officials tend to think of issues over far longer terms than American leaders, further complicating communications between the two political centres, she said.

Asked if the outcry over the surveillance balloon was exaggerated, Ms Haines said “it’s so crazy, it’s like an episode of ‘Veep’ on some level”, referring to the US political satire TV series.

But she added that it was reasonable to have a “forceful reaction” to the surveillance balloon.

The Biden administration’s efforts to put the badly strained relations with Beijing back on sounder footing came as US Navy divers on Thursday completed an operation to recover pieces of the spy balloon, which a US fighter jet had shot down off the coast of South Carolina in early February, according to US Northern Command.

And on Friday, a US official said the government had called off the search for two unidentified flying objects – in remote areas of Alaska and around Lake Huron – after the military shot them out of the sky this month.

But the completion of the recovery nonetheless raised questions about what intelligence could be gleaned from the remains, as occurred in 1960 when the Soviet Union pored over the wreckage of a U-2 plane or in 2001 when the Chinese military looked over a damaged Navy spy plane involved in a collision with a Chinese jet.

“They didn’t learn very much from us,” Dr Kahl said on Friday. “We learnt a hell of a lot from them.”

Dr Kahl declined to provide any details pending the outcome of the analysis, but said the balloon’s payload had the ability to do full-motion and high-resolution video, as well as antennae that could intercept electronic transmissions.

China’s high-altitude surveillance balloons were not designed to spy on the continental US, Dr Kahl said, suggesting this instance was an opportunistic step taken by senior Chinese military officials after the balloon strayed into Montana from Canada.

“They built these things predominantly to support them in a potential war in the Western Pacific” and to spy on US bases in Guam and Hawaii, he said. NYTIMES