Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley has admitted what the Pentagon has probably always known: The Chinese alleged spy balloon that floated across the U.S. last January and February, didn’t do any spying (it may have even been a weather balloon, but this is still not said). “The intelligence community, their assessment—and it’s a high-confidence assessment—[is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon,” Milley told “CBS News Sunday Morning” on Sept. 17.
After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon’s sensors had never been activated while over the continental United States, CBS reported. But by then, the damage to U.S.-China relations had been done. On May 21, President Biden remarked: “This silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars’ worth of spying equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shot down, and everything changed in terms of talking to one another.”
So, CBS asked: “Bottom line, it was a spy balloon, but it wasn’t spying?” Milley replied, “I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn’t transmit any intelligence back to China.”
