Beijing has slammed the US decision to shoot down a Chinese balloon that flew over the country, as the American Navy worked to salvage debris to learn more about what the Pentagon says was a spy craft.
The Pentagon said two destroyers — the USS Oscar Austin and USS Philippine Sea — and the USS Carter Hall, a ship with a landing dock, were engaged in a retrieval operation off the coast of South Carolina.
US defence officials said Navy divers would attempt to collect pieces of the balloon and its payload, which hangs below the balloon and contains surveillance equipment, because the debris had fallen into a relatively shallow part of the Atlantic which was only about 47ft deep.
Hours after an American F-22 fighter jet shot down the balloon with a Sidewinder missile, Beijing accused Washington of “seriously violating international conventions” and repeated its claim that it was a balloon for “civilian use” that had veered off course due to bad weather.
The Chinese defence ministry said it would reserve “the right to use the necessary means to deal with similar situations”.
The F-22 Raptor fired an air-to-air missile at the balloon at 2.39pm on Saturday when it was six nautical miles off the coast, in US airspace, causing the balloon to crash into American territorial waters.
Democrats on Sunday praised President Joe Biden for ordering the military to shoot down the balloon.
“President Biden made the right decision to shoot down this alleged Chinese spy balloon out of range of American civilians and infrastructure,” said Jack Reed, the Democratic Senate armed services committee chair.
But some Republicans asked why Biden had not ordered the military to take action before the balloon — which entered US airspace over Alaska on January 28 — had flown across sensitive military sites.
“Taking it down over the Atlantic is sort of like tackling the quarterback after the game is over,” said Mike Turner, head of the House intelligence committee. “The satellite had completed its mission. It should never have been allowed to enter the US.”
Defence officials said they did not down the balloon over land because of the risk to civilians. But they added that the US had monitored its course and gathered intelligence on it as it crossed North America.
“What has not been understood . . . is that this actually provided us a number of days to analyse this balloon and . . . learn a lot about what this balloon was doing, how it was doing it,” said one senior defence official.
Marco Rubio, Republican vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said Biden should have spoken to the US public during the week, but that the administration was focused on trying to salvage the trip that secretary of state Antony Blinken was supposed to make to China this weekend.
Blinken cancelled his trip on Friday, saying China had violated US sovereign airspace. He had planned to meet President Xi Jinping on what would have been the first trip to China by a Biden administration cabinet secretary.
Mike Mullen, a retired admiral and former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said one unanswered “big question” was whether the leadership in China knew about the Chinese military operation — “whether the right hand knew what the left hand was doing”.
Mullen told ABC television that the episode had “put a big dent” in efforts to attempt to stabilise relations between Beijing and Washington.
One person familiar with the thinking inside the US administration said the US did not yet know if Xi was aware about the balloon operation.
The person added that China had not demanded that the US return the debris from the balloon.
The Pentagon on Wednesday revealed the presence of the balloon as it was flying over a sensitive military installation in Montana where the US bases nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The defence official said it was part of a fleet of Chinese spy balloons operating over five continents. It entered US airspace on January 28 near the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. It flew into Canadian airspace two days later and re-entered US airspace over Idaho on January 31.
The official also said that Chinese spy balloons had “briefly” transited the continental US three times while Donald Trump was president and once at the start of the Biden administration.
However, one former senior Trump administration national security official said he and other top civilian officials were unaware of any such incident.
The Pentagon also said a second Chinese balloon had been detected over Latin America. Colombia’s air force announced that a possible balloon was spotted flying at 55,000 feet over the north of the country on Friday, before leaving the airspace. “It was determined that it did not represent a threat to national security,” it said in a statement.
The person familiar with the administration’s thinking said Chinese officials were summoned to the state department on Wednesday but that the diplomats were unable to provide an immediate explanation.
“They were caught off guard and didn’t have a story yet,” the person said. “We made clear that we knew exactly what was going on and needed rapid actions . . . It took them much longer than necessary to get back to us.”
Additional reporting by Eleanor Olcott in Hong Kong and Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá
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