NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A ccording to the “two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official” with whom NBC News reporters Courtney Kube and Carol Lee spoke, the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the continental United States in February was, in fact, “able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites”:

China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time, the three officials said. The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images, the officials said.

NBC’s sources added, however, that China’s intelligence-gathering coup could have been worse. Administration officials reportedly blocked some of the balloon’s ability to gather and broadcast electronic signals, and they were able to “move around potential targets.” Nevertheless, the Chinese surveillance apparatus did collect intelligence on some of the four sensitive military sites it overflew, including the ICBM silos at Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base.

That answers one of the many outstanding questions about the relative menace posed by the balloon. In part, at least. When the balloon was discovered by the intrepid Montana-based reporters who looked up, CNN anchor Jim Sciutto alleged that U.S. officials “were able to block” the device from gathering signals intelligence. Indeed, they were “able to turn the tables, so to speak, to gather intel on the balloon itself and its equipment.” But not sufficiently to prevent it from completing at least part of its mission.

NBC’s report also clears up a concern that administration officials expressed once the balloon began its trek across the continent regarding whether it had a self-destruct mechanism on board. It did, and China had the ability to remotely detonate it. Whether it declined the option or the mechanism failed remains a mystery.

And yet, there are still plenty of outstanding questions the Biden administration hasn’t answered about the nature of this operation and the others like it, which, according to the administration, had become all but routine.

The balloon that sped across the U.S. was one of two simultaneous unmanned Chinese incursions across the continental American airspace. The second traveled over Central America, providing the Chinese with a live look at the breadth of America’s air-defense zones. Both balloons descended from the heights at which high-altitude balloons typically operate to a visibly observable course, suggesting both were engaged in the same mission. U.S. Northern Command later revealed that China took down this southern balloon after it transited its course over Latin America. But what intelligence was it gathering and why?

NBC’s sources are still defending the administration’s decision to make as few sudden movements as possible between January 28, when the balloon was first observed over U.S. territory, and February 4, when it was blown out of the sky off the coast of the Carolinas. They are also still making the irreconcilable case that the balloon was relatively harmless despite the president’s belated decision to shoot it down:

The Defense Department directed NBC News to comments from February in which senior officials said the balloon had “limited additive value” for intelligence collection by the Chinese government “over and above what [China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low earth orbit.”

Given the extent to which China’s balloon could capture signals intelligence in ways satellites cannot, this is a tendentious claim. Still, if the balloon was of such “limited additional value,” why shoot it down at all? Moreover, why spend the following week turning North America’s airspace into a live-fire zone?

In the days that followed the balloon’s big adventure, U.S. F-16s and F-22s shot multiple unknown objects out of American airspace at a pace that betrayed the frenetic nature of it all. When the president finally deigned to update the American people about the circumstances that convinced him to light up North America’s skies, he admitted that the Air Force’s targets were likely commercial or scientific in nature. Indeed, he had no “evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky.” Merely that radar systems had opened their aperture and were picking up signals that Defense officials previously overlooked (for good reason).

So, what inspired this panicky response? Was it related to specific intelligence? Did the administration overreact in the face of the political criticisms he received as a result of his lethargic response to China’s incursion? Did we just tighten up the aperture on those radar systems? If so, are we no longer seeing the vehicles that U.S. officials realized only in retrospect were foreign objects?

And whatever came of the administration’s early efforts to claim that Chinese incursions into not just America’s airspace but nations all over the world had become a routine feature of modern life? Defense officials initially told reporters that Chinese balloons “transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration,” later admitting that Trump administration senior leadership might never have been made aware of the incursions. The Pentagon press secretary, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, eventually admitted that the Pentagon subsequently assessed that Beijing has “Chinese balloons operating over at least five continents.”

Can we, therefore, assume that these operations had objectives similar to those that the North American spy balloon successfully carried out, at least in part? Are these balloons overflying sensitive military sites and gathering signals intelligence intercepts? What nations are they traversing, and is there any indication that China is directing these apparatuses to overfly staging areas the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command could utilize in the event of a conflict? How vulnerable are these countries to repeated incursions? How vulnerable are we?

Lastly, the incursion episode and the jumpy response it engendered among U.S. policy-makers raises some discomfiting questions about the existence — or lack — of deconfliction networks and procedures between Washington and Beijing.

As the New York Times reported at the time, China and the United States established crisis lines of communication following the 2001 collision of a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter plane over Hainan Island. Amid the balloon’s overflight, those channels “failed.” Indeed, Chinese officials “did not call to work out a way to deal” with the international incident, which was “revealing.” What it revealed was the advanced atrophying of bilateral conflict-resolution mechanisms. Given the rising tensions between Beijing and the West, establishing robust and reliable ways to reduce dangerous ambiguity in a crisis should be a paramount priority. So, where are we on that?

NBC’s report provides us with some answers to the nagging questions that linger from early February, but it raises others and fails to address some of the more pressing concerns that arose from that incident.