Sen. Jim Risch: Chinese spy balloon represents ‘an invasion’ but didn’t fly over sensitive sites in Idaho

WASHINGTON – After the U.S. military shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon and three other flying objects in just over a week, an Idaho senator who has been briefed on the incidents said Wednesday that President Joe Biden should tell the nation everything he can about the unprecedented series of events.

Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview that after a Tuesday briefing from Pentagon officials, Democrats and Republicans alike want Biden to explain his decision to down three objects over the weekend before they were identified. In contrast, the president has said Pentagon officials advised against shooting down the spy balloon until it was off the coast of South Carolina.

“On a nonpartisan, bipartisan basis, there was a unanimous feeling that the president of the United States really needs to stand up and address the American people,” Risch said. “This was an invasion, for crying out loud.”

The Idaho senator emphasized that the Chinese balloon downed by an Air Force F-22 on Feb. 4 needs to be distinguished from the other three objects, which were detected after U.S. and Canadian governments adjusted radar systems to catch more potential incursions. From Friday to Sunday, the U.S. military shot down the objects off the northern coast of Alaska, over Canada’s Yukon Territory and over Lake Huron. As of Wednesday, U.S. and Canadian authorities had not announced finding debris from any of the objects.

Based on Tuesday’s briefing from Pentagon officials, Risch said he believed the objects were probably balloons, much smaller than the Chinese balloon and likely used for research, not spying. The senator, who is a rancher, said he has found remnants of two weather balloons in one of his pastures in southern Idaho that were clearly marked as belonging to the National Weather Service and suspects that once debris from the unidentified objects is found, it may reveal they were similar devices.

On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said there was “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”

“These very well could be balloons of a completely benign nature,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday on MSNBC, adding that they may have been used for commercial or scientific research. “We don’t know for sure because we haven’t recovered that debris.”

Kirby told reporters Monday the smaller objects were downed because they were flying low enough to pose a threat to commercial air traffic. Under those circumstances, Risch said, shooting them down was “absolutely” the right decision.

While those objects may prove to be relatively trivial, Risch said the surveillance balloon – which the Chinese government has denied using to collect intelligence – should be taken very seriously. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Idaho senator said he has received countless briefings on China’s use of high-altitude balloons for spying, a program he has been aware of since the Trump administration, when balloons entered U.S. airspace.

“We’ve known for some time that they have the balloon program,” he said, and the U.S. government tracked the balloon that was eventually shot down as it took off and traveled near the equator, on the track other Chinese balloons had taken.

While the use of balloons in spycraft dates back to the Civil War, Risch said, China uses them because they can operate at an altitude between 60,000 and 180,000 feet – higher than most aircraft can travel and lower than satellites orbit the Earth – part of the skies Risch said “nobody watches” because “nothing’s ever gone on” in that area.

One of those Chinese balloons previously passed over Texas and Florida, Risch said, but none of them had traveled over sensitive sites until earlier this month, when residents in Billings, Montana, spotted a strange object in the sky. A day later, the Pentagon confirmed that the unmanned vehicle had passed above Malmstrom Air Force Base, which houses nuclear missile silos. It later passed over Air Force bases in Nebraska and Missouri, but Risch said that by then the U.S. military had taken “defensive measures” to ensure it couldn’t transmit.

What’s more, he said, the Chinese government “shut the thing down” once they realized it was causing an international “brouhaha.”

Risch said it’s unclear how much valuable intelligence the balloon collected, and it seems likely the episode will prove more valuable for the United States, especially as the wreckage is collected and analyzed.

The Pentagon has said the spy balloon passed over Alaska and through Canada before re-entering U.S. airspace over North Idaho. Risch said a map of the vehicle’s trajectory shows it traveling south into Idaho near the Washington border before turning eastward and following the U.S.-Canada border toward Montana, suggesting it may have been steered in that direction.

He joked that there wasn’t much for the balloon to see in Idaho’s far north except for the endangered caribou population, which hasn’t existed in the state since Canadian wildlife officials removed the last remaining animal from the Selkirk Mountains in 2019.

“It was just mountains,” he said. “They didn’t fly over any critical facilities in Idaho.”

While the Intelligence Committee had been “generally aware of the program” in the past, Risch said, they had “other fish to fry” and he didn’t get the impression that the balloons were important.

“They weren’t bothering us,” he said. “They were mostly on the equator. They had flown over other countries. … Obviously, if we were aware that they were going to run a balloon across the country – particularly across sensitive sites – we would have been very concerned about it.”

Another takeaway from the spy balloon saga, Risch said, is that the U.S. and Chinese governments don’t have the same kind of established “deconfliction” processes that have long existed between the United States and Russia, which have prevented escalation between Washington and Moscow even when the two nation’s militaries were operating on opposite sides in the Syrian Civil War.

When U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to call his Chinese counterpart on a special crisis line hours after the balloon was shot down, the Pentagon said, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe refused to take the call, with his department saying the United States had “not created the proper atmosphere” for dialogue.

“This has really underscored the threat that China is,” Risch said. “It is the challenge of the 21st century, unquestionably.”