An American fighter plane put an end on Saturday, February 5, at the theft of the surveillance apparatus spotted above the air space of the United States. The Chinese Foreign Ministry “protested the American attack of a civil airship”.
by Frédéric Lemaître (Beijing, correspondent) and Piotr Smolar (Washington, correspondent)
He was the size of three buses, but left in the sky only an ephemeral cloud. There is no longer a Chinese “spy” ball above the United States. On Saturday, February 4, an American fighter plane F-22 Raptor, which took off from the Langley base (Virginia), put an end to the flight of the surveillance apparatus spotted above American airspace. And only one missile was enough.
The White House gave the green light for this operation until the target was off the South Carolina, above the Atlantic Ocean, to avoid any risk of damage humans or materials that would have been suffered on the ground by the scattered debris. The ball fell into American territorial waters. Immediately, a research mission was launched to recover the still identifiable parts of the machine.
The four days taken by the White House to order this strike are explained from an operational point of view. But this period fueled republican criticisms accusing Joe Biden his inaction. In addition, the soap opera occupied the American media and aroused the curiosity of the inhabitants in overflown areas, seeking to capture the balloon in video.
But this stretch of the crisis cannot hide obvious: it is first of all the Chinese regime, despite its denials, which is found in an uncomfortable position, on the defensive, tangled in its own lies. Beijing has certainly expressed regrets and claimed that the ball, doomed to meteorological research, was drifting. But the American authorities say they have no doubt about the purpose of its flight: a spy mission.
a daring espionage operation
Questioned in the afternoon at Hagerstown airport (Maryland), President Joe Biden explained that he had asked that the ball be killed on Wednesday, learning his existence. The manager would then have followed the prudent recommendations of his staff, in order to prevent collateral damage.
The machine was flying at around 18,000 meters, well above commercial aircraft. In a statement, the American defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, confirmed that he had been used by China to “try to monitor strategic sites” in the United States, especially in Montana, where a silo of nuclear missiles. The apparatus would belong to a Chinese air fleet of this nature, which would have already ventured several times in recent years in American airspace.
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