Spy balloon was an ominous sign

A former intelligence official’s warning that Australia and the US are being targeted in “the largest intelligence operation in the history of the human race” underlines the importance of Sunday’s shooting down by an American warplane of a Chinese surveillance balloon.

Douglas Wise, a former deputy director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, told Washington correspondent Adam Creighton the crisis over the balloon showed China already saw itself as being “at war” with Australia and the US, even if we did not.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin says the payload of the balloon, the size of three buses, was being used by the communist regime to “ surveil strategic sites in the continental US”. The trajectory of what has become known as the “Red Zeppelin” was focused on vital US nuclear assets. After it was detected north of Alaska on January 28, it was tracked high in the sky (at 18,600m) over Montana where 150 US Minuteman III nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles are deployed at Malmstrom Air Base. Beijing’s claim it was an innocent “civilian airship” used for “weather research” that had been blown off course (taking it over nuclear missile silos) had no credibility. Joe Biden was right to order Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to call off a trip he was to make to Beijing on Friday. Some US commentators are comparing the drama over the Chinese balloon with the crisis between the US and Soviet Union following the 1960 shooting down of US U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers.

Much is to be learned on the balloon’s precise mission and that of others in what the Pentagon says is a “fleet” of Chinese surveillance balloons. Two more have been sighted over Canada and Latin America in recent days. US ships are picking up vital debris. What is not in doubt is the drama has exposed the lawless levels of espionage the CCP regime is embarked on.

Mr Wise, who spent decades in the CIA and DIA, said Australia should be seriously concerned at the brazenness of the balloon operations. The Chinese “don’t have accountability and don’t operate under the rule of law or a moral frame of reference’’, he said. What they did with the balloon was provocative and the risk of being found out was not worth the intel value; they could have been testing “a potential weapons delivery or advanced sensor system”.

His warning should be heeded at the highest levels of government and military command in Australia, the US and beyond.