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      US says it killed Islamic State leader Usamah al-Muhajir in Syria

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      The US military said on Sunday it conducted a strike that killed Usamah al-Muhajir, an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria.“The strike on Friday was conducted by the same MQ-9s that had, earlier in the day, been harassed by Russian aircraft in an encounter that had lasted almost two hours,” a statement from US Central Command said.It was not immediately clear how the US military confirmed that the person killed was Muhajir. Central Command did not give any more details about him.The statement said there were no indications any civilians were killed in the strike. The military was assessing reports that a civilian may have been injured.“We have made it clear that we remain committed to the defeat of Isis throughout the region,” Gen Erik Kurilla, commander of US Central Command, said in the statement.Washington has stepped up raids and operations against suspected Islamic State operatives in Syria, killing and arresting leaders who had taken shelter in areas under Turkey-backed rebel control after the group lost its last territory in Syria in 2019.The US-led campaign which killed former IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who declared himself the “caliph of all Muslims”, has since targeted surviving leaders, many of whom are thought to have planned attacks abroad.US military commanders say the IS remains a significant threat within the region, though its capabilities have been degraded and its ability to re-establish its network weakened.At its peak in 2014, the IS controlled one-third of Iraq and Syria. Though it was beaten back in both countries, its militants continue to mount insurgent attacks.The US air force earlier released video footage it said showed an encounter between the drones and Russian fighter jets on Wednesday, which forced the MQ-9 Reapers to take evasive action.US Air Forces Central said in a statement: “These events represent a new level of unprofessional and unsafe action by Russian air forces operating in Syria.”Lt Gen Alex Grynkewich, commander of Ninth Air Force in the Middle East, said one of the Russian pilots moved their aircraft in front of a drone and engaged the SU-35’s afterburner, reducing the drone operator’s ability to safely operate the aircraft.R Adm Oleg Gurinov, head of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, said the Russian and Syrian militaries had started a six-day joint training that was set to end on Monday.In comments carried by Syrian state media, Gurinov said Moscow was concerned about flights of drones by the US-led coalition over northern Syria, calling them “systematic violations of protocols” designed to avoid clashes between the two militaries. More

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      Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92

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      Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More

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      Jack Teixeira, Pentagon leaks suspect, indicted by federal grand jury

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      Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old US airman accused of leaking confidential intelligence and defense documents online has been indicted by a federal grand jury, the Department of Justice said on Thursday.Teixeira, of North Dighton, Massachusetts, has been charged with six counts of wilful retention and transmission of classified information relating to national defense, the justice department said.He was arrested by armed FBI agents at his family home in April this year and remains in custody.More details soon … More

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      Son of late CIA director cautions against far-right extremism in the US

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      A man who was three years old when his father – an American intelligence operator – sent him a letter on a vanquished Adolf Hitler’s stationery has declared himself disgusted by US extremist groups who still admire the former Nazi ruler.“Those people have no idea – the history and foulness of that,” Dennis Helms, the son of the late Richard Helms, the CIA director from 1966 to 1973, said of the presence of neo-Nazis and antisemitism in the US. “There can be nothing that’s worse … I can’t say enough bad about that.”Helms’s remarks came in an interview with the Guardian as the US prepared to observe Tuesday’s 79th anniversary of D-day, when Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy to help liberate north-west Europe from Nazi Germany’s control.The military campaign started by that invasion culminated in Germany’s surrender on 8 May 1945, a little more than a week after the suicide of Hitler, who oversaw the murders of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, among other atrocities.His family has never been quite sure how, but Richard Helms, then working for the US Office of Strategic Services’s intelligence branch while based in London, managed to get his hands on a sheet of paper under Hitler’s letterhead and write a missive to his son carrying the date of Germany’s surrender, known as Victory in Europe – or V-E – Day.“The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe – three short years ago when you were born,” Richard Helms’s letter to Dennis read. “Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”The letter went on to describe how thousands of people died as a result of their efforts to put a stop to Hitler, who “had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man … and a fear of intellectual honesty”.“The price for ridding society of bad is always high,” Richard Helms’s letter added in closing. “Love, Daddy.”Dennis later learned that his father had apparently actually interviewed Hitler while covering the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a reporter during a previous career. According to his son, Richard was always proud to have personally seen Black American runner Jesse Owens win the 200-yard dash at those games, frustrating Hitler’s dreams of a competition dominated by white athletes.Now 80, Dennis later provided his father’s V-E Day letter to the CIA, the successor of the OSS, which Richard led during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The CIA displays it in its private museum alongside other artifacts provided by Richard Helms’s family, including a dinner plate from Hitler’s chancellery that he acquired during a trip to Berlin in September 1945.The letter to Dennis has been publicized before, and a picture of its contents went viral on social media on the most recent V-E Day anniversary.However, just two days before that, a man clad in extremist insignia and having a history of praising Nazis online shot eight people to death at a mall in Texas. And late last year, President Joe Biden had the occasion to release a statement saying “the Holocaust happened” and “Hitler was a demonic figure” after the rapper once known as Kanye West earned a suspension from Twitter by speaking approvingly of the Nazi ruler and publishing an image of a swastika blended with a star of David.Dennis said it was disturbing that Hitler’s regime still finds such high-profile support in a country that his father spent his life serving and which helped bring Hitler’s downfall.“There is no excuse for that,” Dennis said. “Not that there ever was.”Though Donald Trump has condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Dennis noted how proponents of both have generally supported the former president, who is widely considered the frontrunner for the 2024 White House nomination.Trump enjoys that status despite federal investigations of attempts to subvert his 2020 election defeat, incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress and the retention of classified records. He’s facing criminal charges in connection with the payment of hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels over a sexual encounter that she says the two had. And, among other legal perils, he was recently found liable in civil court for sexually abusing author and columnist E Jean Carroll.Dennis said he imagines his father “just rotates in his grave” in Arlington National Cemetery most times that Trump speaks.“He lies all the time – he cheats,” Dennis said of Trump. “I think that he is a guy who has none of the values that my father did.” More

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      Schumer decries Republican senator’s ‘revolting’ remarks on white nationalists

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      The Democratic US Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned as “utterly revolting” remarks in which the Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville appeared to defend white nationalists in the US military.In an interview with the Alabama station WBHM, published on Monday, Tuberville was asked: “Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?”He answered: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”The Senate armed forces committee member added: “We are losing in the military so fast. And why? I can tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda, as Joe Biden’s agenda.”Tuberville is currently attempting to impose his own agenda on the US military, by blocking promotions and appointments in protest of Pentagon rules about abortion access.On Thursday, Schumer said: “Does Senator Tuberville honestly believe that our military is stronger with white nationalists in its ranks? I cannot believe this needs to be said, but white nationalism has no place in our armed forces and no place in any corner of American society, period, full stop, end of story.”Previously, Sherrilyn Ifill, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal defense fund, said: “I hope we are not getting so numb that we refrain from demanding that Mr Tuberville’s colleagues in the Senate condemn his remarks.”Schumer added: “I urge Senator Tuberville to think about the destructive spectacle he is creating in the Senate. His actions are dangerous.”On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Tuberville said he was “being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military”.A Tuberville spokesperson told the Washington Post the senator “resents the implication that the people in our military are anything but patriots and heroes”.The same spokesperson told NBC Tuberville “has kind of a sarcastic sense of humor” and “was expressing doubt about this being a problem in the military”.Reports have shown the US military has a problem with white nationalism and white supremacy, despite the Pentagon having prohibited “active participation” in extremist groups since 1996.In October 2020, a Pentagon report warning of a problem with white supremacists in the military was sent to Congress. It was released in 2021.In February 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, co-published documents showing one in five applicants to one white supremacist group claimed ties to the US military.On Thursday, Adam Hodge, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said it was “abhorrent that Senator Tuberville would argue that white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, while he also threatens our national security by holding all pending DoD military and civilian nominations.“Extremist behavior has no place in our military. None.”Fact-checking Tuberville, WBHM, an NPR station, noted Pentagon efforts “to keep extremists, particularly fascists, out of the military”.The station also fact-checked a remark about “what [Joe Biden’s] done to our military with the woke ideas, with the [critical race theory] that we’re teaching in our military”.Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans have turned it into an electoral wedge issue.WBHM said: “The US military is not requiring that CRT be taught and there is little evidence that it’s being discussed much at all in the ranks. According to Military Times, the one instance in which it is being used in an educational setting is at the US Military Academy at West Point.” More

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      ‘I wish he had finished his book’: Chad L Williams on WEB Du Bois

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      Chad L Williams has written a brilliant biography of WEB Du Bois, a civil rights powerhouse widely regarded as America’s most important Black intellectual. Williams speaks and writes with a warmth and authority which have made him a star at Brandeis University, where he is the Samuel J and Augusta Spector professor of history and African and African American studies.The Guardian caught up with him just after he arrived in his hometown, San Francisco, where he was combining promotion for The Wounded World with a reunion with his sister and his parents, both retired attorneys.Williams lives in Needham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Madeleine Lopez, who directs the Center for Inclusive Excellence at Regis College, and their three children.“I thought I was going to go to law school but then I realized I didn’t want to be like my parents,” Williams said. “My first encounter with Du Bois was during my freshman year at UCLA, in a course on African American nationalism when I read [Du Bois’s 1903 classic] The Souls of Black Folks.“I was blown away. I remember not knowing what to make of this very strange book that had all of these powerful metaphors in it. It was really undefinable as far as discipline. It had history, sociology, philosophy, music. It is truly one of those timeless, classic books.“I started reading his other books like Black Reconstruction in America and really came to appreciate him as the most significant Black intellectual and scholar activist in American history.”To Williams, Du Bois was “singular” because of the sheer span of his life: “Ninety-five years; born in 1868 during the presidency of [Andrew] Johnson, during Reconstruction, he dies the day before the March on Washington, in Ghana in 1963. He really encapsulated the struggle for Black freedom and equality throughout the 20th century in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. I never thought I’d write a whole book about Du Bois. But yeah, it did happen.”Williams was a graduate student at Princeton when he first went to Amherst College, where most of Du Bois’s papers are in a library named in his honor. He saw a reference to “Du Bois world war I materials” and asked to see them.“I figured maybe I’ll get a couple of folders and [the librarian] returned with six microfilm reels. And I think, ‘What could this possibly be?’ I load this first reel and I see this manuscript which I knew nothing about. It was over 800 pages long. In addition to the manuscript, all of his research materials and all of his correspondence related to this book entitled The Black Man and the Wounded World.“He worked on it for two decades and no scholar had ever talked about it. I was stunned. This was this huge aspect of his life and career and scholarship which had been overlooked. From that moment I was hooked on understanding it. It would have been the definitive history of [Black soldiers] in world war I and one of Du Bois’s most significant works of scholarship – but he never completed it.”I asked if Williams identified with Du Bois’s seminal idea of double consciousness in every Black American, and how it related to the unfinished work on the war: “Did it mean anything to you as a Black man?”“I think not. Not initially. When I first read The Souls of Black Folk I was really just trying to understand who Du Bois was and what this book was about.”But soon, Williams began to reread the book every year. As he learned more about African American history, he “came to appreciate the significance of Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness. And subsequently began to think about it just in terms of my own racial identity.“But it’s such a powerful metaphor and I really think it sits at the heart of my book, in terms of why Du Bois supported world war I, and how he felt that the war was an opportunity to reconcile that double consciousness that Black people faced. This tension that he described, of being Black on the one hand and being American on the other, this was the opportunity to put that theory into practice and to test it.“He genuinely thought those warring ideals he talked about could be reconciled … and he genuinely believed the war could serve as that opportunity. And ultimately he was wrong.”Du Bois fought for the creation of a Black officer corps, even though he had to accept segregated training. When he got to France, to interview Black soldiers, he was appalled by what he learned.“This is the beginning of him working on his book conducting research and also reckoning with the failed expectations of the war. He was genuinely taken aback by the racism that he was exposed to and Black soldiers told him about.”White officers spread the libel Black soldiers were raping French women. French mayors told Du Bois Black soldiers were much better behaved than white.“Getting the first-hand accounts from all these mayors was really important. And when he publishes them in [the NAACP magazine] the Crisis it’s an incredibly bold act, going directly against the narrative the government and the army are putting out about Black troops” being well treated.Like most great books, The Wounded World is a tribute to persistence. Williams worked on it for 12 years but he started thinking about it when he discovered Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript, 23 years ago.“One of the things that I think us writers can appreciate … is howdifficult it is to write a book,” Williams said. “I wish Du Bois had finished his book. But I can empathize with him. It’s not easy, even when it’s the great Du Bois, who wrote 22 other books.”
      The Wounded World: WEB Du Bois and the First World War is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      From Ellsberg to Assange: Jack Teixeira joins list of alleged leakers

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      Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts air national guard member who was charged on Friday with leaking classified Pentagon documents, has joined a long list of individuals who have been prosecuted for allegedly disclosing sensitive US national security intelligence.Previous leaks have ranged from information about US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan to details of Russian interference in American elections. Despite the diversity of the subject matter, the treatment of the leakers has shared a common relentlessness on the part of the US government in pursuing those it accuses of breaching its trust.Daniel EllsbergIn March 1971, Ellsberg, a military analyst, leaked a top-secret study to the New York Times. The document, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, spanned US involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and exposed covert efforts by successive US presidents to escalate the conflict while hiding deep doubts about the chances of victory.Ellsberg was prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act – a law designed to catch first world war spies – and faced a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison. All charges were dropped after the FBI’s illegal wiretapping of Ellsberg was revealed.Early last month, the 92-year-old Ellsberg, who has become revered as the doyen of whistleblowers, revealed that he has terminal cancer and has months to live.Jeffrey SterlingSterling, a former CIA operations officer, served more than two years of a 42-month sentence after he was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking information about a botched covert US operation with Iran to the then New York Times journalist James Risen. In 2003, Risen published details of the operation in a book, State of War.It was not until 2011, under Barack Obama’s administration, that Sterling was arrested. Federal prosecutors accused him of leaking details of the Iran engagement out of “anger and resentment” – a reference to an earlier claim from Sterling, who is Black, that he suffered discrimination while at the CIA.Sterling has denied ever talking to Risen about Iran.Thomas DrakeA former senior official with the National Security Agency (NSA), Drake was charged in 2010 with leaking classified information to the Baltimore Sun. He faced 10 counts with a possible 35-year sentence, though the charges were whittled down to a single misdemeanor for which he was given a year of probation.Drake has always insisted that he had no intention of harming national security, presenting himself as a whistleblower who had been trying to sound the alarm on technical flaws in NSA programs that were wasting billions of dollars.Chelsea ManningAs a former intelligence analyst posted outside Baghdad during the Iraq war, Manning had access to classified information that shone a light on the vagaries of war there and in Afghanistan. She leaked hundreds of thousands of military records and diplomatic cables via the open information site WikiLeaks in 2010 in one of the largest disclosures of military secrets in US history.Three years later, she was convicted under the Espionage Act. She was given a 35-year sentence, of which she served seven. In a memoir published last year, README.txt, she wrote: “What I did during my enlistment was an act of rebellion, of resistance, and of civic disobedience.”John KiriakouKiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, was sentenced to two years in prison in 2012 for leaking the identity of a covert operative to a journalist. He was the first CIA officer to be imprisoned for doing so.Prosecutors insisted that they went after Kiriakou to protect the safety of undercover government agents. He countered that he was a whistleblower attempting to expose the use of torture in the so-called “war on terror”.Kiriakou was the first former government official to talk in public about waterboarding, the form of controlled drowning used against terrorism suspects in the aftermath of 9/11.Edward SnowdenIn 2013 Snowden disclosed inside intelligence about the US government’s dragnet surveillance of the digital communications of millions of Americans through the Guardian and Washington Post. Working at the time as an NSA contractor, he fled to Hong Kong and from there to Russia, where he was granted asylum.After he outed himself through the Guardian, a raft of Republican politicians demanded that Snowden be extradited back to the US to face trial as a traitor. Donald Trump called for his execution three years before he was elected US president.In his support, a number of prominent public figures, including Ellsberg, have lauded Snowden as a pro-democracy hero who should be allowed to come home with a pardon.Reality WinnerThe former NSA intelligence contractor and air force linguist was sentenced to more than five years under the Espionage Act in 2018 for leaking a top-secret document on Russian interference in the US presidential election. She pleaded guilty to having handed a copy of a classified report about Russian hacking of voting software suppliers in the 2016 race.She was released after three years. Having regained her freedom she told CBS: “I am not a traitor, I am not a spy. I am somebody who only acted out of love for what this country stands for.”Julian AssangeThe WikiLeaks founder was initially charged in 2019 with conspiring to hack into a military computer – an accusation arising out of the massive leak by Manning to WikiLeaks nine years earlier. The seriousness of prosecutors’ case against him was dramatically expanded later that year to include 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act.Assange has been held for the past four years in Belmarsh prison in London as extradition proceedings work their way through British courts. The Joe Biden White House has come under mounting pressure to drop the charges, including from leading news outlets, on grounds that the prosecution is putting a chill on press freedom.Jack TeixeiraThe air national guardsman now finds his name added to the list. He was charged in a Boston federal court on Friday with two counts under the Espionage Act, each carrying a possible 10-year sentence.Prosecutors allege that they have evidence to prove that Teixeira unlawfully retained and transmitted hundreds of classified defence documents. The FBI has indicated that he enjoyed security clearance for sensitive intelligence marked “top secret/sensitive compartmented information”.The leak of the Pentagon documents is believed to have started on the social media platform Discord. Teixeira reportedly visited the platform over several years posting about guns, online games and racist memes, though any motive for the alleged leak remains obscure. More

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      Chinese balloon gathered intelligence from sensitive US military sites – report

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      A Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence as it flew over sensitive military sites in the US, despite efforts by the Joe Biden White House to thwart its espionage mission, new reports suggest.China succeeded in flying the massive balloon over some military bases on multiple occasions and sent the information back to Beijing in real time, NBC News reported on Monday, citing two current senior US officials and one former high-level administrator. The balloon, which was the size of three school buses, was occasionally flown in a figure-eight formation over at least some of those sensitive sites before it was shot down in early February.“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,” NBC’s report cited the officials as saying.White House official John Kirby told reporters on Monday that he could not confirm NBC’s report, but said the US limited the balloon’s “ability to be able to collect anything additive”.He added that the US government was able to study and analyze the balloon while it was in US airspace, saying: “We gained some useful context.”The Pentagon said experts were still analyzing debris collected from the balloon after it was shot down on 4 February.“I could not confirm that there was real-time transmission from the balloon back to (China) at this time,” said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, adding, “that’s something we’re analyzing right now.”Beijing officials have vehemently denied that the balloon was a government intelligence-gathering asset, claiming that the US overreacted to what was an unmanned civilian vessel that had accidentally strayed off course. The balloon triggered a major national security incident and a diplomatic row, prompting the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to postpone a long-awaited visit to Beijing.Once the balloon’s existence became public, its flight was closely tracked as it glided from Alaska to Montana, where the US Department of Defence stores some nuclear assets at the Malmstrom air force base. The balloon sped up as China tried to get it out of American airspace as quickly as possible, according to the officials cited by NBC.The officials said that the Biden administration had limited China’s efforts to gather intelligence from sensitive sites by moving potential targets and by blocking the balloon’s ability to pick up and transmit electronic signals.The balloon spent a week flying over North America before a US warplane shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February.Biden’s administration played down the balloon’s capabilities at the time. But after it was shot down, the White House confirmed the vessel was carrying equipment capable of intercepting and geolocating communications. “It’s not a major breach,” Biden said after the balloon was destroyed. “It’s a violation of international law. It’s our airspace. And once it comes into our space, we can do what we want with it.”The debris is still being analysed by American security experts. China has deployed similar balloons to collect intelligence over 40 countries on five continents, the US government has claimed. More