Thread by @AmyZegart

Thoughts about the #Chinesespyballoon, intel history, and lessons learned. A thread.
Q1: Why did the US in 1960 (when a U2 was shot down over the USSR) and the Chinese last week say that spy activities were weather missions when everyone quickly knew it wasn't true?

The answer is fig leaves can often be very useful b/c official acknowledgement of truth can escalate a crisis. After the Soviets invaded Af, the US launched a covert op to arm the Mujahideen.The Soviets knew, & we knew that they knew. But both superpowers pretended otherwise.

1 reason was to keep the proxy war from becoming an all-out war between the US and Soviet Union that could have gone nuclear. But in both the U2 and spy balloon incidents, the fig leaf strategy backfired, for 3 reasons.

1. Horrible timing -an imminent dip'c meeting that made the situation politically unpalatable; 2. Clear evidence the cover story wasn't remotely plausible; 3. Provocative optics -a captured US pilot, a spy balloon flying over the US heartland that citizens could see in the sky.

The lesson should be that fig leaf excuses cannot save the day when you're facing horrible diplomatic timing, obvious truths, and provocative optics.

Q2: Why on earth would the Chinese govt risk so much by sending this balloon right before the Blinken visit? You could say the same thing for the Gary Powers's 1960 U2 flight. The answer usually has more to do with bureaucracy than most people think.

Powers's U2 flight wasn't a one-off. It was part of a regular set of surveillance activities. The same with China's balloons. I suspect both crises erupted mostly because govt bureaucracies were operating as they usually did.

Preventing crises often requires DISRUPTING normal bureaucratic ops before it's too late. And that's hard. It requires people to think ahead of time about the costs and benefits if things go awry and it requires convincing organizations to stop doing what they normally do.

Govt bureaucracies are designed to keep doing things the same way all the time. Normally, there are big benefits to SOPS. We want pilots to have the same rules of engagement in times of war, and we want agencies to have standard procedures, training, policies, etc.

But in crises, those SOPS become risky and sometimes deadly. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis nearly ended up in nuclear war precisely because people forgot to suspend a whole host of normal activities.

We now know for ex that 1 regularly scheduled US surveillance flight veered off course into Soviet airspace and was intercepted by Soviet fighters. US fighter jets were sent to escort the U2 home. At that moment US fighters were armed with nuclear missiles.

Control over firing them rested in the hands of the pilots. Had one of the US or Soviet pilots involved made one different decision, the crisis could have turned out very differently. The next day the US canceled all U2 flights around the world.

During the crisis, US officials also forgot to cancel an ICBM test launch from Vandenberg AF base. B/c of heightened alert levels, all other missiles at the base had nuke warheads. But not the 1 test missile. The Soviets could easily have misinterpreted the test as a strike.

US officials even went ahead with a previously scheduled sim of a nuke missile attack on FL from Cuba, producing some hair-raising moments when it wasn't clear whether this was a test or the real thing. JFK remarked, "There's always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word."