QUANTICO, Va. — U.S. intelligence analysts examining the wreckage of the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down earlier this year by an Air Force F-22 made an early and surprising discovery: the balloon was stitched together largely with classified documents.
“It’s got a little bit of everything in here,” said Master Chief Petty Officer Brian O’Leary, who helped pull the balloon’s skin from the waters off South Carolina. “Pol-mil assessments, threats of the day, internal training slides. Geez, that's a lot of classified.”
The surveillance balloon was over 200 feet tall, roughly the size of a MAJCOM Class Six. To construct it required thousands of pages of classified documents, or roughly one Mar-A-Lago.
“What is this?” asked Navy Lt. Patricia Harlow, pulling up several sheets of laminated paper from the wreckage. “It looks like a daily intel briefing from…2016? I swear our intel guy briefed the exact same intel last week.”
