Photo/Illutration The suspected Chinese spy balloon falls to the ocean after being shot down off the coast of Surfside Beach, South Carolina, on Feb. 4. (Reuters Photo)

On May 1, 1960, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) received a phone call from a senior Pentagon official reporting that one of their spy planes was missing, having failed to return from its clandestine mission.

The aircraft in question was a U.S. one-man U-2 reconnaissance plane operating at a high altitude over Soviet air space.

The White House immediately started working on a cover story and issued a news release to the effect that “an unarmed weather research aircraft, operated by a civilian, has gone missing.”

But the lie was swiftly exposed with the Kremlin’s announcement that a “U.S. military aircraft had been shot down for invading Soviet air space.” And the U.S. pilot, who survived the attack by parachuting down onto Soviet soil and was captured, admitted he had been spying.

That was 63 years ago, right during the Cold War era. U.S.-Soviet relations collapsed and so did a planned Paris summit between the two nations in May 1960.

Eisenhower later noted in his memoir, “The big error we made was, of course, in the issuance of a premature and erroneous cover story.”

Who’s telling the truth this time, then?

A suspicious balloon seen in the sky over the United States was shot down. Washington is blaming Beijing for invading U.S. air space with “a Chinese spy balloon,” while Beijing protests it was “a civilian airship used for scientific and technological purposes such as weather research.”

When the subject is espionage, obviously no nation volunteers information on how it goes about it. I can’t help suspecting that both China and the United States are holding back some vital parts of the truth.

In fact, balloons have historically been closely related to military espionage. Napoleon I (1769-1821) used spy balloons, and the former Imperial Japanese Army reportedly sent for a French reconnaissance balloon to study its structure during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895).

I certainly do not want to see a repeat of the Cold War. I fear a chain reaction of mutual distrust could lead to heightened military tensions.

I worry about the shaky reality of U.S.-China relations.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Feb. 7

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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