Congressional investigators are scrambling to explain how F-35 jet parts loaded with classified stealth tech vanished into Hong Kong on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's watch.
The parts have been missing since June, Politico reported on Friday. A shipment of F-35 components headed from Australia to the U.S. for repairs was mysteriously "rerouted mid-Pacific" and turned up in Hong Kong instead, three people familiar with the matter said.
It's reportedly still not clear "who has possession of it now."
"The shipment included one of the jet’s canopies, which covers the cockpit and contains stealth technology that only the U.S. and its allies have access to," sources told Politico. "An adversary could study the parts and potentially reverse-engineer the prized technology if it had one of the canopies."
The mess triggered closed-door briefings for congressional staff starting in June, with more expected. The Pentagon's F-35 Joint Program Office would only confirm it is "aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components" and said it's working "to retrieve these components, investigate the incident, and place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence."
Hong Kong is a Chinese special administrative region, and Beijing has a long, documented history of hacking its way to F-35 secrets, Politico reported.
J.J. Gertler, a former House Armed Services Committee staffer, told Politico's Audrey Decker and Mark Satter, "It's no secret that China has been aggressively trying to get F-35 data through electronic espionage, among other means. But even if they already had specifications or other data about the part, possessing a real one can give them even more to go on and can verify or refine whatever they already had learned."
Lockheed insisted it "handles every shipment with the utmost diligence," while the State Department declined comment and China's embassy claims "ignorance."
The blunder lands amid mounting turmoil inside Hegseth's Pentagon, where whistleblowers describe chaos.
