Trump Says China “Spies on Us” After Report Ties Chinese Imagery to Iran Strike That Killed Three U.S. Troops

President Donald Trump on Sunday declined to treat a Wall Street Journal account of Chinese satellite support for a deadly Iranian strike as a crisis in the run-up to his Sept. 24 meeting with Xi Jinping.

“You know what they say? That China spies on us. I say you’re right, and we spy on them, too,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One returning from Ireland. “They basically do what we do.” Asked whether he would raise the imagery with Xi in Washington, he said the Chinese leader has “behaved reasonably well” and that “we behave reasonably well.”

The Journal, citing U.S. officials familiar with the incident, reported Friday that before Iran’s July 17 ballistic-missile attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in northeastern Jordan, Tehran obtained high-resolution pictures of the installation from Chinese entities. Officials described the link as the clearest evidence yet that Chinese support for Iran during the war has had lethal consequences for American forces. They did not name the companies and did not accuse the government in Beijing of directing the transfer. Iran also obtained imagery after the strike, the officials said.

Iranian missiles hit a housing area where U.S. troops were sleeping. Killed were Army Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York; 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Hawaii; and Pfc. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Texas. Four other service members were wounded and medically evacuated. The attack was among a cluster of strikes on the base inside 24 hours and the first American combat deaths at that site after an April ceasefire, according to officials cited in the Journal and subsequent U.S. coverage.

Public commercial imagery reviewed by the Journal showed damage to more than 20 structures. Iran later published sharper pictures of the wreckage than those open-source images, the paper reported.

U.S. officials have already taken the matter to their Chinese counterparts. Beijing asked for proof and refused to accept that Chinese firms were feeding Tehran targeting-quality pictures, the Journal said. The finding lands 11 days before Xi’s scheduled visit to Washington, a meeting Trump has treated as a priority for managing the relationship even as the Iran war continues.

Chinese commercial satellites have become a known vendor in the global imagery market. The officials’ point was not that a tourist snapshot of a desert runway appeared online. It was that pictures precise enough to help select impact points on a manned American compound reached the force that then fired.