By Alexander Cornwell

MANAMA, Bahrain (Reuters) – The United States believes an alleged wide-ranging Chinese cyber espionage campaign called Salt Typhoon targeted and recorded phone calls from “very high-level” American politicians, a White House official said on Saturday.

Comments by Anne Neuberger, U.S. deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, to reporters at the Manama Dialogue regional security conference in Bahrain’s capital revealed new details of the campaign.

Although much metadata was likely stolen from Americans, U.S. officials believe “the purpose of the operation was more targeted,” Neuberger said.

“We believe … the actual number of calls that they received, recorded and answered tended to be focused on very high-level political figures,” she continued.

She did not elaborate or reveal the identities of the targets.

Chinese officials had previously called the allegations disinformation and said Beijing “strongly opposes and combats cyberattacks and cybertheft in all forms.”

“We are still investigating the scope and scale” of the hacking campaign, Neuberger said.

The New York Times reported in October that members of US President-elect Donald Trump’s family and Biden administration officials were among the targets of China-linked hackers who broke into telecommunications companies.

A senior U.S. official said this week that dozens of companies worldwide had been targeted by the hackers, including at least eight telecommunications and telecommunications infrastructure companies in the United States

U.S. officials have claimed that the hackers’ targets included Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Lumen and others, and that intercepted phone audio and a large portion of call recording data were stolen.

(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; Writing by Jonathan Landay; Editing by Paul Simao)