China has had a spy base in Cuba since at least 2019, confirms US

According to a Biden administration official, China has been operating a spy facility in Cuba since at least 2019. This is part of Beijing’s global endeavour to improve its intelligence-gathering capabilities.

The individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss publicly, said the US intelligence community has been aware of China’s eavesdropping from Cuba and a bigger attempt to set up information-gathering operations throughout the world for some time.

According to an individual knowledgeable with US intelligence on the topic, the Biden administration has ramped up attempts to prevent China’s ambition to expand its surveillance activities and feels it has achieved some headway through diplomacy and other undisclosed action.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that China and Cuba had signed an agreement in principle to install an electronic eavesdropping station on the island, confirming the existence of the Chinese spy site. According to the Journal, China planned to contribute billions of dollars to a cash-strapped Cuba as part of the discussions.

The story, however, was deemed false by the White House and Cuban officials.

“I’ve seen that press report, it’s not accurate,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in an MSNBC interview on Thursday. “What I can tell you is that we have been concerned since day one of this administration about China’s influence activities around the world; certainly in this hemisphere and in this region, we’re watching this very, very closely.”

The US intelligence community had determined that Chinese spying from Cuba has been an “ongoing” matter and is “not a new development,” the administration official said.

President Joe Biden’s national security team was briefed by the intelligence community soon after he took office in January 2021 about a number of sensitive Chinese efforts around the globe where Beijing was weighing expanding logistics, basing and collection infrastructure as part of the People’s Liberation Army’s attempt to further its influence, the official said.

Chinese officials looked at sites that spanned the Atlantic Ocean, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and the Indo-Pacific. The effort included looking at existing collection facilities in Cuba, and China conducted an upgrade of its spying operation on the island in 2019, the official said.

Tensions between the US and China have been fraught throughout Biden’s term.

The relationship may have hit a nadir last year after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to democratically governed Taiwan. That visit, the first by a sitting House speaker since Newt Gingrich in 1997, led China, which claims the island as its territory, to launch military exercises around Taiwan.

US-China relations became further strained early this year after the US shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had crossed the United States.

Beijing also was angered by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s stopover in the US last month which included an encounter with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The speaker hosted the Taiwanese leader at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in southern California.

Still, the White House has been eager to resume high-level communications between the two sides.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to China next week, a trip that was cancelled as the balloon was flying over the US Blinken expects to be in Beijing on 18 June for meetings with senior Chinese officials, according to US officials, who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity because neither the State Department nor the Chinese foreign ministry has yet confirmed the trip.

CIA Director William Burns met in Beijing with his counterpart last month. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with his Chinese counterpart in Vienna over two days in May and made clear that the administration wanted to improve high-level communications with the Chinese side.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently spoke briefly with Li Shangfu, China’s minister of national defence, at the opening dinner of a security forum in Singapore. China had earlier rejected Austin’s request for a meeting on the sidelines of the forum.

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