Global Courant
WASHINGTON — China has been operating a spy base in Cuba since at least 2019, as part of a global effort by Beijing to improve its intelligence-gathering capabilities, according to a Biden administration official.
The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. intelligence community has known for some time about China’s espionage from Cuba and an increased intelligence effort around the world. collect.
The Biden administration has stepped up efforts to thwart Chinese push to expand its espionage operations and believes it has made some progress through diplomacy and other unspecified actions, said the official, who was familiar with US intelligence. on this issue.
The existence of the Chinese spy base was confirmed after The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that China and Cuba had reached an agreement in principle to build an electronic listening station on the island. The Journal reported that China planned to pay billions of dollars to Cuba as part of the negotiations.
The White House called the report inaccurate.
“I saw that press release, it’s not accurate,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in an MSNBC interview Thursday. “What I can tell you is that we have been concerned about China’s influence activities around the world since day one of this administration; certainly in this hemisphere and in this region, we’re watching this very, very closely.
The US intelligence community had determined that Chinese espionage from Cuba is an “ongoing” case and “not a new development,” the government official said.
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío also refuted the report in a Twitter post on Saturday.
“The defamatory speculation continues, clearly promoted by certain media outlets to cause harm and alarm without observing minimal communication patterns and without providing any data or evidence to support what they are spreading,” he wrote.
President Joe Biden’s national security team was briefed by the intelligence community shortly after taking office in January 2021 about a number of sensitive Chinese efforts around the world with Beijing weighing up expansion of logistics, base and collection infrastructure as part of the People’s Liberation Army effort to further his influence, the official said.
Chinese officials looked at locations in the Atlantic, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and the Indo-Pacific. The effort included looking at existing collection facilities in Cuba, and China upgraded its spy operation on the island in 2019, the official said.
Tensions between the US and China have been high throughout Biden’s tenure.
The relationship may have reached an all-time low last year following then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to democratically-ruled Taiwan. That visit, the first by a sitting speaker in the House since Newt Gingrich in 1997, prompted China, which claims the island as its territory, to launch military exercises around Taiwan.
Relations between the US and China came under further strain early this year after the US shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had crossed the United States.
Beijing was also angered by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s stopover in the US last month, which included a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The speaker received the Taiwanese leader at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California.
Still, the White House is eager to resume high-level communication between the two sides.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to travel to China next week, a trip that was canceled because the balloon flew over the US. Blinken expects to be in Beijing on June 18 for meetings with senior Chinese officials, US officials said, who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity because neither the State Department nor the Chinese foreign ministry have yet confirmed the trip.
CIA director William Burns met with his counterpart in Beijing last month. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with his Chinese counterpart in Vienna over two days in May and made it clear that the administration wanted to improve high-level communication with the Chinese side.
Defense Minister Lloyd Austin recently spoke briefly with Li Shangfu, China’s Minister of National Defense, at the opening dinner of a security forum in Singapore. China had previously rejected Austin’s request for a meeting on the sidelines of the forum.
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AP Diplomatic writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.
