Washington’s badly frayed relations with China were just starting to recover from the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States in early February before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had been forced to postpone his trip to Beijing because of all the hot air about the balloon flight, had finally rescheduled his visit for June 18. Then, last week, came word of a Chinese spy station in Cuba. In truth, there is nothing particularly scandalous about the latest revelations.
Opinion If the United States can spy on China, why can’t China spy on the U.S.?
It all began with a Wall Street Journal story on Thursday: “Cuba to Host Secret Chinese Spy Base Focusing on U.S.” The article reported, citing anonymous U.S. officials “familiar with highly classified intelligence,” that “China has agreed to pay cash-strapped Cuba several billion dollars to allow it to build the eavesdropping station” and described this as a “brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S.”
Cue the predictable outrage from Capitol Hill.
“We are deeply disturbed by reports that Havana and Beijing are working together to target the United States and our people,” said a joint statement from the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), and the vice chair, Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “We must be clear that it would be unacceptable for China to establish an intelligence facility within 100 miles of Florida and the United States.”
The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), said in a tweet that he was “deeply troubled” by the report and added, “If true, this would be yet another act of Chinese aggression.” The No. 3 House Republican, Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), cited this as further evidence that “[President] Biden has continually allowed Communist China to take advantage of his weak leadership and chip away at our national security.”
Then on Saturday, the White House said in a statement that China already had a spy base in Cuba. According to Biden administration officials, they inherited this issue from former president Donald Trump and have been working through diplomatic means to counter Chinese intelligence-gathering in Cuba and elsewhere.
China might be upgrading its intelligence presence in Cuba, but the presence itself isn’t all that new — or shocking. The Soviet Union had its largest overseas listening post near Lourdes, Cuba, for decades. The United States was willing to risk war to remove Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba but tolerated those signals collection efforts. That’s because Washington has long recognized that nations have a right to spy on one another.
Indeed, the United States can hardly call out Chinese spying with a straight face when the U.S. intelligence community undoubtedly operates the largest signals-collection network in the world. Revelations from Edward Snowden, the Discord leaks and other sources make clear the U.S. National Security Agency vacuums up vast amounts of communications from around the globe, spying on friends and foes alike.
China knows all about U.S. collection efforts — not least because, after the establishment of relations between Beijing and Washington in the 1970s, China hosted NSA spy stations near its border with the Soviet Union. The Kremlin was undoubtedly unhappy about Project Chestnut but had to live with it.
Nowadays, the United States regularly cooperates in intelligence-gathering on China with allies such as Australia and New Zealand and sends its own surveillance aircraft near Chinese airspace. After a Chinese fighter aircraft flew too close in late May to a U.S. RC-135 aircraft (a signals intelligence platform known as the Rivet Joint) flying over the South China Sea, U.S. officials indignantly and rightly complained. But if the United States is allowed to spy near China, why isn’t China allowed to spy near the United States?
“We should not be the least bit surprised by the possibility of a Chinese listening post in Cuba. The two countries have had an intelligence relationship for decades,” Paul Heer, a former U.S. national intelligence officer for East Asia, told me. “And any intelligence collection the Chinese do from Cuba would be roughly equivalent to U.S. collection against China from our Allied listening posts and surveillance missions in the Western Pacific.”
Heer suggested that “this story is being blown way out of proportion, perhaps (or presumably) by folks in Washington who are trying to subvert the Biden administration’s efforts to revive engagement with Beijing.”
U.S. relations with Cuba could also suffer collateral damage from the latest revelations. Biden had lifted some Trump-era sanctions, but he has not normalized ties with Cuba, which has been under U.S. sanctions for more than 60 years. Is it any wonder that Cuba, facing a severe economic crisis aggravated by its central planning policies, might look to China for financial support? “By leaving most of Trump’s sanctions in place, the administration has left the Cubans no choice but to seek foreign patrons wherever they can find them if they want to survive,” William LeoGrande, a Latin America specialist at American University, told me.
The revelations should highlight the need for the United States to lift its sanctions and engage with Cuba to offset China’s influence. But, more likely, they will have the opposite effect — making it politically impossible for Biden to improve relations with Cuba anytime soon.
The bottom line is that we need to be more selective in our outrage. China carrying out genocidal policies against the Uyghurs, crushing freedom in Hong Kong or imprisoning dissidents — that’s truly outrageous. Even sending a spy balloon over the United States was unacceptable, although the balloon’s path was most likely inadvertent and not a calculated challenge from Beijing. China collecting signals intelligence from Cuba might be a cause for American discomfort, but it’s no outrage, and it’s no reason to blow up efforts to improve relations with Beijing.
Opinion by Max Boot