Few Americans
would ever forget those chilling 18 minutes in the evening of October
22nd 1962. As they gathered around their radios and televisions, their
president, John F. Kennedy, revealed that the Soviet Union had moved
nuclear-capable missiles to Cuba, 90 miles (140km) from the coast of
Florida. America would blockade the island until they were removed, he
said. It was the first the public learned of the crisis that over the
next five days would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Listen to this story.
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.Analogies with that episode were perhaps inevitable when the Wall Street Journal,
followed by several other American media outlets, reported on June 8th
that China had made a secret agreement to establish a listening station
in Cuba. Senators from both sides of the aisle urged the White House to
take preventative action. Mike Gallagher, a Republican congressman who
chairs the House of Representatives’ new bipartisan Select Committee on
the Chinese Communist Party, warned that a new cold war “once again, has
come to our doorstep”. He even quoted from Kennedy’s address that night
in 1962.
Yet such comparisons are
undue. The White House, having initially dismissed the reports as
inaccurate, now says that China has gathered signals intelligence from
Cuba for some time and upgraded its facilities there in 2019. Officials
say they have shared their concerns with Cuba and successfully lobbied
other governments not to host Chinese military or spying outposts.
Despite the furore, America’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken
(pictured), will go ahead with a long-delayed visit to Beijing—his first
in that role—on June 18th.
Chinese eavesdropping in Cuba is, indeed, nothing new. A report from the US
Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute in 2011 suggested that
China had access to three listening stations there, at Bejucal, Santiago
de Cuba and Lourdes. It was using them to intercept radio and
mobile-phone transmissions, and to conduct cyber-espionage, the report
said. The Lourdes facility, just outside Havana, was the Soviet Union’s
biggest overseas listening station and used by Russia until the early
2000s.
Dennis Wilder, a former China analyst at the CIA
and now a professor at Georgetown University, says he had been aware of
China’s use of Cuba for electronic eavesdropping since the end of the
cold war. The facilities there, he says, are most likely operated by the
Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army Joint Staff Department
(often referred to as 3PLA and roughly equivalent to America’s National Security Agency). Other 3PLA sites may include North Korea, Pakistan and Djibouti, where China opened its first (and only) overseas military base in 2017.
China
is probably using facilities in Cuba to try to hoover up information
related to American satellite systems, Mr Wilder suggests, and the
recent upgrades may have involved installing bigger, more powerful
data-gathering equipment, which is often contained in large round
structures known as radomes. “That’s the kind of thing that I think that
the Chinese are trying to put in Cuba—very large arrays with tremendous
capability,” he says. “That kind of capability would be very, very
useful to the Chinese military.”
Troubling
as that may be for America, it has few good options to respond. China
and Cuba have both denied the media reports and the Biden
administration’s subsequent allegations. Anyway, such facilities do not
violate international law. And America is thought to have many similar
sites in countries around the world, including Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan and Australia, and uses them to gather signals intelligence on
China. So America is unlikely seriously to escalate its protests over
any such Chinese activity in Cuba.
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China,
meanwhile, is using the controversy to highlight what it sees as
American hypocrisy. “Slanders and smears” would not obscure America’s
“deplorable track record of indiscriminate mass spying around the
world”, a foreign-ministry spokesman said on June 12th. In a call with
Mr Blinken two days later, Qin Gang, China’s foreign minister
(pictured), rebuked America for harming China’s security. But both sides
have confirmed Mr Blinken’s trip. And though American officials do not
expect breakthroughs on a lengthy agenda, including Taiwan and Ukraine,
they hope the visit will help to establish better lines of
communication. “Intense competition requires intense diplomacy,” said
one.
That will come as a relief to many
other countries, especially in Asia. They worried that tensions were
spiralling out of control in February when America shot down a Chinese
high-altitude balloon that the Pentagon said had been monitoring
American military bases. China said the balloon was gathering
meteorological data, but the White House rejected that explanation and
postponed a visit by Mr Blinken that had been scheduled for later that
month.
The effect was to stall efforts
to stabilise relations that President Joe Biden and his Chinese
counterpart, Xi Jinping, began when they met in Bali in November. In the
past few weeks, however, there has been a swirl of high-level contacts,
including a visit to Beijing in May by William Burns, the CIA
chief. Jake Sullivan, America’s national-security adviser, also met
Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, in Vienna that month. Economic officials
have met, too.
Resuming high-level
talks is important because it means the two sides can at least
communicate their positions in private. That is preferable to doing so
in heated public exchanges as they have for much of the time since a
visit to Taiwan in August by Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of America’s
House of Representatives. Direct contacts could also facilitate
progress on some technical and commercial issues, which would smooth the
way for Mr Xi’s expected attendance of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Co-operation forum in San Francisco in November. Mr Blinken’s trip could
open the door, too, for others whom China is more interested in
receiving, such as America’s treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, and
climate envoy, John Kerry.
Even
so, the Cuba controversy is a reminder that high-level strategic
tensions endure—and will not be easily resolved. That was also clear
when China’s defence minister, Li Shangfu, refused to hold talks with
America’s defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, at a security conference in
Singapore in early June (China wants American sanctions on General Li
lifted first). In their public statements, General Li warned America and
its allies to stop surveillance operations near China’s coast, while Mr
Austin cited an “alarming increase” in unsafe Chinese intercepts of
American and allied ships and aircraft.
The
Cuban contretemps also feeds into a domestic political climate in both
China and America that is making it harder for their leaders to
compromise on any substantial issues. And their room for manoeuvre could
shrink further in the coming months, with a presidential election due
in Taiwan in January and campaigning for America’s presidential poll
expected to start in earnest this August with the first Republican
primary debate.
The level of hostility
towards China on both sides of the aisle in Congress was writ large in
responses to the Cuba reports. “We urge the Biden administration to take
steps to prevent this serious threat to our national security and
sovereignty,” said Mark Warner, the Democrat who chairs the Senate
Intelligence Committee, and Marco Rubio, the Republican vice-chairman.
Mr Gallagher accused the Biden administration of whitewashing Chinese
aggression. “We must make it clear that, as President Kennedy said over
60 years ago on the eve of a previous crisis in Cuba, ‘One path we shall
never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.’” ■
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