The White House and Cuban officials, however, called the report inaccurate.
“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.
US 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 mainland China, which claims the island as its territory, to launch military exercises around Taiwan.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in Kaohsiung on Saturday. Photo: AFP
Beijing also was angered by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s stopover in the US last month that 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.
US 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 June 18 for meetings with senior Chinese officials, according to US officials, who spoke on Friday on condition of anonymity because neither the State Department nor the Chinese foreign ministry has yet confirmed the trip.
US defence 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.
