National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Monday that the U.S. has made its concerns about Chinese operations in Cuba known to the Cuban government, after a Biden administration official confirmed over the weekend that China has been utilizing a spy base on the island since at least 2019.
“This is not a new development that China has been trying to achieve some intelligence-gathering capabilities in Cuba and frankly elsewhere in the hemisphere,” Kirby said on Monday. “From day one when we came in, we took this issue seriously.”
Kirby said the U.S. has taken steps to “mitigate the vulnerability of those activities,” and defended the Biden administration’s decision not to confirm the presence of the base last week, when reports around the topic started to circulate.
“The sensitive nature of this information is such that we just simply couldn’t go into more detail even before the first story appeared to try to better inform that reporting,” Kirby said. “That is how sensitive this stuff is.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that China and Cuba had reached an agreement in principle to build an electronic eavesdropping station on the island. The Journal reported China planned to pay a cash-strapped Cuba billions of dollars as part of the negotiations. The White House called the report inaccurate.
Over the weekend, a Biden administration official said China already has been operating a spy base as part of a global effort by Beijing to upgrade its intelligence-gathering capabilities and the U.S. intelligence community has been aware of China’s spying from Cuba for some time.
“After the first stories appeared, we worked very, very hard, as expeditiously as we could, with the intelligence community to try to get some context downgraded so that we could provide it over the weekend and we did that,” Kirby said Monday.
“Sadly, not everybody seems to take it as seriously as we do because clearly there is a source or sources out there that think it is somehow beneficial to put this kind of information into the public stream,” he added.
Kirby said he was not aware of an effort to find how the information got to the media. He added former President Donald Trump’s administration would have had the same access to the intelligence on the spy base as Biden’s does.
The revelation comes as Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to travel to China next week as the Biden administration pushes to improve ties that hit a new low in February after a Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down over U.S. airspace.
Blinken on Monday said the Biden administration was briefed on Beijing’s efforts to expand intelligence collecting when ithe president took office in 2021.
“It was our assessment that despite awareness of the basing efforts and some attempts to address the challenge in the past administration, we weren’t making enough progress on this issue,” he said.