After blatantly denying the Wall Street Journal’s reporting last Thursday, about China’s multibillion-dollar spy base on America’s doorstep, in Cuba, calling the story “not accurate,” the Biden administration confirmed its existence last Saturday.
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby admitted that China’s efforts to beef up its espionage capability on the island, just 90 miles from the U.S. homeland, were an “ongoing issue” that the Biden administration inherited. He claimed that President Biden directed his team to address the issue “quietly” and “carefully,” beginning with “diplomacy.” Kirby claimed that these “diplomatic efforts have slowed the PRC down.”
But bumbling deceitfulness and pussyfooting with China so as not to derail diplomacy only shows Biden and his team are simply incapable of protecting America from its top security threat, Communist China.
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With Secretary of State Antony Blinken on his way to Beijing over the weekend, it’s high time to back up diplomacy with some serious combat power, which is the only thing that would intimidate Beijing into engaging in serious negotiations.
Team Biden well knows that China has maintained a military electronic eavesdropping facility in Cuba for more than a decade. Any serious military intelligence analyst is aware of it. John Kirby, a retired Navy rear admiral who served in both the Biden and Obama administrations, either slept through his intelligence briefings for years or kept the truth away from the American people. So did Joe Biden.
As a former senior official in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) bound by non-disclosure commitments, I’m unable to disclose any details about China’s spying post in Cuba. But here’s some open source reporting that Fox News Digital readers should be aware of. A 2011 unclassified report by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute warned that China had “at least three Soviet-era monitoring facilities in Cuba: Lourdes, Bejucal, and Santiago de Cuba.” These surveillance bases were intended to “facilitate” the PRC’s operations against the United States in the event of significant downturn in the Washington-Beijing relations.
According to a 2015 Oxford University book “China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain,” the China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has operated signals intelligence stations (SIGINT, in intelligence parlance) in Bejucal and Santiago, Cuba, to collect U.S. communications, including from military satellites, since 1989. In March 2016, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio confirmed, albeit indirectly, the existence of the Bejucal SIGINT post, advocating that “this Chinese listening station in Bejucal” should be kicked out of the country.
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While China places the premium on human spying, holding decisive advantage over the U.S. – we have 200,000 personnel serving in the U.S. Intelligence Community and China has two million intelligence agents – its second-greatest spying capability is intercepting U.S. communications.
Stealing Washington’s secrets is the primary mission of the spy bases in Bejucal and Santiago, which are staffed by Chinese military SIGINT personnel. Located just 90 miles from Florida, the Bejucal SIGINT post enables Chinese intelligence to scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic. Just 325 miles from the U.S. military’s Central Command headquarters at Tampa, it is an ideal location to intercept signals, track ballistic missiles and even monitor U.S. space launches.
This SIGINT base is periodically upgraded with new surveillance technologies. Between 2017 and 2018, a new “radome” steerable parabolic antenna and its spherical enclosure were added. Signals interception, missile tracking, satellite uplinks and downlinks, radio communications, and tracking objects in space are examples of Bejucal’s spy tools.
Recent upgrades have expanded these capabilities to include disruption of satellite communications, a critical component of U.S. wartime command and control functionality that the U.S. relies on for every aspect of its war-fighting doctrine.
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The modernized SIGINT post, therefore, directly enables China’s spacewarfare doctrine, that Beijing has been operationalizing since January 2007 when its military stunned the world by testing a new class of weapon – a space weapon. In this test, the Chinese military blew up its own defunct weather satellite Fengyun-1C (FY-1C) to smithereens by firing a ballistic missile – labeled SC-19 by the U.S. military – armed with a 600 kilogram kinetic kill vehicle.
Meantime, Team Biden has been ignoring multiple signposts, indications and warnings (I&Ws, in intelligence parlance), of which the upgrades in China’s SIGINT post in Cuba are just one but important piece of the puzzle. Beijing is transitioning onto a wartime footing, preparing for a fight with the U.S. military over Taiwan.
China’s President Xi Jinping recently installed a “War Cabinet” and directed China’s military to be ready for war. “The entire military must… concentrate all energy on fighting a war,” Xi said during a recent visit to China’s armed forces’ operational command center.
To augment its warfighting capabilities, China is beefing up its space order of battle, having doubled its number of satellites in orbit from some 250 in 2019 to 499 in 2021, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Satellites provide critical wartime functions, including missile warning, navigation, communications, reconnaissance, and command and control, among others.
In mid-January, the Chinese Navy conducted a series of military drills in the South China Sea that the PLA characterized as “realistic combat-oriented confrontational exercises.” On May 30, Xi directed his national security team to prepare for a “worst-case scenario” amid an increase in threats he claimed China faces.
Despite these clear signs of an impending conflict, Biden’s Pentagon has depleted crucial weapons stockpiles to such dangerous levels – by sending them to Ukraine to fight Russia – that U.S. forces would run out of existing precision weapons in less than a week in a potential war with China, according to a prominent Washington, D.C.-based think tank. All this despite China already holding a military advantage over the U.S. by having more ships, airplanes, and both offensive and defensive missiles.
Relying on diplomacy to talk Beijing out of targeting the U.S. homeland as the CCP is pursuing its decades-long goal of establishing control over Taiwan is wishful thinking. Even Biden’s military bureaucracy realizes the gravity of the current situation, according to Politico’s recent piece, titled “The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China.”
The piece states, “the United States… lost thousands of service members, dozens of ships, and hundreds of aircraft” in dozens of war-game scenarios, simulating a “horrifically bloody” confrontation between the U.S. and China.
Having participated in China-U.S. war simulations when serving as a senior intelligence official in the DIA, I can attest that the outcome described by Politico is realistic.
Team Biden is incapable of confronting the strategic threat posed to America by China. Lying or playing semantic games will not help focus Americans on the need to prepare nor would it appease China.
If the U.S. is serious about neutralizing foreign threats, we must place a new team in charge of America’s security.
