Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged on Monday that China upgraded its intelligence collection facilities in Cuba in 2019.
Blinken’s admission appears to be a stark divergence from the picture painted by multiple Biden administration officials who denied last week that Beijing and Havana had agreed to a deal for this facility to be built.
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“When this administration took office in January 2021, we were briefed on a number of sensitive efforts by Beijing around the world to expand their overseas logistics basing collection infrastructure to allow them to project and sustain military power at a greater distance,” he said. “They were considering a number of sites around the world for that expansion, including intelligence collection facilities for intelligence collection in Cuba. In fact, based on the information we have, the PRC conducted an upgrade of its intelligence collection facilities in Cuba in 2019.”
The Wall Street Journal reported the news of a supposed deal for this facility to be built last Thursday, and shortly thereafter, representatives from both the Pentagon and National Security Council said it was untrue.
“I can tell you based on the information that we have that that is not accurate, that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing any type of spy stations,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said last Thursday. “Separately, I would say that the relationship that those two countries share is something that we continuously monitor.”
National Security Council coordinator John Kirby made similar comments that day, as well. On Monday, he defended the administration's handling of the situation, despite the apparent about-face, saying that it worked "expeditiously" to declassify relevant intelligence so that it could be shared publicly.
"We were as forthcoming as we should have been given the nature of this information," Kirby told reporters. "Sadly, not everybody seems to take it as seriously as we do because, clearly, there's a source or sources out there that think it's somehow beneficial to put this kind of information into the public stream, and it's absolutely not."
Blinken said the previous administration wasn’t “making enough progress on this issue, and we needed a more direct approach,” and within months of Biden’s instruction to address the problem, they started seeing positive results.
“We've been executing on that approach, quietly, carefully, but in our judgment, with results ever since. I can't get into every step that we've taken,” he added. “But the strategy begins with diplomacy. We've engaged governments that are considering hosting PRC bases at high levels. We've exchanged information with them. Our experts assess that our diplomatic efforts have slowed down this effort by the PRC. It's something that we're very carefully monitoring.”
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The secretary is expected to travel to Beijing later this month, according to multiple outlets, potentially ending a monthslong saga after he postponed the trip back in early March due to the China spy balloon. The surveillance apparatus, which was the size of three blimps, traversed the continental United States from west to east, including over sensitive military sites, before the U.S. military shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean.
Last week, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for the Indo-Pacific, said the department had seen “a steep rise" in "aggressive" and "unprofessional" military maneuvers by the Chinese military, which is aggressively expanding and modernizing.