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After the White House admitted China has been spying on the US from a surveillance facility in Cuba for years, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is asking senior Biden administration officials what they know about Beijing using US technology to spy on Americans.
On June 11, the White House acknowledged China has had a so-called “listening post” in Cuba since at least 2019. The two Communist nations use the facility to tap into electronic signals from US communications systems, radars and weapons systems to covertly gather intelligence.
“[China’s signals intelligence] collection and the PRC companies that support it have relied in part on accessing or exploiting US intellectual property” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), said in a Wednesday letter to US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.
Gallagher added that Beijing has done so “even as they have undermined US interests, violated US export control restrictions, and boosted the surveillance and censorship capabilities of authoritarian states.”
With that information in mind, the committee wants to know how aware the intelligence community is of the connections between China’s surveillance and commercial activities – and whether the information “has been used to inform ongoing export licensing decisions,” according to the letter.
While the Biden administration only recently admitted the spy base’s existence, the US had secretly known about it for some time, apparently keeping many officials and lawmakers in the dark about the ongoing surveillance efforts roughly 100 miles south of Florida’s coast.
On behalf of the committee, Gallagher asked Haines and Raimondo whether the intelligence community had briefed the Commerce Department on what companies had been supporting China’s espionage efforts, inadvertently or otherwise, given that the department helps decide which US products can be sold to foreign countries.
