Is China using US tech to spy on Americans from Cuba?

WASHINGTON – 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.

“Did the Intelligence Community’s knowledge of these companies and their support to PRC SIGINT [Chinese signals intelligence] operations factor in decisions on whether to grant [export] licenses?” he asked. “Will it factor in decisions currently facing the Department of Commerce? 

He also asked how many export license applications had been filed by American companies aiming to ship US-made products to China since the American intelligence community learned of the Cuba spy base in 2019.

“How many of these applications did the Department of Commerce reject? How many of the approved applications are for products that could enable SIGINT collection, processing or analysis?” he asked. “Do any of these companies have export licenses pending before the Department of Commerce?”

The concern is that Chinese companies tapped by Beijing to support its surveillance efforts have purchased and used American products in their technologies.

The committee is particularly suspicious given China’s decade-long push to push private commercial companies – such as the notorious Huawei cell phone company – into the country’s military-industrial complex to rapidly modernize its armed forces, according to the letter.

“By leveraging innovation in the private sector, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) gains access to capabilities more quickly than if it relied on the state-owned defense conglomerates alone,” Gallagher wrote. “For SIGINT, this means a much closer relationship between the PLA’s Strategic Support Force and the Ministry of State Security [with] the PRC’s information and communications technology companies, including but not limited to Huawei and ZTE.”

Gallagher further asked Haines and Raimondo to list all other Chinese information and communications technology companies that are supporting China’s spy programs in foreign countries.

“Have the identities and activities of these companies and their contribution to [China’s spying] operations been shared with the Department of Commerce, or any other member of the End-User Review Committee?” he asked.

Gallagher said the likelihood of China using such companies to spy on the US is especially likely given Beijing’s 2017 “National Intelligence Law,” which declared that “any [Chinese] organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work” both at home and abroad.

“In light of the PRC’s approach to modernizing its defense and intelligence capabilities, it is clear any enhancement or expansion of [its] SIGINT capabilities in Cuba is likely to be aided by PRC telecommunications companies,” Gallagher wrote. “Huawei, for example, has assisted the Cuban government in modernizing its telecommunications and Internet infrastructure since the 2000s.”

Huawei, whose products were banned from use in the US by the Federal Trade Commission in 2022, has been long suspected of surveilling users for Beijing. Then-President Donald Trump championed efforts in 2018 to ban the military from using the company and later outlawed the sale of US semiconductors to Huawei without a special license.

“They used to have free rein over our country,” Trump said in 2020, dubbing the tech giant “Spywei.” “What happens is Huawei comes out and they spy on our country.”

Gallagher said the committee is also concerned that Huawei and other Chinese tech giants, such as ZTE and Great Dragon Information Technology, maintain a “regular business presence” in Cuba.

“Having offices and business operations in Cuba,” he wrote, “would provide cover for PRC SIGINT operators to travel to and from the island without creating the same suspicion as official travel.”