Intelligence Agit-Prop: Secret Signals: Decoding China’s Intelligence Activities in Cuba (July 1, 2024) a project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Hidden Reach Special Initiative.

 

Pic Credit here

 

Pix Credit here (Cardinals Eavesdropping at the Vatican)

There has been much discussion (off and on sadly) about all sorts of signals and wave related devises that appear to be doing a lot of damage to individuals as the security services toddlers play spy versus spy with collateral damage (see discussion here for example:Video--Mark Zaid and Rob "Butch" Bracknell on Anomalous Health Incidents (AKA Havana Syndrome): Joint meeting of the International Committee of the ABA Senior Lawyers Division (SLD) and the National Security Committee of the ABA International Law Section (ILS); more essays here: Cuba Sonic Weapons Affair). But beyond the theatrics of wave or beam or related devices, the day to day drudge work of eavesdropping continues. Cuba, cash starved, and starved as well for reliable (that is well heeled and militarily capable) allies has an asset worth selling related to this market for keeping tabs on "competitor" states--its proximity to the United States.

It ought to come as no surprise, then, that Cuban locations, long used by Cuba's former patron, the now dissolved Soviet Union (resurrected  as the Russian Federation at least in a somewhat less reliable spirit) are now available for rent or long tern lease to others. Those "others" and the facilities and technologies on offer, were nicely described for those of us without any access to state secrets, in the Report, Secret Signals: Decoding China’s Intelligence Activities in Cuba (July 1, 2024). Written by Matthew P. Funaiole, Aidan Powers-Riggs, Brian Hart, Henry Ziemer, Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., Ryan C. Berg, Christopher Hernandez-Roy, the Report is a project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Hidden Reach Special Initiative. 

Pix Credit here

The Report offers a non-secrets based glimpse at the architecture of Cuban-Chinese surveillance architectures in Cuba. There are several interesting points beyond the obvious (that is that (1) this is occurring; (2) that it may have effects on the US security architecture for among other establishments, SouthCom, especially in its Florida facilities bit likely all around the Gulf coast; and (3) the effects on ideological and propaganda warfare remains cloudy not because of their capacity to project but because their presence itself projects a narrative meant to disrupt and destabilize and weaken popular confidence). The facilities have been around for a while, their use by China has been known in some facilities since at least 1999, and the US has had plenty of time to apply countermeasures--which serves as a reminder that the careless empire tends to pay for that lapse in sometimes costly ways. Beyond that one can consider additional possibilities.

The first is the obvious--the facilities are obvious in the sense that there is no effort to hide them. Not that anyone can walk in, nor are they are of eco-walking tours of Cuba. But rather that China and Cuba (in this case) make no effort to hide them. Again the propaganda and narrative insertions value of that obviousness may be worth more than whatever surveillance they may be able to extract from these facilities.  Second, it is likely that these are limited use facilities in the sense that they are value adding rather than value creating facilities with respect to information harvesting. There is likely a bit of redundancy in the operations that one would expect from actors for which money would not be much of an object given the stakes and objectives of competition at the highest levels of Empire. True enough the spectacle of the Chinese balloons over North America provided a diversion, but there are other tried and true modalities that remain bedrock parts of the security apparatus and its projections abroad. Still there may be value added; the Report notes:

Collecting data on activities like military exercises, missile tests, rocket launches, and submarine maneuvers would allow China to develop a more sophisticated picture of U.S. military practices. While modern military communications are highly encrypted—meaning the contents of the messages and data are hidden—information on the frequency, origin, direction, and pace of communications traffic can provide significant intelligence value. Other types of data can be collected with less concern for encryption. Notably, ELINT and radar systems, like the one possibly installed at Bejucal in recent years, are within range to monitor rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. (Secret Signals: Decoding China’s Intelligence Activities in Cuba )

The third is that these remain multi use facilities in a kind of odd way--one might imagine that the farming undertaken in many of these rural facilities is real enough (revealed by a look at the pictures in the Report); and that adds to both the casualness and the projection of power through carelessness inherent in the pictures published; they just don't care and can grow melons at the same time. Fourth, that propaganda value can work both ways, especially in an election year in which hard targets offer internally useful objects against which to project politics. Spy balloons and Cuban surveillance facilities  can be used to advantage. Fifth, one wonders about the connections between this and the broader issue of more aggressive measures long taken by security services (and likely others) against people or where people are damaged collaterally, the so-called anomalous health incidents. There probably isn't any, of course and the topic remains sensitive from all sides, and yet delivery modalities being what they are, the question lingers.  

And that leaves us with Cuba--again passive, in a kind of aggressive way. And protective, in the form of its choices of patrons in a climate in which it understands that its neighbor to the North still views its government as illegitimate and ripe for replacement. That is statecraft and politics, of course. But it does have consequences.  And these consequences are not amenable to the warm embrace of a presidential visit. Calculation all around. Some of it semiotically concrete--in the form of these monuments to power relationships; and virtual, in the form of the harvesting of data in facilitates from which produce and other edibles are also harvested. The connection is irresistible--as propaganda. And indeed perhaps the greatest utility of all of this theater is in its agit-prop (agitation propaganda) now unmoored from its traditional location in the arts and the art of literary performative propaganda: certainly if these facilities were actually able to produce value added intelligence, one might  want to have engage those responsible for countermeasures more directly. But the presence of the facilities themselves produces value, not for what they do but for what they signal about projections of power from one empire deep into the spece of its rival:

Beijing has clear political and ideological motivations to keep afloat one of the world’s few remaining Communist Party–led governments. Yet its interests there are also clearly strategic. China’s ambitions to expand its overseas military presence are well documented, and Cuba provides an attractive foothold for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Caribbean. An unclassified assessment by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released in February 2024 lists Cuba as one of several countries where China is looking to establish military installations.  Cuba is currently embroiled in its worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Havana is in desperate need of external assistance. China has emerged as a critical lifeline, providing billions in debt relief and direct assistance in recent years. (Secret Signals: Decoding China’s Intelligence Activities in Cuba )

That said, the fact that someone went to the trouble of performing agitation propaganda does not mean one ought to sit and watch the show. That recourse, of course, poses the greater danger of this theater than the theater itself.

Pix credit here

The Report is well worth reading. Please ACCESS HERE.