• U.S. intelligence experts say China has had a spy base in Cuba since 2019
  • The existence of the base was confirmed by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday
  • The White House initially denied the report, calling it inaccurate

China has been secretly operating a spy base in Cuba for four years, a White House official said, confirming that the communist country is increasing its surveillance capabilities right on the United States’ doorstep.

A Biden Administration official recently spoke on the condition of anonymity and confirmed the news that China has been in Havana since 2019.

The confirmation comes just days after White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby denied that China had a base in the Caribbean, amid reports President Xi Jinping was plotting to build a base.

‘I’ve seen that press report, it’s not accurate,’ Kirby said in an MSNBC interview regarding the Wall Street Journal’s original story.

And while Kirby was technically correct, a more disturbing truth has since emerged – China already has a listening station on the communist Caribbean island.

Additionally, China appears to be looking to expand their number of bases around the world and has been quite some time.

The Biden Administration official who spoke out said they have long been worried about China’s eagerness to expand their spying operations.

‘What I can tell you is that we have been concerned since day one of this administration about China’s influence activities around the world; certainly in this hemisphere and in this region, we’re watching this very, very closely,’ he continued.

Chinese officials at one point looked at sites spanning the Atlantic Ocean, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and the Indo-Pacific.

The original Wall Street Journal report on Thursday shared that China and Cuba had reached an agreement to build an electronic eavesdropping station on the island.

The Journal reported China planned to pay a Cuba billions of dollars as part of the negotiations, however the U.S. intel official said the base was ‘not a new development.’

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío also refuted the report in a Twitter post Saturday.

‘The slanderous speculation continues, evidently promoted by certain media to cause harm and alarm without observing minimum patterns of communication and without providing data or evidence to support what they disseminate,’ he wrote.

The news of the base comes at a time when the relationship between China and the U.S. has been increasingly unsettling.

In 2022, former-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited democratically governed Taiwan which led to China launching military exercises in the area.

Earlier this year, the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had crossed into the United States.

It was reported in the weeks after that the balloon gathered intelligence from several American military sites before it was shot down.

The sources said China could have gathered more intelligence if not for the Biden administration’s efforts to block it.

The balloon entered US airspace on 28 January and was shot down on 4 February after passing over US nuclear missile sites, including the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to China next week, a trip that was canceled as the balloon was flying over the U.S.

Blinken expects to be in Beijing on June 18 for meetings with senior Chinese officials, according to U.S. officials.

CIA Director William Burns met in Beijing with his counterpart last month. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with his Chinese counterpart in Vienna over two days in May and made clear that the administration wanted to improve high-level communications with the Chinese side.