A National Security Council spokesperson on Monday doubled down on comments from the White House and the Pentagon over the weekend calling initial reporting about Chinese efforts to establish a new spy base in Cuba “inaccurate.”
“The original reporting, as we said, was inaccurate,” spokesperson John Kirby said during the regularly scheduled White House press briefing. “We did the best we could in the moment to be as forthcoming as we could.”
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal, followed by POLITICO and other outlets, reported that China had been in conversations with Cuba to set up an eavesdropping facility roughly 100 miles from Florida — reporting that officials called inaccurate, without elaborating. But on Saturday, officials confirmed that such a base already existed, and has since at least 2019.
Kirby denounced the sources behind the initial report.
“We were as forthcoming as we should have been at the time the first stories appeared,” Kirby said on Monday. “Sadly, not everybody seems to take it as seriously as we do. … 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.”
Kirby also rejected the idea that the White House or the Pentagon had walked back comments calling the early reports inaccurate.
“The fact that we came out a couple of days later and provided some clarifying information does not mean, and should not be taken as I’ve seen in some of the press reporting, as some kind of walk-back,” he said.
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