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OPINION:
The recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela didn’t take place in isolation. While American attention focused on operational execution and deterrence signaling, a strategic adversary was quietly collecting something far more valuable than headlines: data.
For the Chinese Communist Party, this was not merely a regional crisis; it was a rare, real-world intelligence opportunity.
China’s hemispheric listening post
From long-established signals intelligence (SIGINT) facilities in Cuba to newer, Chinese military-linked collection sites across South America and the Caribbean, Beijing had a front-row seat to observe the way the U.S. fights — not in theory, not in exercises, but in live conditions, under operational stress, with real command authorities, real data links and real tactical decision-making.
Facilities near Bejucal and Havana, Cuba, which have long been considered successors to the Soviet-era Lourdes intelligence complex, provide China with persistent access to U.S. and partner-force electromagnetic activity across the Caribbean Basin and northern South America. These sites are optimized not for espionage theater but for passive collection: satellite communications, tactical data links, airborne and maritime command-and-control traffic and timing patterns that reveal far more than content alone ever could.
At the same time, China’s deep-space and signals facility in Neuquen, Argentina (nominally civilian, but widely assessed as operationally tied to the People’s Liberation Army Aerospace Force), extends Beijing’s collection reach across the Southern Hemisphere. Combined with access points in Cuba and other permissive regional environments, China enjoys something no adversary should ever have in America’s hemisphere: persistent, unchallenged visibility into U.S. operational behavior.
A similar risk exists in Chile at the Cerro Ventarrones Observatory, where Chinese-operated space-tracking and observatory facilities, publicly described as civilian scientific cooperation, provide Beijing with line-of-sight access to satellite telemetry, space-to-ground communications and regional electromagnetic activity across the Pacific and the Southern Hemisphere. Though marketed as benign astronomy, these installations have clear dual-use value, enabling monitoring of satellite tasking, command uplinks and data relay patterns during U.S. and allied operations.
China’s hemispheric collection posture is further reinforced by space weather and satellite monitoring infrastructure, such as the China-Brazil Joint Laboratory for Space Weather, alongside Chinese technical access embedded in telecommunications and satellite programs in Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia and Peru. Together, these form a permissive intelligence architecture spanning the Western Hemisphere.
How China harvests warfighting data
Why does this matter? Because modern warfare is no longer defined solely by platforms or weapons systems. It is defined by networks, data links, command processes and communication protocols. The Venezuela operation presented China with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe how U.S. forces integrate satellite communications, airborne assets, maritime elements, cyber coordination and coalition interfaces in real time.
From a SIGINT perspective, this is gold. Even encrypted traffic reveals structure, message frequency and handshake timing, as well as network hierarchy, fallback behaviors and command latency. These patterns allow a sophisticated adversary to build command dictionaries, map decision authorities, identify intrusion points and design cyber or SATCOM attack paths tailored specifically to U.S. doctrine and habits. This is how future conflicts are won before the first shot is fired.
Under normal circumstances, the U.S. would never voluntarily expose this level of operational detail to a near-peer competitor. Yet by allowing the CCP to entrench intelligence infrastructure in Cuba, Argentina and across the hemisphere, we effectively did just that — passively, predictably and without resistance.
This isn’t speculation. China has spent decades studying U.S. military operations precisely to identify these moments: real-world deployments that reveal what exercises never can. The Venezuela operation was a controlled environment for Beijing to refine its understanding of U.S. command and control under pressure, regional force projection and information dominance. These insights will directly inform Chinese planning for future contingencies, including those related to Taiwan.
The broader implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable: Hostile intelligence infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere is no longer a peripheral concern. It is an active, ongoing threat to U.S. warfighting advantage. SIGINT stations do not need to fire weapons to be decisive. By the time conflict arrives, the damage is already done.
This is where the Trump administration must act. The United States cannot continue to tolerate Chinese military-linked intelligence facilities operating freely in our hemisphere under the guise of civilian cooperation. That means elevating counter-collection as a strategic priority, reassessing diplomatic and economic leverage over host nations, expanding electronic protection measures and treating foreign SIGINT basing in the Americas as the national security threat it is.
China has just collected lessons it will use for decades. The question now is whether Washington will learn from this moment or allow the next one to be even more costly.
• L.J. Eads is a senior fellow of Prague Security Studies Institute, former U.S. Air Force SIGINT Space Network Warfare Officer and the founder of Data Abyss, where he develops data-driven tools to identify and counter China’s adversarial intelligence and military activities.
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