Inside the Ring

U.S.-China joint spying

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair is visiting Beijing this week to take part in a secret ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of two U.S. electronic eavesdropping posts in western China.

The Cold War listening posts were aimed at the Soviet Union and now spy on Russia, and they represented the most substantive yet secret sign of the strategic gambit launched during the Nixon administration of using the so-called “China card” to counter the Soviets.

The eavesdropping posts are located in remote western Xinjiang province near the towns of Qitai and Korla, and they remain a closely held electronic spying program.

The New York Times first disclosed the existence of the two listening posts in June 1981, reporting that they had been set up under a 1979 agreement and opened in 1980. The facilities focused their electronic sensors on Soviet missile tests carried out from bases at Leninsk, near the Aral Sea, and at Sary-Shagan, near Lake Balkhash.

The posts also were promoted by then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat and now vice president, as needed for verifying compliance with Soviet-U.S. arms control treaties.

The joint spying program includes China’s military intelligence section, which agreed to provide personnel for the sites, along with some CIA technicians, as part of the 1979 agreement. The agreement called for total secrecy about the operation.

Despite decades of CIA involvement, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta did not attend the Beijing ceremony. A CIA spokesman declined to comment, citing a policy of not discussing travel by the director. A DNI spokeswoman also declined to comment.

Local press reports from India and Pakistan said Mr. Panetta was visiting those countries.

The listening posts helped replace electronic listening posts aimed northward from Iran that were lost after the 1979 Iranian revolution.

A former intelligence official familiar with the program said the Chinese posts in recent years have been largely symbolic because they cost tens of millions of dollars to maintain and produce little in the way of strategic intelligence. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continued sensitivity of the program.

Some in Congress have questioned the utility of funding the posts after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, U.S. intelligence officials have defended the program as a positive sign of Chinese military and intelligence cooperation in an otherwise contentious relationship.

START verification fight

The Obama administration is opposing legislation pending in the Senate that would continue arms control verification inspections under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire Dec. 5.

“Our focus in Geneva is to complete negotiations on a START follow-on treaty by early December,” a State Department official told Inside the Ring.

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