Moscow is more likely to join efforts with Cuba-based Chinese SIGINT facility, targeting the U.S. The RLI predicted in February 2022 that Russia might reopen the Lourdes intelligence facility that had been closed since 2001.
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The forecast is confirmed by the fact that the center has resumed its activity. Some GRU agents with the 6th Radio Intelligence Directorate are reported to arrive in Cuba as diplomats, missile engineers, computer technology and exact mathematics experts. With the center officially closed by the Russians, some employees stayed in Cuba, including Pavel Smolko and Alexander Utochkin, officers of 47747 military unit (in Klimovsk, where equipment from Lourdes was transported).
With experts of that kind, the Lourdes center will most likely collect not just SIGINT but also MASINT, which means assessing U.S. air defense systems range and developing routes for possible missile strikes targeting the United States.
These assessments are based on studying the experience of Russian military intelligence before and after a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russian diplomats in Europe, especially missile engineers, are also known to carry out these functions. Military intelligence officers of that qualification prevailed among the diplomats expelled by some European democracies.
Lourdes Radio Electronics Center (REC), nor far from Havana, is able to grab traffic carried by American communications satellites, eavesdrop on telephone communications and intercept messages from the NASA Mission Control Center in Florida.
China has reached a secret deal with Cuba to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island roughly 100 miles (160 km) from Florida, the Wall Street Journal said. But Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio denied the agreement.
The tasks listed for the facility correspond to the capacity of the Lourdes center. The data that require additional verification suggest that some premises were leased to China after the center had been closed in 2001, which means the Chinese have long been present there. China’s paramount Xi Jinping visited Cuba in 2014 with the Chinese president engaging in a follow-up visit with Cuba’s dictator, Raul Castro, in 2016. China reactivated Lourdes as well as three other intelligence stations on Cuba in 2019.
There are reasonable doubts that Russia’s technological capacity is able to ensure the work of the center at present, as Russia is not able to successfully resist the West on its own. That is why the Kremlin counts on Beijing in that confrontation.That way, Russia and China will possibly share the Lourdes center. That is in line with the level of cooperation in political intelligence sharing between the two countries. Russian foreign intelligence chief Naryshkin acknowledged on January 17, 2023, that Moscow and Beijing are sharing a large amount of intelligence, operational and signal data. If China gains access to the Lourdes center, that will mean more military intelligence sharing. We believe this prospect has a high chance, as China is gearing up for an operation against Taiwan, potentially triggering a conflict with the United States.
