By Hannah Ng and Tiffany Meier
March 15, 2023 Updated: March 16, 2023
(Left) The Chinese
balloon drifts to the ocean after being shot down off the coast in Surfside
Beach, S.C., on Feb. 4, 2023. (Right) The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson
participates in a group sail during the Rim of the Pacific exercise off the
coast of Hawaii, on July 26, 2018. (Randall Hill/Reuters; Petty Officer 1st
Class Arthurgwain L. Marquez/U.S. Navy via AP)
China is ramping up
intelligence collection efforts against the United States, warns James Fanell,
a former director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S.
Pacific Fleet.
In late January, Japanese
astronomers stationed in Hawaii noticed mysterious
green laser beams that were being fired over the island. The laser beams were
being shot down from space over one of the largest mountain ranges in Hawaii.
Initially, when they
first reported these beams to the public, these astronomers said that they came
from a NASA satellite—they were thought to be American lasers. But just a week
after their initial statement, the Japanese astronomers issued a correction
saying that these green laser beams were not from a U.S. satellite, but
instead, they more likely came from a Chinese satellite.
Fanell said that the
beams could be measuring quite a number of things including pollution, “the
height, the altitude, the size, the shape, the distances of particular
installations in Hawaiian Islands, which happen to have a lot of U.S. military
facilities.”
“They could be testing
our reactions and responses from the U.S. installations in terms of their
ability to detect these green lasers. So they could be watching for a response.
They may have somebody’s computers already tapped and looking at what they say
when they see the laser, testing our observatories that we have in the Big
Island of Hawaii to see what their communications are,” Fanell told the “China in Focus” on NTD.
He believed that it would
be a mistake to disregard China’s actions or just assumed them to be related to
the environment.
“I think there’s
definitely a military aspect to this given the presence that we have there in
the islands from the Pacific Missile Range test facility (PMRs.) In Hawaii
we’re testing our own nuclear ballistic missiles from Hawaii, to … Pearl Harbor
and Camp Smith, Pacific fleet our submarine forces specifically, and even to
the Big Island where the U.S. Army and Marine Corps does a lot of training
there as well,” he said in an interview on March 14.
“Mapping and using green
lasers is another way of measuring our capabilities and our resources,” he
added.
“So part of their
activity towards us, I think we will see much more as they increase the overt
nature of their intelligence collection against the United States,” Fanell
noted.
He further pointed to
the report on a spent
rocket stage from a Chinese launch of a trio of spy satellites burned up over
Texas on March 8.
“Given the intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance efforts that the PRC has been conducting more
and more focused on the United States that we need to be aware of what these
are,” he noted, using the official name of the People’s Republic of China.
“Was this just a normal
space launch that went awry? Or was this something related to some other kind
of grand strategy that the Chinese have to use their military resources to
isolate or even attack the United States?” he added.
Seek
Access to Artic
Fanell singled out
the report on Chinese
surveillance buoys discovered in Arctic waters last fall that were intercepted
by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).
According to him, these
objects would help the communist regime to collect data on the Arctic
environment, the sea environment, the sea temperature, the salinity, the
currents, and things of that nature.
Fanell believed that the
move serves the regime’s effort to “access through the Arctic, to be able to
transit ships up there to carry supplies and goods to Europe, from China
instead of having to go all the way through the South China Sea, the Indian
Ocean, Suez Canal, and into the Mediterranean where things take much longer and
are more at risk.”
He noted that no move of
the regime is “benign.”
“So whatever data they’re
gaining about the maritime domain, from these buoys, or from any other ISR
sensor, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sensor, whether it’s an
aircraft, a submarine, a satellite, a human intelligence person, anything—that
will go into the PLA and help them in the missions and tasks that they’ve been
given by [Chinese Communist Party (CCP) head Xi Jinping], and previously, by
[former CCP head Hu Jintao], which is to be the strongest and biggest military
in the earth by 2049,” he said.
Displace
US
The regime’s ultimate
goal is to “displace the United States and be the world’s superpower,” he said.
According to Fanell,
China’s 14th rubber-stamped National People’s Congress shows the totalitarian
nature of the regime.
“That’s kind of the
regime in their nature, and their ideology is to become the greatest power on
the earth and to rule the rest of the world the same way they rule their own
people, which is to have total control,” he noted.
“And we’ve been watching
it for the last three years over the dynamic zero COVID policy where no one
could move around in their country without permission of the government. And
that’s what they want. And we need to be resisting that because that’s slavery.
And we don’t want to live in that,” Fanell said.
Roman Balmakov contributed to this report.
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