Today, we welcome Cleo Paskal, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a frequent lecturer for the U.S. military about the Indo-Pacific region.
Cleo came in to discuss the PRC's efforts to infiltrate Guam and the regional islands to undermine US relationships with those communities, the threat it creates to national security, and how we need to do to respond.
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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at [email protected]
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
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Special thanks to Noel Flores for the sample of the Album Eat Your Greens and song Anger Management by Anita Schwab on his channel Jazz of the South Pacific. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/zfRUrnNhwfs?si=Afcsham-r5Gjnjaj
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Transcript
00:00:04 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website, at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Cleo Pascal, investigative journalist for Freedom for Democracies and a special lecturer at the Air War College about the Pacific region. Cleo came in today to discuss the PRC's efforts to infiltrate Guam and the regional islands around it to undermine U .S. relationships with those communities, the threat it creates to national security, and how we need to respond. So let's get started.
00:01:04 CLEO PASCAL
For most Americans, the idea is that there's the West Coast. Alaska,
00:01:10 JACK GAINES
Hawaii.
00:01:11 CLEO PASCAL
Alaska, Hawaii. And then if they're being clever, they might go, oh yeah, there's Guam. But the distance between Hawaii and Guam and the location of Guam is often pretty fuzzy. So Guam is maybe two, three hour flight from Manila and maybe five or six hour flight from Honolulu. In fact, it's the other side of the dateline. So if you're going to be very geeky about it, you'll go, is that the west -western part of the U .S. or is that the most eastern part of the U .S.? Because, of course, it's the other side of the dateline. Right. And then what you really need to do is look north of Guam because Guam is the southern part of the Mariana's island chain. It's its own thing. It's its own territory. It's been... part of the United States as a territory since the Spanish -American War, so since the late 19th century, which includes the islands of Saipan and Tinian, and they are also part of the United States. This is where the United States shares a maritime boundary with Japan, and we're the site of some of the most fierce battles of World War II. We just passed the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan and the Battle of Tinian. That became the busiest airport in the world in early mid -1945, where the B -29 bombers were taking off in wave after wave after wave to hit Japan. And that's where the Enola Gay took off from. And that is all the United States of America. Highly strategic, has been for a long time, right off the coast of Asia. In between Hawaii and Guam, there's a whole other stretch of islands, which is the Marshall Islands, the Federal States of Micronesia, and Palau. which are independent countries, but which have signed this completely unique document with the United States called the Compact of Free Association, which gives the U .S. exclusive defense and security rights and responsibilities in those countries. So these are independent countries, along with what is now CNMI, Commonwealth of Northern Marian Islands.
00:03:26 CLEO PASCAL
were all part of the Japanese Empire from 1914 to 1944. This is what enabled Japan to be in a position to hit Pearl Harbor and created this impenetrable chunk of the Central Pacific, which meant that U .S. forces had to go south through Guadalcanal, through the Solomon Islands, up through Bougainville, and then come up from the bottom through Tarawa to be able to start to fight its way across east to west. So that control over the Central Pacific that Japan had meant that Japan could keep the U .S. pushed towards Hawaii and isolate Guam. The Japanese hit Guam just after they hit Pearl Harbor and took Guam. So that gave them the whole stretch across the Central Pacific. And after the war ended, the U .S. Navy controlled an area that combined is about as large as the continental United States. and administered it under naval control. And there was all sorts of stuff going on. Saipan was closed to the outside for years. On the record, the Naval Technical Training Unit, I think, was the cover for it. But the CIA basically was running operations in Saipan to train a few Tibetans, but more Taiwanese that were supposed to be sent in to mainland China with disastrous results. The Marshall Islands were nuked 67 times in various nuclear tests. This was kind of an active zone for testing, training, very highly strategically important. And there was a real understanding in D .C. because you had people in Congress who had fought in the Pacific Theater, who knew people who died in these islands, who didn't want that to happen again. The U .S. strategic community knew how important control over this area was to keep the threat contained to the Asian coast. But some of that information has now been lost and the Chinese are all over the place. That assumption that the U .S. can safely get across the Central Pacific to get to its treaty allies and to get to Guam and to get to the bases in Japan and South Korea is now being questioned.
00:05:52 JACK GAINES
Is it U .S. defensive officials or is it strategy watchers in the region?
00:05:52 CLEO PASCAL
it U
00:05:57 CLEO PASCAL
Indo -PACOM is starting to get very concerned. And definitely the leadership in Guam and the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is starting to say, we've got some serious problems here and we need help. And especially currently the governor of Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is saying, we're seeing Chinese activity that is very disconcerting. And we need help. In my mind,
00:06:21 JACK GAINES
we need help. In my mind, I see a lot of water and a few dots of islands reaching back and forth. It's hard to imagine it as a territory.
00:06:32 CLEO PASCAL
Yeah. And what you said is if you put your logistics hat on, a lot of water and a few islands, a few islands become really important. So the less land and the more water, the more important that land is.
00:06:47 JACK GAINES
Yeah. You want to talk about what? it is that's concerning them about the RC's activities?
00:06:53 CLEO PASCAL
Sure. So the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, which the acronym is CNMI, joined the United States. But when it joined, it kept control over certain aspects of immigration and labor because its economy is so different than the rest of the U .S. Some may remember the issues it had with garment factories, for example. Early on, Chinese interests had set up garment factories there with some pretty horrific labor conditions. But because it was part of the U .S., they could put the Made in the USA label on it. From the beginning, the Chinese were eyeing CNMI's loopholes to figure out how they could use it to gain advantages in the U .S. When China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization, the value of that disappeared. But it started to shift to earth tourism. where Chinese would come and give birth in CNMI and then they'd have little American babies. You had more recent issues, Chinese -linked casinos. One of them, a few years ago, running more money through it than the casinos in Macau. Billions of dollars. And it was almost exclusively Chinese gamblers. And the way that the money was coming out of China and... Working through corresponding banks to give these lines of credit to these gamblers made it look an enormous amount like money laundering. There was never any proper investigation done by the U .S. government. There are about 40 ,000, 50 ,000 people living in Saipan. And you've got billions in Chinese casino money flowing through the economy. So you can imagine how that distorts politics and the economics of the place.
00:08:39 JACK GAINES
Oh, absolutely. Just trying to wonder, what is it that they're laundering? Is it all the commodity trade that they're doing around the world? Is it the fentanyl?
00:08:48 CLEO PASCAL
It needs an investigation. We shouldn't be wondering. This is U .S. jurisdiction. So there's absolutely no reason that this question can't be answered. If you go to Garapan, which is the capital I've come with under the Marianas, it's the biggest town in Saipan, by far the biggest building. is this casino, which was almost finished. It had started operations, but it had a whole hotel complex on it. And they had a typical Chinese Communist Party -linked style. They had built it on a grave site, so the locals were just horrified. You know, they dug up ancestors, and there was no proper reburial or anything. Like, the whole thing was just horrific. It was very close to completion. And then one of the construction workers fell off the scaffolding and died. And it turned out that they were not there on a work visa. And this gets to this other question of the visas. So apart from these other loopholes, Chinese can get on a plane in Hong Kong and fly straight to the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas with no visa. And the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is considered U .S.
00:09:54 JACK GAINES
the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is considered U .S. territory. So they can take a domestic flight from there into the continental U .S.?
00:10:02 CLEO PASCAL
They're not supposed to. Supposed to stay in the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas. But there are successful prosecutions of people who have been illegally taking Chinese by boat to Guam. We talked to the mayor of Rota, which is the island closest to Guam. And one Chinese guy who got off the plane in Rota with an inflatable boat as his luggage. Yeah, there have been cases of Chinese sea people with boats on their docks and knock on the door and ask to buy the boat or to get a ride. And they did it for one of the Fish and Wildlife guys. You know, it's not hidden. But the other thing is that the woman who ran the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas has been convicted of selling. driver's licenses, specifically to Chinese.
00:11:01 JACK GAINES
Oh, wow. So,
00:11:01 CLEO PASCAL
So, yeah.
00:11:03 JACK GAINES
Any idea how many she sold?
00:11:05 CLEO PASCAL
I don't know, but it wasn't one or two. This was a business. So everything I'm mentioning, there have been people prosecuted for bringing Chinese from CNMI to Guam. The Bureau of Mortar Vehicles woman was found guilty. They've also been using the U .S. Postal Service because, of course, once you're in CNMI, that's the U .S. domestic mail. So using the U .S. Postal Service for distributing drugs, over 30 members of Congress led a letter to Secretary Mayorkas. Why does this loophole persist? And that was in November last year. And they finally got an answer, which said that, well, the Chinese contributed a lot to the tourism economy of CNMI in 2008, 2009. So that was the justification. Oh, wow. The regulations that allow for them to come in say this can be suspended on national security grounds. So it's sort of inexplicable. They're now saying, well, we'll change it from no visas to some sort of electronic semi visa. But there's no reason it shouldn't be a normal visa like any Chinese national going to anywhere else in the United States.
00:12:18 JACK GAINES
What else are you finding happening due to the flow of? Chinese tourists into Guam.
00:12:24 CLEO PASCAL
We know that one of the big priorities is Taiwan. And we also know that they want to, as much as possible, win without fighting, which is a misnomer because they're fighting. They're just fighting on a different battlefield.
00:12:38 JACK GAINES
Yeah. Win without major combat.
00:12:40 CLEO PASCAL
Yeah. Win without major loss of Chinese life is probably the more accurate way. But if you're focused on Taiwan, one of your biggest challenges is Guam. You need to disable Guam or take Guam offline somehow. Make it inoperable or ineffective.
00:13:00 JACK GAINES
Sure. Because that's where all the aircraft that are going to support Taiwan defense are going to go.
00:13:05 CLEO PASCAL
Yeah. And other forms of military support and intel support and all that. And we know that Guam already had issues with Volt Typhoon cyber infiltration into critical infrastructure. And you also, ideally, you want people on the ground. To be very blunt, you can blow up the planes or you can disable them, but you can also kill the pilots.
00:13:30 JACK GAINES
But in the waiting without fighting mindset, how do you see their efforts in these islands?
00:13:36 CLEO PASCAL
If you've got the Chinese that have come in to CNMI without a visa, very hard to know who they are. There's no background check. They've just gotten on a plane and gotten off the plane. And then they've illegally come into Guam. you don't know who they are. So you have untraceable saboteurs, whatever. And the U .S. military has found Chinese nationals roaming around bases in Guam and have handed them over to the FBI, and I don't know what's happened to them after that. Guam is a problem for them. And being able to get people onto Guam without detection is an advantage. Now, two of the three countries, Palau, and Marshall Islands recognize Taiwan. If they recognize Taiwan, that gives them an added layer of defense because it means there's no Chinese embassy. And the Chinese embassies operate like these forward operating locations. You can run the influence operations and the intel operations more