195: Cleo Paskal on PRC operations in Guam

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 CApodcasting@gmail.com 

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 easily if you've got an embassy. But you're getting a huge amount of Chinese organized crime operating in those countries. which functions to corrupt the political system and destabilize it. And I think, ideally, the goal is to subvert them to the point where first they ditch Taiwan, and then maybe they also walk away from the Compact of Free Association with the U .S. And Broken Tooth, for example, who's one of the big triad leaders who's been designated by the U .S., was operating out of Palau. And in the case of the Marshall Islands, there are two Chinese nationals who bought Marshallese citizenship. and then tried to set up a country within a country.

00:15:16    JACK GAINES
Like a free trade zone or something else?

00:15:18    CLEO PASCAL
Yeah, it's kind of like a free trade plus plus, where it would have its own control over immigration and customs. They were calling it Hong Kong. Oh. Yeah. It was on Ronglap Atoll, which is... an atoll that was irradiated during the bikini tests. And they were saying, we're going to turn this into like a Hong Kong of the Marshall Islands. But basically, they wanted to get this legislation passed that would create this country within a country. And remember, the country itself recognizes Taiwan. So they wanted to create this China -friendly enclave in a country that recognizes Taiwan and that has a critical U .S. military base, Kwajalein. And it came very, very close to happening. I know firsthand that the attorney general of the Marshall Islands repeatedly asked the FBI for help in getting the information necessary to prosecute not just those two Chinese nationals, but the Marshallese citizens that were being bribed by them. And those two Chinese nationals were brought up on charges in New York because the money that they were bribing the Marshallese officials with was being run through a UN -affiliated NGO based in New York. Oh, wow. which had linkages to a whole bunch of other countries as well. And it was never brought to trial. The DOJ let them settle. And because they settled, the evidence never became public. So the Attorney General of the Marshall Islands couldn't prosecute them. They were given credit for time served. And after a very short period of time, both of them were deported, these two Chinese, back to the Marshall Islands. with no case files given to the attorney general of the Marshall Islands. So they were walking around the Marshall Islands free just before the elections. And this is a country that's crucial for U .S. defense and security. So a little bit of help on the corruption files in any of these countries. I mean, the governor of the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas has said, please investigate me. Send treasury officials. Send a resident district attorney. Go after the corruption in my territory. The Attorney General of the Marshall Islands is saying the same. The Attorney General of Palau is saying, I need lawyers. I want to go after these people. I don't have enough lawyers. So if you're talking about defense and security in the Indo -Pacific and countering the Chinese threat, it's fine to send out Coast Guard cutters. But if you send out a few lawyers and a few investigators, you're going to... really have a huge effect that could change lives for the better across the region and reinforce U .S. security. So you need a lawfare task force,

00:18:10    JACK GAINES
task force, attorneys, judges, investigators, prosecutors, law enforcement. Yeah.

00:18:18    CLEO PASCAL
The corruption is like in kinetic warfare, you do aerial bombardment before you land your forces. So the corruption is that sort of softening up of a system before you go in and take over. You weaken it and riddle that infrastructure, that democratic accountability, transparency infrastructure. You just bombard it with corruption to the point where it's ready to collapse and then you can come in and take it over. So it's a form of state capture. Proxies are fine. We didn't really talk about the middle country, the one that doesn't recognize Taiwan, but which recognizes China, the Federal States of Micronesia. The former president of that country, he wrote several letters that then became public describing what the Chinese were doing, completely bypassing his authority, backing independence movements, corrupting his officials. So he openly described it. And then as a result, Apparently, during COVID, there were some who wanted to decline entry to U .S. boats, probably not legal under the Compacts of Resociation, but they're being primed for that kind of a thing. Like in the Solomon Islands or in Vanuatu, where Coast Guard ships didn't get permission in time to come in and land. There were just these inexplicable delays. Kiribati as well. So it's already happening. Everything that we're talking about now is even further down the road in a place like Solomon's. It's worth focusing on this northern central Pacific zone because it is legally tied to the U .S. in a way that no other zone is. So it should be a priority.

00:20:00    JACK GAINES
Well, do you want to talk a little bit about the Solomons as an example of how it could end up if we don't pay attention? Sure.

00:20:07    CLEO PASCAL
If you want to understand how the PRC operates and what its goals are, it is a very useful case study because unusually we have a starting point. The Solomon Islands. recognized Taiwan until 2019. And then in 2019, it switched to China. So there's that preliminary phase. Why did the switch happen? Which is also very helpful to study. And it seems like at least part of the reason was there was a long -term subnational cultivation of Chinese actors, including leadership within the province of Guadalcanal. And so they identify potential leaders at an early stage in their career, maybe at a provincial level, and then back them and build them up. And then eventually they end up in the central government and in a position to be proxies for them to make this sort of a big move. So that's kind of the softening up phase. And you'll see that now in Palau and in the countries that still recognize Taiwan, there is that subnational cultivation going on. But once the switch happened. Then you can see what China really wants. Where does it go after? The Chinese put forward the security deal. We've seen the draft of it. It specifically says that the Chinese, with the permission of the local government, which is becoming more and more of a proxy, can send in forces to protect Chinese citizens and major projects and put down civil dissent. And we're going to do police training with you and give you security. equipment, including communications, and all that sort of stuff. So there's an attempted takeover of that security infrastructure. There was a very good investigation done by a consortium of journalists in Solomon Island that said that the prime minister had a property empire of eight houses on this tiny prime minister's salary, and they named the bank. He's using a French bank to run these mortgages. Well, there's been no investigation done. And that journalist that outlet is called In -Depth Solomon is a very good investigative journalist. And I just want to take a pause for a minute and highlight the work that is being done on the ground by honest people at very great risk.

00:22:17    CLEO PASCAL
just want to take a pause for a minute and highlight the work that is being done on the ground by honest people at very great risk. So these incredible journalists, incredible political leaders, the same thing with leaders in the Solomon Islands who... have been trying to block Huawei from setting up towers in their districts. Their jobs have been taken away. They've been prosecuted, persecuted. Their families have been gone after. Same thing with the journalists. So just to underline that there are alternatives. If somebody says, oh, they're all corrupt, that is absolutely not the case. You have many, many honest people willing to... Collaborate.

00:23:04    JACK GAINES
Up with prosecution, yeah.

00:23:06    CLEO PASCAL
That's right. And if you don't go after the corruption, those people will be suffocated. They'll become examples that the Chinese use to show people why it's not worth standing up to them.

00:23:20    JACK GAINES
Or they'll get tired of it and they'll go somewhere else. Yeah. Okay. And so that's the effect that RC influence has in the regions. Do you see it actually causing CNMI to... disassociate from the United States and actually shift over to PRC? Or collapsing Guam support to the U .S.? Because Guam was part of the U .S.

00:23:40    CLEO PASCAL
Guam was part of the U .S. since the Spanish -American War, and CNMI is only part of the U .S. since sort of the 70s or 80s, they have very different histories. If you're from CNMI, you've seen empires come and go. Your great -great -grandfather would have spoken probably Spanish. Then your great... grandfather might have spoken German. And then your grandfather probably spoke Japanese. And then your father spoke English. Those waves of colonial influence went through there. So they're very geopolitically sophisticated and can be a little bit cynical.

00:24:24    JACK GAINES
I would imagine so.

00:24:25    CLEO PASCAL
Yeah. But... That last thing, I was speaking to somebody in her 90s for the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan, and she went to school under the Japanese, and she was a 10 -year -old hiding in the caves during the Battle of Saipan. You know, when Marines came to her cave and brought her and her family out, they'd been hiding in the caves for weeks. She said it wasn't the starvation, it was the thirst that really got to them. And one of the Marines gave her water from his canteen to drink. And the humanity of the interaction with just some guy from who knows where in the U .S. touched her at a really deep level. And then sort of they went through this process of I mentioned Saipan was closed. And then there was this Congress of Micronesia. And then they had this vote about whether or not to join the United States. And that was the first time in hundreds of years of colonial history that the people of CNMI were given a choice about their own future. And the word she kept using when she talked about the relationship with the United States was this gift of freedom. When the Japanese were in Saipan, the hierarchy was the Japanese were first, then came the Okinawans and Koreans, and then came the Chamorros and the Carolinians. And the relationship with the U .S. was just totally different. This is the first time that they were given a choice. And especially the older generation remembers that. So they're not going to leave the U .S., but Guam is different because there's been an anti -colonial movement in Guam for a long time. And some of it is legitimate.

00:26:17    JACK GAINES
But it's also fermented where they can.

00:26:19    CLEO PASCAL
Yeah. And so what the Chinese are very good at is taking a real problem, exacerbating it, and giving you the wrong solution. I interviewed the governor of Guam, and she said when the Japanese were beheading people in Guam, they were raping people, they were committing horrific massacres. And she said, look, given the geography of Guam, this is our reality. This is where we are. And I would prefer to be under the U .S. military than the Chinese military, basically. But that's not where the Chinese entry points are. The Chinese entry points are through this corruption and the economic things. And I think that Guam and CNMI are much more valuable to China, attached to the U .S. as a kind of catheter through which they can attach venom that goes into the system, directly into the veins of the U .S.

00:27:16    JACK GAINES
Like you were saying, mailing drugs through the post office, getting driver's licenses and probably taking flights in without having to worry about identification.

00:27:26    CLEO PASCAL
You know, we happen to have excellent, honest governors in both Guam and CNMI at the moment. But there's a lot of money arrayed against them so that they're not in place the next time around. The other component to it is... You get these windows of opportunity for investigation when you have somebody honest in power, like the current governor in Commonwealth of Northern Marianas. He says, come investigate me. There should be a rapid response corruption investigation team when they've got that little window to come in before... He gets voted out.

00:28:03    JACK GAINES
gets voted out.

00:28:05    CLEO PASCAL
Yeah, before the corrupt elements get their way to just...

00:28:09    CLEO PASCAL
Look at everything. Look at the casino. Look at, you know, the visa issue. Currently, they're trying to pressure the governor to lobby direct flights from mainland China into CNMI with people with no visas. What the governor is saying is relying on the Chinese tourism sector is not a good idea. What happened in Palau was the Chinese built up the Palau tourism sector and then pulled it all out to try to put pressure on the Palau government to make them abandon Taiwan. So what he's saying is the Chinese tourism sector comes with political leverage. And if something happens with China anyway, the U .S. government could block that tourism. So he's holding the line, but the pressure is growing. So without this rapid response corruption investigation team, you can just see all of these tentacles expanding and making it more and more difficult. for accountability, transparency, and the survival of U .S. strategic interests in a critical region of the Indo -Pacific.

00:29:18    JACK GAINES
It's interesting that tourism is ramped up just in time for the elections. Yep. Plus the gambling, the drug shipping, everything else going on with it.

00:29:27    CLEO PASCAL
Send in the lawyers. I never thought I'd get to the point in my life where it's like, oh, lawyers are the solution.

00:29:31    JACK GAINES
lawyers are the solution. Sometimes lawyers are the solution. Yep.

00:29:36    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes of 1CA Podcast.