Chinese nationals have accessed U.S. military bases and other facilities dozens of times, U.S. officials said, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
Government agencies like the Defense Department and the FBI held a review the past year to limit the events, the Journal reported. Officials allegedly call the people involved in the incidents “gate-crashers” and have espionage concerns about their occurrence. The gate-crashers have reportedly shown up in places like a U.S. missile range in New Mexico and a U.S. government rocket launch site in Florida.
A similar report about gate-crasher incidents in Alaska by USA Today was published in May. According to that report, one “incident” of attempted breach of Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska, involved Chinese citizens who “blew past a security checkpoint.”
A drone was found in the vehicle of the visitors, who said they were lost tourists, USA Today reported.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., has pushed back on U.S. concerns about the occurrences.
“The relevant claims are purely ill-intentioned fabrications,” Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson with the embassy, told the Journal. “We urge the relevant U.S. officials to abandon the Cold War mentality, stop groundless accusations, and do more things that are conducive to enhancing mutual trust between the two countries and friendship between the two peoples.”