President Donald Trump is paying an important visit to China this week as part of his 12-day tour of Asia.
In advance of his visit, several hundred Chinese officials have been studying Trump’s every move – his interviews, tweets and personal preferences – in order to help prepare Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping, according to a report.
This secret Chinese military unit is code-named Skyheart, and it has existed since 2012. Skyheart has reportedly been preparing for Trump’s visit for several months, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Skyheart (Twitter)
The Washington Free Beacon spoke to a person familiar with the operation, and they had an exclusive report about Skyheart:
A special government unit linked to the Chinese military is code-named Skyheart and made up some 350 officials who work around the clock at a secret facility in western Beijing called Western Hills, site of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general staff headquarters where China’s underground nuclear command and control complex is based, according to a person familiar with the operation.
Skyheart was first set up around 2012 and focuses exclusively on providing intelligence and information on foreign leaders to senior Communist Party and military leaders.
The analysts have been closely studying everything about Trump in preparation for the summit. No information is too trivial for the group, including Trump’s habits, his likes and dislikes, the books he reads, television programs he watches, food preferences, favorite clothes, and brand names of products he prefers.
The group also studies videos and photographs for clues to Trump’s personality.
In recent years, the Chinese analysts gained a relatively new window into Trump that has been closely scrutinized: his postings on social media.
Trump regularly signals his policies and preferences unofficially through the social media outlet Twitter. “No detail is too small to be gathered,” said the person familiar with Skyheart.
The open-source intelligence program, along with traditional human, electronic, and cyber spying, is a major focus of Chinese civilian and military leaders who regard the United States as China’s main enemy and most important intelligence target. Beijing’s other priority targets are Taiwan, Russia, and Japan.
