WASHINGTON -- Chinese army spies have burrowed so deeply into
Taiwan's intelligence community that the U.S. government has stopped
short of sharing relevant security information with Taipei, a
well-placed source says.
China's deep penetration casts doubt on the widely held notion that
Taiwan could successfully fend off an attack from the mainland. If
Beijing has an intelligence edge, it could translate into battlefield
advantages should cross-strait tensions reach a flash point.
The source, a U.S. government official, says the issue came to light
in 1995, when U.S. intelligence first got wind of massive Chinese
espionage at U.S. nuclear-weapons research labs.
That year, a so-called "walk-in" Chinese official gave CIA analysts a
package of Chinese military documents, including detailed drawings with
exact measurements, that showed China had stolen design secrets to
America's deadliest nuclear warheads, including the miniaturized W-88.
U.S. intelligence figured Beijing advertised its heist to send a
warning to the U.S. to think twice about defending Taiwan.
Later that year, and in 1996, Beijing carried out major military
exercises near Taiwan to scare voters from supporting pro-independence
candidates. China's communist hard-liners are hell-bent on seizing the
island republic.
What's not known publicly is that Chinese intelligence at the same
time sent the documents -- and the veiled threat -- to Taipei.
"The walk-in told us, the United States, that he had also provided
this information to Taiwan," the government source said -- so that
Taiwan would lose faith in the U.S. military's resolve in coming to its
rescue if China attacks.
More important, Washington never asked Taipei about it.
"And the reason given to me, that we didn't check that out, is we
believe that Taiwan intelligence services are penetrated," the source
said in an interview.
Experts on military intelligence operations in China and Taiwan say
they wouldn't be surprised if Taiwan's security is severely compromised.
"Until very recently Taiwan didn't vet people, because their
counterintelligence didn't have the resources," said Bill Triplett,
co-author of "Red Dragon Rising: Communist China's Military Threat to
America." "It's a sensitive issue, and they're just now getting to the
point where they're going to have to do" more thorough background
checks.
Yet at the same time, Taiwan's legislature just passed a measure that
opens up contacts between Taipei and Beijing.
"Expect a lot more spies to come over from the mainland," Triplett
said.
He says China already has more than 34,000 Taiwanese intelligence
operatives.
"If Taiwan is going to open itself up to more contacts with the
mainland, it's going to have to increase the budget of the
counterintelligence people," Triplett said. "It has no choice."
Last year, Taiwan caught communist spies on its biggest air base. The
mainland has smuggled spies into Taiwan on fishing boats. And it's
"turning" people abroad, particularly ex-Taiwanese living in America.
Take convicted Clinton-Gore fund-raisers for example.
John Huang, Maria Hsia, Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung are all from
Taiwan. Huang and Hsia are suspected Beijing agents, while Trie and
Chung have confessed to
doing Beijing's bidding. (/news/archives.asp?ARCHIVE_ID=120Chung,
however, has since cooperated fully with the FBI and has apologized
publicly for his involvement.)
What's more, convicted Chinese spy Peter Lee, a former nuclear lab
scientist, is from Taiwan. So is Wen Ho Lee, who awaits trial on charges
he mishandled U.S. nuclear secrets. The FBI originally suspected he
passed secrets to China.
Chinese intelligence often conducts what's known as "false-flag"
operations, whereby agents appeal to Taiwanese not on communist grounds
but on ethnic-Chinese grounds, notes former Reagan National Security
Council official Ken deGraffenreid. Or it recruits Taiwanese spies by
pretending to be working on behalf of Taiwan's nationalist party.
China also gathers information about Taiwan's military in more subtle
ways -- through business and personal contacts. About a third of
Taiwan's long-distance phone calls are to the mainland. And Taiwan
businesses have invested some $30 billion in China.
"There's a constant back-and-forth going on," Triplett said. "But
there's always a problem when you have a democratic country on one side
and a totalitarian country on the other."
As former director of intelligence programs for Reagan's National
Security Council, deGraffenreid understands why U.S. intelligence would
want to cool communications with Taipei.
"You always assume that when you're dealing with a liaison service,
there's a pretty good chance they've been penetrated," he said. "So that
would apply to any relations we have with the Taiwanese. We just have to
be very careful."
Since Taiwan and China have a common ethnic bond -- family ties, same
language -- and are divided mainly by politics, "the possibility of
successful espionage is pretty high," deGraffenreid added.
He compares the countries to West Germany and East Germany during the
Cold War, adding that communists mined the West's secrets "like
termites."
The KGB and the East German secret police had "riddled West Germany,
including U.S. operations there, and doubled everything back on all of
our ops," deGraffenreid said.
"It was an intelligence rout. They had war plans, they had everything
they wanted," he said. "Had it come to an actual shooting war, the West
would have been in deep doo-doo because of the espionage."
DeGraffenreid added: "I don't know if the mainland has penetrated
Taiwan to that extent. But if they did what the East Germans did to us,
it's possible."
The deeper the intelligence penetration, the more vulnerable Taiwan
is to mainland attack.
China has the advantage of not only knowing about Taiwan's military
assets and defense plans. But it also benefits from knowing what Taiwan
intelligence knows about China's military assets and attack plans. Any
edge, of course, is blunted by Taiwan's own
spying.