Keyser offers guilty plea to US court

Donald Keyser, a former US State Department official known to be friendly to Taiwan, has pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a romantic entanglement with a senior Taiwanese intelligence officer once stationed in the Taipei representative's office in Washington. The charges centered on a secret trip he took to be with her in Taipei for several days in September 2003.

Keyser, 62, pleaded guilty to two counts of making false official statements in connection with his relationship with the Taiwanese official, Isabelle Cheng (程念慈), 34, and one count of unlawfully removing classified documents from the department.

A sorrowful Keyser told the court in a plea hearing on Monday that "I am deeply ashamed of what I have done."

Recounting his relationship with Cheng, Keyser, who is married, said in a statement, "I knew that she was an overtly declared official of an intelligence service of Taiwan."

"Over time, I developed a personal relationship with Ms Cheng. I did not want to disclose the extent of this personal relationship to others, particularly my wife," Keyser said. "I never provided Ms Cheng any classified information, except for information that was cleared for release to Taiwan," he said.

He acknowledged that his liaison with Cheng might have made him vulnerable to blackmail by Taiwan.

Key policy maker

At the time, Keyser was principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, a key policy maker for the department. He retired in September last year. The department on Monday refused to comment on the case.

What apparently tipped off FBI investigators was a 2003 side trip that Keyser took after an official mission to China and Japan. In that trip to Taiwan, he and Cheng engaged in "local sightseeing," Keyser said in his Monday statement.

To conceal the trip, Keyser admitted that he failed to mention it, as required, to officials in a later official interview and in a form required for foreign travel by government officials. That failure resulted in one of the false statements charges.

In addition to that trip, US attorneys said that from 2002 to September last year, Keyser "had an undisclosed personal relationship with Isabelle Cheng, in which he regularly communicated with her by telephone and e-mail, met with her privately on numerous occasions, and occasionally traveled with her. These contacts were not reported by Keyser to the Department of State."

The other false statement charge stems from an interview in which Keyser denied having a relationship that, in effect, left him open to blackmail.

Keyser told the interviewer he did not have a "close tie of affection" with a foreigner, did not engage in conduct that made him "vulnerable to coercion, exploitation or pressure from a foreign government," and did not hide any foreign travel.

`Inappropriate'

In his statement on Monday, Keyser said that while he had answered "no" to the coercion question, "Although my personal relationship with Isabelle Cheng was clearly inappropriate, no effort to exploit me was ever made" by the Taiwanese government.

After the Taipei trip, the FBI began to trail Keyser and noted a series of meetings with Cheng and her boss, Lieutenant General Huang Kuang-hsun (黃光勳) -- believed to be the intelligence chief of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office at the time -- in Washington area restaurants. Keyser was seen handing envelopes to Cheng and Huang.

Those meetings, which were normal for the way US-Taiwan diplomatic relations are handled in Washington and which were a big part of the FBI's original case against Keyser last year, did not figure in Keyser's guilty plea.

However, they led to Keyser's arrest in September last year outside a Washington-area restaurant in which the three had just had lunch. Shortly after the arrest. Cheng left Washington for Taiwan.

As a consequence of the FBI investigations that followed those meetings, FBI agents raided Keyser's home and allegedly found large numbers of classified documents among Keyser's papers and computer files.

The US attorney's office in northern Virginia, where the case was brought, said FBI investigators found more than 3,600 documents in Keyser's home, including more than 25 classified as top secret and "numerous" others classified as secret or confidential that Keyser allegedly brought home as early as 1992.

It is those documents, not the Cheng relationship, that led to the charge of removing classified US documents.