Wed, Jul 19, 2006 page1

• Wife of espionage suspect works for the CIA

  • By Charles Snyder and Chang Yun-ping / STAFF REPORTERS IN WASHINGTON AND TAIPEI
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  The wife of former US State Department official Donald Keyser, Margaret Lyons, is a CIA official on loan to the office of the US' top spy, John Negroponte, Negroponte's office has confirmed.

  Lyons "is a CIA employee currently on a detail assignment to the office of the Director of National Intelligence," a spokeswoman told the Taipei Times on Monday.

  The spokeswoman said that her office would "decline to respond" to any other questions about Lyons.

  Security clearance

  A CIA spokesman also confirmed that Lyons works for the agency. She is a "senior officer" who has worked with the agency for "decades," he said. Despite the case against her husband, the agency has not revoked Lyons' security clearance, he said.

  The open-source unit that Lyons is now detailed to is the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which monitored and translated broadcasts in countries around the world, and made them available to government officials, scholars, journalists and others.

  Lyons' name surfaced in a story in the current issue of Time magazine, which described her as a senior CIA officer, and said her job was a "sensitive post" helping to set up a new open-source unit.

  Relationship

  The revelation adds a new wrinkle to the case in which Keyser has pleaded guilty to three charges stemming from his relationship with Isabelle Cheng (程念慈), a former National Security Bureau intelligence officer in Washington, and whom, the FBI is trying to prove, Keyser assisted to spy on the US.

  Keyser, through his lawyer, has denied that he was a spy.

  One of the three charges to which Keyser pleaded guilty was having a large volume of secret and classified documents stored on his home computer and on floppy discs found in his home.

  In a filing on July 5, the prosecution, without naming Lyons, said Keyser's wife knew for a year that Keyser had kept the documents at home, in violation of US law and government policy.

  Time reported that, in addition, government officials have told the magazine that during an FBI search of the couple's home, agents found CIA documents that Lyons herself put there without authorization. The magazine said that Lyons admitted that the couple had failed "to properly secure" the material.

  In its July 5 filing, the prosecutor said that during a search of Keyser's house in September 2004, investigators found more than 3,600 classified documents, including 28 top secret documents and nearly 2,000 secret documents. Nearly half of the documents were found in a bookshelf in a recently refinished basement den.

  The raid took place the same day Keyser was arrested after a lunch at a well-known Washington area restaurant with Cheng and her boss, Michael Huang (黃光勳), reputedly the National Security Bureau's top intelligence operative in Washington.

  According to the FBI, Keyser told investigators that a secretary mistakenly boxed up the documents and he did not know they were there.

  He said he did not know of the basement documents until "his wife told him she had discovered classified material while sorting through the boxes in the basement closet [after the refinishing was completed], and asked him to do something about it," the FBI said.

  At one point, Keyser said he did not believe her, and at another he said he could not remember her telling him about the files.

  "He also claimed that his wife, not him, must have removed classified documents from the boxes and placed them in the basement bookcase," the FBI alleges.

  Lyons has not been charged in the case.

  Many documents were found on a laptop that Keyser took with him on a 2003 trip to China, during which he also had a secret three-day rendezvous with Cheng in Taiwan which he failed to report to his superiors, and for which he pleaded guilty to one charge last year. He allegedly accessed some of the documents in China, an unlawful act, and also carried the laptop to Taiwan.

  A US Federal District Court in a Virginia suburb of Washington has set an Aug. 9 hearing date on the FBI's request to bring additional charges against Keyser. Since much information will be classified, the judge ordered the hearing to be held in secret.

  Meanwhile, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman Michel Lu (呂慶龍) said yesterday that US-Taiwan communications through the Washington based Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office during 2003 and 2004 had been smooth and effective. He made the comments in response to media reports that Keyser had resorted to communicating through the National Security Bureau to make Taiwan better understand Washington's policies.

  "He [Keyser] claimed that he met with Cheng and her supervisor Michael Huang because he did not believe that US policy was being adequately conveyed to Taiwan, and regarded [National Security Bureau] channels as another means to communicate US policy to the government in Taipei," a court document from the FBI said.

  Lu said US-Taiwan relations had remained healthy after news of the Keyser case broke in 2004.
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