Keyser sentenced over affair with Taiwanese agent

A US federal court on Monday sentenced former State Department official Donald Keyser to a prison term of 12 months and one day, plus two years of subsequent supervised release, in a case that stemmed from Keyser's illicit relationship with a Taiwanese intelligence officer, Isabelle Cheng Nien-tsu (程念慈), when she was posted to Washington earlier this decade.

The sentence, which many people who attended the hearing described as lenient, also includes a US$25,000 fine and would give Keyser some flexibility in where he would serve the prison term.

It was not immediately clear whether Keyser's lawyers planned an appeal.

Keyser, 63, was not immediately taken into custody, as the judge, T.S. Ellis III, of the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia, in the Washington suburbs, allowed Keyser to surrender voluntarily.

The case, which at one time seemed poised to strain the convoluted way in which the US and Taiwan do business in Washington, devolved into a matter of fairly narrow technical and bureaucratic issues, plus a saga of an affair between a middle-aged senior US official and a younger Taiwanese intelligence officer.

Keyser guilty in December 2005 to three charges that carried maximum prison terms of 13 years. A plea agreement between the prosecutor and Keyser's lawyers had initially called for a minimum term of 18 to 24 months in prison.

The charges were that Keyser lied to customs officials and State Department investigators about a secret trip to Taiwan he took with Cheng in 2003, that he lied about having an affair with Cheng which may have exposed him to blackmail by Taiwanese authorities, and that he stored more than 3,000 official documents in his home -- including many secret and classified documents -- in violation of government rules.

Prosecuting David Laufman was critical of Taiwan during the case and during Monday's hearing at one point called the Chen administration a "hostile government," which raised eyebrows among attendees, many of whom were friends of Taiwan.

However, Ellis repeatedly interrupted Laufman's efforts to interject US-Taiwan relations into the arguments. He said that the US government, through the FBI, had tried to establish an espionage charge in the Keyser-Cheng relationship, but had failed to do so. At one point, Ellis reminded Laufman that the case "was not about spying."

The case began when Keyser met Cheng socially in 2002 and began a two-year relationship. The following year, Keyser made an unauthorized trip to Taiwan to meet the 35-year-old Cheng. Keyser, who is married, hid a customs declaration he signed on his return to the US and failed to mention the trip in an internal State Department questionnaire. He also failed to tell his wife about the trip.

Later, in an annual review of his top secret clearance, Keyser also hid his relationship when questioned about any foreign entanglements that could subject him to blackmail or exploitation. That was the basis of the second charge.

A FBI raid on his house uncovered thousands of sensitive and classified official documents, the basis of the third charge against him.

In an impassioned plea to the judge for leniency, Keyser expressed regret for "unforgivable carelessness" and "a significant lapse of judgment."

"I can't imagine what I was thinking," he said about becoming involved with Cheng -- whom he called "that young woman" -- and concealing the relationship.

However, he said: "I was not at any time an agent of Taiwan."

He added that his meetings with Cheng and her boss at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in Washington -- the National Security Bureau's (NSB's) top agent in TECRO, [Huang Kuang-hsun (黃光勳)] -- were in furtherance of US policy on Taiwan.

"Neither Cheng nor Huang ever sought or received from me any unauthorized information," Keyser said.

Many US officials meet NSB officials in Washington on a regular basis, a normal and useful activity for US policy toward Taiwan, he said.

In sentencing Keyser, Ellis said he took into account more than 50 letters supporting Keyser and attesting to his character.

These came from various sources, including former senior ambassadors, generals, admirals, intelligence officials and active State Department officials.

An to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in the courthouse, but told the Taipei Times that Rice was not one of the letter writers.