Taiwan’s armed forces said they would tighten internal security mechanisms and implement education programs, as well as encourage officers to report spying activities, in response to a profusion of military espionage cases in recent years.
The situation has come to wide international attention after an article titled Chinese espionage now rampant in Taiwan was published in Defense News magazine in the US earlier this month.
Amid a thaw in relations between Beijing and Taipei, Taiwan’s military officers are cashing in on their intimate knowledge of military secrets, including classified information on US military equipment, defense specialist Wendell Minnick wrote in the article.
He said that Taiwanese officers have sold China information “on the E-2K Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and PAC-2 anti-ballistic missile systems, Hawk air defense missile system, and the Raytheon Palm IR 500 radiometric infrared camera.”
“Although cross-strait relations are improving, the military has always been vigilant about combat readiness and counter-intelligence tasks,” Ministry of National Defense spokesman Major General David Lo (羅紹和) said on Wednesday in response to the article.
Lo said there were three main methods of recruitment and penetration used by Chinese intelligence agencies to infiltrate Taiwan’s military.
“The first way is to recruit Taiwanese who are working and conducting business in China. On their return or on visits home, they go on to contact people in active military service,” he said.
“The second way is to target greed and other weaknesses, by enticing retired or active service personnel with large amounts of money. The third way is by using military personnel’s dependents, who lack awareness. They usually start with a small enticement, then follow it up at opportune times to recruit [their target] to conduct espionage,” Lo said.
He added that the ministry would implement education programs to enhance the ethics and moral virtues of military personnel and keep rigorous tabs on their daily activities, while encouraging personnel to report illegal activities.
Lo said that most cases of Taiwanese officers spying for China in recent years were revealed by whistle-blowing officers in the military, which indicates that officers are highly alert and aware of the need to protect classified information, and possess the strong virtues befitting of soldiers.
The Defense News article quoted former deputy minister of defense Lin Chong-pin (林中斌) as saying: “The cross-strait contest on intelligence gathering is one of asymmetric warfare.”
Lin reportedly said that China enjoys many “advantages” over Taiwan, one being that it is a tightly controlled authoritarian society, while Taiwan is a democratic one given to an excess of freedoms, and lax discipline and regulations.
“China has a long tradition of winning the espionage war against its rivals, including the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)… Beijing is resolved in achieving unification with Taiwan, versus the severely divided political situation between pro-Taiwanese consciousness and pro-Chinese consciousness in Taiwan,” Minnick quoted Lin as saying.
Last month, Ko Cheng-sheng (柯政盛), a top-ranking retired navy vice admiral, was found guilty of passing classified material on to China and trying to recruit junior officers to help him spy. He was sentenced to 14 months in prison.
The court last month reduced a sentence of life imprisonment to 18 years in jail for colonel Luo Chi-cheng (羅奇正), a former senior officer in charge of counter-intelligence missions at the ministry’s Military Intelligence Bureau. Luo was found guilty of espionage for selling military intelligence to China, in a case dating from 2011.
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