The US has maintained a signals intelligence (SIGINT) facility on Yangmingshan in suburban Taipei in a highly secret security cooperation program with the island, it was learned yesterday.
The SIGINT system provides Taiwan's National Security Bureau (NSB) with information vital to ensuring its security against military threats from China, Janes Defense Weekly says in a report to be published next week.
The information sharing also gives the US National Security Agency (NSA) some access to Chinese military communications in Nanjing and Guangzhou military regions, the magazine says.
NSB and Taiwan's defense ministry declined to comment on the report. But the United Daily News said yesterday that the intelligence cooperation between Taiwan and the US in monitoring Chinese military radio communications had been successful and would be expanded.
The Yangminshan facility is able to intercept radio communications within 500km, the paper said.
The base provides the security agencies with an indications and warnings system to counter any efforts by China to launch a surprise attack against Taiwan, according to the report.
The activities of China's strategic nuclear force, the Second Artillery Corps, are of special interest as they could unleash up to 400 Dong Feng-11 (M-11) and DF-15 (M-9) tactical ballistic missiles in multiple-wave and multi-directional saturation attacks, it says.
The base has 10 antenna masts, of which six are high-frequency (HF) dipole antennas formed in a circular configuration known as a "Fix-6" or "6 Element" composition that serves both interception and direction-finding (DF) roles, it says.
This type of HF-DF antenna formation allows Taipei and Washington to intercept Chinese military radio communications and a large complex of 17 satellite dishes near the HF antenna facility allows data to be up-linked to the NSA, according to the report.
The base, established in the mid-1980s, underscores the close relationship between the two security agencies, despite the lack of official ties between the countries.
After Washington switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979, most US intelligence and military operations on the island were either turned over to the Taiwanese government or became covert enterprises, it says.
The Taiwan base, which replaces the SIGINT station previously located in Hong Kong's New Territories, links Taipei with a network of HF SIGINT operations that include six stations in Japan and one in Thailand, the report says.
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