A new report from the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation says that a recent spy case in Taiwan involving a military officer identified only as “Chiang” (蔣) raises serious questions about Taiwanese counterintelligence.
The report plays down the probable damage and recommends that Taiwan “should remember the value of reassuring its allies in private,” and also brief friendly capitals.
While providing no real answers, the report says that the major questions raised by the Chiang case are: How much damage did Chiang do to Taiwanese security? To what extent are Chinese intelligence organizations targeting Taiwan’s command, control, computers, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems? To what extent are Taiwanese government institutions penetrated by Chinese intelligence?
A Taiwanese air force captain surnamed Chiang, who worked at a site in northern Taipei performing similar functions to that of the regional operations control centers, was believed to have passed intelligence to China.
The case rocked the Taiwanese military, because it came little more than a year after a high-profile spy for China was caught and is now serving a life sentence.
The Chinese-language Next Magazine reported on Feb. 29 that Chiang’s uncle, who operates a business in China, had helped pass on the information allegedly obtained by Chiang, which reportedly included classified material on Taiwan’s early-warning radar system as well as E-2T/E-2K Hawkeye surveillance aircraft.
The Jamestown Foundation analysis said: “The case raises several questions that countries friendly with Taipei should consider before condemning the Taiwanese government as so penetrated to be irrelevant. The same concerns should be mirrored in Taipei as a call for more transparency with allies.”
It added that the investigation might be ongoing, but Taiwanese investigators identifying the scope of the damage so quickly suggests that the Ministry of National Defense could “very well be right” in downplaying concerns about the damage.
“The real question now is how was Chiang removing data — electronically or by hard copy — because it affects how much technical data was delivered to China,” the report says.
The foundation also said that if most Chinese espionage cases involve picking up Taiwanese businesspeople in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and using them to access Taiwanese government officials, then the deliberateness or opportunism of China’s spies will depend on how well they can investigate the background and connections of those businesspeople.
“The normal elements of Taiwanese espionage cases in fact militate against really successful operations, because the Chinese intelligence services are several steps removed from the information they are trying to get,” it says.
“Additionally, very few Taiwanese traitors operate for very long inside Taiwan, suggesting military security and the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau are relatively effective,” it added
The report concludes that more evaluation is in order before “throwing up one’s hands entirely.”
In a recent interview with the Taipei Times, a US military expert with deep knowledge of Pentagon practices said that he had heard no recent complaints about Taiwan’s security.
He said there was no reason to believe that US arms sales to Taiwan would be affected by fears about technology leaks to China.
However, a recent report by the US’ Congressional Research Service (CRS) on arms sales to Taiwan said that greater cross-strait integration has raised concerns about the leakage of military technology, intelligence and other secrets.
The CRS report added that since Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) became president in May 2008, there has been a question of whether Taiwan’s pursuit of closer integration with the PRC “has an implication of Taiwan’s strategic reorientation away from the US toward the PRC.”
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) yesterday said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) “should not follow the Democratic Progressive Party’s [DPP] direction,” after KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) had said that China posed a threat to Taiwan. Chiang was quoted by Reuters as saying during an interview that China’s “one country, two systems” formula for an unification with Taiwan “has no market” in the nation. Chiang also described China as the major threat to Taiwan, Reuters reported. Jaw, who has expressed interest in running for KMT chairman this year and in the 2024 presidential election, wrote on Facebook that
RSS