Top government officials involved with mainland affairs yesterday appealed to China to release retired National Security Bureau (NSB) departmental chief Pan Hsi-hsien (潘希賢).
They urged China's leaders to adopt a conciliatory stance on the matter, rather than indulging in Cold War rhetoric.
"Pan went to the Chinese mainland as an ordinary businessman. He is not engaged in special operations. We hope the Chinese government will not seek to turn the issue into a new obstacle to healthy cross-strait relations," said Chen Ming-tung (陳明通), vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC).
Meanwhile, officials at the NSB said that according to information received from China, Pan would be released next week.
"Pan will be detained for at least five days [from June 30]" the official said. He also said that a number of Taiwanese businessmen in China were waiting to accompany him on his release.
"We are sure that Pan is safe for the time being," the official said.
The NSB had requested that the MAC assign this case to the semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) for negotiation with Beijing's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS).
Officials also said that the NSB had in mid-June contacted Pan's wife, Liang Mei-ling (梁美玲), who in turn had relayed by telephone their instructions to him to return to Taiwan immediately as he was in breach of the law.
Pan had responded, the officials claim, that the law had not yet passed its third reading in the legislature, although, in fact, it had.
Chen Ming-tung did not go into detail about the negotiations with China but he did stress that Taiwan's national security system should be rigorously investigated immediately.
"A high-ranking NSB official went to China only three days after retiring. The government will decide whether to discipline senior NSB officials," Chen told reporters yesterday.
NSB Director-General Ting Yu-chou (丁渝洲) apologized to lawmakers in a closed-door briefing of legislators Friday.
The NSB officials promised the legislators they would deliver a list of 57 recently retired officials to the Bureau of Immigration to prevent a repeat of the incident.
"We made a big mistake. Our officials did not clearly tell Pan that he was breaking the law when he went through exit formalities," Ting told lawmakers, "and some high-ranking NSB leaders neither warned him nor notified me."
Lawmakers revealed that Ting admitted Pan's case would result in a shake up of Taiwan's national security system but that damage to the system would in fact be slight.
"Pan was not responsible for matters involving secret agents," a KMT lawmaker who attended Friday's meeting, told the Taipei Times on condition of anonymity. "Pan will therefore not be in a position to give Chinese officials information on Taiwan's special agents in China," he said.
The lawmaker also claimed that the case reflected political in-fighting within the NSB.
"Some officials belong to the faction of former Director-General Yin Tsung-wen (殷宗文), and Ting apparently cannot assert his authority over them them until Yin steps down from the position of secretary-general of the National Security Council," said KMT lawmaker Hsu Chung-hsiung (徐中雄).
"A rumor in the security services is that Ting will set about reorganizing the NSB, and that may be the reason why officials revealed the Pan story to reporters after Pan arrived in China," Hsu added.
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