A former State Department official at the center of accusations over possible Taiwanese espionage has told associates that he never passed any classified information to contacts from Taiwan, the associates said on Friday.
The former official, Donald Keyser, has also denied that he received any financial compensation for passing information to the Taiwanese, but he has acknowledged that he may have been sloppy in his reporting of foreign contacts.
Keyser, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell on Chinese issues, was charged on Wednesday with not reporting a secret side trip he made to Taiwan last year during an official government trip to Japan, and officials say they suspect that he passed delicate information to Taiwanese contacts in Washington.
Neither he nor his lawyer has made any public comments since his arrest, and Keyser's private comments to associates offer the first hint of a possible defense.
In an affidavit in the case, the FBI said agents who had Keyser under surveillance saw him giving documents to two Taiwanese government contacts at meetings in the Washington area in July and August, just after he had resigned from the State Department. One such document was marked "Discussion Topics," the FBI said.
The affidavit said Keyser had told the FBI that he would often prepare written "talking points" for his two Taiwanese contacts. Keyser went further in his assertions this week to associates, saying that he never shared any classified information with the Taiwanese.
The associates who have had contact with him since his arrest worked with him in government and were generally admiring of his work, but did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the case.
While the longtime foreign service officer has been charged only with making false statements to the government by concealing his trip to Taiwan in 2003, investigators are continuing to pursue broader espionage accusations as well.
Keyser also faced accusations of a security breach in 1999, when he and five other employees were disciplined over a missing laptop that contained secret information.
Still, his arrest this week shocked many former colleagues at the State Department, who described him as a committed public servant.
Keyser, 61, was first commissioned as a foreign service officer at the State Department in 1972 and over the years held senior positions in Washington as well as in US embassies in Japan and China.
He held top-secret security clearance and was promoted in January to principal deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs before stepping down in July.
During his years in the State Department, Keyser never showed any favoritism or bias toward Taiwan in its continuing diplomatic tension with China, associates and former colleagues said. If he had, they added, he would have stood out in the foreign service.
"I don't know of any senior officials who are pro-Taiwan," one former senior State Department official said.
He and others said foreign service officers largely view some Taiwanese officials' struggle to stay separate from China as a distrac-tion, when the truly important relationship for the US is China.
Carl Ford Jr, an assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research until he retired last year, worked directly with Keyser. He agreed that few if any State Department officials were openly pro-Taiwan.
He added that a handful of them "are at least neutral. And Don was very much down the middle. That did set him apart from the others."
Ford, like others interviewed, said he was "more than surprised" to learn of Keyser's arrest. "I found it incredible. I never saw him as disloyal," Ford said.
Ted Gallen Carpenter, an East Asia expert at the Cato Institute in Washington, said he encountered Keyser often at conferences and other events.
"He always struck me as balanced and prudent in his approach," he said.
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