As cases of Chinese espionage emerge, Taiwan must respond by “depoliticizing” the issue and recognize the fact that anyone could potentially become a spy for China, an analyst told a seminar in Washington on Thursday.
There is a need to “recognize that anyone can be a victim. Anyone can make that choice. It doesn’t matter where they come from,” Peter Mattis, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst, said at the event organized by the Global Taiwan Institute.
People who worked for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and national security organizations, as well as people on the Democratic Progressive Party side “have chosen to spy for some reason or another,” Mattis said, citing a case of alleged espionage involving a former assistant who worked for National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) during Wu’s time as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2018 to last year.
Photo: Cheng I-hwa, AFP
“This is why, to me, it is a tragedy that you have an aide to Wu, or that you have someone who worked in the Legislative Yuan for so long, who was spying for the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Mattis said.
Whether it is “a blue spy, green spy, white spy, it doesn’t matter what kind of spy, as long as it hurts Taiwan, it’s a good spy,” he said, an apparent reference to the “cat theory” of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), a pragmatic economic philosophy that can be summarized as: “it does not matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
Taiwan should handle the spying situation with great caution, and establish objective standards of behavior and security procedures that “allow people to have a clear set of expectations, what’s acceptable, what’s not, and also the rules to remove people from sensitive positions,” Mattis said.
Besides the issue of espionage, he raised concerns about Chinese military exercises at a range in Inner Mongolia that simulated the surroundings of the Presidential Office in Taipei.
The CCP has been placing a persistent focus on Taiwan’s military police command and, therefore, presidential security, he said.
“This, to me, is quite concerning, because there is an importance of a national leader, and this is a very clear and deliberate effort to make sure that they have real-time awareness of the president’s security detail,” he said.
Other key speakers at the two-hour seminar, titled “Enhancing US-Taiwan Cooperation in Countering the CCP’s Ideological Work and Political Warfare,” included Mike Studeman, former commander of the US Office of Naval Intelligence and a retired rear admiral, and Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at RAND Corp.
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