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EDITORIAL: Spying
cases lose-lose for Taiwan
For the optimists who believed that China would wind down its aggressive
behavior as relations between Taipei and Beijing improved under President Ma
Ying-jeou (馬英九), a series of spy scandals in recent years might have brought
them back to sobriety.
Relations in the Taiwan Strait show signs of improvement under Ma, but China has
not abandoned the military option, continuing its impressive arms build-up and
modernization program. So, while Taipei has instructed the Ministry of National
Defense to focus more on natural catastrophes, the People’s Liberation Army has
continued to develop strategies and tactics directly relevant to an invasion of
Taiwan.
The same has occurred on the espionage front, with key defense systems becoming
the target of intelligence collection by Chinese handlers and their agents. Two
areas of crucial importance to Taiwan — the Po Sheng and the Anyu
command-and-control modernization programs — have repeatedly been attacked by
Chinese agents. Given that air defense would play a major role in any armed
conflict between the two countries, it is unsurprising that China would try to
compromise those systems by recruiting sources within the military.
Among the most famous espionage cases involving Taiwan’s command, control,
communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR)
capabilities in recent years are those of Gregg Bergersen and Kuo Tai-shen
(郭台生); army general Lo Hsien-che (羅賢哲); and an air force captain surnamed Chiang
(蔣), who was arrested earlier this week.
Forced into damage-control mode after news of Chiang’s arrest was made public on
Wednesday, the ministry argued that lessons learned from the Lo case had allowed
the ministry to catch Chiang — who reportedly was working in conjunction with
his uncle, who does business in China — before any serious damage could be done
to national security.
Although there might be some validity to this claim, the case nevertheless risks
causing serious harm to US confidence in Taiwan’s ability to protect its secrets
from prying Chinese eyes.
This inevitably raises the question of whether, amid the counter-intelligence
successes, there might be other cases that we do not know about, of spies who
remain undetected and are passing on damaging secrets to China.
For Taiwan, this creates a “lose-lose” situation. Publicizing successes draws
attention to the serious problem of Chinese espionage, while an absence of
success gives the impression that security in the armed forces is lax.
Conversely, for China, sustaining the intelligence war against Taiwan is a
win-win strategy, as success allows it to penetrate its adversary’s military
systems, while failures — those who get caught — undermine the image of Taiwan
as a place where secrets can be kept. As a result, Taiwan’s allies, which in the
military sector means predominantly the US, could be both impressed by Taipei’s
counter-intelligence capabilities while at the same time becoming increasingly
wary of sharing sensitive technologies and information with it — not so much
because Taiwan is doing a bad job, but solely from the sheer volume of
intelligence operations targeting it.
Just as with terrorism, a target can protect itself successfully 99 percent of
the time, but all it takes is for one group of attackers to slip through the net
to cause serious damage. This is the unforgiving nature of counter-intelligence,
a task that growing political, economic and social ties between Taiwan and China
in recent years has made all the more formidable.
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