20110215 PRC espionage and carrier program

PRC espionage and carrier program

By Reuben Johnson

Reports in the Ukrainian newspaper Seyvodnya (Today) and other news outlets in the country said that a Russian national, Aleksandr Yermakov, had been giving a six-year prison term following his conviction on charges of spying on behalf of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Had Yermakov’s mission been completed, it could have significantly accelerated the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) effort to field its own operational aircraft carrier.

“An operational Chinese carrier — and the ability of China to extend the range of its strike aircraft — could measurably complicate any scenario for the defense of the Republic of China [ROC] on Taiwan, or US assistance of that defense in the event of an attack by the mainland,” a Pentagon source familiar with the PLAN carrier program said. “The ROC is without question the big loser if the PLAN gained a carrier force.”

Specifically, Yermakov had been stealing classified information related to the Ukrainian Nazemniy Ispitatelno--Tryenirovochniy Kompleks Aviatsii (Land-based Naval Aviation Testing and Training Complex), or NITKA, which is located in the Crimea near the city of Saki. This facility was built when Ukraine was one of the vassal states of the former Soviet Union and was developed to train carrier pilots. It remains today the only one of its kind in the world.

The NITKA facilities are an essential land-based installation for any nation operating one of the Russian-designed carriers that utilize a ski ramp for take-off instead of the steam catapult used on US and French aircraft carriers, and an arresting cable/tailhook landing system. The two carriers of this type in the world are the Russian Navy’s Admiral Kuznetsov, and its sister ship, the Varyag, acquired from Ukraine by the PLAN in 1998.

A Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) counterintelligence officer, who spoke to news outlets and was only identified as “Oleg N,” provided extensive details on Yermakov’s activities and said he had been assisted by his 35-year old son. His son had registered “an off-shore zoned company that provided services in the sphere of arms deliveries,” the officer said, adding that its company profile described it as a provider of “a full spectrum of military-technical, testing methods and design information based on the initiatives of received orders.”

Arms dealers who act as middlemen between the Ukrainian authorities and export customers typically register these firms in Cyprus or other nations where it is relatively easy to create a corporation that is licensed to deal in the trading of weapons or defense-related technology. (A colleague researching another story on Eastern European arms trafficking once told me that he had discovered “an address in Cyprus with more than 800 arms trading firms registered at just that one location.”)

The SBU would not officially specify the PRC as the intelligence service behind the attempted penetration of the NITKA facility, but would only say that the nation in question was “in the Southeastern Asian region.” However, the Ukrainian daily confirmed that China’s espionage services were directing Yermakov’s activities “had been provided by diplomatic sources.”

Yermakov had reportedly been providing China with defense-related technology for a period of about 10 years.

“At the request of his Beijing comrades he had identified former military personnel, defense industry specialists from Russia, Ukraine and other nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States to travel to the PRC to participate in scientific seminars and symposiums, which were organized under the guise of tourist excursions. For each one of these ‘tourists,’ Yermakov received up to US$1,500,” the newspaper said.

However, operational gathering of information on NITKA crossed the line between the semi-legal recruiting of experts to travel to the PRC and impart what they knew and illegal, active espionage. Chinese intelligence had promised to pay the father-son team US$1 million for the delivery of documentation on this training facility and its operations in the form of drawings, digital photos and information on flash drives. As preparation for the operation, “Yermakov’s son made several trips to the PRC, where he visited People’s Liberation Army Navy facilities and met with their representatives,” the paper said.

The PLAN acquired the Varyag from the Nikolayev shipyards in 1998 for only US$20 million, using a Chinese tourism company as a cover for the sale. The original Chinese buyers had promised the ship would be turned into a casino and entertainment complex to be moored in Macau, but the ship was soon moved to the Dalian shipyards, where it has been undergoing a refit for several years.

“The Chinese need their own NITKA” for training their own carrier pilots, Ukrainian news sources reported, “and they have already begun building their own complex.”

Yermakov had proposed this construction “could be accelerated by utilizing these documents from Ukraine.”

Currently, the PLAN is building a massive carrier pilot training base at Xingcheng, Liaoning Province. Other facilities for training of carrier personnel and engineering support specialists have been built in Xian, Shanxi Province. The Xingcheng facility is a near duplicate of the design of NITKA in Ukraine.

The SBU and diplomatic sources who spoke to Seyvodnya state that in addition to “digital data, drawings, and construction documents, the Russian duo had prepared some 1,500 A4-size pages of documents to hand over to Chinese intelligence.” This information had a value “to the national interests of Ukraine in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

This case is not the first time China’s espionage service has tried to purloin information about the NITKA facility. Last year, several Ukrainians from the city of Zaparozhe, including a military officer, were sentenced to prison for attempting to sell information on the same base. A senior Chinese colonel involved in the operation named Yao Tzunu was also given a five-year sentence. However, because of his diplomatic immunity, he was instead expelled from Ukraine.

This expulsion occurred in mid-July last year, but the incident was kept under wraps at Beijing’s request. Ukrainian defense industry and intelligence sources have suggested that “there has been an attempt to downplay this incident because it could be bad for business overall. Many of the components for the Russian-designed Sukhoi Su-27SK and Su-30MKK aircraft operated by PRC armed forces come from here in Ukraine and there is no desire to disrupt this very profitable trade.”

Moreover, Ukraine has been central to the Chinese effort to copy the Su-27-series of aircraft sold by Russia. Chinese production of what Russian authorities call the “illegal” copy of the Su-27, the J-11B, is assisted by Ukrainian industry in the form of major subsystems. Additionally, a prototype of the carrier version of this aircraft, the Su-27K, was also acquired by China from Ukraine and has now been replicated in the form of the Shenyang J-15. Once the Varyag is operational, a wing of J-15s will form part of the ship’s strike element.

Reuben Johnson is a correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly, the Weekly Standard and the Washington Times, based in Kiev, Ukraine.