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CCP official
‘honeybaited’ by Taiwan: cable
LOOKING-GLASS WAR: News that former Chinese
officials may have been seduced by an alleged Taiwanese spy came as a newspaper
wrote China was opening ‘spy schools’
By J. Michael Cole / Staff Reporter
When Chinese authorities announced that former Chinese minister of finance Jin
Renqing (金人慶) was stepping down in August 2007, they claimed he was doing so for
“personal reasons.” According to a series of classified US diplomatic cables
recently released by Wiki-Leaks, the real reason behind Jin’s resignation was
his romantic involvement with a woman who was linked to several other prominent
Chinese officials. That woman, it is alleged, was a Taiwanese intelligence
operative.
One of the cables, sent by the US consulate in Shanghai and dated Sept. 7, 2007,
described how some members of the top echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
would pass mistresses around and how one woman — described by a US official as
“a promiscuous socialite” — had been involved romantically with at least three
of them.
Aside from Jin, former Sinopec Corp (中國石化) chairman Chen Tonghai (陳同海) and
former Chinese minister of agriculture Du Qinglin (杜青林) were suspected of ties
with the woman.
Du resigned abruptly in 2006, while Chen was sentenced to death with a two-year
reprieve in July 2009 in a corruption case involving millions of US dollars.
After his resignation, the Chinese State Council transferred Jin to a government
think tank, where he was made deputy chief.
“The woman had been introduced to these men as ‘someone working with a Chinese
military intelligence department,’” the cable said.
As it turns out, the woman, whose identity is not revealed in the cables, was
believed to be more than a “social butterfly” and might in fact have been a
Taiwanese intelligence operative. Her fate remains unknown.
Asked for comment about possible involvement by Taiwan in the case, Ministry of
National Defense spokesperson David Lo (羅紹和) referred the Taipei Times to the
National Security Bureau (NSB), saying it was in a better position to discuss
such matters. Other defense officials said after looking at the report that it
was policy not to comment on WikiLeaks cases.
Officials at the NSB, Taiwan’s main civilian spy agency, would not comment.
Known in intelligence lingo as a “honey trap,” the use of female operatives to
extract information from, or compromise, targets on the opponent’s side is an
age-old practice used time and again by various intelligence.
In one recent case, described as Taiwan’s worst espionage incident in the past
half century, Major General Lo Hsien-che (羅賢哲) was alleged to have been
recruited, while stationed in Thailand between 2002 and 2005, by a “tall,
beautiful and chic” young Chinese agent in her early 30s.
Indicted last month for spying for China, Lo’s espionage might have included
passing information on the Po Sheng (“Broad Victory”) program, an umbrella
project to modernize Taiwan’s C4ISR capabilities, to his Chinese handlers.
In related developments, a British newspaper reported that China had opened a
series of “spy schools” amid efforts to substantially increase the training and
recruitment of agents.
The report, published on Friday in the Telegraph, said China’s program began in
2008 with the founding of the first Intelligence College at Nanjing University
and a second in Guangdong Province at the end of last year.
These efforts have accelerated as China recently opened its eighth National
Intelligence College at Hunan University in Changsha City, Hunan Province, with
similar schools opening on university campuses in Beijing, Shanghai, Xian,
Qingdao and Harbin since January, the report said.
The new schools seek to transform and modernize the Chinese intelligence
services and produce intelligence officers who are “trained in the latest
methods of data collection and analysis,” the report said.
Each school recruits between 30 and 50 carefully screened undergraduates each
year, it said.
Commenting on the establishment of one such intelligence college at Fudan
University in Shanghai, a spokesman at the university told the Telegraph that
the effort was “in response to the urgent need for special skills to conduct
intelligence work in the modern era.”
Cao Shujin (曹樹金), deputy dean of the Zhongshan National Intelligence College,
told the paper that after students spent a year studying information management,
they could elect to switch to the Intelligence College.
The new colleges are “nothing for the West to worry about,” Cao said.
“We are just trying to provide the right sort of skills for our requirements,”
he said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY VINCENT Y. CHAO
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