Analysis: The Current State of the China-Taiwan Spy War
March 1, 2013 7 Comments
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Last week I spoke about the current state of the espionage war between China and Taiwan with Tim Daiss, a Southeast Asia-based American journalist who has been covering the Asia-Pacific region for over a decade. Our discussion formed the basis of a comprehensive piece on the subject, published in British newspaper The Independent, in two parts (part one and part two). I told Daiss that the Ministry of State Security —China’s primary national intelligence agency— is not known for its technological prowess. However, the sheer size of Beijing’s intelligence apparatus is proving a good match for the more advanced automated systems used by its less populous regional rivals, including Taiwan. When it comes to traditional human intelligence, the Chinese have been known to employ time-tested methods such as sexual entrapment or blackmail, as was confirmed most recently in the case of Taiwanese Major-General Lo Hsien-che. Lo, who headed the Taiwanese military’s Office of Communications and Information, was convicted of sharing classified top-secret information with a female Chinese operative in her early 30s, who held an Australian passport. During his trial, which marked the culmination of Taiwan’s biggest spy scandal in over half a century, Lo admitted that the Chinese female spy “cajoled him with sex and money”. In addition to honey-trap techniques, Chinese spies collect intelligence by way of bribery, as do many of their foreign colleagues. In the case of China, however, a notable change in recent years has been the accumulation of unprecedented amounts of foreign currency, which make it easier for Chinese intelligence operatives to entice foreign assets, such as disgruntled or near-bankrupt state employees, to sell classified data. Read more of this post
China and Taiwan swap jailed spies in historic first
December 1, 2015 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment
News of the spy exchange emerged in the Taiwanese press on Monday, when it was reported that Taipei had released Li Zhihao. Li, a mysterious Chinese intelligence officer known in spy circles as “the man in black”, had been arrested in 1999 after being lured into Taiwan, and was serving a life sentence. He is believed to be 70 years old. In return, Beijing appears to have freed Chu Kung-hsun and Hsu Chang-kuo, two colonels in Taiwan’s Military Information Bureau, who were arrested by mainland China’s counterintelligence nearly a decade ago. At the time of their arrest, the Taiwanese government protested that the two officers had been kidnapped from the Vietnamese side of the Chinese-Vietnamese border. But Beijing had dismissed Taipei’s protestations and had convicted the two men of espionage.
It is worth pointing out that the two Taiwanese officials had initially been sentenced to death, but their sentences were later commuted to 20 years behind bars. It is believed that they were the last Taiwanese military officials held in China for espionage, and that they were the highest-ranked Taiwanese spies imprisoned in China. Their release, therefore, marks an unprecedented development in Chinese-Taiwanese relations, though it should be remembered that dozens of Taiwanese civilians are held in Chinese jails on espionage charges.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 01 December 2015 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with China, Chinese Ministry of State Security, Chu Kung-hsun, Hsu Chang-kuo, imprisoned spy swaps, Li Zhihao, Military Information Bureau (Taiwan), News, Taiwan