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Spook Mountain: How US spies on
China
By Wendell Minnick
TAIPEI - The United States and Taiwan have a
cooperative intelligence-sharing agreement that allows
both the US National  Security Agency (NSA) and Taiwan's National
Security Bureau (NSB) to listen in on mainland Chinese
military communications in both the Nanjing and
Guangzhou military regions. With the assistance of the
NSA, Taiwan has constructed a signal intelligence
(SIGINT) base at Pingtung Lee on Yangmingshan Mountain
just north of Taipei, which has been operating for at
least 15 years.
The fact that it is a US
operation in a country with which it has no diplomatic
ties requires some examination. First, Taiwan's
geographic proximity to China makes it the first choice
for stationing a SIGINT base. Second, Taiwan is pro-US
and shares a mutual fear of Chinese military
expansionism. Third, Taiwan needs an indications and
warning (I&W) system that prevents China from
launching a surprise attack.
First reported by
Jane's Defence Weekly this January, the facility now
appears to have grown more ears. Shortly after the
recent Jane's report, additional antennas were located
by Asia Times Online on Wunjian Mountain near Dazhi just
south of Pingtung Lee. Atol has interviewed a former NSA
official who once worked at Pingtung Lee.
The
former NSA official told Atol: "It is a classified NSA
operation. It is known within the NSA as the SIGINT
Liaison Branch [SLB]. The reason it is so hush-hush,
besides the fact that NSA operations are always
classified, is that NSA is an official US government
agency, and we are not supposed to have any official
representation on Taiwan."
The facility provides
Taiwan the necessary edge to prevent the People's
Republic of China (PRC) from winning a decisive battle
quickly. Data processing from the facility enables
Taiwan to appraise China's current threat status.
Information provided includes details of China's armed
forces, their structure and organization, tactical
doctrine, order of battle, weapons and equipment, and
supporting battlefield functional systems. This includes
how the PRC operates in accordance to its doctrine and
training.
Of special concern are the activities
of the Second Artillery Corps, which has the capability
of unleashing up to 400 Dong Feng-11 (M-11) and DF-15
(M-9) tactical ballistic missiles in multiple-wave and
multidirectional saturation strikes on Taiwan.
Intelligence gathered by the facility provides options
for Taiwan's leaders to interdict and defeat China's
military by maneuver or attack. Taiwan's goal is not
necessarily to inflict serious harm on the mainland with
the use of offensive weapons currently in its arsenal
and those in development, but to force China to abandon
its attack, or compel the United States to enter the
conflict.
In a war, China would first attempt a
"decapitation strategy" that would include missile and
air-force assaults on key military installations and
command, control, communications, computers and
intelligence (C4I). Pingtung Lee would no doubt be the
first site hit. Taiwan and mainland China are separated
by the Taiwan Strait, which is 72 nautical miles at its
closest point and 140 nautical miles at its farthest
point. Chinese warplanes can reach Taiwan in just seven
minutes and Chinese warships in about five hours.
The Pingtung Lee site has 10 antenna masts, of
which six are high-frequency (HF) dipole antennas in a
circular pattern called a "six element" or "fix-six"
arrangement that performs both interception and
direction-finding (DF) tasks. This type of HF-DF antenna
configuration allows Taiwan and the US to monitor
China's military radio communications. There is one
radome on the base, installed in early 1998, that allows
the NSA to uplink data back to the US for further
processing. Prior to that, all SLB communications went
through a nearby commercial satellite dish facility
belonging Chunghwa Telecom. The antenna complex located
by Atol on Wunjian Mountain near Dazhi has the same
"fix-six" configuration, with an additional collection
of several microwaves nearby.
Pingtung Lee is
maintained with the support of Summit Telecom Systems
(STS), a US commercial company based in Maryland, which
conducts operations in Japan, South Korea and the Azores
as one of the numerous "caretaker" companies the NSA
uses to maintain SIGINT sites around the world. The NSA
source told Atol: "Civilian personnel are there only in
a support role. They man the communications center and
maintain the communications equipment, and the station
computers."
One STS employee who served as
"senior liaison" with the Taiwanese government between
1995 and 2000 has provided material describing the
technical aspects of the operation. According to the
information, the base operates "a variety of
special-purpose telecommunication and data-processing
systems".
From 1995-2000 the NSA initiated a
major upgrade and modernization program that "identified
weaknesses in systems architecture, then designed a
large-scale multi-year modernization program which
integrated significant new processing capabilities and
provided a tenfold increase in overall system capacity.
[It] implemented web-based technology as a
cost-effective replacement for dated software processes.
Information that used to require hours or days to
process and report can now be processed and reported in
less than a minute," the STS source said.
The
NSA also improved training and development programs for
Taiwanese running the facility. This endeavor led the
Taiwanese to be "more self-sufficient and less reliant
on external assistance". This shift of authority and
responsibility "enabled US staff to focus on broader
strategic initiatives and has allowed absorption of a
fivefold increase in the number of supported systems
with no increase in staffing".
According to the
STS source, the NSA initiated and designed a major
information-technology (IT) upgrade "which provided [a]
100-fold increase in server capacity and replaced old
LAN [local area network] technology with a high-speed
ATM [asynchronous transfer mode] network ... simplifying
IT architecture and eliminating use of non-standard
proprietary technology in favor of standardized
commercial solutions. [It] mitigated [the] risk of data
loss by instituting off-site backup for critical data
and by redesigning system architecture to provide
redundant systems at single points of failure."
The former NSA source elaborated on the role the
station played in US intelligence-gathering on China.
The source stated that the NSA has "helped the Taiwanese
effort tremendously by providing them with equipment
systems, specialized software, and teaching them a lot
of analytical techniques. The relationship is extremely
important to the US also, because of the growing threat
of the Chinese, and the fact that Taiwan has the
Chinese-language capability while we have so little. A
very large percentage of what the NSA obtains about the
Chinese comes from the Taiwanese operations."
When SIGINT operations in Hong Kong had to
relocate because of the impending 1997 handover to
China, responsibilities were divided between facilities
in Taiwan and Australia. Hong Kong's Stanley Fort
Satellite Station, code-named "Project Kittiwake", at
Chung Hom Kok was moved to Australia in 1993 and placed
under that country's Defense Signals Directorate at
Geraldton, Western Australia. The Chung Hom Kok station
monitored Chinese satellite communications; telemetry
from Chinese ballistic missile tests, and satellite
launches; mission data from intelligence satellites,
which included both electronic intelligence and
photographic intelligence satellites; and domestic
telecommunications downlinked from China's geostationary
satellites.
Radio interception tasks at the
former HF aerial farm at Tai Mo Shan, New Territories,
Hong Kong, was closed and transferred to Pingtung Lee,
Taiwan. With this, Taiwan joined an interconnected
network of HF SIGINT operations that include Kikai-jima,
Japan, with a similar "fix-six" HF-DF antenna system,
and Khon Kaen, Thailand. Geographically, Taiwan is in an
excellent position to assist. Without Taiwan's coverage,
the US SIGINT picture of mainland China would be
critically deficient for the US intelligence community.
Transferring SIGINT responsibilities from one
country to another is not difficult. The UK-USA Security
Agreement, signed in 1947, divided SIGINT collection
responsibilities between the United States and the
United Kingdom (including Commonwealth members
Australia, New Zealand and Canada). This was done to
prevent duplication and to maximize collection
capabilities. The US facility at Pingtung Lee falls
under the responsibility of the NSA. Therefore, data
collected on China must be shared not only with the
Taiwanese, but also with US SIGINT partners, according
to the agreement.
The United States and the
Republic of China (ROC) have had a SIGINT relationship
since World War II, when the US helped the Nationalist
(Kuomintang, or KMT) government in China fight the
Japanese occupation. That rapport continued after the
Nationalists escaped to the island of Taiwan in 1949 to
avoid being destroyed by communist forces.
US
intelligence operations in Taiwan were impressive during
the Cold War. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
based its now-famous Air America, Civil Air Transport
and Air Asia transport operations in Taiwan. The CIA's
Western Enterprises operation to invade China from bases
in Burma (now Myanmar) was also headquartered there.
During the Cold War SIGINT stations were
constructed all over Taiwan. US and ROC intelligence and
military personnel manned these outposts and a limited
amount of data were shared with the ROC government. US
SIGINT operations in Taiwan gave the US crucial data on
the Vietnam War and activities in mainland China.
Cooperative US-ROC SIGINT operations throughout
the Cold War consisted of the US Naval Security Group
Activity, USN-21, in Taipei; US Air Force Security
Service Office, Air Task Force-13 in Taipei; 327th
Communications Reconnaissance Company, US Army Security
Agency, Nan Szu Pu, near Kaohsiung; US Naval Auxiliary
Communications Center under the direction of the CIA;
and U-2s equipped with both photographic and SIGINT
equipment flown by Taiwanese pilots.
As the
Vietnam War began to unwind in the early 1970s, US
military activities in Taiwan began to fold. From
1972-73 the United States closed all SIGINT facilities
except the US Air Force (USAF) Security Service Support
Base, 6987th Security Group, at Linkou, just 10
kilometers northwest of Taipei. It remained under US
military control until 1977.
After US president
Jimmy Carter declared "normalized" relations with the
People's Republic of China in December 1978, all formal
US government organizations in Taiwan were privatized.
The US Embassy was renamed the American Institute in
Taiwan (AIT) in March 1979. The US government turned
over the remaining US intelligence and military
operations to Taiwan or they became covert enterprises
using nationals as cover.
According to a former
USAF technician who worked at Linkou until 1985 as a
civilian contract worker for the ROC military, the
facility was still active at that time. The Linkou
facility was moved to Yangmingshan some time after 1985.
The time and transition from Linkou to
Yangmingshan is unclear, but what is clear is that
Pingtung Lee places Taiwan in a critical role for US
intelligence and regional security interests. If the
United States should lose Taiwan in either a forced or
voluntary "reunification" it would upset US intelligence
gathering, processing and capabilities, and thus greatly
endanger regional security. For this reason, democracy
or no democracy, the US position in its pledge to defend
Taiwan against PRC aggression must be seen in a
different light. Taiwan can no longer be dismissed by
the United States as expendable, but must be considered
an active and pro-US partner in the regional security
and stability of East Asia.
(©2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our
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