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The Men in Black: How Taiwan spies on
China
By Wendell Minnick
 TAIPEI - Taiwan has long had an
excellent reputation for gathering intelligence on
China's activities. President Chen Shui-bian's
declaration
on November 30 that China had exactly
496 missiles aimed at Taiwan is a good example. He cited
the numbers as justification for the forthcoming
referendum, asking voters whether China should redirect
its missiles. What was staggering to most analysts was
not the exact number, but Chen's identification of the
number of missiles per base.
Chen identified the
number of operational short-range ballistic missiles
(SRBM) within 600 kilometers: Leping base (96) and
Ganxian (96) in Jiangxi province; Meizhou (96) in
Guangdong province; and Yongan (144) and Xianyou (64) in
Fujian province. Chen's office later pointed out that
intelligence reports indicated that none of China's
cruise missiles were available on the bases and that
none of the missiles aimed at Taiwan were armed with
nuclear warheads. The missiles were identified as four
types of SRBM: DF-11 (M-11) DF-11A (Mod 2), DF-15 (M-9)
and a DF-15 variant.
So how does Taiwan come up
with such precise information?
The answer lies
mostly with Taiwan's human intelligence resources, known
as HUMINT. The Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB),
jokingly referred to as the "Men In Black", recruits
from a large pool of over 500,000 Taiwanese businessmen
living and working inside China. Because Taiwan
businessmen have invested around US$100 billion in
China, this makes China hesitant to go around
arbitrarily arresting them.
Expatriate Taiwanese
are not the only source for the MIB. The mainland
Chinese Global Times, published by the People's Daily,
reported in 2001 that Taiwanese agents were recruiting
local Chinese with sex, money and a third method dubbed
the "democratic-justice" technique that appeals to those
who feel victimized by Beijing government policies. A
lopsided male-to-female ratio, low government salaries
and disgruntled government employees in a corrupt
bureaucracy, make China a spy recruiter's dream.
It was a disgruntled government employee who
played the key role in China's biggest espionage scandal
since the end of the civil war in 1949. In 1999 China
executed two senior army officers, major general Liu
Lian-kun and brigadier general Shao Zheng-zhong, by
lethal injection for spying for Taiwan. Liu's motivation
for spying was his bitterness at being unfairly
implicated in a corruption probe and thus denied a
promotion. It is believed that shortly after the
scandal, Liu traveled to Hong Kong in the early 1990s
and met with the MIB station chief. Liu and Shao were
arrested shortly after China's 1996 missile tests over
the Taiwan Strait. They had provided information that
the three missiles fired near the island were armed with
dummy warheads, a fact that was reported in the press
after then-president Lee Teng-hui publicly disclosed the
information. It angered China into launching a
full-scale probe, and Liu and Shao were quickly rounded
up. Their deaths served as a reminder of the danger of
sharing intelligence with the public.
When Chen
Shui-bian made a similar disclosure exposing China's
missile capabilities in November, China once again
launched a dragnet to find those responsible. It is too
early to tell whether they found their prey, but in
December reports began to filter out of China of
Taiwanese spy networks being swept up. Approximately 24
Taiwanese, and an unknown number of Chinese, were
arrested in Guangdong, Hainan, Anhui, and Fujian
provinces. One of them, Wang Chang-yung, told reporters
from his Fujian jail cell that he had agreed to work for
the MIB in 2002 due to financial problems. Another
Taiwanese, Chang Keng-huan, also admitted to working for
the MIB for money.
Unhappiness in the
intelligence community over President Chen's public
comment on the 496 missiles has been evident. To make
matters worse, it weakened a long-established
intelligence-sharing relationship between Taiwan and the
US. Information is regularly shared with US intelligence
agencies on a number of fronts, including signal
intelligence. There is some speculation that Taiwan and
the US also share information gathered by Taiwanese
businessmen working in North Korea.
One
complaint voiced by Taiwanese intelligence officials is
that there has been a decrease in intelligence gathered
on China since 2000, when Chen was elected as president.
As a member - and now head - of the Democratic
Progressive Party, Chen was a vocal supporter of an
independent Taiwan before the 2000 election.
Intelligence officials believe that one method of
recruiting agents was the argument that they would be
assisting with the eventual reunification of the two
countries. With Chen's election came a new perspective
that Taiwan was no longer pro-China or pro-unification.
China has also changed the focus of what it dubs
a Taiwan spook. During the 1989 Tiananmen Square
crackdown - a massacre of peaceful pro-democracy
demonstrators - Chinese authorities blamed "Kuomintang
agents" for inciting the protests. However, since Chen's
election, the label has shifted to "Taiwanese spies".
The propaganda move reflects the very real shift, both
politically and culturally, of a new Taiwanese identity
emerging on the island.
The Military
Intelligence Bureau, or "Men in Black", has suffered
some setbacks as well - not only in China, but also at
home. In November 2003 former MIB officer Tseng Chao-wen
and a current MIB officer, Chen Suei-chung, were
arrested for spying for China. The two were accused of
supplying China with intelligence that Tseng sent by
ciphered messages from convenience store fax machines.
Police discovered a codebook inside Tseng's home. MIB
officials began focusing on Tseng after he made contact
with MIB intelligence officers working in Beijing. Then
in December another MIB employee, Pan Chin-yang, was
arrested while supplying intelligence to China. All were
motivated to spy for financial reasons, they said.
The problem with human spies is that they are
erratic. Though they can provide details that electronic
intelligence gathering devices cannot collect,
information is difficult to verify. Taiwan's lack of
electronic intelligence devices, compared to their
extensive use in the West, only means that it must rely
more on the human element. Another problem with
espionage is that professional spies are predictable -
but the covert world is full of amateurs.
Wendell Minnick is the Jane's Defense
Weekly correspondent for Taiwan and the author of
Spies and Provocateurs: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of
Persons Conducting Espionage and Covert Action
(McFarland 1992). He can be contacted at
janesroc@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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