By Jens Kastner

本文刊登於2011年1月4日Asia Time online

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/MA04Ad01.html

TAIPEI - For decades, there has hardly been a place more suitable to monitor the rising China than Taiwan. In close proximity to People's Liberation Army (PLA) military bases along China's southeastern coast, the island has long been amassing electronic hardware at air-defense radar stations on top of Yangmingshan, Taipei's iconic recreation mountain.

Being one of the world leaders in information technology, Taiwan arguably has what it takes to field one of the world's most advanced Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. But also when it comes to the gathering of intelligence on the soil of mainland China, the Taiwanese have always had a sizable edge over other countries.

Like Israeli agents who blended into Arab societies in the run-up to the Gulf wars, Taiwanese spies with their shared ethnicity, language and culture can keep a much lower profile in mainland China than their foreign counterparts – with nearly 1 million Taiwanese businesspeople living there making for ideal cover. Yet, after almost three years of relatively Beijing-friendly President Ma Ying-jeou having the say in Taipei, there is speculation that Taiwan is beginning to renounce its role of being other countries' eyes and ears.

Ma, who heralds the concept of "honest diplomacy" when dealing with China, is not only suspected of having stopped recruiting agents to operate on the other side of the Taiwan Strait but also of planning to put the brakes on the sharing of intelligence with the US and Japan, its longtime allies.

As it's in the nature of things that relevant data is hard to come by, scholars and press alike are somewhat left in the dark. To what extent Washington has been tapping intelligence gathered by Taiwan is subject to assumptions, but according to sporadically emerging Taiwanese media reports, a cooperative intelligence-sharing agreement allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) to access information on mainland military communications gathered by Taiwan's signal intelligence (SIGINT) bases.

Defined as intelligence gathering by interception of signals which are often encrypted, SIGINT produces valuable information after cryptanalysis. In addition, significant clues can also often be drawn by evaluating who is signaling whom at what times and in what quantity. Apart from US-Taiwan cooperation in SIGINT and PAVE PAWS – a long-range radar system for missile warning and space surveillance – and the collecting of hydrographic data in the Taiwan Strait, there's word that from the 1960s on, and extending even into the George W Bush era, Taiwan played a role in the setting up of US-run surveillance and reconnaissance facilities targeting China at locations as far-flung as Mongolia, India, Malaysia and Singapore.

Needless to say, the relations the US has with Japan and South Korea are considerably more straightforward than with Taiwan. As the US has an actual military presence in both Japan and South Korea, the sharing of intelligence is largely uncomplicated. By contrast in Taiwan's case, there's only the somewhat vague Taiwan Relations Act sorting the military relationship out. Yet even in the absence of a direct US military presence, intel exchanges with Taiwan, taking place at specific times and adjusted to their purpose, have been common.

Rumors that Taiwan's attitude is currently changing are fueled by the alleged rejection of an US proposal to get Tokyo on the boat in terms of intel sharing. According to recent media reports, Randy Schriver, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, last year held talks with relevant Taiwanese officials in order to persuade Taipei to revive a triangular US-Taiwan-Japan intelligence connection which has been in place since the 1990s. Such an initiative would have fit in well with the Obama administration's "Reengagement in Asia-Pacific" doctrine, which saw the US seeking to strengthen ties especially with South Korea, Japan and even Australia.

Still, the turning down of Schriver's proposal by Taiwan's National Security Council doesn't necessarily mean that the island under Ma is turning its back on the US and its democratic peers in East Asia, or rethinking the practice of intelligence sharing. Ma's known stance that he prefers Washington functioning as the sole power balancer between Taipei and Beijing, leaving no role for Tokyo in cross-strait affairs, could be at least as plausible an explanation.

On January 28 2010, at exactly 1:04 pm, a Taiwanese air-force radar station discovered an unknown aircraft approaching the island's northeastern airspace at a speed of 320 knots. It flew along the edges of Taiwan's air-defense identification zone, which is the area where aircraft are obliged to identify themselves, and briefly entered Taiwanese airspace at 1:15 pm. Then, the mysterious aircraft headed towards Japan. After several days of evaluation, Taiwan came to the conclusion that the intruder has been a Russian TU-95 long-range strategic bomber.

According to speculations on Taiwan's declining willingness to share intelligence, the island could refrain from passing on information on similar incidents in future.

But Taiwanese experts Asia Times Online talked to don't quite think so. And not only because the US or Japan would have likely noticed the Russian bomber before the Taiwanese had anyway.

"Regular intel exchange is going on between Taiwan and relevant countries as far as I know, and there is no interruption at all," says Arthur Ding, a research fellow at the China Politics Division at Taiwan's National Chengchi University.

"Valuable intel gathered by Taiwan is of course exchanged with the US, and there's still a direct data link between the US and Taiwan through PAVE PAWS which would have detected the Russian bomber's intrusion," says Wang Jhy-perng, a military expert with the Association for Managing Defense and Strategies. However, Wang says that although their might be no significant changes in Taiwan's willingness to share intelligence, the sticking point is that both the quantity and quality of information Taiwan might pass on to its traditional allies has decreased significantly during Ma’s tenure. "While the US still wishes to monitor China through Taiwan, much fewer Taiwanese are being sent to China to gather intelligence, which has been resulting in a steep decrease in the amount of valuable information."

Indeed, as sophisticated as Taiwan's electronic eyes and ears might be, the island's human-intelligence network on the ground is said to have been suffering profoundly under President Ma's "sunshine policy". Several recent high-profile cases of active and retired Taiwanese agents allegedly receiving their paychecks from both sides of the Taiwan Straits highlighted an endemic problem within the Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB), and in particular its recruitment practices.

Under Ma, the Taiwanese intelligence community has suffered from high turnovers in staff and from bureaucratic interference, which has prompted the bureau to rely more on businessmen and students as opposed to properly trained and patriotic agents. Consequently, not only the quantity and quality of information has been suffering, but rather worrying is also the agents' lack of loyalty to Taiwan. A businessman or student who casually gathers information in addition to pursuing his actual trade is much more prone to extortion or hostile persuasion, and therefore likelier to become a double agent.

As another indicator on the poor shape Taiwan's intelligence apparatus is in, in early 2009, authorities even felt impelled to do an awkward step forward in order to deny reports that the recruitment of agents to work inside China had been stopped all together.

The question that suggests itself is whether Taiwan, with its rapidly warming cross-strait ties, will continue to be seen as a useful source of valuable information by the US and its allies. If it does not, at what point will Washington's willingness to keep Taipei up to date be affected? Intriguingly, the common man's guess seems as good as that of the experts.

"How I wish I knew, but I don't," answers Professor Gerald Chan, a visiting scholar at the MacArthur Center for Security Studies. "Frankly speaking, I do not know," apologizes Professor Ding. "It's a very interesting question but not easy to answer," sighs Wang, scratching his head.

Wang however adds that from a Taiwanese perspective, no matter how friendly relations with Beijing might become, the need to share intelligence likely won't cease to exist. "Prior to the January incident, Russian bombers hadn't shown up here in a long time," he says.

Jens Kastner is a Taipei-based journalist.