China’s spilled secrets

By David Wise, the author, most recently, of Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War with China (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 06/09/11):

A Chinese spy story with a reverse twist surfaced in Beijing last week, providing further evidence that China’s rulers are having trouble maintaining their tight control over the Internet.

Maj. Gen. Jin Yinan of the People’s Liberation Army, in what he apparently thought was an internal briefing, revealed half a dozen cases of Chinese officials who had spied for Britain, the United States and other countries. Somehow, the video of his sensational disclosures leaked out. Clips of his hours-long talk appeared on at least two Chinese websites, Youku.com and Tudou.com, but were quickly removed by government censors.

It was too late. The extraordinary video is on YouTube and can be viewed the world over, although not in China, where YouTube is blocked.

The video is the latest example of how in a wired world, China’s government is beginning to lose its grip over the Internet and news events. When two high-speed trains crashed in July, sending four cars plunging off a viaduct, killing 40 people and injuring about 200, millions of microbloggers in China responded through the popular website Sina Weibo. Many vigorously protested the government’s handling of the disaster.

In his talk, Jin, head of a department at the National Defense University, revealed details, many previously classified, of the espionage cases. The most prominent official he identified as a spy was Kang Rixin, the former head of China’s nuclear power program and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, who was sentenced to life in prison last year for taking bribes.

But the general said the real story was that Kang sold secrets about the power industry to an unnamed foreign country. The details were too embarrassing to be made public, Jin said, because “the damage he has done by selling secrets was a lot more devastating than economic losses.”

According to Jin, Lu Jianhua, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, passed information to five foreign governments, including the U.S., Japan and Taiwan. He was sentenced to 20 years.

But it was when Jin talked about Li Bin, China’s former ambassador to South Korea, that his voice shook with indignation. Li was detained in 2007 but only “lightly sentenced” to seven or eight years on economic charges. “We could only talk about his involvement in economic problems in public,” Jin said, “because the case was much too humiliating and damaging to make public. Have you ever heard of an ambassador spying for a foreign country?”

According to the general, the information Li gave to South Korea had compromised China’s negotiating position in the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons. The data, he said, “seriously compromised” China’s national security.

On the list of spies, Jin included Col. Xu Junping, who defected in New York in 2000 while traveling with a Chinese military delegation. Xu had been a visiting scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; he had also spent a year at Bath University in Britain and spoke near-perfect English. At the time he defected, Xu was director of the Chinese Defense Ministry’s liaison office for the U.S. According to Jin, he would have been able to provide valuable information about the thinking of China’s senior military leaders, their personalities “and their habits in making decisions.” He was the highest-ranking defector from the PLA.

Another spy identified by Jin was Cai Xiaohong, who had been a senior official in Beijing’s liaison office with Hong Kong before Britain handed over the territory to China in 1997. Cai was sentenced to 15 years in 2004 for passing state secrets to British intelligence well before the hand-over.

Jin also referred to Tong Daning, a Chinese social security official, who was convicted of spying for Taiwan and executed in 2006. Tong was a senior official in the multibillion-dollar pension fund. Chinese civil servants were reportedly required to watch videos of his trial to deter others from engaging in espionage.

In his videotaped talk, the general deplored what he described as a moral decline, the result of economic reforms and the opening up of China’s institutions. He warned that the government would have to be on alert to detect and prevent more espionage cases.

When Jin gave his talk, and exactly how it leaked out to the Internet, was not made clear. Although China has often charged bureaucrats with corruption and fired several after the 2008 tainted-milk scandal and the recent high-speed train wreck, it has rarely identified its officials as foreign spies.

That in turn raises an interesting question. Although it has been widely assumed that Jin’s talk got out by mistake, it is at least possible that the leak was deliberate, an effort by the PLA to embarrass China’s political leadership and to remind it of the military’s power. Or it may have been a ploy by the PLA, which has its own intelligence service, to rattle the MSS, the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence service responsible for catching spies. The spies, it is true, were caught, but only after they had done their damage.

The back story — just how the videotape got out — remains uncertain. But given the Chinese government’s obsession with secrecy, a more likely scenario is that someone deep inside the bureaucracy decided that despite the risk of being caught, the spy story deserved to be shared on the Internet.

Fuente: Bitácora Almendrón. Tribuna Libre © Miguel Moliné Escalona

Security Before Politics

By Porter J. Goss, a Republican, director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006 and was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004 (THE WASHINGTON POST, 25/04/09):

Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

– The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
– We understood what the CIA was doing.
– We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
– We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
– On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately — to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser — and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

Circuses are not new in Washington, and I can see preparations being made for tents from the Capitol straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, “Why don’t we have better overseas capabilities?” I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat — or God forbid, another successful attack — captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.

Unfortunately, much of the damage to our capabilities has already been done. It is certainly not trust that is fostered when intelligence officers are told one day “I have your back” only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it. After the events of this week, morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.
We must not forget: Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.

The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate. The terrorists captured by the CIA perfected the act of beheading innocents using dull knives. Khalid Sheik Mohammed boasted of the tactic of placing explosives high enough in a building to ensure that innocents trapped above would die if they tried to escape through windows. There is simply no comparison between our professionalism and their brutality.

Our enemies do not subscribe to the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. “Name, rank and serial number” does not apply to non-state actors but is, regrettably, the only question this administration wants us to ask. Instead of taking risks, our intelligence officers will soon resort to wordsmithing cables to headquarters while opportunities to neutralize brutal radicals are lost.

The days of fortress America are gone. We are the world’s superpower. We can sit on our hands or we can become engaged to improve global human conditions. The bottom line is that we cannot succeed unless we have good intelligence. Trading security for partisan political popularity will ensure that our secrets are not secret and that our intelligence is destined to fail us.

Fuente: Bitácora Almendrón. Tribuna Libre © Miguel Moliné Escalona