Taiwanese caught up in China espionage cases
Scores of businessmen have been accused of spying and jailed in China, say some who have been held. They blame the island's Military Intelligence Bureau.
TAIPEI, TAIWAN — The Kafkaesque spy world that Taiwanese businessman Song Hsiao-lien says he fell into has left him financially strapped, unemployed and unnerved after nearly four years in a Chinese prison.
Song was further rattled after his release late last year by the discovery in January of a body in Taipei's Dansuie River that turned out to be that of another former accused spy, Jiang jen-shi.
Song says he and Jiang are among scores of businessmen whose lives have been upended over the years by the historic distrust between China and Taiwan, the shaky nature of Taiwan's intelligence community and, in particular, the recruitment practices of the island's Military Intelligence Bureau. By some accounts, 800 Taiwanese are in Chinese jails, many allegedly on trumped up charges.
Experts, some of whom declined to be identified given their work and the topic's sensitivity, say the Taiwanese intelligence community has been hurt by high turnover and bureaucratic muddle, prompting it to rely increasingly on businessmen and students, with serious consequences for the quality of information.
"The intelligence community in Taiwan is in very bad shape," said Wu Yu-shan, an analyst with the Academia Sinica think tank in Taipei, the capital.
Song, 45, says his problems started in early 2002 with a phone call from someone who seemed to know that he was leaving for China and who said he was a travel agent. Song, who was investing in several real estate projects on China's southern Hainan island, agreed to meet him at a Taipei coffee shop. The thirtysomething man, who gave only the surname Fan, was soon joined by his boss, a tall skinny man in his 60s who gave only the surname Huang. A Chinese news release later identified them as Fan Mingjian and Huang Maji.
The pair asked Song to pick up a few routine items in China for them, some newspapers, a magazine, a map. They advanced him $650 for expenses and he returned with the items a few weeks later.
Song returned to Taiwan every few weeks to see his wife and three children. At subsequent meetings, Fan asked Song to provide information about a Hainan military port, and draw pictures of what he had seen, which Song did. Hainan, a tropical resort island, also has several military bases and is where a U.S. EP-3 spy plane was forced to make an emergency landing after a midair collision in 2001. Song says he was still not suspicious.
