Part 2: Spies and Provocateurs
30 Years of Spooks and Kooks - Rape and Rumpus - Lover of Tragedy, Not Romance
#17
7 September 2022
Part 2: Spies and Provocateurs
30 Years of Spooks and Kooks - Rape and Rumpus - Lover of Tragedy, Not Romance
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - At some airshows and defense expos the defense journalists, as a fraternal joke, took turns playing mind games with the North Korean delegation with their weird haircuts and gaudy ill-fitting suits. They were listed as part of the Chinese delegation, but they behaved like a chain-gang wandering from booth to booth grabbing brochures. Covered in sweat, each holding two huge paper bags stuffed with brochures, we would take turns sniping at them all day: “Kim Il-sung sucks” or “Kim Jong-un is bèndàn”. It was a coordinated, but not coordinated, mind fuck. Everywhere they wandered, there would be at least one of us in that area doing our jobs - interviewing someone, taking photographs, being lied to by the PR people.
Teasing, taunting, terrorizing the North Koreans was fun, but when a fellow trickster got a copy of their real names in Korean with plans of publishing it, I took the paper, tore it up, and explained why. They most likely would end up in gulags when they returned to Pyongyang. That is when I hung up my trickster hat. I would not endanger the lives of men and their families solely on their forced allegiance to a despotic regime. The idea they might all be sent to a brutal gulag was no longer a trickster stunt, but as an accomplice to murder in my book. Perhaps it was the Jew in me, but I would not allow it. I have engaged North Korean front companies and disrupted their agency, but all the names were cutouts in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. You had to dig deep into the documents to find the original owner in Pyongyang (if indeed that was their real name).
But things can go haywire in darker ways. When you find a front company and things go sideways, the journalist becomes the prey and your story becomes a nightmare. Not because it was wrong, but because it was absolutely fucking right.
There is a phrase in Asia that defines how far you can fuck with someone’s life: don’t break their rice bowl. Rice is simply one meal, but the bowl is the thing that carries their food and makes it possible to eat. When you shut down a front company of an “evil” entity (Iran, North Korea, pedophile adoption agency), you are making enemies with entities that might use violence in retaliation. AND, they never forget you, ever. Going to the police for help is useless. Confucian logic does not work in a proactive manner beyond the political mandates of extreme political leadership (Burma, Cambodia, China).
Today’s “woke” or “progressive” Western journalists see violence as passé, something that can be stamped out by shaming, doxing, canceling. The truth is that you have to embrace violence: “I have been running away from violence my whole life. I should have been running towards it. It's in our nature. Earliest human skeletons had spearheads in their heads and ribcages,” remarked the main character from the 2005 movie Lord of War. Further, “You can fight a lot of enemies and survive. But if you fight your biology, you will always lose.”
But it was Janet Malcolm in her 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer, that redefined journalism for me: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
The book was a pivotal work on the psychopathology of journalism.
Malcolm pulled the mask off journalists who feign integrity and self-esteem: “Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public's right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”
Malcolm shattered my thinking. Is journalism psychopathy? What happened to the Hegelian dialectic of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis? Journalists celebrate Hegel’s model to no end.
Would Aporia be better? Though twisted, the method does send a message; exempli gratia: Perhaps psychologist Carl Jung was wise in keeping a loaded pistol next to his bed? Everyone, including monsters, deserve a good night’s sleep…
Would poetic Aporia be more honest, even though it would be an arrogant inversion, like the upside down crucifix of horror movies? What conclusion comes from that, whether Synthesis or not? After all, the most delusional trope in this business is “a good journalist asks the tough questions.”
New journalists do not realize it but every time they write a story they invite people into their lives. The journalist will have forgotten the story written ten years prior, but the subject of the story has not. Perhaps that person lost their job, security clearance revoked, wife and kids gone via a humiliating divorce…on and on. People do not forget your name, even though you, the journalist, have moved on to another deadline.
This is what happened after writing a story based on the drunken rantings of a man working on contract for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) at the signal intelligence facility on Yangmingshan Mountain at Pingtun Li. The facility intercepts Chinese military radio communications and is a joint U.S.-Taiwan National Security Bureau (NSB) program.
The source was a “drinking buddy”. Angry at the world, but who was not? Part of today’s nihilistic worldview. He was close enough in my life to drop by the apartment and was a always a gentleman to my girlfriend. He seemed reasonable until drunk, then an insane level of rage was switched on. His anger stemmed from his current paycheck, his career status after retirement from the U.S. military, divorce, and on and on. Alcohol fueled his anger. But nothing was more like nitrous oxide than Bacardi 151° (75.5% alcohol by volume), banned in 2016 as literally a fire hazard.
Then one night he gave me an envelope. It had details of the facility, the names of personnel, and evidence of the NSA-NSB relationship. I followed their morning bus to the work site later that week to confirm.
U.S. NSA - Taiwan NSB Signal Intelligence facility on Yangmingshan Mountain. Author Photograph.
Personnel data included in the envelope:
ABOVE/BELOW: Cropped and redacted personnel data for transparency regarding source material. The personnel sample for this article is NOT the same person that provided the material. Author collection.
The legendary Desmond Ball came to Taiwan later that Fall and I took him to the facility to survey the antennas and photograph the base. He said that when the Five Eyes knew they would lose Hong Kong in 1997, they would have to find a new home for their satellite station at Stanley Fort (Project Kittiwake/Chung Hom Kok) and the aerial radio intercept station at Tai Mo Shan Village in the New Territories. Some of the intake was moved to Taiwan. But it was unclear to him, until seeing tall high-frequency direction-finding antennas at the site, where it had run off to. Some of the Kittiwake satellite interception capabilities were most likely moved to Pingtun Li where there are 40 satellite dishes of various sizes (both defense and commercial) located directly across from a coffee shop/restaurant ironically dubbed Secret Garden.
Ball was a bit of a soul mate. We both shared the internal conflict and the consequences of writing about intelligence operations and then actually protecting other operations. By both guarding secrets and exposing secrets when it became necessary. Our conflicting worldview was not something either of us ignored, but debated endlessly on a broad range of ethics. Ball had provided covert assistance to Burmese rebels and served as an advisor to the Thai border intelligence units along the rugged border with Burma. At the same time wrote some the greatest tomes on intelligence operations ever produced.
My “drinking buddy” working at the facility knew I worked for Jane’s Defence Weekly and knew what I would do with material in the envelope. So after several months of confirming much of the data, I did it…
The problem is that I never asked for the envelope. We talked about the base a lot, as it was largely an open secret in my world. But I was hungry to break a big story for Jane’s. Make a name for myself. I placated my conscious by contacting the Defense Attache Office (DAO) at the American Institute of Taiwan (AIT) to ask whether they would like to inspect the rough draft and if there were any requests to redact, I would do so. AIT declined.
On 24 January 2001, Jane’s Defense Weekly published “Taiwan-USA Link Up on SIGINT”. I was already in the U.S. during my annual visit. Two weeks of snowy days and nights, covered bridges, bonfires and beers with my old hunting buddies. My then girlfriend would continue working at her job, nest while I was gone, visit friends for coffee, whatever. For the first week, e-mails bounced back and forth. Nothing out of the ordinary…then silence.
D.H. Lawrence perfectly quantified existential threats and American morality: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
I believe this is endemic in the American male psyche.
That is what kicks-in when you face the existential abyss that Nietzsche had warned: “He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
According to my personal journal, when my plane landed in Taoyuan just after 9pm, I tried to call her at the airport. Nothing. After an hour in the taxi, I arrived at the front door. When I twisted the key, pushing the door open, I could smell it. I did not even bring my luggage inside.
I walked around. Dried blood all over the bed. Dried blood all over the sink and toilet. Her little footprints from the bed to the bathroom plastered on the ceramic floor. Her red hand prints on the walls like art from a caveman. Her belongings, clothes, personal items, all gone. She had packed and left.
Except for a coffee a few months later, I was able to confirm the gory details, I never saw her again.
When she had lived with me, I had told her more times than I can count to never open the door when someone knocked, including my friends. That my job was dangerous. That it made me a target. That anyone within arms reach was potentially collateral damage. But that does not make it her fault for ignoring my warnings.
Women do not take men seriously; they have studied men all their lives; they know our bravado, the hero narrative, the mansplaining; we are not real men to them…we only act like it.
I was just playing make believe spy games in her worldview. I was not a real man. I was not the hero. I was not the brave one. To her, I was just another foreign boyfriend; one of many Peter Pans she had dated in the past and no doubt would in the future. That is, until she was beaten and raped by my “drinking buddy”.
But as I began ripping the sheets off the mattress, in those small seconds, I became that hard, isolate, stoic…monster that to this day has never melted.
“If you are going to fight, fight like you’re the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s ark…and brother, it’s starting to rain.”
End