Taiwan’s Counter-Intelligence Failure
Endangering Military Personnel and Families
China In Arms BOOKSTORE and GIFT SHOP!
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4 January 2024 (Thursday)
Taiwan’s Counter-Intelligence Failure
Endangering Military Personnel and Families
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - In Israel, which faces the same existential threat as Taiwan, you do not identify military personnel in critical positions.
China’s intelligence agents are always looking for new recruits in Taiwan’s military, particularly those with access to critical military intelligence platforms, such as the P-3C Orion Maritime Patrol Aircraft (see below photograph).
The problem is Taiwan’s military feels that identifying the active-duty personnel’s identity, duty station/expertise, and their family in photographs, is a morale booster.
Last week, I went to the National Central Library and poured over years of the Youth Daily News. I photographed some of these profiles as evidence they are not protecting their people.
Particularly since Chinese intelligence often uses a potential recruit’s family as leverage via coercion. Please read Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil.
I understand the Taiwan military’s argument that these profiles are a morale booster, but it also gives China too much information too easily.
Taiwan’s military should protect their personnel from Chinese coercion and a life in a post-invasion Taiwan, especially their family members.
While Taiwan’s political chattering class within the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are stabbing each other in the back to board the last helicopter off the island, the men and women in the military will either be dead or placed in prisoner of war (POW) camps.
If I could quote Victor Davis Hanson, the DPP believes they are “not subject to the ramifications of its own ideology.”
And do not assume the military’s Tier One will stick around either. They will be the first ones on those Black Hawks, that is if they have not already commandeered all of the C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft.
And, unlike Vietnam’s last stand, China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles (DF-26) and anti-ship cruise missiles will keep the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers and Marine Corps’ assault ships too far from Taiwan’s shores to stage an airlift.
Not to forget China’s land-based air defense missiles cover most of the island already. No kidding; China can shoot down almost anything flying over Taiwan. So goes air supremacy.
