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DEFENSE MINISTRY DENIES SPY NETWORK CRACKED BY BEIJING

2003-12-23 22:32:00

    Taipei, Dec. 23 (CNA) The Ministry of National Defense (MND) denied Tuesday that its spy network in mainland China had been cracked by Beijing.

    MND spokesman Huang Suey-sheng said the report, first broken by the Hong Kong-based Ming Pao daily on Monday, is not true and that the domestic media should be careful about how they relay the story.

    Premier Yu Shyi-kun dismissed as unsubstantiated the paper's report that Beijing had arrested 21 Taiwanese and 15 mainland Chinese for spying for Taiwan since Nov. 30, when President Chen Shui-bian said that Beijing has 496 missiles targeting Taiwan.

    Yu said Chen's information comes from satellite photos rather than Taiwan spies and that the Ming Pao report is groundless.

    However, the report was supported by retired intelligence official Chen Hu-men who claimed that the Military Intelligence Bureau under the MND has lost contact with at least three of its secret agents on the mainland.

    It was all grist to the mill for the opposition lawmakers in their war of words with Chen in the lead up to the 2004 presidential campaign. They claimed that the president has risked the lives of the country's spies on the mainland by revealing the number of missiles pointed at Taiwan.

    In a rebuttal of the opposition lawmakers' criticism, several ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers Tuesday dismissed the report as a political ploy hatched by the opposition with the intention of tarnishing the president.

    DPP lawmaker Lai Ching-teh said Chang Rong-gong, an opposition Kuomintang (KMT) official in charge of mainland Chinese affairs, visited the mainland five times in the last two months as an emissary of KMT Chairman Lien Chan, who is running against Chen in the 2004 presidential election.

    Lai suggested that Chang concocted the scheme with his Beijing host during his mainland trips with the purpose of undermining Chen's credibility.

    Another DPP lawmaker, Lin Chung-cheng, questioned the truth of Chen Hu-men's claims, asking how someone who has been retired for many years could know that the Military Intelligence Bureau had lost contact with three agents.

    DPP lawmaker Chiang Chao-yi said the whole thing is a scheme cooked up by Beijing in the hope of boosting Lien's presidential campaign.

(By Maubo Chang)

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