Spook Mountain: How US spies on China By Wendell Minnick
TAIPEI - The United States and Taiwan have a cooperative intelligence-sharing agreement that allows both the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Taiwan's National Security Bureau (NSB) to listen in on mainland Chinese military communications in both the Nanjing and Guangzhou military regions. With the assistance of the NSA, Taiwan has constructed a signal intelligence (SIGINT) base at Pingtung Lee on Yangmingshan Mountain just north of Taipei, which has been operating for at least 15 years.
The fact that it is a US operation in a country with which it has no diplomatic ties requires some examination. First, Taiwan's geographic proximity to China makes it the first choice for stationing a SIGINT base. Second, Taiwan is pro-US and shares a mutual fear of Chinese military expansionism. Third, Taiwan needs an indications and warning (I&W) system that prevents China from launching a surprise attack.
First reported by Jane's Defence Weekly this January, the facility now appears to have grown more ears. Shortly after the recent Jane's report, additional antennas were located by Asia Times Online on Wunjian Mountain near Dazhi just south of Pingtung Lee. Atol has interviewed a former NSA official who once worked at Pingtung Lee.
The former NSA official told Atol: "It is a classified NSA operation. It is known within the NSA as the SIGINT Liaison Branch [SLB]. The reason it is so hush-hush, besides the fact that NSA operations are always classified, is that NSA is an official US government agency, and we are not supposed to have any official representation on Taiwan."
The facility provides Taiwan the necessary edge to prevent the People's Republic of China (PRC) from winning a decisive battle quickly. Data processing from the facility enables Taiwan to appraise China's current threat status. Information provided includes details of China's armed forces, their structure and organization, tactical doctrine, order of battle, weapons and equipment, and supporting battlefield functional systems. This includes how the PRC operates in accordance to its doctrine and training.
Of special concern are the activities of the Second Artillery Corps, which has the capability of unleashing up to 400 Dong Feng-11 (M-11) and DF-15 (M-9) tactical ballistic missiles in multiple-wave and multidirectional saturation strikes on Taiwan. Intelligence gathered by the facility provides options for Taiwan's leaders to interdict and defeat China's military by maneuver or attack. Taiwan's goal is not necessarily to inflict serious harm on the mainland with the use of offensive weapons currently in its arsenal and those in development, but to force China to abandon its attack, or compel the United States to enter the conflict.
In a war, China would first attempt a "decapitation strategy" that would include missile and air-force assaults on key military installations and command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I). Pingtung Lee would no doubt be the first site hit. Taiwan and mainland China are separated by the Taiwan Strait, which is 72 nautical miles at its closest point and 140 nautical miles at its farthest point. Chinese warplanes can reach Taiwan in just seven minutes and Chinese warships in about five hours.
The Pingtung Lee site has 10 antenna masts, of which six are high-frequency (HF) dipole antennas in a circular pattern called a "six element" or "fix-six" arrangement that performs both interception and direction-finding (DF) tasks. This type of HF-DF antenna configuration allows Taiwan and the US to monitor China's military radio communications. There is one radome on the base, installed in early 1998, that allows the NSA to uplink data back to the US for further processing. Prior to that, all SLB communications went through a nearby commercial satellite dish facility belonging Chunghwa Telecom. The antenna complex located by Atol on Wunjian Mountain near Dazhi has the same "fix-six" configuration, with an additional collection of several microwaves nearby.
Pingtung Lee is maintained with the support of Summit Telecom Systems (STS), a US commercial company based in Maryland, which conducts operations in Japan, South Korea and the Azores as one of the numerous "caretaker" companies the NSA uses to maintain SIGINT sites around the world. The NSA source told Atol: "Civilian personnel are there only in a support role. They man the communications center and maintain the communications equipment, and the station computers."
One STS employee who served as "senior liaison" with the Taiwanese government between 1995 and 2000 has provided material describing the technical aspects of the operation. According to the information, the base operates "a variety of special-purpose telecommunication and data-processing systems".
From 1995-2000 the NSA initiated a major upgrade and modernization program that "identified weaknesses in systems architecture, then designed a large-scale multi-year modernization program which integrated significant new processing capabilities and provided a tenfold increase in overall system capacity. [It] implemented web-based technology as a cost-effective replacement for dated software processes. Information that used to require hours or days to process and report can now be processed and reported in less than a minute," the STS source said.
The NSA also improved training and development programs for Taiwanese running the facility. This endeavor led the Taiwanese to be "more self-sufficient and less reliant on external assistance". This shift of authority and responsibility "enabled US staff to focus on broader strategic initiatives and has allowed absorption of a fivefold increase in the number of supported systems with no increase in staffing".
According to the STS source, the NSA initiated and designed a major information-technology (IT) upgrade "which provided [a] 100-fold increase in server capacity and replaced old LAN [local area network] technology with a high-speed ATM [asynchronous transfer mode] network ... simplifying IT architecture and eliminating use of non-standard proprietary technology in favor of standardized commercial solutions. [It] mitigated [the] risk of data loss by instituting off-site backup for critical data and by redesigning system architecture to provide redundant systems at single points of failure."
The former NSA source elaborated on the role the station played in US intelligence-gathering on China. The source stated that the NSA has "helped the Taiwanese effort tremendously by providing them with equipment systems, specialized software, and teaching them a lot of analytical techniques. The relationship is extremely important to the US also, because of the growing threat of the Chinese, and the fact that Taiwan has the Chinese-language capability while we have so little. A very large percentage of what the NSA obtains about the Chinese comes from the Taiwanese operations."
When SIGINT operations in Hong Kong had to relocate because of the impending 1997 handover to China, responsibilities were divided between facilities in Taiwan and Australia. Hong Kong's Stanley Fort Satellite Station, code-named "Project Kittiwake", at Chung Hom Kok was moved to Australia in 1993 and placed under that country's Defense Signals Directorate at Geraldton, Western Australia. The Chung Hom Kok station monitored Chinese satellite communications; telemetry from Chinese ballistic missile tests, and satellite launches; mission data from intelligence satellites, which included both electronic intelligence and photographic intelligence satellites; and domestic telecommunications downlinked from China's geostationary satellites.
Radio interception tasks at the former HF aerial farm at Tai Mo Shan, New Territories, Hong Kong, was closed and transferred to Pingtung Lee, Taiwan. With this, Taiwan joined an interconnected network of HF SIGINT operations that include Kikai-jima, Japan, with a similar "fix-six" HF-DF antenna system, and Khon Kaen, Thailand. Geographically, Taiwan is in an excellent position to assist. Without Taiwan's coverage, the US SIGINT picture of mainland China would be critically deficient for the US intelligence community.
Transferring SIGINT responsibilities from one country to another is not difficult. The UK-USA Security Agreement, signed in 1947, divided SIGINT collection responsibilities between the United States and the United Kingdom (including Commonwealth members Australia, New Zealand and Canada). This was done to prevent duplication and to maximize collection capabilities. The US facility at Pingtung Lee falls under the responsibility of the NSA. Therefore, data collected on China must be shared not only with the Taiwanese, but also with US SIGINT partners, according to the agreement.
The United States and the Republic of China (ROC) have had a SIGINT relationship since World War II, when the US helped the Nationalist (Kuomintang, or KMT) government in China fight the Japanese occupation. That rapport continued after the Nationalists escaped to the island of Taiwan in 1949 to avoid being destroyed by communist forces.
US intelligence operations in Taiwan were impressive during the Cold War. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) based its now-famous Air America, Civil Air Transport and Air Asia transport operations in Taiwan. The CIA's Western Enterprises operation to invade China from bases in Burma (now Myanmar) was also headquartered there.
During the Cold War SIGINT stations were constructed all over Taiwan. US and ROC intelligence and military personnel manned these outposts and a limited amount of data were shared with the ROC government. US SIGINT operations in Taiwan gave the US crucial data on the Vietnam War and activities in mainland China.
Cooperative US-ROC SIGINT operations throughout the Cold War consisted of the US Naval Security Group Activity, USN-21, in Taipei; US Air Force Security Service Office, Air Task Force-13 in Taipei; 327th Communications Reconnaissance Company, US Army Security Agency, Nan Szu Pu, near Kaohsiung; US Naval Auxiliary Communications Center under the direction of the CIA; and U-2s equipped with both photographic and SIGINT equipment flown by Taiwanese pilots.
As the Vietnam War began to unwind in the early 1970s, US military activities in Taiwan began to fold. From 1972-73 the United States closed all SIGINT facilities except the US Air Force (USAF) Security Service Support Base, 6987th Security Group, at Linkou, just 10 kilometers northwest of Taipei. It remained under US military control until 1977.
After US president Jimmy Carter declared "normalized" relations with the People's Republic of China in December 1978, all formal US government organizations in Taiwan were privatized. The US Embassy was renamed the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) in March 1979. The US government turned over the remaining US intelligence and military operations to Taiwan or they became covert enterprises using nationals as cover.
According to a former USAF technician who worked at Linkou until 1985 as a civilian contract worker for the ROC military, the facility was still active at that time. The Linkou facility was moved to Yangmingshan some time after 1985.
The time and transition from Linkou to Yangmingshan is unclear, but what is clear is that Pingtung Lee places Taiwan in a critical role for US intelligence and regional security interests. If the United States should lose Taiwan in either a forced or voluntary "reunification" it would upset US intelligence gathering, processing and capabilities, and thus greatly endanger regional security. For this reason, democracy or no democracy, the US position in its pledge to defend Taiwan against PRC aggression must be seen in a different light. Taiwan can no longer be dismissed by the United States as expendable, but must be considered an active and pro-US partner in the regional security and stability of East Asia.
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