A U.S. spy whose role was cultivated for two decades rose to the top of Taiwan’s secret nuclear weapons program and, at a crucial moment, stole vital documentation that stopped the bomb program in its tracks, according to former intelligence officials.
The theft by the spy, a colonel in Taiwan and longtime Central Intelligence Agency agent, halted a program that 20 years of international inspection and U.S. intervention had slowed but never stopped, the officials said.
The covert U.S. operation culminated 10 years ago this month. Though it was reported then that the colonel had defected, dealing a crippling blow to Taiwan’s nuclear weapons program, his work has never been acknowledged openly or described in detail before by U.S. officials.
That weapons program had the potential to ignite a war, as China had threatened a military attack if Taiwan deployed a nuclear weapon. Furthermore, Taiwan was closer to developing a nuclear weapon than was previously known, according to a study to be published next month in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The study provides lessons for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. It shows how a nation can secretly and patiently assemble a nuclear weapons program piece by piece, as several U.S. allies and enemies–among them Israel, Iraq and Iran–have done with varying degrees of success. The study also demonstrates how international political and diplomatic pressure can disrupt a nation’s dreams of possessing nuclear arms.
The story of the spy who stopped the nuclear weapons program, Col. Chang Hsien-yi, who was deputy director of Taiwan’s nuclear energy research institute, has never been fully told. The CIA refuses to discuss it, and Chang effectively disappeared after he defected to the United States 10 years ago.
He was recruited as a CIA agent in the 1960s, when he was a military cadet, according to former intelligence officials. In the 1970s, as he rose through the ranks of Taiwan’s secret weapons hierarchy, Chang was nurtured and cultivated as a spy for the United States.
In the 1980s, he provided the United States with a unique inside look at the burgeoning nuclear bomb program–secret information that could not be obtained by electronic eavesdropping or spy satellites.
Of the former intelligence officials who discussed the case, only James Lilley, a retired U.S. ambassador and former CIA station chief in Beijing, agreed to be quoted by name.
Lilley said he believed it was time for the case to publicly acknowledged as a great success, a classic in the annals of intelligence that should be made known to the American public.
“You pick a comer, put the right case officer on him and recruit him carefully, on an ideological basis–although money was involved–and keep in touch,” Lilley said. “Then, in the early ’80’s, it began to pay off.
“You couldn’t get this stuff from intercepts, and you couldn’t get it from overhead,” he said, referring to covert electronic-eavesdropping and satellite reconnaissance systems.
“You had to get it from a human source. And you had to use it very carefully.”
In December 1987, as the secret program was gaining steam, Chang defected to the United States, with the CIA’s assistance, smuggling reams of documents out of Taiwan: damning evidence of the progress Taiwan had made toward building a bomb.
State Department officials confronted Taiwan, which agreed to halt the program.
“This was a case where they actually did something right,” Lilley said, referring to the U.S. intelligence and diplomatic communities. “They got the guy out. They got the documentation. And they confronted the Taiwanese.”
Taiwan’s official position ever since has been that it will not use its scientific expertise and technical abilities to build a nuclear weapon.
