Enemies of the People

For years the Russian KGB, the CIA and other espionage organizations have tried to fathom the enigmatic course of life in China by monitoring provincial radio broadcasts, intercepting military messages and occasionally recruiting contacts within the People's Republic. Not surprisingly, the best China spies are the Chinese themselves. Agents of Taiwan's intelligence network in past years have provided the most sensational and intimate glimpses into the murky world of Peking politics.

In recent weeks Taiwan has even been willing to advertise its network of loyalists and informers on China's mainland. Breaking with precedent, Taipei has published the names of some 20 "martyrs,"--spies and agents who lost their lives while operating in the People's Republic. A Taiwan government-recruited mainland spy named Wang Hung, 30, surfaced in Taipei after having served a year as an undercover operative in China. Purportedly a political instructor in the Red army stationed in Yunnan province, Wang told TIME'S Bing Wong that he formed clandestine cells among urban youths who had been sent to the countryside to work on agricultural communes.

Taipei claims that Wang is one of 10,000 secret agents on the mainland involved in such activities as sabotaging production, forming secret anti-Peking cells, and passing copied documents on to Taiwan's couriers. The number of op eratives is probably exaggerated; nonetheless, Taiwan's secret agents can claim credit for some sensational exposes. Notably, they brought to light the letter written by Mao Tse-tung to his wife in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in which Mao complained about the personality cult that was being built around him and sharply criticized his then heir-apparent, Defense Minister Lin Piao.

New Agents. The chief problem of Taiwan's intelligence network, which is directed in Taipei by General Yeh Hsiang-chih, is recruiting and maintaining contact with its agents in China's tightly controlled society. One useful technique in getting new agents is to exploit traditionally close family relationships by approaching prospects through their relatives. A major area for contacting potential spies is Yunnan province in China's far Southwest, near the "Golden Triangle" of Burma, Thailand and Laos, where remnants of a Kuomintang army have operated since the end of World War II.

Hong Kong is also a lively espionage center. Among the 300 to 400 overseas Chinese who daily visit the mainland from the British colony, there is an occasional Taiwanese agent on his way to making contact with secret Nationalist sympathizers. Similarly, off the coast of Fukien province, opposite Taiwan, Nationalist patrols sometimes "capture" Communist agents posing as ordinary fishermen and subject them to intensive intelligence grilling.

Not all the results are trustworthy. In fact, some "intelligence" about mainland activities published by Taiwan so perfectly fits its anti-Communist propaganda that it might have been manufactured by imaginative p.r. agents in Taipei. Stiil, Peking considers Taiwan's espionage serious enough to issue periodic warnings about the presence of spies. Recently Canton radio reported sabotage by a "scoundrel" in a gas plant and chastised the factory's deputy director for his lack of vigilance. Some visitors to China have been taken to prisons where they have seen "counterrevolutionaries" and other "enemies of the people"--many of them, presumably, guilty of working for the hated little island across the Taiwan Strait.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.