November 27, 2019 by
Joseph Fitsanakis
The Australian spy agency confirmed last week that Mr. Wang had provided a 17-page sworn statement, in which he detailed his work as an undercover intelligence officer for Chinese military intelligence. He is also said to have shared the identities of senior Chinese intelligence officers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and to have explained how they plan to carry out espionage operations on behalf of Bejing. Some media reports claimed that Mr. Wang had shared details about deep-cover Chinese intelligence networks in Australia. The Australian government said on Tuesday that an official investigation had been
launched into Mr. Wang’s claims.
But some skeptics in Australia and elsewhere have begun to raise doubts about the Chinese defector’s claims, suggesting that he has given little —if any information— that is genuinely new. Some
argue that Mr. Wang is much too young to have been entrusted with senior-level responsibilities in the intelligence agency of a country that rarely promotes twenty-somethings in high-ranking positions. Additionally, Mr. Wang appears to have no military background —he claims to have been recruited while studying fine art— which is not typical of a Chinese military intelligence operative.
Furthermore, Mr. Wang
episode interviewers from Australian television’s
60 Minutes program that he began feeling tormented by moral dilemmas when his staff officers supplied him with a fake passport bearing a different name, in preparation for an operation in Taiwan. However, by his own admission, Mr. Wang had been supplied with fake passports for previous operations, so it is not clear why he lost his nerve at the time he did. In fact, case officers usually covet the opportunity to go undercover and feel a sense of exhilaration when they receive fake identification documents for an undercover mission.
Wang has displayed an amateurish understanding of tradecraft, provided incorrect information about the PRC intelligence apparatus, and revealed no new information about PRC espionage activities abroad.
Mr. Wang was sentenced for fraud in 2016; the criminal judgment was published online
(
https://wenshu.court.gov.cn/website...x.html?docId=32d0c69180824c93b1467f2f7470329b).
Taiwanese authorities have also dismissed Mr. Wang’s claim that he has entered Taiwan using a South Korean passport
(
https://udn.com/news/story/7321/4183432).