Social media exploded late last week regarding Elon Musk’s Friday visit to the Pentagon. A seemingly well-sourced New York Times story claimed that Musk would be briefed on the Department of Defense’s overarching war plan for China. It should go without saying that this is a highly classified and sensitive document. This news thus alarmed many, with former intelligence officers such as myself asking why Musk had any “need to know” such plans, given that he isn’t a national security official. Then there’s the concern that President Donald Trump later noted: Musk’s extensive commercial and financial ties to China. Those ties make him liable to blackmail or coercion.

The Trump administration fired back angrily, asserting that the Times‘s story was fake news and demanding any leakers be found. But if it was fake, how was it even a leak? Regardless, the Pentagon is now commencing that leak hunt, complete with lie-detector tests. One problem?

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What if Beijing already has those top-secret DoD war plans? 

It’s not merely that the U.S. government has a serious problem with penetration by Chinese spies and hackers. That’s a known counterintelligence concern, albeit one that our intelligence community has only recently begun to treat with appropriate seriousness. Blunting Chinese espionage is the top job for American spy-hunters these days.  

The real trouble involves sharing highly classified war plans and intelligence with U.S. allies. Deterring Chinese aggression in East Asia and the Western Pacific is a multinational enterprise where the Pentagon is the lynchpin of a complex scheme involving several U.S. security partners, above all Japan and Australia. However, Taiwan is the crux of the challenge. Military experts in Washington have long fretted that Taipei’s strong rhetoric about preventing Chinese aggression far outstrips its actual defense preparations. Despite years of pressure from the Pentagon, Taiwan’s defense spending remains far below what’s required for effective deterrence. 

Facing pressure from the Trump administration, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te promised to boost his country’s defense outlays to 3% of GDP, a considerable jump from the current 2.45%. However, Trump wants a much stronger effort from Taiwan — his nominee to be the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, recently told Congress that Taipei needs to spend closer to 10% of its GDP on defense if it really intends to deter Chinese aggression. 

Making matters worse, perennially inadequate defense spending isn’t Taiwan’s biggest security challenge; it’s Taipei’s grave counterintelligence problem. Simply put, Taiwan’s defense and security structures are so deeply penetrated by Chinese spies that Beijing knows everything about its plans to deter aggression by the People’s Liberation Army, including American defense and intelligence secrets. At this point, any secrets Washington shares with our Taiwanese partners stand a high chance of winding up in Chinese Communist hands. This grave threat has enormous implications for U.S. war planning in Asia.  

How did we get here?

Taiwan’s counterintelligence challenges aren’t new. They’ve been festering for a couple of decades in the face of a truly massive spy offensive waged by Beijing against its tiny neighbor across the Taiwan Strait. An alarming pattern has emerged wherein Taiwanese military and intelligence officers take employment in mainland China after their retirement, raising questions about how long they were secretly serving the mainland communist regime. Those co-opted Republic of China officials then use their connections to entice still-serving Taiwanese colleagues to spy for Beijing, usually employing financial enticements. 

This vast spy war being waged by Beijing against Taipei includes a wide array of conventional espionage and human intelligence operations against Taiwan managed by the PLA as well as the powerful Ministry of State Security. Those efforts, which have penetrated Taipei’s security structures at an alarmingly deep level, are bolstered by formidable cyber espionage conducted against Taiwan by MSS and PLA entities. Beijing’s United Front Work Department wages political warfare against Taiwan, subverting its democracy with well-placed agents and pervasive propaganda. This comprehensive espionage-influence offensive constitutes an existential threat to ROC independence. A top U.S. expert recently explained how China’s spy war compared to normal state-on-state espionage: “It’s not practiced at this kind of scale, with this kind of malign purpose, and with the ultimate goal being annexation, and as a result, that makes this different.” 

A new detailed report by the Washington-based Global Taiwan Institute provides shocking counterintelligence information regarding Beijing’s overheated spy war against Taiwan, making plain that the Chinese Communist Party’s three-pronged espionage-influence offensive against the ROC aims at the island’s annexation by Beijing. This isn’t “normal” spying by any measure. 

“Taiwan faces a relentless set of overt and covert political warfare activities intended to break its will to resist,” the GTI report explains, adding that the number of undetected CCP spies in Taiwan surely runs into the thousands. Worse, the majority of arrested Chinese spies — in some years, as many as 80% — are current or former ROC military officials. Many of these turncoats are enticed to spy for Beijing due to greed. CCP agents aren’t just paid based on the Taiwanese defense information they sell to the MSS or PLA; they receive cash bonuses for fellow ROC military members they recruit to spy for China. Cleverly, Beijing has watchers on pawnshops, moneylenders, and loan sharks located near Taiwanese military facilities, looking for cash-hungry individuals needing a quick money fix. 

The alarming data points speak for themselves. Taiwan’s National Security Bureau stated that 64 people were prosecuted for Chinese espionage last year, compared with 48 in 2023 and 10 in 2022. Last year, 15 veterans and 28 active service members were charged. Clearly, the CCP’s methods of recruiting Taiwanese military members are working. Keep in mind that these are merely the cases that the NSB has managed to crack. 

Take the example of a recent CCP espionage scandal in Taiwan involving a 10-person spy ring that was broken up last year by NSB and ROC military counterintelligence. The turncoats were motivated mainly by cash. The ringleader, Chen Yu-hsin, retired from the Taiwanese military and then went to work in China, where he was recruited to spy for Beijing in 2021. Following the standard pattern, Chen recruited several still-serving PRC officers to spy for the CCP. Chen served as their handler and intermediary with Beijing. 

While most of the seven serving military officers that Chen recruited into his espionage network weren’t particularly high-ranking, many held sensitive positions. One was an ROC intelligence officer, while another was a lieutenant colonel pilot serving with the Taiwanese military’s elite special forces aviation wing. Following standard patterns, Chen tasked ring members with passing him classified information wanted by the CCP, including ROC war plans, communications links, and intelligence assessments. They did so in exchange for cash, averaging about $3,000 per stolen classified document.  

In a bizarre twist, Chen enticed the special forces pilot to steal his American-made CH-47 Chinook helicopter and land it on a PLA aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait. In exchange for such a propaganda coup for Beijing, the pilot was offered $15 million. He accepted the deal, but ROC counterintelligence foiled the strange plot prior to its execution. 

WALTZ SAYS US WILL ANSWER CHINA THREAT WITH ECONOMIC AND MILITARY ‘LETHALITY’

Taiwanese media over the last couple of years has offered a constant drumbeat of unmasked Chinese spies. Finally, Taipei is responding to the threat, including overdue discussions about increasing the punishments for espionage. One of the reasons so many Taiwanese people are willing to spy for Beijing is that the risks are too low. Of the eight ROC military members prosecuted for their involvement in the Chen spy ring, the stiffest prison sentence was 13 years, while some received sentences as light as 18 months.

There’s little that American intelligence can do in the short term about Taiwan’s massive Chinese espionage problem. The Pentagon and our spy agencies must restrict the classified war plans and intelligence we share with Taipei until Taiwan demonstrates sufficient seriousness about protecting secrets. Until then, sharing information with our ally appears tantamount to passing it straight to Beijing — a risk that will cost American lives in the event of any war with China.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.