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Kuanshan, Taiwan. Early this year, military intelligence agents and prosecutors showed up at a farm here in southern Taiwan and told Lo Hsien-sheng they needed to search the premises.

“They said they were looking for money,” recalled Lo, 52, a retired soldier whose younger brother, a senior officer in the Taiwanese military, had just been arrested in Taipei and charged with spying for China.

The search was part of a frenzied effort to answer questions deeply troubling to Taiwan and Washington. Why did a successful and seemingly loyal officer in a military rooted in hostility to the Chinese Communist Party turn against his country, and what secrets did he betray?

Until his arrest in late January, Maj. Gen. Lo Hsien-che ran the army command’s communications and electronic information department. That put him at the heart of a command-and-control system built around sophisticated, highly secret American technology that China had been trying to get its hands on for years.

Sentenced to life in prison in July by the Military High Court, Lo is the highest-ranking officer convicted of espionage in Taiwan in decades. It was a reminder, the Ministry of National Defense said, that despite warming relations between Taipei and Beijing, “mainland China’s efforts to collect our military intelligence have not stopped but intensified.”

Lo’s spying on behalf of Beijing for at least seven years has stirred deep unease, not only because he had access to secrets but also because of his background. Lo, the son of a Kuomintang (KMT) soldier who fled to Taiwan in 1949 to escape Mao Zedong’s Red Army, grew up with the values that dominate the military establishment of Taiwan.

What those values exactly are has become more confused in recent years as democracy has shaken old certainties and exposed deep divisions between those who favor rapprochement, and even reunification, with the mainland and rivals who want to keep Beijing at arm’s length.

Lo’s motives for spying, said Andrew Yang, deputy minister of national defense, are under investigation. “It is a jigsaw puzzle. We haven’t reached the final stage yet,” he said.

Taiwan’s government, which was tipped off about Lo by the United States, has released few details of his treachery. But through media leaks and occasional statements, it has sought to calm fears that he betrayed Taiwan because of any pro-Beijing ideology or desire for reunification.

“His motive was just money and sex, mainly sex,” said Lin Yu-fang, a KMT lawmaker and member of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee. This explanation holds that Lo, a married father of three, stumbled into a Beijing-sprung “honey trap” while serving in Bangkok from 2002 to 2005 as a military attache.

It was a time of frustration and even anger in Taiwan’s KMT-dominated military and civilian bureaucracies, which worried about the country’s direction under then-President Chen Shui-bian, the island’s first non-KMT leader since 1949.

Chen, who left office in 2008, alarmed many in the KMT by stressing Taiwan’s separate identity from the mainland and by making gestures, mostly symbolic, that tilted toward independence for Taiwan, which Beijing has vowed to stop at any cost.

Lo’s brother said his jailed sibling never revealed sympathy for the Communist Party but didn’t consider it an enemy anymore.

“We were raised on slogans about fighting communists and serving the Republic of China,” Hsien-sheng said. “I know my brother would never betray Taiwan’s interests.”

Beijing, he said, “stopped being our enemy” when Taiwan lifted restrictions on travel to the mainland in the 1980s, and their father, along with many other former KMT soldiers, began making trips back to visit relatives.

Espionage across the Taiwan Strait is hardly new. In August, a court in Taipei convicted a Taiwanese software engineer for trying to obtain information about Taiwan’s US-made Patriot missile defense system from friends in the military.

But Lo’s betrayal has stirred acute alarm. His job gave him access to some of Taiwan’s most closely guarded secrets involving a new command, control and communications system known as Po Sheng, or “Broad Victory,” long a target of Chinese espionage here and in the United States.

In 2008, former Pentagon employee Gregg Bergersen pleaded guilty to providing classified data on US weapons sales after the FBI uncovered a Beijing spy ring focused on American military cooperation with Taiwan. One of its main targets, according to a court affidavit, was Po Sheng.

Yang said the system was not compromised by Lo’s spying, which involved at least five transfers of information to, and payments from, a Chinese handler.

But at a recent Taipei conference on security, Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a Taiwan expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, said the case showed Taiwan’s espionage and counter-espionage networks were “deeply gangrened’’ by communist agents.

The KMT, which has rapidly expanded Taiwan’s ties with the mainland since returning to power in 2008, has responded furiously to suggestions that Lo’s betrayal points to a wider rot and that the military can’t keep US secrets safe. It insists it shows only one man’s weakness in the face of temptation.

The Washington Post