A former senior US defense analyst was sentenced to almost five years in prison on Friday for passing on classified information about US arms sales to Taiwan that eventually ended up in Beijing’s hands, a case that federal prosecutors described as a serious security breach for the US and Taiwan.
Gregg Bergersen, 51, was sentenced to 57 months in prison and three years of supervised release in a federal district court in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Virginia, for passing classified material to Kuo Tai-shen (郭台生), a Taiwan-born naturalized US citizen from New Orleans, on sales of sensitive Taiwan air defense and communications systems and plans for future arms sales to Taiwan.
The crime, for which Bergersen pleaded guilty in March, occurred between March last year and February this year, when he, Kuo and a third co-conspirator were arrested.
At the time, Bergersen was a senior analyst at the US Department of Defense’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), the organization that handles all military sales to foreign countries.
Bergersen was a leading expert and was referred to on the DSCA Web site as the “go-to” person in the area of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), a system of systems that would play a critical role in the advent of a Chinese attack against Taiwan.
Kuo, who pleaded guilty to espionage in May, will be sentenced on Aug. 8. He faces a possible life sentence.
The third convicted conspirator, Kang Yuxin, a Chinese citizen, will be sentenced on Aug. 1. She faces a possible 10-year term, the same maximum sentence that Bergersen could have received.
Bergersen was not charged with espionage, but with conspiracy to leak government secrets to a person who was not entitled to receive them.
Documents presented by federal prosecutors said that Bergersen was unaware that the secrets would be passed on to China and that Kuo had convinced him they would be transmitted to Taiwanese officials with whom he was in contact.
It was not clear from the documents whether Taiwanese officials had received the information or whether any Taiwanese officials were involved in the case.
Documents provided by the prosecutors said that Bergersen had provided Kuo with information about US arms and military services sales, which were transmitted to an unnamed Chinese military official in Beijing through Kang, who operated as a “cut out,” or intermediary.
The recipient of the information, prosecutors said, was described as “PLA [People’s Liberation Army] official A,” who operated out of Hong Kong and Guangzhou. News reports said he was also involved in other recent Chinese espionage operations in the US, including information passed through Hong Kong.
The indictment focused on two sets of secret information.
One was for a command-and-information-technology program called or “Broad Victory,” or “Po Sheng” that Taiwan initiated in 2003, which included the purchase of “a substantial amount of technology” from the US government, primarily involving C4ISR.
The technology Bergersen provided Kuo reportedly involved important areas of US-Taiwan military cooperation and coordination, one of the reasons why prosecutors were greatly concerned about Taiwanese security as well as that of the US.
“One crucial security cooperation goal for national purchasing C4ISR technology,” the indictment said, “is compatibility with United States military systems. Accordingly, DSCA has stated its intention to release systems that promote communications between friendly forces and the United States forces.”
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense maintains that the espionage operation between Bergersen and Kuo did not seriously compromise the Po Sheng.
The second type of material illegally passed on was a top-secret Pentagon report to Congress on planned US military sales to Taiwan over the coming five years. It included the “quantity, dollar value and name of weapons system planned for sale to Taiwan over the next five years,” a government affidavit said.
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