CHINESE BID TO SET UP EAST TIMOR SPY BASE

'Strategic threat' ... Chinese officials approached East Timorese authorities about installing a surveillance radar in 2007. Photo: Fiona-Lee Quimby

PHILIP DORLING – THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD – 10 may 2011

CHINA failed in its attempt to establish a spy base in East Timor, according to leaked United States diplomatic cables.

The Chinese proposal to build and operate a surveillance radar facility on East Timor's north coast was made in December 2007, but was viewed with suspicion by senior East Timorese officials who consulted the United States and Australia before rejecting the project.

The Chinese initiative, described as "a strategic threat", is revealed for the first time in US embassy cables leaked to WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to the Herald.

While Chinese diplomats insisted to their American counterparts that East Timor was "strategically unimportant" to Beijing, the US embassy in Dili reported to Washington in February 2008 that the Deputy Prime Minister, Jose Luis Guterres, had called in the then US ambassador Hans Klemm to advise that Chinese defence firms had approached the government of East Timor with an offer to establish a radar array to monitor shipping in the strategic Wetar Strait.

Although anxious to secure assistance to crack down on illegal fishing in East Timorese waters, Mr Guterres was suspicious of the Chinese offer to build and operate the radar facility free of charge.

"The only catch was that the facilities were manned by Chinese technicians," Mr Guterres told the US embassy, and he expressed "his concerns that the radar could be used for purposes other than those touted by the Chinese''.

''They could instead be used to extend China's radar-based intelligence perimeter deep into south-east Asia.''

The deep waters of the Wetar Strait separate East Timor's north-east coast from Indonesia's Pulau Wetar Island and are reportedly used by US Navy vessels including nuclear submarines in transit between the Pacific and Indian oceans.

An Australian defence intelligence source told the Herald that Australian officials were aware of the Chinese proposal that was "just another part of China's growing intelligence activity through Asia and beyond".

Other US embassy cables contain references to expanding Chinese intelligence activities in south-east Asia including, for example, Philippines intelligence concerns that Chinese proposals to establish new consulates in the Philippines were intended to provide cover "to conduct SIGINT [signals intelligence] and other collection activities targeting US and Taiwanese military activities".

US diplomats in Dili reported that President Jose Ramos-Horta, Mr Guterres, and the Secretary of State for Defence, Julio Pinto, had "repeatedly and explicitly" affirmed that "Timor-Leste's strong preference is to co-operate with its democratic partners - Australia, Portugal, the US, and Japan - on defence and security matters''.

Chinese defence assistance to East Timor has been confined to construction projects, modest offers of training assistance and the supply of two 40-year-old Shanghai-class patrol boats - a procurement decision that attracted some media attention in Australia last year.