Singapore spy case raises China’s recruiting fears in island state

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The case of a Singaporean caught spying on China in the United States has raised fears about the recruitment of China’s intelligence assets in an island state that has gained trust among Western governments and maintains good terms with Beijing.

Jun Wei Yeo, a 39-year-old academic also known by the name of Dickson Yeo, pleaded guilty in a US court on Friday to acting as an illegal agent of Chinese intelligence. He will be sentenced in October and faces up to 10 years in prison.

The Singapore Interior Ministry said in a brief statement Sunday that it had been aware of Yeo’s case since his arrest by US authorities in November, and that he is receiving consular assistance.

Court documents show that Yeo was lured into becoming a Chinese asset four years earlier while attending a forum in Beijing to give a presentation on Southeast Asian politics. He moved to the United States in January 2019.

“A fool like this can make all Singaporeans suspicious,” academic and former Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan said in a Facebook post in response to the spy case.

Initially claiming to represent China-based think tanks, Yeo’s recruiters offered to pay him for reports and political information, but later learned that some of his contacts were intelligence agents, court records show.

Tasked with finding people with nonpublic information on politics, economics, and diplomacy, Yeo first focused on Southeast Asia, before moving to the United States.

When he moved to the United States, his handlers gave him a bank card and told him to contact them using multiple phones to avoid detection.

Using a fake consulting and business networking site on LinkedIn, Yeo reached out to individuals, targeting those with financial or work problems, and paid them to write reports.

Among those he attracted was a high-level security clearance civilian working on a U.S. military fighter jet program.

Yeo’s former doctoral supervisor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore was an ethnic Chinese-American citizen, accused by Singapore authorities in 2017 of being an agent of foreign influence for an undisclosed country.

Huang Jing denied those allegations, and although he was never convicted, his residence pass was revoked.

Now working in Beijing, Huang said he was surprised and pleased that Yeo had been caught, noting that he had an “obvious sense of insecurity and hunger to be someone.”

Two former classmates said Yeo had dreamed of being a diplomat but that the Singapore establishment had rejected him. Yeo could not be reached for comment.

ASIA SWITZERLAND

The Interior Ministry said investigations into Yeo “had revealed no direct threat” to Singapore.

While Yeo may have betrayed the line by betraying his own country, he was caught spying on the superpower with which Singapore has the closest security ties, although the city-state is bound by its own rules to pursue a neutral foreign policy. .

In disagreement with the United States over trade and other matters, Beijing on Monday denied knowledge of the Yeo case and accused the United States of using espionage claims to defame China.

The deterioration in Sino-US relations hit a new low last week as the United States closed the Chinese consulate in Houston and China retaliated by seizing the U.S. consulate in Chengdu.

Yeo’s case reinforced concerns raised by Western security think tanks that Singapore was a soft target for China to recruit well-educated Chinese ethnic assets whose passports allowed them easy access to countries almost everywhere.

“People might be more suspicious of Singaporeans if there is a perception that Singapore is engaged,” said Chong Ja Ian, a visiting academic from Singapore at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chong said the incident may also make it difficult for Singapore to walk the diplomatic tightrope between Washington and Beijing.

Often described as the Switzerland of Asia due to its wealth, international financial network and neutrality, Singapore is one of the most politically stable countries in a region where the United States and China have competing interests.

China is Singapore’s largest trading partner, as it is for many Asian countries.

A report from the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy in 2018 found that Singapore’s universities had one of the highest levels of collaboration globally with researchers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

And the US-based Jamestown Foundation group of experts said last year that China used business associations and other organizations in Singapore to spread propaganda about a “greater China” identity among Singaporeans, 75% of whom are of Chinese ethnicity.

Bilveer Singh, from the department of political science at the National University of Singapore, said the opening and strategic location of the city-state has made it a center for many countries to “acquire intelligence” and “agents of influence.”

Yeo “was definitely not an isolated case,” he said.

A Mexican researcher from another Singapore university, Duke-NUS, was arrested in the United States earlier this year for acting on behalf of Russia.

Reuters asked the Interior Ministry to comment on whether Yeo was an isolated case and, among other questions, whether there would be restrictions on academics coming or visiting China.

The ministry said it would not comment further.