Liberty Times reported on Dec 20 that Chinese agents in Taiwan might have been involved in pre-alerting the Chinese military of impending reconnaissance missions by reconnaissance-pod carrying ROCAF F-16. The paper said there had been several instances where the Chinese military was able to pre-position its fighters near the reconnaissance route, thus disrupting the reconnaissance mission or even forcing the mission to abort. It won’t be easy to verify the accuracy of the report. But I am sure this is not the first time Chinese agents were suspected of penetrating ROCAF security:
The document above, dated 1966, was drafted in the wake of two incidents of suspected security breach in Project TACKLE. Paragraph 2 shows that, as early as 1964, ChiCom agents had been suspected because there were indications that the Chinese military might have been notified of an impending U-2 mission before the launch.
Paragraph 7 points out that the most vulnerable point is the telephone communication:
So for the F-16 case, if the Chinese military is able to launch the countermeasure aircraft before the recon F-16 takes off, then we have good reasons to believe that the communication link is being tapped, or worse, there are “moles” inside ROCAF. Otherwise, anybody with a mobile phone sitting outside Hualien AFB can easily tip off the ChiCom in real time. But don’t blame aircraft spotters. We don’t ban all cutting knives simply because one person has used a knife to commit murder, right?
Or is it possible that ChiCom receives no pre-alert but makes predictions solely based on data collected from previous F-16 recon missions? This could explain Chinese prior awareness of U-2 missions forty years ago, as shown in Paragraph 8 below. But I doubt this also applies in the F-16 case.
From what I heard from a retired ROCAF officer, he said ROCAF suspected it’s the T-33 radio relay aircraft that did a few flights just days before the U-2 missions that tipped off PRC, since it had different flight profile, radio check and other things than other aircraft.