The CIA Spy Who Thwarted Taiwan's Nuclear Plans

Gray Chang was branded a traitor for exposing Taipei’s covert weapons program. Many now view him as a hero.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The c I. A Spy who thwarted Taiwan's nuclear plans
by Timothy McLoughlin read by Mike Cooper. During the summer months,
when the winds of eastern Idaho don't make them unplayable,
Gray Chang likes to head to one of the courses
near his home for a round of golf. In his eighties.
With a pencil thin mustache and an impish laugh, he

(00:21):
strikes an amicable, if unremarkable figure. Chang has lived largely
anonymously since arriving in Idaho Falls in nineteen ninety, holding
a steady job at the near by laboratory, the details
of which would two technically bewildering for most to probe further,
He raised three children, and in retirement tries to squeeze
in two golf games a week. The prosaic, utterly suburban

(00:43):
existence befits almost too perfectly an international spy trying to
blend in, and that's just what Chang was. Decades ago.
Colonel Chang chiang Yi was one of Taiwan's most senior
nuclear engineers working on its covert weapons program. While the
US had pledged to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion

(01:04):
and station nuclear weapons there. The island's leaders believed their
own program would provide the most formidable defense. Seeking to
counter such proliferation, the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited Chang
to feed it intelligence, which the Americans ultimately used to
pressure Taiwan to abandon the program. Even today, his actions
provoke a spirited debate. Some see him as a traitor

(01:27):
who thwarted Taiwan's defenses against China's dream of unification. Others
have hailed Chang, who fled to the US in nineteen
eighty eight, as an overlooked hero who kept the wild
safe from a potential nuclear catastrophe. Chang recounts his exploits
with a tone that swings from gravely serious to jocula,
and says his motivation was ideological. The choices his own.

(01:49):
There was no suitcase filled with cash or nefarious blackmail
that forced his hand. It naturally happened, he said, of
his years of spying. Eighty years since the U S
detonated the first atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is entering a more dangerous,
unpredictable chapter of the nuclear era. Russia's war on Ukraine,

(02:10):
Israel and Americas strikes on Iran, and doubts about President
Donald Trump's reliability all risk eroding the post Cold War
consensus on who should and who should not possess nuclear weapons.
Once the pursuit of rogue pariahs, national governments are now
breaking a long taboo and openly discussing the benefits of
developing such arms. The debate has become particularly pronounced in

(02:33):
South Korea and Japan. China's nuclear forces are quickly expanding,
while a crucial arms treaty between the US and Russia
is set to expire next year, leaving them without limits
on the size of their nuclear arsenals for the first
time in more than half a century. My expectation is
that ultimately things will get worse before they get better,
said Ankidpanda, a senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program

(02:55):
at the Carnegian Dument for International Peace. We will likely
see arms racing of the kind that, frankly, we haven't
seen in the post Cold War period. Against this unnerving backdrop,
Chang's actions look ever more remarkable. A daring mission of
non proliferation during a time of nuclear optimism, Taiwan's situation
has remained precarious in the decades since Chang fled with

(03:18):
the help of the CIA, China, which claims the island
as its own, regularly conducts military exercises that are seen
by some analysts as rehearsals for a possible blockade or invasion.
That both Taiwan and China continue to co exist is proof.
Chang says that he was correct in his actions. What
do I need to say, he responded, when asked about

(03:38):
being labeled at turncoat. Are we better off? The answer
he said was undoubtedly, yes, we are. On October sixteenth,
nineteen sixty four, China became the fifth country to join
the Nuclear Club when it detonated a bomb in the
Takla Makan Desert in the northwestern region of Shinjiang. The
Chinese Civil War had ended fifteen years earlier with the

(04:00):
victory for the communist forces, and nationalist troops led by
Chang Kaishek retreated to Taiwan. The pace of China's nuclear
development was as astonishingly fast as it was deeply unsettling
to Taiwan and the United States. Though the US stationed
its own nuclear weapons in Taiwan, Chang directed his officials
to begin work on the Shinchu project two years after

(04:22):
China's test. Scientists would use the cover of a nuclear
power facility to covertly develop nuclear weapons. Crucially, they needed
to keep the efforts hidden from the Americans, who were
working to curb proliferation. Chang joined Taiwan's clandestine weapons effort
about a year after it began. In nineteen sixty nine.
He was sent to study in Tennessee, and it was

(04:43):
there Chang believes that the CIA took an initial interest
in him. But still confident in Taiwan's need for a
nuclear weapon, he rebuffed what he surmises were early approaches
from the spy agency. I was so eager, Chang said,
of the nuclear program. I was thinking at the time, Yes,
Taiwan sh also have won the bomb two. As of
seven a m. Eastern time on August six, the CIA

(05:06):
had not responded to requests for comment. As he rose
through the ranks, though Chang's once solid belief that Taiwan
needed its own bomb began to erode, much of his
skepticism was rooted in how he viewed the island in
relation to the mainland. He saw both peoples as Chinese
with a shared ancestry. The cross straight tensions were, in

(05:26):
his mind, an internal political struggle that would be made
exceedingly more dangerous with the addition of a nuclear bond
to Taiwan's arsenal. It doesn't make sense to develop a
weapon of mass destruction to kill each other, he recalls, thinking,
by the way, I do not like Communists, but love Chinese,
Chang emailed me following one of our conversations. The US
cut off for more diplomatic relations with Taiwan in nineteen

(05:49):
seventy nine in favor of the People's Republic of China.
Five years later, Chang was promoted to deputed Director of
the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research i NEER. The same year,
he formalized his relationship with the CIA, which he'd been
providing information to on and off for the previous two years.
Chang's confidence that he was doing the right thing deepened

(06:10):
in April nineteen eighty six when the number four reactor
of the Chennobill Nuclear Power Plant exploded. By nineteen eighty eight,
the US decided it was time to act and pulled
Chang out. He didn't show up for a staff meeting
at the iner and co workers found a note in
his desk draw stating he'd resigned from his position. With
the CIA's help, Chang flew to Seattle, then traveled to

(06:31):
a safe house outside Washington, d c. His wife and
three young children, who had flown to Disneyland in Tokyo
shortly before his extraction, joined him in the US. Using
the intelligence Chang passed along, the Americans confronted Taipei, and
the weapons program was shut down. Chang's disappearance was reported
by local media. In the following months, the CIA moved

(06:53):
him from a safe house in Virginia to a home
in Towson, Maryland, and then to Idaho Falls, where the
agency helped him secure a job the Idaho National Laboratory,
a nuclear research facility. He kept his real name, but
added the first name Gray when he became a U.
S citizen in nineteen eighty nine. His actions caused a
furore in Taiwan, and he was added to the island's

(07:13):
most wanted list. It wasn't until nineteen ninety seven that
more details of Chang's role became public. James Lilly, the
longtime CIA operative term diplomat, gave an interview to The
New York Times and hailed the operation as a master
class in intelligence work and diplomacy. Though he never met him,
Chang suspects that Lilly, who died in two thousand nine,

(07:34):
was the big boss behind the operation. The CIA has
never acknowledged Chang's role, and many documents relating to it
remained classified. The agency didn't respond to an emailed request
for comment on Chang's actions. Neither did Taiwan's ruling Democratic
Progressive Party DPP. Alexander Huang, director of international affairs for
Taiwan's opposition Kormin. Tang, maintains that Chang is a traitor.

(07:58):
From a pure military judicial point of view, he cannot
be forgiven and should be punished by law, he said.
On the broader question of whether Taiwan would be better
off with a nuclear weapon, however, Huang has serious doubts
a bomb carries the risk of sanctions or international ostracization,
which would be particularly burdensome to Taiwan given its already
lonely diplomatic status. Taiwan has also developed into a raucous democracy,

(08:22):
quite the opposite of North Korea, and Huang wasn't sure
that the public would agree with having a nuclear weapon,
or that every Taiwanese president would feel comfortable with a
huge black box with him all the time. David Albright,
a nuclear weapons expert who published one of the first
reports on Taiwan's nuclear program, wrote that Chang and the
U S intelligence community had prevented the nightmare scenario of

(08:44):
a nuclear armed mainland China from confronting a much smaller,
nuclear armed Taiwan given Beijing's assertiveness, and resolved to take
control of Taiwan by force if necessary. I asked Albright
if he still stood by his assessment. He said that
he did. Even if Taiwan had succeeded in building a
nuclear weapon without prompting a Chinese invasion, it would have

(09:05):
been very difficult for the US to continue its sustained
military and economic support. Since Taiwan halted its nuclear program,
the idea of restarting it has been mentioned only fleetingly.
The DPP is against the development of nuclear weapons and
has called for their destruction globally. The party also opposes
nuclear energy, and the island has steadily closed its nuclear reactors.

(09:27):
Concerns over energy security appear to be changing that approach, however,
There'll be a referendum later this month on whether to
restart a nuclear reactor that was shut down earlier this year.
While it seems unlikely that Taiwan would restart its weapons program,
other countries are debating obtaining such a deterrent or growing
their existing arsenal Amid concerns about Trump's reliability as a

(09:49):
security partner, his administration has suggested overtly or by implication
that it is just not as interested in extended to
terence relationships as the Biden administration. At Mallory Stewart, a
former Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrance,
and Stability at the U s State Department. Stewart pointed
to discussions in South Korea and Japan about the need

(10:11):
for an indigenous nuclear deterrant. She also raised anxiety over
the lightly lapsing of the New Start Arms treaty between
the US and Russia next year, and a recently signed
nuclear cooperation agreement between Britain and France that came about
in part due to uncertainty over their US ally. Chang
has never attempted to return to Taiwan, even after the

(10:32):
warrant expired. His homesickness dissipated over time, helped in part
by the advent of video calls and messaging apps. Once
his parents died, he said he had little interest in visiting.
I'm still looking for food, beef, noodles, all those types
of things, Chang said, I would like to go back
to Taiwan to have those tastes. While his opposition to
nuclear weapons hardened over time, he says he never sought

(10:55):
to be an anti nuclear activist and didn't share his
views publicly. He did try in other ways to prevent disasters.
He volunteered to be an inspector of Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction program in the run up to the US
invasion in two thousand and three, but says he was
rejected because of his unconventional resume. I wouldn't say I
had a great, big, ambitious plan to pursue world peace

(11:16):
without nuclear weapons, he said. Nevertheless, his actions were hugely
consequential Publicly, quite a few people accused me of betrayal,
of being a traitor, Chang said, adding that such opinions
bother him little. He puts more credence in a note
his son wrote him after discovering the truth of why
the family had suddenly departed for the US. It reads,

(11:36):
in part, there is no doubt in my mind that
you made the correct decision, not only for your family,
but for Taiwan as well