ASIO officers met whistleblowers in pancake parlour

as posted here

A PANCAKE Parlour restaurant and a cafe in the Block Arcade in central Melbourne are unlikely places to discuss claims of Chinese espionage.

But these were among the venues chosen for meetings between ASIO officers and employees of the Australian arm of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei.

ASIO officers have travelled to Melbourne and Sydney this year to meet Huawei whistleblowers, after the domestic spy agency received information alleging that some Huawei technicians and executives had direct links with the Chinese People's Liberation Army and to the Chinese government.

The allegations made by current and former Huawei employees to ASIO were that the Chinese telecommunications company, which has operations across the globe, was not the purely commercial enterprise it claimed to be.

Rather than being a privately owned company that exists only to make profits on the sales of telecom equipment, Huawei's operations in Australia were controlled by the Chinese government, the employees claimed, and several other employees had close links with the PLA.

These employees told ASIO they believed the hi-tech Huawei was involved in cyber espionage against Australian interests, but when grilled by ASIO, were unable to produce firm evidence of espionage activities.

Hauwei strongly denies any suggestions that it is a front for Beijing, describing as "ludicrous and inaccurate" claims that it has links to the Chinese military or the communist government in Beijing.

The company employs more than 100 people in its Sydney office and about 20 in Melbourne and is said to have an annual turnover in Australia of more than $150 million, selling a wide range of telecommunications equipment to other telcos. ASIO's challenge has been to test the veracity of the claims made by these whistleblowers.

Are they telling the truth? What evidence do they have to back their claims? Are they just being paranoid or are their claims motivated by commercial or other factors?

The Weekend Australian does not know what conclusions ASIO has come to in relation to this; however, the spy agency has taken an active and ongoing interest in the information provided to it.

These included claims that there was a clear distinction inside Huawei between its Australian employees and the Chinese nationals the company had brought in from China.

The Chinese nationals were reserved, did not mix with the Australians, and would "drop everything" when asked to attend meetings with Chinese diplomatic officials.

"They would report back through their embassy what was happening," one former Huawei employee told The Weekend Australian. "It seemed that these people had an official function beyond simply doing business."

Another told of how apprehensive Huawei executives were when hosting a visit in March this year of the propaganda chief of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Changchun. "They called him "Number 5", one employee recalls, referring to the fact that Mr Li was ranked five in China's nine-person politburo standing committee.

Another employee noted that Huawei was unusually security conscious, employing one senior official whose sole job was to monitor the company's emails and its external communications.

ASIO's covert probe of the company has been conducted at the same time as Huawei has tried to allay suspicions within the Australian government by providing a "routine briefing" to ASIO officers in June to give them "a brief introduction to Huawei".

as posted here