Singapore — Nearly a year after Dickson Yeo was deported from the US, the Singaporean who had acted as a paid agent of China has been released from detention.
Yeo, 40, had been sentenced to two years’ jail in the US and was detained by the Internal Security Department (ISD) on Dec 30, 2020, on his return.
Yeo’s is the most spectacular local case to have surfaced in the age of social media, illustrating its usefulness in the case of espionage.
It is known that Yeo had tried unsuccessfully before to get employed by government agencies in Singapore that was known to handle classified information.
According to the Internal Security Department (ISD), the threat Yeo posed has been neutralised.
It was in 2018 that Yeo posted a phoney job listing on the professional networking site, LinkedIn, in the name of a non-existent “consultancy firm” he had dreamed up.
He netted more than 400 resumés, many from people employed by the US government and military who had security clearances. He relayed the ones he thought might be useful to a China operative.
On July 24, 2020, Yeo, who is also known as Yeo Jun Wei, pleaded guilty in the United States for being an “illegal agent of a foreign power” in that country. He was sentenced to 14 months in prison by a US court on Oct 9.
Shortly after his guilty plea, a spokesperson for the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy announced that Yeo’s PhD candidature had been terminated with immediate effect.
According to the Assistant Attorney-General for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, Mr John Demers: “The Chinese government uses an array of duplicity to obtain sensitive information from unsuspecting Americans.
Yeo was central to one such scheme, using career networking sites and a false consulting firm to lure Americans potentially “of interest” to Beijing. Mr Demers described this as “yet another example of the Chinese government’s exploitation of the openness of American society”.
While the US government pointedly fingers at China, ISD statements took care not to name China or Beijing. So the department’s statements refer only to an unnamed “foreign power”, “foreign government” and to “foreign handlers”.
When Yeo was deported to Singapore, he was arrested under the Internal Security Act. ISD said at the time that he would be interviewed to establish if he had engaged in activities prejudicial to Singapore’s security.
The agency added: “Singapore will not allow our nationals to be subverted or used by any foreign actors for activities prejudicial to our security and national interests”.
“The Government takes a very serious view of any Singaporean who enters into a clandestine relationship with a foreign government and engages in espionage or subversive activities at the behest of the foreign power”, ISD said, adding that it would deal firmly with such individuals in accordance with Singapore law.
The Straits Times reports the ISD as saying that when it investigated Yeo’s activities, it ruled that his deals had been clandestine and that the former PhD student knew full well that his handlers were employed by the intelligence apparatus of a foreign state.
“Investigations also showed that Yeo was tasked to source information and provide reports on issues of interest to his foreign handlers, for which he was paid substantial amounts,” the department added.
Those reports were primarily on global and regional geopolitical issues and developments, including issues related to Singapore.
ISD added that he had unsuccessfully sought sensitive government positions, so he could “enrich his reports with privileged policy insights and classified information”.
Therefore, Yeo was unable “to obtain and pass on any classified information about Singapore to his foreign handlers,” ISD found out in the course of its investigations.
”Information from ISD’s interviews with individuals whom Yeo had approached and other related investigations have largely corroborated what Yeo has disclosed or admitted to,” the department added, saying that the threat he poses as a foreign agent has been judged to be “effectively neutralised.”
It has ruled that Yeo does not pose a security threat that “warrants continued detention”. /TISG
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