We truly are not a nation at peace, but in a state of war.

Edward Lin

Written By Allen West for allenbwest.com

I’ve been here in DC since Sunday and whenever I’m here, I still think about 9-11 and the threat of Islamic jihadism in our nation’s capital. I recall that Capitol Hill was a place where Anwar al-Awlaki was invited to offer prayers. I remember Nidal Hasan was stationed here at Walter Reed Army Medical Center before being reassigned to Ft. Hood, Texas, and we know what happened there. We often focus on the infiltration of militant Islamists in our midst, but we forget there’s another very clear and present danger.

As reported by Reuters, “A U.S. Navy flight officer with knowledge of sensitive American intelligence collection methods faces espionage charges over suspicions he passed secret information to Taiwan and possibly to China, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the suspect as Lieutenant Commander Edward Lin, who was born in Taiwan and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen, according to a Navy article profiling him in 2008.

Lin was a flight officer assigned to the Special Projects Patrol Squadron, with experience managing the collection of electronic signals from the EP3-E Aries II signals intelligence aircraft, officials said.

Information about how the U.S. Navy carries out such signals collection operations could be highly valuable to a foreign government. A heavily redacted Navy charge sheet twice accused the suspect of communicating secret information and three times of attempting to do so “with intent or reason to believe it would be used to the advantage of a foreign nation.”

The suspect was also accused of engaging in prostitution and adultery. The document was redacted to blot out Lin’s name and did not identify what foreign country or countries were involved. The U.S. officials said both Taiwan and China were possibly those countries but stressed the investigation was still ongoing.”

LCDR Lin reminds us there’s a threat to America from across the Pacific Ocean. Here again we have someone in our uniform whose allegiance to our nation, in the end, meant nothing.

Let’s be honest, this goes back to one Benedict Arnold, so there’s nothing new under the sun. However, we need to come to grips with the threat emanating from the Pacific: China. Recently, here at the NCPA we had the pleasure of former Defense Intelligence Agency Commander, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn participating in one of our lecture series. He firmly stated that China has a cyber unit consisting of some 800,000 members. The United States recently established the US CYBERCOMMAND (CYBERCOM) and we have somewhere between 10,000 to 15,000. We have a serious issue with the theft of our intellectual property, much from China. We even have an issue with counterfeit parts that end up being parts for our weapons systems, courtesy of China. The most recent Chinese fighter jet has some very marked resemblances to our F35 fighter jet.

LCDR Lin reminds us of that famous quote attributed to Roman statesman Marcus Tulius Cicero: “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at …..