Isabelle Cheng is a former Taiwanese intelligence officer who successfully co-opted a senior U.S. State Department official named Donald Keyser in 2002.

Keyser joined the State Department in 1972 and spent many years in various locations throughout Asia including Beijing, Tokyo, and Taipei. He was fluent in Chinese and conversational in Russian, Japanese, and French, and made valuable contributions wherever he went. But Keyser also had a string of romances with various women over the course of his career and was well-known among his peers for his wandering eye

In the fall of 2002, while serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific affairs, Keyser was introduced to Cheng, who was ostensibly an employee of the quasi-diplomatic Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, but in reality, an intelligence officer for the Taiwanese National Security Bureau.

The two quickly became close, and what to Keyser’s mind was a romantic affair began. The romance soon came to the attention of State Department counterintelligence and the FBI, who began surveilling the pair. Keyser emailed Cheng hundreds of times and failed to report foreign travel related to the affair, or to report the relationship at all, as required by regulation. He even went so far as to describe a coworker as someone who was “ripe for recruitment” by a foreign intelligence service.

In September 2004, Keyser was observed bringing classified documents to a lunch meeting with Cheng and her boss, General Michael Huang, the senior NSB officer in the US. A search of his home also turned up thousands of neatly filed classified documents.

After a protracted legal battle, Keyser was sentenced to 366 days in prison. Cheng escaped serious consequences and now teaches at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.

For episode 120 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with Robert David Booth, a retired State Department counterintelligence agent. We discussed several of the biggest cases of his career, from foreign intelligence agents to officials leaking sensitive documents to the press. The episode is available now.

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