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Taiwan has detained an intelligence officer on suspicions he leaked defense secrets to rival China, forcing the defense ministry to swing into damage control, a military spokesman said on Wednesday.
Investigators searched the home of the officer late on Tuesday and found classified information about China's annual military drills and unspecified scientific research developments, defense officials said.
``We have immediately activated damage-control mechanisms and assessed the impact of the leaked information on national security to take necessary counter-measures,'' military spokesman Liou Chih-chien told a news conference.
The detained officer worked in the Defense Ministry's telecommunication development office, which is responsible for collecting military intelligence on the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
Liou said the information the officer leaked was about Chinese military exercises and not about Taiwan, but his actions may have enabled Beijing to better understand the extent of Taiwan's intelligence on the mainland.
Taiwan and China have been spying on each other since they split at the end of a 1949 civil war. China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province and has vowed to attack if the democratic island of 23 million people declares independence.
In Taiwan's most famous spy scandal, a vice defense minister was executed in the early 1950s for providing China with the island's combat plans.
Beijing executed a Chinese major-general and a senior colonel in 1999 for spying for Taiwan in the biggest espionage scandal of China's Communist era.
The defense ministry said the Bureau of Investigation discovered the latest spy case while investigating a credit card forgery.