1

THE BATTLE FOR SHANGHAI

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were 400 million people living in China, which covered 11 million square kilometres. Various further parcels of once-Chinese territory had been annexed during consecutive foreign invasions. With the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the British had granted themselves Hong Kong, known as the “Fragrant Harbour”. Other “unequal treaties” led to the granting of Concessions—entire areas of major cities—to the “long noses”, as well as the imposition of war damages by foreign powers, which devastated the Chinese economy.

In 1900 in Beijing, the “northern” capital, foreign legations were besieged during the Boxer Rebellion, as it was called by foreign journalists. By the end of the fifty-five-day siege, the uprising had been crushed by an international expeditionary force, and the dowager empress Ci Xi, an ally of the Boxers, was toppled. The last Manchu emperor, Pu Yi, was forced to abdicate at the age of six in 1912. The new Republic of China, headed by nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, quickly took shape as a dictatorship under the yoke of the northern warlord Yuan Shikai.

The history of modern Chinese espionage begins ten years after these events, in the French Concession of Shanghai, a port on the River Huangpu, which is an tributary of the Yangtze. Three hundred thousand Chinese people lived in the Concession. Indeed, the story of Chinese communism and its secret services is partly French; in the 1920s, Shanghai was nicknamed “the Paris of the Orient”.

The French were not the only Westerners to have wrested a concession from the Manchu emperors. Shanghai’s International Settlement belonged to the British and the Americans, whose jurisdiction was applied to its 750,000-strong Chinese population, while another million lived in the working-class Chinese neighbourhoods of Zhabei and Nandao. One doesn’t need an abacus to work out that only 30,000 Westerners—“foreign devils”, with their own police force, army and legal system—were imposing their rule on fully half the city’s inhabitants.

These laws had a variable geometry, for the Western powers, like the Chinese bourgeoisie, turned a blind eye to the fact that Shanghai at the time was not only one of the most lively cities in the world, both economically and culturally; it was also a paradise for gambling, weapons and opium trafficking, and a hub for Western prostitute-trading, spying and myriad different kinds of fraud and corruption.

The powerful made accommodation with this extraordinary underworld: Yu Qiaqing, president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, was simultaneously a major businessman and a senior figure in the Green Gang (Qing Bang), the all-powerful secret society that pulled the strings in this astonishing shadow puppet theatre. The head of this criminal organization, Du Yuesheng, had a powerful “blood brother”, Félix Bouvier: the owner of both the Canidrome, Shanghai’s greyhound racing track, and the Grand Monde Casino, where exiled Russian princesses, American arms dealers and Japanese spies played for high stakes, as immortalized in the 1932 film Shanghai Express.

“Mister Du”, the Al Capone of Shanghai, also drew into his clan of influential characters people like the young nationalist general and future leader of the Republic, Chiang Kai-shek, and Étienne Fiori, who had previously worked as an intelligence officer in Morocco, and was now both head of the French Concession’s Special Police Bureau and active in the criminal activities of the Corsican mafia, which was in cahoots with the Green Gang.

A short, swarthy man with slicked-back hair and a crooked smile, Fiori’s principal criminal involvement was with the “Grande Combine”, a white slave network that consisted of Corsicans “Shanghai’ing” young French girls and sending them to the largest brothel in the world, in exchange for opium bricks sent by Mister Du to Marseille.1 But this trade was hardly reserved for the export market. Huge quantities were consumed in Shanghai’s 800 opium dens, to which people were guided by some 3,000 “vagabonds”, as the henchmen of the Green Gang were called.

This diseased, corrupt world was starting to provoke an immune response. Influenced by the Russian Revolution and their professors, young Chinese people—students at the Aurora University and members of the nascent Rickshaw Association union—were determined that the East would soon turn red.

Mao dodges the French police

In July 1921, twelve delegates representing fifty-seven militants from different provinces all over China met at a supposedly secret location, in the house of one delegate’s relative: 160 Wantz Road in the French Concession.

In the small, dimly lit, smoky salon, ashtrays were passed around and tea was served before the participants launched into debates with two emissaries from the Comintern, “Maring” and “Nikolsky”. “Maring”, in fact a Dutch man called Henricus Sneevliet, communicated Moscow’s position: it was an excellent idea to establish a communist party, but it was vital that it aligned with the Kuomintang, the nationalist party founded by Dr  Sun Yat-sen to carry out the democratic revolution begun ten years previously with the overthrow of the last Manchu emperor. The first three days of discussion continued late into the night, relocating to the dormitory of the girls’ school on Rue Auguste-Boppe, where the delegates eventually slept after these exhausting sessions (the schoolgirls were on holiday).

On the evening of a fourth day of fiery debate, a strange-looking man knocked at the front door, claiming that he was looking for someone called Li or Zhang, both very common names. Then, apologizing that he had the wrong address, he turned on his heels and left.

It was one of Fiori’s police officers. Following the Russian envoy Maring’s advice, the delegates made a hasty getaway, “like mice, with their hands on their ears”, as a Chinese expression puts it. Their instincts were correct: ten minutes later Chinese policemen, led by a French officer, burst into the house.

The history of the Chinese Communist Party had barely even begun and it had already exposed a shadowy web of informants, secret police and spies.

Chinese people tend towards fatalism rather than growing discouraged. The following day, in the absence of the two Comintern representatives, the delegates relocated their meeting to a pleasure boat, which they sailed around a lake in Zhejiang, a province to the south-west of Shanghai. The motions proposed were as plain-spoken as Confucian aphorisms; they debated them while watching wild cranes in flight and the delicate gait of elegant ladies carrying parasols as they took their afternoon constitutionals.

Against this enchanting background, they ratified their decisions on this fifth day of talks, and baptized their new movement the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or Gongchandang in Pinyin). Based on the Russian model, the younger version adopted a straightforward programme: to set up a red army, topple the bourgeoisie and establish a rule of the proletariat in which private property and class differences would be abolished. As Comrade “Lie-Ning” (Lenin) had insisted, each communist party had to be organized around the principle of “democratic centralism”, within which factions were not tolerated, and professional revolutionaries were bound by a framework of iron discipline.

The leader of these Chinese Bolsheviks was an elected general secretary, a brilliant intellectual inspired by Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution of 1789: Chen Duxiu. Among the younger delegates, one man from Changsha, capital of Hunan province, was known for his brilliance and his reserve. In the future he would come to be known as Mao Zedong, “Red Sun”, and he had almost ended up in a French prison.

The Comintern would have preferred the CCP to have chosen someone with greater flexibility than this young tub-thumper: someone open to the idea of a “united front” with the Kuomintang, for example. Nonetheless, Moscow agreed to provide for the needs and education of the new party as it suited it. Meanwhile, towards the end of 1921, Maring, who bore a certain distrust towards this group of intellectuals, met with Sun Yat-sen, who had established his government in the south, in Canton (modern-day Guangzhou). He offered Dr  Sun Moscow’s aid, and even, without consulting his Chinese comrades, that of the CCP.  This marked the beginning of the entente cordiale between the Kuomintang and the future USSR.  The latter’s objective, according to Lenin, was to unite a greater China, which had been ravaged by warlords, through a left-leaning government whose alliance would break the political isolation that plagued the nascent USSR.

The CCP—despite chafing at the bit, eager to start the revolution there and then—held back, encouraged by the promise of an even brighter future. Yet there was a moment when it seemed like this might never come to pass. Who was it who had betrayed the Party’s inaugural meeting? And how to resolve the mystery, other than by setting up an investigation and creating a small spy network? This book is no less than the story of how that embryonic structure would one day become the biggest secret service network in the world.

Luo Yinong, a young student who came, like Mao, from Hunan, and who would later be sent to Moscow to be trained in the art of espionage and revolutionary insurrection, took charge of the inquiry into the infiltration of the Party meeting. This revealed that the intrusion of the French police had a simple explanation, and that the Comintern was to blame.2 It seemed that two young emissaries from the Comintern’s youth organization, bringing subsidies for their Chinese comrades, had been shadowed by Fiori’s agents since their arrival in Shanghai. As far as can be ascertained, they were Henri Lozeray and Jacques Doriot, both from Saint-Denis, a suburb to the north of Paris. Realizing that they were being tailed by the police, the young men were careful to take a circuitous route on their way to joining the other delegates at the meeting. But their liaison agent must have been less prudent.

After they returned to France, via Moscow, these two men helped set up the Paris branch of the CCP, and, as we shall see, assisted a well-known militant, the true founding father of the original Chinese communist secret service. But let us leave them for the time being, as they board a ship to Vladivostok and then the Trans-Siberian express to Paris, via Moscow and Berlin.3

The Soviets’ Chinese networks

The Soviets, meanwhile, as we shall see, did not remain idle. In Moscow, their secret service, the Cheka, set up by the Polish-born Felix Dzerjinsky, had as its emblem a gladiator sword and shield. The sword’s razor-sharp blade represented the Cheka’s highly efficient foreign intelligence service, the INO.4 The shield represented the political police, whose job was to eliminate counter-revolutionaries and imperialist spies within Russia, beginning with those from the British Intelligence Service and the Deuxième Bureau (France’s external military intelligence agency). The Cheka was conducting a ruthless war against both services. At stake was the very survival of the revolutionary state, which was surrounded by an ever-tightening circle of anti-Bolsheviks.

Since the beginning of the 1920s, the Cheka, renamed the GPU in 1922, had been investing hugely in China, with two objectives. The first was the recruitment of Chinese agents to inform Moscow of the intentions of, variously, warlords, the imperial powers who owned the Concessions, exiled White Russians preparing their return, Kuomintang nationalists, and informers who were traitors to the revolution. It was a huge programme. The Cheka’s sponsoring of the security services of both the nascent CCP and the Kuomintang was also a strategy for controlling them.

The Cheka was not the only organization operating behind the scenes. At the same time, the Red Army’s intelligence service, the Razvedoupr (better known as the GRU), headed by General Arvid Seibot, was also active. In every country in the world, the GRU was monitoring military potential as well as overseeing the military sections of the communist parties, which were themselves born of the Red Army. The Latvian-born Jan Berzin, head of the 3rd Directorate (Espionage), was soon to become head of the GRU, and would go on to intensify operations in Asia. In China, following an agreement with Sun Yat-sen, this sizeable service—which is still active today, under the same name—also oversaw, in an advisory capacity, the Huangpu Military Academy, which had been set up by Chinese nationalists. In 1927 the military attaché to the Soviet embassy in Guangdong was Colonel Semion Aralov, who had been the first head of the GRU in 1918, under Trotsky.

We have already heard of the third Russian organization present in China, more outwardly political than the Cheka or the GRU: the Comintern, founded in 1919 to foment the world revolution. Its clandestine activities were organized by the International Liaison Service (OMS), led by an old revolutionary called Iossip Piatnitsky. These activities included the transfer of funds and financing of parties, unions and committees, and the training of agents in clandestine skills, including encryption and broadcast of wireless messages, forging of documents, and developing cover stories for secret agents.5

The organization of the Soviet espionage service in China was taking shape. The first rezident of the Cheka in Beijing, Aristarkh Rylski (real name Aristarkh Riguin), was replaced in 1922 by the Armenian diplomat–spy Yakov Davtian, who undertook several missions to France under the name “Jean Jan”. Not long after his arrival in Beijing, Davtian complained to his superior Meyer Trilisser, head of the INO in Moscow, that he was being weighed down by the enormous amount of work he faced. “The workload, though extremely interesting, is incredibly heavy and challenging. One has to demonstrate a great sense of responsibility. The distance from Moscow, the poor quality of the liaisons, the mutual incomprehension with the Centre—everything complicates our work. I have never worked so hard in my life—even at the INO—as I do here and my nerves have never been under such severe strain.”

But Comrade Davtian reluctantly put a brave face on it, because China was, as he said, “the hub of world politics, not just world imperialism’s Achilles heel but also ours”. And even if Riguin and Davtian did not get on particularly well, the INO “residences”, or intelligence stations, in Beijing, Tianjin, Mukden, Changchun, Harbin, Canton and Shanghai were thriving, as evidenced by the encouraging report penned by Davtian a year after his arrival: “The work is going well. If you have been following the documents that I have been sending, you will see that I have succeeded in extending our network all over China, meaning that nothing important can happen without us being alerted. Our network of contacts is expanding. Overall I can say that none of the White Russians living in the Far East can get by unnoticed. I know everything that happens, often even before it has actually taken place.”6

On 11  February 1923, Davtian sent a message to the Centre, as Moscow intelligence headquarters is known: “I have significantly expanded our activities. We now have appropriate Residences in Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing and Mukden. I have set up a significant administrative apparatus in Harbin. We have plans to infiltrate the Japanese intelligence service, and a wide network of informers in Shanghai.”7

In Beijing, Soviet military intelligence (the GRU) was officially represented by General Anatoli Gekker, who was the Soviet Embassy’s military attaché there until 1925. One of Gekker’s official missions at the time was to help the Russian military advisors attached to the Kuomintang army to oversee the creation of a nationalist military intelligence training corps, and supervise an intelligence service nicknamed the “College” (Zhongxue), run by a senior figure in the Kuomintang, a former teacher called Tan Pin-san.8 The Soviets were thus overseeing both the nascent Chinese communist intelligence service and that of the nationalists, whose leader, Sun Yat-sen, continued to support an alliance with Moscow up until his death in March 1925.

This formally present military apparatus was just the tip of the iceberg. In practice, the great majority of GRU intelligence in China, like Cheka/GPU intelligence in the USSR, was collected by “illegals”: undercover secret agents, whether roaming or permanently stationed. Traces of them can be found in the hundreds of French intelligence reports I have consulted, through which I have been able to create a real Who’s Who of Russian espionage in China in the 1920s and 1930s. This has been a fairly complicated undertaking, given that we are talking about a world where everyone had multiple aliases, false names and “fake-genuine” passports, which abound in the archives of the French Consulates in Shanghai and Tianjin from the interwar period.

It was by no means only in China, in the French Concessions and the International Settlements of Shanghai and Hong Kong, that the Chinese Communist Party was establishing its underground network. In Paris, too, young militants on a work–study programme were being schooled in undercover techniques. They had to brave the French police force, the counterintelligence service and the external military intelligence service that had been instructed to root them out. Decorated with First World War medals, Police Chiefs Louis Ducloux and Charles Faux-Pas-Bidet from the Sûreté (French security service) and Colonel Henri Lainey, head of the counterintelligence and intelligence service (SCR), had to shift the focus of their work to combatting the rising tide of Bolshevism and its agents. The so-called “yellow peril” was still to come, but the political unrest in China and Indochina demanded a high level of vigilance and was a matter of great concern for the French Empire in Asia. For the militants from the Far East, learning how to foil the tails and traps mounted by master spies in the streets of Paris, Lyon and Marseille meant that they were already playing a role in this war of shadows.

Zhou Enlai’s Hakkas come to Paris

China’s Hakkas used to be a nomadic people; hence their name, which means “guest families”. Over the course of many centuries, they fled the Mongols and sought refuge: on the plains of central China, south of the Yellow River, by the Pearl River in Hong Kong, in Canton, and elsewhere. They were as brave in battle as they were adventurous in their travels. Many left China. They constitute a distinct ethnic group, with their impenetrable dialect, and symbols and rituals very different from those of the rest of the Chinese diaspora. During the Qing dynasty of 1644–1912, their luxuriant hair was testimony to the fact that they refused to express allegiance to the Manchu conquerors by shaving their heads and keeping only a single plait. Women had the same rights as men, at least in terms of the right to work in the fields. A Hakka bowed down to no one. A Hakka was indomitable.

One sign of this was the fact that, unlike other Chinese peoples, Hakka fathers did not force their daughters to have their feet bound and atrophied in order to turn them into objects of desire. When they reached adulthood, Hakka women married only other Hakkas, for the bourgeois of Shanghai, the Mandarins of Beijing and the farmers of Changsha considered them hideous, with their “enormous” feet. The Hakkas are proud people. The legendary Hong Xiuquan, flamboyant leader of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), was a Hakka. Hong’s vision was the establishment of a heavenly kingdom of peace on earth. This revolutionary spark triggered a civil war; according to the brothers Élisée and Onésime Reclus, France’s most famous geographers at the time, the subsequent repression led to the loss of between 12 and 15 million lives in China.9 The Taiping saga horrified the entire world and inspired Jules Verne to create a character called Wang, a philosopher, in The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China.

Had the men of the interwar French Special Branch and military intelligence officers actually read the anarchist Reclus brothers or Jules Verne? We can’t know, but they had certainly been following the tribulations of the Chinese in France in July 1922. Whilst no doubt ignorant of the complex history of the Hakkas, detectives were keeping the effervescent world of France’s Chinese student–workers under constant surveillance. Many of the Chinese students were engaged in propaganda in the diaspora for the defence of academic freedom, and they joined both the nationalist Kuomintang led by Sun Yat-sen, himself a Hakka, and a new group that had infiltrated them: the CCP, established in Shanghai with money from Moscow and help from the communists Doriot and Lozeray.

Under assumed names, these young Chinese in Paris engaged in clandestine activities, operating in secret cells. One of these Hakkas was little “Ten” from Sichuan, with a baby face and jet black hair flying in the wind—he was none other than the future Deng Xiaoping, who worked in the Renault factory and was nicknamed “Mister Mimeograph”, because he spent his evenings printing out New Youth and Red Dawn, underground Chinese-language pamphlets. Who would have imagined then that he would become president of the People’s Republic of China sixty years later? Or that, among the Hakkas in the Paris communist circle, there were no fewer than three future marshals of the People’s Liberation Army? This trio would play a role in every chapter of the history of the secret services: Chen Yi, Ye Jianying and Zhu De.10

According to French secret police reports, the young communist Hakkas met for the first time in spring 1922, at the apartment of Henri Lozeray, alias “Gardon”: 15 rue Goncourt, in Paris’s 11th arrondissement. Lozeray, who worked as a typesetter, was head of colonial affairs in the Communist Youth, and though he had just missed the birth of the CCP in Shanghai, he was in the front row for the baptism of its European branch. The meeting in his apartment was organized by another Renault employee, a lathe operator nicknamed “Wu Hao”. The future leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, was also there, under his given name, Nguyen Ai Quoc; the police had already built up a fat dossier on him, dating back to his attendance at the founding meeting of the French Communist Party. He worked retouching photographs and mending china, and went by the alias “Ferdinand”. Ferdinand was in fact a Comintern agent, and his friendship with the Breton Jean Cremet, a rising star in the French Communist Party, did not fool the authorities as to his additional, clandestine involvement in the struggle.11

The Sûreté inspectors also staked out a building at 17 rue Godefroy, in the Gobelins neighbourhood of Paris near the Place d’Italie, where a small Chinatown was growing up. A young man calling himself Mr  Stephen Knight, who dressed like an English gentleman and held a British passport, lived on the second floor. He claimed to be a businessman from Hong Kong. His description matched that of the Wu Hao who had been at Lozeray’s apartment, and they were indeed one and the same person: the son of a bureaucrat from Zhejiang, south-west of Shanghai, a young man who had become radicalized early on. His real name was Zhou Enlai. Having broken off relations with his family, he had spent time in Japan before coming to Europe. In November 1920, Zhou, alias “Wu Hao”, arrived in Marseille on board the Bordeaux, a French merchant ship. With a natural instinct for clandestine activity, for two years he ran Chinese communist cells in France, Belgium and Germany. After the occupation of the Chinese Legation in Paris by student–workers, the police arrested him, but, unaware of his true identity, merely decided to escort him to Marseille, from where he was to be expelled from France and sent back to China. He managed to jump unseen from the moving train in open countryside, and thus escaped his guards. The “revolutionary mandarin” was already proving himself a skilled escape artist.

Zhou surrounded himself with faithful Hakka comrades, also gifted in clandestine activity, and became close to a young man called Nie Rongzhen who, like Deng Xiaoping, hailed from Sichuan. He had studied with Deng at the University of Grenoble and then at Charleroi in Belgium, where he fell under the influence of Belgian socialists. Recruited by Zhou for his scientific mind, he was expert in encryption and wireless messaging. He worked as an engineer with Creusot and Renault. He would later became a marshal in the People’s Liberation Army, and one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb.

It is worth remembering that these Hakkas and future marshals, and the rest of the group that formed around Zhou, along with their children, will continue to feature in this singular tale, all the way up to the present day.

French counterintelligence did not depend only on informers. Pen-pushers at 11 rue des Saussaies in Paris were making shrewd estimations. They realized that Moscow must be subsidizing the Chinese, with French Comintern agents acting as intermediaries.

A seasoned radical named Suzanne Girault was responsible for transferring the money. Born in Switzerland, where she first met Lenin, she had worked as a primary school teacher in Russia, where she was recruited in 1919 by the International Liaison Service of the Comintern, the OMS.  This was how she came to be responsible for handing over tidy sums to various revolutionary groups, including the Chinese, as was clear from documents seized by the French police during a search of her home, after a spy ring led by Jean Cremet was uncovered in 1927.

In summer 1924, Zhou Enlai returned to China. It was not until he reached Hong Kong that the French police discovered who it was who had been hiding behind the alias Stephen Knight, and that the English gentleman and the Chinese labourer Wu Hao were one and the same man.

The spies who inspired Man’s Fate

Zhou Enlai arrived in Hong Kong on 1  September 1924. From there he continued on to Canton, where he joined the corps of officers running the Huangpu Military Academy, created at the instigation of the Russians and Sun Yat-sen, to participate in the formation of a nationalist army to fight the warlords of northern China.

Various comrades from his time in Europe joined him there, including Ye Jianying, Chen Yi and Nie Rongzhen. The academy was under the tutelage of Mikhail Borodin, permanent representative of the Comintern to China, and General Blücher, head of the Soviet military advisory mission. The CCP was gaining wisdom with age. With a membership of 30,000, it had joined forces with the Kuomintang, and several high-profile figures of the communist movement—such as Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong—became part of the joint leadership, although it was dominated by nationalists.

Clearly, this double affiliation within the burgeoning national army led to a certain amount of ambiguity, with the “officer factory” at Huangpu training both communists and nationalists. Borodin had chosen a promising young general, Chiang Kai-shek, to run the school, with Zhou Enlai as head of the political department. Also in Borodin’s entourage was another familiar gaunt figure from the Paris period: Nguyen Ai Quoc, the future Ho Chi Minh. The honeymoon between nationalists and communists reached its apotheosis when the head of the Academy and chief of the National Revolutionary Army, Chiang Kai-shek, sent his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, to study in Moscow.

This was rather surprising, considering that Chiang Kai-shek had set upon a secret plan: having defeated the warlords, he decided it was now time to get the communists out of the way. The Chinese bourgeoisie would have no scruples about supporting him, especially since the communists had been independently organizing major strikes in Canton, Hong Kong and Shanghai. When the mass strike in Canton began in 1926, Chiang decided to punish the communists. The arrest of Zhou Enlai and other leaders was a warning shot. Chen Duxiu, the CCP chief, thought that the communists needed to distance themselves from the nationalists, although Borodin, speaking in “his master’s voice” (in other words, Stalin’s), did not agree.

This did not prevent Borodin from taking precautions: in October 1926 he sent his bodyguard, Gu Shunzhang, to Vladivostok, to familiarize himself with espionage and revolutionary insurrection techniques. Comrade Gu was a quite extraordinary character: born in 1902 on the wrong side of the tracks in Shanghai, he spent his adolescence hanging around bars, smoking opium, having affairs with women, learning the ways of the underworld and being sworn into the Green Gang. He became a brilliant illusionist called Hua Guangqi, performing his wildly popular show in famous nightclubs and casinos such as the Grand Monde and the Sincere Department Store. Who would have suspected that Gu the magician had secretly joined the CCP?

After his return from the USSR, Gu, along with Kang Sheng, the new leader of the Shanghai district party, organized a communist patrol as protection against the increasing threat posed by the Kuomintang.

In March 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Kuomintang, established his army and government in Nanjing, the southern capital. Within weeks, on 12  April 1927, everything began to fall apart for the communists. Chiang had outflanked them. The massacre that took place was, as the American journalist Harold Isaacs titled his book, “the tragedy of the Chinese revolution”. The young writer André Malraux was later to base his novel Man’s Fate on these tragic events.

As the CCP was planning an insurrection, several thousand criminals from the Green Gang set about the slaughter of communist militants and sympathizers. The authorities and police in the foreign Concessions averted their eyes from the bloodbath that was taking place outside their walls in the Chinese quarter. Zhou Enlai, Luo Yinong, Gu Shunzhang and Kang Sheng managed to hide in the French Concession, where they spent their days planning the reorganization of the Party as they waited for things to calm down. Elsewhere in China, the picture was hardly more cheering: in September, in Hunan, Mao Zedong led the disastrous Autumn Harvest insurrection, whose few survivors later took refuge in the mountainous desert region of Jiangxi before founding their own red army. Then, in December 1927, another insurrection, the Canton Uprising, was crushed; some 15,000 communists were massacred.

The double game of Captain Pick

The situation was a catastrophe for the Soviets. Not only had the CCP been decimated in several large Chinese cities in the wake of its disastrous policy of allegiance with the Kuomintang, followed by a series of bold insurrections intended to make people forget this compromise; but worse, the Chinese police had burst into the Soviet embassy in Beijing, arresting diplomats and seizing cartloads of archives. The police also arrested the new head of the CCP, Li Dazhao, the “Chinese Lenin”, who had taken refuge there. He was executed without trial on 28  April 1927.

Huge numbers of the Embassy documents have been amassed and decrypted, detailing the ways in which the Comintern and the Soviet government set up networks of secret organizations in China. We know today that the discovery of this setup owes a great deal to the interception of communications, uncommon at the time, by the British, who were already experts in the field. The organization responsible for wiretapping, the Government Communications and Cypher School (GC&CS), had set up wiretapping stations in every large garrison town across the British Empire from 1920. In China, these stations were located in Hong Kong and Shanghai.12

The humiliation suffered by Moscow only increased when Dai Li, the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s intelligence service, had the documents translated and published as a book of selected extracts from the communications of the Soviet spies.13 A report sent to Paris by the French intelligence service, which also consulted the documents, summarized the wealth of information that had been seized, and the naivety of the Soviet cadres who had neither encrypted nor destroyed the files after they had finished with them:

Document numbers 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 deal with Soviet espionage and counterintelligence. N°7, dated 1925, outlines the general organization of the intelligence service in the south; among other things it reveals that at the time the Soviets were already preparing to send secret agents to Hanoi and Haiphong, Macao and Hong Kong. N°8 is a report on intelligence gathering in Kwantong [Guangdong, region of Canton] in November 1925.

Nos 9, 10 and 11 deal with counterintelligence in Kwantong and offer interesting information about the creation, development, organization and functioning of an organization in Canton that was closely modelled on the Russian GPU (Cheka).14

And since bad news often comes in twos, so it was that in May 1927, an agent considered one of the most important figures of the GRU in China defected. The Shanghai Municipal Police’s Irish-born Chief Detective Inspector Pat Givens must have been thrilled to be able to “debrief” and “turn” this experienced GRU officer. But who was Evgeny Mikhailovich Kojevnikov, also known as “Morskoy”, “Dorodin”, “Hovans” and “Captain Pick”?15

His public persona was that of a Tsarist officer who had backed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, before joining Borodin in China. From 1926 onwards he worked for the head of the GRU in Beijing. But in fact he had been recruited months earlier by Givens and was secretly reporting everything he knew about the activities of undercover spies employed at the Russo-Asian bank Dalbank, the role of correspondents for the press agency Tass, and Chinese communist activists.

His role as a double agent—one might call him an intelligence swindler—was detailed in a statement given some years later by Gu Shunzhang, the magician who became one of the most important figures in the CCP’s intelligence service: “At the time I was Borodin’s bodyguard, and a secret service agent in Hangzhou and Wuhan. I discovered that Eugène Pick, who worked for Borodin as a warrant officer, had stolen from his boss a notebook and a report about foreign ships docked in Hangzhou, and sold them to the French consul. Pick was working as a spy for several foreign consulates.”16

Pick told his British handlers that on 18  April 1927 he had received orders from Borodin to have Chiang Kai-shek—responsible for the recent slaughter of communists in Shanghai—assassinated, and that, on 1  May, he had received a counterorder from the INO rezident, S.L.  Wilde. It would appear that he let his guard down and was unmasked, for two weeks later, according to a leaked French counterintelligence report, Pick was almost kidnapped by a commando unit led by a certain “Pockmarked Chen”.

It was under his pen name “Captain Eugène Pick” that the Russian defector compiled China in the Grip of Bolsheviks, in which he divulged a list of dozens of Soviet operatives active in China.17 There is no doubt that references to these agents, often accompanied by anti-Semitic allusions, were not written by Pick alone, but were the fruit of a collaboration between the British, French and Kuomintang secret services. Indeed, according to Russian archives, Pick was no more than a low-ranking subaltern who had been drafted as an informer by British Intelligence from the start.18

It barely mattered. This blisteringly polemical publication was a powerful propaganda weapon. The book, which had a considerable impact all over the world, bolstered the image of Chiang Kai-shek as poised to bring down the “Red Dragon”. André Malraux drew on Pick’s book for certain episodes in his Man’s Fate, including the failed assassination attempt on Chiang and some elements of the Baron Clapique character (note the similarity of the Baron’s name to that of the Captain). In 1933 Malraux won the Prix Goncourt. The same year, Hergé was working on a Tintin book, The Blue Lotus, in which Dawson, the unlikeable chief of the British Police Force who is persecuting the young reporter Tintin, bears a remarkable similarity to Pat Givens. It was Givens the Irishman who, until 1936, was responsible for rooting out communist agents, for which he received the Order of Brilliant Jade from Chiang Kai-shek himself in recognition of his loyal service. It was also Givens, head of Special Branch, who had manipulated the entire Pick affair from beginning to end. As we shall see, Malraux embellished his novel’s plot with anecdotes that he heard from another communist defector whom he met in Shanghai in 1931: the deputy general secretary of the French Communist Party, Jean Cremet.

Special operations

The inscrutable “Zhao Rong”, alias Kang Sheng, was one of several CCP leaders who went to ground in the French Concession, which Dai Li’s nationalist police were not authorized to enter—even when the chief spy of the Kuomintang came to ask the corrupt police chief Étienne Fiori and his Chinese police inspectors for their assistance. (The latter were allowed to enter the International Settlement thanks to Givens’s Special Branch.) Chief Inspector Huang Jirong was, like Dai Li, a member of the Green Gang. “Pockmarked Huang”, as he was nicknamed, would surely have been proud to know that he was the inspiration for the main character in Josef von Sternberg’s film Shanghai Express, with Marlene Dietrich in the role of the bewitching Shanghai Lily.

Kang Sheng did leave the French Concession to see another film, a Harold Lloyd picture, at the Carlton Theatre on Park Road. This served as a cover for his secret assignation with “Wu Hao”, who was preparing to leave for the USSR on a mission. Wu Hao was of course the indefatigable Zhou Enlai, who handed over responsibility for the secret service to Kang for the duration of his absence. The young intellectual, son of a landowner from northern Shandong—homeland of Confucius—wasted no time, since Luo Yinong had given him the task of establishing networks and infiltrating the enemy.19

While communists were being shot and decapitated in the Chinese district of Zhabei, Kang managed to pull off the infiltration of the century. This highly cultivated, well-turned-out young man became personal secretary to Yu Qiaqing, president of the Chamber of Commerce, with the aid of servants also originally from Shandong, who helped him find a job with the wealthy businessman. Yu was a member of the Green Gang, and, like all the other stalwarts of industry, finance and commerce, sided with the boss, his friend Du Yuesheng, who had given the green light for the murder of communists as demanded by Chiang Kai-shek.

As they drank tea, smoked opium and chatted about their flourishing businesses, Yu and Du had no reason to suspect that the young intellectual in gold-rimmed spectacles, handwriting sales orders and invoices in the next room, was the head of a communist spy ring. How could they have known he was the very person responsible for setting up a new network, in preparation for the communist revenge?

In August 1927, Zhou Enlai and his wife, Deng Yingchao, left Shanghai for Dalian disguised as a pair of antique dealers. From there they took the train for Moscow. Under the alias Chen Guang, Zhou moved with his young wife into the Hotel Lux, a crumbling palace that hosted heads of the Comintern and secret agents preparing to leave on mission, including the Frenchman Jean Cremet (room 27) and the German Richard Sorge (room 19). To further cover his tracks, Zhou was also given a Russian moniker, “Moskvin”.20

Soon after their arrival in Moscow, the couple were sent for espionage training at the GRU spy school on Lenin Hills, where they learned the latest spy skills, coding and wireless broadcast techniques.21 In spring 1928, the two “antique dealers” took part in the Chinese Communist Party Congress held in a Moscow suburb, inside a GPU-owned sanatorium. Stalin claimed it was organized outside China for security reasons, but no one fell for this: it was a clever way for Moscow to retain control of the Chinese sister party’s new direction. Eighty-four delegates took part, along with 100 observers, most of them students at Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University, where young Chinese people were inducted into the joys of Marxism-Leninism. The Congress reluctantly backed the main tactics of the Comintern leadership, which had met just before to hammer out its strategy: “The Party must prepare for a new revolutionary dynamic. The principal mission that currently falls to the Chinese Communist Party is the conquest of the masses. No more playing with uprisings … The Party must control the activities of partisan detachments, and consider that these units will serve as a basis for a vast mass movement that will extend to all the Chinese people.”22

In other words, the CCP—which, in spite of significant losses, now had 40,000 members—should encourage the setting up of military organizations in both cities and the countryside. Although Mao Zedong, who first set up the rural bases, was absent, the way was now open for his Long March to power in twenty years’ time. In the meantime, Zhou Enlai and the “urban” leaders Li Lisan, Zhang Guotao and Xiang Zhongfa were to return to China with the following objective: to create an efficient combat structure, with the secret services as the vanguard.

When he came back to Shanghai in November 1928, Zhou Enlai took over the transformation of the small protection service there, now renamed the “Central Committee Special Branch” (Zhongyang Teke), or Teke for short, to carry out “special operations” work (Tewu Gongzuo).23 Gu Shunzhang, the magician, was conjured up to supervise these missions alongside Zhou, flanked by the new CCP general secretary, a former mariner called Xiang Zhongfa, who had been leader of the Red Gang (Hong Bang), a Triad, or traditional secret society, and bitter rival of the Green Gang.

The Teke established secret bases across the whole of China, including Hong Kong. But Shanghai remained at the heart of this underground war. One Chinese specialist of international affairs told me in 2008 that intelligence officers still considered—not without a certain nostalgia—that there was a direct link between today’s service and the original organization founded by Zhou Enlai at this time. The Teke was comprised of four sections: the 1st Section was responsible for close protection of leaders, making available apartments where they could sleep and organizing meetings; the 2nd was responsible for intelligence and counterintelligence; the 3rd, the “Red Guard”, was a squadron whose advance guard was known as the “dog-beating squads” (Dagou Dui) and dealt with the elimination of traitors. Lastly, the 4th section was responsible for communication.

From this time on, under Kang Sheng’s leadership the Teke also became principally responsible for security, a secret police force tasked with surveillance of its own party. Kang excelled at spying on his own friends. The writer and novelist Han Suyin, daughter of a Hakka-origin Chinese father and a Belgian mother, first sat down to interview Zhou Enlai in 1956 for a biography that she eventually published nearly thirty years later. Her description of this police function is very telling:

The Teke kept records of every member of the Party, gathered all kinds of information, punished betrayals, managed radio stations. It also organized protection teams and vigilante commandos who carried out extra-judicial killings of those who were suspected of betraying the interests of the Party, of allowing leaks of information or of having caused the arrest or death of comrades.

Secrecy, a characteristic which Zhou had begun cultivating during his stay in Paris, became an essential element of the communist structure.24

To prevent leaks, Teke agents were not allowed to have any kind of relationship with other party militants. The organization was so compartmentalized that even its name was not known. For residents of Shanghai, it was known by the macabre name “Wu Hao’s dagger”; few will have got the reference to Zhou’s nom de guerre. But the name was clearly justified by the violence with which the Teke executioners assassinated dissidents, resistance fighters, deserters and other opponents. Kang Sheng and Gu Shunzhang’s men did not stop at killing traitors or informers: they would massacre the entire family. In this, they were not so very different from Chiang Kai-shek’s henchmen, but they also revived an ancient Chinese tradition of exquisitely refined torture, the principle being that the more slowly the death is administered, the more it will inspire terror.

The jewel in the Teke’s crown was the 2nd Section, responsible for intelligence and infiltration. Multiple connections branched out, exploiting the famous guanxi—relationships based on family, community and geography—to infiltrate Shanghai’s powerful cultural and artistic milieus. Within this world, the Teke constituted a small army of messengers, people smugglers, and informers. The eyes and ears of Wu Hao were focused on martial arts clubs, cultural and religious groups, the worlds of music, theatre and cinema, “flower girl” brothels, and Russian cabarets where some of the “polusky girls” were “white of skin but red of heart”. Kang Sheng, though obsessed with antique Chinese eroticism from the Ming era, was also a habitué of the modern world of Shanghai’s film studios. This was where he met up with a childhood friend from Shandong, possibly a former lover, now a cinema starlet called Lan Ping (“Blue Apple”). Later she became rather more famous as Jiang Qing, better known as Madame Mao.

By exploiting all these adroitly woven threads, a spider’s web of connections, the clandestine CCP system set itself an ambitious goal: to use the endemic corruption in the city to infiltrate Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and the foreign police forces.

Gemo spies on the counterattack

Chiang Kai-shek is generally seen as a fine tactician and a peerless political animal, who successfully supplanted his rivals within the Kuomintang, but as a weak strategist. He may have won the battle for Shanghai for now. But would he be able to conquer the north? Unify China at the expense of the communists? Win the war? It was already shaping up to be a protracted conflict, according to the embryonic theory being developed by Mao, who would come to be recognized in the long term as the better strategist of the two.

In any case, the Generalissimo—or “Gemo”, as he was commonly known—had crushed the communists in Shanghai and intended to pursue the country’s reunification by conquering the north. If he was to succeed in governing the entire country, Chiang was going to have to rely on master spies as fierce and implacable as their enemies. The Gemo’s closest comrades were two brothers, Chen Guo-fu and Chen Li-fu. They were, like him, from Zhejiang, with links to the Green Gang, and responsible for the political intelligence of both the Kuomintang and the Blue Shirts, a militia group inspired by European fascist movements.25

The most powerful of the Gemo’s service heads was Dai Li. Born in 1897 in the Year of the Rooster, he too was from Zhejiang. Like the Chen brothers, he had lost his father at a young age, and by the time he was fourteen had become a foot soldier in the service of a warlord. He ended up at the Huangpu Military Academy, where he befriended several communists before later becoming their executioner.

Dai set up a new secret service, the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (Diaocha Tongzhi), which, when it was subsequently reorganized and put under the control of the military, was renamed the Juntong, though it was still known to the wider public as the “BIS”. A trusted member of the Green Gang, Dai became captain of the military police in 1927 and played a key role in the collapse of the communists in Shanghai. Friendly and polite with a face described as “squirrel-headed”, Dai was capable of appalling brutality. Throughout China, talk was rampant of the torture suffered by those who fell into his hands, including being given heroin overdoses. All of which earned him his nickname abroad, the “Chinese Himmler”. Rumours spread, wildly amplified by communist propaganda, which may be explained by the fact that several prominent communist prisoners had chosen “submission” and defection over dying in excruciating agony.

Nowadays, more balanced biographies have been written about Dai Li.26 He is credited with having set up a network of 100,000 agents in China, and of having organized a vast machine whose tentacular system extended well beyond China, thanks to another former Huangpu officer, General Tang Yueh-liang, who organized the international secret service using a network of military attachés. A system of influence was built up, with Soong May-ling, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, at its head. It aimed to make Roosevelt’s USA shift from its position of neutrality to supporting the Kuomintang against the Japanese. Dai Li was also a pioneer in intercepting communications. With the help of an American encryption and decryption expert, Herbert O.  Yardley, he was able to set up a state-of-the-art service. During the 1920s, it was largely the ability of Chiang Kai-shek’s services to intercept communications that enabled him to crush the warlords. The only problem was that this highly sophisticated service was riddled with communist agents.

Chen Geng and the Breton of Shanghai

With hindsight, it cannot be denied that Stalin’s policy of dispersing the CCP for a time within the Kuomintang was beneficial to communist espionage. Some militants never identified themselves as communists and remained hidden, like moles, within the labyrinthine nationalist structures: the Blue Shirts, the BIS, the national army, the communication service, and so on.

This deep penetration was controlled by Chen Geng, a militant at the head of the 2nd Section—the Teke’s secret intelligence service. Born in Hunan in 1904 in the Year of the Dragon, to a wealthy landowning family, he was, thanks to a personal tutor, well read in Confucian philosophy, including the virtues of “filial piety”. This had not prevented him from running away from home at the age of thirteen to join the republican army. After a period as a union leader on the railways and as a strike organizer, he joined the CCP.  He trained as an officer at the Huangpu Military Academy, from which he graduated as a cadet in its first graduating class. During the military campaign in the north, he experienced an event that was to play a key role in his later life: during an ambush he saved the life of the Gemo, Chiang Kai-shek himself.

But Chen Geng was only hero for a day: in 1926 he was sent along with Gu Shunzhang to the USSR to complete the GPU training programme. When he returned to China, after taking part in various failed uprisings, he took over Teke intelligence in Shanghai under the alias “Mr  Wang”. His first mission was to throw light on a mystery: the 14  April 1928 arrest on Gordon Road of Luo Yinong—a fierce, longstanding militant, responsible for setting up the embryonic intelligence service—and his subsequent assassination, which took place immediately after he was handed over to the Chinese police. With the help of Gu Shunzhang’s contacts in the police and his old friends in the Green Gang, Chen discovered that a German-speaking woman had approached the British Special Branch and offered to hand over hundreds of activists in exchange for a considerable sum of money. To prove her good faith, she had given Pat Givens’s men Luo’s address. The traitor was a woman called He Zhihua. She was the ex-wife of Zhu De, the former warlord who became a communist general and was amongst those who had spent a period in Paris. She had lived with Zhu in Germany, at the time of the “student–workers”. After a stay in the USSR, she joined the secretariat of the CCP leadership in Shanghai, which gave her access to the list of party members. In an utter betrayal of communist ideals, she was planning to sell out her former comrades and use the money to begin a new life abroad.

The revenge of the “dog-beating squads” was not long in coming. Killers turned up at the traitor’s home, and found her in bed with her new husband. They emptied their Mauser 7.65 pistols into the couple. Riddled with bullets and seriously wounded but still alive, He Zhihua abandoned her husband’s corpse and vanished. The Teke killers, however, managed to recover the list of names and, most significantly, to broadcast the chilling message that “Wu Hao’s dagger” never slept. It knew neither pity nor remorse.27

Of all the infiltration operations conducted by Dai Li’s service, however, the most successful was silent: the encrypting and communications service. The militant responsible for these missions was Li Kenong. Li is worth considering in a little more depth, because he would later become one of the most important figures in the world of Chinese espionage.

Behind his dark glasses, Li Kenong had the soul of a journalist. He was born in the impoverished eastern province of Anhui in 1899 in the Year of the Pig. With his portly figure, moustache and cheerful demeanour, he was known as the “smiling Buddha”. In his youth he went to France on the work–study programme and it may have been during that period that he became one of the first of Zhou Enlai’s agents. In any case, he was to spend thirty years working as a spy in the service of the “revolutionary mandarin”.

After his return to China, Li worked as a journalist. In 1926 he had become deputy editor of the National People’s Daily and a supporter of Chiang Kai-shek’s northern campaign, although he was secretly now a militant communist. He returned to Shanghai in 1928, where he continuing working both as a journalist and for the Teke. He contrived to be taken on as Chiang Kai-shek’s personal cryptographer. As an expert in this field, he succeeded in joining the General Staff of the nationalist army, and thus was able to send “Wu Hao” and Kang Sheng copies of the telegraph messages that sat on his desk. He was part of a network that included Qian Zhuangfei, another communist mole, who had become secretary to Xu Enzeng, the head of the Kuomintang’s BIS secret service.

Meanwhile, Nie Rongzhen, who had also been in Paris and was now a specialist in wireless communication, was charged with setting up a radio post in Hong Kong. In May 1930 he arrived in Shanghai, also under cover of being a journalist, and joined Chen Geng’s staff, as he explained in his memoirs:

Apart from me, other people with specific responsibilities included Chen Geng, Li Qiang and others … It was a nerve-wracking and exciting time. We managed to place several highly competent comrades in key enemy departments—Li Kenong, Qian Zhuangfei and Hu Di. With their help we had real-time access to information on different organizations, and we knew which comrades the enemy had uncovered. Occasionally we even received detailed information of planned attacks on us by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.28

Another aspect of the responsibilities of “Mr  Wang”, alias Chen Geng, was to provide the logistical support of his intelligence service to operatives from Moscow. Though this mission would seem to contradict the tight security regulations in place, it was ordered by the Comintern as part of its plan to set up a Far Eastern bureau, and to provide support to Comintern personnel attached to the GRU who were sent to China on missions by General Berzin. These included Jean Cremet and Richard Sorge, who met in January 1930. Cremet was largely based in Shanghai’s International Concession, working with the Far Eastern Bureau as an itinerant inspector to other communist parties in the region (Japan, Philippines, Dutch East Indies, and so on). As his reports to the Centre make clear, he was dispatched to help Ho Chi Minh set up a communist party in Indochina, Hong Kong and Macao. He was also sent to convince Chen Duxiu, the former head of the CCP who had broken with the movement in 1927, to return to the fold and visit Stalin in Moscow. This feels rather like it must have been a trap, bearing in mind Chen’s links with the exiled Trotsky.

Cremet was posing as a wealthy Belgian trader named René Dillen, in whose name he had a fake passport. He was active until the spring of 1931, after which he vanished from Moscow’s sight—going to ground after the defection of Magician Gu (see below). In around summer 1930, he was sent to negotiate the purchase of arms in Shanghai, which he escorted back on board a junk destined for the Guangxi 8th Red Army Corps, a maquis organized in Hakka territory by Deng Xiaoping, an old comrade from the Paris days. During the voyage, however, the extraordinary Breton communist vanished during a storm. “He was drawn to the depths, to the kingdom of the Dragon King”, as they say in Chinese. He drowned on the high seas.

In Moscow there was fury: what had happened to him? Another French comrade, Joseph Ducroux, who was familiar with Asia, was sent to try and find him. In fact, by this time leaning towards Chen and Trotsky’s position, Cremet had decided to organize his own disappearance, with the help of Clara and André Malraux. He was one of the first significant Comintern defectors under Stalin’s rule.29

Richard Sorge, meanwhile, was somewhat luckier—at least for the time being. He set up a new Soviet surveillance post in Shanghai. Although he was the object of criticism from within the GRU regarding his usefulness, he did help organize the visit of several senior members of the CCP to the USSR, including Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming.30 Sorge went on to spy on Japan, where he was captured and hanged in 1944, though the information he had gleaned three years previously had been sufficient to warn Stalin that Hitler was preparing to invade the USSR.

Gu the magician defects

Joseph Ducroux drew a blank in his investigation into the disappearance of his comrade, with whom he had once worked in the Colonial Affairs Department of the French Communist Party. All those he consulted, whether Chinese or Indochinese, were unable to offer any answers as to what might have happened to Cremet. He had simply vanished.

Ducroux wrote an unpublished memoir in the 1950s, in which he recalled how the hunt for Cremet unfolded: “On my way from Paris to the Far East, I stopped in Moscow in February 1931 and was housed in a private house in the city, where only Abramov [head of the OMS] and a French comrade came to visit. I had no direct contact with the Communist International. During one of our many meetings, Abramov confided in me that it was some time since the Comintern had had news of Cremet, since his departure [from Moscow] in 1929. He told me the name he had been travelling under, which I have forgotten. He had a Belgian passport. Abramov asked me to go round all the hotels in Shanghai and Hong Kong to see if I could find any trace of him, which I did, not without encountering numerous obstacles and with no success in either city. I could not, of course, visit every single one of the many hotels in these two major international ports. But those I did visit offered up no trace of the man who was travelling under a Belgian alias. I drew a complete blank on Cremet.”31

Frustrated, Ducroux continued his travels and went on to Singapore, where he was enlisted to help the nascent South Seas Communist Party (covering Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies and Burma). He was, in other words, taking over Cremet’s abortive mission. On 27  April 1931, he moved into the famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore under the name Serge Lefranc.

Ducroux probably had no idea of what had taken place in Shanghai since he had left the city—a shocking event with implications that reverberated through the Teke and the wider CCP.  The magician Gu Shunzhang had defected from the party. On 25  April 1931, after leaving the city with other party leaders, the illusionist went to Wuhan, as usual, to perform the magic tricks that served as a cover for his missions. While he was there, he was spotted in the street, surrounded by children of all ages, by a nationalist informer, a former member of the CCP, who alerted local Kuomintang agents. They threw themselves on Gu, seized him, and a local BIS officer sent telegrams to Nanjing to announce the fantastic news. The nationalists’ worst enemy, one of the most important figures in the CCP, had been caught like a rat in a trap. But the head of the BIS, Xu Enzeng, had left the office to go dancing with his mistress’s sister; this gave Qian Zhuangfei, head of encryption but more importantly a communist mole at Kuomintang headquarters, time to alert the other main informer in the Shanghai Central Telegraph Bureau, Li Kenong. Li in turn alerted Chen Geng, head of the 2nd Section. During the hours that followed, Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, Chen Yun (Kang’s new deputy), Li Qiang (head of the communications section), and Xiang Zhongfa managed to find safe houses for some 500 activists. They also ordered Li Kenong and Chen Geng to leave town.

Nie Rongzhen found himself once again on the frontline, as he recounts: “We were lucky enough to have had comrade Qian Zhuangfei working in the office of the BIS in Nanjing, who helped us avoid an even greater disaster. When Qian, who was extremely clever and capable, learned that Gu had defected, he went straight to Shanghai to alert the Central Committee of the urgency of the situation.

“I went straight over to see comrade Zhou Enlai, but he was not at home. I told our “sister” Deng [Zhou’s wife] and warned her to flee. Given the circumstances, it was vital that we act before the enemy did. It was Zhou Enlai himself who took care of everything. Every office of the Central Committee and every one of the comrades whom Gu knew was moved to a new location. All links with Gu were broken. Working day and night it took us only two days to complete the job.”32

Zhou and his comrades were right to act as they did. Gu Shunzhang immediately switched his allegiance to the services of Chen Lifu and Xu Enzeng, the master spies of the nationalist movement. In addition, he agreed to head up a special anti-communist section, and to author an instruction manual for the fight against the communist secret service. In the hours that followed, roundups made it clear that the magician really had revealed everything he knew about the underground organization of the CCP.  In spite of all the precautions that the communists had taken, there were multiple arrests in different cities. On 21  June 1931, Xiang Zhongfa, general secretary of the party since the 1928 Moscow Congress, was captured hiding out in a jewellery shop on Avenue Joffre with his mistress, a cabaret dancer. He too offered to defect to the Kuomintang, but he was shot before a counterorder pardoning him, signed by Chiang Kai-shek, reached his jailers.33

As part of his planned response, Zhou Enlai decided to restructure CCP intelligence. The leadership of the special services was now made up of a group of five militants. Kang Sheng, now the man with the most power, surrounded himself with four others who had been trained in the USSR and whose ideological commitment was unswerving: Chen Yun, Guang Huian, Ke Qingshi and Pan Hannian.

“I remember Kang Sheng during that period,” recalled Guan Shuzi in an interview with the author half a century later in Taiwan. He too had defected to the Kuomintang, later on. “I had just returned from studying at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. I was lying low in the Hotel Normandie in Shanghai. I met Kang in an apartment that belonged to the underground. He was very affable and distinguished, though he chain-smoked throughout. We had to deal with another big problem for Moscow: Hilaire Noulens, head of the Comintern’s Far Eastern bureau, had been arrested. I had seen Noulens very recently: he had the biggest bunch of keys that I had ever seen in my life, for all the secret apartments he looked after.”34

Indeed, at around the same time that the Party’s general secretary was killed, Moscow learned of a further damaging failure in the wake of Gu Shunzhang’s defection. On 15  June, Hilaire Noulens and his wife had been arrested in Shanghai as Comintern agents. The couple remained tight-lipped and gave nothing away, and were sent to prison. It was not until 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that their son revealed their real names: Yakov Rudnik and Tatiana Moisseenko. But from their papers, deciphered by the police, dozens of Western-born Soviet agents were identified in Shanghai. Many fled to the USSR.  Curiously, the best known of the spies identified at the time, Richard Sorge, remained under surveillance but was never arrested.

However, a suspicion persists: on 1  June 1931 the Frenchman Joseph Ducroux, alias “Lefranc”, had been arrested in Singapore. Special Branch officers found on him a badly encrypted notebook, with a PO Box address in Shanghai: HILANOUL BP 208. Was Ducroux in fact indirectly responsible for the collapse of the Comintern’s Shanghai bureau? Or had he been amongst those denounced by Gu Shunzhang, and the British officers had simply waited before arresting him, as a final kick to the collapsed anthill?

On 6  June, there had been another setback: Nguyen Ai Quoc (later Ho Chi Minh) was arrested in a Kowloon district of Hong Kong. Ducroux had met with him before leaving for Malaysia, but his details were also discovered in Hilaire Noulens’ papers, duly combed through by the detectives working for Pat Givens, the British police chief in Shanghai.35 Her Majesty’s colonial police were active throughout the Shanghai–Singapore–Hong Kong triangle.

For Kang Sheng, Gu’s defection was not all bad. It meant that he could extend his realm, and assume complete control of the Teke’s 4th Section, responsible for encryption and communication. Zhou Enlai also gave him the green light to hand over responsibility for revenge executions to Guang Huian, making him the new head of the 3rd Section. Guang, nicknamed “Little Shandong”, started by ordering the killing of three women: Gu’s wife and two Cantonese servants. “Wu Hao’s dagger” was pitiless. Gu’s entire family was buried alive in caverns dug and sealed beneath the city, as a telegram from the French secret service revealed:

Gu Shunzhang defected, his whole family assassinated, the affair uncovered after the arrest of Wang Liao De Zi, an accessory to Zhou Enlai, who confessed to the June 1931 assassination of 11 people. The corpses were found at the corner of 37 Ai Dang-li and Prosper Paris Road, at number 33 in the same block in the French Concession, and in the International Settlement, at 6 Sien Teh Feung Passage.36

During the following two years, the battle for control of Shanghai continued with escalating violence. The ongoing struggle between the Kuomintang secret services and those of the CCP, told in all its detail, would fill several volumes.37 It foreshadowed the settling of accounts that ultimately led to the victory of communism in 1949, not only in Shanghai but across the whole of China.

On 7  January 1933, according to the French Sûreté, a meeting of communist cadres took place in Zao-ka-dou, where the restructuring of the Chinese GPU was agreed upon: there was to be an investigation group set up to spy on party traitors; units to provide protection for active members of the party; and a “dog-beating squad” to eliminate traitors.

These decisions are an indication of the level of infiltration that the clandestine CCP was once again facing. Two months after this meeting, Chen Geng, former head of the 2nd Section, was arrested, having gone into hiding at the home of the great writer Lu Xun. He was described by the French as the “head of the 2nd Section”, although he had in fact been replaced two years previously by another exceptional agent, Pan Hannian.38 Arrested on Peking Road on 24  March 1933, Chen was sentenced a week later and handed over to the Chinese police. “Mr  Wang” was so important in the eyes of the Kuomintang that he was transferred to Nanchang, where he was interrogated by Chiang Kai-shek himself. But at the end of the interrogation the nationalist leader, recalling how Chen had saved his life during the battle for the north, decided to release his prisoner, asking him to negotiate an accord with the “red generals” in his camp. In May, Chen Geng “escaped”, and fled to the Soviet zone of Jiangxi. He remained a communist and was a commander during Mao’s Long March.

Six months later, a report by the new French chief of police, Louis Fabre—Fiori finally having been removed from office for corruption and collusion with the Green Gang—brought news of Gu Shunzhang, who had become head of a special anti-communist brigade. The French report gave details of the Blue Shirts, the 3,000-strong paramilitary organization led by the Chen brothers, and revealed the organizational structure of their special services:

1. An intelligence service composed of: a) a military intelligence section (Wang Pai-ling); b) a secret intelligence service (Kou Chien-chung, Kuomintang Central Committee);

2. An executive department (Gu Shunzhang), charged with carrying out terrorist activities, which recruits mainly from graduates of the Huangpu Military Academy. Made up of secret cells in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canton, Beijing.

At the head of the nationalists’ blacklist of people to bring down was Zhao Rong, better known as Kang Sheng. Kang had been single-handedly running the urban special services in Shanghai, but now it seemed his time was up. Zhou Enlai had joined forces with Mao. Kang Sheng, master shadow-puppeteer, went to Moscow to join Stalin.

Kang Sheng goes to Moscow

At the beginning of 1933, Kang Sheng was sent to Moscow to join the Comintern leadership. The revolution in Europe was floundering with Hitler’s rise to power. It was imperative that it be revived in Asia. Kang was to be trained in new Soviet methods of state security and espionage. He was also involved in agitprop, as propaganda was called in those days. Agitprop, disinformation and deception were all weapons as important as intelligence-gathering.

Towards the end of 1933, Kang published an article in the Comintern journal entitled “The 6th Kuomintang campaign and the victory of the Chinese Red Army”. Perhaps this was a straightforward analysis seeking to trigger worldwide proletariat solidarity with the Chinese revolution. But it may have been intended to obtain support from Stalin and his strategists for the leaders who had renounced urban insurrection in favour of a rural-based guerrilla movement—not least the new communist warlord, Mao Zedong, and his army of peasants.

The following year, Kang Sheng coauthored a short book with his comrade Wang Ming, another Chinese attached to the Comintern leadership, who was to become the next interim general secretary of the CCP, after completing his Soviet training. Revolutionary China Today was published in several languages via Willi Münzenberg’s propaganda arm of the Comintern.39

Kang Sheng was expected to painstakingly copy the new Soviet methods. The techniques of the GPU, the secret police, were what a powerful Chinese movement needed. Kang must surely have approved of what André Malraux had written two years earlier: “The International had no choice … Its aim was to give the Chinese proletariat, as quickly as possible, the class-consciousness it needed in order to attempt to seize power … I have to admit that a Russian-style secret service, but even stronger, was certainly one possible solution.”40

Kang focused on the surveillance of Chinese students at both Sun Yat-sen University and the KUTV, the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. As instructed, he spied on the Trotskyist followers of the former CCP leader, Chen Duxiu.41 But most of all “Master Kang” learned to blend in. He became immersed in the type of collective paranoia instituted by Stalin, which was to leave a permanent mark on China.

In 1935, the Chinese “Grand Inquisitor” even came close to depriving the world of one of its great communist leaders, Ho Chi Minh. Kang was part of the commission of inquiry into the errors made following the destruction of networks in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore in 1931. The troika charged with studying Nguyen Ai Quoc’s dossier was made up of Dmitri Manuilsky, technical head of the International; Vera Vassilieva, head of the Indochina Section; and Kang Sheng. Manuilsky remained neutral in the affair, all the more so since he certainly risked being blamed himself, for having dispatched the two Frenchmen involved in the debacle, Cremet and Ducroux. Nguyen Ai Quoc faced the blame for his friendship with Borodin, the former Comintern envoy to China who had subsequently been purged; or for his escape from a British jail in Hong Kong in 1932. Or had he been working all along as an agent of the British Intelligence Service? It was clear that Kang Sheng loathed him, and it took all the diplomatic skills of Comrade Vassilieva, arguing that his arrest had simply been a consequence of his inexperience, to save him at the eleventh hour.42

Meanwhile Stalin’s rival, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad on 1  December 1934, a prelude to the Moscow Trials. Kang Sheng redoubled his efforts, and was rewarded by being allowed to take part in a devastating purge in the ranks of the Asian communists in Muscovite exile. In his room in the Hotel Lux, where he was living with his wife Cao Yi’ou and his mistress Su Mei (who also happened to be his wife’s sister), Kang even set up his own miniature GPU, the “Office for the Elimination of Counter-Revolutionaries”. Hundreds of young Chinese people in Moscow who believed in communism were denounced, sent to the gulag or shot in the neck by the men of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the new NKVD.  Among them, presumably condemned for being a “Trotskyist”, was Xin Ouyang, former head of the 2nd Bureau of the Shanghai Teke, once headed by Kang Sheng.

Undoubtedly, the Moscow Trials were the inspiration for the mass purges known as the Yan’an Rectification Campaign, presided over by Kang in 1942 with Mao’s authorisation. By the mid-1930s, Kang Sheng had been completely integrated into the apparatus of Stalin’s secret police. They trusted him. In particular, he was given the responsibility of keeping an eye on an embarrassing guest, “Nicholas Elizarov”, who was in reality Chiang Ching-kuo, son of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. In 1925 he had been sent to Moscow to study, during the period when the USSR backed the Kuomintang. The bloody conflict between the Kuomintang and the communists in 1927 had meant that he was now more hostage than guest. He had even been forced to write a tract denouncing his father, the supposedly cunning and cruel Chiang Kai-shek. But Stalin spared both father and son: there was every indication that he would soon likely obliged to renew the USSR’s alliance with Chiang against the Japanese, and so, in mid-April 1937, the young Chiang was sent back to China with his blonde Russian wife, whose name—Fayina Ipatevna Vakhreva—long remained a state secret.

Not long after Chiang’s departure, two other well-known Chinese sons arrived, Mao’s own children. Two months earlier, Kang Sheng had been sent to France on another delicate mission. It was not his first visit. In 1936 he had spent several months in Paris during the government of the Popular Front, before going to Spain as a delegate of the Comintern to inspect the International Brigades, set up to fight on behalf of the Spanish republicans.43 But this time, in the winter of 1936–7, he was sent to try and find two “illegal emigrants”, the children Mao had had in the 1920s with his second wife Yang Kaihui: Anying and Anching. This was one of the new tricks Stalin had up his sleeve: in order to keep the CCP leaders on a tight rein, he detained members of their families, like trophies. The trouble in this case was that, while Chiang Kai-shek had always felt real affection for his son, Mao Zedong seems to have been much less attentive to his offspring.

It is true that in the meantime, between October 1934 and October 1935, Mao had led the Long March, the strategic retreat of 12,000 kilometres to evade the Kuomintang army, and the exodus of an army of 120,000 partisan fighters, supervised by many Hakkas, of whom only 20,000 remained by the time the marchers reached Yan’an in Shaanxi province. There, in deepest rural China, an embryonic communist state was established. In January 1935, the Zunyi Conference was held, during which Mao managed to seize power of the CCP and distance himself from Soviet theories on how to conduct the revolutionary war. Urban insurrection had only led to failure. The spearhead of the revolution was to be the peasantry.

Zhou Enlai joined forces with Mao and took over diplomacy. The names of several of his generals are already familiar to us: Zhu De, Chen Yi and Ye Jianying had been with Zhou in Europe and were to play important roles, as was Chen Geng, the former head of intelligence in Shanghai. The nascent state lacked only a head of the secret services, and an iron-willed interior minister. Stalin sent Kang Sheng, along with several Soviet advisors to the Comintern, to prepare for the final victory, and the advent of what can only be called the Chinese surveillance state. With remarkable irony, Kang Sheng was to use the methods he learned in Moscow to eventually purge the Soviets and their supporters from within Mao’s secret service.