2

MAO’S SECRET SERVICE

On 1  November 1995, a low-key but moving celebration took place in Beijing. On behalf of President Boris Yeltsin, renowned Sinologist and Russian ambassador to China Igor Rogachev bestowed on a Chinese secret agent Russia’s highest distinction, in recognition of his contribution to the defence of the USSR.  This was a doubly posthumous ceremony, for both the Chinese spy being honoured and the Soviet Union were dead, the latter having been dissolved at the instigation of Yeltsin himself. But the Russian officials had not forgotten those who had worked for the victory of the USSR against the Third Reich, during what they call the “Great Patriotic War”. And this was an excellent opportunity to enhance the newly revived Sino-Russian friendship.

The name of the secret agent, who would have been 100 years old in 1995, was Yan Baohang, and the services he had rendered were truly significant: in May 1941, he was one of those who warned the Kremlin of Hitler’s imminent attack on the USSR.  Four years later, the information from his espionage of the Japanese army enabled Stalin to launch his lightning attack on Japan.

Yan’s son, Yan Mingfu, accepted the medal on his father’s behalf with tears in his eyes. Yan Mingfu had himself headed an important political intelligence department, the “United Front Work Department” (Tongzhan Gongzuo Bu), until June 1989, when he was dismissed for expressing sympathy with the students demonstrating for democracy on Tiananmen Square. Later he chaired an NGO involved in the “business of charity”. A man of strong principles, Yan Mingfu was proud of the father he had followed into the world of professional intelligence. He, like his father, was born in Manchuria. In 1941, when he was only ten years old, his father—a lawyer as well as a secret communist—became part of the inner circle around Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, Soong May-ling, and the nationalist general Zhang Xueliang. Zhang, despite being a prominent member of the Kuomintang, claimed the distinction of having kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek in December 1936, in order to coerce him into joining forces with the CCP against the Japanese. Indeed, it was under the twin influences of the Soviets and, soon after, the Americans, that nationalists and communists sealed a new alliance, the Second United Front, to fight Hirohito’s army, which invaded the country after an initial attack on Shanghai in August 1937.

Moscow agreed to support this alliance, handing over some $450 million to Chiang Kai-shek between autumn 1937 and November 1940. In return, the Chinese Red Army was reorganized and placed under the command of the Kuomintang Military Affairs Commission. The 8th Route Army fought in the north-west, while the New Fourth Army operated south of the Yangtze River.

This explains why Zhou Enlai was in Chongqing, the capital of a “united” China at war with Japan, in spring 1941. Zhou, leading the nascent communist diplomatic service, had instructed Yan Baohang to gather as much information as possible from those in the nationalist inner circle he had managed to infiltrate. In 2005, Yan Mingfu, who waited ten years after the ceremony honouring his father to reveal the details of the affair, divulged that his father had made many high-level contacts, “including important government figures, Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Ke, the son of Dr  Sun Yat-sen, and many others.”1

Diplomatic cocktail parties offer an opportunity to exchange specialist information amid banal small talk. So it was that, one fine day in May 1941, Yan Bahoang was invited to a dinner in honour of the German military attaché—the Reich had not declared war on China. In the course of this soirée, he overheard Sun Ke say that Adolf Hitler planned to launch Operation Barbarossa around 20  June. Yan discreetly had the information confirmed, before reporting the conversation straight back to Zhou Enlai, who, in turn, sent a coded telegram to Mao Zedong’s Yan’an communist headquarters. From there the information passed through the usual channels: the Comintern, via the Soviet permanent envoy to Mao. According to the Chinese, this was how Stalin was able to make preparations to prevent an even bigger disaster than the one that eventually took place that summer.

That was not all: Yan Baohang did not rest on his laurels. Four years later, Chen Geng, who had been former chief of the special services in Shanghai in 1931 before becoming head of the Red Army Military Committee’s political department, asked Yan to obtain information on the Japanese army in Kwantung, in the north-east, to find out about any planned attack by its elite troops on the USSR in the near future. Yan managed to obtain extremely precise information on troop deployment, defence plans, weapon types, the details of troop numbers and units, and names of army generals.

It was thanks to Yan’s intelligence-gathering that Stalin’s troops succeeded in crushing the Japanese army in August 1945. On 8  August, just two days after the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on the 6th, and the day before they dropped the second on Nagasaki, the USSR went to war against Japan. Eighty Soviet divisions—half a million men supported by an artillery of 26,000 weapons, 3,700 tanks and 500 planes—carved the Kwantung army led by General Yamada Otozo into pieces. With vital help from Chinese spies, the Soviets were at last able to take their revenge for Tsarist Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.2

This episode reveals two important facts: firstly, that the Chinese communists were continuing to work closely with the Comintern and the Soviet secret services; and, secondly, that Zhou Enlai, at the time of Japan’s surrender, was still in control of the CCP’s external, political and diplomatic intelligence. However, he had been forced, at Mao’s insistence, to cede to Kang Sheng control of the party’s police, counterintelligence and internal repression services. As we shall see, this was an unfortunate choice that almost led the party to self-destruct.

Kang Sheng sets up the secret police

On 29  November 1937, there was great excitement in the walled city of Yan’an, where Mao Zedong had his headquarters. Aeroplanes were never seen flying over the city, but that day a Tupolev TB3 bomber from Moscow landed on an improvised and icy runway. On board was Kang Sheng, the Chinese Grand Inquisitor; Wang Ming, whom the Russians wanted to impose as general secretary of the CCP; and two Chinese intelligence specialists who were later to become ministers in the People’s Republic of China, Chen Yun and Zeng Shan.3 Not to mention, of course, Kang Sheng’s wife and mistress, the sisters Cao Yi’ou and Su Mei. Following strict instructions from the Kremlin, Kang and his team, together with Mao, were to take over the anti-Japanese resistance in Yan’an.

One biography of Zeng Shan includes a very telling image: a photograph of all the plane’s passengers—except the women—and the welcoming committee. In the centre, Mao, relaxed and corpulent, cigarette in hand, is wearing a worn, badly buttoned jacket, with a Red Army commander’s cap on his head. To his left is Kang Sheng, in a fancy uniform and an elegant cap adorned with a red star, recognizable by his schoolteacher’s posture and his intellectual’s steel-rimmed spectacles. On the right, Wang Ming, the Russians’ man, looks away, beyond the frame.

In the days that followed, it came as no great surprise when Kang Sheng received orders from Mao to take over the leadership of the Political Protection Bureau, which had been headed since 1935 by Wang Shoudao, a fellow militant from Hunan. In the summer of 1938, Kang was ordered to restructure and take over the CCP’s new secret service, the innocuously named “Social Affairs Department”. In Chinese it was called Zhongyang Shehuibu, Zhongshebu or Shehuibu for short; in English it is known as the SAD.  “The CCP had consolidated intelligence and CI (Counter-intelligence) into the Social Affairs Department in approximately 1936, but Kang was responsible for the final shape of the department after 1938,” explained Matt Brazil, an Australian specialist of Chinese intelligence. “Three organizations were integrated into SAD: the Special Branch (above); the Political Protection Bureau, which provided Red rear area security before the Long March and security for Mao during it; and the Guard Office (Baowei chu) which provided protection to Mao in [Yan’an] and a local constabulary and CI service. Under Kang and his deputy Li Kenong, SAD expanded into every province where the CCP had control. SAD had elements doing military security, political security, economic security, international intelligence, and domestic intelligence. SAD’s members were paid more and had privileges and access to food unavailable to other party members.”4

In other words, the SAD was branching out in all directions. Kang Sheng was surrounded by a group of private secretaries, his “trusted men”: Xiao Li, Fu Hao—future ambassador to Japan—and Zhao Yaobin, a chief of staff who defected to the nationalist camp in 1949.5 The sisters Cao Yi’ou and Su Mei followed Kang Sheng around like two little poodles, but also filled filing cards with information about all the comrades—small pieces of card bound by vegetable twine that would later prove very useful to party archivists.

Kang Sheng first contrived to push his deputy director Li Kenong, considered to be “Zhou Enlai’s eyes”, from his inner circle. At first glance, Kang’s chosen mode of organization was taken from the Soviet model: Section 1 dealt with administration and personnel; Section 2, intelligence; Section 3, counterintelligence; and Section 4, intelligence analysis. There was also a general affairs department, part of the officers training corps. Two additional special sections were set up, for security and the “executions department” (Zhisibu) respectively. External liaisons were managed by another former comrade from Shanghai, Pan Hannian, who was responsible for complex liaison operations with the Japanese intelligence services, with the purpose of obtaining information on the Kuomintang.6

Relations with the Triads were also tricky. Some of the secret societies had sold themselves to the Japanese, such as the “Hong Five Continents Society” (Wu Zhou Hong Men); others were semi-patriotic (such as the Green Gang of Shanghai), while others still were patriotic and ready to collaborate with the communists. The Long March and the move to Yan’an would have been impossible had Mao not maintained some kind of allegiance to the longstanding Elders Brothers Society (Gelaohui), whose members included Zhu De, the other military leader of the Long March, and Deng Xiaoping’s own father.

“In other words,” explains the Korean historian Park Sang-soo, a specialist in rural secret societies, “if the backbone of the Long March was the astonishing Hakka community, its logistics were guaranteed by the secret society Gelaohui, to which many of those who later became high-ranking members of the Communist Party belonged.”7

The highly sensitive work of dealing with these relationships with secret societies and Triads fell to the second-in-command at the SAD, Li Kenong, who took over personally when he returned to Yan’an in 1941 after three years of special activities as Zhou Enlai’s deputy and with the 8th Route Army. It was Zhou who insisted that he be included in Kang Sheng’s inner circle.

Kang Sheng set up an intelligence school at the Date Garden to train his secret agents and his political officers. Wu Defeng, his director, received instructions to spread the party line: “We must forget what we studied in Moscow and develop our own Chinese-style intelligence.”8 Among the school’s teachers were the unionist Wu De, future mayor of Beijing, who taught economics, and Chen Yun. Chen Yun, a Jiangsu militant born with the century, was, as we have seen, part of the group that had reorganized Shanghai’s special service, the Teke, after the defection of Magician Gu. After returning from Moscow with Kang, he was given the important role of running the CCP’s Organization Department. From 1940 onwards he was in charge of the Central Finance and Economics Department. Chen could be considered the founding father of the Chinese communist economic intelligence system. After 1949 he was one of the principal architects of the first Five-Year Plan.9 In the West it is a widespread misconception that the Chinese, unlike the Japanese, did not engage in this early period in what’s now known as “economic intelligence” and commercial and financial espionage. Chen’s role proves otherwise—that a large part of communist espionage strategy has been devoted to economic intelligence since the very birth of the PRC.

Under Kang Sheng, the SAD—the CCP’s new secret service—dealt with the most minute details of political and economic life, while maintaining agents in the military, political, economic and international intelligence agencies. On top of that, in 1943 Kang took control of the Commission for Work Behind Enemy Lines, for which SAD operatives and military intelligence officers worked. With Mao’s support, Kang Sheng was constantly expanding his power beyond the political police. The poetically named “Date Garden” soon came to be feared by CCP cadres as a horrific, nightmarish lair: not only was it Kang’s headquarters, but it also had interrogation rooms and prisons built into the clay hillside, where suspects were interrogated until they pronounced their self-criticism and committed a formal confession to paper. This would earn them, depending on the case, either a bullet in the back of the neck, or the right to be presented at a public “struggle session”, during which they would self-flagellate and endure public abuse.

This extension of Kang’s domain continued: increasingly greedy, he took control of all communications, imposing at the top his henchman Li Qiang, former chief of the clandestine radio station in Hong Kong and Shanghai. This gave him access to the contents of all reports sent back to Moscow by Soviet agents in Yan’an. Along the way, Kang also succeeded in getting Deng Fa, chief of security, demoted, and Luo Ruiqing, head of military intelligence, removed.

Somehow, as early as 1938, Kang had also managed to seize control of the Red Army Secret Service (Qingbaoju). This was something of a paradox, given he had neither participated in the 12,000-kilometre Long March, nor ever commanded a military unit, unlike the famous “marshals” Zhu De, Lin Biao, Chen Yi, Peng Dehuai, Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying and Luo Ronghuan. This strategic service, headed by Ye Jianying, the “Heroic Sword”, was the precursor to the Second Department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, represented by military attachés in embassies around the world, after the foundation of the PRC in 1949.

Army chiefs did succeed in forcing Kang Sheng to share power over both the garrison regiment, which was responsible for protecting Yan’an, and the Second Department of the party’s Central Military Commission, which guided war strategy. Naturally, Mao himself presided over the latter.10 But this hardly made any difference, since Kang Sheng contrived to bypass every obstacle and continued to widen his circle of influence. In 1943 he gained control of the operational intelligence services of the two main armies, the “Eighth Route Army” and the “New Fourth Army”, which distinguished themselves in every major battle against the Japanese.

In order to build on this sprawling edifice of power in Yan’an, Kang pulled off two masterstrokes. First, he isolated the Soviet delegates under his charge who had come to China as agents of Stalin, to report on how the Chinese comrades’ operations were progressing. The Comintern envoy Peter Vladimirov (real name Vlasov) was no longer “the eyes of Moscow” in Yan’an, and more of a hostage. Then, by making a definitive alliance with Mao, Kang prevented Wang Ming, a former fellow exile in Moscow, from usurping Mao, which was what the Kremlin wanted. He decided to have him poisoned, in small doses, like in some ancient legend. Kang Sheng, despite having been imposed by the Soviets in the first place, was now actively opposing them.

The Soviet representative Vladimirov kept an explosive diary throughout this period. In it he complained of being quarantined to the point that he was only allowed to see Kang Sheng and Xiao Li, his private secretary. He saw Mao rarely. Kang was becoming more anti-Soviet by the day. On 4  February 1943, after rejoicing that the German troops had been crushed at Stalingrad, Vladimirov noted in his diary:

I was not mistaken in my previous conclusions. Kang Sheng has a strong influence on the Chairman’s moods. Mao Zedong is indifferent to the practical problems of socialism. He is crammed with Kang Sheng’s inaccurate stories about our country; in this case this is the only source of his information. As for Kang Sheng, he is only too glad to slander us. He is a rabid enemy of the Soviet Union, he sullies the Bolshevik Party and spares no efforts to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from consolidating ideologically.

In over 500 pages of entries, the hapless Vladimirov describes the long drawn-out collapse of Yan’an, the crucible of the revolution, under the dual aegis of Mao and Kang—these revelations are all the more surprising coming from a cadre moulded in the steely ideological rigidity of Stalinism.11

More contradictions were to come, and Vladimirov was not the only one to notice them. But Kang Sheng had another trick up his sleeve: the “Queen of Hearts”. Since December 1937, the former cinema actress known as “Blue Apple”, who hailed from the same village as Kang—Zhucheng, in Shandong—and who was even rumoured at one time to have been his mistress, had become part of his inner circle. After joining the CCP, she came to Yan’an and was introduced by Kang to Mao. The chairman immediately fell under her spell. From then on he had eyes only for her; all his other lovers were dismissed, and she reigned unchallenged, just as the favourite concubine of the emperor would have done in earlier eras.

Despite criticism from Yan’an leaders opposed to their marriage, the young woman soon became the third Madame Mao, better known by her new name, Jiang Qing (Azure River). For good measure, Mao’s unfortunate second wife, He Zizhen, was sent to the USSR, where she was locked up in an asylum for the insane; various other women of Mao’s entourage, including the American journalist Agnes Smedley, were also dismissed.

It is almost an understatement to say that Jiang Qing had great admiration for Master Kang (Kang Lao), as she called Kang Sheng. This only enhanced Kang’s status as powerful shadow master, since she was not only Mao’s wife but also his private secretary, with political as well as personal influence. The only people who were permitted to see Mao at any time of the day or night were Kang Sheng and Mao’s male private secretary, who was later to be given a key role during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. This was Chen Boda, who had been head of the propaganda section of the CCP’s Central Party School. Leadership of the school was later handed over to none other than Kang Sheng himself.

In 1942, Kang, marrying his ideology with his policing techniques, launched an internal campaign as head of the secret services to purge the party of dangerous influences, including Wang Ming, the man Stalin had wanted to replace Mao. The purpose of this “rectification movement” (zhengfeng) was to engender self-criticism, a crackdown on spies, and elimination of counterrevolutionaries of all kinds. It recalled the Stalinist purges and the Moscow trials that Kang had both witnessed and participated in six years earlier, during his persecution of the Asian community at Soviet universities.

Starting with the closed world of writers who criticized Yan’an bureaucracy, the campaign rallied political leaders including Chen Yun, Zhu De, Ye Jianying, Liu Shaoqi and several other major Chinese communist figures. It initially focused on group discussions about “rectifying work style”, and Mao’s writings on art and literature. But it also foreshadowed the “struggle sessions” and the public trials and humiliations of the Cultural Revolution, whose most prominent leaders were Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng and Chen Boda.

Kang Sheng, inventor of Maoism

Between 1942 and 1944, encouraged by Mao, Kang Sheng began hunting down spies and forcing the party’s “deviationist” elements to submit to self-criticism, change their ideological viewpoints and commit to “thought reform”. Writers targeted included Ding Ling and Wang Shiwei (assassinated in 1947 by the communists), while the hunt began for all “deviationist” cadres who backed Moscow’s preferred faction instead of rallying behind Mao.

Kang Sheng followed the Leninist precept that “the party strengthens itself by purging itself”, with his own innovation of mass meetings. On 8  June 1942, he organized a demonstration, during which various leaders spoke in favour of extending the campaign. This could be seen as the launch of a new stage in the history of Marxism—the invention of the Mao Zedong cult of personality, and the birth of Maoism.

On 16  December 1942, while cadres were “struggling” to reform their thinking, Kang Sheng caused a sensation at an open-air meeting, where he declared that political “deviation” was inextricably linked to being a spy.

“This is the great revelation,” he explained in his high-pitched voice. “There is a close link between the twin crimes of espionage and deviationism. One is not a deviationist, as we have tended to believe, by chance or by error. It is, ineluctably, dialectically, because one is a Japanese agent or a Kuomintang spy—or both. We must begin a ruthless hunt to root out these two plagues from Yan’an because, by fighting against deviationism, we weaken the clandestine plots of our enemies, and vice versa.”

Kang’s tirade opened the way to appalling abuses. Kang Sheng launched a reign of terror in Yan’an and other areas under communist control, and a huge and diverse range of techniques of repression began that are still employed by the political police in 2019. These included the setting up of the “Central Case Examination Group” to discuss a suspect’s fate; the bigongxin method of forcing a false confession in order to build a case against the accused; sixiang gaizao, thought reform or brainwashing, permitting the accused to work on correcting their mistaken thinking (this would have its moment of glory during the Korean War); and reform through labour, which prefigured the Chinese gulag, the laogai.

As Kang Sheng was convinced that at least 30  per  cent of each organization was made up of spies and counterrevolutionaries, the “social workers” of counterintelligence, as they were sometimes called, had a quota to fulfil—to which end Kang established an inquisitorial system, utilizing techniques of punishment and interrogation inspired by the millennia-long Chinese tradition of torture, updated by twentieth-century Stalinism for the requirements of the era. Among the popular tortures practiced by Kang Sheng’s gang were “the bamboo cut: bamboo spikes were driven under the fingernails. Passing a horsehair through the eye: a hair from a horse’s tail was inserted into the penis; Passing through a woman: water from a narrow hose was pumped into the vagina at great pressure; Giving the guest a drink: a large quantity of vinegar was forced down the throat; after the first few retchings, the pain was excruciating; Beam pulley: the victim was suspended by his arms and lashed with leather thongs; Pressing incense: with the prisoner suspended from a rafter by his arms, smoldering incense was applied to the armpit; when withdrawn it tore out a piece of burning flesh; Pulling down the road: the prisoner was bound and tied to a horse’s tail, then dragged to his death as the horse was whipped; Assisting production: the prisoner dug his own grave and was pushed in and buried alive.”12

There was madness in the air at Yan’an, as Vladimirov noted in alarming reports he sent to Moscow: “24  June 1943: Kuomintang spies are being arrested. How many spies are there? And what gives Mao Zedong the right to suspect any communist of treason? And what sort of right is it, the right to supreme wisdom?

“30  June 1943: Kang Sheng displays a special attitude towards all kinds of shady characters. There is the impression that no real danger threatens the real Japanese spies, Kuomintang, and other agents in the Special Area, if they respect Kang. How many dubious characters of all kinds enjoy the confidence and protection of leading CCP functionaries! But honest communists are not among those whom [Kang’s] department favours … Kang Sheng is unpopular in the party, but he has planted his people there too. Secret reports as well as denunciations through ‘exposing speeches’ at meetings—this is all the intraparty life of the CCP.”

On 6  September 1943, Mao and Kang Sheng launched a campaign of “spy reform” during which, as Vladimirov explains, “everyone—young or old—was busy spy-hunting or exposing himself.” At this stage of the inquisition, the CCP was running out of money. Nonetheless, when certain leaders let it be understood that it was time to put an end to such practices, they clearly ran the risk of being denounced as spies themselves. Even Zhou Enlai became suspicious in the eyes of Kang Sheng. He had after all been in contact with the Kuomintang in Chongqing. Perhaps his collaboration had begun in 1927, at the Huangpu Military Academy. Maybe the 1931 betrayal of Gu Shunzhang in Shanghai had not in fact been an unfortunate accident. And Zhou was in contact with the US Army Observation Group, a mission sent to Yan’an by President Roosevelt in September 1944 to coordinate the war against the Japanese, known as Colonel Barrett’s Mission Dixie.

However, it was almost impossible to attack Zhou, who had the full support of both Mao and the Soviets. This became clear after an unfortunate fall from a horse in Yan’an led him to be hospitalized in the USSR—though even this did not stop the SAD from attacking those in his circle, including Qian Zhuangfei, who had once saved the leadership of the party by informing the Shanghai leadership of Gu the magician’s defection. The unfortunate Qian was caught, tortured and executed. The very elements that had made the mathematical expert a hero—for having infiltrated Chiang Kai-shek’s communications department—were now turned against him. Kang Sheng was convinced that the double agent had become triple agent. Without a doubt, the violent attack on the unfortunate Qian was because he had undertaken his mission as a communist mole in 1931 under the direction of Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai, without Kang Sheng being informed.

Meanwhile, Zhou succeeded in obtaining the last-minute release of Chen Muhua, a member of the diplomatic apparatus he had set up, who later won fame for her foreign affairs activities in Africa, where she promoted trade links and established a family planning programme. Kang accused her of spying. Her real error was being related to a Kuomintang general.13 But Kang had crossed a red line on this occasion; he was attacking far too many spies and counterrevolutionaries, even going so far as suspecting one of Mao’s sons.

Mao made it clear to Kang that it was important to know when to bring a rectification campaign to an end, explaining that suspects should not actually be killed. How many died in Yan’an? Around 2,000, I am told in Beijing. It’s hard to know. For comparison, the Sinologist Jean-Luc Domenach claims that, during the May–July 1940 purge in Hebei alone, 360, 1,200 and 2,000 executions took place in three neighbouring districts.14

The communists were now largely under the thumb of Moscow. On 22  December 1943, George Dimitrov, the Bulgarian who had overseen the official cessation of Comintern activities worldwide, sent a telegram criticizing the campaign and demanding that Mao guarantee both the life of the chairman’s rival Wang Ming and Zhou Enlai’s position. The Moscow leadership even suggested that Kang was “a spy charged with destroying the CCP from top to bottom”, and wondered how the most loyal pro-Soviet could have become such a traitor, turning completely against his former mentors. In this pervasive atmosphere of paranoia and spy mania, it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that, as one Beijing researcher has suggested—not without malice—“one day we will find out that Kang Sheng was unwaveringly faithful to the Russians, that he was their spy, and that his mission was to make the Chinese Communist Party implode”.

This reaction from the Kremlin was understandable. Two months earlier, Vladimirov had managed to send his doctor, Orlov, to visit Wang Ming; Orlov realized that Wang was being poisoned in a series of small doses. On 2  January 1944, Mao sent a telegram to Dimitrov to reassure him about Zhou Enlai’s position, but explained that, because Wang Ming had previously been captured by the Kuomintang and released under suspicious circumstances, he could not be trusted. A few days later, according to Vladimirov, Mao invited Wang to the Peking opera, where the leader went back on his inopportune remarks and expressed his gratitude to Comrade Stalin. The Soviets had just saved Wang Ming’s life: he would be sent back to the USSR in 1950.15 This allowed them to preserve their alliance with Mao without going directly against Kang Sheng.

Nevertheless, trouble was now brewing for Kang, orchestrator of the first great Chinese purge. The CCP leadership was now openly in opposition to him, with the sharpest criticism coming from Zhou Enlai, on 6  September 1944. Hatred of the man known behind the scenes as the “party’s hangman” was such that Mao had to force him to undertake his own self-criticism in March 1944: “It was a subjectivist mistake, only 10  per  cent of the comrades criticized were really spies!” was the substance of his explanation. Meanwhile, insidious rumours were circulating about him—concerning his three-way marriage with Cao Yi’ou and Su Mei; the fact that he had vouched for Jiang Qing’s “political virginity”; and the mysterious circumstances of his entry into the party and his clandestine life in Shanghai while living under the roof of a Green Gang chief.

Kang was relieved of his position as coordinator of the intelligence services—which now passed entirely into Li Kenong’s control—and sent back to his native Shandong to set up a programme of “agrarian reform”. He went on to lead another violent purge in that province. The Yan’an Rectification Campaign was to have another perverse effect: long after the People’s Republic of China had been established, party members who had lived in Yan’an back when it was the epicentre of the fight against spies were suspected of playing for both sides. There is, after all, no smoke without fire.

Zhou Enlai’s alternative secret service

Even in the midst of this political maelstrom, Zhou Enlai had managed to keep Kang Sheng from sole control of all the intelligence services. Li Kenong, Zhou’s eyes and ears, had been deputy leader of the SAD.  Now, in spite of the rumours that swirled around him about his relationships with the young Red Pioneer boys with whom he was often seen, he had taken over as head of the entire service.

Zhou Enlai had gathered around him a few trusted people he knew from either Paris or Shanghai, to set up, with Ye Jianying’s support, a new, distinct military intelligence service: the 2nd Department, which was independent of the pre-existing Red Army Secret Service. Its head was one of Li Kenong’s comrades, Liu Shaowen, who liaised with Chen Geng, head of the Red Army Military Committee’s political department.

The service had been established specifically in order to keep important aspects of intelligence out of Kang Sheng’s destructive orbit, and it is at the root of an unusual arrangement that continued right up until Xi Jinping’s reform of the People’s Liberation Army in 2017 (see Chapter 14): the existence of two separate and competing Chinese military intelligence services: the 2nd Department of the army general staff (Er Bu, or PLA2), and, closer to Zhou’s original creation, the General Political Liaison Department (Zongzheng lianluobu).

Meanwhile, two civilian organizations, still active today, were given increasing powers under Zhou, with Mao’s endorsement. The first was the ILD, the International Liaison Department of the Communist Party (Zhonglianbu), which reported to the Central Committee of the CCP.  Wang Jiaxiang, the son of a peasant with Soviet intelligence training, set up the ILD at the communist base of Jiangxi in 1931, before taking over from Kang Sheng at the Comintern in Moscow. The ILD was in fact a kind of miniature Chinese-style Comintern, and over the years it managed relationships not only with the liaison services of other communist parties around the world, but also with various third-world liberation movements. Wang was reappointed head in 1951, and remained in post until 1966. Even then, he continued until his death in 1974 to maintain contact with various interested political parties around the world, whether of the left, centre or right, as well as working for the party leadership in an advisory capacity.

The second service, which also reported to the CCP Central Committee, was called the “United Front Work Department” (Tongzhan Gongzuo Bu). Through discreet and painstaking work within social, political, cultural, economic and religious organizations, the UFWD brought significant segments of the population over to the CCP’s cause. Both within China and overseas, it targeted Chinese people who were beyond the Kuomintang’s sphere of influence, or prepared to break away. Even today, it continues its mission to rally overseas pro-Taiwanese Chinese (Huaqiao) to the Beijing cause. In other words, as far back as the 1940s, Zhou Enlai and his colleagues had set out to influence foreign parties and governments and obtain the support of public figures to help build a “new China”. Zhou chose a longstanding friend to head the UFWD: Li Weihan, better known by his nom de guerre “Luo Mai”, as André Malraux calls him in his first “Chinese” novel, The Conquerors. Li, one of the student–workers from the Paris days, now wore two hats, as both a syndicalist and a secret agent in Shanghai. With the UFWD he would set up a major apparatus for influencing international opinion towards Chinese communism.

To his credit, Li Weihan and his UFWD did pull in some big fish in the United States, including General Li Tsung-jen, former vice-president of the Chinese nationalists, who agreed to return to China in 1965. Before that, and even more significantly, rocket engineer Qian Xuesen was brought back into the fold. Trained in the US, Qian was working at the Caltech Aircraft Propulsion Laboratory in 1950 when the FBI was alerted to the fact that he was sending books and technical journals to China—though of course this was not technically espionage, in the sense that these materials were freely available. In any case, the Chinese services would hardly have asked a scientist of his calibre to risk prison when the plan was to invite him back to China to launch the missile industry and become part of the team developing the atomic bomb, an obsession of Mao’s since 1945. The situation was extremely risky, however: this was at the height of Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign, which culminated in the death sentence and execution of the Rosenbergs as members of the Soviet spy ring that had infiltrated the Atomic Center at Los Alamos.

In 1955 Qian did return to Beijing to work on the development of Chinese missiles, and later the famous anti-ship missile Silkworm. He was not the only one: eighty-four Chinese scientists trained in the US returned to China because of the UFWD’s persuasive tactics. On 5  November 1960, thanks to Qian, the Chinese would launch their first R-2 rocket, a precursor to the Dongfang (“East is Red”). Marshal Nie Rongzhen, who had worked for Zhou’s technical service in Paris and Shanghai, joined the technical team developing communist China’s strategic weapons. He opened a bottle of champagne, in the presence of Qian, and declared: “This is the first Chinese missile to fly over the horizon of its motherland, marking a turning point in its history.”16

One of those collaborating with Qian and Nie, Qian Sanqiang, should arguably be considered the real father of the Chinese atomic bomb. Born in Zhejiang in 1907, he was working in a European laboratory when Japan attacked China in 1937, a member of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s atomic research team in Paris, part of the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research). Qian Sanqiang and his wife, the physicist He Cehui, witnessed the splitting of uranium and thorium nuclei under the action of neutrons, and they also had occasion to meet other atomic scientists linked to the underground Soviet intelligence, including Bruno Pontecorvo who, after his move to Moscow, would go on to help the Chinese make their own atomic bomb.17

In 1947, the Chinese couple discovered the principles governing the tripartition and quaternary fission of uranium. This led to an enhanced understanding of nuclear fission both in France and in Moscow, where the results of their experiments were sent. Chinese leaders were undoubtedly delighted when these eminent scientists returned to China in 1948, on the eve of the Red Army’s victory over the Kuomintang; it meant that, when the time came, they would no longer have to depend on the goodwill of Soviet scientists.18

In December 1949, Chiang Kai-shek retreated and fled to Taiwan. In Chinese tradition, a defeated general and his army change sides. This was the case with former intelligence officers from Dai Li’s nationalist secret service, the BIS.  The rout had evidently been hastened by Dai Li’s death in a plane crash on 17  March 1946, and his immediate replacement by General Mao Feng, father of Chiang Kai-shek’s first wife. The crash has sometimes been blamed on the communist services, but was probably simply due to heavy fog.19 Multiple defections followed. The most famous defector was Shen Zui, a former BIS cadre and Dai Li’s aide-de-camp who, at the request of Zhou Enlai, and to obtain clemency from his communist jailers, wrote “confessional materials” (jiadai cailiao) which were then turned into widely circulated books describing the depravity of Shen’s former bosses in the nationalist secret services.20

However, the publishing of propaganda books is clearly not the best way to influence democracies or turn the public mood in one’s favour. Zhou Enlai and the now victorious CCP’s Chinese secret services knew that they had to exercise great subtlety in their use of agents of influence, and to exploit the goodwill of high-profile cultural figures without their knowledge.

Pearl S.  Buck, the Gong sisters and Eleanor Roosevelt

In 1937, ten years before the start of the Cold War, FBI chief J.  Edgar Hoover, the unassailable leader of US counterintelligence, opened a file on the novelist Pearl S.  Buck. Even when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, for a body of work that included several novels set in China—East Wind: West Wind, The Good Earth, Sons, The Mother, A House Divided—she remained under surveillance. Hoover was not keen on writers, and on his orders the “Untouchables”, a notorious Chicago-based team of federal law enforcement agents, amassed a wealth of documentation on Buck, a passionate advocate for human rights and the Chinese cause. As the records show, despite his legendary paranoia, Hoover was not wrong on one point: Buck did try to influence the wife of the president, Eleanor Roosevelt, to abandon her relationship with Madame Chiang Kai-shek and back the Chinese communists: “They are the ones who have the true support of the people. You have to talk with Zhou Enlai,” the novelist insisted.21

Buck urged Mrs Roosevelt to pay attention to Soong Ching-ling, widow of the late nationalist leader and founder of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-sen. A graduate of Wesleyan College, Madame Sun Yat-sen never became a communist, but in 1926, newly widowed, she visited Moscow, just after Chiang Kai-shek had taken control of the Kuomintang and contributed in large part to the increasing corruption spreading through the party, thanks in particular to his links with the Green Gang. Madame Sun participated in many propaganda campaigns via multiple committees, leagues and anti-imperialist fronts, all orchestrated by the astonishing Willy Münzenberg, leader of the Comintern’s media empire. In the United States, she also had the “Chinese lobby” to deal with, led by her own sister, Soong May-ling—Madame Chiang Kai-shek—and other members of the wealthy Soong family.22

Buck had no trouble convincing the First Lady that Madame Sun Yat-sen was the only one in the family pursuing her husband’s ideals with real integrity. She pointed out the criminal activities of the Kuomintang, telling Mrs Roosevelt about Dai Li, the head of the special services, then still very much alive and active, and nicknamed the “Chinese Himmler”.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle was largely female. It included another remarkable Chinese woman, who was also part of Zhou Enlai’s inner circle of special agents: Gong Pusheng. Daughter of one of Sun Yat-sen’s generals during the revolution of 1911, Gong had been a brilliant student at Columbia, where she and her youngest sister, Gong Peng, had led the non-communist student movement. Thereafter the fates of the two Gong sisters had seemingly drawn apart. “Little Sister” Peng, who loved tales of honour, outlaws and warlords, like the picaresque Romance of the Three Kingdoms, had gone to Yan’an in 1935, where she became Zhou Enlai’s secretary in Chongqing. She worked mostly in press relations, through which she made many friends, including the American journalist Edgar Snow. She undertook multiple liaison missions abroad for the CCP, and after she married a party leader named Qiao Guangua, Zhou sent the couple to Hong Kong to set up the New China News Agency, which served both as an organ of propaganda and as an intelligence post. In 1949, when the People’s Republic was founded, Gong Peng became director of the intelligence section at Zhou’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Waijiaobu diaocha xinwensi), a post she held until 1958.

Meanwhile, “Big Sister” Gong Pusheng was playing a major role in the United States. She had become a member of the Human Rights Committee at the League of Nations in New York and, as requested by Zhou, had inveigled her way into friendships with the elite of the Democratic Party. Naturally, she gathered valuable intelligence that she passed on to the Chinese secret service.

Like her younger sister, Gong Pusheng was extremely pretty. She was also a passionate feminist. She and Eleanor Roosevelt got on well and she soon became a close friend and confidante of the First Lady. The FBI was aware of her relationship with the president’s wife, but because they thought of her primarily as the daughter of a nationalist general, it apparently did not occur to them that she might also be a secret member of the CCP.  Pearl Buck, who did not hide her dislike for Chiang Kai-shek’s clan, was kept under much closer surveillance. The pro-Kuomintang lobby remained very powerful in the United States, and kept a close eye on her. Ultimately, despite the urging of Pearl Buck, Soong May-ling and Gong Pusheng, in 1943 Eleanor Roosevelt was forced by her husband to cancel a trip to China, during which she had been planning to meet Zhou Enlai. But Zhou was to have the last word.

The mystery of The Blue Lotus

The Blue Lotus affair is quite simply one of the strangest episodes involving Comintern agents, the Chinese secret services and Zhou Enlai’s network of influence in the arts world.

Hergé originally found fame in 1930 after his first Tintin volume, Tintin in the Land of Soviets, was published serially in the children’s supplement of a right-wing Belgian Catholic newspaper. At the time, in line with his editor and readership, he made no attempt to hide his dislike of communism. But The Blue Lotus, the book that really made him famous five years later, was quite different.23 Hergé did a vast amount of reading while working on this volume, the most deeply researched of all his works.24 It tells the story of Tintin in China, bravely engaged in a fight against drug traffickers in cahoots with both the Japanese secret services, headed by the cunning Mitsuhirato, and the imperial powers who reigned over the International Concession—the story’s police chief, Dawson, was modelled on Patrick Givens, the Irish-born head of the Shanghai Special Branch and the bane of the Shanghai communists.25

Perhaps people believed that Tintin’s allies in the Sons of Heaven secret society, and his friend Chang, represented the Chinese people as a whole when faced by the cataclysm of war, Western imperialism and the Japanese. In any case, the book delighted both the Kuomintang and the CCP, particularly in the wake of their new anti-Japanese alliance. The facts were drawn directly from real news stories: the famous train attack on 18  September 1931, which triggered the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, is carried out in the comic book by the spymaster Mitsuhirato. This character—“A true Japanese knows everything honourable, sir!”—was inspired by Colonel Doihara Kenji, also chief of the real-life secret society the Black Dragon Sect (a black dragon features on the cover of The Blue Lotus).

Public opinion in the mid-1930s was hostile to the Japanese, and many books released at that time were strongly influenced by Willi Münzenberg’s Comintern propaganda service. Indeed, Brussels was the hub of these operations, for it was there, in February 1927, that Münzenberg founded the League Against Imperialism, presided over by Albert Einstein, with Ho Chi Minh, Sun Yat-sen’s widow and André Malraux—who, as usual, made a speech—in the front row. As we’ve seen, Madame Sun Yat-sen, like the Gong sisters, was a major figure in the international networks of influence set up by Zhou Enlai and his special services, and in 1928 she attended another Brussels meeting of the League Against Imperialism, where an array of well-known participants showed their support for Chinese communism.

Among Madame Sun’s friends in Belgium was Lou Tseng-Tsiang, a former prime minister of her husband. In 1926, after his wife died, Lou took orders and became a Benedictine monk at the abbey of St André in Bruges, taking the name Dom Pierre-Celestin Lou. It was through him that, on 1  August 1934, Hergé first met Zhang Chongren, a young student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Zhang Chongren, who had come to Brussels from Shanghai three years previously, helped design The Adventures of Tintin in the Far East (the original title of The Blue Lotus), serialized later that year in the Petit Vingtième. To help him with his research, Dom Pierre-Celestin Lou lent Hergé the book he himself had published the previous year, The Invasion and Occupation of Manchuria.

Zhang does not appear to have been a right-wing student or linked in any way to the Kuomintang. But we do know that his close friend in Brussels, a biology student named Tong Dizhou from Zhejiang, was a graduate of Fudan University, founded by Zhang’s uncle. Tong went on to establish the People’s Republic of China’s Institute of Oceanology in 1950 and served as its first director. He later became vice-president of the Academy of Sciences and gained renown in the 1960s for cloning carp.26 He became an important regime figure at the instigation of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the secret service that we know persuaded large numbers of scientists to return to the fold.27 Was he secretly a member of the CCP the whole time he was in Brussels, or was he brought round to the cause later? In any case, Tong was to become one of the communist regime’s senior scientific figures.

Similarly, his old friend Zhang went on to be closely associated with communism, whatever he may later have wished people to believe. In the wake of the communist victory, he would meet Marshal Chen Yi, who led the troops that took Shanghai in 1949. The subsequent repression of counter-revolutionary elements in the city was implacable: 100,000 Shanghai residents were executed, including many members of the secret societies referenced in The Blue Lotus. The leader of the Green Gang, Du Yuesheng, fled the city. He died in Hong Kong in 1951.

Zhang, meanwhile, was to be well regarded by the communist authorities. In the 1950s, Chen Yi, now mayor of Shanghai, organized a committee to select artists for patronage, appointing two familiar figures: Pan Hannian, the secret service man and former intimate of Kang Sheng and Li Kenong; and Madame Sun Yat-sen, now vice-president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The committee chose Zhang as an official artist. He received many commissions for his sculptures and paintings, including a huge sculpture of “six characters: a worker, a farmer, a soldier, a young man, a woman of the people and a child, all standing together about to hoist a large flag bearing the five-star emblem of the PRC.  The sculpture symbolized the union of the entire people, which had brought about political change. Its meaning was immediately understandable; everything was concentrated in this sculptural form.”28

Zhang would later recount that some bureaucrats complained that he did not have enough “political thought”, and that perhaps someone else should have been chosen. But at the time, the CCP claimed that his work was promoting “socialist realism”. He continued to create glorifying statues such as that of Shen Yumin, a heroine of the CCP in Shandong. “At that point I was well known as a sculptor. In 1954, I created a statue of a revolutionary activist, a hero of the People’s War, for a Moscow exhibition of sculpture from socialist countries, the only Chinese work to be selected.”29 In other words, whatever political ideology he may have held in the mid-1930s, Zhang at least ended up an important member of the PRC, legitimizing its ideals through art.

In 1966, he fell victim to the plight of many artists during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. This was not because he was hostile to the regime, but because his protector Chen Yi, now foreign minister, was first in the Gang of Four’s line of fire; even his friendship with Zhou Enlai failed to protect him. It was only with Deng Xiaoping’s political reforms from 1981 that Zhang was rehabilitated. At this time Hergé tried to find his old friend, whom he had made the hero of Tintin in Tibet. The novelist Han Suyin, Zhou Enlai’s biographer and friend, helped Hergé find Zhang and persuaded Deng—a fellow Hakka—to allow Zhang to visit Belgium. There was a moving reunion in Brussels. Tintin-lovers were delighted. The CCP was also delighted; the tales of “Ding Ding”, as the plucky reporter was called in Chinese editions, were promoting the very slogans Zhang had advocated: “Use foreigners to serve China!” (Yang wei zhong yong); “Use foreign power to enact Chinese propaganda!” (Liyong waili wei wo xuanchuan). It is this “future” context—the closeness of Zhang to both Hergé and to the communist regime—that is rather telling when we look at the political ideas in The Blue Lotus.

In 1934, when Zhang first met Hergé, the young Chinese artist told him which Chinese slogans should appear on the walls of Shanghai in his drawings for the book. He did the calligraphy for him. As Benoît Peteers correctly points out in his biography of Hergé, The Blue Lotus is dotted with innumerable inscriptions, drawn by Zhang himself, which underline the political significance of the story.30 Their translation reveals certain surprises: “Abolish the unequal treaties!” “Down with imperialism!” [Dadao Diguozhuyi! 打倒帝国主义!] “Boycott Japanese goods!”

Obviously this messaging was subliminal and entirely beyond the understanding of the thousands of children and adults who, like me, have read and adored the story. But it does explain the general context in which the book was conceived.

When Tintin leaves Shanghai, he goes “deep into Chinese territory”. “From the moment he gets there, we can’t touch him!” says the Japanese general on his tail, Haranoshi. This was territory freed from enemy threat—the enemy being the Japanese, the French and British imperialists and the Kuomintang. The flooded village Tintin visits there is called Hou Kou; in 1931, when the story is set, the region of Jiangxi was one of Mao’s first rural soviets, where the nascent Red Army was under the command of one of his old Hakka friends—none other than Zhang’s future patron, Chen Yi. Chen was one of the former Paris student–workers, a member of Zhou Enlai’s underground. He liquidated 2,000–3,000 communists hostile to Mao in the Hou Kou region.31 Hergé would not have known about these events, given the lack of broadcast news and so on at the time. So was this setting a random choice, or evidence that Hergé had access to insider communist knowledge, coming from Chen via Zhang?

Hergé was presumably not manipulated into including these details in his book, but perhaps his platform was harnessed by the CCP propaganda machine and its policy of a “united front”. The anti-Japanese line of The Blue Lotus, which provoked fury from the pro-Japanese lobby in Brussels, suited the Kuomintang. In 1939 Madame Chiang Kai-shek invited Hergé to visit China at her expense, but with the outbreak of war in Europe he never took up the invitation. He lost touch with Zhang, who meanwhile lived through the throes of Shanghai’s occupation under Hirohito’s troops.

A number of mysteries about Hergé have remained unresolved by the many books published about him, notably those overseen by the Hergé Foundation for its centenary celebrations in 2007, and indeed the details described above remained unknown until the publication of this book in French in 2008. This was partly because of Hergé’s celebrated reputation in the world of children’s literature, with his renowned Tintin series, and partly because it was hard to imagine that a writer–illustrator known for his far-right politics during the Second World War had once been a communist sympathizer, and perhaps had even been unknowingly manipulated by Chinese communists.

Probably the main reason why the Blue Lotus/communism story took so long to emerge is simply that no one thought to investigate the context in which Zhang Chongren and Hergé became friends, nor to analyze how much influence Zhang had on the Belgian writer. I myself, as one of many investigative journalists whose youthful career ambitions can be traced back to reading The Blue Lotus, understand only too well how society might have preferred to stick to the touching, apolitical tale of an international friendship between Hergé and Zhang Chongren, and their fictional counterparts, Tintin and Chang Chong-chen.

The precise nature of The Blue Lotus’s political dimension may never be clear. But the fortunes of Hergé’s friend Zhang were also those of China in his age: Chen Yi, Zhang’s protector, had now taken Shanghai, and in September 1949 Mao had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. A new era of Chinese intelligence was opening up.

1949, the birth of the spy state

By 1949, the military defeat of Chiang Kai-shek was complete. Chiang withdrew with his army to Formosa (Taiwan), which, with the help of the Americans—and particularly the CIA—would become a stronghold for the dreamt-of “reconquest of mainland China”. Since that time half a century ago, these two Chinas have been engaged in an extraordinary covert war.

The “Bamboo Curtain” fell across the Taiwan Strait in the south, and the Great Wall in the north. As with communist regimes in Eastern Europe, security services—secret police and intelligence agencies—were set up and played a key political role. Under the CCP, they organized and administered surveillance of the largest national population in the world, and, until the 1970s, worked for the global export of the communist revolution, in concentric circles beginning in Asia.

However, multiple setbacks hampered Mao Zedong’s dreams for the People’s Republic of China: the Tibetan rebellion, backed by the CIA and the Indian intelligence services, which was crushed in 1951 and led to the young Dalai Lama’s flight to India; the Korean War (1950–3), in which China lost a million men, and with it Mao’s hope for military conquest of Taiwan; the 1953 death of Stalin, for—although the two leaders had never really got on—Mao had copied his methods of controlling the population and the planned economy; Nikita Khrushchev’s arrival at the Kremlin, which precipitated a schism with the Chinese that slowed their technological progress, notably in their naval fleet and the development of the atomic bomb; the disastrous error of the 1958–62 economic programme known as the “Great Leap Forward”, which would claim the lives of 30 million Chinese; Japan’s recovery, after a period as little more than a vast American aircraft base on the PRC’s eastern flank; the secret war on China waged from Hong Kong by Taiwan and the West; the British counterinsurgency operations against Chinese guerrillas in Malaysia and Singapore, and the American operations against Filipino Huks; the Sino-Indian Wars of the 1960s; and the French war in Indochina (1945–54), followed by the American conflict in Vietnam (1955–75).

It was in this challenging international context that the Chinese special services emerged and grew. They received guidance from various Soviet comrades in the MGB (the transitional name of the former NKVD and future KGB), including Colonel Ivan Raina, deputy director of the 1st Directory. But the Chinese kept the Soviets at a respectable distance, including them only very indirectly in their intelligence operations—not least because they were well aware that the Soviets had embedded operatives in certain Chinese intelligence networks.

The two communist countries’ services agreed on the exchange of information gleaned in capitalist countries of the West, but it was out of the question for the future KGB to wield authority over its Chinese counterpart as it was doing in Eastern Europe. In a show of goodwill during Mao’s 1949 trip to Moscow, Stalin pointed out various American imperialist agents within Mao’s entourage, including the journalists Edgar Snow, Anna-Louise Strong and Sidney Rittenberg. Rittenberg, less fortunate than the other two, was held prisoner by Chinese counterintelligence for several years, while Mao tried to use Snow as an intermediary with the CIA; this was absurd, since Snow was not working for them. According to recent accounts, Stalin went on to insist that Mao receive a list of all Chinese agents working for the Soviets, though it is hard to believe that Moscow was not also maintaining networks of “illegals”, at least in border zones.32

The Soviets were undoubtedly reassured by the fact that Kang Sheng had been replaced by Li Kenong as head of the SAD.  Li was now responsible for foreign intelligence, management of agents, and the top-secret archives of the triumphant CCP.  It was a sign of his importance that he attended meetings of the Party’s political bureau as an observer.

The SAD developed a network of regional offices throughout China, whose function was counterintelligence. These offices reported to the departments, sections and teams set up at all administrative levels of the CCP: provinces, municipalities, and districts (xian). Li Kenong was promoted to the rank of colonel general (three-star general) in the new People’s Liberation Army (PLA). As deputy chief of staff, he was also responsible for military intelligence (the PLA2 and PLA General Political Liaison Department) as well as intercepting communications, carried out by an undercover section of the Meteorological Bureau. The operational command of these services fell to General Li Tao. This apparatus was able to operate abroad through a network of military attachés and with the support of journalists from the military section of the New China News Agency (Xinhua). The intelligence services were very involved in the wars in Indochina and Korea (led by General Liu Shaowen, successor to Li Tao), as well as in the Beijing-instigated insurgency conflicts that were unfolding throughout Asia.

Luo Ruiqing’s Gonganbu

Eventually, most of the security service was incorporated into the Ministry of Public Security, the Gonganbu. Set up on 20  October 1949, the Gonganbu had 308,808 officers; its headquarters were located at 14 Dongchang’an Avenue in Beijing, not far from Tiananmen Square, from where it still operates today. The ministry dealt with internal security, the police, and counterintelligence, particularly in small towns where the SAD did not have an office, as well as running the newly founded Chinese gulag system of “re-education camps”, the laogai.

The Gonganbu only carried out foreign missions in border countries. For example, Ling Yun, a veteran of the SAD and former Yan’an investigator who became head of the Gonganbu in Guangzhou, set up a spy operation in Hong Kong. In the 1980s he was to become minister for state security—the Guoanbu, the new spy agency created at the instigation of Deng Xiaoping, which has become increasingly active in the twenty-first century.

For ten years, the Gonganbu was headed by Luo Ruiqing, an important figure in the revolution who, like most of the founding cadres of Gonganbu, came out of the Red Army—military security was often the first to take over liberated areas. He was nicknamed the “Chinese Dzerzhinsky”, a reference to the founder of the Russian Cheka (the KGB from 1954). An effigy of Dzerzhinsky, a Polish Bolshevik and friend of Lenin, sat not only on Luo’s desk, but also in the interrogation centres of the secret police.

Born in 1906 in the Year of the Horse, into a family of wealthy Sichuan landowners, he attended the Huangpu Military Academy, where he became acquainted with Zhou Enlai. On 1  August 1927, he took part in the Nanchang uprising, which was a failure—albeit a legendary one, since that was when the PLA first came into being. Luo trained in counterintelligence techniques with the GPU in the USSR, after which Moscow sent him to Paris to tackle the French Deuxième Bureau. In Paris—capital of his beloved French Revolution and home to his idol, the Jacobin Saint-Just—he went underground. After he returned to China in 1938, he was appointed political commissar of the 6th Army. After being wounded and sent to the USSR for treatment, he took over command of the 5th Corps. During the Long March, his role in the secret services expanded and he became both head of political security and deputy head of foreign intelligence. 1938 saw his first clash with Kang Sheng, which robbed him of the role of head of military intelligence.

Despite everything, Luo’s role in the secret war against the Japanese was considerable and in 1945 he reappeared as a member of the CCP Central Committee. Thus began a race to see who would take over the leadership of the CCP’s many security institutions after the party took power in Beijing.

Though he did not descend into the same frenzied hunt for spies as Kang Sheng had before him, Luo Ruiqing nonetheless created an iron-fisted police state under the direct control of Mao and Peng Zhen, head of the political-legal commission that oversaw all the security services. On 1  January 1951, announcing his ministry’s annual figures, Luo boasted that he had arrested 13,812 “spies” between January and October 1950.33 He also created the “Second Department” (Gong An Er Chu), an elite group of investigators in charge of high-level political affairs, which examined senior figures under suspicion, or particularly complex espionage cases. The Second Department also handled the interrogation of Pu Yi, last emperor of China, captured by the Russians and handed over to the Chinese in 1950. This particular service followed to the letter the directives of the CCP Central Committee’s Political Defence Bureau (Zhengzhi Baoweiju).

Jean Pasqualini, the Corsican-Chinese journalist imprisoned as a spy between 1957 and 1964, was among those interrogated by the 2nd Department. He painted a complex portrait of Luo Ruiqing to me, one that recognized Luo’s complicated relationship with Mao: “Mao’s real problem was that he never actually had full control of every aspect of power, unlike Stalin. In particular, he never had a security chief who was entirely in his hands. Luo Ruiqing was not a Maoist. He was 100  per  cent communist, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. But it truly was all for the cause! He entirely lacked any personal ambition. Luo realized that after each campaign of mass internal repression—the Yan’an Rectification movement and the 1954 repression, for example—Mao was strengthened, and he was trying to stop this trend. He focused on drawing attention to external rather than internal risks: the Taiwanese and the Americans, against whom effective counterespionage needed to be developed.

“Luo Ruiqing was very popular with his staff, with the security people. Firstly, they knew he was not acting out of personal ambition. And secondly, he treated them well. He lived relatively modestly. He did not treat his agents like minions. Everyone I met in prison had a lot of respect for him.”34

Tensions with KGB comrades

“Imperialist spies” were not the only targets. Chinese leaders kept a close eye on the Soviets, particularly the MGB/KGB rezident in Beijing from 1947 to 1958, Ivan Zaitzev. Nikolai V.  Roschin, Soviet ambassador to the PRC, was in charge of coordinating Moscow’s intelligence operations in China. Unlike other sister countries, and although the leader of the Gonganbu was considered to be pro-Soviet, the Chinese regarded security advisors with suspicion. They realized that, despite past agreements, Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD in Moscow, was setting up new spy networks in China. The first tension arose when a man called Kazakov was arrested in Shanghai; though a Chinese citizen, he was a Soviet agent.

Yet not everything to do with the Soviets was cause for concern. For example, they helped to establish the Nanjing Foreign Language School for the training of intelligence personnel. The best students were sent to the Institute of International Relations and the future-KGB training school in Moscow, to learn the latest techniques of intelligence gathering. Among these top students was Lieutenant Cao Gangchuan, a graduate of the Russian-language school in Dalian. By the end of the century, he was to become head of the Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (COSTIND), and in 2007 he was named armed forces minister.35

Alexander Panyushkin, former head of the Chongqing NKVD office, returned for a year to Beijing to serve as ambassador. In 1956, during a visit to Britain, the newly appointed head of the KGB, General Ivan Serov, asked the British secret services for permission to open a KGB Rezidentura in Hong Kong to keep southern China under surveillance, which he was denied. Serov did send somebody to Hong Kong, however: a counterespionage expert, Colonel Yuri Voronin, to set up an anti-British intelligence service, at the request of the Chinese.

Tensions grew between Beijing and Moscow in the wake of the 1953 deaths of Stalin and Beria. In 1958, several incidents took place in which Chinese police officers refused orders by Soviet comrades to arrest their fellow Chinese. As a result, the Soviets called for the dismissal of Li Kenong, head of the Social Affairs Department.

According to information provided to me by Iliya Sarsembaev, a Moscow-based specialist in Sino-Soviet relations, Khrushchev sought to defuse the emerging rivalry between Beijing and Moscow: he sent Mao a list of Chinese agents who had been working for the Russians for 27 years, a much longer list than the one delivered by Stalin. Some of these agents were CCP members who had been sent to the USSR for training in the 1920s: “A number of them stayed behind in the Soviet Union after graduation, took nationality, and became intelligence and counterintelligence officers in the NKVD, creating a large, reliable and powerful network of Chinese agents, loyal to Marxism-Leninism and Stalin. This network, set up during the 1920s and ’30s, was an effective long arm for the Soviet Union until the late 1950s, and played an important role in foreign policy under Stalin, to whom they provided quality intelligence. However, many of these [Chinese-born Soviet nationals] were accused of Trotskyism and became victims of the 1936–7 purges. Later, on Khruschev’s personal orders, these agents’ names were handed over to Mao, as testimony to the fraternal friendship between the Russian and Chinese peoples.”36

But the Chinese were not only suspicious of the Russians. They were also closely monitoring the embassies of the new Warsaw Pact people’s republics, as evidenced by an amusing anecdote that was recounted to me by a specialist in Hungarian affairs.

Fooling around at the Hungarian embassy

In 1956, the Beijing representative of the Hungarian State Security Agency (AVO), József [P.] Szabó, officially a press attaché, was enjoying a romantic intrigue with the wife of the Hungarian ambassador, Ágoston Szkladán. Liu Lantao, one of the heads of the UFWD Chinese secret service, was sent to Budapest as part of a delegation led by Vice-President Marshal Zhu De. He asked the head of the AVO, Mihaly Farkas, who had been Kang Sheng’s comrade in Moscow, “Is your AVO Resident’s fooling around with the ladies a constituent part of your intelligence operations?” He explained to Farkas the true purpose of Szabó’s extravagant expenses on hotel rooms, or “conspiracy apartments”, rented by case officers to debrief their agents—or, it seemed, for other, personal uses.

Szabó was ousted from the AVO.  But every cloud has a silver lining: he went on to become a journalist and eventually head of Hungarian radio. The Hungarians, meanwhile, did not forget this episode, taking note, like the Soviets, of the fact that the Chinese were monitoring secret agents of fellow communist countries as closely as they were those of the imperialist nations.37 The Soviet ambassador in Budapest at the time, Yuri Andropov—future head of the KGB and one of the main architects of the ultimate break with the Chinese—never forgot this lesson.

Farkas, the head of the AVO, failed to foresee the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. He was arrested in October 1956, expelled from the party and thrown into prison. The cuckolded ambassador in Beijing was replaced by Sándor Nógrádi, a former Comintern agent active in France in the 1930s, who was later appointed head of Hungarian state radio Magyar—in other words, as Szabó’s boss. The AVO was dismantled in October of the same year.

The Chinese intelligence chief’s visit to Budapest had another unexpected result. Liu’s reports, like those of the military attaché Colonel Zhang Bingyu, fed Mao’s concerns that the Budapest uprising, like that in East Berlin the same year, coupled with Khrushchev’s report on de-Stalinization, held serious risks for Chinese communism. Mao ordered Zhou Enlai to set up an institute to predict potential future disasters. The Institute of International Relations (Guoji guanxi yanjiusuo) was set up as part of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Its other main function was to train spies for the SAD and the Xinhua News Agency.

Xinhua News Agency: a nest of spies

The New China News Agency (Xinhua) began to play an important role in international intelligence gathering. Liao Chengzhi, nicknamed “Liao the sailor man”, because of his former role in the dockers and seamen section of the Comintern, founded the agency in the Yan’an era; it became a state agency in 1949. Its “international” sections, along with those of the PLA, were responsible for collecting foreign intelligence abroad, some of which was used for propaganda purposes—a journalist’s investigation of poverty or the situation of African Americans in the United States, for example. The rest of the news and reports remained unpublished, entering the circuit of confidential reports seen only by leaders, access to secrets being controlled according to a hierarchy of importance within the CCP.  Twice a week, Xinhua’s Department of International Affairs published an internal magazine called International Affairs (Guoji Neican). It drew on articles from Xinhua’s foreign correspondents all around the world, which were never published.

The use of the Xinhua agency as a cover for the secret services was particularly significant in Hong Kong. Set up by “Little Sister” Gong Peng and her husband, Qiao Guangua, at the request of Zhou Enlai, Xinhua served as a sort of embassy, or even a shadow Chinese government, in the British colony. The deputy director of the agency was always a Chinese intelligence operative, until Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997. Moreover, in the 1950s and ’60s, a series of Xinhua correspondents were identified as working as liaison officers with Third World guerrilla movements, in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Others, in small numbers, defected, which enabled counterintelligence agencies to study Xinhua’s internal organization system and its integrated intelligence role.

Franco-British secret agents and Australian “surveyors”

The number one problem for Western intelligence—supported by Taiwanese and Japanese postwar intelligence services—was to understand how this new China and its special services functioned. As part of the Cold War agreements, the CIA relied heavily on its allies’ secret services. That was how the French Foreign Service of Documentation and Counterintelligence (SDECE) became widely known. Jacques Locquin, an outstanding journalist and former Resistance member, was named head of the SDECE’s Political Affairs Section at the end of the Second World War: he later became a correspondent for Agence France-Presse in Beijing. In 1957, Locquin helped former French foreign minister Edgar Faure write The Turtle and the Serpent, a book conceived as a kind of memorandum for General de Gaulle, who had not yet returned to power, to help him decipher the intentions of the “enigmatic Chinese”. But the Gonganbu caught the intrepid reporter in a honey trap, or what Mao’s agents called “the beautiful woman stratagem” (meiren ji). Locquin was expelled from China as an “undesirable element”. Jean Pasqualini, “Mao’s prisoner”, as he titled his autobiography, was not so lucky. He was thrown into a Gonganbu jail on trumped up charges of spying for France and was not released until January 1964, when General de Gaulle recognized Mao’s government.

Despite these successful interventions, Chinese counterintelligence was working according to very imprecise hypotheses, as Pasqualini explained to me: “When the Gonganbu men arrested me, they claimed that I was spying for the SDECE.  I denied it, and nothing they did in their interrogations changed that. They could not force me to confess, because it wasn’t true. I was actually working for British intelligence. My MI6 handlers were Edward Youde in 1953—he went on to become ambassador in Beijing—and John Fretwell the following year. I never had any direct contact with them; I used to bring my information to the Indian High Commission in Beijing, which was collaborating with the British. It was more discreet.”

During his time in prison, Pasqualini found himself in the political detention centre known as the Basket of Herbs (Caolanzi), which was so important that it was located inside the Imperial City in the heart of Beijing, north of Mao’s residence in the Zhongnanhai complex. This was where Pasqualini crossed paths with two CIA agents who had been caught up in the action at the beginning of the 1950s, Richard Fecteau and Jack Downey, whose plane—which belonged to the CIA’s front company, the Civil Air Transport—was shot down in November 1952 while they were on a mission sending armed anti-communist guerrillas into Manchuria. Several nationalists who had already been parachuted in had been arrested and forced to send radio messages drawing the CIA men into a trap. Luo Ruiqing’s secret services waited two years to announce the men’s capture. Then, after a grand show trial, the two Americans were held prisoner for almost two decades, before their release in 1971. Their plane, a highly symbolic bit of war booty, is still displayed prominently at the PLA Museum in Beijing. During the 1954 trial, the Chinese announced that in January 1953 eleven more Americans had been arrested, after another plane was shot down. Those operatives were luckier than Fecteau and Downey, and were released only two and a half years later. The Gonganbu also announced that, between 1951 and 1954, 106 American and Taiwanese agents parachuted in to train anti-communist guerrillas had been killed, and 124 captured. It was not until 1960 that the CIA was persuaded their operation had achieved nothing. Eventually it was brought to an end, along with CIA backing for the Tibetan armed resistance.38

Half a century later, James Lilley, China specialist at the CIA and later ambassador to Beijing, made an assessment that was widely shared in the CIA: “Downey and Fecteau’s capture was one of the most glaring examples of the CIA’s failed covert policy in the early 1950s. Shortly after the two CIA officers were lost in Manchuria, those of us working clandestinely in Asia recognized that covert operations, including missions like Downey’s into China, were not revealing much about the closed-off Middle Kingdom. Contrary to CIA predictions, our missions were unable to locate or exploit the kind of discontent among the Chinese population that could be used to establish intelligence bases in China.”39

Unable to undertake deep surveillance work in the Chinese theatre, and without the kind of sophisticated satellites and communications interception systems that exist today, the Americans asked the Australians to undertake brief missions in China. Several journalists, academics and businessmen accepted the role of “honourable correspondent”—a voluntary intelligence collaborator. This was both less expensive and less dangerous than trying to set up guerrilla bases. Since its inception in 1957, businesspeople and retailers of all stripes had been attending the Canton Fair, the showcase of China’s burgeoning economy. Many agreed to gather pertinent intelligence there. The MO9, as the Australian service was called at the time, even employed a real businessman and created a small company, tailor-made for these operations.

Recently opened archives in Canberra indicate that, throughout the Cold War, first the MO9 and then its successor the ASIS, alongside the Australian Foreign Affairs Department, ran a formidable “sweeping” operation in China with the help of Australian visitors, managing to turn the Chinese espionage system against the Chinese themselves.

This is how it was described by Timothy Kendall, author of an excellent book on China through the eyes of Australians, Ways of Seeing China—although his account could also easily describe similar strategies deployed by other democracies: “Throughout the Cold War, the Australian Government relied on this network of ‘surveyors’ to map the communist terrain and generate new information about China. I use the word ‘surveyor’ because they were not professionally trained intelligence officers but, for the most part, ordinary citizens—passive intelligence gatherers who collected data that was then used by Australian strategists and allied nations. Most of the information they gleaned was security-related data: it focused on standard of living, visibility of Chinese security personnel, ports in China, warships, the presence of Russians in Chinese cities, the attitude of China towards Taiwan and so on.”40

Australian surveyors managed to create a massive patchwork of intelligence that two or three professional spies would never have been able to gather in China, in the midst of great political turbulence. However, there were some hiccups. During the Labor government of the early 1970s, the Australian secret services had the bright idea of recruiting a student on a university exchange as an “honourable correspondent”. He was given all the necessary espionage equipment: camera, video camera, invisible ink. But on his return from China he was filled with guilt and sank into a depression. Worse, he told all his friends what he had been made to do, then went to the Chinese Embassy in Canberra to apologize for having spied on his friends. Not only that, but by dint of complaining, he even managed to persuade MO9 to pay him AU$4,000 in damages.41

The fall of Pan Hannian

The paranoia typical of police systems in totalitarian countries like China, vastly amplified by Kang Sheng, continued to be felt in the early PRC of the 1950s, to the point that the hunt for imperialists or nationalists spying for the Kuomintang affected some communist cadres well respected for their role in the revolution. One of the earliest instances was the case of Chen Bo, alias Bo Lu, known as the “Sherlock Holmes of Yan’an”. In 1950, after he became head of the Canton Gonganbu, he and his colleague Chen Kun were arrested by some associates on the charge of spying for MI6 and the Kuomintang. They were sentenced to twenty years in prison.42

The most famous case, however, took place in Shanghai: that of Pan Hannian, who, twenty years earlier, had been involved in the early secret war alongside Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng. Pan, a superb secret agent, had made his career in the SAD, becoming deputy head of Asia, while also serving as deputy mayor of Shanghai under Chen Yi. He was part of the team that enthusiastically carried out Mao’s instruction of December 1950: “In the repression of the counter-revolutionaries, take care to strike with safety, precision and severity.”

The crackdown was led with an iron first by Xu Jianguo, the head of the local Gonganbu known as the “executioner of Shanghai”, who had been trained by Kang Sheng at the SAD.  Had Pan Hannian fallen out with the master of Shandong’s security men, who had begun to resurface in the mid-1950s? Was he framed for trying to loosen the repressive stranglehold over his hometown, with its 100,000 dead, as some in China now believe? Or was he caught, as others suppose, in Zhou Enlai’s wrath?

Whatever the case, on 3  April 1955, while attending a rally, Pan was arrested, along with the Gonganbu deputy director, Fang Yan. He was accused of having spied for the Japanese and the nationalist camp, and specifically of having allowed Kuomintang nationalists to escape the vengeance of proletarian justice. From the records it appears that he had been in contact with both the Japanese secret services and those of the former Kuomintang leader, Wang Jingwei, who had turned to collaborating with the Japanese occupation, and was known as the “Chinese Pétain” as a result.

The problem for Pan, who was expelled from the CCP, is that all of this was true—but he had been acting at the request of Zhou Enlai. All these events had taken place in 1940, at the same time as Europe saw Hitler and Stalin sign the Nazi–Soviet pact and divide Poland. Mao and Zhou saw no harm in maintaining a similar strategic relationship with the Japanese, against whom they were officially at war, if the mutual assistance between the Japanese and communist services meant that they were weakening their common enemy, the Kuomintang. This was how Pan Hannian had come to be exchanging information with Li Shiqun, the head of Wang Jingwei’s secret services. Since March 1940, Wang—a former left-wing rival of Chiang Kai-shek within the Kuomintang—had settled in Nanjing, where he had become leader of a so-called “national government”, but had in fact gone over to the Japanese occupying forces. This “Napoleon of the Ningbo” gave himself the title of Zongcai, a Chinese version of Il Duce or the Führer. A motley band of former communist representatives, disgraced nationalists, opium traffickers, brothel keepers, and criminal elements from the underworlds of Shanghai and Nanjing had joined General Wang.

Among them were the two heads of Wang’s new secret services: a couple of shady crooks, Ding Mocun and Li Shiqun, trained in the art of intelligence in the USSR.  Back in Shanghai, under cover of a “Social Information Agency” (Shehui Xinwenshe), they had established the “Red Guard”, the Teke’s shock troops led by the magician Gu Shunzhang before his defection. Ding and Li were arrested in May 1934 on their way to assassinate a senior Kuomintang leader. To save their skins, they joined Chen Lifu’s Blue Shirts and fought against their former comrades. In 1938, they followed one of them—Zhou Fohai, co-founder with Mao of the CCP, who had also turned nationalist—to join the ranks of the collaborationist Wang Jingwei.43 Now in the pay of this Japanese vassal, Ding and Li set up a new secret service that collaborated directly with Kempeitai, the “Japanese Gestapo”. Theirs was a dizzying trajectory, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary in 1930s China. It had not ended well: Ding, “the little devil”, was shot in 1947 by the Kuomintang, while Li Shiqun ended up being poisoned by his Japanese handler.

Meanwhile, at Zhou Enlai’s behest, Pan Hannian had managed to make secret contact with Li Shiqun, and they exchanged information useful to both sides. Naturally this story, not officially disclosed by the Gonganbu’s 2nd Department investigators, did not help his case in 1955.

There was worse to come: Pan had also been in direct contact with the Japanese themselves. In 1940, when he was “exchanging” with his old Red Guard friend turned fascist, Pan Hannian also made contact with Lieutenant General Kagesa Sadaaki, a Japanese intelligence officer in the Nanjing government, to propose a ceasefire between the communist army in the north and the Japanese troops.44 Kagesa had been a senior official in Japan’s 2nd Bureau (Rikugun Johobu), becoming first head of the 7th Section (Asia), then the 8th (strategic propaganda), before being assigned to the occupation troops in China. All of which is to say that he was a master in espionage and manipulation.

It’s hard to know which of the two, the Japanese spy or the communist operative, was manipulating the other, but what is clear is that the ceasefire plan submitted by Pan to the Japanese came to nothing. Meanwhile he had been compromised in the eyes of the CCP secret service apparatus, and supporters of Kang Sheng also drew attention to his file, in order to make him appear to be a “Japanese agent”.

A committed activist for the cause and an exceptional spy, Pan Hannian was sent to the laogai for twenty years; it is only today, long after his death, that books are being written that seek to rehabilitate his reputation.45 It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the fall of Pan Hannian was a veiled attack against Zhou Enlai, who, in 1955, opened up Chinese diplomacy to the global Non-Aligned Movement, when he attended the Bandung Conference.

Zhou would never have made it to the conference had he taken up his seat on the Indian aeroplane the Kashmir Princess, which was taking his delegation to Indonesia on 11  April 1955. In an attack blamed on the Kuomintang and the CIA, the plane exploded after it had passed Natuna Island and was approaching Malaysia. Reportedly, British agents from the Hong Kong Special Branch, working together with special agents from Li Kenong’s SAD, had got wind of a planned attack and persuaded Zhou to travel on another plane flying over Burma. The CIA abandoned an alternative plan to poison Zhou Enlai in Bandoeng.46

The SAD under Li Kenong

After the founding of the PRC, the Ministry of Public Security—the Gonganbu—had continued the repression of counter-revolutionary elements. But, unlike other “socialist” countries, the Chinese did not yet have a true state-run foreign intelligence service. They maintained a structure subsidiary to the leadership of the CCP.  The SAD, located at 15 Gongxian Hutong, was now considerably weakened, because all the elements responsible for counterintelligence had been integrated into the Gonganbu. Mao made this decision to avoid criticism over having kept the leaders of the Yan’an Rectification Campaign in office.

Zhou Enlai insisted that Li Kenong be kept in his post in foreign intelligence. According to one of his Chinese biographers, Li’s first job was to co-write with a team of veterans an internal history of the communist special services from 1927 to 1949, a task that took him six months.47

Meanwhile Kang Sheng, his rival and boss, was eclipsed. Various different theories have been put forward to explain why he was removed from the top post in the intelligence services. One explanation is that his role in the Yan’an purges had attracted the wrath of many senior officials, some themselves victims of his frenzy. Kang, the man known abroad as the “Chinese Beria”, was sidelined from the leadership and, depending on which version of events we follow, either retired to his native Shandong to establish a political stranglehold from which he planned to bounce back, or, somewhat less likely, was struck by acute paranoia and symptoms of schizophrenia and placed in a mental asylum. This was the theory put about by Mao’s doctor, Li Zhuisui.48

Rumours swirling around the American intelligence community hinted that Kang’s fall was linked to the death of Stalin, or that of the real Beria in the same year. Those who tended towards this interpretation pointed out that, during his training in Moscow, Kang had been part of a pro-Stalinist faction, and was now suffering the same fate as some of his counterparts in the new Eastern European states. But, as we have seen, Kang Sheng’s ambition had long been to establish an autonomous Chinese system hostile to Moscow. In this, he had the support of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai—the difference being that both of those men had to show diplomacy in the matter.

Around this time, Maurice Oldfield, head of the MI6 station in Singapore—and director of the British secret intelligence service in 1973–8—obtained information indicating that not only did Kang Sheng remain a close and influential associate of Mao, but also that it was he who had convinced the chairman, in the early 1950s, to break with the USSR, when Moscow was seeking to wield control over China through its advisors and scientists.49

There is one other possible explanation, which I explored with Rémi Kauffer in our biography of Kang Sheng,50 with the help of certain people in the French intelligence services and their links with missionary networks and the Chinese “Church of Silence”: that Kang Sheng had in fact been tasked with seeking out and bringing back Chinese scholars from around the world, for the purpose of developing a Chinese atomic bomb. Many clues point to the viability of this explanation.

In 1956 Kang Sheng returned to the public eye. In the meantime, Li Kenong had been developing the SAD’s intelligence networks and, under the wing of his friend Zhou Enlai, was appointed deputy minister of foreign affairs. This led to the two men appearing in Geneva in 1954 during the negotiations for peace in Indochina.

To modernize the service, and encourage people to forget the Kang Sheng era, the name of the service was changed. No longer the SAD, in 1955 it became the CCP Central Investigation Department (Zhongyang Diaochabu), or Diaochabu for short, with one branch of the SAD separating out into the Legal and Administrative Work Department.51

In the 1950s each embassy had its own “Bureau of Investigation and Research”, which dealt with intelligence gathering. One fact became clear over the years: the Diaochabu did not have the rigid structure of the Soviet KGB; its jurisdiction fluctuated, as much for those with posts in the service—such as agent recruiters and case officers (gongzuo dandang guan)—as for its coordinators, who were subordinate to the central directorate of the CCP.

Intelligence was collected and examined by the CCP’s 8th Bureau, a vast centre of analysis that in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, signalled a change in direction towards the outside world, altering its name to the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). This institute was set up almost at the same time as the Foreign Affairs College, which was responsible for the training of secret agents. The simultaneous establishment of these two institutions was obviously backed by Zhou Enlai, who was now at the helm of China’s international and diplomatic policy-making.

On 9  February 1962, after a thirty-year career in special affairs and intelligence, Li Kenong died in Beijing from the consequences of the brain damage he had suffered after a fall three years earlier. He had been seriously ill for quite some time. When his close associate Chen Geng, former head of the Teke in Shanghai, had died in March 1961, Li had been unable to travel to the funeral, although his name was on the Funeral Committee list. Officially, Li retained his position as deputy army chief of staff, in charge of overseeing military intelligence alongside the head of Diaochabu. However, in reality, the Diaochabu had now for some time been run by cadres from the Yan’an period: Kong Yuan, former secretary of Kang Sheng in Shanghai and a close associate of Zhou Enlai, assisted by Zou Dapeng and Luo Qingchang. In the gathering storm of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese secret services were about to experience new and terrifying levels of turmoil.