3

THE SPIES’ CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Tens of thousands of Red Guards stood screaming and brandishing Little Red Books of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, their hearts bursting with emotion for the man they called the “Red Sun in the hearts of the people of the world”. They waved banners warning against “Soviet revisionists” who were accused of having destroyed Marxism-Leninism, and flourished placards with slogans attacking the “American imperialists” bombing Vietnam. Sometimes the sound of stamping grew muffled as, egged on by Chairman Liu Shaoqi, the “Chinese Khrushchev”, they trampled to the ground an old teacher accused of being a “Mandarin”, or kicked a “degenerate” cadre who had got caught up in “bourgeois ways”. From the distance, in the direction of a university campus that had descended into anarchy, came the sound of shots, perhaps exchanged between rival Red Guards, or squadrons from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent in by Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s closest comrade-in-arms, in an attempt to put a stop to the chaos that these leaders themselves had triggered.

The violent clashes, pitched battles and mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that began in the summer of 1966 must have seemed quite bizarre to the thousands of workers hard at work like ants 8 metres below the ground, breaking stone with pickaxes and jackhammers as a revolutionary storm swirled through the streets of the capital. At least, that is how I imagined it forty years later on a guided tour of Dixia Cheng, the vast city beneath Beijing that Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao built during the Cultural Revolution as protection in the event of a nuclear or chemical attack ordered by the Kremlin.

The launch of a vast KGB disinformation campaign in China led to a renewed burst of activity on this vast, secret project. A legendary Russian agent named Victor Louis was, unwittingly, the cause. He wrote regularly for the press in the West, publishing scoops from impeccable sources with the help of his friend Yuri Andropov, the new head of the KGB.  In March 1969, he stoked Chinese paranoia in the wake of several border incidents on the banks of the Amur River, which saw the two Red Armies, Russian and Chinese, engaging in skirmishes. Dazibao, wall posters denouncing Soviet “social-imperialists”, began to appear on buildings all over Beijing. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, Zhou Enlai met with his Russian counterpart, Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin. Passing through Beijing airport, Kosygin was on his way back from Hanoi, where he had paid homage to the coffin containing Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body, as the second Indochina war continued to rage. Zhou was hoping to defuse the Sino-Soviet clashes, because, as Victor Louis revealed, he feared a Soviet nuclear attack on Beijing.1

Dixia Cheng: the underground bunker city

“It was during this time that we literally buried the secret services!” a source told me in 2007. The underground city, Dixia Cheng, was built by 40,000 civilians and soldiers to house 300,000 people, or 40  per  cent of Beijing’s population at the time. The miners of the revolution dug down as far as 20 metres below ground, over an area of 85 square kilometres.

I made my way down the long corridors with a friend, a Japanese filmmaker. Our guide was a young female soldier in combat fatigues, whose choice of words was shaped by 1960s ideology—an impeccable Red Guard, forty years after the fact. The sense of mystery was only enhanced by portraits on the walls of Mao, Zhou and even Lin Biao, “the young tiger of the forest”, once Mao’s heir apparent but now long erased from history. Photographs of Sukhoi planes, Soviet tanks and American B-52 bombers were displayed along the dank, clammy walls. There were vintage posters, the kind one can pick up in flea markets the world over, denouncing “social-imperialist jackals” and “American paper tigers”. We smiled at the images of French and Japanese planes that belonged to the “lackeys of US imperialism”. The French were much less hated than the Japanese, the mere sight of whom inflamed the Chinese. France was the homeland of the Paris Commune and General de Gaulle, who recognized the PRC in the 1960s, before it took over China’s seat at the UN in 1971. But this relatively positive view of the French did not prevent the Red Guards from posting dazibao on the walls of the French Embassy at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, calling its nationals “dog heads” and provoking mockery on the part of General de Gaulle, who responded with mild irony, “To be called dog heads by Pekingese rather takes the biscuit.”

The first level of Dixia Cheng is 8 metres underground, a warren of streets built as an exact replica of Beijing’s open arcades, with a filtration and aeration system designed to cope with a possible chemical attack and nuclear radiation. Here the militia, the secret services, the Gonganbu and army reservists would hide, weapons and gas masks at the ready, scanning their Little Red Books as they awaited the enemy strike.

Next is an even deeper second floor, 20 metres below the ground, with shelters for the civilian population, shops, puppet theatres to keep children occupied, nurseries, hospitals, cinemas, covered markets, and dormitories as far as the eye can see. Street signs with numerical names were designed to make it easier for civil protection troops and the army to find their way quickly through the maze of streets. Under the dark eyes of our young Red Guard, I noted down the number 01–8001 in the gallery where we stood, indicating that we were walking in the direction of Tiantan Park and the Army Library.

A European journalist who has lived in Beijing for many years told me that once upon a time her apartment, which previously belonged to a senior party functionary, had had a trap door leading straight down to a shelter connected directly to the Zhongnanhai (“Central and Southern Seas”) government complex that stands to the west of the Forbidden City. When I put this to our guide, at the mere mention of Zhongnanhai she responded by holding up a hand and shaking it, clearly shocked: “Mimi! Mimi! It is secret!”

There are several entry points to this historical site. Different exits lead out of the underground city not far from the Forbidden City into Xidawo Changlie, a former Xingfu Dajie carpet factory, and into the Chongwen and Qianmen neighbourhoods. Today the underground city has taken on an entirely new dimension. With the destruction of several old neighbourhoods in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games, many of the underground galleries have been filled in or taken over as the basements of hotels or shops, and for a new underground train line leading directly to the Olympic stadiums.

Some of these galleries have been updated, reinforced and rebuilt in utmost secrecy, under cover of the Olympic building programme, by special PLA engineering and military security units. The rapid transport systems, constructed like light railways, can move troops from one part of the underground city to another in case of unrest, or exfiltrate leaders from the underground garrison at Zhongnanhai and the Baiyi Building of the Central Military Commission (CMC), with its underground levels and twelve floors above ground, which have been entirely renovated in order to conform to anti-seismic and anti-terrorism standards.

At the same time, work on a new underground city beneath Beijing, designed for civilian activities, began in the summer of 2006 and was completed in 2012. The CMC directed the project, overseeing the triumvirate in charge of the works—the CCP, the PLA and Beijing City Hall—to construct seven or eight more advanced anti-nuclear shelters, though this still only provides room to shelter 10  per  cent of the population in the event of an attack. The Chinese dream is that this invisible city will be the largest in the world, with reinforced command centres at Beijing’s four cardinal points, a doubling of evacuation points to 150, and an underground transport network for troops or refugees in twenty neighbouring districts, connected to railway stations and airports. At the time of writing the first edition of this book, the authorities were considering the viability of constructing similar underground cities in Shanghai, Nanjing and eventually other cities of over 1 million inhabitants.

We have come a long way from the purely defensive construction built at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Politically, though, we are not far today from the system of the 1960s, when the best protected underground position, apart from that of Mao Zedong himself, was the area housing the headquarters of Kang Sheng, who had once again become head of the secret services.

The mysteries of the Bamboo Garden

Having retired to his native Shandong in the early 1950s, Kang the “shadow master” was recalled to Beijing a few years later, from where he would play a leading role in communist China’s largest ever purges, similar to the “rectification campaign” he had carried out in Yan’an in 1942.

The subterranean city tunnels led to the Bamboo Garden in the north of Beijing, not far from the Drum Tower. This was the former residence of a Ming emperor’s head eunuch and, later, a Qing emperor’s cousin—a group of pavilions ornamented with red lacquer, surrounded by a Tao garden planted with bamboo and filled with winding paths, rocks and fountains. It was here that Kang Sheng established his headquarters. There were many strange goings-on in and around the different pavilions. Underground bunkers were filled with piles of artworks that had been looted from temples or old houses by bogus Red Guards in Kang’s pay. There were alcoves filled with hundreds of erotic books from the Ming period—a taste Kang shared with Mao—with titles like The Prayer Mat of Flesh and The Plum in the Golden Vase. These were particularly relished by Kang, not least because he had had such works banned. He spent hours listening to tape recordings of thousands of women during orgasm, real or simulated. He watched pornographic plays, of which many exist in the traditional Chinese repertoire, performed by androgynous actors from the Beijing Opera in the roles of elegant women, hua dan, who excelled at imitating the sexual pleasure of aristocratic ladies, courtesans or simple peasants. It is unclear if Kang enjoyed these plays because of his own erotic perversions, or whether it was related to his obsession with the administrative evaluation of the most private areas of people’s lives. After all, this was at a time when the minister of health, who was the wife of the Gonganbu chief, obliged women to post the dates of their periods on the front doors of their homes.2

The men in green jackets running around the Bamboo Garden were not thinking about sex. They were busy at work in the underground listening stations, with their encrypted communication systems and red telephones that allowed the secret services to communicate instructions to provincial officials. Kang Sheng, who was always dressed in white—the traditional colour of death—used these telephones to call his native Shandong, to find out how the revolution was taking shape and whether, for example, the house of Confucius had been destroyed yet, as per his orders. He would call the leader of the local Red Guards, whom he trusted implicitly, for the simple reason that this was his own son, Zhang Zishi.

Today the Bamboo Garden is a tranquil boutique hotel—though still run by the secret services—where I went for a drink with my Japanese filmmaker after our underground tour. It was nothing like what it had been in Kang Sheng’s time—a buzzing hive of activity, the centre of operations for the Cultural Revolution throughout China. By following the thread of national events, we can unravel some of the most important episodes in the battle for power and overall control of the secret services in the 1950s–60s. In China, of course, power and control of the secret services were, and still are, one and the same thing.

Kang Sheng was rising through the ranks once again, using both political and ideological means. As surprising as it seems to us today, at the time, Deng Xiaoping and Kang Sheng were entirely in agreement when it came to dealing with the thorny issue of relations with the USSR.  Unlike Mao, they both had international experience that gave them a global perspective. Both regretted the fact that, since the death of Stalin in 1953 and the rise of Khrushchev, the global revolution had softened, with a new emphasis on peaceful coexistence with the United States.

Act I: Kang Sheng and the Sino-Soviet split

In the 1950s Kang Sheng returned to Moscow with Peng Zhen, formerly of Yan’an Special Services, who had become mayor of Beijing in 1951. Representing the International Liaison Department (ILD) of the CCP, the two were there to set in motion a break with the Soviets. The head of the Soviet ILD, Yuri Andropov, who later became head of the KGB, was well informed. He understood that Mao was trying to unite the CCP around his leadership by fostering hostility toward Moscow. Mao criticized the Kremlin leadership under Khrushchev for its malleability and its reformism—the very same charges he would soon level in China against Chairman, Liu Shaoqi, as well as Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen and the head of the Party’s Organization Department, Yang Shangkun.

From 1956—when Kang Sheng first accused Tito’s Yugoslavia of being behind the “counter-revolutionary rebellion” in Hungary—to the 1960s—when he personally attacked Khrushchev—Kang, the former (and soon to be reinstated) head of the secret services, appears to have been the main actor responsible for the escalation of the Sino-Soviet split.

“You are not qualified to argue with me,” Khrushchev once yelled at him. “I am the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and you are just an alternate member of your political bureau.”

With piercing eyes behind his metal-rimmed spectacles, Kang Sheng replied in the broken Russian that he had picked up in Moscow, “Your credentials are much more shallow than mine. In 1931 I was a member of the Politburo standing committee. In 1935 I was an alternate member of the executive of the Comintern. At that time, you were not even a member of the Central Committee.”3

The Soviets’ loathing of Kang Sheng was all the more intense because, like Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, he had once been an approved agent of the GPU, the KGB’s predecessor, from which he had learned everything he knew about espionage techniques: dissimulation, disinformation, manipulation—and, as was to become quite clear, how to turn a situation completely on its head.

Many members of the Chinese leadership thought that Kang Sheng was pushing the anti-Soviet line too hard. But the purpose of these and subsequent attacks was to impress both Mao and Khrushchev; Kang was playing a game of both internal and international politics. He and Mao agreed on many points, including the most important of all: that China should become the new centre of world revolution. But to achieve this, they had to revive the revolution in China itself.

Act II: The Shanghai Gang and the Shandong Mafia

Kang Sheng was part of the group of ideologues based in Shanghai who launched the campaign against revisionist tendencies within the party in the fields of art and literature. As in the Yan’an era, political positions were critiqued through culture. It might seem that a play or a novel was being strongly criticized, but it was actually the author’s protector politicians who were being targeted. The four leaders of this Shanghai group, whose name is etched into the historical memory of that terrifying era, were known as the Gang of Four.

Jiang Qing, the film actress known as “Blue Apple” in 1930s Shanghai, was the gang’s figurehead. She was Mao’s official wife; like an emperor of old, he also lived with other concubines provided by Kang Sheng and Wang Dongxing, chief of his personal security team. Madame Mao, like Kang, was from Shandong, and it was she who helped Kang make his successful return to the top brass of the party and the secret services.

Zhang Chunqiao was also from Shandong, and nicknamed the “Old Eunuch”. He had studied at the Shaanbei Academy, formerly run out of Yan’an by the SAD—in other words, the secret services. There he had become Ke Qingshi’s secretary. Ke was the activist who had helped Kang Sheng restructure the Shanghai intelligence service in 1931 after the defection of Gu the magician. In 1960, Ke became mayor of Shanghai, with Zhang as his head of propaganda. In 1965 the Old Eunuch recruited a young journalist from the daily newspaper of the CCP’s Shanghai Committee, the Jiefang Daily (or Liberation Daily), to launch the first attacks on intellectual circles deemed to be counter-revolutionary.

The third member of the Gang of Four was Yao Wenyuan, son of Yao Pengzi, a well-known writer in the 1920s. Yao Junior worked as a secret agent for Pan Hannian, that other spymaster, and a friend of Zhang Chongren, of Blue Lotus fame. This was before Pan’s imprisonment on trumped up charges of spying for the Kuomintang.

The last member of the gang, and the most important in the CCP hierarchy, was Chen Boda, the main advisor of the Cultural Revolution Group. Originally from Fujian, near Shanghai, he had been Mao’s secretary in Yan’an and, along with Kang Sheng, the architect of the cult of Maoism. In the 1960s, the two men continued the deification of the chairman with a particular stroke of genius: they selected quotes from Mao’s abundant writings and collected them into a small book with a red plastic jacket, called Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Every good revolutionary learned these aphorisms by heart and was able to chant them like Buddhist sutras or Muslim suras.

As Stephen Fitzgerald, Australia’s first ambassador to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), wrote in his memoirs, “The Cultural Revolution was also the struggle between Beijing and Shanghai.”4 It was in Shanghai that the first attacks were made—on a theatre production, with the purpose of persecuting top-ranking officials including the mayor of Beijing, Peng Zhen, and the PLA chief of staff, General Luo Ruiqing.

Act III: The overthrow of Luo Ruiqing

The undermining of CCP top brass was possible only through an alliance with the army leadership. Mao Zedong and the defence chief, Marshal Lin Biao, together plotted the overthrow of Luo Ruiqing. Luo, a veteran of the Long March and head of the Gonganbu at the founding of the PRC, was army chief of staff as well as deputy prime minister. He also controlled a large part of the security apparatus. Clearly, his downfall would help Kang gain a stranglehold over the coveted secret services.

In early 1966, Lin Biao ordered Luo’s arrest. He suffered such horrific treatment in March of that year that he tried to commit suicide by throwing himself from the window of his interrogation cell. With two broken legs, he was transported by the Red Guards to the site of a mass meeting, where he was forced to make his own self-criticism.

Kang Sheng concocted a dossier on him, garbed in the language of betrayal, accusing him of “illicit intercourse with foreigners”, presumably the USSR.  Throughout the Cultural Revolution, until his health deteriorated from opium and cigarettes, Kang Sheng excelled in compiling incriminating files on his enemies, put together from murky cases that often went back to the 1930s.

This was the second time in thirty years that Kang had robbed General Luo of the top job in the secret services. The battle for control of these services raged all the way through the bloody turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Kang Sheng relied on the help of Wang Dongxing, one of his former deputies, to stop Luo, strengthen his ties with Mao, and take apart the special services even as he was clawing back its overall leadership. Wang, one of Mao’s longstanding bodyguards, had been deputy head of the Gonganbu since 1955, and head of the 8,000-man 8341 (basansiyi) Unit, also known as the “Central Safeguard Regiment” (jingwei tuan), established in 1938.5 On every journey out of Beijing, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were protected by a hundred of these elite guards. On 16  July 1966, combat swimmers from the 8341 Unit helped Mao swim 15 kilometres down the Yangtze River.

Our history so far has shown us that one political-security elite managed to maintain power from the 1920s. Many of the political leaders during the 1960s had been secret agents in the pre-1949 underground, and intelligence professionals were more likely to reach the higher echelons of the Party apparatus.

This provided Kang Sheng with useful biographical details for the records he kept on leaders who might one day fall from the top of the tree. This was all part of the cycle of battles between factions and groups, bound together by so-called “invisible relations” (touming guanxi), but nonetheless often in opposition to one another. This phenomenon was naturally rooted in Soviet communism, but was also influenced in the PRC by specifically Chinese forms of historical despotism.

The KGB in the eye of the hurricane

The Russians, naturally, were still exerting a strong influence. Their experts had been sent home in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, which Kang Sheng had of course orchestrated. After becoming head of the KGB in 1967, Yuri Andropov had hopes of converting the Soviet embassy in Beijing, which he would run as ILD chief for a few more months more, into the control tower of the Chinese revolution.6 In the USSR itself, some Chinese were still considered friends. They remained in Moscow and were approved as Soviet agents, although obviously, as a front, they had to denounce the “social-imperialist” Russians before the Chinese regime, to avoid a similar fate to that of Luo Ruiqing. To my knowledge, only one of the trainees from the 1930s remained in the USSR as a specialist on the Chinese secret service desk. With his Russified name “Djancha”, this former GPU agent was absolutely committed to the Soviet cause. In 2008, his son, Sergei, was still living in Moscow, where he ran a travel agency specializing in travel to China.

In the mid-1960s, the Beijing activities of the KGB and the military intelligence GRU were considerably scaled back, and even getting hold of the Jiefangjunbao, the PLA newspaper forbidden to foreigners, was not easy.7 Soviet diplomat–spies were trailed by dozens of Chinese agents wherever they went. The most common tactic to avoid this was to leave the embassy in the trunk of an ordinary cadre’s car, then be dropped off and get lost in the crowd. But given the constant presence of the Red Guards, for anyone who did not belong to one of the Central Asian or Mongolian ethnic groups, it was impossible to avoid being spotted for long.

The journalist Alexei Antonkin, who chose to work for the USSR’s TASS news agency rather than for the KGB, was useful to the Beijing embassy when it came to obtaining confidential documents such as the “Communications of the Central Committee of the Party”, dated 16  May 1966, or the “Report of the Working Group of the Central Committee for the Examination of the Errors of Luo Ruiqing”. Antonkin also managed to procure the list of the newly elected Central Committee members, enabling the team of analysts at the Soviet embassy to take note of the rise of women, dignitaries, agents for the intelligence services around Kang Sheng and Wang Dongxing, and theorists like Chen Boda and Zhang Qunqiao—all to the detriment of the more moderate faction around Liu Shaoqi—the “Chinese Khrushchev”—and Deng Xiaoping.

Antonkin received instructions from his TASS supervisors ordering him to write articles about how the Chinese people were “hostile to Mao”. Like his KGB comrades, he drew from one of the most informative sources in the PRC, the “wall newspapers”, or dazibao: “The best source of information, and the least used by reporters other than those working for the Chinese press, were quite under the radar: the dazibaos plastered all over the walls of the city. I found all kinds of dazibao in the Haidian district, a short way away from the University of Beijing. Some were more interesting or revealing than others. Among the plethora of dazibaos, I was able to find information that was in line with official guidelines. Internal conflicts in factories, universities, different administrations and banks were plastered all over the walls … I took useful information from dazibaos in Haidian and on Wangfujing [the busiest commercial street in Beijing] which spoke of peasant and monk revolts in Lhasa and other parts of Tibet—which was a first—making it clear that the Chinese army had put down these revolts before they spread.”8

KGB agents, likewise struggling to put together the different pieces of the puzzle, encountered further difficulties, to the point that Alexander Sakharovsky, head of the KGB First Chief Directorate and so in charge of foreign intelligence, wrote in a directive: “The KGB Rezidentura in Beijing is operating under siege conditions.”9 Indeed, Fedor Vasilyevich Mochulsky, resident in Beijing since 1965 under his official title of “embassy advisor”, went through some very tense periods when he was subjected to intimidation by Kang Sheng’s men. Several Soviet agents were expelled by force in two successive waves: Yuri Kossyukov and Andrei Krushinsky in 1966; and Nikolai Natachin, Valentin Passchuk and Oleg Yedanov the following year. When Yuri Andropov was promoted to head of the KGB in 1967, the Chinese protested using their habitual jargon: “This is a sudden and significant change in leadership within an important instrument of the fascist dictatorship in the hands of the revisionist Soviet ruling faction,” proclaimed Beijing–Information on 12  June 1967.

In order to find out what was going in China, Yuri Andropov had to step up his “K Line” activities—K for Kitai, the Russian word for China. But how could the K Line act, having lost its internal networks? The KGB’s First Directorate was clear: the initial objective was to recruit Chinese people during diplomatic meetings held outside China. This was a particularly difficult operation given that Chinese diplomats circulated in groups and lived together under the watchful eye of agents from the CCP’s secret service, which was once more in the hands of Kang Sheng.

The second objective was to set up a special KGB Rezidentura in Hong Kong, one of the preferred points of entry into southern China. The Taiwanese special services had made it their main point of infiltration, but like the American services, their spies were regularly expelled from the British colony, because London did not want to provoke its powerful neighbour. (This “friendliness” by the British did not prevent the 1966 Hong Kong riots, which were plotted in Canton by the Chinese secret services.) Hong Kong also remained the privileged place where refugees from China were “debriefed”, having swum across the Pearl River to escape the bloody turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. The head of the KGB office in Hong Kong, Stepan Tsumayev, was expelled in 1972. It was not until 1977, during the interim era of Hua Guofeng’s leadership, that new KGB operatives returned to the British colony. They would include Yevgeni Zhemchugov and Rezident Mikhail Markovich Turchak, who was stationed in North Korea before becoming first bureau chief in Beijing (1976–81), then head of the China Section in the KGB’s 6th Department.10

The third objective of the KGB First Directorate was to recruit agents from among the Uyghur, Tajik and Kazakh minorities, in Kazakhstan and other border states, who would be able to blend in with the local population, particularly in the region around Xinjiang (former East Turkestan), which had a large Muslim population and had been independent until its annexation by China in 1949.

The fourth objective was to work closely with intelligence services such as the Mongolian Foreign Service, which could run agents relatively unnoticed in Inner Mongolia, which was under Chinese control. The papers of KGB defector and MI6 agent Vassili Mitrokhin, held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, confirm this programme. Studying this archive enables us to see how the KGB was obliged to proceed in a circular fashion during the Cultural Revolution, having recalled its “illegal” agents from China and lost several along the way. The KGB’s collaboration with the Mongolian and North Korean secret services therefore proved very useful. It was necessary to cooperate with the Border Guard Intelligence Service in Kazakhstan, Manchuria and Xinjiang in order to send in undercover, pro-Soviet Chinese agents, but also to monitor and study the activities of Chinese agents abroad, including in enemy countries such as Japan and the United States. Between 1966 and 1969, according to a report filed by Krestyaninov, who was stationed in Canada, the KGB managed to identify a network of eleven Chinese secret service agents run out of New York by Siu Minchen, a translator at the UN, his wife Tsin Fen, an academic, as well as Den Yuishu, employed at the University of Maryland, Yan Tsiuya-yun at the University of Georgia, the Kuomintang consul general in Los Angeles, Tsian Yishen, and Tsen Yisan, an actress living in New York.11

In 1969, a Chinese restaurateur in New York named Min Chiau-sen was murdered, along with her friend Wang En-ping. According to the investigators, Miss Min, borrowing the name of another Chinese woman who had died in an accident in 1952, had been sent undercover to the United States by Li Kenong’s service. No one knew who killed her. New York triads? Kuomintang agents? Might it even have been the Russians?

The KGB, meanwhile, also had an operative working against the Chinese in France: Ronald Lebedinsky, a KGB specialist on China, who was posted to Paris in 1974. Andropov’s service was in a race with the Chinese services to recruit Madame Mao’s former husband Ma Jiliang, alias Tang Na, who had been running a well-known Chinese restaurant in the city, La Fontaine de Jade, since 1961.12 Shortly before his death in 1988, the Guoanbu—the post-Mao intelligence agency—contacted Ma Jiliang to write his memoirs, presumably fishing for details on relations between his ex-wife and Kang Sheng. For Madame Mao, at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, was right in the eye of the hurricane.

The disintegration of the special services

In August 1966, Mao stood in Tiananmen Square and addressed the young Red Guards: “We are right to revolt!” This was the launch of the fight against artists, teachers and intellectuals, a campaign of cultural annihilation particularly dear to Madame Mao’s heart. At the end of the summer, the witch-hunt of party functionaries began. Kang Sheng attended all the mass meetings and rallies in his customary white suit as a representative of the “Central Case Examination Group”, a kind of super-secret police. He simultaneously launched the pursuit of counter-revolutionaries within the intelligence services.

However, even as the crusade against anti-party elements began to grow, it was vital that the ensuing anarchy should not lead to the total destruction of the secret services. On 8  September 1966, Kang Sheng, in accord with Wang Dongxing, posted a Central Committee directive attempting to limit the Cultural Revolution’s attacks on the services: “Codes, telegrams, confidential documents, files and secret archives are the essential secrets of the Party and the State; the safeguarding of all of these elements is the responsibility of all cadres, revolutionary masses, students and revolutionary teachers. The Red Guards and the People’s Liberation Army Reservists must cooperate with the Government and Party organizations and the People’s Liberation Army in assuming the glorious responsibility of protecting secrets of the Party and the State.”

But the leadership had unleashed something it was unable to control. The Chinese security and intelligence apparatus began to fall apart, like all the other institutions disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Luo Ruiqing was its first sacrificial victim. In the winter of 1966, three “revisionist” leaders, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Yang Shangkun, were arrested and subjected to a barrage of intense criticism and humiliating self-criticism in mass meetings where collective hysteria prevailed over Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Yang Shangkun’s was a particularly curious case: as head of the Central Committee’s General Affairs Office, Yang, who came from a wealthy Sichuan family and had been trained by the GPU in Moscow, was accused of having bugged Mao’s office on behalf of the Soviets. Only in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution was it discovered that he had indeed bugged the Zhongnanhai office as far back as the 1950s, but with Mao’s agreement—just as Richard Nixon had recording devices hidden, presumably for posterity, in the Oval Office. In that case, of course, the bugs proved to be the president’s own downfall when the Watergate scandal emerged.13

If someone was not suspected of being a KGB spy, they were suspected of working for the CIA.  Liu Shaoqi’s wife, Wang Guangmei, was accused of being a “spy for the imperialist services” and, in the charming words of Madame Mao, of being “Sukarno’s whore”, on the grounds that she wore an evening gown and a pearl necklace during an off-duty trip to Indonesia where she met that country’s president. During a mass rally in April 1967, Madame Mao did everything she could to humiliate Wang and force her to self-criticize, which she refused to do, in spite of the wondrously crafted file on her produced by Kang Sheng.

China, with its 800-million-strong population, was inflamed by the Red Guards’ revolts. The public security service, the Gonganbu, did not escape the fire. Of the 250,000 functionaries at the Ministry for Public Security, as it was officially known, heads of committees in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere were dismissed from their posts. In 1966, every Gonganbu deputy minister, with the exception of Kang Sheng’s ally Wang Dongxing, was purged for being a “double agent”. Two of the imprisoned leaders—Ling Yun and Liu Fuzhi—were to resurface after the Cultural Revolution and avenge themselves in the 1980s by setting up new secret services, while three others died in prison.14 Meanwhile, 225 heads of the Gonganbu’s central offices and 34,480 functionaries were fired. 1,500 were killed. The Gonganbu Red Guards even published their own newspaper called The Red Security Officer (Hongsi Gongan) recounting their exploits.

The public security minister himself, however, Xie Fuzhi, opted to remain loyal to Mao and Kang Sheng. This led him, with a certain irony, to oversee the destruction of his own organization, whilst simultaneously orchestrating his and his wife’s promotion within the new system. His wife Liu Xiangping was appointed minister of health. As the ship began to sink, a good number of the Gonganbu’s forces found a lifeline in the army, headed by Mao’s ally Marshal Lin Biao.

At this rate, the entire Chinese intelligence universe was in danger of imploding, as Kang Sheng was only too aware. Working out of the Bamboo Garden, he set about strengthening his own networks. Many others were also finding ways to hang on to their positions. Lin Biao’s army, Zhou Enlai’s diplomatic service and Wang Dongxing’s special units all preserved entire sections of the system. Zhou guaranteed the decent treatment of some jailed functionaries. This was the case for some political figures, including Deng Xiaoping, and for some intelligence agents.

The collapse of the Diaochabu

After the death of Kang Sheng’s rival Li Kenong in 1961, Kong Yuan, who had been Kang’s secretary at the CCP’s Shanghai Organization Department in the 1930s, took over as head of the Diaochabu, the CCP’s intelligence department. Kong was a close friend of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping—so close indeed that in September 1939 Kong and Deng had married two women who were themselves close friends in a joint celebration at Yan’an, with a small party organized by Mao. Zhuo Lin, Deng’s new wife, was a secret agent behind Japanese lines.15

From 1961 onwards, Kong Yuan’s task had become increasingly challenging, for the Diaochabu was now responsible not only for the investigation and monitoring of party cadres, but also for intelligence missions abroad under various diplomatic or journalistic guises. Kong, who had been deputy minister of foreign trade, had begun planning to enlarge the role of economic intelligence within the service.

The Cultural Revolution broke this momentum. Kong’s deputy in the Diaochabu, Manchu Zou Dapeng, was arrested and murdered by the Red Guards in April 1966. In November, it was Kong Yuan’s turn to be removed from office; his wife, Xu Ming, principal private secretary to Zhou Enlai, did not support the Red Guard attacks—she committed suicide. Kong’s other deputy, Luo Qingchang, also a private secretary to Zhou Enlai, replaced him for a while, and the service was put largely under military supervision, although its external operations were still coordinated by a special office in Zhou Enlai’s foreign affairs department. What was left of the organization appeared to be dormant.

Given the abuses of the Gang of Four, it is hardly surprising that several Diaochabu officials posted abroad during the Cultural Revolution attempted to defect. In April 1967, following new skirmishes between rival factions of the Red Guards, the Diaochabu headquarters in the West Garden (Xiyuan) were stormed by the PLA, and the service completely shut down.16 Many leaders were sent to the countryside for “rectification” of their incorrect ideas. Most were sent—not by chance—to Shandong province, Kang Sheng’s stronghold; this allowed him to maintain control over his former secret agents, who were now forced to work in the fields in what were called May Seventh Cadre schools. These labour camps were intended as a way of sorting the wheat from the chaff and enabling the ultimate redeployment of “re-educated” functionaries.

The archivists of the Diaochabu and their files were largely absorbed into the 2nd Department of the PLA, responsible for military intelligence, under the authority of Marshal Lin Biao. But not entirely: Kang Sheng took several loyal functionaries into his own networks and secret archives to examine incriminating charges against fallen leaders. Certain other leaders, including Luo Qingchang, were under the protection of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, and were able to continue their investigations. This was very similar to the situation back in the 1940s: while Kang Sheng was engaged in witch-hunts, Zhou Enlai strove to maintain at any cost the autonomous networks so useful for his diplomacy.

***

For Kang Sheng’s Central Case Examination Group, barely any pretext was needed. In mid-April 1967, a 50-year-old woman, Su Mei, was found dead in her Beijing apartment. Deputy director of the political department at the Academy for Political and Legal Cadres, which trained security officials, Su was none other than the sister-in-law and former mistress of Kang Sheng. At first it was thought that she had committed suicide. When the autopsy showed that she had been the victim of a murder covered up as suicide, Kang had a file drawn up on the woman who had conducted the autopsy, and arrested the head of the Academy where Su had worked. Once more, it was innocent people who were paying the price. Soon rumours began circulating in elite circles: Kang Sheng had ordered the murder of his ex-lover and sister-in-law to keep her from revealing awkward details about his CCP membership and his relationship with the Green Gang, the mafia that ruled Shanghai during the 1930s.

In the academic world where Su Mei had worked, however, the intelligence sector was somewhat protected, just as scientific research, particularly in the field of nuclear physics, was safeguarded. Scientists were preparing for the launch of the first Chinese space satellite, Dong Fang Hong 1, nicknamed “East is Red”, in 1970. It was a similar situation for the first think-tank established in China, linked to the Diaochabu. According to historian Matt Brazil, “the only one of these institutes [Mao] kept open was the just established (1965) China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). Although it continued to function, CICIR had to send some staff to the countryside while others remained in Beijing to analyse important events like the US escalation in Vietnam, the USS Pueblo crisis, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the border crisis with the USSR.  By 1969 Mao allowed CICIR to be restored. The Foreign Ministry’s Institute of International Relations did not reopen until 1973, underlining the critical role of CICIR during this period when Mao recognized the USSR threat and the opportunity for an opening to America.”17

Despite the difficulties in obtaining intelligence from within China, just as the KGB was still able to operate until 1967, the CIA too launched a wide-ranging analytical programme called POLO, whose archives have been open to researchers since 2007. These offer another perspective on the disintegration of the Chinese secret services during the Cultural Revolution. On 28  November 1969, John Kerry King, deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Political Analysis, gave the green light to the distribution of a memo (“POLO XXXVII”) describing the destruction and rebuilding of the Chinese security apparatus.

According to the memo, “By September 1965, the only [remaining] leaders of organs of the political–security apparatus were those who had been working for Mao personally—constituting a de facto apparatus within the apparatus. Mao’s personal apparatus ‘possibly’ included: Kang Sheng of the secretariat; Wang Dongxing from the Central Committee staff office; Luo Qingchang and Yang Qijing, of what remained nominally of the old Social Affairs Department or equivalent [actually the Diaochabu–NdA] (Luo was a SAD man assigned to Zhou Enlai’s secretariat).”18

In December 1970, a new CIA report (“POLO XLII”) threw some more light on the changes that were taking place: “The security area would be concerned with both political security (the Party, especially the leadership) and public security (the populace). The chances are that the de facto political security directorate, subordinate at first to Mao directly and then (like the staff office) to the Politburo standing committee, has now been reabsorbed by this de facto secretariat. Kang Sheng and Wang Dongxing, as officers of the Cultural Revolution Group, may supervise themselves as heads of security area, and may concurrently head some of the departments of this area, e.g. a reconstituted Social Affairs Department or (a later name) Political Security Department.”19

The CIA was finding it increasingly hard to get a grip on all these developments, since Mao Zedong and Kang Sheng, beginning to be wary of Lin Biao’s military networks, were making plans to infiltrate them. This was the mission given to General Guo Yufeng, an official at the PLA’s Political Department. In 1967 he was catapulted in as head of the CCP’s Organization Department, which—with the help of Kang Sheng’s wife, Cao Yi’ou—was putting together incriminating files on members of the anti-party faction. Meanwhile Kang, afraid that Lin would become increasingly empowered if the PLA were instructed to restore order against the Red Guards, had also instructed Cao to infiltrate undercover agents into the marshal’s entourage.20

The Maoist faction similarly seized control of the PLA’s 2nd Department in 1967, appointing General Shen Shazi as Chief of this military intelligence division. Shen’s deputy, Xiong Xianghui (about whom more later), was also head of the 3rd Department in charge of communications; he was one of the most senior Chinese secret agents and a friend of Zhou Enlai. He was also responsible for guarding the PLA 793 Foreign Language Institute of Zhangjiakou, which trained military intelligence officers and analysts in communication interception, and which also later imploded in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Thus, despite being nominated Mao’s heir apparent at the 9th Congress of the CCP in 1969, Lin Biao now found himself surrounded by spies trying to glean information about him to prepare for his fall at the instigation of Chairman Mao himself.

The principal consequences of these upheavals were that many of the PRC’s intelligence missions around the world became impossible to maintain. Xinhua News Agency journalists or embassy diplomats who were deported at the time were not necessarily spies, as people thought they must be. In fact it was often the opposite; precisely because they were mere supporters of the Cultural Revolution abroad, who had not been trained as special agents, they were easily detected as they sought to foment revolution in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. According to a CIA report, “a message sent to one embassy in mid-December (and probably representing a circular directive to all overseas installations) had stipulated that between one-third and one-half of all mission personnel should return for retraining and direct participation in the ‘Cultural Revolution’”.21

In January 1967, 600 of the 2,200 embassy staff—both spies and genuine diplomats—returned to Beijing. A first “reprogrammed” group was sent off to Burma, to engage in the new common mission: to foment revolution, handing out Chairman Mao badges, copies of his Little Red Book, and other magazines and books translated into different dialects, published by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. The campaign was so ridiculous that in the opposing pro-Soviet camp, Markus Wolf, head of the East German intelligence service, received orders from Moscow to count the number of posters of Mao that had been plastered onto walls in Zanzibar.22

In other parts of the world, however, Kang Sheng’s group did help trigger uprisings, just as in the 1920s the Soviets had encouraged, advised and armed the Chinese communist insurgency. There were clear parallels between the failed uprisings of 1927, which led to Chiang Kai-shek’s reign of “white terror”, and the attempted September 1965 uprising by the Indonesian Communist Party, supported by Beijing, which led to nothing but a bloodbath. One million Indonesians were murdered by Suharto’s army; he seized the moment and usurped Sukarno.

May ’68 and Kang Sheng’s Little Comintern

While Kang Sheng had brought the Diaochabu secret service to its knees, he was still relying on the other two services of the CCP’s Central Committee, now stripped down and affiliated with the world of intelligence: the International Liaison Department (ILD) and the United Front Work Department (UFWD).

The ILD was largely answerable to the umbrella of organizations controlled by Zhou Enlai. Wang Jiaxiang, its founder and chief after the “Liberation”, suffered terrible retribution at the hands of Kang Sheng, as did Li Weihan, another figure from the same service. The entire Wang family was persecuted; some were murdered, others starved and made homeless. Wang’s wife, Zhu Zhongli, was locked up for six months in a windowless cell in the ILD building and tortured by Cao Yi’ou, Kang Sheng’s wife, who was running the department alongside her husband. Like Madame Mao and Lin Biao’s wife Ye Qun, Cao took enormous pleasure in persecuting other women and seeing them suffer. Many functionaries were also purged by one of Kang’s deputies, Wang Li, former head of the Diaochabu’s 9th Department, who formed his own group for rooting out “counter-revolutionaries”.23

Kang Sheng wanted to transform the ILD into a “little Comintern”, a new International for training national, pro-Chinese-communism sections throughout the world. This required a deepening of the Sino-Soviet split, achieved by creating schisms in traditional, pro-Moscow communist parties abroad. Kang and his faction had been trying to improve relations with Albanian and Romanian communists, and had been making overtures since the early 1960s towards Hungary and East Germany. A CIA report even suggested that at one point it looked like the latter might go over to the Chinese camp.24

As far as Western Europe was concerned, local counterintelligence agencies identified the Chinese embassy in Switzerland as the main hub for making links with smaller parties, where Marxist-Leninist communists praised the thought of Chairman Mao to the skies. Former cadres from pro-Soviet parties broke with Moscow and agreed to set up pro-China groups. They attracted younger activists to this beating heart of the new revolution. As head of China’s ILD, Kang Sheng personally received Maoist delegations. They were fascinated by this revolution in which a rebellious youth was rising up against the adult world and Soviet “revisionism” was being torn apart alongside capitalism. “Run, Comrade, the old world is behind you!”

But the main European leader of this pro-Chinese protest movement, the Belgian Jacques Grippa, was no longer very young himself. During the Second World War he had been leader of the Armed Partisans, the resistance wing of the Belgian Communist Party. In the ’60s, at the time of the Sino-Soviet spit, he chose the Chinese camp and laid the foundations for a textbook Maoist movement. I interviewed him on several occasions in Brussels and he told me how he had met up with Kang Sheng and the men from the Chinese secret services, in Switzerland and elsewhere. On two occasions he visited Beijing, the new Mecca of communism, caught up in the whirlwind of the Cultural Revolution. But as a realist, he felt sympathy for the losers of this story: Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Grippa was pro-Chinese, but hostile to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution—and resolutely unimpressed by Kang Sheng.

A similar rift occurred within the French Communist Party. Marxist-Leninist groups formed; to a great degree these constituted the crucible of what became the Parisian intelligentsia in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, after the cataclysmic surge of May ’68 up until the early 1970s, French Maoists neither rode the crest of the revolutionary wave at home, nor resorted to terrorism as in neighbouring Italy. This might have been because of the Chinese leadership’s special attitude towards the French government. They made clear to French Maoist comrades who came to the PRC, hailed as the “heirs of the Paris Commune”, that the CCP had no desire to see de Gaulle overthrown; for he had recognized the PRC and left nationalist Taiwan adrift. Although portraits of Mao loomed over the Sorbonne during the events of May ’68, and in spite of the wild claims propagated by the interior minister Raymond Marcellin, in fact the Chinese secret services did not encourage the protests, and orthodox Maoists remained on the sidelines, compared with other leftist groups.

Kang Sheng himself told a visiting delegation of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of France (PCMLF) that they were right in urging their supporters to vote neither for de Gaulle nor for Mitterrand in the 1965 presidential elections. Writer Régis Bergeron recalled his meeting with Kang Sheng during that trip: “He can’t simply be described as a security chief, because he was such an ideologue. That’s why he was in charge of the ILD.  We met him in August 1966, when the Red Guards were marching through Beijing. He was tired. He only slept four hours a night. All his actions were measured. He was thin as a rake, with the demeanour of an intellectual. Every issue we raised, his secretary took out a new sheet of paper. He spoke Chinese; like Zhou and Deng, he spoke barely three words of French. His interpreter, Madame Ci, had studied at the Sorbonne. She had been the interpreter during conversations between Mao and Malraux.”25

Raymond Casas, a former resistance fighter for the French “franc-tireurs”, as well as an ex-member of the French Communist Party, also took part in this curious adventure. He took notes during meetings. During a dinner organized by the Chinese, he heard about Kang Sheng’s visits to Paris in 1925 and 1936, and his meetings with leading communists like Marcel Cachin and Jacques Doriot. “Kang Sheng told me he was in Paris when the Popular Front came to power in 1936,” Casas recalled. “He told me, ‘I was in Paris on 1  May 1936. I saw forests of red flags with the hammer and sickle hanging from the windows of apartments and shops. It was hard to believe. I left Paris in late 1936. It was the Spanish Civil War.’”26 Casas told me that Kang Sheng had realized the Maoists should hold back from criticizing de Gaulle, since in 1945 de Gaulle had entered into a tripartite alliance with the French Communist Party, led by Maurice Thorez. However, the French Maoists were not all in agreement. Those from the small Federation of Marxist-Leninist Circles (FCML), the group around Georges Frêche, who was later elected the socialist president of the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Council, did call on its members to vote for de Gaulle in 1965, calling Mitterrand “a CIA agent”.27

Amidst all this Maoist activity in Europe, the Soviets were monitoring the Chinese in Switzerland, for which purpose a special section, the “Twelfth”, was created. As former Russian diplomat Nikolai Poliansky recalled, “We had to allow nothing to slip past us of the activities of the Chinese in Switzerland, whether it was the activities of the Chinese embassy in Bern, the work of the Association of Swiss-Chinese Friendship, the arrival of delegations, or the Maoist activities of various leftist youth organizations like the Revolutionary Marxist League in Lausanne. It was well known that every Soviet embassy in Europe had its own specialist in Chinese affairs (there had even been a special decision on this passed by the Central Committee of the CP). In Bern, this specialist was the third secretary, Valeri Ivanovich Sysoev, a KGB agent who spoke Chinese and had worked at the embassy in Beijing. He was responsible for all intelligence-gathering on Chinese activities in Switzerland.”28

In Lausanne, the KGB succeeded in infiltrating an undercover agent into a pro-Chinese group, an abattoir worker called Marcel Buttex. In February 1970, Buttex was arrested and sentenced for spying for the Soviets.29

Bogus defectors and the phony party in the Netherlands

Meanwhile, two extraordinary episodes in this secret war took place in the Netherlands. Along with Switzerland, the Netherlands was considered an ideal base for the Chinese secret services. As early as the 1950s, in an operation called Red Herring, a China counterespionage section called the Binneenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD) had been working with the CIA to detect the presence of major intelligence agents in the country, such as Zou Dapeng, second in command at the Diaochabu, who was killed during the Cultural Revolution.

From 1960 onwards, Xie Li, the Chinese chargé d’affaires at The Hague, was also under close surveillance. He, like Zou, disappeared in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Their target, as part of the “united front work”, had been the Chinese community in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, with the ultimate objective of wresting this diaspora back from the nationalists in Taiwan.

In 1963, Xie Li was replaced by Li Enqiu, a stern man with links to Maoist groups in the three Benelux countries, where Jacques Grippa was also a major figure. On 16  July 1966, Dutch police in The Hague found a seriously injured Chinese man sprawled on the pavement not far from a compound housing Chinese diplomats. The BVD opened an investigation in conjunction with the Belgian police. The man, Xu Zicai, was a Chinese engineer, a specialist in transmissions, who had made the mistake of asking for political asylum. He was hospitalized, and then, in a dramatic twist, kidnapped semi-conscious from the hospital by a commando unit. Two weeks later on 29  July, a van emerging from the Chinese embassy compound was intercepted by the police, who discovered Xu’s corpse in the back. He had been beaten to death. A few days later, Li Enqiu was expelled from the Netherlands. But his career was not over. He was sent to Czechoslovakia as an ambassador.

Another diplomat, Liao Heshu, took over the Chinese secret service in The Hague. He was constantly monitored by the BVD until 24  January 1969, when he went to the police and announced he wanted to defect to the West and talk to the CIA.  This was a triumph for Cleveland Cram, chief of the CIA station in The Hague. He organized Liao’s transfer to the United States for a debriefing. But this turned out to be disappointing: Liao passed on information about the death of Xu Zicai and about the operating methods of Chinese services in Europe, but that was it. James Angleton, head of counterintelligence at CIA headquarters in Langley, who had already been burned by certain Soviet defectors, realized that Liao Heshu was a bogus defector, sent by Kang Sheng to penetrate the CIA.  For once Angleton’s instincts were right. To keep the Chinese ignorant of the fact that their double agent had been unmasked, the CIA gave Liao a minor job translating unimportant documents, while keeping him under close surveillance.

A joint operation by the CIA and BVD was rather more fruitful. They set up a phoney Marxist-Leninist party with the purpose of infiltrating the PRC by inveigling Kang Sheng with invitations. This extraordinary operation, baptized “Mongol”, was exposed in 2004 by Frits Hoekstra, a former BVD agent, who was at the time responsible for the communism section of the Dutch secret services. In his memoirs, he recounts how a Dutch Marxist-Leninist communist party (the MLPN) was created in the 1960s with 600 members, the secret purpose of which was overseen by four surveillance officers from the BVD, who also produced the party newspaper De Kommunist. They not only fooled Beijing and received money from Tirana, then allied to the Chinese, but even succeeded in weakening the Netherlands’s traditional pro-Moscow communist party.30

Chris Petersen, the general secretary of the MLPN—in reality a BVD informer by the name of Peter Boevé—managed to get himself invited by the CCP leadership to Beijing; he has an indelible memory of the incredible food provided. Boevé was a mathematics teacher, recruited as a BVD informer in 1957 at a youth festival in Moscow; he had travelled to China to study Mao Zedong’s ideology. Subsequently, as a guest of the Albanians and the Chinese, he met all of the CCP top brass, including Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng. As a result of these meetings, in 1969 the Chinese embassy in The Hague offered Boevé more funding for De Kommunist—thereby saving the BVD a fair amount of money. This almost comical operation was not unique. While researching this book, I came across a story from Australia, in which the CIA and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization were engaged in a similar infiltration operation in the same period, registering fake students at Beijing University.

Xiong Xianghui and the “American” card

While the CIA and Chinese services were crossing swords in the Netherlands, in Britain, one extraordinary Chinese man was responsible for setting up the PRC’s London embassy at 31 Portland Place in 1965. MI5 was keeping a close eye on Xiong Xianghui, who was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable Chinese secret agents of the twentieth century. The details of his story were brought to light in his memoirs, published in 2006 a year after his death at the age of eighty-seven. It is a sign of the times and of the extent to which Chinese diplomacy has opened up that his book, which reveals a great deal about the history of Chinese intelligence, can now be bought openly in Beijing, from the People’s Liberation Army Publishing House shop and other bookshops in the capital.

The title of Xiong’s memoir could hardly be more straightforward and direct: My Career as an Intelligence Officer and Diplomat.31 Born in 1919 in the Year of the Goat, Xiong was the son of a Shandong judge. He became involved in politics in 1936, secretly joining the CCP while still a student. He soon came to the attention of Zhou Enlai, who exhorted him to join the staff of one of Chiang Kai-shek’s generals, Hu Zongnan. In yet another triumph for the CCP’s special services, which excelled at infiltration, Xiong succeeded in becoming Hu’s private secretary, a position he held for a decade. His masterstroke came in 1947, as he was preparing to leave on a mission to the United States with his wife Chen Xiaohua—the only person privy to the fact that he was a mole. Just before his departure, he learnt some vitally important information: a jubilant General Hu told him that the nationalists were planning to annihilate the communists with an attack on Yan’an, headquarters of the revolution. Duly warned by Xiong, Mao Zedong and his troops retreated into the mountains, and Yan’an was nothing but a ghost town by the time the Kuomintang soldiers showed up.

Following two years of secret service activity in the US, Xiong returned home after the communist victory and joined Zhou Enlai’s nascent diplomatic service. Zhou entrusted him with the post of deputy director of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, where he worked alongside several other intelligence officials, including Zou Dapeng. He accompanied Zhou Enlai to Geneva during the 1954 discussions on Indochina. It was on this occasion that London and Beijing decided on a mutual exchange of envoys. Xiong went to the British capital in 1962 and remained there until the Cultural Revolution, when he returned to China and became one of the deputy directors of the Diaochabu.

With Zhou’s agreement, Xiong was one of the signatories of a petition protesting the fact that Marshal Chen Yi, then foreign minister, had been labelled “revisionist”. When Xiong in his turn became a target of the Red Guards, and all his comrades were sent to the countryside to undergo rectification, Zhou reminded Mao that Xiong had once saved his life in Yan’an; as a result, he was allowed to remain in Beijing to continue his intelligence missions. One of these was to infiltrate Lin Biao’s staff, where he became deputy director of the PLA’s 2nd Department.

This was a hugely important position. Xiong was charged with a top-secret mission that risked incurring the wrath of the man who was considered to be Mao’s future successor. In this role, Xiong took part in a transformation of PRC strategy whose effects would be felt worldwide. He became secretary of a small group of marshals charged with drawing up plans for a radical change of diplomacy, to be presented to Mao: in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, they had looked closely at the consequences of the Sino-Soviet clashes, and were afraid of the very real possibility of all-out war with Moscow. Notwithstanding Lin Biao’s fiery speeches antagonizing both the USSR and the US, two of the marshals, Chen Yi and Ye Jianying, proposed making diplomatic overtures towards the US.  Chen and Ye, who had been part of the network of Hakkas around Zhou Enlai in Paris in the 1920s, had a broader and more tempered perspective on the outside world. Through them and Agent Xiong, Paris was about to become the centre of some surprising intrigue.

Chen Yi wrote a report proposing that the Chinese “play the American card” against the Soviets. Xiong reported this idea to Mao. But how would they be able to hold talks with Washington without the Soviets finding out? Ought they to take advantage of the negotiations on Vietnam already instigated by Nixon? Ultimately the Chinese used various strategies to pass information to the Americans, some more successful than others. Mao, for example, floated the idea during a meeting with André Malraux, organized by Zhou Enlai. Unfortunately, Malraux, de Gaulle’s minister of culture, was listening to his own voice as usual, and failed to hear what was being said to him.

So Mao tried another tack: an interview with the journalist Edgar Snow, who had achieved a certain amount of fame for his 1937 book about the Long March, Red Star Over China. Not long before he died, Stalin had hinted to Mao that Snow was a CIA agent. Twenty years later, this made him seem the ideal intermediary for passing information to Nixon. This was a fatal error, for when his book was first published, the Americans had in fact labelled Snow a communist.32 Snow was unable to pass any information on to Nixon’s administration, which believed him to be an agent passing on communist disinformation.

Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger, alerted to the Chinese plan, put out several hooks to lure in Beijing. He used a special navy unit, independent of the CIA, to contact the Chinese services. As early as 1970, the Chinese learned of the Americans’ desire to negotiate, thanks to several moles, including one in the CIA and another in the French diplomatic service, both of whom were only unmasked ten years later. Attempts were also being made in the opposite direction: in The Hague, the Chinese embassy summoned “their” Marxist-Leninist man Chris Petersen to ask him what he thought about Beijing’s overture towards the United States. The BVD agent lost no time reporting this to his Dutch handler and the CIA was quickly alerted.

Once more, Paris became the hub for clandestine Chinese talks. In 1968, Kissinger had relied on the services of former resistance fighter Raymond Aubrac to contact Ho Chi Minh—godfather to Aubrac’s son33—about a possible ceasefire in the Vietnam War. But Ho Chi Minh died in 1969. He was not going to be able to help his old comrade Zhou Enlai now.

This time, at Kissinger’s request, contact with Chinese secret agents was made by General Vernon Walters, an interpreter during the Kennedy–de Gaulle discussions and now military attaché in Paris. He was careful to ensure that the head of the CIA’s Paris office, David Murphy, was kept in the dark about what was going on. Murphy, suspected of being a KGB agent, was on the blacklist drawn up by James Angleton, head of counterintelligence at Langley. This was quite the circus of spies: Liao the bogus defector, Petersen the faux-Maoist working for the CIA, and the CIA’s Paris station chief, in the pay of the KGB.

Luckily for the Chinese, however, they had another player in this double-bluffing ring: Cao Guisheng, an advisor at the Paris embassy who was in fact the Diaochabu’s station chief. He was just as high-flying a spy as Xiong Xianghui. In 1954, Cao was Hanoi correspondent for Xinhua, the classic cover for Chinese secret agents. He flew to Geneva to join Zhou Enlai’s delegation for the Indochina negotiations—a meeting that was swarming with intelligence specialists. The head of Diaochabu himself, Li Kenong, was present. The only known photograph of the spymaster in Europe was taken at the conference, featuring his familiar black-rimmed glasses. It also shows Zhou, standing next to Pierre Mendès-France. Xiong Xianghui and Gong Peng, then director of foreign affairs intelligence, were in attendance, too.

Cao was trusted and he was Anglophone. He was put in charge of liaising with Walters. He set up the meetings between Zhou and Kissinger. First, on 25  July 1970, Kissinger attended a secret meeting with Huang Zhen, the Chinese ambassador to France, at Huang’s residence. Soft music was played, the air was filled with perfumed incense, and Kissinger was served apricots, smoked tea and Shaoxing wine to break the ice.

The strategy worked. A year later Kissinger travelled to Beijing, where he held talks on 9  July 1971 with Zhou Enlai. “For us this is an historic occasion,” he declared. “Because this is the first time that American and Chinese leaders are talking to each other on a basis where each country recognizes each other as equals.”34

Caution remained the watchword, however; it would not take long for the KGB to learn about the talks. Andropov put about a rumour that Kissinger was a Soviet agent, with the express purpose of derailing the Sino-American discussions.

The Chinese would have been hard pressed to endorse this manoeuvre, particularly as Kissinger ended up doing them an immense service at the expense of Moscow. Right at the end of his trip, a meeting took place whose significance was not recognized at the time. Kissinger met one of the four marshals, “Heroic Sword” Ye Jianying, at Beijing airport, and revealed intelligence so top-secret that even US intelligence officials were in the dark about it. He drew from memory an extremely detailed picture of the Soviet troops deployed along the Chinese border. He recalled land units, missiles, and strategic forces, the exact number and names of the divisions, the four kinds of tactical missiles at the Soviets’ disposal—the SS-1B SCUD, the SS-12—and so on. Marshal Ye was stunned. His own spies could never have dreamed of receiving such valuable intelligence. To avoid leaks, Kissinger insisted that even the CIA must not know the Chinese were being given this information. The Hakka marshal beamed: “Thank you very much indeed. This will be very useful. And it is a great indication of the US desire to improve our relationship.”

Kissinger’s trip opened the way for Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing. Among others, Edgar Snow was present on that occasion, at last recognized by the White House as a great observer of China and an unparalleled analyst of Chinese affairs.

The Sino-American entente cordiale had immediate consequences for intelligence; the services on both sides agreed to set aside past differences and disputes. As we know, the Diaochabu station chief in The Hague, Liao Heshu, had “defected” to the West. Since it was the CIA who had received him and realized that he was a phoney defector, the organization saw no harm in returning him to Beijing. In exchange, the Chinese finally released their two favourite prisoners: Richard Fecteau and Jack Downey, whose spy plane had been shot down in 1952.

Even more spectacular was the deployment of overt special services liaison officers, with the opening of respective embassies in 1973; James Lilley became the first CIA official formally attached to the US embassy in Beijing, while a Diaochabu agent was attached to the Chinese embassy in Washington.

“The Chinese eventually agreed to a deal in which each country could station one intelligence officer in its diplomatic mission in the other country’s capital city,” Lilley explains in his memoirs. “This placement of declared agents would be an indication of the closeness of the relationship since the CIA reserved that practice for its allies. As Kissinger had promised, I was revealed to the Chinese. The deal, however, was not entirely reciprocal. My understanding is that the Chinese did not inform us directly of the identity of my Chinese counterpart in Washington. Only later did we presume that the Chinese ‘declared agent’ was an English-speaking diplomat named Xie Qimei, a senior Chinese officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”35

The end of the Mao era

Sino-American relations had fundamentally changed. This was exactly what Marshal Lin Biao had so opposed—but he had lost his life in a plane crash on a flight to the USSR in September 1971, after a failed putsch against Mao. After this, the Cultural Revolution took an even more unexpected turn.

According to the official story, Lin and his clan had tried to organize a coup, code-named Project 571. After the plan was uncovered, the official version went that Lin, his wife Ye Qun and his relatives fled, aboard a Trident plane that crashed in Mongolia. But some elements of the story remain unresolved even today.36 Under the leadership of Wang Dongxing, an “Investigation Group of Lin Biao’s anti-party faction” was set up with people from Unit 8341, the political security wing of the PLA, and the investigator–archivists of the Gonganbu. Three leaders of the latter were members of the Group: Yu Sang, Hua Guofeng and Li Zhen—the minister of security, who was to die in mysterious circumstances the following year.37

In the wake of the plane crash, the CIA looked into the disappearance of more than 100 generals who had been in on Lin Biao’s attempted coup.38 Naturally, military intelligence had to be reined in. This task fell to the elderly general Liu Shaowen, who had helped Zhou Enlai set up his own intelligence network to rival Kang Sheng’s in the 1940s.

The staff of the Diaochabu, the party’s investigative service—which had been absorbed into the PLA’s control—now regained its autonomy under the leadership of another close friend of Zhou, Luo Qingchang. Marshal Ye and his advisor, the former Diaochabu director Kong Yuan, were helping to reorganize the service, which had managed to avoid falling under Kang Sheng’s thumb.

Kang was now seriously ill with cancer. His final public appearance is described in the memoirs of Étienne Manac’h, the French ambassador in Beijing at the time. On 30  September 1974, Manac’h noted his impressions of the reception given in honour of the PRC’s twenty-fifth anniversary: “The ceremony and the meal were brief. Just before we got up from the table, two people in wheelchairs were brought out in front of us. They were dignitaries who were being kept away from the jostling at the exit. The first, who stopped for a moment at our table to shake the hand of [Foreign Minister] Ji Pengfei, was Kang Sheng. His body was slumped and his eyes deeply sunken in his emaciated face.”39

He may have been dying, but this did not stop Kang from trying to set up a third force, hostile to both Deng Xiaoping’s faction and to the Gang of Four; he had collaborated in turn with both clans. Even on his deathbed, Kang wanted to send Mao a “file” on Madame Mao and Zhang Chunqiao claiming that they had both been spies for the Kuomintang since the 1930s.40 It’s true that during the early 1970s, at the time of Lin Biao’s fall, there did exist within the security apparatus a group of people who, according to Hong Kong-based historian Ting Wang, indeed constituted a sort of “third force” led by Kang Sheng.41

Kang Sheng died on 16  December 1975, closely followed in January 1976 by Zhou Enlai, and then Mao Zedong that September. The following month, October 1976, the moderate group supporting Wang Dongxing and Deng Xiaoping was responsible for the arrest of the Gang of Four. Hua Guofeng succeeded Zhou Enlai as prime minister and Mao as party chairman, and eventually became head of the military commission that commanded the PLA, with the support of the indomitable Marshal Ye.

Even before this transition, however, another leader vilified by Kang Sheng had re-emerged. On 12  April 1973, after six years under house arrest and being sent with his wife to work in a factory in Jiangxi, Deng Xiaoping had made an appearance at a dinner given by Zhou Enlai, in honour of Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. For months, Mao had been wanting to restore order in China. So Deng was pulled from the tractor factory and, under Zhou’s guidance, helped to restore state power and, specifically, its central bureaucracy. Under Deng, who became Zhou’s deputy, there was a clear shift in focus towards economic development and his “Four Modernizations”: industry and commerce, education, the military, and agriculture.

Yet it was Hua Guofeng who became the nominal leader in 1976 after Mao’s death, leaving Deng frustrated and chomping at the bit. He, like the CIA and the French SDECE, must certainly have thought that Hua was only playing the same intermediate role played by Beria after Stalin’s death, and that he would simply disappear after securing the real transition of power.42 This threatened not to be the case.

Hua Guofeng, whose name means “Vanguard of China”, was imposed on the CCP in a strange way that for some reason was never officially acknowledged. Many rumours circulated, with some claiming that Mao had issued a specific injunction before he died, rather like the clause in Lenin’s will demanding that Stalin be removed from the Politburo.

But this was rather different: one of the most insignificant figures of the CCP rose to become a member of the group investigating the Lin Biao affair, then minister of security (head of the Gonganbu), then head of the CCP’s central school, then general secretary and president of the party itself, as well as of its military commission—all at the express request of Chairman Mao. In other words, unexpectedly, Hua turned out to be Mao’s heir—not Lin Biao.

“Contrary to what has often been said, Hua Guofeng was not just anybody,” a French expert in China who has gone into the question told me. “I am convinced that he was actually Chairman Mao’s biological son. This explains not only their physical resemblance, but also Hua’s posting in Hunan, Mao’s native province [see below], and his inexplicable promotion to the rank of security minister and president, all as a result of a secret clause that only a small number in the Politburo were privy to.”

This is certainly a convincing explanation as to why we know so little about Hua’s origins, other than that he was born in Shanxi in 1920 or 1921, named either Su Zhu, or Liu Zhengrong, and that he was an illegitimate child or possibly an orphan when he joined the Long March at the age of fourteen. He is one of the few heads of state, along with the North Korean Kim Il-sung, about whose early life we know almost nothing.

In 1977, a covert organization called 637 Headquarters, which backed Deng Xiaoping, circulated an illicit and devastating document entitled Fire on Hua Guofeng. This mini-biography recounted how Hua Yu, the new president’s mother, had married a communist railway worker whom she then named as the father of her son. The family settled in Yan’an, headquarters of the revolution. In 1937 Hua Yu became one of Kang Sheng’s mistresses after the latter returned from Moscow. Shortly afterwards, according to an investigation carried out by Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen in the 1960s, Kang had the unfortunate railwayman killed. If true, this is the crux of the story: Mao married Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng’s former mistress, and Kang—perhaps as compensation—was given Hua Yu, mother of Mao’s son, as his mistress.

This theory, however, is unconfirmed speculation. What we do know is that, once Mao came to power, he appointed Hua Guofeng party secretary of the Xiangtan prefecture in Hunan province, where Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace, is located. According to the official story, the two men did not meet until 1959, when Mao made a pilgrimage home to Hunan. Not long afterwards, Hua was promoted to govern Hunan province. During the Cultural Revolution, his violent suppression of the Changsha Red Guards earned him the nickname the “Hunan Butcher”. In 1975, after Hua’s appointment as deputy prime minister and head of the Gonganbu, Muslims banned from praying in mosques began rioting in Yunnan, a province bordering Vietnam. Hua sent in the military to violently crush the rebellion.43

On 8  January 1976, Zhou Enlai died, and Mao made Hua prime minister soon after. Deng Xiaoping was put under house arrest after a demonstration in Tiananmen Square, held in memory of Zhou Enlai and aimed at strengthening Deng’s position. Meanwhile, a fake will and testament, written by the KGB but ascribed to Zhou, was circulating abroad, in which Zhou supposedly denounced the Cultural Revolution. Mao, at the heart of all these different machinations, named Hua his successor.

1976 was the Year of the Dragon, when the Heavens remove the emperor’s mandate, leading to great upheavals. Zhou’s death in January had been followed by the Tiananmen political earthquake in April and an actual earthquake in Tangshan in July, which claimed at least a quarter of a million lives. Mao Zedong died on 9  September 1976 after a long illness. A month later his widow, along with the rest of the Gang of Four, was arrested by commandos from Unit 8341, the army’s political security unit. State security forces, with the support of the army under Marshal Ye’s leadership, were poised to bring Deng Xiaoping to power.44

However, Hua Guofeng’s and Wang Dongxing’s reign in Zhongnanhai, government headquarters, continued. Having gained power in mid-October, they were trying to expand the prerogatives and activities of the Diaochabu, the party’s intelligence bureau, which was re-established on 28  July 1978 under the leadership of Luo Qingchang. Their goal was to consolidate their position and, with Luo’s help, remove their rivals. Deng Xiaoping, already in a strong position within both the party and the army, was opposed to this. No doubt he did not want this organization, which had caused him and many other functionaries so much trouble, to regain the upper hand. Deng planned for the majority of intelligence officers in the international service to leave their embassies, so that espionage would once again be done by undercover agents, working as journalists (as had already been the case) and, from the 1980s, businessmen.

By the late 1970s, however, the lack of professionalism in the post-Cultural Revolution intelligence service led to some serious failures by the new Chinese diplomatic service. Two spectacular events bore witness to this.

The Khmer Rouge and the Black Panther

On 5–9  November 1978, Wang Dongxing visited Cambodia—or “Democratic Kampuchea”—accompanied by Luo Qinchang, head of the re-established Diaochabu. Mao’s former bodyguard reminded the Khmer Rouge leaders of the PRC’s ten-year friendship. With Kang Sheng, Wang had helped Kaing Khek (“Deuch”) and Nguon Kang (“Ta Mok”) to set up the terrible secret police S–21 (Nokorbal), responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. Ta Mok and Pol Pot thanked Wang and China for sending so many advisors to Cambodia.

But scarcely had Wang and Luo returned home before a Vietnamese liberation offensive began, which led to the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge and, on 7  January 1979, the fall of Phnom Penh. Prince Norodom Sihanouk had been a Khmer Rouge hostage, but was hostile to the Vietnamese; the Chinese just managed to fly him out in time. Wang Dongxing was now sidelined, and Pol Pot’s men embarked on a new guerrilla war. On 13  January, Ieng Sary, another prominent Khmer Rouge leader who had fled to Thailand, arrived in Beijing asking for $5 million in financial aid. Deng Xiaoping was open in his assessment of what the Khmer Rouge had done in Cambodia: “As we have already said, domestic counterintelligence activities created a negative atmosphere, slowing down many activities and causing social problems as well as many other problems. We must recognize that the massive scale of counterintelligence activities has created negative elements that need to be eliminated. A thorough study of this political aspect should be undertaken and concrete measures taken.”45 These were highly euphemistic words; Deng was well aware that the man standing in front of him was one of the leaders behind a genocide that is estimated to have claimed some 2 million lives.

Chinese intelligence chiefs, having proved themselves unable to keep the government properly informed, were also on the receiving end of fierce criticism, for even as Vietnam was launching its assault, Chinese intelligence was confidently informing Beijing that the Khmer Rouge would easily be able to repel the assailants and protect the capital. At the Chinese embassy in Phnom Pen, there were some excellent and trustworthy operatives, including the Indochina specialist Cao Guisheng, the man who had organized Kissinger’s visit to Paris—he had been dispatched to Phnom Penh towards the end of 1976.

What happened? Were the Chinese agents blinded by their ideological closeness to Pol Pot and his followers? Whatever the reason behind this failure, the poor analysis of the situation—based on flawed intelligence—proved catastrophic for the PRC.  One thousand Chinese military advisors fled Cambodia via Thailand, leaving 4,000 civilian advisors in the clutches of the Vietnamese army. In addition, contact was momentarily lost with the Khmer leadership, which vanished into the jungle to organize its guerrilla warfare under Ta Mok, accompanied by a single Chinese agent, equipped with one defective satellite radio.

Coupled with the routing of the PLA on the Vietnamese border, this was a serious setback. Nonetheless, Deng Xiaoping continued to support the Khmer Rouge for another ten years as it fought the new government installed by Hanoi. Details of Diaochabu operations in Cambodia were revealed in 2010 when a Sino-Cambodian defector called Vita Chieu published his memoirs in Taiwan. He revealed that the head of Cambodian missions under Kang Sheng, Cai Xiaonong, had been killed. His successor, Wang Tao, was under orders from Deng Xiaoping to curb relations with the Khmer Rouge.46

***

Another, no less resounding fiasco took place in a country far less obviously close in ideology to Maoist China: the Shah’s Iran. In August 1978, Hua Guofeng travelled to Iran at the head of a delegation that also included Qiao Shi, an intelligence expert from the ILD who would become an important figure over the next two decades.

The two men had signed an agreement in Romania and Yugoslavia linked to China’s break with Albania, a hitherto Maoist state. Its leader, Enver Hoxha, believed that Hua Guofeng and China’s other new leaders had betrayed the world revolution, just as Khrushchev had. The Albanian secret service, the Sigurimi (Drejtorija e Sigurimit të Shtetit, State Security), which was set up with the help of Kang Sheng, now began shadowing Chinese agents. When Hoxha published his 800-page “diaries”, he castigated these agents, and railed against the envoys “of the Xinhua agency, these Chinese secret service agents, in various countries of the world. The employees of this so-called news agency are engaged in all sorts of tasks, they collect information on everything, on state institutions, economic and social organizations, the organization of the army and details of the military, political parties, well-known individuals, and general aspects of the life of the country where they have been sent. In other words, they are engaged in undercover intelligence work.”47

After withdrawing their intelligence bases from Albania, the Chinese had negotiated with Ceaus sescu and Tito to redeploy them in Romania and Yugoslavia. Their 1978 trip to Tehran had a similar purpose. It was the Shah’s twin sister, the shady Ashraf—nicknamed the “Black Panther”—who oversaw the negotiations, alongside General Nasser Moghadam, the new boss of SAVAK, Iran’s dreaded secret police. Their objective was to create a regional intelligence base that the Israeli Mossad would also be invited to join. In the end, however, Hua’s public declarations of the PRC’s eternal friendship with the Pahlavi dynasty fell rather flat; just a few months later, on 16  January 1979, the Iranian revolution spread. The Shah flew into exile with his family; he would not return.

With the subsequent accession to power of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Americans lost their electronic interception base in Mashad. They invited the Chinese to join forces with them by putting up electronic listening devices along the Russian border. When the Iran–Iraq War broke out in 1980, Deng Xiaoping—seeking the mullahs’ forgiveness for China’s support for the Shah—supplied Silkworm rockets to the new regime.

It was Hua Guofeng who came out weakened by these two failures, and by the new balance of power within the CCP.  Wang Dongxing was demoted from the leadership of his elite military security unit, 8341 (restructured as 57001), and was eventually removed from power. In December 1978, Deng Xiaoping defeated Hua at the CCP Central Committee Plenum. Now in control of both the party and the army, Deng, who had been nicknamed “Little Cannon” as a short, stocky student, was ready to launch. He would soon begin the Four Modernizations programme, and usher in a massive intelligence agency appropriate for this newly awakened China: the Guoanbu.