4

DENG XIAOPING’S DEEP-WATER FISH

The last emperor of China, Pu Yi, was completely swamped in his oversized uniform. This was the ultimate humiliation for the fallen sovereign, who as a child in the early twentieth century had played in the Forbidden City, and who rose to the dragon throne at the age of eight. The young man had been kidnapped along with his concubines by the Japanese secret services under Colonel Doihara—the inspiration for the spy Mitsuhirato in Hergé’s The Blue Lotus—who sent him to reign over the puppet state of Manchukuo. The Soviets captured Manchukuo in 1945 and, five years later, handed the puppet emperor over to the new communist People’s Republic.

This was how, in 1950, the “Son of the Dragon” found himself the prisoner of Mao Zedong. Seated across from him was a Gonganbu inquisitor, jovial and inflexible by turn. He handed him a cigarette, paper and calligraphy brushes. Pu Yi had no choice but to accept Zhou Enlai’s edict that “Today the emperor is the people!” He was forced to recount episodes from his debauched life, to show that he was submitting and thus prove his allegiance to the people. This is how Pu Yi learned what the “New Democracy” was, to use the title of Mao’s book, which he was given to study as part of his “re-education”.

Bernardo Bertolucci portrayed this episode in his Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor, made during the Deng Xiaoping era (1978–89). China’s new openness in that time is evident in the fact that the great Italian director was given permission to film with Peter O’Toole, John Lone, Joan Chen and the other actors in the real Forbidden City. Filming in Beijing was made possible thanks to Ying Ruocheng, the rather unusual deputy minister of culture at the time, who also played the role of governor of the detention camp in the film. This was not entirely coincidental. Ying, considered one of the greatest English-speaking actors in China, was born into an influential Manchu family in Beijing. His father founded the liberal newspaper Ta Kung Pao. He himself was a national theatre actor and a translator of Shakespeare, as well as an “honourable correspondent” for the Guoanbu, the new Chinese secret service, founded four years before Bertolucci’s film was made.

“‘Honourable correspondent’ is a laughable title for the role. Ying was a top-ranking state security official. He was given the entirely honorary rank of ‘deputy minister’,” a French diplomat who knew him at the time told me twenty years later.

“He used to be invited to cocktail parties at the French embassy, in the late 1990s when Pierre Morel was ambassador, and we were warned by our own secret services that he had a high position in the Chinese intelligence service. It’s true that he used to down a lot of whisky during those embassy dos, which meant that people didn’t take him very seriously. But he must have picked up lot of intelligence anyway. And he was such a good actor that Bertolucci invited him back to play the lama Norbu in Little Buddha in 1993. The Chinese must have appreciated him rather less in that, given that it was a story of reincarnation and made allusions to the Dalai Lama.”

In fact, probably quite the opposite was true—it was precisely in a case like that of Bertolucci’s Little Buddha that a high-flying “correspondent” like Ying, working on the fringes of the Guoanbu, could prove invaluable, identifying political and cultural figures who backed this film, clearly shot through with support for Tibetan “separatists”.1 Similarly, he managed to gather a great deal of useful information when he acted in the television series Marco Polo in the United States, or toured his productions of Elizabethan plays around the UK, Germany and France.

However, Ying’s life—he died at the end of 2003 at the age of seventy-four—had not always been easy. During the Cultural Revolution, he had been incarcerated in Qincheng Prison No. 1 in Beijing, which was run by the 5th Gonganbu Department under Wang Dongxing. This was where disgraced dignitaries and spies were locked up. Among his fellow prisoners was Zhang Langlang, an unlucky art student accused of being a French secret agent, whose only crime was to have studied French in high school.

Ling Yun, the eye of the serpent

Qincheng Prison N°1 was a garrison similar to the one where Pu Yi had been imprisoned in 1950, and where he had been interrogated, just like in the film, by the counterintelligence agent Ling Yun, who was a victim of the purges during the Cultural Revolution (see Chapter 3). Ling had been in Qincheng at the same time as our future Guoanbu agent, Ying Ruocheng. Did friendship grow out of this coincidence? Was this the reason that Ling, promoted to chief of the new secret services twenty years later, invited Ying to become an “honourable correspondent”?

Ling Yun was born in 1917 in the Year of the Snake, in the city of Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai. His given name was Wu Peilin—Ling Yun was a nickname meaning “noble ambition”. He joined the CCP at the age of twenty, eager to help kick out the Japanese occupiers, and went to Yan’an in 1939. Three years later, he became head of interrogation at Kang Sheng’s Social Affairs Department (SAD), right in the middle of the rectification campaign. Methods were brutal at SAD headquarters, and Ling must have excelled in the art of extracting confessions, because after the “Liberation” in 1949 he was promoted to head of the Gonganbu bureau, the new Ministry of Public Security, in Jinan, capital of Shandong—homeland of Kang Sheng. By now Kang had been sidelined, and Ling’s appointment suggests that he may have been instrumental in keeping him under surveillance.

The following year, 1950, Ling took over the leadership of the SAD’s 2nd Intelligence Bureau, which Li Kenong ran as the party’s investigation service. As an extension to counterintelligence, the Fushun War Criminals Management Institute was set up and was now taking the lead in the mission to “re-educate” nationalist generals and other leaders of the old regime. This was how Ling found himself sitting opposite the last emperor, Pu Yi, though he did not, in fact, give him an especially hard time. His interrogations of nationalist Dai Li’s former secret agents were much more fruitful. Indeed, they laid the groundwork for new operations against Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek and his troops had fled, leaving behind numerous spies and sleeper agents on the mainland. Many moles dug themselves in deep, awaiting better days and instructions from Taiwan to go ahead and destabilize the communists in power.

Sometimes investigations were conducted very judiciously. In 1949, Mao had imprisoned the only American to join the CCP, who had even offered his services to the Department of Social Welfare: Sidney Rittenberg. Stalin had personally told Mao that Rittenberg and Edgar Snow were CIA agents. Rittenberg, under his Chinese name Li Dunbai, was jailed for espionage in 1949 and remained in jail until 1955, when, after a lengthy investigation into his case, Ling Yun came to his cell to apologize in person before his release. This was not necessarily wise, however, for when Ling later got in trouble during the Cultural Revolution, Rittenberg—now imprisoned again on charges of being an “American” and “Zionist spy”—saw his sentence increased because of that old episode. Ling, too, was later accused of being an “American-Zionist viper”, who had once released a CIA and Mossad spy.

Up until this low point during the Cultural Revolution, Ling Yun’s career had followed a remarkable trajectory: after serving as head of counterintelligence in Canton and as head of the 1st Gonganbu bureau (internal security), he had become deputy minister of the same bureau, and been elected the representative for Shandong in the National People’s Congress. Ling Yun had also overseen the modernization of Qincheng prison. Then the Cultural Revolution took place, and alongside it the destruction of the Gonganbu. In January 1968, he was arrested with Feng Jiping, head of the Beijing Gonganbu, along with many other security executives.2 The counterintelligence specialist found himself behind bars in Qingcheng prison at the instigation of his former comrades, Kang Sheng, Xie Fuzhi and Wang Dongxing. On 13  January Kang Sheng gave instructions to the inquisitors: “This group of counter-revolutionary special agents, working for the enemy, has sold the most intimate secrets of the Party and the country, the government and the army, and, if they are guilty, they deserve ten thousand deaths. In dealing with them we cannot simply deploy the same methods used for ordinary criminals.”

Ling Yun must have known what to expect from an interrogation, but he surely never imagined becoming the victim of his own colleagues from the bureau. Meanwhile, Kang Sheng advocated that “to prevent them from committing suicide they should be handcuffed” and “as enemies be subjected to extremely severe shock interrogations”.3

In February, Kang received his first report. He wanted the interrogations to intensify, in order to force answers out of this “group of counter-revolutionary double agents”: “Were they organized into a group of double agents at the instigation of Luo Ruiqing [the former Gonganbu boss turned army chief], and Peng Zhen [Beijing’s mayor]? They often gave intelligence to the enemy—in what way did they benefit from this?” he scrawled with a furious brushstroke, in the margins of the reports he sent back with comments after reading them.

The interrogations and torture continued for two months, until Kang Sheng and Xie Fuzhi claimed that they were now clear about the Gonganbu group. Its members remained in detention, handcuffed almost the entire time, until the end of the Cultural Revolution. Several, including the deputy ministers Xu Zirong and Xu Jianguo, died in prison. Ling Yun was released in August 1975. Surprisingly, like many other officials who suffered at the hands of Kang Sheng, he prostrated himself in front of Kang’s funeral bier on 21  December 1975, and his name even appeared on the Funeral Committee’s list—a very useful document that contains the names of many in the intelligence community. One might suspect that Ling had secretly maintained a kind of esteem, a cold admiration, for Kang, who was after all the one who had given him his first leg up in the secret service.

In the years that followed, Ling Yun found himself at the heart of special operations. He travelled a great deal, accompanying various leaders, and was responsible not only for organizing their security but also for helping them with their overtures to the outside world. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, China had been left staggering, like a blind man who has just recovered his sight. Its leaders were well aware that they would have to build a new intelligence service, and Ling Yun was part of this recovery and reconstruction. He became deputy minister of the Gonganbu in 1978 and was elected to the Shanghai assembly (though this parliament obviously did not have the same function as in democracies). He accompanied Hua Guofeng during state visits abroad. In October 1979, at the head of a large delegation, the two men visited Western Europe—Great Britain, France, West Germany and Italy. Various directors from the Chinese security services took the opportunity to make purchases, including buying computers in France and Germany, which would prove very useful in the future. In Britain, Hua and Ling were received by Queen Elizabeth; in France, they met President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris.

However Ling’s most significant trip took place earlier that year. In January 1979, he accompanied Deng Xiaoping to the United States. Ling appreciated the opportunity to collaborate with the FBI and the services in charge of Jimmy Carter’s security, along with those of other VIPs including Deng. Meanwhile, the Chinese intelligence services had got wind of a Taiwanese plan to assassinate Deng while he was in Washington. Chiang Kai-shek had been dead for four years and his son Chiang Ching-kuo had replaced him; trained in Moscow, he maintained the authoritarian regime of the Kuomintang with an iron fist, and its secret services were just as powerful as those in the PRC.  Everything was a state secret, including the real name of his blonde Russian wife, Faina Epatcheva Vakhreva. Chiang was directly in charge of the special services that entrusted this mission to the United Bamboo Gang, a powerful triad based in Taiwan with several international branches. Though the Gang did not succeed in killing Deng, it did assassinate Henry Liu, a writer living in the US, who had made the mistake of writing a critical biography of Taiwan’s new president.

Another concern for those responsible for Deng’s protection was the rumour that a US Maoist group, of all things, was planning to disrupt Deng’s visit. The Revolutionary Communist Party reproached Deng for betraying Mao and opening China up to capitalist ideology. It organized a large demonstration in Washington DC called the “Deng Demo”. The skirmishes that took place led to several criminal prosecutions, and Bob Avakian, the party leader, fled to France, where he went into hiding. In the late 2010s, the organization has been concentrating its efforts on the “fight against fascism”—that is, opposing Donald Trump’s presidency. Thus Avakian still carries the torch for one of the world’s last remaining Maoist parties.

For Deng Xiaoping, his week in the US as Carter’s guest went extremely well, and on the flight home he and Ling toasted their success with champagne. A colour photograph shows the two men positively glowing: the Little Helmsman, as Deng was known, and Ling the “big bear”, puffed up in his blue Mao tunic, large bifocals perched on his nose, lips stretched in a voracious smile. Ling Yun, “Noble Ambition”, had truly won the jackpot. He was now the most important spymaster in the PRC.

The clean break from Maoism

The reformers upon whom Deng relied, the leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were in agreement: it was necessary to erase the past and undertake a thorough appraisal of the crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution, in order to lead China on the road to reform, particularly with the plan to create a modern secret service. Hu Yaobang, general secretary of the CCP’s Central Committee and its overall number one (under Deng’s tutelage), was charged with delivering a very long-winded speech on 9  November 1978 about Kang Sheng’s role in the Cultural Revolution. It was a kind of post-mortem detailing many of the crimes of which Kang had been found guilty.

Li Junru, one of Hu’s distant successors in this post, and an important advocate of Chinese reformist ideology in recent years, has told me that, like many other major statements during that time of great change, Hu’s speech took place in front of the Central Party School in Beijing, of which he was then deputy director.

The party’s investigation department, Luo Qingchang’s Diaochabu, had produced a fat report bringing together all the testimonies against Kang Sheng, dating back to the 1930s. Everything was there: the fact that, in 1966, Chairman Liu Shaoqi had asked for a review of the case of former “Moscow agents”, which brought to light the troubled past of Kang Sheng; how former leaders Chen Duxiu, Li Lisan, Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming had been considered deviationist because of files on them compiled by Kang; and how Kang had organized the Yan’an purges: “At the time, both Liu Shaoqi and former prime minister Zhou Enlai said that Kang Sheng was not the ideal man for such important work. They also suggested that he be investigated. But most members of the Central Committee had by then been dispersed all over the country, and a special investigation was not possible.”4

Subsequently, Hu explained in his speech, Kang pursued similar operations, labelling as “counter-revolutionary” anyone who stood in his way, particularly in Shandong, which had now became his personal fiefdom: “Recognizing the need for special security, for secrecy, and for granting ‘high security’ protection to those involved in intelligence work, the Central Committee made the Department of State Security an impenetrable and independent kingdom.”

Hu Yaobang’s listing of these files in his speech ran to many pages, but the students and functionaries in the audience, shocked by the revelations about the “Chinese Beria”, remained alert throughout. The testimonies confirmed some of the craziest rumours, and explained the horrific events that had taken place during the Cultural Revolution, which, according to even the lowest estimates, had led to the deaths of between 1 and 2 million people. Alongside the trial of the Gang of Four, the speech delivered by Hu Yaobang inevitably brought to mind Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech”, which heralded the era of de-Stalinization in the USSR.

However, in the CCP of 1978, things were not yet quite so advanced. Hu Yaobang, while playing the transparency card by denouncing the leaders of the previous decade, relied on a kind of demonization not so different from the “Kang Sheng method”—for example, voicing the suspicion that Kang had always been a “Kuomintang agent”. This was always the explanation for the party’s and special services’ self-destruction during the Cultural Revolution: whoever benefited from the crime must inevitably have been working for the Kuomintang.

“Kang Sheng’s corpse will stink for all eternity!”

In the course of his seemingly interminable speech, Hu Yaobang described Kang Sheng as the “fifth man” in the Gang of Four. The reality, as we have seen, was a little more complex. Hu’s concluding words first summed up the new impetus that the group around Deng Xiaoping hoped to give to politics, and to the remodelling of the intelligence services: “Last year we reviewed a large number of cases that had built up over the past few years. Many unresolved issues have now been clarified and many of our comrades have been released. At the same time, we have rehabilitated many people, functionaries as well as ordinary people, whether or not they were members of the Party, all victims of false, fabricated accusations. If we cannot bring those who have died back to life, we can at least restore their reputations, and posthumously confer honours upon them with the appropriate ceremony. As the Chinese proverb says, ‘Disgrace based on injustice will be changed into glory’. The dead can now rest in peace. As you know, comrades, our comrades suffered a great deal, both morally and physically, before passing away. Some were tortured to death. Others committed suicide. Still others were poisoned or murdered by other means. Some died of hunger, others were locked up in insane asylums and died of despair. Those who had once held a position in the Party or the government were rehabilitated fairly quickly, but there are still millions of lowly functionaries and ordinary people awaiting justice. Some died long ago, and their bodies have long rotted away, but the label of ‘enemy agent’ still sticks to them. Their families still suffer. Even if the Organizational Department were larger, there would not be enough people to re-examine and settle all these cases one by one. We therefore hope that each province and district will undertake case reviews, so that we will be able to resolve all the outstanding cases as quickly as possible, and release those who remain in detention as soon as we can, and leave nothing hanging. To carry out this task we cannot rely solely on functionaries; we need the help and cooperation of the masses. With their help the work will be done quickly.”5

Hu Yaobang then refocused his attacks on Kang, who had died three years previously: “It is odious that Kang Sheng perpetrated so many crimes. The worst of which was that by the end he was even keeping Chairman Mao, National Assembly Speaker Zhu De, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, and Vice-Chairman Deng Xiaoping under surveillance. He had bugging devices installed in Chairman Mao’s library and office. Everyone remembers that Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was in hospital for a long time. One of the reasons was of course the state of his health, and the fact that he was in need of rest. But another reason is that he could no longer remain at home. Prime Minister Zhou Enlai once said to Field Marshal Ye Jianying, with bitter irony, ‘I cannot live at home. I have no choice but to move into the hospital … there at least I can say what I want.’

“In September Chairman Mao summoned Kang Sheng and ordered him to end his campaign of dirty tricks. Kang Sheng denied everything. But later, in December 1972, during repair work in Chairman Mao’s office, eavesdropping devices were discovered. Chairman Mao was furious. He summoned Kang Sheng and demanded an explanation. Kang Sheng not only vehemently denied any responsibility, but he also took the precaution of eliminating the three technicians involved, thus covering one crime by another.

“Chairman Mao once told the Central Committee, ‘I am surrounded by far worse people than Lin Biao. They are not men but devils.’ He was of course referring to Kang Sheng’s spies. From 1969 to 1975, Kang Sheng spent 230 million yuan on purchasing sophisticated spy equipment imported from abroad. This equipment was not used against our enemies but against our own revolutionary comrades. During the last ten years, as head of our intelligence system, he turned our secret services into a kind of Gestapo, independent of the Central Committee. His henchmen were able to arrest and punish whomsoever they wanted. They could eliminate a man without orders. They could do and they did whatever they wanted.

“In 1971, after the Lin Biao–Chen Boda incident, Kang Sheng was put in charge of investigative work in the Special Cases Section of the Central Committee. Acting behind the back of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, then head of the section, he took over virtually intact the network of special agents set up by Lin Biao in Guangzhou, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Hainan, Shenyang and Beidaihe. He also brought into his network all those who supported the Lin Biao–Chen Boda faction. In the latter half of 1972, he brought all of these elements together, along with 500 men drawn from his own security network, to form the Special Actions Group. Kang Sheng’s office served as their base and they were under his direct control. Kang also set up his own network of special agents in each of the country’s fifty-four major cities. Every branch was under the responsibility of people in whom he had absolute confidence. Their task was to monitor the activities of Party officials and to report back regularly to Kang Sheng. It should be noted here that no bureau chief at the Central Committee had as much [room for manoeuvre] as Kang Sheng. Chairman Mao had always insisted that bureau chiefs should not have too many secretaries. Nonetheless Kang Sheng had not only a large number of secretaries but also a dozen liaison officers at his disposal. What did they do? Nothing special. They did the work of any special agent. They transmitted secret reports. They sought to destroy other people. Although Kang Sheng was responsible for a single department, one office was clearly not enough. He needed two additional annexes so that all his ‘office staff’ would be comfortable. Only then could he broaden his sphere of influence, claim absolute power, and commit every imaginable crime.

“Kang Sheng’s power reached its zenith around 1974; everyone in the government felt it. Many comrades in the Party’s central apparatus noticed that ‘it is better to enter hell than Kang’s office.’ The idea was even expressed in verse:

More frightening than drawing your own last breath
Is being called to Kang’s office, the Kingdom of Death.

“Everyone was afraid of Kang. They considered him more important than King Yama, the god who judges and governs the dead in Buddhist hell. He and his henchmen were able to arrest and kill people as they pleased. They set up a torture chamber. It was said of Kang Sheng that he was an ugly man who ‘never said anything bad, and never did anything good’. Without Kang Sheng and his network of agents across the country, without a spy in every district, the Gang of Four would never have been able to seize power without killing all of the Party leaders first.”

Clearly, by focusing on Kang Sheng’s evil deeds, Hu could leave Mao’s reputation unblemished and his aura preserved. The Gang of Four trial took place between November 1980 and January 1981 and was broadcast on television. Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow, was sentenced to life imprisonment,6 and those who led the Cultural Revolution with her were also given long prison sentences. The trial—conducted, naturally, in the Stalinist tradition—also served as an occasion for accusing Kang Sheng of a slew of further crimes, even though he had by then been dead for several years. This was a kind of sideshow to the main event—the trial of the Gang of Four—and the announcement of Kang’s posthumous punishment was in keeping with the whole spectacle: on 31  October 1980, on the eve of the trial, the CCP Central Committee announced his expulsion from the party, as well as that of his sidekick, Xie Fuzhi (d. 1972), the former head of the Gonganbu.

As we’ve already noted, Deng Xiaoping’s rejection of the Maoist period was reminiscent of the “thaw” that began with the USSR Communist Party’s 20th Congress in 1956 and the de-Stalinization it heralded. But unlike Khrushchev, who had been with Stalin all the way, Deng himself had suffered under the rule of Mao, the Gang of Four and Kang Sheng’s secret police. Even after the Cultural Revolution had ended, he was still tormented by the daily sight of his son Deng Pufang, confined to a wheelchair after being thrown from a high window by the Red Guards in 1968.

This led Deng to commit to a three-fold reform of the intelligence services, in parallel with the major political and economic overhaul that he was planning. This troika of reform was conceived with the help of Zhao Ziyang, and with the support of Hu Yaobang. First, Deng wanted to cast Kang Sheng back to the underworld, where he was commonly held to be the demon master. In Hu’s words, “One might be fearless when facing the king of the underworld, but quite terrified by the boss Kang” (bupa yanwang, zhipa Kang laoban). Hence Hu’s highly critical speech and the posthumous revocation of Kang’s party membership.

Second, Deng decided to demote the CCP’s secret service wing, the Diaochabu, to a minor political function, and to integrate its “external intelligence expertise” into a large, modern espionage and counterintelligence service. Finally, in tune with the country’s modernization projects, the opening up of China towards the outside world required a strategic reorientation of this new secret service—and indeed all the other services dependent on the party, foreign ministry and army—towards economic, scientific and technological research. With these three moves, Deng Xiaoping “revolutionized” Chinese intelligence.

The Chinese KGB

On 6  June 1983, Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang announced the establishment of a new Ministry of State Security, or Guojia Anquanbu. The Chinese officials to whom I have spoken call it for short either Anquanbu or Guoanbu; I have adopted the latter term to facilitate reading and pronunciation.

“In order to guarantee the security of the state and to reinforce counterintelligence,” Zhao declared at the first session of the 6th National People’s Congress (1983–8), “the State Council submits for the approval of this session plans to establish a Ministry of State Security to take the lead in these tasks.”

Though considerably smaller in scale, with at this stage around 7,000 cadres, the Guoanbu was hoping to become the Chinese KGB.  Under the direction of “Noble Ambition” Ling Yun, it had the same role as that Soviet service: foreign intelligence, and counterintelligence. It was created through a merger of part of the CCP’s Diaochabu, responsible for intelligence in embassies around the world, with a huge number of counterintelligence officials from the Gonganbu, the “public security” ministry. The Gonganbu continued to maintain units for uncovering spies and dissidents in the provinces, at the lowest level of the pyramid, while the deputy ministers who assisted Ling Yun at the new Guoanbu—Hui Ping and Wang Jun—were drawn from there. Zhou Shaozheng, who almost became the leader of the Guoanbu but ended up merely a deputy minister, came from the Diaochabu. Born, like Ling Yun, in Zhejiang, Zhou was a specialist in technological intelligence and a former diplomat in Central America. Given his background in party intelligence, he represented the most political wing of the new ministry.

Ling Yun was anointed by Deng Xiaoping and his daughter Deng Rong—“Daddy’s Ear”, as she was nicknamed—who had close links to the military intelligence lobby through her husband, Colonel He Ping, military attaché in Washington. Ling also enjoyed the support of two men from Canton, both born in the same district: Marshal Ye Jianying—whose son would soon be appointed head of one of the PLA’s intelligence services—and Liu Fuzhi, another counterintelligence specialist from the Gonganbu.7

Liu played an important role in the establishment of the new national spy administration. After serving as Marshal Zhu De’s secretary in Deng Xiaoping’s 8th Route Army, he had honed his counterintelligence skills in the 129th Division of the 8th Army and then in the Social Affairs Department. Subsequently he had become chief of staff to Luo Ruiqing, who would later become first head of the Gonganbu. Like Ling Yun, Liu had also served as deputy minister of the Gonganbu, during the Cultural Revolution, under Xie Fuzhi.

Liu was all but forgotten from 1967 to 1971, but as a qualified lawyer, he helped to reform criminal law in the new China, which led to him being appointed minister of justice in May 1982. He had great influence on Deng, as well as on Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, both in the choice of new structures and in the appointment of Ling Yun. Once the central counterintelligence function had been stripped from the Gonganbu, Liu became its head—minister of public security. It was his idea for the new Ministry of State Security—the Guoanbu—to absorb part of the Diaochabu, which would maintain the party archives, as well as continuing an internal inspection role both at home and within embassies abroad. Kong Yuan, who had been head of the Diaochabu until the Cultural Revolution, also continued to keep a close eye. He was now responsible for the overhaul of military intelligence, and helped Ling Yun to set up the new State Security.

Beijing’s Western Park (Xiyuan), one stop after the zoo on the 332 bus and one before the Summer Palace, is an extensive royal park within the Imperial City. It housed the former Diaochabu buildings, now extended and modernized to accommodate the Guoanbu. Satellite photos today show the full extent of this secret ministry. At the beginning of the 1980s, it brought together a dozen large departments.

The 1st Bureau was responsible for internal affairs and security in the provinces, working in tandem with local Guoanbu offices, for example in Beijing (headed by Ming Buying) and Shanghai (under Ding Shenglie), as well as with the 1st Bureau of Liu Fuzhi’s Gonganbu, headed until 1990 by Tan Songqiu. Though fewer in number than the Gonganbu’s, the Guoanbu also had its own border guard units and camps reserved for its specific prisoners within the laogai, the Chinese gulag. In April 1983, one of these Guoanbu concentration camps welcomed some new prisoners: members of a Taiwanese intelligence network in Tianjin known as “the Society of the Continent” and the lawyer Huang Hanson, sentenced to ten years in prison for “espionage”. This heralded the start of a long list of State Security prisoners sent to the laogai.

The 2nd Bureau was responsible for foreign intelligence, first and foremost in the already very active bases of Tokyo, Bangkok and Singapore. Its agents were given diplomatic cover in embassies as “advisors” or “second secretaries”. In the Japanese capital, analysts led by Kamakura Sadame, head of the Naicho (Cabinet Intelligence & Research Office), took note of Chinese advisor Guan Zongzhou’s arrival at the embassy in April 1983—just as the Guoanbu was being set up—under Ambassador Song Zhiguang, who had himself been the first intelligence officer at the newly opened Chinese embassy in Paris twenty years earlier.8

In France now, the embassy advisor Zhu Guanghai was being watched by the DST, a domestic intelligence branch of the national police. Officers soon realized that since his posting in Gabon, Zhu had devoted himself to “African affairs”. Paris was indeed at the time the capital of Francophone Africa, but it turned out that this was not the only reason for Zhu’s interest. In 1984 he was posted to the London embassy in Portland Place as a “second advisor”, where he coordinated spy missions under the watchful eye of MI5. The Guoanbu in London went on to develop recruitment operations for English-speaking members of the African elite, coordinated from 1987 onwards by another Africa specialist—officially also a second secretary—Huang Xiugao.

The 3rd Bureau focused particularly on infiltration in the three places over which the PRC intended to recover sovereignty in the longer term: Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Deng Xiaoping did not want to die without standing at least once on Hong Kong soil free from the British colonial yoke. A large delegation of Guoanbu officials was registered at the Xinhua News Agency there, which acted as a de facto embassy, stopping short of an actual parallel government.

The 4th Bureau was responsible for technology, in other words the technical aspects of espionage both for roaming or permanently stationed international operatives and for counterintelligence. The 5th Bureau was responsible for local intelligence—not to be confused with the 6th Bureau, which ran counterintelligence. These two Bureaus were in turn supported by the 7th, which carried out surveillance missions and special operations. All worked closely with the Political Security Bureau, whose 2nd Section focused on foreign diplomats stationed in Beijing or the consulates of other major cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou. Special ops officers received training at the former Diaochabu secret agent training camp in Nanyuan, south of Beijing.

The 8th Bureau was responsible for research, largely through open sources, and took over the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (Xiandai Guoji Guanxi Yanjiusuo), a subsidiary division of the Diaochabu. Despite CICIR members’ regular denials of any association with the intelligence services, on 20  February 1984 Cheng Zhongjing, director of the CICIR, was appointed as an advisor to the Guoanbu leadership, with Wu Xuewen, who had been expelled from Japan for espionage, as his deputy. Cheng was also director of the College of International Relations at Tsingua University (Guoji Guanxi Xueyuan), a training school for intelligence agents being posted abroad that was situated near the Summer Palace.

The 9th Bureau was responsible for dealing with the risk of infiltration by undercover enemy agents, and of Guoanbu agents defecting or being “turned” by the enemy. It also analyzed how enemy services protected themselves from Chinese operations. As we shall see later in the chapter, the 9th Bureau found itself with much to do following the defection of a senior Guoanbu official in 1985.

The 10th Bureau, destined for major development, oversaw research in scientific and technological intelligence. It worked with specialist state agencies such as the State Scientific & Technological Commission and the intelligence division of the huge Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (COSTIND). The 11th Bureau managed the stock of information technology equipment that was being built up. Some of its computers had been purchased a few years earlier by the number two at the Gonganbu, Li Guangxiang. Li, a specialist in the fight against Taiwan, travelled to West Germany to study how the federal police, the Bundeskriminalamt, had carried out a massive population registration programme during the fight against the “Red Army Faction”, the Baader-Meinhof Gang famously inspired by the Maoist revolution.

Finally, the 12th Bureau was the Office of Foreign Affairs (Waishiju), located in Beijing on the same premises as the Beijing Gonganbu bureau on Dongchang’an Avenue, and run by the extraordinary Yu Zhensan. It was responsible for liaisons with foreign intelligence services, including officials from various Western agencies—David Gries of the CIA, Dr  Herms Bahl (“Dr  Queck”) of the West German BND, Nigel Inkster of MI6, and Thierry Imbot from the French DGSE—who were all, of course, under close surveillance.9 The KGB rezidentura, headed by Viktor Kracheninnikov, which had made a comeback after the Cultural Revolution, was no exception to this rule.

The Guoanbu’s Office of Foreign Affairs worked with its Office of Political Security to monitor diplomats, journalists and the first trickle of tourists, increasing in number now that tourist visas were being issued. Indeed this was one of the reasons given for the very creation of Guoanbu; no sooner had Ling Yun taken office than he announced: “The intelligence agencies and secret services of some foreign countries have increased their spying activities against China’s state secrets and are now sending agents to subvert and destroy our country.”10

It would be a few more years before a broad economic intelligence agency developed. But since the 1980s, this area of espionage had become something of an object lesson. In autumn 1984, Western diplomats stationed in Beijing began taking notice of a newly created school for industrial espionage, as evidenced by an article in a well-informed specialist newsletter:

Diplomats are showing considerable interest in a new training institute going into operation in China. What you might call a school for spies. Not the usual kind of cloak and dagger espionage, like we see in novels. This institute is training a Chinese elite to do industrial espionage. What they want is know-how, and their main targets are Japan, the United States and a few Western European countries (specifically West Germany, France and Great Britain). Some of these very sophisticated spies are being sent abroad as businessmen for state-trading enterprises, and others are attached to Chinese embassies overseas. Most of them, however, go abroad as students studying for advanced degrees.11

Another sign of the times was the establishment in February 1982 of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade (MOFERT), headed by Chen Muhua—we might remember from Chapter 2 that Zhou Enlai had removed him from the clutches of Kang Sheng in Yan’an, after Kang claimed he was “a Kuomintang spy”. MOFERT’s international sector—as well as that of its successor, MOFTEC—offered important cover for roaming Guoanbu agents, as Deng Xiaoping had suggested.12

All this training appears to have been rather necessary, because—according to several intelligence and security specialists who were fighting the new Chinese services at the time—they were not very good at what they were doing. As one French expert put it, “The Chinese needed this training school. Industrialists seemed to think that they weren’t very good at economic espionage. For example, where the Japanese divide the task up between them—they go into a lab and make sure to take photos and notes about everything—the Chinese would stick together and barely dare to ask any questions.”

One analyst in the Japanese intelligence service, the Naicho, put it this way: “The Guoanbu was training new cadres, who needed to know at least two languages, and to learn to be very proactive when it came to intelligence research. But the first thing they needed to do was to tour the embassies to monitor the Chinese diplomats, whose own attitude left a lot to be desired. Many were recalled to Beijing following a Guoanbu investigation and subjected to an in-depth interrogation.

“The service didn’t have a large budget, which it was not happy about. It had no planes, and few cars and computers. In fact, amongst some of the older leaders, the Gonganbu still had a better reputation, even though the Guoanbu had been set up as a part of a programme of political and economic liberalization. It’s a good service, [the equal of others in the East Asian region]. It just needed to develop considerably.”13

This presumably explains why, all of a sudden, dozens of Chinese translations of books about foreign intelligence services began to appear in Beijing.

A literary interlude

In June 2007, I entered a group of buildings from the 1950s that were so dilapidated they appeared all but abandoned, in the Fangzhuang district of southern Beijing. The doorman was eating a bowl of rice and reading the newspaper. He casually passed me the phone so that I could speak to Mr  Zhang Meirong, director of the Qunzhong Publishing House, whose offices were just upstairs. If I had a manuscript to leave, Mr  Zhang suggested that I write to him. But I had already written to him, to announce that I was coming to see him. After a little discussion, a beefy young man led me down a maze of dark corridors to the publisher’s offices. He was wearing a bright red T-shirt bearing the inscription “Chinese Public Security”—the Gonganbu. When I asked him if he was part of the police, he proudly told me that he was. This didn’t really surprise me, given that Qunzhong Publishing House is more or less a satellite of the Gonganbu and Guoanbu. It specializes in non-fiction books about the police and the secret services, and novels about private detectives and espionage. Stories about terrorism became very popular in China after 9/11.

While he served me tea, Mr  Zhang told me how much he loved France. I explained to him that the book I had come to discuss had already been published—by him—under the title: Youyongchi—Faguo mimi jigou—the translation of my book La Piscine: The French Secret Service Since 1944.14 I told him that I had only discovered a few months earlier that it had been published in Chinese in 1987, and as I was the book’s co-author, I would be most grateful if I could obtain a few copies. Meiyou wenti! No problem! I was sent off to see Madame Zhang Rong, director of the collection and head of fiction in translation.

She too offered me tea, in good English, and invited me to lunch, for it was not far off midday. But first she had to call the stock department. She absolutely adored France. She had been to Paris and Nice. As far as the book was concerned, there should be no problem at all! She went away, came back, served me tea. She was waiting for a call. If there is a problem, she assured me, it’s sure to be easily solved. I took the opportunity to request a catalogue. Of course! No problem at all. Then the phone rang—the conversation lasted a while. Now Madame Zhang’s tone changed. There appeared to be a small problem: “Unfortunately, since the book was published in 1987,” she told me, “there are no copies available.” Not even a copy in the archive that could be photocopied—or even just for me to take a look at? No.

Comrade Zhang presumably thought that I understood only English, for this was not what had been said during the telephone call I had just overheard. Rather, I understood that the book was classified as neibu (secret) for foreigners. This was really a little odd, given that I, a foreigner, had written it. She told me that another edition had been brought out the same year by the publishing arm of the University of Public Security (Zhongguo Renmin Gongan Daxue Chubanshe), if I wanted to try to obtain it there. That was the end of our conversation. “By the way,” she added, “I am afraid that there is no catalogue available.” It appeared that I was no longer invited to lunch, either.

It was not long before even the edition of my book “pirated” by the Gonganbu no longer existed, either—it never had. I still do not know what actually happened: was the Qunzhong Publishing House ordered not to grant my request following an outside intervention? Or were they simply worried that I had come to claim the copyright stolen from me, my co-author, and our French publisher? I suppose I should have been grateful. After all, the important thing is to have played a part in the education of the masses, and the training of China’s special agents, in the spirit of friendship between peoples.

Many of the books on intelligence that I found in bookshops on that trip were originally published in the 1980s. The Qunzhong Publishing House had published Spy, Counter Spy, the autobiography of the British MI6 agent Dusko Popov; another publisher had brought out a translation of James Bamford’s Puzzle Palace, about the American National Security Agency, with whom Deng Xiaoping’s services collaborated against the Soviets. I found The KGB (Ke Ge Bo) by the American John Barron, and GRU: The Most Secret of the Soviet Services by the Frenchman Pierre de Villemarest. All of these texts, and others like them, form part of a Guoanbu apprentice agent’s reading list, while at the same time appealing to a broad audience, for the Chinese are very fond of tales about spies. This was the background against which La Piscine was published.

I have already lost face with this story of La Piscine, but I must make another self-criticism—about my book with Rémi Kauffer, Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Service. Published in 1987 in France, this book was also the subject of a curious Chinese translation, this time at the request of the Central Party School’s publishing arm. Despite this official commission, the translator, who had suggested the addition of a new, updated preface, told me that we would need to wait for permission to publish it. The material must have been too sensitive—we never got the green light. Printed and bound, the book was, I was told, circulated to a few hundred important comrades at the party summit, within the Central Party School, and in some special departments. Some of the people I met clearly knew the book well. “But why are you so interested in such a vile person?” I was once asked.

These fine scholars must have jumped when reading the book’s final chapter. For it is only today, twenty years later, that I can reveal the end of this story. In 1985, a senior functionary in the Guoanbu, known as “the adopted son of Kang Sheng” defected, and handed over all his secrets to the CIA.

Operation Jade Powder

The three counterintelligence services—State Security (the Guoanbu), Public Security (the Gonganbu) and the army intelligence (still the PLA2)—shared the running of the largest Beijing hotels, some of which they actually owned. This allowed them to spy on the travellers and businessmen who were beginning to arrive in ever larger numbers, with the hope of investing in Deng Xiaoping’s China.15

In the 1980s, there was extensive surveillance at the Beijing Hotel, a stone’s throw from Tiananmen Square. Bugs and hidden surveillance cameras were installed in the restaurant, the lobby and the bar, at reception, and in the bedrooms. The monitoring was not always very discreet. Bernard Gérard, head of the DST, used to tell French executives a funny story at conferences to make it clear what they were up against. A Breton businessman called his boss in Brittany from his room at the Beijing Hotel. Wanting to talk about the terms of a contract that they were negotiating, the two men spoke to each other in their native Breton. Suddenly, a female voice cut into the conversation: “Speak French!” Stubbornly, the two businessmen continued talking in Breton—which is unfortunately not on the curriculum of the Institute of Foreign Languages where Guoanbu officials are trained. Suddenly, the line was cut. Thus the head of French counterespionage received a new piece of technical information: a large room in the basement of the Beijing Hotel housed an army of “telephone ladies”, who swap places depending on the languages being spoken, in order to monitor all conversations taking place in every room in the building.

A little earlier, in the autumn of 1985, one of a group of CIA agents who had come to the hotel’s bar for a drink was caught on camera. What created a stir was the sight of the affable Chinese man who sat facing him, whom he obviously knew well: this was Yu Zhensan, head of the Guoanbu’s Office of Foreign Affairs, situated just two blocks away. The men of the 9th Bureau—the Guoanbu’s internal security—wasted no time in alerting their superiors at the central office in Xiyuan, in the Fragrant Hills Park. But Ling Yun saw no cause for panic: after all, this was precisely what Yu and his Office were meant to do—discuss and “exchange” with the intelligence representatives from foreign services.

However, a few weeks later in November, Ling must have been kicking himself. Yu Zhensan left for a visit to Hong Kong, apparently for both professional and personal reasons—later it was thought that he had a Western mistress there. In fact, it might well have been she who was responsible for the dramatic twist that ensued when Yu disappeared, and a rumour began to circulate that “a senior Guoanbu official had defected and been picked up by the CIA”. The operation to exfiltrate him from Hong Kong, somewhat delayed because of ill health, had been codenamed “Operation Jade Powder”.

On 24  November 1985, an extraordinary piece of information ostensibly of no relevance to this development appeared on the teletype machines. The FBI had arrested a Chinese mole in the CIA called Larry Wu-Tai Chin—from his name in Pinyin, Jin Wudai—who had apparently been furnishing state secrets to the Beijing services for thirty years. The consequences of this affair would be great. It triggered an earthquake not only at CIA headquarters in Langley, and in Washington, but also at Xiyuan, the Guoanbu headquarters in Beijing.

Meanwhile, Yu Zhensan’s defection remained relatively unknown to the wider public. In early summer 1986, Rémi Kauffer and I were in Hong Kong researching our book on Kang Sheng. Back then the last few junks were still moored in the Fragrant Harbour, where we got wind of the affair and gathered some information about Comrade Yu’s background. This provided the material for the final chapter in the Kang Sheng book, even though at the time there were significant gaps in our knowledge of the affair. We did, however, discover that Yu himself had been responsible for the arrest of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, first identified as a mole in 1983. On 17  September 1986, teletype machines tapped out an AFP dispatch from Hong Kong: “A Chinese spy has escaped to the United States, having sold out an agent who had been working for Beijing from within the CIA, the US intelligence service, for 30 years, it was reported in a Hong Kong magazine on Wednesday.

“Yu San, head of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Chinese Ministry of Security, was described in January by reliable sources in Beijing as being in hiding abroad. According to Pai Hsing magazine he has claimed asylum in the United States.

“His first ‘gift’ to the CIA was to reveal that Larry Wu-Tai Chin, 63, employed by the CIA for thirty years, was one of the most important spies working for Beijing, according to Pai Hsing. Mr  Yu offered up this information to the CIA during a secret visit to Hong Kong in November 1985. Mr  Chin, a US citizen of Chinese origin, was arrested by the FBI, the US Federal Police, on 22  November. Having been sentenced to life imprisonment for spying, he committed suicide in prison in February.

“The magazine further reports that Yu—also known as Yu Zhensan—is currently in McLean, near Washington, D.C., where he is being interrogated and will remain a guest of the CIA for two years.”

When I met Lu Keng, the editor of the bi-weekly Pai Hsing, in Hong Kong it was clear that his sources were unimpeachable. A Kang Sheng victim during the Cultural Revolution, he had spent ten years in jail, but by 1986 had built up a cordial relationship with the new party leadership and in particular with the general secretary, Hu Yaobang, whom he had interviewed several times.

Over the course of months and years, Yu Zhensan’s extraordinary life story was gradually revealed. Forty-something years old, his original name was Yu Qiangsheng, and he was part of the Chinese nomenklatura, a key member of the bureaucracy, with longstanding links to both the CCP and the Kuomintang—in fact, both to Mao Zedong’s close entourage and to Chiang Kai-shek’s family. There were several other major figures in the China of this period who also had forebears in both camps, which was hardly surprising given the interactions that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s between the two parties.

Looking at the Yu family tree is rather enlightening. A wealthy Chinese man named Yu Mingzhen, from Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, had two sons: Yu Dachun and Yu Dawei, both fierce Kuomintang militants who followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan in 1949. Yu Dawei served as the nationalist minister of defence between 1954 and 1965, and his son, Yu Yang-ho, married Chiang Kai-shek’s granddaughter—the daughter of Chiang Ching-kuo, who had succeeded his father as president of Taiwan.

But his brother, General Yu Dachun, had children who had remained on the mainland. His son Yu Qiwei, also known as Huang Jing, was a veteran communist activist. In 1931 in Qingdao, Shandong province, he met somebody through his sister Yu Shan, a beautiful singer and actress at the Beijing Opera. This somebody, known as “Crane of the Clouds”, went on to become the film actress “Blue Apple”—before gaining notoriety as Jiang Qing, mistress of Kang Sheng and then wife of Chairman Mao. The future Madame Mao lived with Yu Qiwei—some even claim they were married—until the CCP sent him to Beijing, at which point Jiang Qing decided to move to Shanghai to pursue her career in cinema. There she married another figure in the entertainment industry, Tang Na, who went on to open a restaurant in Paris, and who became, in the 1980s, an “honourable correspondent” for the Soviet secret services.

This glamorous circle—Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng and Yu Qiwei—met up again in Yan’an in 1935, along with Yu Shan. Despite Mao’s marriage to Jiang Qing, Yu Shan became one of his many mistresses. In 1949, when Madame Mao was in hospital in the USSR—just as the triumphant communists were setting up shop in Beijing—it was Yu Shan who was sharing the chairman’s bed. Some comrades actually confused her with Madame Mao, heard of but never seen.16

Yu Qiwei, Jiang Qing’s former lover, had stepped aside for Mao, though he had remained a friend of Kang Sheng. In another blinding political crossover, he went on to marry a very unusual journalist, Fan Jin. She, along with her friend Gong Peng, was part of Zhou Enlai’s famous circle of female Chinese spies in the United States, which had played an influential role around Pearl S.  Buck and Eleanor Roosevelt.17

Yu Qiwei and Fan Jin had two sons. The younger, Yu Zhengsheng, became a high-ranking figure in the CCP.  After serving as party leader in Shandong and Hubei, then as minister of construction, he made a notable entrance into the Politburo in 2002, later becoming secretary of the Shanghai City Council in October 2007, replacing Xi Jinping.18 Between 2012 and 2017, he was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest ruling body of the CCP. However, his career was nearly ruined in the 1980s, because his older brother was none other than Yu Zhensan—the Guoanbu double agent who handed himself over to the CIA in 1985. Fortunately for Yu Zhensheng, his father-in-law, General Zhang Aiping, was defence minister at the time.

One last aspect of this complex family tree is worth our attention: when the propaganda activist Yu Qiwei died of a heart attack in 1958, Kang Sheng agreed, at Madame Mao’s behest, to make Yu Zhensan his “adoptive son”. This explains how Yu became a counterintelligence agent, and how—though he had not participated in any of the violent abuse that was Kang’s trademark—he managed to climb the ladder in the Foreign Affairs Office, joining first the Gonganbu in 1974 under Deputy Minister Yu Sang (no relation), then the Guoanbu when it was set up in 1983. In this key position, Yu Zhensan knew all the tricks of the trade when it came to recruiting foreign agents.

The CIA mole and the Chinese priest

At the FBI, the defector Yu Zhensan was codenamed Planesman. It was not until the Bureau’s head of Chinese affairs, I.C.  Smith, finally met him in late 1986 that the extraordinary saga of “Kang Sheng’s adopted son” came to light. Smith’s memoirs, published in 2004, quote extensively from my book, and confirm the accuracy of the Yu family tree that Rémi Kauffer and I had drawn up:

If one accepts the writings of Faligot and Kauffer, Planesman was not just an ordinary Chinese citizen employed by the [Gonganbu]. He was one of China’s “golden youth”, the offspring of China’s political elite. I became convinced that the “golden youth” were in a better position to see the hypocrisy of the Communist system under which they lived … I believe Planesman saw this hypocrisy and at some point decided to hit back in his own way.

His actions were simply audacious. He strolled around [Guoanbu] headquarters, routinely photographing documents on desks, pulling files, and making inquiries, and being the son of those with influence, he benefited from special treatment. He even pilfered the desk of his supervisor, whom he referred to as the “Beijing Bitch”, where he was able to gain access to the most secret of the information contained within the [Guoanbu].

… Planesman in the flesh was a gregarious, animated individual who spoke in fractured English, but who seemed to have a very real zest for life. When we met at last after Operation Eagle Claw was over, he confirmed my long-held suspicion that he was the ultimate risk taker. I had the impression he would have paid the CIA to allow him to be their spy.19

Operation Eagle Claw, the FBI’s codename for the unmasking and arrest of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, was probably—at least until the 2007 Chi Mak case—the most stunning FBI catch on record of someone found spying for the Chinese intelligence services.

Born in 1924, Larry Wu-Tai Chin joined the CIA in 1948 as a translator at the US Consulate in Shanghai. The SAD, headed by Pan Hannian, willingly allowed him to leave with the Americans in 1949. If he managed to be recruited and to rise through the ranks, he could be a very important double agent.

The young Chinese interpreter was transferred to the US Consulate in Hong Kong. During the Korean War, he participated with the US services in the interrogation of Chinese prisoners of war who had come to the aid of Kim Il-sung’s army. He was recruited into the Chinese intelligence services in Okinawa, Japan, in 1952 by a certain Mr  Wang, who was probably Liao Chengzhi, nicknamed “Liao the sailor man”. As we know, this former Comintern agent, also an expert on special ops in Taiwan for the ILD, founded the Xinhua News Agency and turned it into a nest of spies.20

At the time of his recruitment, Larry was working in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, then part of the CIA.  The FBIS listened in on and transcribed broadcasts from regional radio stations in China, which enabled it to draw up a picture of how Chinese society was evolving using only “open sources”. Larry was initially stationed at FBI headquarters in Santa Rosa, California, and then at CIA headquarters in Langley, where he had access to confidential documents and information about US projects in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War.

In the summer of 1970, Larry sent a key document to Beijing containing evidence that Richard Nixon had decided to enter into negotiations with the Chinese. We now know how decisive this diplomatic turn would be for the balance of global power. Knowing the intentions of the White House in advance was hugely useful to Mao and Zhou. Naturally, like so many communist spies captured during the Cold War, the Chinese mole within the CIA used this episode as an argument in his defence after Yu Zhensan sold him out, claiming that he had acted in the interests of peace and “friendship between peoples”. The French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, imprisoned around the same time for espionage, told me that his Chinese handler encouraged him to use this line of defence in case he was ever caught.

Between 1978 and 1981, Larry made five trips to Canada. He had two handlers; the first was Ou Qiming, an intelligence veteran who had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. They almost always met in clothes shops or Chinese restaurants in Toronto. The second was Zhu Entao, who later became deputy head of the Gonganbu and the Chinese representative at Interpol. In between these meetings, Larry received microfilms, which were sent by special courier to Hong Kong the same day. Using the “invisible banking system”—one with no accounting records or book-keeping, run on coded messages and personal phone calls—his account would be immediately credited with what the Chinese call “flying money” (fei qian). The FBI discovered that, after each of these trips, a sum of $7,000 was deposited into a Hong Kong bank account belonging to one Larry Wu-Tai Chin.

In January 1981, he retired. According to the usual rules, he was not allowed to return immediately to China. In November of that year, he travelled to London where he met with his handler, Ou Qiming, to prepare for his return, due to take place in early 1982. Plans were underway for secret festivities in his honour in Beijing. Counterintelligence officials from the Gonganbu, including, I was told, its then deputy head Ling Yun, were planning to roll out the red carpet in his honour. Comrade Larry was to be given the title of “service chief”. This was not merely an honorific. It entitled him to a larger pension and a “golden parachute” bonus of $40,000, to be deposited in his Hong Kong bank account.

It was then, according to I.C.  Smith of the FBI, that Larry made a fatal error. After a sweep of his apartment, US counterespionage agents discovered that he had kept the key of his room (number 533) at the Qianmen Hotel. The FBI believed it had discovered his handler, a Chinese woman to whom he paid mysterious visits in New York. In fact she was his mistress. In intercepted telephone conversations, the two were heard discussing various technical devices that intrigued the FBI, but turned out to be sex toys. A double agent leading a double love life was almost bound to get tripped up eventually. The FBI’s discovery of this secret, and the threat of its revelation, will have made it much harder for Chin to resist pressure during interrogations.

It was thanks to an anonymous source that the FBI found the real figure handling Chin: “Our source”, explains Smith, “reported that Chin’s escape contact was a Catholic priest in New York named Father Mark Cheung. Amazing. I was taken aback by the very audacity of the Chinese but at the same time admitted a grudging admiration for their shrewdness. The priest, an ethnic Chinese, had been recruited to work for the Chinese Ministry of Public Security [the Gonganbu] and spent years establishing his cover serving parishes in the South Pacific and Hong Kong. In an emergency, Chin was to meet with Cheung in the confessional of his Transfiguration Church in Chinatown. Cheung later returned to Hong Kong and, after an interview by FBI agents during which he was completely uncooperative, reentered China never to resurface.”21

This source who helped the FBI to identify the priest was still in Beijing. It was, of course, Yu Zhensan, alias Planesman. But from the beginning of 1983 to the end of 1985, there was no question of arresting Larry Wu-Tai Chin, for this would endanger Yu, their source at the heart of the Guoanbu. They first had to wait for him to defect.

Finally, on 22  November 1985, Larry was arrested. This operation was far from straightforward for the CIA, which was understandably embarrassed by the public disclosure of this obvious failure by its own counterintelligence service. This was during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when the CIA had an agreement with Deng Xiaoping’s intelligence services to jointly intercept Soviet communications, and both countries were involved in joint operations supporting the Mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviet military. Bill Casey, head of the CIA, nonetheless finally gave the green light for the arrest of the mole in his ranks. Operation Eagle Claw finally swooped.

During the first days of his interrogation, Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a narrow-faced man whose glasses were constantly sliding down his nose, remained silent. But when one of the FBI agents mentioned the name of his longstanding handler, Ou Qiming, he cracked.

Between 4 and 7  February 1986, Larry’s case was heard in the Federal Court of Alexandria in Virginia. Journalists following the trial were disappointed: the Chinese agent remained silent, and neither the CIA nor the FBI wanted to release information about how they had caught him, because to do so would expose the role of Yu Zhensan. Yu was put under witness protection; he assumed a new identity and was sent to live in a safe house near San Francisco. He apparently remained in contact with his cousins in Taiwan. Larry Wu-Tai Chin admitted to having handed over documents, but he claimed that all had been declassified. This did not quite fit with his admission that he had received around $180,000 from Beijing. As we know, he argued in his defence that he had fostered good relations between the United States and China, citing his reports of the expected Nixon thaw. But to no avail.

On 7  February, Larry was sentenced to a long prison sentence for spying. Two weeks later he committed suicide in his cell, suffocating himself with a plastic bag that he fastened tight around his head with his shoelaces. In 2014, a reliable source in Taipei told me that on the eve of his suicide, he had received an authorized visit from a Chinese consul, who led him to understand that if he died without revealing his secrets, Beijing would provide for the needs of his family. This final interview was discreetly recorded by the FBI.22

While going over the details of case, Kauffer and I stumbled upon an extraordinary chain of events: the whole thing had started when Larry Wu Tai-Chin told his handlers about the arrival in Beijing of a new undercover CIA officer, in a diplomatic post. Chinese counterintelligence chiefs sent Yu Zhensan to try and recruit him, but instead Yu used the contact with the CIA to go over to the Americans himself. He began to hand over intelligence—sporadically in the case of Larry, whose name he did not know, though he was aware of his existence. This enabled the CIA to identify Chinese moles within the agency. In other words, thanks to Yu’s perfidy, Larry had signed his own death certificate when he faithfully reported to his Chinese paylords that a new US agent was in town.

Bernard Boursicot and the Beijing Beauty

Before his defection, Yu Zhensan delivered a dossier on another spy—one in the French embassy whom he had actually handled in Beijing. Three months after the suicide of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, on 6  May 1986, Bernard Boursicot went on trial in Paris accused of spying for China. This was the first case of its kind in Western Europe, in contrast to the multiple espionage trials that had taken place in the United States. Previously only spies for the Eastern Bloc had been tried and convicted.

Boursicot’s case was unusual, not least because he had been recruited to the Diaochabu—CCP intelligence—by his Chinese lover, a woman called Shi Peipu, a singer at the Beijing Opera. As it turned out, his lover was a man. Both were denounced by Yu Zhensan; according to some sources, Boursicot was also denounced by a second, less important, Chinese spy who handed the information to MI6.23 He was arrested by the French DST.

Boursicot and his lover became a public laughing stock, fuelled by the mockery of the examining magistrates. The prosecutor appeared to be having much fun at their expense: “By what curious acrobatics was Shi Peipu able to convince Boursicot that he was female?” The presiding judge, Versini, was even more brutal: “What on earth did you get up to in bed?” It was certainly a unique case; its only historical parallel is the story of the knight of Eon, a hermaphrodite spy sent by the French King Louis XV to the English court in the eighteenth century. David Cronenberg even made a moving film about Boursicot, M.  Butterfly (1993), starring Jeremy Irons as the French diplomat/spy.

But beyond a romantic tragicomedy treated as a burlesque worthy of Monty Python, the Boursicot affair was also a case study for both Chinese and Western counterintelligence. The French DST, with the help of intelligence provided by the Americans, intercepted Shi and Boursicot.

I have interviewed Boursicot dozens of times, including for this new English-language edition of my book. Born in 1944 in Brittany into a modest family, Boursicot left France at eighteen to take up a post as a teacher in the newly independent Algeria. He had not only a burgeoning interest in the developing world, but also a passion for cinema, and despite his modest background he was adopted as the protegé of Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque française, who introduced him to the work of film-makers like Akira Kurosawa and Joris Ivens. Ivens was at the time in preproduction for his 1976 propaganda film about the Chinese revolution, How Yukong Moved the Mountains. It is one of the longest films ever made, at 763 minutes.

General de Gaulle had recently officially recognized the PRC.  After passing the foreign service examination as an accountant, Boursicot was lucky enough to be posted there in October 1964. Western diplomats tend to stick together, but the young Breton was burning to discover China, which had undergone such a huge transformation, into a society of the common people. All he wanted was to get out on his bicycle and explore Beijing. Sometimes, his boss and eventual friend, the consul Claude Chayet, invited him to cocktails, where a few local people from Beijing were permitted to meet foreigners.

It was at one of these affairs, in the run up to Christmas 1964, that Boursicot met an intriguing and attractive young man, finely built, not tall, but with a striking face and wearing a Mao-collared suit. Shi Peipu was a member of the Writers’ Union and the author of opera libretti and plays. Bernard was irresistibly drawn to this talented young man, who had trained with Mei Lanfang, a Beijing Opera actor who was world-renowned for his performances in the great female roles traditionally played by men.

Over the following months, Boursicot and Shi together explored ancient China, the worlds of the Tang and Ming dynasties, of the last Manchu emperor, and of the Forbidden City. Then, in May 1965, there was a dramatic development: on one of their walks, Shi took his hand and revealed to him that he was actually a woman. When Shi Peipu was born in 1938, into an aristocratic family in the northern province of Shandong, Shi’s mother had feared that her mother-in-law, the matriarch of the house, would insist that her husband take a third wife unless she gave him a son. She decided to raise her daughter as a son: to dress and educate her like a boy.

Shi begged Boursicot to keep her secret: it was vital that everyone still believed she was a man. “This revelation changed my life, my entire way of seeing the world,” Boursicot told me twenty years later. “It became impossible for me to conceive of life without Peipu.”24

A few weeks later, Boursicot lost his virginity to Shi. It was very different from what he had imagined. He allowed himself to be guided, confident that certain caresses and gestures of modesty were linked to the complexity of Chinese tradition. Returning to the bedroom from the bathroom, he noticed blood beading on his lover’s thigh.

“Now you are my wife,” he whispered in her ear, bursting with joy. In December 1965, when the French foreign ministry told him that he would be changing jobs and returning to Europe, they met for one last time. Shi Peipu, in tears, told him that she thought she was pregnant.

“It will be a boy, and we shall call him Bertrand. I’ll be back soon, I swear it,” Bernard told her. He was inconsolable.

A Breton in China

After a period in Saudi Arabia and Paris, Boursicot returned to Beijing in September 1969 as an archivist and officer responsible for the diplomatic pouch, a subordinate but sensitive administrative position, given that all embassy secrets now passed through his hands.

The Cultural Revolution was in full swing, and Mao Zedong was trying to wrest power back from his rivals. In governments around the world, the political earthquake was being watched with apprehension. Diplomats at the British embassy found themselves under attack, as did journalists: Reuters correspondent Anthony Grey was accused of spying and held under house arrest for two years until his release in October 1969.25

In the French embassy, the newly arrived ambassador, Étienne Manac’h, a Breton like Boursicot, warned his diplomats to take care. Despite the chaos, Bernard, criss-crossing Beijing by bicycle in his Mao suit, eventually located Shi. His first question to her was about their child:

“Where is our son Bertrand?”

“He is being brought up by farmers in Xinjiang,” she told him. “It is far too dangerous to go and see him now.”26

In order for them to continue seeing each other, Shi Peipu requested permission to teach the young diplomat Chinese and Mao Zedong Thought. The report by DST commissioner Raymond Nart describes an apparently comical but actually serious consequence: “One evening, a week after [the discovery of] Shi Peipu, while he was at her apartment, a crowd of local people burst in, grabbed Shi Peipu and dragged her away.”

In late spring 1970 Bernard met an official from the Ministry of Public Security called Kang. Of course, this was a trap laid by the Chinese secret services, and Shi Peipu told Boursicot that two men from the Beijing municipality were going to replace her as his “teachers”. “Kang” and his accomplice “Zhao”—their real names were Kang Gesun and Peng Zhe—were from the Diaochabu, which had a special section for compromising and recruiting foreigners stationed in China.

“Kang was my case officer from 1970 to 1981,” Boursicot told me. “He was Muslim. I remember he didn’t eat pork. Zhao was the political commissar and he taught me Marxism-Leninism. In 1981 Kang told me, ‘We were very lucky to have recruited you, because there wasn’t much left of the intelligence service during the Cultural Revolution.’ That was when I realized that Kang was very high up in the intelligence world.”27

Kang and Zhao drilled him on Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and love of the common people. Wei renmin fuwu! He had to learn this expression—serve the people. Boursicot could not have asked for more. All he wanted in exchange was to enjoy his romance with Shi Peipu and retrieve his son; even, perhaps, to take them both back to France one day. If we are to believe the DST interrogations, Boursicot began passing diplomatic documents to the Chinese in the spring of 1970, and continued to do so up until May 1972, when he was posted to Dublin as an archivist-cryptographer. He resumed his espionage activities in April 1979, when he was posted to the ghostly embassy in Outer Mongolia. He lived in a suite in a hotel in Ulaanbaatar, where he stored archives in a safe.

“During the interrogations,” Boursicot has explained, “the DST commissioner Raymond Nart told me, ‘You should have come to us, you would have been given fake documents to deliver to them, and instead of going to court, you would have been given the Légion d’Honneur!’ Frankly, would I have had fewer problems if I had become a double agent? Well yes, of course I would, but I was politically committed. I thought I would be able to help the country out of its isolation. There was one major condition, however: I never gave the Chinese information about my own country, France.”

This was confirmed by the DST investigation. It would have been treason if he had handed over documents in French stamped “secret” or “highly confidential”. The Chinese were in any case mainly interested in the Americans’ intentions in Vietnam, and in their sworn enemies, the “Soviet revisionists”, with whom they had been in a seven-month border dispute in 1969 over the Amur River.

Thanks to his work, Boursicot was finally given permission to visit his son Bertrand, or Dudu by his Chinese name, and was even able to spend holidays with him and his mother. The documents he delivered to his handlers came from other French embassies around the world, from the foreign ministry, and the various embassies in the PRC where he served. The Chinese were increasingly eager for documents about the USSR’s military capacity, so Boursicot, in Ulaanbaatar, began cutting out articles from the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, typing them out in his own words, and—using a stamp filched from the ambassador—adorning them with a beautiful “TOP SECRET” stamp in red ink. Mao’s agents were very happy.

They also received some more serious intelligence about the Soviet economy, the revival of Japanese militarism, the Indian elections, ethnic problems in Mongolia, Richard Nixon’s trip to Beijing, and various news roundups on Hong Kong and China. The collaboration ended when Boursicot left Ulaanbaatar in March 1981. As the DST commissioner Nart noted, “Boursicot told us that during a visit to France with Shi Peipu—and this had nothing to do with any intervention from Kang or anyone else in the People’s Republic—one day in Paris the two made the decision to break off relations with the Chinese cadre.”

The Chinese knight of Eon

Boursicot was arrested in Paris at 11.40am on 30  June 1983, near the École Militaire metro station, by a team of police officers who took him to DST headquarters. He was led down to the basement, fearing the worst. The investigators, led by divisional commissioners Raymond Nart and Yvan Bassompière, took turns questioning him. For them, it was a perfect Chinese espionage case that would throw light on the modus operandi of the new Chinese secret services: the Guoanbu, or State Security, which was barely known to the DST; its creation had only been announced by Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang three weeks earlier, on 6  June.

Questions flew thick and fast about the disappearance of about 100 documents from the embassies in Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, right around the time when Boursicot had been there. But Raymond Nart also had another question: who were the Chinese people living with him on Boulevard du Port Royal, Monsieur Shi Peipu, and his son Shi Dudu?

Bernard Boursicot, almost relieved, answered: “I didn’t do any of it for money!”

“But who is Shi Peipu?” the DST officers repeated. Shi had not yet been arrested. The diplomat hesitated, because of course his big secret was not the fact that he had been spying for China, but his rather unusual love affair.

“Shi Peipu is a woman,” he confessed eventually. “And Shi Dudu is my son!” he added with pride. At this stage of the discussion, it was clear that he had nothing left to hide. He had spent too long pretending and concealing things, and wanted to explain himself. People in the DST would understand what had happened to him. He had done nothing serious. At last he would be able to live openly with his Chinese wife and their son. He would be released, probably with an official reprimand from the French foreign ministry. But that was not too bad.

The following day, 1  July 1983, the DST investigators arrested Shi Peipu at the diplomat’s apartment. Because of her heart problems, they agreed to interview her there.

Shi recounted her version of the story to Commissioner Bassompière. Her account was almost identical to that of her “husband”. She explained how she had grown up in Shandong and begun taking singing lessons in 1945 with the great teacher Mei Lanfang. She soon found herself immersed in an underworld where the worlds of the arts and the secret services collided—a remarkably common trope in Asian spy stories, as we have seen.

She explained how, thanks to the Deng regime’s liberalization policy, in October 1982 she had managed to get herself invited to France by an academic institution. Security services agreed to allow her and her child to join Boursicot in Paris. Shi remained in contact with Wang Erqing, a cultural attaché at the Chinese embassy on Avenue George V and the darling of the French Sinophile world. He was even once the subject of a French television documentary.

The day after Shi’s first interrogation, the examining magistrate Bruno Laroche accused Bernard Boursicot of “handing over intelligence information to agents of a foreign power”. He charged Shi Peipu with being his accomplice—this was somewhat strange considering the chronology of events, for if anything it had been Boursicot who was Shi Peipu’s accomplice, rather than the other way round.

The judge also ordered a medical examination to determine Shi’s sex, for “she” was now claiming that “she” was a man—which the doctors confirmed. The news was made public on 13  July. In his cell in the Fresnes prison, Boursicot fainted when he heard the unbelievable news on the radio: “The Chinese Mata Hari is actually a man!” The news made the front page of all the newspapers, as the DST expected, tearing the Franco-Chinese couple apart, and hinting none too subtly at the homosexual overtones of the affair. The truth was not confirmed to Boursicot himself until he saw Shi Peipu in the hallway after a meeting with Judge Laroche.

“I don’t believe it. I want to see,” Boursicot insisted. Shi unbuttoned his trousers.

A week later, the Frenchman tried to cut his throat with his razor. How could he have been tricked like this? During the first medical examination, Shi had given a “technical” explanation of how the French diplomat had been tricked. American journalist Joyce Wadler, then New York correspondent for The Washington Post, explained it ten years later in her book on the case, Liaison. She quotes the statement Shi Peipu made to the judge:

As concerns our sexual relations, these always took place in the dark as Boursicot always showed the greatest délicatesse toward me. I want to stress that this was my first sexual experience, and according to Boursicot, the same was true for him. Since I did not have a female sexual organ Boursicot could not penetrate me. When we made love, I kept my legs lightly pressed together, so that Boursicot may have had the impression that he was penetrating me.

During the trial, medical expert Dr  Jean-Pierre Campana described how Shi had managed to conceal his genitals during a relationship that had lasted eighteen years: “Shi Peipu hid his penis inside the folds of his scrotum, which if the thighs are squeezed tightly together can be confusing because of the pubic hair. Of course, this allows only a fleeting and superficial penetration and requires a very credulous partner.”

Wadler quotes the doctor’s statement, which was published in The New York Times during the trial, detailing Shi’s manipulation: “Then, as the examination is ending, the prisoner, without being asked, says that he would like to explain something to the doctors. Easily, smoothly, he pushes his testicles up into his body cavity. The skin of the scrotal sack hangs slack, like curtains. The man now pushes his penis between his legs, toward his back, bisecting the skin of the scrotum, and squeezes his legs tightly together. The penis is hidden, while the skin of the scrotum resembles the vaginal lips, beneath a triangle of pubic hair. Pushed between the empty scrotal sac, the penis has also created a small cavity so that shallow penetration is possible.”28

However in his statements to psychiatrists, Shi Peipu insisted that he had never deceived his lover about his sex. Having tricked him once already, with this statement Shi Peipu now betrayed for a second time the man whose love had got them in this mess in the first place.

Shi was well rewarded for giving evidence against Boursicot: in February 1984 he was released on bail by the Court of Appeal. The Chinese authorities were putting pressure on the French by various means, and high-up ministers were keen to smooth out these “diplomatic” difficulties. Meanwhile, Boursicot remained behind bars.

“A magnificent setup”

During the trial, the prosecutor summarized the DST’s position, arguing that the case was “a magnificent setup by the Chinese intelligence services” and claiming that Shi Peipu had come to France in 1982 in order to “reactivate Boursicot, because he was on his way to becoming a ‘cadre B’, that is, a fully fledged diplomat.”29

In his own testimony, the DST commissioner Raymond Nart did eventually acknowledge Boursicot’s extenuating circumstances: “You have to understand that espionage is a martial art in China and that the Chinese, with the assumption that one launches an attack on a defeated army, quickly spotted Boursicot in his first post: he was nineteen years old, immature, with sexually undefined tastes, and they threw Shi Peipu at him.” He sagely concluded, “Such a fragile character as Boursicot should never have been posted to Beijing. The tragedy of this case is that it is not the instigators being judged, nor the reckless people who sent Boursicot first to China and then to Ulaanbaatar.”

While the prosecutor left the jury to decide on Shi Peipu’s sentence—he had recently suffered a heart attack—he demanded that Boursicot serve at least five years “because of his mentality”. Henri Leclerc, Boursicot’s lawyer, argued that “if any intelligence was handed over to the enemy, it must be recognized that it was very low level”, but he was ignored. The court sentenced both of the accused to six years in prison. Libération captured the feelings of many with its headline: “Boursicot case: a verdict as cruel as Chinese torture.”

On the whole, though, the great and good of Paris seemed more sympathetic to the androgynous Chinese artist than to the French diplomatic archivist. President Mitterrand pardoned Shi Peipu in 1987, and he settled in Paris. This was the first time a convicted foreign spy had escaped being declared persona non grata. Shi often returned to Beijing, where he was friends with the deputy mayor and had an apartment near the Forbidden City. Boursicot, rather less fortunate, had to wait to be released from prison, and was only given permission much later to return to China for a visit. Without his knowledge, a small group of former colleagues at the Beijing embassy, including his loyal friend Claude Chayet, had worked behind the scenes to secure his release. The ambassador, Étienne Manac’h, was not among them—he was not willing to stoop to the aid of a junior official, even though he was a great friend of China and particularly of Zhou Enlai, who once said of Manac’h that he was a “great bridge between the West and China”.

Despite this sad double epilogue—the suicide of Larry Wu-Tai Chin and the imprisonment of Bernard Boursicot—Yu Zhensan’s revelations enabled Western intelligence services to learn a great deal, both about how to proceed with the new Chinese KGB and about its own battle strategy. It was Ling Yun, the head of the Guoanbu, who lost face in these cases. In August 1986, the Chinese fought back by sentencing a Chinese-origin American citizen, Roland Shensu Loo, to twelve years in prison for spying for the CIA and the Taiwanese secret services. Around the same time, John Burns, a New York Times correspondent, was deported, officially for reporting from a no-go zone. The Guoanbu established strict guidelines on dealing with foreigners; Shanghai call girls were permitted to dance with tourists and businessmen on condition that they did not give out state secrets. Forbidding all contact with them would have prevented the security services from being able to engage in the classic operations known as the “beautiful woman stratagem” (meiren ji), the erotic recruitment of Western, Japanese and Korean businessmen and diplomats.

It took decades for me to discover that, when Yu Zhensan was debriefed by his CIA hosts, he told them that at the beginning of Boursicot’s handling, the Chinese services were sufficiently prudish to doubt that their trick would work—they believed that Boursicot would quickly realize that he was in a homosexual relationship. The unexpected success of the operation encouraged the Guoanbu to increase this kind of honeytrap over the following decades.

Meanwhile, a senior official named Guan Ping replaced Yu Zhensan as head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yu, who served for a long time as an advisor to the American, British and Taiwanese secret services, died in 2013. He had been living in the Chinatown of an American city, under the false identity that the CIA had given him. Before he moved there a rumour had circulated—perhaps on his protectors’ initiative—that he had been murdered by Chinese agents in his safe house.

Ling Yun quit the intelligence world in 1985. That long-serving spymaster died in 2018 just after turning 100 years old. His replacement was a politician, rather than an intelligence professional. Jia Chunwang was born in 1938 in Beijing, and graduated in Physical Sciences from Tsinghua University, the Chinese MIT.  He was the son-in-law of Bo Yibo, a famous CCP leader and veteran of the anti-Japanese war, who had served as finance minister in 1949 and was a major supporter of the economic reforms instigated by Deng Xiaoping. Jia’s only relationship to the security services came from his recent co-optation onto the Discipline Commission. His meteoric rise up to the top echelons of the Communist Youth League had impressed leaders like Hu Yaobang; perhaps his appointment was already on the cards during his July 1985 trip to Washington, accompanied by Ling Yun, at the head of a youth delegation.30

As a member of the CCP’s Beijing Municipal Committee, Jia knew Fan Jin, mother of the defector Yu. Obviously, he did not care to have this fact raised, and when John Burns of The New York Times had the audacity to try to question the Guoanbu’s new boss about the Yu Zhensan affair, he was promptly expelled from China.

The Guoanbu was sensitive on the matter because it feared other defections would follow the Yu case. The 9th Bureau went round all the Chinese embassies and repatriated any agents at risk of defecting. Despite these precautions, in September 1986, one of the heads of the service, nicknamed “Fu Manchu”, proposed to the French that he defect to the West. That November, Du Bingru, the commercial attaché at the West German embassy, offered his services to the BND.

Despite this series of misfortunes afflicting Jia’s special services, he was described as being affable, and fascinated with the West. He spoke English and, just as Zhou Enlai had in the early days, he had great admiration for the French intelligence services and the CIA.  He was also on the frontline of China’s new offensives in economic, scientific and technological intelligence—Deng Xiaoping’s dream. This was how the pool of “deep-water fish” (Chendi yü) developed: the Guoanbu term for the thousands of exceptional special agents, hidden in the deepest strata of society—the cultural, scientific, economic and military worlds of the enemy, each a significant piece of the puzzle.

A Chinese-style National Security Council?

Setting up yet another spy station to throw light on an ever-changing world would not be enough for a country as big as China. Deng Xiaoping was all too aware of this, especially given the major upheavals of the mid-1980s. These began with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party in March 1985, leading a reform team focused on glasnost (political transparency), and perestroika (economic restructuring).

Gorbachev became president in 1990, and soon talks between him and US President Ronald Reagan were cleansed of the bitter taste of discord, evolving into cordial agreement. Was the anti-Soviet alliance between China and the US about to fade, or even collapse?

Every day senior Chinese leaders were given a bound file of materials assembled from special service reports, including: “reference materials” (cankao ziliao) from the Xinhua News Agency and its “confidential newsletters from abroad” (guoji necan); reports from the international section of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; dispatches from military attachés that were scrutinized by the 2nd Department (PLA2); analyzes from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and “investigation documents” (Diaocha ziliao) from the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR).31

The political-legal commission that coordinated all of the Chinese secret services—led by two survivors of the Cultural Revolution, Peng Zhen and Chen Xidian—was unable to centralize and analyse all these sources. That would amount to stacking one bureaucratic structure on top of another. That was why, when the Guoanbu was created in 1983, Deng Xiaoping—perhaps inspired by his own “American dream”—decided to set up a kind of National Security Council, a simpler version of the one at the White House.

“It does not matter if a cat is grey or black as long as it catches mice!” Deng would say, as a way of justifying opening up to a market economy under socialist rule. But the remark could equally be applied to geopolitics and international relations. What was the point of the considerable risks taken by China’s “deep-water fish”—deep-cover or sleeper agents—if the intelligence they gathered, even when duly cross-checked, did not help Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang to make decisions?

Deng gave a former diplomat, Huan Xiang, the job of establishing the International Studies Research Center (Zhongguo Guoji Wenti Yanjiu Zhongxin), under the aegis of the State Council of the PRC—in other words, the government. Headed by Huan’s deputy, Xu Dachen, a specialist on German affairs, the ISRC’s role was to analyze a dozen or so hundred-page summary reports, usually sent out daily to those in the ruling elite. The ISRC was also expected to merge with the Diaochabu’s similarly named Institute of International Studies, to further synthesize the information, intelligence and analysis being transmitted to government at Zhongnanhai.

The purpose of all this was to give Deng and his team a clearer view of the outside world—that is obvious. The real question is: why did he choose Huan Xiang?

Huan, who was close to Zhao Ziyang, was first noticed by Zhou Enlai. A well-travelled, open-minded journalist with a gift for languages, he was born in the western province of Guizhou in 1910 in the Year of the Dog. He studied both in Shanghai and at Waseda University in Japan. He had a remarkable career as a journalist (notably at the Wenhui Bao daily in Shanghai) and as a diplomat; in the early 1960s, he set up the PRC’s embassy in the United Kingdom with the master spy Xiong Xianghui. He went on to become ambassador himself.

He never talked about the Cultural Revolution; the years between 1965 and 1976, when he basically disappeared, were a particularly terrible period for him. Afterwards he returned to political life, becoming the ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the EEC.  By the time he was eighty, still as fresh as an imperial carp, Huan’s immense reputation earned him the privilege of being named advisor to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and vice-chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the National People’s Congress. There he was one of ten members including the spy–ambassador Fu Hao, an expert on Japan.

But Deng Xiaoping chose Huan Xiang because, in the mid-1980s, he had come up with some audacious hypotheses about the way the world was turning and the changes that were to be expected, especially in the wake of the US–Soviet summit called by Reagan and Gorbachev in early 1986. The question was whether China’s alliance with the United States would survive. His analysis had revolved around the evolution of the Star Wars system that Reagan wanted to set up, in order to force the Soviets to negotiate the end of nuclear proliferation and bring to an end the arms race threatening to exhaust both superpowers’ economies.

“The two largest military powers are weakening and in the process of decline,” Huan had said at a symposium in 1986. “They are developing militarily towards multipolarization. If the Star Wars plan develops, then multipolarization will become bipolarization, which risks becoming permanent. If that were to happen, if second-tier countries want to put in place a Star Wars plan, it will be very difficult. The position of these countries will rapidly decline.”

In other words, only the end of the Cold War could save China and allow it to develop into a major power; otherwise, it would lag behind the two great “partners” in a latent conflict that had already been going on for half a century.

On 28  February 1989, Huan Xiang, the “Chinese Kissinger”, died at the age of eighty, having revolutionized the leadership’s vision in many different ways. He did not live to see the end of the Cold War or the fall of the USSR.  With his death, and the decline of his research centre, the strategic intelligence of Deng Xiaoping’s team began to falter, as the staggering events of Tiananmen, completely unanticipated by the Chinese secret services, began to unfold.