7

JIANG ZEMIN’S GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE

On 26  June 1999, at the Institute of Far Eastern Affairs of Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University, the Bavarian police came upon a horrific scene that bore all the hallmarks of a suicide.

It was only three days later that the Münchner Kurier reported that a woman had been found dead in an apartment belonging to the Department of Chinese Studies. It was not until 3  July that an announcement appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung at the instigation of the professors and students of the Institute in memory of their deceased colleague:

In namenloser Trauer um

Violetta Zhang

13–11.1965—26.6.1999

Die Professoren, Mitarbeiter und Studierenden am Institut für Ostasienkunde der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

The blond, blue-eyed, German-born Violetta’s Chinese surname came from a failed marriage to a Shanghai man called Zhang Zhongping. She had died at thirty-four, in such impenetrable circumstances that the investigation eventually concluded, “Cause of death: unknown.”

The police commissioner in charge of the criminal investigation was a woman known as Stephanie “Glück”. Violetta’s partner effectively put Glück on trial in a document describing her investigation as riven with professional incompetence, or worse, as a deliberate attempt to conceal what had really happened. Following this, in 2006, a summary judgment by a Bavarian court prohibited the publication of the police commissioner’s real name. It is, however, possible to discuss the unsolved circumstances of Violetta’s death, and I believe it is important to do so.

According to the author of the document, the journalist Armin Witt, there were multiple question marks surrounding Violetta’s death that warranted further investigation. Witt was not alone in thinking so: the German television channel RTL II, where he worked, made a documentary reconstructing the events, which asked troubling questions: why had the authorities—the emergency services, police and judicial investigators—failed to agree among themselves the precise time the corpse had been discovered? According to the police report, Violetta cut her wrists, but the autopsy report, which I have seen, fails to mention this. There was no blood at the scene, either on the body or in the small studio within the Institute where she was found slumped on a leather sofa. Why had the other residents on the premises that day not been interviewed? Why did the forensic report say that a syringe had been found plunged deep into her chest? Did Violetta really write the suicide note left propped up prominently on the table? (“Dear Armin, you are right, I see it now. I am leaving you, I can no longer bear my life. It is nobody’s fault. I beg you to forgive me. I have a great deal of love for you. Violetta.”) Just two days previously, she had told her family—as they later testified—that it was “thanks to Armin that I’ve put my life in order”.1

To understand what really happened, we must go back to early 1998, and Armin and Violetta’s holiday to Shanghai, where Violetta had previously studied Chinese. As a student of the Tang era, she had long dreamed of a boat trip on the China Seas, and once in Shanghai the couple began planning a trip for early 1999 on board the Galaxy, a yacht that Armin had bought in Yugoslavia. The couple made contacts through the German consul in Shanghai, Krüger, and a friend of theirs who was the military attaché at the German embassy in Beijing. They were also thinking about setting up a tourism business between Germany and Hainan Island in southern China, where the Galaxy was to anchor.

But, four months prior to Violetta’s death, this plan fell apart. Perhaps the Chinese authorities had grown suspicious of Armin, who was a journalist but had entered China on a tourist visa; or of Violetta, who spoke Chinese too well; or of the fact that they were in possession of classified nautical charts, and had brought with them a book full of stories about networks of Chinese people living overseas, written by a man called Sterling Seagrave, who was regarded with suspicion by Beijing.

This is not to mention the fact that, though it is open to visitors, Hainan Island is highly guarded, because of its numerous military installations and electronic interception stations. It was here, for example, that Chinese fighter planes forced down (and later dismantled for parts) a US Navy spy plane EP-3E on 1  April 2001. Moreover, at the time, Hainan’s governor Ruan Chongwu—a former Gonganbu chief—had a particular interest in West Germany, and for good reason: from 1978 to 1983, he had been an advisor at the Chinese embassy in Bonn, in charge of scientific and technical intelligence. Of course, as a reformer close to Hu Yaobang, Ruan, who held the Gonganbu portfolio until 1986, wanted to give a positive image of the police as being close to the people. It is more than reasonable to suppose that, for the Guoanbu’s Hainan chief Wang Yunji, and his bosses in Beijing, this pair of unfortunate tourists might well have been “honourable correspondents” working for the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

Was Violetta Zhang unaware that she had this reputation, or had she indeed been contacted by the BND, because of her knowledge of China? Was she being monitored by Guoanbu agents at the consulate on Romanstraße in Munich—who were particularly active, given that the BND headquarters was on their doorstep in nearby Pullach? Some may have thought that, since she had a Chinese surname, Violetta had an obligation to the country, and thus that she had somehow betrayed it. Whatever the facts of her activity in China, she was made to pay dearly for this supposed disloyalty.

The case bore all the signs of a state-sponsored crime dressed up as suicide, and of an official cover-up intended to avoid challenging and thus falling out of favour with a foreign country. Assuming that Zhang was indeed killed by the Chinese, the German intelligence services, having fully got the message, were hardly about to declare a major diplomatic incident over her death. Armin Witt believes that Violetta may have discovered something she should not have known about, to do with either her Institute or ChinaForum, the academic society that she oversaw, as the Institute’s secretary, and which had been infiltrated by the Chinese services. Witt was also suspicious about the exact role of her ex-husband, Zhang Zhongping, who was now living between Munich and Sweden, where he worked for a telephone company.2

I have looked closely into the details of the affair. It is undoubtedly the case that the Chinese secret services have frequently tried to infiltrate foreign institutes and China research centres—the Chinese watching the China-watchers, as British and American observers like to say. This is particularly true in instances where they are convinced that false covers are involved, just as those they themselves provide for their own agents, as diplomats, journalists or academics. In West Germany, this suspicion was not entirely unfounded, for there were several former BND employees working in research institutes in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich.

In the Jiang Zemin era (1997–2004), the Chinese were certainly targeting these organizations, making contacts and setting up academic exchanges. At the time, Ms Lu Yaokan, an analyst from the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR)—the Guoanbu analysis centre—and a leading Germany specialist, was locking down the West German scene and even wrote memoranda about these various institutes, such as the Federal Institute of Orientalism and International Studies.3

In Beijing, as the CICIR’s head of European strategy, with a focus on German affairs, Lu was responsible for following cases such as that of Violetta Zhang. Along with Professor Feng Zhongling—who specialized in both France and Germany4—she analyzed and participated in the selection of intelligence targets in Germany on behalf of the Guoanbu, to whom she reported directly.

The Guoanbu think-tank

However, Lu and her boss Geng Huichang—who was appointed head of the Guoanbu in September 2007—had more pressing concerns than the death of Violetta Zhang, although it had put the Chinese services in a very awkward position. In the Haidian district of Beijing, another death—this time probably a genuine suicide—had just struck at the heart of the CICIR.  This was a small world, comprising some 400 analysts who put their all into giving a serious, intellectual image to the think-tank, as far removed as possible from the special services. “We only deal with issues to do with international relations, we have nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence,” a francophone specialist at the CICIR called Ms Gao Ying was to claim, shamelessly, a decade later.

Given these efforts to distance the think-tank from the Guoanbu, the death of Qiu Guanghui on 26  September 1998 was extremely compromising—not only because of the conditions that led him to end his life, but, even more problematically, because he was acting head of the Guoanbu’s 8th Bureau, which oversaw the CICIR.  In other words, he was the interface between it and the training schools for future officers and intelligence agents.

Qiu’s career had followed a traditional course. Born in 1956, he had studied strategy at the PLA Military Command Academy, while his wife taught at the Academy of Diplomacy. In the early 1990s, as a specialist in counterintelligence, he travelled to Hong Kong, Australia and Japan on a “material acquisitions” trip, a term that barely disguised its real purpose of technological espionage. During his mission, he indulged in his passion for gambling. In the feverish, smoky atmosphere of the casino, he lost enormous sums of money that he claimed as expenses. In an echo of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, Qiu justified his huge expenses by inventing fictitious agents paid by him—a common practice by intelligence crooks in services around the world.

In thrall to his addiction, he lost HK$2 million in Macao gambling dens, on the eve of the handover of the Portuguese colony to the Chinese in 1999. Somehow, he managed to conceal what had happened. Two years later, he was transferred to the Xishan centre in west Beijing. He became both a member of the CCP committee within the Guoanbu, and head of the bureau that oversaw the CICIR.  The purpose of the CCP committee within each ministry was to ensure the ideological purity and proper application of the leadership’s directives within each institution. The secret service did not escape such regulation. Qiu was thus well placed to conceal his own actions.

Eventually, though, he ran out of luck. In an attempt to eradicate endemic corruption, the tail end of the twentieth century saw the launch of multiple investigations, which impacted on many Chinese functionaries. The word on the street was that Jiang Zemin was using the opportunity to disguise corruption within his own faction, the so-called “Shanghai clique”. In September 1998, an officer from the PLA’s Political Department, Major Jiang Shengmao, found himself accused of having misappropriated funds from companies run out of General Staff headquarters. Such were the misadventures that arose from the privatization of part of the PLA.  Jiang committed suicide.

Next was the turn of Qiu, the inveterate gambler. During the course of an investigation into a Hong Kong Chinese company, military security realized that Qui had taken US$1.2 million to fuel his habit. He fiercely denied the accusation and explained that secret missions can be extraordinarily expensive, but he was summoned to appear before the Party Committee and the Guoanbu Disciplinary Committee. On 25  September, the Guoanbu’s new boss, Xu Yongyue, fired him. At home the next day, he swallowed a large number of pills and turned on the gas.5

This episode illustrates the prevailing climate during the remodelling of the security services at the turn of the millennium. Exactly which empire was Qiu ruling over? The CICIR was just one of around 2,500 think-tanks set up during the Deng/Jiang era. Until recently, though, it had been one of the most prestigious.

The whirlwind of the Cultural Revolution had stirred things up so much that it is easy to overlook the fact that the CICIR, created in 1965, was one of the few research institutes that Mao had left partially open throughout the 1960s and ’70s.6 Its analysts studied the war in Vietnam; the crisis between the United States and North Korea after the seizure of the spy ship USS Pueblo by Kim Il-sung’s Coast Guard; the French May ’68 student uprising, which jeopardized the presidency of General de Gaulle, China’s closest friend in Europe; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968; and the Sino-Soviet border incident of 1969—the same year that some of those sent to the so-called May 7 re-education schools in the countryside came back to join their comrades in Beijing.

When Deng Xiaoping returned to power, the CICIR had fallen under the control of the State Council, in other words the government. As a cover, genuine students were invited to join the think-tank; nowadays, it is possible to study for a two-year Master’s degree or a three-year doctorate in International Relations. Control of the institute passed from the Diaochabu to the Guoanbu after the latter was established in 1983, and today it remains answerable, in both administrative and budgetary terms, to State Security.7 In the jargon of the special services, it is registered as an “open” (gongkai) organization, in order to facilitate intelligence gathering through multiple networks.

While the CICIR’s 400 or so members provide sophisticated analyses of even the slightest geopolitical events, its real influence stems from the fact that its researchers, experienced professors and young professionals have links with thousands of academics and policy-makers all over the world, and organize academic exchanges with many strategic research centres abroad. When I was working at such an institute in Japan in 2000, I realized that one of the tricks often employed by both the Chinese and the North Koreans is the exchange of researchers between two institutions, using the visiting card of a foreign research centre to gain entry to the most closed circles of the host country, as well as third countries.

Beijing’s CICIR is one of the rare examples anywhere in the world of a think-tank presenting itself as 100  per  cent academic, but having become 100  per  cent integrated into the intelligence service. Over time it has answered variously to the 8th, 11th and 13th Bureaus of the Guoanbu. “The Institute of Contemporary International Relations is the analysis section of the MSS [Guoanbu],” according to Nicholas Eftimiades, a specialist on Chinese affairs affiliated first with the CIA and later the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency).8

In addition, for specific missions or targeted research, the CICIR frequently co-opted both academics and members of the CCP, PLA or state secret services. Gao Ying told me that she returned to her university in summer 2007 after completing a three-year stint at CICIR, where she produced reports on international terrorism under Professor Li Wei.9 Li, a great traveller, was director of antiterrorism research at the CICIR, and head of the Counterterrorism Bureaus (fankongbuju) of both the Guoanbu and the Gonganbu. He was one of the most senior members of the anti-terrorist strategy group for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

CICIR researchers are not afraid to go into the field, even on highly dangerous missions—for example, into Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan—and they are even sometimes called upon to act as intermediaries in conflicts between warring factions. Sending an agent to a foreign country for short periods of time is difficult for the counterintelligence service, which is more used to dealing with the routines of permanently stationed Guoanbu officers working under diplomatic cover in foreign countries.

In the 2000s, increasing numbers of analysts from these services and think-tanks began accompanying high-level political and commercial delegations on missions abroad. During 2007, for example, several missions to Africa were organized by Xu Weizhong, a CICIR expert on African energy issues.10 Making the most of the PRC’s increasing openness toward other countries, CICIR analysts also began organizing conferences in China to which representatives of foreign institutes were invited. It was up to the host organization to seduce invitees into committing to a regular exchange of information, and to set in motion a mechanism for recruiting foreign researchers, subsidized by a variety of benefits in kind: money, sex, organized tours, publications of articles and books, or the gratifying status of being baptized a “friend of China”.

Jiangnan Social University in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, is another higher education institution for the training of Guoanbu cadres. I have been unable to verify the claims of certain American observers, including the journalist David Wise, that the university teaches espionage techniques, martial arts and surveillance methods.11 On the other hand, it is clear from its website that its students produce a large number of studies on various economic and geostrategic issues related to national security: in 2017 this included subjects like the Colour Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and their implications for Chinese security, Beijing’s involvement in the fight against ISIS, and the security implications of the One Belt One Road strategy. Clearly the Guoanbu expects its officers and functionaries to gain a good knowledge of the country’s geopolitical strategy before beginning to undertake intelligence missions.

In liaison with the CICIR, many of these analysts take part in international conferences arranged with other organizations, such as the China Institute of International Strategic Studies (CIISS), an offshoot of military intelligence (PLA2); the Academy of Social Sciences; the Shanghai Institute of International Studies; and many others. These institutes, which are like echo chambers, are truly Chinese centres of analysis, and regularly organize meetings on topics that allow their researchers to corroborate information and investigate major trends.

“We have frequent meetings with people from the CICIR or the United Work Front Department, which plays a very important role in foreign intelligence, for example in my field of expertise, the United States,” explained Professor Liu Jianfei, director of the Foreign Affairs Division at the CIISS, another first-level organization reporting to the Central Party School, which functions as a training academy for senior civil servants honing strategic policy.12

In the course of this long discussion with Professor Liu—at an old-fashioned pavilion at the Friendship Hotel in Haidian district—I began to understand that the work of strategic intelligence researchers is structured according to a system linked closely to espionage. Walking through Haidian, north-west of Beijing, one realizes that all the main civilian intelligence agencies, such as the CICIR, are based there. The CICIR was initially housed in a building under military control, then at Tsinghua University—the Chinese MIT—before moving to a brand new building boasting conference rooms and a library of 500,000 reference works on international relations, as well as various rooms for smaller meetings.13

The CICIR also produces publications, including its internal newsletter, Research in International Relations (Guoji guanxi yanjiu), which is classified and intended for Guoanbu directors and government or party members. There is also a monthly magazine, Contemporary International Relations (Xiandai Guoji Guanxi), intended for a wider audience. The think-tank publishes books, including one on terrorism written by Professor Li Wei, and The Global Strategic Resource Survey, a crucial topic for a Chinese economy hungry for new energy resources.14 In this respect, the Guoanbu is clearly emulating the CIA, which also publishes reference texts for the general public. Researchers are increasingly sought after by Chinese media, and, exploiting the new policy of openness, it is not uncommon to see analysts on the China Global Television Network (formerly CCTV) explaining events in Darfur or Iraq. Some have even become well known abroad, such as Professor Yan Xuetong, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who often appears on CNN talking about global security, and travels frequently all over the world. He decided to leave the CICIR, which he believed was increasingly losing out to other think-tanks, including some with links to the military, whose reports and analyses were going into far deeper detail. He took up the directorship of a rival international studies institute in 2007.

In 1993, in the wake of the huge geopolitical upheavals triggered by the end of the Cold War, the CICIR was remodelled; new leaders were appointed, and four sub-institutes were added to the seven that already existed (see Appendix VI). These area studies institutes largely correspond to the same divisions in both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Guoanbu. In terms of the concrete application of special operations, the central administration is particularly interested in Division 7, because its researchers study the biographies of international heads of state. A “headhunter” selects the figure to be researched, then seeks the help of secret service stations abroad for an intelligence operation. In the mid-1990s, Zhang Liangen, an expert on France, was looking at President Jacques Chirac and his relationships with the United States and Japan; Africanist Liu Yueming was compiling information on Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadéma, then the doyen of African leaders; and Chen Shuangqing was investigating whether the Israeli prime minister and leader of the Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, was likely to continue the peace negotiations with the PLO initiated by the Oslo Accords (1993–5).

Jiang Zemin and the supervision of the special services

During this period, General Secretary and President Jiang Zemin was continuing down the path first mapped out by Deng Xiaoping, seeking to develop intelligence and analytical structures that would, for the first time, permit the PRC to compete on a level with the Americans. He asked his chief of staff and right hand, Zeng Qinghong, to set up a new National Security Council in Beijing.

The respected academic Ding Yifan—former Paris correspondent for the newspaper Enlightenment Daily (Guangming Ribao), and now senior fellow and deputy director of China’s Institute of World Development, which is part of the State Council’s Development Research Centre—distilled for me in 2007 this attempt to create a single organization for coordinating the entire PRC intelligence system, as well as offering a detailed vision of the global situation:

There is a fundamental difference between the vision and the strategy of Jiang Zemin and that of President Hu Jintao today. Jiang used to have a good relationship with the United States, unlike today’s situation [in 2007], which is marked by a challenging relationship with the Bush administration. On top of that, Jiang’s vision was global, while Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao are primarily focused on strengthening positions in Asia, with the purpose of creating a single market with an ASEAN free trade area. With his global vision, Jiang Zemin wanted to create a National Security Council, but it has to be said it did not function particularly well.15

There may very well have been an administrative bottleneck—a hallmark of the Chinese system, inherited from dynastic China’s highly centralized imperial structure and then combined with a neo-Stalinist tradition, which greatly inhibited development of the entrepreneurial spirit common to all Western intelligence services. But, alongside the structural changes that accompanied the growing need for knowledge and decision-making tools, within the Chinese communist system the weight of the political framework and factional battles remained significant.

Jiang Zemin’s takeover of the entire array of Chinese secret services took place in two stages, tied to the fourteenth (1992) and fifteenth (1997) party congresses as deadlines for remodelling them. During the 14th Congress, Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping got rid of the Yang brothers, Shangkun and Baibing, who had helped them bring down the Tiananmen opposition, but since then had held on to a disproportionate amount of influence: it was even rumoured that, with those two at the head of the army, there was a risk of another attempted coup, similar to that attributed eleven years earlier to Marshal Lin Biao. The two Yangs were craftily ousted, and at the same time the structure of military intelligence also began to be modified, in light of the Chinese conviction that a new era of war and intelligence had begun with the First Gulf War of 1991, following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. For good measure, the Yang brothers’ main ally, Prime Minister Li Peng (the “Beijing hangman”), was also deposed—with one essential condition, which he had imposed to guarantee himself a trouble-free retirement: that Luo Gan, his personal secretary and security specialist, be allowed to hold on to his central position in his preferred fields.

Change was also in the air for Qiao Shi, forced to cede control of the security and special services sector. But Qiao was pushed not only out but up, appointed chairman of the National People’s Congress, a far more prestigious position than head of the secret services. Abroad, Qiao Shi was nicknamed the Chinese Andropov, a reference to the former head of the KGB who had become a reformer in the USSR and catapulted Mikhail Gorbachev to power in 1987. For the old Chinese guard, this appellation was hardly a compliment, given that 1992 saw the implosion of the USSR, the dismantling of the KGB, and the collapse of the communist party’s power. Faced with a post-Tiananmen situation in which the dynamic of reform seemed to have stalled, Qiao Shi—who had been genuinely ambivalent about Tiananmen—wanted to give greater weight to the role of parliament and, concomitantly, to reduce the influence of the CCP.

This debate was made more challenging in the early 1990s, when the leadership established something of a personality cult around Deng Xiaoping and his achievements, using him as a cover to advance their own agenda. Developments in Poland had further coloured Zhongnanhai opinion against the relative reformist Qiao. Everything Deng Xiaoping obsessively feared was contained in a single word: Solidarnos sc c. After all the upheaval in the USSR and China, the Solidarity movement was Deng’s nightmare come true: the underground movement led by Lech Wałęsa was supported not only by the majority of Poles, but also by confederations of international unions, Pope John Paul II’s Vatican, liberal intellectuals everywhere, and the CIA.  It forced the Polish communist party to negotiate and then give up power in 1989.16 And all this had taken place with almost no violence.

Jiang Zeming understood only too well what had so concerned his mentor. In the 1990s, China’s strategy of openness to the world—including a cordial commercial agreement with the United States—was accompanied by major crackdowns on crime and dissent, waged by Tao Siju, the Gonganbu minister; his wife, Chen Fanfang, was head of the Gonganbu’s 1st Bureau. In 1991, Eric Meyer—a Beijing-based journalist and former correspondent for, amongst others, the Brussels newspaper Le Soir and the French radio station France Inter—wrote an article about this crackdown: “Tao Siju announced the establishment of ‘intervention brigades’, capable of sniffing out in advance any planned sabotage or demonstration,” Meyer explained.

However, on November 13, Public Security News published a demand for an increase in both equipment and people for domestic and foreign espionage purposes. This might seem extreme, even bizarre, given that Beijing was already teeming with spies and informers in every shop and on every street corner, who trailed for the slightest reason any passing stranger, whether student or businessman, and any Chinese person they might speak to.

… According to the Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post, China has triggered a huge expansion of its secret troops installed in its embassies abroad, undercover as diplomats or journalists, including in the United States and the USSR.

… Which all suggests two things: one, that espionage remains today one of the most solid pillars for guaranteeing the survival of this dictatorial regime, and two, that China is willing to pay for all this work, lavishly, and seemingly without limit.17

Although they had been undercover together in Shanghai in 1949, Jiang Zemin and Qiao Shi had never liked each other. Qiao had a better reputation within the party and seemed to delight in the fact that Jiang had been general secretary during the events of June 1989. There was a popular joke at the time: “When the course of the river drops (Jiang), the great stone gains in height (Qiao Shi).” Zhongnanhai had used Qiao Shi to organize the hunt for dissidents, but this danger had faded over the years. Now Jiang and his Shanghai clique thought they could push him out, with the help of old conservatives anxious at the idea of a new reformist project emerging.

As we know, they were ultimately successful in robbing Qiao of the security portfolio, after the 14th Congress in 1992. But he would not be got rid of with a single backhand swipe. As well as becoming head of the National People’s Congress, he managed to maintain control of his invisible web of relationships—his touming guanxi—within the world of intelligence. He also manoeuvred some of his men into key posts, such as Wei Jianxing, now in charge of security issues, who also took over the Party Discipline Commission in 1992. There was also the Qiao loyalist Ren Jianxin, secretary of the political-legal commission that oversaw intelligence and judicial affairs. The commission’s two deputies were Luo Gan and Jia Chunwang, head of the Guoanbu.

This led to a rather complicated cohabitation, bearing in mind the struggle between Luo Gan and Qiao Shi in the wake of Tiananmen for control of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), then estimated at 800,000 men, which passed from the administrative supervision of the Gonganbu to the Central Military Commission. Jiang took over leadership of the CMC after Deng Xiaoping’s death in 1997,18 and needed to promote the rise of his own men, most of whom were linked in some way to the Shanghai clique. The most important of these men was Zeng Qinghong, whose qualities were not dissimilar to those of Qiao Shi, and who had been assigned to set up a security council.

Zeng, a Hakka from Shanghai, had come to Beijing with Jiang Zemin, for whom he worked as a private secretary at the time of Tiananmen. He was the son of Deng Lujin, a heroine of the Long March, and General Zeng Shan, who had been the leader of the first Chinese soviet in Jiangxi and at Kang Sheng’s side when he arrived in Yan’an from Moscow in 1937.19

Between 1993 and 1997, Zeng was head of the CCP’s powerful General Affairs Department, within which an expansion was taking place of some functions traditionally dependent on the secretariat. This expansion needed to take into account various different factions. The department began by increasing its staff to 350 civil servants, employed in political research, economic policy, party archives and the personal security of the leadership.20

Like Mao, Jiang Zemin attached great importance to the Central Security Bureau and its regiments, reorganized after Tiananmen under the leadership of Yang Dezhong, who had been Deng Xiaoping’s bodyguard, and You Xigui, his personal minder from Shanghai, who ended up being promoted to general. You’s constant presence at Jiang’s side, especially on overseas trips, was a sign that he not only physically protected leaders, but also played the role of advisor and overall linchpin of political intelligence.

Another organization gaining momentum in the Deng–Jiang transition era, in terms of both intelligence and decision-making, was the Political Research Bureau (Zhengce yanjiushi), headed by Teng Wensheng, formerly a Diaochabu head; Teng had been responsible for running the new service since mid-June 1989, with Jiang’s elevation to the top job.21

In the Jiang Zeming era, a myriad of “working leadership groups” (gongzuo lingdao xiaozu) emerged to address strategic and security issues: Taiwanese affairs, “the upholding of social stability”, national security, and so on. Similarly, Zeng Qinghong restructured the Bureau for Foreign Affairs (Zhongyang Waishi). This body reported simultaneously to the government (the State Council) and the party, and was charged with defining the major axes of PRC diplomacy. The bureau was was also known by its English name, the Central Office for Foreign Affairs (COFA). It was no coincidence that, towards the end of the twentieth century, as China became increasingly prominent on the world stage, its organizations were adopting English titles. Some officials even found themselves having to reverse their names on business cards, putting their first name before their surname to “Americanize” their profile.

The COFA was not the only body to have overtaken the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in importance. It also collaborated with another political intelligence service, which had been founded back in the first days of the communist victory, and which increased in stature during the 1950s and 1960s under the aegis of Kang Sheng: the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee (Zhonglianbu), the ILD, originally modelled on the Soviet Comintern. We already know it from earlier chapters, and in the 1990s, under the guidance of its director Ms Li Shuzheng, it began to regain its stature.

Trained in communist youth movements in both Shanghai and later the USSR, Li had reached the top of the service over the course of twenty years. In the days of Mao, Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng, the ILD had established links with other Marxist-Leninist parties. In time, it broadened its reach to associate with traditional communist parties; in 1983, it sent the head of its Europe section, Cao Junjie, to the L’Humanité Festival, organized by the French Communist Party. With the collapse of communism across Europe in 1989, the ILD began to make contact with parties across the political spectrum, with the goal of understanding the political dynamics of different countries. Today, the ILD has a representative in some forty international embassies. Its work is parallel to, and often intersects with, that of the Guoanbu, and some officials move between the two for different assignments. Similarly, it collaborates with the party’s Investigation Bureau and the United Front Work Department.

In the manner of the Guoanbu, the ILD began setting up other cover associations, such as the China Association for International Understanding, which brings foreign academics over to China and houses them in the ILD-run Hotel Wanshou, in Beijing’s Haidian district. While the ILD is located in a large, modern building constructed during the Jiang Zemin era, its “research offices”—the heart of political intelligence—remain at 4 Fuxing Street, an old building that it shares with a security services publishing house, Contemporary World Publishers (Dangdai Shijie Chubanshe).

In recent years, Chinese leaders have sought to give the ILD new status by making its director a minister, and it is clear that there are multiple interwoven relationships and bridges between the various Chinese secret services. It is quite understandable that until very recently their counterespionage opponents—whether Western, Indian, Korean or Japanese—have had trouble compiling an authoritative Who’s Who of its special agents.

The “Black Horse”

Jiang Zemin was now on the attack. On 18  March 1998, after thirteen years of loyal service as head of the Guoanbu, Jia Chunwang was forced to give up the State Security ministership—though not without seizing a portfolio that was significantly weightier, at least in terms of staff numbers. He now became head of Public Security, with hundreds of thousands of police officers under him. He was to oversee the full range of missions assigned to the Gonganbu, from traffic control—at a time when car sales were exploding in China—to the management of the Chinese gulag, the laogai, partially co-administered by the Guoanbu, given its responsibility for spies and dissidents.22

Jia was replaced at the Guoanbu by the 56-year-old Xu Yongyue, who had a crewcut and high cheekbones, a snub nose, dark sunken eyes, deep red lips, and a high forehead that gave him the look of an intellectual. His horse-like chin befitted his animal in the Chinese zodiac. He was born in July 1942 in the Year of the Horse, in Zhenping, Henan province. His father’s given name for him was Yongyue, which means “eternal jumper”. It is hardly surprising that he was nicknamed the “Black Horse” (Heima).

In 1962, after two years of service in the PLA, Xu entered the Beijing School of Public Security at the age of twenty, and then later became a teacher in the school’s technical section. Having officially joined the party in 1972, he was appointed secretary within an office of the Academy of Sciences, a transfer that involved working in scientific intelligence.

In 1976, he became private secretary to the education minister, Zhou Rongxin, a friend of his father. It comes as no surprise to learn that his father, Xu Mingzhen, had a career as a secret agent, notably in the United Front Work Department and the Ministry of Defence, mainly working in Hong Kong and usually for missions against Taiwan. In 1992, six years before his son was made head of the Guoanbu, Old Xu was named Beijing’s secret envoy to the Taiwanese authorities, and sent to meet President Lee Teng-hui in Hong Kong to warm the relationship between the “two Chinas”.23

The younger Xu had earlier worked as secretary to Zhu Muzhi, the deputy director of propaganda in the CCP Central Committee (1976–82). There he had become acquainted with another important figure in the world of espionage: the extremely discreet Yu Wen, a deputy director and the wife of Qiao Shi, then coordinator of all the security services. Better still, Xu had been secretary to the head of the new Discipline Inspection Commission, the “Immortal” Chen Yun, in office from 1978.24 Deng Xiaoping had chosen Chen, who was both the revolution’s economist and co-founder of the Shanghai Teke in the 1920s, to lead the fight against corruption. Chen had also been Qiao Shi’s mentor.

In other words, Xu was, if not a foreign intelligence expert, then at least an experienced insider to lead Jiang Zemin’s Guoanbu. Before his promotion, he was the number two in Hebei province, at the beginning of what he believed was a political career. But he was stopped in his tracks, and the Taiwanese analysis of his appointment was astute:

Xu Yongyue’s leap to the post of Minister for State Security drew attention from all quarters. His successful entry into the central core of CCP power can be attributed to the following factors: 1) Xu had a strong background working in the public security system and had put in long years as secretary, to a range of CCP senior statesmen, who relied heavily on his services. In particular, during his term as Chen Yun’s confidential secretary he had an early opportunity to establish a personal rapport with Jiang Zemin in Shanghai. 2) In the work arranged for him as deputy secretary of the Hebei Provincial Party Committee and head of political science and law work after Chen Yun faded from the political scene in 1993, Xu won the approbation of the Party Central Committee for his steady, restrained, down-to-earth work style and very low profile with regard to the mass media. 3) China’s Ministry of State Security is in charge of secret service, espionage, and domestic and overseas intelligence work. It is the power that preserves the CCP’s dictatorship and has long been a key posting vied for by members of all factions. Jia Chunwang had already enjoyed a long tenure as Minister of State Security. Xu’s appointment to this weighty office and his inclusion among the members of the Central Committee Leading Group on Taiwan Work are an element of the CCP’s changing-of-the-guard plan for carrying its dictatorship forward into the next century.25

But, above all, Jiang Zemin needed a reliable man to reorganize the foreign intelligence services.

Xu’s overhaul of the Guoanbu

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, author of a rather hagiographic biography of Jiang Zemin, is nonetheless right when he explains that “Jiang quietly but radically expanded the Ministry of State Security, giving it broad powers to maintain public order and ferret out corruption, in addition to its stated roles in espionage and counterespionage. The Ministry’s mission required it to monitor (and spy on if necessary) ordinary citizens, Party members, government officials, and foreign nationals. It did not go unnoticed that by building up the [PAP] and the [Guoanbu], Jiang was setting up his own independent base of assertive (and potentially intrusive) power that was outside the ring of control maintained by the Beijing Party organization, run by the combative Chen Xitong, and by the PLA general staff, with whom he was still not very close.”26

Before expanding the prerogatives of the Guoanbu—which had played an important role during the Hong Kong handover the previous year, and had ramped up its operations against Taiwan and the rest of Asia, the new boss had to clean up the Augean stables. There was the dirty business of CICIR leader Qiu Guanghui’s gambling, and the allied services that Jiang Zemin wanted to reclaim, such as the United Front Work Department. Many of the UFWD’s agents carried out intelligence missions abroad, using cover provided by the Foreign Affairs Bureau within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These operatives found themselves lodged in embassies alongside Guoanbu spies. In July 1998, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji—like Jiang Zemin, a former mayor of Shanghai—revealed that the UFWD had been importing tens of thousands of cars, and had pocketed more than 2 billion yuan that had been shared between various leaders of the party and the army.

A purge was needed, along with an internal clean-up within the Guoanbu—in other words, the “deprivatization” of the secret service. In fact, during a Politburo meeting in July 1998, Jiang Zemin gave the green light for the process of separating the commercial enterprises then run by the police, the army and the security services. In the previous decade, when Deng Xiaoping had instructed the Chinese to make money, the trend had been both the privatization of the state sector, and the setting up of commercial enterprises dependent on public bodies. These initiatives, set in motion in tandem with the “socialist market economy”, were at the origin of multiple scandals and a wide variety of corruption cases.

Meanwhile, those within Guoanbu had to be seen to be irreproachable. Qiu, who had gambled away secret service funds, was an example of the serious corruption that needed to be wiped out. A progress report presented to the new boss, Xu Yongyue, declared that the service must dispose of 112 companies, and cut ties with 144 more. A handful were allowed to remain attached to the service, but were to be duly accredited with the state registration chambers. In the following year, 110 of the 112 companies were abandoned.

This was not easy, for many directors of overseas and underground operations complained that they would be deprived of “necessary channels for professional security work”—in other words, many secret agents would lose their cover, both in China and abroad.27 However, in the context of the fight against corruption, the service heads considered it vital that the secret services rebuild their image, in accordance with the party line. Under Xu, a mini decoupling committee was set up, with the deputy minister Ding Renlin, the Guoanbu’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection secretary, Yu Hongbao, and Liu Yiping, a deputy minister and head of corporate affairs. Under their leadership, a “rectification committee” was set up, with branches in all thirty-one of the Guoanbu’s provincial offices.

The Guoanbu needed to lead by example, taking part in committees overseeing the “decoupling” of inter-administrations.28 In practice, this meant that, in the Jiang era at the turn of the century, the Guoanbu arrogated to itself the lion’s share of internal security, even though it had been originally created with the specific purpose of carrying out espionage operations abroad and conducting foreign counterintelligence.

During a video conference with the heads of the regional offices, Xu Yongyue persuaded his services to establish memoranda on “decoupling” operations. The question was which companies should be given up and which should be kept, and under what form of management. The Guoanbu needed to decide whether to close them down completely, or hand over their administration to local authorities or central government, in general the Economic and Trade Commission.

The operation was completed in June 1999. The Guoanbu “confidentiality committee” sent a directive to all sectors asking them to “guarantee confidentiality while the rectification of businesses was underway”. It was imperative to avoid identification through overly curious or indiscreet “hostile forces”—either those businesses the Guoanbu had decided to keep under its direct control, or those that remained allied to the Guoanbu for the purposes of carrying out espionage abroad.

Tens of thousands of undercover agents abroad were thus posted to other welcoming business fronts with an established cover. The outcome of this highly original “decoupling” operation was that, although Xu was indeed pursuing reform of his services, he was obliged to ask Beijing to compensate for the loss of his private enterprises with substantial budgetary increases—if, that is, China was to continue to expand its intelligence community, which was certainly the goal of the globally ambitious Jiang era. In the second half of the 1990s, Xu validated the reshaping of his service along the lines shown in Appendix VIII, which I was able to draw up with the help of Chinese open sources and with many contributions from men and women—in the West, Japan and even the PRC—who knew details about its structure.

Of all the local offices, the Beijing office at 14 Dongchang’an Avenue was obviously the best known, especially since the Guoanbu was sharing its offices with the Gonganbu. Not only was this Beijing bureau in charge of controlling the operations in the capital itself, but it also oversaw international operations and kept an eye on expat communities—diplomats, journalists, businessmen—under the direction of Li Yintang, distant successor of the CIA defector Yu Zhensan. Like all the offices in major cities, it had to collaborate with another major administration, the Bureau of State Secrets, which was responsible for both the classification of state secrets, and the prevention of any leaks via contact with foreigners (Li tong waiguo), long prohibited but now less of an issue given the economic expansion and increase in trade underway in the 1990s.

MI6’s former Beijing head of station, Nigel Inkster has explained that intelligence-gathering abroad is now largely dealt with by the regional State Security Offices (Guoanju and Guoanting): “Most of the foreign-intelligence collection within the [Guoanbu] is conducted by the State Security Bureaus … The Shanghai [bureau] carries out collection against the United States and its main Western allies; the neighbouring Zhejiang [bureau] against northern Europe; the Qingdao [bureau] against Japan and the Koreas; the Guangzhou [bureau] against Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia; and the Beijing [bureau] against Eastern Europe and Russia.”29

Playing for high stakes in Afghanistan

Everything seems to be a state secret in the People’s Republic of China. Every year, alarming reports by Amnesty International, China Watch and Reporters Without Borders list the number of journalists who have been expelled or arrested. Yet, at the same time, when everything is stamped “top secret”, leaks are inevitable.

Take a sunny spring Sunday morning in Beijing’s Panjiayuan flea market, during my 2007 trip to research this book. Nothing could be more enjoyable than rummaging around the market’s bookstalls. They attract almost no tourists, since all the books are in Chinese. Sellers would fall over themselves trying to sell me books of photos, or magazines with pictures of scantily dressed Chinese girls. This particular Sunday, they showed no surprise when I expressed interest in what ought not to have concerned me in the slightest: the history of the CCP, the Lin Biao plot of the early 1970s, the mysteries of Hu Yaobang’s rise and fall, the Gang of Four, salacious stories about Madame Mao or Jiang Zemin’s Shanghai clique. The booksellers were unsuspecting because such stories fascinate plenty of readers, who lap up revelations that confirm or contradict the many rumours, which often turn out to be extremely precise and accurate. Imagine my excitement when, next to a stack of dusty old pamphlets by Mao, I came upon a 240-page document, with a stamp on its top right-hand corner: 秘密—Mimi, meaning “secret”.

The toothless old woman to whom I handed over 20 yuan was so happy that she also tried to sell me the pile of Chairman Mao’s writings: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People; Rectify the Party’s Style of Work; Against the Cult of the Book, and the rest. But I was very happy with my top-secret document, “Collection of World Strategic Reference Materials of the 4th Bureau”, published jointly by military intelligence—the PLA2—and the Central Military Commission’s Office of International Military Cooperation.

This text, which I sent ahead to France in order to avoid having it on me when I left the country, had a markedly historical flavour. Published internally by the PLA General Staff in March 1983, it dealt with current news topics of the time: the Falklands War, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These reports from the PLA2 also covered technical and tactical capacity—for example, the use of Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan—and were used for training officers. They also drew on reports, translated into Chinese, by American and Soviet experts.

Above all, the document made clear the extent to which, since the war in Afghanistan (1979–89), Chinese military intelligence had grown beyond its traditional theatres in the Far East and Asia. The situation in Afghanistan took a singular turn under Jiang Zemin with the victory of the Taliban and the entrenchment of al-Qaeda, a major destabilizing factor in the region—and the PRC had certainly had a hand in these developments. Not only did it share a 75-kilometre border with Afghanistan, but in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion in late 1979, the Chinese—at the request of the Americans—had taken a major role in the arming, training and financing of the Afghan Mujahedin. They continue to support the Taliban today, hoping to play an important role in ending the long-running conflict.30

The armaments supplied by Beijing had offered the Taliban a distinct advantage against the invading Soviets: the Simonov machine guns and Kalashnikov assault rifles cloned by the Chinese used the same ammunition as the Soviet military. This meant that, if a group of Afghan underground fighters managed to steal weapons from Soviet troops, they would be able to use them. But the real prizes were the Chinese-made 107mm multiple rocket launchers that Beijing gave the Muhajedin at the Americans’ request. The central location of aid to the Afghan resistance was in Peshawar, where the CIA and the Chinese services had weapons depots. Chinese advisors were also present in the Yasin region, while logistics operations were overseen by the Air Force general Zhang Tingfa.

An ideological problem had overshadowed Beijing’s support, but Deng Xiaoping and his team were pragmatic. They would have preferred not to abandon Afghanistan’s pro-China communist organizations, such as Shoaleye Djawid (Eternal Flame) or Sorha (The Reds), but the traditionalist warlords did not distinguish between these Marxist-Leninists and those supported by Moscow. All were secularists and atheists—infidels—and all were to be liquidated. Besides, romanticism was not the strong point of Chinese diplomacy. In the art of war, which they had had no small part in inventing, the Chinese understood that a wise ruler builds alliances with strong warlords. Thus, in 1980, the Diaochabu and the PLA2 backed a warlord named Rahmakoul, the general of a small army at the eastern end of the long Wakhan corridor, a strip of Afghan territory wedged between the USSR, China, Pakistan and India.

Similarly, it was easier to supply arms to these underground fighters than to secure the logistics of Maoist groups seeking to mount attacks in Kabul. Fundamentalist Islamist resistance leaders, like the fierce and increasingly powerful Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, benefited from this. Beijing was caught in a paradox: the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) of Hekmatyar, jihadist hero and future ally of the Taliban, was liquidating pro-Chinese groups such as the Afghanistan Liberation Organization (Sazman-i Rihayi Afghanistan). ALO fighters were murdered in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. In November 1986, Dr  Faiz Ahmad, founder and leader of the organization, was betrayed by a double agent and handed over to Hezb-i-Islami, along with several of his deputies.

Legend has it that, in August 1980, the PLA’s engineering troops established an arms delivery route to guerrillas in the north of the country via the Karakorum Highway, the old Silk Road. In fact, the vast majority of Chinese weapons were airlifted to Islamabad, an operation overseen by the air general Zhang Tingfa, who was also first party secretary in the Air Force, and visited the area as early as 1979. Thousands of mules, the “strategic animals” of the Mujahedin, did take the Karakorum Highway. There was also talk of creating a Mujahedin office, to be set up jointly by Saudi Arabian and Chinese services.

The campaign against the Soviet invaders, backed by Beijing, provoked an inevitable response from the KGB, which organized diversionary operations in Afghanistan, the USSR and Xinjiang, far-west China, where they were carried out by Tajiks recruited in East Turkestan, which had been annexed by the PRC.  Chinese border guards frequently arrested “infiltrated Soviet agents”.

The ethnic revitalization plan waged against the centralized power of Beijing was even described in a 1979 book by Victor Louis, an extraordinary Russian-born journalist and expert on Soviet disinformation, who wrote for the Western press, including the Evening News and the Sunday Express. He was known to have close links to the KGB.  In The Coming Decline of the Chinese Empire, Louis predicted the implosion of the People’s Republic of China following uprisings by minorities like the Tajiks and the Uyghurs.

Mao’s grandson, secret agent

In October 1983, General Eugene F.  Tighe of the US Defense Intelligence Agency was sent to Beijing by President Ronald Reagan for talks with General Huang Zhengji, then deputy director of the PLA2. On the agenda were the practical aspects of operations to supply weapons to Afghan partisans.

Until 1984, the Chinese had been the Mujahedin’s main suppliers; after that, it was the CIA and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Everything always went through the embassies. Mohammad Yousaf, head of the ISI’s Afghan Office, recounted this anecdote: “I never visited the US embassy; I never attended diplomatic functions or formal military occasions. The only exception was with the Chinese. Every year General Akhtar [Abdul Rehman Khan, head of the ISI] and I would go to the Chinese embassy for dinner after the official signing of the arms protocol, whereby China agreed to supply us with specified types of quantities of weapons and ammunition for the Mujahideen. This was typical Chinese. They always insisted on absolute accuracy in all their dealings. I remember the colossal fuss that was made, involving high-ranking embassy officials, when just one small box of ammunition among thousands went astray. We later recovered it, but very politely they had insisted we move heaven and earth to do so. What a contrast to everybody else.”31

Naturally, the Chinese were seizing the opportunity to try and sell their equipment. The Afghan battlefield served as a showcase for newly created, outward-looking services like COSTIND.  But, despite pressure from their US “comrades”, the Chinese failed to sell their Red Arrow laser-guided portable missiles to the Pakistani army, which found them impractical. In 1985, the Pakistanis had the idea of suggesting that the Chinese transform their multiple rocket launchers (MBRLs), which were unfeasibly heavy, into portable ones (SBRLs). “We had already made this change at the request of the PLA, but by now it was considered an obsolete weapon,” the Chinese military attaché in Islamabad, Colonel Zhou Jiang, told me. Nonetheless, 500 were ordered and sent to Rawalpindi, followed by another thousand in 1987. “This weapon greatly increased our ability to target Kabul,” General Akhtar recalled.

What the head of the ISI did not say—and perhaps did not even know—was that there was an unusual officer in the military intelligence mission in Islamabad at this time. Deputy military attaché Major Kong Jining was none other than Mao Zedong’s grandson, as I discovered and revealed in 2001 in the French magazine Le Point. This choice of envoy—the son of one of Mao’s few children to have survived both the revolution and the Chairman’s general lack of interest in his offspring—indicates just how important Beijing perceived its role in Afghanistan to be.

In 1936, He Zizhen, Mao’s second wife, gave birth to a daughter named Li Min. This was after the Long March, and before she was dispatched to the USSR so that her place could be ceded to Jiang Qing. Nine years later, Li Min was sent back to China, where she was brought up by Jiang Qing alongside Jiang’s own daughter with Mao, Li Na. Her mother He Zizhen, who was placed in a psychiatric asylum by Stalin, was allowed to return to China after the communist victory, on condition that she undergo electroshock therapy in Shanghai.

After gaining a science degree, Li Min worked in the laboratories that were developing the atomic bomb. Later, she worked at COSTIND under Nie Rongzhen, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. There she met a general’s son called Kong Linghua. They married in 1959 and had two children: Kong Jining, born in 1962, and his younger sister Kong Dongmei. As children, they used to visit their grandfather Mao at the Zhongnanhai government complex. They would put on little Red Guard uniforms and chant their grandfather’s sayings. The fall of the Gang of the Four was a far from glorious moment: Li Min was arrested, and she denounced her stepmother and guardian Jiang Qing as a counter-revolutionary. This allowed her to rejoin the privileged elite under Deng Xiaoping, while her husband, General Kong, was appointed head of PLA propaganda.

At twenty-one, their son Kong Jining went to Nanjing to study English with the other trainee cadres at the PLA’s Institute of International Relations, where future special agents were trained. This was how the young Major Kong came to meet his baptism of fire in the late 1980s, when he was sent to Pakistan as assistant to the military attaché, helping supply weapons to the Mujahedin in liaison with the ISI.32

Ironically, it was the same teams of Chinese military intelligence agents—around 300 of them, according to the CIA—who later reversed the process with Pakistan’s help, recuperating and sending back to China material that had originally been delivered to the Mujahedin, such as the Stinger portable air-to-air missile.33

According to US sources, there was little to be proud of in the final episode of Chinese aid to Afghanistan, the Battle of Jalalabad. This siege of the pro-government garrison by Islamist guerrillas, which lasted from March to June 1989, was a failure for the anti-Soviet forces. In addition to the rebel forces’ poor strategy, the refusal of the Chinese to supply ammunition or help with logistics played a pivotal role.

A US source told me at the time that Beijing was sending a clear sign to Washington: it was at this time, in the midst of the Tiananmen protests, that the American embassy and CIA decided to grant asylum to Professor Fang Lizhi, and Deng Xiaoping was not happy about it. But this U-turn in Afghanistan also reflected the fact that Moscow’s simultaneous thaw in relations with both Beijing and Washington was changing the rules of engagement. Not long afterwards, as we shall see, it would lead to the beginning of a close collaboration between the Chinese secret services and the KGB and, later on, the new Russian organs of intelligence—against the Americans and NATO.

When the Taliban took power in Kabul, however, the Chinese special services were still in the front row. In 2000, agents of the Guoanbu and its CICIR paid regular visits to Afghanistan’s fundamentalist leadership. The following year, in March 2001, the large Chinese manufacturer Huawei installed communications systems in Kabul and Kandahar, just as it had in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Even more extraordinary, after the 9/11 attack on New York’s World Trade Center that autumn, and the subsequent US offensive in Afghanistan, Beijing’s secret services were able to recover an American missile thanks to their now besieged Taliban peers. It was duly sent to Beijing to be taken apart and analyzed.

Chinese military intelligence even managed to infiltrate Uyghur secret agents into the small Islamist group in Xinjiang led by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—a few of whom were killed or captured by the Americans and interned in Guantanamo Bay as terrorists. Commandos of the NATO-led ISAF—the International Security Assistance Force, which had been in Afghanistan since the beginning of 2002—frequently found Chinese-made weapons in the storerooms of the al-Qaeda members they were hunting. In May 2007, an ISAF helicopter was shot down by the new HN-5 portable anti-aircraft missile launcher—Hong Ying (Seabird)—which the Chinese had sent via Iran to both the Taliban and the Iraqi Shiite resistance.

In June 2006, Afghan President Hamid Karzai went to Beijing and gave a speech at the China Institute of International Studies, in which he implored the Chinese to step up in the common fight against terrorism. Professor Li Wei, the Guoanbu’s terrorism advisor, could only approve—as long as he ignored the fact that it was the Chinese, even more than the Americans, who had equipped and helped both the Taliban and future al-Qaeda members among the Muhajedin, as Jiang Zemin’s global secret services grew and grew.