8
CHINA AND RUSSIA VS AMERICA
Just before midnight on 7 May 1999, the US conducted a series of test strikes on real targets using JDAM precision-guided missiles,1 guided by GPS. Since 24 March, NATO had been bombing Belgrade—its first offensive in half a century of existence. The pretext was aiding the province of Kosovo in its defence against the Serbs, and supporting its separatist paramilitary organization, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Three of the five missiles dropped by B-2 bombers hit the Chinese embassy, in the Neo Beograd municipality. In the smoking rubble, about thirty Chinese lay wounded. Three people were killed; they were, officially, journalists reporting on the war between NATO and Serbian forces: Shao Yunhuan, 48, attached to the Xinhua News Agency, and Xu Xinghu, 29, and his wife Zhu Ying, 27, both correspondents for Enlightenment Daily (Guangming Ribao).
There was no doubt that the attack was in violation of international law. During the hours that followed, a decade after the massacre of students calling for democracy, demonstrations were held in Tiananmen Square. People carried placards with reproductions of Guernica, Picasso’s famous painting depicting the Nazi aerial bombardment of the Basque city during the Spanish Civil War, and slogans like “Down with American imperialism!” or “No, Clinton, we are not Monica!” A year on from the Lewinsky scandal, its shadow still hung over American politics.
In the White House, Clinton himself, overwhelmed by the escalating conflict, tried to reach President Jiang, who was refusing to take his calls and demanding a public apology. Was it really true that a certain Dr Folamour in the Pentagon had authorized the airstrike without the president’s knowledge? In his memoirs, Clinton reiterated the official explanation: that the CIA had inadvertently used an out-of-date map of Belgrade, which showed the embassy as an old Serbian building used for military purposes. The embassy building, finished only three years earlier, appeared to have been rather easily overlooked.
A week passed. On 14 May, the US president finally managed to talk to Jiang Zemin: “I apologized again and told him I was sure he didn’t believe I would knowingly attack his embassy. Jiang replied that he knew I wouldn’t do that, but said he did believe that there were people in the Pentagon or the CIA who didn’t favor my outreach to China and could have rigged the maps intentionally to cause a rift between us. Jiang had a hard time believing that a nation as technologically advanced as we were could make such a mistake. I had a hard time believing it, too, but that’s what happened.”2
It was a humiliating situation for Jiang Zemin. He had done everything he could to maintain a cordial relationship with the White House since Clinton had become president in 1993, including welcoming him on a state visit to China the previous year. In the upper echelons of the PLA, Jiang had come under a great deal of criticism for this stance. Now, Zhang Wannian, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, was expressing concerns—shared by several other generals—about Zhongnanhai’s soft response to what had happened in Kosovo. But members of the Politburo Standing Committee asked General Zhang to allow cooler heads to prevail within the ruling circle of the PLA. A centrist position was presented on television by Jiang Zemin’s heir apparent, Hu Jintao.
Hu expressed the government’s anger, while at the same time threatening those who might seek to exploit the situation by encouraging rioting during anti-American demonstrations. It would serve no one’s interests to see a rerun of Tiananmen, or, a more recent example, the 25 April demonstration by the Buddhist-Taoist Falun Gong movement, which had paralyzed the centre of Beijing with a peaceful siege of Zhongnanhai, residence of the ruling elite. The situation was complicated by the fact that the Falun Gong leader, Li Hongzhi, had gone to live in the United States, and Chinese intelligence claimed he was part of a CIA conspiracy.
General Zhang took this opportunity to develop his concept of the “New World War”. He shared the opinion of the securocrats, who were using the CIA as a punching bag in their analysis of the Belgrade bombing, claiming that:
1. Senior NATO generals gave the order to strike.
2. Without seeking the agreement of the other NATO countries, the United States and Great Britain gave the green light to the attack in order to test both the Chinese government and the public reaction.
3. The CIA missile attack was part of a broader long-term campaign of hostility as part of its anti-communist campaign.
4. The CIA used the excuse of ‘out of date maps’ to conceal its real motives for the attack.
5. The CIA took advantage of this so-called ‘accidental bombing’ to pressure the US government and Congress to increase its budget.3
Meanwhile, General Chi Haotian, who had ordered the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and was now defence minister, outlined a different five-point list—the “five preparations” constituting the necessary response to this deliberate US attack. The Chinese needed to:
1. Win the hi-tech war;
2. Win via a blockade and a counter-blockade in the Taiwan Strait;
3. Wage a modern war following a military provocation by the US-Japan alliance;
4. Win a third regional world war launched by the United States and NATO against China and other countries;
5. Successfully protect China against a US-led nuclear offensive.
It was easy enough to say. But everyone knew that the Chinese army was a colossus with feet of clay. Faced with US technology, the PLA would be as paralyzed as the ancient Terracotta Army. That was why the Belgrade coup had triggered such an earthquake, comparable to the humiliation twenty years earlier when the PLA had been routed by Vietnamese forces.
Jiang Zemin had no desire to add fuel to the fire. He needed first to find out what had really happened in Belgrade. Various interpretations were possible, according to intelligence conveyed to Zhongnanhai. The Chinese special services, represented in Washington by General Chen Kaizeng—former military attaché in London and future head of military intelligence—believed that the purpose of the Kosovo war in general (1998–9) was to divert attention away from the Lewinsky affair, and that the embassy attack may well have been a genuine blunder. Jiang Zemin, the object of constant rumour-mongering regarding his many mistresses—including the beautiful singer Song Zuying—would certainly have understood. However, the total destruction of a foreign embassy demanded another explanation, perhaps a little less far-fetched and a little more rational.
Within an hour of the bombing, Jiang had convened the Standing Committee of the Politburo, to whom he advocated a moderate response to the United States. This contrasted with his thundering Kremlin counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, who—between gulps of vodka—unleashed the idea of a great Sino-Russian military alliance against NATO. But Jiang had every reason to avoid fanning the flames. As Beijing was getting ready to join the World Trade Organization, China and America had more to gain from commercial cooperation than from triggering a new Cold War.
Mission Save Milos sevic c
Behind this realpolitik, there were also technical reasons for maintaining a conciliatory attitude. General Xiong Guangkai, who was close to Jiang and responsible for the PLA intelligence services, and his subordinate General Luo Yudong, head of the PLA2, briefed the country’s seven leaders.4 He explained that the Chinese embassy had actually been home to several top-secret joint Sino-Serbian operations, which NATO had uncovered. This collaboration between Belgrade and Beijing dated back almost two decades to 1977, when Belgrade service manager Stane Dolanc had accompanied Tito, president of the Yugoslav Federation, to Beijing. We know what happened five years later in 1983, just as the Guoanbu was being set up: Dolanc welcomed the deputy minister of Chinese security on a visit to Yugoslavia whose purpose was to strengthen the Chinese regional intelligence bases in Belgrade and Bucharest, Romania.
After Tito’s death and the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation, the Guoanbu had intensified its collaboration with the Serbian services. In November 1997, Serbian leader Slobodan Milos sevic c and Jovica Stanis sic c, head of the SDB service (Sluz zba drz zavne bezbednosti), had made a visit to Beijing.5 But it was principally military intelligence that was affected by the embassy bombing. Among the most seriously wounded was the military attaché Colonel Ren Baokai, in charge of liaising with the Serbian army and in particular with General Branko Krga’s military intelligence service, the Vojna obaves sajna sluz zba (VOS). The embassy wing where Colonel Baokai’s office was located was one of the targets of the radio-controlled bomb, as the Chinese protested to their central command in a dispatch intercepted by the Echelon network, run by the US with the help of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. There was a good reason for this targeting: the wing housed a large system for eavesdropping and broadcasting secure signals. Not only did the Chinese track missiles in order to study what countermeasures might be feasible, but the radio system also enabled the Serbian army to track the missiles’ communications and even to guide some of their operations. NATO’s wiretapping system uncovered this on 23 April, when an air attack intended to strike Milos sevic c interrupted shortwave broadcasts to the Serbian army. (These resumed some time later—from the Chinese embassy.)
“According to my sources, the Yugoslav army was using the Chinese embassy’s antennae to broadcast their own shortwave messages,” explained Milos s Vasic c, a correspondent in Belgrade for Vreme magazine, who has studied the case. “They fired hundreds of metres of coaxial cable from their transmitter, which was located in another building in the neighbourhood. The Chinese had been repeatedly warned to stop broadcasting these messages, but they continued, which is why they were bombed. The same sources claimed that the embassy was housing the main base of Chinese intelligence, which meant that the Americans were able to kill two birds with one stone.”6
Even as the ashes of the journalists killed were being repatriated to Beijing, the Chinese secret services remained focused. Ten days later, Echelon again intercepted communications between the Guoanbu headquarters, headed by Xu Yongyue in Beijing, and what remained of its intelligence base in Yugoslavia. Their contents were summarized in a report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency: “Chinese embassy personnel in Belgrade were instructed … to collect missile fragments from the bombed embassy building and send them back to China, probably aboard the aircraft chartered to evacuate injured embassy personnel.”7
In addition, the Americans obtained evidence that this collaboration between the Chinese and the Serbians had been negotiated by Milos sevic c’s wife, Mira Markovic c. After a trip to China in 1990, she had openly expressed her admiration for the Chinese system, and in particular the way in which the Tiananmen movement had been so effectively crushed. Now, at the instigation of former prime minister Li Peng and his deputy Luo Gan, the Chinese secret services even drew up a plan to whisk the Milos sevic cs out of the country and grant them asylum, as they had done for the Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk in 1979. (The reader may recall that the attempt in 1989 to do the same for the Romanian Ceauses scus had failed.) Plans for the operation to rescue the Milos sevic cs had been in place since November 1998 between the Guoanbu and the SDB, whose new head, Radomir Markovic c, was a friend of the Milos sevic cs’ son Marko, who also hoped to find refuge in China.
History, however, decreed otherwise; Slobodan Milos sevic c was indicted in absentia by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague in May 1999, and arrested two years later. He died in prison in 2006 before the trial ended. Rumour has it that his wife tried to reach China before settling in Russia. Her son, Marko, showed up at Beijing airport on 9 October 2000, travelling on a diplomatic passport, but was turned back because he didn’t have a visa.8
Other war criminals remained on the run.9 In 2007 a group of former Milos sevic c collaborators and friends of his widow Mira were spotted in Shanghai, according to sources with knowledge of the hunt for Serbian warlords. Among them were former police chief General Goran Radosavljevic c (“Guri”), wanted in Europe for war crimes, and his intelligence officer, Dragan Filipovic c (“Fitcha”), known for his book—heavily influenced by Chinese ideology—How to Fight the Globalist Stench. In China, I was told that Filipovic c had links with one of the Shaolin martial arts schools, the cradle of wushu and kung fu, where commandos from the Chinese special forces train.
The PLA2 in Serbia
Jiang Zemin’s Central Military Commission activated all its intelligence units and analysis centres to study the war in Kosovo. One might argue that this move was connected with the Chinese determination to build a GPS system to compete with NATO’s JDAM, which had guided the missiles that hit the embassy in Belgrade, by developing a relay system to cannibalize the European Galileo programme, temporarily joining up with it. But that was clearly not all.
The aim was to examine the details of the conflict and analyze the consequences of US strategy, tactics, use of weaponry and new technologies. The same study had been made in relation to the US-led Operation Desert Storm—the operation to retake Kuwait after its invasion by Iraq in 1991. The Kosovo war was a strategic turning point, and this in itself was a reason for reflection on the part of PLA strategists. It was up to the PLA2 to study all the latest technical innovations, such as the use of helicopters to infiltrate special forces into the Kosovo Liberation Army. The results of this study led the Chinese to begin setting up similar units in 2000.
The researchers concluded that what made this war innovative was the use of hi-tech weaponry. Tactical and strategic attacks were coordinated from a command centre far from the battlefield and the enemy defence perimeter. Missiles were accurately triggered at a distance of up to 12,000 kilometres from Kosovo, just as cruise missiles were guided from a distance of 800 kilometres, and bombers flew at high altitude without having their targets in their sights. The Chinese reports were clear: this was “the first war without vision”, a “contactless” war in which information systems and the control of airspace were determining factors.
In 1999, Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui were given permission to publish a book whose thesis would revolutionize the field of military strategy. Unrestricted Warfare drew on the experience of the wars in the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. Qiao and Wang argued that modern conflicts making heavy use of hi-tech weaponry were too costly for developing countries like the PRC. At the same time, Western democracies, under pressure of public opinion, no longer wanted to lose men in combat. This was a weakness that must be exploited, by developing new forms of urban guerrilla warfare that would sap the enemy’s willingness to fight. This strategy would involve both economic warfare and the computerized destruction of the enemy’s IT systems. These predictions were sufficiently influential to lead some US observers to suggest in 2001 that the Chinese colonels’ concept of asymmetrical warfare had given Osama bin Laden the idea of attacking the World Trade Center.10 Despite a certain reticence among some officers of the old guard, the PLA invited the two colonels to undertake a study on Kosovo based on their ideas.
Meanwhile, NATO strategists were conducting their own research: they believed that recent attacks, including the bombardment of its websites and those of the White House with spam, were allowing the PLA’s 3rd Department (the PLA3, in charge of communications) to test the Americans’ responsiveness in this new era of information technology warfare.11 In the aftermath of the NATO strikes on Yugoslavia and the destruction of Beijing’s embassy, the Chinese were questioning their own theory of a “world moving towards multipolarity”. Once again, the United States had shown that—in their eyes at least—they were still the world’s policemen.
Another consequence of the war was that General Xiong Guangkai set up a military technological research taskforce. On the political front, Jiang Zemin was particularly unhappy with the ultra-nationalist sentiments being expressed by many strategists affiliated with military think-tanks, but he was obliged to work with them. After a barrage of Chinese propaganda against “hegemonic American policies” and attacks on NATO’s role in the Kosovo crisis, the Politburo ordered its strategists to analyze why NATO was so openly aligned with Serbian and Russian positions.
The problem for the leadership was this: on the one hand they had re-established a relationship with the Russians and Serbs, but on the other, they were afraid that Kosovar independence would set a bad example. They were, of course, thinking of the thorny issues of Tibet and Xinjiang. “We must remember the words of the late Deng Xiaoping, who said that China must keep a low profile in any international affairs that do not pose a direct threat to its vital interests and national security,” concluded one report.
Officials drew a parallel with the Romanian revolution of 1989, when the Chinese services had wrongly predicted that Ceauses scu would retain his hold on power. Ten years later, in the summer of 1999, Jiang Zemin gave the green light for the creation of a new strategic think-tank, comparable to the White House National Security Council, which advises US presidents on national security and foreign policy matters.
Hu Jintao, who went on to become general secretary of the CCP in 2002, inaugurated this new Bureau of International Strategic Studies (Guoji zhanlüe yanjiushì), tasked with shaping strategy against the United States and NATO.12 To do this, the new service had to provide the CCP Central Committee, the State Council (or government) and the Central Military Commission with in-depth analyses of intelligence reports, which would then be used as the basis for making policy recommendations. Its director was Jiang Zemin’s protégé, Zeng Qinghong (director of the CCP’s General Affairs Bureau), and among his choice of advisors was, of course, General Xiong Guangkai, supported by several experts on NATO, including General Zhang Changtai, who would be appointed military attaché in Paris in 2006. With eighty analysts in three departments studying US defence affairs and European issues, as well as NATO itself, this new centre for intelligence analysis and forecasting had its headquarters at the Xishan Military Command Centre, which also housed the Guoanbu headquarters. There is no doubt that, during this period, one man in particular stood out for his versatility: General Xiong Guangkai, head of military intelligence.
General Xiong Guangkai, intelligence star
Busy as he was in June 1999, Xiong would certainly have been interested in the apparent suicide of the German Sinologist Violetta Zhang, detailed in the previous chapter. He was a distinguished Germanist and fluent German-speaker, who often travelled to Munich to take part in seminars on terrorism and other strategic issues.
The baby-faced Xiong, with his large glasses, profuse head of hair and bulging forehead, was born in the Nanchang capital of Jiangxi in March 1939, in the Year of the Rabbit. This zodiac animal is considered yin (dark), which contradicted his given name, Guangkai (“luminous project”). This horoscope sign, which as we shall see fascinated him, is located in the west, and is distinguished by its prudence and discretion along with a desire to impose its way independently on the way matters progress.13
There is a reason for mentioning the meaning of the names given to children according to ancient traditions of the movement of the stars, the structure of the family and the horoscope. Even in the era of GPS-guided missiles, such details have genuine significance in Chinese lives. It is also valuable to know that in communist mythology, Nanchang, where General Xiong was born, was the birthplace of the PLA, after a failed uprising led by Mao on 1 August 1927. Xiong bore on his uniform a crest for this date, “8–1” (Ba yi); the date of the uprising had been chosen because this is a lucky number. Its significance became even more marked when the date and time were chosen for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics: 8 August 2008 at 8pm.
After a long time spent on the benches of the Zhangjiakou (formerly Kalgan) Institute of Foreign Languages, Xiong Guangkai began his career as a translator and intelligence officer in East Germany, where he was posted from 1960 to 1967. Then, from 1974 to 1981, he was military attaché in West Germany. It was during these two periods, when he travelled a great deal around the two German republics, that he made many friends in the Warsaw Pact intelligence services. These friends included a young but experienced KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. Since this glorious era, when socialist regimes covered half of Europe, the two intelligence officers have remained in contact and regularly exchanged gifts to celebrate Russian and Chinese New Year.14
In 1982, Xiong joined the PLA2 General Intelligence Department under the command of General Wu Jinfa, and helped forge the new and reformed services of the Deng Xiaoping era. He was involved in the surprising Sino-American collaboration against the Soviets in the last years of the USSR—the joint interception of Soviet communications, and the provision of military support to the Afghan resistance.
In 1988, Xiong had taken over the leadership of the PLA2. Under him it remained responsible for military intelligence, while the PLA3, then led by General Shi Quan, dealt with signals intelligence (SIGINT) and other missions that were part of the information technology war. For this reason the PLA3 was also known as the Communications Department (Tongxin Bu), a sector it shared with the PLA4 (Xibu), in charge of electronic warfare (electronic countermeasures and radars, also called Dianzi Duikang Leida Bu).15
As we have seen, within the structure of the PLA, a deputy army chief of staff was named overall head of the various special departments; in Xiong’s time, this was General Xu Xin. Xu had close links with President Yang Shangkun and his brother, General Yang Baibing, head of the PLA’s General Political Department, and he had involved the military intelligence apparatus in the suppression of the Tiananmen protests in 1989. Xiong had showed no qualms about infiltrating the democratic movement in many different ways. Three years later, in November 1992, he took over from Xu Xin as deputy chief of staff, thus becoming head of the vast military intelligence conglomerate. He appointed a Red Prince in his place at the PLA2: General Ji Shengde, son of Ji Pengfei.16
Xiong was one of the few officer generals to have climbed, rung by rung, to the very top of the military intelligence career ladder. In 2007 he went on to play a major role as head of the China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS), a PLA2 think-tank. He experienced one major career setback, when he unsuccessfully lobbied for Jiang Zemin to name him Guoanbu minister, which was deemed impossible: it was felt in the upper echelons of the service that he risked bringing an overly political tone to a ministry trying to maintain some neutrality in the struggle between political factions. Some felt that Xiong was using his trips abroad for his own personal publicity, in order to increase his standing within China itself. This was suggested in the American Defense Intelligence Agency’s highly detailed dossier on him (its author also noted that he had two daughters with his charming wife Shou Ruili, an aeronautic engineer allergic to seafood).
At the time of the Belgrade affair in 1999, 2,000 analysts were employed on Bei Andeli Street, north of Beijing. From here, a daily intelligence bulletin instituted by Xiong was distributed to the top brass of the army, the government and the party. Hundreds of analysts were also working independently of the PLA2. Every ten days, the CIISS published an internal newsletter about the “movements of foreign troops” (Waijun dongtai). This might cover the Mexican army or the French navy, though it naturally tended to focus on the large regional armies of Asia. This secret document was sent to all PLA departments. During Xiong’s leadership, it was Colonel Chen Xiaogong who managed the information base. Chen rose from intelligence strategist to military attaché in the United States, and then head of the PLA2. In the summer of 2007, he was named overall head of all the military special services.
Xiong Guangkai had an unusual and rather remarkable profile; he became a kind of itinerant super-diplomat for the PLA and was in contact with all the major foreign military representatives—American, Russian, French, British, German—and even international policymakers. As overall head of military intelligence, an ambassador for the army, and a sales representative for the arms industry, he frequently travelled to America and Europe, as well as consolidating relationships and fostering arms-trading agreements with South Africa, Syria and North Korea, where he knew Kwon Hui-Gyong, former ambassador to the USSR and head of the Research Department for External Intelligence.
In fact, some strategists were suspicious of the beliefs that lay beneath General Xiong’s moderate and jovial appearance. In 1995 he threatened the Clinton administration after the US president expressed interest not only in making a state visit to Taiwan, but also in inviting the Taiwanese president, Lee Teng-hui, to the White House. Xiong warned the Americans of the “explosive” consequences of such a position. Challenged in the press, he claimed that he was merely quoting Deng Xiaoping—by then 91 years old—who had been intensely focused for twenty years on the return of Hong Kong to China: “The status of Taiwan is at the crux of Chinese–US relations. If this question is not handled properly, the result could be very explosive!”
In 1996, at the height of the Taiwan Straits crisis, when the PLA was testing new missiles, Jiang Zemin successfully defused the situation by sending an ageing secret agent, Xu Mingzhen—father of the Guoanbu chief Xu Yongyue—to meet with the Taiwanese president on a visit to Hong Kong. The meeting was encouraged by the Hakka networks, to which both Lee Teng-hui and Deng Xiaoping belonged.
In December 1997, after Deng’s death and the handover of Hong Kong, Xiong Guangkai became—like his civilian counterpart Xu Yongyue—advisor to the Central Leading Group for Taiwan Affairs, chaired by Jiang Zemin, which was engineering a hardline strategy for bringing about the annexation of Taiwan. There were now 1,328 nuclear strategic missiles of the 2nd Artillery permanently aimed at the rebel island.
***
Considering the immense size of the PLA—2.2 million men—it was hardly surprising that the array of intelligence services linked to it was concomitantly massive. The Chinese had originally copied the Soviet GRU—a service that remained unchanged even after the implosion of the USSR—and only later diversified the structure. Thanks to its military attachés, the PLA2 was able to gather intelligence about foreign armies based on open sources and contacts between military attachés in different countries.
In recent decades, the PLA has also copied the former USSR’s system of science and industrial intelligence services, in China brought together under the veritable “intelligence vacuum cleaner” COSTIND. In order to increase the PRC’s technological potential, its firepower, and its tactical and strategic resources, military intelligence employs tens of thousands of agents—scientists, students, tourists, shopkeepers and businessmen.
There are, of course, many cover organizations known to the French DST and the FBI, such as the China Association for International Friendly Contacts (CAIFC), created in 1984. The CAIFC created a subsidiary that was also involved in international liaisons for military intelligence, the Centre for Peace and Development Studies. The CAIFC’s general secretary in 2001–7 was Colonel Li Ning, whose focus was on establishing solid relationships in the field of economic exchanges. He was a former aide to General Xiong Guangkai and a former military attaché in London, specializing in the handover of technology secrets and arms sales to the Middle East. So much for “peace and development”.
In autumn 2007, the CAIFC found itself in the eye of the storm. Wang Qingqan, a founding member of the organization, was sentenced to death in a closed hearing, for treason and spying for the Japanese. He was a PLA colonel and head of mission in Japan until the end of the 1990s, having been appointed first secretary at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo with a remit to widen the circle of “friendly” acquaintances. He took this mission so seriously that he was “turned” by the Japanese services, handing over confidential intelligence. He was arrested in the summer of 2007 by the Guoanbu in Beijing. The leaders of the PLA2, like secret services the world over, know only too well that contact work can be an excellent way of gathering large amounts of intelligence, but also has its risks.
Meanwhile, the PLA2 was busy setting up front companies and infiltrating bona fide businesses. Not only that, but the PLA2 had a consummate rival in the PLA’s General Political Department, namely the Liaison Service, headed for a period by Deng Rong, daughter of Deng Xiaoping, and then from 1999 by General Liang Hongchang. Espionage and psychological warfare were the two mainstays of the Liaison Service. It has long been claimed, correctly, that the principal target of its secret agents is Taiwan. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, counterintelligence agencies have discovered the existence of more and more private companies set up as fronts in Europe and the United States. It is hardly shocking that the most powerful country in the world is also the most spied upon; nor does it come as any surprise that the United States is not best pleased at finding itself the principal victim in this high-stakes game.
The Cox Report: Chinese plunder in America
The extent of Chinese technological espionage was becoming apparent as the millennium turned (see Appendix III for the overall structure). On 1 October 1999, the French defence attaché saw the PLA march in Beijing and realized that the Red Flag (Hongqi 7) was an exact copy of the French Crotale missile. The Americans were in for an even more unpleasant surprise: the Chinese rocket Dongfeng 31, with nuclear warheads, was a shameless replica of US technology.
In spring 1999, a Taiwanese-born physicist named Wen Ho Lee was fired from the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Center, arrested, and charged with handing over information to Beijing. Professor Lee was eventually released, with an official apology from the court, in September 2000. He appears to have been the victim of a Chinese would-be defector, who had contacted the CIA in Taiwan in 1995 claiming to be in possession of documents implicating the Los Alamos physicist. The FBI eventually admitted that they had been tricked by a sham defector who was trying to feed the Americans false intelligence. Lee had in fact refused to hand over information to a group of Chinese scientists he had met at international conferences; they were asking about Trident missile W-88 nuclear warheads to be fitted to submarines, which the Chinese wanted to copy. Was this the Guoanbu trying to punish him for his non-cooperation, by labelling him a spy? In the book he later wrote about the affair, Lee revealed that he had indeed had dealings with two science “head-hunters”, Zheng Shaotong and Li Deyuan. The latter had apparently tried to worm his way into French scientific circles working on “nonlinear hyperbolic equations”.17
These discoveries confirmed the findings of the Cox Report, published coincidentally just two weeks after the Belgrade embassy bombing, on 25 May 1999. It had taken a long time to put together this 700-page dossier, which detailed the PRC’s vast technological espionage of the United States.
Critics of the report—some possibly activated by the Chinese themselves—saw it as a clear attack on the Clinton administration, already undermined by the Lewinsky affair and the Chinagate scandal (the revelation that the Chinese had made financial contributions to the Democratic National Congress in the lead-up to Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign). In reality, though, the technical details in the report point the finger at the Bush and Reagan administrations, and it barely mentions Chinagate. For good measure, it was countersigned by four Republican representatives and four Democrats. This impressive bipartisan unanimity in itself suggests the enormous extent of Chinese technological theft.
The Cox Report concluded that China had managed to penetrate all the secrets of American defence, including rocket guidance computers, neutron bombs, multiple nuclear warheads and laser searches. It warned that, although the Chinese did not yet have the capacity to launch their own production of the prototypes they had copied, they would be able to do so by 2009 or 2010. The report also indicated that the Chinese services were not the only guilty parties: several American companies had handed over important technologies to the Chinese by means of their joint ventures. Others had had their patents or technical plans stolen through sheer naivety.
Twenty years on, the Cox Report remains burningly topical—we can’t know if it is still pertinent in the list it provides of CCP demands for Chinese spies, but it is at least highly relevant today in its detailing of their working methods, particularly as the services’ financial means are much greater now than when the report was written. It is also a useful reminder that the machinery of government was entirely under the control of the CCP Central Committee’s general secretary and PRC president Jiang Zemin, who chaired the Politburo and its executive, the seven-member Standing Committee, supported by a powerful secretariat. At the head of the secretariat was vice-president Hu Jintao, who later succeeded Jiang. The Central Committee also included among its members Xu Yongue, head of the Guoanbu and so of counterintelligence. The State Council, equivalent to the government, was run by the prime minister, Zhu Rongji, also a high-ranking CCP official.
The PLA was under the direct control of the party’s Central Military Commission (CMC). “The party commands the gun; the gun must never be allowed to command the party,” as Mao used to say. Nothing had changed in the twenty years since his death. Thus Jiang Zemin also chaired the CMC, supported by two senior vice-chairmen, Generals Zhang Wannian and Chi Haotian, who were vehemently anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) during the Kosovo war. Everything was structured around this top-down power apparatus: the eight-member CMC controlled the army, the navy, the air force, the 2nd Artillery (strategic missiles), the spying operations of the PLA2, the PLA Liaison Office, and, after Tiananmen, the People’s Armed Police (PAP).
While the CMC controlled the strategic axes of defence, the government was also directly behind several industrial organizations. Set up in 1982 by Deng Xiaoping and directed by his daughter, the science and technology research organization COSTIND had become more of a civil body since 1998, as it no longer officially reported to the CMC, but to the government-run Council of State Affairs. As we saw in the case of Hong Kong, COSTIND managed large state-owned companies.18 These projects were in collaboration with a myriad of “scientific and technological leading groups”—research and development units, piggybacking on the Academy of Sciences and Military Sciences, and other academies within defence- and intelligence-related universities and research institutes. They all came under the umbrella of the State Council-controlled International Studies Research Centre (ISRC/Guoji Wenti Yanjiu Zhongxin), also dreamt up by Deng Xiaoping.
In March 1986, Deng had launched Programme 863, whose purpose was to raise the necessary funds for these projects. After ten years, with the help of 3,000 scientists, around 1,500 objectives had been attained in the fields of economics and defence. The most experienced scientists were chosen to reduce the gap between the West and China in advanced defence, aeronautics and space, information technology, lasers, automation, energy and new materials. Programme 863 focused on the following areas of military intelligence:
The Cox Report details the many goals on intelligence services’ “shopping lists”, used to guide spies and obtain abroad the means necessary to accelerate research and develop specifically Chinese applications. The modernization objectives listed in the report mainly concern battlefield communications, reconnaissance (aerial or other), space weaponry, mobile nuclear weapons, attack submarines, aerial pursuit, remote-controlled weapons, and the training of rapid-action land forces.
The race for information technology and its applications had two arenas: civilian and military. The Cox Report focused on the military aspect because it appeared to be the most threatening. But of course, China was using identical methods to pirate blueprints for civil aviation, cars, renewable energy technologies, drug monopolies and new means to protect the environment, to take just a few examples. Indeed, the services rely on the guiding principles decreed by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the “16 characters” policy, which specifically requires the mixing of “civil” and “military” in order to “erase the borders between state operations and commercial activities, between purely military and commercial interests”:
Combine the military and civil society—Jun min jiehe 军民结合
Combine peace and war—Ping zhan jiehe 平战结合
Prioritize military production—Jun pin yousheng 军品优生
Civil society must support the military—Yi min yang jun 以民养军
After outlining the PRC’s objectives in technological development, the Cox Report established the specific role of secret agents, based on the testimony of both China experts in the United States and several Chinese defectors:
The primary professional PRC intelligence services involved in technology acquisition are the Ministry of State Security (MSS) [the Guoanbu] and the PLA General Staff’s Military Intelligence Department (MID) [the PLA2].
In addition to and separate from these services, the PRC maintains a growing non-professional technology-collection effort by other PRC Government-controlled interests, such as research institutes and PRC military-industrial companies. Many of the most egregious losses of U.S. technology have resulted not from professional operations under the control or direction of the [Guoanbu] or [PLA2], but as part of commercial, scientific, and academic interactions between the United States and the PRC.
Professional intelligence agents from the [Guoanbu] and [PLA2] account for a relatively small share of the PRC’s foreign science and technology collection. The bulk of such information is gathered by various non-professionals, including PRC students, scientists, researchers, and other visitors to the West. These individuals sometimes are working at the behest of the [Guoanbu] or [PLA2], but often represent other PRC-controlled research organizations—scientific bureaus, commissions, research institutes, and enterprises.
Those unfamiliar with the PRC’s intelligence practices often conclude that, because intelligence services conduct clandestine operations, all clandestine operations are directed by intelligence agencies. In the case of the PRC, this is not always the rule.
The Cox Report outlined the Guoanbu’s activities in the highly specialized area of technological research, noting that, when spying on a particular domain, the State Security service might well come across other information of a civil or military nature. “The MSS relies on a network of non-professional individuals and organizations acting outside the direct control of the intelligence services, including scientific delegations and PRC nationals working abroad, to collect the vast majority of the information it seeks.”21
Two years after the publication of the Cox Report, Paul D. Moore, head of Chinese counterintelligence at the FBI and witness to many cases of Chinese espionage, detailed the challenges facing investigators in the wake of the fragmented nature and so-called amateurism of Chinese espionage, with its highly complex divisions of labour:
One of the problems the FBI and other U.S. counterintelligence agencies have long had with attempting to neutralize Chinese intelligence-collection operations in the United States is that the people who covertly gather intelligence for China normally don’t look like spies, act like spies or pilfer large amounts of secret information.
… For most areas of Chinese intelligence collection, the actual work of locating and obtaining desired information, even very sensitive data, is carried out by academics, students, businessmen or journalists. Chinese intelligence officers typically do not direct or control the effort, because it is Chinese intelligence consumers who determine the nature and extent of Chinese collection operations, just as it is U.S. consumers whose purchases shape the U.S. economy.
Since they are not intelligence professionals, Chinese collectors do not understand or make use of clandestine techniques such as “dead drops” under pedestrian bridges in parks; instead they tend to rely on simply sitting down with a knowledgeable friend or contact and asking confidentially for information or assistance. The normal consumer collects information for his own use or for his immediate co-workers, so his collection goals are very modest. Even when a collector pilfers sensitive or classified information, it is normally in small pieces.22
To put together these vast puzzles, China relies on a large number of correspondents to carry out this semi-clandestine work. In 2000, the FBI estimated that the Chinese had the third-largest number of espionage agents in the United States. Eight years later, the FBI estimated that China had now taken the lead and that the Guoanbu, the military spying services and the allied civilian research offices were now the best run in the world, despite the significant growth of the Russian services after Vladimir Putin had become president in 2000. The question was whether the FBI was exaggerating the dangers to justify demanding larger budgets.
According to the FBI, in 2000 there were nearly 2,000 Chinese government officials, diplomats and journalists based in Canada and the United States giving cover to the top layer of intelligence—mostly in “white” and “grey” areas, in other words largely using open sources. The presence of 15,000 Chinese students—even if only a minority were professional secret agents—offered considerable opportunities for targeting laboratories and research centres in, for example, Silicon Valley. Three thousand Chinese delegations visited the US and Canada every year. This figure does not include the large numbers of tourists, touring circuses and Beijing opera companies, all naturally accompanied by many agents, who keep their eye on more than the visiting performers during such visits.
There was also known to be infiltration of “deep-water fish” into the large Pacific Coast Chinese communities, in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Vancouver (known as “Wang Cover”). In 1999, according to Charles Svoboda, former head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the PLA2 was using Chinese mafia networks, the Big Circle Boys, based in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa, to carry out intelligence missions. One of the largest foreign intelligence operations was run out of the Ottawa embassy, located in a former convent; CSIS set up a special counterintelligence unit with the sole purpose of protecting itself against the Chinese services.
Beyond this broad outline—embellished with numerous concrete examples, available in full online23—the Cox Report details the wide variety of approaches employed to acquire foreign technology:
There are three remarks that should be made at this point. Firstly, the Cox Report covered the US, but this type of operation was equally underway in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea. Secondly, these espionage techniques were also applied to Chinese economic intelligence in the US. Finally, the lines between the two sometimes blurred, with Chinese military intelligence agents carrying out civilian economic espionage missions, or picking up information of interest to large “patriotic” companies subsidized by the Chinese state. In short, the Cox Report confirmed that, at the turn of the millennium, the Chinese technological espionage operation in America and beyond was dizzyingly vast.
The Clintons and Chinagate
Among its many revelations, the Cox Report noted the fact that the PLA2 was headed by General Ji Shengde, son of the former foreign minister Ji Pengfei. This apparently minor detail was more significant than it might have seemed: as the Cox Report was published in late May 1999, Ji Shengde was about to be arrested—because of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
While the Monica Lewinsky affair was breaking, a potentially much bigger scandal was brewing: Chinagate. By 1996, the Democratic Party had received around $4.5 million in donations for President Clinton’s re-election campaign from the Chinese-Indonesian group Lippo, the Chinese-Thai group Charoeun Popkhand, and San Kin Yip, based in Macao. The funds included some $300,000 paid at the direct request of the head of the PLA2—General Ji Shengde, Xiong Guangkai’s deputy.25 In September that year, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that the funding was of problematic origin; this was followed by a Washington Post piece stating that the Justice Department’s investigation had discovered the involvement of Chinese agents.
The trap had been set in the 1980s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton dined regularly at the Fu Lin Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, owned by Charles (Yan Lin) Trie. Bill, who was introduced to Trie by Hillary, often went there for lunch, never paying a cent, and the boss soon became a “friend”, as did one of his relatives, formerly of the Taiwanese air force, called John Huang. He worked for Lippo, a financial and commercial partner of several Chinese companies, and one of the donor organizations involved in Chinagate in 1996—by which time Huang was a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee.
This tells us two important things: first, that the Chinese were adept, just as the KGB had been, at preparing the ground for long-term operations, betting on a few privileged young people to make their way to the top of the elite; and secondly, that the employment of Chinese-Americans and Taiwanese was considered vital, since this was a way to obscure the true identity of an operation’s sponsors up in Beijing.
The planting of Huang turned out to be a wild success. After the first Clinton administration began in 1993, he was taken on in the US Department of Commerce, becoming deputy assistant secretary for international economic affairs and became advisor for China to Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. In January 1994, with Brown’s blessing, Huang was given unlimited access to confidential documents about economic and technological intelligence, even though in principle only a US-born citizen could be given such authorization.
Around the same time that John Huang joined the White House, the China Resources Group (Huaren Jituan)—a holding company subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC)—became a major shareholder in Lippo, with a 50 per cent stake in the company. China Resources also served as a front for General Ji Shengde’s PLA2. The military implications of Chinagate became clear when it was revealed that the arms dealer Wang Jun, director of Poly Technologies—the subsidiary of the intelligence think-tank COSTIND—had also received an invitation to the White House in December 1996. This visit was organized by none other than Charles Trie, owner of the Clintons’ favourite Little Rock Chinese restaurant, who had been raising funds for the Democrats for fourteen years.
Just before his trip to the PRC in June 1998, Clinton felt the scandal breathing uncomfortably down his neck. The media revealed links with Liu Chaoying, a PLA colonel and businesswoman with links to China Aerospace International Holdings (CASIL), a company set up by the Chinese military and listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange as a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Corporation.
The CASIL director Wang Meiyue has been named for his role in the Chinagate scandal and its links with the PLA2. His agent in the US was Johnny Chung, a Chinese-American who had introduced the attractive Colonel Liu into Democrat circles during Clinton’s re-election campaign. The two were photographed together at a 1996 fundraising reception. Johnny Chung received a $360,000 donation to the Democratic Party, including a cheque for $50,000 handed over personally in March 1995 to the First Lady’s chief of staff, Margaret Williams. Chung named Colonel Liu in his testimony to the FBI investigation charged with throwing light on the Chinese contribution to Clinton’s re-election campaign. According to Chung, Liu had confirmed that the money came directly from the PLA and had even had him meet the PLA2 chief, Ji Shengde.
Far from being a free spirit of the Chinese elite, Liu was the daughter of Admiral Liu Huaqing, former head of the Chinese navy who had become first PLA chief, charged with modernizing the military, then a vice-chairman of the CMC. He was implicated in the 1991 French-Chinese frigate case in Taiwan, as one of the fortunate beneficiaries of illegal kickbacks. Jiang Zemin replaced him in September 1997 with General Wang Zhannian, the “hawk” of the Kosovo war. While Beijing denied any meddling in US democracy and Colonel Liu escaped the affair untouched, Chung and Johnny Huang were each given a five-year prison sentence, and the money was eventually returned. President Clinton, denying any knowledge of the funds’ origins, stopped short of ordering an independent commission of inquiry, instead supporting a full investigation by the FBI.
In the United States, one of the most harmful consequences of Chinagate was probably the wealth of technology intelligence obtained by the Chinese lobby. The FBI compiled an exhaustive list of the companies who had engaged in this subterfuge, as well as establishing the ambiguous role of the Department of Commerce, in which John Huang had played a clandestine role facilitating transactions in favour of Beijing. The plot thickened further in April 1996, when a strange plane crash in Bosnia cost US Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown his life, shortly after the head of the White House administration, Leon Panetta, had asked him to “put to one side” some incriminating archives concerning the “Chinese connection”.
The heat was taken off Chinagate by a cigar in the Oval Office. Monica Lewinsky supplanted Colonel Liu in the minds of most Americans, and then George W. Bush was elected in 2000. But later on, with the possibility—twice—of Hillary Clinton being elected to the White House, Chinese analysts knew that the buried scandal of hidden funding might well come back to haunt her. This might actually have suited them in the 2016 election.
Meanwhile in Beijing, a key figure regularly quoted in the American press took the hit for Chinagate. He was also implicated in a separate corruption scandal within China. In 2000, Ji Shengde, head of the PLA2, was suspended and transferred to the Academy of Military Sciences, before being arrested, tried behind closed doors and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. This led his father, former foreign minister Ji Pengfei, to commit suicide.
The mysterious Dozorov dossier
Ji had been officially replaced as head of military intelligence in August 1999 by General Luo Yudong, director of the Nanjing espionage academy, the Institute of International Relations, and former head of intelligence at the Chengdu regional command, covering Tibet. Luo was at the centre of another international intrigue among the Chinese spies of the new millennium.
In May 1999, as the rubble of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was still smoking, a mysterious man made a trip to Beijing. General Valentin Korabelnikov was head of the GRU, Russian military intelligence. The GRU had hardly changed since the Soviet era, except that it was now working closely with its opposite number in Beijing, the PLA2. Korabelnikov was in the PRC for discussions with his “Chinese comrades”, principally his counterpart, the bald-headed General Luo. The US-led bombing of the embassy could only help relations between the Chinese and the Russians, which were in any case already good. Moscow seized the opportunity to exploit the surge in nationalist and anti-American sentiment that accompanied the NATO offensive, NATO being the great bogeyman of the Cold War era.
As we know, there had been an era when the Soviet services oversaw the Chinese, followed by an era of ideological disagreement that lasted until the end of the Cultural Revolution. Then had come a rapprochement orchestrated by Deng Xiaoping, though the two countries still regarded each other with distinct suspicion in that period. In the 1980s, Yuri Andropov’s KGB knew that Deng was collaborating with the Americans, who had deployed “big ear” eavesdropping devices in the Pamir Mountains and helped the Chinese to arm the Afghan Mujahedin against the Soviet army. The Kremlin wondered whether Mao and Kang Sheng had been right during the Cultural Revolution to brand this man a “capitalist roader”. This question—who was the real Deng Xiaoping?—has been one of the great mysteries confronting me in the writing of this book.
After appointing Vladimir Putin as prime minister in August 1999, Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned as president in December of the same year. Putin, a former KGB counterintelligence officer, became acting president of the Russian Federation. In May 2000, after receiving the keys to the presidential residence, Putin discovered a cabinet in his office that contained a bulging file on a man three years dead: Comrade “Ivan Sergeyevich Dozorov”, better known as Deng Xiaoping.
Every person who ever worked for the Soviet services received a Russian identity. The life of Deng was such a mystery even to KGB elders like Putin that the Dozorov file was still in his hands in 2007. It was filled with layers upon layers of information: medical records; documents about Deng’s role in the Comintern under the alias “Krezov”; his role in Paris from 1923 to the end of 1925, with Comrade “Moskvin” (Zhou Enlai); his time in Moscow between January and August 1926; the grades he obtained in Russian and English in class 7 at Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University (which had 300 Chinese students); his relationship with Karl Radek, the provost of the university who was murdered in prison in 1939, and Radek’s lover Larissa Reissner (who also had an affair with Liu Shaoqi in 1928); his contacts with Trotsky, who came to teach at Sun Yat-sen University; his links with the Comintern agent Jean Cremet (“Vainer”) in France, the USSR and China, the man who had armed Deng’s Guangxi underground fighters in 1929; his file, no. 233, as a Chinese member of the Soviet Communist Party; his certification by the Russian secret services and his military training with the GRU (weapons handling, encryption, disguise, espionage); his false passports; his links with pro-Russians such as the future Chinese president Yang Shangkun (imprisoned for wiretapping Mao on behalf of the KGB during the Cultural Revolution) and with Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s exiled son in Moscow; his romantic relationship with a 19-year-old student, Zhang Xiyuan; and even, quite extraordinarily, how, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in 1969, on the run and under the protection of the Sichuan military district, he had been put in touch with an Asian-origin Soviet intelligence officer.
Everything was in there, an absolute cornucopia of information for historians. It was such an explosive file that the Chinese probably had no desire for it ever to see the light of day.
A Russian intelligence expert told me that he had examined the dossier, classified as “state secret, access forbidden”, and that it still remains in the hands of the Russian president, as one of Putin’s ultimate trump cards. Today, however, Putin has noticeably warmer relations with Beijing than when he first became president in 2000. So why keep hold of this file now, after all this time? Perhaps Putin occasionally consults it in order to clarify what happened on 16 May 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev went to Beijing to meet Deng in the middle of the Tiananmen protests and found himself snubbed, just as the Soviet empire was on the verge of collapsing.
Or perhaps Putin uses it to revisit the August 1991 diplomatic blunder that occurred during the attempted coup against Gorbachev, when the Chinese ambassador to Moscow, Yu Hongliang, expressed ardent support for the putsch. The irony was that, almost ten years previously, it was Yu who had been sent to Moscow to re-open channels, dropping hints to Piotr Kapitsa, a well-known academic specializing in China, that Beijing was keen to discuss certain issues it hoped to deal with regarding Vietnam, Mongolia and Afghanistan. Contact had been established with the Soviet ministries of defence and foreign affairs, as well as with the KGB, and it was decided that secret negotiations would be conducted twice a year, once in each capital.26 Yu, who represented Deng Xiaoping’s position on the attempted coup, had to leave Russia in 1991 after it failed. But Sino-Russian relations were not adversely affected.
The Sino-Russian spy axis
Nature abhors a vacuum. The dismantling of the Soviet services after the collapse of the USSR left the field wide open to the globalized development of Chinese services. In the early 1990s, the Russians realized that their range of international intelligence activities was shrinking. Unlike military intelligence—General Yevgeny Timokhin’s GRU, which remained intact—the KGB was split up into at least four sections: border guards, wiretapping (FASPII), counterintelligence (FSB) and the 1st Directorate in charge of intelligence (PGU) within the foreign intelligence service (Sloujba Vnechnoï Razvedki), under the leadership of the academic spy and future prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov.
In the years that followed, these services signed agreements with most of the foreign intelligence services that had once been their enemies. But with the Chinese, the stakes were different. In the summer of 1992, Primakov, leader of the “Orientalist” clan within Russian intelligence and diplomacy, went to Beijing to sign a secret cooperation protocol between the four major services: the SVR and GRU on the Russian side, and the Guoanbu and PLA2 on the Chinese side. In November 1995, the Russian ambassador to Beijing Igor Rogatchev celebrated the good relationship between the services by honouring the memory of the Chinese spy Yan Baohang, who had informed Stalin of Hitler’s plan to invade the USSR in June 1941.27 A strategic partnership agreement signed in 1996 by Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin—who had studied in the USSR—intensified this relationship.
In the spring of 1999, NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia and the bombing of the Chinese embassy strengthened the China–Russia intelligence axis, signalled by the mutual visits of various notables from the services. In May 1999, General Valentin Korabelnikov, head of the GRU, was spotted in Beijing. The following month, General Zhang Wannian, first vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, accompanied by General Xiong Guangkai, head of military intelligence, made the pilgrimage to Russia. On the first day of their visit to Moscow, on 9 June, Zhang and Xiong met with the then FSB head, Vladimir Putin. Beyond his role in strategic issues, Putin, we may recall, was a long-time friend of Xiong.
The following day, the Chinese held talks with their military counterparts: General Manilov and of course Korabelnikov, the master “bat” (symbol of Russian military reconnaissance). On the agenda was a plan to share intelligence about the missile defence system the Americans were hoping eventually to deploy in the Far East and Eastern Europe. There were also technicalities to be discussed around Russia’s decision to sell its SIGINT intercept base at Lourdes, Cuba, to the PLA by January 2002, for budgetary as well as tactical reasons. The Chinese now had greater financial means than the Russians to run this type of system, and there was nothing stopping them from selling the Russians mutually beneficial information gathered through the base. Ultimately, the Chinese established an even greater presence there than the existing Russian apparatus, along with several other eavesdropping and transmission stations for spying on the United States.28
Meanwhile, in September 2000, Xiong Guangkai, together with the Gonganbu chief Jia Chunwang, welcomed to Beijing General Konstantin Totskiy, head of the Federal Border Guard Service. This is an extremely important agency, not only because of the historical Sino-Russian border conflict, but also because it is a key—if often underestimated—intelligence service, as explained to me by the China–Russia relations expert Iliya Sarsembaev. The focus of these three-way meetings was another area of cooperation: organized crime and illegal immigration, mainly from the PRC to the Russian Federation, as the flow of Chinese immigrants into the Russian Far East intensified, accompanied by the emergence of Chinese mafia organizations in Khabarovsk and elsewhere. The previous year, Chinese gangsters had murdered the head of the Russian mafia in Khabarovsk.
In 1999–2000, Russian media reported on this extension of the field of Sino-Russian cooperation. Under the headline “Old spies unite”, the Moscow Times published an analysis by a former KGB officer specializing in Chinese issues, Konstantin Preobrazhensky. His remarks about the psychology governing the Sino-Russian alliance have been corroborated by all, both Russian and Chinese, with whom I have discussed it:
The cooperation between Russian and Chinese spies is comfortable on the psychological level. After all, Chinese spies are communists. The Russians are all former members of the Communist Party and cultivate great nostalgia for the communist era, when both their salary and their status were much higher. They do not hide their communist sympathies. In Russia, they freely use the term “comrade”, which dates back to the Stalinist era, as a term of affection. It is easy for Russians to find a common language with the Chinese. And Russian spies do not like America at all, blaming the country, as a stronghold of capitalism, for all the misfortunes that have plagued Russia since the fall of the KGB.29
Shortly after this, the monthly review Segodnyia pointed out something that was to become surprisingly common in the world of post-Cold War intelligence: “The Russian security services are now taking lessons from their former Chinese students.”30
On top of these published pieces, I was offered a third account of the Sino-Russian intelligence rapprochement. This one came direct from “Ivan”, a former border intelligence officer who conducted exercises with Chinese counterparts answering to both the Guoanbu and the Central Military Commission: “I think that, with hindsight, we have to recognize that Mao was right in launching the Cultural Revolution against the ‘Chinese Khrushchev’. At least he managed to safeguard the Communist Party. Because here, unlike in China, the party has collapsed and we have lost power. The only organizations that today are keeping up the tradition of socialism are the intelligence services, which are thus able to strengthen ties with the Chinese. That explains the excellent quality of the relationship between our services today.”31
The Shanghai Club
In 2002, President Vladimir Putin was seeking to forge a triangular alliance with China and India to counterbalance US domination. But the decades-long outright hostility between New Delhi and Beijing had not faded. Moreover, India was beginning to grow closer to the United States, after decades of friendship with the USSR. Under Jiang Zemin (1989–2002), China’s closest ally was neighbouring Pakistan, with whom it had commercial ties, especially in arms trading. So Putin and Jiang had to content themselves with a tactical alliance, each helping the other to deal with the deployment of US missile defence systems—the Russians in Eastern Europe; China facing Taiwan.
Intelligence exchange agreements—which included the sharing of technology intelligence—become paramount. Nonetheless, there was absolutely no question of the Chinese answering to the Russians as had been the case back in the 1920s and 1930s, or even of working in tandem, as had been the case between Russian and Chinese organizations when the PRC was first founded in 1949. Those days had been swept away for good in the whirlwind of the mid-century Sino-Soviet schism and the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, according to Chinese political scientists, this had been the one positive legacy of the terrible Kang Sheng era: “At least, after having been the Soviet services’ man within Chinese communism, he then became the architect of the rupture and the subsequent independence of our services.”32
The Russians and Chinese initiated a basic programme of regional cooperation known as the Shanghai Club or Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Founded in Shanghai on 14 and 15 June 2001, this later evolved by bringing the former Muslim republics of the USSR into the Sino-Russian allied sphere of influence: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Today the Shanghai Club has an economic component, as well as a section for fighting “Islamist terrorism”, established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
On 16 July 2002, Pravda—a newspaper that has changed a great deal now that it is no longer the mouthpiece of the Soviet Communist Party—revealed that the head of the Russian National Security Council, Vladimir Rushalo, had met with major figures in Chinese intelligence on a four-day visit to Beijing, with the intention of strengthening links between Russian organizations and the Chinese security services. The summit was of such significance that it was the acting Guoanbu and the Gonganbu ministers, Geng Huichang and Jia Chunwang respectively, who were there agreeing the expansion of security cooperation, within the framework of the Shanghai Club.
An underlying element of this strengthened alliance was the fight against Islamists, specifically the Muslim separatists of Chechnya and Xinjiang. In autumn 2005, deputy Gonganbu minister Meng Hongwei was chosen to head the “Security Group”, one of the ten units organizing the Year of Russia celebrations being planned in China. The Security Group was an organization aimed at consolidating bilateral relations with the Russian FSB, a step towards the group being named to the rotating presidency of the Shanghai Club’s anti-terrorist group—achieved after successfully inviting Mongolia, Pakistan, Iran and India to a summit for coordinating the national security forces and those of the Shanghai Club in the fight against Islamist fundamentalism.
This explains why it was so important for the Chinese to strengthen the Eastern axis of their international partnerships. For example, in March 2006, while chairing the Shanghai Club summit in Tashkent, the deputy Gonganbu minister Meng Hongwei announced a 2007–9 development plan for a regional antiterrorist department.33
In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, inter-service coordination included training drills by counterterrorist forces. In September 2007, a brigade from the Snow Leopard Unit (xuede feizhoubao), headed by Captain Qu Liangfeng, went to Moscow to lead its men in the Domestic Counterterrorism “2007 Cooperation” exercises. This special unit of the PAP—which reported directly to the Central Military Commission—was headed by Hu Jintao himself, by then Jiang Zemin’s successor as paramount leader of the PRC. Coming a year before the Games, this exercise focused attention on the commandos of the 13th Special Brigade of the PAP Corps, which had already taken part in about 100 operations—but these had only been in Beijing, where the Brigade was stationed.
This was all part of the Shanghai Club programme, and on the Russian side, it did not go unnoticed that the training exercises were taking place at a time when people were talking again about the failure of the special forces during a 2004 hostage-taking at a primary school in Beslan. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, a little earlier that summer, the “2007 Peace Mission” manoeuvres on the borders of Kazakhstan—involving 6,000 men from the six Shanghai Club countries—revolved around a simulated hostage-taking by 1,000 Islamists.
What’s a little espionage between friends?
Clearly, there was more than a cordial agreement developing in the early 2000s between the Chinese and Russian intelligence services. But this did not, apparently, prevent the Chinese from attempting to steal Russian technological secrets. Inter-service agreements were drawn up to make clear that, even if the Chinese did try to spy on the Russians, a protocol between Beijing and Moscow meant that everyone would remain discreet on the subject, and that the problem would be solved amicably.
Several Chinese espionage cases in Russia have nevertheless been hinted at in newspaper articles. There was the 2000 case of the Institute of Oceanology in Vladivostok, which saw the laboratory head Vladimir Shchurov trying to interest colleagues at the Chinese Institute in Harbin in his underwater listening devices. In 2002, Valentin Danilov of the Krasnoyark Space Research Institute in Siberia, was caught by the FSB providing technical information about satellites to the Chinese. Russian counterespionage was extremely sensitive when it came to aerospace engineering, given that the Chinese were engaged in a vast operation of “cannibalizing” the MIR space station at this time. Initially this takeover was backed by a rather shaky Sino-Russian partnership agreement, whose aim was the conquest of the Moon for military purposes. The flight of the first Chinese astronaut, or “taikonaut”, Colonel Yang Liwei, took place on 15 October 2003.
According to COSTIND, which manages manned flights as part of the Project 921 programme launched in 1992, Yang’s space flight was the first step towards a Chinese Moon landing, with exploration to be followed by settlement of the Moon and, eventually, the conquest of Mars. The intention is that the red Chinese flag will fly on the “red planet” on 1 October 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, by which time the PRC will have successfully established an inhabited settlement on Mars.34
Another known case of aerospace espionage was the Macheksport affair of November 2005, named after a company run by Igor Rechetin. Rechetin was arrested by the FSB along with two other executives and accused of spying for the Guoanbu, which was hoping through them to procure space technologies and components that could be used to arm intercontinental ballistic missiles. In this affair and the others of its kind that have not reached public attention, a double standard appears to be at play. While the Russian agents are either brought to court or placed under house arrest, their Chinese case officers (Gongzuo dandang guan) remain invisible after the scandal has broken. They are simply taken back to the border with a pat on the shoulder.
The Chinese secret service residents stationed in Moscow, officially in charge of liaison with Russian “organs”, would be contacted directly in the event of a problem of this type and expected to solve it within three cell phone calls. Two such agents have made names for themselves as outstanding collaborators with FSB, SVR and GRU experts: General Zhu Da, the PLA2 military attaché in Moscow, and the Guoanbu’s Moscow station chief, the “minister–advisor” Cheng Guoping. Despite Cheng’s importance within the Guoanbu, he has also remained a diplomat. When he was Chinese consul in Khabarovsk, he often served as an interface with the Russian secret services. Later, he became a Mandarin presenter on Radio Moscow.
This was in the era when Prime Minister Primakov, the “KGB peace lord”, was promoting the idea of talks with Uyghur nationalists in Kazakhstan, to try to mediate between the Xinjiang separatist movement and the Chinese authorities. Radio Moscow’s Chinese service highlighted these negotiations in broadcasts pushing the idea of peace. But after 9/11, the Chinese intelligence services’ unified antiterrorist command became determined to do everything it could to eliminate the Uyghur separatists before the Beijing Olympics took place.
Given all we’ve seen in this chapter, it should be no surprise that they sought to do this with the help of their reconciled friends, the Russians. We know that this new special relationship between the Chinese and Russian secret services coincided with the rise of Chinese technological espionage. But the early 2000s was also an era of economic warfare.