12

BEIJING 2008

CHINA WINS THE ESPIONAGE GOLD

During the flight to Athens on Sunday, 24  March 2006, Geng Huichang might well have reflected on the astonishing epic of the Olympic Games. As deputy Guoanbu minister, he must have recognized the link between the performances of superb naked athletes on the racetracks of ancient Olympia and the consummate, no-less-elite ancient art of Chinese espionage, with an equally storied legacy. In the eighth century BCE, around the time of the First Olympiad (776 BCE), epic battles were taking place between the secret agents of different Chinese states, similar to the ancient Greek city-states. The period of major economic and military clashes between 770 and 475 BCE is described in the famous Zuo Zhuan, the “Spring and Autumn Annals”.

This heroic era was marked by the adventures of Xi Shi, a kind of Chinese Mata Hari—a legendary beauty who precipitated the fall of King Wu of Nanking using “the beautiful woman stratagem” (meiren ji)—the timeless art of erotic seduction employed by Chinese spies. These episodes were codified in the Chinese text best known in the West, Sun Tzu’s treatise The Art of War, which began circulating in China in 510 BCE.  In the final chapter, the great strategist uses his calligraphy brush to describe the different kinds of spy. “There are five kinds of secret agents that can be employed, namely: native agents, moles, double agents, provocateurs and peripatetic informants. When these five types of agents are all at work simultaneously and nobody knows their processes, they constitute the ‘sovereign’s treasure’.”1

So was Professor Geng, as he was known, a native, a mole, a double agent or a provocateur? It seems he was a “peripatetic”, not to mention highly literate, a man who certainly knew his classics. He was also the public face of the famous secret service football team, the Goan. Geng was a round-faced man, with large glasses and slicked-back, jet-black hair. Flying over Piraeus as the plane approached the airport, perhaps he was taking stock of his strange career, constantly on the move.

In 2006 he was in his fifties; born in Hebei in 1951 in the Year of the Rabbit, he was an important geopolitical specialist and head of the intelligence think-tank China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a position that had naturally led to him becoming second in command at the Guoanbu. On top of this, he would go on to have a remarkable role in the nuclear negotiations that the Americans and North Koreans were planning, as well as becoming increasing specialized in economic intelligence. By September 2007, he would be named overall head of the Guoanbu.

The noisy Athens airport was decorated with giant photos of Evzonoi—an elite guard sporting distinctive white kilts and pompom-topped shoes. Geng Huichang was greeted by the Chinese ambassador, Tian Xuejun, who took him the following day to see three high-ranking officials: the minister of public order Vyron Polydoras, the head of the National Intelligence Service Ioannis Korantis, and the police chief Anastasios Dimoschakis. After discussing Prime Minister Constantin Karamanlis’s recent visit to Beijing, they got straight to the heart of the matter, the purpose of Geng’s mission: the security strategy for the 2008 Olympic Games. After all, not only was Greece the birthplace of the ancient games, but it was also the first and only country to have hosted the Olympics since the 9/11 attacks. Professor Geng’s expertise was limitless, and this was the new mission that had fallen to him: to protect the Olympic torch.

The Beijing Olympics: “One World, One Dream”

“The Central Party School has an important role in developing the theories that govern the current international strategy: for example, the ‘theory of peaceful development’, on China’s rise and on diplomatic activities that have led to our soldiers now taking part in peacekeeping operations in Africa under UN control.”

These were the words of Li Junru, head of the CCP school for training cadres. Li, a close friend of Hu Jintao, was keen to explain to me the genesis of current policy, which is still based on a Marxism-Leninism for the twenty-first century: “In terms of the outside world, the theory that we have developed for training communist party cadres corresponds to the theory of ‘social harmony’ in China, developed by President Hu. We believe that the Chinese Communist Party must continue to rule this country, which now has a population of 1 billion, 300 million. But having analyzed the experience of the USSR and its collapse, we understand that different systems have to coexist, just as socialism coexists with the market economy in our country. This is what we mean by the policy of harmonies that we have put in place since our 16th Congress. China wants to be a leader of world peace, and the Olympics will be a marvellous showcase for getting that message across.”

This is, of course, merely a brief summary of my much longer conversation with Li, also an influential member of the China Reform Forum. Li even agreed to answer my more technical questions about the flow of information within the party and the government, the role of the intelligence services, and many other topics that proved extremely useful to me while I was writing this book. I am all the more aware that in the world of Chinese intelligence, starting with the Guoanbu, the CCP Central Committee and its political commissioners play just as important a role as during Mao’s time, even if the political theories driving policy have evolved. In Chinese embassies all over the world, I have seen that it is often the party representative who coordinates intelligence activities.

It was clear from Li’s words that there were many challenges facing Hu as president, the wider leadership of the CCP, and the State Council. They were walking a tightrope: wanting the international community to adopt the policy summarized by the slogan of the Beijing Games—“One World, One Dream” (Yige Shijie, Yige Mengxiang)—whilst avoiding people abroad politicizing the Olympics by drawing attention to a number of problematic issues: the energy conquest of China across the globe; its role in Africa, particularly in Sudan and Darfur; the flow of its cut-price exports; large-scale counterfeiting; the policy supporting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the weakness of the yuan; the pervasive corruption impacting on foreign companies; all-out espionage including computer-hacking; and the build-up of a large army which was adopting hacking technology and was primarily a threat to Taiwan—which would remain the case into the Xi era, in spite of Taiwan’s attempt at rapprochement with Beijing after the Kuomintang’s electoral victory in 2008.

There were also plenty of issues related to China’s domestic politics, including everything to do with human rights, in particular freedom of expression, crackdowns on dissent, the difficult questions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and the repression of religious and philosophical movements such as Falun Gong. Could the excitement of sport make the rest of the world forget all this? That was the dream of the CCP and the PLA’s security services, which were in a state of alert rarely seen before in modern China, to ensure that these issues did not surface, erased from people’s minds by the athletes’ performances. This was how the leadership hoped China would finally, head held high, enter the modern world of the twenty-first century.

***

China was expecting 100 heads of state, 20,000 athletes and 2 million visitors. Four billion fascinated viewers would be witnessing China taking its place, for the first time, at the centre of the world—where, as far as the Chinese were concerned, it had always stood. Everything, from the choreography of the events to the splendour of the stadiums and the beauty of the athletes’ performances, had to reflect an image of the PRC triumphant. But, to borrow one of Deng Xiaoping’s famous precepts, one must conquer with modesty. For the organizers of Beijing 2008, nothing could be allowed to disrupt the ceremonies and the events.

In the run-up to the games, it sometimes seemed, when talking to the Chinese, that they were exaggerating the risks so as to reassure themselves, or to prove that they were truly experts in security. It was unclear why the colossal PRC would be unable to manage what a country as small as Greece had achieved—unless it fell victim to bureaucratic management problems, a natural disaster, the massive flow of spectators, or organized criminal activity involving ticket-touting. Still, 1.3 billion Chinese losing face would make for rather a lot of sad faces—not least among the CCP leaders, first and foremost President Hu.

Alongside weather engineers and pollution cleaners, security agents played a key role in the games. This was a golden opportunity for the Chinese services to become officially part of the international arena dominated by the major intelligence, security and counterterrorism communities. It was vital that they succeed in protecting the athletes, the public, and most particularly the regime, which was more vulnerable within its own borders than it cared to admit, both socially and economically, given the multiple minority nationalities and risk of insurgencies on the margins of its empire.

This explains why the cluster of security services was closely monitoring both the Chinese population and foreigners as the Olympics approached. The leadership at Zhongnanhai was hoping to see Chinese athletes win large numbers of medals, but they were also going for gold in another field—espionage. China was attempting to square a huge security circle: ensuring complete safety for both the local population and foreign visitors to the games, without insisting on stifling levels of security. How was the leadership to ensure that security would be 100  per  cent guaranteed, without preventing journalists from doing their work freely and positively?

How was it going to be possible to avoid infringing the rights and principles held dear by both tourists and journalists, when the media was restricted, journalists were monitored, emails and text messages were intercepted, bugs hidden in hotel rooms, suitcases rifled through, address books stolen, and every sound, from a scream to a whisper, recorded, from the suites of the Beijing Hotel and rooms of the Friendship Hotel to the a small hutong guest-houses? How could China be seen to respect its citizens’ rights when those same hutong neighbourhoods had barely escaped being destroyed to make way for Olympic construction and a clean-up of Beijing’s centre?

The Lives of Others, the beautiful 2006 film by the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, tells the story of a Stasi agent in East German spying on a couple who work at the theatre. As elsewhere, it was a smash hit in China, with one significant difference—it was officially banned. Nonetheless, pirated DVDs of the film circulated for a year all over the country, for everyone recognized themselves in this film—the ordinary citizen, constantly spied on by the regime, by the communist party, by State Security, by the ladies from the neighbourhood committee with their red armbands.

It so happens that Guoanbu in Chinese, State Security, translates exactly to Staatssicherheit—Stasi—in German. And let us not forget the terror felt by the CCP leaders in 1989 when, just months after they had faced down their own uprising at Tiananmen, the Berlin Wall was torn down with pickaxes. They were right to be afraid of disturbances during the Olympics, while the world was watching.

“What the Chinese special services were asked to do,” a journalist who has lived in Beijing for years explained to me, “was to ensure that no movement demanding any kind of recognition, no uprising like Tiananmen, be allowed to take place in front of 4 billion television viewers. In comparison to that, the risk of a Uyghur or Tibetan terrorist attack was just a pretext to ensure that people in Beijing, indeed all Chinese people who have any contact with foreigners, think only about the games, and nothing else!”

Nonetheless the political activities of all “five poisons”, as the 610 Office called them—Tibetans, Uyghurs from Xinjiang, Falun Gong adherents, other dissidents, and Taiwanese separatists—remained an issue of great concern for the CCP.  The extraordinary safety procedures set up for the Olympic Games were shaped entirely in response to them.

The secret services in Olympic training

Up until the seventeenth party congress, which took place in October 2007, it was Luo Gan, head coordinator of the services as chair of the party’s political-legal committee, who was in charge of preparing the intelligence and security protocol for the Olympics. As we know, Luo—who had been close to Li Peng, “the butcher of Beijing”—had enthusiastically backed the repression of the Tiananmen massacre, and had coordinated the fight against the Falun Gong movement in 1999 and the creation of the 610 Office. The Gonganbu minister Zhou Yongkang played a key role by Luo’s side, before taking over from him on the Politburo Standing Committee in October 2007, as coordinator of the security and special service work section (tewu gongzuo). He was replaced at the Gonganbu by Meng Jianzhu.

Zhou was given the most important task: coordinating all the intelligence agencies abroad and the repression within China, following in the footsteps of his namesake Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng the “shadow master”, and Qiao Shi, “the Chinese Andropov”. But his presence on the Standing Committee testified to the fact that Hu Jintao had not entirely succeeded in getting rid of Jiang Zemin’s old Shanghai clique, led by Zeng Qinghong, who was also active in the security field and was Zhou Yongkang’s brother-in-law. Zeng continued to be influential from the shadows, following Chinese tradition, at the intersection of the military lobby (his brothers and sisters were all PLA generals) and what was already being dubbed the oil mafia—a lobby that had begun to play a crucial role, including in the domain of intelligence, because of China’s need for a massive supply of energy.

With ten months to go before the Olympics, Zhou Yongkang needed to prioritize the smooth organization of population control and the security of the games. If a terrible accident or attack did take place, he was not going to be able to blame Luo Gan, whose retirement and handover to Zhou had been something of a poisoned chalice. The CCP and the government carried out several major operations with the “Leading Group of National Security” (Guojia Anquan Lingdao Xiaozu), led by President Hu himself.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympics had been set up in December 2001, strongly overshadowed by the 9/11 attacks that had taken place three months earlier. Risk assessment structures were put in place, which bolstered existing government structures—notably the Security Command Centre set up to ensure public safety during the games. One principal structure was kept in place beyond August 2008, a body headed jointly by the Guoanbu and Gonganbu, called the Counterterrorism Bureau. Unsurprisingly, its head, Professor Li Wei, was one of the deputies to Geng Huichang, head of the Guoanbu.

Professor Li was also director of the Centre for Counterterrorism Studies at the CICIR.  In a report he validated Beijing’s decision to set up China’s first counterterrorism agency, to collaborate with Westerners, Russians and members of the Shanghai Club, which also included the majority-Muslim former Soviet republics of Central Asia. He proposed major changes in the Chinese approach to tackling terrorism, including the establishment of the new agency, which should be specific and autonomous. His conclusion made clear what the real issues were: “Antiterrorism measures are vital to ensure a climate of social harmony.” In other words, the new measures were not only aimed at averting hypothetical attacks by al-Qaeda, but equally at diverting attention from the various enemies within, whether the Falun Gong movement, spontaneous uprisings such as the peasant revolts recurrent in central China’s history, or insurgencies taking place on the country’s furthest frontiers—Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia—not to mention social movements in major urban centres.

One of the first full-scale counterterrorism exercises took place in Inner Mongolia, involving 2,700 men from various units of the PLA Special Forces and the People’s Armed Police (PAP), and “blue-haired dogs” from the Gonganbu. The large industrial centre of Baotou served as the location; the scenario was a workers’ uprising and a subsequent explosion of terrorist activities. The joint exercise was a success. As head of the new joint Guoanbu/Gonganbu Counterterrorism Bureau, Professor Li, who had overseen the operation with his deputy Zhao Yongchen, was extremely pleased, claiming that thanks to this anti-terrorist effort, “local security and social stability would be guaranteed”.

The blurring of responsibilities did not stop there. At the same time, the highly discreet Counterterrorism Working Group (CTWG) came into being. With a lightweight structure of just a few dozen analysts, it was able to bypass the more weighty administrations such as the Gonganbu, and had direct access to Hu Jintao, his rival and vice-president Zeng Qinghong (dismissed from office in October 2007), and the office of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

More of a think-tank than a coordination committee, the CTWG brought out regular reports and made recommendations on how to assess the risk of attack, especially in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo. As is often the case with the Chinese, in order to maintain institutional balance, the group had not one single head, but two deputy directors: one was a career counterintelligence official, Xiong Desheng; the other was Professor Li.

This heavyweight counterterrorism expert had been a key figure in the field since his 2004 report. This had led to the setting up of the CTWG in June that year. “The government needs to increase its efforts in several areas,” he had written, “including legislation, institutional structures, technological research, training personnel, and increasing public awareness of the danger of terrorism.”

The kidnapping of two Chinese engineers abroad at the end of 2004 accelerated the CTWG’s activities in protecting Chinese executives in certain high-risk areas abroad where they were increasingly present, particularly the Muslim Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa. Then came the Islamist 7/7 attacks in London on 7  July 2005. Li Wei drafted another report, warning of the risk of similar attacks in Beijing and detailing the northern capital’s weak points: “In Great Britain, as in Spain the year before [the 2004 Madrid train bombings], a small group of people were able to spread terror in an urban area. This must be taken into account for Beijing.”

The CTWG’s reports and proposals went to the numerous security coordination agencies reporting respectively to the State Council, the Presidency and the CCP.  However, to avoid any administrative backlog, the analysis always went first to the Leading Group on State Security, led by Hu Jintao, the Gonganbu chief Zhou Yongkang and the Gonganbu chief Geng Huichang.

The result was clear: for the first time in the history of the Chinese secret service, a technocratic lobby—influenced as much by the theories of American neoconservatives around George W.  Bush as by the most conservative elements of the CCP—was in charge of the first steps in China’s counterterrorism strategy, and also of the security of the Olympic Games. Professor Li was credited with having played a role in the appointment of his colleague Geng as head of the Guoanbu, since he had Hu Jintao’s ear.

A home-grown Orange Revolution?

Liu Jing, deputy Gonganbu minister, was given a diabolical role: to crush the Falun Gong movement in time for the Olympics. Since 2006, the Chinese leadership had grown increasingly afraid of a home-grown “orange revolution” akin to the one that had taken place in Ukraine at the end of 2005, and which the Russian and Chinese services had directly attributed to the CIA.  The Polish Solidarity movement had posed a similar threat to Deng Xiaoping twenty years previously.

In 2005, Liu Jing was commissioned to report on the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia. The objective was to determine whether China was at risk of a similar upheaval because of the non-violent opposition of Falun Gong and other, growing social movements that were causing great anxiety to the CCP elite. Political scientists and security experts were tasked with analyzing the use of NGOs by the CIA in both ex-Soviet countries.

As always, the Guoanbu was never far from these delicate operations. Three analysts from the CICIR, Xu Tao, Feng Yujun and Li Dong, were dispatched to Kiev and Lvov to conduct “sociopolitical surveys” and draw up profiles of the Ukrainian movement’s leaders, Viktor Yushchenko and his ally Yulia Tymoshenko, who were seen as being in the pay of the United States.

This resulted in Geng Huichang presenting a report to Hu Jintao. The Guoanbu had managed to get hold of a list of the Oranges’ financial supporters, which included Freedom House—an NGO chaired by former director of the CIA James Woolsey. The Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Institute were also on the list, accused by the Guoanbu of having been a principal backer of the 1989 Tiananamen protests. Specifically, the ministry charged Soros with supporting the entourage around both Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general secretary at the time, and his friend, the dissident businessman Wan Runnan, who escaped to France after the 4  June massacre.

When it rains, it pours: in late summer 2007, another foreign movement began causing concern among the Zhongnanhai leadership: the “Saffron Revolution”, a series of anti-government protests in Myanmar, led by Buddhist monks. The CCP leaders were concerned about the possibility of the unrest spreading to Tibet.

***

As number two at the Gonganbu, Liu Jing did not want to take any risks with Falun Gong, whose guru Li Hongzhi was in exile in the United States. He thought it vital to continue chasing down the movement. As we have seen, the 610 Office abroad was under Luo Gan’s leadership. It clearly also had bodies in China, which did the same work as the mainstream security services and poached their personnel. Liu Jing relied on the Gonganbu’s 26th Bureau, headed by a man called Zhang Yue, using its services to set up “610 Offices” within every regional Gonganbu office, in conjunction with the 5th Bureau (which administered the huge Chinese gulag, the laogai). The purpose of these offices was to track down, arrest and interrogate sympathizers of the Falun Gong movement.

Because the Gonganbu was tasked with dealing with mass revolts, rather than the targeted terrorism carried out by small, seasoned groups, Liu was also joined by an antiterrorist police force set up in August 2005. This was a new special force equipped with the most effective technical facilities for coping with mass urban unrest. Until then, the crushing of demonstrations, strikes and riots—including Tiananmen Square in 1989—had been carried out by the PAP, created in 1983, and the PLA.  The PAP, under the overall command of General Wu Shuangzhan, had some 800,000 police officers. Reformed as a result of its disastrous performance during Tiananmen, it was still not considered effective enough to deal with the new problems brought about by the transformation of Chinese society in the twenty-first century.

“The new squadrons of this new force will be better able to deal with terrorist incidents, demonstrations and other critical situations,” said Zhou Yongkang, during a presentation of the corps in his last few months as Gonganbu minister. Naturally, people were imagining all sorts of horrendous scenarios that might take place in the massive crowds at the Olympics, moving between different stadiums, as well as the possibility of increased unrest. Already, according to Gonganbu statistics for 2004, some 74,000 demonstrations and “disturbances” had taken place, involving almost 4 million Chinese.

The new special police units were to be spread across thirty-six cities, with a nucleus of 600 specialists, equipped with helicopters and light-armoured personnel vehicles, in each major city—Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, and Chongqing, the largest with over 32 million inhabitants. But the PAP had not spoken its last word: commandos from its 13th Special Brigade would also be on the scene. They had already taken part in 100 or so operations in the capital, where they were stationed, and it was their Elite Snow Leopard unit that had gone to Russia to rehearse collective hostage-taking exercises, seen in real life when Chechen commandos stormed a school in Beslan in September 2004.

The PLA, too, was involved in this massive exercise in the run-up to the Olympics. Without attempting to unravel the labyrinth of all the different corps and units involved, I shall highlight just a few. The Olympic Games Security Committee was linked to an important military command. This command, responsible for overall games security, was led by Tian Tixiang, who reported to General Chen Xiaogong’s PLA2 intelligence department and to military security, a subsidiary of the PLA General Political Department. The military was given eight missions that paralleled the “civil” security operations: the air defence of Beijing and other host cities including Qingdao, where water sports were being held; maritime safety, dealing with entry points to coastal areas; the response to nuclear, biological and chemical terror attacks (some of the bunkers in the underground city, Dixia Cheng, were modernized in view of this, as was the underground command of the Central Military Commission to which they connected); and finally tactical support, with its own special forces in case of terrorist attacks and hostage-taking. During the year that preceded the games, the PLA carried out some twenty-five full-scale disaster simulations.

Although a wide-ranging Olympics Security Committee had been set up, with links to both the Beijing Olympic Committee and the Beijing Municipal Government, a thorny issue remained unresolved. It led to the special services spending time visiting foreign intelligence agencies and soliciting visitors even a little bit in the know—including academics and journalists such as myself, as I described at the beginning of this book. The problem was a basic difference of opinion between two lobbies and two theories of Chinese security. One, represented by Professor Li Wei of the Guoanbu, saw al-Qaeda commandos everywhere among other terrorists, including, in his classification, Uyghurs and Tibetans. The other side, which was represented by the Gonganbu’s Liu Jing, expected mass demonstrations that risked degenerating into violent protests, or a resurgence of Falun Gong along the lines of its 1999 peaceful sit-in.

Paranoia was on the rise as the fateful date 8/8/2008 approached. In November 2007, the special services suggested that security be strengthened to prevent the possibility of a bacterial attack during the Olympics. They recommended monthly monitoring of the capital’s twenty-seven laboratories, to check that no viruses, bacteria or disease-carrying agents had been stolen. According to Liu Jing, this was the type of attack most to be feared around the time of the games. The question was to what extent he agreed with the theories of his rival Li Wei on who might perpetrate unrest.

There was only one solution that would ensure that everyone agreed on the real risks: total surveillance, with no breaches and no exceptions.

The Olympic Games Security Command Centre

The deputy at the Beijing mayor’s office, Qiang Wei, handed Hu Jintao a progress report on the security for the forthcoming games in mid-February 2007. He assured the president that all was progressing smoothly. The Olympic Security Command Centre, set up in June 2006, was key. There was rather more discretion around the “Intelligence Centre” that had been specifically conceived for the games, whose objective was to pursue, both in China and abroad, the regime’s opponents—Uyghurs, Tibetans and Falun Gong, as well as foreign spies disguised as sports journalists.

Before being named director of the Beijing’s Gonganbu bureau (Beijing Gonganju), where he remained until 2001, Qiang Wei (b. 1953) had a career in the chemical industry, and had been elected to various political posts in the Beijing municipality. His role in the Communist Youth League while the future president Hu was its head had obviously played a part in his appointment as head security honcho for the Olympics, just as it had when he was appointed to the Beijing mayor’s office in December 2007.

With a budget of $1.3 billion, Qiang requested special help from the American, Russian, German, British and French security services, as well as advice from Europol, after having looked closely at the security procedures for the 2004 Athens Olympics. Qiang considered that the biggest threat to the games came from from al-Qaeda, via Uyghur separatists. Private US and European security companies provided state-of-the-art equipment to supplement purchases from the MILIPOL homeland security fair, held every year in Paris.

As director of the Security Coordination Group, Qiang Wei announced the launch of the games’ Security Command Centre, which would guarantee a real-time response to any risk arising from the large-scale events. He appointed five deputy directors: Ma Zhenchuan, his successor as director of municipal public security, specifically in charge of video and computer surveillance (including interception of emails, text messages and mobile phone communications); the deputy Gonganbu minister Liu Jinguo, responsible for liaising with his boss Meng Jianzhu and not to be confused with his fellow vice-minister Liu Jing; Zhu Shuguang, deputy PAP commander; Li Binghua, vice-president of the Olympic Committee, in charge of dealing with security issues related to invited sports federations; and finally Niu Ping, about whom little was communicated. There was a good reason for this—he was a counterintelligence veteran and deputy Guoanbu minister.

It was because of Niu Ping that the Guoanbu was given the mission of running the other branch of the coordinating committee, the Intelligence Centre (qingbao zhongxin). This organization had been set up without fanfare in June 2006, to gather intelligence about any dangers threatening the Olympics. It relied on Guoanbu intelligence agents posted abroad, but was also willing to seek information from foreign intelligence services.

Special Guoanbu departments were established in Xinjiang and Tibet to anticipate the threat of subversive movements, as well as any possible activities by the Taiwan secret services, which were present in Fujian and Shanghai and which, Beijing officials thought, might attempt to give insurgents a helping hand. According to surprising but reliable intelligence, special teams from the Guoanbu and PLA3, led by General Chen Xiaogong, went to Pakistan and Afghanistan to make contact with al-Qaeda, through their longstanding contacts in the Taliban as well as among cadres of the Pakistani ISI service, with which the Guoanbu was on good terms. Their message for al-Qaeda’s leaders was clear: it would not serve their interests to attempt to disrupt the Beijing Olympics. It has even been claimed that the Chinese knew the whereabouts of bin Laden in 2008, but were careful not to share this information with the Americans. Geng Huichang’s agents were certainly active in the field.

According to Western security sources, despite the collaboration sought and obtained by the Chinese services, the Olympics Intelligence Centre played a role in detecting foreign service agents attempting to pry in Beijing, under cover of being there for the games. The centre dealt with registering all journalists, athletes and spectators who were entering China on tourist visas, and were therefore the most difficult to force to conform to regulations.

In addition to all of this, the Olympics Intelligence Centre was also responsible for protecting the Olympic torch. After being lit in Olympia, Greece on 25  March, then transported to the Panathinaikos stadium, the torch was to be flown to Beijing on 31  March. From there the relay would begin, with the mottos “Journey of Harmony”—which recalled Hu Jintao’s slogans—and “Light the sacred fire, propagate our dream”, which echoed the CCP’s Olympic slogan “One World, One Dream”, which had been plastered on walls all over Beijing for months. Over 130 days, nearly 20,000 torchbearers were to travel 137,000 kilometres across the whole of China—the longest distance ever run in the entire history of the modern Olympic Games.

There was always a real danger of the torch being hijacked, stolen, or used for propaganda purposes by some Tibetan, Uyghur or Falun Gong-affiliated Qigong group. To deal with this risk, each province established strict measures, overseen by the security services. Only the most trustworthy police and soldiers were chosen to represent the lofty ideals of Pierre de Coubertin, inventor of the summer Olympics, and carry aloft their flaming symbol.

Registering journalists and tourists

Under the pretext of organizing Olympics security, the Chinese services launched the largest-ever operation of registering foreign nationals, in addition to the reinforcement of their longstanding strategies for controlling the Chinese population.

A special committee was set up, theoretically to facilitate access to the games for sports journalists, in conjunction with the International Olympic Committee. But it imposed the usual draconian conditions for visiting foreign journalists, who were to be granted visas provided that they had an invitation from an official body and were able to detail all the people they would interview and all the places they would be visiting. This, of course, made it possible for the Guoanbu’s international relations department, which was responsible for journalists, to trail them more easily than if they had entered the country on a simple tourist visa. Anyone who did try this was at risk of provoking retaliation against themselves as an individual, or their editorial board.

Journalists were obliged to provide extremely elaborate documentation in order to obtain visas and permits for entering the stadiums themselves. According to the authorities, this was aimed at preventing “fake journalists” from operating on Chinese soil. The Chinese authorities pledged to relax restrictions on journalists explicitly covering the Olympics or covering stories in the lead-up to the games. This led to an extremely strict registration protocol being adopted by the Guoanbu, the Gonganbu and the Ministry of Information—to take just three principal departments out of the twenty involved in the Olympics Security Committee.

These were the identification codes entered into both the Guoanbu system as well as that of the Press Service of the Beijing Olympic Committee, in liaison with the press centre of the National Olympic Committee:

– (E) Journalist, editor, photo editor, generalist dependent on media or freelance under contract.

– (Es) Sports journalist: specializing in one particular Olympic sport.

– (EP) Photographer category.

– (EPs) Specialized sports photographer.

– (ET) Technician.

– (EC) Auxiliary (clerks, secretaries, interpreters, drivers, couriers). These had access only to the Beijing Olympic Committee’s Press Service. To be attached to press groups, newspapers/journals and the National Olympic Committee after reservation of a private Press Service office.

– (ENR) Member of a non-rights-holding radio and/or television organization (granted only by the International Olympic Committee).

– (Ex) Local press. Access only to the Olympic facilities (Zone 4) of the co-organizing cities during the football, sailing and horseback events. No access provided to facilities in the capital, including the Press Service.

– (Epx) Local photographer. Again, access only to the Olympic facilities (Zone 4) of the co-hosting cities during football, sailing and horseback events, and no access to facilities in the capital, including the Press Service.

As this registration and categorization was taking place in China, teams were being set up in every Chinese embassy abroad to identify sports journalists and pinpoint the nature of their media outlets, in order to define whether they expressed an “antagonistic” or a “friendly” attitude towards China. This work was linked to that of the diplomatic intelligence organizations: the Foreign Affairs Information Department, the 610 Office, the Guoanbu, the United Front Work Department, the CCP International Liaison Department, the Party Political Investigation Bureau, the police (Gonganbu liaison officers), the PLA Liaison Department and the PLA2 defence attachés. Deputy minister Li Junru even pointed out to me the existence of some CCP Central Party School positions, for example, at the Washington embassy.

Naturally, the purpose of all of this was to ensure security in the Chinese sense: to prevent journalists at the Olympics on the pretext of covering sporting events from reporting on problematic subjects, whether internet censorship or the situation for Uyghurs in the capital. Moreover, since the Chinese systematically use their state media as cover for intelligence activities, most significantly with the Xinhua News Agency, they inevitably assumed that the CIA, the German BND, MI6 and the French DGSE would be bound to send battalions of “honourable correspondents” to the games. On the other side, MI5 was warning British visitors to the Olympics to be wary of attempts to recruit them as “friends of China”, a warning that was equally pertinent to other foreign nationals.

Apart from foreign spies, it was human rights activists that the security services wanted to prevent from disrupting the smooth running of events. A banner unfurled with “Long live free Tibet!” during a Rebecca Adlington swimming race would have been as unacceptable for the Gonganbu’s “blue-haired dogs” as an attack blamed on the Uyghurs, like the one in May 2007 in which Mao Zedong’s giant portrait on Tiananmen Square was blackened.

This explained the putting on file, as we saw in Chapter 10, of Qigong and other martial arts associations, not only in China but also in countries such as France, Germany, Australia and Canada, which were believed to be harbouring Falun Gong supporters or members. Nationals of these countries who were involved in the movement might come to the games to whip up non-violent protests, or even hold press conferences, such as the one organized by a team from Reporters Without Borders near Beijing’s Olympic Press Centre in the autumn.

One of the organizations responsible for setting up these data banks was the CICIR, which carried out an extensive file compilation programme targeting different NGOs, particularly those working in Darfur, as well as the international organizations that were arguing for a boycott of the Olympic Games. One of its challenges was to try and establish relationships between these groups and the CIA.  Once again, as throughout their history, the Chinese special services were caught between two stools: on the one hand they had to go cap in hand to ask for help from the Americans with both technology and know-how in the fight against terrorism; and yet at the same time they were seeking to score points against the United States, their number one rival, by firming up and expanding their twenty-first-century espionage programme.

The Danes on camera

We cannot close this chapter without pointing out that the Olympics saw the emergence of new practices within existing services, and even some new ad hoc services: namely, the establishment of an unprecedented “sports intelligence” department, targeting all rival foreign teams, which was engaged in operations either independently or with a team of personnel from the Guoanbu, the PLA and the National Sports Administration. This strategy was overseen at the highest level by Liu Peng, minister of the General Administration of Sport of China (Guojia tiyu congju, GASC), who chaired BOCOG, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games.

According to a French “sports intelligence” source, since the Athens Olympics if not earlier the GASC had been training peripatetic teams of professionals, both civil and military, to focus on the three main sporting disciplines: athletics, swimming and other water sports. These teams benefited, no doubt, from logistical support as well as the Guoanbu’s technical expertise, particularly in terms of wiretapping and intercepting communications. They not only engaged in sports surveillance missions, but also in the selection of athletes to be sent abroad for training, and recruitment of foreign coaches, generally dismissed after their use was exhausted. Some of these coaches came from the former Eastern Bloc—former East Germany, Romania, Hungary—where they were ideologically more reliable, had links with the old secret services such as the Stasi, and were expert in the intensive use of doping.

There were also various special operations in individual disciplines, such as ping-pong, where it was particularly important that the Chinese not be outdone by foreign teams. In a number of countries, including Sweden, the Chinese had been spying on rival athletes’ training habits in order to train clones into the same strengths and weaknesses, against whom their own champions could train. Similar operations had been conducted for three years against Italian and French fencers—which did not, however, prevent them from ultimately excelling at Beijing.

Project 119 was set up in 2001 as a huge profiling enterprise, including the individual registration of foreign athletes. Its declared aim was for the PRC to win 119 gold, silver and bronze medals—the target was later increased to 122. China had won thirty-one medals at Athens in 2004. This work was boosted by technical teams sent all over the world to film the sports teams considered the most “dangerous”, or, alternatively, niche sports that they thought were neglected—and therefore a weak point—in certain countries. These were often women’s sports, which traditionally received less financial support in the West than in the East, such as women’s weightlifting and women’s wrestling.

This explains why several cases of espionage—no doubt only the tip of the iceberg—emerged ahead of the games. Danish female footballers were filmed in their hotel room in Beijing by technicians spying on them behind a two-way mirror; they were caught red-handed in a small adjoining storage room. The explanation provided by hotel management, who smuggled out the secret agents, was that they had been in the closet not to spy, but to get a glimpse of the athletes ahead of the games. Honour saved! Another example was the computer hacking of the British canoe and kayak teams and the British boxing federation, which had been uncovered by MI5. This operation had obtained access to the athletes’ Sports Federation files, which contained their medical records, professional records, and personal data.

Naturally, several European security services returned some parries to ensure security of communication between Beijing and their countries, or within Beijing, or between athletes, their families, their coaches, and so on during the games. Several episodes that came to light after the games—such as the case of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s advisor, whose Blackberry was stolen in Shanghai by a young Chinese woman—showed that the Guoanbu’s technical services were exploiting weak points such as unencrypted laptops and cell phones, as well as tourists’ private lives. It was even feared that the Chinese might break into the Downing Street server and siphon off emails. Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5 at the time, warned that “China was carrying out state-sponsored espionage against vital parts of Britain’s economy, including the computer systems of big banks and financial services firms.”2

For the Chinese, putting aside the security aspect, the outcome of the Beijing Olympics was positive. Though they did not succeed in their ambition of winning 119—or 122—medals, they came away with a total of 100 medals, including fifty-one gold. The special services’ antics during the games did not go unanswered. The 2012 London Olympics provided an excellent opportunity for British intelligence to take revenge, and for the Chinese to attempt further improvement of their sporting success. Chinese sports intelligence had many days ahead of it.

***

Contrary to the promises made to the International Olympic Committee and world opinion, the 2008 Olympics had not led to any softening of domestic policies, nor to opening the door even a chink toward democracy. If anything, the games saw another turn of the screw for Tibetans, Xinjiang Uyghurs, Mongolians, trade unionists and cyber-dissidents, who suffered further crackdowns, the likes of which had rarely been seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre twenty years earlier.3

The Olympics went wonderfully well from the point of view of Chinese security and intelligence officials. Apart from the Tibetan crisis and the battle against Uyghur separatists, the challenge launched by China had had a most successful outcome. The various agencies known as “special working bodies” (tewu gongzuo jigou) benefited from considerable resources and budgets thanks to the games. Their image was strengthened in the Chinese media, in the eyes of the local population, but also, paradoxically, among the foreign intelligence agencies that cooperated with Beijing on counterterrorism security for the games.

The Chinese intelligence community experienced the Olympics as an unprecedented test, one that allowed it to shift to a higher level and take its place alongside China’s strategic and economic power-brokers. It was an opportunity to make great changes both for population control in the digital era, and in creating tools to gain strategic knowledge of the outside world. After the games ended, Geng Huichang, head of the Guoanbu, was able to reposition himself in his favoured fields of strategic and economic intelligence. Another notable result of the Olympics had been the collaboration of mixed Gonganbu/Guoanbu teams in the exploding field of counterterrorism, their activities often blurred with counterinsurgency tactics in civil society. Similarly, the PAP—which had distinguished itself in London and Paris with the Olympic torch relay led by its own Zhao Shi—now possessed both a counterintelligence and a counterterrorism department.

In 2010, a similarly massive security operation was undertaken for the Shanghai Expo. The operation was supervised by Cai Xumin, a Shanghai native and head of the local Guoanbu, and the newly appointed vice-president, Xi Jinping; the latter had already coordinated security for the Olympics two years earlier. Xi’s ambition, with the backing of the Shanghai clique and the relative goodwill of Hu Jintao himself, was to succeed Hu as general secretary, head of the Central Military Commission, and president of China.

This was a major challenge, because guaranteeing the security of the Shanghai Expo would be far more complicated than it had been with the Olympics—not only because the Expo took place over six months, from 1  May to 31  October 2010, but also because the numerous exhibition venues, pavilions and stands were scattered over a large area of the city, rather than in a relatively small number of hyper-protected stadiums. Thus the PLA requested assistance from security bodies, who agreed to undertake training exercises once again, in spite of the evident tension between certain cadres representing the Shanghai military region and those who came to share the expertise they had gained from the Olympics—such as the introduction of ground-to-air missiles for destroying projectiles or hostile aircraft.

General Xie Dezhi, second-in-command of the Shanghai garrison since 2008, coordinated the exercises, whilst introducing some innovations. These included cooperation with the Gonganbu, the decision to fly PLA-piloted EC 135 helicopters over the Expo sites, and the training of special units for street fighting, in replica settings of the Bund and other Shanghai neighbourhoods, constructed out of cardboard in Mongolian villages. Most significantly of all, after having studied the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks by Islamist maritime commandos, the marine units carried out security and civil protection exercises similar to those carried out at the mouth of the Yangtze River in Shanghai, with five ships and helicopters. Guoanbu operatives mounted their own various operations—honeytraps, blackmail and censorship—against foreign visitors during the Expo, as was the tradition at all major fairs and international exhibitions.

Two years later, when he replaced Hu Jintao as general secretary, Xi Jinping set about establishing a new programme for coordinating the intelligence community (see Chapter 14). But before that, two men whose image had benefited from their successful roles in securing the Olympics and the Shanghai Expo found themselves at loggerheads. They were Zhou Yongkang, coordinator of the security services, and Xi Jinping himself, who was now hoping to become paramount leader of the PRC.  Not since the Cultural Revolution and the days of Kang Sheng, head of Mao’s secret service, had the battle of the Beijing factions played such a devastating role.