14

XI’S MOLE HUNT AND THE BIRTH OF THE STRATEGIC SUPPORT FORCE

On 20  May 2017, The New York Times caused a sensation with the publication of an explosive investigation into the CIA, which had reportedly “lost” dozens of Chinese sources, either volunteers or paid informants, who’d been furnishing valuable intelligence about the PRC since 2010. These sources, having been manipulated by the CIA, had now been arrested by Chinese counterintelligence and tried on camera, charged with spying for the “imperialist services”. Their fortunes varied; most were handed sentences of varying weight, depending on whether they agreed to collaborate during interrogation or, preferably, to return to spying, this time feeding the Americans false intelligence. Some were executed. The New York Times described a cadre shot in cold blood in front of his colleagues.

In its assessment of the roots and consequences of this disaster, the CIA tried to get to the bottom of how its agents and informers in the enemy camp had come to be identified in such large numbers. Had they been badly managed by their handling officers, or were some of their Chinese recruits in fact double agents, who had managed to pull the wool over the Americans’ eyes by pretending to work for the US while really being in the pay of the Chinese services? Had their communications been intercepted? Were coded instructions embedded in documents attached to emails?

Tactical blunders were also cited, including the possibility that CIA case officers had made the mistake of meeting their informants in unsecured locations, for example hotels studded with hidden microphones, such as the Hilton in Beijing, near the huge US embassy on An Jia Lu Street. However, the report of former CIA analyst Gregary Levin, now regional security officer in the US embassy, suggests that this hypothesis is unlikely. This document, entitled Crime and Safety Report and still accessible in 2018 via the US embassy website, clearly warns American businesspeople gallivanting in China:

All visitors should be aware that they have no expectation of privacy in public or private locations. All means of communication, including telephones, mobile phones, faxes, emails, and text messages, are likely monitored.

There are regular reports of the human and technical monitoring of American businesspeople and visiting U.S.  citizens. Activities and conversations in hotels, offices, cars, and taxis may be monitored onsite or remotely. Overt placement of microphones and video cameras are common in taxis. All personal possessions in hotel rooms, residences, and offices may be accessed without the occupants’ consent/knowledge. Elevators and public areas of housing compounds are under continuous surveillance. Business travelers should be particularly mindful that trade secrets, negotiating positions, and other business sensitive information may be shared with Chinese counterparts, competitors, and regulatory/legal entities.

The areas around U.S.  and other foreign diplomatic facilities and residences are under overt physical and video surveillance; dozens of security personnel are posted outside of facilities and around residences, while video cameras are visible throughout the diplomatic offices and residential neighborhoods of Beijing. Embassy employees are warned not to discuss sensitive information in their homes, vehicles, or offices, and members of the private sector should take precautions to safeguard sensitive personal and/or proprietary information. In 2016, U.S.  Embassy employees reported an increase in the tampering of locks on the front door of their residences, suggesting forced entry. In some cases, the tampering led to door locks that no longer operated as intended.

The Chinese government has publicly declared that it regularly monitors private email and internet browsing through cooperation with the limited number of internet service providers (ISPs) and wireless providers in China. Wireless access in major metropolitan areas is becoming more common. As a result, Chinese authorities can more easily access official and personal computers. U.S.  Embassy employees have reported seeing unknown computers and devices accessing their home networks. These intrusions likely required advanced computer knowledge and network password hacking to enable such a connection.

Many popular services and websites (Google, Twitter, Facebook) are blocked.

Holden Triplett, the FBI attaché at the US embassy in Beijing, officially in charge of liaison with the Chinese security services, sounded the same warning.

Back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they feared the worst, and with good reason. Though the focus in recent years had been on PLA hackers and cyber-warfare, human intelligence had continued to be vital. But, as evidenced by the China file bequeathed by Paul Brennan, the outgoing CIA director, to his successor Mike Pompeo in early 2017, this had been gravely compromised.1 The CIA’s internal counterintelligence service and the FBI set up a multidisciplinary team, located for security reasons in another part of Virginia. Its purpose was to conduct a “retrospective analysis”, called Operation Honey Badger, to try and work out what had led to this serious intelligence failure. The possibility that there were traitors within the US services could not be ruled out.

Meanwhile, the Chinese media applauded what they saw as an homage of vice to virtue: the US “imperialist” services finally recognizing the superiority of their Chinese opponent. What they conveniently ignored was the fact that the disaster had been brought to light because American journalists, unlike them, enjoyed freedom from state intervention.

This game of smoke and mirrors was highly reminiscent of that between the KGB and the CIA at the height of the Cold War. The Chinese intelligence community was working hard at tracking down traitors both within and without the state apparatus, which is what had led to the loss of so many of the CIA’s sources.

This Chinese mole hunt had begun under Hu Jintao in 2008. On taking over in 2012, Xi Jinping had set up a taskforce, which he himself chaired, to “strengthen national security”. In 2017, the counterintelligence services launched a vast campaign to raise awareness of the problem of foreign espionage, with dedicated websites, animations explaining how to spot a spy, and TV soap operas glorifying the heroes of this “special work” (tewu gongzuo). It was journalists, academics, and Chinese-American and Taiwanese businesspeople who were to bear the brunt of the campaign. In April 2016, the Guoanbu promised a reward of up to $77,000 to any citizen who helped to uncover “a lead that played a decisive role in enabling the prevention or shut-down of spying activity.”

None of the names of the lost CIA agents were published by The New York Times in 2017. However, it was clear from the focus of the Chinese investigation that moles had been recruited from the highest levels of diplomacy and government, and even in some cases the Chinese secret services. The Guoanbu was at the heart of this crisis, for two reasons. Firstly, a substantial number of its top-level managers and operatives had been recruited by foreign secret services; secondly, its internal counterintelligence service had been tasked with detecting “double agents” within either the Guoanbu or other parts of the state apparatus.

Although the CIA had probably lost many informants, it had not been responsible for recruiting all these agents. Recruitment took place as little as possible within China itself, despite the fact that the main CIA station was located in Beijing. CIA satellites, located under diplomatic cover in consulates in Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shanghai, Shenyang and Wuhan, were under permanent surveillance. The station chief in Beijing was officially “accredited” through his counterpart at the Guoanbu office in Beijing, Li Dong, and his bosses at the East Gardens headquarters. This was part of the limited cooperation dating back to the days when the Chinese and Americans had worked together against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Because of this scrutiny, the CIA resorted to using operatives who were entirely clandestine and NOC (under “non-official cover”), and who sometimes made contact with their agents. Most of their recruits were Chinese—diplomats, scientists and special agents—from within China itself. Other foreign services allied with the CIA helped to recruit these agents, whom they then either “shared” or passed on to the Americans, who had the largest budgetary and logistical capacity, not least when it came to offering these agents new homes if they decided to defect. These foreign services were primarily the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean, as well as British MI6 and the German BND, both of which had a strong presence in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Moles at the top of the Guoanbu

An extraordinary episode took place in Hong Kong, beginning in 2010, when Li Hui, secretary of one of the Guoanbu’s deputy ministers, fell under the spell of a Chinese-American woman while visiting the semi-democratic city, still swarming with foreign secret agents. Li, a 40-year-old graduate from Beijing University and a specialist in the English-speaking world, agreed to work for the CIA.  Thanks to information he provided, the FBI arrested several Chinese spies in the United States.2 Now on the alert, the Guoanbu unmasked Li in March 2011, and realized that he had handed over many secrets about its internal workings. But meanwhile he had also recruited other colleagues, including his boss, the deputy minister Lu Zhongwei. This Shanghai native, an expert in the secret economic war being conducted in Japan and the rest of East Asia, was sacked in June 2012, if not for treason then for the neglect that had allowed Li to turn.

This was a serious blow for the Guoanbu boss, Geng Huichang, himself a specialist in US affairs, whose career rise had gone without a hitch since his 2007 appointment to oversee the security of the Olympic Games. Geng was an unusual figure in the services, having chaired the well-known CICIR think-tank, home to hundreds of researchers and analysts who travel the world attending international symposia. They constitute, of course, the Guoanbu’s 11th Bureau, and this was where Geng had recruited his friend Lu Zhongwei, a specialist in North-East Asia and specifically Japan, who was named head of the CICIR himself in 2000.

At this point, it is worth adding an important detail to Geng Huichang’s biography. Critics in Beijing have tended to claim that, until he became first deputy minister and then minister of state security, he had not done anything particularly impressive. There are indeed several notable lacunae in his CV.  But the facts yet to be revealed, though the CIA is well aware of them, challenge the legend propagated by the Chinese: before becoming deputy minister in 1998, Geng, like his colleague Cai Ximin (head of the Guoanbu in Shanghai), disappeared for several years. According to some sources, the two men were working as undercover officers in various foreign countries, notably in the United States, conducting a series of complex and successful operations.

This explains why Geng could not be dismissed, even after the identification of a succession of traitors that made the very foundations of the Guoanbu tremble. The case of his friend Lu Zhongwei was not the only one to strike at the very top level of the ministry. As we already know, a few months later it was the turn of the Guoanbu’s number two, Qiu Jin, the deputy minister responsible for counterintelligence. He was accused of being a double agent—shuang mian jiandie, literally a two-faced spy. Then, in late 2014, Liang Ke, head of the Beijing office, was arrested along with dozens of his colleagues. He was accused not only of having worked for foreign services but also, by implication, of having participated in the attempted coup led by Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang by wiretapping the new president, Xi Jinping.

From the outside, with Qiu’s replacement as deputy minister by another senior figure in counterintelligence, Ma Jian, who oversaw operations in North America, everything appeared to be back to normal. A Guoanbu cadre for thirty years, Ma was said to be so effective that he could even have replaced Geng, who was soon due for retirement. In early winter 2014, Ma made a tour of China’s allies among foreign services, including Pakistan’s ISI.  But in January 2015 he suffered a surprising change of fortune: he was imprisoned for corruption and spying. The prosecution claimed that he had received funds from a Chinese businessman who had fled to the United States in October 2014—Ling Wancheng, brother of Ling Jihua, the principal private secretary of former president Hu Jintao. The Chinese special services were determined to do whatever it took to bring Ling back to China.

Obviously, the hunt for moles continued with unabated frenzy on both the Chinese and the American side. Ma was replaced by Su Deliang, political commissar and deputy minister of the Guoanbu.3 In April 2016, Beijing uploaded a film to YouTube in which Ma Jian confessed, explaining that he needed a lot of money to maintain his six mistresses! Though he made no mention of his job as a spymaster, no one in the world of international intelligence was deceived by this footage. Ma was jailed for life in December 2018.

Ma Jian had been put through the wringer by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the legal arm of the “tiger hunt” against corruption, whose head, Wang Qishan, was both Xi Jinping’s closest advisor and his vice-president from the nineteenth party congress in October 2017. As far back as December 2014, a Taiwanese counterintelligence specialist told me: “The mainland Chinese are using the front of the fight against corruption to perform a purge which is really about their hunt for moles. In this case, the CIA could not have known the real reason for the dismissal of one of its agents.” So was this a tiger hunt, or a mole hunt?

The shake-up within the Guoanbu was considerable, but other sectors of government had also been infiltrated. Witness the case of Ambassador Ma Jisheng, who presented his credentials to Icelandic president Ólafur Ragnar Grimsson on 12  December 2012. The following month he had returned to China with his wife, Zhong Yue, to celebrate the Chinese New Year—it was the Year of the Snake. As soon as they got off the plane, they had been arrested by the Guoanbu and taken to a secret prison for interrogation. A colleague, another diplomat, had been arrested in Japan, where he had served with Ma—it turned out that the ambassador had first been recruited by the Naicho, the intelligence service that reports directly to the Japanese prime minister, during his posting as embassy advisor in Tokyo, from 2004 to 2008.

During that period, Ma Jisheng had narrowly avoided a tricky situation when one of the first secretaries of the embassy, Wang Qingqian—in fact a military intelligence colonel under diplomatic cover—was unmasked and sentenced to death for spying. A similar situation had emerged in Seoul, where the Chinese ambassador Li Bin was identified as an American agent. Non-diplomatic figures had also been accused of spying for the United States. In November 2008, a biochemist called Wo Weihan, whose daughters lived in Austria, had been arrested on spying charges by the Guoanbu, condemned to death and executed in Beijing. In 2014, the CCTV reporter Rui Chenggang was targeted. Interrogated about his work for the CIA, he was also charged with corruption, for which he received a six-year prison sentence.

It seems clear that, under Hu Jintao, the secret services had been seeking to test the Obama administration. The secret war between China and the US certainly intensified during Obama’s two terms as president, and even more so after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. During this period, Ma Jisheng was caught up in this growing tussle, used first by both the Naicho and the CIA, and later, during his posting to Iceland, by the CIA alone.

The Chinese espionage offensive was ramping up, as evidenced by the large number of spy networks dismantled in the United States and the cyber-attacks led by the PLA3, against well-chosen targets such as the US Office of Personnel Management—the hacking of which in 2015 forced the CIA to withdraw several of its officials from its embassy in Beijing. This further weakened the agency’s manpower, already greatly affected during this decade by the loss of so many of its sources. By summer 2017, after The New York Times broke that story, some experts were wondering if the CIA was not in fact embarking on a new strategy in its psychological warfare tactics, leaking information about its woes to the media.

This was clearly, for the CIA, a terrible series of unfortunate events. However, it was also extremely damaging to the Guoanbu’s credibility, its reputation damaged not only by this mole hunt, but also by a series of corruption cases that had done great harm to the entire Chinese administration. The result was that the Guoanbu’s role in counterintelligence (via its 8th Bureau) was restricted, only resuming in early 2018. Its rival ministry, the Gonganbu, now run by Guo Shengkun, saw its own counterintelligence department grow, along with its cyber-security service, which was distinct from that of the PLA.

This renewal of counterintelligence activity, alongside anti-corruption tracking abroad, indicated the important, albeit slightly forgotten, role of the Gonganbu’s 1st Bureau, which had increased its responsibilities in the fight for national security and counterintelligence since 2012, as had been the case at the founding of the PRC sixty years earlier. This was the internal security bureau, whose full title was Gonganbu Guonei Anquan Baoweiju—Guobao for short. It was now as active as the Guoanbu when it came to interventions abroad.

This provoked a mini-scandal soon after Donald Trump’s election in autumn 2016, when the FBI arrested Sun Lijun, head of the Guobao, who had the rank of a deputy minister. He and his deputy had flown to the US to try and obtain the extradition of Guo Wengui, who Beijing claimed was a corrupt billionaire. The FBI seized their computers and mobile phones before putting the “Pandas” (as the service’s agents were called) on the first plane back to China.

Meanwhile, the FBI was continuing its investigation of the Chinese infiltration of the CIA.  Within the next six months, two CIA operatives, Kevin Mallory and Jerry Chun Shing Lee—stationed in Beijing until 2007—were charged with espionage. Other Western services had not been immune to the Chinese intrusion. In 2015, after the NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s defection, some of MI6’s agents in China narrowly avoided having their cover blown—which suggested that the Chinese and Russians had intercepted communications from the American NSA.4 In May 2018, it was revealed in France that two former DGSE operatives, Henri Manioc and Pierre-Marie Winterat, had been arrested and accused of spying for a foreign power—China—in December 2017.

The situation of Colonel Henri Manioc was unusual because he was a former DGSE chief of station under diplomatic cover at the French embassy in Beijing. He had defected in 1998 after having fallen in love with a Chinese woman he later married, who worked for the PSA car company in China. He went on to open a restaurant on Hainan Island, at which point Su Deliang was sent to monitor his handling. Su, formerly head of the Guoanbu in Shanghai—from where operations against the French and British were conducted—went on to be named overall head of the Guoanbu’s counterintelligence service (the 8th Bureau).

Manioc later returned to France and set up a consulting firm with offices in Paris and London. He was convinced that the DGSE, after having questioned him, had decided to pardon his defection, since he had not revealed any key secrets to the Chinese. Nevertheless, in the intelligence community his actions were considered a betrayal. It was not until Emmanuel Macron’s election as president in 2017 and the appointment of a new DGSE director that the affair resurfaced, and with it an understanding of the extent of the attacks carried out by the Guoanbu against the allied British, French and American services.

Manioc’s case, if it makes it to trial in 2019–20, will be the first of its kind since the Boursicot case of the 1980s. It should also bring to light the secrets passed to the Guoanbu by the two retired DGSE agents, not least concerning the internal workings of the French counterintelligence service.

Chen Wenqing and the purging of the Guoanbu

After using the Guoanbu to overthrow Zhou Yongkang’s network, Xi Jinping decided to remodel the service yet again, both purging it and curbing its powers. The main leaders around Geng Huichang were fired or arrested and charged with cooperating with foreign intelligence services.

In 2016 the command of the service was split between Geng Huichang, who was due for retirement, and a political commissioner called Chen Wenqing, who was preparing to take over as head of state security. At the time of his appointment in November 2016, the media drew attention to the fact that he had come to the job from the CCDI, which had just led the “tiger hunt” against corruption to target the faction around Zhou Yongkang, under whom he had in fact once served.

However, Chen had already worked for the Guoanbu, after he gained a law degree in 1983 from the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, along with two fellow students who also climbed the Guoanbu ladder: Niu Ping, who headed the Olympic Games Security Committee, and Ma Jian, the head of counterintelligence who had just been arrested. In the 1990s, Chen headed the service’s regional department in Sichuan province, where he was born in 1960. Later, he joined the all-powerful CCDI, where he was deputy secretary until 2015. In the great communist tradition, he had been asked to carry out the arrests and investigations for the downfall of his former friend Ma Jian, as a way of proving his absolute loyalty to the Xi Jinping faction.

It was true that Geng Huichang had been about to retire on the grounds of age, but it was also the case that an investigation to continue to identify moles was opened by a “special agent”, Tang Chao, appointed by the new director Chen. Rumours began to circulate in diplomatic circles that have since been confirmed: Geng Huichang was now the subject of an investigation. In addition to the dismissals of various counterintelligence heads, the main grievance against him was that four years earlier, at Zhou Yongkang’s instigation, the Guoanbu had begun electronically monitoring party leaders, including Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. Ultimately, the CCDI’s investigation exonerated Geng: Zhou Yongkang had short-circuited the Guoanbu counterintelligence hierarchy in Beijing, bypassing even its head Liang Ke, in order to eavesdrop on the Chinese leadership.

Despite this “political acquittal”, Xi Jinping decided to retire Geng and replace him with Chen from the CCDI.  In addition, he decided to reduce the influence of the Guoanbu and rebalance it with the role of the Gonganbu’s 1st Bureau, which also operated abroad.

Some time earlier, on Xi Jinping’s orders, there had been a major change of leadership within the Guoanbu’s regional offices, already underway before Chen’s appointment. On 10  September 2015, the Beijing Youth Daily announced changes in leadership at the Guoanbu regional offices in Shanxi, Guizhou, Shandong, Xinjiang, Shanghai, Hainan and Henan. Indeed, following Zhou Yongkang’s failed coup in 2013, transfers, arrests and purges began to multiply rapidly in 2015 under Chen’s leadership.

I have been able to identify the main Guoanbu regional directors, who will no doubt remain in their positions for years to come unless they, in turn, become the victims of denunciations. In alphabetical order of provinces and megacities: Hebei (Liu Zengqi), Heilongjiang (Chen Donghui), Hubei (Zhang Qikuan), Hunan (Liang Jianqiang), Jiangsu (Liu Yong), Liaoning (Wei Chunjiang), Shandong (Jiang Lianjun), Shanghai (Dong Weimin), Shanxi (Wang Xiuwen), Sichuan (Zhao Jian), and Zhejiang (Huang Baokun). In Beijing, Li Dong, a specialist in Russian affairs, has replaced Liang Ke, who is now in prison.

On 7  November 2016, Chen Wenqing was officially named overall head of the Guoanbu, and his predecessor Geng was named advisor to the Central Leading Group for Taiwan Affairs at the Central Foreign Affairs Commission; he also remained on the political-legal commission overseeing security and the coordination of the security and intelligence services.

Chen’s appointment was an indication of how much things had changed since the time when the Guoanbu was reluctant to include a branch of the CCDI within its structure, arguing that it had its own system of internal scrutiny, and fearing that a team examining operational expenses in such an extremely sensitive ministry risked leaking sensitive information regarding intelligence and counterintelligence.

During the CCP’s nineteenth congress in October 2017, from which Xi Jinping emerged supreme leader of the PRC, it became clear that he intended to reinforce the political-security structure with a network of his own people—in other words, officials who had already worked with him in his different fiefdoms. We shall see over the next few years whether the Guoanbu will manage to regain the strategic importance it had in the past. Early indications, as this book goes to press, suggest that its new minister will not be content with just carrying out mole or tiger hunts.

One particular episode from early 2018 is very telling. After much internal debate, it was eventually decided that Chen Wenqing would be responsible for the partnership with foreign intelligence services to develop the strategic security of the One Belt One Road initiative. Along with Meng Jianzhu, the security coordinator at the executive level of the CCP, it was decided that the head of the Guoanbu, rather than the head of the Gonganbu, would handle relations with the foreign security services of all the countries traversed by this gigantic project—twenty-eight to date.

Naturally, a first counterterrorism circle was to be set up with close allies from the Shanghai Club, including Russia and the Muslim republics of the former USSR.  In January 2018, a meeting was held in Uzbekistan, organized by the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), part of the Shanghai Club. A Russian counterintelligence expert, Yevgeniy Sysoyev, formerly number two at the FSB, presided over the meeting, seconded by Chinese representatives linked to the Guoanbu: the permanent representative Xu Chuangong and the RATS deputy director, Ms Zhou Qing. At the same time, Chen Wenqing was developing relationships with Asian allies including U Thaung Tun, Myanmar’s national security advisor, and General To Lam, Vietnam’s minister of public security. The recurrent theme was the fight against terrorism—for the Chinese, primarily the battle against Uyghur separatists, whose jihadist elements were beginning to dwindle after the strategic defeat of ISIS in the Levant in 2017.

In the spring of 2018, Chen Wenqing resumed his campaign, and went to meet officials from countries as disparate as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Spain, Germany and Turkey. With the latter, there was the pressing issue of Turkish-speaking Uyghur separatists, active in both Xinjiang and ISIS, and often supported by the MIT, the Turkish secret service.

The convenient mystery of Flight MH370

In recent years, a number of events have changed how Chinese leaders think about the utilization of military intelligence. We have seen the importance of the First Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But according to information from a senior PLA officer, one particular event precipitated this shift of perspective, just as Xi Jinping and his advisors were preparing a huge overhaul of the army and its intelligence services.

On 8  March 2014, Malaysian Airlines Boeing flight MH370, flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, disappeared off the radar with 239 passengers and crew on board, including 153 Chinese nationals. Among the various conspiracy theories, the most frequent was that put forward by Western intelligence services, who accused the much-weakened Guoanbu of a disinformation campaign implicating all outposts of Chinese state media, in particular CCTV television—the first to broadcast it worldwide, before it was taken up by Fox News. This was the false claim that the plane had been brought down in a terrorist attack by the East Turkestan Independence Movement, the Uyghur nationalist movement in Xinjiang, whose spirit had been somewhat broken by the killing of passengers in Kunming station, Yunnan, the week before.5 To back up the rumour, the Chinese services leaked information from Hong Kong that two individuals on the flight had been travelling on fake European passports. Shortly after, Beijing even suggested that a Uyghur suspect—an artist from Xinjiang—had also been a passenger on Flight MH370. The implication was that the plane might have been brought down by a Uyghur suicide bomber.

We should remember that, during its restructuring in the globalizing 1990s, the Guoanbu had expanded its special section for broadcasting fake news, the Wuchuan Teke, modelled on the disinformatsia section of the former Soviet KGB. The Chinese character wu (误) means “the word that has fallen from the sky”, and today is taken up by a battalion of internet users obviously non-existent back in the 1990s.

According to a source, whose information has proved highly reliable over the years, in autumn 2014 the intelligence services sent President Xi a surprising report that explained the considerable diplomatic cooling between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing—not helped by the fact that, of the 227 passengers on Flight MH370, 153 were Chinese.

Since June that year, the Chinese services had been following a line of enquiry suggesting the plane had disappeared during an attempt to hijack it. They were investigating effectively two alternative versions of the same scenario. The first hypothesis was that the hijacking had taken place on the approach to Vietnam, and that having forced the plane to turn around and return to Malaysia, the hijacker(s) were demanding the release of the ex-prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, leader of the Malaysian opposition. Prosecutors initially claimed that the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had been at Ibrahim’s trial a few days earlier, but this has subsequently been refuted. Under this scenario, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak refused to enter into negotiations, and the plane crashed.

But Guoanbu and PLA2 investigators tended towards an alternative hypothesis, presumably drawing on evidence from surveillance carried out in the region by the PLA: they believed that Royal Malaysian Air Force fighters (either Sukhoi SU-30 or F/A-18D Hornet) had been tasked with shooting down the plane, once it had begun to be seen as a real danger. Such a decision on the prime minister’s part would have been somewhat surprising—although the report included the fact that that he was implicated in the murder of an interpreter who had become his mistress, during a 2005 trip to Paris while he was minister of defence; she was allegedly planning to reveal information about bribes paid during negotiations over the purchase of a French submarine. In this scenario Razak, known for being both implacable and irascible, convinced himself that the Americans, whose base at Diego Garcia was threatened by the Boeing’s flight path, would cover up his decision. But none of this explains why no trace of the plane has ever been found, despite the vast resources employed by Chinese military intelligence, including detection vessels and reconnaissance satellites. Meanwhile, the naval intelligence service (Haijun Qingbao) and the PLA’s combat fleet both took the opportunity to increase their sphere of intervention, particularly in the Indian Ocean.

It is highly likely that the new military intelligence systems put in place in 2015 will prove more effective in the future. Besides the virtually free publicity given to the PLA3 (responsible for SIGINT), showing that its satellites could play a useful role in air safety, the PLA fleet naturally found itself on the frontline when it sent a missile-launching frigate and an amphibious landing ship (whose potential utility might be questioned) to the search areas. But Admiral Yin Zhuo drew perhaps the greatest propaganda feat out of the mystery when he explained that this affair proved it was in China’s strategic interest to establish a permanent naval base in the Spratly Islands.

The SSF and the PLA’s new intelligence

In the aftermath of a major series of purges within the PLA, related to multiple corruption cases and the failed attempted coup of 2012, Xi Jinping, as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), finalized the structure of the new army. On 31  December 2015, it was reorganized along three major lines, with the establishment of the Army Leadership Organ, the PLA Rocket Force—which replaced the former nuclear missile corps, the 2nd Artillery—and the Strategic Support Force (SSF, or Zhanlue Zhiyuan Budui).

To summarize, the leadership now consisted of a Joint Staff Department (Junwei lianhe canmo bu), managing five “war zones” or “theatre commands” (north, east, south, west, and central) to replace the seven military regions that had existed previously.

The Special Support Force is of particular interest, since it now integrates most of the Chinese military’s intelligence and specifically cyber-warfare departments.6 According to its new head, General Gao Jin, the SSF is an “informational umbrella” (xinxisan), in other words an assembly of resources bringing together the Aerospace Reconnaissance Bureau (tianjun bu), a cyber-army (wangjun), and electronic warfare troops (dianzizhan budui). The SSF controls the Beidou communications satellites copied from the European Galileo system, the hacking stations of the former PLA3, aerial reconnaissance, satellite imagery and, above all, an army of drones of every shape and size, which tail foreign vessels in the international waters of the China Sea. The drones (UAV) used to be under the PLA2’s jurisdiction.

The SSF, which groups together the new Chinese information warfare service, has its own intelligence centre (qingbao zhongxin), with four main departments: (a) an intelligence collection department; (b) an intelligence processing department; (c) a dissemination management department; and (d) a technical support department. At the same time, most of the intelligence functions of the former PLA2 are now spread out over several different sectors, as American experts Peter Mattis and Elsa Kania explain:

The available Chinese sources suggest that the former General Staff Department’s (GSD) intelligence functions have been divided between three new organizations, the Joint Staff Department (JSD), the Strategic Support Force (SSF), and perhaps also the PLA Army leading organ (i.e. national-level headquarters). The structural logic and organizational dynamics associated with these changes allow for certain initial inferences about the future of PLA intelligence.

The JSD appears to have responsibility for strategic-level intelligence and to have taken over the human intelligence mission associated with the former GSD Second Department (2/PLA). The GSD deputy chief responsible for intelligence and foreign affairs, Admiral Sun Jianguo, is now a JSD deputy chief and continues to represent the PLA to foreign audiences in Beijing and at forums like the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Sun also still serves as the president of the China Institute for International and Strategic Studies (CIISS), a position with some authority in the military intelligence community. The JSD includes a subordinate Intelligence Bureau (Qingbaoju), which is most likely a renamed 2/PLA, which was known as the Intelligence Department (Qingbaobu). Unofficial sources identify the previous head of 2/PLA, Major General Chen Youyi, as chief of the Intelligence Bureau.

A full list of the new heads of this organizational structure encompassing military intelligence and cyber-warfare can be found at the end of this book.

It should also be noted that the new intelligence department, within the SSF, now competes with the Guoanbu and the 1st Bureau of the Gonganbu regarding strategic intelligence abroad, with its own handling officers under civilian cover. In addition to this, along with officials from the traditional International Liaison Department and the Central Committee’s United Front Work Department, there is another military structure that, contrary to various rumours, has not disappeared—the Liaison Bureau (Lianluoju—now a bureau rather than a department), part of the Central Military Commission’s new Political Work Department (Junwei zhengzhi gongzuo bu). This military espionage service continues to send “deep-water fish” around the world to propagate its own version of the “Chinese Dream”.

In short, this is not merely a cosmetic reform, but a large-scale integration of China’s counteroffensive resources. In evaluating its significance, it is worth quoting Moscow’s reaction—for it was, after all, the Russians who helped launch the Chinese communist secret services a century ago. An article published by the Sputnik news agency on 19  January 2016 stated:

China has established a new combat force to safeguard its national security: the Strategic Support Force (SSF). This unique structure will bring together the whole scope of capacities of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in waging special operations and information warfare.

Apart from the former Departments of the PLA General Staff Headquarters, which were responsible for the technical reconnaissance, cyber intelligence, electronic warfare and offensive cyber operations, the new forces will be responsible for the military intelligence at large and for the psychological operations in particular. Additionally, the newly formed Forces could include Special Operations Units.

Thus, the Strategic Support Force is a structure with no equal in the world.

The most effective intelligence community of the century?

Today the community of Chinese security and intelligence services is the largest in the world, at least in terms of the sheer numbers of their officials, officers and agents. Since the first French edition of this book came out in 2008, they have attained the technological competence of the US and Russian services, particularly in the field of intercepting communications and the use of spy satellites. The numerous cyber-attacks attributed to the PLA’s special units are evidence of this, although they are not the only ones to engage in this kind of operation.

Similarly, China is today involved in the massive siphoning of economic, scientific and technological intelligence, described under the generic term “sea lamprey tactics” in Chapter 9. Military and technological intelligence has gained considerable prominence as the Chinese develop their weapons and capabilities on land, at sea, beneath the sea, in the sky, and in space, towards Mars. Their strategic intervention in the search for possible energy sources has led to their activities on continents from which they have long been excluded, with Xi Jinping’s extraordinary One Belt One Road project.

Africa and Latin America, where Mao tried in vain to foment revolution in the 1960s, have now become significant zones of Chinese economic and cultural influence. Africa is such an important area for twenty-first-century China that it is on the way to supplanting the European Union as the continent’s number-one partner in trade and development. Two facts alone bear witness to this: the setting up of a strategic base in Djibouti, which means that for the first time expeditionary forces from the US and China find themselves side by side in a third country; and, for the first time since decolonization, there are more French-speaking African officers applying to train in China, at the Nanjing Academy and elsewhere, than at the prestigious French military academy of Saint-Cyr.

The strategy of cultural seduction, called “soft power”, is also playing an unexpectedly important role. This has included the creation of a network of Confucius Institutes for the promotion of Chinese language and culture internationally (also supported by large multinationals like Huawei Technologies and ZTE, whose goals are not only cultural).7 The 2008 Olympic Games, with its slogan “One World, One Dream”, and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, were also part of this powerful strategy.

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Chinese services have begun to be better recognized, although the number of historians, journalists, academics and special service analysts closely studying the way they function remains relatively small. The word “Guoanbu” will probably become as familiar in the twenty-first century as the acronyms MI6, CIA and KGB were in the twentieth.

The significance of this is related to the likely evolution of Chinese society for decades to come. As in the former USSR—and to a certain extent in the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin—the security and intelligence services are not simply an organ of information-gathering, or even of influence and limited action, as in democratic countries. They are an essential pillar of power, alongside the army and the single ruling party.

In the Chinese system, the special web of relationships known as guanxi has always played a decisive role in the rise or fall of this or that faction or clan, as has been seen in various tortured episodes in the history of the CCP in the People’s Republic. Regional networks, generational relationships, the fact of having studied at places such as Tsinghua University, the Shanghai clique around Jiang Zemin, the network of Communist Youth League leaders around Hu Jintao, and the oil lobby supported by Zeng Qinghong and Zhou Yongkang have all played a role that is being reproduced down the generations. The networks around Xi Jinping were detailed in 2016 by Cheng Li in his remarkable book Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era.8 I myself have also investigated and demonstrated the importance of the Hebei Band in the special services.

But there is also a generational phenomenon specific and new to this fifth generation of CCP leaders. At the end of the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017, Xi Jinping not only emerged more powerful than ever, but the ideological and economic orientations established in that moment of triumph will give even greater weight to the role of intelligence and security administrations in the PRC.

The importance of this new generation of senior cadres in the intelligence field can be measured by their entry into the 204-strong CCP Central Committee. Wang Qishan, head of the powerful CCDI, has ceded his place to a new figure: Zhao Leji. This does not mean that Wang has retired—he remains one of the most important of Xi’s confidential advisors, effectively a de facto vice-president. Zhao’s deputy is Yu Zhongfu, also on the Central Committee, a former air force commissar.

Chen Wenqing, the Guoanbu chief formerly of the CCDI, has also come onto the Central Committee. Almost more significant politically—China still functions with a dual leadership system shared between a technical director/minister and a political commissar—Song Tao is now minister of the important International Liaison Department, in charge of political intelligence and contacts with political parties abroad. In terms of domestic security, Cai Qi is deputy director of the National Security Council chaired by Xi Jinping; Wang Xiaohong is director of the Beijing office of the Gonganbu; and, finally, General Zhong Shaojun, who runs the General Office of the Central Military Commission, is head of military security.

Cai Qi and Zhao Leji have also joined the upper echelons of the Politburo, alongside Guo Shengkun, the Gonganbu minister, elected at the 18th Congress in 2012. His Guoanbu counterpart Chen has not achieved this rank, indicating that his position has less political influence. At an even higher level, Zhao Leji is one of the seven members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee that leads China, and has been awarded the portfolio of overseeing the security services as a whole.

Thus, under Xi Jinping no less than under his predecessors, with the CCP as the sole political party, the key role of the intelligence services remains as important in Chinese politics—in organization of internal affairs and control of the people, and in the eternal battle of the clans in power—as it is at the level of the vast global, economic, political and military strategy that is now known worldwide as the “Chinese Dream”.