NOTES

INTRODUCTION: OLD RED SPIES NEVER DIE

1. See “Ex-Party intelligence Division Celebrates 90th Anniversary”, Global Times, 24  May 2017.

2. A list can be found at the end of this book giving the names of the main Chinese intelligence services, as well as those of their principal leaders.

1. THE BATTLE FOR SHANGHAI

1. For further reading on the Green Gang and Du Yuesheng, see Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service: Kang Sheng and the Shadow Government in Red China (trans. Christine Donougher), London, Headline, 1989; Roger Faligot, La mafia chinoise en Europe [The Chinese Mafia in Europe], Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2001; Brian G.  Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang, Politics and Organized Crime, 1919–1937, Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1996.

2. From the biography of Luo Yinong, in Hu Hua (ed.), Zhonggongdang shirenwuzhuan [The Dictionary of Historical Personalities of the Communist Party], vol. 8, Research Centre of Historical Figures of the CCP [Zhonggongdang shenwu yanjiuhui], Xi’an, Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1983.

3. The future communist mayor of Saint-Denis, Jacques Doriot, actively collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. As a result, Russian and Chinese sources often avoid mentioning that he was present in Shanghai in July 1921. This is made apparent, however, in the archives of the Paris Police Prefecture (carton BA 40). See Jacques de Launay, “Dossiers de police des socialistes” [Police dossiers of socialists], Histoire pour tous, April 1975; and Hans Heinrich Wetzel, Liu Shao Chi, le moine rouge [The Red Monk], Paris, Editions Denoël, 1961. Doriot took part in a further political mission to China in 1927.

4. The GRU was and still is the armed forces’ Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye). The Cheka was replaced in 1922 by the GPU, and then in 1934 by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). The INO (Foreign Intelligence Department) remained throughout these metamorphoses.

5. This information is available in the archives of the French and International Concessions in Shanghai, as well as in Russian archives and the memoirs of Chinese revolutionaries who subsequently broke with communism, which are particularly eloquent on the subject. Official Chinese sources are more circumspect, because even today CCP leaders do not want to admit publicly that these services were entirely created by the Russians.

6. Vladimir Nikolayevitch Uzov, “Le renseignement soviétique en Chine, 1925–1927” [Soviet intelligence in China, 1925–1927], Communisme, N°65–66—2001. This article provides an excellent overview of the Soviet apparatus in China, based on recently opened archives.

7. Ibid.

8. According to documents in V.N.  Uzov’s Russian archive, the College’s president, Tan Pin-san (1886–1959), had at his disposal an entire service with several branches set up by Fu-Li, his deputy in charge of counterintelligence and financial questions. A certain Yan-li was in charge of the informer network and the fight against organized crime, while somebody called Chen was head of counterintelligence in the Kuomintang army. The entire organization was overseen by the Soviet advisor Pozdneev.

9. Élisée and Onésime Reclus, L’Empire du Milieu [The Middle Kingdom], Paris, Hachette, 1902. Higher numbers have been cited, but they include the indirect victims of the violence triggered by the revolt and its subsequent repression, as is always the case during a civil war. See also the book by their son and nephew, Jacques Reclus, La révolte des Taï-ping (1851–1864). Prologue à la révolution chinoise [The Taiping Revolt (1851–1864): Prologue to the Chinese Revolution] (preface by Jean Chesneaux), Paris, Le Pavillon Roger Maria Éditeur, 1972.

10. Chen Yi (1901–72), who studied art at the Grande Chaumière Academy of Painting, was expelled from France along with fellow agitator Ye Jianying (1898–1986), who was from Canton and whose name means “heroic spear”. He was the son of a wealthy Singapore merchant. Zhu De (“Red Virtue”, 1886–1976) arrived in Marseille in autumn 1922 at the age of 36, a former warlord and opium addict turned communist. He went on to join the Chinese network in the Weimar Republic.

11. See more about Cremet in Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, L’hermine rouge de Shanghai [The Red Ermine of Shanghai], Rennes, Les portes du large, 2005.

12. Nigel West, GCHQ, the Secret Wireless War 1900–86, London, Coronet Books, 1987.

13. The embassy archives were published by the White Russian N.  Miraevsky, World Wide Soviet Plots, as disclosed by hitherto unpublished documents seized at the USSR Embassy in Peking, Tianjin Press (1927).

14. French military attaché report by Major Roques from Beijing, dated 18  February 1928, Service historique de l’armée de terre à Vincennes, France, 7 N 3284.

15. Archives from the Shanghai Municipal Police (MAE, E 515, cartons 458, 459, 460–465). Report N°33 mentions an assassination attempt on Chiang Kai-shek planned by Luo Yinong, with help from the GPU’s Achinin, secretary at the Soviet consulate in Shanghai.

16. Statement by Gu Shunzhang after his desertion, Shanghai Municipal Police, Special Branch archive N°2911/8, 1931.

17. Captain Eugène Pick, China in the Grip of Bolsheviks. The incredible story of “Captain Pick”, circus performer, petty criminal and spy for the Japanese navy in Shanghai, who vanished in a Taiwanese prison in 1950 after having been tried and sentenced by the Americans, is at the heart of Bernard Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai, London, Profile Books, 1998.

18. Vladimir N.  Uzov, “Le renseignement soviétique en Chine” [Soviet espionage in China], op.  cit.

19. For a full account of Kang’s life see Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service: Kang Sheng and the Shadow Government in Red China (trans. Christine Donougher), London, Headline, 1989; and John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng, the Evil Genius behind Mao and his Legacy of Terror in People’s China, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1992; in Chinese, Lin Qingshan, Kang Sheng waizhuan, [biography of Kang Sheng], Hong Kong, Xinchen Chubanshe, 1987.

20. Pierre Broué, in his monumental history of the Comintern, listed the following aliases used by Zhou Enlai: Chen Kuang, Du Bisheng, Hu Fu, Kuan, Kuan Sheng (which may have been a confusion with Kang Sheng), Shao Shan, Siu, Te Ren, Wei Hen, Wu, Wu Hao and Moskvin. Pierre Broué, Histoire de l’Internationale communiste (1919–1943) [History of the Communist International, 1919–1943], Paris, Fayard, 1997.

21. Author interview with Guan Shuzhi in Taipei, 20  June 1986. Professor Guan was a communist in Shanghai during the 1930s, where he knew the team around Zhou very well, particularly Kang Sheng. He then crossed over to the opposing camp and became a supporter of the Kuomintang.

22. Quoted in Jacques Guillermaz, Histoire du parti communiste chinois [History of the Chinese Communist Party], vol. 1, Paris, Petite bibliothèque Payot, 1975.

23. Australian historian Matt Brazil suggested to me that the Shanghai structure was not in fact set up by Zhou Enlai, but rather that, a few years earlier, at the end of 1926, the military commission of the CCP created a Special Operations Bureau (Tewu Gongzuo Chu) in Wuhan, which constituted the other element of the developing structure. It was from this original service that the 2nd Department of the army, charged with military intelligence (PLA2), was born. But it is likely that Zhou borrowed this title for the “Bureau” whose embryonic foundations he laid in Shanghai in spring 1927, and then more concretely the following year after he returned from the USSR.  See Matthew Brazil, “China”, in Rodney P.  Carlisle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Armonk NY, M.  E.  Sharpe, 2004.

24. Han Suyin, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, London, Jonathan Cape, 1994.

25. Chen Lifu was head of the Investigation Section of the Kuomintang’s Organization Department. Ascetic, almost mystical in his anti-communist beliefs, he set up a service in the Kuomintang for intelligence and psychological warfare, called the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (Zhong Tong), headed by his cousin, Xu Enzeng, who like him had trained in America in radio communication. The second organization overseen by Chen Lifu, the AB or anti-Bolshevik line, specialized in infiltrating the communist underground in rural areas, and used psychological operations to provoke clashes between different groups of communists. The “turning” of prisoners was particularly prevalent, as suggested in a report by the Deuxième Bureau dated January 1935, signed by Colonel Bonavita, military attaché in Beijing: “When the Reds are arrested or surrender, they are not executed, but they are sent to concentration camps called “re-education camps” where they learn about the errors that they have made”. Archives du Service historique de l’Armée de Terre [Archives of the History Service of the Army], Vincennes, France.

26. Yu Maochun, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1996; Frederick Wakeman Jr, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service, Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2003.

27. John Byron and Robert Pack retrace the details of this episode in The Claws of the Dragon, op.  cit. I uncovered the details of Luo Yinong’s arrest in the Shanghai police archives: in dossier 205, 30  April 1928, “Lou-Ye-Nong” is described as being an “important member of the CCP’s counterintelligence … This was a serious loss for the CCP”. Byron and Pack also reveal that, in 1983, the Chinese executed He Zhihua’s son as part of a general crackdown on corruption.

28. Nie Rongzhen, Inside the Red Star: the Memoirs of Marshal Nie Rongzhen (trans. Zhong Renyi), Beijing, New World Press, 1984.

29. Jean Cremet resurfaced in Europe, helped Malraux in Spain, and took part in anti-Nazi resistance in northern France. He lived under a false name, Gabriel Peyrot, until his death in Belgium in 1973, as Rémi Kauffer and I discovered after a lengthy investigation twenty years later. See Faligot and Kauffer, L’hermine rouge de Shanghai [The Red Ermine of Shanghai], op.  cit.; and Roger Faligot, Les tribulations des Bretons en Chine [The Tribulations of Bretons in China], Rennes, Les Portes du large, 2019.

30. Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.

31. Unpublished memoir about Jean Cremet, given to the author and Rémi Kauffer in January 1989 by his daughter, Mme Frontisi-Ducroux.

32. Nie Rongzhen, in Inside the Red Star, op.  cit., claims that special agents had time to go to Gu’s apartment, where they found a letter addressed to Chiang Kai-shek in which Gu said that he was planning to change camp. This strikes me as an ex post facto attempt to blacken Gu’s character, and there is no other evidence to confirm this version of events.

33. See Byron and Pack, The Claw of the Dragon, op.  cit.

34. Author interview with Professor Guan Shuzhi, op.  cit.

35. I have delved deeply into archives of the Noulens affair, in which Ho Chi Minh features under his alias “Fernand”, a variation of the pseudonym “Ferdinand” he used in France (ARCH DMP). See also: Dennis J.  Duncanson, “Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong 1931–32”, The China Quarterly, Jan–March 1974, and Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941, Berkeley/Los Angeles CA, University of California Press, 2002. Incidentally, a document with his photo, found in the Comintern archives (Тибо in Russian), confirms that when in the USSR Cremet often used the pseudonym Thibault (both his wife’s and his mother’s surname); this contradicts a doubt expressed by Quinn-Judge.

36. Dispatch No. 159 from the French Consulate, dated 26  November 1931 (MAE), which also mentions the Noulens case and that of Comintern agent Joseph Ducroux, arrested in Singapore.

37. In addition to my book with Rémi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service, op.  cit., I have relied both on archives and recent books published in China, including Hao Zaijin, Zhongguo mimi zhan—zhonggong qingbao, baowei gongzuo jizhi [The Secret Chinese Battle: The truth about CCP intelligence and protection], Beijing, Zuojia Chubanshe, 2004.

38. In fact, they called him “head of the 2nd Section of the GPU”—a reference not to the Russian service, but to Chinese/CCP intelligence. They didn’t know exactly how the Chinese services functioned, but did know that many of the intelligence cadres had been trained in the USSR.

39. Published in 1934 in Moscow, in Paris by the CDLP and in New York by Workers Library Publishers.

40. André Malraux, La Nouvelle Revue Française, April 1931.

41. Kang Sheng was vehement in his denunciations of Trotskyists, even though at the beginning of his stay in Moscow some thought he had secret sympathies for the left opposition and for Trotsky himself. The latter was assassinated five years later in Mexico by the NKVD.

42. Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: the Missing Years, 1919–1941, op.  cit.; Robert Turner and Victor Usov, “Kang Sheng—Chinese Beria”, Far Eastern Affairs, N°4, 1991; William J.  Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life, New York, Hyperion, 2000.

43. For more about Kang Sheng’s time in Paris, see the testimonies of French Maoists such as Jacques Jurquet in Kauffer’s and my biography of Kang Sheng, op.  cit., chapter 3, “May 68 and the small Comintern of Kang Sheng”. These testimonies have since been confirmed by documents in the Russian archives.

2. MAO’S SECRET SERVICE

1. Interview with Yan Mingfu published by the New China News Agency (Xinhua), “Chinese intelligence agent contributes to WWII Victory”, 4  May 2005.

2. The use made of Yan Haobang’s information in 1945 is quite clear. In terms of the information he provided in 1941, it is much less clear, for Stalin does not seem to have made much use of the plethora of information he received warning him of Hitler’s imminent attack. Why would he believe the Chinese spy and not agents from his own GRU, like Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper, Kim Philby and Alexander Rado? According to the Russians, General Filipp Golikov, head of the GRU, received a total of eighty-eight warnings of the Nazi attack without acting on them (Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations, from Lenin to Gorbachev, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990).

3. Zeng Shan, the leader of the first Jiangxi soviet (1927–35), was the father of Shanghai’s vice-president Zeng Qinghong, Jiang Zemin’s éminence grise and the rival to his successor as president, Hu Jintao. See his biography by Su Duoshou and Liu Mianyu, Zeng Shan Zhuan, Jiangxi Chubanshe, 1999.

4. Matthew Brazil, “China”, in Rodney P.  Carlisle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Armonk NY, M.  E.  Sharpe, 2004. To complete the story, it should be added that after the creation of the SAD, a new protection section of the CCP came into being, led by Zhou Xing, under the aegis of Kang Sheng. Zhou Xing distinguished himself in 1931 with the assassination of a number of Trotskyist dissidents.

5. Without actually naming him, Jean-Luc Domenach evokes Fu Hao’s career as a “strange diplomat” in his thought-provoking book Comprendre la Chine aujourd’hui [Understanding China Today], Paris, Perrin Asies, 2007.

6. Warren Kuo, Analytical History of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 4, Institute of International Relations, Taipei, 1971. In addition, Report No. 4508/S of the Shanghai Police Service, dated 25  November 1939 and signed by police chief Louis Fabre, points out that “for the overseas Chinese there is a special section in Hong Kong run by Pan Han, in conjunction with the Comintern.” He further identifies “Kang Sheng aka Chao Yun, as head of the GPU in Yan’an”.

7. Author interview with Park Sang-soo, Paris, 2  April 2000. For more detail on the relationships between the CCP and secret societies, see the history section of my book La mafia chinoise en Europe [The Chinese Mafia in Europe], Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2001.

8. For further details on the functioning of the SAD and biographical details of its main cadres, see Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service: Kang Sheng and the Shadow Government in Red China (trans. Christine Donougher), London, Headline, 1989.

9. See Liu Jiadong, Chen Yun yu diaocha yanjiu [Chen Yun and the Search For Investigation], Beijing, Zhongguo wenxian chubanshe, Beijing, 2004. See Chen’s article published in N°11 of the internal magazine The Communist, 1  October 1940, entitled “Some Questions about the Party’s Secret Organisations”. See also Selected Works of Chen Yun, (1926–1949), Beijing, Foreign Languages Press, 1988.

10. John Byron and Robert Pack assert that General Wang Zhen, from Hunan, commanded this elite regiment (The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng, the Evil Genius behind Mao and his Legacy of Terror in People’s China, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1992). However, the German Sinologist Wolfgang Bartke of the Institute of Asian Affairs in Hamburg claims that he led anti-Japanese guerrilla operations first in the Canton region, and later in the north-east until the Japanese surrendered (Who’s Who in the People’s Republic of China, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1981). We will meet General Wang Zhen later, during the 1989 Tiananmen massacre (Chapter 5).

11. Peter Vladimirov, The Vladimirov Diairies, New York, Doubleday, 1975.

12. Byron and Pack, The Claws of the Dragon, op.  cit.

13. Han Suyin, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, London, Jonathan Cape, 1994.

14. Jean-Luc Domenach, Chine: L’archipel oublié [China: The Forgotten Archipelago], Paris, Fayard, 1992. Even the least lenient historians of the period, such as Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their book Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005), claim that only a few thousand died. Clearly, this was not so much a mass massacre as an experimental terror device, which would later be applied by other regimes in the East: North Korea, Burma, Laos and Cambodia, under the influence of Chinese communism.

15. Wang Ming’s life was saved by Orlov and Vladimirov. He left China for the USSR in 1950. Five years after his death in 1974, a Moscow publisher brought out a book under his name in several languages: Wang Ming, Mao’s Betrayal, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1979.

16. Iris Chang, Thread of the Silkworm, New York, Basic Books, 1995.

17. Bruno Pontecorvo, brother of the Battle of Algiers filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, was a member of Service B, the French communist intelligence service linked to the Red Orchestra, the famous spy network that drove the Soviet GRU.  Meanwhile Qian Sanqiang was linked during the war to Pao Xienju, the press officer of the Chinese nationalist embassy in Bern, who worked under the alias “Polo” (as in Marco Polo) for the Red Orchestra’s Swiss branch. See Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Service B, Paris, Fayard, 1985.

18. In 2004, the PLA published an astonishing book entitled Investigation of the First Chinese Nuclear Bomb, containing much new information (Liang Dongyuan, Yuangzidan Diaocha, Jiefangjun Chubanshe, Beijing, 2005).

19. General Jacques Guillermaz, military attaché of the Free French in Chongqing, who knew Dai Li well, wrote to me on 10  April 1986: “Kang Sheng had nothing to do with the plane crash that caused the death of Dai Li on 17  March 1946. The aircraft that was transporting him flew through a very heavy storm between Shanghai and Nanjing before crashing during a forced landing in the middle of the countryside.”

20. Shen Zui’s book (written with the help of his daughter Shen Meijuan) is published in English as A KMT War Criminal in New China, Beijing, Foreign Languages Press, 1986. In Chinese: Shen Zui, Wo zhe san shi nian, Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1983.

21. Peter Conn, Pearl S.  Buck: A Cultural Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Buck would continue to support Zhou and Mao during the Korean War in 1953, but fell out with them later during the Cultural Revolution.

22. See Sterling Seagrave, The Soong Dynasty, London, Sigwick & Jackson, 1985; and Lords of the Rim, London, Corgi, 1995. Also see Bernard Brizay, Les trois sœurs Soong (Une dynastie chinoise du XXe siècle) [The three Soong sisters: A 20th Century Chinese Dynasty], Paris, Éditions du Rocher, 2007.

23. The Blue Lotus was first published in Great Britain by Methuen Children’s Books in 1983.

24. See Pierre Assouline’s biography, Hergé, the Man who Created Tintin, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.

25. Pat Givens, head of the Special Branch, was an officer of the Shanghai Municipal Police from 1906 to 1936. He organized a protective force with two Irish inspectors like himself, Mr  Ganley and Eugene Hugh Lynch. All three were admirers of Michael Collins, the ex-head of the IRA’s secret services, who later became defence minister of the Irish Free State.

26. In their delightful biography Chang!, Jean-Michel Coblence and Zhang Yifei, Zhang’s daughter, mention his friendship with Tong, without specifying who he was (Brussels, Editions Moulinsart, 2003).

27. In 1949, the head of the Academy was Li Weihan, a close associate of Zhou Enlai from their Paris days. On 13  June 2002, his distant successor, Wang Zhaoguo, head of the United Front Work Department, celebrated the centenary of Tong Dizhou’s birth in Beijing.

28. Gérard Lenne, Tchang au pays du Lotus bleu [Chang in the Land of the Blue Lotus], Paris, Librairie Séguier, 1990.

29. Ibid.

30. Benoît Peeters, Hergé, Son of Tintin, Baltimore MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

31. See Chen Yi’s article in Lucien Bianco et al. (eds), La Chine. Le Dictionnaire du mouvement ouvrier international [Dictionary of the International Workers’ Movement: China], Paris, Les Presses de Sciences Po, 1985.

32. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World: the Mitrokhin Archive II, London, Penguin Books, 2005.

33. Figure cited by Domenach in his study of the laogai: Chine: l’archipel oublié, op.  cit.

34. Author interview, Paris, 29  November 1986.

35. Xiaobing Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army, Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

36. See Iliya Sarsembaev’s doctoral thesis, La question territoriale: enjeu géopolitique dans les relations sino-russes [The Territorial Question: Geopolitical strategies in Sino-Russian relationships], under the direction of Dominique Colas, Paris, Institut d’Études politiques, 2005.

37. Account by Miklós Lengyel, Hungarian state radio correspondent, 18  April 1996.

38. William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, London, Zed, 1986.

39. James Lilley (with Jeffrey Lilley), China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, New York, Public Affairs, 2004.

40. Timothy Kendall, Ways of Seeing China: From Yellow Peril to Shangrila, Freemantle, Curtin University Books, 2005.

41. Richard Hall, The Secret State: Australia’s Spy Industry, Melbourne, Cassell Australia, 1978.

42. Jean-Luc Domenach, Mao, sa cour et ses complots, derrière les murs rouges [Mao, His Circle and Its Plots: Behind the Red Walls], Paris, Fayard, 2012.

43. These cases of espionage around pro-Japanese leader Wang Jingwei provided the material for Ang Lee’s film Lust Caution (2007), which was inspired by the real-life story of a spy infiltrating the entourage of Ding Mocun.

44. See Chang and Halliday, Mao, op.  cit.

45. Zhang Yun, Pan Hannian Zhuan [Pan Hannian: A Biography], Shanghai, Chubanshe, 2006. In 1998 the Gonganbu monthly magazine, China Police, devoted several issues of the magazine to a biography lauding Pan Hannian.

46. Wendell L.  Minnick, “Target: Zhou Enlai—was America’s CIA working with Taiwan agents to kill the Chinese premier?”, The Far Eastern Economic Review, 13  July 1995.

47. Kai Cheng, Li Kenong: Zhonggong Yinbi Zhanxiande Zhaoyue Lingdaoren [Li Kenong: The CCP Hidden Battlefront’s Remarkable Leader], Chinese Friendship Publishing Company, 1996.

48. Dr  Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (trans. Tai Hung-chao, foreword by Andrew J.  Nathan, with the editorial assistance of Anne F.  Thurston), New York, Random House, 1994.

49. Richard Deacon, ‘C’: A Biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield, Head of MI6, London, Futura, 1984.

50. See Faligot and Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service, op.  cit.

51. I have heard Chinese functionaries use the abbreviation Zhongdiaobu as well as Diaochabu when talking of the Central Investigation Department.

3. THE SPIES’ CULTURAL REVOLUTION

1. See John Barron, KGB, The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, New York, Readers Digest Press, 1974. The book was published ten years later in Chinese, translated by Shen Enqing (Liaoning Renmin Chubanshe).

2. See Jean Marabini, Mao et ses héritiers, Ombres chinoises sur le monde [Mao and his heirs, Chinese shadows on the world], Paris, Robert Laffont, 1972.

3. Quoted in John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon, op.cit.

4. Stephen Fitzgerald, China and the World, Contemporary China Paper N°11, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1977. The Australian embassy opened in Beijing in 1973.

5. For more details on the role of Wang Dongxing, former deputy to Kang Sheng at the SAD in Yan’an, see Dr  Li Zhisui, La vie privée du camarade Mao, op.cit.; Jung Chang, Jon Halliday, Mao: the unknown story, op.cit.; P.  H.  Chang, “The Rise of Wang Tung-hsing: Head of China’s security apparatus,” in China Quarterly, N°73, March 1978; “Wang Tung-hsing—The Head of Peiping’s Undercover agents”, in Issues & Studies, Taipei, August 1976.

6. Several studies and memoirs have been published in Russia on the role of Soviet agents in China, including Viktor Usov, Kitayskiy Beria, Kang Sheng (The Chinese Beria Kang Sheng, Moscow, Olma-Press, 2003, and, by the same author, Sovietskaya Razvedka v Kitae [The Soviet intelligence service in China in the 20th Century], Moscow, Olma-Press, 2002.

7. This newspaper is today available online in both English and Chinese (more detailed): http://english.chinamil.com.cn/

8. Alexei Antonkin, Les chiens de faïence (témoignage d’un correspondant de l’Agence Tass à Beijing) [The memoirs of a Tass news Agency correspondent in Beijing], Paris, Editions de l’équinoxe, 1983.

9. Quoted in Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin, The KGB & the World—The Mitrokhin Archive II, London, Penguin, 2006.

10. Some of these KGB officers published their memoirs in Russian, including Arkadi A.  Zhemchugov (who worked in China, Burma, Indonesia and Malaysia): Kitayskaya Golovolomka [Chinese Puzzle]. During the 1990s, Turchak was reappointed bureau chief.

11. Mitrokhin Archive, file MITN 2–14–1.

12. Mitrokhin Archive, file MITN 2–6–1.

13. John Byron, Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon, op.cit.

14. The imprisoned deputy ministers were Yang Qijing (released in 1973), Wang Jinxiang, Liu Fuzhi, Ling Yun (the top counterintelligence expert), and Yang Yumin. The three who died in prison were Yu Sang, Xu Zirong and Xu Jianguo. The latter’s case is a perfect example of how the Cultural Revolution ripped right through the top echelons of the security services: an expert on military security, Xu had been Mao’s bodyguard during the Long March, and later Zhou Enlai’s. He was transferred to Kang Sheng’s SAD in 1936, where he headed the Security Division. After the “Liberation” of 1949, he became head of the Gonganbu in Tianjin and Shanghai. He was appointed ambassador first to Romania and then to Albania, where he set up collaborations with the respective local secret police, Securitate and Sigurimi.

15. Pu Qiongying was the real name of Deng’s wife, Zhuo Lin. Kong Yuan’s wife was called Xu Ming. For more details about this double wedding, see Deng Maomao, Deng Xiaoping, My Father, New York, Basic Books, 1995.

16. This detail is taken from Zhou Enlai’s memoirs, a two-volume work: Zhou Enlai Nanpu, vol. 2 1949–1976, Beijing, Renmin Chubanshe, 1989.

17. Matt Brazil, “Mao Zedong”, in The Encyclopaedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Armonk, M.  E.  Sharpe, 2004.

18. The editor of this CIA report added the following names to the list of key leaders in the security sphere: “Zhang Yunyi and Xiao Hua from the Central Control Board; Xie Fuzhi and Yu Sang of the Ministry of Public Security [the Gonganbu], supported by Wang and Yang. Chen Boda, Political Research Bureau; and Kang Sheng, of the ‘five man group’; the presumed successor (never identified) to Peng Zhen as the supervisor of the central Political Departments; and as an unattached, free-floating, doubly dangerous figure, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing.”

19. CIA: Communist China, The Political Security Apparatus, 11. Destruction and Reconstruction, 1965–1969, (Reference Title: POLO XXXVII), 28  November 1969, RSS No. 0037/69. I have reinstated the transcription of proper pinyin names for consistency with the rest of this book, whereas the CIA editors originally used the Wade-Giles-CIA system.

20. See R.  Faligot, R.  Kauffer, Kang Sheng & the Chinese Secret Service, op.cit.; Yao Ming-Le, Investigation of the Death of Lin Biao, preface by Simon Leys, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1983.

21. CIA archives declassified in May 2007, Intelligence report, ref. POLO XXXI; Mao’s Red Guard Diplomacy, 1967.

22. Markus Wolf with Anne McElvoy, Man Without a Face: The autobiography of Communism’s greatest spymaster, New York, Random House, 1997.

23. For more on purges in the ILD, see CIA Intelligence Report, The International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party, (Reference Title: POLO XLIV), RSS No. 0054171, December 1971.

24. CIA Intelligence Report, “The Chinese Communist impact on East-Germany”, ref. ESAU VII-60, from CIA archives declassified in May 2007.

25. Author interview, Paris, December 1986.

26. Letter from Raymond Casas to the author, 2  December 1987.

27. Ironically, Frêche, alias “Georges Lierre”, was accused by his FCML comrades on 5  June 1964 of being an “agent of the US secret services” (PCF archives). There are many documents about IDL links with Maoist groups around the world in Faligot and Kauffer, Kang Sheng & the Secret Service op.  cit. Since it was first published, many archives have been opened confirming this central role of the IDL in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.

28. Nicolas Poliansky, MID (12 ans les services diplomatiques du Kremlin) [Twelve Years in the Kremlin diplomatic service], Paris, Belfond, 1984. In fact, Poliansky was mistaken: the RML was not Maoist but Trotskyist, originating with the Fourth International.

29. See Danièle Martin, “Les cordonniers ‘suisses’ du KGB”, Espionnage, N°6, December 1970.

30. Bob de Graff and Cees Wiebes, Villa Maarheeze, De geschiedenis van de inlichtingendienst buiteland [Villa Maarheeze: The History of the Intelligence Service Abroad], The Hague, Sdu Uitgevers, 1998.

31. Xiong Xianghui, Wode qingbao yu waijiao shengya [My Career in Intelligence and Diplomacy], Beijing, Zhonggongdang Shi Chubanshe, 2006.

32. In Shanghai Pat Givens, head of the British Special Branch, had compiled a large file on Snow, the “communist agent”, after he published an article revealing that Chen Duxiu, former head of the CCP, had been tortured by Givens while detained in the International Concession.

33. See Roger Faligot, Les seigneurs de la paix [Lords of Peace], Paris, Le Seuil, 2006.

34. National Security Archive, Memorandum for Henry Kissinger, by Winston Lord, “Memorandum of your conversation with Zhou Enlai”, 29  July 1971.

35. James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley, China Hands, Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, New York, Public Affairs, 2004.

36. Another version of Lin Biao’s death posited that he was assassinated in a Beijing restaurant on the orders of Kang Sheng and Madame Mao; see Faligot and Kauffer, Kang Sheng & the Chinese Secret Service, op.cit; Yao Ming-Le, Investigation of Lin Biao’s death, op.  cit.

37. Having only just replaced Xie Fuzhi at the head of Gonganbu, Li was arrested and imprisoned by the service. Months later, he committed suicide by a drug overdose. Xie’s widow, Liu Xiangping, then health minister, was, like her late husband, close to the faction around Madame Mao. Had she dispensed with her husband’s successor, as rumour had it? Mao’s doctor, Dr  Li Zhisui, performed Li Zhen’s autopsy; he confirmed drug overdose as the cause of death.

38. POLO archive XLVIX, August 1972, RSS N°0058/72.

39. Interview with Étienne Manac’h, December 1986. The ambassador published these diary entries in Volume 3 of his Mémoires d’Extrême Asie (Memoirs of Far East Asia), Paris, Fayard, 1977.

40. Interview with Ting Wang, Hong Kong, July 1986; see also Byron and Pack, The Claws of the Dragon, op.  cit., and Philip Short, Mao Tsé-toung, Paris, Fayard, 2005.

41. The “third force” was led by Kang Sheng and included members of the Politburo including Hua Guofeng, Wang Dongxing, Ji Dengkui, Wu De, Li Desheng, Chen Xilian and Saifudin. Its leading members had been closely associated with the security services. Before his death in December 1975, Kang Sheng was party vice-president and head of the security apparatus. Hua was appointed head of the Gonganbu in January 1975, and Wang was both responsible for the security of the CCP elite and commander of Unit 8341. Ji Dengkui joined the security services and was now in charge of the Political-Legal Group of the Central Committee, while Chen Xilian and Li Desheng were members of the “Investigative Group concerning Lin Biao’s anti-party faction”. At one time or another, they had all worked for Kang Sheng. See Ting Wang, Chairman Hua, Leader of the Chinese Communists, London, C. Hurst & Co./Queensland, University of Queensland Press, 1980.

42. Roger Aimé, head of the SDECE in Beijing, sent a despatch to headquarters in Paris suggesting precisely this scenario. Interview with Alexandre de Marenches, SDECE director (1969–81), June 1993.

43. Ting Wang, Chairman Hua, Leader of the Chinese Communists, op.  cit.; Wojtek Zafanolli, Le Président clairvoyant contre la Veuve du Timonier. Mécanismes de l’idéologie et pratique politique en Chine maoïste [The Clear-Sighted President Versus the Great Helmsman’s Widow: Mechanisms of Ideology and Political Practice in Maoist China], Paris, Payot, 1981.

44. Among the men who arrested Madame Mao was Marshal Ye Jianying’s own bodyguard, Cao Qing, who in September 2007 became head of the Central Guard’s Bureau.

45. Serge Thion, Ben Kiernan, Khmers rouges!, Paris, J.-E.  Hallier/Albin Michel, 1981. For further details on the relationship between Pol Pot and Kang Sheng, see Faligot and Kauffer, Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Services, op.  cit.

46. Vita Chieu, The Khmer Rouge and Red China: My Untold Story, Taipei, Bookman Books, 2010.

47. Enver Hoxha’s notebooks (Reflections on China, Tirana, 1979) are filled with interesting comments on the Chinese secret services. He was particularly critical of Geng Biao, who replaced Kang Sheng as head of the ILD.

4. DENG XIAOPING’S DEEP-WATER FISH

1. A year after the publication of this book in French, revealing the role of Ying Ruocheng, his memoirs were published; these confirmed the claims herein. They also revealed that he was recruited by Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, as a secret service agent (Ying Ruocheng and Claire Conceison, Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China’s Cultural Revolution, Lanham MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

2. See Chapter 3. A local Gonganbu bureau is called a Gonganju. Similarly, a provincial office is called a Gonganting. But the reader has enough names to remember, so I have chosen to call it the Gonganbu in all cases, for the sake of simplicity.

3. A Great Trial in Chinese History: the Trial of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-revolutionary Factions, November 1980–January 1981, Beijing, New World Press, 1981. Byron and Pack, The Claw of the Dragon, op.  cit.

4. Author interview with Li Junru, Beijing, July 2007.

5. The translation of this speech was published by the short-lived but interesting magazine Paris-Beijing, N°1  September–October 1979.

6. According to official reports, Madame Mao committed suicide in prison in May 1991.

7. See the biography of Ye Jianying in Maitron, Biographical Dictionary of the International Labor Movement, China, op.  cit.; for a biography of Liu Fuzhi, see J.  de Golfiem, Personnalités chinoises d’aujourd’hui [Major Chinese Figures of Today], Paris, L’Harmattan, 1989; Wolfgang Bartke, Who’s Who in the People’s Republic of China, op.  cit.

8. CIA Directorate of Intelligence—Directory of Chinese Officials: National Level Organizations, a reference aid, CR- 85–12068, June 1985.

9. Appointed in 1985 by his father General Imbot—who was head of the DGSE at the end of the Rainbow Warrior affair (the destruction of the Greenpeace ship in New Zealand by a underwater DGSE team)—Thierry Imbot specialized in Chinese affairs before apparently committing suicide during the 2007 Franco-Chinese frigate scandal in Taiwan. One of his main contacts in Beijing was Zhu Entao (1938–2015). Officially head of the Gonganbu’s Foreign Affairs Office, Zhu was an Interpol agent who often travelled to France. However, the FBI had banned him from visiting the US because of spying during the Larry Wu-Tai Chin affair. Zhu published his somewhat pared-back memoirs in 2006. His British counterpart Nigel Inkster was deputy head of the MI6 station in Beijing in 1983 and in Hong Kong, where he reorganized the British services during the handover of the colony. In 2001 he became a deputy director of MI6, in the role of chief operating officer. He is now director of future conflict and cyber security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the author of China’s Cyber Power (Adelphi Series, 2016).

10. See Roger Faligot, “La sûreté de l’État fait peau neuve en Chine”, Le Monde diplomatique, August 1984.

11. The China Letter, September 1984.

12. At the head of the international department of the MOFERT were Bu Zhaomin (head of relations with international organizations) and Zhang Xianliang, deputy director of the International Bureau.

13. Interviews recorded in summer 1986 during research for our biography of Kang Sheng.

14. Roger Faligot, La Piscine: The French Secret Service since 1944, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.

15. According to Nicholas Eftimiades (Chinese Intelligence Operations, Annapolis MD, Naval Academy Press, 1994), other hotels under surveillance were the Palace Hotel (run by the PLA), the Great Wall Hotel, the Xiang Shan Perfumed Hill Hotel, and the Kunlun Hotel, owned by the Gonganbu. Additionally, the Jianguo Hotel, the Bamboo Garden Hotel (former residence of Kang Sheng), the Hotel Beijing, and the Hotel Qianmen were run by the Guoanbu. The Friendship Hotel in Haidian even had offices of various state institutions and “research offices”.

16. Ross Terrill, Madame Mao: The White Boned Demon (revised edition), Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 2000.

17. Luo Bote, “Yu Zensan de teshu quanshi” [The Extraordinary Existence of Yu Zhensan], Zhenming, Hong Kong, October 1986.

18. Les Arcanes de Chine, N°15, bimonthly edition 25  February–10  March 2005. See www.arcanesdechine.com. This superbly researched newsletter was edited by Agnès Andrésy, author of Princes Rouges. Les nouveaux puissants de Chine [Red Princes: China’s New Rulers], Paris, L’Harmattan, 2003.

19. I.  C.  Smith, Inside: A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI, Nashville TN, Nelson Current, 2004.

20. See Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Services, op.  cit. Born in Tokyo, the head of the Xinhua News Agency was Liao Chengzhi (1908–83), a specialist in the United Work Front, and vice-president of the National People’s Congress. He died in September 1983. See “Liao Chengzhi, un grand patriote et révolutionnaire” [Liao Chengzhi, a great patriot and revolutionary], La Chine en construction, September 1983. The obituary confirms that, between 1928 and 1932, Liao worked in Germany for the International Seafarers’ Union, led a Chinese sailors’ strike, and was arrested and deported from both the Netherlands and Germany. In Jan Valtin’s book, Without Fatherland and Border (1947), he appears under the name of Leo Tchang as a leading member of the Comintern (M-Apparat) responsible for military activities in Rotterdam.

21. I.  C.  Smith, Inside, op.cit.

22. See more about the case in Tod Hoffman, The Spy Within: Larry Chin and China’s Penetration of the CIA, Hanover, Steerforth Press, 2008; and I.C.  Smith, Inside, op.cit.

23. Former Canadian intelligence service officer Tod Hoffman mentions him in The Spy Within, op.  cit.

24. Interview with the author, Rennes-le-Château, 23  October 1998. Several other interviews allowed me to reconstruct the details of the case, along with counterintelligence records whose details correspond precisely with what Bouriscot told me. I was able to cross-check his testimony with the two former DST officers who had conducted the interrogations, as well as a former CIA agent who had followed the Yu Zhensan case. Bernard Boursicot agreed to allow me to evoke further details of his private life that make it possible to understand what happened.

25. Anthony Grey published a memoir about this period, A Hostage in Peking, London, Michael Joseph, 1970.

26. The Chinese secret service had “given” Shi Peipu a Uyghur baby from Xinjiang, the same ethnic group as the Turks, whose physical appearance was similar to that of a baby of mixed Asian and European heritage.

27. Author interview, Paris, 10  April 1998.

28. Joyce Wadler, Liaison: The gripping real story of the diplomat spy and the Chinese opera star, New York NY, Bantam Books, 1993. The medical and psychiatric reports in my possession are obviously considerably more detailed, but these quotations efficiently sum up the case, and tally with Boursicot’s account thirty years later.

29. Quotations taken from court reports of the case.

30. Jacques de Golfiem, Personnalités chinoises d’aujourd’hui, op.  cit. See also the official biography of Jia Chunwang in Who’s Who in China, Current Leaders, Beijing, Foreign Language Press, 1989.

31. For a description of the various structures active at the end of the twentieth century, see “Comment les dirigeants chinois sont informés sur l’étranger”, Perspectives chinoises No. 37, Hong Kong, September/October 1996; and David L.  Shambaugh, “China’s National Security Research Bureaucracy”, The China Quarterly, June 1987.

5. 55 DAYS AT TIANANMEN

1. This information, like other details about the KGB’s activities in this chapter, has been cross-checked with several sources from both Russian and Western intelligence, as well as with journalists and diplomats who were stationed in Beijing at the time.

2. A reference to the 55-day Boxers’ siege of the foreign legations in Beijing in 1900, an event that ended with the fall of their ally, the Empress Manchu Ci Xi. In 1964, Nicholas Ray took this episode to the screen in 55 Days of Beijing, starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and David Niven.

3. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin, New York, Crown Publishers, 2004.

4. See Gordon Thomas, Chaos Under Heaven: The Shocking Story Behind China’s Search for Democracy, New York, Birch Lane Press Books, 1991. Thomas was part of the press corps in Beijing at the time.

5. With the exception of Jean-Luc Domenach, few China-watchers in Europe realized how important Qiao Shi was. Rémi Kauffer and I wrote about him in the early ’80s, and mentioned him at the end of our biography of Kang Sheng in 1986. A biography has been published about him in Chinese: Gao Xin, Zhonggong Jiao Qiao Shi [Qiao Shi, the Tycoon of the Communist Party], Hong Kong, Shijie Shuju, 1995.

6. This was how he was described by Graham Hutchings, Beijing correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, who interviewed him in August 1988 and profiled him when Qiao became the party no. 1 (“Party Promotes Loyal Secret Policeman with a ‘merciless’ smile”, The Daily Telegraph, 8  June 1989). See also Roger Faligot, “Qiao Shi, l’homme des chiens bleus”, Le journal du dimanche, 11  June 1989; and Roger Faligot & Rémi Kauffer, “Le chef des services secrets vise le fauteuil de Deng”, Le Figaro Magazine, 1  July 1989.

7. Qiao Shi’s wife may have given up her surname “Wang”, which hinted at family ties with Kuomintang leaders, when she was arrested as part of the anti-rightist campaign of 1957. She is now called Yu Wen. See Gao Xin, Zhonggong Jiao Qiao Shi, op.  cit.

8. Biography of Liu Changsheng, in Jean Maitron (ed.), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier international. La Chine, Paris, Les Éditions ouvrières, 1985.

9. The appointment of Qiao Shi completed the overhaul of the ILD leadership. His assistants were Qian Liren, Zhu Liang and Ms Li Shuzheng. His advisors and political intelligence experts who had particularly distinguished themselves in Africa and Asia were Tang Mingzhao, Zhang Zhixiang, Li Yimang, Ms Ou Tangliang, Feng Xuan, Liu Xinquan and Zhang Xiangshan (China Directory, Tokyo, Radiopress Inc., 1983).

10. Author interview with James Yi, Hong Kong, 4  July 1986.

11. For a full description of all these movements, see Andrew G.  Walder, Popular Protest in the 1989 Democracy Movement: The Pattern of Grass-Roots Organization, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1992.

12. Andrew J.  Nathan and Bruce Gilley (eds), China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files, London, Granta Books, 2002.

13. Excerpts from CCP Central Office Secretariat, “Minutes of the May 17 Politburo Standing Committee meeting”, document supplied to Party Central Office Secretariat by the Office of Deng Xiaoping, quoted in Andrew Nathan and Perry Link (eds), The Tiananmen Papers, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2001. This book is an astonishing documentation of the minutes of Chinese leadership meetings during the events of 1989. I have also quoted from the meeting on 3  June when it was decided to send in the army. A certain number of American specialists on China suggest that the document is fake, because of the positive image it lends to Zhao Ziyang, but the broad thrust of the leadership conversations at this critical time have been ratified by many other documents and testimonies.

14. Xiaobing Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army, Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

15. Michael D.  Swaine, The Military & Political Succession in China: Leadership, Institutions, Beliefs, Santa Monica CA, Rand Corporation, 1992. According to Nicholas Eftimiades (Chinese Intelligence Operations, Annapolis MD, Naval Institute Press, 1994), Deng Xiaoping did succeed in establishing a liaison with the regional centres of PLA2, military intelligence.

16. Transcript available at http://folk.ntnu.no/tronda/kk-f/fra081100/0444.html.

17. See Chapter 11.

18. Gordon Thomas, Chaos Under Heaven, op.  cit.

19. Donald Morrison (ed.), Massacre in Beijing: China’s Struggle for Democracy, New York, Time Books, 1989.

20. Iliya Sarsembaev, La question territoriale: enjeu géopolitique dans les relations sino-russes, op.  cit. US defence attaché Larry Wortzel said he had heard rumours of tank battles, but did not believe it, although he admitted that, at the time, soldiers were attacking journalists, tourists and even Western diplomats, who, unlike the Soviets, were obliged to take refuge in diplomatic residences.

21. Libération, 7  June 1989. Sabatier published a remarkable biography of Deng Xiaoping (Le dernier dragon [The Last Dragon], Paris, J.C.  Lattès, 1990), in which he goes into great detail about the Tiananmen massacre.

22. Xiaobing Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army, Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2007. The author lists the following as among the general officers dismissed in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre: Hong Xuezhi, deputy secretary general of the CMC; Guo Linxiang, deputy director of the PLA Political Department; Li Desheng, political commissioner of the National Defence University; Li Yaowen, navy political commissioner; Zhou Yibing, commander of the Beijing Military Region; Xiang Shouzhi, commander of the Nanjing Military Region; Wan Haifeng, political commissioner of the Chengdu Military Region; Li Xianxiu, commander of the PAP; Zhang Xiufu, political commissioner of the PAP; and of course Xu Qinxian, commander of the 38th Corps. For an exhaustive list, it would obviously be necessary to go all the way down the ranks of the armed services.

23. Jacques de Golfiem, Personnalités chinoises d’aujourd’hui, op.  cit.

24. Roger Faligot, “Chine: les espions manifestent” [In China, the spies are demonstrating], Le Journal du dimanche, 7  May 1989.

25. Guan Yecheng, Zhongnanhai bingnian tai si fu zhong [Attempted coup d’état in Zhongnanhai], Zhenming N°146, Hong Kong, December 1989; Wei Li, “The Security Service for Chinese Central Leaders”, The China Quarterly N°143, September 1995.

26. The Independent, 27  December 2017.

27. James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley, China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, op.  cit. In contrast to the absurd story of the CIA station chief going on holiday, his assistant, Martha Sutherland, saw the PLA pepper her Beijing apartment with bullets.

28. See Roger Faligot, La mafia chinoise en Europe [The Chinese Mafia in Europe], op.  cit.

29. Hong Kong is a cursed place for Swiss diplomats. In 1956, the wife of another Swiss Federation consul was burned alive in her car during riots between nationalists and communists.

30. Nicholas Eftimiades, Chinese Intelligence Operations, op.  cit.

31. See Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop, DST.  Police secrète, Paris, Flammarion, 1999.

32. Roger Faligot, “Des ‘espions’ chinois à Paris pour surveiller les dissidents” [Chinese spies in Paris keeping watch on dissidents], Le Journal du dimanche, 22  April 1990.

33. Donald Morrison (ed.), Massacre in Beijing: China’s Struggle for Democracy, op.  cit.

34. He was notably accused of involvement in the 1992 return of two dissidents to China, Xu Gang and Ma Qianbo, which was made possible thanks to contacts within the Chinese secret services.

35. Renseignements Généraux, Activités associatives et commerciales de dissidents chinois, 29  March 1993. Since none of these people have been the subject of legal proceedings, I will not name them. What is important here is to understand the penetration mechanism of the Chinese services. One of their agents involved in this affair, a journalist named Wang, was in 2007 company secretary of a business involved in Sino-European trade, run by well-known members of the Benelux business community.

36. The fact that Ma Tao possessed an up-to-date passport was highly unusual. With the banning of the FDC on 7  January 1990, “a spokesman for the Office of Arrivals and Departures in the Public Security [Gonganbu] announced the very same day that the passports of Yan Jiaqi, Wan Runnan and Chen Yizi had been cancelled by law, because of the role that they had played in the establishment of the FDC abroad and because of their continued activities that put the security, honour and interests of China at risk.” Beijing Information, 15  January 1990.

37. MfS report, ZAIG, Nr.321/89, Berlin, 30.6.1989. Information über die Durchführung kirchlicher Solidaritätsveranstaltungen im Zusammenhang mit den konterrevolutionären Ereignissen in der VR China [Information on the Leadership of the Church Solidarity Events Connected With Counter-Revolutionary Events in the PRC], in Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle (eds), Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS—Januar-November 1989 [Orders and Reports of the Guoanbu: January–November 1989], Berlin, BasisDruck Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1990.

38. Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons: The Extraordinary Memoirs of a Communist Spy Chief, London, William Heinemann, 1988.

39. In 2007, Ivan Vladimirovich Grigorov was appointed a commercial tribunal judge in Moscow.

6. OPERATION AUTUMN ORCHID, HONG KONG

1. Author interview in Tokyo, March 1996.

2. Robert Delfs, “Death in the Afternoon”, The Far Eastern Economic Review, 2  May 1991.

3. Ruth Price’s remarkable biography The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005) describes in detail Smedley’s relationship with the Comintern and Soviet intelligence.

4. A little later another scandal emerged involving the Japanese prime minister. Hashimoto Ryutaro (1937–2006), a victim of the “beautiful woman stratagem” (a honeypot sting), was forced to testify before the Japanese parliament that his mistress—who remained unnamed—was a Chinese spy who had became a Japanese citizen. Born in 1955, her name was Li Weiping, and she first met the future prime minister when she was working as a translator during his visit to China in 1980. She was then posted to the Chinese embassy in Tokyo as part of the CCP’s intelligence service, the Diaochabu. Later she worked for the Gonganbu’s Beijing bureau, which was responsible for counterintelligence and for the recruitment of foreign agents. According to one of my journalist contacts, she also tried to seduce the president of the Yomiuri Shimbun press group.

5. See Lo Ah’s history of the Political Department: Lo Ah, Memories of Special Branch, RHKP (published in Chinese with the title Zhengzhibu Huijilu), Overseas Chinese Archives, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996.

6. Hong Kong Police Report, Special Branch Summary, November 1950, Public Record Office, London, CO537/6075—6450. The document also details the many Taiwanese intelligence networks in Hong Kong. (Shing Sheung Tat’s Cantonese name is spelled Cheng Xiangda in pinyin.)

7. See Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop, La Piscine: The French Secret Service From 1944, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.

8. James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley, China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, op.  cit.

9. Citations du président Liou Chao-chi [Thoughts of President Liu Shaoqi] was published in France in 1969 by Pierre Belfond, translated from the Chinese by Yves Dulaurens, with preface by Maurice Ciantar. The publisher claimed that “only one pirated edition had been published to date in Hong Kong, a translation of this edition.”

10. The journalist Duncan Campbell was the first to describe this set-up, in “Hong Kong: A Secret plan for dictatorship”, New Statesman, 12  December 1980.

11. See Roger Faligot, British Military Strategy in Ireland, Dingle/London, Brandon/Zed Press, 1983.

12. I published a number of articles on the subject at the time, including “Veillée d’armes à Hong Kong” [Armed vigil in Hong Kong], Politique internationale N°73, Autumn 1996.

13. See Far Eastern Economic Review, 16  November 1995. Prior to this, Shen Hongying was head of the Office of Protection of Secrets in Beijing (Guojia baomiju).

14. Nicholas Eftimiades, Chinese Intelligence Operations, Annapolis MD, Naval Institute Press, 1994.

15. Xu Jiatun, Xianggang Huiyilu [Hong Kong Memoirs], Taipei, Lianjing Chubanshe, 1993. Xu recounts how he suggested to the CCP that they open a discreet line of communication with the major capitalists of Hong Kong, who should no longer be considered “class enemies”, but rather as potentially useful allies.

16. Among candidates put forward as potential future leaders of the Hong Kong executive was lawyer T.S.  Lo (Lo Tak-shing), who had already announced that he was ready to take up the post. This member of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, of mixed Chinese and European heritage, was close to Li Peng, especially since he had been the first businessman to go to Beijing to shake his hand after Tiananmen. But public opinion was so hostile to him that he quickly withdrew from the race; the support he had been receiving went to another lawyer, Judge Simon Li.

17. Agnès Andrésy, Princes rouges, les nouveaux puissants de Chine [Red Princes: The New Chinese Power-Brokers], Paris, L’Harmattan, 2003. The newsletter Arcanes de Chine can be read online at www.arcanesdechine.com.

18. Two of Goldspot’s three shareholders were not resident in Hong Kong but in Beijing: Wu Wei and Wu Yu, both living in the elite neighbourhood of Diaoyutai, where Qiao Shi, head of the secret service, also lived until 1989. The third shareholder, Zhang Yong, lived in Sino Plaza, Gloucester Road, Hong Kong, but was still a national of the PRC.  Document of the Chamber of Commerce of Macao: Private Notary’s Office in Macao, from the Notary António J.  Dias Azedo, Ao de maio de mil novecentos e noventa e nove, Agência Turística e Diversões Chong Lot, Limitada.

19. Lo Ping, “Secrets About CCP Spies—Tens of thousands of them scattered over 170-odd cities worldwide”, Chen Ming, No. 2311, January 1997, pp 6–9; FBIS (Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an open-source CIA outfit), Journal Discloses “Secrets” about PRC Spy Network, FBIS-CHI-97–016, 1  January 1997.

7. JIANG ZEMIN’S GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE

1. Armin Witt, Violetta: Ein Tatsachenroman über chinesische Spionage im Westen [Violetta: A True Story of Chinese Espionage in the West]. See the associated website: www.violetta-zhang.de.

2. Letter from Armin Witt to the author, 21  November 2007.

3. Lu Yaokan, “‘Xide’ Zhenbang dongfangxue yu guoji wenti yanjiusuo ‘jianjie’” [A brief introduction to the German Federal Institute of Orientalism and International Studies], February 1987. See also a memorandum published in the CICIR’s journal: Lu Yaokun and Feng Zhonglin, “Deguo dui yazhou of zhanlue kaolu ji zhengce taozheng” [Strategic considerations of Germany and policy adjustment towards China], Xiandai guoji guanxi, N°5, 1993, pp. 15–20.

4. Feng was also the Chinese translator of Uli Franz’s biography of Deng Xiaoping.

5. Yue Shan, “Inside China Mainland”, Cheng Ming, N°241, 1998.

6. Some historians trace the creation of the CICIR’s predecessor to the period of conflict with the Japanese, when Zhou Enlai set up an institute in contact with the American OSS Mission Dixie and a Comintern satellite spy station in Yan.

7. David L.  Shambaugh, “China’s National Security Research Bureaucracy”, The China Quarterly, N°110, June 1987. In 1999, the CICIR returned to being under the CCP’s control as at its founding, though it continued building a semi-open intelligence organization.

8. Nicholas Eftimiades, Chinese Intelligence Operations, op.  cit.

9. One of the reports by Professor Li Wei and Ms Gao Ying was officially published by the CICIR in 2004, co-authored by Yang Mingjie, Chen Jiejun, and Shi Gang, under the title “International Counter-Terrorism: Inspiration from Current Predicament”. It was essentially a summary compilation of what had been written in the West in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the United States.

10. See the special report “Chine-Afrique”, La lettre de l’Océan indien [China and Africa: Letter from the Indian Ocean], November 2006, and other articles on the Chinese in Africa since 1992, on the website www.AfricaIntelligence.fr.

11. David Wise, Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War with China, Boston MA/New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

12. Author interview in Beijing, 29  June 2007.

13. The CICIR now also has an (English-language) website: http://www.cicir.ac.cn.

14. Chen Fengyi (ed.), Guoji Zhanlüe ziyuan diaocha [Global Strategic Resources Review], CICIR, Beijing, Shishichubanshe, 2005.

15. Author interview in Beijing, 20  June 2007.

16. The Hong Kong-based journalist Willy Wo-Lap Lam details Deng’s thinking at this time in China after Deng Xiaoping: The Power Struggle in Beijing since Tiananmen, Hong Kong, P.A.  Professional Consultants Ltd, 1995.

17. “La Chine investit massivement dans l’espionnage” [China is investing massively in espionage], Le Soir, 19  December 1991. Since 2008, Eric Meyer has published an online newsletter called Le vent de la Chine [China Winds]: www.leventdelachine.com.

18. Murray Scot Tanner, “The Institutional Lessons of Disaster: Reorganizing the People’s Armed Police After Tiananmen”, in James C.  Mulvenon (ed.), The People’s Liberation Army as Organization, Washington DC, RAND, 2002.

19. Further details can be found in his biography: Su Duoshou and Liu Mianyu, Zeng Shan Zhuan, Jiangxi, Jiangxi Chubanshe, 1999; and in that of Zeng Qinghong: Wu Kegang, Zeng Qinghong—Zhongong Xiang’ao da guanjia, [Zeng Qinghong: Guardian of Hong Kong and Macao], Hong Kong, Xinhua Publishing, 2004.

20. Zeng Qinghong’s assistants in the department were: Yang Dezhong (from 1982); You Xigui (who replaced him in 1997); Wang Ruilin (1983); Hu Guangbao (1993); Chen Fujin (1994); Wang Gang (also 1994)—who replaced Zeng in 1999 as general affairs director of the CCP; and Jiang Yikang (1996).

21. Teng Wensheng was a real political player, as is clear from the fact that he sometimes wrote speeches for Deng Xiaoping and then became a minister at the turn of the century, when he was replaced at the head of the service by Wang Huning.

22. For further details, see Hongda Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, Boulder CO, Westview Press, 1992.

23. See “Biographical sketch of Xu Yongyue”, Archives of the 3rd Bureau China Department of the intelligence services of the Office of the Japanese Prime Minister; as well as the author’s personal archives (Japan, 2000). See also Agnès Andrésy, Princes rouges, les nouveaux puissants de Chine, op.  cit.

24. The expression “the Immortals” is used to refer to the group of historical leaders who had participated in the Long March.

25. Yale Y.  Chen, “New Minister of State Security Xu Yongyue”, Inside China Mainland, Taiwan, June 1998.

26. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin, New York, Crown Publishers, 2004.

27. Jianshao anquan yewu gognzuo qudao is the Chinese term. I have relied for my account of this operation on the analysis carried out (based on published information) by Michael S.  Chase and James C.  Mulvenon, “The Decommercialization of China’s Ministry of State Security”, International Journal of Intelligence & CounterIntelligence, 15, 2002.

28. The Guoanbu leaders on the committees of these nine regions were: Zhao Baowen (Hebei); Zhang Shengdong (Shanxi); Geng Zhijie (Liaoning); Cai Xumin (Shanghai); Chen Yunlong (Zhejiang); Wang Jiashan (Anhui); Wang Guoqing (Shandong); Yaomin (Henan); Shen Xingfa (Shaanxi). Chase and Mulvenon believe that Guoanbu people were also present in sensitive provinces like Tibet and Xinjiang, but that their names remain unknown.

29. Nigel Inkster, China’s Cyber Power, op.  cit.

30. Farhan Bokhari, Kiran Stacey and Emily Feng, “China courted the Afghan Taliban in secret meetings”, Financial Times, 6  August 2018.

31. Mohammad Youssaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, London, Leo Cooper, 1992.

32. During the following decade, Colonel Kong Jining worked in Beijing with the strategic analysis group led by General Luo Renshi, former military attaché in Paris. He was then posted to London, where he was put in charge of technological intelligence before joining the military intelligence staff in 1997. (For further detail, see my article “The secret history of Mao’s grandson”, Le Point, 6  July 2001.) Kong went on to found, with his mother Li Min, a commercial enterprise: the Beijing Eastern Kunlun Culture Propagation Co, which publicized the “thought” of his grandfather, Chairman Mao. In 2018, he was head of a Christian NGO called China Mercy, providing aid to the poor of the country.

33. The Far Eastern Economic Review, 28  October 1993.

8. CHINA AND RUSSIA VS AMERICA

1. Joint Direct Attack Munitions.

2. Bill Clinton, My Life, New York, Knopf, 2004.

3. Cheng Ming, Hong Kong, June 1999.

4. The seven members of the Standing Committee of the CCP Politburo, elected on 19  September 1997, were: Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Zhu Rongji, Li Ruihan, Hu Jintao, Wei Jianxing, and Li Lanquing. Wei Jianxing was the security coordinator. Qiao Shi finally retired, though as we know he had already left this sector to become speaker of the National People’s Congress in 1992. Not long afterwards, Wei was replaced as head of the secret services by Luo Gan, who was close to Li Peng.

5. Stanis sic c was ousted the following year, in November 1998. Milos sevic c was afraid that he was planning a coup against him.

6. Letter to the author, 2  December 2007.

7. Quoted in Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America, Washington DC, Regnery Publishing, 2000.

8. In an article entitled “Yougoslavie—les amitiés en panne” [Yugoslavia: stalled friendships] in the online newsletter Le vent de Chine, 16  October 2000, journalist Eric Meyer suggests that the emotion in Beijing following the fall of Milos sevic c on 5  October 2000 was even more intense than the elation following Suharto’s fall in Indonesia (1998), or the Kuomintang’s loss of power in the Taiwan elections of March 2000. In the case of Taiwan, ultimately the CCP leadership would have preferred to see their longstanding enemy remain in power in Taipei than face a new, potentially pro-independence president.

9. See Jacques Massé, Nos chers criminels de guerre. Paris-Belgrade-Zagreb en classe affaires [Our dear war criminals: Paris-Belgrade-Zagreb in business class], Paris, Flammarion, 2006.

10. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Masterplan to Destroy America, Pan American Publishing Company, 2002.

11. Stéphane Marchand, Quand la Chine veut vaincre [When China Decides to Conquer], Paris, Fayard, 2007 offers a clear explanation for the war between the old and new guard of the PLA in the wake of the traumatic Kosovo war.

12. See the newsletter Très Très Urgent (TTU) [Very, Very Urgent], October 1999.

13. The character Xiong, meanwhile, signifies the word ‘bear’.

14. According to The Far Eastern Economic Review, 8  August 2002.

15. For further details see Chapter 11. David Shambaugh is correct to point out that, according to US military documents, drawn from contradictory Chinese sources, this structure also features another communications department, independent of the 3rd and 4th (Modernizing China’s Military, Progress, Problems, and Prospects, Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2002). I noticed the same problem in Japanese defence sources.

16. Ji Pengfei was a CCP diplomacy veteran, former foreign minister and negotiator over the future of Hong Kong; he was also another friend of Qiao Shi, now speaker of the National People’s Congress. General Ji appointed as his deputy Colonel Kong Jining—the same Kong who had served in the Afghanistan campaign, Mao’s grandson.

17. Wen Ho Lee, My Country Versus Me, New York, Hyperion, 2001; Notra Trulock, Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal, San Francisco CA, Encounter Books, 2003.

18. Including the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), the China North Industries Group Corporation Limited (NORINCO), the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC).

19. This explains rumours that the outbreaks of both SARS and bird flu in China began near the PLA laboratories outside Canton, where research into bacteriological and biological warfare was being conducted. In 1984 China had signed up to the international convention on the prohibition of bacteriological warfare (Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons Convention—BTWC), but this did not put an end to research that had begun during the Korean War.

20. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, some of COSTIND’s research departments have focused on means of destroying enemy systems through the use of intelligent weapons to attack radars and radio transmitting stations; the jamming of enemy communications by electronic warfare; attacks on communications centres and naval command centres; the destruction of electronic systems with electromagnetic pulse weapons; the destruction of computer systems with viruses; and so on.

21. US House of Representatives Select Committee, “U.S.  National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, Volume 1”, op.  cit., Chapter 1 ‘PRC Acquisition of US Technology’, pp. 19–20.

22. The Washington Post, August 2001. This description does not only apply to the United States. The case of the Valeo student (Chapter 9) is a good illustration of this system and explains the difficulties facing counterintelligence services and companies when it comes to prosecution and obtaining convictions.

23. US House of Representatives Select Committee, “U.S.  National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, Volume 1; submitted by Mr.  Cox of California, Chairman”, 3  January 1999 (declassified in part 25  May 1999), https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851/pdf/GPO-CRPT-105hrpt851.pdf.

24. The section of the Cox Report dealing with Chinese theft of technological secrets was confirmed two years later by another defector in December 2001: Colonel Xu Junping, director of strategy at the Ministry of Defence. Colonel Xu had worked in liaison with General Xiong Guangkai. According to my British colleague Gordon Thomas, who had access to part of his debriefing, Colonel Xu reportedly told the FBI that the Chinese were funding the higher education of students in America at leading universities, including Harvard and Yale, as part of a long-term intelligence plan. Xu revealed everything that the Chinese knew about CIA operations in the Far East; that the Chinese now have the largest number of spies of all services operating clandestinely in the United States; how China had bypassed sanctions against Iraq to help Saddam Hussein rebuild his nuclear potential; how a Chinese service team had gone to Belgrade to extract Milos sevic c just before his arrest and referral to the ICTY; that Osama bin Laden had links with the Chinese special services; how China was intending to exploit Europe’s recurring “problem” with (Chinese) immigration, and so on. In short, Xu’s defection and the revelations of his debriefing came at just the right time to confirm every neoconservative fantasy about China, just as the testimonies of some KGB defectors had been exploited during the Cold War for domestic political purposes.

25. This is the amount given by Shambaugh in Modernizing China’s Military, op.  cit. In 1999, Johnny Chung testified before the inquiry that he had received $300,000 directly from General Ji Sheng, but handed over only $35,000 to the Democratic National Committee (The International Herald Tribune, 6  July 1999). In September 2007, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Hong Kong-based Norman Hsu—linked to the same networks and convicted of fraud—had contributed $850,000 to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign.

26. Iliya Sarsembaev, La question territoriale: enjeu géopolitique et idéologique dans les relations sino-russes, op.  cit.

27. See Chapter 2 for details about the Yan Baohang affair.

28. For further detail, see Chapter 11.

29. Moscow Times, September 1999.

30. Segodnyia, May 2000.

31. Details of this interview cannot be supplied, to protect the source’s anonymity.

32. Interview with Professor Meng Changlin, China Reform Forum, June 2007.

33. Intelligence Online, N°521, 7  April 2006 (www.IntelligenceOnline.fr). Meng was later promoted to president of Interpol, based in Lyon, but was recalled to Beijing in 2018 to be tried for corruption.

34. See Philippe Coué, La Chine veut la lune [China Wants the Moon], Paris, A2C médias, 2007; and Brian Harvey, China’s Space Program, London, Springer & Praxis Publishing, 2004.

9. SEA LAMPREY TACTICS: ECONOMIC WARFARE

1. For more details of this case, see Chapter 14.

2. “J’avais accès à tout l’intranet, je ne pensais pas que c’était confidentiel” [I had access to the entire intranet, I didn’t think it was classified], interview with David Revault d’Allonnes, in Libération, 21  June 2005.

3. Cyrille Louis, “Le chimiste du CNRS se défend d’être un espion” [CNRS research scientist defends himself against accusations of spying], Le Figaro, 20  April 2006.

4. The excerpts cited here are taken from the four-page MI5 manual, first written about by Times journalist James Adams in his book The New Spies, London, Hutchinson, 1994. These tips remain valid and are pertinent to visitors from all countries. See also Roger Faligot, “Renseignement économique: la guerre fait rage en Asie” [Economic Intelligence: The War Rages in Asia], L’Asie, December 1997.

5. Modelled on the FBI in the USA, the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MJIB or Fa Wu Pu Tiao Ch’a Pu), which deals with counterintelligence, reports directly to the Taiwan Ministry of Justice.

6. For details on all these affairs, and the influence of the Chen Yun clan, including the role of special agent Dai Xiaoming—a friend of both Chen Yuan (Chen Yun’s son) and Robert Huang (Hillary Clinton’s interlocutor during Chinagate)—see Agnès Andrésy, Princes rouges, les nouveaux puissants de Chine, op.  cit.

7. See Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Services, op. cit.

8. Author interview, 12  May 1988.

9. The Chinese had obviously studied the Japanese system, as discussed in a highly technical article by Qihao Miao and Zuozhi Zhang, “Anatomy of JETRO’s Overseas Technology Monitoring: Bibliometrical and Content Analysis”, Scientometrics, 1990.

10. Beijing Information, 1  February 1993.

11. Author interview, Beijing, 27  June 2007.

12. Before taking over in 2001, Wei had been deputy of the previous director, Gui Shiyong. In 2018 Huang Shouhong took over from Wei.

13. These include Beijing’s National Institute of Economic Research, the Economic Research Centre in Shanghai, and several others.

14. China Daily, 5  December 2006.

15. Daniel Schaeffer, La pratique de l’intelligence économique chinoise dans l’acquisition des hautes technologies [The practice of economic intelligence in the acquisition of advanced technologies], Proceedings of Conference on Economic Intelligence and International Competition, IECI, 16  November 2006, Paris La Défense.

16. Juan Antonio Fernandez and Laurie Underwood, China CEO: Voices of Experience from 20 International Business Leaders, Singapore, John Wiley & Sons (Asia), 2006.

17. The Indian intelligence service’s Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), increasingly present around the world and of course one of the principal enemies of the Chinese services, is itself beginning to undertake something similar. By 2017, India had become a fully-fledged member of the SCO, as had its arch-enemy Pakistan. One of Beijing’s aims is obviously to end New Delhi’s support for Tibetan refugees, principally of course the most important of them all, the Dalai Lama.

18. Taipei Times, 8  June 2013.

19. Le Canard enchaîné, 6 February 2019.

20. Le Canard enchaîné, 8 March 2017.

21. See “Beijing: Clearstream et frégates” [Beijing: Clearstream and Frigates], Intelligence Online, 26  May 2006.

22. Christine Deviers-Joncour, Opération Bravo, où sont passées les commissions de la vente des frégates à Taiwan? [Operation Bravo: What became of the sales commissions of the frigates destined for Taiwan?], Paris, Plon, 2000.

23. “Des camarades chinois bien arrosés” [Well-greased Chinese comrades], Le Canard enchaîné, 3  May 2006.

24. Its full name is the Leading Group in Charge of National Rectification and Standardization of Market Economic Order.

10. THE 610 OFFICE AND THE FIVE POISONS

1. Falun Gong means “work of the wheel of the law”. Qigong means “work of the breath”.

2. For more on the Taiping movement, see Chapter 1; about Falun Gong’s roots, seeMaria Hsia Chang, Falun Gong, secte chinoise. Un défi au pouvoir [Falun Gong, the Chinese Sect: Challenge to Power], Paris, Editions Otherwise, CERI, 2004.

3. You Xigui later became leader of the Zhongnanhai elite’s special security troops, the Jingwei Budui, and the 57003 elite unit.

4. Andrew J.  Nathan and Bruce Gilley, China’s New Rulers: the Secret Files, op.  cit.

5. Chris Patten, Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths About World Affairs, London, Allen Lane, 2006.

6. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, The Man Who Changed China: The Life & Legacy of Jiang Zemin, op. cit.

7. Jennifer Zeng, Witnessing History: One Woman’s Fight for Freedom and Falun Gong, Crows Nest, Australia, Allen & Unwin, 2005.

8. Jacques de Golfiem, Personnalités chinoises d’aujourd’hui, op.  cit.

9. The Epoch Times can be accessed online: www.epochtimes.com.

10. Experience shows that attacks by cyber-warriors often occur when a country is in crisis. It is an opportunity for attackers to test the response capabilities of the targeted country. See Chapter 11.

11. Ji Shi, Li Hongzhi & His “Falun Gong”: Deceiving the Public and Ruining Lives, Beijing, New Star Publishers, 1999.

12. Bruce Pedroletti, “Des membres du Fa Lu Gong seraient victimes d’un trafic d’organes en Chine” [Falun Gong members reportedly victims of organ trafficking in China], Le Monde, 18  August 2006.

13. Author interview, Montreal, 25  March 2002.

14. Author interview, Sydney, 26  December 2006. David McKnight is the author of Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War: The Conspiratorial Heritage, London, Routledge, 2001. His article “When Money Talks, the Right and Left Swap Sides” was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 9  June 2005.

15. Cameron Stewart, “Spy drive to tackle Chinese,” The Australian, 28  December 2006.

16. Statement by Chen Yonglin in The Epoch Times, 30  October 2005.

17. See Chapter 2.

18. In September 2005, a staff member at the Canadian embassy in China, Yang Jianhua, defected with his family. He was a hairdresser, but as we have seen, a junior job is not necessarily evidence of a minor role in the Chinese security apparatus.

19. Author interview, location concealed, 28  July 2007.

20. See Intelligence Online, N°536, 8  December 2006.

21. Wang Jianping, Written submission to the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee’s Inquiry into Asylum and Protection Visas for Consulate Officials, 26  July 2005.

22. Richard Bullivant, “Chinese Defectors Reveal Chinese Strategy and Agents in Australia”, National Observer, N°66, 2005.

23. As we know, the origin of these two distinct military intelligence services goes back to the 1940s in Yan’an, when Zhou Enlai set up a service independent of the one headed by Kang Sheng (see Chapter 2).

24. Pierre de Villemarest, GRU, le plus secret des services soviétiques, 1918–1988 [The GRU: Most Secret of the Soviet services, 1918–1988], Paris, Stock, 1988. In Chinese: Ge Lu Wu—Su jun qingbaobu neimu pilu, (trans. Xiao Lianbing), Beijing, Huaxia Chubanshe, 1990.

25. He was replaced in 2006 by Zhang Chantai, who had been posted to Paris in the 1980s as deputy to the military attaché.

26. Vicent Jauvert, “Les “grandes oreilles” de Pékin en France” [Beijing’s big ears in France] L’Obs, April 2014.

11. CYBER-WARRIORS OF THE PLA

1. Li Kenong’s Diaochabu managed to infiltrate a Cambridge-educated secret agent. John Tsang was unmasked in 1961, at Hong Kong’s Little Sai Wan station (run by GCHQ and the DSD). See Duncan Campbell, “The Spies Who Spend What They Like”, New Statesman, 16  May 1980.

2. See Doris Blackwell and Douglas Lockwood, Alice on the Line, Alice Springs, Outback Books, 2001.

3. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World, London, Arrow, 2002.

4. Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, OYSTER, The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Melbourne, Mandarin Australia, 1990. Labor’s return to power at the end of 2007, led by former Beijing ambassador Kevin Rudd, was obviously in a less fraught context than the Cold War.

5. By the summer of 2007, the Pueblo was once more the subject of negotiation. Kim Jong-il, feeling magnanimous, was ready to return it to the Americans, in return for certain advantages in nuclear negotiations.

6. Bruce Swanson, Eighth Voyage of the Dragon: A History of China’s Quest for Seapower, Annapolis MD, Naval Institute Press, 1982.

7. For further details about the Japanese spy system, see my book: Roger Faligot, Naisho, Enquête au cœur des services secrets japonais [Naisho: A Journey into the Heart of the Japanese Secret Services], Paris, La Découverte, 1997.

8. Author interview with Desmond Ball, Canberra, December 2006.

9. This system is described by a former employee of the Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE). See Mike Frost and Michel Gratton, Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments, Toronto, Doubleday, 1994.

10. Several senior intelligence officials have been appointed to this post. We have already met some of them; others—including generals Kong Yuan, Xu Xin, Xiong Guangkai and Chen Xiaogong—feature only at the end of this book (see Appendices).

11. See the article on his appointment in Intelligence Online, 23  August 2007.

12. With Xi Jinping’s reform of the PLA in 2015, these bureaus fell under the Strategic Support Force (SSF). See Chapter 14.

13. Desmond Ball, “Signals Intelligence in China”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, August 1995.

14. Also included within the group of organizations governing military communications and interception is the PLA Communications Department, headed by General Yang Liming, which is in charge of liaison between the Central Military Commission, the army general staff, and various units that ensure the protection of the most sensitive government lines. In 2011, this department was renamed the Informatization Department.

15. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987. The celebrated Washington Post reporter explains how the Soviets would have keeled over if they had known the extent of the intelligence the Chinese and Americans were trading, and not just through the wiretapping stations.

16. Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America, Washington DC, Regnery Publishing, 2000.

17. His successor as CIA station chief, Keith Riggin, later became chairman of a consulting group called Pamir Resources & Consulting, Inc, which was named, curiously enough, after the SIGINT Operation PAMIR.

18. Interview with Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, 14  August 2007. This former Bundeswehr officer wrote a history of the BND, Schnüffler ohne Nase, Der BND [Sniffers With No Noses: The BND], Düsseldorf, ECON Verlag, 1994. See also Michael Müller and Peter F.  Müller with Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, Gegen Freund und Feind, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 2002.

19. Desmond Ball, Burma’s Military Secrets—Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) from 1941 to Cyber Warfare, Bangkok, White Lotus Press, 1998.

20. Beijing Information, 13  January 1986. See also the report by Yu Qingtian, “Deux villes scientifiques flottantes” [Two floating scientific cities], La Chine en construction, May 1987.

21. The Far Eastern Economic Review, 3  August 1993.

22. See in particular the ships Xing Fengshan (V856), Beidiao N ° 841, and the Yanha 519, modified and renamed the Yanha 723. For more details, see Bernard Prézelin, Les flottes de combat [Combat Fleets], Rennes, Éditions maritimes et d’Outre-mer, 1995.

23. Prézelin, Les flottes de combat [Combat Fleets], op.  cit.

24. See Intelligence Online, N°529, 25  August 2006.

25. See Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui and Moises Sio Wong, Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution (ed. Mary-Alice Waters), New York, Pathfinder Press, 2005.

26. Details of these and other operations can be found in the dissertation by Second Lieutenant Sebastian Manzoni, L’infrastructure nationale de l’information en République populaire de Chine—une illusion de liberté [The National Information Infrastructure in the People’s Republic of China: An Illusion of Freedom], under the direction of Catherine Sarlandie de la Robertie, Social and Political Sciences Division, Ecole Spéciale Militaire de St-Cyr, Military Training School, Military School of the Technical and Adjudicative Corps, June 2003.

27. Letter from Zhang Ping to the author, including a technical dossier, Beijing, 10  November 1994.

28. The results of this research were given to a provincial body, the Sichuan Zhongcheng Network Development Company Ltd. See Manzoni, L’infrastructure nationale, op.  cit.

29. See the article by Michel Alberganti, “Le dernier virus informatique envoie son butin en Chine” [The latest computer virus sends its booty to China], Le Monde, 16  January 1999.

30. According to Indian sources, the 1999 taskforce also included the following figures: General Fu Quanyou, the PLA chief of staff, Generals Yuan Banggen and Wang Pufeng, Wang Baocun, Shen Weiguang, Wang Xiaodong, Qi Jianguo, Liang Zhenxing, Yang Minqing, Dai Qingmin, Leng Bingling, Wang Yulin and Zhao Wenxiang.

31. Jean Guisnel, Guerres dans le cyberspace. Services secrets et internet [Wars in Cyberspace, Secret Services and the Internet], Paris, La Découverte/Poche, 1997. In Chinese: Jang.Jinei’er (Jean Guisnel), Huliangwang shangde jiandiezhan (trans. Xu Jianmei), Beijing, Xinhua Chubanshe, 2000.

32. MI5 was indeed at the forefront of the battle against Chinese cyber-attacks: in December 2007, The Times revealed that the head of MI5 at the time, Jonathan Evans, had warned the heads of some 300 businesses and banking/financial institutions of Chinese operations targeting Britain and Germany (Rhys Blakely, Jonathan Richards, James Rossiter and Richard Beeston, “MI5 alert on China’s cyberspace spy threat”, The Times, 1  December 2007).

33. Interview with WorldNetDaily correspondent Anthony C.  LoBaido, who wrote in his article on the Blondes that they were using engineering cells in the US at Cal Tech Laboratories, MIT, Baylor, Texas A & M, West Point, Liberty Baptist and even the Air Force Academy in Colorado. This no doubt explains why the Chinese complained that the CIA was behind this offensive.

34. Soldier’s Daily (Zhanshibao).

35. Mingbao, 27  February 1999.

36. Willy Wo-Lap Lam, Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era: New Leaders, New Challenges, New York, M.  E.  Sharpe, 2006.

37. What follows is a summary of the Chinese system of cyber-control that has been the subject of several books, including the following: William Hagestad II, Chinese Cyber Crime, China’s Hacking Underworld (2nd edn, CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016); Nigel Inkster, China’s Cyber Power, op.  cit.; and the most complete, Dean Cheng, Cyber Dragon: Inside China’s Information Warfare and Cyber Operations (Santa Barbara CA/Denver CO, Praeger Security International, 2017).

38. Didier Huguenin, “Manœuvres et pratiques d’Intelligence autour d’une stratégie Sud-Sud” [Chinese Strategic, Business and Competitive intelligence in Western and Central Africa], Master IIDC, Intelligence économique, Institut francilien d’Ingénierie des Services, Université de Marne-La-Vallée, 2008–9.

39. This decision was equally brought about by the Chinese attacks against the IT system of the Dalai Lama, whose government in exile is based in India.

40. Paris-based French newsletter Très Très Urgent, N°743, 20  January 2010.

41. Gmail was attacked the following year by the Chinese.

12. BEIJING 2008: CHINA WINS THE ESPIONAGE GOLD

1. The term “espionage” in the title of The Art of War’s final chapter is expressed by the character “jiàn”, which denotes a ray of sunlight coming through a half open door: 间 in simplified Chinese. At the time the text was written, it was the moon shining through a shuttered doorway: 閒. It is still used in the word “spy”: Jiàndié 间谍. I personally retranslated (into French) the quotation from the Chinese text. My version is less poetic than those that spread in the West from the first translation, published in Paris in 1772 by the Jesuit priest Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, a friend of Emperor Qianlong. I prefer the term “sovereign’s treasure”, closer to the original than the phrase “divine labyrinth”, which still appears in the published French translation. It turns out that the technical terms used by Sun Tzu are actually quite close, in my opinion, to the intelligence vocabulary still in use in twenty-first-century China.

2. “Gordon Brown aide a victim of honeytrap operation by Chinese agents”, The Sunday Times, 20  July 2008.

3. See Fabien Ollier and Marc Perelman, Le livre noir des JO de Pékin [The Black Book of the Beijing Olympics], Paris, City Editions, 2008.

13. ZHOU’S FAILED COUP: THE GUOANBU SAVES XI JINPING

1. See my article, “The Tiger Conspiracy”, Vanity Fair, April 2015.

2. The Bamboo Garden in north Beijing is one.

3. This telephone conversation was brought to light by two exiled Chinese investigative journalists, Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang, in A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, New York, Public Affairs, 2013.

4. Agnès Andrésy, Xi Jinping, la Chine rouge, nouvelle génération [Xi Jinping, Red China, and the New Generation], Paris, Éditions L’Harmattan, 2013.

5. See Nick Holdstock, China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State, London/New York, I.B.  Tauris, 2015.

6. Agnès Andrésy, Xi Jinping, la Chine rouge, nouvelle génération, op.  cit.

7. Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Services, op.  cit.

8. See “Le Guoanbu amputé du contre-espionnage?” [The Guoanbu cut off from counterespionage?], Intelligence Online, N°729, 11  February 2015; and Peter Mattis, “The Dragon’s Eyes and Ears: Chinese Intelligence at the Crossroads”, The National Interest, 20  January 2015.

9. Jason Pan, “PLA Cyberunit Targeting Taiwan Named”, Taipei Times, 10  March 2015.

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

1. Pompeo was appointed by Donald Trump, and subsequently named secretary of state in 2018.

2. See the box in Chapter 8 listing the principal cases involving Chinese spies in the United States.

3. As we have seen, in China, the organization of espionage is two-pronged: the technical director’s role is parallel to that of a representative of the CCP, whose job is to maintain ideological discipline.

4. Reuters, “Britain pulls out spies as Russia, China crack Snowden files: report”, 14  June 2015.

5. See Nick Holdstock, China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State, op.  cit.

6. For details see John Costello, “The Strategic Support Force: China’s Information Warfare Service”, China Brief, Jamestown Foundation, 8  February 2016; and Dean Cheng, Cyber Dragon: Inside China’s Information Warfare and Cyber Operations, Santa Barbara CA/Denver CO, Praeger Security International, 2017.

7. See “Soupçons sur les Instituts Confucius” [Suspicions about the Confucius Institutes], Intelligence Online, N°558, 15  November 2007; and Fabrice de Pierrebourg and Michel Juneau-Katsuya, Nest of Spies: The Startling Truth About Foreign Agents At Work Within Canada’s Borders, Montreal, Éditions Stanké, 2009.

8. Cheng Li, Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership, Washington DC, Brookings Institution, 2016.

NOTE ON SOURCES

1. Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service: Kang Sheng and the Shadow Government in Red China (trans. Christine Donougher), London, Headline, 1989.

2. Peter Mattis, Analyzing the Chinese Military: A Review Essay and Resource Guide on the People’s Liberation Army, Washington DC, Jamestown Foundation, 2015.

3. Xiong Xianghui, Wode qingbao yu waijiao shengya [My Career in Intelligence And Diplomacy], Zhonggongdangshi Chubanshe, 2006.