Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

On that first visit, Dagan had seen that technology had become something China could not get enough of; more was spent on this than on food. Nowhere was it more evident than in surveillance. Ultrasonic detectors sensitive to noise or motion, electronic invisible beams that activated hidden cameras and silent alarms, bugging and debugging devices: Israel had the best and found a ready market in China. Some of the equipment the sales team had brought included gadgets developed by Mossad, such as voice analysers that would monitor the tension in a person making a telephone call. IAI had created a new radar that emitted electromagnetic energy pulses that bounced off an enemy aircraft and betrayed its shape and size. Other Israeli companies had found a ready market for the kind of surveillance equipment that had become an integral part of the urban Chinese infrastructure: electronic monitors analyzed every minute of the working day, checked on performance rates, even toilet breaks and personal activities. Meir Dagan had seen that no building in Beijing appeared able to operate without its quota of Israeli microchips that constantly fed the banks of computers by which the government kept track of its citizens from birth to death.

At the banquets where the delegation had been feted, speaker after speaker had spoken of the Asian Century, that by the year 2005, of the thirteen cities with world populations in excess of 10 million, seven would be around the Pacific Rim. China’s predicted economic growth of 8 percent a year would allow it to create the world’s largest cybercity; its reserve of currency, by 2010, would exceed that of Japan; by that year one in ten of all corporations around the Pacific Rim would be under the virtual control of its Chinese investors; by the year 2015, countries like Thailand and the Philippines would be under the economic management of China. All this would be achieved, a banquet speaker had enthused, by China’s ability to export technology it had bought from Israel. The irony was not lost on the guests.

At one banquet Meir Dagan had been introduced to Qiao Shi, once China’s supreme intelligence chief. At over six feet, he was unusually tall for a Chinese man. Qiao’s stoop, it was rumored, was from a childhood illness that had kept him bedridden for long periods during which he had pored over the written Chinese language. By the age of six he had mastered its radicals, strokes, phonetics, and recensions. The discipline of learning was good training for his future as China’s spymaster, and he had become the longest-serving intelligence chief in the world. In their brief encounter, Meir Dagan had found Qiao polite yet distant, but ready to raise his glass of French cognac to toast the Israeli delegation and offer them Cuban cigars.

Now, eighteen months later on that October day in 2005, Dagan had come as an emissary to pass on the request to Qiao that Beijing must intervene to stop North Korea from arming Iran, an action that could not only precipitate a regional war but also might lead to a global conflict.

Their meeting came under the well-honed rule of Total Deniability. There would be no record kept of the secure-line phone calls to set up the meeting or its purpose. The flight plan and the passenger manifest were classified. Only Porter Goss and John Scarlett knew the purpose of the trip. Senior diplomats at the State Department in Washington and the Foreign Office in London had deliberately been kept out of the loop so that they could truthfully deny any knowledge of the mission.

Dagan had familiarized himself with Mossad’s profile of Qiao Shi and the ultimate control he had over the activities of five spying organizations: ILD, the International Liaison Department, was engaged in covert activities primarily directed against the United States; MID, the Military Intelligence Department, targeted the military capabilities of America, Great Britain, and other member states of the European Union; MSS, the Ministry of State Security, handled all counterintelligence within China; STD, the Special Technical Department of the Ministry of State Security, who had helped carry out the theft from Los Alamos, also collated all signals traffic from Chinese embassies overseas; and NCNA, a news service reporting on Chinese affairs and also a cover for CSIS spies abroad.

CSIS had its own buildings in Beijing. Counterintelligence was housed in a four-story structure on West Qiananmen Street; foreign intelligence operated from a modern building near the city’s main railway station. But the major activities of the several thousand men and women CSIS employed were coordinated from inside the compound at Zhongnanhai, where the Chinese leadership lived and worked. Next to the prime minister’s office was a single-story, squarely built building with the traditional curved, red-tiled roof and a paved area containing a helicopter pad and parking space for cars. The building’s roof was festooned with aerials. An American satellite’s photograph revealed the building had an inner courtyard with an ornamental pond and a landscaped miniature garden. Qiao Shi’s private office was the only one with direct access to the courtyard.

It was from there that he ran intelligence networks that extended across the Pacific into the United States and Europe, into the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Japan. At his command was an army of spies and informers and an unrivaled budget to maintain them.

His entire career had been based on adroit, low-key moves, climbing up through one ministry’s bureaucracy to another. His command of languages—he spoke French, Japanese, and Korean—had brought him to the Foreign Ministry. As a diplomat he had traveled widely before being recalled to a senior position in the Ministry. In 1980, he had been appointed by Deng Xiaoping as head of state security. Deng had died, but Qiao’s power remained undimmed: he knew all the secrets, the peccadillos, and other personal shortcomings of the old men of Zhongnanhai, the last survivors of the Long March of 1934 when they had made an unforgettable two-year journey of six thousand miles across mountain ranges and provinces larger than most European nations; it had been not only a strategic military retreat from the terrible reality of brother killing brother but a major migration leading to eventual nationhood for a new China.

One of the first decisions of Mao Tse-tung after he proclaimed the birth of the Communist state on October 1, 1949, was to create a leadership compound in the lea of the Forbidden City from where the emperors had ruled for seven hundred years. Qiao Shi had helped to turn it into one of the most fortified areas on earth. There were guard posts in the most unexpected places: cut into the trunks of trees with each niche just large enough for a man, or concealed within shrubbery. Sensors, tripwires, and body-heat-sensing cameras proliferated. No aircraft was permitted to overfly, and only helicopters, ferrying the old men to and from their summer palaces in the hills to the west of the city, came and went. In the compound they lived along the eastern shore of the lake in the center of the compound. Many of the homes were palaces, often with thirty or more bedrooms, magnificent salons, and indoor swimming pools. Furnished with artefacts removed from the Forbidden City, each mansion had its retinue of servants and guards who lived on the north side of the lake in several barracks screened by vegetation. There were over a hundred varieties of trees and shrubs planted around the compound as a reminder of those the old men had seen on the Long March. The lake itself was filled with carp. Mao had initially ordered a hundred thousand; over the years the number had increased, some said to several million. More certain was that the water was dark with their feces, and a team of gardeners were employed to constantly remove it. The few foreigners who had been admitted to Zhongnanhai had said there was an unpleasant smell from the lake.