DA-CHUAN ZHENG. In 1984, Da-Chuan Zheng, Kuang-shin Lin, Jing-li Zhang, David Tsai, and Allen Yeung were convicted of conspiring to illegally export restricted military equipment to the People’s Republic of China. All had been identified during a sting operation conducted by federal agents and U.S. Customs as seeking to purchase various items, such as radar jamming equipment, including English Electric Valve Company traveling wave-tube amplifier chains and Watkins-Johnson Inc. traveling wave-tube amplifiers. Described as a businessman from Hong Kong, Da-Chuan Zheng acknowledged under interrogation that in recent years he had spent some $25 million on similar purchases. An attempt by the defendants to appeal a definition in their indictments as too vague was dismissed in July 1985. See alsoTECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
DANILOV, VALENTIN. A respected Russian physicist and head of the Thermo-Dynamics Center at Krasnoyarsk State Technical University, Valentin Danilov was arrested in 2004 and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment, having been found guilty of espionage on behalf of the People’s Republic of China.
DEBENTURE. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) codename for a “black radio” station, DEBENTURE was established in Singapore in 1954 and was intended to improve the flow of middle class Chinese refugees across the frontier to Hong Kong. As the screening of refugees was SIS’s principal source of intelligence, DEBENTURE was intended to encourage more people to make the hazardous journey over the border. Originally intended to be sited in Hong Kong, political objections meant the transmitter had to be located in a secure military compound elsewhere.
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (DIA). One of several United States intelligence agencies collecting information about China, the DIA is headquartered at Bolling Air Force Base, outside Washington DC, and trains defense attachés prior to their deployment in Beijing. Defense attaché reporting is collated by analysts who circulate their own assessments or contribute to National Intelligence Estimates compiled under the authority of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The DIA concentrates on Chinese naval strength and the Chinese nuclear weaponsprogram and routinely issues threat assessments within a classified environment. An assessment, dated April 1984, suggests that the current Chinese stockpile of nuclear weapons amounted to 150–160 warheads but acknowledged that this figure was based on estimates derived from indirect sources, mainly from counting the delivery systems and studying test yields. The DIA had been unable to locate any airfield storage sites and had concluded that the limited size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal was a reflection of Beijing’s needs rather than any shortage of nuclear matériel.
DIA collection efforts in Beijing have been curtailed by ubiquitous hostile surveillance that has amounted to harassment, and in 1995, two DIA officers were expelled from the country. See also HOU DESHENG; MONTAPERTO, RONALD N.
DENG. In February 2010, a 41-year-old consular officer employed by South Korea’s consulate in Shanghai resigned following an investigation conducted by the Ministry of Justice into the activities of his Chinese wife, an attractive woman identified only as Deng. Three years earlier, he had reported his discovery at home of compromising photographs of her with two of his colleagues, together with a computer file containing a collection of confidential consular documents, including details of visa applications and a list of cell phone numbers belonging to 200 members of President Lee Myung-bak’s reelection campaign. According to her husband, Deng had been a civil servant until five years earlier, and the suspicion was that she had passed information to the Ministry of State Security. See alsoHONEYTRAP.
DENG XIAOPING. The Ministry of State Security (MSS), Guojia Anquanbu, an intelligence agency intended as an outward-looking intelligence service, was created by Communist politician Deng Xiaoping in 1983. Deng’s organization replaced the Ministry of Public Security, Gong’anbu, as the PRC’s principal security apparatus. This was a major development as hitherto the country has been isolated, with few diplomatic missions overseas, and almost wholly preoccupied with issues of internal security. The creation of the MSS, charged with conducting intelligence collection operations overseas, was a significant turning point for the country.
Born in Sichuan Province in 1904, Deng Xiaoping came from a farming background but studied in France, where he was influenced by Marxism. He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China in 1923 and worked his way up through the party ranks and, in 1934, participated in the 6,000-mile Long March with Mao Zedong. He was instrumental in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economic reconstruction after the disastrous Great Leap Forward started by Mao but was twice purged during the Cultural Revolution, after which he embraced the “Four Modernizations,” originally announced by Zhou Enlai in 1973, as the goals for the PRC, advocating reform in industry, science and technology, agriculture, and the military.
Following Mao’s death in September 1976, Deng outmaneuvered Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, and although never becoming premier or even CCP chairman, became the PRC’s de facto leader in 1978.
Deng had five children by his third wife. Their son Deng Pufang was thrown out a window by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and has been confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. A daughter, Deng Rong, was assigned to the PRC’s embassy in Washington DC after normalization but adopted the alias “Xiao Rong.” She was accompanied by her husband, a military attaché, He Ping, a son of Marshal He Long, a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army and the Long March. Deng died in February 1997. See also PROJECT 863.
DING, JIAN WEI. On 28 October 2008, a federal grand jury in Minnesota indicted Jian Wei Ding, aged 50 of Singapore; Ping Cheng, aged 46 of Manhasset, New York; and Kok Tong Lim, aged 36, also of Singapore, for conspiring to export Toray carbon-fiber material, which had space and uranium enrichment applications, to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Between February and March 2009, all three pleaded to a single count of conspiracy to violate Export Administration regulations.
Ding controlled several Singaporean import-export companies; one of which acquired high-technology items for the China Academy of Space Technology, a research institute working on Chinese spacecraft programs. According to the prosecution, Ding’s role was to manage the companies, to maintain a relationship with the Chinese end-users of his Toray purchases, and to provide the funding. Cheng’s role was to act as the agent in the United States for Ding’s companies, while Lim made contact with potential suppliers. The trio negotiated with a company in Minnesota that purported to be a supplier of aerospace commodities, and Ding admitted that he sent Cheng there twice to inspect Toray material. He also acknowledged that he instructed Cheng to export the Toray material to Singapore and Hong Kong without the required export license.
Cheng admitted that he had traveled from New York to Minnesota to inspect 104 kilograms of Toray material prior to its final acceptance by Ding’s companies and had instructed his freight forwarder to ship his purchase to New York for storage before it could be shipped illegally. Finally, Lim confirmed that he had urged the Minnesota company to place an order of Toray material on behalf of Ding’s companies. The three face charges with a maximum penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment and a maximum fine of $1 million. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
DIRECTION GÉNÉRALE DE LA SÉCURITÉ EXTÉRIEURE (DGSE). The DGSE is one of the few Western intelligence agencies to operate a declared station in Beijing, and its director, General René Imbot, posted an officer to the French embassy in 1986. Later, Imbot’s own son Thierry was sent to Beijing in a liaison role, but he died in mysterious circumstances following the sale of French frigates to Taiwan. In 2000, the Sino-French relationship cooled when the DGSE representative, known only as Henri, a well-regarded graduate of the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales with a degree in Mandarin, defected and was resettled by the Ministry of State Security.Described as taciturn, it was suggested Henri had been suffering from depression after his wife had declined to accompany him to China, and he had begun an affair with his interpreter. See also FRANCE; HONEYTRAP.
DIXIE MISSION. In July 1944, the U.S. Army Observation Group, known as the Dixie Mission, attempted to establish a relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The mission consisted of 18 experienced China hands led by Colonel David D. Barrett and was to provide military analyses, while John S. Servicefrom the Department of State was to provide political analysis. Hitherto, local intelligence collection had been in the hands of the U.S. naval attaché in Chungking, Commander James McHugh, who would later be replaced by Commodore Milton Miles.
Initially, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration had sought Chiang Kai-shek’s permission to send the delegation into what was a Communist controlled area of Yan’an, but Chiang had refused. However, after Vice President Henry Wallace visited Chiang in Chungking in June 1944 and agreed to remove General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, an ardent critic of Chiang, permission was granted. Ironically, Stilwell had strongly supported the idea of the Dixie Mission, which had been advocated by a Foreign Service officer, John Paton Davies, Jr., to President Roosevelt. Another concession was for Chiang to have a direct link to Roosevelt through General Patrick Hurley, a Texas oilman with no Far East experience, who was chosen for the task. Hurley likened the differences between Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) and Mao Zedong’s Communists as akin to the differences between Democrats and Republicans in the United States.
In July 1945, Hurley visited Tai Li, the KMT’s spymaster and head of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization(SACO) in Chungking. Tai and SACO’s deputy director, Admiral Milton “Mary” Miles, who was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, persuaded Hurley that the Dixie Mission was more or less a conspiracy by State Department personnel to favor Mao’s Communists and that the mission intended to use U.S. Army paratroopers to lead Communist guerrillas in combat. That, argued Hurley, was tantamount to de facto recognition of the Communists and their declared objective of destroying the KMT.
Meanwhile, John S. Service was reporting to Washington DC that Mao’s Communists were more akin to European socialists than Soviet Communists and that an agrarian capitalism would emerge without the violence associated with the Bolshevik Revolution. Furthermore, Barrett had evaluated the PLA by observing exercises and attending officer training schools and commented on the PLA’s excellent performance in combat, even though it had been over four years since the PLA had been deployed in large numbers of troops against the Japanese, and on that occasion, the conflict had been a setback for the PLA. Nevertheless, the PLA maintained the illusion that they, in contrast to the KMT, were active and effective fighters. In reality, the Communists simply had allowed Dixie Mission personnel to see only what they wanted them to see, which usually consisted of specially staged events. Nor did anyone ask to visitKang Sheng, though he was active behind the scenes in denying access to any aspect of his intelligence apparatus.
In March 1947, the last members of the Dixie Mission left China but were caught up in political controversy. Barrett was denied promotion to general, and both Davies and Service were drummed out of the State Department. However, after the normalization of relations with China, Service returned to China, where he was warmly received by China’s elite, including Mao Zedong. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
DU SHASHAN. Hired by General Motors (GM) in Detroit in 2000, 41-year-old Du Shashan obtained a transfer to a hybrid technology division three years later and began copying proprietary documents. In 2005, five days after she had been offered severance, she copied thousands more documents and set up a company, Millennium Technology International, to trade with Cherry Automobile, a GM competitor in mainland China. On 23 July 2010, Du Shashan and her husband, Qin Yu, aged 49, who are both U.S. citizens, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Michigan on conspiracy and fraud charges, having been charged in 2006 with destroying documents sought by investigators after they had been observed near a Dumpster from which the Federal Bureau of Investigation later recovered shredded documents. According to GM, the value of the stolen information was estimated at $40 million. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
EAGLE CLAW. The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the codename EAGLE CLAW for the investigation ofLarry Wu-tai Chin.
EAST TIMOR. In December 2007, East Timor, having already received a pair of elderly Shanghai-class patrol boats, received an offer from a defense firm in the People’s Republic of China to construct and manage a radar station to monitor maritime traffic in the Wetar Strait, a strategically important narrows between East Timor and Indonesia’s island of Pulau Wetar. Although the East Timorese government in Dili was keen to identify illegal fishing in the country’s territorial waters, there was a suspicion that the gift, manned by Chinese technicians, would have a covert intelligence-collection function to watch movements in a choke point used by nuclear submarines and other vessels to transit the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Having consulted Australia, the United States, and the Philippines, the offer was declined.
EIGHTH BUREAU. The Eighth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) operated as the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and later became responsible for counterespionage operations against external threats. The Ninth Bureau monitors all organizations and individuals deemed to be anti-China and against the Chinese Communist Party and runs investigations. It shares this responsibility with another MSS department, which concentrates on domestic counterespionage and takes on investigations into, for example, foreign adherents of Falun Gong, the pro-democracy movement, and Christianity who campaign overseas. Reportedly, in a recent success, the Eighth Bureau identified a People’s Liberation Army general who had been spying for Taiwan.
ELEVENTH BUREAU. The Eleventh Bureau of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) acquired responsibility for running the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations when the Eighth Bureau took over counterespionage. The Eleventh Bureau fulfills the role of the MSS’s analytic branch and compiles reports for the Central Committee and the party leadership drawn from open sources, academic research, and secret intelligence from the Fifth Bureau. Although theoretically a secret organization, the Eleventh Bureau is becoming more open and draws on a network of similar facilities across the country. It is also more reliant on open source reporting, conducting what might in any other society be regarded as legitimate journalistic research; although, their actual topics and priorities are considered classified. As pressure grows from the Chinese Communist Party leadership for information relating to international affairs, the status of the Eleventh Bureau has become elevated. Because of the expertise developed within the Eleventh Bureau, its personnel are often transferred to other key positions within the MSS.
ENGELMANN, LARRY. An American academic from Johns Hopkins University studying in Nanjing at the Center of Chinese and American Studies, Larry Engelmann developed a relationship in 1988 with Xu Meihong, a military intelligence officer assigned by the Ministry of State Security (MSS) to monitor his activities and determine whether he was an authentic scholar or a spy. Having encouraged the liaison, the MSS began to suspect from his intercepted letters mailed home to the United States that Engelmann had succeeded in turning the tables on Xu and had recruited her. She was arrested, dismissed from the People’s Liberation Army, and returned to her village. Years later, she would be reunited with Engelmann, and after they married, they wrote an account of their experiences, Daughter of China. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
ETHEREAL THRONE. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used the codename ETHEREAL THRONE for Jeffrey V. Wang, a 37-year-old engineer born in Honolulu, employed by the radar division of Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, the defense contractor designing components for the F-15 Eagle and F-18 fighters and the B-2 bomber. He was identified as a Ministry of State Security (MSS) source by an FBI informant who claimed to his handler, David LeSueur, to have good contacts at the People’s Republic of China (PRC) consulate in San Francisco and had already named Katrina Leung, codenamed PARLOR MAID, as an MSS spy. A lengthy investigation of Wang was conducted and included participation by one of his friends, Denise Woo, who was an FBI special agent. The operation eventually was terminated when it was realized that the informant held a family grudge against Wang, but in August 2004, Woo was indicted on leaking sensitive FBI information to him. She was later dismissed and fined $1,000.
EVANS, RICHARD M. Born in April 1928 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, Evans joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1952 and was posted to the Beijing station in 1956 before returning to London the following year. He was back in Beijing in 1962 for two years and spent four years in Berne, from 1964, before transferring to the Foreign Office. He was then appointed head of the Far Eastern Department and ended his diplomatic career as ambassador in Beijing from 1984 to 1988. In 1983, he published an unclassified version of a personality profile he had drafted for SIS, Deng Xiaoping: The Making of Modern China. After his retirement, and having received a knighthood, he worked as a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. See also GREAT BRITAIN.
EWERT, ARTHUR. Arrested in Rio de Janeiro in December 1935, Arthur Ewert was a seasoned revolutionary with a German background who had emigrated from East Prussia before World War I to Detroit, where he had found work in a leather factory and become an active trade unionist. In 1917, he and Elise Saborowski had moved to Toronto, only to be arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and deported for attempting to organize a branch of the banned Communist Party. Undeterred, Ewert had worked for the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and was invited to Moscow by the Comintern. He attended the Fifth Congress of the CPUSA in New York in August 1927 as Josef Stalin’s personal representative and, upon his return to Moscow, was elected to the Executive Committee of the Third International and also to the Reichstag as a Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands deputy.
In 1931, Ewert was sent on a mission to Yuzhamtorg in Montevideo, Uruguay, the Comintern’s Latin American cover organization, and when this had been completed successfully, he was posted with Elise to Shanghai, the Comintern’s Far East headquarters, carrying false American passports in the names of Harry Berger and Machla Lenczycki. They remained in China until July 1934, when they were recalled to Moscow and prepared for a new assignment, to accompany Luís Prestes to Brazil and participate in the military coup that would establish a Soviet-style government.
Although sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, Ewert was amnestied in May 1945 but, upon his return to Germany in 1947, was found to have been driven insane by the torture he had endured in captivity. He died in 1959. His wife Elise, deported to Germany with a fellow conspirator, Olga Benário Prestes in 1938, was last seen alive at Lichtenburg in 1941.
FALUN GONG. Created in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, the Falun Gong movement is a pacifist, Buddhist-based religion that adopted Taoist gymnastic exercise. It gained political notoriety when, on the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the organization unexpectedly held a huge silent vigil in the center of Beijing before quietly dispersing.
Banned in April 1999, the movement was publicly condemned as an illegal sect and became a target for the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Falun Gong’s worldwide network of co-religionists sustained cyber attacks that eventually were traced to the Information Service Center of Xin’an in Beijing, reportedly an MSS front organization. Information about the Central Committee’s response to Falun Gong has been revealed by defectors, among them Chen Yonglin, who in July 2005, disclosed the existence of Central Bureau 610, and Zhang Jiyan, the wife of an auditor based, until March 2007, at the embassy in Ottawa. See also AVOCADO; CYBER ESPIONAGE; INFORMATION WARFARE; INFORMATION WARFARE MILITIA; SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO); TITAN RAIN.
FAR EAST COMBINED BUREAU (FECB). The cover name of the British cryptographic organization in prewar Hong Kong, the FECB began operations on Stonecutter’s Island in 1932 under the leadership of Royal Navy Captain Arthur Shaw but was evacuated in 1941 to Kranji, Singapore, and then to Kandy. Shaw was succeeded by Captain John Waller and then by Captain F. J. Wylie. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the FECB was replaced by Combined Intelligence Far East, located in Singapore. See also GREAT BRITAIN; SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (SIS).
FARRELL, FRANK. Formerly a newspaper correspondent, Major Frank Farrell of the U.S. Marines operated as an intelligence officer in southern China during World War II and was successful in neutralizing Germans in Canton and Shanghai after the Nazi surrender in May 1945, when many were inclined to continue supporting local Japanese networks.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI). The FBI is unique among the world’s law enforcement and security agencies as it serves as both the federal police, with responsibility for pursuing more than 200 categories of federal crimes, as well as the United States’ principal internal security agency. Because of extraterritorial jurisdiction, the FBI is also required increasingly to conduct investigations abroad, mainly terrorist-related, and posts a large number of personnel overseas.
Established in 1935 from the former Bureau of Investigation, the FBI has grown into an organization with a budget of well over $6 billion; it employs a staff of more than 30,000, including over 13,000 special agents who carry weapons and have powers of arrest. Based at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, the FBI runs 56 field offices located in major cities throughout the United States with over 400 resident agencies located in smaller locales and over 50 international offices headed by legal attachés, who enjoy diplomatic status in the host countries to which they are accredited. In September 2002, after years of negotiations by a State Department team led by Donald Keyser, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) allowed the FBI to open a provisional Legal Attaché’s Office in Beijing for a period of two years. Special Agent Anthony Lau, who had been the legat at the United States Consulate General in Hong Kong, was transferred to Beijing. Upon his retirement in 2003, he was replaced temporarily by Special Agent William Liu, but in April 2004, FBI Director Robert Mueller visited Beijing, and the PRC agreed to give the Legal Attaché’s Office full diplomatic status, so Liu became the first fully accredited legat in Beijing, with responsibility for the PRC and Mongolia. Liu was later succeeded by Special Agent Steven Hendershot.
The FBI is the principal agency responsible for counterintelligence operations in the United States and, since the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1973, has assigned a squad of special agents and support personnel to concentrate on the threat posed by Chinese-sponsored espionage. Previously, the FBI’s focus has been limited to studying links between Maoist student groups, such as the Revolutionary Union, and any foreign intelligence sponsors.
Concentrated on the Washington Field Office, the China Squad (the exact size of which remains classified) conducts classified physical and technical surveillance operations on hostile intelligence personnel based at the PRC’s embassy and liaises closely with its counterparts in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the State Department, various military counterintelligence offices, Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other U.S. agencies with an interest in the PRC. In addition, the FBI remains the principal counterintelligence contact for foreign liaison officers posted in Washington.
The FBI’s Chinese counterintelligence program is concentrated at headquarters in two sections of the National Security Division (NSD), formerly the Intelligence Division, designated NSD-2, with analytical work conducted by NSD-3. Meanwhile, the Washington Field Office has a large squad devoted to Chinese counterintelligence and is the focal point of the FBI’s efforts at monitoring the PRC’s diplomatic and military establishment in Washington. Similar squads are located in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago, where there are large ethnic Chinese communities as well as international organizations, such as the United Nations. Further, smaller numbers of FBI personnel are scattered around FBI field offices to monitor PRC students and visiting delegations.
The NSD is headed by an assistant director and, since 1973, has been led by Edward J. O’Malley, Jim Geer, W. Douglas Gow, Wayne Gilbert, Tom DuHadway, John Lewis, Neil J. Gallagher, and Sheila Horan; although, none was a China specialist, and some had little counterintelligence experience. NSD-2 was also headed by a succession of section chiefs with little exposure to China matters, particularly during the Cold War, when Soviet Bloc countries were regarded as a greater priority. Indeed, one assistant director minimized the threat posed by the PRC, disparaged the China program, and advocated its closure. Bruce Carlson was the first and only NSD assistant director to be truly a China expert, fluent in the language with a real understanding of China’s history and culture.
The FBI’s essential expertise in China matters rested in select field offices, especially at the Washington Field Office, New York, and San Francisco, where a small but dedicated cadre of FBI special agents developed considerable skill. At headquarters, the Chinese counterintelligence program competed for resources and attention, with units concerning the Soviet Bloc countries and Cuba, and in the field offices, with units pursuing criminal investigations. While there were those with considerable backgrounds who headed the China Unit, such as T. Van Magers, there were also those, like Ken Geide, who ran the unit with little operational experience concerning the PRC. This was largely a result of the FBI’s China program having been relatively small during the formative years, immediately after the normalization of diplomatic relations, and the absence of any established career path within the organization for personnel dealing with counterintelligence in general and those assigned to Chinese counterintelligence in particular. Any ambitious FBI special agent assigned to China counterintelligence was obliged to transfer to other sections to achieve promotion to the FBI’s coveted Senior Executive Service.
The FBI’s counterintelligence priorities are determined by the director of national intelligence, but the organization routinely mounts operations to inhibit Chinese espionage, and occasionally these operations become public, usually following the expulsion of a diplomat or the arrest of suspects. In just such an example, in December 1987, the FBI entrapped the PRC’s assistant military attaché, Hou Desheng, and another Chinese diplomat, Zang Weichu, as they attempted to buy what they believed were classified NSA documents from an informant in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Washington.
The FBI acknowledges a significant increase in cases involving what might be categorized as state-sponsored industrial espionage, noting that, since March 2006, it has participated in obtaining evidence for bringing criminal prosecutions against 44 individual suspects in 26 separate investigations. See also AMERASIA; ANUBIS; BOEING 767-300ER; CAMPCON; CHANG FEN; CHI MAK; CHIN, LARRY WU-TAI; CHINCOM; CHUNG, GREG; ETHEREAL THRONE; GOWADIA, NOSHIR S.; HOU DESHENG; KAO YEN MEN; LEE, DAVID YEN; LEE, DUNCAN C.; MIN GWO BAO; MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS); PARLOR MAID; PRICE, MILDRED; SHAN YANMING; SUCCOR DELIGHT; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; TECHNOLOGY COUNTERFEITING.
FIFTH ACADEMY. Created by the Ministry of National Defense in 1956, and headed by Qian Xuesen, the Fifth Academy became China’s principal research establishment concentrating on missile and satellite development.
FIFTH BUREAU. The Fifth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) is responsible for secret intelligence reporting and the assessment of intelligence before it is circulated to the Eleventh Bureau for distribution outside the MSS.
FIRMSPACE. In October 2008, three employees and two directors of a Singapore-based import-export business, FirmSpace, were indicted on charges of conspiring to export embargoed carbon-fiber technology to the PRC. The sensitive material, with applications in the space technology and nuclear fuel-enrichment fields, was ordered from a Minnesota manufacturer by Jian Wei Ding and Lim Kok Tong for delivery to an address in New York, where a third employee, Cheng Ping, was to store it before it was shipped overseas. According to the indictment, FirmSpace’s directors were two Chinese nationals, Gao Xiang and Hou Xinlu. See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
FIRST BUREAU. A branch of the Second Department of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff, the First Bureau is a geographic section concentrating on Taiwan and Hong Kong. It deployed personnel under commercial, journalistic, and academic cover and used the Bank of China, the China Resources Group, and the Everbright Group as vehicles for its operations.
FONDREN, JAMES W. In May 2009, a senior Department of Defense officer based at the Pentagon was arrested and charged with espionage on behalf of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), apparently having been recruited under a “false flag” by a Taiwanese, Tai Shen Kuo. However, a month later, his indictment was changed to accuse him of having worked for Beijing for more than a decade. Aged 62, Lieutenant-Colonel Fondren held top secret clearances as deputy director of the Washington liaison office for U.S. Pacific Command and was charged with passing secrets to Kuo, whom he had first met at the Houma Country Club in Louisiana.
According to the indictment, Fondren wrote an e-mail in 1998, stating that Kuo was using opinion papers provided by Fondren on Taiwanese military issues to ingratiate himself with the Chinese government. The two men then, in 1999, traveled together to the coastal town of Zhuhai in the PRC to meet a government official, Lin Hong, to whom Fondren promised to obtain reports on missile defenses in Taiwan. He would later exchange more than 40 e-mails with the Chinese between 1999 and 2000. Between June 1998 and January 2000, Kuo paid nearly $8,000 to Fondren’s consultancy, Strategy Inc. After his official retirement, Fondren returned as a contractor to the Defense Department, and Kuo apparently claimed to be working for Taiwan. Convicted in September 2009 on one count of passing classified information to an agent of a foreign government, on 22 January 2010, Fondren was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTITUTE (FLI). Known as the People’s Liberation Army’s Institute 793, the Foreign Language Institute was absorbed into the Institute of Foreign Relations after the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Located at Luoyang and Nanjing, the FLI provides training for personnel prior to an assignment overseas.
FOURTH DEPARTMENT. The Fourth Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Staff Department (GSD)is the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) electronic warfare organization, also known as the Electronic Countermeasures and Radar Department (dianzi duikang yu leida bu).
Established in 1990, the Fourth Department conducts electronic warfare, collects electronic intelligence, and defends vulnerable sites, such as the PLA command bunkers in the Xishan Western Hills of Beijing. Western analysts monitored PLA Navy electronic warfare units conducting a major joint exercise in March 1996 in the South China Sea.
The research facilities most closely associated with electronic intelligence (ELINT) and the development of radar jammers are the 29th Research Institute in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and the 36th Research Institute in Hefei, with academic study and training conducted at the PLA Academy of Electronic Engineering, located in Hefei, Anhui Province.
The PRC’s targets include the U.S. NAVSTAR Global Positioning System, airborne early warning platforms, and American military networks, such as the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System.
To improve the PRC’s access to more sophisticated technology, the Ministry of Electronics Industry (MEI) contracted several Israeli companies, such as Elbit, Elisra, Tadiran, Elop, and Elta, which formed joint ventures with the Southwest Institute of Electronic Equipment (the Hebei-based MEI 54th Research Institute) and the Anhui-based East China Research Institute of Electronic Engineering (the MEI 36th Research Institute) under the generic title Project 63.
Much of the Fourth Department’s ELINT research is undertaken by the Southwest Institute of Electronic Equipment (SWIEE) and the MEI 54th Research Institute. An ELINT satellite program, known as “technical experimental satellites” (jishu shiyan weixing), was developed by Project 701 of the Shanghai Bureau of Astronautics. The first Chinese ELINT satellite was launched from Jiuquan in July 1975 on the FB-1 rocket, which was followed by two more, in December 1975 and August 1976. Western intelligence analysts later learned that the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, the successor of the Shanghai Bureau of Astronautics, took over the program.
The Fourth Department is also responsible for space-based photoreconnaissance, euphemistically referred to as remote sensing (yaogan) and the collection of imagery. The first experimental imagery system was launched in November 1975 and was followed by two more tests. By 2011, nine Yaogan satellites were operational. Then, in September 1987, an FSW-1 (fanhuishi weixing, or recoverable satellite) was put into orbit from the Jiuquan Space Launch Center and returned to earth with its film in Sichuan. Four FSW-1s were successfully launched between 1987 and 1992, but a year later, an FSW-1 mission failed for technical reasons.
The FSW-2 variant, loaded with 2,000 meters of film, boasted a resolution of at least 10 meters, and the first, the Jianbing-1B, was launched in August 1992, with further insertions in 1994 and 1996, each lasting 15 or 16 days before returning with the exposed film cassette. These so-called scientific surveys (kexue shence) had a duration of 15 or 16 days and continued on 20 October 1996 but were followed by several different electro-optical remote sensing platforms, including the FSW-3 and a series designed by the China Academy of Space, operating in a 700-kilometer sun synchronous orbit with a five-meter resolution. Another series, the Ziyuan-1, or ZY-1, developed in a joint venture with Brazil, includes a data transmission capability from an altitude of 778 kilometers with a 20-meter resolution.
The PRC’s intelligence satellites are managed by the National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC) via a ground station at Lizhong, which supplies an estimated 500 clients throughout the country. The NRSC’s research branch is the Institute of Remote Sensing Application, which employs a staff of 300 in five basic research departments and three technology research departments, as well as the Center for Airborne Remote Sensing and the Computer Applications Center, both sponsored by Project 863.
The PRC’s first indigenous synthetic aperture radar satellites (hecheng kongjing leida weixing), which can detect targets through clouds, became operational in 2004 following preliminary work at the China Academy of SciencesInstitute of Electronics’s 501st and 504th Research Institutes (Xian Institute of Space Radio Technology), the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering, and MEI’s 14th Research Institute and the Southwest Institute of Electronic Equipment. The program has been handicapped by the lack of ground stations for data relay satellites (shuju zhongji weixing); although, agreements were made with France in 1993 and Chile in 1994.
The Fourth Department’s project, to develop a space tracking system, began with the launch of the first Dong Fang Hong communications satellite, which was developed by Luoyang Institute of Tracking, Telemetry, and Telecommunications and then controlled from the Xian Satellite Control Center in eastern Beijing. The national satellite control center was formerly located in Weinan, Shaanxi Province, but moved to Xian in December 1987.
Tracking stations supporting the national network are located at Weinan, Xiamen, Nanning, Kashgar, Changchun, and Minxi, with additional shipborne missile tracking platforms (Yuanwang), which can be deployed across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans.
The PRC’s plans to develop an over-the-horizon radar with a range of 250 kilometers, initiated in 1967, later stalled because of export restrictions on sensitive components but was able to resume in 1985 after steps had been taken to acquire the technology. More recent research on the advanced radar, undertaken at the Harbin Institute of Technology, has developed systems capable of tracking aircraft at a range of 1,000 kilometers as well as a high-frequency variant to monitor low-altitude and sea-skimming targets.
Another Fourth Department priority is phased-array radar, on which China began research in 1970 at the Ministry of Electronic Industry’s 14th Institute in Nanjing. As an advanced radar system, essential for space tracking and providing missile early warning, an experimental 7010 apparatus was installed at an altitude of 1,600 meters near Xuanhua, manned by a Second Artillery unit. The 7010 was followed into production by the large 110 monopulse precision tracking surveillance radar, which became operational in 1977.
The Fourth Department is also developing and producing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as wuren jiashi feiji, at Peking University’s Institute of Unmanned Flight Vehicle Design Institute and the Institute of Unmanned Aircraft. Among the projects is the ASN-206, developed by the Xi’an ASN Technology Group, which boasts a coverage range of 150 kilometers with optical and infrared sensors.
FRANCE. French companies engaging in business partnerships in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have found themselves the victims of industrial espionage, with joint ventures being abused as conduits for the illicit acquisition of proprietary commercial information. The state-owned Renault car manufacturer has claimed to have lost sensitive data through the corruption of its senior management in the PRC, and TGV contractors bidding to participate in the construction of a high-speed train found themselves excluded after they had made a significant commitment in sharing expertise.
The French intelligence community has issued warnings concerning the activities of 20,000 PRC students in France and cited the example of a visitor, a member of an official delegation, taking a sample of a patented liquid while on a tour of a laboratory by dipping his tie into it. Reportedly, in 2000, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure’s (DGSE) representative in Beijing succumbed to a honeytrap and defected.
Prior to the G20 finance ministers meeting in Paris in February 2011, a concerted attempt was made to illegally access an estimated 10,000 French government computers, an attack that was reportedly traced to the PRC. See alsoBOURSICOT, BERNARD; CYBER ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
FRANK, DESMOND DINESH. On 8 October 2007, Desmond Dinesh Frank, a citizen and resident of Malaysia and the operator of Asian Sky Support in Malaysia, was arrested in Hawaii by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and charged in November with conspiring to illegally export C-130 military aircraft and training equipment to the PRC, illegally exporting defense articles, smuggling, and two counts of money laundering. According to the prosecution, he had attempted to illegally export 10 indicators, servo-driven tachometers used in C-130 military flight simulators, to Malaysia and ultimately to Hong Kong, without the required license. In May 2008, Frank pleaded guilty to the charges and, in August 2008, was sentenced in Massachusetts to 23 months’ imprisonment. See alsoTECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
GARDELLA, LAWRENCE. Shortly before his death in February 1981, a former U.S. Marine published a memoir, Sing a Song to Jenny Next, described as “the incredible true account” of a secret mission into China in May 1952. He claimed to have been parachuted into Manchuria to join a group of 25 Nationalist guerrillas and attack a nuclear facility beneath the Sungari Reservoir. Having achieved his objective and in the face of overwhelming odds, Gardella had trekked across 1,000 miles of China in just 22 days and had made contact with American forces, which arranged for him alone to be collected off the beach by a U.S. Navy submarine. Upon his return, the lone marine was congratulated by President Harry S. Truman, on 28 June 1952, at the U.S. Navy hospital at Annapolis, who swore him to secrecy.
In the decade following publication, numerous official documents were declassified and released by the U.S. National Archive, which revealed that some military units, including several Ranger companies, had indeed infiltrated North Korea during the Korean War, penetrating far behind enemy lines, and invariably had been landed by sea. However, none of the units mentioned, nor the missions listed, bore any resemblance to Gardella’s tale. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
GENERAL STAFF DEPARTMENT / PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (GSD/PLA). The General Staff Department (Zongcanmou Bu) of the People’s Liberation Army is a military component of the Central Military Commission (CMC). The GSD/PLA, under the supervision of the CMC, organizes and directs the PLA’s military units nationwide, as well as plans and builds the PLA’s armed forces, and consists of several departments, including the First Department (Zuozhan Bu), which is concerned with operations. The Second Department (Zongcan Erbu) is known alternately as the Military Intelligence Department (Qingbao Bu) (MID/PLA) or simply the Second Department / People’s Liberation Army (2/PLA). The Third Department (Zongcan Sanbu) sometimes referred to as the Technical Department, is responsible for signals intelligence, and the Fourth Department (Tongxin Bu) handles communications, electronic intelligence-gathering, and countermeasures.
GENG HUICHANG. In August 2007, a 58-year-old economics specialist from Hebei Province, Geng Huichang, was named the PRC’s minister of state security in succession to Xu Yongyue. See also MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS).
GERMANY. With a Uighur émigré population estimated at several thousand strong, concentrated in Munich, the Federal Republic of Germany has become a target for Chinese intelligence operations conducted by Ministry of State Security (MSS) personnel operating under consular cover. In December 2009, a Chinese consular officer was expelled, having been accused of spying on the expatriate Uighur community, and in April 2011, a 64-year-old Uighur identified only as “L” was charged with having passed information about local Uighurs to the MSS between April 2008 and December 2009.
German companies seeking to develop joint ventures in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have also found themselves victim of industrial espionage, where Chinese partners have either expropriated proprietary technology or illicitly copied and exploited sensitive data. One such example was the design of Germany’s high-speed ICE train, which was found incorporated into the Chinese equivalent.
GE YUEFEI. In June 2006, two NetLogic Microsystems employees, Ge Yuefei, a Chinese national aged 34 of San Jose, and Lee Lan, an American aged 42 of Palo Alto, were indicted on industrial espionage charges, having been identified by a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) source as being responsible for the theft of trade secrets. The information had come from an anonymous e-mail traced to Ge’s wife. According to the FBI’s Christian Cano, Ge and Lee had attempted to receive funding from Project 863, also known as the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China, and China’s General Armaments Division and had illegally downloaded proprietary software designed to develop a network coprocessor chip. The pair had formed SICO Microsystems, a Delaware corporation, to market information stolen from Taiwan Semi-Conductor Manufacturing Company. See alsoINDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
GHOSTNET. In March 2009, a concerted attack on computer targets in the West, identified as having originated in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), was named “GhostNet” and was traced to an attempt to download illicit software, usually a Trojan Horse virus containing a remote access tool (RAT) (known as “Gh0st RAT”) and concealed behind innocent-looking e-mail attachments, into systems run by Tibetan refugees on behalf of the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala in India.
Pentagon intelligence analysts declared that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “often cites the need in modern warfare to control information, sometimes termed ‘information dominance’” and suggested that “China has made steady progress in recent years in developing offensive nuclear, space, and cyber-warfare capabilities, the only aspects of the PRC’s armed forces that, today, have the potential to be truly global.” This view conformed to a policy announced at the 10th National People’s Congress in 2003 concerning the creation of “information warfare units,” when General Dai Qingmin was reported as having predicted that Internet attacks would be mounted in advance of military operations to cripple enemies. Since then, the PLA has been linked by Western investigators to the Red Hacker Alliance, an ostensibly independent group of cyber saboteurs responsible for numerous attempts to overwhelm target commercial and government websites and systems in the United States.
Between 2007 and 2009, GhostNet was thought to have been responsible for many coordinated “denial of service” attacks, and some 1,395 computers in 103 countries had been found to contain covert programs, which included some located in embassies that remotely activated recording systems. A Cambridge University study entitled The Snooping Dragon: Social-Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement, published in March 2009, concluded that GhostNet had been officially sponsored by Beijing. Another study, completed by the forensic analysts MANDIANT in 2010 concluded that the “vast majority” of the advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks experienced by American firms, such as Google and Adobe, could be traced back to the PRC. The attack aimed at Google was especially sophisticated and was discovered to have compromised the search engine’s source codes for the Gaia password management system and to have accessed the legal discovery portals used by the company’s management to cooperate with information requests from law enforcement agencies.
In 2008, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Marathon Oil all sustained similar attacks; although, the damage did not become apparent until the following year. An estimated 20 percent of the Fortune 100 companies had endured similar attacks, such as the notorious AURORA incident in January 2010, which had varied in severity from the siphoning off of proprietary data to the deliberate sabotage of card payment encryption systems. According to MANDIANT, the APT attacks are characteristically sophisticated and can easily defeat or circumvent most conventional commercial countermeasures. The specially designed malware involved in these incidents was often low-profile and camouflaged, averaging an insignificant 121.85 kilobytes in size, making it hard to detect. See also CYBER ESPIONAGE; FALUN GONG; INFORMATION WARFARE; INFORMATION WARFARE MILITIA; SHADOW NETWORK; TIBET; TITAN RAIN.
GONGAN. The term Gongan is the Chinese colloquial reference to the Gong’anbu, the Ministry of Public Security.
GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATIONS HEADQUARTERS (GCHQ). The principal British signals intelligence organization, GCHQ maintained a large establishment at Little Sai Wan between 1953 and 1982 and employed military personnel and civilians to monitor mainland Chinese radio transmissions. According to a disaffected GCHQ analyst, the facility was heavily penetrated by Chinese agents; although, the only case that resulted in a prosecution was that of Chan Tek Fei in 1961. Later, in 1973, two linguists of Taiwanese origin defected to the People’s Republic of China and are thought to have compromised many of the local operations. In May 1980, Jock Kane, a 32-year veteran of the organization, complained publicly about wide-scale corruption at Little Sai Wan, and in 1984, after his retirement, the British government injuncted him on national security grounds to prevent publication of his memoirs, GCHQ: The Negative Asset. See also GREAT BRITAIN.
GOWADIA, NOSHIR S. A naturalized U.S. citizen originally from India, 68-year-old Noshir Gowadia was arrested in October 2005 at his home in Haiku, Hawaii, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and charged with having sold classified information to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) about the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber for $110,000. An avionics engineer, who had played a key role in the development of the plane, and an acknowledged expert on infrared signature suppression, Gowadia was later charged with having attempted to sell information relating to advanced Cruise missiles to unnamed individuals in Israel, Germany, and Switzerland. Between November 1968 and April 1986, Gowadia worked for Northrop Grumman, and he later became a contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. Court documents revealed that Gowadia had been the subject of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act emergency warrant in 2004 when his computer had been examined at Honolulu International Airport. During interviews conducted before he was formally arrested, Gowadia acknowledged having attempted to sell information to contacts in Singapore.
Originally from India, Gowadia received his PhD at the age of 15 and made six trips to the PRC between 2003 and 2005. He was suspected of having visited Chengdu in 2003, where he was thought to have contributed to the development of the J-10 advanced jet fighter produced by the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute. Also compromised was the next generation stealth technology used by the F-15 Eagle, F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning, F-117 Nighthawk, and B-1 bomber.
Prior to his trial, which began in May 2010, the prosecution alleged that evidence of bank accounts in Switzerland and Lichtenstein had been discovered when Gowadia’s multimillion-dollar ocean-front home on Maui’s north shore had been raided. Apparently, Gowadia, having become involved in a dispute with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Air Force in 1993, had enabled Chinese engineers to design a cruise missile able to evade air-to-air heat-seeking missiles. He had also sent classified information to a Swiss official in 2002 as part of a proposal to develop infrared reduction technology for a military helicopter and had given secrets to foreign businessmen in Israel and Germany in proposals to develop the same kind of technology for commercial aircraft.
Gowadia’s trial lasted four months, and in August 2010, the jury took six days to find him guilty on 14 charges of conspiracy, tax evasion, money laundering, and breaches of arms export controls. He was sentenced to 32 years’ imprisonment. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
GREAT BRITAIN. With a history of military and commercial interests in China dating back to the Opium Wars in 1839, Britain’s presence in the International Settlement in Shanghai, and its control over Hong Kong, gave successive United Kingdom governments a strong strategic motive to recover its colony when it was liberated after 44 months of Japanese occupation in August 1945. Among the first British personnel to return to Hong Kong were members of the British Army Aid Group, which also fulfilled an intelligence collection role on the mainland.
During the Cold War, Hong Kong provided an invaluable listening post from which Britain and its allies could monitor developments in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a country governed by a totalitarian regime and largely closed to outsiders. Britain’s responsibilities included internal security, reliant on the Royal Hong Kong Police and Special Branch liaising closely with MI5; external defense, with a permanent garrison in the New Territories protecting the border and the Royal Navy patrolling the coastline; the Royal Air Force based at Kai Tak, equipped with helicopters, fighters, transports, and amphibious aircraft; and Government Communications Headquarters, analyzing signals intelligence at Little Sai Wan. In addition, the Secret Intelligence Service maintained a local station, sharing the task of screening refugees with a project developed in 1950 by the Central Intelligence Agency station chief, Fred Schultheis, operating from the United States Consulate General.
Britain was in conflict with the PRC, albeit through Communist surrogates, during the Malayan Emergency, and much of the government’s subsequent foreign policy east of Suez was dictated by a requirement to defend Hong Kong from a neighbor that exercised a grip on the colony’s water supply, could not be prevented from mounting an invasion overland, and effectively controlled much of the local workforce. This uneasy relationship was maintained until the Beijing’s leadership indicated that the lease over Kowloon would not be extended in 1997 and that the PRC’s historical claim to British territory on the mainland would be renewed. After lengthy negotiations, a compromise was reached, with the Communists pledging to establish a Special Administrative Region in which many of Hong Kong’s conventions and customs could survive separately without total integration into the PRC for 50 years.
The British intelligence authorities encouraged a generation of Sinologists, prominent among them Percy Cradock, Richard Evans, and Nigel Inkster; although, there was rarely a consensus about Chinese Communist intentions, especially in relation to Hong Kong’s future. Whereas Beijing took the closest interest in the colony’s internal affairs, it would not appear that the political leadership made any attempt through the PRC’s intelligence services to influence the course of the negotiations. Following the 1997 handover, the Ministry of State Security apparatus in London has, according to MI5, concentrated on technology acquisition, maintaining a large staff at the London embassy to support these business-orientated operations. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
GUAN FUHUA. In 1983, Colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a KGB officer working under TASS journalistic cover at the Tokyo rezidentura, attempted to recruit Guan Fuhua, a photochemist from the China Academy of Sciences who was researching cures for radiation sickness at the Tokyo Technological Institute. Although local KGB officers usually approached their Chinese targets by offering them part-time work as language teachers, Preobrazhensky gained Guan’s trust by paying a professional interpreter to translate much of his course work into good English. In return, Guan supplied his KGB contact with Chinese and Japanese data of value to the Russian chemical industry, but this attracted the attention of the Tokyo police, who arrested both men, who were promptly expelled. Under interrogation, Guan revealed that he had been trained to communicate by radio with Moscow and had routinely received messages broadcast from a Russian “numbers station.” See also SOVIET UNION.
GUANXI. An ancient Chinese practice of relationships and obligations, guanxi essentially means that there are obligations to be of assistance to those who have assisted you in the past that extends to family members. Guanxi often is a factor in Chinese intelligence gathering, especially as related to Overseas Chinese. See also HONEYTRAP; MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS).
GUOANBU. The unofficial title of the foreign branch of the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security,the word is an acronym for Guojia Anquanbu, an organization created in 1983 and announced by Premier Zhao Ziyang to the Sixth National People’s Congress. See also ILLEGALS; OVERSEAS CHINESE.
GUOJIA ANQUANBU. See MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS).
GUO WANJUN. On 28 November 2008, a Chinese missile expert was executed with Wo Weihan, having been convicted of espionage for Taiwan and the United States. Both men had been arrested in 2005, and at their trial two years later, Guo was convicted of having sold classified ballistic missile information to Wo, who was described as a businessman and said to have received $400,000 from the Military Intelligence Bureau, which had given his wife $300,000 to open a restaurant in Austria. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HAINAN INCIDENT. On 1 April 2001, a United States Navy EP3V Orion ARIES II (Airborne Reconnaissance Integrated Electronic System) aircraft, one of twelve of the Fleet Reconnaissance Squadron (VQ-1) at Kadena on Okinawa, made an emergency landing at Lingshui, on the Chinese island of Hainan, after it had been in a collision with one of two People’s Liberation Army Navy F-8 twinjet Finback II interceptors. Wang Wei, the pilot of the MiG-21 variant, ejected, but his body was never recovered.
Based at the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington, VQ-1 was the U.S. Navy’s largest squadron, with 75 officers and 350 other ranks, and flew from detachments deployed to Misawa on Honshu, Manama in Bahrain, Rota in Spain, and Crete and on counter-narcotics flights from Manta in Ecuador. With a duration of 10 hours, the EP3Vs undertook routine signals intelligence intercept missions, but the flight in April would experience harassment in international airspace from one of the Chinese pilots.
The crew of 24, which included 3 women, attempted to destroy the signals intelligence intercept and Link-11 STORY BOOK secure communications equipment aboard, but they were taken into custody before they could complete the task. They were released after 11 days, and the plane was dismantled and, in July, loaded onto a giant Antonov An-124 leased cargo aircraft when the Chinese refused to allow it to be repaired and flown out to the Lockheed Martin factory in Marietta, Georgia. The EP3V’s pilot, Lieutenant Shane Osborn, who would be decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross, was flown out with his crew on a chartered Continental 737 to Anderson Air Force Base on Guam and then transferred on a C-17 to Hickham Air Force Base on Hawaii for debriefing. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HALPERN, ERIC. The founder of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Eric Halpern spent most of World War II as a Jewish refugee from Vienna in Shanghai, but when the journalist applied for a visa in 1946, to enter Hong Kong, the local security liaison officer (SLO) referred the request to MI5’s headquarters in London, where there was considerable disquiet on the grounds that he had been associated with the Japanese during the war and, thereafter, was suspected of having intelligence links to the Soviets, the Kuomintang, and the United States. The SLO was asked to “take some action to remove him from Hong Kong” because “he looks to us as if he is the kind of person who, as long as he remains, will be a perpetual and rather nagging security headache.”
In 1939, Halpern, then age 37, had joined the staff of a Shanghai journal, Finance and Commerce, but it had closed down in December 1941 when the city was occupied by the Japanese. Thereafter, according to MI5, Halpern had been “one of the chief rats for S. Saito, the former head of foreign affairs in the Shanghai Municipal Police.” A dossier compiled by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) described him as “a suspicious character” who had collaborated with Saito in black market speculations and extortion schemes. Halpern’s OSS file recorded that when he had reached Hong Kong on a visitor’s visa in 1946, he immediately contacted the Special Branch and had claimed to have come to the colony “in order to resume publication of Finance and Commerce.” However, his MI5 file also shows that, at that time, a police informant told Special Branch that “his publishing activities were merely a blind” and that Halpern’s main purpose was “to contact U.S. intelligence.”
Halpern also applied for a job with British intelligence, telling Special Branch that he had worked for OSS in Shanghai, informing the Americans about “atomic research by the Japanese in China . . . especially the activities of General Tai Li (head of Nationalist Chinese intelligence) and his people in connection with atomic research.” However, he said, he preferred “British progressiveness of thought” to the U.S. “mode.” Accordingly, he wrote of himself, “the applicant is desirous of serving the British Empire.” In London, Halpern’s application was described as “possibly. . . a penetration attempt on behalf of Americans or some other power,” and his credentials were checked with the Americans, prompting the head of Special Branch to conclude, “I am not at all convinced that the Americans have not made more use of him than they care to say.”
Halpern’s MI5 file reveals that it was decided to allow Halpern to stay in Hong Kong “in the hope that it would be possible to find out for whom he was working.” In December 1947, he was prosecuted “for giving frivolous information about his nationality when registering at a hotel,” and when he visited Singapore and Ceylon, the local SLOs were alerted by MI5 and asked to report on his activities. The SLO in Colombo reported to his counterpart in Hong Kong that “although nothing adverse is recorded by the police here, his behavior is said by them to have been ‘rather peculiar.’” Then, in 1952, the SLO contacted London with an offer to cover Halpern’s expenses while a guest of a Soviet-organized economic conference in Moscow.
Halpern remained with the Far Eastern Economic Review until 1958, when he was succeeded by the flamboyant Derek Davies, a former Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer, who edited the magazine until 1989. Davies, who died in 2002, had worked on the Financial Times after having served with SIS in Saigon, Hanoi, and Vienna.
HAN GUANGSHENG. Formerly a senior People’s Republic of China (PRC) security official who had worked for theCentral Bureau 610, Han Guangsheng disappeared while part of a delegation visiting Toronto in 2001 and applied for asylum, claiming to have been the head of the Shenyang Ministry of Public Security, the Gong’anbu, where he also had responsibility for local labor camps.
On 7 July 2005, Han surfaced to support claims by Chen Yonglin and Hao Fengjun that the PRC was managing informants in Canada’s Chinese community and routinely gathered economic intelligence, saying, “I do know that the Chinese Communist Party sent people to collect intelligence information, including embassy and consulate staff. Some of the reporters coming from state Chinese media and visiting scholars are also given special spying tasks to carry out.”
Hao’s application for asylum was rejected in 2005 by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board on the grounds that he had been “complicit in crimes against humanity.” He is believed to be still appealing the decision.
HANSON, HAROLD DEWITT. In March 2009, a retired U.S. Army colonel, Harold Dewitt Hanson, and his Chinese wife, Yaming Nina Qi Hanson, were charged with conspiracy to violate an export ban on sales of computerized controls for unmanned aerial vehicles to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Hanson worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and for a Maryland company, Arc International LLC. According to the prosecution, Hanson began in 2007 to attempt to acquire autopilots from a Canadian manufacturer, MicroPilot of Manitoba, for export to the Xi’an Xiangyu Aviation Technical Group in the PRC. Initially, Qi Hanson claimed that the autopilots would be used by a model airplane club in China, but when told the autopilots had been designed for use on unmanned aircraft and not for model airplane use, she insisted that they would be used by U.S. aircraft to record thunderstorms, tornadoes, and ice pack melting rates in the Arctic.
After having purchased 20 of the autopilots for $90,000 and her false assurances, in August 2008, Qi Hanson flew to Shanghai and personally delivered the items to Xi’an Xiangyu Aviation Technical Group in the PRC. Both Hansons pleaded guilty on 13 November 2009 to felony false statement violations, and in February 2010, Qi was sentenced to 105 days in jail with credit for time served, placed on one year of supervised release, ordered to pay a fine of $250 and a $100 special assessment fee and ordered to attend an export education training program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Hanson was sentenced to two years’ probation, fined $250 and a $100 special assessment fee, ordered to perform 120 hours of community service, and also ordered to attend an export training program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HANSON HUANG. A Chinese American born in Hong Kong in 1951, Harvard-educated lawyer, Hanson Huang was detained in Beijing under mysterious circumstances in January 1982, and although embassy diplomats experienced great difficulty in gaining consular access to him, his old friend Katrina Leung, codenamed PARLOR MAID, was able to visit him in prison on her very first attempt. Apparently arrested in his hotel while employed by Armand Hammer’s Occidental Oil, Hanson was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for espionage after having resigned from Webster and Sheffield, his firm in New York, mentioning that he intended to seek treatment for his cancer in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After graduating from Harvard Law School, Hanson had gained a post at the prestigious Chicago firm Baker and McKenzie.
The PRC authorities made no public reference to Hanson’s arrest until February 1984, and there was no obvious reason for his incarceration as he had been considered previously, while a student in the United States, as a PRC loyalist who had campaigned for the PRC’s sovereignty during the territorial dispute over the Diaoyutai Islands, in the East China Sea, claimed by both Taiwan and Japan.
HAO FENGJUN. In June 2005, Hao Fengjun defected from the PRC consulate in Sydney, just two weeks after the first secretary, Chen Yonglin, had taken the same decision. Hao said he was a member of the Ministry of Public Security and was assigned to the 610 Office, which had been created in 1999 to monitor and disrupt Falun Gong activities overseas. Hao told his Canadian Security Intelligence Service debriefers that there were 1,000 Chinese spies in Canada, and two years later, he gave similar evidence to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. See also AUSTRALIA; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HARBIN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Although closely associated with the People’s Liberation Army, the Harbin Institute of Technology is a legitimate academic establishment with several entire departments in the advanced engineering faculties under the control of the China Aerospace Corporation.
HIGH ALTITUDE SAMPLING PROGRAM (HASP). The Central Intelligence Agency’s High Altitude Sampling Program commenced in September 1957 with the delivery to the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing of five specially modified U-2 aircraft designed to collect evidence of Soviet nuclear tests. In 1958, the project was extended to the People’s Republic of China, where Detachment C made regular HASP overflights until the end of 1959. See alsoAIRBORNE COLLECTION; CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HINTON, JOAN. A graduate of Cornell and the University of Wisconsin, Joan Hinton was a gifted physicist and a committed political activist, although never a formal member of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Born in 1921 and educated at Bennington College, she joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, but having attended the first test in July 1945, resigned when President Harry S. Truman decided to drop atomic weapons on Japan. She then worked with Enrico Fermi at the Argonne Laboratory in Chicago and, in December 1947, moved to Shanghai, where she married an American agriculturalist and lived with her brother William and his wife, both ardent Communists.
In September 1951, Hinton publicly denounced the United States government for what she alleged was the use of germ warfare in Korea and continued thereafter to make English-language propaganda broadcasts from Beijing. She settled in Xian but, in 1966, moved back to Beijing as a permanent resident, an extraordinarily rare status, considered by the Western intelligence community to be a reward for her contribution to the development of the uranium weapon modeled on the FAT MAN bomb she had worked on at Los Alamos. See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; QIAN XUESEN.
HO CHIH-CHIANG. A Taiwanese businessman, Ho Chih-chiang was charged by the Shihlin Prosecutor’s Office in Taiwan in April 2010 with spying for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), bribery, and violations of the laws protecting the island’s national security. According to the indictment, Ho, who had conducted business in the PRC, had been recruited by a PRC intelligence agency in 2007 to collect national security information in Taiwan in exchange for financial incentives and other privileges. Acting on Chinese instructions, Ho had attempted to recruit a National Security Bureau (NSB) officer named Chao in an effort to find out about the government’s policies on Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, Japan, and diplomatic information. Allegedly, Chao had been offered liquor, $20,000, and other sums several times larger than his retirement pension in return for details of the NSB’s overseas operations and its satellite communication routings, but the offer had been rejected. See also TIBET.
HOLT, HAROLD. The former prime minister of Australia, Harold Holt disappeared while swimming near his home in Portsea, Victoria, in December 1967. The official police report into the incident concluded the following year that, despite the absence of a body, he had most likely died of drowning. This was the generally accepted verdict until 1983, when a respected Reuter’s journalist, Anthony Grey, published his sensational book, The Prime Minister Was a Spy, which claimed that Holt had been a lifelong spy, working first for the Nationalist Chinese and then for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), who had been spirited away from his home by submarine shortly before the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) closed in on him.
The author of four novels and the survivor of two years of solitary confinement in his home in Beijing as a hostage during Mao Zedong’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, Grey was an experienced foreign correspondent who also presented a current affairs program broadcast on the BBC World Service. Grey did not identify the original source of his story but described him as a retired Royal Australian Navy officer who, “not wishing to draw undue attention to himself,” decided he would prefer to remain anonymous. With such a creditable author, the book was taken quite seriously by many commentators, as it appeared to be a very detailed dossier of a truly astonishing case of top-level espionage.
Grey alleged that Holt had been recruited in 1929 by Sung Fa-tsiang of the Chinese Consulate General in Melbourne, who had bought a series of magazine articles from the young Queen’s College law undergraduate. A year later, having signed receipts for several payments, Holt allegedly was asked by Sung’s replacement, Li Hung, who was later to be China’s vice-consul in Sydney, to act as a secret representative of the Nationalist Kuomintang government and thus began his clandestine relationship with China that was to last his lifetime. When, in August 1935, Holt had been elected to the House of Representatives for the right-wing United Australia Party (UAP), he was “a fully fledged spy” and had been given the nom de guerre “H. K. Bors.” However, in May 1967, Holt allegedly read an ASIO report referring to his own secret codename, “H. K. Bors,” and took fright, calling an emergency meeting with Wong, at which he asked to be rescued. Wong judged that Holt was close to a breakdown and plans were made to infiltrate the spy by submarine the following December from the beach off his holiday home.
According to Grey, Holt was seized by two Chinese frogmen as he snorkeled in shallow water and conveyed aboard the escape hatch of a submarine lying submerged close by. The prime minister was then spirited away to China, where he was granted political asylum, and supposedly lived in quiet retirement for many years, advising Beijing on international trade issues.
According to the author, The Prime Minister Was a Spy was written after he had met an unnamed mysterious Australian businessman who first approached him in May 1983, having undertaken much of the research while pretending to have been working on Holt’s biography. The businessman was Ronald Titcombe, a former Australian naval intelligence officer, who claimed that he had been tipped off in July 1973 by a Chinese official and that, after he had expressed interest in the story, he had traveled to Hong Kong in 1975 to obtain semiofficial confirmation. At a further meeting, organized in Macao in February 1983, Titcombe had sought further details, but although he had not received any conclusive proof, he was able to persuade Grey that the central story had been corroborated and was supported by plenty of circumstantial evidence.
While Grey apparently never questioned the credentials of his informant, it turned out that Lieutenant-Commander Titcombe had been accused in 1967 of sharing classified information with his mistress and, subsequently, had been asked to resign his commission in the Royal Australian Navy. Since then, Titcombe had pursued a controversial business career as an entrepreneur, seeking to promote yachting marinas in such diverse locations as Grenada, Chichester, and Conway, but none had proved viable. When the Observer and the Sunday Telegraph denounced the book as a hoax, Titcombe had sued for libel, and his litigation had been settled by the Observer; although, in 1989, he abandoned the action against the Sunday Telegraph.
HONEYTRAP. The Ministry of State Security (MSS) occasionally uses sexual entrapment in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a technique to coerce potential agents, including foreigners; although, it does not deploy its own staff to participate and depends on intermediaries and surrogates. Evidently, the MSS regards the risks inherent in allowing one of their own officers to engage in seduction as being unacceptably high; although, other Chinese women are sometimes encouraged to cultivate a suitable target, both domestically and overseas, and the MSS has been known to intervene once a relationship with an individual of interest has begun and to request cooperation. Generally, MSS women officers are well educated and would be unwilling to compromise their careers or the interests of their families by engaging in such activities themselves. Similarly, the MSS itself, as a Chinese Communist Party organ, is reluctant to acknowledge requiring its own personnel to act in a way that might embarrass the leadership. Nevertheless, if the opportunity arises, the MSS will certainly turn a blind eye to an entrapment that could reap dividends and will also try to create the conditions in which a potential source encounters prostitutes or other potentially susceptible women.
When the MSS adopted honeytraps, in the mid-1980s, the case officers involved were inexperienced, and initially the results were unpromising. In one incident, a former KGB officer was invited to visit the PRC after he had been approached in Russia by an MSS agent posing as a businessman, and he formed an attachment to a Chinese journalist. However, the MSS case officers intervened too early, before a sexual relationship had started, and the Russian withdrew, leading the MSS to conclude that honeytraps require plenty of time to flourish before an overt step is taken. In a case of industrial espionage detected by a French intelligence agency, the representative of a major pharmaceutical company was wined and dined by a Chinese girl who slept with him. He was later confronted with a video recording of the encounter in an attempt to blackmail him, which proved successful.
In early 2006, a cipher clerk attached to the Japanese consulate in Shanghai committed suicide after he had succumbed to blackmail involving an illicit relationship and then reported it to colleagues. Although the death was an isolated incident, there have been plenty of suspected honeytraps, with U.S. Foreign Service officers (FSO), unaccompanied by their spouses, being apparent targets. In one example, in the early 1990s, a married FSO, alone in Shenyang, was found to have developed a sexual relationship with a Foreign Service National woman employed at his consulate. The affair, which was detected early with the FSO quickly being transferred home, was later found to have been part of an intelligence operation conducted by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS); although, it remained unclear whether any classified information had been compromised. Nor was it obvious what, if any, role had been played by the MSS which, in 1984, created a local branch to support provincial MPS operations in Liaoning Province and the city of Shenyang.
In other cases, a U.S. diplomat fathered a child with an embassy guard in Beijing, and FSO dependents have become involved with local Chinese, doubtless under MSS sponsorship and supervision. In 2000, the defection of representative of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure in Beijing appeared to be motivated by an extramarital affair, but it is likely that the MSS simply allowed the relationship to develop without having stage-managed it from the outset.
Unlike the Soviet KGB and the East German Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung counterparts, the MSS has not institutionalized honeytraps or established a specialist department devoted to sexual entrapment techniques. Instead, all MSS operational groups are familiar with the methodology and, with the sanction of senior personnel at director and ministerial levels, can obtain the required authority to plan and mount such a scheme. See also BOURSICOT, BERNARD; DENG; FRANCE; GUANXI; JAPAN; LO HSIEN-CHE; MI5; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HONG KONG. A center for British intelligence operations since the establishment of the Far East Combined Bureau in 1932, the colony accommodated both an MI5 security liaison officer and a Secret Intelligence Service station to support the local Special Branch and collect intelligence on mainland China. Also located in Hong Kong were the regional signals intelligence organization at Little Sai Wan, several Royal Air Force (RAF) radio interception facilities, and a large radar installation, manned by RAF 117 Signals Unit atop Tai Mo Shan, at an altitude of 2,000 feet, in the New Territories.
Throughout the Cold War, Hong Kong was a major center of espionage as a principal gateway in and out of the mainland and where the Central Intelligence Agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Special Branch, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation maintained local representatives. In addition, the Soviets established both KGB and GRU rezidenturas in the colony, the Taiwanese ran a news agency front, and the Chinese operated from several local front organizations, including the Communist Party’s office in the Federation of Trade Unions building.
Since becoming a Special Administrative Region in 1997 under control of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong has acquired the status of a transshipment point for embargoed goods, often military equipment, to be diverted across the border to the mainland. Dozens of ostensibly legitimate Chinese-controlled businesses, and organizations, such as the pro-Beijing newspapers Takung Pao and Wen Wei Po, have sprung up on the island, whereas their true function is to support PRC-sponsored intelligence operations and facilitate illicit technology transfer. See alsoAUSTRALIA; AUTUMN ORCHID; BRITISH ARMY AID GROUP (BAAG); CANADA; GREAT BRITAIN; KASHMIR PRINCESS; LI CHU-SHENG; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
HOU DESHENG. The assistant military attaché at the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embassy in Washington DC, Hou was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on 21 December 1987 with Zang Weichu, an official from the PRC consulate in Chicago, as they received supposedly classified documents in a restaurant, and both were expelled.
The FBI’s surveillance of Hou had revealed his visits to the Vector Microwave Research Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia, which was headed by a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, retired lieutenant general Leonard Perroots. Perroots’s company received a large number of classified contracts from the Defense Department, and Hou attempted to gain information about a U.S. Navy electronics program. At the FBI’s request, Vector pretended to cooperate with Hou and allowed Hou access to a supposedly classified document deliberately left unattended in the office. The operation concluded when Hou, who often complained of his $75 a month salary, was taken into custody.
Upon his return to Beijing, and while still working for the Chinese government, Hou was appointed the local representative for Mayes and Company, a business owned by the original founder of Vector, Donald Mayes. Under scrutiny by U.S. investigators, Vector ceased trading in 1998, and Mayes, who was living in Mexico when Hou was hired, refused to discuss him; although, a subordinate was quoted in the Washington Post describing Hou as “a conduit to other people.” See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HUANG, ANDREW. On 10 April 2007, Andrew Huang, the owner of McAndrew’s Inc., an international export company, pleaded guilty in Connecticut to one count of making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, having been charged the previous year with operating as a representative for the Chinese Electronic System Engineering Corporation, an organization described as the technology procurement arm of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Huang was alleged to have helped broker the illegal sale and transfer of millions of dollars’ worth of telecommunications equipment from the PRC to Iraq between 1999 and 2001. See alsoTECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HUANG KEXUE. In July 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Huang Kexue, a 45-year-old Canadian scientist living in Westborough, Massachusetts, and charged him with 17 counts of economic espionage on behalf of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including the theft of a commercially important pesticide. Employed for five years by Dow Chemicals in Indiana before he was fired in 1978, Huang was born in the PRC.
In October 2011, Huang admitted he had passed trade secrets belonging to Dow AgroSciences and Cargill to the Hunan Normal University, losses valued at $7 billion. See also CANADA; INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
HUANG XIAN. In May 1985, Huang Xian, a Chinese from Hong Kong who had been convicted of espionage and sentenced the previous year to 15 years’ imprisonment, was released from prison in the People’s Republic of China because of his “willingness to serve Chinese modernization.”
HU SIMENG. A graduate of Beijing University, 30-year-old Hu Simeng married a fellow student, Horst Gasde, in 1966 and returned with him to East Berlin to take up an academic post teaching languages at Humboldt University. She was recruited by her husband to supply information to the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) about her students and the local Chinese émigré community, without declaring that she was already working as a source for the Chinese Ministry of State Security. In 1978, she was deliberately “dangled” by the HVA in an attempt to penetrate the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Berlin base and was recruited, placing her husband on the CIA’s payroll. Both academics continued to work for the CIA and HVA until they were exposed in 1989 when the East German regime collapsed.
HUTCHINSON, MILTON. The pilot of a Martin P4M-1Q Mercator based at VQ-1, the U.S. Navy’s electronic warfare squadron at Iwakuni, Japan, Lieutenant-Commander Milton Hutchinson was killed just after midnight on 22 August 1956, when Chinese MiG fighters attacked his aircraft in international airspace 32 miles east of Wenzhou. His mission was a routine signals interception flight flown on behalf of the National Security Agency. All of his crew also perished, and in the subsequent sea rescue search conducted by the Seventh Fleet, only three bodies and some debris were recovered by the USS David J. Buckley. The bodies of two technicians were later found by the Chinese and returned, but rumors persisted that two other men had survived the crash and had been held prisoner in Shanghai. In March 1957, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, Captain Henry D. Chiu, reported that there was credible evidence to believe that two survivors had undergone interrogation by their captors, were in good health, and, from the description given, could possibly be identified as Lieutenant James B. Deane and either Warren E. Caron or Leonard Strykowski. In the absence of further news and any diplomatic links with Beijing, the incident was quietly shelved. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
HWANG JANG YOP. The most senior North Korean politician ever to defect, Hwang Jang Yop was head of the Kim Il-sung University and then chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly, a post he held for 11 years, until 1983, when he was dismissed for what was alleged to be his too-close interest in China’s capitalist reforms. Even though Hwang had been the principal theoretician responsible for developing Juche Idea, the state ideology, had written a revisionist history of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that marginalized the Soviet Union’s role, and had taught Kim Jong-Il, he was purged and, in 1997, seized the opportunity to defect while on a visit to Beijing.
Reportedly, Hwang had been cultivated for years by the Ministry of State Security through an intermediary, a prominent Chinese scholar. Hwang later moved to South Korea and became a vocal critic of the Pyongyang regime.
ILLEGALS. Known within the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) intelligence community as leng qizi, which translates to “cold chess pieces,” illegals are agents sent on missions under non-official cover with instructions to remain dormant or frozen until activated. Reputedly, this term was coined by Zhou Enlai in the 1930s, when he was conducting underground work in Shanghai and he counseled his agents to “do well the work of being a dormant chess piece” (zuohao leng qizi de gongzuo). More recent references credit Zhou with having “put in place the dormant chess pieces” (baibu de leng qizi). The phrase was also used by a Li Fengtian in early 2010 to describe how the ChineseMinistry of State Security had sought to seed Hong Kong with long-term sleeper agents.
Unlike the Russian use of illegals, as evidenced by the arrest of 10 agents in the United States in July 2010, PRC illegals tend not to be given clandestine operational assignments and simply integrate into the target host society, preparing to be called upon to play a key role in the future. See also CHANG FEN; CHEUNG, MARK; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
IMPECCABLE, USNS. In March 2009, the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed ocean surveillance ship conducting sonar searches for submarines, was the subject of prolonged harassment by five Chinese boats in international waters 75 miles south of Hainan Island. They included fishing boats, an intelligence vessel, and a patrol boat, which maneuvered aggressively to within 25 feet of the American ship and was sprayed with a fire hose. Their objective was to disrupt the Impeccable’s operations, which had been monitored by Chinese Y-12 reconnaissance aircraft, and resulted in a formal diplomatic protest to Beijing. Almost simultaneously, another U.S. surveillance ship, Victorious, was approached in the Yellow Sea by a Chinese ship, which illuminated the warship’s bridge with a blinding, high-intensity spotlight. U.S. Navy analysts concluded that these two episodes were connected and had been undertaken deliberately in support of the People’s Republic of China’s disputed claim to an exclusive economic zone extending 200 miles from the country’s coastline. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
INDIA. Sharing a long border in the Himalayas with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India has a long history of commercial rivalry and territorial disputes with both Imperial China and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In October 1962, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attacked at Ladakh and briefly occupied disputed Indian territory before withdrawing the following month. Nevertheless, the PRC continued to give covert support to Naga rebels in a conflict that would continue in the Jotsoma jungles, at an estimated loss of 100,000 lives, until a ceasefire was negotiated in 1977.
In 1967, there were further skirmishes in Sikkim, and in 1987, tension rose again, with the Indian government concerned about the influence of the Maoist Communist Party of India, particularly in the border states. Sino-Indian relations have also been exacerbated by the asylum offered after the 1959 uprising in Tibet to the Dalai Lama and his supporters.
The PRC is a significant intelligence collection target for the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s Cabinet Office intelligence branch based in New Delhi and created in 1968, while the deployment of PLA forces along the frontier was monitored by the Military Intelligence Directorate, later renamed in 2002 as the Defence Intelligence Agency. In addition, India’s formidable internal security apparatus, the Central Bureau of Intelligence, formerly the Delhi Intelligence Bureau, has maintained a close watch on the Communist Party of India, a Maoist movement suspected of links with Beijing and possession of weapons and funds supplied by the PRC; although, the leadership in Beijing has consistently denied this support. Historically, however, the PRC has maintained contact with sympathetic tribes and rebel movements in the border provinces and has participated in undermining successive administrations in the buffer state of Nepal.
Evidence of the PRC’s relationship with rebels in Naga emerged when, in January 2011, Wang Qing, a Ministry of Public Security officer operating as a television correspondent, was detained and deported after having held a meeting with Thuingaleng Muivah, a leader of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN), the province’s breakaway movement. According to Anthony Shimray, a Bangkok-based arms dealer who had tried to broker the sale for $1 million of Chinese missiles to the Naga insurgents and was arrested by the Indian authorities, the PRC had a close interest in supporting the insurgents active near the frontier at Twang in Arunachal Pradesh. See also CHARBATIA; CHINESE NAVAL STRENGTH; CHINESE SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE; GHOSTNET; GOWADIA, NOSHIR S.; KAO LIANG; KASHMIR PRINCESS; LEE, DUNCAN C.; MALAYAN PEOPLES’ ANTI-JAPANESE ARMY (MPAJA); NANDA DEVI; ORIENTAL MISSION; PAKISTAN; SERVICE, JOHN S.; SHADOW NETWORK; SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO); SINO-SOVIET SPLIT; SMEDLEY, AGNES; SOVIET UNION; SUN WEI-KUO; THIRD DEPARTMENT.
INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE. The Western concept of industrial espionage, defined as the illicit acquisition of commercially sensitive proprietary information, is alien to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where no such narrow distinction exists between state and private interests. With industry overwhelmingly in the hands of the state, the state exercises control over commercial entities that in the West would not be regarded as wholly owned state assets. Accordingly, the PRC seeks to protect its assets by extending official secrecy laws to cover ordinary commercial transactions, as the directors of the Australian mining combine, Rio Tinto Zinc, discovered in 2009 after having negotiated iron ore supply contracts.
In parallel, the PRC promotes the interests of the state’s commercial enterprises by officially sponsoring the collection of proprietary information from foreign competitors and the recruitment of sources and intermediaries who engage in the illicit acquisition of protected data and in the circumvention of foreign export controls. As the PRC’s principal nondiplomatic overseas representative organization, the Ministry of State Security is the chosen channel for much of this activity, with numerous examples of technicians stealing processes and software, ostensibly independent businessmen attempting to purchase embargoed equipment, and well-funded front companies acting on behalf of unidentified clients in Singapore and Hong Kong.
According to French intelligence reports, PRC state-sponsored industrial espionage relies on variations of three familiar techniques. The first is the “lamprey,” in which a project is announced inviting international tenders. A false competition between rival foreign firms is created, with the participants encouraged to improve their product demonstrations, but once their technical data has been compromised, the project ostensibly is abandoned, leaving the Chinese principals in possession of various proprietary items. In a recent example, France’s embassy in Beijing arranged a six-month course for Chinese engineers in support of a bid to sell TGV transport technology, but eventually interest waned, and the PRC developed its own version, which included components from the TGV and the German ICE train.
Another technique, known as “the mushroom factory,” involves a joint venture that is created in partnership with a foreign firm and is dependent upon the transfer of processes that then become available to local competitors, which offer almost identical products. One such victim was Danone, the French dairy producer, which went into business with Wahaha, the Chinese drinks company. However, when Schneider Electric tried to sue China over a breach of patent registered in 1996, the company was taken to court in the PRC, accused of counterfeiting, and fined 330 million yuan. In other examples, a General Motors joint venture to produce the Spark was undermined by a rival vehicle, the Future, manufactured with GM designs, and the partly state-owned French carmaker Renault discovered in January 2011 that its staff had been bribed by Chinese to disclose confidential information relating to the development with Nissan of electric car technology. Matthieu Tannenbaum and two other senior executives were suspended pending an investigation into what was described by the Élysée Palace as a “Chinese link” and what industry minister Eric Besson called “economic warfare.” See also AUSTRALIA; CHANG, THERESA; CHAO TAH WEI; CHENG, PHILIP; CHEN YONGLIN; CHINA AEROSPACE CORPORATION (CAC); CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; COX REPORT; DU SHASHAN; FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI); FRANCE; FRANK, DESMOND DINESH; GERMANY; GE YUEFEI; GOWADIA, NOSHIR S.; HANSON, HAROLD DEWITT; HONEYTRAP; HUANG KEXUE; JIN HANJUAN; KHAN, AMANULLAH; KOVACS, WILLIAM; LEE, DAVID YEN; LIANG XIUWEN; LIN HAI; LI QING; LIU SIXING; MENG, XIAODONG SHELDON; MENG HONG; MOO, KO-SUEN; NAHARDANI, AHMAD; PROJECT 863; ROTH, JOHN REECE; SUCCOR DELIGHT; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; TSU, WILLIAM CHAI-WAI; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA); WANG-WOODFORD, LAURA; WEN HO LEE; WU BIN; XU BING; XU WEIBO; YANG FUNG; YU XIANGDONG; ZHONG MING.
INFORMATION WARFARE. In 1985, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) staff officer, Shen Weiguang, wrote Information Warfare, which was serialized two years later by the PLA’s leading newspaper, Jiefangjun Bao. Since then, the PLA’s Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND) has pursued the topic and sponsored symposia that have been addressed by some of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) most influential figures, including Qian Xuesen and Zhu Guangya. All have endorsed a strategy of information-based warfare as a key part of the PLA’s modernization.
After the 1991 Gulf War, when analysts were impressed by the U.S. Coalition’s impressive performance, advocates of information warfare, such as Qian Xuesen, attended the Third Annual COSTIND Science and Technology Committee meeting in March 1994 and demanded the establishment of a national information network and associated technologies. Then in December 1994, COSTIND sponsored a symposium, “Analysis of the National Defense System and the Military Technological Revolution,” and another, “The Issue of Military Revolution,” in October 1995. The result was the establishment of an Informational Warfare Research Institute, and work on an information warfare simulation center.
Some of the PRC’s leading strategists convened in Shijiazhuang in December 1995 for a “Forum for Experts on Meeting the Challenges of the World Military Revolution,” at which 30 experts called for the development of weapons that can “throw the financial systems and army command systems of the hegemonists into chaos.”
The advocates of Information Warfare claim that these tactics are perfect for modern asymmetrical conflict where underdeveloped countries can gain an advantage against a nation that is “extremely fragile and vulnerable when it fulfills the process of networking and then relies entirely on electronic computers.” They suggested that the PRC should abandon the strategy of “catching up” with more advanced powers and “proceed from the brand new information warfare and develop our unique technologies and skills, rather than inlay the old framework with new technologies,” thereby leapfrogging into the 21st century as a preeminent military power.
At a COSTIND National Directors’ meeting convened in December 1995, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, General Liu Huaqing, asserted, “Information warfare and electronic warfare are of key importance, while fighting on the ground can only serve to exploit the victory. Hence, China is more convinced (than ever) that as far as the PLA is concerned, a military revolution with information warfare as the core has reached the stage where efforts must be made to catch up with and overtake rivals.”
Articles in the PLA’s newspaper, Jiefangjun Bao, and in academic journals, such as the Zhongguo Junshi Kexue(China Military Science), stress the need to develop “perfect weapons,” which serve as “trump cards” (shashoujian) to exploit an adversary’s reliance on sophisticated microelectronics.
The PRC’s very public preoccupation with electronic warfare has fueled the suspicion that Beijing routinely sponsors cyber attacks on Western electronic infrastructure, concentrating on some very sensitive sites. For example, in November 2004, it was reported that systems at the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, California, and the United States Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama, had all experienced intrusions traced back to computers located inside the PRC. See also AVOCADO; FALUN GONG; GHOSTNET; INFORMATION WARFARE MILITIA; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; TITAN RAIN; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
INFORMATION WARFARE MILITIA. In 1998, press reports from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) disclosed that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) computer technicians in Shanxi Province had collaborated with “a certain Datong City state-owned enterprise” to create an experimental Information Warfare Militia staffed by 40 personnel drawn from 30 local universities, scientific research institutes, and other facilities. Their purpose was to develop a capability to jam enemy radar systems, interrupt communications, and attack computer networks. Then, in 2006, the influential Chinese Academy of Military Science published a paper that endorsed the concept of electronic warfare operations and called for the creation of additional units. Since then, according to data collected by iDefense in 2008, an Internet security consultancy, a further 33 Information Warfare Militia units have been established across the PRC, usually accommodated in university computer science departments, research institutes, and technology firms staffed by young graduates. In March 2008, the PLA announced that a unit had been formed in Yongning County in Ningxia Province, consisting of 80 personnel divided into three detachments dedicated to computer network warfare, data collection and processing, and network defense.
In 2009, the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission received a report contracted from the Northrop Grumman Corporation, Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation, which noted that the Ministry of Public Security had posted recruitment messages on two of the PRC’s most notorious computer-hacking forums, www.EvilOctal.com and www.Xfocus.net, offering careers for skilled operators. In addition, volume 6 of Guofang (National Defense), published in 2008, included an article Ding Shaowu entitled “Some Thoughts about Organizing the Provincial Military District Setup to Conduct Training in a Complex Electromagnetic Environment,” which drew attention to U.S. Army electronic warfare techniques successfully applied during recent military campaigns in Kosovo in 1999 and in Iraq in 2003. This advocacy prompted a debate within the Chinese open literature, principally in Zhongguo Junshi Kexue (China Military Science), Zhongguo Guofang Bao (China National Defense News), Jiefangjun Bao (People’s Liberation Army Daily), and the official newspapers of China’s seven military districts, about the need to catch up with Western doctrine. In particular, the term “Integrated Network Electronic Warfare” appeared frequently and was defined as
techniques such as electronic jamming, electronic deception and suppression to disrupt information acquisition and information transfer, launching a virus attack or hacking to sabotage information processing and information utilization, and using anti-radiation and other weapons based on new mechanisms to destroy enemy information platforms and information facilities.
This virus concept (bingdu) was embraced by the PLA General Staff, which in 2007, circulated a revised Outline for Military Training and Evaluation that included a directive to consider training “under complex electromagnetic environments” a core activity. According to a report published in January 2008 by Jiefangjun Bao, 100 senior officers had assembled in the Shenyang Military Region to observe an exercise in which Integrated Network Electronic Warfare was demonstrated and the PLA defended itself from simulated cyber and electronic attacks.
While the evidence of the existence of Information Warfare Militias is clear, the extent of their operations remains a matter of speculation. However, according to Joel Brenner, of the U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive, a substantial proportion of the growing number of cyber attacks mounted against the American electronic infrastructure has been traced back forensically to the PRC. In 2007, a total of 43,880 malicious attacks were recorded as having been made against the U.S. Department of Defense, a figure revealed by Colonel Gary McAlum, chief of staff of the U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations, which escalated by 20 percent the following year to 54,640 incidents. Often, specific facilities in the PRC could be identified as having been responsible for an attack, but more often, it was the nature of the episode and the information sought, that betrayed the likely identities of the perpetrators.
In an example of computer hacking as a method of intelligence collection, rather than sabotage, the PRC was accused by South Korea of having penetrated Seoul’s Ministry of Defense in June 2010 to access sensitive information about a recent decision to purchase several Global Hawks, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance platform from Northrop Grumman in San Diego. A highly controversial procurement previously banned under the Missile Technology Control Regime, the drones represented a significant improvement in Seoul’s surveillance capability and evidently thus became a priority target for Beijing’s hackers. See also CYBER ESPIONAGE; FALUN GONG; GHOSTNET; TITAN RAIN; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (IIR). Run by the Second Department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army (GSD/PLA), the IIR is located in Nanjing and publishes the fortnightly Wai Jun Dongtai(Foreign Military Trends). It also offers training courses for military personnel deployed overseas and was formed from the Foreign Language Institute, which, until 1964, was based in Zhangjiako. The IIR was originally known as the School for Foreign Language Cadres of the Central Military Commission.
INSTITUTE OF PACIFIC RELATIONS (IPR). A front organization run covertly by the Communist Party of the United States of America before World War II, the IPR was headed by Owen Lattimore and then Michael Greenberg, both identified as Soviet agents. The IPR’s true role, to influence public opinion relating to United States’ policy toward China with Communist propaganda, was exposed by Elizabeth Bentley in 1945 when she made a lengthy statement to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. See also PRICE, MILDRED.
INSTITUTE 21. Also known as the Red Mountain (Hong Shan) Institute, Institute 21 was built in 1963, 10 miles northwest of the test headquarters at Malan, as the PRC’s principal diagnostics and radiochemistry research facility for the country’s nuclear weapons program. See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
INTELLIGENCE BUREAU OF THE MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE (IBMND). Taiwan’s parallel intelligence organization, operating in competition to the more powerful National Security Bureau (NSB) controlled by the Kuomintang (KMT), the IBMND’s principal area of activity was in northern Thailand and Burma, supposedly running agents across the border into Yunnan Province in the People’s Republic of China from the “golden triangle.” The IBMND was implicated in the international narcotics trade and, in 1977, was suspected of having supported Ma Sik-yu and his younger brother Ma Sik-chun, Hong Kong’s major heroin wholesalers who had backed the Oriental Daily News, the colony’s Chinese language, pro-Nationalist newspaper. When the Royal Hong Kong Police swooped on the Ma empire in February 1977, both men fled to Taiwan, where they were protected from extradition.
In 1983, the appointment of Admiral Wang Hsi-ling, who had spent the previous 12 years in Washington DC, as the IBMND’s director caused controversy. His predecessor had been dismissed for corruption, but Wang’s career had been in the rival NSB. However, in October the following year, he was implicated in the murder of Henry Liu, and all IBMND personnel were expelled from the United States. Wang was arrested in Taipei in January 1985 and served six years of a life sentence and was released in January 1991. In the meantime, the IBMND was dismantled and replaced by a new organization, the Ministry of National Defense’s Intelligence Bureau.
INTERAERO. On 17 August 2004, a California aircraft parts supplier, Interaero Inc., operated by Arthur Hale, was fined $500,000 in Washington DC, having pleaded guilty to a breach of the Arms Export Control Act and admitted to having exported six shipments of military aircraft parts, valued at in excess of $40,000, to China between June 2000 and March 2001, knowing the consignments were actually destined for Iran. Included were Hawk missiles and parts for F-4 Phantoms and F-5 Tiger fighters. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
INTERNATIONAL LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ILD). The International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates under the control of the Central Committee and is responsible for links with foreign political parties and routinely collects intelligence and conducts intelligence operations overseas. The Zhonggong Zhongyang Duiwai Lianluo Bu, translated literally to “Chinese Communist Party Central Foreign Liaison Department”has undergone a transformation of sorts as international Communism has been on the ebb. Originally, the ILD gained some notoriety when competing with the Soviet Union for influence within the worldwide Communist movement, but it also served as a vehicle for intelligence gathering, or tewu (¨secret work¨), while it was under the control of Kang Sheng.
Always subordinate to the CCP, the ILD evolved during the period of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and the Soviet collapse and began to portray itself as conducting relations with any foreign political party, Communist, socialist, or otherwise. The ILD’s head traditionally has held ministerial status and even outranked the country´s foreign minister.
INTERNATIONAL LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ILD/PLA). The International Liaison Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s (ILD/PLA) General Political Department has been identified by the 2004 Intelligence Threat Handbook, published by the OPSEC Inter-Agency Support Staff, as an agency engaged in the clandestine collection of intelligence in the United States. Although primarily a propaganda and psychological warfare unit targeted against Taiwan, the department was listed in May 2009 by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair as being active in the United States.
INTER-SERVICES LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ISLD). The Far East branch of the British Secret Intelligence Servicebefore and during World War II operated under the semitransparent cover of the Inter-Services Liaison Department from offices in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Headed by Major Rosher and then from 1941 by a Java planter, G. C. Denham, ISLD made a pact with the Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist Party to develop intelligence-gathering networks behind the Japanese lines. See also GREAT BRITAIN; LAI TEK.
IRAN. Following the imposition of international financial, economic, and military sanctions on Tehran in 1979, evidence emerged of a sustained operation to supply the Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear and military matériel. In 2006, a group of Iranian businessmen based in Dubai were indicted in Manhattan on charges of conspiring to conceal banned transactions, together with Li Fangwei, the Chinese manager of LIMMT, a company implicated in the illegal procurement of aircraft parts for Iranian jet fighters. Also indicted was Baktash Fattahi, an Iranian resident in the United States. In 2008, a joint investigation conducted by the U.S. Treasury and Department of Defense identified an American company, the Assa Corporation, as acting for the Bank Melli, and connected to another Iranian-owned entity, the Alavi Foundation. See also CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; INTERAERO; MONTAPERTO, RONALD N.; NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); NORTH KOREA; SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO); TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA); WANG-WOODFORD, LAURA; WEI LEFANG.
ITT CORPORATION. On 27 March 2007, the ITT Corporation, a leading manufacturer of military night-vision equipment for the U.S. military, agreed to pay a $100 million penalty and admitted to having illegally exported restricted night-vision data to the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, and Great Britain. The company also pleaded guilty to charges that it had omitted statements of material fact in required arms exports reports. The $100 million penalty is believed to be one of the largest ever in a criminal export control case, and as part of the plea agreement, the company must invest $50 million of the penalty toward the development of advanced night-vision systems for the U.S. armed forces. See also INTERAERO; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
JAPAN. With a mutual hostility dating back centuries, Sino-Japanese relations have been characterized by war and, from 1931, by the occupation of Manchuria, followed by continuous combat on mainland China until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Thereafter, Japan provided the United States with bases from which to conduct signals intelligence operations, including airborne collection and high altitude aerial reconnaissance flights. During the Korean War, Japan’s naval and air bases proved of critical importance for the United Nations’ forces.
While Japan was demilitarized during the American postwar occupation, trade channels developed with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), thus making each a target for mainly economic intelligence collection, but the relationship was suspended by Beijing in 1958 as Tokyo cultivated Taiwan as an important commercial partner. However, the Sino-Soviet split forced Mao Zedong to restore the unofficial links and, in 1963, establish a trade mission in Tokyo. In September 1972, after President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing, formal diplomatic recognition was given to the PRC, despite some territorial disputes over the Senkaku Islands being unresolved.
In Japan, economic intelligence collection is the responsibility of the Naicho, the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, which is an analytical organization devoid of clandestine collection facilities, thus making it difficult to penetrate; although, Beijing has often attempted to exercise political influence in Tokyo through local Communists. In March 2003, the U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) reported that Beijing sponsored two groups, the Association of Chinese Scientists and Engineers in Japan (ACSEJ) and the Chinese Association of Scientists and Engineers in Japan, both of which were dedicated to the PRC’s objectives in the military and commercial fields in the science and technology sectors. Both groups sponsored “Returnee Friendship Committees,” distributed propaganda, and promoted academic conferences and other gatherings, often held in the embassy in Tokyo, where information could be exchanged in a forum that circumvented “Western protectionism.” According to the NCIX, the ACSEJ had been formed in 1993 and had achieved 731 members, many of them engaged in sensitive research. See also KAMISEYA; NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); U-2.
JIANGNAN SOCIAL UNIVERSITY. Located in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, and not to be confused with the separate Jiangnan University, the Jiangnan Social University was intended to be an annex of the Beijing Institute of International Relations but instead has become a Ministry of State Security (MSS) training facility for headquarters personnel, rather than the local MSS branch office, offering short-term courses on contemporary topics. Its academic staff also participates in other MSS training programs conducted off-campus.
JIANGSU NATIONAL SECURITY EDUCATION CENTER. At the end of April 2009, the director of the Jiangsu National Security Education museum in Nanjing, Ms. Qian, announced the opening of the establishment, which covers the history of the Communist Party Central Committee’s espionage branch since its formation in 1927 to the 1980s and is filled with intelligence-related paraphernalia and gadgetry. A spokesman, Fan Hong, declared that the facility “is for Chinese only.”
JIN HANJUAN. Formerly employed for eight years by the Motorola Corporation in Schaumberg, Illinois, Jin Hanjuan was indicted in April 2008 in Illinois on three charges involving the sale of proprietary information contained in thousands of documents to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and to the cellular telephone manufacturer Lemko, without authorization.
Aged 37, Jin had been arrested on 28 February 2007 by U.S. Customs officials at Chicago O’Hare International Airport as she was about to fly on a one-way ticket to the PRC. A U.S. citizen, Jin was born in China and was carrying 1,300 electronic and paper documents from her former employer (Motorola), a European company’s product catalog of military technology (written in English), as well as documents describing military telecommunications technology (written in Chinese). She was also carrying $30,000 in cash, having only declared $10,000.
Jin, who had joined Motorola in 1998, took a medical leave of absence in February 2006 but, between June and November of that year, negotiated with a Chinese company, Lemko, to develop communications software. On 26 February 2007, Jin returned to work at Motorola but omitted to mention her new job in the PRC, and between 9:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., she downloaded more than 200 technical documents from Motorola’s secure internal computer network and then, at about 12:15 p.m., had sent her resignation by e-mail to her manager. However, later the same evening, she returned to her office and downloaded additional documents and removed them.
Motorola filed a civil suit against Jin, Wu Xiaohua, Pan Shaowei (Wu’s spouse), Sheng Xiaohong, and Bai Xuefeng, all former Motorola employees who had also taken up jobs with Lemko, alleging that they had tried to steal the technical specifications of the SC300 base transceiver station, Internet technology for cellular systems.
At a hearing in November 2011, Jin asked for a nonjury trial before a federal judge, declaring that she was only a bad employee and not a spy. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
JIN WUDAI. See CHIN, LARRY WU-TAI.
KAMISEYA. The U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) largest overseas facility, Kamiseya in Japan occupied the tunnels of a wartime torpedo storage site and consisted of a large antenna field, airstrip, and underground accommodation for intercept operators and traffic analysts. Located some 500 miles off the coast of mainland China, Kamiseya was the NSA’s window into the People’s Republic of China and processed traffic collected from aircraft flown from both Japan and Taipei, Taiwan. Originally occupied by the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1949, the NSA withdrew in 1995. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
KANG SHENG. Born in 1898, Kang Sheng joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1925 and, until he succumbed to cancer in 1975, spent his entire career in the Chinese security and intelligence apparatus and at one point headed the Central Department of Social Affairs. He was also closely connected to Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing, whose mother had been in domestic service in his father’s household, and as young revolutionaries, they may have gone through a form of marriage. He certainly accepted the role of her intelligence adviser and exercised a considerable, if sinister, influence over her. In 1958, Kang adopted Yu Qiangsheng and sponsored his entry into theMinistry of Public Security, an organization he would supervise as a member of the CCP’s Political Bureau in 1966, following the death of Li Kenong. Today, because of his role in the Cultural Revolution, Kang is considered a nonentity and his name rarely mentioned in official circles; although, Chinese intelligence professionals recognize the part he played in building the country’s intelligence structure.
KAO LIANG. Appointed secretary of the Chinese mission to the United Nations in 1983, Kao Liang had been secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s committee in Hungchao before joining the New China News Agency (NCNA). He headed the NCNA bureau in New Delhi until it was closed down after accusations of political interference and, in 1961, opened an office in Dar es Salaam as the NCNA’s chief African correspondent. He was implicated in a coup plot in Zanzibar in 1964 and backed Sheik Babu, who later became that country’s foreign minister. Kao was expelled from Mauritius and was thought to have served as an assistant to the legendary Colonel Kan Mei, the military attaché who had been active in Nepal, Tibet, and India before organizing guerrilla camps in the Congo.
KAO YEN MEN. Following an investigation that lasted six years conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Kao Yen Men of Charlotte, North Carolina, was arrested on 3 December 1993 as a member of a spy ring that had attempted to obtain advanced naval weapons and related technology. The owner of several Chinese restaurants in the Charlotte area, Kao had been under FBI surveillance when he was seen meeting Chinese intelligence personnel who offered him up to $2 million to obtain embargoed American technology, including the U.S. Navy’s MK 48 Advanced Capability torpedo, the F404-GE-400 General Electric jet engines used to power F/A-18 fighters, and the fire-control radar for the F-16 fighter.
Kao subsequently paid $24,000 to an undercover FBI agent for embargoed oscillators used in satellites and, on 22 December 1993, was ordered by a federal judge to be deported for overstaying his visa and for acts of espionage. A decision not to prosecute Kao was made by the Department of Justice to prevent the disclosure of counterintelligence sources and methods and to avoid offending the Chinese government. However, fearing Chinese reprisals, Kao requested deportation to Hong Kong and left behind his wife, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen, and their two children.
KASHMIR PRINCESS. On 11 April 1955, an Air India Constellation, the Kashmir Princess, crashed into the sea en route for Djakarta after a time bomb detonated in an engine cowling under the wing at an altitude of 18,000 feet. All 16 passengers, including members of a delegation from the People’s Republic of China attending the Bandung Conference, were killed; although, the pilot and two of his crew escaped. The delegation, including a group of New China News Agency correspondents, was to have been headed by Zhou Enlai, the former premier, but he changed his plans at the last moment, perhaps having been tipped off to the attempt on his life.
An investigation conducted by the Hong Kong Police Special Branch, led by Assistant Superintendent “Ricky” Richardson and Charles Scobell, with considerable cooperation from the Chinese authorities, established that the aircraft had been sabotaged while under guard in Hong Kong and that the culprit was an engineer supposedly employed by the Hong Kong Engineering Maintenance Company and member of the Kuomintang intelligence service, who had concealed the device in an oily rag and then fled to Taiwan aboard a China Airlines plane. Although the Chinese claimed the incident had been orchestrated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the Special Branch investigation found nothing to support the allegation.
KAZAKHSTAN. The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) former Soviet neighbor and, since 1996, a member of theShanghai Cooperation Organization, Kazakhstan has become the focus of considerable investment by Beijing in an apparent effort to diversify the country’s reliance on foreign energy imported by sea and, therefore, a significant intelligence collection target. Independent since 1991, Kazakhstan is also the subject of interest from the Ministry of State Security because of the large number of Uighur refugees who have sought asylum there.
As the PRC’s principal energy partner in Central Asia, Kazakhstan’s state oil company, KazMunaiGaz, has received financial support from the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in exchange for 15 percent of the country’s total oil production, which is now channeled east to Xinjiang. The CNPC has also partnered KazMunaiGaz to build a $3 billion, 3,000-kilometer oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Xinjiang and the $7.3 billion, 7,000-kilometer Central Asia Gas Pipeline from Turkmenistan. Other local Chinese energy investments include large financial stakes taken by the Export-Import Bank of China in the Aktobemunaigaz Company, PetroKazakhstan, and MangistauMunaiGaz.
In addition, the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Company entered a joint venture with the Kazakh National Nuclear Company in April 2009 to develop the Irkol uranium mine, thought to be capable of producing 250 tons of yellowcake a year. To facilitate transport, Beijing has also committed to establishing a “New Silk Road” through northwestern Kazakhstan to Xinjiang and to backing the Kazakhstan Development Bank’s loan to buy Chinese railway rolling stock.
KENYA. In June 1965, the Kenya Special Branch uncovered a Chinese plot to infiltrate agents and weapons into the country, apparently with the intention of mounting a coup to replace Jomo Kenyatta with his vice president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, whose house had been bugged. A member of the People’s Republic of China’s embassy was expelled, and the following year, Odinga was replaced. Kenyatta was so impressed by the efficiency of his Special Branch, which had been trained and mentored by British MI5 personnel, that he asked MI5 to establish a local security apparatus, the National Security Executive, headed by an MI5 officer.
KEYSER, DONALD W. The 59-year-old deputy chief of the U.S. State Department’s East Asia bureau was arrested in September 2004 when he admitted having become infatuated with 37-year-old Cheng Nian-Tzu, known as Isabelle Cheng, a Taiwanese intelligence officer based at Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington DC. As many as 3,659 classified documents were recovered from his home, and at his trial in October 2007, Keyser pleaded guilty to three felony charges and was sentenced to a year and a day’s imprisonment in a federal penitentiary and a $25,000 fine.
The couple had become intimate in 2002 when President Jiang of the People’ Republic of China had visited the United States, and Cheng had asked her lover for information. He had replied in an e-mail, “Your wish is my command.” Later, in a wiretapped telephone conversation, after the pair had been watched by a Federal Bureau of Investigation special surveillance group unit making love in a car, he had remarked, “The food was good. The wine was good. The champagne was good, and you were good.” When Keyser was arrested, Cheng promptly returned to Taiwan.
Fluent in Mandarin, with his fourth wife working at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Keyser had been educated at the University of Maryland and had spent two years at the Stanford Inter-University Center in Taiwan. Keyser’s wife, who was also found to have removed classified documents from the CIA and knew that her husband had been bringing home material from the State Department, was transferred to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte. See also NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB).
KHAN, AMANULLAH. On 23 July 2003, arrest warrants were served on Amanullah Khan, a 54-year-old naturalized American of Pakistani origin who used the alias “Wali Merchant.” Two days earlier, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had arrested one of his associates, Ziad Jamil Gammoh, known as “Al Gammoh,” a 53-year-old naturalized American, originally from Jordan. Both men had been indicted for attempting to illegally export military components for F-4 and F-5 fighters to China, and they were also charged with conspiring to export parts for the F-14 Tomcat, AH-1J attack helicopter, and Hawk surface-to-air missiles.
Together Khan and Gammoh had run United Aircraft and Electronics, an unincorporated business in Anaheim, California, that purchased and resold aerospace, military, and defense aircraft parts to various foreign commercial and government buyers. However, during an ICE investigation, agents created a fictitious company, Sino-American Aviation Supply, which purported to be based in Shenyang, China, and negotiated to buy restricted items and have them shipped to China without the required export licenses.
On 7 November 2005, Gammoh was sentenced to 78 months’ imprisonment, and on November 28, Khan was sentenced to 188 months’ imprisonment. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
KIM SOO-IM. On 18 June 1950, Kim Soo-im was executed at Kimpo Airport, Seoul, having been convicted of espionage for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Originally trained in the dental clinic of a missionary college, she had been recruited as a spy by her lover, the Communist Lee Kung Kook, in 1942, and after the war, she had been employed as a receptionist at the Banto Hotel, which was used by the U.S. Army as a military headquarters. While working on the switchboard, Kim listened in to many of the telephone calls and relayed this intelligence, and other information she picked up from lonely soldiers, to the North Koreans. Later, she would be transferred to a secretarial post in the U.S. Provost Marshal’s office, where she had access to counterintelligence material. By the time the ceasefire had been agreed, Kim had proved very successful and had established a photographic studio in the basement of her home so she could process the secrets she had stolen. Her arrest came when she turned her attention to spying on the government headed by President Syngman Rhee, who was elected in August 1948. See also SOUTH KOREA; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
KINDRED SPIRIT. The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the codename KINDRED SPIRIT for the investigation into Wen Ho Lee.
KOREAN WAR. The intervention by the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) in the Korean War in October 1950 had been anticipated by the U.S. Armed Forces Security Agency, which had monitored People’s Liberation Army (PLA)movements from Shanghai toward Manchuria from July, but even after elements of the 4th Army crossed the Yalu River and engaged South Korea’s forces, leaving some captives for interrogation, there was a widespread belief that the PRC would not intervene. This view was especially prevalent among General Douglas MacArthur’s G-2 staff, headed by his director of intelligence, Charles Willoughby, who asserted that the prisoners of war were simply isolated Chinese volunteers and did not represent proof that PLA divisions had joined the war. That view changed on 25 November, when Chinese troops overwhelmed completely the U.S. Eighth Army, reversing MacArthur’s advance and transforming it into a rout before the front stabilized around Seoul.
After the war had started, the CIA’s Office of Research and Estimates (ORE) remained undecided on the issue of Chinese intervention and, between 10 July and 9 November 1950, produced 10 Intelligence Memorandums for the Directors of Central Intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter and his successor General Walter Bedell Smith. The CIA’s reporting came primarily from radio monitoring by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), press reports from Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Shanghai of Chinese troop movements, plus some CIA human sources managed by the Office of Special Operations (OSO) bulletins. The CIA’s internal account of the Korean War records that among OSO intelligence reports were some 554 reports disseminated during the critical period from July through November 1950. According to the OSO’s summary in April 1951, “A considerable number of reports derived from Chinese sources . . . trace the movement of Chinese Communist military forces northwards into Manchuria and towards the Korean border, indicating units, equipment, and other order of battle details.” Also included in OSO’s listing of reports are seven “indications based on Chinese Communist commercial activities in Hong King . . . and thirteen indications of CHICOM or CHICOM-USSR conferences and policy statement relating to war preparations.”
The first of the series of relevant ORE Intelligence Memorandum to raise the issue of Chinese intervention was dated 8 July 1950 and suggested that the Kremlin might order a covert or even overt Chinese participation in the war. On 19 July, the ORE’s regular Review of the World Situation remarked that, although the PRC had the capability to intervene, it probably would not do so unless directed to do so by the Soviets. On 16 August, ORE warned of the PRC’s military capacity and, on 1 September, predicted that “the stage has been set for some form of Chinese Communist intervention or participation in the Korean War” and that “some form of armed assistance to the North Koreans appears imminent.” A week later, on 8 September, an Intelligence Memorandum entitled Probability of Direct Chinese Intervention Koreareported that, although there was no direct evidence, “limited covert Chinese Communist assistance to the North Korean invaders, including the provision of individual solders, is assumed to be in progress at present,” noting the presence of an estimated 400,000 Communist troops in Manchuria and an “increasing Chinese Communist build-up of military strength in Manchuria, coupled with the known potential in that area, make it clear that intervention in Korea is well within immediate Chinese Communist capabilities. Moreover, recent Chinese Communist accusations regarding U.S. ‘aggression’ and ‘violation of the Manchurian border’ may be stage-setting for an imminent overt move.”
The ORE Review of the World Situation, dated 20 September, speculated that the most likely Chinese or Soviet intervention, as the North Korean forces crumbled following the amphibious landings at Inchon, would take the form of integrating Chinese Communist “volunteers” into regular North Korean units. The Review also warned that the forces in Manchuria “could enter the battle and materially change its course at any time.” However, on 12 October 1950, ORE 58-50, headed Threat of Full Chinese Intervention in Korea, under Bedell Smith’s signature, was handed to President Harry S. Truman as he flew to Wake Island to confront General MacArthur. The document observed, “Despite statements by Chou Enlai, troop movements to Manchuria, and propaganda charges of atrocities and border violations . . . there are no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea,” concluding that “such action is not probable in 1950” and asserting “from a military standpoint, the most favorable time for intervention in Korea had passed.” Much the same opinion was expressed in the next Review, dated 18 October.
In Korea itself, the position was very different. From 12 October, some 30,000 Chinese troops had crossed the Yalu River, and by the end of the month, another 150,000 had entered Korea. They were committed to combat for the first time on 25 October, against South Korean and American forces, and around 25 were captured. Based on those interrogations, DCI Bedell Smith initially suggested that the Chinese had been deployed to protect Chinese hydroelectric installations along the Yalu River, but on 1 November, he informed Truman,
It has been clearly established that Chinese troops are opposing UN forces. Present field estimates are that between 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese Communist troops organized into task force units are operating in North Korea while their parent units remain in Manchuria.
A week later, on 8 November, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 2 estimated the number of Chinese troops in Korea at 40,000 and reported that they were engaging UN troops up to 100 miles south of the Yalu. Troop numbers in Manchuria were now estimated at 700,000, of which up to 350,000 could be available “within 30 to 60 days for sustained ground operations in Korea.” In reality, the PLA had infiltrated 300,000 soldiers over the Yalu in support of the remaining beleaguered 65,000 North Koreans.
On 24 November, as MacArthur continued to express confidence in his offensive, NIE 2/1 was circulated, entitled Chinese Communist Intervention in Korea, which observed that “available evidence is not conclusive whether or not the Chinese Communists are as yet committed to a full-scale offensive effort.” However, all doubts evaporated on the following day when the PLA counterattacked with 30 divisions, at a time when there were only 12 divisions on the order-of-battle charts at MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, prompting Truman to say, on 28 November, “The Chinese have come in with both feet” and MacArthur to acknowledge, “We now face an entirely different war.”
Both men were right. In the face of this unexpected onslaught, the U.S. 7th Infantry Division sustained appalling losses, the 2nd Infantry Division suffered one-third casualties and had virtually all its equipment destroyed, and at one moment, the entire 1st Marine Division was almost encircled and in danger of decimation. Over the next two months, the UN forces retreated south 200 miles to Pusan.
Chinese preparations for the counterattack of 25 November had gone undetected because the U.S. 8th Army had come to rely on the interrogation of prisoners of war (PoW) as the best source of enemy intelligence and had acquired a pool of some 100 Chinese prisoners to question. However, there was a lack of suitable interpreters, and the first captives turned out to be turned-Nationalists who were terrified of the PLA and, when passed up to Division or Corps levels, reluctant to make any disclosures. Furthermore, some had been primed with bogus details of the PLA’s order of battle, and it would later become clear that the Chinese had kept their most experienced, battle-hardened Communist troops for the second, massive offensive.
During this period, from the North Korean invasion on 25 June, MacArthur’s Far East Command compiled a secret Daily Intelligence Summary, up to 30 pages long, drawn from PoW interrogations, signals intelligence summaries, aerial reconnaissance, foreign language newspaper articles, and radio bulletins and from two other sources of espionage. One was a network of agents established and run by the legendary John Singlaub, a World War II Office of Strategic Services veteran who specialized in recruiting former Korean PoWs who had fought with the Japanese and whom he trained for infiltration back into Manchuria. Singlaub’s organization was charged with collecting information about Communist North Korean intentions, and his reporting was considered reliable. Less so was Willoughby’s secret Korean Liaison Office in Seoul, which purported to be in contact with 16 agents in the North; although, there was some skepticism about their loyalty.
Far East Command also received consular and other reports from the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan and Hong Kong, who provided good warnings, but they had been discounted because of their perceived political motives for exaggerating the PRC threat. In addition, there was some evidence that the KMT occasionally recycled information that it had originally acquired from MacArthur’s headquarters. Nevertheless, although the U.S. Far East Command consistently underestimated the number of PLA troops in Korea, despite escalating the figures from 70,000 on 25 October to nearly 210,000 five days later, it did track the forces in Manchuria quite well, reporting 116,000 in July, 217,000 in early August, to 415,000 and perhaps 463,000 by early November.
The Air Force Security Service (AFSS) also ran an intercept program, codenamed YOKE, monitoring the enemy’s ground control communications and radar, based at Pyongtaek with advance facilities at Kimpo, near Seoul, and on Pyong-Yong-do Island. Here AFSS personnel listened into Korean, Chinese, and Russian channels, and as the demand for Chinese linguists grew, the AFSS enlisted General Hirota, formerly the head of Japan’s wartime signals intelligence agency, to provide a team of 12 Chinese-speaking Japanese to augment a group of school-trained American Chinese linguists who were installed at the Chosen Christian College in Seoul (later Yonsei University). YOKE proved very successful and was in part responsible for the impressive performance of the F-86 Sabre, equipped with a radar gunsight, against the MiG-15s, which were less maneuverable but boasted a higher ceiling and firepower. On one memorable occasion, 15 enemy jet fighters were shot down by F-86s without loss, having been vectored to their targets by ground controllers relying on tactical intercepts rather than early-warning radar.
The AFSS’s ground-control intercept program proved so successful that that there were leaks, with even the media reporting on its activities, causing Detachment 3 of the 1st RSM to suspend operations for a few days in October 1951 to demonstrate to the U.S. 5th Air Force what was at stake. Having gained the attention of senior officers, new communications security measures were introduce to protect the source.
In early 1952, a Chinese switch toward the use of VHF equipment threatened to terminate the AFSS’s ground control interception, but a new facility on Cho-Do Island, off Wonsan, put the antennae in range and restored the quality of communications intelligence available to the United Nations forces. According to a Central Intelligence Agency review, “Communications Intelligence remained the principal source of intelligence for threat until 27 July 1953, when the armistice was signed at Panmunjom.”
American signals intelligence airborne collection operations were flown from November 1950 by the RB-50B, a variant of the RB-29 Superfortress, by the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Wing (SRW) from Yokota, Japan. They began monitoring the North Korean air defense radars, which was an easy task as they were of American origin, having been supplied to the Soviets during World War II. However, the following year, improved RUS-2 early warning radars were detected, followed by the discovery of SON-2 fire-control systems found near Pyongyang. Each time a new system was identified by analysts, the appropriate countermeasures were developed and aircraft fitted with jammers. By the end of the conflict, the 91st SRW had grown to 400 aircraft, including a detachment of RB-45C Tornados from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
It was not until the defection of a North Korean MiG-15 pilot, Lieutenant No Kum-Sok, on 21 September 1953, that detailed information about Chinese air operations in Korea became available. Having flown his aircraft from Dandong to Kimpo, he revealed that the ill-equipped People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) had been strengthened in 1950 by two Istrebitel’naia Aviatsonnaia Diviziaa (IAD or Fighter Aviation Regiments). The 106th IAD had been deployed to defend Shanghai against Nationalist air raids from Taiwan, while General Ivan Belov’s 151st Guards IAD had been sent in July 1950 to train Chinese pilots and protect the 13th Chinese People’s Volunteer Army north of the Yalu River. Hitherto, the PLAAF had acquired a few Soviet-supplied MiG-9 and MiG-15 jet fighters, but it had not been in any position to assist the North Korean Air Force, which had been decimated by American bombers. However, in November 1950, vastly superior MiG-15s had appeared over the Yalu River and proved highly effective until the hasty introduction of F-86 Sabres a month later. Thereafter, two rotating Soviet IADs, initially the 324th and the 303rd, consisting of 30 MiG-15Bs in each, flying from Shenyang, and then from Myaogou, in PLAAF or North Korean livery, with the pilots wearing Chinese uniforms, engaged the American planes but only well behind the frontline and under strict instructions not to fall into enemy hands.
By the end of hostilities, the Soviets had some 13,000 combat personnel in China, with a similar number of support staff centered on a corps headquarters at Antung. Almost all were withdrawn at the end of February 1952, leaving behind only a few technical elements of the 17th Fighter Aviation Regiment. Altogether, the Soviets lost an estimated 278 aircraft and 127 pilots.
Both the Soviets and the Chinese were intensely interested in the F-86, and when one of the fighters was shot down by a Soviet MiG on 6 November 1951, the airframe, number 1319, was captured, even though the pilot was rescued. It was taken to the Andung airbase for examination and later was shipped to Moscow. Six months later, in May 1952, Colonel Bud Mahurin was shot down, and his Sabre was also captured relatively intact. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; LOVELL, JOHN S.; SOVIET UNION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
KOVACS, WILLIAM. On 4 October 2006, William Kovacs, the owner and president of Elatec Technology Corporation in Massachusetts, was sentenced in the District of Columbia to 12 months’ and a day imprisonment, 3 years’ supervised release, and 300 hours of community service for illegally exporting a hot press industrial furnace to a research institute in China that was described as being affiliated with the country’s aerospace and missile programs. Kovacs and Elatec had been charged in November 2003 and had pleaded guilty on 28 May 2004.
Another defendant, Stephen Midgley, separately pleaded guilty, on 28 January 2005, to making false statements in export documents that the furnace did not require an export license when the goods had been shipped to China. Midgley was sentenced to a one-year probation and 120 hours community service and fined $1,500. In addition, the Bureau of Industry and Security gave Midgley a $5,000 administrative penalty. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
KUCZYNSKI, URSULA. Known by her married name of Ursula Beurton, her nom de guerre of Ruth Werner, and her GRU codename of SONIA, was an exceptionally successful case officer taught her craft by Richard Sorge in Shanghai. Born into a family in Berlin that was to become well known for its commitment to radical socialism, Ursula’s father moved to England to take up an academic appointment in Oxford in 1933 as the Nazis took power. Her sister, Brigitte, was recruited as an agent by the Soviet GRU, and her brother, Jurgen, was to lead the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) in exile. Ursula worked in a bookshop selling “progressive literature” and briefly visited New York to do relief work among the homeless. In 1929, she married an architect, Rolf Hamburger, and they set up a home together in Shanghai, where she fell under the influence of other Soviet agents, among them Agnes Smedley, and campaigned for the release of Hilaire Noulens.
Already committed to the Communist cause, Ursula was recruited into the GRU by Sorge; although, at that early stage, she was uncertain of the exact nature of the organization. “Only two years later did I know that it operated under the intelligence department of the Red Army General Staff. It made no difference to me. I knew that my activities served the comrades of the country in which I lived.”
In February 1931, their son, Michael, was born, but this event did not cement their marriage, which was under strain, primarily because of political differences. “I could not talk to him about the people who were closest to me or the work on which my life was centered.” Hamburger was deliberately excluded from Ursula’s clandestine activities and had no idea that Sorge used their house to store secret information. Only later did he convert to Communism, by which time, Ursula had left him. In the meantime, she had spent six months in Moscow undergoing a GRU training course, returning to meet Rolf in Prague and return to China via Trieste in April 1934. They settled in Mukden and, in June 1935, moved to Peking, where she became pregnant by Ernst, a GRU agent with whom she had trained in Moscow.
Ursula returned to Moscow with Michael late in 1935, and after a brief stopover, continued her journey via Leningrad to London, where she was reunited with her family. She then moved with Rolf to Warsaw, where Janina was born in April 1936, but after a mission to Danzig, she was recalled to Moscow to receive further training, the Order of the Red Banner, and a new assignment, in Switzerland.
In October 1938, Ursula was living in the village of Caux, above Montreux, with her two children, supervising a network of agents, which included members of the International Labour Organization of the League of Nations in Geneva and the I. G. Farben plant in Frankfurt. However, her passport was false, and in 1939, she divorced Rolf, who had been ordered back to China, and married a young English veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Len Beurton, in order to acquire British citizenship.
In December 1940, Ursula made her way to England, via Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon, with her children and rented a house in Oxford, where, in late 1942, she was joined briefly by Beurton before he was called up for service in the Coldstream Guards. While in England, Ursula acted as a GRU case officer for Melita Norwood, who supplied atomic secrets from the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, and for Klaus Fuchs, a role that led to MI5’s interest in her in August 1947. Although on the one occasion she was interviewed she denied any connection with espionage, she fled to East Germany in February 1950, the day before Fuchs appeared at the Old Bailey. In her retirement, she lived in East Berlin, an unapologetic Communist, devoted to Beurton and their son Peter, who was born in September 1943. Her biography was published in 1977. She died in 2000, soon after the loss of her husband. See also SOVIET UNION.
KUOMINTANG (KMT). Created as a nationalist political movement in 1912, the KMT received support in 1923 from the Comintern, but in 1927, the Communists were purged by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in anticipation of his capture of Peking the following year. Following the Japanese invasion of 1937, the KMT withdrew to Chungking, but several different Nationalist intelligence organizations competed against each other. The largest was the Resources Investigation Institute (RII), headed by General Wang Ping-sheng, which operated under the umbrella of the Institute for International Studies. The RII operated both domestically and abroad, with George Yeh representing the organization in Delhi and liaising with the regional British Secret Intelligence Service director, Leo Steveni.
The Chinese Civil War continued after the Japanese surrender in 1945, and the KMT was forced to retreat to Taiwanin 1949, where the Republic of China (ROC) was established, in a permanent conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which continues to this day. During the Cold War, until President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, the ROC received considerable intelligence and technical support from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with successive CIA station chiefs in Taipei exercising considerable influence both locally and over the CIA’s Far East Division. One such chief, Dr. Ray Cline, would later be promoted to the CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence.
In 1955, the establishment of the National Security Bureau absorbed the functions of the KMT’s Social Work Committee and the Overseas Maneuvers Committee. See also INTER-SERVICES LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ISLD); JAPAN; STENNES, WALTER.
KYRGYZSTAN. The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) former Soviet neighbor, since 1991 independent and since 1996 a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Kyrgyzstan has received substantial infrastructure investment from Beijing, including a commitment by the China Road and Bridge Corporation to rebuild an 80-kilometer stretch of the strategically important Irkeshtam-Osh highway and to construct a new $2 billion railway, which would connect the country’s coalmines to Kashgar. One of the Ministry of State Security’s (MSS) role in Kyrgyzstan is to ensure the protection of these key assets. The country’s capital, Bishkek, is considered a convenient and safe environment by both the MSS and the Russian Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki (SVR) in which to conduct intelligence operations. Because of years of anti-Maoist propaganda in the Soviet Union, MSS personnel often adopted a “false flag” and pretended to be Kyrghs or Kazakhs when attempting to recruit Russians.
Economically undeveloped, Kyrgyzstan enjoys considerable strategic significance and, in spite of pressure from the SCO, accommodates a U.S. Air Force base at Manas, which is used to support operations in Afghanistan. Now firmly within the PRC’s sphere of influence and a target for intelligence collection by both the PRC and the United States, Kyrgyzstan was the PRC’s first partner in bilateral military maneuvers on the border, codenamed EXERCISE 01, in 2002, involving hundreds of troops from both sides.
LAI TEK. The veteran secretary-general of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), who was elected to the post in April 1939 in Singapore, Lai Tek came from Saigon where, as a Comintern agent of Chinese origin, he had acted as an informer for the local French Sécurité. Recruited as a mole by the Malaya Special Branch in 1934, he was run successfully as a source until March 1947, when he was exposed by his successor, Chin Peng, traced to Bangkok, and strangled. Always backed by Beijing, Lai Tek was handled by John Davis, a Chinese-speaking Malaya Special Branch officer who transferred to the Inter-Services Liaison Department at the outbreak of war. Lai Tek’s complicated life, which included leadership of the wartime Communist resistance under the nom de guerre Hang Cheng and work as a double agent against the Japanese Kempeitai, came to an end after he had looted the MCP’s funds and fled to Hong Kong.
LAM, WAI LIM WILLIAM. In October 2006, Wai Lim William Lam, a 32-year-old from Hong Kong, was arrested and charged with attempting to smuggle goods from the United States to Hong Kong. Lam had purchased a night-vision rifle scope, two submersible night-vision monoculars, a night-vision sniper scope, and a combat optical scope in Stamford, Connecticut. Two months later, Lam pleaded guilty to the charge. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
LAU, HING SHING. On 3 June 2009, Hing Shing Lau, alias Victor Lau, a Hong Kong resident, was arrested at the Toronto International Airport on a provisional arrest warrant issued in the United States. Lau was found to be carrying $30,000 in cash, thought to have been the final payment for 12 infrared thermal imaging cameras purchased from a firm in Dayton, Ohio. The cameras were intended for export to Hong Kong and China, and Lau had originally contacted the company in the hope of exporting cameras manufactured in Texas. On three occasions, he transferred a total of $39,514 from Hong Kong as partial payment for the cameras, and, according to the prosecution, Lau continued to phone and e-mail his business contact to complete the purchase, before finally arranging to take delivery of the cameras in Toronto. The cameras had a wide variety of civilian and military applications, including use in unmanned vehicles, weapon sights, and security and surveillance products. Lau was extradited to Ohio for trial, charged with two counts of violating export control laws and four counts of money laundering. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
LAU YVET-SANG. In November 1966, a New China News Agency editor, Lau Yvet-sang, defected from Hong Kongto Taiwan.
LEE, DAVID YEN. In May 2009, a 52-year-old businessman living in Arlington Heights, Illinois, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and charged with having stolen proprietary information belonging to his former employer, the Valspar Corporation of Wheeling, Illinois, where he had been technical director of new product development until a couple of months earlier. Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had resigned soon after returning from a visit to the People’s Republic of China, and examination of his laptop revealed that it contained a data-copying program and that he had downloaded 44 gigabytes of Valspar’s trade secrets, with a value of between $7 million and $20 million, onto a USB drive without authorization. Before leaving Valspar, Lee had joined Nippon Paint in Shanghai. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
LEE, DUNCAN C. A descendant of General Robert E. Lee, Duncan Lee was a Soviet spy codenamed KOCH who supplied information from inside the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) about developments in China. Born in 1914, in China, where he lived for 13 years with his missionary parents, and fluent in Mandarin, Lee graduated from the University of Virginia and then studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he met his Scottish wife, Ishbel. He later attended Yale Law School, where he and his wife joined the Communist Party of the United States of America, and graduated in 1939, to join Donovan Leisure, the New York law firm headed by General William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan. However, three months later, when Donovan was appointed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coordinator of information, Lee joined the organization as his assistant, with the U.S. Army rank of captain, and continued in the same role when the OSS was created.
He then moved to Washington DC, where he stayed briefly with Mary Price, a Soviet spy codenamed DIR, to whom he had been introduced by her sister Mildred Price, the executive director of the China Aid Council. Lee had met her in the spring of 1942 through his membership of the Institute for Pacific Relations and began an illicit affair with Mary. However, when Ishbel learned of the relationship in the autumn of 1943, Mary broke it off, fearing that Lee’s wife, who knew of his espionage, would compromise his espionage.
By May 1943, Lee had been transferred to OSS’s legal department but continued to have access to classified information and reported on Chiang Kai-shek’s intention to hold a meeting with Communist Party leaders in Siam to discuss relations with the Kuomintang. These reports were highly valued in Moscow. At the end of June 1943, Lee left the United States on a fact-finding tour of the OSS’s bases in Asia for General Donovan and did not to return until early October. He reached Chungking but nearly failed to complete the return journey when he and his two companions, John S. Service of the U.S. embassy and the war correspondent Eric Severeid, were forced, while en route from Kunming in a C-46, to parachute into the Naga Hills and make an epic journey across the Burmese forest to India. No sooner had they bailed out of their apparently stricken aircraft than the engines recovered, and the pilot landed safely at Chabua.
When Lee eventually returned home, much emaciated by his experience, he resumed his espionage, but, according to Elizabeth Bentley’s evidence to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), “Although I succeeded in getting from him more than Mary [Price], he almost always gave it to me orally and rarely would he give me a document, although under pressure he would hand over scraps of paper on which he had written down important data.” She revealed that she had held a rendezvous with Lee outside his house every two weeks and then had spent up to three hours debriefing him, memorizing his information. When Lee had visited New York on business, he had also routinely called her from a payphone and arranged other meetings, at which he passed on secret data. When the NKVD rezidentura in New York suggested replacing her as Lee’s contact, she objected, noting his anti-Semitism and pointing out that it was inappropriate to appoint a Jew as her successor.
Within a few days of his arrival in Washington, Lee had told his contact that an OSS representative in China had recruited a small group of Japanese Communists who he intended to infiltrate back into Japan. He also reported that the OSS also intended to use the same strategy with some Korean Communists as the Japanese were importing Korean labor. A month later, he disclosed that the OSS had reached an agreement with the Kuomintang on conducting joint sabotage operations against the Japanese, and Moscow assessed this report as accurate, noting that the British had been doing the same since 1942.
Identified as a spy by Bentley and exposed by numerous references to KOCH in the VENONA traffic, Lee was summoned to appear as a witness by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to whom he denied any involvement with espionage. Instead of suing Bentley, he went into a private law practice in Washington DC, while the FBI kept him under discreet surveillance and recommended his dismissal from the U.S. Army Reserve, in which he held the rank of lieutenant colonel. Lee lost his appeal and then left the country to represent the American International Group in Bermuda. He later moved with his second wife, a Canadian, to Toronto, where he died in 1988. See alsoAMERASIA; SOVIET UNION.
LEE, PETER. A naturalized American from Taiwan, Dr. Peter Lee had worked as a laser expert at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore before being employed by the defense contractor TRW Inc. on a classified antisubmarine project for the U.S. Navy. In January 1985, Lee visited Beijing and had been invited to lecture at the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, the branch of the China Academy of Engineering Physics where the country’s nuclear weapons designers were concentrated.
Codenamed ROYAL TOURIST by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Peter Lee had been a friend of Wen Ho Lee at Los Alamos, and under interrogation, he admitted that he had met Chen Nengkuan, the Yale-educated leader of the Chinese nuclear weapons program and head of the China Academy of Engineering Physics, in his hotel room. Lee had made several trips to Beijing, and in a plea bargain with the prosecution in March 1998 (in return for a fine of $20,000 and a year in a halfway house), Lee admitted to having compromised classified information. Specifically, Lee had passed information relating to the U.S. Navy’s Radar Ocean Imaging project, a submarine detection program conducted jointly with Great Britain. Because of the sensitivity of the research, a plea bargain was arranged to avoid public disclosure of the details. James Lilley, formerly a U.S. ambassador to the PRC and Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Beijing, commented in 2004, “Peter Lee’s case was they had this guy giving this very sensitive data to the Chinese on underwater detection of submarines. They ran into this case where the navy would not allow a court case against him because of the data. So they had a bargain plea, and he got off basically. For stealing very high-level stuff, he gets probably, what, a couple of months in a halfway house.”
Peter Lee was only slightly connected to the FBI’s investigation of Wen Ho Lee, codenamed KINDRED SPIRIT, which it inherited from the original review of the PRC’s acquisition of the W-88 nuclear warhead technology. See alsoOVERSEAS CHINESE.
LEE, SAM CHING SHENG. On 30 December 2008, Sam Ching Sheng Lee, aged 63 and a native of China, and his nephew, Charles Yu Hsu Lee, aged 31 of Taiwan, were arrested on charges relating to a conspiracy to obtain and illegally export sensitive technology to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The part-owner and chief operations manager of the Multimillion Business Associate Corporation in Hacienda Heights, California, Lee was charged with assisting unnamed people in the PRC to illegally procure export-controlled thermal-imaging cameras in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and Export Administration Regulations. The prosecution alleged that between April 2002 and July 2007, and after they had been made aware of the export restrictions, the Lees exported 10 cameras. Charles Lee purchased them from suppliers for about $9,500 each and gave them to his uncle for shipment to China. One of the recipients was identified as an employee of a company in Shanghai engaged in developing infrared technology. See also OVERSEAS CHINESE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
LEE LAN. See GE YUEFEI.
LE-FANG WEI. See WEI LEFANG.
LEUNG, KATRINA. See PARLOR MAID.
LIANG XIUWEN. In February 2003, 34-year-old Liang Xiuwen, known as Jennifer Liang, was arrested with her 48-year-old husband, Zhuang Jinghua, and charged with conspiring to illegally export to China F-14 fighter parts and components for the Hawk, TOW, and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles systems. Together, they owned Maytone International in Thousand Oaks, California, and on 15 April 2005, Liang was sentenced to 30 months’ imprisonment and fined $6,000 after her husband had been sentenced to 30 months’ imprisonment. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
LIAO HO-SHU. In January 1969, the 42-year-old acting Chinese chargé d’affaires in the Netherlands, Liao Ho-shu, turned up at the Dutch police headquarters wearing only pajamas and a raincoat and requested political asylum. A few days later, he was flown to the United States for debriefing by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Three years earlier, in July 1966, Liao had been involved in the abduction and death of a 42-year-old engineer, Hsu Tzu-tsai, who had been forcibly removed from his bed in the Red Cross Hospital after he had been found badly injured in the street, allegedly following a fall from a window. His removal from the X-ray department, where his skull fracture and spinal injuries were undergoing treatment, had been orchestrated by Liao. However, according to a bulletin released by the New China News Agency, Hsu had been induced by a “secret U.S. agent” to desert and betray his country. The Chinese chargé, Li Enzhou, revealed that Hsu had died of his injuries after he had been returned to the Chinese embassy, so the Dutch police surrounded the building, demanding access to the eight other engineers in Hsu’s delegation to find out what had really happened. The Chinese retaliated by announcing the expulsion of the Dutch chargé in Beijing but refused to allow him an exit permit until the Chinese engineers had been released.
This diplomatic standoff lasted for five months until the end of the year when a compromise was reached and the Dutch police were allowed into the surrounded premises to conduct an inconclusive investigation.
LI CHU-SHENG. The long-serving deputy director of the New China News Agency in Hong Kong, Li Chu-sheng was widely regarded during the Cold War as the senior Chinese intelligence officer in the colony and had previously served as the Chinese chargé d’affaires in Djakarta, Indonesia.
LI FENGZHI. In 2004, Li Fengzhi, a 36-year-old PhD graduate of the Beijing Institute of International Relations, where he had been taught by the principal, Liu Hui, and a member of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), defected to the United States. He had joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1995; although, he was sympathetic to the pro-democracy demonstrators and was recruited originally as a technical support officer at the MSS office, known as Unit 8475, in Liaoning Province.
The MSS sent Li to Denver to study for a PhD in politics and diplomatic philosophy, but while there, he applied for political asylum, a request that was resisted by the U.S. government. Federal prosecutors initially claimed that Li was not really an MSS officer but merely an academic who was attempting to pass himself off as one in an effort to remain in the United States. After a federal judge ruled in favor of Li, the prosecutors submitted an appeal, asserting that he was a threat to national security.
In March 2009, five years after he had been resettled in the United States, Li stated that the MSS spends most of its time trying to steal secrets overseas but also works to ensure the security of the CCP by monitoring and repressing internal political dissent and religious activity. He also described the MSS’s internal counterintelligence role in China, targeted against a perceived threat from foreign intelligence agencies. Li confirmed that the MSS’s primary goal, as set out in a highly restricted internal manual, patterned after the Soviet Union’s KGB, is to “control the Chinese people to maintain the rule of the Communist Party.”
According to Li, the MSS concentrates on the penetration of the U.S. intelligence community and the collection of Western secrets and technology. He also described the censorship of the Internet to prevent the Chinese population from learning about the outside world. While recognizing the need to develop the MSS’s existing liaison relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to counter international terrorism, Li warned that American agencies should approach such cooperation with caution as the MSS is an organ of the Communist Party and does not directly serve the interests of China or its people.
LI JAIQI. Released from prison in the People’s Republic of China in 1975 after having served 28 years on charges of having spied for Taiwan, Li Jaiqi returned to Beijing in 1981, accompanied by his courier, Cai Ping, and his adopted daughter, Qiu Yunnei. All three were arrested in June 1983, and Li, aged 56, was sentenced to life imprisonment for having sent more than 120 messages concealed in secret ink. Cai received three years and Qiu five, for passing confidential documents to her father. See also NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB).
LI KENONG. One of the top three intelligence officers working for Zhou Enlai, Li Kenong was a deputy chief of staff in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and a vice-minister for foreign affairs. In 1947, he was appointed head of theCentral Department of Social Affairs, replacing Kang Sheng, and then, in 1955, headed the Central Investigation Department. He died in 1962 and was succeeded by Luo Qingchang.
LILLEY, JAMES. The first Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station chief to serve at the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, established to move toward the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in 1973, Jim Lilley was appointed following talks between Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong. Between 1951 and 1974, Lilley worked in the Far East Division of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, serving in Vientiane between 1965 and 1968 and, in 1984, was appointed the U.S. representative in Taipei. In 1989, he was posted by President George H. W. Bush to Beijing as ambassador and remained there until his retirement in 1991.
Born in Qingdao, China, in 1928, where his father was an executive with Standard Oil and his mother a teacher, and known by the Chinese name Li Jieming, Lilley learned to speak Mandarin as fluently as he spoke English and French. In Taiwan, between 1982 and 1984, Lilley often met President Chiang Ching-kuo and other leaders in and out of government and was exceptionally well informed about local conditions and political developments.
Soon after Lilley’s appointment in Beijing, the scale of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square escalated, and the CIA’s station in Hong Kong warned that an attempt might be made to seize the pro-democracy leader Fang Lizhi from his refuge in the U.S. embassy. Diplomats observed the protestors and troops from monitoring points and vehicles and by listening in, with permission, on ABC-TV’s internal radio communications. As tension rose, the military attaché Larry Wortzel received a warning by telephone to evacuate the diplomats’ apartments before the People’s Liberation Armyraked the buildings with rifle fire. As the crisis developed, Lilley’s Confidential contacts provided some insight into debates among the Chinese leadership.
In his 2005, memoirs China Hands Lilley recalled having been present in 1977 when Vice President George H. W. Bush met Deng Xiaoping and describes the administration’s debate over the August 1982 communiqué with the PRC that was supposed to limit U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and mentions a secret Ronald Reagan memorandum that effectively nullified the communiqué. He also revealed Reagan’s simultaneous “six assurances” to Taiwan that promised no pressure to negotiate with Beijing and describes the controversial arms sales to Taiwan, which included the Indigenous Defense Fighter and the F-16 fighter.
Widely recognized as probably the only American diplomat to have been admired and trusted by both the governments of Taiwan and the PRC, Lilley was appointed the U.S. ambassador to South Korea in 1986. While in Seoul, he delivered a personal letter from President Ronald Reagan to Korean President Chun Doo Hwan that helped avert a military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. After his retirement in 1988, Lilley continued to write and comment on Chinese issues and died on 15 November 2009 in Washington DC.
LIN BIAO. During the night of 12 September 1971, Lin Biao, minister of defense and deputy to Mao Zedong, was killed when his aircraft, a British-built Trident, crashed in Mongolia while apparently en route to the Soviet Union. Soon afterward, rumors circulated that Lin, who in 1969 had been designated as Mao’s heir apparent, had been involved with his wife (Ye Qun), their son, and a group of senior military staff officers in a plot to assassinate Mao and replace him. Among those who were purged following Lin’s death were Huang Yongsheng, the chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and the air force commander, Wu Faxian. Rumors also persist that Lin’s death was the result of some clandestine intervention by the ubiquitous intelligence chief Kang Sheng, who supposedly had arranged for an air accident to be staged as cover for the murder of Lin and his associates in Beijing. Kang himself headed the group that investigated the death of Lin, noting that the bodies recovered at the crash scene and turned over to the Soviets were unrecognizable.
After his death, Lin was condemned as a traitor and, along with his former political ally, Jiang Qing, was accused of being a “major counterrevolutionary.” Lin is also considered to have been one of the most able commanders of the PLA, having been especially effective during China’s Civil War when he directed the PLA’s conquest of Manchuria and personally led his Red Army troops into Peking. However, his involvement in the Cultural Revolution and his effort in 1971 to restore the position of state chairman led to his being mistrusted by Mao, and he joined the ranks of many who, though loyal, were betrayed by Mao and Kang.
LINDSAY, MICHAEL. A British academic and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) wireless operator, Michael Lindsay was politically sympathetic to the Communist forces to which he was attached in Yunnan Province in 1943. As an adviser on radio communications, Lindsay was in a good position to keep SIS informed of local conditions and developments and, according to Richard Aldrich’s Intelligence and the War against Japan, was a key source for the British and ensured they were well informed about Mao Zedong. See also GREAT BRITAIN.
LIN HAI. On 3 May 2001, Lin Hai (aged 30), Xu Kai (aged 33), and Cheng Yongqing (aged 37) were indicted in New Jersey for stealing proprietary information from Lucent Technologies and selling it to the state-owned Datang Telecom Technology Company, one of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) largest phone and computer manufacturers. Having obtained advanced degrees in America before joining Lucent at very large salaries, Lin and Xu had business visas. Cheng, a naturalized American, was the vice president of Village Networks, a New Jersey-based information technology company.
According to a further indictment issued in April 2002, the trio had created a company, ComTriad Technologies, and received $1.2 million from Datang as part of a joint venture to produce computer software for use in low-cost Internet data services. Having stolen Lucent’s PathStar software system, they marketed it to Datang as the CLX-1000.
Lucent had extensive business dealings in the PRC, having signed lucrative contracts and invested millions in Chinese companies, and Datang denied emphatically that it had engaged in anything improper. Accordingly, in September 2001, the U.S. district attorney requested the PRC government’s cooperation to obtain documents relating to Datang’s relationship with ComTriad and sought permission to interview Datang employees. A year later, the request was granted, and in 2003, prosecutors set a precedent by taking depositions from Datang employees for a trial to be held in the United States. However, in 2004, Lin jumped bail, presumably returning to China, and all charges were dropped against Xu and Cheng. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
LI QING. On 26 September 2008, Li Qing was sentenced in California to a year and one day in custody, followed by three years of supervised release, and fined $7,500 for conspiring to smuggle military-grade accelerometers from the United States to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). According to the prosecution, Li conspired with an unindicted coconspirator in China to obtain up to 30 Endevco 7270A-200K accelerometers for what she was told was a “special” scientific agency in the PRC. The accelerator has military applications in the development of missiles and smart bombs and in calibrating the g-forces of nuclear and chemical explosions.
Li originally approached Endevco to purchase and export the accelerators, but the company notified federal authorities who set up a sting operation. When told by an undercover agent that “I don’t think the U.S. Government will give us a license to export these items to China,” Li replied that she did not wish to get into trouble and would refer the matter to a friend. The agent then received an e-mail sent from chinaman326@hotmail.com, who still wanted to purchase the items, and investigators established that the source of the message was in Beijing. Previously, the same hotmail account had been accessed from an Internet account belonging to Li’s husband, and an intercept on Li’s telephone revealed calls to a number in Beijing. At one point, Li conducted a three-way telephone call with the agent and her coconspirator to discuss the delivery of the accelerometers to the PRC. Li was indicted on 18 October 2007 and pleaded guilty on 9 June 2008. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
LI SHAOMIN. In July 2001, an American academic, Li Shaomin, was convicted in Beijing on charges of having spied for Taiwan. Born in China, Li had a doctorate from Princeton University and was employed as a teacher at a Hong Kong university when he was arrested, according to the People’s Daily, which referred to his guilty plea and recent examples of Taiwanese agents using sex to lure Chinese students to adopt “a hostile ideology.” See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
LI TSUNG-JEN. In 1965, the 74-year-old General Li Tsung-jen, a former vice president and acting president of the Republic of China in 1947, who in 1950 had settled in Eaglewood Hills, New Jersey, rather than move to Taiwan, flew to Switzerland with his wife and defected to Beijing. Long a political opponent of Chiang Kai-shek, Li later claimed that he had been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the generalissimo in a coup and had fled the country to avoid being pressured into participating in the plot.
LITTLE SAI WAN. The local signals intelligence analytical site on Hong Kong Island’s east coast, Little Sai Wan was the Far East headquarters of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), monitoring radio communications inside mainland China. From its establishment in 1953, under Royal Air Force control, the facility became part of GCHQ’s worldwide Composite Signals Organization in January 1964, received signals intercepted at Chung Hum Kok and at Old Belvedere atop Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island and from Tai Mo Shan and Tai Wei in the New Territories. Prior to civilianization in January 1964, when GCHQ took over responsibility for signals intelligence operations in Hong Kong, the task had been divided between the Royal Navy on Stonecutter’s Island and some 500 officers and men of the Royal Air Force 367 and 743 Signals Units. In addition, an 18-strong detachment from the Royal Australian Air Force’s 3 Telecommunications Unit, based at RAAF Pearce in Western Australia, provided additional support.
In August 1954, a total of 15 wireless positions were operational at Old Belvedere, with a further 23 sets working at the other stations, producing 30,315 intercepts. By December, the intercepts grew to 43,782, generated by a total of 50 sets. By the following year, 53 sets, working for 5,038 hours a week, produced 49,804 intercepts. In March 1957, 64 sets, averaging 7,003 hours a week, produced 61,149 intercepts.
The 367 Signals Unit was disbanded in 1962, and Little Sai Wan closed down in 1982 and moved to a purpose-built facility at Chung Hum Kok, on the southern side of Hong Kong Island, and, in January 1995, was transferred to the Australian Defence Signals Directorate base at Kojarena, near Geraldton, in Western Australia. See also GREAT BRITAIN.
LIU, HENRY. A prominent Chinese American and author who wrote under the pen name Chiang Nan, Henry Liu was shot dead in the garage of his home in Daly City, California, in October 1984, apparently to silence his many articles critical of the Republic of China (ROC). The biographer of Chiang Ching-kuo, Liu had made powerful enemies but, having agreed to tone down his comments and having accepted a retainer from the notorious Intelligence Bureau of the Ministry of National Defense, had been assassinated.
His killers, led by Chen Chi-li, fled to Taiwan, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered a videotape implicating the Kuomintang, and eventually evidence emerged that the assassination had been ordered by Vice Admiral Wang Hsi-ling. Chen Chi-li was convicted of the murder, as was Tung Kuei-sen, who stood trial in the United States in 1988. Lui’s widow, Helen Liu, later sued the ROC in the American courts, and following a major political scandal in Taipei, her claim was settled. An account of the case was published in Fires of the Dragon by David E. Kaplan. See alsoNATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB).
LIU SIXING. In March 2011, Sixing (“Steve”) Liu, an engineer employed by L-3 Communications, was arrested and charged with illegally exporting proprietary military data to the People’s Republic of China. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
LI YEH-TSENG. Expelled from Addis Ababa in 1968 with his wife, Chen Chun-ying, Li Yeh-Tseng was a career New China News Agency (NCNA) professional and an intelligence officer. After military service, prior to 1949, he headed the reporting from the Korean War, was appointed a regional news editor in Beijing, and, in 1958, was transferred to the Middle East, where he headed the NCNA bureau in Damascus.
LO CHEN-HSU. In 1983, Lo Chen-hsu, the left-wing editor of the Hong Kong New Evening Post, which followed a pro-Beijing editorial policy, was arrested while on a visit to the People’s Republic of China and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for passing information to the United States. Having confessed, Lo was released after a few months.
LO HSIEN-CHE. On 25 January 2011, 51-year-old Major-General Lo Hsien-che, head of the telecommunications and information warfare department of the Taiwanese army’s command headquarters for the previous three years, was arrested and charged with having been recruited as a spy by the mainland Chinese in 2004, when he was serving in Bangkok as a military attaché. Allegedly, he had been ensnared in a classic honeytrap by a tall, elegant, young woman who traveled on an Australian passport.
The recently retired secretary-general of Taiwan’s National Security Council, General Ting Yu-chou, commented that it would have been easy for Lo to have gained access to “extremely confidential military information of great value to the mainland, such as combat operation plans,” which was interpreted as a suggestion that Lo had betrayed vulnerabilities of the Po Sheng communications system, a network built by Lockheed Martin to link Taiwan directly to the U.S. Pacific Command in the event of a conflict. Such contingency plans are regarded as exceptionally sensitive, and Lo enjoyed some access to them during the period he was engaged in espionage. As a consequence, Taiwan introduced new security screening procedures, including the use of polygraphs for officers promoted to senior posts.
LONG MARCH. In February 1996, a Long March-3D rocket carrying the Loral Intelsat 708 satellite into orbit failed upon liftoff at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center and crashed into a local village. This incident was the third such incident involving commercial payloads in 38 months and prompted an independent investigation sponsored by the launch provider, the China Great Wall Industry Corporation. Headed by Loral’s Dr. Wah Lim, a technical committee included respected industry experts from Hughes Space and Communications, Daimler-Benz Aerospace, and retirees from Intelsat, British Aerospace, and General Dynamics and conducted a thorough review of the incident, concluding that there could have been several possible causes of the accident and not just the one found by the initial Chinese enquiry. This verdict was accepted by the launch provider, which was led by the independent review committee to the principal problem.
However, the advice proffered by the committee had not been submitted in advance to the State Department or cleared by the appropriate authorities, prompting an investigation pursued by the U.S. Defense Technology Security Administration, which alleged that Hughes and Loral had inadvertently passed sensitive information to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which had not been covered by the original Intelsat export license granted to cover the launch. In the Department of Defense’s final assessment, “Loral and Hughes committed a serious export control violation by virtue of having performed a defense service without a license,” and the matter was referred to the Department of Justice for consideration of prosecution.
The Long March, also known as the Chang Zeng or CZ, is the PRC’s principal and most reliable launch system and is scheduled to be improved by the introduction of the CZ-5, due to be operational in 2014. The next generation of rocket, the Pioneer (Kaituoxhe) or KT series, has been under development since 2000 and reportedly has failed in five test flights attempted in 2009 and 2011. See also CHINA AEROSPACE CORPORATION (CAC); TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA); WENCHANG SATELLITE LAUNCH CENTER.
LOVELL, JOHN S. The most senior American intelligence officer to be captured and interrogated by the enemy during the Korean War, Colonel John S. Lovell, aged 46, was taken prisoner on 12 December 1950, when his RB-45C Tornado was shot down by Soviet MiG-15s while on a reconnaissance mission over the Yalu River. Although his pilot, Captain McDonough, and the jet’s other two aircrew were killed, Lovell survived and was questioned by both Soviet and North Korean interrogators. As a member of General Pearre Cabell’s air intelligence staff at the Pentagon, Lovell was exceptionally well informed and was found to be carrying a restricted U.S. Air Force handbook on the Soviet order of battle. His belligerent attitude enraged his North Korean captors who paraded him through a local village wearing a placard identifying him as a war criminal, and he was beaten to death by the local inhabitants.
Following Lovell’s death, and the loss of a potentially priceless source of information, Chinese People’s Liberation Army personnel took over the supervision of all prisoner interrogations, and a total of 262 U.S. Air Force pilots underwent the experience. After the armistice, several pilots remained in Chinese hands, including a Canadian, Squadron Leader Andrew MacKenzie, who was not released until 4 December 1954, and the following year, four F-86 pilots were freed, leaving an unknown number unaccounted for, among them Wing Commander John Baldwin, a Sabre pilot who went missing over Korea, and nine other RAF aircrew. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
LU FU-TAIN. In April 2009, a 61-year-old Silicon Valley businessman, Lu Fu-Tain, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and charged with illegally exporting microwave amplifiers to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The technology, with a military application, was the subject of a trade embargo, and Lu was alleged to have instructed employees to conceal the equipment’s true destination. Lu had founded two companies, Fushine Technology of Cupertino, California, and Everjet Science and Technology Corporation, based in the PRC. The indictment quoted an internal company e-mail from Everjet to Fushine, “Since these products are a little bit sensitive, in case the maker ask you where the location of the end user is, please do not mention it is in China.” In another e-mail, Lu instructed a subordinate to pretend the end user was Singapore rather than China. Lu was charged with one count of conspiring to violate export regulations, two counts of making false statements to a government agency, and one count of violating U.S. export regulations. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
LUNEV, STANISLAV. One of the very few Soviet military intelligence officers to defect, Colonel Stanislav Lunev worked at the Russian Federation embassy in Washington DC under diplomatic cover in May 1992, when he was granted political asylum to remain in the United States. When debriefed by the Central Intelligence Agency, he revealed that he had previously been posted to the Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie’s (GRU) rezidentura in Beijing, between May 1980 and December 1983, under TASS news agency cover.
Born in 1946, Lunev graduated from the Suvorov Military Academy in 1964 and studied Chinese at Nanyang University in Singapore. According to him, he had replaced a GRU officer, Oleg Mastrukov, at the TASS bureau, which was headed by the embassy rezident, Vasili Soloviev, until September 1980, when he was succeeded by his deputy, Evgeni Kalachev. As recruiting local Chinese was considered a next-to-impossible task because of the scale of hostile surveillance (which often amounted to harassment and even violence), the rezidentura concentrated on the cultivation of Western journalists and relied for information on friendly Yugoslav, Czech, and Vietnamese intermediaries. One successful recruitment was an Italian correspondent, codenamed ZAG, who enjoyed good access to the Communist Party and had been granted an interview with Li Xiannian. Although Lunev asserted that “Chinese counterintelligence officers outnumber foreigners almost one hundred to one,” he was the first Soviet “in at least five years to recruit a Chinese national.” His first agent was Zhan, a student at Peking University and the son of a local army district divisional commander, with access to classified Central Committee papers, but he was ordered to drop him on the grounds that Zhan’s information was too good to be true and most likely he was a double agent.
Lunev’s second recruitment was Lu, an engineer at the Beijing Metallurgy factory, who supplied data on locally manufactured weapons, and his third was Zhao, a railway official, whose girlfriend, Jiang, worked in a department at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, handling arms exports to Africa. Both supplied valuable information, and Zhao would later be sponsored by the GRU to immigrate, via Singapore, Australia, and Canada, to the United States, where he had a relation employed by Northrop on stealth technology.
Lunev’s account of the GRU’s operations in Beijing included a hair-raising episode in which one of his colleagues, Stepan Koldov, had been lured to a rendezvous by an agent who had been caught and turned by the Ministry of State Security (MSS). At the last moment, the rezidentura’s ZENIT intercept station discovered that some 200 MSS personnel and 24 surveillance cars had been alerted to Koldov’s departure from the embassy, so he was given a signal to abort the meeting. The GRU believed that the MSS intended to beat Koldov to death and then claim he had been set upon by outraged local citizens.
MACAO. A Portuguese colony until December 1999, when sovereignty was passed to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to become a Special Administrative Region, Macao was a target for intelligence collection operations conducted by the Ministry of State Security’s (MSS) Third Bureau through its local representative cover organization, the New China News Agency (Xinhua). One such MSS operation, codenamed WINTER CHRYSANTHEMUM, was reportedly targeted against individuals and companies from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Known as Dongtian Juhua or simply Dongju in colloquial Chinese, the Third Bureau supervised operations in both territories and targeted individuals with local associations. While some agents were in place at the time of the 1949 conquest of the mainland, most are thought to have been more recent arrivals, often representing themselves as businessmen or people with professional occupations. The MSS relies on the bureau to monitor foreign political organizations figures, to penetrate political groups deemed to be potentially hostile or subversive and watch their contacts with outside political groups, and to maintain surveillance on Taiwanese organizations and their leaders, especially those with military connections. Although Third Bureau personnel are assigned to specific targets, the MSS allows them to pursue related cases should the opportunity present itself.
During the Cold War, especially after the withdrawal of the Portuguese secret police (the PVDE) following the 1974 revolution in Portugal, Macao was a convenient environment for the MSS to meet agents, create front companies, and use the territory as a conduit for clandestine procurement programs. See also CHEN YONGLIN; CHIN, LARRY WU-TAI; HOLT, HAROLD; MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT (MID); SUN YAT-SEN; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
MACKIERNAN, DOUGLAS. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Douglas Mackiernan was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who lost his life in Tibet under mysterious circumstances in 1950. During World War II, he had served in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and it is believed that he was on a secret mission to Lhasa for the CIA when he was beheaded by Tibetan soldiers.
Operating under consular cover and accompanied by Frank Bessac, an academic who left the CIA in 1947, Mackiernan was killed during a shooting incident on the frontier, which also resulted in the deaths of two other members of the group, which had made an epic, two-month journey across the desert from Sinkiang Province to establish contact with the Dalai Lama. The mission ended in double disaster because, as well as the perhaps avoidable loss of life, the Chinese Communists invaded soon afterward, using the presence of American spies as a pretext. In1959, in the midst of a brutal suppression of Tibetans by the People’s Liberation Army, the Dalai Lama fled into exile, and Tibet has been under uneasy occupation by the People’s Republic of China ever since.
It is alleged by his biographer, Thomas Laird in Into Tibet, that Mackiernan’s consular cover in Tihwa (today Ürümqi), subordinate to the U.S. embassy in Nanking, was to conceal his principal task, which had been to monitor and maybe sabotage Soviet extraction of uranium ore from Koktogai in neighboring Turkestan and to report on activity at the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, but the precise nature of his mission remains unknown. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
MAIHESUTI, BABUR. In March 2010, Babur Maihesuti, a 62-year-old Uighur who had been a political refugee in Sweden for the past 13 years, was sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment for spying on other Uighur expatriates for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Maihesuti was convicted of “aggravated illegal espionage activity” after he had been found to have collected personal information about exiled Uighurs, including details of their health, travel, and political activity, and then passed the material to a PRC diplomat and a Chinese journalist, who were PRC intelligence officers. He had also traveled to the United States in May 2009 to attend the Third General Assembly of the World Uighur Congress. In sentencing, the judge observed that by opening the door for a large power like China to spy on its nationals in Sweden, China could use the same network for other kinds of espionage. When the Swedish government declared the implicated diplomat persona non grata, Beijing retaliated by expelling a Swedish envoy.
MALAN. Named after a desert flower, Malan is the People’s Republic of China’s nuclear weapons test center in Xinjiang Province, located 1,200 miles west of Beijing near the city of Uxxaktal and known as “Base 21” and the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology. From the moment work began on the site in 1960, to accommodate 2,000 military personnel and 8,000 civilian technicians and support staff, it was the target of foreign intelligence collection, and in 1964, it received “596,” the atomic weapon that was detonated at Lop Nor on 16 October. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; SENIOR BOWL.
MALAYAN EMERGENCY. The Chinese-inspired insurgency in Malaya between 1948 and 1957 was intended to undermine the newly created Federation of Malaya and was opposed by Great Britain, initially by a police Special Branch, a small security service headed by Colonel John Dalley, and army military intelligence units led by the local director of military intelligence, Colonel Paul Gleadell, with additional support from Combined Intelligence Far East(CIFE), located in Singapore and headed by Dick Ellis of the Secret Intelligence Service. However, there was a lack of interagency cooperation because of a legacy of bitterness over the wartime activities of Force 136 personnel who disobeyed orders in 1941 to surrender to the Japanese and instead fought a guerrilla war in the jungle while others endured captivity. Opposed only by a dysfunctional local security apparatus, the Chinese-sponsored insurgents gained a considerable advantage when the secretary-general of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), Lai Tek, was exposed in March 1947 as a long-term Special Branch asset who had been recruited in 1939.
MI5’s E Branch, responsible for colonial affairs, was represented in Kuala Lumpur by a security liaison officer (SLO), Arthur Martin, and in Singapore by Courtenay Young and then Alex Kellar and Jack Morton. The appointment of Sir William Jenkin as security adviser was intended to coordinate CIFE, Special Branch, and the Security Service, but it was the arrival in 1950 of Sir Robert Thomson as director of operations that transformed the response to the challenge posed by the MCP.
In 1952, upon the resignation of Police Commissioner Colonel William Nicol Gray, General Sir Gerald Templer took over as high commissioner and began to isolate the MCP by recruiting a large home guard and armed police militia. Under Templer, MI5 provided Arthur Martin and Alec MacDonald to run the Special Branch in Kuala Lumpur, with Keith Wey as SLO and Guy Madoc heading the Security Service. One of their first measures was to introduce a comprehensive identity card system, which was intended to identify and isolate the insurgents who were known as Chinese Terrorists or simply “CTs.”
Using informers, the Special Branch developed an accurate order of battle for the CTs and their civilian supporters, the Min Yuen, and was able to help the security forces pinpoint the CTs’ jungle hideouts. In October 1951, under increasing pressure, Lai Tek’s successor, Chin Peng, gathered his Politburo together for a meeting with Chinese People’s Liberation Army advisers to change the MCP’s tactics, which were contained in a document that became known as the October Directive. In effect, the strategy of indiscriminate attacks on villages, post offices, laborers, reservoirs, and electricity power stations was deemed to be counterproductive, and instead, the MCP would concentrate its effort on British mining and plantation staff and their families so as to avoid alienating the general population.
In April 1952, the defection of a senior Min Yuen leader, Nam Fook, led to a major defeat for the CTs, a setback that was followed in May by the beheading of an MCP Central Committee member, “Shorty” Kuk, by his own bodyguards, who claimed a reward of $200,000. Then in July, the notorious “Bearded Terror of Kajang,” Liew Kon Kim, was trapped in his jungle camp, which was protected by a swamp, and shot dead during a sweep of the area by a British patrol acting on Special Branch intelligence. Other defectors included a regional political officer, Moo Tay Mei, and a senior commander, Ming Lee, who simply became disillusioned with the MCP.
It was the defection of another senior MCP official, Hor Lung, who surrendered to a lone policeman in April 1958, that proved the campaign’s turning point. Encouraged by the promise of an immense reward, Hor Lung spent four months moving from camp to camp, telling the cadres that the MCP had abandoned military action. Altogether, 152 CTs and 28 of their top commanders obeyed his order to surrender, thus incapacitating the MCP permanently. A further roundup in Johore in August 1958, codenamed TIGER, eliminated the remaining CTs, and by the end of the year, the Special Branch estimated that there were only 868 CTs at large, of whom 485 had taken refuge in southern Thailand.
The application of orthodox counterintelligence techniques to counter the terrorists resulted in their penetration, and a relationship with the MCP’s charismatic leader Chin Ping, cultivated by his former Force 136 commander, John Davies, ensured the insurgency’s ultimate defeat. With skillful management, Chin effectively destroyed the threat from the MCP and provided a model for intelligence-led counterinsurgency campaigns. The strategy proved so effective that it was repeated in the Borneo conflict, and Sir Robert Thompson recommended the adoption of similar tactics in Vietnam. In 1957, the jungle fighting came to an end, and the Emergency was terminated in 1960, three years after independence, and Chin Peng published his memoirs, My Side of History, in Singapore in 2003.
MALAYAN PEOPLES’ ANTI-JAPANESE ARMY (MPAJA). Upon the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942, 165 members of the Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist Party (MCP) slipped into the jungle and underwent training by British personnel in guerrilla tactics to harass the enemy. Thus, the MCP, with strong intelligence links to the Chinese Communist Party, formed the nucleus of the MPAJA, an organization that would grow to a strength of 10,000 and be trained and armed by Force 136, the regional Special Operations Executive organization.
Created in 1929 by Chinese veterans of the Comintern’s Far East Bureau in Shanghai, the MCP exercised considerable influence over the local Hainanese community in Malaya and, by 1937, virtually controlled the labor movement, even after the party had been outlawed by the British colonial administration. However, following the Japanese occupation, the MCP provided the only disciplined resistance to the enemy, outmaneuvered the local Kuomintang (KMT), and received support from the British. By February 1943, the MPAJA was in direct contact with Force 136 in Ceylon and received liaison personnel (who were infiltrated into the country by air and submarine) and large quantities of weapons. With this logistical support, the MPAJA eliminated the rival Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Army, sponsored by the KMT, and prepared for a major campaign in 1945, timed to coincide with operation ZIPPER, the liberation of Malaya by Allied troops from India.
However, the unexpected Japanese surrender in August 1945 gave the MPAJA the opportunity to disarm the enemy and seize the country before British and Indian troops could take control. However, divisions within the MCP prevented its leader, Lai Tek, from mounting a coup, and by September, the British had established a military administration in Kuala Lumpur and regained much of the countryside. The MPAJA agreed to be disarmed and surrendered 5,497 small arms but omitted to reveal the location of jungle caches containing Japanese weapons, which would later be used by a hard core of 4,000 MPAJA veterans, who went underground to continue a campaign against the British, masterminded by the MCP, which, in June 1948, resulted in the declaration of an emergency. See also GREAT BRITAIN; MALAYAN EMERGENCY.
MAO ZEDONG. Born in 1893, in Hunan Province, Mao came from a peasant background; although, his father, a farmer and grain dealer, attained wealth. For the next several years, Mao alternated between study and work on the farm, eventually embracing Marxist theories, and attended the first session of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in 1921. He developed a unique view of Marxism, which became known as Maoism, a distinctive, peasant-based revolutionary theory, emphasizing guerilla warfare and “winning hearts and minds” through education. He gained increasing influence within the CCP and, in 1934, led his army on the 6,000-mile Long March from Jiangxi to Shaanxi, fleeing the Kuomintang (KMT) army of Chiang Kai-shek. This year-long epic journey on which he was joined by such luminaries as Zhu De, He Long, Deng Xiaoping, and, later, Zhou Enlai, served to consolidate Mao’s control over the CCP.
Mao early on embraced the use of torture against those opposed to him and established a reputation as a ruthless disciplinarian, eliminating all opponents, whether real or imagined. The final withdrawal to Formosa of the KMT in 1949 led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and years of constant upheaval, with various five-year plans, the Great Leap Forward, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and finally the Cultural Revolution. Throughout these episodes, Mao was able to survive because of his complete control of the intelligence apparatus.
At Mao’s direction, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), or Gong’anbu, was formed and reflected the brutal and sadistic personality of its founder, Kang Sheng. Although its primary mission, based on the Soviet NKVD model, was the protection of the CCP, it also fostered the cult of personality surrounding Mao himself. The MPS was largely replaced in 1983 by a rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping when he formed the Ministry of State Security (Guojia Anquanbu),but the MPS remains a powerful and sinister presence in the PRC. Mao died in September 1976, having outlived Kang Sheng (who died in 1975) and Zhou Enlai.
MASK. Between February 1934 and January 1937, the British Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) intercepted and read clandestine wireless traffic exchanged between the Comintern headquarters in Moscow and various illicit stations overseas, including one in Shanghai. Analysis of the signals, codenamed MASK, revealed the existence of a worldwide Communist organization and provided clues to the true identity of hundreds of Soviet agents in the Far East. Altogether, 939 messages from Moscow were read and 634 from London, making a total of 1,573 decrypts. The length of the individual messages varied from a couple of lines to several paragraphs, but they revealed the scale of the Kremlin’s global espionage network. See also GREAT BRITAIN; SOVIET UNION.
MENG, XIAODONG SHELDON. A 44-year-old Canadian software engineer, Meng Xiaodong Sheldon pled guilty in August 2007 at Cupertino, California, to charges of having violated the Economic Espionage Act and the Arms Export Control Act. On 18 June 2008, Meng was sentenced to 24 months’ imprisonment and fined $10,000 for the theft from his employer, Quantum3D Inc. of the source code for the Mantis 1.5.5 program, a fighter training system, apparently for the Navy Research Center in Beijing. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
MENG HONG. Having worked for DuPont for 11 years researching organic light-emitting diodes, Meng Hong was found guilty in June 2010 of transferring the company’s proprietary information about chemical processes to his e-mail account at Peking University. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
MI5. The British Security Service branch responsible for monitoring the activities of suspected intelligence officers operating from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embassy in Portland Place routinely reported that it was unable to provide adequate coverage of the 500 accredited diplomats in London, by far the largest diplomatic mission in the capital. According to the Ministry of State Security defector PLANESMAN, the embassy was “the most productive in terms of reporting” on science and technology of all the MSS’s overseas stations and had been rated fourth in overall importance.
In 1987, the Cabinet Office established an interdepartmental working group to study the problem and received a report from MI5’s K (counterespionage) Branch, recording that, as well as the large group of intelligence personnel based at the embassy, there were some 2,000 students at an estimated 300 different colleges in Great Britain and that several thousand delegates of various kinds were granted visas annually. As a result, protective security advisers from C Branch embarked on a program of improving the awareness of “List X,” defense contractors engaged on classified work who had developed links with Beijing and had accepted visiting Chinese on work experience schemes.
The Cabinet assessment in 1988 concluded that “the Chinese Government is not hostile to the British Government or NATO in the way the Soviet Government and the Warsaw Pact are. We should recognize the distinction between [Soviet] spying with the hostile intent of gaining an advantage over an enemy, and [Chinese] spying with the purely selfish intent of gaining a national advantage.”
Nevertheless, the official British policy remained committed to improving bilateral relations with Beijing and encouraging the People’s Liberation Army to send officers on British training courses. Indeed, MI5 reported, “The Chinese enjoy an access to the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces that is not afforded to any other Communist country” and noted that the Chinese were “now authorized to receive Confidential information from the MoD.”
In 2009, MI5 circulated a 14-page document, The Threat from Chinese Espionage, to 300 selected British banks, businesses, and financial institutions, which described a widespread Chinese effort to honeytrap vulnerable men, asserting that the Chinese intelligence services try to cultivate “long-term relationships” and have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships . . . to pressurize individuals to co-operate with them.”
How the Chinese Intelligence Services Meet Their Intelligence Requirements
The Chinese intelligence services acquire political, military, commercial and scientific intelligence by targeting foreigners and foreign organisations that have come to their attention through any number of ways, anywhere in the world. For example, presence at trade fairs, exhibitions, conferences, lectures, membership of institutes, research facilities, language training in China, the diplomatic or social circuit, military duty, media, publicity and websites. It is also possible that they might identify you as being of interest through the information you use to apply for a visa, particularly if you mention you are a government official or the employee of a high tech company.
It is worth noting that ethnic Chinese, whatever their nationality, are likely to be at greater risk of approach by the Chinese intelligence services because of their perceived shared heritage and potential to help the “mother country.”
The Human Approach
The Chinese intelligence services generally take a non-confrontational approach when dealing with foreigners. An undercover intelligence officer might be introduced to the person being targeted by a legitimate Chinese contact as a friend or colleague. The undercover intelligence officer will then try to develop a friendship or business relationship with the target in order to elicit sensitive information. This process can last years. If the target is considered to be an expert in their field they might be invited to give lectures to an invited audience and to share ideas on an all expenses trip. The combination of lavish hospitality and flattery can be very effective in encouraging the target to open up more than they had perhaps intended. The target might not be aware that they have been disclosing information of value to the Chinese intelligence services, much less that the Chinese consider them to have been recruited.
While the Chinese intelligence services prefer to use friendship and gentle persuasion to achieve their aims, they will also exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurise individuals to cooperate with them. They may also try to elicit cooperation from people of Chinese descent by threatening family members who still live in China.
ESPIONAGE: CHINA
1. The threat of espionage did not end with the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s. A number of countries are continuing to seek sensitive information from UK sources. Traditionally state-sponsored espionage has been carried out for geo-political reasons—to protect the state from foreign threats or to maintain a state’s political regime. However, commercial espionage is a method for a country to maintain its position in world affairs through the development of a strong economy. Examples of commercial espionage include the theft of trade secrets, copyrights or other confidential material, such as contractual agreements and details of negotiating positions.
2. It is estimated that at least 20 foreign intelligence services are currently operating in the UK against UK interests. The Russian and Chinese intelligence services are particularly active, and currently present the greatest concern. For example, the number of Russian intelligence officers in London is at the same level as in Soviet times.
3. The threat against UK interests is not confined to UK territory. Foreign intelligence services may find it easier to target UK interests in their home countries, where they have much greater freedom of action than they would have in the UK itself. Foreign intelligence services are also known to target UK interests in countries where there are far less restrictions and their activities may be tolerated or go undetected by the local authorities. They may also receive support from the host nation.
Introduction
1. The relationship between the UK and China is good and the UK Government is encouraging the growth in business. The UK is one of the largest investors in China and also receives significant inward investment from China. This bilateral trade is growing rapidly. China has been the UK’s fastest growing export market since 2002 and in December 2007 became the UK’s largest Asian export market. The continuing rapid growth of the Chinese economy is a major driver of world economic growth. This has benefits but also has challenges. For example, it has increased the competition faced by industries and business sectors in the rest of the world and it increases the competition for raw materials, such as hydrocarbons.
Why are the Chinese involved in commercial espionage?
1. With the death of Mao Zedong (first chairman of the Communist Party of China) and the end of the Cultural Revolution the Communist Party of China (CPC) realised that ideology alone was not sufficient to maintain power. The CPC recognised it would have to deliver a strong economy with material gain for the individual to ensure continued political dominance.
2. Deng Xiaoping (second chairman of the CPC) began China’s economic reform partially opening China to the global market. China’s economy has since grown rapidly. In its five-year economic plan (2006–2010) the CPC outlined that China must maintain fast and stable economic growth and support the building of a harmonious society. The CPC’s aim is to raise the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 7.5% annually for the next five years.
3. In order to achieve such rapid economic growth Chinese industry must retain a competitive edge. For example, other countries such as India and Vietnam are currently competing with China to offer cheap manufacturing bases for western companies. The increased demand for raw materials, such as oil and iron ore, and new environmental and labour laws, have led to cost increases making manufacturing in China more expensive. This has caused some factories to close suggesting that Chinese industry is struggling to compete in an open market. China is also attempting to diversify its economy, for example, through the manufacture of better made high end products. This diversification of the economy will require the Chinese to increase their knowledge of design and manufacturing processes.
4. Espionage offers a relatively cheap, quick and easy method to obtain information that can help Chinese companies remain competitive. Many of China’s biggest companies are state owned, or have close links to the state. They may receive intelligence collected by the Chinese intelligence services, and are also able to undertake commercial espionage for their own benefit. It is for these reasons that China currently represents one of the most significant threats to the UK.
What are the Chinese espionage priorities?
1. China’s espionage requirements usually fall into the following categories: political, military or economic. All parts of the UK’s national infrastructure fall into at least one of these categories. In terms of commercial espionage, the Chinese regime currently places a particular emphasis on aerospace, space, scientific research and military developments but it has also been active in the energy, raw materials, telecommunications and transport sectors.
2. In terms of UK industry, the Chinese have targeted defence, energy, communications and manufacturing companies. However, any UK company might be at risk if it holds information which could benefit the Chinese. For example, we are aware that other UK industries have been targeted by Chinese electronic espionage activity, these include public relations, business consultancies and international law firms. Some of these companies have been targeted in their own right; others have been “third parties” and used to target companies for which they provide services.
3. As well as China’s national espionage requirements there are likely to be regional requirements too. China has recently increased the level of autonomy in the provinces. This had meant that in some cases local officials have sufficient powers to request assistance from China’s intelligence services. As some local officials are in control of local companies they are able to use the intelligence services to their advantage, requesting information to increase the competitiveness of local companies. This is likely to result in China’s intelligence services taking an interest in a broad range of information from a variety of business sectors.
What information are the Chinese interested in?
1. Any information which could be used to give a competitive advantage is of interest to the Chinese. For example, we are aware that espionage has been used in attempts to gain information on military and defence technologies, details of patents and high-end design technology, commercial contract negotiations and during takeover bids.
Who is spying for the Chinese?
1. There are a number of organisations within China that have an intelligence gathering role. These civilian organisations such as the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Public Security, which collect foreign intelligence and monitor foreign visitors to China, Military organisations within the People’s Liberation Army are also responsible for collecting military intelligence including information on defence technology. Employees of private companies may also be involved in commercial espionage—being tasked by their parent company to steal information from competitors.
How?
1. The Chinese intelligence services have a number of methods for obtaining confidential material. Some use traditional espionage methods, such as cultivating a longer term friendship with a British employee. Others are directed against electronic equipment such as mobile phones and computer networks. The espionage techniques which the Chinese may employ vary from country to country.
2. In Europe and North America the main method of espionage against UK industry is electronic attack. This is due to the difficulties of operating human agents in these countries. In China the intelligence services have few resource constraints in terms of both man-power and technology. The close proximity of other countries in the Far East is likely to make operating in these countries easier. Some of these countries may also be allies of China allowing the Chinese intelligence services to operate with few restrictions. This allows them to use a wide variety of the techniques described below. However, Japan has historically been a difficult country for Chinese intelligence services to operate in. In Africa the Chinese authorities are likely to be able to operate with few restrictions.
The human agent
1. The Chinese intelligence services can identify foreigners of interest through a number of means such as trade fairs, exhibitions and business visas. Once identified an undercover intelligence officer may try to develop a friendship or business relationship often using lavish hospitality and flattery. The Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurise individuals to cooperate with them.
Telephones and PDAs
1. In China and its allied countries there is a high threat of phones (both mobile and landlines) being intercepted by Chinese intelligence services. It is likely that Chinese network operators will cooperate with Chinese intelligence services giving them easy access to network information. Mobile phones and PDAs have varying facilities for data storage. They could be stolen allowing access to this information or accessed via Bluetooth, wireless connectivity or infrared links.
Laptops
1. If a laptop is stolen or confiscated it could be accessed or tampered with. A determined individual could steal the standard access control mechanism within a laptop. Following unauthorised access, information could be stolen. However, perhaps more damaging could be the installation of hardware or software, such as keystroke loggers. These could allow repeated, unauthorised access and modification or copying of data over a period of time.
Other vulnerabilities
1. Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, which are frequented by foreigners, are likely to be “bugged” by the Chinese intelligence services. Furthermore, there have been cases in which hotel rooms have been searched whilst occupants are out of the room.
2. Business cards, which contain email addresses, provide Chinese intelligence services with valuable information which could be used to conduct electronic attacks against an individual’s organisation.
3. During conferences or visits to Chinese companies you may be given gifts such as USB devices or cameras. There have been cases where these “gifts” have contained Trojan devices and other types of malware.
In December 2006, MI5’s director general, Jonathan Evans, warned that China routinely conducted state-sponsored espionage against vital parts of Britain’s economy, including the computer systems of big banks and financial services firms. Almost on cue, there was a security incident when, in January 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the PRC accompanied by some 25 senior businessmen, among them Sir Adrian Montague, the chairman of British Energy, Arun Sarin, then chief executive of Vodafone, and Sir Richard Branson, the head of Virgin. On the second day of the tour in Shanghai, one of Brown’s aides was approached by an attractive Chinese woman in the hotel disco, and after a couple of hours dancing, he invited her back to his room. The next morning, he reported to the prime minister’s protection team that his Downing Street–issued BlackBerry cell phone had been stolen. A classic honeytrap was suspected, but no evidence emerged to indicate that the loss of the unencrypted but codeword-protected equipment had led to a breach of security. A few months later, in May 2008, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez had a very similar experience when the contents of a government laptop were copied while he was on an official visit to Beijing. See also BANDA, DR. HASTINGS; HALPERN, ERIC; HONG KONG; KENYA; KUCZYNSKI, URSULA; MALAYAN EMERGENCY; NKRUMAH, KWAME; ROYAL HONG KONG POLICE (RHKP); SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER (SLO); SPECIAL BRANCH; TSANG, JOHN.
MIAO CHEN-PAI. In July 1966, a 29-year-old former member of a Chinese foreign aid delegation to Damascus applied for, and was granted, political asylum in New York.
MiG-19. On 25 August 1990, a Chinese MiG-19, designated Farmer by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), landed accidentally at the Russian airbase at Knevichi, near Vladivostok. The pilot and plane were released five days later. See also SOVIET UNION.
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (MIB). Taiwan’s Military Intelligence Bureau (Chunch’ingchu in the Wade-Giles Romanization used by Taiwan or Junqingju in the Pinyin Romanization) was formed from Tai Li’s wartime Investigation and Statistics Bureau, and although placed under the Chief of the General Staff in the Ministry of National Defense, it was widely assumed to be under the control of the Kuomintang (KMT).
During the 1980s, when Taiwan began to allow visits to the mainland, the MIB recruited numerous individuals to work as agents, initially businessmen, who cultivated high-ranking military and civilian leaders in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and provided reports to the MIB. These agents were paid as much as $1,500 per month, with a bonus to reward especially important information, which was usually military in nature. There were taught very little tradecraft, but occasionally some were taught to decipher encrypted messages and use invisible ink.
These amateur spies were often caught by the PRC’s security apparatus, which suggested that the MIB had been penetrated. Those arrested were sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment, but usually no announcements were made by either side, as there were no official ties between the two countries, unless an incident was publicized by the PRC media. Many MIB agents have died in mainland prisons, and although neither country has ever published any official figures, it is reliably estimated that there are, at any time, several dozen Taiwanese incarcerated in the PRC.
In 2005, Wo Weihan, a 59-year-old owner of a medical research company in Beijing, was convicted of selling military secrets to Taiwan, having been accused of working on behalf of Taiwan’s Grand Alliance for the Reunification of China, an organization described as a KMT front. Also arrested, and later executed, was Guo Wanjun, a PRC missile scientist who was alleged to be a member of the spy ring headed by Wo.
The PRC tends to publicize the arrest of Taiwanese spies as a means of influencing elections held in Taiwan, and in 2004, Beijing announced the arrest of 24 spies in the run-up to the election held that year. According to a former Ministry of State Security officer, the MIB and the National Security Bureau are considered “amateurish.”
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT (MID). The Military Intelligence Department of the People’s Liberation Army, the Qingbao Bu, is also known as the Second Department or 2/PLA. The PLA’s major intelligence branch, it runs the China Institute of International Strategic Studies in Beijing and a training branch, the Institute of International Relations, in Nanjing, The MID collects mainly military intelligence in parallel with the Ministry of State Security(MSS) through regional offices across the country and coordinates some of its activities with the MSS, which does not have military targets as a priority but is generally quite separate. However, when the MSS acquires intelligence of a military nature or significance, it is shared with the MID, and the MSS also conducts military counterespionage operations and has a role in the protection of important military secrets, such as China’s advanced submarine program. In addition, the MID selects and trains staff to be posted overseas as defense attachés.
The MID’s internal structure reflects the organization’s responsibilities with the First Bureau, developing human sources, and during the Cold War, it ran training schools in Angola, Afghanistan, and Thailand to support local guerrillas; the Third Bureau, concentrating on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao; the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth bureaus, covering specific world regions and undertaking analytical work. The Seventh Bureau, focused on science and technology, mirrors the MSS by being closely associated with various research institutes, computer centers, and research establishments.
MIL MI-4. In March 1974, a Soviet Border Guard Mil Mi-4 helicopter accidentally strayed into Chinese airspace and landed south of Belesha in the Altai Krai. The four aircrew were taken into custody but were released with their aircraft in December 1975. See also SOVIET UNION.
MIN GWO BAO. An aeronautical engineer from Taiwan who had worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1975, Min Gwo Bao was placed under surveillance by Special Agent Bill Cleveland of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in an operation codenamed TIGER TRAP and searched when, in 1981, he attempted to catch a flight to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He was found to be carrying an index card bearing answers to five questions, one of which concerned the miniaturization of nuclear weapons.
Although Min was not charged, his telephone calls were monitored, and in 1982, he was recorded as he conversed with Wen Ho Lee of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During that conversation, Lee, who later was the subject of the FBI’s KINDRED SPIRIT investigation, offered to attempt to determine how the FBI had been tipped off about Min. Later, when confronted by Cleveland, Min appeared to be on the verge of making a confession, but he never made any admissions that justified prosecution, so his employment at Lawrence Livermore was terminated. Additionally, a wider FBI investigation, codenamed TIGER SPRINGE, was launched to gauge the extent of the PRC’s nuclear espionage.
Some years later, Min played some unresolved role in the PARLOR MAID investigation. In December 1990, Cleveland, accompanied by his colleague I. C. Smith, who was then seconded to the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security, encountered Min in the lobby of a hotel in Shenyang while conducting a security review of the local United States consulate. In conversation with Min, Cleveland learned they were scheduled to be on the same return flight to Beijing, but Min did not catch the flight and was not spotted again. The coincidence, if that was what it was, remains unexplained, but Cleveland later recalled that he had told Katrina Leung of his travel plans. Cleveland later commented to his companion, I. C. Smith, “They knew we were coming before we even left.” See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY (MEI). Working in parallel with the People’s Liberation Army’s Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND), the MEI sponsors the China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology (CAEIT) and works closely with COSTIND’s Beijing Institute of Systems Engineering (BISE) to build the electronic industry’s research infrastructure and is fully integrated into the country’s intelligence architecture.
As an important conduit for technical intelligence, the MEI maintains a network of research facilities, including the 2nd Research Institute Taiyuan; the 5th Research Institute; the 6th Research Institute, which concentrates on computer systems engineering and is also known as the Huasun Computer Company; the 7th Research Institute, or Guangzhou Communications Research Institute, which works on mobile digital communications systems; the 8th Research Institute, or Anhui Fiber Optical Fiber Research Institute; the 10th Research Institute, or Southwest Institute of Electronics Technology (SWIET) at Chengdu, focusing on UHF, microwave, and millimeter communications and radar equipment; the 11th Research Institute, conducting research into solid-state laser systems; the 12th Research Institute, focusing on TACAN systems; the 13th Research Institute in Shijiazhuang, pursuing integrated circuits and solid state lasers, using imported French technology; the 14th Research Institute in Nanjing, developing early warning, phased-array, and space-tracking radars; the 15th Research Institute, or North China Computer Institute in Beijing, and known as Taiji; the 18th Research Institute, or Tianjin Institute of Power Sources; the 20th Research Institute in Xian, researching navigation systems; the 21st Research Institute, in Shanghai; the 22nd Research Institute, also known as the China Institute of Radiowave Propagation and associated with the Shaanxi Astronautical Observatory Timing Station; the 25th Research Institute, researching long-wave infrared imaging seekers; the 26th Research Institute in Chongqing, working on surface acoustic wave devices, piezoelectrics, acousto-optics, electronic ceramics, and crystals; the 28th Research Institute, known as the Nanjing Research Institute of Electrical Engineering, producing air defense and air traffic control systems; the 29th Research Institute, or Southwest Institute of Electronic Engineering (SWIEE), in Chengdu, working on radar reconnaissance and electronic countermeasures; the 30th Research Institute, focusing on research and development on advanced common channel signaling software; the 33rd Research Institute, in Taiyuan; the 34th Research Institute, or Guilin Institute of Optical Communications, which cooperates with Nokia on fiber optics; the 36th Research Institute, producing electronic countermeasures; the 38th Research Institute, or the East China Research Institute of Electronic Engineering (ECRIEE), at Hefei, specializing in early warning and artillery radar; the 39th Research Institute, or Northwest Institute of Electronic Equipment (NWIEE), developing satellite ground stations and microwave relays; the 40th Research Institute, in Bengbu, producing connectors and relays; the 41st Research Institute, developing signal generators and test equipment for infrared focal plane arrays; the 43rd Research Institute, or Hengli Electronics Development Corporation, in Hefei; the 44th Research Institute, or Chongqing Institute of Optoelectronics, researching charged couple devices, infrared focal plane arrays, and fiber optics; the 45th Research Institute, in Pingliang, Gansu Province, working on integrated circuit production technology; the 46th Research Institute, in Tianjin, researching the testing of silicon and gallium arsenide materials; the 47th Research Institute, researching advanced integrated circuits; the 49th Research Institute, or Northeast Institute of Sensor Technology, in Harbin, developing vibration and other sensors; the 50th Research Institute, or Shanghai Institute of Microwave Technology, working on automated surface-to-air (SAM) command systems; the 51st Research Institute, developing radar reconnaissance and jamming equipment; the 53rd Research Institute, or Institute of Applied Infrared Technology, in Liaoning, researching passive jamming and optoelectronic techniques; the 54th Research Institute, or Communications Technology Institute, in Shijiazhuang, working on military systems; the 55th Research Institute, researching semiconductors.
As well as this massive research commitment, the MEI runs a large network of manufacturing plants, including the 605 Factory, producing fiber optic cable; the 701 Factory, producing radios; the 707 Factory, known as the Chenxing Radio Factory; the 710 Factory, or Zhongyuan Radio Factory, in Wuhan; the 711 Factory, producing maritime UHF systems; the 712 Factory, making airborne UHF systems, in Tianjin; the 713 Factory; the 714 Factory, or Panda Electronics Factory, making HF and airborne UHF systems; the 716 Factory, producing digital communications equipment; the 719 Factory, assembling airborne navigation equipment; the 720 Factory, China’s principal radar manufacturer, which is closely associated with the 14th Research Institute in Nanjing; the 722 Factory, producing electronic countermeasures and is associated with the 29th Research Institute; the 730 Factory, producing submarine cable; the 734 Factory, making fiber optic cable and wireless equipment; the 738 Factory, assembling computers and closely associated with the 15th Research Institute; the 741 Factory, producing optoelectronics and infrared systems; the 750 Factory, or Guangdong Radio Group Telecommunications Company; the 754 Factory, in Tianjin; the 756 Factory, making navigation equipment; the 760 Factory, making troposcatter systems; the 761 Factory, or Beijing Broadcast Factory, producing VLF systems; the 764 Factory, or Tianjin Broadcasting Equipment Company, making aviation navigation equipment; the 765 Factory, in Baoji, making aviation navigation equipment; the 769 Factory, producing airborne UHF systems; the 780 Factory, making airborne radar countermeasures; the 781 Factory, making electronic countermeasures equipment; the 782 Factory, in Baoji, making airborne radars and transponders; the 783 Factory, or Fujian Machinery Factory, also known as the Sichuan Jinzhou Electronic Factory, in Mianyang, which produces radars and identification friend or foe equipment; the 784 Factory, or Jinjiang Electronic Machinery Factory, in Chengdu, which produces surveillance radars; the 785 Factory, making optoelectronics equipment, SAM guidance radars, and antiaircraft artillery computers; the 786 Factory, making SAM guidance radars, in Xian; the 789 Factory, making antiaircraft artillery computers; the 834 Factory, making tactical communications equipment; the 913 Factory, producing electronic countermeasures equipment and closely associated with the 36th Research Institute; the 914 Factory, or Lanxin Radio Factory, in Lanzhou; the 924 Factory, making radar reconnaissance and jamming equipment, closely associated with the 29th Research Institute; the 4500 Factory, assembling computers; the 4508 Factory, in Tianjin; 6909 Factory, making electronic countermeasures equipment.
MINISTRY OF PUBLIC SECURITY (MPS). Known in Chinese as the Gong’anbu, the MPS was established upon the formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and served as the country’s principal intelligence and security service until the creation, in 1983, of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) or Guojia Anquanbu, but the MPS remains the PRC’s primary internal security service. Rather, more than half the MSS’s staff was drawn from the MPS and related organizations, such as research institutes.
The MPS’s sole role was, and remains, to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, and it became notorious for having adopted the brutality of its founder, Kang Sheng, as well as that of Mao Zedong himself. Its headquarters in Beijing are located at 14 Dong Chang An Street in a compound that includes a branch of the MSS.
While the MSS is dominant in the field of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, the MPS is virtually ubiquitous and thus has much more influence over the lives of ordinary Chinese. The MPS has a much wider remit than the MSS, and its activities are almost entirely domestic, preoccupied with social stability. While the MSS will share information about criminal cases and other matters involving foreigners or technical surveillance, the MPS’s contribution is largely in support of MSS operations, providing facilities, documents, and cover upon request. Both organizations regularly exchange personnel at all levels, and although the MPS is an intrinsic part of the Communist Party and exercises considerable influence, it is complemented by the MSS’s more sophisticated analytical resources. See also ALBANIA; CENTRAL DISCIPLINE INSPECTION COMMISSION (CDIC); CULTURAL REVOLUTION; DENG XIAOPING; HAN GUANGSHENG; HAO FENGJUN; HONEYTRAP; INDIA; INFORMATION WARFARE MILITIA; OU QIMING; OVERSEAS CHINESE; PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (PLA); SHANGHAI; TECHNOLOGY COUNTERFEITING; WAISHIJU; XIONG XIANGHUI; XUE FENG; YU QIANGSHENG.
MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS). Known as the Guojia Anquanbu or Guoanbu, the MSS is the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) government’s intelligence arm, responsible for foreign intelligence collection and counterintelligence, located in Beijing in a large compound in Xiyuan, on Eastern Chang’an Avenue, close to Tiananmen Square. Within the security perimeter is an apartment block, Qian Men, where many of the MSS staff and their families live. The MSS operates independently from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Secondand Third Departments, which also conduct military intelligence and counterintelligence operations.
The MSS was created in 1983 and staffed with personnel drawn largely from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), which hitherto had fulfilled a counterespionage role, and with intelligence cadres from the Chinese Communist Party(CCP). The new MSS was also funded in part by the MPS and established provincial offices, which operated under cover names, such as “Unit 8475.” At the time of the transfer, which was considered controversial because of the political nature of the new organization, there was some reluctance on the MPS’s part to hand over some networks to the MSS. In later years, some of the old MPS professionals came to regret having opted to move to the MSS because, although there were greater opportunities for foreign travel, the financial side-benefits of working closely with industry were no longer available to them. The MSS’s policy of expansion with representative offices in most major towns and cities was reversed in 1997.
The PRC’s intelligence establishment is the third largest after the United States and Russia and originally reflected the structure of the old Soviet KGB. The MSS is responsible to the premier and state council and the CCP’s Political-Legal Committee that oversees ministry activities. In personnel, the MSS prefers nonprofessional intelligence agents, such as travelers, businessmen, and academics, with a special emphasis on the Overseas Chinese students and Chinese professionals working abroad with access to sensitive technological material. Like conventional intelligence agencies, MSS case officers handling sources assign codenames to their sources; although, their system involves a combination of English letters and numbers, such as “LRAX100189” and “NetworkSYproject2.”
MSS intelligence officers are usually recruited before or during their university education, and a large proportion are graduates of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), the Beijing Institute of International Relations, the Jiangnan Social University, or the Zhejiang Police College. Those requiring technical skills usually attend the Beijing Electronic Specialist School. These establishments provide training for MSS recruits, who usually come from families with MSS links or otherwise are influential and beneficiaries of guanxi. Nevertheless, however well connected the candidates are, they will have to be dedicated and disciplined, although not yet necessarily party members. Guanxi is often exercised to facilitate entry into the MSS, and it will also play an unspoken part in future promotion. The MSS’s provincial branches are often staffed with PLA and government retirees.
Unlike the KGB, the MSS is not highly centralized and has a regional and provincial presence, recruiting its personnel from local communities. While branch offices receive directives from headquarters in Beijing and are financed by National Security Special Funds, they are largely autonomous, acting as essential adjuncts to the local administration, although only theoretically accountable to it despite receiving what are termed “administrative expenses.” In reality, the annual MSS reports submitted to the local government are generally vague, do not contain sensitive material, and are uncontroversial. In contrast, annual branch reports to headquarters contain considerable detail.
Employment on the MSS staff holds considerable social status and is considered a desirable career, with promotions endorsed at both branch and headquarters level. Senior branch positions require the approval of the local administration; although, in practice, the will of headquarters usually goes unchallenged, and branch personnel are regarded as employees of the local government. Indeed, more than half the MSS’s staff recruitment takes place in the regions where they will remain for the rest of their careers and where they have local and family links, which are considered important. This structure has no equivalent in the West but enables the MSS to fulfill the increasingly large responsibility of ensuring social stability, considered a significant operational priority. Furthermore, internal transfers and secondments, mainly from the law and political departments of local government, are routine, and training takes place in the branches. There are no centralized, formal training academies, and new personnel are expected to learn their profession by reading old and current operational files, by working with mentors, and attending occasional lectures and conferences. A heavy emphasis is placed on political indoctrination, and although probably less than 15 percent of MSS staff are women, they tend to be almost entirely party members.
MSS personnel are posted overseas under diplomatic cover, from both headquarters and provincial branches, but they do not form separate units based on Russian rezidenturas or stations on the British and American models. However, they are instantly recognizable to regular Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomats who keep their distance. MSS officers attached to diplomatic and consular premises use their own communications channels, and their messages to headquarters are not read by the ambassador. They also have considerable latitude in conducting collection operations and tend not to discriminate in favor of particular targets. Often, they are posted overseas to gain experience rather than to run specific operations or collect intelligence; although, they are expected to report anything of potential value relating to the MSS’s priority targets of dissidents, separatists, religious activists, and Taiwan. In particular, all MSS personnel are acutely aware that anyone from Taiwan could have hostile intelligence connections and might be of value to headquarters.
Domestically, the MSS exercises responsibility for the surveillance and recruitment of foreign businessmen, researchers, and officials visiting from abroad. The MSS Investigation Department surveillance on dissidents and foreign journalists is often quite obvious, but it is supported by more clandestine measures taken by state ministries, academic institutions, and the military-industrial complex. Covert audio and video monitoring is often employed in hotels frequented by foreigners, and such operations may be used to eavesdrop on conversations with visiting scholars or to obtain information to assist in the recruitment of agents. The MSS is also responsible, running a program entitled “Education” for briefing Chinese traveling abroad and warning them of the likelihood of being approached by hostile Western intelligence agencies.
During the Civil War between the Communists and Kuomintang, prior to 1949, the CCP’s principal intelligence institution was the Central Department of Social Affairs (CDSA), which subsequently became the Central Investigation Department (CID) and was later replaced by the Ministry of State Security in 1983.
During the 1950s, most PRC diplomatic missions abroad accommodated an Investigation and Research Office for intelligence collection staffed by CID personnel, with analysis undertaken by the CID’s Eighth Bureau, publicly known since 1978 as the CICIR.
Li Kenong died in 1966 and was succeeded by Luo Qingchang, while Kang Sheng, who had once headed the CDSA and was by that time a member of the CCP’s Political Bureau, assumed responsibility for the CID.
During the Cultural Revolution, the CID was abolished, and most of its senior leadership was sent to the countryside for reeducation. Its activities and assets were absorbed by the Second Department, while a new organization, the Central Case Examination Group, composed of CID cadres under Kang Sheng, was instrumental in the removal from power of Deng Xiaoping and others.
Following the death of Lin Biao in 1971, the CID was reestablished, and when Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing assumed power in 1977, they sought to enlarge the CID and expand the CCP’s intelligence work as part of their more general effort to consolidate their leadership positions, but they were resisted by Deng Xiaoping upon his restoration, who argued that the intelligence system should not use PRC embassies to provide cover and that intelligence personnel should be sent abroad under business and journalistic cover. His view prevailed, and consequently, the CID withdrew from Chinese embassies abroad, leaving only a small number of secret intelligence agents.
A CID veteran, Zhou Shaozheng, became head of the CID’s General Office in 1976, but during the CCP’s 12th National Congress in 1982, a bureau chief in the Central Taiwan Affairs Office denounced him and alleged that, during the mourning period following Premier Zhou Enlai’s death, Zhou Shouzheng had plotted against the premier. An investigation proved Zhou to be innocent, but this incident cost him the chance to be considered for the post of Minister of State Security.
Early in 1983, Liu Fuzhi, secretary-general of the CCP Central Committee’s Politburo and minister of Public Security, proposed the establishment of a Ministry of State Security that would merge the CID with the Ministry of Public Security’s counterintelligence branch, and this was approved in June 1983 by the National People’s Congress, which had perceived a growing threat of subversion and sabotage. Thus, the Ministry of State Security was established under the State Council and charged with ensuring “the security of the state through effective measures against enemy agents, spies, and counterrevolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China’s socialist system.” At its inception, the ministry pledged to abide by the state constitution and law and called upon the citizenry for cooperation, reminding them of their constitutional obligations to “keep state secrets” and “safeguard the security” of the country.
Lin Yun, Deputy Minister of Public Security, was appointed the MSS’s first minister, but in 1985, Yu Qiangsheng, a department head of the Anti-Espionage Bureau codenamed PLANESMAN, defected to the United States, causing Lin and the Anti-Espionage Bureau chief to be removed from their posts. Lin was to be replaced by a well-connected English-speaking physicist, Jia Chunwang, but both the Ministry’s public security and central investigation elements insisted that Lin should be succeeded by one of their own cadres. To settle the conflict, the CCP leadership appointed Jia Chunwang, an outsider with ties to neither side, and under him, the MSS achieved a measurable success in gathering nuclear and other technological sensitive information from the United States.
In 1998, Jia was appointed minister of public security to replace Tao Siju, while also serving as the first political commissar and first secretary of the CCP Committee of the Chinese People’s Armed Police. In December 2002, he was named deputy procurator-general, and in March 2003, he was elected China’s Supreme People’s Procurator by the 10th National People’s Congress.
In 1998, Xu Yongyue, originally from Zhenping in Henan Province, was appointed minister of state security in succession to Jia, and under his leadership, the MSS concentrated on the illicit transfer of sensitive technology. In evidence given to the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress, it was reported that half of the 900 investigations conducted on the West Coast into such crimes involved China, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) estimated that Chinese espionage in Silicon Valley had risen by 20 to 30 percent each year. In addition, Chinese agents had been detected undertaking similar activities in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In August 2007, Xu was succeeded by his 56-year-old deputy, Geng Huichang.
According to information gleaned from defectors, MSS personnel are usually assigned overseas for up to six years, with a few remaining in post for 10 years if required. In most countries, the local MSS office is accommodated by the embassy, but in the United States, there are seven permanent PRC diplomatic missions staffed with intelligence personnel.
In mid-September 1996, in anticipation of the British withdrawal from Hong Kong, the Central Military Commission and the State Council approved the report of the plan drawn up by the MSS and the General Staff Department to reorganize operations. In consequence, an estimated 120 intelligence agents operating in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan under industrial, business, bank, academic, and journalistic cover, were recalled.
The MSS routinely co-opts low-profile Chinese nationals or Chinese American civilians to engage in the acquisition of mid-level technology and data. Travelers, businessmen, students, and researchers are often approached to undertake intelligence tasks, and the MSS maintains control of them through inducements and personal connections (guanxi) and the potential threat of alienation from the homeland. Sometimes referred to as the “mosaic method,” these sources gather random information in a disorganized manner that, when assembled later, can be of high value, such as the acquisition of the W-88 nuclear warhead, which, according to evidence given in 1999 to the U.S. Congress, took two decades to gather altogether. The fact that the W-88’s design had been compromised led the FBI to initiate a lengthy investigation, codenamed SEGO PALM, and narrow its focus to several scientists based at Los Alamos.
Economic espionage conducted by the MSS tended to conform to three patterns. The first was the recruitment of agents, often scholars and scientists, before they departed overseas, who were tasked to purchase information. The second used Chinese firms to buy up entire companies that already possessed the desired technology. And the third, most common, method was the illicit procurement of specific technology through Chinese front companies. According to the FBI analysts, over 3,200 such companies had been set up as fronts for intelligence collection purposes. See alsoHONEYTRAP; NINTH BUREAU.
MONTAPERTO, RONALD N. A 68-year-old former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst, Ronald Montaperto pleaded guilty in September 2006 to retaining classified documents and to passing secrets to his People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence contacts and was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.
Montaperto, who had held a security clearance as a China specialist at a U.S. Pacific Command research center until 2004, admitted having orally briefed two PRC military attachés, Colonel Yang Qiming and Colonel Yu Zhenghe, among others, during his career, which spanned 22 years. He had originally come under suspicion in 1991, when, after eight years in the DIA, he made an unsuccessful application to join the Central Intelligence Agency. An inconclusive investigation was conducted but reopened in July 2003, following information from a defector when he was dean of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. Although Montaperto had been authorized to have contact with Chinese diplomats, he failed to report all his meetings, and while undergoing a polygraph examination conducted on the pretext of a consultancy post in the intelligence community by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he made several incriminating admissions. After leaving the DIA, he worked at the National Defense University but was in Hawaii at the time of his arrest. According to his plea bargain, which required his full cooperation, Montaperto acknowledged having revealed details of American knowledge of clandestine Chinese weapons deliveries to Iran, Syria, and Pakistan.
Montaperto never attempted to conceal his pro-Beijing views and was regarded as a member of an influential pro-China lobby group in Washington DC active in influencing U.S. foreign policy, sometimes referred to disparagingly as “the Red Team.” See also MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
MOO, KO-SUEN. In November 2005, a Korean, Ko-Suen “Bill” Moo, who was employed as an international sales consultant for Lockheed Martin in Taiwan, traveled to Florida to meet undercover U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who, for the past two years, had posed as arms dealers.
The ICE investigation had been initiated when two arms dealers, both paid informants, introduced agents to a French intermediary, Maurice Serge Voros, who, in early 2004, had asked for help in obtaining engines for the Black Hawk combat helicopter. The General Electric engines were on the Munitions List of restricted technology, and over the following year, ICE learned that Voros was representing Moo and that Moo was retained by the People’s Liberation Army. In an e-mail dated December 2004, Moo acknowledged that China did not want its name on any of the contracts, and in March 2005, he extended his requirements to an engine for the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Other items included nuclear missiles, jet engines, nuclear submarine technology, and a complete nuclear submarine equipped with its nuclear weapons systems.
After a series of meetings in London and Orlando, Florida, Moo, Voros, and the undercover agents agreed to a price of $3.9 million for one F-16 engine, and in October 2005, Moo transferred the money into a Swiss bank account he controlled. A month later, having chartered a plane for $140,000 to carry the engine, a F110-GE-129 after-burning turbofan jet capable of giving the F-16 speeds in excess of Mach 2, Moo flew from Taipei to Miami, via San Francisco, with his flight’s declared destination as the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation in Shenyang, China.
On 8 November Moo, having been driven to a hangar in Homestead, Florida, to view the engine, told undercover agents that, after he had delivered it to the People’s Republic of China, he would like to purchase a complete F-16 and an AGM-129 cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead 2,300 miles. However, Moo was arrested the next day, and after six months in jail, where he attempted to bribe a judge and an assistant U.S. attorney, he pleaded guilty to multiple offenses and was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment with three years’ supervised released, fined $1 million, and forfeited his share of the $350,000 seized in the investigation.
Although Lockheed Martin later insisted that Moo had passed a “rigorous” vetting process, the prosecution asserted that he may have transferred technology well before the investigation had begun and had acted as an agent for the PLA for 20 years. After Moo had been detained, an international arrest warrant was issued for Maurice Serge Voros, but he was never caught. See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
NAHARDANI, AHMAD. In February 2003, the owners of Mexpar International Inc. and Pasadena Aerospace, Ahmad Nahardani, aged 55, and Gabriela De Brea, aged 62, were indicted on charges relating to their attempts to export parts of an F-4 Phantom (valued at $128,000) and the Hawk and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles to China. Also arrested in the undercover operation was David Menashe of Tel Aviv, who was charged with making false statements to U.S. Customs agents concerning an attempt to smuggle Hawk and Sidewinder parts into the United States, an investigation that implicated Liang Xiuwen and her husband, Zhuang Jinghua.
In September 2003, Nahardani and De Brea pleaded guilty, and later Mexpar International was placed on three years’ probation and fined $75,000. A year later, De Brea was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and Nahardani received 21 months. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
NANDA DEVI. Following the detonation of the first atomic weapon at Lop Nor in October 1964, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sponsored a mountaineering expedition to Nanda Devi, in the Himalayas, to place a plutonium-powered remote sensor near the summit of India’s second-highest mountain. The climbers, led by M. S. Kohli, Tom Frost, and Dr. Robert Schaller, made their first attempt in October 1965 but were forced by poor weather conditions to abandon the device and return the following spring. Another CIA sensor, weighing an estimated 40 pounds and dependent on a generator with six plutonium cells, was installed on a neighboring peak, Nanda Kot.
In 1978, the discovery of the two atomic-powered remote sensors provoked a brief diplomatic row between New Delhi and Washington, over allegations of plutonium contamination. See also CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); TOPPER; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
NARCOTICS TRAFFICKING. Just as the Japanese occupation forces during World War II encouraged drug use by the local population under their control, intelligence analysts have concluded that, during much of the Cold War, Beijing regarded the cultivation and export of narcotics as a useful source of foreign currency and a means of undermining the reliability of American troops deployed in southeast Asia. According to President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Chinese premier Chou Enlai boasted to him during a visit to Cairo in June 1965, “We are planting the best kind of opium especially for American soldiers in Vietnam.” Evidence accumulated by the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and it successor organization, the Drug Enforcement Administration, indicated that Hong Kong and Burma provided a large proportion of the world’s heroin and that, during the Cold War, the trade was sponsored by the People’s Republic of China authorities.
NATIONAL MINORITIES. Within the People’s Republic of China (PRC), several distinctive ethnic minorities are regarded by the Ministry of State Security (MSS) as potential threats to internal stability, and the organization categorizes all separatists, religious groups, and anti-Communist political activists as counterrevolutionaries, foreign spies, and terrorists. While the overwhelming majority of the PRC is Han, at over 90 percent, there are sizeable Muslim Hui and Uighur populations, and the Khampa tribe in Tibet and the Mongols have a long history of hostility to Bejing’s policies of transplanting and integrating Han Chinese into target territories to dilute local majorities and establish Mandarin as the PRC’s national language.
From an internal security standpoint, these national minorities are considered susceptible to external influence, with the Central Intelligence Agency having supported the Tibetan resistance to the PRC’s occupation. Similarly, some Uighurs have adopted radical Islam and have undergone training across the frontier in Afghanistan. The PRC’s constitution recognizes 56 specific ethnic groups and affords them rights, including religious freedom, whereas, from an intelligence perspective, there is a reluctance to acknowledge any distinction between opponents of the regime and the Chinese Communist Party. See also SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO).
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA). Created in November 1952 as a result of perceived poor cryptographic support during the Korean War, the NSA replaced the Armed Forces Security Agency and became the principal source of American intelligence about China. However, the NSA’s coverage of China was poor because, in contrast to the Soviet target, it was not considered a priority and, on 10 February 1954, reported to the National Security Council that little had been achieved in developing a window into what was essentially a closed country. The NSA’s own Intelligence Advisory Committee noted, “The picture for the major target area in Asia, i.e., Communist China, is very dark.”
Part of the normalization agreement made by Dr. Henry Kissinger in 1979, following the loss of NSA facilities in Iranand the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was the establishment of intercept sites in northwest China at existing seismic monitoring installations at Korla and Qitai, in Xinjiang Province, with a third station at Pamir, for the collection of Soviet signals, close to the Afghan “finger” that extended into China. The facilities were staffed by the NSA, with German Bundesnachrichtendienst and Chinese personnel, and were first disclosed by the New York Times in June 1981 in a report asserting that the sites had become operational in 1980 and were concentrated on Soviet missile telemetry signals transmitted from Soviet missile bases at Leninsk, near the Aral Sea, and at Sary-Shagan, near Lake Balkhash. Congressional approval for the project was organized by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. as a measure to improve verification of compliance with arms control treaties with the Soviet Union.
In November 2009, on the 30th anniversary of the opening of the NSA stations, the director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, visited Beijing to take part in a secret ceremony to celebrate the relationship. See alsoAIRBORNE COLLECTION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB). Created on 1 March 1955, the NSB of Taiwan (Kuo-chia An-ch’uan-chu in the Wade-Giles system of Romanization used by Taiwan, or the Guojia Anquanju in the Pinyin Romanization) amalgamated the civilian Police Administration Office, the Bureau of Exit and Entry Control, and the Justice Department’s Investigation Bureau with the military Taiwan Government Command Headquarters, the General Political Combat Unit, the Military Intelligence Headquarters, and the Military Police Headquarters. The NSB also absorbed theKuomintang’s (KMT) Social Work Committee and the Overseas Maneuvers Committee. The NSB’s first director general, appointed by President Chiang Kai-shek, was General Cheng Jie-min, who had a military intelligence background, had served as deputy to Tai Li in the controversial Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (Juntong), and had succeeded him after Tai Li’s death in 1946. Accordingly, the NSB is often considered to have been derived from the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics.
The NSB consisted of five divisions, covering international intelligence; mainland Chinese intelligence; security and analysis; scientific, technical and telecommunications intelligence; and cryptographic operations. The NSB’s director general also chairs the Coordination Meeting for National Security Intelligence, which supervises all Taiwan’s security and intelligence activities.
While the NSB has not publicized its successes, it has suffered several embarrassments, including the fraud committed in 1999 by the organization’s chief accountant, Liu Kuan-chun, who was suspected of having embezzled almost $6 million before he departed for Shanghai. He was later spotted in Bangkok and then in North America.
When Donald Keyser was arrested in Washington DC by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for passing documents to two NSB officers, the NSB Director General Hsueh Shih-ming immediately recalled the pair. Later the same year, Hsueh Shih-ming was impeached with eight others after an attempt on the lives of President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu, who were wounded while campaigning in Tainan City on the day before the presidential election. Allegedly, the NSB had failed to act when warned of a possible attack on the president and had not taken the threat seriously.
The organization’s political neutrality has often been doubted, and in 2004, Colonel Chen Feng-lin, of the NSB’s Special Services Center’s logistics department, confessed that he had leaked classified information relating to President Chen’s residence and itinerary to a retiree, General Peng Tzu-wen, who had once headed the center and was an outspoken critic of the president. Peng was later indicted for leaking national security secrets on Taiwanese television and potentially putting President Chen’s life at risk. See also CHIANG CHING-KUO; MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (MIB).
NEEDHAM, JOSEPH. Born in 1900, educated at Oundle and a graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a Communist sympathizer in the 1930s though never actually a member of the party, Joseph Needham married a fellow biochemistry student in 1924 but, in 1937, acquired a Chinese mistress, Lu Gwei-djen, a 33-year-old postgraduate from Nanjing, who taught him Mandarin. She would later work in the United States, first at Berkeley and then at Birmingham, Alabama, before settling at Columbia, New York.
In February 1943, after several requests to visit China, Needham was appointed to the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office attached to the British embassy in Chungking, and after having taken a ship to Calcutta, was flown to Kunming. There he became close friends with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, a relationship that continued through correspondence when he returned to Cambridge after the defeat of the Kuomintang (KMT). Over the four years that he remained in China, Needham traveled across much of the country on expeditions to extend British influence and assess the Chinese academic and scientific community and met several other diplomats who were actually engaged in espionage, among them Oliver J. Caldwell, working under U.S. Office of War Information cover, and a Glasgow Scot, Murray MacLehose, the British vice consul in the port of Fuzhou, who in November 1971, would be appointed governor of Hong Kong. In late 1945, Needham arranged for Lu Gwei-djen to leave New York and join his staff as a nutritionist.
However, in April 1946, he returned to England, having been nominated to help his Cambridge friend Julian Huxley head the science division of the new United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. While in Paris, Needham came under investigation by the newly created Central Intelligence Agency and was labeled a far left radical. Nevertheless, he remained with UNESCO for two years before leaving for Cambridge in March 1948 to work on a multivolume book, Science and Civilization in China.
In 1952, Needham was invited by an old wartime acquaintance, Guo Moruo, then head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to lead a group of independent scientists investigating claims made by North Korea that the United States had engaged in germ warfare during the Korean War.
The International Commission began its work in June 1952 and spent two months interviewing villagers who claimed that infected insects, birds, rats, and voles had been dropped by American bombers and that large areas had been sprayed with lethal bacteria. Needham left the analytical work to a staff of 60 Chinese technicians, 23 of whom had doctorates from American universities, and his report, amounting to 665 pages, was published in French in September 1952. His conclusion, that bacteriological weapons “have been employed by units of the United States of America armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose, some of which seem to be developments of those applied by the Japanese army during the Second World War. The Commission reached these conclusions, passing from one logical step to another. It did so reluctantly because its members have not been disposed to believe such an inhuman technique could have been put into execution in the face of its universal condemnation by the people of the nations.”
His report proved highly contentious, and upon his return to London, he insisted that the Americans had resorted to infecting their Korean and Chinese enemies with anthrax, smallpox, tularemia, and typhus. However, he was instantly accused of “the prostitution of science for propaganda” and almost lost his Caius fellowship when the returned to Cambridge. His only public supporter, the anthropologist Gene Weltfish, was dismissed from her post at Columbia University.
Four years later, as the controversy subsided, Needham was asked to attend the sedition trial in San Francisco of John and Sylva Powell and Julian Schuman, three radicals who wrote in their English language journal in Shanghai, China Monthly Review, that the United States had made a secret agreement with the Japanese scientists who had worked at the notorious Unit 731, the “water purification camp” at Pingfan in Manchuria, where the most appalling human experiments on live prisoners had been conducted in pursuit of biological weapons. Needham, who had been warned he would not be granted a visa to visit the United States, declined the invitation to appear as a defense witness, and eventually the case was dropped in July 1959.
Needham returned to the People’s Republic of China again in 1964 and then in 1972, when he was greeted by Zhou Enlai and Mao at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in central Beijing. He retired as master of Caius in 1976, and when his wife, Dorothy, died in December 1987, he resumed his relationship with Lu Gwei-djen and married her in September 1989. However, she died in November 1991, aged 87, and he died in March the following year. His life is documented by Simon Winchester in The Man Who Loved China, published in 2008.
NEPTUNE. On 18 January 1953, a U.S. Navy Patrol Squadron 22 Lockheed, twin-engined P2V-5 Neptune maritime reconnaissance aircraft, from Atsugi, flown by Ensign Dwight C. Angell, crash-landed in the sea six miles off the Chinese port of Shantou, formerly Swatow, having been hit by gunfire. A Coast Guard Martin PBM Mariner seaplane attempted to rescue the crew but crashed on takeoff and sank in heavy seas, killing 10 of the 21 men aboard. A destroyer, the USS Halsey Powell, then closed in to rescue the survivors under continuous gunfire from shore batteries. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
NEW CHINA NEWS AGENCY (NCNA). Long regarded by Western intelligence agencies as a semitransparent branch of the Ministry of State Security, the NCNA began in 1937 as the Red China News agency and has a long tradition of undertaking clandestine roles in pursuit of Beijing’s foreign policy goals. Employing an estimated staff of 10,000, the NCNA is represented in all 30 Chinese provinces and, since opening an overseas office in London in 1947, has established 106 other bureaus. The NCNA office in Hong Kong, during the era of British rule, was regarded as Beijing’s de facto diplomatic presence in the colony.
NCNA bureaus have often been associated with coup plots in third world countries, and in December 1965, the Chinese ambassador in Cairo was withdrawn when the local Mukhabarat found evidence of an attempt to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser linked to the NCNA bureau chief. That regional office, which had covered most of the Middle East, did not reopen until 1985.
The NCNA often conducts subversive operations in isolation of the local diplomatic mission, in an apparent effort to shield Beijing from diplomatic embarrassment, and has established regional centers in Damascus and Dar-es-Salaam. Naturally, these premises became the subject of hostile physical and technical surveillance by Western intelligence agencies because of the difficulty of recruiting penetrations. See also KAO LIANG; ROYAL HONG KONG POLICE (RHKP); XINHUA.
NINTH BUREAU. The Ninth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) fulfills an internal security and counterintelligence function that includes a countersurveillance capability. Sometimes referred to as the anti-defection unit, very little is known outside the MSS about the Ninth Bureau, and even insiders know only of its reputed existence.
NINTH INSTITUTE. The original name of the China Academy of Engineering Physics, the Ninth Institute was the center of the PRC’s nuclear weapons development program. See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
NKRUMAH, KWAME. Deposed by the police and the military while he was on a visit to Beijing in February 1966, Kwame Nkrumah’s political opponents claimed that he had been plotting subversion across West Africa and was intending to make Ghana a client state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Following the coup, some 500 Chinese diplomats and New China News Agency journalists were expelled from the country. The new leadership claimed to have found incriminating Chinese guerrilla warfare handbooks in Nkrumah’s private safe, thus confirming the widespread suspicion that Nkrumah had not only himself become a key PRC asset but also had been engaged in a scheme to use Ghana as an intelligence base from which to extend China’s influence over the region.
Born in September 1909, Nkrumah was appointed Ghana’s prime minister when the country was granted independence by Great Britain in March 1957. A graduate of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania and having studied at the London School of Economics, he returned to the Gold Coast, as it was then known, in 1947 and campaigned for independence. During his nine years as leader, Nkrumah pursued radical socialist policies and courted the PRC, encouraging Beijing to establish a major presence in Accra.
In 1962, Nkrumah survived an attempt on his life and became convinced, based on his receipt of some documents skillfully forged by the KGB, that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was not only scheming against him but also had assassinated Burundi’s prime minister and had plotted a coup in Tanzania. Nkrumah’s response was to draft in KGB and East German personnel to train his National Security Service, but they failed to protect him in January 1964 from a renegade police officer who took a shot at him, killing one of his bodyguards. The KGB again blamed the CIA, persuading Nkrumah he was the victim of an American conspiracy.
In 1965, Nkrumah declared himself president for life but was exiled following the February 1966 coup, which was led by General Joseph Arthur Ankrah, assisted by the head of the local Special Branch, J. W. K. Harley. With British influence restored, by the swift return to Accra of MI5’s Security Liaison Officer John Thompson, the Chinese withdrew, leaving Nkrumah to take up residence in Conakry, Guinea. He died in April 1972, aged 62.
NORTH KOREA. The rigidly Communist state of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), created in 1948 by Kim Sung-il, is the longest surviving client state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with absolute power exercised after Kim’s death in July 1994 by his son Kim Jong-il.
Encouraged to invade South Korea in June 1950 by Josef Stalin, the DPRK agreed to an armistice in July 1953, and since then, Pyongyang has maintained an uneasy peace with Seoul. With severe restrictions on diplomats and tourists enforced by a ubiquitous security apparatus, the DPRK was considered a “denied area” by Western intelligence agencies, which relied on technical collection to monitor the regime. Although routine screening of refugees reaching Japan provided some limited information about the DPRK, most were found to have already been processed by the PRC’s Ministry of State Security, so the reporting was not entirely reliable.
Because of the ruthless reputation of the North Korean State Security Department, the number of escapees was small, and even when the occasional diplomat posted abroad defected, their knowledge of the top levels of the regime in Pyongyang proved very limited. Similarly, conventional signals intelligence sources have been unproductive because of the reliance on antiquated landlines and an absence of investment in modern microwave communications, making interception difficult. Nevertheless, the DPRK remained a significant intelligence collection target because of a requirement to assess the threat to South Korea’s security and Kim’s commitment to developing nuclear weapons and to missile proliferation.
Evidence in 1965 that Moscow had agreed to build a small experimental nuclear reactor at Yongbyon was followed in 1983 by proof that Pyongyang had embarked on a nuclear weapons program using plutonium extracted from a second, larger reactor that went critical in April 1986. In spite of ratifying the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985, the DPRK acquired weapon technology from Pakistan, in return for the delivery of missiles, and in 2005, conducted an underground test of a warhead that failed to detonate fully.
Apparently unable to obtain nuclear weapon designs directly from Beijing, the DPRK exchanged the required information with Pakistan for missile technology generated during the development of the No Dong-1 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which was test launched over the Sea of Japan in 1992. Based on the Soviet Scud-C, originally supplied by the PRC, the No Dong-1 had an estimated range of 1,500 kilometers, and then the DPRK developed the Taepo Dong-2, a two-stage ICBM with a range of up to 5,000 kilometers, which failed when it was launched in July 2006 at the Musudan-ri test range.
Having proliferated missile technology to Pakistan, which then sold Chinese weapon designs to Iran and Libya, the DPRK sold a reactor to Syria. Western efforts to persuade Beijing to curb Pyongyang’s exports of missile and nuclear technology and to open the Yongbyon facilities to international inspection proved futile, making the DPRK a major, but frustrating, intelligence target for the West. See also HWANG JANG YOP; KIM SOO-IM; NEEDHAM, JOSEPH.
NOULENS, HILAIRE. A police raid in Singapore on the home of a Frenchman named Ducroux, who was a suspected Communist Party member, led to the discovery of an address in Shanghai for Hilaire Noulens, a Belgian who was theComintern’s regional representative. Noulens worked as a language teacher, but a search of his home revealed identity papers, including Canadian and Belgian passports, in nine different names. At first, the police believed him to be a Swiss, Paul Ruegg, who had been a prominent Communist Party member until 1924, when he had disappeared to Moscow, but he made no admissions concerning his origins. He and his wife, Gertrude, were handed over to the Chinese authorities for trial, and at a court-martial in Nanking in October 1931, he was sentenced to death and his wife given life imprisonment.
After a long campaign for their release conducted by an international defense committee, in which Agnes Smedleyand Richard Sorge played important roles, the couple were released in June 1932 and deported to the Soviet Union. However, during the period they were held in Shanghai, the international police had an unprecedented opportunity to study the contents of three steel trunks, which proved to be the Comintern’s regional accounts for 1930 through 1931. Using the Pan Pacific Trades Union as a convenient front, Noulens had liaised with the Chinese Communist Party, run a clandestine system of couriers, and had maintained contact with a range of political activists in Indo-China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Malaya through various subagents, of whom one was Gerhardt Eisler. When Elisabeth Poretsky, the widow of Ignace Reiss, was asked about Noulens, she recalled that he had once been based at the Soviet embassy in Vienna, where he had used the surname Luft. “He was then about thirty-five years old, not unattractive-looking but extremely tense, forever moving about and switching from one to another of his three languages apparently without noticing.” He had married the daughter of a Russian aristocrat in Rome, where she had been working as a secretary at the embassy, and after the birth of their son, they had been assigned to the Far East. Although the international campaign to gain their freedom was successful, Poretsky asserted that the story of Noulens/Luft had ended in predictable tragedy:
When he came out Luft learned that the Left opposition had been defeated and that Trotsky had gone into exile. We heard from friends that on his release Luft expressed the desire to return to the USSR but said that he would like to talk to Trotsky first. We were not too surprised, it was just the kind of thing Luft could be expected to say. He did not see Trotsky but returned to the Soviet Union. No doubt he was dealt with immediately, for no one ever heard of him again.
As a result of the Settlement Police’s analysis of the Noulens accounts, a Comintern correspondent, Nguyen Ai Quoc, was arrested by the Special Branch in Hong Kong. He had traveled widely, having left Saigon as a ship’s steward, and had worked in restaurants in London and Paris. His arrest prompted another international campaign to prevent his deportation to the French authorities in Saigon, and after his release, he dropped from sight, only to emerge eight years later in French Indochina under the nom de guerre Ho Chi Minh.
When word spread that Noulens had been taken into custody, Sorge left Shanghai but returned soon afterward, apparently confident that he had not been jeopardized. Although he discouraged Ursula Kuczynski from helping the Noulens campaign, so as to avoid compromising her, many of those who lent their support, including Smedley and Ozaki Hotsumi, were actively engaged in espionage. It is now believed that Hillarie Noulens was a Russian, Yakov Rudnik, and the woman posing as his wife was another Soviet professional intelligence officer, Tatyana Moiseenko.
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