OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES (OSS). Prior to World War II, the United States did not have a centralized intelligence organization, but in July 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed General William “Wild Bill” Donovan as Coordinator of Information. A respected New York lawyer and World War I hero, who had been decorated with the Medal of Honor, Donovan drafted a Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information and was named head of the Office of Strategic Services in April 1942.
The OSS was tasked with the collection and analysis of information as required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to conduct operations not assigned to other agencies but never enjoyed a monopoly in the intelligence field as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Special Intelligence Service maintained that role across Latin America and both the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Department jealously guarded their own areas of responsibility.
As well as conducting operations in Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, the OSS developed a large presence in the Far East and, between 1943 and 1945, trained Kuomintang troops in China and recruited guides and resistance forces from indigenous tribes to work with regular troops in Burma. The OSS also armed and trained resistance groups drawn from the ranks of Mao Zedong’s Red Army as well as the Viet Minh in French Indochina. The OSS also engaged in clandestine operations across the region and participated in espionage, subversion, and the preparation and distribution of anti-Japanese propaganda.
The OSS was disbanded by President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order dated 20 September 1945, and some of its personnel were absorbed by the State Department, which acquired a research and analytical capability, and the War Department. See also MACKIERNAN, DOUGLAS; TIBET.
OGGINS, ISAIAH (“CY”). Born in New York in 1886 to an immigrant Russian Jewish family, “Cy” Oggins joined the Communist Party of the United States of America while an undergraduate at Columbia University and would travel on behalf of the Comintern with his wife, Norma, to Paris, Berlin, and China.
In 1938, he was arrested in Moscow, and he was interviewed by two State Department officials in prison in 1943. He was murdered by the NKVD in 1947, but his fate only became known in 1992 when his KGB file was declassified and released, revealing that he had been accused and convicted of treason. In reality, Oggins and his wife spent two years in a large house in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. The couple then moved to Harbin and were associated with Max Steinberg, another Comintern agent. See also SOVIET UNION.
ORIENTAL MISSION. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) detachment in China, during World War II, headed by the Jardine Matheson magnate John Keswick, was known as the Oriental Mission, and it established a headquarters at Chungking. Keswick negotiated with Chiang Kai-shek for SOE to develop some training facilities on his territory, and Valentine Killery had flown in to complete the arrangements in January 1942. An embryonic special training school (STS) was opened near Chungking in March, but thereafter the relationship had faltered, principally because of the head of the Generalissimo’s intelligence service, General Tai Li, who, among other demands, insisted that a Chinese officer should head the STS. Instead of finding a compromise, Keswick and his colorful White Russian deputy, Vladimir Petropavlovsky, were ordered to leave the country forthwith. The British ambassador, Sir Alexander Clark Kerr, reported this incident to London, asserting, “SOE got into such bad odor with the Chinese because its personnel were almost exclusively representatives of British interests and their tactless and misguided activities, that Chiang Kai-shek himself ordered them out of China and refused them permission to operate.”
Both Keswick and Petropavlovsky were redeployed, the latter to the Balkans and the former to London, where he was appointed director of missions, Area C, covering India, the Far East, and the Americas.
In Shanghai, SOE’s efforts were effectively nullified by the Foreign Office, which, anxious as ever not to offend local sensibilities, vetoed the only proposal the organization came up with, the sabotage of the Eritrea, an Italian warship anchored just off the International Settlement. W. J. Gande, SOE’s local representative, headed a team of six untrained volunteers, but their ambitions were thwarted by the ambassador, who prohibited any action that would arouse anti-British feeling, provoke a Japanese occupation, or compromise the settlement’s neutrality. Thus, nothing was undertaken, and the entire group was eventually arrested by the Japanese acting on information from a Kempeitai agent planted in Gande’s office. Gande himself was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment at the Ward Road Gaol, but most of his team was later repatriated in an exchange of prisoners.
In Hong Kong, the position was only marginally better. A local resident, F. W. Kendall, had been recruited by Jim Gavin when he had visited the colony, and Kendall had subsequently gone on an STS 101 course in July 1941. He had returned to form the Reconnaissance Unit, a small stay-behind group centered on some custom-built hides in the New Territories. When the Japanese did sweep down into Hong Kong, Kendall’s men continued to harass the enemy and undertake the occasional act of sabotage, but when it became clear that the position was hopeless, they either surrendered or trekked northwest to Chungking. Kendall managed to escape, as did (Sir) Robert Thompson, (Sir) Ronald Holmes, and E. B. Teesdale.
That SOE’s Oriental Mission was going to be a catastrophe had been widely predicted. In August 1941, Christopher Hudson had been appointed SOE’s first head of Far East Branch in London, and he had sent Major A. B. O’Dwyer to Singapore in November to make an inspection. His subsequent report to SOE’s chief, Sir Frank Nelson, had made dismal reading, almost as depressing as Killery’s final report, submitted after the evacuation of Singapore. When Nelson gave a copy to his minister, Dr. Hugh Dalton, he observed, “It is most tantalizing to see in the report how His Majesty’s representatives have vetoed any preparatory work, cried for help from SOE the moment trouble started, and then complained if we did not deliver the goods.” Dalton was so amazed by the document that he commented, “The story ought to be written at length like a novel and printed for private circulation.” See also BRITISH ARMY AID GROUP (BAAG).
OU QIMING. During his almost three decades of espionage on behalf of the Ministry of Public Security and theMinistry of State Security, Larry Wu-tai Chin was handled exclusively by Ou Qiming. See also CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
OVERSEAS CHINESE. Overseas Chinese (Haiwai Huaren) is the term used to describe people of Chinese birth or descent who live outside either the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, regardless of citizenship. People of partial Chinese ancestry may consider themselves as Overseas Chinese, and it is this specific group that is the principal focus of the mainland and Taiwanese intelligence agencies and other organizations devoted to the acquisition of restricted technology and the exercise of political influence.
The PRC leadership does not just hope that Overseas Chinese will cooperate with the mother country, nor even expect them to, but simply assumes the cooperation of all Overseas Chinese. In the traditional Chinese view, they are considered Chinese first and Americans or British citizens a poor second. This applies particularly to first-generation Chinese immigrants, who attract the attention of the PRC and, in many examples, have been compliant.
The Chinese have a long history migrating overseas, and it is estimated that there are well over 40 million Overseas Chinese worldwide, including approximately 4 million in the United States, 1.5 million in Canada, 700,000 in Australia, over 400,000 in Great Britain, and 150,000 in New Zealand.
The PRC regularly used the tactic of sponsoring visits from ethnic Chinese to their homeland, and sometimes even to the villages of their families, and then inviting them to attend, and speak at, scientific symposia where classified issues would be raised. Having been softened up with references to their ancestors and appeals to their ethnic loyalty, the target would then be pitched, and not too subtly. Numerous identical reports reached the security authorities of flattering behavior, followed by an unmistakable plea to help the PRC’s research. Among those who acknowledged to having succumbed inadvertently to the transparent strategy was George Keyworth, President Ronald Reagan’s chief scientific adviser, who had been tempted to expound on implosion principles as applied to the neutron bomb. The Chinese tended to pitch everyone indiscriminately, regardless of stature, which led to suspicion of those scientists who either failed to report an approach or later denied one had occurred. See also JAPAN.
OWENS REPORT. On 8 May 1966, a flight of RB-66s, escorted by F-4Cs, accidentally strayed into Chinese airspace while on a mission over North Vietnam and were intercepted and fired on by four People’s Liberation Army Air ForceMiG-17s. One of the MiGs was shot down, prompting a protest from Beijing. An investigation into the incident was conducted by a Pentagon panel headed by General Robert G. Owens, who was indoctrinated into the routine surveillance missions flown by U.S. Navy EC-121, which was supposed to relay warnings from a clandestine radar site on Monkey Mountain, near Da Nang. Owens learned that there had been a failure of communication and that the EC-121 flight had been aborted. On his recommendation, air control of future flights was transferred to Monkey Mountain, with the National Security Agency taking responsibility for all early warning operations. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
PAKISTAN. The relationship of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with Pakistan dates back to 1951, a shared border, and a mutual antagonism toward India. Pakistan supported the PRC during the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict and received military support from Beijing during and after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, including T-59 tanks and F-6 jet fighters, when Islamabad was the subject of an international embargo.
In the nuclear field, the PRC has supported Pakistan’s civil and military development program, and in 1983, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency reported that Beijing had transferred the design of a nuclear weapon with sufficient uranium to build two. By an agreement signed by both countries in 1986, the PRC assisted in the construction of three atomic reactors and provided the advanced technology for a uranium enrichment plant. Since then, the PRC has confirmed its participation in the building of two further reactors. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) coordinated the intelligence collection on the PRC collaboration with Pakistan and, in August 1998, reported:
Imagery analysis reveals the reprocessing plant in the New Labs area of the Rawalpindi Nuclear Research Center near Islamabad is being expanded and modified to handle irradiated fuel from the unsafeguarded plutonium production center at Khushab.
The DoE predicted that Khushab would have produced sufficient plutonium for one weapon by 2000 and, thereafter, would recover enough fissile fuel for another each year. However, by December 1994, the PRC was delivering to the A. Q. Khan research laboratory at Kahuta components for gas centrifuges, required to speed up the development of weapons-grade fuel, and in 1998, the indigenous Ghauri medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) was tested, followed on 28 May by the first of a series of nuclear tests.
According to Gordon Oehler, then heading the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Center, “in 1990 the intelligence community detected the transfer to Pakistan of a training M-11 ballistic missile and associated transporter erector launcher, indicating that operational missiles were not far behind. The intelligence community had evidence that the M-11 was covered by the so-called guidelines and parameters of the Missile Technology Control Regime.” Indeed, two years later, 34 road-mobile Dong Feng-11 short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) were delivered to Pakistan and caught by overhead imagery at Sargodha. A National Intelligence Estimate circulated in 1996 noted that Pakistan had been supplied with an entire M-11 assembly plant that had been built outside Rawalpindi in 1995:
At least some of the M-11s that have been dispersed to military locations throughout Pakistan are now being stored at Sargodha. But we have yet to see operational missiles on imagery. April imagery showed canisters at Sargodha similar to ones seen at the M-11 production facility in China. But a missile-handling exercise was under way at Sargodha at that time, and the canisters were assessed to be mock-ups for use in that exercise.
The PRC also assisted in the construction of the plant at Rawalpindi that manufactures the Shaheen-1 solid-fueled SRBMs and sold JF-27 aircraft, F-22 P frigates equipped with helicopters, K-8 jet trainers, T-85 tanks, and F-7 fighters. The Shaheen-1 followed by the Shaheen-2 are the local variants of the DF-11, export version, the M-11.
Stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan is an important strategic objective for Beijing, which remains sensitive to the threat of Muslim extremism and separatists in Xinjiang Province. Accordingly, the Ministry of State Security maintains a strong representation in Islamabad, collaborating with the Inter-Service Intelligence organization to protect China’s investment in Pakistan, which includes oil and gas exploration, and to prevent Islamic radicalism from contaminating the Uighurs.
As well as being Pakistan’s principal source of defense equipment, China has made a substantial investment in the country’s infrastructure. Among the major Chinese-backed projects has been the construction of the port of Gwadar in Balochistan by the China Harbor Engineering Company, which became operational in 2008; the $70 million Gwadar international airport, which operates under Pakistani military control; and a $12.5 billion oil refinery, funded by the Great United Petroleum Holding Company. In strategic terms, the development at Gwadar provides an access to the Arabian Sea and to a major regional airport.
The PRC’s investment in Pakistan’s infrastructure includes the acquisition, in 2007, by China Mobile of Pak-Tel for $460 million and the control and ownership by the China Great Wall Industry Corporation of a Pakistani telecommunications satellite scheduled to be put into orbit from Sichuan Province in 2011. See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
PARLOR MAID. Codenamed PARLOR MAID by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in 1997, Katrina Leung removed and copied classified documents from the briefcase of her FBI handler, James “J. J.” Smith. When her home was searched in 2002, several classified documents were discovered, including an FBI transcript of a telephone conversation with her contact at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. Also recovered were documents relating to the FBI’s ROYAL TOURIST investigation of Dr. Peter Lee. Although neither Leung nor Smith were charged with espionage, the case demonstrated that Leung had been working on behalf of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) intelligence agencies for a very long period.
While virtually nothing in her background in the PRC can be verified, she is believed to have been born Chan Man Ying in Guangzhou on 1 May 1954 and to have moved to Hong Kong at the age of three, where she was brought up by Susan Chin, her ostensible aunt. They immigrated to the United States in 1970, using Taiwanese passports, and Chin married an American citizen eight days after their arrival in New York, where Leung entered high school. Leung became a permanent resident in August 1972 and obtained an undergraduate degree from Cornell University, where she met her husband, Kam Leung, who was preparing for his doctorate in biochemistry.
Leung initially had studied engineering before switching to economics and was to be awarded a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago while working in the city as a bank teller. Apparently, her first contact with PRC officials occurred in New York in 1972, when she worked as a volunteer at the PRC’s Mission to the United Nations. There she joined the Diaoyutai movement, a pro-Communist organization, and participated in demonstrations in support for the PRC’s claim to the Diaoyutai Islands. In New York and Chicago, she had contact with Lu Ping, an identified intelligence officer who headed the New China News Agency (Xinhua) in Washington DC.
Leung, later codenamed POETIC FIT while under investigation as a spy, became the general manager of Sida International, an import-export firm in Los Angeles that was suspected of engaging in the illegal transfer of technology to China, and thereby came to the FBI’s attention. Apparently, the FBI never concluded the Sida investigation, but in 1982, after she had left the company, she became a highly paid informant, maintaining a high profile in Los Angeles and providing information about local Chinese officials and the émigré community. In 1983, she began a sexual relationship with her FBI handler, J. J. Smith, and then started her own business consulting firm in California, where she was a director of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, as well as being a major contributor to the Republican Party. She was recorded as having made 71 overseas trips during the 20 years she worked as a source for the FBI; although, she failed to declare 15 of them.
On those trips, she was said to have been in contact with Ministry of State Security (MSS) officers on many occasions and was given a gift of $100,000 by the PRC president, Yang Shangkun. Certainly Leung was well connected in Beijing, and the Indonesian Chinese tycoon Ted Sioeng, whose family was investigated by the FBI for illegal donations to the Democratic Party, was a friend, and she had business-related contacts with companies such as Northern Telecom (Canada). Apparently, Smith made little effort to conceal his relationship with Leung, and she accompanied him to his retirement party, which she videotaped, and to President George W. Bush’s inaugural parade in Washington DC. She also lectured classes at the FBI’s Academy at Quantico on the management of double agents, and simultaneously carried on an affair with another former FBI special agent, Bill Cleveland Jr., who had led the TIGER TRAP investigation involving Min Gwo Bao. Early in that case, the FBI had learned that Leung was in contact with Min and frequently had traveled to San Francisco to participate in that operation.
Smith, who met Leung for trysts in London, Hawaii, and Hong Kong, would invariably leave his briefcase, containing highly classified FBI documents, unlocked at her home or in her hotel room. He would also leave her alone with the briefcase, allowing her access to the contents, which she copied. Even after he discovered that Leung was a double agent working for the MSS, he continued to provide her with secret information, and when challenged by the FBI, he denied the affair but was contradicted by videotapes that had recorded the pair engaging in sex in a hotel room. It was not until his fourth interview that he admitted that their affair had lasted eight years. When questions were raised at headquarters by analysts about Leung, Smith declared, untruthfully, that she had taken a polygraph test and passed it. Indeed, Smith had filed no less than 19 evaluation reports describing Leung as “reliable.”
After his retirement in 1993, Cleveland was appointed the head of security at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapons research facility in California. He admitted having had a sexual relationship with Leung from 1988 until his retirement, and he had resumed the relationship in 1997 and 1999. He had continued this liaison after he had discovered that Leung had unauthorized contacts with the MSS in 1991, when she had told her MSS handler that Cleveland was to accompany a U.S. State Department inspection tour in the PRC.
Apparently, Leung worked for the MSS and China’s General Ji Shengde to obtain political access in the United States, a manifestation of an influence operation rather than traditional espionage. Reportedly, she also provided information on advanced technology transfers and access to classified documents to China. Her MSS contact at the San Francisco consulate was codenamed MAO, later identified as Mao Guohua, and she had been assigned codename LUO ZHONGSHAN.
Leung’s involvement in obtaining influence is mirrored by another similar operation run by Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung, directed at the Democratic Party, and both were supervised by General Ji. Leung was also responsible for compromising CAMPCON, a major FBI investigation of illegal campaign finance donations made to the Democratic Party. J. J. Smith had participated in CAMPCON, perceived as the PRC’s attempt to funnel money into the 1996 U.S. election in an effort to gain influence inside President Bill Clinton’s White House. Smith was also the primary contact for Johnny Chung, allowing Smith access to the detailed account records of money passed by General Ji through Chung into the Democratic National Committee. A prolific fund-raiser, Chung cooperated with the FBI and pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his admission that he received $300,000 from PRC intelligence officials to influence U.S. elections.
It is likely that it was a source inside the FBI in Los Angeles who was responsible for compromising a covert operation to install listening devices aboard a Boeing 767 aircraft that was to be used by the president of China while it was in the United States for a refit. The equipment was quickly discovered, and the PRC government disclosed the incident early in 2002, claiming to have found 27 bugs, including some placed in the bathroom and in the headboard of the Chinese president’s bed.
When Smith, codenamed RICH FOLIAGE, underwent an FBI interrogation about his relationship with Leung, the Chinese plane incident was one of several issues raised, and in May 2004, Smith, then aged 60, pleaded guilty to a single charge of making false statements on a personnel security form as part of a background investigation, an offense for which he received three years’ probation and a $10,000 fine. However, he was allowed to retain his FBI pension.
In 2005, the original charge against Leung of the unauthorized copying of national defense information was dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct after the prosecution denied the defense the opportunity to interview Smith, who was to be a prosecution witness. Thereafter, her lawyers negotiated a plea on charges of lying to FBI investigators and a single count of filing a false income tax return for the $1.7 million she had received from the FBI, the $100,000 she had received from the PRC, and some mortgage-related issues. She was sentenced to three years’ probation, fined $10,000, and required to perform 100 hours of community service. See also COX REPORT.
PATTEN, CHRISTOPHER. The last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten was alleged by ministers in the Labour government elected in May 1997 to have included classified information about the negotiations conducted with China prior to the withdrawal from the colony in his memoirs. The claim proved groundless but drew attention to the role played by senior intelligence personnel, such as Sir Percy Cradock, in the tense discussions held in Beijing during Margaret Thatcher’s administration to reach agreement over the future of the leased island and the New Territories. Cradock had been appointed chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1985 and, for the next eight and a half years, until June 1992, was the prime minister’s principal Sinologist and foreign policy adviser.
PENG, YEN-CHIN. In August 2008, following his arrest the previous December, Peng Yen-Chin was extradited from Hong Kong to Manhattan to face charges of money laundering and conspiring to smuggle military equipment to Taiwan. A mechanical engineer employed by UNU Engineering in Taiwan, “Alex” Peng had been caught by an undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, whom he had solicited to buy a fighter pilot’s helmet, which was equipped with the joint helmet-mounted cueing system, an item on the U.S. Munitions List, in a sting operation involving advanced aiming devices and thermal sights. Peng had already purchased over the Internet infrared laser aiming devices and thermal weapons sights, all of which had been shipped by undercover ICE agents to Taiwan as “toys.” While in Taiwan, Peng had paid an additional fee to ensure the lasers would be exported without the required license.
Peng had intended to declare the helmet as a toy and then have it delivered to Taipei by Peter Liu, a Continental Airlines flight attendant, and on 6 December 2007, following Peng’s instructions, part of the dismantled helmet was handed to Liu in New York, with the agent telling Liu that it had been stolen. Undeterred by this news, Liu still took possession of the helmet.
According to court evidence, Peng’s expertise lay in reverse engineering military equipment. A U.S. citizen from Taiwan who lived in Queens, New York, Liu had only known Peng because he had allowed Peng to purchase various military gadgetry from his eBay account for a relatively small fee. Liu pleaded guilty and was imprisoned for 30 months, and on 15 December 2008, Peng also pleaded guilty and received the same sentence. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (PLA). With the largest standing army in the world, amounting to 2.25 million ground troops, the PLA is a unified organization that includes the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, the Strategic Rocket Force, and the PLA Navy, all of which are under the control of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Military Commission. The PLA’s large intelligence organization incorporates the Military Intelligence Department, or Qingbao Bu, also known as the Second Department or 2/PLA.
Founded on 1 August 1927, the PLA’s principal purpose is to give support to the CCP in the People’s Republic of China’s seven military districts through the deployment of 660,00 People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force created in 1983, which fulfills an internal security role under the aegis of the Ministry of Public Security. Apart from temporary deployments abroad during the Korean War, in North Vietnam between 1965 and 1970, the invasion of Tibet in 1950, and border clashes with the Soviet Union and India, the PLA maintains a defensive posture when not conducting exercises to threaten Taiwan. See also ARMED FORCES SECURITY AGENCY (AFSA); ALBANIA; ANUBIS; AUTUMN ORCHID; BLACKBIRD; CAMPCON; CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); CENTRAL INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT (CID); CHARBATIA; CHINA ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING PHYSICS (CAEP); CHINA INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES (CIISS); CHINESE NAVAL STRENGTH; CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; COMMISSION OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRY FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE (COSTIND); COX REPORT; CULTURAL REVOLUTION; DENG XIAOPING; DIXIE MISSION; EIGHTH BUREAU; ENGELMANN, LARRY; FIRST BUREAU; FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTITUTE (FLI); FOURTH DEPARTMENT; GENERAL STAFF DEPARTMENT / PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (GSD/PLA); GHOSTNET; HARBIN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; INFORMATION WARFARE; INFORMATION WARFARE MILITIA; INTERNATIONAL LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ILD); LI KENONG; LILLEY, JAMES; LIN BIAO; LOVELL, JOHN S.; MACKIERNAN, DOUGLAS; MALAYAN EMERGENCY; MI5; MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY (MEI); MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS); MOO KO-SUEN; PIRACY; PRINCELINGS; PROJECT 863; SHADOW NETWORK; SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO); SHU QUANSHENG; SINO-VIETNAMESE WAR; SIXTH RESEARCH INSTITUTE; SOVIET UNION; THIRD DEPARTMENT; TITAN RAIN; U-2; XIONG XIANGHUI; YU JUNGPING; ZONGCAN SANBU.
PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY AIR FORCE (PLAAF). Ill-equipped to defend the mainland from air attacks mounted from Taiwan after China’s Civil War, the PLAAF was dependent on Soviet support in the form of General Pavel F. Batitsky’s 106th Fighter Aviation Regiment (IAD) to protect Shanghai and, from July 1950, on the 151st Guards IAD at Shenyang to train the MiG-9 and MiG-15 novice pilots of the 4th Air Division, and the PLAAF was also dependent on the Soviets to provide cover for the 13th Chinese People’s Volunteer Army during the Korean War. At least one Taiwanese P-51 Mustang was shot down, on 2 April 1950, by Soviet interceptors based in Shanghai, which four months later, on 9 August, accidentally destroyed a Tupolov-2 Bat, mistaken for a B-25 Mitchell.
The Chinese pilots, later part of the Joint Air Army formed with the North Koreans, were no match for the more experienced American aircrew and suffered heavy casualties when they ventured out of PRC airspace, which was the limit of Soviet combat operations.
Even before the Korean ceasefire in July 1953, the PLAAF was engaged continuously in challenging Kuomintangaircraft that routinely entered PRC airspace, usually on reconnaissance missions. On 14 March 1950, an F-10, the photoreconnaissance version of the B-25 Mitchell bomber, was shot down by the PLAAF. Then two days later, a P-51 Mustang was hit by groundfire, killing the pilot. On 2 April, another Mustang was shot down by Soviet fighters over Shanghai; on 29 July, a P-57N Thunderbird was destroyed by groundfire near Xiamen. On 18 November 1951, a P-47N Thunderbolt failed to return from a flight over Guangdong. On 16 June 1953, a P-47N Thunderbolt pilot was killed by groundfire over Dongshan Island.
After the Korean ceasefire in July 1953, more Nationalist aircraft were attacked, and on 17 December, a Thunderbolt pilot was lost to groundfire over Jejiang, with another on 9 February 1954 and another on 18 March, shot down by a PLAAF MiG-15. There was a dogfight between a pair of Thunderbolts and two MiG-15s on 11 May, and five days later, a B-17 was downed by groundfire over Fujian, killing all four crew. On 3 June, a Thunderbolt was shot down by a PLAAF La-11 Fang, and on 16 July, another Thunderbolt pilot was killed by a MiG-15. On 12 September, a PBY4 was shot down near Xiamen, killing the crew of nine. On 15 October, a Thunderbolt failed to return from a mission over the mainland, and on 1 November, a Thunderbolt crashed while on a mission to Fujian, killing the pilot. On 17 November, an RT-33A crashed into mountains near Fujian while attempting to evade a MiG-15. On 19 January 1954, an F-84G Thunderjet was shot down by groundfire. Two days later, a Thunderbolt was also lost to groundfire, followed by another on 20 February. On 22 June, an RT-33A pilot was killed over Jiangxi by a MiG-17 Fresco. On 4 July, four MiG-15s were engaged by four Thunderjets, and one Fagot was shot down. On 16 July, a Thunderjet was shot down by groundfire over Kinmen. On 15 October, an F-86 Sabre was shot down by a MiG-15. On 14 April 1956, four Thunderjets engaged four MiG-15s, and shot one down; On 22 June, a B-17 was shot down at night by a MiG-17, killing the crew of 11. On 20 July, four Thunderjets engaged four MiG-15s and shot one down, and on the next day, four more F-84Gs engaged three MiG-15s and shot down two. Later the same day four Sabres engaged three MiG-15s and shot down two of them. On 4 October, over Shantou, an F-84 was shot down by the PLAAF. On 10 November, a C-46 Commando on an air-drop mission was shot down by the PLAAF over Jejigxi, killing the crew of nine. On 15 April 1957, an RF-84F Thunderflash pilot was killed as he tried to evade a PLAAF MiG. On 1 July, a P-47 pilot was killed by groundfire. On 5 November, a B-26 Invader was shot down and the crew of three captured, to be released the following July. On 18 February 1958, an RB-57D was shot down over Shandong by a MiG-17. On 17 June, a RF-83F Thunderflash crashed, killing the pilot near Fujian while evading MiG-15s. On 29 July, one of four F-84s was shot down by four F-17s near Nan Ao Island. On 14 August, three MiG-17s were shot down by F-86 Sabres. On 25 August, another two MiG-17s were shot down by Sabres. On 18 September, seven MiG-17s were shot down for the loss of one Sabre. On 24 September, 11 MiG-17s were downed by Sabres. Five days later, a C-46 Commando was shot down, killing two of the crew. The two survivors were captured and released on 30 June 1959. On 2 October 1958, another C-46 was shot down by groundfire over Kinmen, killing the crew of five. On 10 October, four MiG-17s were shot down by Sabres, and one Nationalist pilot was captured after his plane had been damaged by debris. On 19 May 1959, a B-17 was destroyed and the crew of 14 killed by a MiG-17 near Guangdong. On 5 July, Sabres shot down two MiG-17s over the Straits of Taiwan. On 7 October, an RB-57D was shot down by an SA-2 near Beijing, killing the pilot. On 16 February 1960, one MiG-17 was shot down by a Sabre over the Straits of Taiwan. On 25 March, an RB-69A was shot down at night, killing all 13 crew, and another was destroyed on 6 November over Shantung Province by an SA-2 Guideline missile. On 1 August 1962, an RB-69A was shot down, killing all 13 crew, and later in the same month, an R-101A Voodoo was lost near Fukien. On 14 June 1963, an RB-69A was shot down near Nanchang, killing all 14 crew, and on 11 June 1964, another RB-69-A was shot down near Yantai, over the Shandong Peninsula, by a MiG-17. On 18 December, a Voodoo was shot down by a PLA Naval Air Force J-6 over Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, but the pilot was captured and released in July 1985. On 18 March 1965, a Voodoo was shot down by a MiG-19 Farmer. On 10 January 1966, an HU-16 was shot down by a MiG-17 over Matsu. On 13 January 1967, four F-104G Starfighters were engaged by 12 MiG-19s over the Straits of Taiwan, with the loss of one Starfighter and one MiG. On 22 August, a C-123B Provider was shot down over the South China Sea. After 1967, no further incidents involving Nationalist aircraft attributable to the PLAAF were reported.
Throughout the Cold War, Chinese ground forces and the PLAAF also confronted United States aircraft, sometimes inside PRC airspace, but often with deadly results. The missions varied from signals intelligence collection, photoreconnaissance, agent insertions, leaflet drops, and “ferret” flights intended to test an adversary’s response and provoke the Chinese ground defenses to activate their radars. On 4 April 1952, a member of a U.S. Navy bomber’s aircrew was wounded by gunfire from a trawler 100 miles south of Shanghai but survived the flight back to Taiwan. On 31 July, two U.S. Navy aircrew were killed and two wounded when their PBM-5S2 Mariner was attacked by two MiG-15s, but the seaplane was able to limp to Pangyong-do in Korea. On 23 November, a U.S. Navy PBS4Y-2S Privateer from VP-28 Squadron was attacked by a single Fagot off Shanghai but was unscathed. On 12 January 1953, a U.S. Air Force B-29 Superfortress on a leaflet drop over Manchuria was shot down by PLAAF fighters. Three of the crew were killed, and 11 were captured, to be released in 1956. On 6 March, a U.S. Navy F4U Corsair reportedly was shot down over Qianlidao in Qingdao. On 23 April, a U.S. Navy P4M-1Q Mercator was attacked by a pair of MiG-15s off the coast of Shanghai but escaped undamaged, as did a U.S. Navy PB-5S2 Mariner of VP-26 Squadron fired on by a PLA Navy vessel in the Formosa Strait on 28 June. On 8 July, a U.S. Navy P2V-5 from VP-1 Squadron escaped antiaircraft fire near Nantien. On 21 July, a U.S. Navy PBM-5 Mariner was attacked and damaged over the Yellow Sea by a pair of MiG-15s; another PBM-5 Mariner from VP-50 was attacked by two MiG-15s 30 miles east of Tsingtao on 2 October. On 18 November, a further Mariner was attacked by two MiG-15s but returned to VP-50 safely. On 27 January 1954, a U.S. Air Force RB-45 Tornado, with an escort of F-86 Sabres, was attacked over the Yellow Sea by eight MiG-15s, an engagement that resulted in the loss of one Fagot. On 9 April, a U.S. Navy P2V Neptune from VP-1 Squadron was attacked over the Yellow Sea by MiG-15s but escaped unscathed. In February 1955, the wing of a U.S. Navy P2V was hit by antiaircraft fire while over the Formosa Strait but survived. Later, on 5 February, an RB-45 Tornado of the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron was attacked over the Yellow Sea by MiG-15s. A dogfight with eight F-86 Sabre escorts ensued, and two Fagots were shot down. Four days later, on 9 February, a U.S. Navy AD-5W Skyraider off the USS Wasp was shot down, but the crew was rescued by the Taiwanese. On 17 April, a U.S. Air Force RB-47E Stratojet from the 4th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron from Eielson was shot down near Kamchatka by two MiG-15s, killing two of the crew. On 10 May, eight F-86 Sabres were attacked off Sinuiju in Korea by twelve PLAAF MiGs, with the loss of two MiGs and one Sabre. On 15 October, a U.S. Air Force F-86 Sabre was shot down by a MiG-15. On 12 June 1957, four AD-6 Skyraiders from VA-145 Squadron off the USS Hornet penetrated Chinese airspace over the coast and experienced antiaircraft groundfire but suffered no losses. This incident was effectively the last encounter between the two protagonists; although, on 14 February 1968, a U.S. Navy A1-H Skyraider on a ferry flight from VA-25 Squadron in the Philippines was shot down over Hainan Island when it accidentally strayed into Chinese airspace, killing the pilot.
The PLAAF has suffered the defection of several pilots, such as Gao Youzong and then Sun Tianqin, a 46-year-old test pilot, originally from Fengxiang, who flew his J-711 experimental aircraft from Dalian to Seoul, South Korea, in August 1983. An airman since graduating from an advanced training course at the 11th Aviation School, Sun revealed that he had undergone reeducation during the Cultural Revolution before being allowed to fly again in 1975. His plane was found to be equipped with the very latest avionics, including the Marconi head-up display and weapon aiming computer and Skyranger airborne radar. Sun joined the Taiwanese air force and, having married a musician, immigrated to Canada.
Others who have flown their aircraft to safety, eventually seeking refuge in Taiwan to collect a well-advertised bounty, include Liu Zhiyuan in November 1987. Disaffection caused by the suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations were cited as motives for some escapes, principal among being Lieutenant Jiang Wenhao, a 23-year-old graduate of the 13th Aviation School and officer of the 145th Regiment of the 49th Division, who flew his Shenyang J-6 from Longxi airport in Zhangzhou to Shangyi airport on Kinmen Island in September 1989. On the following day, he was moved by ship to the Pescadores and then flown to Taipei, where he enrolled in the Taiwanese air force. Examination of Jiang’s plane revealed the existence of an anti-defection device, designed to cut the fuel supply if the aircraft strayed from its designated mission, which had been installed following the defection of another pilot, Liu Zhiyuan in November 1987. After his retirement, Jiang became a celebrated underwater photographer. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA).
PIQUET, JOSEPH. On 14 May 2009, Joseph Piquet was sentenced to 60 months’ imprisonment, to be followed by two years of supervised release. The owner and president of AlphaTronX, a company in Port Lucie, Florida, which produced electronic components, Piquet had been convicted on 5 May of seven federal charges arising from a conspiracy to purchase electronic components for military equipment from the Northrop Grumman Corporation and ship them without the required export licenses to Hong Kong and to the People’s Republic of China. The items included high-power amplifiers designed for use in early warning radar and missile target acquisition systems, as well as low-noise amplifiers that have both commercial and military applications.
Piquet was indicted on 5 June 2008 with his company and with Thompson Tam, a director of OnTime Electronics Technology Limited, an electronics company based in the PRC. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
PIRACY. China’s burgeoning economic expansion has placed pressure on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, which rationally undertook a limited maritime role patrolling the Taiwanese Straits and protecting China’s regional interests. However, in 2008, seven Chinese merchantmen were seized by Somali pirates off the Gulf of Aden. These incidents prompted the deployment to the Indian Ocean of a PLA Navy task force of three surface vessels on an escort mission carrying 70 special forces to protect the 1,265 Chinese commercial vessels that transit the area annually. The first task force, which began patrols in December 2008, consisted of the modern guided-missile destroyers Haiku and Wuhan, supported by a replenishment auxiliary, the Weishanhu. In April 2009, the warships were replaced by a destroyer, the Shenzhen, and a frigate, Huangshan. Then, in July 2009, two frigates, the Zhoushan and the Xuzhou, took over the duty supported by the Qiandaohu. This participation in a multinational naval operation represented a radical departure from the PLA Navy’s doctrine and demonstrated a capability of deploying for extended periods more than 3,400 miles from its home port of Hainan Island.
An estimated 80 percent of the PRC’s imported oil is shipped through the dangerous Straits of Malacca, and a greater reliance on energy imports and foreign trade make sea lane security an increasing preoccupation for PLA Navy intelligence analysts, who acknowledge a vulnerability to pirates and to the possible threat of a naval blockade. See alsoCHINESE NAVAL STRENGTH.
PLANESMAN. The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the codename PLANESMAN for Yu Qiangsheng, a defector from the Chinese Ministry of State Security. See also CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
POLLARD, ANNE HENDERSON. In August 1985, Anne Henderson married Jonathan J. Pollard, an analyst based at the Naval Investigative Service’s (NIS) counterterrorism center, and spent her honeymoon in Venice, a holiday paid for by Israeli intelligence officers to whom her husband was selling vast quantities of classified information. Although working in public relations for the National Rifle Association, Anne Pollard actively supported her husband’s espionage, and when he was arrested in November 1985, as they attempted to seek refuge at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, she was also charged. She was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and served three, while her husband was sentenced to life.
During the NIS investigation of the Pollards, evidence emerged that Pollard had approached South African embassy staff in an attempt to sell classified information while his wife had planned to make the same offer to PRC diplomats. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
POSEIDON, HMS. On 9 June 1931, HMS Poseidon, a Parthian-class submarine built in 1929, sank in 130 feet of water while exercising with its tender, HMS Marazion, in the South China Sea after colliding with a Chinese freighter, the SS Yuta, some 20 miles north of the British naval base at Weihaiwei on the island of Liugong. All but 18 of the crew were rescued by the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, and two who escaped using a Davis diving apparatus died, but in late 2005, the PLA Navy publication Modern Ships reported that the wreck had been salvaged during the early 1970s. A further reference on the Shanghai Salvage Bureau’s website appeared to confirm that a recovery operation had been undertaken; although, the precise reason for raising it remains unclear as the submarine was obviously obsolete and could not have contained any equipment of current value.
PRICE, MILDRED. Identified by Elizabeth Bentley in her autobiography, Out of Bondage, as a Soviet spy, Mildred Price was accused of having provided an apartment in which an underground Communist Party cell could meet. Married to Harold Coy and sister of Mary Price, Mildred Price was the executive head of the China Aid Council, a Communist front. Bentley said that at first she had “regarded Mildred merely as an intermediary with Mary, but soon we discovered she would be a valuable adjunct to our apparatus in her own right.” She was the organizer of the Communist unit, which functioned in the Institute of Pacific Relations—a foundation for Far Eastern studies, which had originally been set up by well-meaning philanthropists but had long since fallen under the domination of the Communists. The organization, because of its respectable past and high-sounding title, had been able to enroll in its ranks a vast number of “innocents,” among them professors and businessmen who were interested in Pacific affairs. Hence, it had become the center of all Communist activity in the Far Eastern field, offering a protective covering to a number of smaller, more obviously pro-Communist enterprises that clustered around it. Among these were the China Aid Council, of which Mildred Price was also the executive secretary, and their magazines China Today and Amerasia.
Mildred Price used the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) as a pool from which suitable prospects could be talent-spotted, but apart from Duncan Lee, Bentley could only recall her rejecting Philip Jaffe, Amerasia’s editor, as a candidate because he was too well known as “a red.” Another contact was Michael Greenberg, a Communist Party of Great Britain member and graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, who had been awarded a PhD from Harvard in 1941 and had worked as Lauchlin Currie’s administrative assistant at the Foreign Economic Administration before he succeeded Owen Lattimore as chairman of the IPR.
Of these, only Philip Jaffe was pursued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as an espionage suspect. Originally, he had been investigated as a key figure in the Amerasia investigation, and although indicted in August 1945 with Andrew Roth and Emmanuel S. Larsen, the charges were dropped because the FBI’s copious evidence had come from illegal wiretaps and searches, which could not be used in court. He was later cited for contempt, having pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times before the Tydings Committee, but was acquitted in April 1951 and thereafter sought immunity from prosecution, apparently anxious to avoid prosecution for wartime espionage, for which the statute of limitations did not apply. Following his acquittal, the FBI conducted four lengthy interviews with Jaffe, which remain classified, but he did implicate Joseph M. Bernstein as a courier, and Bernstein was to emerge in a VENONA text under the cover name MARQUIS. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
PRINCELINGS. Intelligence operations and illicit procurement programs conducted from Hong Kong on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by members of the families of senior PLA and Chinese Communist Party staff, known as “princelings” are a characteristic of clandestine activities based in the Special Administrative Region since the British withdrawal in July 1997. The princelings typically are enriched by participating in low-risk enterprises that buy equipment in the West that would otherwise require export licenses and then divert the matériel to the mainland. As commercial transactions, these purchases enjoy high profit margins and the protection of the PLA once the goods have reached Hong Kong for transshipment to their ultimate destination. With substantial funds at their disposal, the princelings have no difficulty in recruiting intermediaries in the West willing to engage in the “gray-market.” In the few cases that have come to light by customs and enforcement interdiction, tracing the chain of responsibility beyond Hong Kong invariably proves fruitless but certainly reveals high-level sponsorship and close family ties to PLA cadres.
The princelings are occasionally the subject of investigation by the Central Discipline Inspection Commission, the party’s secret anticorruption unit, but in Beijing, they enjoy much of the immunity acquired by the hong erdai, the privileged elite, sometimes referred to as the “red second generation” or the “red successors,” who have family links to the party’s past and present leadership.
PROJECT 863. A venture capital company based in Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province, sponsored by the Ministry of State Security, Project 863 provided financial backing for entrepreneurs in the United States who developed businesses in the high-technology field, often with military or valuable commercial applications. Several investigations of illicit technology transfer in the United States implicated Project 863 as the original source of funding for individuals implicated in the illegal export of embargoed equipment and software, among them Ye Fie, Zhong Ming, Ge Yuefei, and Lee Lan.
Originally initiated with political support from Deng Xiaoping in March 1983, following public announcements in the West concerning the Strategic Defense Initiative and the 1985 European EUREKA initiative, Project 863 is managed by People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND)and the State Science and Technology Commission (SSTC), which was established to supervise research in the six key areas of laser technology, automation, biotechnology, information systems, energy, and new materials. Altogether, 17 major studies were undertaken and funded by 863, independently from the COSTIND and SSTC budgets.
One of Project 863’s successes is in the field of integrated circuits, the microelectronic chips upon which all computers depend. In 1993, the People’s Republic of China was reliant on foreign sources for up to 80 percent of its supply, but by the end of the eighth Five-Year Plan in 1995, China was able to meet half of its total demand for the circuitry with domestically produced products. Since then, production of integrated circuits has increased at a rate greater than 20 percent per year, with a focus on reducing the cost and weight of microelectronics while increasing the reliability and survivability. Project 863 has also made great progress in the development of very large-scale integrated circuits (VLSIC), which have many military applications, including advanced phased-array radars and space systems.
The PRC’s capacity to manufacture sophisticated circuitry has raised the specter of the adoption of altered specifications, and close inspection of some circuit boards integral to the F-16’s avionics has revealed potentially damaging alien interference during the production process. This has created the suspicion that the aircraft’s electronic systems could be vulnerable to sabotage originating from within its own components.
Another 863 objective was the Shuguang 1000 parallel computer system, an 863-funded scheme that achieved 2.5 billion operations per second in 1985. A more sophisticated parallel supercomputer system, the DAWN series, followed, capable of speeds up to 300 billion calculations per second, with miniaturized versions designed for microcomputers installed in missiles, launch vehicles, and satellites. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
QIAN XUESEN. Sent to the United States as a student in 1936, Qian Xuesen (formerly known as Tsien Hsue-shen under the former Wade-Giles Romanization of Chinese names), received his doctorate in physics from Caltech three years later and then moved to Paris to study under Frédéric Joliot-Curie. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army, working on rocket technology, and reached the rank of colonel. At the end of hostilities, he played a key role in debriefing captured German rocket experts, including Werner von Braun, but upon the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, his security clearance was suspended, and he remained restricted to his home at Caltech until he was deported to China in 1955 in exchange for 11 American airmen captured during the Korean War.
Qian was received as a hero in the People’s Republic of China and began to assemble a team of foreign-trained engineers and establish an aerospace research and development organization. In 1956, he drafted a plan closely resembling the U.S. Air Force’s Toward New Horizons to promote a weapons development program that concentrated on atomic energy, missiles, computer science, semiconductors, electronics, and automation and favored missile research over aircraft production. In February 1956, Zhou Enlai approved the establishment of the Ministry of National Defense’s Fifth Academy and allowed Qian to head a military delegation to Moscow to gain Soviet technical support. He also traveled to Dresden to meet Klaus Fuchs, recently released from prison in England, to receive a briefing on the FAT MAN uranium bomb. As a result, hundreds of experienced Soviet engineers were posted to China and a number of Chinese students were sent to study in the Soviet Union. Eventually, 343 contracts and 257 technical projects were sponsored during the period of Sino-Soviet friendship, but the relationship was terminated by Nikita Khrushchev in August 1960.
For the next 20 years, Qian personally supervised research on ballistic and cruise missiles, aerodynamic testing facilities, and satellites and pressed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to adopt nuclear power. He was the subject of harassment during the Cultural Revolution but survived when the Central Committee ruled that the space and missile industry was a priority. Later he would be associated with the CCP’s conservative wing, and in 1977, Qian denounced Deng Xiaoping and his faction, which included the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND) director, Zhang Aiping. Qian’s hostility to Deng undermined his authority, but when he changed his stance and supported Deng’s suppression of anti-regime protestors in 1989, he recovered his status and saw his protégé, Song Jian, appointed as chairman of the State Science and Technology Commission. As director of the Fifth Academy, he masterminded the programs that produced the Silkworm antiship missile, the Dong Feng ballistic missile, and the first successful launch of a PRC satellite in April 1970.
Qian was appointed to the CCP’s Central Committee, and in 1979, Caltech awarded him its distinguished alumni award for his pioneering work in rocket science. In March 1994, Qian persuaded COSTIND to participate in research projects that included remote sensing satellites, hypersonic aerospace planes, adaptive optics, and high-tech communications systems.
In 1999, the Cox Report, issued by the U.S. Congress, Qian was labeled as a spy. Widely acknowledged as the father of China’s space and missile programs, he died on 31 October 2009 at the age of 98 in China, having never returned to the United States. See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
QINGBAO BU. See MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT (MID).
QINGBAO SUO. In the Chinese language, there is no real distinction between “intelligence” and “information” in common usage, and there is no specific term for “intelligence-gathering.” Qingbao suo refers to “information-gathering,” an essential ingredient of the mammoth intelligence gathering effort directed at Western countries. See alsoMINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS).
RB-45C. On 27 January 1954, an RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft escorted by F-86 Sabres was attacked by eight Chinese MiG-15s over the Yellow Sea. One MiG was shot down. Just over a year later, on 5 February 1955, the incident was repeated but with the loss of two MiGs fighters. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
REDBERRY. In 2006, China Unicom began to market a version of the BlackBerry personal digital assistant, which had been developed by Research in Motion, a Canadian company based in Ontario. Known as the RedBerry, the Chinese device appeared to be an almost exact facsimile of the original system.
REDMOND, HUGH F. On 26 April 1951, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer under non-official cover (NOC) was arrested in Shanghai, masquerading as a representative of Henningsen and Company, a food import and export company based in Hong Kong. A former D-Day paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division, Redmond’s cover was backstopped in the British colony, and it was the responsibility of the local British Secret Intelligence Service station to ensure that it was maintained without revealing his true role. Nineteen years later, Redmond died in a Chinese prison, still protesting his innocence.
Redmond enlisted in the U.S. Army in July 1941 and fought in Normandy and Arnhem in 1944 before being wounded during the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945. When he was discharged in October 1945, he had been decorated with the Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Clusters, and a Purple Heart. In July 1946, he had been enrolled in the War Department’s Strategic Services Unit (SSU), a clandestine organization headed by Colonel John Magruder, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) veteran, and posted to Shanghai, where he had married a White Russian piano teacher named Lydia. Having arranged for her to leave China, Redmond had been arrested as he had attempted to board a troopship, the USS General W H Gordon, one of dozens of Americans, mainly missionaries, who were detained during the early years of the Communist revolution.
By then, the SSU had been absorbed into the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which had been created in January 1946 and later became the foundation of the CIA in 1947, but nothing was heard about Redmond’s incarceration until a fellow inmate at the notorious Ward Road Gaol was released to Hong Kong in July 1952. Further news emerged in March 1953, when a German prisoner was interviewed, and in April 1954, a French priest, Alberto Palacios, reported having shared his cell in Shanghai’s Rue Massenet prison. Then, five months later, in September 1954, Shanghai’s Military Control Committee announced that Redmond, having been linked to a spy ring that had been set up by OSS, had been convicted of espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment. Allegedly, the Chinese authorities had seized a large amount of incriminating material, including 16 codebooks, 6 bottles of an ingredient for developing secret ink, hundreds of compromising documents, and a suitcase with a hidden compartment. Also convicted were five other men and two women, of whom Wang Ko-yi and Lo Shih-hsiang were executed in front of Redmond.
By the end of 1955, 28 of the 41 Americans in Chinese custody had been released, but the State Department seemed reluctant to make representations on behalf of Redmond’s family. In January 1958, his mother, Ruth, was allowed a brief visit to his prison, a meeting arranged by the Red Cross and reported by the New York Times. Thereafter, they exchanged letters each month, and she made two further visits, in October 1962 and October 1963, but failing health prevented her from making further journeys. In 1968, the CIA, while maintaining the pretence that Redmond was simply an innocent businessman, arranged for an intermediary to pretend that a fund of $1 million had been accumulated from donations made by well-wishers and attempted to open ransom negotiations with Chinese diplomats, but nothing happened. Finally, in July 1970, Beijing announced that on 13 April 1970 Redmond had died after having severed an artery in his arm with a razor. His body had been cremated, and his ashes were handed over to the American Red Cross for burial in his native town, Yonkers, New York. See also TROPIC; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
REGAN, BRIAN P. A year after taking up his post as a contractor for the National Reconnaissance Office, former U.S. Air Force Sergeant Brian P. Regan was arrested at Dulles Airport as he attempted to board a Swissair flight for Zurich. The 40-year-old Regan had left the Air Force in August 2000, but the father of four had accumulated debts of $116,000 when he approached diplomats representing the People’s Republic of China, Iraq, and Libya with an offer to sell them classified information for $13 million. He was arrested in August 2001 and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in February 2003 after some 10,000 documents and a collection of CDs had been recovered from caches buried in Virginia and Maryland. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
REPUBLIC OF CHINA (ROC). See TAIWAN.
RESHETIN, IGOR. In October 2005, a Russian academic, Igor Reshetin, was arrested by the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) security service and charged with two other members of TsNIIMASh Export, Sergei Tverdokhlebov and Aleksandr Rozhkin, with evading export regulations and smuggling dual-use technology to the People’s Republic of China. Based near the Korolyov cosmodrome, TsNIIMASh is a state-owned aerospace technology company. In December 2007, all three defendants were sentenced to between 5 and 11 years’ imprisonment. See alsoTECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
REVOLUTIONARY UNION. An doctrinal split within the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1966 led to the expulsion of a radical Maoist, Leibel Bergman, who then spent two years in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and returned to found a new organization, the Revolutionary Union, which, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), ultimately in September 1970 would recruit an estimated 350 members, mainly from the Weather Underground and Black Panthers, and be committed to urban guerrilla warfare and the violent overthrow of the United States government. Using his son Lincoln and daughter-in-law Arlene, a leader of the notorious Venceremos Brigade, Bergman drew adherents from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Progressive Labor Party, the Worker-Student Alliance, and the Third World Liberation Front, all New Left extremist groups, and maintained contact with Chinese intelligence personnel through the PRC embassy in Paris and the new diplomatic mission in Ottawa, which opened in October 1971. Bergman’s clandestine network, with headquarters in San Francisco, was penetrated by a pair of FBI undercover agents, Betty and Lawrence Goff, who joined in San Jose, California, in 1969, but testified before Congress in October 1971.
Other American political radicals known to have been supported by the PRC included Chris Milton of the SDS, whose father had been a missionary in Shanghai, and Robert F. Williams, the self-styled president of the “Republic of New Africa,” who sought asylum in Beijing for three years, from 1966, when he was a fugitive facing kidnapping charges, but continued to distribute the Maoist propaganda tract The Crusader. According to the FBI, China’s covert support for the black revolutionary movement lapsed soon after a month-long visit to Beijing in March 1972 by the Black Panthers Raymond Hewitt and Emory Douglas, who had been accompanied by Dr. Tolbert Small and National Lawyers Guild members Allen Brotsky and Charles Garry. See also SINO-SOVIET SPLIT.
RIO TINTO ZINC (RTZ). In July 2009, Stern Hu, the Australian head of Rio Tinto Zinc’s (RTZ) iron ore sales, and three of his colleagues were taken into custody in Beijing and accused of bribery and economic espionage. According to the prosecutors, the mining company had bribed the directors of 16 of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) steel mills, and its computers had been found to contain confidential information concerning annual commercial negotiations, which were described as “state secrets.” Also arrested were Wang Hongjiu, the director of shipping at the Laigang Group, and Tan Yixin, an executive of the Shougang Group, both accused of leaking classified material to Stern Hu.
The episode followed the conviction of Chen Tonghai, the former chairman of Sinopec, the PRC’s second-largest oil company, who was given a death sentence for corruption. Aged 60, Chen’s sentence was suspended for two years to enable him to appeal and to cooperate with investigators. In March 2010, Stern Hu pleaded guilty to charges of bribery and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE.
ROTH, JOHN REECE. On 3 September 2008, a federal jury convicted a 72-year-old retired University of Tennessee professor, Dr. John Reece Roth, of illegally exporting military technical information, acquired from a U.S. Air Force research contract, to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The data related to plasma technology designed for the wings of drones operating as weapons or surveillance systems, and he had been charged with conspiring with Atmospheric Glow Company, a technology company based in Knoxville, Tennessee, to unlawfully export 15 different “defense articles” to a PRC citizen in 2005 and 2006.
According to the prosecution, Dr. Roth used Chinese graduate research assistants and wire transmissions to pass the information and, in 2006, made a lecture tour in the PRC, where he also delivered more sensitive technical data controlled by the Arms Export Control Act. Roth was sentenced to 48 months’ imprisonment and died in London in 2010. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
ROYAL HONG KONG POLICE (RHKP). Granted its royal status following exceptional bravery shown by officers of all ranks during the 1967 Communist-inspired rioting, the Hong Kong Police was staffed by a British officer corps but trod a delicate line between the interests of the governor and the colonial authorities, accommodating a tolerable level of crime and corruption among the local Chinese. Well aware that the mainland exercised indirect control over most of the territory by possession of its food and water supply, the police maintained order but took precautions not to offend Beijing.
The Special Branch represented an elite division of the Criminal Investigation Division and was transformed in 1949 by the arrival of a large group of British police officers, who were recruited by Director Special Branch (DSB), Deputy Commissioner Peter Erwin, to replace veterans of the prewar Shanghai Settlements police. Because of endemic, low-level corruption within the rest of the force, the Special Branch undertook anticorruption and anti-Triad investigations, as well as running more conventional intelligence and counter-subversion operations. The Special Branch became a highly professional security apparatus when (Sir) John Prendergast was appointed DSB in 1960. Hitherto, successive DSBs had rotated through other HKP divisions, but Prendergast retained key personnel so some officers spent much of their career inside Special Branch. With previous Special Branch experience in Palestine, the Suez Canal zone, Kenya, and Cyprus, Prendergast transformed the organization, employed external contractors to undertake sensitive surveillance duties, established a large analytical section, and accepted temporary personnel on secondment from military intelligence, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
On Prendergast’s initiative, subsequent DSBs, who included Brian Slevin (1966–69), Christopher Dawson (1970–71), Richard Richardson (1972–78), James Morrin (1979–84), and finally John Thorpe (1992–97), liaised closely with the local representatives of the Allied liaison services, both formally and informally, by hosting meetings each fortnight, one attended by the MI5 security liaison officer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s legal attaché, the AustralianSecurity Intelligence Organisation officer, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Security Service officer. The alternate event was for the SIS station commander, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station chief, and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service representative. Other liaison relationships included representatives of the Malaysian Special Branch, the Singapore Intelligence Service, the South Koreans, the Japanese, and the Indonesians.
The Special Branch’s targets, apart from the Chinese Communists, were the Nationalists and the Soviets. Although the latter were never allowed to establish formal diplomatic representation in the colony, the KGB and GRU operated under journalistic and trade covers. As for the Kuomintang (KMT), their involvement in the destruction of an Air India Constellation, the Kashmir Princess, on 11 April 1955, en route for the Bandung Conference, resulted in a major and very successful Special Branch investigation using accurate information supplied by the Communists who, in HKPSB parlance, were known as CHIS, an acronym for the Chinese Intelligence Service. The KMT was known as KIS, or the Kuomintang Intelligence Service.
Another preoccupation were groups of saboteurs, thought to have been trained by the CIA in Okinawa; although, usually they showed no interest in crossing the frontier, and those that were not betrayed by moles dropped from sight to spend their funds.
Accommodated on three floors of the police headquarters, the DSB’s staff also occupied numerous other buildings and safe houses across the colony and ran technical and human penetration operations against the Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist front controlled from Beijing. Their premises were raided by Special Branch at the height of the 1967 riots, and the information recovered resulted in an accurate prediction that the unrest would cease by the end of the year. Because of the unique nature of the British administration of Hong Kong, which was essentially an autocracy headed by the governor, the DSB enjoyed very wide powers and was only accountable to His Excellency. Accordingly, the DSB was free to exercise considerable discretion in running operations and invariably deported or refused entry to individuals considered undesirable by Special Branch. When Michael Hanley, a former SLO, was appointed MI5’s director general in 1971, he authorized the DSB to attend the Commonwealth Security conference, the first time that a colonial Special Branch had attended such a gathering and in spite of objections from SIS.
The RHKP eventually fell prey to internal corruption and, in 1973, became the target for a new institution, the Independent Commission against Corruption, which, led by John Prendergast, recently returned from heading the security apparatus in Aden, pursued some of the abuses, perhaps the most serious of which was the case of Chief Superintendent Peter Godber, a former Special Branch officer who had been decorated for bravery during the 1967 riots.
The RHKP’s Special Branch gained more experience of Chinese espionage than any other Allied intelligence service but limited its activities to maintaining surveillance on suspects rather than running offensive operations that might embarrass Beijing. As the 1997 hand-over date approached, the organization became less aggressive as a counterintelligence apparatus, and eventually the entire structure was dismantled, its large civilian staff resettled across the British Commonwealth, and the files removed to beyond the reach of the new Chinese administration. See alsoGREAT BRITAIN; TSANG, JOHN.
ROYAL TOURIST. The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the codename ROYAL TOURIST for the Los Alamos physicist Dr. Peter Lee. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
RUSSIA. While little is known of the operations conducted by the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki (SVR) against Chinese targets, there have been several cases publicized by the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) of Russians accused of spying for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In December 2007, Igor Reshetin was convicted of espionage for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), and in September 2010, two scientists at the Baltic State Technical University in St. Petersburg were charged with passing information to China. See also SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO); SOVIET UNION.
SECOND DEPARTMENT (2/PLA). The principal organization within the General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s (GSD/PLA), the Second Department is also known as the Military Intelligence Department / People’s Liberation Army and is responsible for the collection of intelligence. The Second Department, or Zongcan Erbu, deploys military attachés abroad to embassies, conducts human intelligence and signals intelligence operations, and includes the Analysis Bureau that runs the National Watch Center and the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. Second Department personnel are posted overseas under various covers, including correspondents for the New China News Agency (Xinhua) and the People’s Daily and the China Youth Daily.
Subordinate to the Second Department is the First Bureau, focused on Taiwan and Hong Kong. See also AUTUMN ORCHID; MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY (MSS).
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (SIS). Not considered an intelligence priority by SIS until the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance lapsed in 1923, collection operations in the Far East region were left largely to the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division, especially during the period of financial stringency that followed the British government’s 1920 budget that cut SIS’s expenditure in the region to £18,200, out of a total of £90,000 for the entire organization, and by 1934, the amount devoted to Japan and China amounted to £6,460. The local regional SIS chief, based in Shanghai, was Godfrey C. Denham, formerly the deputy director of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau, who had been appointed in December 1920 and remained in the post until he was replaced in 1923 by the local consul, Harry Steptoe.
Code numbered 28000 within SIS, Steptoe was in poor health but pulled off a considerable coup in June 1931, following the arrest of Hilaire Noulens, by gaining access to the records of the Comintern’s Far East Bureau, but his failure to satisfy London’s demand for information about Japan, where there was no SIS post, led to the creation of the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB) in Hong Kong, where Lieutenant-Commander Charles Drage, a retired Royal Navy officer who had served on the China Station aboard HMS Bluebell, was established. When, in April 1938, the Admiralty complained about the quality of SIS’s information from the Far East, the chief, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, retorted that there were 72 agents on SIS’s payroll in the Far East, of who 29 supplied data on the Imperial Japanese Navy. In addition, another SIS officer, Alex Summers, was based in the colony, with responsibility for an area that covered southern China, Formosa, and French Indochina. In 1939, the FECB was transferred to Singapore, where the SIS station was headed by Major J. H. Green, who liaised closely with his French and Dutch colonial counterparts and was joined in the summer of 1940 by Drage. In February 1941, Godfrey Denham returned to SIS as regional director with the code number 69000.
Supported only by a subordinate station in Peking, headed by Frank Liot Hill, working on military activity in northern China, Steptoe continued to concentrate on Chinese political intelligence until 1940, when W. Gordon Harmon was established under press attaché cover at the embassy in Chung-king. However, SIS operations in the north of the country effectively ceased in early 1942, following the fall of Singapore in February, when Steptoe and Hill were interned by the Japanese, later in October to be repatriated in an exchange of diplomats in Mombasa. Fortunately for both men, the Japanese did not appear to realize their significance and missed the opportunity to interrogate them. Summers was not so lucky and remained in captivity in Stanley Camp for the remainder of the war.
Meanwhile, Gordon Harmon in Chungking established a link with Zhou Enlai, who authorized the release of some valuable Japanese signals intelligence, but an attempt to reinsert Frank Hill into Xi’an in 1942 failed, and the Kuomintang only allowed him to reach Chengdu, whence he was evacuated before he died of illness in October 1943. Harmon came to rely on the KMT for information, not all of which was reliable, and a review of reporting from China during the first 10 months of 1943 revealed that of a total of 119 reports, 34 had originated with Special Operations Executive, which had developed a relationship with the KMT’s Resources Investigation Institute, and 21 from American diplomats. SIS’s principal independent source appeared to be from an Estonian, Colonel Richard Maasing, who was in contact with the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, Lieutenant-General Makoto Onodera. Only seven reports came from Harmon, of which two had been dismissed as simply expressions of opinion. However, by 1944, the situation had improved dramatically, with 566 reports delivered from 10 stations, of which the largest were at Kunming, Nanping, and Changping, employing a staff of 41. Twenty of these personnel were case officers who handled more than 400 separate sources, some of them in the Maritime Customs and the Salt Gabelle tax authority. A coast-watching service was based at Wenzhou, keeping an eye on Japanese shipping in Amoy, and SIS ran a junk equipped with a transmitter in December 1944 from Foochow.
During the war, SIS conducted clandestine intelligence-collection operations from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and then Delhi under Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD) cover, a semitransparent organization that stretched across the Far East and was headed first by Wing Commander Pile, later succeeded by Major Rosher, who had been ISLD’s representative briefly in Hong Kong, and then by Godfrey Denham. During the war, ISLD’s principal contribution was to infiltrate teams equipped with wireless transmitters into Japanese-occupied territory, as exemplified by Sergeant John Cross, but in strategic terms they accomplished little at considerable cost in human and technical resources. Cross later described his experiences, for which he was decorated with the Distinguished Service Medal, in Red Jungle.
By the end of hostilities, SIS had expanded its presence on mainland China with stations at Tientsin, Ürümchi, Shanghai, and Nanking but was heavily dependent on the Nationalists for liaison reporting. No stay-behind networks had been created in anticipation of the Communist takeover, and the stations that were overrun were not allowed to transmit or send encrypted cables. The KMT’s offer to supply SIS with all it required, for £3,000 a month, was accepted, and a collaboration, codenamed SALVAGE, began from headquarters in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which supposedly were in radio contact with a clandestine Nationalist network across southern China. Doubts soon emerged about the authenticity of the SALVAGE product, and the arrangement was terminated.
In the postwar era, SIS established a headquarters in Singapore under Combined Intelligence Far East cover to conduct operations against Communist influence in the region, concentrating on Malaya, Hong Kong, and Indonesia, supervised by the Far East Controllerate at headquarters in London. SIS personnel in Hong Kong operated under military liaison cover, and they included Andrew King, Ellis Morgan, Barrie Gane, Jimmie James, Brian Stewart, Stephen Longrigg, Nigel Inkster, and Gordon Barrass.
Within SIS, which traditionally has been staffed by generalists rather than specialists, there has always been an element of separation between the Soviet watchers and the Far East hands. As an example of the latter group, Richard Evans spent much of his career as a China watcher.
SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER (SLO). Overseas representatives of the British Security Service (MI5) are known as security liaison officers and traditionally have been attached with diplomatic status to high commissions in Commonwealth countries, but in Hong Kong, the SLO was assigned to the governor’s staff and acted as an adviser to the Special Branch and a conduit to MI5’s headquarters in London, working closely with the local Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station, which operated under military cover. The first postwar SLO was Major H. E. Wilson, who temporarily headed the SIS station under Inter-Service Liaison Department cover. Two SLOs in Hong Kong, (Sir) Michael Hanley and (Sir) John Jones, would later become MI5 directors general.
SENIOR BOWL. A Central Intelligence Agency operation to monitor activity at the Lop Nor test site by deploying D-21 drones dropped from B-52H bombers outside the PRC’s airspace west of the Philippines was codenamed SENIOR BOWL. The unmanned, ramjet-powered 44-foot aircraft overflew the target area flying at Mach 3.3 at 80,000 feet and then returned over the ocean where the waterproof camera and film capsule would be ejected with a parachute to be snagged by a specially adapted C-130 in a complex airborne procedure codenamed TAGBOARD. At a predetermined height, an explosive charge would then destroy the D-21, leaving no trace of the incursion. Although Chinese radar did detect some of the SENIOR BOWL incursions, which began in November 1969, they mistook them for SR-71 Blackbird missions and issued diplomatic protests. In 1972, President Richard Nixon undertook to terminate what were described inaccurately as SR-71 overflights, and the remaining D-21s were consigned permanently to David-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. By the time SENIOR BOWL was terminated, 50 drones had been built by Lockheed. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
SERVICE, JOHN S. Born in Chengtu, Szechwan Province, in 1909, Jack Service attended a school in Shanghai until 1924, when he went to the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the State Department in 1935 and served in Beijing and then Shanghai before being appointed a political officer in Chungking in 1941, where he lived with his wife Caroline and their two children. During World War II, Service advocated support for the Communists, condemning Chiang Kai-shek as a corrupt warlord. He also attended the first Chinese Communist Party Congress in March 1945 but was recalled to Washington DC, where he would be arrested and accused of leaking classified information to a leftist journal, Amerasia. He gave evidence to a federal grand jury in August 1945 and was later appointed to a consular post in India.
However, in March 1950, he was summoned before a Loyalty-Security Board to be cross-examined about his alleged Communist sympathies and evidence from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he had passed secrets to Amerasia. He was dismissed in December 1951, following an adverse report by the Tydings Committee published in July 1950, together with other “China hands,” among them John Carter Vincent, John Paton Davies, and Oliver Edmund Clubb.
In 1957, following an application to the U.S. Supreme Court, Service was reinstated by the State Department but was denied a security clearance. He then became an academic, being appointed curator of the Center for China Studies Library at Berkeley, and, in 1971, published The Amerasia Papers, followed three years later by a collection of his dispatches, Last Chance in China. He died in 1999, aged 89. See also DIXIE MISSION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
SHADOW NETWORK. In April 2010, U.S. and Canadian computer security researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto published details of how a spy ring in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), termed the Shadow Network, systematically hacked into personal computers in government offices in several continents and in particular, the highest levels of India’s Ministry of Defence. The intruders accessed restricted documents that included classified security assessments of the states of Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, and Tripura, as well as the Naxalites and Maoists opposition groups. There was also personal information about a member of the Indian Directorate of General Military Intelligence and evidence that computers at the Indian embassy in Kabul, Moscow, and Dubai and at the High Commission in Abuja, Nigeria, had been compromised. Confidential embassy documents about India’s relationships in West Africa, Russia, and the Middle East, reports on several Indian missile systems, and copies of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mails were also accessed over a period of a year. Furthermore, computer systems used by the Indian Military Engineer Services in Bengdubi, Calcutta, Bangalore, and Jalandhar, the 21 Mountain Artillery Brigade in Assam, three Indian Air Force bases, and two Indian military colleges were also penetrated.
Other compromised material included details of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) movements in Afghanistan, and during a study lasting eight months, the researchers monitored the PRC intruders hacking into the computers of various Indian government agencies and then alerted the authorities in New Delhi. The Shadow Network was believed to be an offshoot of the GhostNet operation but was considered much more sophisticated and difficult to detect. Although it gave the appearance of being conducted by criminals based in Sichuan Province, researchers noted the ease with which the origins of such attacks can be masked and that Chengdu was the site of a People’s Liberation Army technical reconnaissance bureau that financed the University of Electronic Science and Technology’s research on computer network defense. Specifically, the researchers recovered documents classified at the “secret,” “restricted,” and “confidential” levels and included information from a member of the National Security Council Secretariat concerning Indian security situations.
Ye Lao, a PRC official in Chengdu, said that “it’s ridiculous” to suggest the Chinese government had a hand in the hacking of the Indian computers and added, “The Chinese government considers hacking a cancer to the whole society.”
SHAN YANMING. In September 2002, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested 32-year-old Shan Yanming of Daqing as he attempted to board a flight to the PRC and charged him with gaining unauthorized access to the computers of a Silicon Valley business where he was employed.
Shan also worked for Daqing Oil, a division of China’s state-owned PetroChina, which arranged for Shan to travel to Mountain View, California, for training with 3DGeo Development on software used to support oil and natural gas surveys. Shan was learning to operate the company’s seismic-imaging software, which depended on proprietary algorithms to sift through seismic data and locate oil deposits. A company official later stated his employees “were keeping an eye on” Shan because, two years earlier, another PetroChina employee had been found to have entered the company’s offices on a weekend and accessed its computer network without permission.
Earlier, in September 2002, another 3DGeo employee had discovered that Shan had transferred the company’s most precious software source code from the network to his own computer, and these data were later found on Shan’s laptop. He was confronted about the illicit transfers and arrested a week later as he tried to flee the country. When the FBI examined his laptop, a password-breaking program was found, named Crack, which was designed to gain unauthorized access to computer networks. The FBI also established that when a group of company officials from the PRC had visited Shan several weeks earlier, one of them had brought him a detachable data storage device.
PetroChina subsequently assured 3DGeo that the company had no knowledge of Shan’s attempt to steal secrets, but on 7 July 2004, Shan pleaded guilty in federal court to a one-count indictment charging him with gaining unauthorized access to 3DGeo computers to fraudulently obtain proprietary software programs and source code. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
SHANGHAI. The International Settlement of Shanghai, created in 1854, following the 1844 Treaty of Nanking that ended the first Opium War, established British and French enclaves, known as concessions, outside the city walls, which came under the control of a municipal council run by international businessmen, with its own Shanghai Municipal Police, supervised by the British. The Municipal Police’s counterespionage branch was the Special Branch, headed by Harry Steptoe, a Japanese-speaking British Secret Intelligence Service officer.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, an increasing number of Russian refugees settled in Harbin and Shanghai, and they were followed during the 1930s by a large flow of Jews fleeing persecution in Germany. The International Settlements also attracted numerous intelligence professionals, such as Richard Sorge, Ursula Kaczynski,and Agnes Smedley, and accommodated the Comintern’s Far East Bureau. As German influence waned after 1916, the Japanese exercised increasing local influence until Imperial troops invaded Manchuria in 1937 and then occupied the whole of Shanghai in December 1941.
In April 1938, General Chang Tso-lin, chief of the Second Department of the Chinese Communist Party’s Military Committee, suggested direct liaison with the NKVD, and an agreement was made for the exchange of information, with the Chinese providing details of White emigrants, foreigners, and Trotskyites in return for lists of known Japanese agents. The Chinese were also to share captured Japanese codes so communications could be decoded in Moscow and the contents shared. The result of this collaboration was the establishment of a joint office, linking the NKVD’s local rezidentura with a legal and one illegal Chinese counterpart.
The new joint office consisted of the First Department, engaged in the management of an intelligence network, personnel training, and study of operational techniques; the Second Department was the intelligence branch that processed agent reports; and the Third Department was administrative. According to the NKVD’s official history, the joint office’s annual cost of $20,000 was met equally by the two parties.
In May 1938, the Seventh Department of the NKVD’s Foreign Intelligence Directorate appointed two GRU officers, and by the end of the year, the relationship had flourished to the point that the Chinese had created seven illegal rezidenturas, linked to each other by radio and couriers, operating actively in Ningsia, Hangchou, Tientsin, and Hong Kong, with some additional information coming from rezidenturas in Peking, Tsingtao, and Tsinan. The priorities were details of Japanese troop movements, mobilization plans, and threats of air raids on Chinese cities.
The NKVD came to take a poor view of Chinese organization, agent training, and operational security and complained that the Chinese had attempted to recruit Soviet joint office personnel. Nevertheless, the Soviets provided training in secret writing methods, cipher systems, direction-finding equipment, and other technical support and, in return, received a flow of military, political, and economic intelligence.
As well as intensive Soviet activity in Shanghai, the city also accommodated the U.S. Navy’s first signals intelligence collection site on foreign shores. A clandestine intercept facility was established in 1924 to monitor Japanese Imperial Navy wireless traffic in tandem with another station aboard the cruiser USS Huron, but further sites were opened at Wailupe, Hawaii, in 1925 and then in Peking in 1927. The Shanghai station was reinforced in 1927 by the arrival of a cargo ship, the USS General Alava, which was withdrawn in March 1929, and then was designated Station A and linked to Office of Naval Intelligence facilities at Cavite and Guam. After much success, including with Japan’s diplomatic traffic, Station A was closed in December 1940 and transferred to the Philippines.
During World War II, Shanghai retained its reputation as a center of espionage, and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation came across several cases in 1941 where Nazi spies on missions to the United States had been supplied with cover addresses in Shanghai as a means of communicating with their Abwehr controllers in Hamburg. More recently, with the city’s transformation as a major hub of global commerce, Western tourists and businessmen have reported incidents that indicate the presence of an active and vigilant Ministry of Public Security apparatus. See alsoAIRBORNE COLLECTION; ARMED FORCES SECURITY AGENCY (AFSA); ANUBIS; BANNER, USS; BLACKBIRD; CENTRAL BUREAU 610; CENTRAL DISCIPLINE INSPECTION COMMISSION (CDIC); CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); CHIANG CHING-KUO; CHIN, LARRY WU-TAI; CHINA ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING PHYSICS (CAEP); CHINA AEROSPACE CORPORATION (CAC); CHINESE SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE; COLLECTIVE SECURITY TREATY ORGANIZATION (CSTO); COMINTERN; DENG; EWERT, ARTHUR; FARRELL, FRANK; FOURTH DEPARTMENT; GREAT BRITAIN; HALPERN, ERIC; HANSON, HAROLD DEWITT; HINTON, JOAN; HONEYTRAP; HUTCHINSON, MILTON; ILLEGALS; INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; KAZAKHSTAN; KOREAN WAR; KYRGYZSTAN; LEE, DAVID YEN; LEE, SAM CHING SHENG; MALAYAN PEOPLES’ ANTI-JAPANESE ARMY (MPAJA); MAO ZEDONG; MASK; MI5; MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY (MEI); NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB); NEEDHAM, JOSEPH; NOULENS, HILAIRE; PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY AIR FORCE (PLAAF); POSEIDON, HMS; REDMOND, HUGH F.; REVOLUTIONARY UNION; ROYAL HONG KONG POLICE (RHKP); SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (SIS); SERVICE, JOHN S.; SHRIVER, GLENN D.; SMEDLEY, AGNES; SOONG, CHARLIE; SOUTH KOREA; SOVIET UNION; SPECIAL BRANCH; WORTON, WILLIAM A.; WU SHU-TUNG; XIONG XIANGHUI; YU QIANGSHENG; ZHU CHENZHI; ZIELONKA, STEFAN.
SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO). Created in 1996 by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and originally known as “the Shanghai Five,” the SCO established a 100-kilometer border zone in the member states in which military information and intelligence would be exchanged freely in an effort to reduce regional tension. Three years later, further protocols were added to the SCO to embrace counterterrorism operations, measures for the suppression of separatist movements and mutual anti–drug-smuggling operations. Then, in June 2001, Uzbekistan joined the group, with Iran, India, Pakistan, and Mongolia accepting observer status. Although intended as a forum for the exchange of intelligence and the mounting of joint military exercises, the SCO is thought by Western analysts to have strengthened bilateral relations among the member states but to have failed to eliminate mutual Sino-Russian suspicions or to provide a reliable channel for passing intelligence on sensitive issues, such as nuclear installations.
Attempts by the PRC to develop the SCO into a free-trade area have been opposed by Russia, which has also declined to participate in joint military exercises conducted with the People’s Liberation Army. Furthermore, the Kremlin remains suspicious that the SCO has been manipulated by the PRC to improve its access to regional oil and gas reserves, citing Chinese investment in two major pipelines. The Kazakhstan-China pipeline controlled by the China National Petroleum Corporation pumps oil 3,000 kilometers from the Caspian Sea to Xinjiang, and the Central Asia Gas Pipeline, a joint project with Kazakhstan’s KazMunaiGaz, sends natural gas on a route from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to the PRC. Whereas the old pipelines were aligned on a north-south axis, sending energy into Soviet Russia, the new alignment is intended to benefit Beijing.
In 2004, the SCO adopted a special counterterrorism center, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), headed by a deputy director of the Russian Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) security apparatus, to simplify the detention and extradition of terrorist suspects between participating states. Hitherto, the RATS system had been used by the FSB to facilitate access to suspects deemed extremists who had been granted refugee status in a neighboring country, their names having been added to a common database. Under the terms of the SCO’s convention on privileges and immunities, RATS personnel and their bases are given diplomatic status, and these rights were exercised in 2008 when a Uighur imam, Huseyincan Celil, who held a Canadian passport, was deported from Uzbekistan to the PRC. Similarly, using the RATS in 2007, Russia began to deport Falun Gong supporters to the PRC, among them Ma Hui, a United Nations mandated refugee, and Gao Chuman, who were escorted across the border in March and May respectively.
In 2005, the SCO applied Chinese-inspired pressure on the Uzbek and Kyrgyz governments to terminate U.S. Air Force leases on local bases, which led to the closure of the American facility in Uzbekistan. See also COLLECTIVE SECURITY TREATY ORGANIZATION (CSTO).
SHEN JIAN. One of Kang Sheng’s most trusted subordinates, Shen Jian was based in Havana in October 1962 and was entrusted by the Cubans with an unexploded U.S. Air Force missile so the PRC could reverse engineer it. Highly regarded in Beijing, Shen was consulted by Zhou Enlai in 1973, when Mao Zedong was suspicious of Henry Kissinger’s discreet approach to normalize Sino-American relations. Reportedly, Shen was able to verify that the approach was real enough by checking with Larry Wu-tai Chin.
Shen’s wife, Xiong Xianhui, was a former head of the English Department at the Beijing International Relations Institute, who had been responsible for monitoring Kissinger when he first went to China. She spoke excellent English, having attended Smith College in the United States before the revolution.
SHENZHEN DONJIN COMMUNICATION COMPANY. In August 2007, the Intel Corporation filed a lawsuit against the Shenzhen Donjin Communication Company Limited, claiming that the Chinese firm had stolen its proprietary technology. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
SHESU LO, ROLAND. In 1986, a Chinese American from Los Angeles, Roland Shesu Lo, was arrested in China and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for espionage allegedly conducted between 1984 and 1985. A former Taiwanese intelligence officer who had immigrated to the United States in 1980, Shesu Lo was the first American citizen to be charged with espionage since full diplomatic relations had been established. See also NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB); TAIWAN.
SHIMRAY, ANTHONY. An international arms dealer based in Bangkok, Anthony Shimray was arrested in Bihar in September 2010 when he strayed across Nepal’s border while visiting Kathmandu. Under interrogation, Shimray revealed that he had acted as an intermediary for NORINCO (Beifang Gongye) and China Xinshidai, both weapons manufacturers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and had supplied rifles, explosives, and rocket launchers to various insurgent groups in India, including the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, usually smuggling them from the Chinese port of Beihai through Bangladesh. He also revealed that, since 2008, the PRC had sponsored an NSCN veteran, Kholose Swu Sumi, as the organization’s permanent representative at Kunming, in Yunnan Province. Reportedly, several senior PRC intelligence officers had told Shimray that their strategy was to subsidize the NSCN as a means of undermining New Delhi’s authority to conduct border negotiations and to collect intelligence about the deployment of Indian military forces in what the NSCN claimed was an autonomous “Greater Nagaland.”
SHRIVER, GLENN D. In June 2010, 28-year-old Glenn Duffie Shriver, who had applied to join the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) three years earlier, was arrested as he attempted to board a plane in Detroit bound for South Korea. He was charged with having failed to disclose that, when visiting the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where he had studied in Shanghai as an undergraduate, he had met Chinese intelligence personnel and had been paid $70,000 in three installments by them. In October 2010, Shriver, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to communicate national defense information to a person not entitled to receive it and was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
Fluent in Mandarin, Shriver was befriended by three PRC intelligence officers while living in Shanghai in October 2004, having recently graduated from Grand Valley State University in Michigan, and agreed to return to the United States and apply for a job in the American intelligence community. In court, he admitted that he had intended to gain access to classified information and then pass it to the PRC. According to his confession, he had met a woman named “Amanda” after he had answered an advertisement in a local English language newspaper seeking scholars of East Asian studies to write articles. He had been paid $120 for his first contribution, a paper on Sino-U.S. relations in respect to North Korea and Taiwan, and then had been introduced to a “Mr. Tang” and a “Mr. Wu,” who he would meet more than 20 times in the following years. Even after he had moved to Korea, to teach English, and become engaged to a girl named “Yumi,” he continued to maintain contact with Amanda.
Between 2005 and his arrest, Shriver applied to join the U.S. State Department and the CIA and admitted to having made false statements in December 2009 on a CIA questionnaire, when he claimed not to have had any contact with a foreign government or its representative during the last seven years. He also failed to mention his travel to the PRC in 2007, when he received a $40,000 cash payment for having submitted his job application.
SHU QUANSHENG. On 7 April 2009, Dr. Shu Quansheng, a 68-year-old naturalized American citizen, was sentenced to 51 months’ imprisonment for illegally exporting space-launch technical data to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and for offering bribes to Chinese government officials. The scientist was also ordered to pay $387,000 in restitution.
The president, secretary, and treasurer of AMAC International, a high-tech company located in Newport News, Virginia, with a representative office in Beijing, Shu was arrested on 24 September 2008 and, on 17 November, pleaded guilty to three charges concerning the export of a defense service in violation of the Arms Export Control Act, the export of a defense article, and attempting to bribe a foreign government official in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
According to the prosecution, Shu helped the PRC with the design and development of a cryogenic fueling system for space-launch vehicles based at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island.
Shu, who had conducted cryogenic research for the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and written 6 books and 100 academic papers, also illegally exported technical data related to the design and manufacture of a 100-M3 liquid hydrogen tank and offered $189,300 in bribes to officials at the 101 Institute to win, in January 2007, a $4 million hydrogen liquefier contract for a French company he represented.
According to the Department of Justice, Shu was associated with the People’s Liberation Army’s General Armament’s Department, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology’s 101st Research Institute, the Beijing Special Engineering Design Research Institute, and the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. The prosecution also alleged that, in 2003, Shu had supplied the PRC with a document entitled Commercial Information, Technical Proposal and Budgetary Officer-Design, Supply, Engineering, Fabrication, Testing and Commissioning of 100-m3 Liquid Hydrogen Tank and Various Special Cryogenic Pumps, Valves, Filters and Instruments, which contained controlled military technical data. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
SIDEWINDER. In May 1996, a joint Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) task force, codenamed SIDEWINDER, conducted a study of Chinese organized crime and intelligence operations and compiled a report entitled Chinese Intelligence Services and Triad Financial Links in Canada, which proved highly controversial and was replaced by a document codenamed ECHO. This too was criticized by the Parliamentary Security Intelligence Review Committee, which noted in its 1999–2000 annual report, “As to the first draft of the SIDEWINDER report, we find it very faulty in almost all respects. It departed from standards of professionalism and lacked the most basic analysis.”
SINO-AMERICAN COOPERATIVE ORGANIZATION (SACO). Established in 1942 by a U.S. Navy officer, Commander Milton E. Miles, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, SACO was headed by the Kuomintang intelligence chief Tai Li and staffed by some 3,000 American personnel centered on Chungking. SACO was intended to coordinate Chinese operations against the Japanese and built a signals intercept and direction-finding station outside the city, which was linked by radio to San Diego; although, much of the traffic was sent encrypted over commercial cable carriers direct to Washington DC. Known as Happy Valley and Station F, the site was the first U.S. Navy intercept facility in China and drafted in operators from Australia and from Cavite in the Philippines. One of their tasks was to monitor Japanese transmissions from spies reporting on Flying Tiger aircraft taking off from Kunming, and the identification and elimination of these clandestine sets prompted the creation, in November 1943, of a new station at Ningsha in Mongolia. Later, new sites were opened at Kweilin and Nanning, but plans to expand SACO’s activities to a further 17 forward bases were abandoned in August 1945, following the detonation of the two atomic bombs on Japan. See also OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES.
SINO-SOVIET SPLIT. Although Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts detected and reported the apparent ideological differences between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties, wider acceptance of a Sino-Soviet split took several years to be fully acknowledged by United States policymakers. The monitoring of public statements and broadcasts from both Beijing and Moscow allowed some interpreters, such as the CIA Directorate of Intelligence’s Donald Zagoria, to discern the subtle nuances in policy commentaries that suggested the denunciation in Moscow of Josef Stalin in the February 1956 secret speech at the 20th Party Congress by Nikita Khrushchev had been viewed by Mao Zedong as revisionism. In July 1958, Morris Child, a Federal Bureau of Investigation informant inside the Communist Party of the United States of America, codenamed SOLO, returned from Moscow with the first hard intelligence that a serious breach had developed between the Soviet Union and the PRC.
Some in the CIA were quite ready to accept the assertion of the KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, who, following his departure from the rezidentura in Helsinki in December 1960, had alleged that the supposed split was part of a wider Kremlin deception intended to mislead the West about the true nature of the Soviet relationship with Mao and even with Josip Broz Tito. Although many of Golitsyn’s theories were later discredited, the fact that CIA analysts debated the issue at all is an indication of the paucity of accurate information available from Beijing during that era. Nevertheless, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued the CIA with a secret directive to exploit and exacerbate internal Communist tensions, encouraging the agency to
create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism, impair relations between the USSR and Communist China and between them and their satellites, complicate control within the USSR, Communist China and their satellites, and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of the Soviet Bloc.
Proof of the policy schism between Beijing and the Kremlin only emerged following Khrushchev’s visit to China in October 1960, when divergent reports circulated concerning nuclear weapons and doctrine relating to the promotion of international Communism rather than peaceful coexistence. Dismayed by Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinism and committed to a strategy of opposing Western colonialism, Mao invited him to Beijing at the end of July 1958 for an unexpected visit lasting three days. Ostensibly, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss a crisis in the Middle East, where the United States had landed troops in Lebanon and Great Britain had intervened in Jordan, at a moment when Mao sought to apply pressure on the Quemoy garrison. Although a routine joint communiqué was issued at the visit’s conclusion, the ambiguous language employed apparently betrayed a growing division between Soviet and Chinese strategy.
On a further visit, in September 1959, to attend the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Chinese revolution, Khrushchev made an overt commitment to world peace, rejecting Mao’s militancy in favor of trade and aid, and failed to issue the expected bland joint communiqué. Mao had been offended by Khrushchev’s trip, without prior consultation, to President Eisenhower in Washington DC earlier in the month and by his lack of support for Chinese pressure on the Nationalists in the Taiwan Straits. An incident on the Indian border with Kashmir was engineered to demonstrate China’s displeasure, and Khrushchev responded by an oblique attack on Beijing in a speech delivered in Novosibirsk on 10 October, confirming the Soviet Union’s commitment to an ideological rather than military struggle with the West, declaring Soviet neutrality on border disputes with India and cautioning against “adventurism” in Laos and Korea. When, in December 1959, on the centenary of Stalin’s birth, Pravda reported on his failures while Renmin Ribaodescribed his virtues, the scale of the doctrinal differences between the two parties became more apparent.
The vote taken by the 81 international delegates attending the 22nd Congress on a motion criticizing Albania, but actually aimed at Beijing, demonstrated the Kremlin’s relative strength, with the Soviets receiving support from virtually all the Communist parties in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, whereas the Chinese were backed by all the Asian parties, with the sole exception of Ceylon. Of the 68 speeches reported to have been made by foreign delegates, those from Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Luxemburg, Belgium, Denmark, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and Guadeloupe opposed Albania. Altogether, 44 delegates took Moscow’s line, with only 24 refraining.
The CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence monitored the deterioration in the relationship between Mao and Khrushchev by careful analysis of the broadcast and print media, study of public speeches, and subtle changes of nuance in joint communiqués, combined with reporting from clandestine sources, including some in the Polish Communist Party. See also REVOLUTIONARY UNION.
SINO-SOVIET TREATY. Formally known as the Pact of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, the treaty was signed in Moscow on 14 February 1950. The agreement formed the basis of economic aid for Beijing in return for a 10-year lease on the Soviet naval base in Manchuria, the Manchurian railway, and mining rights in Xinjiang Province, where there were deposits of valuable minerals, including uranium. However, following his visit to Beijing in June 1959, Nikita Khrushchev terminated the agreement and withdrew all Soviet technicians from the People’s Republic of China, thus handicapping many infrastructure projects, including Beijing’s secret nuclear weapons research program.See also CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
SINO-VIETNAMESE WAR. In October 1978, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) detected the movement of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from garrisons in Kunming toward the Vietnamese border, and within the month, analysts reported that the PLA had accumulated 320,000 troops and 350 aircraft in the area and instituted a special communications link from Beijing to Duyun. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia on 4 January 1979, the NSA and the Australian Defence Signals Directorate monitored the brief conflict, which eliminated Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Phnom Penh, and anticipated a Chinese response, which followed at dawn on 17 February, when the PLA overwhelmed Vietnam’s northern province and remained in occupation for 29 days. An NSA review of the conflict concluded that radio silence, imposed by both the Vietnamese and the Chinese, had handicapped the agency’s ability to provide Washington DC with accurate assessments of the deteriorating military situation in the frontier region. See alsoAIRBORNE COLLECTION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
SIXTH RESEARCH INSTITUTE. The Kongliusuo, or Sixth Research Institute, of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force is the principal Chinese signals intelligence organization and is based in Beijing.
SK-5. The U.S. Navy’s designation for the Ryan 147SK unmanned drone, the SK-5, malfunctioned on 10 February 1970 while on a damage assessment mission to North Vietnam. The plane’s controller on a Navy E-2 Hawkeye lost contact with the SK-5, which continued to fly until it ran out of fuel and then automatically deployed a parachute to land on Hainan Island. The PLA later claimed to have shot down the aircraft, identifying Qi Deqi and Zhou Zingcheng of the 4th Regiment, Division 8, as the Naval Air Force officers responsible. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
SMEDLEY, AGNES. Always a firebrand revolutionary, Agnes Smedley was from a poor family in Missouri and committed herself to anticolonialism when she met Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian nationalist at Columbia University in New York in March 1917. Thereafter, she was constantly in the vanguard of campaigns for radical, feminist causes and, in particular, schemes to undermine the British Empire. She was indicted on espionage charges in March 1918 after the arrest of a group of Indian nationalists who had established contact with the German government and had planned to smuggle home weapons and propaganda. She was an active member of the Socialist Party and a regular contributor to its newspaper, the Call. After her release from prison, she moved to Berlin, where she continued her close association with Indian nationalists.
In November 1928, she traveled to China as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and immersed herself in the Chinese revolutionary movement. In her absence, she was tried in the marathon Meerut conspiracy trial, which began in March 1929, following the arrest of the leading members of the outlawed Indian Communist Party. Later the same year, she moved to Shanghai and soon afterward became the mistress of Richard Sorge, the famous Soviet GRU agent. She introduced Sorge to a Japanese journalist, Ozaki Hotsumi, who was translating her best-selling autobiography, Daughter of the Earth, and in 1941, both men were arrested in Japan on espionage charges and executed in 1944. While in Shanghai, Smedley contributed to the Comintern-backed English language newspaper, Voice of China, using the pseudonym “R. Knailes,” standing for “Rusty Nails.”
Between June 1933 and April 1934, Smedley was in the Soviet Union, recovering her health and working on her journalism, but by October 1934, following a brief return to the United States, she was reporting for the Manchester Guardian from the Sino-Japanese front. For 18 months, she lived among the Communist guerrillas and became close to their leader, Mao Zedong. In August 1940, her health failed and she was evacuated by air to Hong Kong, where she was placed under house arrest by the British authorities. Having obtained her release, she became a vocal critic of the colony’s administration, and in May 1941, she arrived by ship in California. Her account of the war against the Japanese, Battle Hymn of China, was published in 1943 and is still regarded as a masterpiece of war reporting, even if the political bias is strident. In July of that year, she entered an artists’ retreat, Yaddo, near Saratoga Springs, New York, but continued her political campaigning in support of the Chinese Communists.
By August 1944, Smedley had attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; although, her political views had been well known for many years, not least because they had been noted in the report issued in 1938 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), chaired by Martin Dies. In March 1948, she was obliged to leave Yaddo, and early the following year, she was named as a Soviet spy by General Charles Willoughby, the former director of military intelligence in Japan, who had edited a report on the Sorge case, based on the interrogation of his Japanese captors. Willoughby’s allegations were given additional weight by testimony of Hede Massing and Whittaker Chambers, who both identified Smedley as a Soviet agent, as well as the confession written for the Japanese by Richard Sorge. Smedley indignantly denied the charges but experienced considerable difficulty in obtained a renewal of her American passport because the HCUA intended to subpoena her as a witness. Smedley settled for a travel document, limiting her movement to Great Britain, France, and Italy and, in December 1949, arrived in London, where she moved in with friends she had made in Hong Kong.
In April 1950, Smedley was admitted to a hospital in Oxford for surgery on the duodenal ulcer that had been responsible for her poor health, but she died on 6 May, the day after her operation. See also SOVIET UNION.
SOONG, CHARLIE. In 1879, a 13-year-old stowaway named Han Chao-sun was discovered aboard a U.S. Coastguard cutter. He was promptly renamed Charlie Soong and turned over to a Methodist minister, who sponsored his education in the United States. Upon his return to China, Soong married into a wealthy Shanghai family with underworld connections and, within a few years, acquired a considerable fortune. In 1911, he met the young radical, Sun Yat-sen, and in 1915, Sun married the second of the Soong daughters, Ching-ling. After Charlie’s death in 1919, the youngest daughter, Mei-ling, took up with Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang’s marriage into the Soong family smoothed the way for Chiang to take control of the Kuomintang Party and of China itself. The oldest daughter, Ai-ling, married one of China’s richest men, H. H. Kung. There was a popular Chinese saying about the sisters, “One loved money, one loved power, and one loved China,” alluding to Ai-ling, Mei-ling, and Ching-ling, respectively. A brother, T. V. Soong, served as premier, foreign minister, and economic minister. The Soong sisters were known not only for their remarkable beauty but also for being intimate participants in the history of China in the 20th century. The longest surviving sister, Mei-ling, lived to the age of 105, dying in New York in 2003.
SORGE, RICHARD. A charismatic Soviet intelligence officer, Richard Sorge was born in Germany in 1895 and graduated from the University of Hamburg. Having served in the Kaiser’s army during World War I and married the wife of his economics professor at Aachen, Christiane Gerlach, Sorge moved with her to Moscow in 1924 and, thereafter, undertook numerous military intelligence operations for the GRU, working under his own name as a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. However, Sorge’s clandestine life, and his many affairs, did not suit Christiane, who divorced him and immigrated to the United States.
While in Shanghai for three years, from 1930, Sorge built a spy ring and exercised his considerable personal charm over Ursula Kuczynski and the American journalist Agnes Smedley, both members of his organization. His activities were placed in jeopardy in 1931 by the arrest of the local Comintern representative, Hilaire Noulens, who had been informed of Sorge’s true role. Sorge was obliged to temporarily suspend operations, and later he would return to Moscow, where he moved in with the beautiful Katchka Maximova, with whom he remained until his next assignment overseas.
In September 1933, Sorge moved to Tokyo and created a large network, which collected valuable information about Japanese intentions and transmitted it to Moscow. Sorge himself penetrated the local German embassy and, after the outbreak of war, having gained the trust of the ambassador, was appointed the press attaché. He also acquired a pair of mistresses, Kiyomi, an exotic dancer at a notorious nightclub, the Fuji Club, and Miyake Hanako, a waitress working at the same establishment, but this led to Kiyomi denouncing her lover to the Kempeitai. When the police went to his home, early in the morning of 18 October 1941, they waited for an hour so as to allow the unidentified owner of a vehicle with diplomatic plates to leave.
Sorge was taken into custody with some 40 other spies and, after a lengthy interrogation, was hanged in November 1944, leaving Hanako to tend his grave. After the war, Kiyomi was shot dead in the street, and her murder went unsolved, but in Moscow, rumors had circulated that at the moment of his arrest, Sorge had been in bed with Helma, the wife of his friend Eugen Ott, the German ambassador, and under interrogation Sorge, had betrayed his entire network.
SOUTH KOREA. The Republic of South Korea has been, and remains, a priority target for the collection of political and military intelligence conducted by the Ministry of State Security (MSS), which also seeks to exercise influence among Seoul’s policymakers. Recent evidence of attempts to penetrate Seoul’s government include an MSS operation run against South Korea’s consulate in Shanghai and an attempt, in June 2010, to illegally access a computer system to acquire details of a plan to purchase Global Hawk drones from Northrop Grumman. See also KOREAN WAR; LILLEY, JAMES.
SOVIET UNION. In 1921, the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet Cheka established a rezidentura in Peking headed by Aristarkh Rigin using the alias Rilsky, and during his year in China, he organized sub-rezidenturas in 10 other cities. He was replaced by Yakov K. Davtyan, the Cheka’s first foreign intelligence chief, and in 1925, he was succeeded by his assistant chief, Sergei Velezhev, alias Vedernikov.
Operating independently, but in parallel with the Cheka, was the Soviet military intelligence service, the Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie (GRU), or Fourth Department of the Red Army’s main intelligence directorate, which in 1923 established a commercial cover in Tientsin, the Far Eastern Trading Company, headed by Abraham Ehrenlieb, who later became such a respected figure in the local émigré community that he was elected president of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. He would be succeeded by a Lett, Adam Purpis, who traveled on a passport issued in Honduras.
In 1923, the Kuomintang (KMT) leader Sun Yat-sen and the Soviet Union’s representative, Adolf Ioffe, signed the first Sino-Soviet agreement, and a group of advisers, led by Mikhail Borodin, traveled to Canton (Guangzhou), while a KMT delegation headed by Chiang Kai-shek visited Moscow. However, a year later, in September 1924, the Soviets made a separate treaty in Peking, which included a loan of 10 million yuan, the supply of weapons for the People’s Revolutionary Army and the provision for three years of 135 military advisers, among them Pavel Pavlov, Vasili Blyukher, and Nikolai Kuibyshev. The Soviets were primarily interested in the White Guards (who had fought the Red Army and then taken refuge in Manchuria, territory then controlled by the pro-Japanese General Zhang Zuolin) and their organizations, the monarchist Bogoyavlensk Brotherhood, the Committee for the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Emigrants, the Musketeers, the Black Ring, and the Blue Ring.
By 1925, the Cheka, now transformed into the Obyeddinenoye Gosudarstvennoye Politischekoye Upravlenie (OGPU), operated a rezidentura in the Shanghai consulate, headed by Yakov Minsky, supported by Rudolf I. Abel and a deputy rezident, Leonid Eitingon, alias Leonid A. Naumov. Later, Eitingon would be appointed rezident in Harbin in 1927, succeeding Fedor Karin and Vasili Zarubin, and then in Peking. In March 1927, Mikhail Borodin, representing the Comintern in Shanghai, attempted to organize a coup against Chiang Kai-shek, but the uprising was crushed on 12 April, and within a fortnight, 25 of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership had been executed. The KMT also seized the Soviet consulate in Peking, confiscating a large quantity of incriminating material, including codebooks, lists of agents, and documents listing recent deliveries of arms to the CCP.
Eitingon’s principal source in Harbin was a former Tsarist naval officer, Vyacheslav I. Penkovsky, of the Amur Flotilla, who had been a spy for the Soviets, with his wife, since 1924. Fluent in Mandarin and a graduate of the Petrograd Practical Eastern Academy and the university’s legal faculty, Penkovsky had obtained Chinese citizenship and worked in Harbin’s high court, where he picked up useful information. Another agent, codenamed OSIPOV, was recruited in 1928 and was a chauffeur in the Japanese gendarmerie before he joined the organization’s special political section, which worked against the Soviets. In 1929, OSIPOV, who remained in touch with the rezidentura until 1938, planted documents on the Japanese that suggested 20 of their agents had applied to restore their Soviet citizenship, resulting in their immediate elimination by the Japanese.
Another Soviet source was a former kappelevets officer, a Chinese Army colonel, who was linked to various Russian émigré groups, including the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, the Squad of Russian Falcons, and Braun. He was responsible for tipping off the rezidentura to a bid by Ataman Semenov to form a Cossack division for a future war against the Soviets. According to a report from Karin in 1925 addressed to his OGPU chief Mikhail Trilisser:
The OGPU rezidentura in Northern Manchuria with the center in Harbin . . . is working regularly and systematically on the secret opening of diplomatic and other classified mail of a whole series of Japanese institutions. The Japanese General Staff, Japanese military missions in China, Japanese armies in Kwangtung Province (Port Arthur), Korea (Seoul), China (Tianzin), and others entered into the sphere of action of our intelligence.
While Eitingon was the Harbin rezident, he learned that Zhang Xieliang, one of Zhang Zuolin’s allies and the leader of the Mukden group of “provincial militarists,” was collaborating with the Japanese to create an independent Manchurian republic in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which was intended to be a Japanese protectorate aligned with Outer Mongolia.
Such plans threatened Soviet interests. Accordingly, Moscow decided, in June 1928, to eliminate Zhang Zuolin by blowing up his private railway carriage, an assassination undertaken by Eitingon and the local illegal rezident, Khristofor Salnyn, codenamed GRYSHKA, a crime that resulted in the deaths of 17 other passengers, including General Wu Jiangsheng, and blamed on the Japanese because they had been responsible for guarding the viaduct on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden (now Shenyang) that was sabotaged with explosives. Eitingon’s role as rezident ended with his withdrawal following a raid on the Harbin conducted by the Chinese police on 27 May 1929. Exactly two months later, diplomatic relations with the KMT were severed by the Kremlin, forcing a closure of all the illegal rezidenturas, except Boris Bogdanov’s, which survived in Manchuria until 1931.
After Eitingon’s recall, he was appointed rezident in Istanbul but was compromised by a defector in June 1930, Georges Agabekov. He then was placed in charge of a specialist unit, recruiting long-term agents in the West, and traveled twice to California to cultivate Chinese immigrants. After World War II, in late 1946, Eitingon returned to China, to Xinjiang Province, to advise the CCP on the suppression of the Uighur separatist movement, which was believed to be funded and armed by the KMT and British Intelligence. Under Eitingon’s supervision, an experienced NKVD officer, Colonel Nikolai Prokopyuk, organized an armed response to the rebels, and by 1949, the Uighurs had been defeated.
Having collaborated closely with Moscow until the Sino-Soviet split, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) modeled its internal security apparatus on the Soviet NKVD (and later KGB), becoming a pervasive, oppressive instrument of the Chinese Communist Party that included the lao jiao, the equivalent of the gulag, a huge system of penal colonies and reeducation camps into which millions of suspected counterrevolutionaries, spies, and reactionaries disappeared during periodic purges and campaigns. However, whereas the Soviet intelligence structure maintained a substantial presence overseas and established legal rezidenturas in diplomatic premises and illegal networks to support espionage, Mao Zedong opted for domestic repression and isolationism, with foreign intelligence collection apparently limited to operations conducted against Taiwan and military reconnaissance along the Indian and Soviet borders.
The Soviet border, some 2,700 miles in length, was a constant source of tension over disputed territory, one focus being Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri River, where, in March 1969, there was a major clash between Soviet border guards and the People’s Liberation Army. The issues over the frontier were eventually settled in 2004.
Having participated in the creation of a mirror-imaged totalitarian state, Soviet intelligence personnel would themselves be victims of hostile surveillance and harassment in Beijing, with Stanislav Lunev, who defected from the GRU rezidentura in Washington DC in May 1992, providing the West with a compelling account of Soviet attempts to cultivate sources in the PRC. According to Colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky, who was an adviser to the KGB’s scientific and technical directorate until his retirement in 1991, he attempted to recruit Chinese scholars while he was based at the Tokyo rezidentura between 1980 and 1985, under TASS journalistic cover, but achieved little success. He claimed that most of the KGB’s operations directed against the PRC were conducted from Mongolia, where the local Ministry of Security was under the KGB’s control, even though most of its personnel were of Chinese origin and considered of doubtful loyalty. The KGB also ran operations from Burma, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, usually involving the recruitment of refugees who were sent back across the frontier. Indeed, the Kazakh KGB’s chairman was later promoted to Moscow to head the First Chief Directorate’s Sixth Department.
Preobrazhensky is the only KGB retiree to have given an account of his experiences of working against Chinese targets, but his career in Tokyo was terminated when he was compromised by Guan Fuhua in July 1985. See also MIL MI-4; RESHETIN, IGOR; RUSSIA.
SPECIAL BRANCH. The principal security organization in British controlled territories, the Special Branch usually consisted of local Criminal Investigation Department detectives supervised by British personnel, who received intelligence and technical support from MI5. Prior to World War II, security in the International Settlements of Shanghai was controlled by a Special Branch headed by a British Secret Intelligence Service officer, Harry Steptoe, and Chinese Communist-inspired subversion was monitored by similar bodies in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. See also ROYAL HONG KONG POLICE (RHKP).
STEINBERG, MAX. The Comintern representative in Harbin, Max Steinberg used the alias Charles Emile Martin, but his alias was exposed in January 1956, when he and his wife, Elsa, were arrested in Switzerland and deported after serving three months’ imprisonment for passport offenses.
Originally from Belgorod-Dnestrovsky and born in 1889, Steinberg worked from November 1935 under commercial cover in Harbin as a director of Charles Martin and Company and using a Swiss passport issued by the Swiss legation in Warsaw. His declared business was the import and sale of Fiat motorcars and Italian aircraft in partnership with an elderly Milanese lawyer, Dr. Eugenio Carutti. While in Harbin, Steinberg also worked with a Comintern agent, Isaiah Oggins, but moved to Chailly, near Lausanne in Switzerland, in 1939. During World War II, Steinberg was connected to the GRU spy ring known as the Rote Drei and was also known as George Wilmer.
STENNES, WALTER. Formerly a leading Nazi in Germany and the Berlin commandant of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Walter Stennes was appointed a liaison officer with the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1934 and became Chiang Kai-shek’s principal intelligence adviser. Born in 1895, Stennes fell out with Adolf Hitler in 1931 and made two unsuccessful attempts to remove him from power, which resulted in his own lengthy exile in Shanghai.
He remained in China until 1949 and then returned to Germany where he died in 1989, and after his death, it was alleged that, while working for the KMT, he had also acted as a source for the NKVD, codenamed DRUG (friend), until 1952. According to a report published in Trud in March 2000, Stennes had been in contact with Richard Sorge in Shanghai and had warned Josef Stalin that the Nazis would attack the Soviet Union in May or June 1941. The KGB’s official history confirmed that in 1941 Vasili Zarubin had been sent to Shanghai to make contact with Stennes.
STEPTOE, HARRY. The head of the Special Branch of the International Settlement Police in Shanghai, Harry Steptoe was also the local representative of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) between the wars. He was interned by the Japanese in 1942 and then exchanged at Mombasa with other diplomatic and consular personnel. Steptoe never recovered from his detention and was given early retirement from SIS in 1945.
SUCCOR DELIGHT. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used the codename SUCCOR DELIGHT for Wu Bin,a 33-year-old former pro-Western professor of philosophy from Hohai University in Nanjing, graduate of Shanghai’s Fudan University, and Ministry of State Security (MSS) agent, who was tasked in November 1990 to collect technology in the United States and pass it back to China through a front company in Hong Kong. The MSS recruited Wu because his cousin was known to run a computer business in Norfolk, Virginia.
Wu was told by MSS officers that his choice was to cooperate with the MSS or go to prison for his pro-Western activities, but the offer was sweetened by a promise that Wu could personally make money and further, that his girlfriend, Wang Jiyang, could join him in the United States once he was settled in and was producing technology.
Wu, who had been extensively interrogated while at his university, agreed to cooperate with the MSS, conscious that he had seen colleagues severely beaten for their pro-Western activities, and was instructed to memorize a three-page list of desired technological items. Wu, who had no technological training, was told to simply become a successful businessman in the United States and that his value was for the long term. Evidently, the MSS had discovered that he had a cousin in the Norfolk, Virginia, area, and Wu was given a handler named Shen, who, once Wu had settled in Norfolk, sent postcards as “reminders” of his family remaining in China.
Always reluctant to undertake his MSS mission, he approached the FBI through an intermediary, Jing Pingli, in April 1991 and was enrolled as SOURCE 422 by a Mandarin-speaking special agent, Bruce Carlson. Wu provided information about his handler, a certain Mr. Chen, from whom he received $2,000 at a safe house in Washington DC in August 1991, and about a group of Yugoslavs who were attempting to procure Chinese rocket launchers. SUCCOR DELIGHT was regarded as a valuable source by his FBI case officer, Blake Lewis, who paid him $700 a month and established him and Jing, who changed his name to Robert E. Li, in a small office in Virginia Beach above a McDonald’s restaurant. In November, the MSS indicated its approval of Wu’s performance by allowing his wife, Wang Jiyang, to join him, and she brought him more cash. Soon afterward, the MSS asked Wu to order 44 vision-intensifier tubes, and he opened negotiations with a manufacturer, Varo Inc., of Garland, Texas. He also acquired a new partner, Zhang Pizhe, a 35-year-old graduate student at Old Dominion University, who had previously been employed by the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
However, in October 1992, Wu was arrested by U.S. Customs and convicted of breaches of the Arms Control Export Act relating to a consignment of 1,000 night vision goggles worth $2 million and, in September 1993, was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. Li and Zhang received five years’ each. The Customs operation, initiated after a tip from Varo, was unaware that Wu was an FBI informant, and although the FBI knew he was engaged in procuring matériel, did not realize that the items were the subject of an export embargo. The prosecution’s star witness turned out to be Wu’s wife, Wang Jiyang, who had discovered her husband’s mistress and had been caught while attempting to remove $50,000 from one of his frozen bank accounts. Although apparently offered the opportunity to be deported to China, after PRC embassy officials intervened, Wu preferred to serve his sentence at Loretto, Pennsylvania, declaring that he intended to live in Paris after his release. Wu served his sentence and successfully fought off attempts by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport him, but ultimately, claiming harassment, he returned to China. See alsoTECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
SUN TZU. In the fourth century BC, General Sub Tzu wrote The Art of War, in which he expounded on the advantages of conducting efficient intelligence operations. Having commanded the army of the Wu state, at the estuary of the Yellow River, Sun Tzu had much to say on the topic of espionage networks and defined the role of double agents, defectors, and penetration operations. He remains an iconic figure in modern China; although, the Ministry of State Security does not regard him as offering any guidance relating to the conduct of intelligence operations.
SUN WEI-KUO. In September 1966, 25-year-old Sun Wei-kuo, an assistant information officer at the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, defected and was granted political asylum in India.
SUN YAT-SEN. The leader of the Tung Wo Triad Society in Hong Kong, Sun Yat-sen was born into an agricultural family near Canton in November 1866 but received a Christian education in Honolulu, where his elder brother had immigrated to. He gained a medical degree from the Alice Memorial Hospital in Hong Kong and practiced in Macaobefore becoming involved in politics in 1894, founding the Hsing Chung Hui (Revive China Society) and combining with the Triads to oppose the corrupt Manchu administration and mount a coup in Canton in October 1895. Sun’s Young China movement failed to seize the city, and he went on the run, finally seeking refuge in Macao with a price of £100,000 on his head. From the Portuguese colony, Sun traveled to Hong Kong, Kobe, and Hawaii before reaching San Francisco, where a plot to abduct him was foiled. Finally, in October 1896, Sun arrived in London but was kidnapped and detained in the Chinese legation in Portland Place for 12 days until news of his incarceration leaked, and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, intervened to have Sun released.
Sun’s campaign among Chinese émigrés continued until December 1911, when he returned to China after the emperor had been deposed in a coup and was elected provisional president of the republic of China in Nanking in January 1912. Hailed as the first leader of Nationalist China, Sun was forced into exile in 1913 to Japan, where he reorganized the Kuomintang (KMT), and then declared himself president of a military government in Canton in 1917. He established the Whampoa Military Academy near Canton, appointing his protégé Chiang Kai-shek as commandant and, with support from the Communists, fought numerous campaigns in the north to unify the country before his death in Peking in March 1925.
SU YANG. See ZHU, PETER.
TAI LI. Born in Zhejiang Province in May 1889, the ruthless chief of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police was sometimes referred to as “Chiang’s Himmler.” Tai Li (Dai Li using the Pinyin Romanization of Chinese names) was commissioned into the Kuomintang’s military police and, by 1927, was in command of the organization’s branch in Shanghai when Chiang launched a successful coup. His relationship with Chiang prospered on his bloodthirsty reputation and his willingness to hold summary executions to eliminate opponents. Promoted in 1928 to head Chiang’s secret police, initially known as the Clandestine Investigation Section of the Chinese Military Council but later as the Investigation and Statistics Bureau, General Tai became known as “the Butcher” because of his elimination of thousands of suspected Communists. He also headed the feared Blue Shirt Society, a paramilitary fascist group that undertook security and intelligence work on the Generalissimo’s behalf. Cruel but efficient and a rigid disciplinarian, in 1938, Tai engineered the defection of Zhang Guotao, a leading Communist, using a beautiful woman, Han Suyin, as an intermediary, and gained such respect and prominence that he was the only officer trusted to wear a weapon in the Generalissimo’s presence.
According to one of the many legends surrounding Tai Li, he refused his deputy, General Pan Chi-wu, permission to marry and then turned down his request to resign. Soon afterward, the girl was found dead, and the grief-stricken General Pan’s plea to join a monastery was also declined, leading him to believe that Tai would never allow him to leave the service alive.
During the war with Japan, Tai made an alliance with some of China’s ubiquitous secret societies to foment resistance behind enemy lines and achieved high ranks in one of the Triads, the notorious Green Gang, which boasted 400,000 members in Shanghai and another million in the Yangtze valley. Headed by Du Yuesheng, the Greens moved their base to Luchow, leaving their rivals, the Red Circle, to dominate Canton and southern China. Their austere leader, Ming Te, was also cultivated by Tai and participated in guerrilla operations against the Japanese.
With mainly American support, Tai sought to undermine not only his principal Communist opponent, Kang Sheng, but also to challenge some uncooperative warlords, some recalcitrant Triads, and, of course, the Japanese. Tai’s great advantage was his ability to dominate and manipulate American policy through the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, to the extent that the Office of Strategic Services was unable to conduct independent operations without his sanction.
Tai died when his plane crashed in poor weather in March 1946 between Qingdao and Shanghai, also killing three bodyguards and a code clerk. His biography, Spymaster, was written by Frederic Wakeman in 2003. See also CHIANG CHING-KUO; MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (MIB); NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB).
TAI SHEN KUO. Originally from Taiwan and the son of a senior army officer, Tai Shen Kuo became a naturalized U.S. citizen and, in August 2008, was sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment for passing information acquired from Gregg Bergersen, a retired Pentagon analyst, and from retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel James Fondren, to Beijing.
Aged 58, Tai Kuo owned several businesses in New Orleans and had been employed as a tennis instructor at the U.S. embassy in Taipei before he obtained a student visa in 1973 to attend Nicholls State College, at Thibodaux, Louisiana, on a tennis scholarship, and later had worked as a tennis professional at the Ellendale Country Club. He also worked for the Guangdong Friendship Association, a voluntary group dedicated to the promotion of Sino-American ties, where he met Lin Hong, the man identified as his handler.
Well known as a restaurateur, the owner of Mr. Tao’s, in New Orleans, Kuo had posed as a Taiwanese agent, in a characteristically Chinese version of a “false flag” operation, to extract documents from Bergersen who was sentenced to nearly five years’ imprisonment. When confronted in February 2008 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had detected a link to a separate case in California, Kuo agreed to cooperate and testified against Fondren. Kuo’s sentence, served in Arizona, was later reduced to five years.
Also jailed was “Katie” Yu Xin Kang, a 33-year-old Chinese woman who was employed in Tai’s furniture business but acted as an intermediary with the Ministry of State Security and lived with him at his home on Wellington Drive, Summerfield, Louisiana. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
TAIWAN. Throughout the existence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), one of the Beijing leadership’s principal objectives has been absorption of the Republic of China (ROC) and occupation of Taiwan and its neighboring islands of Quemoy, Little Quemoy, the Pescadores, and Matsu Islands. A guarantee of military assistance from the United Stateshas been pivotal in preventing a full-scale assault on Taiwan during several periods of high tension, such as August 1958, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) shelled the Quemoy garrison, imposed an air and naval blockade, and escalated the propaganda rhetoric in local radio broadcasts. Intelligence agencies reported concentrations of aircraft in Fujian and Zhejiang and Communist Party meetings at which citizens pledged to support the liberation of Taiwan “at any time,” during a period when the West was distracted by developments in the Middle East. In September, Beijing announced a 12-mile territorial limit but only harassed U.S. Seventh Fleet vessels escorting supply ships to relieve Quemoy and did not prevent Nationalist planes conducting airdrops. The Seventh Fleet presence grew to 6 aircraft carriers, 3 heavy cruisers, and 40 destroyers deployed in the Straits. No frontal assault materialized, and an air battle fought with interceptors armed with American-supplied Sidewinder missiles resulted on 24 September in the loss of 10 MiG jet fighters.
Overflights of the Chinese mainland had taken place routinely since 1955, when, between 11 May and 12 June, at the height of fear that Taiwan was about to be invaded, U.S. Marine F2H-2P Banshee photoreconnaissance aircraft, usually based in Korea, were transferred to Tainan airfield in southern Taiwan to conduct a total of 22 missions over Fukien Province, escorted by F2H-2 fighters. Although some MiG-15s had attempted to intercept these flights, no American aircraft were lost. As well as collecting imagery, some flights were signals intelligence missions to enhance the interception program conducted by the U.S. Army Security Agency site on the Nan Szu Pu airfield.
Subsequent reconnaissance flights were made from Taoyüan by RB-57D aircraft, the American variant of the British Canberra, which had been loaned to the Nationalists by the U.S. Air Force. Two were shot down over China, in February 1958, over Shandong, by a PLA Naval Air Force MiG-15, and in October 1959, near Beijing by an SA-2 Guideline.
Until the move toward normalization of relations between Washington DC and Beijing in 1971, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) relied on the Nationalists to act as surrogates to collect information from human sources and provide support facilities for so-called Third Force guerrilla movements supposedly operating independently on the mainland, conducting anti-Communist campaigns. Initiated during the Korean War, Third Force activities were sponsored from April 1951 by a semitransparent CIA front organization, Western Enterprises, which ran training camps on White Dog Island for volunteers before sending them to Okinawa to practice parachute jumps. These CIA operations, which infiltrated men into Sichuan and dropped supplies to Hui tribesmen and a clandestine movement headed by Ma Pu-fang, were all doomed to collapse but not before huge amounts of money had been invested in them.
Other Nationalist ground operations sponsored by the CIA were run across the Burmese border, where General Li Mi commanded two regiments or irregulars, some of whom had undergone CIA training in Thailand. However, Li Mi’s organization was heavily penetrated by agents working for Mao Zedong, including a radio operator based in Bangkok, who was able to alert the Communists to plans to mount raids across the PRC’s frontier until his duplicity was discovered.
Although the political climate between Taipei and Beijing has improved in recent years, to the point of allowing regular civil flights and other exchanges between the two countries, the military balance has remained, with analysts constantly comparing the relative strength of the PLA and the ROC’s armed forces. Beijing remains acutely interested in its adversary’s hardware and contingency plans. A comparison between the two sides gave the PLA a naval advantage in destroyers at 27:4, frigates 48:24, attack submarines 57:2, and fast patrol vessels 77:50. However, Taiwan’s sophisticated air force, armed with 144 F-16 fighters (with a request to purchase a further 66 of the C/D variant), 125 F-CK-1s, 50 F-5Es, and 57 Mirage 2000s, supported by 6 airborne early warning aircraft and 25 hardened early warning ground radars, suggests a reliance on a strategy of exercising air superiority backed by batteries of modern Patriot PAC-2, Hawk, and Sky Bow missiles. In contrast, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF)boasts 127 Sukhoi-30s, 132 Sukhoi-27s, 390 J-8 fighters, 60 J-10s, 579 J-7s, and 235 Q-5 and JH-7A ground attack aircraft, supported by 7 airborne early warning planes. While the PLAAF enjoys a huge numerical superiority, its aircraft are largely obsolete, even if they are scheduled to be retrofitted with improved avionics.
In such a competitive environment, intelligence concerning new equipment, recently acquired weapons, and changes in tactics becomes a potentially war-winning priority, and accordingly, both Taipei and Beijing devote considerable resources to assessing the relative strength of the opposing forces. Almost totally dependent on modern U.S. military equipment, Taiwan is sensitive to fears that the country cannot protect its modern technology from mainland espionage. The Chinese Communists also routinely indulge in “false flag” intelligence collection operations to penetrate Nationalist security.
In spite of improved political ties fostered by President Ma Ying-jeou, a member of the Kuomintang who was elected in 2008, Taiwan remains a key target for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), and in 2009, a presidential aide, Wang Jen-ping, was convicted of having sold more than 100 confidential documents to the MSS over the previous two years. In November 2010, a senior military intelligence officer, Colonel Lo Chi-cheng, was arrested on suspicion of spying for China, having been recruited by a local businessman, Lo Ping, who was sentenced to 42 months’ imprisonment by a civilian court. In April 2011, Colonel Lo was given life. Then, in January 2011, General Lo Hsien-che was detained on the same charge. See also AA-2 ATOLL; AUSTRALIA; BERGERSEN, GREGG W.; BLACK BAT SQUADRON; BLACK CAT SQUADRON; CAMPCON; CHANG HSIEN-YI; CHANG, THERESA; CHEN YONGLIN; CHIANG CHING-KUO; CHIANG KEWILIN; CHI MAK; CHIN, LARRY WU-TAI; CHINESE NAVAL STRENGTH; CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; CHINESE SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE; CIVIL AIR TRANSPORT (CAT); CLINE, RAY; DIRECTION GÉNÉRALE DE LA SÉCURITÉ EXTÉRIEURE (DGSE); EIGHTH BUREAU; FIRST BUREAU; FONDREN, JAMES W.; GE YUEFEI; GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATIONS HEADQUARTERS (GCHQ); GUO WANJUN; HANSON, HUANG; HO CHIH-CHIANG; HONG KONG; INTELLIGENCE BUREAU OF THE MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE (IBMND); INTERNATIONAL LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ILD); JAPAN; KAMISEYA; KASHMIR PRINCESS; KEYSER, DONALD W.: LAU YVET-SANG; LEE, PETER; LEE, SAM CHING-SHENG; LI JAIQI; LILLEY, JAMES; LI SHAOMIN; LI TSUNG-JEN; MACAO; MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (MIB); MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT (MID); MIN GWO BAO; MOO, KO-SUEN; NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB); OVERSEAS CHINESE; PARLOR MAID; PENG, YEN-CHIN; PIRACY; SECOND DEPARTMENT (2/PLA); SHESU LO, ROLAND; SHRIVER, GLENN D.; SINO-SOVIET SPLIT; SOVIET UNION; TAI SHEN KUO; TAKHLI; THIRD DEPARTMENT; TSOU, DOUGLAS; U-2; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA); WANG HSI-LING; WEN HO LEE; XIONG XIANGHUI; YU QIANGSHENG; ZHANG JIYAN; ZHU CHENZHI.
TAJIKISTAN. The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) former Soviet neighbor, independent since 1991 and since 1996 a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Tajikistan has received considerable infrastructure investment from Beijing, including a power line network installed by China Theban Electric Apparatus Stock in partnership with the Tajik national power company. Having fallen within the PRC’s sphere of influence, Tajikistan has become a significant target for intelligence collection by the Ministry of State Security.
TAKHLI. The U.S. airbase at Takhli in central Thailand was the launch site for a series of overflights conducted by a Taiwanese U-2C and a U-2F of the nuclear test site at Lop Nor in June 1967. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; BLACK CAT SQUADRON; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION. Evidence collected during criminal investigations conducted in the United Statessuggests that the collection of modern technology is pursued as a priority by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence authorities, which employ both professional agencies to undertake acquisition operations and private individuals who appear to act independently, confident that they can sell sensitive data to the government. According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report published in November 2009, “These efforts fall broadly into four broad categories”:
1) “actuarial” intelligence cobbled together from multiple sources; 2) “professional” intelligence-gathering conducted or directly sponsored by PRC intelligence agents; 3) “enterprise-directed” acquisition of controlled technology driven by entities within the Chinese state scientific research and development military-industrial sectors; and 4) “entrepreneurial” industrial espionage and illegal technology exports carried out by private actors seeking rewards from the Chinese government.
The “actuarial” approach was described in detail in the January 2000 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Report to Congress on Chinese Espionage Activities against the United States, declassified in January 2006, as “grains of sand” collected indiscriminately, often from unrestricted sources, which, when assembled later, could provide valuable information. Sometimes referred to as the “mosaic method,” this system was considered “inefficient but not ineffective.”
Because the Chinese consider themselves to be in a developmental “catch-up” situation, their collection program tends to have a comparatively broad scope. Chinese collectors target information and technology on anything of value to China, which leads them to seek to collect open-source information as well as restricted/proprietary and classified information.
Gradually, of course, as the quality of PRC technology improves, this scattergun, piecemeal methodology will yield fewer results, and the commission predicted that the collection effort will inevitably become more focused. Indeed, the commission cited the Chi Mak case and the prosecutions of Gregg Bergersen and James Fondren as evidence that Chinese clandestine operational sophistication had improved.
In assessing the more professional methodology, the commission referred to Project 863 and quoted a 2008 Defense Security Service report that noted a rise in Chinese commercial firms making “a purposeful attempt to make the contacts seem more innocuous by using non-governmental entities as surrogate collectors for interested government or government-affiliated entities.” This view reflected the earlier CIA and FBI testimony that “China’s commercial entities play a significant role in the pursuit of proprietary/trade secret U.S. technology. The vast majority of Chinese technology entities in the United States are legitimate companies; however, some are a platform for intelligence collection activities.”
As an example of “enterprise-driven” espionage conducted by the PRC or state-sponsored organizations, the commission cited the conviction of Greg Chung in July 2009 and quoted from the Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair when examining “entrepreneurial espionage”:
Non-professional intelligence collectors—including government and commercial researchers, students, academics, scientists, business people, delegations and visitors—also provide China with a significant amount of sensitive U.S. technologies and trade secrets. Some members of this group knowingly or unknowingly collect on behalf of [PRC intelligence agencies] or Chinese defense industries, presenting a significant intelligence threat. But in many cases the collection efforts of these private-sector players are driven entirely by the opportunity for commercial or professional gain and have no affiliation with [PRC intelligence].
The Commission’s examples of “entrepreneurial espionage” included Dr. Shu Quansheng, imprisoned in November 2009, and the FirmSpace indictment handed down in Minnesota in October 2008. See also AMGEN; CHANG, THERESA; CHAO TAH WEI; CHENG, PHILIP; CHI TONG KUOK; DING, JIAN WEI; DU SHASHAN; FRANK, DESMOND DINESH; GOWADIA, NOSHIR S.; HANSON, HAROLD DEWITT; INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; IRAN; ITT CORPORATION; JIN HANJUAN; KHAN, AMANULLAH; KOVACS, WILLIAM; LAM, WAI LIM WILLIAM; LAU, HING SHING; LEE, SAM CHING SHENG; LIANG XIUWEN; LI QING; LIU SIXING; LU FU-TAIN; MENG, XIAODONG SHELDON; MENG HONG; MOO, KO-SUEN; NAHARDANI, AHMAD; ROTH, JOHN REECE; SUCCOR DELIGHT; TAIWAN; TSU, WILLIAM CHAI-WAI; WANG-WOODFORD, LAURA; WAVELAB INC.; WEN HO LEE; WU BIN; XU BING; XU WEIBO; YANG FUNG; YANG LIAN; YU XIANGDONG; ZHANG, DAVID; ZHANG, MICHAEL MING; ZHONG MING; ZHU, PETER; ZHU YAN.
TECHNOLOGY COUNTERFEITING. Between 2002 and 2004, a series of unprecedented computer system failures in the United States linked to substandard equipment prompted a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) study of the appearance of large quantities of counterfeit technology on the international market. One focus was on routers and other hardware, including gigabit interface converters purportedly manufactured by Cisco, a company with 80 percent of the U.S. market. The FBI discovered that bogus Cisco products had closed down a major computer system in Pittsburgh and, in 2004, had caused the failure of a national weather reporting network that supposedly had been upgraded with new hardware.
The FBI investigation revealed a widespread fraud in which subcontractors had acquired counterfeit technology from suppliers in Shenzhen, a special economic zone in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and then peddled the material to clients as the authentic product, using ostensibly legitimate serial numbers, packaging, software, and manuals. However, once installed, the equipment experienced a high failure rate and, of more concern to the intelligence community, included subroutines that allowed access to protected sectors previously thought secure and undermined cryptographic systems.
The counterfeit material was traced back to the PRC through intermediaries in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Great Britain, and investigations were launched against two U.S. government contractors, eGlobe Solutions of Seattle and Syren Technology, based in Laguna Niguel, California. Run by two brothers, Mike and Scott Song, eGlobe’s clients included Raytheon, the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, and the U.S. Air Force at Spangdahlem, Germany, and the proprietors were charged with having sold counterfeit Cisco and Sun Microsystems equipment between May 2003 and July 2005, valued at $788,000. In the case of Syren Technology, Robert and Michael Edman, both of Richmond, Texas, were indicted in December 2007 with having sold fake Cisco hardware to the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the U.S. Air Force. In addition, an investigation conducted by Lockheed Martin revealed that two of its subcontractors, American Data and Gulfcoast Workstation Relational Technology Services, had provided the U.S. Navy with counterfeit Cisco routers.
The FBI concluded that up to 10 percent of technology sales, estimated at $100 billion annually, involved counterfeit products and noted that much of the material was exported from the PRC by the Chinese postal service and not by regular shippers, in small consignments, with manuals, hardware, and software sent separately. Typically, the equipment was then assembled by middlemen, some of them even authorized legitimate suppliers, who offered it at suspiciously low discounts. Apart from the security implications for critical infrastructure, the counterfeiters had penetrated the open market information technology trade and used eBay as a method for distributing fake or substandard computer components.
During the FBI’s investigation, which raised many trademark and other issues, it received assistance from the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing, but the extent to which the PRC authorities had colluded in the large-scale counterfeiting activities in Shenzhen remained unclear. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
TEWU GONGZUO. A term used by the Chinese when referring to clandestine activities, tewu gongzuo means literally “secret work activities.”
THIRD DEPARTMENT. The largest of all the People’s Republic of China’s intelligence agencies, reportedly employing 20,000 staff, the Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) General Staff Department (GSD) is responsible for signals intelligence collection and maintains a close relationship with the PLA’s Fourth Department, which engages in electronic warfare.
The Third Department (Zongcan Sanbu) incorporates the GSD’s Electronic Countermeasures and Radar Department (dianzi duikang yu leida bu), which conducts the country’s cryptographic operations from numerous ground stations, half a dozen ships, trucks, and airborne PLA Air Force platforms flown from the Sixth Research Institute (Kongliusuo) in Beijing. The Third Department’s headquarters is located close to the GSD First (Operations) Department complex in the hills northwest of the Summer Palace and is staffed by some 20,000 personnel, including a large number of linguists trained at the Luoyang Institute of Foreign Languages.
Signals collection operations are controlled centrally from Beijing with subordinate satellite sites spread across the country. A large station in Lanzhou monitors Russian traffic and also functions as a strategic early-warning facility, while the Shenyang station covers Russia, Japan, and Korea. The Chengdu site covers India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia, while Nanjing concentrates on Taiwan. Guangzhou covers Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, and smaller stations located along the border at Jilemutu, Erlian, and Hami monitor Russia.
The Third Department collaborates with its American counterpart at Korla and Qitai on the Afghan border, and runs two other stations in Shanghai. Additional intercept facilities have been built on Rocky Island (Shidao), near Woody Island in the Paracels, and in Burma, perhaps for covering the Indian Ocean.
TIBET. Occupied by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1950, with intensive oppression from 1959, which forced the Dalai Lama to take refuge in Dharamsala, Tibet has been a focus of domestic unrest and a source of external political pressure from émigrés and their supporters. A resistance army, the Chushi Gangdruk, was created in 1956, after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had bombed several monasteries. Headed by a wealthy Tibetan businessman from Litang, Andrug Gompo Tashi was put in touch with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) the following year by the Dalai Lama’s two brothers, and arrangements were made for volunteers to undergo training at Saipan and then at Fort Hale, Colorado, in preparation for their reinsertion by parachute and their role in CIRCUS. It was a group of Chushi Gangdruk guerrillas that escorted the Dalai Lama over the frontier to safety, a risky exfiltration that the organization would come to regard as one of its major successes.
Thereafter, the resistance was based at Mustang, in northern Nepal, mounting occasional raids into Tibet, which, from March 1961, were supported with modern weapons supplied by the CIA. Their principal target was traffic on the Lhasa-Xinjiang highway, which the Chinese closed in 1964 because of the number of attacks, but fear of reprisals and a comprehensive network of informers prevented Chushi Gangdruk from penetrating deeper. Three years later, the CIA began winding down the operation, and in the summer of 1974, Nepal’s army dismantled the Mustang base after the Dalai Lama ordered the surviving guerrillas to surrender. A few committed suicide, and the remaining veterans were imprisoned briefly before being resettled in camps in Kathmandu and at Jampaling, near Pokhara, and found jobs subsidized by the CIA.
Another large group of refugees concentrated at Dehradun in Rajasthan where, under the sponsorship of the Indian Central Intelligence Bureau, they were trained as guerrillas. Following the Indo-Chinese border conflict in 1962, the Indian government deployed them to Chakrata as part of the paramilitary Special Frontier Force led by General Sujan Singh Uban to undertake reconnaissance missions over the border into the PRC, principally to collect information on PLA positions for the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). In February 1963, training for what became known as Establishment 22 was conducted by CIA personnel headed by Colonel Wayne F. Sanford, a former U.S. Marine.
Émigré Tibetan activists and the separatist movement continue to be regarded as priority targets for intelligence collection by the Ministry of State Security, as confirmed by numerous MSS and PRC diplomatic defectors, among them Zhang Jiyan in Ottawa and Chen Yonglin in Sydney. Additionally, the Dalai Lama and his adherents are the subject of harassment, hostile penetration, and a strategy of disruption orchestrated by the MSS, which has included sophisticated cyber attacks on émigré websites and computer networks, while the MSS has credited the CIA with masterminding internal dissent and undermining the regime by spreading propaganda. See also CYBER ESPIONAGE; GHOSTNET; MACKIERNAN, DOUGLAS.
TIGER TRAP. The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the codename TIGER TRAP for the surveillance in 1981 of Min Gwo Bao, which was later extended to cover Wen Ho Lee.
TITAN RAIN. In 2002, the United States intelligence community began monitoring cyber attacks mounted from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) but channeled through North Korea. Codenamed TITAN RAIN, the operation identified thousands of attempts to penetrate the U.S. Information Systems Engineering Command, the Defense Information Systems Agency, and the Space and Missile Defense Acquisition Center. In January 2010, the Internet company responsible for managing the Google search engine revealed that the PRC had been behind a concerted political and corporate espionage program known as AURORA, which had targeted major financial, defense, and technology companies in the United States since 2005 and had also pursued human-rights activists and political dissidents within mainland China. Other websites, including the BBC and Wikipedia, also reported interference with access to their services and, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission’s Report to Congress, for 18 minutes on 8 April 2010, China Telecom seized control of some 15 percent of the entire worldwide web by erroneous network routes, which had the effect of channeling routine Internet communications involving IBM, Yahoo!, Microsoft, the U.S. Congress, and various U.S. military websites, through servers in the PRC.
This unprecedented diversion was brief in duration but was interpreted by Western analysts as a sophisticated attempt to test Beijing’s ability to manipulate the Internet and hijack private messaging, perhaps even inserting malware into the traffic, thereby contaminating target computer systems. According to the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team at the Department of Homeland Security, reports of cyber incursions have increased from 5,503 incidents in 2006 to 41,776 four years later, and the U.S. State Department’s BYZANTINE HADES investigation traced many of them to the People’s Liberation Army. See also CYBER ESPIONAGE; GHOSTNET.
TONGJ BU. The Communications Department of the PLA’s General Staff Department, the Tongj Bu is responsible for the PLA’s communications.
TOPPER. On 30 March 1960, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deployed U-2 aircraft on a series of missions from Atsugi over the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to drop javelin-like remote sensors calibrated to seismically detect evidence of nuclear tests. The second TOPPER mission, flown a few days later on 5 April, ended in a mechanical failure, which required the pilot to make a crash landing in a paddy field in Thailand. The wreckage was recovered to Bangkok’s Don Muang airfield, where a C-124 cargo plane flew it back to Edwards Air Force Base in California.
The use of remote sensors to collect technical intelligence is a highly effective method of monitoring activity in identified locations associated with the testing of warheads and missiles. The equipment, usually a modified geophone or seismometer, is designed to detect events at long distances, measure the intensity of teleseismic waves, and provide data that, when processed with similar information from other sites, will offer an accurate bearing on the source. With sufficiently sensitive apparatus, a nuclear detonation occurring deep under a mountain thousands of miles away can be recorded by a network of devices linked to a central facility. Since the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Monitoring System has been responsible for the management from Vienna of 250 stations worldwide, which ensure compliance.
However, the challenges posed by the PRC, which has consistently rejected participation in international treaties limiting nuclear tests, are considerable because much of the country is subject to vibration from naturally occurring earthquakes, the test site at Lop Nor in western Xinjiang Province is far from the nearest neutral territory from which regional wave infrasound monitoring could be conducted, and from 1961, the Soviets conducted their underground nuclear tests south of the known atmospheric test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. Altogether, some 340 Soviet tests were registered until 1989. In contrast, a total of 45 tests were conducted at Lop Nor from October 1964, of which 23 were atmospheric, with the first underground test detected in September 1969, and the last atmospheric test conducted in October 1980. The last underground test at Lop Nor took place in July 1996, and since then, the PRC appears to have been in de facto compliance with the treaties since the ban on atmospheric testing in 1963, which it has refused to sign. See also NANDA DEVI; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
TROPIC. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the codename TROPIC for an operation conducted in 1952 to drop Kuomintang agents into eastern Manchuria from a C-47 and a B-17. When the CIA’s unmarked C-47, based in Atsugi but flying missions from Seoul, was shot down near Antu in Jilin Province on 29 November, two crewmen, Robert C. Snoddy and Norman A. Schwartz, were killed, and 24-year-old Richard G. Fecteau and 27-year-old John T. Downey were captured. They had been attempting to “air snatch” documents from an agent with a Fulton Skyhook but had been lured to the area by messages sent by agents who had been operating under Chinese control.
Two years later, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced the conviction of the pair and 11 other Americans, aircrew from a B-29 downed over Liaoning, on espionage charges, and they remained in Chinese captivity until 9 December 1971 and March 1973, respectively, when they were released over the Lo Wu Bridge into Hong Kong. Both were newly recruited CIA officers and under interrogation revealed what information they had, Fecteau having had less than five months’ experience in the agency. Downey had joined the CIA from Yale in June 1951 and, after three months’ training at Fort Benning, Georgia, had been posted to Atsugi. In 2010, TROPIC was the subject of a documentary film, Extraordinary Fidelity, which was made by the CIA for training purposes and was introduced in the Langley campus “bubble” by the director, Leon Panetta.
Between 1951 and 1953, a total of 212 agents were parachuted into mainland China, of whom 101 were killed and 111 captured. The initially unexplained loss of the C-47, which effectively terminated CIA paramilitary operations in the PRC, was a result of the capture of the team of agents, led by Chang Tsai-Wen, which had been inserted in July after training on Saipan. The plane had been lured into a trap while attempting to exfiltrate Li Chu-ying, who had been delivered the previous month on an inspection mission. See also CIVIL AIR TRANSPORT (CAT); TAIWAN; U-2.
TSANG, JOHN. A senior Hong Kong Police (HKP) officer, Superintendent John Tsang was a Ministry of State Security mole who had joined the Special Branch in 1951 and had also served in the Criminal Investigation Division and in the uniform sections. Much admired by his colleagues, Tsang was a tall, imposing man who had spent a year at Oxford University and had received rapid promotion, most recently from Police Commissioner Henry Heath.
Tsang was identified after a routine, random search of a visitor at the Lo Woo border bridge had revealed a courier carrying a coded message between his toes. He was detained and replaced by a volunteer from the MI5 security liaison officer’s unit, who delivered the item to a house occupied by a single woman, who, from a picture on her wall of a police passing-out parade, appeared to be connected to the police. Physical and technical surveillance eventually revealed that she was John Tsang’s mother.
At the time of his arrest in 1959 by his close friends Peter Law and Richard (“Ricky”) Richardson, Tsang was deputy commandant at the Police Training School and considered by colleagues to be a likely candidate as the HKP’s first Chinese commissioner. During five months of interrogation, Tsang revealed that he had been coerced into working for the Chinese after they had learned that during World War II he had spent a year in Japan, training to be a Japanese spy. He made a full confession, confirming that he had maintained contact with the Chinese throughout his service in Special Branch, which had begun in 1951, and then was deported to China. During the Cultural Revolution, he broadcast from Guangzhou on the radio, urging his former compatriots to revolt. A lengthy Special Branch investigation revealed that Tsang had been especially friendly with another Chinese officer at Sau Ki Wan, Superintendent Wong Wing Yin, who had been working for the Kuomintang in Taiwan. He too was arrested, interrogated, and then deported.
When the American author James Clavell visited Hong Kong to research Noble House, he learned about Tsang’s espionage and included a character in his book based on the case.
TSOU, DOUGLAS. Having fled from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949, when the Communists gained power, Tsou immigrated to the United States 20 years later and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Between 1980 and 1985, he was employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), first in San Francisco and then in Houston, before he admitted in 1986 that he had written a letter to a representative of the government of Taiwan revealing secret information, this being the identity of an intelligence officer working for the People’s Republic of China. Tsou was fired immediately and, in 1988, was indicted. At his trial in 1991, he was found guilty of a single count of espionage and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, prosecutors having claimed that the information contained in that single letter represented only a small amount of the total passed to Taiwan during his six years with the FBI. See also NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB).
TSU, WILLIAM CHAI-WAI. On 10 January 2009, William Chai-Wai Tsu, aged 61, was arrested by agents of the Export and Anti-proliferation Global Law Enforcement Task Force at the Commerce Casino in Hacienda Heights, California, and charged with violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Employed by a Beijing-based military contractor, Dimigit Science and Technology Company, and vice president of Cheerway Inc., Tsu exported more than 400 restricted integrated circuits with military applications in radar systems to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over a period of 10 months, having assured several American suppliers that the circuits would not be exported. According to the prosecution, Tsu supplied restricted technology to several customers in China, including the 704th Research Institute, also known as the Aerospace Long March Rocket Technology Company, a firm affiliated with the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.
On 3 August 2009, Tsu pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 months’ imprisonment. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
TUNG CHI-PENG. Following the assassination of the prime minister of Burundi, Pierre Ngendandumwe, in January 1965, the assistant cultural attaché, Tung Chi-Peng, defected to the Central Intelligence Agency and revealed that the Chinese embassy had orchestrated the attempted coup and was planning to overthrow the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo so as to gain access to that country’s uranium reserves. The Burundi authorities immediately expelled the entire Chinese diplomatic mission in Bujumbura.
U-2. Reconnaissance flights by the high-altitude Lockheed U-2 over mainland China began in August 1957 with two missions flown from Peshawar in Pakistan. They went undetected, and the absence of any SA-2 Guideline missiles made the incursions relatively risk free.
More regular incursions started on 18 June 1958 when two aircraft of Detachment C of the 4th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional) were flown by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pilots from Atsugi in Japanto photograph suspected troop movements. The imagery disclosed none, but two months later, a further four missions were completed as Quemoy came under an intensive artillery barrage. More flights took place on 9 September and 22 October, but again the imagery did not reveal any indication that the People’s Liberation Army was preparing to invade Taiwan or occupy the vulnerable islands of Quemoy and Little Quemoy.
In March 1960, TOPPER missions were flown to insert remote sensors in China, but the loss of a U-2 in Thailand on the second flight reduced Detachment C’s strength to three planes. Clearly, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force(PLAAF) was aware of the high-flying aircraft because, on one mission flown in March 1960, more than 30 PLAAF fighters attempted interception. The aircraft were withdrawn from Atsugi in August 1960 at the request of the Japanese government and transferred to Edwards Air Force Base in California.
In December 1960, the CIA established Detachment H at Taoyüan, near Taipei, to overfly the mainland. Southern China was covered from Cubi Point in the Philippines, while the north was penetrated from Kunsan on South Korea’s west coast, the dismantled planes having been flown by C-130 transports to the remote takeoff airfields for reassembly.
Following the decision to equip the Nationalists with the U-2A, flight conversion training began at Laughlin Air Force Base in May 1959, with six candidates led by Colonel Shih Chu Yang. Two of his pilots, Colonel Chen Wai-sheng and Captain Fan Hung-ti were killed, and Shang Shi-hi was withdrawn from the program after he survived two crashes by ejecting, only to be killed later in an F-104. Eventfully, a total of 26 Nationalist pilots would qualify on the aircraft in the United States.
Upon their return to Taiwan, the pilots were assigned to the 35th Reconnaissance Squadron, known as the Black Cats and formally established on 14 December 1960, to fly a pair of Taiwanese U-2Cs supplied by Lockheed under CIA sponsorship in June. Their first overflight of the mainland was accomplished on 13 January 1962, and thereafter, they continued regularly, up to three times a month and, by the end of the year, had collected imagery of China’s nuclear plants in northwestern Qinghai and the uranium enrichment facility at Lanzhou, Gansu, without incident. On one occasion, on 28 May 1962, a U-2 pilot reported that his instruments had indicated that Chinese radar had locked onto his plane, but he took evasive action, and no missile was fired at him. The flights were extremely arduous, and 12-hour round-trip flights were not unusual.
The Chinese soon became aware of the incursions and, in July 1962, broadcast a reward of $280,000 in gold to any Taiwanese pilot who defected with his plane. On 9 September, Colonel Chen Huai-sheng’s U-2A was brought down by a SA-2 Guideline missile nine miles south of Nanchang, and he is thought to have used his parachute and survived, albeit briefly, and died in a hospital. On 1 November 1963, Major Chang Di-yeh U-2C was shot down after having been hit by two SA-2s over Jiangxi while on the return journey over the coast during a mission to photograph a nuclear weapons plant at Lanzhou and the Jiayuguan missile test site. He would remain in captivity until he was released in November 1982. On 23 March 1964, Major Liang Te-pei was drowned after he suffered an equipment failure and ejected into the sea during a high altitude signals intelligence flight along the periphery of Chinese airspace over the Taiwan Straits. Three months later, on 7 July, Colonel Lee Nan-ping was killed when his U-2G was shot down by an SA-2 over Fujian, having overflown southern China from Cubi Point. On 27 November, several SA-2s missed a U-2 but one only narrowly, causing the pilot, on a mission to Lanzhou, to experience temporary blindness because of the missile’s engine flare.
On 9 January 1965, Major Wang Shi-chuen’s plane, on a mission to photograph the Paotow uranium enrichment plant with an infrared camera, was shot down southwest of Beijing by an SA-2, and he survived the crash with two broken legs. He would be released in Hong Kong in November 1982 with Major Chang Li-yi. In March 1965, a PLAAF MiG-21 fired two missiles at a U-2, but neither hit.
The fifth and last Taiwanese pilot to be shot down was Captain Huang Jung-bei, whose U-2C was hit by an SA-2 over Jiaxing on 9 September 1967. As well as these losses, a further six Taiwanese pilots were killed in accidents while on operational or training flights: Major Chih Yao-hua on 9 September 1962, Major Wang Cheng-wen on 22 October 1965, Captain Wu Tsai-shi, Major Yu Ching-Chang on 21 June 1966, Colonel Chang Hseih on 3 January 1969, and Major Huang Chi-Hsien on 24 November 1970. Reportedly, another unnamed pilot died when his U-2R crashed near Taiwan on 23 November 1973.
One explanation for the heavy casualties suffered by the U-2s flying to or from Taoyüan, amounting to five planes, was the difficulty in concealing the aircraft movements, especially takeoffs, from an airfield only 90 miles from the Chinese coast and under constant hostile radar and signals surveillance. Various countermeasures and decoy flights were tried, but the Chinese ground defenses received plenty of advance warning to prepare their Fan Song acquisition radars, even if the most advanced versions of the MiG-21 consistently failed to climb into range. Another complication was the duration of the U-2 flights flown to or from Taoyüan, which might take up to 12 hours to complete a 3,000-mile round-trip, and the fact that some target areas, such as the nuclear installations in the far northeast, could not be reached from airfields in India and Pakistan.
A total of 102 reconnaissance flights were completed by the U-2 until the program was terminated by President Richard Nixon following his visit to Beijing in February 1972, and the planes were returned to the United States in 1974. See also AIRBORNE COLLECTION; SENIOR BOWL.
UIGHURS. Formerly, the inhabitants of eastern Turkistan, the Uighurs came under Chinese Communist control in 1949, and the province was renamed the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. Speaking their own Turkic dialect and being predominantly Sunni Muslim, the Uighurs campaigned unsuccessfully against the annexation of two million square kilometers of their country and against a policy of ethnic Han immigration and settlement.
Uighur separatists are considered a priority target for the Ministry of State Security, and their activities are under constant surveillance. During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, numerous Uighurs were captured by Coalition forces, accused of having attended al-Qaida training camps, and detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but in 2004, they were declared eligible for release; although, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they could not be repatriated to China, where they would likely face persecution. Since then, two groups have been released to an island in the Pacific and another to Bermuda. See also GERMANY; NATIONAL MINORITIES.
UNITED FRONT DEPARTMENT (UFD). A branch of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, the UFD, formerly known as the United Front Work Department, is responsible for links with non-Communist émigré groups and has been identified by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) as an espionage organization active among Chinese émigrés and engaged in psychological warfare in pursuit of policy goals set by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A CSIS analysis described the UFD’s role as “one of compelling overseas Chinese to take part in economical and technical espionage, whether through patriotic appeals or simple threats.” See also OVERSEAS CHINESE.
UNITED STATES CONSULATE GENERAL. Until the move toward establishing formal diplomatic relations with Beijing began in 1973, the principal U.S. intelligence outpost responsible for monitoring the People’s Republic of China was the Consulate General in Hong Kong, which accommodated a large Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)station under semitransparent political section cover and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) legal attaché. The CIA station chief and his staff were declared to the British colonial authorities, and they maintained a close relationship with the local Special Branch. Similarly, the FBI legat held regular meetings with the Director Special Branch, and some, such as Don Grove, later to be succeeded by Jim Martin and Mike di Pretoro, acquired considerable expertise on Chinese espionage. However, as a base for human source operations into the mainland, Hong Kong fared poorly, and Peter Sichel, who headed the CIA station between 1956 and 1959, recalled, “It was a total waste of time and a total death mission for anyone who got involved.”
The Consulate General was itself a target for Chinese intelligence operations, and as the 1997 hand-over date approached, the FBI concluded that some of the local staff who were ineligible for foreign passports were vulnerable to recruitment by agents of the Ministry of State Security. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA). During World War II, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS)established liaison missions in China to support the Kuomintang; although, the organization harbored many who supported the Communists and espoused the view that they were more effective in opposing the Japanese. This political debate, promoted by what became known as the “China lobby” in Washington DC, would prove controversial, but the administrations of both Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower supported Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
During and after the Civil War in China, the United States sponsored the Nationalist cause and conducted intelligence operations through surrogates, including the Civil Air Transport (CAT), which acted as a clandestine air force, infiltrating agents, dropping supplies, and distributing propaganda leaflets. CAT operations continued after the withdrawal to Taiwan in 1949, and according to news releases in Beijing, some 212 agents were parachuted into the mainland between 1951 and 1953, of whom most gave themselves up, were captured, or were killed.
In the absence of other sources of intelligence about developments inside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the Cold War, the United States relied upon overhead reconnaissance flights, flown since 1948 from Japan, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Signals intelligence collection missions were undertaken by RB-50B aircraft of the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Wing from Yokota, Japan.
As the PRC began to develop a nuclear weapons program, the test site at Lop Nor in western Xinjiang Province became a priority target, but it is so remote, being 2,000 miles from the coast, that it could only be monitored effectively by overflights and satellite passes. Since its construction in April 1960, the facility has been the subject of continuous surveillance by U-2 aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird, remotely controlled unmanned drones, and satellites.
Other targets include the missile test center at Shuangchenzi; the submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test facility in the Bohai Gulf, south of Huludao; the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) launch sites at Chiuchuan in Gansu Province and at Changxing; the gaseous diffusion plant at Lanzhou; and the space center at Chongqing. Overflights also concentrated on the 1st Submarine Flotilla headquarters at Jianggezhuang (near Qingdao), the bomber factory at Harbin, and the laser research laboratories at Changchun.
The only human sources emerging from the PRC during the Cold War tended to be refugees crossing into Hong Kong, who were the subject of routine screening in the hope of acquiring useful intelligence. Following the arrest of Hugh Redmond in 1951 in Shanghai, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) abandoned the use of officers working under non-official cover and, without any diplomatic premises on the mainland, was forced to depend almost entirely on technical collection, a relatively risk-free expedient, especially when CIA U-2 missions began flying from Peshawar in 1957. These incursions went unchallenged until May 1960, when the first aircraft was shot down by a SA-2 Guideline over Sverdlovsk. Thereafter, Nationalist pilots flew from Taiwan, and this continued without incident until September 1960, when Colonel Chen Huai-sheng’s U-2A was shot down nine miles south of Nanchang. Nevertheless, the U-2 overflights continued, complemented by missions flown from Kadena on Okinawa by the SR-71, which flew for the first time in April 1962 but was not announced to the public, by President Lyndon Johnson, until the autumn of 1964.
Incursions into mainland airspace by the SR-71 were terminated in 1971, as part of Dr. Henry Kissinger’s agreement with Beijing, but flights by pilotless aircraft continued, despite a heavy rate of attrition. Between 1964 and 1969, the New China News Agency reported that 19 such drones had been shot down. During the Cold War, the most aggressive aerial reconnaissance of the mainland was conducted by Taiwan, which lost up to 9 U-2s, 3 RB-57s, and 2 RF-101s over the mainland. Their operations, undertaken by the Black Cat Squadron, were pioneered by Dr. Ray S. Cline, the CIA station chief in Taipei between 1957 and 1962 and later the CIA’s Director of Intelligence. During his posting to Taipei, Cline supervised a program of leaflet drops over the mainland, offering rewards for defectors with military information, and this resulted in the unexpected arrival of a People’s Liberation Army Air Force pilot in his obsolete MiG-15 fighter.
After the PRC was established as a nuclear power, the U.S. intelligence community concentrated its collection effort on assessing the country’s military power and on counter-proliferation, seeking to identify Beijing’s sale of weapon and missile technology to nuclear threshold countries, principally Pakistan, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Libya, and Algeria. With the PRC’s support, Pyongyang became the world’s leading exporter of ballistic missiles, enabling Iran to develop its Shahab-3, an MRBM with a range of 800 miles, test fired in July 1993.
The PRC has been the subject of numerous National Intelligence Estimates, which have reported on Beijing’s nuclear weapons development program from the delivery in 1950 of Soviet R-1 rockets, designated the SS-1 Scanner. This SRBM, based on a German V-2 design, formed the basis of the Dong Feng (East Wind) project and would produce the Long March space launch vehicle.
Because of the difficulties in running human sources in Beijing, regarded as a “denied area” for the management of individual assets, the CIA inevitably has come to rely on technical means of collection; although, it has acquired valuable information from defectors, among them PLANESMAN in 1985, leaving the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) to recruit “international assets” with access to the PRC’s diplomats stationed in the United States. Inherent in such operations is the danger of hostile penetration, as was demonstrated when the PARLOR MAID investigation collapsed in 2005 with the exposure of Katrina Leung’s double agent role for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the recruitment of Ronald Montaperto, a Defense Intelligence Analyst. However, the PRC’s espionage appears to be directed primarily at providing a covert conduit for embargoed military and commercial technology, rather than the collection of intelligence through the development of clandestine networks of conventional spies. Indeed, the MSS’s main targets in the United States seem to reflect the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic priorities, being Uighur separatists, the democracy movement, Falun Gong branches, Tibetan nationalists, and all issues affecting Taiwan.
In early 1995, a “walk-in” at the CIA station in Vientiane, Laos, offered to sell a collection of secret documents stolen from a classified PRC facility, which he had removed from his office and then couriered to himself overseas by DHL. Included in this material was compelling proof that the designs of the W-88 and W-76 Trident II missile warheads, the Minuteman III’s W-78, the Peacekeeper’s W-87, the Minuteman II’s W-56, and the Minuteman II’s W-62 had all been compromised, suggesting a major leak at Los Alamos. However, after a lengthy counterintelligence analysis, the CIA concluded that the walk-in was not only unreliable but also possibly a deliberate MSS plant dispatched to convey misleading data. However, the defector was later interviewed extensively by the FBI after he had moved to the United States and judged to be authentic. See also AGEE, PHILLIP; AIRBORNE COLLECTION; AMERASIA; ARMED FORCES SECURITY AGENCY (AFSA); ARNOLD, JOHN; BERGERSEN, GREGG W.; BOEING 767-300ER; CAMPCON; CATHAY PACIFIC; CHANG FEN; CHANG HSIEN-YI; CHANG, THERESA; CHAO FU; CHAO TAH WEI; CHARBATIA; CHENG, PHILIP; CHEN YONGLIN; CHEUNG, MARK; CHI MAK; CHINA AEROSPACE CORPORATION (CAC); CHINCOM; CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING; CHINESE NAVAL STRENGTH; CHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; CHITRON ELECTRONICS; CHI TUNG KUOK; CHUNG, GREG; CIRCUS; COMINTERN; COX REPORT; CYBER ESPIONAGE; DA-CHUAN ZHENG; DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (DIA); DING, JIAN WEI; DIXIE MISSION; EAST TIMOR; ENGELMANN, LARRY; EWERT, ARTHUR; FIRMSPACE; FRANK, DESMOND DINESH; GARDELLA, LAWRENCE; GOWADIA, NOSHIR S.; GREAT BRITAIN; GUO WANJUN; HAINAN INCIDENT; HALPERN, ERIC; HANSON, HAROLD DEWITT; HANSON, HUANG; HAO FENGJUN; HIGH ALTITUDE SAMPLING PROGRAM (HASP); HINTON, JOAN; HONEYTRAP; HOU DESHENG; HUANG, ANDREW; HUTCHINSON, MILTON; ILLEGALS; IMPECCABLE, USNS; INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; INFORMATION WARFARE; INFORMATION WARFARE MILITIA; INSTITUTE OF PACIFIC RELATIONS (IPR); INTELLIGENCE BUREAU OF THE MINISTRY OR NATIONAL DEFENSE (IBMND); INTERNATIONAL LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ILD); JIN HANJUAN; KAMISEYA; KEYSER, DONALD W.; KHAN, AMANULLAH; KIM SOO-IM; KOREAN WAR; KOVACS, WILLIAM; KYRGYZSTAN; LAM, WAI LIM WILLIAM; LAU, HING SHING; LEE, DUNCAN C.; LIANG XIUWEN; LIAO HO-SHU; LI FENGZHI; LILLEY, JAMES; LIN HAI; LI QING; LI SHAOMIN; LIU, HENRY; LO CHEN-HSU; LOVELL, JOHN S.; LU FU-TAIN; LUNEV, STANISLAV; MACKIERNAN, DOUGLAS; MAIHESUTI, BABUR; MENG, XIAODONG SHELDON; MIN GWO BAO; MOO, KO-SUEN; NAHARDANI, AHMAD; NANDA DEVI; NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); NEEDHAM, JOSEPH; NEPTUNE; OGGINS, ISAIAH (“CY”); OU QIMING; OVERSEAS CHINESE; OWENS REPORT; PENG, YEN CHIN; PIQUET, JOSEPH; POLLARD, ANNE HENDERSON; PRICE, MILDRED; PROJECT 863; QIAN XUESEN; REGAN, BRIAN P.; REVOLUTIONARY UNION; ROTH, JOHN REECE; SENIOR BOWL; SERVICE, JOHN S.; SHAN YANMING; SHEN JIAN; SHENZHEN DONJIN COMMUNICATION COMPANY; SHESU LO, ROLAND; SHRIVER, GLENN D.; SHU QUANSHENG; SINO-SOVIET SPLIT; SINO-VIETNAMESE WAR; SK-5; SMEDLEY, AGNES; SOONG, CHARLIE; SORGE, RICHARD; SUCCOR DELIGHT; TAI SHEN KUO; TAKHLI; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; TECHNOLOGY COUNTERFEITING; TITAN RAIN; TOPPER; TSOU, DOUGLAS; TSU, WILLIAM CHI-WAI; UNITED STATES CONSULATE GENERAL; VELA; WANG HSI-LING; WANG MINCHUAN; WANG-WOODFORD, LAURA; WAVELAB INC.; WEI LEFANG; WEN HO LEE; WORTON, WILLIAM A.; WU BIN; XIAN HONGWEI; XIONG XIANGHUI; XU BING; XU WEIBO; YANG FUNG; YANG LIAN; YARDLEY, HERBERT O.; YU, PAUL; YU JUNGPING; ZHANG, MICHAEL MING; ZHONG MING; ZHOU ENLAI; ZHU YAN.
UZBEKISTAN. A member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) since June 2001, Uzbekistan has received considerable investment from China in an effort to exercise greater local influence and to diversify the country’s dependence on oil imported by sea. The China National Petroleum Company has partnered the national oil company, Uzbekneftegaz, to develop the Mingulak oilfield in Namangan and has begun exploration in Ustyurt, Bukhara-Khiva, and Fergana. Under pressure from the SCO, the Uzbek government in 2008 terminated an agreement with the U.S. Air Force to fly missions in support of operations in Afghanistan.
VELA. The Spanish word for “watchman,” VELA was the codename for a secret United States Air Force surveillance satellite project, which was operational between October 1963 and April 1970, to monitor Chinese nuclear detonations.
VIETNAM WAR. Interception of Chinese signals by the U.S. National Security Agency in 1965 revealed that 80 to 90 percent of U.S. Air Force air raids over North Vietnam’s northeast quadrant were being compromised by early warning alerts supplied from ground radar sites inside China. Furthermore, the Chinese were found to be predicting the reconnaissance flights of Strategic Air Command drones, resulting in the loss of up to 70 percent of the unmanned aircraft. A study concluded in April 1967 and codenamed PURPLE DRAGON traced the source of the leak to an encrypted single sideband channel that linked Da Nang to Bien Hoa and provided 20 hours’ advance notice of the drone missions. Even without being able to read the messages and relying solely on traffic analysis, the experts were able to predict 18 out of 24 operations. New security countermeasures were introduced to improve communications security, and the losses dropped dramatically.
VOROBIEV, E. D. The director of the Soviet atomic weapons production facility at Chelyabinsk-40, E. D. Vorobiev was a colleague and close friend of Igor Kurchatov and, in April 1956, was appointed to supervise the transfer of Soviet nuclear technology to China. He moved to Beijing in May 1957 and oversaw the construction of the Northwest Nuclear Weapons Development Establishment near the city of Haiyan in a remote corner of Qinghai Province. Also known as the Qinghai Provincial Mining Zone, the Ninth Academy, Factory 221, and Koko Nor, the site was designed as a replica of the Soviet facility at Sarov designated Arzamas-16. Assisted by E. A. Negin, the chief weapons designer from Arzamas-16, together with his engineering team of N. G. Maslov and V. Y. Gavrilov, Vorobiev began construction of a huge uranium enrichment facility, covering seven acres, at Lanzhou in Gansu Province and selected Jiuquan as the location for a reactor, designated Plant 404, and a neighboring weapons assembly plant. However, Soviet collaboration was terminated in August 1958 when Mao Zedong declined Nikita Khrushchev’s demand for Soviet military bases in China and for control over China’s foreign policy. Accordingly, Vorobiev and his colleagues were withdrawn during the autumn, ostensibly on leave but never to return. In consequence, all work on the plutonium production reactor was suspended in August 1960.
Concern about Soviet knowledge of every aspect of the Chinese nuclear weapons program prompted a decision to relocate the Haiyan establishment to several different sites, some of them underground, near Zitong in northwestern Sichuan Province, where it was renamed the Research and Design Academy of Nuclear Weapons. As well as being unknown to the Soviets, the narrow valleys around Zitong had the added advantage of being almost permanently obscured from overhead reconnaissance by dense cloud cover. See also SOVIET UNION.
WAISHIJU. Within the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, the counterintelligence branch, known as Waishiju, was headed until his defection in 1985 by Yu Qiangsheng.
WANG HSI-LING. The chief of Taiwan’s National Defense Intelligence Service, Vice-Admiral Wang Hsi-ling was an attaché at the Republic of China (ROC) embassy in Washington DC in 1984 when the dissident journalist Henry Liuwas murdered at his home in Daly City, California.
During the trial of Chen Chi-li, a member of the mafia-like United Bamboo Gang, who was convicted of shooting Henry Liu, evidence emerged that implicated Vice-Admiral Wang. After some initial resistance from President Chiang Ching-kuo, the Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed Wang, and while he denied any involvement in the murder, he did admit that he had wanted Chen to “teach Liu a lesson.” However, three polygraph examinations indicated that Wang had been less than truthful in his denials of causing the murder, and he was eventually convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by a military tribunal in April 1985. He served his sentence at Taiwan’s Garrison Command facility, where political prisoners were normally held, and his family was allowed daily visits to his cell suite, which included a kitchen and study. Less than six years later, Wang was released, together with Chen and another conspirator, Wu Tun.Rumors persist that the order to murder Liu was actually initiated by Chiang Hsiao-wu, President Chiang Ching-kuo’s second son (grandson of Chiang Kai-shek), who was linked to Chen Chi-li.
In 2007, Wang, who had negotiated while in Washington the transfer of two former U.S. Navy Tench-class submarines to Taiwan, renamed the Hai Shih-class, participated in a ceremony involving the ROC’s navy submarine fleet. See also MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (MIB); NATIONAL SECURITY BUREAU (NSB); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
WANG MINCHUAN. The director of Chinese studies at Baghdad University since October 1959, 40-year-old Professor Wang Minchuan defected to the Central Intelligence Agency in June 1961 while on a visit to Greece. See alsoUNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
WANG-WOODFORD, LAURA. On 24 December 2007, Laura Wang-Woodford, a U.S. citizen and director of Monarch Aviation, a company based in Singapore that for 20 years had imported and exported components for military and commercial aircraft, was arrested at San Francisco airport, having arrived on a flight from Hong Kong, and was charged with the illegal export of embargoed aircraft parts to Iran. Also indicted was her British husband, Brian Woodford, who was the company’s chairman; although, he was never arrested.
In a 20-count indictment issued in New York in 2003, Wang-Woodford had been charged with operating Jungda International, a Singapore-based successor to Monarch, and accused of supplying restricted aircraft parts to Iran. At the time of her arrest, Wang-Woodford had been carrying catalogs from the China National Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation, a firm identified by the U.S. Treasury as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
In March 2009, Wang-Woodford pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, was sentenced to 46 months’ imprisonment, and agreed to forfeit $500,000. An investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that Monarch Aviation was a front company sponsored by the Ministry of State Security. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
WATT, GEORGE. In 1967, a Vickers engineer, George Watt, was convicted of espionage in Lanzhou and served three years’ imprisonment in Beijing.
WAVELAB INC. On 6 June 2008, WaveLab Inc. of Reston, Virginia, was sentenced to one year of supervised probation, a $15,000 fine, and forfeiture of $85,000 for the unlawful export of hundreds of controlled power amplifiers to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The prosecution was brought by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry after WaveLab purchased the amplifiers with an assurance that the equipment would not be exported. The undertaking had been signed by Walter Zheng as WaveLab’s chief executive officer on 5 March 2008. Walter Zheng was also Zheng Guobao, a graduate of the PRC’s University of Science and Technology in Hefei, where he had obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
WEI LEFANG. A Chinese financier who peddled nuclear weapons components to Iran, Wei Lefang was indicted in April 2009 for laundering tens of millions of dollars through half a dozen New York banks. According to the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, Wei had duped the banks with an assortment of aliases and phony businesses, in spite of having a federal banking ban against him, and was charged with conspiracy and falsifying records.
Wei had been barred from conducting business with U.S. banks in 2006 because of his involvement in Iran’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction. To circumvent the ban, Wei had adopted the expedient of using false names and nonexistent companies to collect funds channeled through unsuspecting banks, which included Citibank, Wachovia/Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Standard Charter Bank, and JPMorgan Chase. The shipments of illegal matériel had been made from Wei’s China-based company, LIMMT Economic and Trade Company. When Morgenthau announced his intention to apply for Wei’s extradition from China and was asked about Chinese cooperation, he replied, “We’re always optimists.” See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
WEIQI. A popular Chinese game of warfare where the goal is to slowly surround the enemy, taking a little territory while even giving some away, as part of an overall strategy, until the adversary is forced into a corner and surrenders. The People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy, in many respects, can be said to mirror this game.
WENCHANG SATELLITE LAUNCH CENTER. Located on the island of Hainan, the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center is closer to the equator than any other similar site in China and is intended to accommodate launch vehicles designed to send space stations and satellites into orbit and provide support for manned space flight and future lunar missions. In 2013, it will replace the Xichang Satellite Launch Center as China’s primary launch facility and operate in parallel with the Shuang Cheng Tzu Missile and Space Test Center in Jiuquan and the Wuzhai Missile and Test Center in Taiyuan, 250 miles southwest of Beijing. Mission control for lunar and manned flights is conducted by the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center, with the Xi’an Satellite and Telemetry Control Center tracking the vehicles. Further coverage is supplied by four PLA space tracking ships and by one overseas site, at Swakopmund in Namibia. See alsoCHINESE NUCLEAR WEAPONS; LONG MARCH; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
WEN HO LEE. Originally from Taiwan, where he was born in 1939, Wen Ho Lee had been one of the three best suspects on a list compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that had contained 70 others at Los Alamos known to have traveled to China between 1984 and 1988. Of the three, one was Sylvia Lee, Wen Ho’s wife, who worked at Los Alamos as a data entry clerk with a top secret clearance.
Lee first attracted the FBI’s attention in December 1982 when he contacted Min Gwo Bao by telephone to offer his support and suggest he could find out “who had squealed” on the scientist. As Min Gwo Bao was already the subject of a surveillance operation codenamed TIGER TRAP, it was extended to cover Dr. Lee.
The KINDRED SPIRIT investigation turned out to be a nightmare for all concerned, not least because of the complicated background to the case. Stymied over the original theft from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, on which the FBI had failed to gather enough evidence to mount a prosecution, it did lead the mole hunters to Wen Ho Lee, who had been recorded in December 1982 making a telephone call to Min Gwo Bao. Although he had initially denied the conversation, Wen Ho Lee admitted it when confronted with the evidence and then acted as an agent for the FBI, attempting to entrap the suspect in telephone calls and a personal meeting in California, during which he had worn a wire. This attempt had failed; although, during the course of the operation, the FBI had learned, through a polygraph examination, that Wen Ho Lee had been passing information to Taiwan since 1978. This aspect of the investigation was abandoned in March 1984, but when his name appeared as a suspect in the KINDRED SPIRIT case, the FBI initially concealed the fact that between 1985 and 1991 both Wen Ho and Sylvia had been used as the FBI’s informants, submitting regular reports on potential breaches of security at Los Alamos and on details of official visitors from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the years 1986 and 1987, America’s nuclear weapons laboratories received an average of 500 visitors from countries listed as “sensitive” by the Department of Energy (DoE), and this figure was to rise within 10 years to 1,700, including 785 from republics of the former Soviet Union, so there had been plenty for Sylvia to report on. The official statistic for visitors from China rose from 67 to 410.
In February 1994, Lee again attracted attention when he was greeted warmly by Dr. Hu Side, the chief of the Chinese nuclear weapons program, who was on an official visit to Los Alamos. The encounter was strange because Lee had never reported having met Dr. Hu.
The embarrassment for the FBI in May 1996, after an enquiry lasting 8 months and the pursuit of 12 possible leads, was that their own informant, Wen Ho Lee, had been identified as the “only individual with the opportunity, motivation and legitimate access” to both W-88 weapons systems information known to have been betrayed to China. For reasons that have never been fully explained, no action was taken against Wen Ho Lee, even to limit his access to classified material, and he was not questioned by the FBI until he was polygraphed in December 1998. In the meantime, the FBI had attempted to entrap Lee with a telephone call from a Cantonese-speaking special agent who had introduced himself as a Ministry of State Security official and inquired if there was any material to go back to the PRC. He also asked when Lee was intending to visit the PRC again, but Lee had been very circumspect and noncommittal. However, as the FBI noted, Lee had not reported the strange call as he should have done, and it was considered odd that Lee had not remarked on the request for material to go back to the PRC unless, of course, previous consignments had been sent.
The charade was inconclusive, and certainly did not prove Lee had been engaged in espionage. As a counterintelligence strategy, it was altogether pretty futile. The FBI agent had spoken Cantonese, not the Mandarin usually used in Beijing, so his approach may not have been entirely convincing, and naturally he could not use any pre-agreed recognition signals or passwords. Nevertheless, the FBI felt it was significant that Lee had failed to declare the call and then, when challenged, procrastinated about precisely what had happened. A search of his office and computer had failed to reveal what had happened to thousands of deleted and copied files, and at least seven computer tapes had disappeared.
Lee was interviewed formally by the FBI in January 1999 and again in March and finally arrested in December 1999, but the entire case had been compromised by the premature, front-page publication of one version of it by the New York Times on 6 March 1999, based on a leak of evidence given to a Congressional committee. According to the FBI Director Louis Freeh, who previously had severely reduced the number of personnel assigned to counterintelligence in general and to Chinese counterintelligence in particular, “The reporting was unconscionable,” but his determination to have the matter go to trial was undermined by Attorney General Janet Reno, who decided, under political pressure from “several Asian-American groups” that claimed “the FBI was persecuting Lee based on his ethnicity,” to abandon the indictment and reach a plea agreement based on a single relatively minor charge of mishandling classified documents. Freeh had been outraged by this interference, recalling that Lee had gone to extraordinary lengths to download, copy, and remove from a secure national laboratory 40 hours of work stretching over 70 days. Even after Lee’s security clearances were stripped at Los Alamos, he made attempts to reenter the weapons design area, including one try at 3:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve of 1998, not exactly a normal work hour.
Lee was kept in solitary confinement, supposedly to prevent him from compromising any further information and from fleeing the country, and although the FBI did not prescribe the conditions in which he was held, it was hoped that, in custody without bail, the scientist would crack and confess. But after 227 days of solitary confinement in the Santa Fe County Detention Center, in what Judge James Parker described as “demeaning unnecessarily punitive conditions,” he was released in September 2000 after accepting Reno’s plea bargain. The prosecution dropped 58 of the 59 charges in return for information on the whereabouts of the crucial missing seven tapes. With the promise of immunity, Lee admitted there had been more like 17 or 20 tapes, but insisted he had discarded them in a trash dump. None was ever recovered, despite testimony that the missing data could “in the wrong hands change the global strategic balance.” Thus, Lee was convicted of a single felony and sentenced to time already served. In 2006, he received a $1.6 million settlement of his claim for breaches of his Privacy Act rights.
A counterintelligence assessment of Wen Ho Lee made a convincing argument for him having been recruited by Li Deyuan at a conference held at Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1985, and this had heralded his first known trip to Beijing the following year, to address the Tenth International Conference on Fluid Dynamics. The FBI had briefed Lee before his attendance and had also approved a second trip, in 1988, when he had met Hu Side and the IAPCM (Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics) director, Zheng Shaotang, in his hotel bedroom, but upon his return from each, when he had listed the names of the scientists he had met, he had denied having been asked about any classified information. Years later, he would admit that he had helped the Chinese with hydrodynamic nuclear codes on both occasions. A third invitation, to both Wen Ho and Sylvia in early 1989, to attend a conference on Experimental Fluid Mechanics at Chengdu, was declined on instructions of the increasingly anxious head of security at Los Alamos, and although they could travel to the PRC no more, there were no restrictions placed on trips to Taiwan and Hong Kong, which they visited in March and December 1998 and again in 1999. The FBI suspected that, at least on the trip to Hong Kong, Lee had taken the opportunity to slip across the border to meet his contacts, and the FBI traced a purchase from American Express of some illicit travel. The FBI was also suspicious about Lee’s employment of a PRC national, who was a graduate student, as his assistant in Los Alamos and his later attempts to conceal the nature of the work they had shared.
Lee had been caught in numerous security violations at Los Alamos, but none amounted to proof of espionage, a charge Lee consistently denied. Concerned about the apparent disappearance of seven computer tapes onto which Lee had downloaded huge quantities of classified information, the prosecution plea-bargained a disastrous deal, which left it with almost nothing and certainly not the missing computer files. Why had Lee transferred thousands of classified files onto an unclassified, unprotected system? Why had he deleted hundreds of computer files after he had lost his security clearance? What had driven him to make numerous attempts to gain access to his office within the Los Alamos secure area after he had been barred from it? Had he been a spy, and if so, for whom had he worked, the PRC, or Taiwan, or both?
The case wrecked the career of the former National Security Agency analyst Notra Trulock, who had tried and failed to impose some discipline and cohesion within the DoE’s counterintelligence division while serving as the department’s director of intelligence. Trulock was falsely accused of having race-profiled Wen Ho Lee, recommending him for investigation on racial grounds, but although this baseless charge was taken up in the media with enthusiasm, there was no substance in it. Lee had been an obvious candidate from KINDRED SPIRIT’s outset, but the FBI had appeared curiously lacking in drive to take the necessary steps until Congress began to take evidence about technology transfer to China and was tipped off to DoE security lapses. Trulock’s testimony in 1998, published in what became the Cox Report, released in May 1999, had proved devastating, highlighting a political reluctance to undermine the White House’s determination to improve Sino-American relations. Incredibly, when the sheepish DoE officials were actually presenting their evidence, Lee himself was in Taiwan, on a trip for which he had been refused permission. He had gone anyway, on an undeclared consultancy contract to the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, an academic body known to be engaged in military research. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
WON CHONG-HWA. Aged 34, Won Chong-hwa was a North Korean intelligence officer thought to have been responsible for the abduction of more than 100 people from the PRC and South Korea. She also operated in Seoul, seducing South Korean officers to gather information for the North Korean State Security Department (SSD), and when she was arrested, one of her victims, an army officer named Lieutenant Hwag, was also taken into custody, as was Kim Tong-sun, who had acted as her courier, carrying information across the border.
Born in Chongjin in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) Hamgyong Province, Chong-hwa’s father had died when she was a child, and she was recruited as an agent when she was just 15. She attended the Kim Il-Sung Political and Military University sponsored by the Alliance of Socialist Working Youths and, in 1989, joined a special unit, where she received espionage training, learned South Korean geography, and adopted a southern accent. In 1992, after signing a confidentiality agreement, she sustained a head injury, forcing her withdrawal from the course, but then in 1996, she was imprisoned for theft at Pyongyang’s Paradise Department Store. She was also convicted of stealing five tons of zinc but, to avoid a death sentence, fled across the Yalu River to China.
In 1998, she started a small business in Jilin Province but was traced by the North Korean authorities and invited, aged 25, to join the SSD. A file later compiled by South Korea’s Joint Public Security Affairs Investigations Headquarters concluded that she began her espionage in China by tracing other North Korean refugees or “renegades” in the cities of Yanji and Huichun in Jilin.
In March 2001, as Won Chong-hwa prepared for a mission to South Korea, she became pregnant by a South Korean businessman, named Choe, who had visited China to meet a prospective wife through an international matchmaking service. Instead of obtaining an abortion, the North Koreans encouraged her to keep the baby and marry the father. Once established in South Korea, she divorced her husband and, posing as a refugee from the north, offered herself to the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS). Meanwhile, she founded an import business in Kyonggi Province and traveled to China frequently to buy aquatic products; although, on each visit, she reported to her SSD handlers. Between October 2002 and December 2006, she made 14 trips to China, and her principal role appears to have been the seduction of Korean businessmen linked to the South Korean NIS. She also submitted reports on leading political figures, including Hwang Jang-yop, former secretary of the North Korean Workers’ Party, and Kim Sung-min, representative of the Radio Free North Korea, who was a leader of the North Korean refugees in South Korea. She was paid $34,000 in cash and was told that her operation had been assigned a budget of $60,000.
One part of her assignment was the assassination of refugees, and she was issued with needles and a quantity of poison to perform her task. From 2005, she registered with a matchmaking service, identifying herself as a “military officer in active duty,” expressing a preference for men in her category. She made contact with dozens of lovesick officers, including a Major Kim, and passed their personal details to her handlers.
Eventually Won Chong-hwa fell in love with Lieutenant Hwang, an officer based in Kangwon Province, who was seven years her junior, and even after he realized his lover was a spy, he stayed with her and planned to stow away on a ship to Japan. Assisted by him, between September 2006 and May 2007, Won Chong-hwa gave more than 50 talks on military security topics to personnel at South Korean bases, but in them, she often lauded North Korea and supported Pyongyang’s nuclear program. She also visited Japan three times, claiming to be meeting prospective husbands, but in reality, she was tracing North Korean refugees.
According to the South Korean dossier on Won Chong-hwa, who was arrested on 15 July 2007, her father had been killed in 1974 as he attempted to cross to the South as a spy, and Kim Tong-sun, her 63-year-old foster father, was a North Korean refugee who entered South Korea from Cambodia in 2006. He too had been trained by the SSD, and Won’s younger half-sister, with the same father but a different mother, was also a spy, and her younger brother was an SSD driver. At her trial in Suwon in September 2008, Won Chong-hwa made a full confession.
WORTON, WILLIAM A. In 1935, a U.S. Marine Corps officer, Major William A. Worton, joined the Far East Section of the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). A World War I veteran of the Aisne-Marne offensive and having undertaken 3 assignments over 10 years in China and fluent in Mandarin, Worton had attended an ONI conference and recommended that a Fleet Intelligence Officer based in Shanghai or Hong Kong should develop a network inside and outside Japan to report on Japanese fleet movements. The proposal, later rejected by ONI, as there was a reluctance to share intelligence with the British, was initially accepted, as was Worton’s offer to volunteer for the mission.
By 1935, the ONI had already developed a group of coast watchers in China to monitor Japanese shipping and established an espionage network that included a Harvard exchange scholar at the Imperial University in Tokyo and a member of the Asiatic Primate Expedition.
In the late summer of 1935, Worton, accompanied by his wife, traveled to China via France and the Suez Canal to avoid being detected by Japanese agents and carried three passports. One identified him as an attaché in Peking, another as a U.S. Government employee conducting official business, and the third as “Archibald Robertson.” Having settled in Shanghai, he moved to Nanking, where he met Tai Lai, an old acquaintance from his previous assignments in China; Worton believed he had to trust someone, and since Tai “knew the war was coming,” he agreed to steer potential agents, both Chinese and European, to Worton, who was under no illusion that these same agents would report to Tai as well. His agents, who were to operate in Sasebo, Nagasaki, and Shimonoseki, included the Austrian artist Fritz Schief, Franzi von Sternburg (another Austrian), and various ethnic Chinese, who achieved some success.
In 1936, Worton was replaced by another U.S. Marine Corps officer, Captain Charles C. Brown, and returned to the United States on a ship, which stopped briefly at Yokohama where, he later reported, he did not leave his stateroom. He later claimed, in an oral history contributed in 1969, that his mission had “opened the eyes” of the Navy to the fact that there were marines “who were capable of making decisions affecting the Navy” and that his contacts with Tai Lai had paved the way for his subsequent assistance to the Americans during World War II, which included the establishment of a weather station in Mongolia. In 1946, Tai also was instrumental in freeing some Marines who were prisoners of the Communists.
No official records survive of Worton’s ONI mission, which was revealed 10 years after his death in 1973. After his retirement, Major General Worton was appointed chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
WO WEIHAN. See MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU (MIB).
WU BIN. A Ministry of State Security agent codenamed SUCCOR DELIGHT by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Wu Bin was arrested by U.S. Customs in October 1992. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
WU SHU-TUNG. In October 1967, Wu Shu-Tung traveled from Hong Kong to Taipei to defect and was greeted as the most senior mainland Chinese Communist ever to have switched sides. He had headed the Chunghwa Book Company in Shanghai and had headed the office in Hong Kong but was also well connected to the leadership in Beijing, which he had visited twice a year since 1950, consulting with Zhou-Enlai and Shen Yu-pin. As a member of the Anti-Persecution Struggle Committee, he had played a significant role in the 1967 riots in Hong Kong, and in his debriefing, he gave a detailed account of the operations conducted by the Committee’s subordinate sections, which included the smuggling of weapons, the distribution of propaganda, and the development of measures intended to intimidate the local population.
XIAN HONGWEI. In April 2011, two People’s Republic of China businessmen, 32-year-old Xian Hongwei, president of the Beijing Starcreates Space Science and Technology Development Company Limited, and his 33-year-old vice president, Li Li, were indicted in Alexandria, Virginia, on charges of attempting to purchase thousands of radiation-hardened microchips in violation of the Arms Export Control Act, having been arrested in Hungary in September 2010 and extradited.
Beijing Starcreates had been engaged in the import and sale of programmable read-only memory microchips to the government-controlled China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which designs and produces strategic and tactical missile systems and launch vehicles. When the two men approached a company in Virginia and offered pay to $64,500 for 40 of the hardened microchips and inquired about purchasing 1,000 chips, apparently in staggered purchases they hoped would avoid suspicion, the vendor contacted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which mounted a sting operation. In June 2011, both men pleaded guilty and were due to be sentenced in August. See alsoUNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
XIE QIMEI. The first Ministry of State Security station chief posted to Washington DC under first secretary diplomatic cover in the cultural section, Xie Qimei was Jim Lilley’s counterpart as China’s “designated spy” at the PRC embassy; although, his position was never publicly acknowledged in the same way.
Little was known about Xie’s career, and some believed he was working under alias, but clearly, he must have had a relationship with Deng Xiaoping to have been entrusted with the assignment. A cold, hard individual, taller than most of the other members of the embassy staff, he was often observed as being aloof and detached from his colleagues. Between 1984 and 1985, he was the second-ranking Chinese official at the PRC’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, a post often filled by intelligence officers. He then moved to a United Nations Secretariat position as under-secretary-general of the Technical Development Department. In 1995, he was identified as a “specially invited editor” of a Chinese book, China and the United Nations: Commemorating Fifty Years of the United Nations.
XINHUA. The People’s Republic of China state domestic news agency, Xinhua, posts correspondents overseas and routinely provides the Second Department of the Ministry of State Security personnel with journalistic cover. It provides the Chinese leadership with classified reports on domestic and international events and demonstrates many of the characteristics of a regular intelligence agency. However, it also has a reputation for engaging in propaganda, and some of its staff have been corrupt, with China Youth Daily reporting the imprisonment of two journalists who accepted gold ingots as bribes in return for not reporting coal mining accidents.
The Washington DC office of Xinhua was headed by Lu Ping when he first met Katrina Leung, the Federal Bureau of Investigation asset codenamed PARLOR MAID. In July 2010, it was reported that Wan Wuyi, the 58-year-old head of propaganda at Xinhua, where he had worked for the past eight years, had defected while attending a course at Oxford University. See also NEW CHINA NEWS AGENCY.
XINJIANG. Decades of ethnic conflict in Xinjiang between the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs and the transplanted Han migrants, who now amount to 40 percent of the population, has left the province a source of great concern to Beijing, where attempts to suppress local separatists and jihadists influenced by Afghan and Pakistani religious extremists have been considered a strategic priority for the security and intelligence apparatus.
The East Turkistan Islamic Movement is considered a terrorist organization, and since the 2001 Coalition invasion, militant Uighurs have been detained in Afghanistan while fighting alongside the Taliban. The separatists have conducted an increasingly violent campaign in Xinjiang, where an estimated 197 people were killed and 1,000 injured in rioting in July 2009, and were blamed for the assassination of a Chinese diplomat in Kyrgyzstan the previous year. In October 2009, an al-Qaida leader, Abu Yahya al-Libi, called on the Uighurs to prepare for “a holy war.” The Ministry of State Security (MSS) intervened prior to the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to arrest activists to prevent an alleged atrocity planned to disrupt the event and maintains a close watch on the Uighurs, who have been linked to al-Qaida, and on cross-border smugglers, whose trade in heroin has created a local HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Evidence that MSS personnel in Germany had been targeted against the local Uighur refugees in Munich emerged in December 2009 when a Chinese consular officer was expelled, having been accused of spying on the expatriate community. In a similar case in April 2011, a 64-year-old Uighur identified only as “L” was charged with having passed information about the local Uighur émigrés to the MSS between April 2008 and December 2009.
Disaffection in Xinjiang has been exacerbated by official corruption, one complaint both the Han and Uighur communities agree on. Their target was Wang Lequan, the powerful regional party chief since 1994 who was accused of channeling lucrative investment to his home town of Shouguang in Shandong. Although considered immune even from the Central Discipline Inspection Commission, eventually Wang was dismissed in April 2010.
Uighurs captured in Afghanistan and detained at Guantanamo Bay have been among the groups declared safe for release from American custody; although, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they are not eligible for return to China where they could expect persecution, arrest, and execution. Accordingly, a few have been granted asylum in the Pacific and by Bermuda. See also SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION (SCO).
XIN PEIWEN. A member of an army cultural troupe, Xin Peiwen was the leader of three entertainers who were convicted in 1988 of plotting to persuade pilots to defect from the People’s Republic of China.
XIONG XIANGHUI. Like many of his revolutionary colleagues, Xiong Xianghui came from the educated elite that ruled prerevolutionary China. Born in Shandong on 12 April 1919, the son of a country magistrate, he began his revolutionary career in 1936 as a student where he was spotted by Zhou Enlai, who assigned him the task of infiltrating the Kuomintang (KMT). At a meeting of potential staff members, Xiong impressed Hu Tsung-nan, one of the KMT’s ablest generals, and by the next year, Xiong was appointed to Hu’s personal staff, a position he retained for the next decade. Xiong was told by another early Chinese Communist, “ni shi Zhou Enlai chouhua de yige leng qizi.” (You are one of the dormant chess pieces planned and placed by Zhou Enlai.)
Xiong’s greatest coup was achieved in 1947 at the height of the Chinese Civil War when he was about to leave Shanghai to attend university and was intercepted by Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police to be escorted back to General Hu. Xiong feared his links to the Communists had been exposed, but he was met with broad smiles from Hu, who explained that his army was about to attack Mao Zedong’s base in Yan’an, in northwest China. He instructed Xiong to study the plans in a locked room and advise on the assault strategy, thereby allowing Xiong the opportunity to warn the Communists and give Mao and Zhou time to evacuate the city. Although Hu claimed to have captured Yan’an, trumpeting a great victory, the city had been abandoned, with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) escaping to the hills. Mao later said Hu’s information had been worth “several divisions.” The episode proved to be a turning point in the war, and two years later, a triumphant PLA entered Beijing.
After the attack on Yan’an, Hu allowed Xiong to take the interrupted study leave, and he later graduated with a degree in political science from Western Reserve University. Upon his return, Xiong startled his former KMT associates by joining the new diplomatic service of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where he became one of Zhou’s most trusted aides, attending the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina, when the PRC and Great Britain agreed to exchange chargés d’affaires. In 1962, Xiong himself was appointed to the post in London.
During the Cultural Revolution, Xiong was denounced as a revisionist by Red Guards, but Mao authorized Zhou to intercede, and while many of Xiong’s colleagues were exiled to the Chinese hinterland, Xiong remained in Beijing.
On Mao’s instructions, Xiong sat in on discussions with four of the PLA’s most senior generals, who examined the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the United States and subsequently authored a paper that advocated playing the “American card” against the Soviets. This strategy paved the way for the 1971 talks with Henry Kissinger, which Xiong attended as Zhou’s assistant and prepared President Richard Nixon’s visit to China the following year. Xiong was also a member of the delegation that took over the United Nations seat formerly occupied by Taiwan. Then, in 1991, he published his autobiography in China, Twelve Years Underground with Zhou Enlai, in which he revealed his espionage role. Though not considered a founder of the Ministry of Public Security, nor the Ministry of State Security (MSS), his considerable contributions to the Chinese Communist Party’s success in the Chinese Civil War are often cited within the MSS but as an example of one’s revolutionary spirit, not as a practitioner of intelligence operations. He died on 9 September 2005, having completed his diplomatic career as ambassador to Mexico.
XU BING. A manager with Everbright Science and Technology based in Nanjing, Xu Bing was sentenced on 1 July 2009 to 22 months’ imprisonment after attempting to export military grade night-vision technology to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Xu admitted, after first attempting to obtain an export license for the technology, that he and others at Everbright had tried to obtain the equipment illegally. The company sent $14,000 to an undercover agent in New Jersey, but when Xu arrived to discuss the transaction in October 2007, he was arrested. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
XUE FENG. In December 2011, a Chinese-born American geologist, Xue Feng, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment after a secret trial held in Beijing.
Xue, who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago, had been working in China for IHS Inc., a Colorado-based energy firm, when he was arrested in November 2007 by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and accused of collecting secret data on China’s oil industry. While under interrogation, MPS officers stubbed burning cigarettes out on his arms and hit him with an ashtray.
During his trial, Xue was accused of selling a database that contained information relating to the coordinates and volumes of reserves for 30,000 Chinese oil wells. Also convicted were Chen Mengjin and Li Dongxu, both Xue’s former classmates at a Chinese university who were later employed by PetroChina and were sentenced to 30 months’ imprisonment. A third defendant, Li Yongbo, a manager at the Beijing Licheng Zhongyou Oil Technology Development Company, received eight years. In supporting Xue, IHS maintained that the data gathered by Xue was not classified and was readily available from open sources.
XU LIN. In May 1990, Xu Lin, a 32-year-old consular official at the People’s Republic of China’s embassy in Washington DC, defected and announced his decision at a press conference sponsored by a student group, the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars. Xu, who had worked in the embassy’s education section, had been assigned to work with Chinese student organizations, but he had become increasingly disenchanted with official Chinese policy, especially after the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Xu stated that he had arrived in the United States in 1988, so he had not been a firsthand witness to the violent crackdown on the democracy movement. Xu had persuaded fourteen Chinese diplomats in the United States to defect, including five in Washington, four in San Francisco, four in Chicago, and one in New York.
Xu described how, after this episode, he was told by senior embassy officials that the ideological training given to students in the United States should be strengthened and that they must be discouraged from attending pro-democracy meetings. However, he also claimed that many embassy staff exercised a quiet resistance to the repression.
Xu revealed that he personally had held letters from students informing on the unauthorized activities of their fellow students or student groups. When Xu testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he described how the Ministry of State Security had taken an active role in recruiting embassy personnel to monitor and harass students with suspected reformist and pro-democracy sympathies.
XU WEIBO. The president of Manten Electronics in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, Xu Weibo was arrested in July 2004 and charged with violating the export laws. Also arrested was his wife and purchasing agent, Xiu Lingchen; her brother and company vice president, Hao Lichen; and Hao’s wife and company comptroller, Kwan Chun Chan, who were all naturalized U.S. citizens. In May 2006, they admitted sending restricted electronic items that had a military application and were valued at $400,000 to China at the request of the 20th Research Institute and 41st Research Institute and lying to American distributors and concealing the nature of the shipments.
According to documents filed in court, the two Chinese research facilities were part of the Ministry of Information Industry and develop military and civilian communications technology. The 20th Research Institute was described as specializing in aircraft landing systems and military radio navigation technology, while the 41st Research Institute works on military amplifiers and testing devices for military instruments. It was alleged that the 20th Research Institute “poses an unacceptable risk in the development of weapons of mass destruction or the missiles used to deliver weapons of mass destruction.”
The four defendants agreed to forfeit $391,337, which represented profits from the company for the two years prior to their arrests, and Xu was sentenced to 44 months in prison. Xiu received an 18-month sentence, Hao received a 30-month sentence, and Kwan received 6 months’ house arrest. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
XU YONGYUE. In 1998, Xu Yongyue, a native of Zhenping in Henan Province and a member of China’s blue-blooded elite, was appointed minister of state security in succession to Jia Chunwang. Xu was a trusted deputy to President Jiang Zemin and advocated an end to the corruption that had plagued the ministry, such as the sale of exit permits for travel to Hong Kong that were routinely issued to intelligence personnel. Corruption had long bedeviled the intelligence sector because the Ministry of State Security (MSS) was exempt from inspection by the central discipline inspection departments. In 2002, he was elected to the Central Committee and, in March 2003, he was reappointed head of the MSS. In 2004, Xu was instructed by an angry Luo Gan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee’s Politburo, to monitor Ding Zilin, the mother of a Tiananmen Square victim who had submitted video testimony to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and to other Tiananmen dissidents domestically and abroad. Under Xu, the MSS was also involved in suppressing Falun Gong dissidents.
On 12 October 2004, Xu attended a meeting with Nartai Dutbaev, chairman of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, to confer about bilateral cooperation on “fighting international terrorism, extremism, organized crime, and the drug business.” In February 2006, Xu led a delegation to Singapore’s minister of defense and, in 2007, was replaced by his MSS deputy, Geng Huichang.
YANG FUNG. On 31 July 2007, Yang Fung, the president of Excellence Engineering Electronics Inc., was charged in California with illegally exporting controlled microwave integrated circuits to China without the required authorization from the Department of Commerce. On the following day, Yang pleaded guilty. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
YANG LIAN. On 3 December 2010, a former Microsoft engineer, Yang Lian, was arrested in Portland, Oregon, as he attempted to purchase the first 5 of 300 radiation-hardened programmable semiconductors for $20,000 from undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents. According to the prosecution, Yang admitted, when he pleaded guilty to charges in March 2011, that he intended to drive to Canada and fly the restricted items to the People’s Republic of China himself. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
YARDLEY, HERBERT O. Born in Worthington, Indiana, in 1889, Herbert Yardley was the most controversial cryptanalyst of his generation and, in 1938, accepted a contact with Chinese government to solve Japanese diplomatic wireless traffic.
Until October 1929, Yardley had been employed by a secret U.S. State Department cryptographic bureau based in New York, known as the Black Chamber. Unemployed and short of money, Yardley wrote The Secrets of the Black Chamber in 1930 and revealed that confidential Japanese communications had been intercepted and read throughout the 1921 Washington Naval Conference. As a result of these disclosures, Yardley accepted a consultancy role in Tokyo and reconstructed the Japanese cipher systems. This left him in an ideal position, eight years later, to assist the Chinese in breaking the very same codes. Yardley’s own version of this relationship, The Chinese Black Chamber: An Adventure in Espionage, was not declassified and published until 1983, 24 years after his death. See also NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY (NSA); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
YONG JIEQU. In 1991, Yong Jiequ enrolled in a graduate course at Concordia University in Montreal and joined the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), where he became an activist, urging the membership not to criticize the Beijing government. Three years later, in 1994, Yong applied for permanent resident status in Canada and was interviewed by the federal immigration authorities and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which challenged him with surveillance evidence that he had made frequent visits to the People’s Republic of China embassy in Ottawa and had been seen in the company of a suspected Ministry of State Security (MSS) officer. Yong denied he had been recruited as an MSS agent or had collected information on other Chinese students, and an immigration court later ruled that, as the CSSA was not a Canadian institution, no espionage had taken place.
YU, PAUL. On 4 April 1973, Dr. Paul Yu, a naturalized American citizen of Chinese origin, hanged himself in the washroom of TWA flight 742 from Taipei shortly before it landed in Honolulu. The immensely successful proprietor of Ad-Yu Electronics, based in Pessaic, New Jersey, since 1951, Yu had just been refused a visa to enter Hong Kong and was returning to the United States to face questions from the Federal Bureau of Investigation over alleged violation of federal bankruptcy laws. Yu was also suspected of illegally exporting missile components, but the mystery surrounding his death was never cleared up.
YUE ZHONGLIE. In 1981, a Chinese citizen, Yue Zhonglie, was convicted of spying for the Soviets and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China. According to reports of his trial, he had crossed into the Soviet Union the previous year and had been recruited by the KGB to collect economic, military, and political information.
YU JUNGPING. Said to be a senior colonel of the People’s Liberation Army, formerly assigned to the People’s Republic of China embassy in Washington DC, Yu Jungping reportedly defected to the United States in the 1990s; although, no public announcement was made. See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
YU QIANGSHENG. The son of Yu Qiwei, the head of the clandestine propaganda department in Qingdao, Shandong, who died of a heart attack in 1958, at the age of 47, Yu Qiangsheng was adopted by Kang Sheng and employed in theMinistry of State Security’s (MSS) foreign espionage branch until he defected in 1985 to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At the time, he was on a visit to Hong Kong to see his French girlfriend, reportedly a U.S. State Department employee. Codenamed PLANESMAN by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), he supplied information that led to the identification of Bernard Boursicot and Larry Wu-tai Chin as MSS sources. The defection proved a major setback for the MSS and resulted in the dismissal of Lin Yun.
Yu’s father, who adopted the name Huang Jing to escape the Kuomintang (KMT), was appointed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader in the northern port city of Tianjin. Yu’s mother was Fan Jin, who had been closely associated with Premier Zhou Enlai. She had also replaced Jiang Qing in her husband’s affections, thereby creating a problem for her when the latter married Mao Zedong. Yu’s brother was Yu Zhen Sun, the Party chief in Shanghai, while their uncle was Yu Tai Wai, a senior KMT politician in Taiwan, a rocket expert who later became minister of defense.
During the Cultural Revolution, Yu, then a member of the Ministry of Public Security, was banished to the countryside, where he was unable to protect his mother from degradation at the hands of Red Guards directed by her old rival, Jiang Qing. Having failed to prevent her humiliation, Yu would become increasingly resentful at her treatment until he finally made contact with the CIA.
Yu’s brother Yu Zhengsheng, a senior CCP official in the central province of Hubei, found his career handicapped by the defection, but he later recovered and was recommended as a candidate for the Standing Committee of the Politburo in 2002 and as a vice premier. His ability to avoid the dire political consequences usually associated with a family member’s disgrace was attributed to his friendship with Deng Pufang, the eldest son of Deng Xiaoping, who was confined to a wheelchair after he had been thrown out of a window by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of being ruined, Yu, who was trained originally as a missile engineer, spent 12 years in the coastal province of Shandong and made a success of his appointment as mayor of Qingdao.
YU XIANGDONG. Also known as Mike Yu, Yu Xiangdong worked for the Ford Motor Company for 10 years until 2007, when he joined the Beijing Automotive Company in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In November 2010, Yu pleaded guilty to two charges of transferring Ford’s proprietary information about electrical power and distribution systems onto a computer hard drive and taking it to the PRC. See also INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE; TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
ZHANG, DAVID. In October 2010, David Zhang, also known as York Yuan Chang, and his wife, Leping Huang, who were the owners of General Technology Systems Integration Inc., were arrested by U.S. Customs agents and charged with illegally exporting dual-use technology to the Sichuan Institute of Solid-State Circuits. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
ZHANG, MICHAEL MING. On 20 January 2009, Michael Ming Zhang, aged 49, and Policarpo Coronado Gamboa, aged 40, were arrested in California and charged with illegally exporting controlled electronic equipment to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and with the illegal trafficking of counterfeit electronic components from the PRC to the United States. Zhang was the president of J. J. Electronics in Rancho Cucamonga, and Gamboa operated Sereton Technology Inc. in Foothill Ranch. Zhang was accused of exporting more than 200 computer memory devices with dual use applications used in battle tanks and of handling, in 2008, 4,300 counterfeit Cisco electronic components with an estimated retail value of more than $3.3 million. Zhang and Gamboa were also charged with having tried, in 2007 and 2008, to sell 3,500 counterfeit Sony memory sticks made in the PRC. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; TECHNOLOGY COUNTERFEITING.
ZHANG, NIKOLAI P. In July 1980, a Soviet intelligence officer, Nikolai Zhang, was convicted of espionage in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), along with two Chinese companions, and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The two Chinese were ordered to be executed by a firing squad. According to Zhang’s confession, he had undergone three years’ of training and had tried to photograph the PRC’s northeast border area. See also SOVIET UNION.
ZHANG JIYAN. In early March 2007, Zhang Jiyan, the wife of a diplomat posted at the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embassy in Ottawa, defected and applied for political asylum, having acquired an internal document that revealed the existence of a 10-member unit devoted to blocking the Falun Gong’s New Tang Dynasty Television request for a broadcast license. Zhang said the PRC government had agents in Canada spying on and harassing the Falun Gong and four other dissident groups, known as “the five poisons,” being Taiwanese, Xinjiang, and Tibetanactivists and the pro-democracy movement. Shortly after Zhang’s defection, her husband was recalled.
ZHEJIANG POLICE COLLEGE. Drawing its students from across the entire country, the Zhejiang Police College recruits many into the Ministry of State Security (MSS) at an earlier stage than other universities. All MSS personnel are, of course, state security police officers, but only a minority of Zhejiang Police College graduates join the Ministry of Public Security (the Gongan).
ZHONGGONG ZHONGYANG DUIWAI LIANLUO BU. This name is literally translated “Chinese Communist PartyCentral Foreign Liaison Department.” See also INTERNATIONAL LIAISON DEPARTMENT (ILD).
ZHONG MING. In November 2008, Zhong Ming, also known as Andy Zhong, a permanent resident from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Ye Fei, an American citizen, became the first defendants to be convicted under the Economic Espionage Act, a statute passed in 1996. A computer engineer, Zhong had been arrested with Ye at San Francisco airport in November 2001 with a suitcase filled with chip design documents. Zhong had previously been employed with Ye at Transmeta Corporation and Trident Microsystems, and Ye had been employed at NEC Electronics Corporation and Microsystems Inc.
An indictment, dated 4 December 2002, alleged that both men had ties to a PRC government program in Hangzhou and that the city had funded a joint venture, the Hangzhou Zhingtian Microsystems Company, which had been formed to help Zhong and Ye exploit the stolen technology. When they were searched, federal investigators found correspondence between the men and officials at China’s National High-Technology Research and Development Program. One document, translated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, referred to a Chinese government “panel of experts” that had found the venture would have a “positive effect on the development of the PRC’s integrated-circuit industry” and recommended that “every government department implement and provide energetic support.”
According to their plea bargain, Zhong and Ye had incorporated Supervision, a company financed by Project 863, an organization based in Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province; although, local officials claimed they had never heard of the Hangzhou Zhingtian Microsystems or the two men. Because of their cooperation, Zhong and Ye were sentenced to just one year’s imprisonment. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
ZHOU ENLAI. Born in 1898 in Jiangsu Province to a relatively privileged family, Zhou Enlai received a good education in literature, poetry, painting, and calligraphy and, due to his grandmother’s peasant background, was later able to qualify as a revolutionary when that pedigree was deemed essential. Zhou studied in Japan and then in France, where he was exposed to Communist doctrine. He also traveled to Great Britain, Belgium, and other European countries, before returning to China, where he was appointed director of the Whampoa Military Academy’s political department when Chiang Kai-shek was the director. The death of Sun Yat-sen hastened the split between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang that ultimately led to the Chinese Civil War and the eventual Communist victory.
At the time of the proclamation of the formation of the People’s Republic of China, Zhou was named as premier and minister of foreign affairs. In that latter capacity, Zhou traveled widely until he relinquished the post in 1958, but he retained the premier’s position until his death in January 1976. He was also responsible in 1954 for developing the five principles of peaceful coexistence, announced at the Bandung Conference, which were intended to be the guides to enhancing links with newly decolonized countries, the basis of which was a declared respect for territorial integrity and noninterference in a country’s internal affairs.
Zhou was steeped in clandestine operations and had been the principal CCP intelligence officer in Shanghai throughout the 1930s. He was especially adept at infiltrating agents into the Kuomintang, or baibu de leng qizi (putting in place dormant chess pieces), such as Xiong Xianghui, who was appointed General Hu Tsung-nan’s personal aide.
In his In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, Theodore White described Zhou as “along with Joseph Stilwell and John F. Kennedy, one of the three great men I met.” Zhou argued for more conciliatory foreign policies than the distrustful Mao Zedong and, as a result, played a key role in the normalization of relations between China and the United States. When the Chinese first learned of the American initiative, Mao was suspicious, but Zhou, who understood the potential of good intelligence, consulted Shen Jian, the veteran International Liaison Department official and Kang Sheng confidant. Zhou tasked Shen to check on the overture’s authenticity and, having contacted Larry Wu-tai Chin, confirmed that the approach was valid.
Zhou had a profound influence on China’s intelligence community and even today remains a revered figure, often quoted by Ministry of State Security personnel. See also SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (SIS).
ZHOU HSINGPU. The second secretary at the People’s Republic of China embassy in London since 1957, Zhou Hsingpu defected to the Soviet Union with his wife and two children when their ship, the Baltika, docked in Leningrad in October 1963.
ZHOU HUNGCHIN. In October 1963, Zhou Hungchin, a 44-year-old member of a Chinese delegation of technicians on a visit to Tokyo, defected to the Soviet Union.
ZHU, PETER. On 26 August 2006, Peter Zhu, purportedly employed by the Shanghai Meuro Electronics Company, attempted to buy several restricted products that required export licenses, including amplifiers used in digital radios. These broadband items are three-stage devices designed for use in commercial digital radios and wireless local area networks and are listed in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Zhu’s request was made to an undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, and thereafter, Ding Zhengxing and Su Yang became involved in the negotiations. Both Ding and Su traveled to Saipan in the Mariana Islands on 25 January 2008 to receive the amplifiers and were arrested. They were later indicted for conspiracy to illegally export defense articles, aiding and abetting the illegal export of defense articles, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, and they returned to El Paso, Texas, while Peter Zhu became a fugitive. See also TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA).
ZHU CHENZHI. On 10 June 1950, a Chinese Communist spy, Zhu Chenzhi, was shot in Taiwan by a firing squad along with her source, Wu Shi. The Republic of China’s deputy minister of defense, Wu had provided her with top secret information, including the island’s strategic defense plans. Three other senior Kuomintang (KMT) officials were also found guilty of espionage.
Born in 1905, the fourth daughter of a wealthy owner of a fishing company in Ningpo, Zhu was educated at a school where she came under the influence of the principal who was an underground member of the Chinese Communist Party. At the age of 20, she participated in demonstrations in Shanghai with classmates who were sympathetic to the cause. In 1925, she took part in antiforeign protests in Shanghai and two years later married the chief engineer of a munitions plant supporting the warlord Zhang Zuolin, who controlled most of northeast China.
Following the Japanese occupation in 1931, she moved with her husband and daughter, Zhu Xiaofeng, to Nanking, where he succumbed to cholera the following year. In 1937, she married again, to a Communist, and they lived in Wuhan, working for the party. This involved frequent travel to Hong Kong, Zhejiang, and Guilin, to gather intelligence and raise money. However, in 1940, her husband was arrested by the KMT and incarcerated in a camp in Shangrao, Jiangxi Province, where she was able to visit him three times before he organized a mass escape.
Then in 1944, in Shanghai, she was arrested and interrogated by the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, but she was released and continued to work in the Communist underground movement until 1948, when she was sent to Shanghai to work for a commercial enterprise and visited Taiwan. This led to her main assignment, to maintain contact with Wu Shi, a long-time Communist sympathizer who, unpaid, had been supplying valuable military information about the KMT since 1947.
In November 1949, Zhu traveled under alias by boat from Victoria Harbour to the north Taiwanese port of Keelung, concealing gold jewelry in her clothes, and stayed at the home of her stepdaughter, who was employed by the KMT’s intelligence service. On Saturdays, she would visit Wu, pretending to make deliveries of pharmaceuticals, but in reality, she received information, which she then couriered to Cai Jiaogan, the head of the Communist Party in Taiwan. Altogether, Zhu made seven trips but, in January 1950, was compromised when Cai was detained and questioned. She was arrested on 18 February in the Zhoushan islands off Zhejiang before she could leave for Hong Kong and flown to Taipei for interrogation. Having refused to cooperate with her captors, she was executed four months later.
ZHU YAN. In April 2006, Dr. Zhu Yan, a 29-year-old Chinese living in the United States with a work visa, who had received a PhD in geo-environmental engineering from Columbia University, was hired by a computer software company in New Jersey, which sold environmental management software to a government agency in China’s Shanxi Province. Zhu worked for a comprehensive multimedia environmental information management portal that developed a proprietary software program for the Chinese market, which allowed users to manage air emissions, ambient water quality, and ground water quality. Zhu’s employment was terminated in July 2008, and in April 2009, he was arrested and charged with sending his company’s entire database to China’s Shanxi Province Environmental Protection Agency, thus enabling it to renege on its contracted payments and to pirate the vendor’s propriety software. See alsoTECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION.
ZIELONKA, STEFAN. In May 2009, Warrant Officer Stefan Zielonka, a 52-year-old member of the Polish Sluzba Wywiadu Wojskowego (SWW), was thought to have defected with his wife and child to the People’s Republic of China. Zielonka had worked as a SWW cipher clerk for 30 years and was familiar with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) encryption systems and Polish intelligence operations worldwide. Reportedly, Zielonka and his family had been resettled by the Ministry of State Security in the Shanghai area, but his body was recovered from the Vistula in April 2010.
ZONGCAN SANBU. The Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) General Staff Department, this organization is the PLA’s principal signals intelligence branch, reportedly employing 20,000 personnel.
INTRODUCTION
Books on the subject of Chinese intelligence operations are indeed rare, partly because, for many decades, Beijing’s security apparatus was deeply introspective, scarcely interested in foreign collection operations, and partly because, until recently, there were few opportunities in the West to study examples of Chinese espionage. The situation was no better on Taipei, or indeed Hong Kong or Macao. Accordingly, the literature is thin in English.
The first author who attempted to tackle the topic was Richard Deacon in 1974. An old newspaper hand, and a former wartime British naval intelligence officer, Deacon had begun a series of intelligence agency histories in 1969 with his History of the British Secret Service, followed by a History of the Russian Secret Service and later by similar books on the French and Japanese services. A pioneer in the field of documenting a notoriously difficult subject, Deacon laid the groundwork for many others seeking to lift the veil of secrecy on the international intelligence community; although, there would not be another attempt until two French journalists, Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer, produced The Chinese Secret Service: Kang Sheng and the Shadow Government in Red China in 1989. Thereafter, nobody else tried to research in the same area, and the dearth of material to work on is probably the reason.
The heads of the British, French, Indian, Israeli, Rhodesian, German, American, Romanian, and Soviet intelligence agencies have been published. So too have their subordinates, with the field being led by American, South African, and British retirees but with a sprinkling of Canadians, Australians, and Norwegians. In addition, there are the defectors, mainly Soviets, who have released their memoirs having been resettled in Australia, Canada, Norway, Great Britain, and the United States. And yet, there is not a single member of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) who has ever released an account of his or her activities. Quite simply, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) stands alone as being a major player in the world of espionage without ever having contributed to the literature. There is no tradition of retirees publishing their memoirs, of senior officers recalling their triumphs, of former prisoners writing of their experiences, of journalists chasing cases of espionage, or of government agencies declassifying documents and making archival material available to historians.
Although little has been written on the broad topic of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) intelligence operations, quite a lot has been published concerning individual examples of Chinese espionage, and these case histories fall into four broad categories. Firstly, there are the books covering espionage conducted during World War II, a collection dominated by accounts of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); although, this organization was preoccupied with developing a liaison relationship with the Nationalists against the common enemy, the Japanese Empire. Secondly, there are the case histories of specific examples of PRC espionage, some quite obscure, such as the Chi Mak spy ring, the notorious Wen Ho Lee investigation into the loss of American nuclear secrets, the Federal Bureau of Investigation prosecutions of the Amerasia defendants, and the more recent breach of security that centered on Larry Chin. Thirdly, there are the titles devoted to the Kuomintang (KMT) and Nationalist politics and, finally, the more modern, more polemic studies of the threat posed by the PRC’s burgeoning economy.
During World War II, the OSS attempted to develop a relationship with the Chinese in the over-optimistic hope of challenging the Japanese in the region, but the results were mixed, as several eyewitnesses recorded, among them Colonel Francis B. Mills, Oliver J. Caldwell, Charles Fenn, and Milton Miles. In addition, Dan Pinck, Kermit Roosevelt, and Maochun Yu have documented the OSS’s activities in mainland China, mainly based on declassified documents. A useful bibliography of OSS material was published by Dan Pinck in 2000.
In the postwar era, the very closed nature of Communist Chinese society was reflected in the paucity of the literature. There was considerable hostility to the “China lobby” in the United States, where advocates of better relations, or indeed any relations with Beijing, were regarded with considerable suspicion of being crypto-Communists. Accordingly, little went into print, and anyone supporting the PRC cause after the Korean War, which technically only ended in a ceasefire, found that their opinions handicapped their careers. In the case of Jack Service, whose fight for reinstatement took him to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was not published until 1971.
Following President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing, there was a profound change in attitude to the PRC, and the country that hitherto had been isolated from the outside world became the subject of intense interest to some political scientists, even if they found the challenge daunting, with restrictions on research to the point that what would be considered legitimate academic enquiry elsewhere was viewed as tantamount to espionage by the authorities in Beijing.
In more recent years, the PRC’s espionage operations conducted within in the United States have attracted considerable attention, both from the media and from Congress; although, only one case, that of the Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee, has resulted in more than a single case history. Unusually, Wen Ho Lee wrote his version of events in 2002; then his Department of Energy investigator, Notra Trulock, wrote his the following year, and in 2007, Dan Stober and Jan Hoffman released A Convenient Spy. The revelation that the PRC had embarked on a lengthy campaign to influence and recruit ethnic Chinese in the United States encouraged Congress and the media to pursue the issue, but even the well-connected Washington Times correspondent Bill Gertz has never interviewed an MSS defector.
In the absence of these sources, or even original documentation, the emphasis shifts from intelligence operations conducted from Beijing to books written by those who have made a study of intelligence collected about the PRC, and the first to cover this area from his own experience was probably Dr. Ray Cline, who released Secrets, Spies, and Scholars in 1981. Since then, David Kaplan has pursued the Kuomintang’s involvement in the notorious murder of the journalist Henry Liu.
REFERENCE WORKS
Blackstock, Paul, and Frank Schaf Jr. Intelligence, Espionage, Counterespionage, and Covert Operations: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978.
Constantinides, George. Intelligence and Espionage: An Analytic Bibliography. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983.
Kross, Peter. The Encyclopedia of World War II Spies. Fort Lee, VA: Barricade, 2001.
Mahoney, M. H. Women in Espionage: A Biographical Dictionary. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1993.
McLaren, Angus. Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Minnick, Wendell L. Spies and Provocateurs: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Persons Conducting Espionage and Covert Action, 1946–1991. London: McFarland, 1992.
O’Toole, G. J. A. The Encyclopedia of American Intelligence and Espionage: From the Revolutionary War to the Present. New York: Facts on File, 1988.
Parrish, Michael. Soviet Security and Intelligence Organizations, 1917–1990. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992.
Pinck, Dan C. Stalking the History of the Office of Strategic Services: An OSS Bibliography. With Geoffrey M. T. Jones and Charles T. Pinck. Boston: OSS/Donovan, 2000.
Polmar, Norman, and Thomas Allen. Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage. New York: Random House, 1997.
Richelson, Jeffrey. A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
CHINESE ESPIONAGE: PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
Braun, Otto. A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939. Translated by Jeanne Moore. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.
Brown, Jeremy, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds. Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Butterfield, Fox. China, Alive in the Bitter Sea. New York: Times Books, 1982.
Byron, John, and Robert Pack. The Claws of the Dragon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Chang, Iris. The Thread of the Silkworm. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Chang, Pao-min. Beijing, Hanoi, and the Overseas Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Chen, Jack. The Chinese of America. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.
Chen, Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Chen, Yung-fa. Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937–1945. Berkeley: University of Califronia Press, 1986.
Cheng, Nien. Life and Death in Shanghai. New York: Grove, 1986.
Ch’en Li-fu. The Storm Clouds Clear over China: The Memoir of Ch’en Li-Fu, 1900–1993. Edited and compiled by Sidney H. Chang and Ramon H. Myers. Stanford, CA: Hoover, 1994.
Cherepanov, A. I. As Military Adviser in China. Translated by Sergei Sosinsky. Moscow: Progress, 1982.
Chesneaux, Jean. Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China, 1840–1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.
———, ed. Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Translated by Gillian Nettle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971.
Chin, Cathy. Death of My Husband: Larry Wu-Tai Chin. Taipei, Taiwan: Tunghwang, 1998.
Cline, Ray. Secrets, Spies, and Scholars. Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1981.
Conboy, Kenneth, and Dale Andrade. The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet. Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2002.
Deacon, Richard. The History of the Chinese Secret Service. New York: Taplinger, 1974.
DeVere, Howard. China’s Intelligence and Internal Security Forces. Alexandria, VA: Jane’s Information Group, 1999.
Eframiades, Nicholas. Chinese Intelligence Operations. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 1994.
Endicott, Stephen. James G. Endicott: Rebel out of China. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980.
Faligot, Roger, and Remi Kauffer. The Chinese Secret Service: Kang Sheng and the Shadow Government in Red China. New York: William Morrow, 1989.
Fialka, John J. War by other Means: Economic Espionage in America. New York: Norton, 1997.
Field, Frederick V. China’s Greatest Crisis. New York: New Century, 1945.
Fitzgerald, Stephen. China and the Overseas Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Fraser, John. The Chinese, Portrait of a People. New York: Summit Books, 1980.
Gale, Esson M. Salt for the Dragon: A Personal History of China. Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1953.
Hahn, Emily. Chiang Kai-shek. New York: Doubleday, 1955.
Han Suyin. Wind in the Tower: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Revolution, 1949-75. London: Triad, 1978.
Houn, Franklin W. A Short History of Chinese Communism. Jersey City, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
Hunter, Edward. The Black Book on China: The Continuing Revolt. London: Friends of Free China Association, 1958.
———. Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds. New York: Vanguard, 1951.
Huo Zhongwen, and Wang Zongxiao. Sources and Techniques of Obtaining National Defense Science and Technology Intelligence. Beijing: Kexue Jishu Wenxuan, 1991.
Hutchins, Ambassador Robert L. Tracking the Dragon: National Intelligence Estimates on China during the Era of Mao, 1948–1976. Pittsburgh: Government Printing Office.
Jacobs, Dan N. Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1981.
Jacques, Martin. When China Rules the World. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
Jung Kang, and Jon Halliday. Mao: The Unknown Story. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.
Kohli, M. S., and Kenneth Conboy. Spies in the Himalayas. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003.
Lunev, Stanislav. Through the Eyes of the Enemy: Russia’s Highest Ranking Military Defector Reveals Why Russia Is More Dangerous than Ever. With Ira Winkler. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1988.
Macfarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Mehong Xu, and Larry Engelmann. Daughter of China. New York: Wiley, 1999.
Mitarevsky, N. Worldwide Soviet Plots: As Disclosed by Hitherto Unpublished Documents Seized at the USSR Embassy in Peking. Tientsin, China: Tientsin, 1929.
Pick, Eugene. China in the Grip of the Reds: Sketches of the Extravagant Effort Made by Soviet Russia to Set Up and Control a Red Regime in China, with Strong Light upon the Ruthless Character of Borodin and His Agents. Shanghai, China: NorthChina Daily News and Herald, 1927.
Pocock, Chris. 50 Years of the U-2. Aiglen, PA: Schiffer, 2005.
———. The Black Bats: CIA Spy Flights over China from Taiwan, 1951–1969. With Clarence Fu. Aiglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2010.
Qiao Liang, and Wang Xiangsu. Unrestricted Warfare. Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts, 1999.
———. Unrestricted Warfare. Panama: Pan American Publishing, 2002.
Rittenberg, Stanley. The Man Who Stayed Behind. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Roche, Edward. SNAKE FISH: The Chi Mak Spy Ring. New York: Barraclough, 2008.
Sawyer, Ralph D. The Tao of Deception. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002.
———. The Tao of Spycraft. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998.
Seagrave, Sterling. The Soong Dynasty. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Snow, Edgar. Red Star over China. New York: Grove, 1994.
Stober, Dan, and Jan Hoffman. A Convenient Spy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.
Takeda, Pete. An Eye at the Top of the World. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Taylor, Jay. The Generalissimo’s Son: Chiang ChingKuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Timperlake, Edward, and William Triplett. Red Dragon Rising. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002.
———. Year of the Rat. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1998.
Trulock, Notra. Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003.
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. 2011 Report to Congress. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2011.
Utley, Freda. The China Story. Chicago: Regnery, 1951.
Wakeman, Frederic E. Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Watt, George. China Spy. Middlebury, IN: Living Sacrifice Books, 1973.
Wen Ho Lee. My Country versus Me. New York: Hyperion, 2002.
Wilbur, C. Martin, and Julie Lienying How. Missionaries of the Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China, 1920–1927. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Willoughby, Charles. Shanghai Conspiracy. New York: Dutton, 1952.
Winchester, Simon. The Man Who Loved China. London: HarperCollins, 2008.
Wise, David. The Tiger Trap. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011.
Wren, Christopher S. The End of the Line: The Failure of Communism in the Soviet Union and China. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.
Wu, Harry Hongda. Laogai: The Chinese Gulag. Translated by Ted Slingerland. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.
Xu, Meihong, and Larry Engelmann. Daughter of China. New York: Wiley, 1999.
Yardley, Herbert O. The Chinese Black Chamber: An Adventure in Espionage. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
Zagoria, Donald S. The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956–1961. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962.
CHINESE ESPIONAGE: REPUBLIC OF CHINA
Badey, James R. Dragons and Tigers. Loomis, CA: Palmer Enterprises, 1983.
Branch, Taylor, and Eugene M. Propper. Labyrinth. New York: Viking, 1982.
Bresler, Fenton. The Chinese Mafia. New York: Stein and Day, 1980.
Cline, Ray S. Chiang Ching-kuo Remembered. Washington, DC: U.S. Global Strategy Council, 1989.
Clough, Ralph. Island China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Cohen, Marc J. Taiwan at the Crossroads. Washington, DC: Asia Resource Center, 1988.
Crozier, Brian. The Man Who Lost China. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976.
Gold, Thomas B. State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1986.
Kaplan, David E. Fires of the Dragon. New York: Atheneum, 1992.
Long, Simon. Taiwan: China’s Last Frontier. New York: St Martin’s, 1991.
Pepper, Suzanne. Civil War in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Posner, Gerald. Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.
Schurmann, Franz. Republican China. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Soldatov, Andrei, and Irina Borogan. The New Nobility. New York: Perseus Books, 2010.
Stolper, Thomas. China, Taiwan, and the Offsore Islands. White Plains, NY: Sharpe, 1985.
FAR EAST
Barber, Noel. The Fall of Shanghai. New York: Coward, McCann, 1979.
Boettcher, Robert. Gifts of Deceit. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1980.
Braun, Otto. A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939. Translated by Jeanne Moore. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.
Clark, Robert M. The Technical Collection of Intelligence. Washington, DC: CQ, 2009.
Cooper, John. Colony in Conflict: The Hong Kong Disturbances, May 1967–January 1968. Hong Kong: 1970.
Laurie, Clayton D. Baptism by Fire: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the CIA, 1953–1961. Abilene, KS: Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, 2010.
Preobrazhensky, Konstantin. The KGB/FSB’s New Trojan Horse. Menlo Park, CA: Gerard Group, 2009.
Sinclair, Kevin. Asias’s Finest: An Illustrated Account of the Royal Hong Kong Police. Hong Kong: Unicorn, 1983.
UNITED STATES
Allen, Maury. China Spy: The Story of Hugh Francis Redmond. Yonkers, NY: Gazette, 1998.
Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
Barron, John. Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996.
Bearden, Milton. The Main Enemy. With Jim Risen. New York: Random House, 2004.
Chang, Gordon. Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Cheung, T. K. ExCIA Man: In and Out of China. Hong Kong: Asian Research Service, 1973.
Dulles, Allen. The Craft of Intelligence. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Freeh, Louis, My FBI. New York: St Martin’s, 2005.
Gardella, Lawrence. Sing a Song to Jenny Next: The Incredible True Account of a Secret U.S. Raid into China. New York: Dutton, 1981.
Gertz, Bill. Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999.
———. The China Threat. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000.
Gibson, Richard M. The Secret Army: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Drug Warlords of the Golden Triangle. With Wenhua Chen. Singapore: John Wiley, 2011.
Gup, Ted. The Book of Honor. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
Held, E. B. A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011.
Hoffman, Tod. The Spy Within. Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2008.
Holober, Frank. Raiders of the China Coast: CIA Covert Operations during the Korean War. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 1999.
Keeley, Joseph. The China Lobby Man: The Story of Alfred Kohlberg. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969.
Khan, E. J. The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Koen, Ross. The China Lobby in American Politics. New York: Octagon, 1974.
Kubek, Anthony. How the Far East Was Lost. Chicago: Regnery, 1963.
Leary, William M. Perilous Missions: Civil Air Transport and CIA Covert Operations in Asia. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984.
Lilley, James. China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.
Lundberg, Kirsten. The Anatomy of an Investigation: The Difficult Case(s) of Wen Ho Lee. With Philip Heymann and Jessica Stern. Boston: Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2001.
Mann, James. About Face. New York: Vintage, 2002.
May, Gary. China Scapegoat: The Diplomatic Ordeal of John Carter Vincent. Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1979.
McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. With Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II. New York: Harper Colophon, 1972.
McGranahan, Carole. Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Menges, Constantine C. China: The Gathering Threat. Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2005.
———. Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan’s Foreign Policy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Mier, Andrew. The Lost Spy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009.
Mills, Col. Francis B., Robert Mills, and Dr. John W. Brunner. OSS Special Operations in China. Williamstown, NJ: Phillips, 2002.
Milmore, John. #1 Code Break Boy: Communications Intelligence in the Korean War. Haverford, PA: Infinity, 2002.
Mishler, Clayton. Sampan Sailor: A Navy Man’s Adventures in WWII China. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1994.
Newman, Robert P. Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Ostermann, Christan F. Inside China’s Cold War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International History Project, 2008.
Prados, John. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
Prouty, Fletcher. The Secret Team. New York: Prentice Hall, 1973.
Rafalko, Frank J. MH/CHAOS: The CIA’s Campaign against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 2011.
Rand, Peter. China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Ryan, William L., and Sam Summerlin. The China Cloud: America’s Tragic Blunder and China’s Rise to Nuclear Power. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.
Schurmacher, Emile C. Our Secret War against China. New York: Paperback Library, 1962.
Service, John S. The AmerasiaPapers: Some Problems in the History of USChina Relations. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California Press, 1971.
Smedley, Agnes. Battle Hymn of China. New York: Knopf, 1943.
———. China’s Red Army Marches. New York: International, 1934.
Smith, Felix. China Pilot: Flying for Chiang Chennault. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1995.
Smith, Warner. Covert Warrior: CIA’s Secret War in Southeast Asia and China, 1965–1967. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1996.
Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. New York: Norton, 1990.
Trest, Warren. Air Commando One: Aderholt and America’s Secret Air Wars. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000.
U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Strategy and Tactics of World Communism. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1948.
U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities. “Intellectual Freedom”: Red China Style (Testimony of Chi-Chou Huang): Hearing before the Committee on Un-American Activities. 87th Cong., 2nd sess., May 24, 25, 1962.
U.S. Congress. House. Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China. The Cox Report. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999.
U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Governmental Affairs. The Justice Department’s Handling of the Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie Case: Hearing before the Committee on Governmental Affairs. 106th Cong., 1st sess., September 22, 1999. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000.
Wijer, Birgit van de. Tibet’s Forgotten Heroes: The Story of Tibet’s Armed Resistance against China. London: Amberley, 2010.
WORLD WAR II
Adamson, Iain. The Forgotten Men: Commandos in Wartime China. London: Bell, 1965.
Aldrich, Richard. Intelligence and the War against Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Barrestt, David D. The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1970.
Bartholomew-Feis, Dixee. The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War against Japan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
Caldwell, Oliver. A Secret War: Americans in China, 1944–1945. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.
Cave Brown, Anthony. The Secret War Report of the OSS. New York: Berkeley, 1976.
Cross, John. Red Jungle. London: Robert Hale, 1958.
Dunlop, Richard. Behind Japanese Lines: With the OSS in Burma. New York: Rand McNally, 1979.
———. Donovan: America’s Master Spy. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982.
Fenn, Charles. At the Dragon’s Gate: With the OSS in the Far East. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 2004.
Jeffery, Keith. MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Leith, Hal. PoWs of the Japanese, Rescued: General J. M. Wainwright. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2003.
Liddell, Guy. The Guy Liddell Diaries. Edited by Nigel West. London: Routledge, 2005.
Miles, Milton E. A Different Kind of War: The Unknown Story of the U.S. Navy’s Guerrilla Forces in World War II China. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.
Mills, Colonel Francis B., Robert Mills, and Dr. John W. Brunner. OSS Special Operations in China. Williamstown, PA: Phillips, 2002.
Moreira, Peter. Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Marth Gellhorn. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006.
Pinck, Dan. Journey to Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 2003.
Roosevelt, Kermit. The Overseas Target: War Report of the O.S.S. Vol. 2. New York: Walker, 1976.
———. War Report of the O.S.S. New York: Walker, 1976.
Smith, Michael. The Emperor’s Codes. London: Bantam, 2000.
Stanley, Roy M. Prelude to Pearl Harbor: War in China, 1937–1941 Japan’s Rehearsal for World War II. New York: Charles Scribner, 1982.
Wasserstein, Bernard. Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion, and Collaboration in the Second World War. London: Profile Books, 1998.
Williams, Peter, and David Wallace. Unit 731: Japan’s Secret of Secrets. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989.
Winbourn, Byron. Wen Bon: A Naval Intelligence Officer behind Japanese Lines in China in World War II. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1994.
Yu, Maochun. OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES
Pringle, Robert W. Historical Dictionary of Russian/Soviet Intelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006.
Trenear-Harvey, Glenmore. Historical Dictionary of Air Intelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009.
Turner, Michael A. Historical Dictionary of United States Intelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006.
West, Nigel. Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005.
———. Historical Dictionary of Cold War Counterintelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007.
———. Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006.
———. Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008.
WEBSITES
Central Intelligence Agency www.cia.gov
Defense Technology Security Administration www.dtsa.mil
Federation of American Scientists www.fas.org/irp/world/china/index
Hong Kong Police www.police.gov.hk
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission www.uscc.gov
I. C. Smith was born in Memphis, Tennessee, served in the U.S. Navy, and graduated from the University of Louisiana at Monroe while working as a police officer. He joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1973 and, over the next 25 years, was assigned to St. Louis, Missouri; Washington, DC; Miami, Florida; and Little Rock, Arkansas. He also served between 1988 and 1990 as the FBI’s legal attaché in Canberra, Australia, with responsibility for liaison with the independent nations of the South Pacific, including Papua New Guinea and New Zealand.
While posted to the FBI’s Washington Field Office, he was assigned, at his request, to a Chinese counterintelligence squad, was promoted its supervisor, and led the investigation of Larry Wu-tai Chin, the CIA officer who spied for the People’s Republic of China for over 30 years. He was promoted to FBI Headquarters, where he completed the first affidavit and made the presentation before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain approval to conduct electronic surveillance of China.
His other duties included a year as an FBI Inspector’s Aide, where he inspected FBI offices throughout the United States as well as offices in Hong Kong and Tokyo; unit chief for the East German counterintelligence squad, where he served in the Federal Republic of Germany to liaise with the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV); and assistant special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, where he handled air force General Rafael del Pino, the most senior Cuban officer ever to defect.
In 1990, he was promoted to the FBI’s elite Senior Executive Service and appointed the State Department’s Chief of Investigations, Office of Counterintelligence Programs, Diplomatic Security and traveled to the Soviet Union, China, and Nicaragua to conduct threat analyses for the high-risk diplomatic establishments. Upon his return to the FBI’s National Security Division, he was appointed section chief for analysis, budget, and training, responsible for liaison with foreign intelligence and security agencies and representing the bureau within the U.S. intelligence community and on the National Foreign Intelligence Board, where National Intelligence Estimates are prepared for reading by the president of the United States. There, he was also designated an inspector-in-place.
In 1995, he was transferred to Little Rock as special agent in charge for the state of Arkansas during the height of the Whitewater campaign finance investigations involving Charlie Trie and John Huang. After retirement in 1998, he testified before a Senate committee that was investigating Chinese influence in U.S. elections and illegal campaign finance contributions in an FBI investigation codenamed CAMPCON.
Since retirement, he has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution, the Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, the Office of the Counterintelligence Executive, Mercyhurst College, Arkansas State University, and the Raleigh (North Carolina) International Spy Conference. He has frequently appeared on major television networks, including CBS and ABC, and his autobiography, Inside, was published in 2004. In 2009, he testified before the U.S.-China Commission in Washington, DC, on the intelligence threat posed by the People’s Republic of China. In 2011, he lectured at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. He continues to be a knowledgeable source of information for those writing about the threat posed by China to the national security of the United States and has been quoted by such authors and reporters as Seymour Hersh, Michael Isikoff, Ron Kessler, Chitra Ragavan, Bill Gertz, and David Wise, and was the principal interviewee for PBS’s Frontline report “From China with Love,” an expose on the Katrina Leung espionage investigation. He appeared on Japan’s Asahi television network and was interviewed by Romania’s HotNews (an online newspaper) and by the BBC.
He and his wife, Carla, moved to Virginia’s Tidewater area in 1999, where they keep Arabian horses. His website can be found at www.icsmith.com.
Nigel West is a military historian specializing in intelligence and security issues, and while still at university, he worked as a researcher for two authors: Ronald Seth, who had been parachuted into Silesia by SOE, and Richard Deacon, a former wartime Naval Intelligence officer and latterly the foreign editor of the Sunday Times. He later joined BBC TV’s General Features department to work on the SPY! and ESCAPE! series.
His first book, coauthored with Richard Deacon in 1980 and published by BBC Publications, was the book of the SPY! series and was followed by other nonfiction: MI5: British Security Service Operations, 1909–1945 (Bodley Head, 1981); A Matter of Trust: MI5, 1945–72 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982); MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations, 1909–45 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983); The Branch: A History of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (Secker and Warburg, 1983); Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984); GARBO (coauthored with Juan Pujol, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985); GCHQ: The Secret Wireless War (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986); Molehunt (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); The Friends: Britain’s Postwar Secret Intelligence Operations (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988); Games of Intelligence (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); Seven Spies Who Changed the World (Secker and Warburg, 1991); Secret War: The Story of SOE (Hodder and Stoughton, 1992); The Faber Book of Espionage (Faber and Faber, 1993); The Illegals (Hodder and Stoughton, 1993); The Faber Book of Treachery (Faber and Faber, 1995); The Secret War for the Falklands (Little, Brown, 1997); Counterfeit Spies (Little, Brown, 1998); Crown Jewels (with Oleg Tsarev, HarperCollins, 1998); VENONA: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (HarperCollins, 1999); The Third Secret (HarperCollins, 2000); Mortal Crimes(Enigma, 2004); The Guy Liddell Diaries (Routledge, 2005); MASK (Routledge, 2005); Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence (Scarecrow, 2005); Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence (Scarecrow, 2006); On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Greenhill, 2006); Historical Dictionary of Cold War Counterintelligence (Scarecrow, 2007); Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence (Scarecrow, 2008); Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage(Scarecrow, 2009); TRIPLEX: Secrets from the KGB Archives (Yale University Press, 2009); Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming’s James Bond (Scarecrow, 2009); Historical Dictionary of Naval Intelligence (Scarecrow, 2010); SNOW(Biteback, 2011).
In 1989, he was voted The Experts’ Expert by a panel of spy writers selected by the Observer. He is currently the European editor of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and teaches the history of postwar intelligence at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Virginia. In October 2003, he was awarded the U.S. Association of Former Intelligence Officers first Lifetime Literature Achievement award. His website can be found at www.nigelwest.com.
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