Miss a previous installment?
Read Part I | Read Part II | Read Part III
1
2015, Beijing
From the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security at Xiyuan, you could glimpse the magnificent grounds of the Summer Palace. For Chinese spymasters, it was a reassuring sight: a perfect realm of lakes and gardens, maintained with care over centuries. Surmounting this majestic space was a Buddhist hall that stood atop what the Chinese called Longevity Hill.
The minister had his own private dining room overlooking the gardens, where he liked to entertain visitors. He had a personal chef, who was said to be better than the general secretary’s cook, at his private quarters near the Forbidden Palace. Better wines, too. In the evening, he served his guests cocktails from a mirrored tray. The Chinese spymaster entertained like the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in his suite overlooking the Thames, or the CIA director admiring the view across the trees to the Potomac.
About ‘The Tao of Deception’
Yu Qiangsheng had maintained a grand office here before he defected to the West. For years, his name had been unmentionable at the ministry. Now he was simply forgotten by most of the senior cadres. The stench of his betrayal was covered by the perfume of good times.
But not for the younger professionals like Ma Wei, who had tried to rebuild the service after Yu bolted to Hong Kong and the West. She had stayed in her lair at the far end of the compound, supervising her team of agent recruiters and spy hunters; she rarely was invited to the private dining room, and she even more rarely accepted the invitation.
The mandarins of the Chinese intelligence services didn’t see it coming. On a Monday morning, investigators from the party’s Discipline Inspection Commission descended on MSS headquarters. They seized files that were said to include taps of the phones of the general secretary, “Big Daddy” himself, and other members of the Politburo. Police accompanying the commission inspectors arrested the vice minister, and the minister himself quickly “resigned.”
Ma was invited a week later to meet with a small national security committee of the Politburo. They said she had been chosen as the ministry’s next chief. She refused at first. That wasn’t simply her modesty. Few women had ever run a major cabinet agency, let alone a security ministry. She didn’t have a fancy pedigree; her family wasn’t rich, even with the scraps they had collected in red envelopes.
“Why me?” she asked. The Politburo representative gave her a simple, one-sentence answer: “Because you are not corrupt.” That was the new order of the day.
As Ma was leaving, the Politburo national security adviser gave her a delicate Chinese brush painting, which he said had been drawn by the general secretary himself. It recited in traditional Chinese characters, each stroke painted with finesse, the words of the ministry’s motto: “Serve the people firmly and purely, reassure the party, be willing to contribute, be able to fight hard and win.” Ma bowed and left the office. When she returned to the compound at Xiyuan, her younger colleagues who had gathered in the lobby broke into applause.
Even after her appointment as minister, Ma Wei stayed mostly out of sight. She avoided her fancy ceremonial office overlooking the Summer Palace. She preferred to work in the tightly compartmented space she had built years before in the back of the compound where she and her officers analyzed the files, day after day. She was a spy, not a politician. She had the ministry install a private elevator and tunnel so that she could escape to her hideaway without anyone knowing.
“I don’t believe in miracles,” she would tell her colleagues. “I am a communist. I believe in the science of fact. In our work, there are no giant leaps. Only small steps.”
For nearly a decade, Ma had assigned her colleagues to take those small steps by examining every detail of every known case of CIA recruitment or attempted recruitment. She gave a talk to each new class of officers who joined the ministry. She called her lecture “Little Things,” because she mistrusted the big men around her and their big things.
“When I say ‘little things,’” she told her officers, “I mean the small operational details where our adversary might be careless. They might repeat a past practice, or use a standard protocol one too many times, or overlook an ordinary garden bench or coffee shop table where we might have planted a microphone.
“Dear students, start with the basics. We know that every CIA operation in China must begin with an effort to evade our surveillance. They know that we are very diligent, so they work hard to develop these surveillance detection routes. When they find one that is successful, it would not be surprising if they repeat it. It works! So, please, look to see if officers repeat the same routes. Do not let them imagine that we see. But check carefully, and you may find buried treasure.”
Heads would nod around the room. Of course. Little things.
And they knew facts, the students who had been briefed into the most sensitive cases. That was really how they were unraveling the CIA networks. They arrested an agent; they examined how he had been handled; then they looked for other examples of the same tradecraft.
“Students, please think small about CIA communications technology, too. Yes, sometimes we will have big success and obtain one of the fancy devices that communicate directly to a satellite. Our engineers will have fun with that. Perhaps they can discover the frequency and see if it is used again. Or, maybe, they will engineer the device in reverse, so we can see how it works and break the encryption algorithm. I would be very happy if you found those big things.
“But, please, remember that we are looking for the small mistakes that make these big systems vulnerable. We know the CIA instructs its agents to use the deep web to send encrypted files or documents. These are hard to find. Impossible, almost, unless they use the same address twice. And of course, they will. It is too hard to set up a completely new protocol for each agent. There isn’t time. You must have something on the shelf that’s ready to go.
“But dear students, if they use something twice, we should see the pattern and be attentive. Because they will use it again.
“If people were perfect, there would be no work for spies. But they make mistakes. They think they have closed a door, but it’s still open. They think no one is listening, but we have big ears. They repeat things — a line of code, an address, a technique. Perhaps they think we are human, so we will forget to check. We won’t catch their simple mistakes. But we are inhuman. That is our calling.”
Miss Ma had given that lecture nearly a dozen times now. And it had paid off, year by year. Her cell of specialists gathered bits and pieces, tidbits that were left behind, footprints not quite covered. And with these fragments, they had crafted a seamless net to catch spies.
The MSS ruthlessly exploited its successes. When they found another CIA plant in their midst, they interrogated him until he had given up every last secret — about his CIA case officers and their routines, dead drops and communications methods. That helped the MSS capture another spy, and another.
2
2020, Beijing
What was Ma Wei’s secret? She urged her colleagues to pay meticulous, “inhuman” attention to finding patterns. And why? Because she realized that the CIA had become predictable. The Chinese had always imagined that Americans were wildly creative risk-takers. That was their secret power. But Ma had understood that many Americans didn’t really like to take chances. Ordinary was good enough.
Ma had seen it first when she was a student at the University of Wisconsin. She was already reporting to the Ministry of State Security then, and she had been terrified that she would be discovered by the FBI. But over time, she learned not to worry.
The campus police interviewed her at the beginning of each term. It was supposed to be a friendly talk about campus matters, like a meeting with the dean of students, but Ma knew better. This was the screen through which American law enforcement would, in theory, identify the people who might be spies. But the screen had gaping holes.
What surprised Ma, made her giggle later, was how stupid the questions were. The police officers were reading from a list: Have you received any unusual letters or parcels from China? Has anyone contacted you from the Chinese government? Have you improperly obtained classified information? It was a checklist, which they could then send to the FBI field office in Madison to affirm that they had vetted their students. The Americans were so nice; they wanted her to feel welcome.
She began to wonder then if Americans, the giants who had defeated Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, were really ten feet tall.
Ma’s real revelation came years later, almost by accident, when she was investigating the “tunnel mistake” at the CIA base in Chengdu. As part of her inquiry, she reviewed the recordings that had been made in the outer workspace of the base.
They didn’t reveal any big secrets. Agency officers were careful not to talk about classified matters outside the bubble or other secure spaces deeper inside the base. But the talk in the anteroom offered an unusual look at ordinary conversation among CIA officers, like placing a microphone next to the office water cooler.
Ma learned that Sonia Machel was a CIA officer, like her husband, Tom Crane, simply because she was inside the agency’s restricted space. That proved to be a very valuable fact. Ma ordered a review of old surveillance records of Sonia and realized that she had aborted a run to make a dead drop for the agency’s still-unidentified mole in the Chengdu MSS office. That made it easy to find him.
But Ma had learned little things, too, from the CIA water-cooler talk. She understood that Crane must have been base chief because his colleagues called him “boss” or “chief.” She realized that the agency had a special case going in Chengdu because Crane would halt certain conversations by saying, “That’s RH,” which she knew meant “Restricted Handling.”
The most surprising revelation was that this secret lair of spies was so ordinary. Officers complained about home leave. They cautioned each other not to get in trouble with the inspector general. They worried about congressional investigations. They discussed whether to contact lawyers. It occurred to her, as she listened, that the CIA had become predictable. The freewheeling brotherhood of trust was a myth. These people were careful, even behind the doors of their enclave. And it dawned on her that an organization that had been created in 1947 to break the rules now played by the book.
Once Ma Wei understood that the CIA was a bureaucracy, she realized that her challenge was to be creative. Throw away the musty rule book that Yu Qiangsheng had compiled. Come at the adversary from directions he didn’t expect.
Ma looked for new solutions to old problems. The MSS had always been vulnerable when its officers tried to fill and collect dead drops in America. The FBI could see MSS officers coming a mile away. So, Ma decided to recruit a Chinese American businessman from Northern California, a respected U.S. citizen, and turn him into an MSS courier.
The target was Tankai “Edwin” Fung. The MSS recruited him during a business trip to China in 2015. A Chinese “friend” approached. The Chinese man said he needed simple help — nothing unpleasant or dangerous. He told Fung to reserve hotel rooms on business trips and share the room numbers with him in Beijing. He should leave money in each room, usually $10,000. The next day, he should return. The money would be gone. In its place would be a small computer storage card. He should fly to Beijing and give the card to his Chinese friend.
The MSS turned Fung into their mule. He performed this routine at three hotels in the western United States and three on the Eastern Seaboard. He didn’t seem to realize that he was servicing MSS dead drops. It was an ingenious system that operated from 2015 to 2018. The MSS let its mule do all the dirty work. Fung was caught by the FBI and sentenced in 2020 to prison, but Ma had recruited other mules by then.
It bothered Ma, too, that the Chinese were still so culture-bound, dependent on the overseas Chinese community. So, she created new operations to run Anglos, too. And she was brazen, as in the cold pitch she authorized of a former CIA officer named Evan Joseph Ward.
Ward was running a small consulting business when the MSS first contacted him on social media in 2017, under the cover of a supposed think tank. They invited him to visit China two months later, where he met someone named Michael Hing, who said he would pay a research stipend if Ward could gather useful information using his former government contacts. He gave the former CIA officer a covert device disguised as a Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
It was an outrageously bold action, with none of the old pieties about pretending to be weak when strong.
Ma made mistakes. Fung and Ward both got caught. But so what? If Ma was blocked in one operation, she would try another tactic. And for every agent the FBI discovered, she had many others in play. She was the American girl. The Americans might have stopped taking risks, but not Ma Wei.
3
2020, Washington
Hendrick Hoffman, the former chief of the East Asia Division, brooded about Ma Wei. She confounded him. She was a single woman, childless, from a smoggy industrial suburb of Shanghai. She was the Chinese version of a nobody. How had she learned the skills that allowed her to flay the skin of the CIA’s operations in China so that the agents he and others had recruited were a mess of quivering flesh? It galled him to think that the agency had been defeated by this woman who so diligently turned America’s house of secrets upside down.
The CIA’s China problems had continued, even after they caught Arthur Li. More Chinese penetration agents were exposed. As soon as the CIA tried to touch a potential Chinese source, a light seemed to go on at MSS headquarters. China’s offense had become as strong as its defense. The number and intensity of operations against the United States doubled, and then doubled again.
Ma was nailing people who had even passing contact with American intelligence or its cutouts. She ordered the arrest of one MSS official she accused of working for the CIA — and went on to jail 350 more people she connected to the case. Working for the CIA had become like being a target in a shooting gallery.
As the troubles deepened, the agency had asked Hoffman to come back to head a special counterespionage cell within the East Asia Division.
Hoffman obsessed about Ma Wei the way the fictional George Smiley anguished over his nemesis, “Karla.” Hoffman wondered about Ma at odd hours. What was she planning? How many more penetrations of the CIA was she running in addition to the ones the agency had discovered? How many of the CIA’s sources were doubles, feeding disinformation?
Hoffman had odd, paranoid thoughts: Were the Chinese tapping the electrical grid in Langley to spy somehow through the electricity that coursed through Headquarters? Had they invented insect cameras that buzzed in through air shafts, or robotic cockroaches that lived in the walls of the seventh-floor conference rooms?
Hoffman took to reading the ancient texts of Chinese spycraft, written by Sun Tzu and other commentators 2,500 years ago. They were supple parables of espionage: If you are strong, act weak; if you’re near, pretend to be far away; if you have secrets, feign ignorance. To disorient your enemies, make them angry; when they are at ease, make them weary; when they are resting, make them move.
Hoffman enjoyed the elusive poetry, but he understood Ma well enough to know that this ancient tradecraft wasn’t the secret of her success. These were the hoary precepts that Yu Qiangsheng had enumerated for Tom Crane during his long debriefing. But Ma Wei was the anti-Yu. Her Chinese colleagues still called her the American girl. But what did that mean? What did she understand about America that made her such a clever adversary.
Hoffman was a big man, red-faced. He liked to tell colleagues that a fat man like him had an advantage as an intelligence officer. He could move slowly, stop to rest by the side of the road, excuse himself to find a bathroom. He didn’t like this wisp of a Chinese woman who had outsmarted his agency. He ruminated about her for weeks and months and years.
He wanted revenge. He decided to do what the agency did too rarely these days. He became creative.
4
2023, Washington
Intelligence operations aren’t “nice.” CIA officers have the authority to break the laws of other countries to obtain intelligence. They can lie about covert actions taken abroad to subvert governments or steal secrets. When the agency conducts a “deniable” operation, that means it can be denied if it’s exposed. When people say intelligence operations exist in a shadow world, where normal definitions of right and wrong don’t apply, they’re sometimes right.
Tom Crane had accepted those rules when he joined the agency in the 1980s. And even though the system had bent back against him cruelly during the years when he was suspected as a Chinese mole, he still accepted the code. He would have authorized the same ruthless operations to identify the traitor. Many of his CIA colleagues had learned to play it safe to avoid trouble. Not Crane. He still wanted to win.
So, when his former boss from the East Asia Division contacted Tom in 2023 and asked him to attend a special briefing on what he called “the China File,” he wanted to be helpful. Hendrick Hoffman had retired not long after Tom; he was a “former,” or so Tom thought. But oddly, he called using the encrypted messaging application Signal, rather than an open line.
“I’m angry,” Hoffman said. “We’re getting our clock cleaned by the Chinese.”
“I’ve been angry since they nailed my agent in 2007,” answered Tom.
“They called me back to fix this. I need help.”
Tom agreed immediately. Some part of him had been waiting for this call since the day he left the agency.
Hoffman didn’t ask Tom to walk in the front door at Langley, past the stars on the wall for fallen heroes and the chiseled inscription: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” This was different. He told Crane to meet at a clandestine location on the upper floors of a bland commercial office building in Manassas, Virginia, a suburb of Washington beyond the Beltway.
“I’m getting dragged back in again,” Crane told his wife.
“You never really were out,” she answered.
She studied his face. His eyes were heavy; sad, after so many years of struggle in an uncertain combat. He hadn’t left. He was still trying to finish something.
“Why are you doing this? They screwed you over.”
“Payback, partly. All those people died. But this is for me.”
“You can say no,” she said.
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
She knew her husband. It was true. There was a part of him that was empty.
“Then do it,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you need to.”
Hoffman was the same as Tom remembered: portly, intense, peering over the top of his glasses with an accusatory look even when he was about to ask a favor. Hoffman was an intellectual; he could read Chinese nearly as fast as English. But he always treated intelligence operations as a knife fight.
A polygrapher from the Office of Security waited in an adjoining room. The first priority, before Hoffman said a word, was to check Crane’s reliability.
Hoffman excused himself while the polygrapher administered her test. She queried Tom about contacts with Chinese nationals or any other foreigners, and any potentially compromising information. The test went smoothly; Tom hadn’t talked much to anyone the past few years, other than his wife. When the test was done, Hoffman returned.
“We can’t take any chances on this,” he said. It wasn’t an apology, just a statement of fact.
Tom nodded. He didn’t yet know what the project was, but he understood it required extreme caution.
“The Chinese have been eating our lunch,” Hoffman began. “I don’t have to tell you about the destruction of our agent networks, because you watched it begin. But you may not realize how aggressive the Chinese have become in the years since they rolled up our assets.”
“I don’t know anything,” said Tom. “The FBI told me to shut up. I don’t ask questions. I keep my head down.”
“Of course,” said Hoffman. “I would apologize on behalf of the agency, but that would be meaningless. And untrue. The agency doesn’t have anything to apologize for. They had to investigate you.”
“Understood. No hard feelings. You were telling me how the MSS is eating our lunch.”
“I hate statistics. They give me a stomachache. But let’s start with them. Between 2000 and March 2023, the Chinese ran 224 known intelligence operations against the United States government. Those are the ones we caught. God only knows how many they actually ran. And that doesn’t count cyberhacks. Over the last ten years, we had 104 Chinese cyberattacks, in addition to the other espionage cases.”
“We’re getting clobbered,” said Tom, shaking his head.
“Correct. It’s nauseating. As of 2020, the FBI was opening a new China counterintelligence case every ten hours. Two a day. They had about 2,500 active cases going. The Chinese have gotten very good at this game. Makes us look like chumps.”
“What can I do about it? I want to help. Obviously.”
“We need to punch the MSS in the nose,” said Hoffman. “But we have to do it in a way that looks like it’s the Chinese who are throwing the punch. You get me?”
“Not at all. What are you talking about?”
“We need to set up your girlfriend. Ma Wei. She’s the best thing they’ve got. We need to make the MSS think she’s rotten.”
“You’re nuts. She’s not my girlfriend, for starters. I took her out to lunch a couple of times. That’s it. And she is their star. They won’t mess with her. She’s untouchable.”
“Nobody’s untouchable. And guess what? We’re going to poison the well. With you. You’ve seen more of her than anyone in the agency. We’re going to make the Chinese think you recruited her, long ago. We’re going to wreck her career and maybe put her in prison.”
Crane shook his head, in a combination of appreciation and horror.
“You are a nasty bastard, Hendrick.”
“Thank you,” he answered.
Tom received a blue badge as if he were a full-time employee again, but he didn’t go anywhere near Headquarters. Hoffman had created a small task force that met in the Manassas building and another covert location in Vienna, closer to the city. The team included someone from the CIA’s “skunk works,” known as the Directorate of Science and Technology, and a cyber-geek from the Directorate of Digital Innovation who could help plant phony information in the right places.
Hoffman briefed the task force on the structure of deception that he planned to create. “We are going to create a legend in reverse,” he began. “We’re not going to hide the tracks of a real agent but create the tracks of a fake one. Her crypt will be ‘LCLONER.’ She will be the most useful agent we never recruited.”
The men and women in the room thumped the conference table, whistled and otherwise signaled their approval. Tom surveyed the room. He was ten years older than most of them. Many of his fellow team members had the sallow faces of people who spent too much time in dark rooms playing video games.
Hoffman handed out assignments, each of them chapters in the legend he proposed to create. Members of the team listened carefully, asked questions, and then dispersed to other islands in the secret archipelago that rings Washington.
[Do you have feedback on this story? Tell us here.]
One team went to Singapore. With help from an agent inside the local branch of a large Swiss bank, they created an electronic paper trail for an account into which quarterly payments of $25,000 appeared to have been made to Ma Wei since 2007, several months after her second meeting with Crane. Sixteen years of payments, with interest, added up to a handsome sum.
The Singapore team doctored the false records so that the payments seemed to have originated with an account in Jersey that the agency had in fact used before to pay a Chinese agent — one of the several dozen who had been swept up in the dragnet that began in 2010.
Another team from S&T doctored a covert communications device that would be left for the “agent,” Ma Wei, at a dead drop outside Beijing. It would be programmed with a communication stating that the device was being sent to agent LCLONER, as had been noted in previous communications, to replace an earlier device with less advanced encryption. The frequency of the new device would match one of the cov-comm devices the CIA knew the Chinese had already captured.
The cov-comm should log another communication: a request for an urgent meeting with the CIA case officer who had recruited the agent, location to be supplied by an alternate but unstated method.
When the device was engineered by S&T, Hoffman sent it by pouch to the Beijing station. On a Restricted Handling channel, he told the chief there to have one of his officers drop the device at a clean site the agency had never used before. The officer making the drop should subtly be sure that Chinese surveillance had in fact detected his run. The Chinese would doubtless watch the spot and, eventually, collect the device.
Now the task force needed to create the intelligence that the fictitious agent Ma Wei had provided to the agency. Hoffman searched the information provided over the past year by the small roster of agents the CIA had managed to recruit since the debacle. He selected three documents that would upset the Chinese but whose intelligence value had already been tapped by the CIA.
How could the Chinese see that an MSS officer had delivered information to the CIA? Hoffman had an idea: The agency knew what communications frequencies the Chinese had identified and were able to intercept. The CIA had kept one of them clean for future use in deception operations. Now, Hoffman transmitted two of the Chinese documents via this circuit — knowing they would be intercepted. He appended a note saying they were highly reliable because they had been obtained from source LCLONER.
Hoffman wanted another channel, to lock in the deceptive intelligence. The FBI had been investigating a suspected Chinese agent within the bureau’s counterintelligence section. Before the bureau made an arrest, Hoffman asked if the agent could be shown, in his digital stack of cables, a piece of raw intelligence about MSS operations in the United States. Ma Wei hadn’t actually written that file, but it had come through one of the branches she supervised.
When these chapters of the legend had been prepared and put in place, Hoffman requested a meeting with Tom, one on one.
“Now, we need just one more thing,” said Hoffman, putting a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “We need you.”
5
2023, Beijing
Tom Crane flew from Washington to Beijing, via Tokyo. He traveled on a diplomatic passport. China was open again after covid, but the Tokyo leg was half full. Crane was staying at a hotel downtown, but he had a taxi drive him to the new American Embassy east of the city center. It looked splendid, with its elegant white columns and Zen-cool reflecting pool. Nearby was Chaoyang Park, where Sonia had serviced a dead drop in another life.
Tom was on a mission that was, in its way, diabolical. He was going to cold-pitch Ma Wei. The station had been monitoring her movements for several weeks, using overhead surveillance. They watched to see when she left the office, noted her route of travel home, checked when she was unguarded.
Tom stayed at his hotel, venturing out to see the sights, until he received an encrypted signal from the embassy with a time and place where he should seek to encounter Miss Ma. She was a single woman, married to her job, you might say, and she had a driver and a housekeeper. But most evenings she liked to take her dog for a stroll in Yuanmingyuan Park, near her apartment, and this evening was forecast to be especially nice.
Tom did an adequate surveillance run. The MSS would be suspicious later if he hadn’t made the attempt. But he knew that the park had heavy fixed surveillance. It was near Tsinghua University and the technical centers where many of China’s military-industrial projects were hatched.
Ma arrived home at 6:30. She changed into casual clothes and descended from her apartment to the street. Ahead of her, tugging at its leash, was a stocky Pekingese with a flat face and big eyes obscured by a bang of fur. The sky was deepening color as dusk approached; the air was clean for Beijing. Many pedestrians were wearing masks after several years of covid lockdowns, but Ma’s face was uncovered.
She approached the park and its graceful array of lakes and canals. Her step was light. She worked hard as MSS chief, and she enjoyed the nightly escape into a world of well-manicured natural beauty.
Tom had finished his SDR an hour before and was standing at the north end of the park, watching the route that she normally took. He turned on the tape recorder he was carrying in his pocket, which he knew the Chinese would take from him later.
He saw the scampering dog before he glimpsed its mistress, but then Ma was unmistakable. She dressed like a woman in middle age now, proper trousers rather than jeans, and her hair in a short bob. But she was still a youthful woman with the buoyant manner that Tom remembered from their encounters.
[Sign up for David Ignatius’s Follow email alerts to read more from him.]
Tom walked toward her, head down until she was close. When he was ten yards away, he raised his head and strode directly at her. She was in reverie, lost in time, and he caught her by surprise. The first look on her face was a bright flash of recognition, then a darker look of fear. Tom began speaking before she could walk away. He was close to her now.
“Miss Ma, it’s Tom Crane from the U.S. Embassy,” he said. “You remember me. We had lunch together.”
He was a foot away now. In a quick motion, one that he had practiced a dozen times, he slipped something into the open carryall she always slung over her shoulder. It was the number of the bank account in Singapore that the agency had doctored to show the fictitious payments.
“No,” she said loudly. “Go away!”
Tom continued, not breaking stride. “Miss Ma, I have come to see you to make sure we continue your relationship with the CIA.”
There was a look of horror on her face now. She was an intelligence officer. She knew what was happening.
“What are you talking about?” she roared. “I have no relationship with the CIA. Go away. I am calling the police.”
He was still beside her. “Please, we are very grateful. That is why I have come to see you, to remind you of our long relationship and to personally express the thanks of the United States government.”
She was running away from him now and screaming for help in Chinese. Tom didn’t follow. He waited for the police to arrive and take him in for questioning.
Crane was released after two days. He had diplomatic immunity, but the Chinese still wanted to mess with him. They had taken his tape recorder, of course, and the copy in his pocket of the Singapore bank account number, in case the authorities didn’t find the one in her bag.
Ma Wei would insist that it was all a setup, and maybe people would believe her at first. But they would gradually discover the trail of breadcrumbs that Hendrick Hoffman had left, and they would never really be sure, would they? That was the beauty of this operation. It created a haze of doubt over Ma that she would never be able to dispel. Her career as MSS minister was effectively over, whether they charged her with espionage or not.
On the flight back to Washington, Tom wondered whether he felt guilty for what he had done. But this woman wasn’t innocent. She had directed the intelligence service of a police state. She had run operations that had resulted in the deaths of several dozen Chinese people who had worked for the United States.
Still, Tom couldn’t sleep on the long flight home.
In his near-slumber, he recalled the hundreds of hours with Yu Qiangsheng as he explained the Tao of deception. He thought of the haunted gaze of his agent in Chengdu and his flush in the intoxicating moment that the Chinese man became a spy, and he remembered the red pulp of the man’s face after he had been arrested and interrogated.
He recalled in his half-consciousness the glint in Ma Wei’s eyes as she had wheedled for the information that his wife was a deep-cover CIA officer. And he saw again that last moment in the park in Beijing days before, and the shocked look from her that said, at once, “How could you?” and “Of course.”
What had Crane learned? Perhaps that, as Yu had told him, it is best to win wars without fighting.
Tom’s war was over, and so was Ma Wei’s. Somehow it didn’t feel like victory.