The

Tao Of

Decep

tion

Part III

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A bullet through the head, fired at close range in the courtyard of the Ministry of State Security’s headquarters, ended the life of the Chinese agent Thomas Crane had recruited in Chengdu in 1999. The Chinese meant it as a public execution. They knew the Americans would be watching and listening with every device they possessed. The Chinese message to the CIA was: We’re not frightened of you anymore. Now it’s your turn to worry.

When they saw a surveillance photograph of the man’s body, his skull exploded from the force of the bullet, Tom and Sonia Crane made the decision to end their Beijing tour. They had stayed two years in Beijing, a normal assignment. But they were spent. Losing an agent is a bit like losing a child. There’s a sense of failure that accompanies the grief. You don’t know what you did wrong, but the damage is irreparable, and the guilt persists.

When the Cranes returned to Washington, the CIA offered them both good new jobs. But the taste of espionage had soured. They put in their papers for retirement; they had both served twenty years in the clandestine service and were eligible for full pensions. Tom took a job as a China analyst for a big defense contractor; Sonia stayed home with their girls. They bought a house in the suburbs in Great Falls.

The CIA was on guard after the execution of its Chengdu agent, but for several years the rest of the agency’s network in China continued to run seemingly unmolested. China, meanwhile, was flexing every muscle. It hosted a dazzling Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008 and an equally stunning world expo in Shanghai in 2010. It tested an antisatellite weapon and built an aircraft carrier. People began to talk of the inevitability of Chinese economic dominance. The only thing Beijing seemed to lack was spies.

Then, in 2010, something happened. The CIA’s networks in China began to shrivel and die. As with Ernest Hemingway’s famous description of bankruptcy, the agency’s disaster came gradually, then suddenly. At first, the cases seemed isolated: An agent failed to communicate on schedule. Another didn’t collect a drop. A third vanished after a meeting. Then a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, went off the radar.

By 2011, the bad news was cascading. The Ministry of State Security was ripping apart, plank by plank, the intelligence structure that the CIA had built over decades. The Chinese didn’t disguise the savagery of their counterespionage campaign: Over the course of two years, nearly 30 CIA sources were killed or imprisoned. The agency tried desperately to exfiltrate the agents who hadn’t yet been rounded up, but in almost every case, it was too late. A generation of American spies was wiped out.

This bludgeoning of the CIA’s China network was one of the agency’s most closely guarded secrets, for a simple but terrifying reason: The only plausible explanation for the loss of so many CIA assets was that the MSS had recruited a mole inside the most senior ranks of the agency’s operations against Beijing. A monster was inside the house.

The CIA director designated a small team from the CIA and the FBI to organize a hunt for the mole. The intelligence agencies were still reeling from two Russian penetration cases a decade earlier, and now this.

The mole hunters operated from what might be described as the back closet of the back room. Their first priority was to make an accurate damage assessment. This lasted many months. It was like collecting bodies from a battlefield. These victims were Chinese who had trusted the CIA to keep them alive, and now they were gone, liquidated one by one.

When the task force had finished the toll of lost agents, it began a meticulous review of each case to look for leaks. Who could have had access to secret recruitments that stretched through the late 1980s into the 1990s and 2000s? No CIA suspect quite fit all the evidence, but the mole hunters assembled a short list consisting of the agency’s most senior China operations officers. This list included many former Beijing station chiefs and their deputies. It seemed impossible, but one of these officers had apparently betrayed the agency and destroyed nearly everything it had built in China. Tom Crane was on the list.

Tom noticed small things at first. Former colleagues stopped returning his phone calls. He wasn’t invited to conferences with other China hands. People begged off lunch dates. He asked Sonia what might be happening, and she was puzzled. But then she called one of her closest friends from the agency, a woman with whom she had carpooled when their children were younger, and the friend begged off. She wouldn’t meet for coffee, and she wouldn’t explain why.

The Cranes had always been a model CIA couple. They had served in denied areas, taking personal physical risks. Both had received medals when they retired. They had been popular with their colleagues. On the surface, they had done everything right.

It didn’t take long to realize that they were under suspicion as Chinese penetration agents. Tom had heard rumors of the lost assets in China; people talked, even when they weren’t supposed to. And he certainly knew that his Chengdu walk-in case had gone bad. He remembered the image of the tormented man’s face. Tom understood with crystal clarity why he was being shunned. He and his wife were suspects.

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The Cranes had been home nearly three years when the FBI asked Tom to come to the Washington field office on Fourth Street. Visiting the bureau as a suspect was agony; Tom had worked with the FBI frequently over his two decades at the agency. He had done nothing wrong, in his mind, but he still felt ashamed. He had been “canceled” in the intelligence world.

The FBI office was a few blocks past Chinatown. Tom came an hour early; he walked the streets nervously. He had an instinct as he neared the entrance to run away, but that wasn’t an option.

The special agent in charge told Tom it was an informal interview; he asked if Tom wanted a lawyer present, and Tom said no. The FBI agent smiled and nodded approval, but Tom could see that he was thinking: Now we’ve got him.

“You handled Yu Qiangsheng,” the FBI man began. “That means you probably know more about how Chinese intelligence works than anyone in this country.”

“Maybe,” said Tom. “Is Yu still alive?”

“He died last year. A stroke. He wasn’t taking care of himself. We didn’t publicize it. The Chinese would have claimed they killed him, to scare other defectors. Do you know what he told us before he died? He said that if he were running the MSS, he would try to recruit Tom Crane.”

Tom laughed and shook his head. Yu probably would have said that.

“That’s bullshit,” he responded. “Yu drank too many highballs. His head was messed up.”

The SAC turned the questioning over to two specialists from the China branch of the counterintelligence division. They walked Tom through the details of his career. They had no evidence, no motive, no known intent — no predicate at all, really, except opportunity. Crane knew the cases. He spoke perfect Chinese. And he had the feel of the country on his skin. As Tom had confessed once to his wife, he dreamed in Chinese.

The FBI interrogators picked at every loose thread. Among the lost Chinese agents were two that Crane had pitched successfully early in his career — in Malaysia and then in Cambodia. How had he recruited them so easily? After those postings, why had he applied for base chief in Chengdu? A higher-ranking position as station chief in Hanoi had been available; why hadn’t he chosen that? What contacts did he have with the MSS before the agent code-named LCBRINK bumped him? When others had argued that this Chinese “walk-in” was a provocation, why did Crane meet him anyway? Why did Crane provide this agent with sensitive covert-communications gear after only six months?

Tom’s answers — that he operated on skill, intuition and careful practice, and always with the approval of his superiors — seemed hollow even to him.

Then the FBI team began to rake over Crane’s years in Beijing, especially his close contacts with the deputy chief of the MSS, Ma Wei. Why did he meet her several times? Why didn’t he include more details about her operational activities in his field notes? When she questioned him about his activities in Chengdu, did he reveal, perhaps unwittingly, his MSS agent there? During the time he was chief of operations in Beijing, did he check the communications protocols personally? Why had he reviewed the list of agency assets three times while he was in Beijing? Why did he return home after two years when he could have requested an extension of his tour? Did he think he was to blame for the death of his Chengdu agent, or others?

The questions were meticulous; the investigators had every cable and operational report Tom had ever filed. Inevitably, there were questions he couldn’t answer, and anomalies that he knew would raise questions and suspicions. The simple fact was that he had known the identities of most of the Chinese agents the CIA had recruited over three decades. He was an obvious suspect.

When Tom left the interview, he felt dirty. The FBI’s catalogue of insinuations left him furious at himself. For all his care, he had opened doors to the MSS in Chengdu and Beijing.

But beyond this self-reproach, he felt a rage at Ma Wei, the congenial MSS officer who had teased bits of information from him like a magician picking his pocket. He had been a fool, imagining that he was charming her even as she readied a dagger that would eviscerate the CIA and its Chinese agents.

The FBI’s interrogation of Sonia was, if anything, even worse. They focused on the fact that she was half-Chinese. Did she think Chinese people were discriminated against in America? They gave her a “psychological test” that included photographs of Chinese people in Chinatowns, in opium dens, working as railroad laborers — and asked for her reactions.

“This is racist crap!” Sonia told the FBI agents. They took careful notes about her outburst.

The inquisition continued: They asked Sonia if she sympathized with Chinese people. They asked her why she was teaching her two daughters Chinese. Did she expect to live there again? She had mixed ancestry: Did she think of herself as more African or Chinese? Were Chinese more hostile to Black people than Americans, or less?

Sonia kept it together through the interview. But when she got home to Great Falls, she fell into her husband’s arms and sobbed.

The case lingered, month after month. Tom’s intelligence community contacts had vanished at the start of the investigation, and, without them, he was of little use to the defense contractor who had hired him. He was let go. He put together a small consulting company of his own, which specialized in advising Japanese companies that were active in China and the other Asian countries where he had served.

The Cranes were in limbo, it seemed, until the case was resolved. Tom’s business was struggling, but beyond that, it was a torment to remain under investigation. He wasn’t sleeping well; he was drinking too much. He and Sonia couldn’t talk about the investigation, but they couldn’t avoid it, either.

Finally, it became obvious: The only way to escape suspicion was to help identify the person who had penetrated the agency. It was like the plot of “The Fugitive.” He had to find the MSS version of the “one-armed man.” But to catch a mole, he would first need to build a trap.

Tom’s years of turmoil in Washington were a time of triumph for Ma Wei at the Ministry of State Security. She had subtly guided the devastating campaign against the CIA, which was celebrated with grisly regularity inside the walls of the MSS compound at Xiyuan. When the Chinese caught more CIA spies within their ranks, they didn’t try to play them back at the enemy or conduct a public trial. They killed them. As a sign to the Americans.

The bodies piled up at Xiyuan. The party’s senior cadres showered praise on Ma Wei for her aggressive methods and meticulous attention to detail. China hadn’t known a great spymaster since the defection of Yu Qiangsheng. Now, the young case officers had a model. She was embarrassed when the ministry circulated a list of the “four goods” in recruiting agents: Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. They attributed it to the hero-spy Ma Wei, even though it was a rip-off of a shopworn precept of CIA tradecraft. That wasn’t her approach at all, but she kept quiet.

China roared like a lion. New money was spouting everywhere, not just in Beijing and Shanghai but in second-tier cities across the country. Regional banks would lend to anyone for anything, it seemed. Ma went home to visit her parents in the Suzhou district west of Shanghai. Once it had been a welter of alleyways and workers’ flats; now, it was a metropolis dotted with new residential towers and shopping malls.

“We have our China dream,” said her mother contentedly. She had worked in a factory when Ma was a girl; now she played cards with her friends. Her father, a policeman, was driving a big new Japanese car. He hadn’t bought that with his earnings as a cop. People gave them fat red envelopes at Chinese New Year’s, stuffed with yuan.

They wanted to be friends with people whose daughter was so influential.

Ma told her parents to give the money back, but she knew they wouldn’t listen. Nobody did. For a country that had been so poor, money made people dizzy. The new prosperity gladdened Ma, of course. But she worried that it was setting loose forces of disorder that would eventually require more and more control.

Ma did her best to sidestep party feuds, but it was becoming difficult. The “little men,” the consensual Politburo members who allowed everyone to take a dip of the spoils, were being displaced by the “big men,” who wanted it all for themselves. The Communist Party was supposedly in charge, but people gossiped that provincial party leaders in Chongqing and Shanghai and Chengdu were running their own fiefdoms, using state-run banks and local enterprises as personal cash machines.

Intelligence officers like Ma knew they were sitting on a volcano: Top jobs in the army, police and the party itself were up for sale, and as quickly as the bribes were paid to a big man’s relative in Hong Kong, a wire transfer was purchasing real estate in Cannes. Party leaders feted each other at lavish banquets — eight courses, sometimes ten, at the fanciest restaurants in Beijing. They imported the best wines, Bordeaux and Burgundy vintages that even the French couldn’t afford. Every official’s wife had a bag from Louis Vuitton, and his mistress had two.

The big men were battling for power in 2012. Chinese magazines began to print scandal stories as the party titans leaked damaging information about each other. The boss in Chongqing briefly seemed to be dominant, but then he was vaporized — expelled from the party. The same thing happened to the Politburo security chief Ma had disliked.

Ma studied the newspaper photograph of Yu Qiangsheng’s younger brother, now on the Politburo, so sleekly groomed, the indispensable friend of the powerful. To Ma, he and his friends were no different from the defector Yu whom she had despised. She had that same fervent desire to put a bullet through all of their heads.

Rumors circulated at MSS headquarters that Ma Wei would be purged. She had disemboweled the CIA, but she had been outspoken in her criticism of corruption. Ma’s boss, the chief of the MSS, was a weathervane, waiting to see who emerged on top. His sister had just bought a seaside estate in Vancouver.

It was the time of “no one knows.” The rumor mill, which was wrong except when it was right, said the army was supporting a party disciplinarian who had risen in the ranks as a provincial chief in Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai. He had a round, sturdy face and an iron will. His nickname was “Big Daddy.” By the end of 2012, he was the only big man left standing.

Sensible people looked for a place to hide at such a moment, but that wasn’t in Ma Wei’s character. She was still the schoolgirl in Suzhou who had defied the bullies. She created a special cell to run counterespionage operations, deep in the Xiyuan compound, where she supervised her assault on the CIA and its “friends” in China. She didn’t touch China’s new wealth, and it didn’t touch her.

Arthur Li, the diffident young officer who had accused Tom Crane of discrimination back in Beijing, was surely on the FBI’s list of suspects. Tom had mentioned him during his interviews. But Li was long gone. He had left the CIA, still protesting about anti-Chinese bias, after he finished his tour in Beijing. He worked overseas now for a Japanese company that did business in China, and he wasn’t volunteering to come home for an FBI interview.

Crane considered the matter: Could someone become so angry about what he viewed as anti-Chinese prejudice that he would betray his country? Tom didn’t know the answer, so he asked Sonia, who was half-Chinese.

“Off-the-wall question,” Tom ventured as they were having an evening cocktail. “You told me the agency sometimes discriminates against Chinese people. So, how bad is it?”

She answered immediately.

“Very bad. Sometimes all they see is skin color. They don’t need to polygraph you. They just assume you could be a double agent before you open your mouth.”

There was an awkward pause. The Cranes had been married for so long they didn’t often talk about race.

“If you thought that the agency was disrespecting you, like, really screwing you, would you work for the other side?”

“Of course not,” she answered. “But some people might.”

Tom had to find a dangle; someone who might lure a Ministry of State Security case officer to make a pitch — and open a door to search for Arthur Li. As in most things, he consulted Sonia. Once again, she focused on “Chinese-ness.” The easiest approach, she said, would be to play on the implicit bias of the MSS, which was that Chinese Americans did in fact have an innate sense of loyalty to their ancestral motherland.

Tom shook his head. How was he going to find someone alluringly Chinese enough that the MSS might bite?

“Try Valerie,” said Sonia. Valerie Wen had joined Tom’s consulting firm six months before. She had been born in Hong Kong and spoke perfect Chinese. And most enticing of all, she had worked for six years as a CIA analyst.

Sonia made the ask, and the logistics proved easy. Valerie had a business trip planned to Southeast Asia. Sonia asked her to add a stop in Kuala Lumpur. There, she should visit a wine bar two blocks from the U.S. Embassy. The Cranes knew from their posting to Malaysia years before that this particular bar was a favorite trolling ground for MSS officers.

Valerie was a short, vivacious Cantonese woman. She was ready for anything, so long as it wouldn’t get her in trouble. “What should I do in KL, exactly?” she asked.

Sonia answered that she should wait in the bar for Chinese guys to chat her up. The ones she wanted to meet would act like they didn’t work for the government, but they would be obvious. Too friendly, too curious.

Valerie should let on that she used to work for you-know-who. Then she should wait for them to make a pitch. Money, consulting, access. Something of value. When they did, she should ask if they knew Arthur Li. She shouldn’t record the conversation, but she should take careful notes immediately after she left them to provide later to the FBI.

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And, improbably enough, that’s just how it happened in Kuala Lumpur. The wine bar was on a busy street in the jumble of the embassy district. It was air-conditioned so cold against the sweltering heat that Valerie had to wear a sweater. She sat at the bar for an hour the first night and then left when someone took her for a sex worker. She came back the next night and, bingo, two Chinese men invited her to sit at their table.

They made conversation for a few minutes. The Chinese leaned in close when Valerie said she had worked for the agency. “Maybe you could write some reports for us,” one of them said, in the classic initial come-on in a recruitment.

“I could use the extra money,” said Valerie.

They continued the conversation at another bar, farther from the embassies and quieter. The man making the pitch tried to encourage her by saying that one of Valerie’s former colleagues had agreed to be helpful, too, writing reports and sharing other information.

“Arthur Li?” she asked.

“That’s the guy,” answered the MSS recruiter, in a staggeringly incompetent breach of operational security.

“Did you recruit him?” she asked.

“No,” the MSS man answered. “It was another officer. A woman.”

That’s how it happened. Really. Intelligence operations succeed and fail because of the inescapable fact that humans do stupid things.

Tom had his man. He contacted the FBI.

The FBI had been suspicious of Li from the early days of the mole hunt. In fact, bureau agents had gotten a warrant to search his hotel room many months earlier when he foolishly made a stopover in the U.S. On his laptop was a document that described CIA tradecraft and the precise timing of one covert mission. They found handwritten notes, too, about his work as a case officer. The notes included the names of assets, the locations of operational meetings and details about CIA covert facilities.

The FBI let the fish swim back into the sea; they waited and watched, hoping to catch Li in the act of meeting with the MSS. They were as inept as the Chinese case officer who blurted out the fact that Li had been recruited.

When Tom called the FBI with the new information that Valerie had gathered, agents were wary at first. This seemed like a movie plot. A suspected mole had run a sting to gather information that appeared to incriminate another suspected mole. Maybe there were two Chinese moles. But the agency’s representative on the joint CIA-FBI task force remembered Li as a bad apple.

Bolstered by Crane’s information and their own evidence, the FBI put Arthur Li back under surveillance. They got lucky. Li stupidly booked a layover in the United States again. When he landed, he was arrested and charged. He denied everything at first, even the notes on his own laptop computer. But a few months later, he pleaded guilty to espionage. The next year, he was sentenced to more than a dozen years in prison.

The FBI and the CIA didn’t officially drop their investigation of the Cranes, but they let it wither and die. They believed they had found their mole in the CIA, the highest-ranking Chinese penetration of the agency since Yu Qiangsheng had delivered Larry Wu-Tai Chin in 1985.

Officers from the East Asia Division hosted a party in a private room at a restaurant on Route 123, near CIA headquarters. They invited the Cranes. It was a celebration.

One that was short-lived, though. A few months later, the MSS arrested a new CIA asset inside China, one who had been recruited long after Arthur Li lost access to classified information.

The CIA hadn’t solved the China puzzle after all.

To be continued.

Read Part 4 on July 3. Sign up for David Ignatius’s Follow email alerts to get the links to the next installments as soon as they are published.