The week after Yu Qiangsheng defected from China, he was closeted in a safe house in Repulse Bay, facing the sea. Guards from the CIA’s Office of Security kept watch from a nearby flat and from across the street. Britain controlled Hong Kong back then, and the apartment was safe from the Chinese agents who would have killed Yu if they knew where he was hiding.

Yu paced the rooms of the safe house the first few days, sleepless and depressed. He wanted to be gone, but he was still in Beijing’s reach; worse, he was in a colony. His stomach hurt, and he complained about the food at every meal. He demanded bottled water from Europe and a food taster to make sure he wasn’t being poisoned.

Every day that first week, Yu received a young, well-mannered American visitor. His name was Thomas Crane. His parents had been missionaries in Henan and Shandong provinces, and he spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese. They had hoped their son would become a missionary, too, but he had joined the Central Intelligence Agency, which was entirely different and also in some respects the same.

Crane’s first assignment was to babysit Yu Qiangsheng while the agency decided whether to bring him to America.

Yu had the face of a mandarin: thin lips; sharp eyes; a high forehead; dark hair going to gray, without the usual black dye. Perhaps that was part of his problem. He was too good to be true: a son of the revolution; no, more than that, a prince. His father had been hiding with Mao Zedong in the caves of Yan’an; his father’s first wife had run off to become Mao’s mistress. Yu had survived the Cultural Revolution to become the head of foreign operations of the Chinese spy service. He had been adopted after his father’s death by a ruthless man who became head of China’s secret police. Truly, he knew all the secrets.

And now, Yu declared, he despised China and wanted to escape. The agency at first didn’t trust him. He had been dropping a hanky, passing tidbits of information, for two years. But the agency’s counterintelligence staff warned that he might be a dangle, a provocation meant to trick the CIA into revealing its secrets. And, perhaps, the agency didn’t want to hear what he had to say.

“There are five kinds of spies,” Yu Qiangsheng explained to Tom one morning in the sticky, windless heat of Hong Kong. As he enumerated each variety, he raised a soft, slender finger.

“There are ‘local spies’ who mingle with the enemy; there are ‘internal spies’ who penetrate the enemy’s secret service; there are ‘turned spies’ sent by the enemy but doubled; there are ‘living spies,’ who appear ordinary but hide their deeper purpose. And there are ‘dead spies,’ whose lives are expendable.”

“Which one are you?” asked Crane, not just to be polite.

“I am a dead spy, perhaps,” answered Yu. “But that is a decision for your agency. They choose and I accept. The ch’i of trustworthiness is to be correct and calm.”

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Correct and calm were usually good words to describe Tom Crane, too. He was nearly six feet, not quite tall. He had a pleasant face, soft brown hair; eyes that held a steady gaze; a mouth that naturally formed an easy smile. It was a face you might look past at a gathering or on a street, and that was just part of what made him a natural intelligence officer.

Crane was good at listening, and the old man liked to talk, so that morning and for many months afterward, Crane received a tutorial in Chinese intelligence. He learned the tradecraft of the Ministry of State Security, the “Tao of deception,” as Yu called it. He learned the unwritten history of the revolution, and its legacy of betrayal and shame.

Yu was saving his biggest secret that first week. As a high-ranking Chinese intelligence official, he knew the name and history of the agent his ministry had recruited within the CIA. He had written it in his own code in a small notebook, a mìjiàn, the Chinese called it. The CIA wanted Yu’s notebook when he first came over the border, but he refused to decode it. He wanted to be on the plane to America first.

But after a week, Yu was running out of time. He was nearly a dead spy, and he wanted to remain a living one. So, he told Crane to summon the CIA station chief from the American consulate on Garden Road to the safe house.

The station chief was perspiring when he arrived at Repulse Bay in the steam bath heat of the November afternoon. The Americans were a sweaty people, Yu thought, hairy and smelly, too. But they had power and money. The station chief looked like an overstuffed wallet.

He shook Yu’s hand firmly when he arrived, squeezing the fine bones. That was another thing about Americans; they didn’t appreciate the politeness in a soft handshake. “What have you got for me?” the chief demanded.

“You have been penetrated,” said Yu. “There is a Chinese spy in the CIA. We recruited him in 1944. We have been running him ever since. His English first name is ‘Larry.’ In Chinese, we call him ‘Wu-Tai.’”

“Prove it,” said the chief.

Yu opened the small notebook and pointed to an encrypted name. “This one. It means ‘Chin.’ He is a translator for your foreign broadcast information service. He told us Nixon’s plans when he came to China in 1972. He provided defense documents. He gave us the code names and locations of your deep-cover agents in China. Go on! Check and see.”

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“Larry Chin,” said the station chief. A sour look came over his face, as if he had swallowed a bad radish. “I know him.”

“Arrest him now. If he learns that I have defected, he will tell his MSS case officer, and he will flee. Hurry, now.” He made a gesture with his hands, as if to say, go away, do your business.

The station chief went to his car, where he had secure communications. He awakened the watch officer in the East Asia Division and requested traces on Larry Wu-Tai Chin. He waited while the watch officer called in the most senior counterintelligence officer on duty.

Counterintelligence already had a file on Chin. He had indeed joined the U.S. Army as a translator in 1944; he transferred to the CIA in 1952, and as one of the agency’s few competent Chinese linguists, he had handled for more than 30 years some of the CIA’s most sensitive information about China. The FBI had warned two years before that he might be a Chinese double agent, but the CIA’s spy catchers hadn’t wanted to admit that he might be rotten. Now they had no choice.

The station chief wanted more from Yu’s mìjiàn, but he said no, not until he was in America.

Yu Qiangsheng departed Kai Tak Airport that night on a Gulfstream jet; the CIA plane had no markings except the tail insignia. The Office of Security sent a team of bodyguards, but the only case officer who accompanied Yu was Crane. Yu asked for champagne; the plane had only whiskey, so Yu drank that, the whole bottle.

The FBI arrested Larry Chin a week later. At his trial in February 1986, he was convicted of espionage. “When I think about what I accomplished,” he said, “my imprisonment for life is a very small price to pay. It was worth it.” A few weeks later, he suffocated himself in his jail cell in Manassas, Virginia.

Yu wasn’t easy to manage when he arrived in the United States. He made extravagant demands. He wanted the CIA to provide him with a harem of women. He drank. He thought he was the chosen one, the person whose lineage was red gold.

The only CIA officer who ever established rapport with him was young Crane. He would pose simple questions and draw complicated answers.

“Tell me about your family,” Crane would ask.

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And the nightmare would emerge, chapter by chapter. Yu’s father was a physics student who broke from his Kuomintang family to become a revolutionary; he married a beautiful but faithless Shanghai actress who abandoned him for Mao; impossibly, she became the leader of the ultra-leftist “Gang of Four” that terrorized China. Yu’s family was hounded during the Cultural Revolution, but he survived and eventually prospered. His younger brother, who would sell anyone to save his skin, also rose in the party ranks.

Crane wondered at first what had broken Yu’s loyalty. As he listened, he realized that before his defection, Yu had been choking on self-disgust. He knew the party’s true history. He had accompanied the American writer Edgar Snow in the early 1970s to visit the old comrades who made the revolution. What he heard was a sense of betrayal. The revolution was a lie; the party was infested with cruelty and corruption. Yu tried to live with it, but blood dripped from the walls.

Yu had attempted to contact the Americans before he finally fled. He was suffocating in the newly powerful Chinese police state, but Washington had fallen in love with Beijing. Three times, he signaled to the FBI that a Chinese spy was in their midst. The CIA rebuffed the warnings; they didn’t want a flap. Finally, like steam rising in a kettle, Yu had blown out the top. He crashed the border into Hong Kong, carrying his mìjiàn in his coat pocket.

Crane listened to his hurt and anger. But this was espionage, not therapy, and he kept pulling on the string of how the Chinese ran their intelligence service. Yu delighted in telling the young CIA man about Chinese tradecraft; after all, he had invented much of it.

Yu laid bare the MSS. In his last days at the ministry, he had wandered the halls, photographing documents atop people’s desks, pulling secret files, inquiring about special projects. He was a red prince. No one would stop him. He had brought out spools of film along with his mìjiàn.

He gave Crane the order of battle. “The MSS doesn’t have money to buy people’s loyalties or establish fancy covers,” he said. It rode on the wind.

“What China has is people,” Yu explained. He gave an example of a surveillance operation against a Russian illegal agent in Beijing two years before where the Chinese had used three thousand people to follow him. “Can you imagine that?” he laughed. He said that Americans might scoff at Chinese technology, but the security agencies had put microphones everywhere — in every park bench where a foreigner might sit, or restaurant table where they might eat.

One night, when Yu had been drinking, he whispered into Tom’s ear: The MSS had a program called “a thousand talents” to steal Western knowledge. The Americans made it easy. They invited Chinese researchers to every university and corporate lab. They were sloppy in guarding their own secrets. That was China’s best weapon, American inattention.

“You cannot stop being Chinese,” Yu said. “Many of these Chinese students in the United States, they don’t remember Mao’s horrors. They believe in a new China dream. And if not, their parents in Beijing and Shanghai will remind them. The Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Berkeley, Cambridge, the same. They are still Chinese. That is where we recruit the MSS army.”

Tom heard it all, month after month. Sometimes he brought his new bride, Sonia Machel, to the sessions. She was the daughter of a Mozambican father and a Chinese mother who had grown up in Macau when it was a Portuguese colony. She also spoke fluent Chinese.

Sonia’s father had spied for the United States before leaving Macau, so the CIA trusted her, too. They were a “tandem couple,” as the agency liked to say. Every marriage has secrets, but for a tandem couple there are only secrets. Yu Qiangsheng relaxed with her and told more stories.

After more than a year of debriefing the Chinese spy, the Cranes were assigned overseas. Their first posting was to Kuala Lumpur to work the large Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. They were good at it. Sonia spotted and developed the best prospects for recruitment as agents, and Tom pitched them. They were rising stars. They moved on to Phnom Penh after that, to seek recruits among the Chinese community there.

Yu was resettled in a suburb of Los Angeles. The CIA found him a wife. He was a complainer, like many defectors, wanting more money and perks. He thought he had given the agency the keys to the kingdom. The Chinese put out rumors several times that he had been assassinated abroad. It made Yu happy that the Chinese government remained so deeply ashamed by his defection that it needed to pretend he was dead.

The Cranes came home to Washington briefly after their tour in Cambodia. They were slotted next for China. Their first posting would be in the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Consulates were an afterthought for diplomats, but not for spies. They could be better hunting grounds.

Before Tom left for China, he asked the Office of Security for permission to see Yu. He hadn’t come to love the old man, but he felt responsible for him. Tom was the closest thing to Yu’s American son.

Yu had gotten fat eating American food, and he was drinking more. But he was happy to see the CIA officer with whom he had shared all his secrets.

“You are a ‘traveling man’ now,” said Yu. That was the Chinese expression for spy. He took out one of the books he had brought from China, and he held Crane’s hand while he read: “Be just like a blackbird entering the heavy forest or a fish diving into the deepest pool without a trace.”

Yu asked for another glass of whiskey. Crane went to fetch it, then kissed the old man on the forehead and left.

Tom and Sonia arrived at a newly built U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. Previously, the staff had been squeezed into a local hotel, so this was liberation. The compound was bounded by stucco walls on a narrow street in an unfashionable part of town south of the murky river that bisected the city. Inside the main gate was a grand portico topped by the seal of the United States and guarded by two Chinese stone lions.

Chengdu was thought to be easy duty for American diplomats. It lies west of the sweltering cities of the Yangtze delta, nestled on a fertile high plain. To the north and west are rugged mountains that might once have been visible on a clear day, but Chinese industrial cities didn’t get those anymore.

Chengdu was a boom town in the late 1990s. “To get rich is glorious” was China’s mantra now, and Sichuan was living the dream. Investment money surged in from Hong Kong and Taiwan and America; old buildings were razed for new factories and office buildings, which soon were demolished to make room for even bigger ones.

The consulate had a large staff of Chinese nationals, presumed to be spies, who snooped around any space that was open to them. The site was surrounded by tall office blocks, so Americans were warned that the building was probably bathed in electromagnetic energy; they should assume that conversations in rooms with windows could be read by lasers that measured the vibrations of the panes.

The CIA base was behind a maze of doors on the second floor at the rear of the building. Crane had to open a dozen locks to get to his classified workstation. The space was hidden away from Chinese employees, and conversations within its baffled “Acoustic Conference Room” were secure, or so it was assumed.

Tom held a meeting in the ACR his first week with the five officers serving under him. Three were “declared,” meaning that the State Department had told the Chinese government that they were CIA personnel. The other three, including Tom and his wife, were “undeclared,” with cover as ordinary members of the consular staff. The Cranes were the only truly fluent Chinese speakers.

“We can’t make mistakes here,” Crane began his first team huddle, remembering what Yu had told him about Chinese tradecraft. “We’re under constant, pervasive surveillance. At home, at work, on the bus, out walking on the street. Don’t assume you’re ‘clean,’ even after a surveillance detection route that has taken you half the day.”

Heads nodded. They’d heard all that in training at the Farm. Tom saw the false confidence. He’d been cocksure once himself, in Kuala Lumpur, and burned an agent. He admonished the group:

“The Chinese own this space. Our disguises are great. Sure. But don’t trust them. Our counter-surveillance technology is excellent, too. We have friendly eyes and ears in space to watch over us. But don’t trust that, either. It is very, very hard to beat Chinese fixed surveillance that’s on every street corner.

“Assume the worst. If you’ve gotten to a drop site and you think you’re clean after a five-hour SDR, you’re almost certainly wrong. Do another five hours. If you have the tiniest shred of doubt whether you’re clean, then abort the drop. Otherwise, you’ll get someone killed.”

“So, what are we doing here?” asked a woman who was on her first assignment. “Other than going to the gym.”

“We’re waiting,” said Tom, “for the moment when someone slips a note in our pocket in the market, or stops to talk at a party, or happens to meet us in the park. The golden moment. And then we will have a day, maybe just a few hours, to respond.

“Be ready,” he continued. “Anytime, any day, a walk-in could crash the front door of the consulate. Any afternoon you stroll down Lingshiguan Road, a Chinese official could drop that note in your purse. And then it’s off to the races.

“We’ll have everything set. A template: Where to hold the first meeting. How to map an SDR that gives you a chance of coming out dry in a monsoon of surveillance. A comms protocol that’s ironclad. But be ready to go. This is a street ballet. You have to be limber, flexed, in position behind the curtain, always. Otherwise, when it’s showtime, we’re screwed. Understood?”

Heads nodded. Of course they understood. That’s what they had signed up for. Old-timers still referred to the agency sometimes as “Clowns in Action,” but they were remembering the sloppy days when cocktail parties were the habitual venues for spotting agents, and good tradecraft meant not getting fall-down drunk. That was over. The Chinese didn’t drink vodka. They had cameras watching their cameras.

Tom still heard Yu Qiangsheng’s voice in his head, and the Chinese hadn’t forgotten him either. The senior cadres of the Ministry of State Security remembered the white-knuckle panic they felt after Yu’s defection. The lights had stayed on all night for weeks at the ministry’s new headquarters in Xiyuan, next to the Summer Palace. The office overlooked the imperial gardens and the lake where the carp were so thick they made the water gleam golden-pink. But in the years after Yu fled, the shutters remained drawn and the heavy curtains behind them, too, to shield a ministry that remained shellshocked.

Senior MSS cadres had hoped at first that Yu might have run off with one of his mistresses, or maybe died in a car accident. But those comforting fictions dissolved when Larry Wu-Tai Chin was arrested. He had messaged his case officer in New York, a Catholic priest, as it happened, to say that he feared he was under surveillance. A few days later, the FBI arrived at his home.

Some members of the Central Committee claimed that if the ministry had moved faster, it might have saved Chin. But that was nonsense. If they had tried to exfiltrate him, they would only have exposed more MSS officers. The blessing was that Chin had done the right thing and killed himself with a plastic bag tightened around his neck.

The MSS did the right thing, in return. It erected an anonymous memorial to him, no name, no message, in Fragrant Hills Park, north of the city center in Beijing. MSS cadres still wandered by on weekends to pay their respects.

How to rebuild when the house is in ruins? This had been the question in the decade after Yu Qiangsheng fled. Some thought the ministry could limp along with modest repairs. But there was a revolt. It came from above, from the generals of the People’s Liberation Army who had never liked the idea of an independent spy service in the first place. And from below, from the younger officers who knew that Yu Qiangsheng had probably compromised every major operation that their service was running.

So, the ministry started over. And in this project, the most creative officer turned out to be a young woman named Ma Wei.

Ma Wei was from Shanghai, whose residents liked to think they were the best at everything, including spying. But she was from an ordinary family. Her father was a policeman. Her mother worked in a factory. She didn’t attend one of the fancy high schools, but she received extremely high marks from her teachers in Suzhou district. She was hazed for her good grades. She got into fights with girls who bullied her and, small as she was, she always won. The Shanghai party committee noticed her. She received a scholarship to study in the United States.

Ma Wei went to college in the “heartland.” She studied at the University of Wisconsin for four years as an undergraduate, and then two more as a graduate student in psychology. She rooted for the Badgers. She ate fried cheese curds. She learned to speak perfect English. She was the girl nobody noticed.

The Ministry of State Security had invited Ma to a special training camp the summer before she left for Madison, as they did with many Chinese studying abroad. From Madison, she filed reports every six months to the Shanghai office of the Ministry of State Security, via a Chinese “friend” in America.

Ma was living on campus when an American newspaper published a report of Yu Qiangsheng’s defection. She felt physically ill. She knew the ministry. She was a secret member of the team. It was her work, too, that Yu had betrayed. When she finished her studies and returned home, she applied for a job with the ministry and was given a place in the North America branch.

People at MSS headquarters called her “the American girl.” She wore jeans and black sneakers, and she gathered her long black hair in a ponytail. Her favorite singer was Madonna. She had rap musicians on her playlist. Older cadres in the MSS didn’t know what to make of her.

Ma Wei thought that the MSS was too afraid of the CIA. China had more money now. It didn’t need to concentrate so much on “loyal” Chinese like Wu-Tai Chin. It could buy loyalty. She had seen the Americans up close. They were as greedy and selfish as anyone. And the CIA made mistakes. Agents were sloppy. They got caught.

And now the Americans were getting scared about terrorism. This could provide an opening. Al-Qaeda had bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The CIA was looking for partners.

Ma Wei was one of the young MSS employees in Beijing sent to attend counterterrorism seminars offered by the CIA for “the liaison service.” The seminars took place in an embassy annex in Beijing. The CIA knew she spoke English, but she was mostly quiet. She listened very carefully and filed extensive notes after every meeting.

“Miss Ma” was the name she asked the Americans to call her. She asked for help on some of the exercises. What was MASINT? How did geolocation work? How did a name get on a watchlist? She would ask one CIA officer to explain, and appear not to understand, so another would try. Back at work, she made a “face book,” with all the individuals she had met and notes about each.

The MSS already knew the names of the declared officers in the Beijing station, but Miss Ma was able to give more details. Then, working with information provided by MSS agents who were part of the Chinese staff inside the embassy, they could match known intelligence officers with other Americans with whom they socialized, shared lunch in the cafeteria, played sports on weekends.

This was her Tao: She was careful and precise like an engineer, but also creative like an artist. The tradecraft of Yu’s era had been to mobilize in great numbers. Ma despised this approach for all sorts of reasons. Her style was nimbler. And she had a burr under her saddle — something to prove to herself and a few of her senior colleagues: She wanted nothing to do with this man Yu.

The MSS called her operation “CT File,” in English. It exposed nearly all the CIA deep-cover officers in Beijing, and it brought great credit to Ma. The ministry promoted her two ranks and, a year after that, they made her deputy chief of the North America section. This new role gave “the American girl” confidence to develop more aggressive targeting.

“Let’s test them,” proposed Ma at a staff meeting in Xiyuan. “Let’s run defectors at them and see how they react. Real ministry officers, with intelligence histories that are verifiable and accurate. Then we can see how the Americans vet agents, why they trust one and not another. We need more Wu-Tai operations. We want to have so many moles in the CIA that they bump into each other.”

Tom Crane learned to use his intuition. He heard Yu’s voice in his mind, from late nights when the old man was homesick and wanted to read aloud from his dog-eared text of Sun Tzu. Yu spoke in his courtly Mandarin, his voice mellowed by Scotch whisky:

“‘Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.’ Do you hear that, Tom? ‘Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.’ Are you listening? ‘Under fragrant bait, there is certain to be a hooked fish.’ Understand?”

Tom had heard. During his first year in Chengdu, five Chinese offered to defect — each of whom claimed to have urgent actionable intelligence and wanted immediate covert support. Which ones were real? Crane wished he had an assay, to tell fool’s gold from the real thing. In the end, he had his instinct, and it proved unusually reliable.

The dangles were artfully packaged. Two of the would-be defectors were especially tantalizing. They claimed to be from the local MSS branch. One threw a message over the stucco wall on Lingshiguan Road; he claimed to be recruiting Chinese students to go to America. The other left a handwritten message under the windshield wiper on an embassy car; she said she was responsible for placing agents inside American companies based in Sichuan.

They wanted immediate contact, of course. Tom delayed; he sensed they might be phonies. He had the FBI run checks on the students who had supposedly been dispatched to America; most of the names were duds. He asked the National Resources Division to query the companies about their employees in the province. The company security officers said they didn’t allow Chinese employees in their secure workspaces. So, Tom left those dangles dangling.

The easiest thing to do with a defector was to say no: Nobody in the agency ever got blamed for being too careful. The costs of being wrong were usually higher than the benefits of being right. But the best intelligence officers have a sixth sense. They know which risks are worth taking. And that instinct kicked in when the fifth offer to spy for America landed in Tom’s pocket.

Tom was strolling home after work from his office on Lingshiguan Road to his apartment in the Jinjiang Hotel across the river. It was early spring; the trees were budding, half green. He made this trip on foot every day he could; a friendly American, practically advertising his availability, in the hope that a Chinese would make contact.

Tom was walking up Renmin Road toward the bridge when a man bumped him from behind. He was tall and he had a hungry look, eyes blazing as he looked directly at Crane and then darting away. Tom felt the man plunge his hand into his coat pocket and then clumsily withdraw. After the bump, the man hurried on his way. Tom studied him, height, build, clothes. The sidewalk had been crowded when the man brushed past, so the cameras monitoring Renmin Road wouldn’t have a good shot.

Tom kept walking, crossing the bridge, but he loitered in a riverside park before going back to his rooms. The hotel had been the former location of the consulate; every ceiling panel and wallboard might hide a camera. It wasn’t the place to read a covert message.

He took a seat on an empty bench facing the river. He removed the message from his pocket, holding it with a handkerchief, and read the Chinese characters. He quickly translated them in his head:

“I work for the Ministry of State Security. I need money. I have a woman problem. I can sell you secrets. The first is free. Your deputy consul general, Louis Chen, has been recruited by my ministry. I have many other secrets. Meet me tomorrow at 4:00 pm at the eastern edge of Xinglong Lake, south of the city, on the path below Hupan Road. If you are alone, with no surveillance, I will approach you. Bring a brown paper bag with $20,000 in cash as a first payment and a plan for future communications. I will bring a brown paper bag with intelligence. We will exchange bags.”

Tom folded the message in his handkerchief to preserve any prints or DNA. He rose from the bench and took a taxi back to the consulate. He passed through the 12 locks to his workspace. He sat down and wrote a flash message on the Restricted Handling channel to Hendrick Hoffman, the chief of the East Asia Division.

Why did Crane think this one was real, after a series of fakes? He tried to explain it in his cable to Headquarters. This man was straightforward and transactional. He made a proffer of extremely valuable information, the identity of a Chinese mole in the consulate, but he held back other information. The man said that he needed money, and he explained why, an expensive mistress. He proposed a plausible meeting place, in a location far enough from the city center that Tom might be able to shake free of surveillance.

But that wasn’t really the reason. Tom believed the man because of the half-crazy look in his eye, of fear and determination. He felt the man’s hand tremble as it hit his pocket, and the way his thumb got caught as he pulled his hand away. He saw the desperate stare — can I trust you with my life? — before the man’s eyes skittered away. It is always a question of a man’s ch’i, Yu had told him. His inner spirit. Tom couldn’t prove this one was the real thing. But he knew it.

Headquarters was wary. They were used to saying no. And this walk-in wanted the keys to the kingdom, namely, a communications protocol, on his first meeting. But Tom insisted. He prepared an ops plan, with a long surveillance detection run that would include a car, the metro, three bus rides, two long walks and three disguises. Tom would have only one person for operational support, Sonia. She would begin the run by driving him to a bend in the road outside the city center where watchers would be blind for twenty seconds.

Headquarters took one urgent step. Cable traffic to and from Louis Chen, the deputy consul, was immediately controlled. To investigate him, the agency created a tiny compartment, with one representative each from State, the FBI and the CIA.

Tom’s ops plan was scrubbed by the East Asia Division, which proposed some changes. He wanted to give the asset one of the new covert communications devices that bounced burst messages off a satellite, but Headquarters said no, too fancy and too risky if he’s double. They proposed instead an old-fashioned, one-time code pad. Tom said fine.

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“This guy sounds too good to be true,” warned Hoffman, the East Asia Division chief, on a secure call after midnight Chengdu time. “Either he’s a nut, or he’s a plant.” He had recently left as station chief in Beijing and didn’t trust anything in China.

“I think he’s real,” answered Tom. “So does my wife, and she’s much smarter about China than me.” The division chief knew Sonia. He agreed. That sealed the deal.

Sonia Machel was what the military liked to call a force multiplier. She would have appeared striking anywhere, with lustrous skin and a face at once Asian and East African. Her family had emigrated from the Portuguese colony of Mozambique to Macau a half-century earlier. Her Portuguese was nearly as good as her Chinese. She could look like many people, and like no one.

The operation began with Sonia driving their Volkswagen to a park west of the city that was popular with foreigners. It had tennis courts and, nearby, a golf club. The Cranes had traversed this route a dozen times, always with a nominal destination but, really, looking for a topographical anomaly, a blind spot where a car could turn into a slow curve and become invisible long enough for a passenger to open the door and gently roll to the bushes by the curb. They’d found “the perfect curve,” as Sonia called it, and over the six months constructed the SDR plan around it.

Now practice was over.

“Here it comes,” said Sonia as she braked before entering the turn. Several cars had been following them, changing places since they left the city center, but they had remained a discreet distance, allowing the essential twenty seconds.

“Goodbye, darling,” she said. The door opened, a body fell gently to the pavement, a rubber dummy popped into place in the passenger seat.

“Roll,” Tom told himself. He had practiced the maneuver so many times, starting more than a decade ago at Camp Peary. Out the door, across the pavement, into the shrubs and gone before the trailing car approached. And then into his first disguise, and his first chain of subway and bus rides.

Tom reached Xinglong Lake an hour before the meeting. He thought he was clean. But was he willing to bet a man’s life on it? There was an underground garage on the west side of the lake. He entered it in one disguise and left in another. He stealthily walked the circumference of the lake, which offered a 360-degree view, looking for people, cameras, any hint of danger. Sometimes on a surveillance run, the hair on his arms prickled as if from static electricity. This time he was flat calm. Clean.

As 4:00 p.m. neared, Tom found the underpass hideaway he had diagrammed in his operations plan; he took off his last disguise and placed it in his backpack. From the pack he removed the brown paper bag, which contained $20,000 and the code pad and instructions.

Tom walked along a dirt path beside the lake. Hupan Road was above him, to his left. He didn’t want to look back. He might break the spell, like Orpheus gazing at Eurydice. He was beginning to give up hope when a Chinese man walked quickly past him. He recognized the gait, the quick, impulsive step; he remembered the height and the build. The man was carrying a brown bag.

There was a bench ahead, at a curve in the lakeside path. The Chinese man sat down and placed his bag on the wooden slats. Tom approached and took the adjacent seat, placing his bag next to the other man’s. The sound of the traffic on Hupan Road faded; they were alone in the still of the afternoon. Tom looked into the Chinese man’s eyes for a long moment, nodded slowly, okay, let’s do this, and the other man did the same.

Tom took from his pocket a piece of paper on which he had drawn a Chinese character. The left half was a symbol for speech; the right side represented foliage. The image conveyed the idea of hidden communication, words under cover. The name of the character was dié. It meant: “to spy.” He showed it to the Chinese man, and then put it back in his pocket.

Each man rose from the bench, taking the other’s paper bag. Tom didn’t breathe easily until he returned home late that night, exhausted, to the embrace of his wife. His apartment wasn’t secure, and he didn’t want to arouse Chinese suspicions by returning to the base so late. He didn’t dare look into the bag until they were in the base early the next morning.

Tom opened it in the ACR. He removed a photograph from the brown paper. The picture had been taken from an underground shaft; the camera looked upward, toward a hole bored through a concrete floor. The photograph was marked with an address, 4 Lingshiguan Road, and a timestamp, from two years ago, when the consulate was being completed.

“Holy crap!” he whispered. “They’re inside the building.”

Thomas Crane, the CIA’s base chief in Chengdu, tugged the consul general down the stairs to the consulate basement on Lingshiguan Road. A secretary and a Chinese administrative officer tried to follow, but Crane blocked them and locked the basement door. He paced the length of the big room, peering at the concrete floor and chipping at any irregularities with an ax he had brought from the armory upstairs.

“What the hell are you looking for?” asked the consul general. He was balding, in middle age, wishing he wasn’t stuck in the Chinese provinces.

“A hole in the floor,” answered Tom. “I need a flashlight.” He pointed to a big lamp on the wall. He shined the beam into the corners of the room and behind the filing cabinets and bookshelves that lined the walls.

“How do you know there’s a hole?” demanded the diplomat. His intelligence chief was scaring him.

“I can’t tell you,” Tom answered. The consul general started to protest, but Tom raised the palm of his hand. “Sir, please don’t ask any more questions.”

The consul general retreated while Tom continued his investigation. At the rear of the room was a wooden wall that enclosed an empty storeroom. He surveyed the wall, calculating its position. He looked up toward the ceiling and rechecked his measurements. By his reckoning, the boundary wall of the CIA base’s classified workspace was three floors above.

“Ground zero,” said Tom. “Has to be.”

Tom took his ax and swung it hard against the wall, splintering the wood. The consul general shouted for him to stop, but he swung again, harder, and once more, until the frame gave way. Tom shined his flashlight along the floor, and there, in the concrete, was a six-inch hole, with a thick rubber casing sprouting from the opening and rising up through the ceiling to the floor above.

“Those bastards,” muttered Tom. “They’ve run wires upstairs.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said the consul general. He looked dazed. The worst thing that could befall a U.S. diplomatic facility abroad seemed to have happened to his little piece of real estate. “What do I do now?”

“Stay put,” said Tom. “Don’t let anyone come down here.”

Tom raced up two flights of stairs to the CIA base, ax in hand, navigating the maze of doors and locks. To anyone he encountered along the way, he barked, “Can’t talk now.”

Inside the secure area of the base, Tom took his ax to the supporting wall. The inside was lined with a thin strip of metal to prevent intrusion. After four clanging blows, the wall and its lining collapsed. Inside was the top of the same rubber tube Crane had seen in the basement. He peered inside. It appeared to be empty.

“Oh, no, no, no!” Tom muttered, followed by a loud oath. He knew what the empty casing meant. Yu Qiangsheng had told him in one of their endless tradecraft discussions that the Ministry of State Security designed its surveillance systems so that wires could be withdrawn quickly if they were ever discovered.

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Tom ordered a CIA colleague to secure the space and then ran pell-mell back down the stairs to the basement. The befuddled consul general was standing by the splintered wall there. Tom ignored him. He hacked at the rubber tube with his ax until it severed and examined the interior. There were still some wires inside; the Chinese hadn’t been able to pull them all out yet.

The consul general had his arms up, begging for an explanation.

“Not now,” said Tom. He bent the rubber casing to a 90-degree angle and buried the ax halfway in, so that the remaining wires couldn’t be extracted.

“Duct tape,” he shouted, and the consul general fumbled around until he found some in a supply storage cabinet. Tom taped the wires to a nearby support beam, so they couldn’t be retracted more.

The consul general was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor, his head in his hands. All of this, whatever it was, would be his responsibility.

“What should I tell Washington?” he asked plaintively.

“Leave it to me,” said Tom. “Right now, you need to go upstairs and tell everybody that things are fine. We just had a little electrical problem.”

The base chief took charge, to the consul general’s relief. Tom summoned a CIA Technical Services team overnight from Beijing. The team tapped into the remaining wires, but they had gone dead. In the CIA’s workspace on the second floor, the technicians dismantled the walls to check for cameras or microphones. They found nothing. The Chinese evidently hadn’t been able to fish their wires past the metal lining. And they hadn’t penetrated the Acoustic Conference Room, where the base did its most sensitive work, or the classified computer system.

“Maybe we lucked out,” Tom told his CIA colleagues in the bubble after the frantic search ended. But he was haunted by the possibility that the Chinese had seen or heard something that might prove valuable.

He sent a quick flash cable home on the Restricted Handling channel. He received back an RH cable from Langley commending him for prompt, decisive action. It wasn’t until a day later, when he was alone in his office with his wife, that he let himself breathe.

“That was, uh, unusual,” he said. “Right on the line between near disaster and total disaster.”

“You did good,” she responded. “Iceman.”

The State Department lodged a protest with the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The Chinese government denied responsibility, though it offered no alternative explanation. Had an army of rats with tiny jackhammers burrowed through the concrete foundation of the building? State decided against issuing a public complaint. The Chinese had been caught red-handed; a public shaming would only create more problems.

Tom wanted to take the offensive. The Technical Services team widened the hole in the basement and sent down cameras, hoping to collect more Chinese surveillance gear. But the lines were dead, and any other equipment had been extracted.

Tom then proposed excavating the tunnel and sending a CIA Global Response Staff team down in hot pursuit of the Ministry of State Security. But Hendrick Hoffman, the chief of the East Asia Division, told him that would be a “cowboy move,” risky and insecure. Tongue in cheek, Tom proposed a vivid demonstration of America’s reaction: Widen the hole, enclose it in plastic and use it as a toilet.

Tom and his colleagues concluded that the best response would be to feed concrete through a tube into the small opening, pump it as deep as it would go, and then seal it up tight. The consulate’s maintenance department mixed the concrete in the basement, so the Chinese wouldn’t see, and siphoned it into the hole.

A Ministry of Public Security official appeared at the gate and requested entry for a building inspection, but the consul general reminded him tartly that the compound was sovereign American territory.

Tom and Sonia were the only consulate officers who knew that the breach had been disclosed by a “walk-in” from the MSS.

What to do about Chen, the deputy CG whose treachery had been proffered by the walk-in as a sign of his bona fides? Hoffman, back at Headquarters, wanted to put him under surveillance and wait for his next meeting with his handler. But the State Department nixed that. Too sensitive, too vulnerable, too much of a pain in the butt for an already frazzled consul general. State chose its favorite way of saying no: How would it look when it was published in The Washington Post?

Instead, Chen was quickly summoned to Beijing for a supposed meeting with the ambassador. He was greeted by a joint CIA-FBI team who said they had rock-solid evidence he had been recruited by the MSS. This wasn’t true, but Chen cracked and agreed to spill everything he knew in exchange for a reduced sentence.

The FBI at first wanted to double Chen back against the Chinese, but he was so jittery, the bureau decided he would break under the stress. Chen delivered what his inquisitors demanded: He provided a detailed account of his recruitment during his previous posting in Bangkok, including the honey trap that had snared him and the identity of the MSS case officer who had pitched him.

“All they saw was my Chinese skin,” Chen said during his interrogation in Beijing. “They targeted me because they thought they already owned me as a Chinese man.”

When Tom heard that comment, he remembered what Yu had said about how Chinese people were always Chinese. This racism was an MSS vulnerability, but Tom knew that it afflicted the CIA, too. He watched the way his wife was treated, how some other members of the station would stop talking when she came around. When he asked her about it, she just shrugged. Her parents were U.S. citizens, but one was always “African” and the other was “Chinese.” It couldn’t be fixed.

Chen was sent home on the next plane. He later agreed to a negotiated plea; in exchange for cooperation, he received a suspended jail sentence.

Tom had a team of watchers deployed on the ground and satellite eyes overhead to stake out Chen’s next scheduled meeting with his case officer. But the MSS officer was a no-show. They knew Chen was busted.

Tom Crane had punched his ticket. He had recruited a penetration agent inside his adversary’s spy service. Now he had to communicate with him and keep him alive.

In the paper bag that Tom had given his agent, he provided the simplest and most secure means for communicating: A pad to code and decode messages in an unbreakable cypher, and a secure radio frequency on which to exchange messages with the CIA. But for two months, the man vanished back into the anonymity of Chengdu.

Tom’s colleagues back home predicted that the walk-in would never make contact again. But he thought otherwise. In their momentary interaction, the Chinese spy had a rapturous look on his face, melded with his terror of discovery. He had said in his initial pitch that he needed money to fix a “woman problem,” but Crane guessed that like a gambler, he was aroused by his risk-taking, too. This man liked walking on the edge, and he’d be back for more.

“I love tunnels,” said a genial Hoffman, the East Asia chief, during a secure videoconference chat with Crane after the dust had settled. “They never work.”

And it was true: Tunnels had a poor history in modern espionage. The CIA had dug one to tap a Soviet Army communications line in East Berlin during the 1950s, and the Russians had used it to feed disinformation. The FBI had bored a shaft under the new Soviet Embassy on Mount Alto in Washington during the 1980s, but the plot was discovered before the tunnel was finished. Now, the Chinese tunnel had reached a similar dead end — though, in truth, the CIA was lucky it was tipped off in time.

The tunnel discovery had turned Tom into a star. But it is a universal truth in the spy business, as in most aspects of life, that success breeds envy. Some of his colleagues thought his recruitment of the MSS volunteer who had brush-passed him on Renmin Road had been too easy, too perfect.

Tom dismissed the grumbling. The CIA was like high school, where you were surrounded by jealous kids and bullies. Nice people worked for the Commerce Department or the Bureau of Land Management. Colleagues wondered if he’d been more than lucky in Chengdu. Some even wondered if he had been a witting tool of the MSS.

The tunnel “mistake,” as MSS officials privately described it, was another blunder for a Chinese intelligence service that seemed in 1999 to be snakebit. The Politburo fired the ministry’s director. The new director, in turn, fired the head of the North America section. The People’s Liberation Army argued that a separate intelligence ministry shouldn’t exist at all, since the PLA’s Third Branch did the truly important work of signals intelligence, including the strange new wizardry known in English as “cyber.”

The only MSS officer who benefited from this latest stumble was Ma Wei, the deputy chief of the North America section, who was still known as “the American girl.” After the firings, she was promoted to chief of the section and immediately began what she called a “restructuring.”

“All our secrets were disclosed a decade ago by Yu Qiangsheng,” she told her colleagues in her maiden speech as chief of the section. The room was silent. “He shamed our service. Now, we need to create a new service untouched by his crimes.”

Ma was haunted by Yu. He had stolen not only the secrets of the MSS but also its soul. Every day he lived in exile in America was a reminder that the new China was unsteady. It was a toy of the West; it could be bought.

When the MSS chief mentioned Yu during a private lunch after Ma’s promotion, he was startled by the vehemence of her response. “I have a fervent desire to put a bullet in his head,” she said.

Ma set about building a new service. She thought the MSS was too timid and lazy. More Americans could be recruited if China acted more boldly. She reorganized her branch to better identify targets: The MSS had made a practice of scooping up vast quantities of defense and economic information and then sifting it for useful nuggets. It was antiquated, like panning for gold. Ma instead imposed what the CIA called “targeting” and “tasking.” She instructed her officers to identify people who had real secrets and pursue them.

The Chinese knew the essence of good tradecraft, but some people had forgotten. Ma reminded her colleagues of Sun Tzu’s advice to know their enemy and know themselves. She dropped 2,500-year-old field notes into her tradecraft lectures. “If the trees move, the enemy is approaching.” “Where birds congregate, the field is empty.” “If the birds take flight, beware of an ambush.” People weren’t always sure what she was talking about, but they liked it.

Ma thought her colleagues were too uptight. She encouraged them to relax. Failure was okay. A perfect score was a sign that you weren’t taking enough risks. She organized cocktail parties and karaoke nights at the ministry social club, and basketball and ping-pong games in the gym. She tried to make the compound at Xiyuan feel more like the college campus she remembered in Madison.

Ma referred to China’s slowly growing roster of American agents as “our dear friends.” Yes, most of the assets were still Chinese American, drawn from the easiest recruiting pool. But there were more needy and greedy Anglos, too. Ma had studied psychology as a graduate student; now she created a psychology unit in the North America section to understand people’s needs and vulnerabilities.

“Americans are born to expect success,” she said at the introductory psychology lecture. “But most Americans these days do not succeed as they hoped. When they reach forty-five years, they take stock: Their marriages are unhappy; their jobs are boring; money is scarce; debts are large; their parents are old and feeble; their children are disobedient. That is our moment, to reach out to our dear friends and find a way to provide what they are missing.”

Ma Wei didn’t tell her colleagues, but her life-cycle approach was classic CIA tradecraft, an espionage version of Gail Sheehy’s “Passages.” To the cadres of the MSS, bound by tradition and cut off from the West, the concepts sounded revolutionary.

Ma introduced another practice that proved devastatingly effective. She insisted that senior staff of the North America section reassess every known case in which the CIA had recruited a Chinese agent. She asked her team to look for patterns. How did the CIA’s recruits communicate with their handlers? How often were they in contact? What common features characterized the people who were recruited? What was the communications protocol? Were there any common internet addresses or radio frequencies?

As soon as the MSS found a pattern that was repeated, she advised, it could begin to crack the code. Her students listened.

Tom Crane’s agent in the MSS proved to be a stone-cold professional. Following their initial rendezvous at Xinglong Lake, Tom never had another face-to-face meeting with him. But after two months of silence, the agent sent an encrypted radio message using his one-time pad. He wanted to exchange new secrets for more money. The agency gave him a cryptonym, LCBRINK, and a “201” file, and began reconnoitering dead-drop sites where they could make exchanges.

The Cranes prepared each drop site meticulously. Satellite reconnaissance identified potential locations. Remote, but accessible; situated so that they allowed a few seconds of invisibility from any chance observer. The satellites were distant partners; they could watch the sites before the Cranes dropped a package, and then monitor the pickup. But the human factor was still decisive. Crane aborted one early drop because he felt a shadow of doubt that he was clean, even when technical surveillance gave a green light.

The Cranes were the only people in China who knew the CIA was running an MSS agent in Sichuan. For them, it was the closest thing to having a child. The agent was utterly dependent on them for safety and nurture; one clumsy moment and he would be doomed. It was strange, but what Tom loved about intelligence work was the intimacy of that bond.

“I know him,” Tom told his wife after LCBRINK made the third successful pickup and drop. “I’ve watched him move. I’ve seen his face. I know where he lives. I’ve seen his wife and his mistress. I know where he gambles. I know how crazy and needy he is. I don’t want him to get caught.”

“We’ll keep him dry,” said Sonia.

The Cranes were true partners. Tandem couples sometimes got so stressed they started running covert actions on each other, but the Cranes happily cohabited their secret compartment. Sonia had joined the agency as an analyst because of her fluent Chinese, but after she and Tom married, she received “hostile environment” training at Camp Peary and became a case officer. She was a natural operator, nimbler on the ground than Tom was.

CIA officers always live two lives. Tom had proposed to her in Chinese. She had laughed and answered “yes” in English. Some nights at home she sang to him in Portuguese. When they went to clubs, she could vamp like Lil’ Kim. When Tom asked her once in bed if she was a liar, she answered proudly, “Yes.”

Sonia alternated with her husband in making the drops. She moved effortlessly between disguises, altering her skin tone, clothing and posture so deftly that even her husband might not recognize her. She insisted on handling the most sensitive drop since the first meeting by the lake.

Headquarters had decided that after six months and three successful drops, LCBRINK should be given a direct covert communications device. It was a simple burst transmitter that uploaded the agent’s messages to a satellite and downloaded the agency’s instructions.

The cov-comm device was hidden in an artfully configured stock of pine wood, seemingly fallen from a tree, like those strewn across every park in Chengdu. The wooden fragment was indistinguishable from other sticks and branches on the ground except for a reddish fungus on its underside.

Sonia walked the taut wire of surveillance alone. The drop site was in a thickly forested park north of the Third Ring Road. Sonia circumnavigated the city several times, following the route she and her husband had mapped. She changed vehicles and directions many times, but more important, she changed her appearance, one hour in the guise of an older Chinese woman draped in a gray shawl; next as a younger woman wrapped in a silk headscarf; then as a slender man in a cloth cap and baggy jeans.

In this last disguise, as a youth on a leisurely stroll in the park, she approached the wooded area that was the drop zone. The tree branch with its electronic treasure was stuffed into the bag slung over her shoulder. She was clean. Her run had been perfect. She felt so dry she was fluffy. She walked toward the drop site.

A car was parked in the far distance; a red Honda Accord, with two people in the front seat. It was a new model, one just marketed in China. Ten minutes earlier, she had seen a white Accord, also with two occupants. Coincidence, maybe. Two new cars out driving in a scenic park. She walked toward the glen where she would drop the disguised tree branch. She steadied her gait, loping, boyish. Her heart pounded against the tight binding around her chest.

Sonia reached toward the bag for the covert communications device. As she did so, she took a breath and closed her eyes. Breathe, she told herself. Remember. Yu had told the Cranes that the Chinese lived for American mistakes; their advantage was in their numbers; they were everywhere; coincidence didn’t happen in their world.

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In that silent moment, eyes wide shut, Sonia saw in her mind’s eye the image of the man she knew as LCBRINK, cuffed to an iron chair as he was interrogated. And she sensed, instantly, that she was about to deliver a death sentence.

She kept walking, easy steps, past the drop site and toward a clearing beyond, pausing occasionally to look at the trees, until she reached the south gate of the park and caught a bus back toward the city. Overhead reconnaissance photographs later confirmed that the two Hondas were part of the MSS motor pool.

“You saved his life,” Crane told his wife later in the ACR at the consulate, when he debriefed her about the run.

“This time,” she answered. “Next time, it’s your turn.”

Chengdu was a triumph for the Cranes. They asked to extend their tour when it ended after two years, but Headquarters wanted them back home to help Hoffman run the East Asia Division. Before Tom left, he revisited the concrete-filled opening of the Chinese tunnel to say a benediction; he rechecked the communications protocols and drop sites that would be handed off to the next base chief, who would take over his agent inside the MSS.

When the Cranes boarded the plane for the long trip back to Washington, the MSS agent was still operating, invisible and undetected. The ministry knew it had a leak, but it hadn’t yet found the pattern.

Tom Crane and his wife returned to China six years later. This time, Tom was appointed chief of operations in the Beijing station. The station chief at the time was an analyst rather than an operations officer, so Tom would effectively run clandestine activity in China. He would be a “declared” officer, officially part of the CIA. Sonia would not; that meant she would be taking more risks.

In the intervening years, the Cranes had grown up in the way a lucky couple can in middle age. The first two years back, Tom was a senior deputy in the East Asia Division, planning and running operations against Chinese targets around the world. They had then moved to Tokyo, where Tom, undercover as a U.S. trade official, became a “singleton,” a lone-wolf recruiter who traveled abroad on false passports and in disguise, pitching prospective Chinese-speaking agents.

The Cranes returned to Washington for another two years, as Tom continued the singleton role. He was the closer, the officer the agency sent in to complete big recruitments. He traveled to California to visit Yu, who was fading into a defector’s cantankerous dotage. The man was still an encyclopedia of Chinese tradecraft, but it was dated now, and sometimes he seemed to be repeating the same page.

Sonia had taken most of those six years off to start a family. Since leaving Chengdu, they’d had two daughters, now five and three, both with the easy adaptability of expat kids. Sonia knew she was starting to get restless when she began looking for gigs as a singer with an Afro-Portuguese band in D.C.

Tom went ahead of the family to set up shop in Beijing. He flew into a China that had hurtled forward in the years he had been away. Beijing Capital International Airport was so dense with flights that it had added a second terminal and was about to open a third; China was already planning another, entirely new airport about forty miles south in Daxing.

The country’s growth astonished him; it was something you couldn’t fathom from intelligence reports. Tom did the math: A country growing ten percent a year roughly triples its wealth in a decade. That was what had happened to China. Everything old had become new again.

Like everything else in Beijing, the U.S. Embassy was bursting at the seams; work had started on a fancy new compound northeast of the city center, but it wouldn’t be ready for another few years. The old building was in the Jianguomenwai compound, three miles east of Tiananmen Square; the dowdy building had once been the embassy of Pakistan. The CIA station competed for space with every other American agency and interest group that wanted a piece of the new China.

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The family had been assigned a comfortable, soulless apartment in a compound near the embassy. It was late winter when Tom moved in, and Beijing was dry and bitterly cold. From his window, he could see the leafless trees that lined the diplomatic area, bending against the winds gusting in from the mountains north and west of the city. Cold weather was miserable, but it was good for spies. Watchers hated to stay out on the streets. Disguises were easier in bulky coats and hats. Cold people made mistakes.

“I hate this apartment,” Sonia announced the day after she arrived that spring. She stood at the windows, looking at the dull vista of the diplomatic quarter; it had the charm of a well-tended prison.

“What do you think they’re beaming at us?” she said, rapping at the windowpane. “Lasers or microwaves or both?”

Tom put a finger to his lips and pointed to the ceiling.

“No, I want them to hear,” said Sonia, eyes flashing. “We have two young children. Their health is precious. Five people who served in the U.S. Embassy Beijing since 2000 have been diagnosed with melanomas. Did you know that? We had a briefing at the State Department a week ago. Five people! Everyone should know that.”

Tom nodded his head. Nobody signed up to get cancer.

“You’re right, sweetheart. I hope they’re listening.” He raised his voice. “If anything happens to my wife or children while we’re here, I will hold the government of China legally and morally responsible. Tongshi! Comrades, you don’t want me as an enemy.”

The wild card for Tom wasn’t the Chinese economic landscape. It was counter-terrorism, which had become a near-obsession for the CIA in 2006 and consumed a surprisingly large part of his time as chief of operations. Instead of recruiting and running Chinese spies, he was meeting with them to discuss counter-terrorism cooperation.

The Chinese were beginning a savage repression campaign against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Of course, they claimed that the Uyghur rebels were really an al-Qaeda front. The MSS offered to share intelligence from their penetrations of the groups and asked for reciprocal CIA help. Tom thought it was a poisoned cup, but he drank.

Tom’s chief liaison partner was Ma Wei, now one of the deputy chiefs of the Ministry of State Security. She had been promoted two years earlier from her post as chief of the North America branch. She was still the ministry’s avenging angel. In addition to running aggressive operations against the United States, Ma was said to be cracking down on the corruption that had been endemic in the MSS — and making enemies in the process.

Tom studied Ma Wei’s impressive biography in his briefing book on MSS leadership. “I wonder if she’s recruitable,” he asked himself. That would be his “extra credit” assignment in Beijing, he decided. To draw the very best talent in the MSS into a conversation with the CIA.

Tom met her at a one-day counter-terrorism seminar the MSS was hosting for the visiting CIA director. The participants’ fervid denunciation of Muslim extremism was predictable; Tom approached Ma during a coffee break and began a conversation about the welcome arrival of spring. She chatted back, amiably. She wasn’t pretending to be shy in English anymore. Crane sought her out at the next coffee break and invited her to join him for lunch; to his surprise, she agreed.

Miss Ma proposed that they meet on “neutral” ground, in a private room at the Beijing Hotel on the grand boulevard known as Chang An, next to Tiananmen Square. The hotel was an old Soviet-era monstrosity and every room had been wired for sound for decades, but Tom didn’t object. It was a start. The next time he would choose the lunch spot.

The “American girl” welcomed him. She had dropped her black sneakers and ponytail now that she was a senior cadre. She dressed fashionably in clothes she had bought from Zara, which had just opened a branch in Beijing. Crane planned to do the talking; now that he was a “declared” officer, part of his job was carrying the flag.

But it was Miss Ma who steered the conversation. She asked Crane if he missed Chengdu. His CIA cover there was blown, obviously, now that he was a declared CIA officer in Beijing. She apologized for the “tunnel incident.” It was a mistake, she said; the chief of the MSS office there had been replaced.

“How did you know the hole was there?” she asked sweetly, with what seemed almost a wink. “It was a great secret.”

“Lucky guess,” answered Tom, winking back and then changing the subject. He wondered if she knew anything real; probably she was just probing.

“And your wife. Does she work for the CIA?”

Tom hesitated, only for an instant. “No, thank goodness,” he replied. “She’s a consular officer.”

Tom debated whether he should meet her a second time, and then he made an invitation for another lunch, “early next year.” She accepted.

Why was Crane optimistic that his outreach to Ma Wei was worth the trouble? China watchers back at Langley thought she might be on a collision course with the new minister of public security. He had made his reputation (and fortune) running party operations in regions that had begun to boom in the 1990s and early 2000s, moving from oil-rich Liaoning to Sichuan, which was gushing with money from new start-ups, and finally, back to Beijing to run security.

The security chief was a tough, canny operator. Like everyone in his generation, he had survived the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. As he rose, he made common cause with the wealthy children of the party elite, doing them favors, helping them launder the profits of China’s roaring boom. He was a very different animal from Ma Wei; where she had made her name through finesse and precision, he understood raw power.

One detail in the security chief’s résumé jumped out at Crane. He was very close to the Communist Party secretary in Shanghai, a former minister of construction who had been appointed to the Politburo in 2002. This man had spent his career rehabilitating his image and ingratiating himself with party cronies who were becoming rich. His family name was Yu; the CIA files said that he was the younger brother of Yu Qiangsheng.

So it was with some curiosity that Tom met Ma for a second lunch in February 2007. He proposed a chic restaurant frequented by art dealers and collectors in a new office tower east of the city center. Crane said his wife helped him pick it out. The place featured spicy dishes from Yunnan province in the far south, near the Laotian border.

Ma startled him with her first question.

“How is Sonia?” she asked pleasantly. “Is she enjoying her consular work?”

“Loves it,” said Tom quickly. “The kids are happy, too. Thanks for asking.”

Ma seemed almost relaxed over lunch. She ordered a mushroom dish that was a house specialty and said she loved it. She admired the art on the walls, especially a retro-Maoist painting that showed workers painted in day-glow yellow and red and the word “art” painted in the corner.

Tom tested the limits. He mentioned a story that had just appeared in the South China Morning Post about new worries in the party about corruption. It had obviously been a leak from party officials. What did she think?

Ma parried that one. “Hard to say. I didn’t see the story.” And to a question about the charismatic new party chief in Chongqing, rumored to be campaigning to become the next general secretary of the party, she demurred, as well. “I cannot say I know this gentleman personally.”

Tom asked her when they finished the meal if she would join him a third time; she answered that she would see if it was “convenient.” He wondered if he would ever hear back.

And why was Ma Wei willing to meet with the CIA officer Thomas Crane? That was a more complicated question.

Ma had taught her generation of MSS officers how to interrogate facts. The ministry was a hoarder: It stored every audio record, every intercepted communication, every case of shadowing known or suspected CIA officers throughout China. Ma was especially curious when MSS operations failed. She wanted to know why.

So, of course, she had wanted to understand the famous “tunnel mistake” in Chengdu. Evidently, there had been a leak, but the ministry had never discovered who it was. So, Ma had decided to interrogate the facts of that case.

The tunnel had been discovered in 1999. The CIA must have learned of it hours before. She instructed her analysts to look for anything unusual that week in the Chengdu office of the ministry: Were there any sudden absences or breaches of duty? Then she asked for the surveillance logs on Thomas Crane, who she now understood must have been base chief. Surveillance teams had followed him all over town but never caught him at a drop or a meeting.

Ma’s research team examined a dozen suspects in the MSS office in Chengdu, tracked their movements and tapped their phones. But they had come up empty-handed there, too. So, eventually, Ma had put the case aside.

Ma’s interest revived after her first lunch with Crane. There was something about his odd, momentary stutter before he insisted that his wife didn’t work for the CIA that turned on a light. Of course: Crane’s wife was a deep-cover officer and part of the team that serviced the MSS agent.

Ma began anew, looking for evidence about Sonia Machel. She had her team search the audio tapes from the aborted penetration of the secure area of the consulate. That operation hadn’t produced much, because the microphones hadn’t reached to where the base’s officers discussed sensitive matters. But Sonia Machel’s voice was distinct among those allowed to enter the base. She was clearly an operations officer, under deep cover.

Ma’s team looked for Sonia by combing through thousands more photos and audio recordings. The search required hundreds of people; it was a marriage of old-school and new. But finally, the facts confessed. There were photos of Sonia taken by officers in two Hondas from the MSS, arriving at a glen in the forest and then leaving. The watchers had checked; she had never made a drop; it was just a walk in the woods.

Ma suspected otherwise. She instructed her army of analysts to scrub every surveillance image from every entrance and exit to the park for the following week, looking for any member of the MSS staff in Chengdu who entered the area where Sonia had been. And soon enough, they found it. The agent had come looking for the drop that Sonia aborted. A long-distance camera captured him searching on the ground for a stick that wasn’t there.

Tom Crane’s chief worry in the Beijing station was a tall, slender Chinese American officer named Arthur Li. He was a Yale graduate, an agency throwback in that respect. He came to the CIA with his own version of “great expectations.” His father was a prominent MIT-trained chemical engineer; his mother was a concert violinist. Perhaps he suffered from this burdensome background, but Arthur Li proved to be a complainer and an underperformer. He was a “declared” officer, so he didn’t do much spying himself, and he seemed bored by his other duties.

“That kid is trouble,” said Sonia, after he had behaved with a sullen lack of interest at a small dinner the Cranes gave at their apartment. As in most things, she was right.

Tom gave him a negative fitness report in his annual review, and Li complained bitterly to the station chief. He claimed that Crane had a racial bias, stating in a written response: “Mr. Crane doesn’t trust me because I’m Chinese. He won’t give me serious assignments.” The station chief, being a modern bureaucrat, advised Tom that it would be very unfortunate, indeed, if Li filed a discrimination complaint with the inspector general.

So, Tom gave the young officer more responsibility. He wasn’t about to send him out on operations. But he brought him into the station’s inner circle, where he had access to information about the agents the CIA was running in China. The files he saw didn’t have agents’ real names, to be sure, only cryptonyms. But they contained some details about the tradecraft the CIA used to contact each one.

“Thank you for recognizing my abilities,” said Li when Tom offered him this additional responsibility. And he seemed to become more interested in his work. But after six months, he grew listless again and asked for a larger role in reviewing operations. The next major operation was a sensitive drop that involved Sonia. Tom flatly refused Li’s request.

Li’s tour ended a few months later, and he departed Beijing. He had a vituperative exit interview with the station chief, who by this time had concluded that he was a spoiled brat. Li refused to shake Tom’s hand on the way out the door, but his sullen temper did him no good. Hoffman, the East Asia chief, warned him about poor performance when he returned home, and the inspector general’s office, after a brief review, rejected his discrimination claims. A year later, informed that he would not be promoted, he began the long resignation process at the CIA.

On a day in the summer of 2007, near the end of the Cranes’ second year in Beijing, Chengdu suddenly and uncharacteristically turned up in high volume in National Security Agency monitoring of the signals traffic from the MSS headquarters in Beijing.

The Chengdu office then went into lockdown — with no messages going in or out. The CIA base in Chengdu tried to contact its only agent on the books there, LCBRINK, but the cov-comm message went unanswered at first. A day later, a message was sent in plain, unencrypted text. It was zàijiàn, which means goodbye.

The agency queried Taiwanese intelligence, which had good coverage in Sichuan. Were they aware of anything unusual involving the security service in Chengdu? The Taiwanese reported there was a rumor in senior party circles that the MSS office had arrested one of its mid-level officers.

The Cranes spent their last days in the Beijing station with a sense of dread. They had been considering whether to extend their tour for another year and had promised to let headquarters know soon. Finally, a week before their decision was due, the hammer fell.

On a Restricted Handling channel, Tom received a photograph of the courtyard at MSS headquarters at Xiyuan that had been taken by a satellite operated by the National Reconnaissance Office.

It showed a man strapped to a chair in the court of the ministry, naked from the waist up. The exquisite precision of the image showed the prisoner’s face. He had been badly beaten, but Tom could recognize his features. It was the Chinese man who had dropped a note into his pocket eight years before and had spied for the CIA ever since.

The agony showed on the prisoner’s face, and it was felt by Tom and Sonia in their hearts. They ended their tour at the end of the summer and went home. And the bad times were just beginning.

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?

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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.

[David Ignatius answered reader questions about 'The Tao of Deception' in his live chat. Read the transcript here.]

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.

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.

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.

[David Ignatius answered reader questions about ‘The Tao of Deception’ in his live chat. Read the transcript here.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.”

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.

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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.